A few months ago, I heard a friend talking about Among the Almond Trees. At first, I didn’t pay much mind to it until she mentioned that it was a memoir by a Palestinian writer and added that it was a text he insisted on writing after he was diagnosed with cancer, and that he had just returned to the heart of his homeland: the countryside of Ramallah, after an absence and voluntary exile of thirty years.
She continued to talk about it in more detail and my excitement at getting the book only increased the more I heard. I got my hands on the book and began reading attentively; I wanted to know something: What was the last word with which he extended his voice and released it to the world as the crumbs of his age began falling, getting closer to his eternal silence? I wondered: what would a person walking his last few steps want to say? Would he be choked by the essence of departure in each direction he goes while he listens to the final symphonies of life?
I was trying to see life and perceive it through the eyes of a poet facing death head-on, fighting with all possible means to resist it even though he wouldn’t pass by chance to defeat it, ripping out his hair strands on one side, clenching his jaw at times, sometimes his pulse would falter, and other times his blood curdles till it finally succeeds and destroys him.
I finished reading it, and spent a long time engrossed in thought regarding the poetic title that Hussein Barghouthi chose for his memoir. I turned the book over and once again read the back cover, which consisted of an introduction by his compatriot, the revolutionary Palestinian poet Ahmed Dahbour. There was one phrase that made me stop in my tracks: “This is a man who kept dripping poetry until the last moment of his life, although his true poetry found its natural breath in a composite text like the one in our hands.”
I thought deeply about the symbolism and eloquence of the chosen title, and just how indicative it was of the inside of the book. I remembered three things while looking at pictures of almond trees: The first thing I remembered was the part in the memoir where he talked about his parents’ story, and their marriage. Even though his mother’s family were against their marriage, his father still won her over, and took her with him to Amman where they spent the duration of their honeymoon. After that, they returned to his village in the countryside of Ramallah, and there he plowed the lands around their house, planting it with gardens of almond trees.
The second thing was the atmospheres he created in the worlds of his writing, and his long inner monologues; when the symptoms of the malignant disease managed to penetrate his frail body, Barghouti began to evoke the view of the mountains from his childhood, conversing with himself and saying, “The mountain is ill with cancer!” he cries silently and continues “Fight back, this land is yours, fight back!” he would think that if he collapsed, then so would Petra—his wife. He feels the mountain call back to him, saying “Tell her: no matter what happens… If you visit me, I’ll be among the almonds! Where the sun will shine bright and the blossoms will fill the sky, there will be gardens, and bees, and until that time comes, fight back!
The third thing I would be reminded of is the picture of his grave that I have stared at intently through my phone screen, the place where he instructed to be buried among the almond trees. I looked thoroughly at his gravestone that was surrounded with greenery and delicate flowers from all four directions, I use my thumb and pointer to zoom into the picture to read the words engraved on the white marble:
“If you visit me, I’ll be among the almonds
The Poet Hussein Jamil Barghouthi
1954-2002
I was the distance between the falling rain
The blossoming flowers
On a green hill under the rainbow
I will leave the depth of earth at night
A marble palm bearing the new moon like a goblet
So, bathe in the rivers
And wait for my return…”
Once again, I return to the book, starting from its first pages. The poet starts the biography by telling us about the story of his return to his homeland, to “the beauty that had been betrayed” as he puts it. He decided that the place of his birth would also be the place he would draw his last breath. Then he starts to narrate the details of the hospital and the disease, and his own definitions interest me here, I find describing the hospital as the “final Wailing Wall” and his soul as “a lost word wandering in a dictionary between the words ‘death’ and ‘living’.” He says: “He roams on the edge of events, on the outskirts of things.”
As I finish reading the first few pages, and vaguely scan the rest of the book, I find myself pausing to reconsider the information I gained, drawing an asterisk next to it. Some of the things I learned were:
About the badger animal, a small carnivorous, nocturnal animal, sleeps in the mornings and is active in the evening, it can be considered a danger to humans. I also learned about a strange type of milk that I was unfamiliar with; fig milk (fig sap): which turned out to be an acidic liquid that can cause infections to the eyes if touched. It oozes from fig stem when it is cut off while it is still unripe, it does wonders when added to sheep’s milk, coagulating to form a delicious cheese with the flavor of figs.
I also learned about the legend (or myth) of the Murdered Woman’s Eye (Spring) and Barghouthi’s knowledge of how the story goes. His summary of the myth starts when he went to swim in the pool with his friend Ali who suddenly told him “You’re swimming in tears!” before explaining how the myth originated: “There was an exceptionally beautiful woman who was unfairly killed by her family, so she turned into a siren living in the wild springs. She inhabits this spring in particular, so it was named ‘The Murdered Woman’s Spring’” as his friend finished the story, Hussein imagined the crack in stone from which the water flowed as the siren’s eye gushing tears, and from a puddle of her tears, a pool forms then branches out in channels to irrigate the orchards around them.
A new question arose after reading the first chapter of his memoirs: was he living his current reality to its fullest? Or was he hung up in the past like a ‘Roba Vecchia’ of life? Was he burdened and stressed by what he would receive in his next life in the journey from life to death as if he were watching the unknown? These sudden questions were part of my attempt to try and understand this complex phase in his life.
I closed the book, and a small, folded scrap of paper, which I had tucked between the paged fell out, and I began to turn my gaze at the striking words that I had previously written down on it: architectural abortion, acid rain, the cinema of doom, shadow boxing, light architecture, and wilderness instinct.
I contemplated the meaning of the words ‘Architectural abortion’ then I remembered that it was used to describe the city of Russeifeh. He described it as a city of dust, a deserted land that resembles “a reality that is fried at 45°C” then he elaborated by calling it “a horizon of sandy dunes, dull colors, houses of grey concrete that are heavier than the atmosphere surrounding them, it looks like a cacophony, or an architectural abortion, not one flower in sight, limited greenery, visual poverty and spaces that create a hunger for color.”
Then I moved on to the second term I had written down, which was ‘Acid rain.’ I turned the pages until I reached page 52 and began reading the paragraph that revealed the ambiguity of those words. This is the expression that crossed his mind when they told him that he would undergo chemotherapy, and my reflection aroused his following comment: “and instead of desires streaming through my blood, there were liters of medicine that were enough for me to know the meaning of ‘Acid rain’.” I like the descriptions and labels that he produced and assigned to things, although they may seem too simple in others’ perspective.
My gaze fell to the questions that I underlined on the page, they were asked by his young son Aather, who was only three years old at the time. He once asked him “Hussein, who poured the sand on the mountains?” and once he came to him with a fountain pen and asked, “does this pen write poetry?” Upon reading these questions, I recalled what he had said earlier about his son, when he lived in a house at the foot of the mountain, overlooking forests of pine, evergreen, and almonds. and I recalled the phrase “the shadows of my memory” when he said: “And here, Aather will grow up, near the shadows of my memory.”
My goodness! How heartbroken I was that his son will grow under the shadow of his memory, and not within it! Inevitably, all his thinking will turn to his only child, who will not be allowed by the numbered destinies—sadly, to live and see the stages of his next life, as if fate gave him a luxurious gift, but did not give him time to enjoy it. I looked back at my phone screen, staring at the image of young Aather, and on his small face, a look full of innocence.
As I continue to write this, I have a kitten beside me jumping on the couch and trying to mischievously approach my foot and lick it, so I directly recall Barghouti’s description of the cat that accompanied him in the almond fields. At that moment, he examined the trunk of an almond tree and described that cat as spotted with white and black spots, as if its colors mirrored the tree trunk.
I also noticed the scenes of his deep reflections on the fine details throughout the chapters of his biography, and I found him describing the atmosphere of a winter morning, sitting near the well as he turned his gaze around him, he says: “Oh God, I forgot that in this world there are bees, ants, grass, spring onions, and a warm sun”, and he continues “being attentive to what I have already forgotten, or even betrayed, is the first leaf in the will of life that began to manifest within me”, and then says in another paragraph: “It’s like I’m learning to pay attention to small details from scratch” he adds, adding a quote by an unknown source “God is in the details.”
In the middle of his memoirs, he quotes the German painter Paul Klee: “Art does not reflect what exists, it makes it visible,” and then he projects this phrase on his illness and beautifies it, and turns it into an artist who highlights small details, and he continues: “Cancer is the artist who made the invisible in my eyes visible, when art, love and death meet in the soul.”
He then goes on to explain his condition after his first chemotherapy session as soon as he left the room, when it was too difficult for him to walk, so he would stand after each step to catch his breath, “And the details become more prominent, they become visible, all my attention is concentrated in an uncleaned spot of dust in a neglected corner of the stairs, or in a paper scrap thrown away, or a black insect on the glass, moving its wings under the sun and not flying, as if a second universe I had not noticed before and forgotten, suddenly comes to existence.” He goes on to take on his precise descriptions of the orange, the man and everything around him, “Details, details, details, as if every soap bubble has a universe within it!” Oh my God! It is as if we cannot notice these overlooked details unless we are on the brink of our last breath!
Thinking about that, I was reminded of the old grandmother in the famous philosophical novel Sophie’s World by the Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder, when the doctor diagnosed her with a terminal illness, she said “I never realized how rich life was until now.” Granny’s words correspond to the meaning expressed by the late novelist Abdul-Rahman Munif in one of his texts “So much delight and beauty exist in life, and because it is so close, many do not see it, or do not know how to enjoy it, and when they realize that, it is late and everything is over.” Yes, yes, a thousand times! Impending death reshapes the way humans see life, and the joy that exists in it! Because of that, I find myself wondering… why don’t we learn to adjust the compass indicator of our precise sense towards the possibility of imminent death and change our way of seeing things and the entire world?
I find myself lingering on the scene in which he joyfully leaves the hospital; the first thing he did was to stand among the pine tree shadows, recounting an old wise saying: “if you are in the right place within yourself, then wherever you stand is the right place for you.” It was only after leaving that he realized how he longed to travel; to see many other views, to erase the hospital corridors from his mind, and the smell of medicine that lingered in his nose.
A couple of days after leaving the hospital, he surrendered himself to the tranquility of night as he walked along the Red Sea shore with his son, and his wife, along with a friend of theirs. He was enjoying the susurration of the waves and the sea foam, and he wished it could wash his mind of all its memories, and I could almost hear his voice as he cried out at the end of that chapter “I don’t want anything other than this moment!”
I put the book aside and then returned to it a few days later to browse it for one last time before it joins its peers in its new home on my shelf, and I stopped at some of the phrases that I cornered between brackets, like the one in which he wrote “But I did not want to hear these words from this particular nurse; her face was like one of the signs of resurrection, this is how it seemed to me,” or another saying “My body itself was stiffening, and its movement decreased, and there was no crying or joy, it was a statue in progress” and “How I wish to be a sculptor; so I could carve into the feelings of this stiffening body […] and with my own hands, make a plate for Aather and Petra, it has to be done by my own hands, that is the condition, and the whole basis of this wish. Then I would wake Aather and his mother from their sleep, and we would sit around a primitive wooden table, or on an olive patio, and eat together… this would be my celebration of life: a plate of salad.”
In short, one of the marvels of this biography— despite its small size— is that it is a colorful hybrid of reflections, interpretations, imaginations, dialogues, and journal entries, overflowing with questions, quotes, myths, and nostalgia.
I finish writing this with my phone in my other hand, looking at the exhausting features under the optical glasses, and the sound of his whirlwind breathing, listening to the words of the 48-year-old, spending his last days in the hospital, closely watching as the sun starts to set in his earthly life: “I have a feeling that I have accomplished a part of a long forgotten dream, and it is not to leave this earth without leaving a mark on it, even if not a big one; I have long given up on the idea of perfection. Nothing is perfect, whether it is something I have written, or want to write.” As his words come to an end, I find myself thinking about the ‘losing desires’ that he talked about between the lines of his memoir, and I can’t help but remember his uncle, whom Hussein once asked when the happiest days of his life were, to which he answered: “when I would play in the dirt, wearing my taqiyah (cap).”
T1680
