Personal account as a
Palestinian refugee
By: Shane
Farrell , March 2, 2011
http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArchiveDetails.aspx?ID=246120#
Without a
doubt, Jamal Krayem Kanj has had an interesting life. He was born 10 years
after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and grew up in the Nahr
al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon. As a youth, Kanj flirted
with the idea of joining the armed resistance in Syria, survived Israeli
airstrikes and fled war-torn Lebanon to finish schooling in Iraq, before
eventually settling down in the USA. If Kanj were to put all this down in
writing, then it’s definitely worth the read.
To our
benefit, Kanj recently published his book, Children of Catastrophe: Journey
from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, which documents his experience
as a Palestinian refugee from a personal perspective. On the book’s Facebook group, which has
just under 2,000 fans, Kanj says that “connecting people in the West with the
personal experience of Palestinians in refugee camps was my main motivation
[for] writing the book.”
Kanj
details, but does not dwell on, the harsh conditions growing up in the camp.
“Many nights [I woke] up with headaches and blackened nostrils from breathing
the kerosene smoke while we slept,” he writes, since at the time his family lit
their home using kerosene lamps, but he has “no memory of lacking any of life’s
pleasures.” This, he explains, is due to the fact that “it is not possible to
lack what you have never experienced.”
Indeed,
his childhood seems to have been mostly a happy one. His accounts of fishing
with dynamite, having close encounters with sharks, enjoying early “wink
relationships” with girls and hunting birds using a muzzle-loading rifle give
the book a lot of color in the opening chapters. But more gripping is his
account of leaving the camp, unbeknownst to his family, at the age of 11 with
several other children to join the military wing of the Fatah Palestinian group in Syria. After
being rejected, Kanj and his fellow aspiring revolutionaries find themselves
penniless in a foreign country, having no idea how to make it back to the camp.
Politics
is central to his early experiences that shaped his political views, and these
resonate throughout the book. The introduction, for instance, gives a brief
account of the factors that led to the establishment of the Nahr al-Bared camp.
It also includes a stern criticism of early Zionist leadership, saying Israel’s
first Prime Minister Ben Gurion “consciously or unconsciously assigned jargon
tantamount to ethnic cleansing to [Israel’s] military operations.”
The author
then describes in great detail an event, which, he argues, has not been
adequately covered internationally. Following the infamous kidnapping of Israeli Olympics athletes in
Munich in September 1972, Israel raided Nahr al-Bared in an operation it called
“retaliation,” but Kanj claims it was “an act of vengeance intended to cause
the most damage to another civilian target.” This event is captured in a
chapter that focuses entirely on Israel’s military raids.
Kanj also
says that the Lebanese army was bent on the destruction of the Nahr al-Bared
camp from the outset of the 15-week battle against Fatah al-Islam militants in
the summer of 2007. He claims that after entering the camp, the army “looted”
houses, painted “racist graffiti” on walls and destroyed or burned down many
homes that were still intact. His anger toward those who destroyed his
childhood home comes across clearly. On the other hand, he voices admiration
for the perseverance of fellow camp residents, who “were able to laugh and even
make jokes about their predicament.” In an online interview, Kanj points out that laughter
became an “escape [and] a therapeutic” way to get through personal hardships.
But while
these political issues are inextricably linked to the author’s identity, some
of the passages read more as an academic paper than as a memoir. Undoubtedly,
Kanj’s personal experiences shaped his political opinions, but the flow of the
book suffers at times as it jumps from personal narrative to historical account
to political opinion. This is exacerbated by the fact that the chapters are
themed, resulting in the book’s confusing chronological order.
A bigger
criticism, perhaps, is his failure to elaborate on aspects of his life that
would have been of interest to his target niche, that is, the Western audience.
The most glaring of these is his omission of any detail concerning his arrival
to America. Although Kanj attempts to pre-empt this by agreeing that “the story
of my life in America […] deserves more than a chapter in this book,” Children
of Catastrophe would have benefited from an explanation as to why he
decided to go to America specifically, why he applied to a school in Texas and
how he ended up settling down in San Diego. An insight into his early memories
of America and his perception of it as a Palestinian refugee would have given
more depth to the story.
That being
said, the book remains a valuable purchase as it is rich in personal experiences
and gives interesting insights into the hardships and struggles of Palestinian
refugees. It humanizes a place and a people that, as Palestinian-American
author and journalist Ramzy Baroud put it, “have been seen for too long as mere
subjects of statistical data and academic discussion.”
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