Soul in Exile Quotes

“Hysteria! And grief and bitterness. That's what goes on. Not satisfied that our fighters evacuated the city, the enemy went after their women and children whom they left behind in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, slaughtered them, and left their bodies stacked in grotesque piles in the muddy lanes, fly-covered, rotting in the sun. They went after our Palestine Research Center the repository of our culture and history in exile, whose treasures we had been collecting since the day we left Palestine, looted it then burned it to the ground. Fifteen thousand of our people, including boys under the age if twelve and men over the age of eighty, were picked up and put in a concentration camp called Ansar. Our community in Lebanon, half a million men, women, and children found itself suddenly severed from institutions (educational, medical, cultural, economic, and social) they had depended on for their everyday living, which the enemy destroyed. Our fighters, the mainspring of our national struggle, were shipped to thre deserts of Algeria, the outback of Sudan, and the scorching plain of Yemen. Our leadership sought refuge in Tunisia. And when the choked psyche of our nation gasped for air, some months later, we lunged atat each other in civil war, because we had failed our people and ourselves. Our promises had proved illusory.”
― Fawaz Turki, Soul in Exile

“The siege of Beirut brought with it all the ancient terrors of sieges -- city gates broken, libraries burned down, fire dropped on defenders. A truly medieval event recalling these sieges of Jerusalem in 1099 and Acre in 1189. This siege also was a metaphor of confrontation between East and West and a fascinating symbol of the clash of self-definitions between settler-colonialism and native resistance. It was a mirage from the medieval age that bespoke, as sieges then often did, the most dreadful catastrophe that could befall people: the destruction of their city and their subsequent wanderings in search of shelter to house their passions and the outward expression of their culture. To Palestinians everywhere, the siege of Beirut became the most monumental event in their modern history -- even more monumental than the dismemberment of, and exodus from, Palestine in 1948.
The Israelis tried everything during these siege. To starve the city. To bomb it to rubble. To terrorize its inhabitants with psychological warfare. To cut its water, medical, and food supplies.”
― Fawaz Turki, Soul in Exile

“The starving children of Tel Zaatar who arrived in West Beirut will never be the same again. These were children who walked all the way from their camp and on the way found themselves walking alone. Children who saw their parents bayonetted to death in front of their eyes. Children who were shellshocked. Children who, before the siege, had been physically and mentally healthy and were now deaf-mute. Children who went into convulsions when they heard the word "water." Children who woke up in the middle of the night screaming. Children who lost every member of their families. Children who did not play, or run around, but sat staring, responding neither to questions nor the offer of food.”
― Fawaz Turki, Soul in Exile

“Israelis can win a war but in doing so they submit to us. They can occupy Palestine, yet they remain captive to the dialectic of its existence. They can banish the native presence, but cannot ostracize its reality.”
― Fawaz Turki, Soul in Exile

“No occupation by a people of another can ever, of course, be characterized as benign. Occupation is, by definition, vile and scurrilous. It also goes to the heart of the human dialectic: for the venomous consciousness of the occupiers turns unheard in time as they subjugate their victims by the rule of the gun, this destroying for themselves what there is of humanity in humans and restoring in them what there is of beast. For brutality has a way about it of seeking vengeance on those who unleash it. Conversely, the struggle of the occupied draws into its orbit men and women whose consciousness is penetrated by a senseof the value of freedom. Whereas Zionism, as a colonizing ideology, has become the code of the bully, tyrannizing people through contempt of their humanity...”
― Fawaz Turki, Soul in Exile

“Our political program, I write, calling for the establishment of a secular, democratic state in the whole of Palestine for both Palestinians and Jews, represents a humanistic vision of a society that recognizes no oppressor-oppressed, occupier-occupied dichotomies. Palestinian violence, I conclude, is the only weapon left to the Palestinians -- a colonized people -- to ensure the hearing for the voice of moderation. Besides, I add, the world recognizes that the violence committed by slaves to break their chains is not the same as the violence committed by the slave master to subdue them.”
― Fawaz Turki, Soul in Exile

“Everybody shivered. All over the camp, the emaciated dogs died. Every day had a thousand and one wrinkles and a thousand and one knots. The men looked for employment, for food. They avoided the police, who were implicating Palestinians in everything from inflation and communist plots to cold spells. And once every month they lined up, as if in a funeral procession, to receive their UNRWA rations of flour, powdered milk, and dates. The rations lasted a week. Then people ate words. The words led to orange groves in Jaffa, to olive trees in Tershiha, to cloudless summers in Haifa. And back again to Bourj el Barajneh.”
― Fawaz Turki, Soul in Exile

“The people were wrapped in rags given to them by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA. Rags originally "donated by the American people." The girls walked around wearing baseball hats. Out of the sacks our UNRWA flour rations came in mothers cut underpants for their sons. I often walked around with my behind covered with a handshake and the proclamation that the contents were a "gift from the American people.”
― Fawaz Turki, Soul in Exile

“Progress has never been made by contented people. In the midst of oppression, only the oppressed will abolish injustice. Only those who are defined as the footprint of a shadow emerge from the night with a dream.”
― Fawaz Turki, Soul in Exile