To mark Spread the Word’s 30th Anniversary, three London-based emerging writers have been commissioned to create a short original piece of written work. These Emerging Writer Commissions aim to showcase new work by London-based emerging writers, and provide a developmental and profile-raising opportunity. Three London-based deaf and disabled writers have also been commissioned for our Deaf and Disabled Writer Commissions.
The 30th Anniversary Emerging Writer Commissions are generously supported by The London Community Foundation and Cockayne – Grants for the Arts.
The Emerging Writer Commissions were printed, alongside Deaf and Disabled Writer commissions and Borough of Literature Commissions, in the Deptford Literature Fesitval Anthology.
Theories of Change by Giselle Cory
There is no sense of a beginning or end. It moves like a river. I am nearly an hour late and have to walk against the crowd to find the group.
I squeeze past manicured older women who remind me of my mother, dogs wearing keffiyehs, and middle-aged men clustered behind a ‘Scousers for Palestine’ banner. Chants spring up and then fall away again, but I don’t join in. I don’t do anything. I’ve stopped walking, and am standing at the crowd’s edge. Something is happening to me, but I can’t name it yet. When I get home, I’ll read that 300,000 of us came out, but for now, all I know is that there’s an endless stream of people and many of them look like me.
I’ve settled on my identity but that wasn’t always the case. The earlier iterations of me are still in there, with all their fear of being left out or worse. I am still the child who, upon realising I was different, fell into panic that others would find out too; who covered myself in sunscreen so I wouldn’t turn black as my brother threatened I would; who picked up that Palestinian was a dirty word and didn’t claim it in public. That child can hear people shouting Free Free Palestine at the top of their voices, in their thousands, and can see an endless patchwork of Palestinian flags and colours carried along by the crowd.
***
I scan for the group. I feel nervous to attach myself to strangers, but I didn’t want to come alone. Dad had called as I was walking to the station.
‘Hi. Listen. Are you meeting up with your friends there?’ I knew where this was going.
‘There’s a group of us.’ I don’t tell him that we’ve never met. He’d find it odd that I sought out a group whose common thread is being in the minority. The group exactly resembles his own circles – minus half a decade – but he wouldn’t claim his was by design. And he’d be surprised that he is my route in, that they would praise his otherness where he doesn’t see any. Our parents unwittingly give us tickets to places, whether or not they want us to go there.
‘Ok. Honey, I won’t come today, if that’s ok. It’s… sometimes these things become antisemitic.’ He says this last part quietly.
His hesitation doesn’t surprise me. Growing up, I took pride in how little bitterness he carried with him. When he talked about the arrival of Zionist militias into his neighbourhood, I asked why the police did nothing. He paused before he replied, ‘It was very difficult. They were having to put up with Arab and Zionist terrorism.’ Recollections of the violence came with reminders that not everyone was in favour of it. When a family friend was shot coming out of his front door, Dad explained that a gang had taken over the house of the Jewish family next door, squatting at the windows with rifles and waiting for the man to leave for work. ‘The family didn’t ask the gang to come in. They didn’t want any part of it. They just came, like in Northern Ireland.’ But his benevolence has limits. ‘A gang leader, a murderer, became Prime Minister of Israel,’ he says with horror in his voice some 70 years later.
I thought him the wisest man alive, and could only parrot his overtures. But today, his approach feels too small. And we can’t both be right. If he’s right, I’m naive or hateful. Striding towards the station, the years seem to be falling away like they were never attached at all, until I am a kid again, ashamed of falling short of the judgement of a parent.
‘I obviously wouldn’t be going if I thought that’d happen.’ I hear how sharp I sound, and immediately regret it. ‘But don’t go if you’re not comfortable.’
‘If you can’t find your friends, call me and I’ll come and meet you.’ I hear that he can protect me better than I can protect myself, and I flush with anger. It’s only much later that I hear something else: a father wishing to protect their child, no matter her strength or his age. I tell him that I’ll call him but this is a lie.
***
From within the flow of the march, a woman shouts for my attention. I don’t recognise her until she pulls down her N95 and waves me over.
The rest of the group and their pillar-box red placards resolve out of the crowd. The group is small and there’s not much conversation. When it does come it’s soon cut off by a megaphone. Gaza Gaza don’t you cry we will never let you die. We are not here to chat, after all. I make a note to wear a beanie next time, hide an earbud underneath and listen to that podcast about real life hauntings.
The group all have keffiyehs or flags. I want to explain that Palestine isn’t a brand for my family, that we don’t collect insignia like it’s a sports team. But in other ways I try to emulate them, desperate to fit in. I look the least other, and it makes me nervous. Unlike everyone else, I could pass as white – at least in London and if you didn’t look too hard. In the noughties that felt like a gift.
I drop in that my father is Palestinian. It doesn’t really help. They feel like pretenders next to me, and I feel like a fraud when someone says I am so sorry, like the war is hurting me more than it’s hurting them, like I have any claim to pain or sympathy, like I know anything about what it feels like to be Palestinian.
***
The march slows as it navigates Hyde Park Corner. Someone climbs up a scaffolded building and raises a flag. Big cheers erupt. Up ahead, flares spew dirty smoke, short lines of green and red sitting in the damp air. I wish they wouldn’t. It feels like opportunism, an excuse to be a bit naughty and get away with it. Protests are a spectacle. It’s their purpose, but I bristle at the idea that we’re all performing something together, every other weekend, almost like Church. But it’s this or go to bed feeling like a spectator, as occupied territories are levelled. I find the spare placards stashed in the bottom of a buggy. I bounce one up and down in time with the chants, but say nothing. It feels too daring to say Palestine out loud, and bad manners to shout in public.
***
For an event Dad avoided for fear of violence, there are a lot of strollers. We come into step with a family as they crowd around one of their children. Someone hands the child a megaphone. After some direction from his dad, he raises it to his mouth. His family erupt in celebration, and the boy gets louder and surer at each repetition.
I try to imagine my father passing on that life skill but I can’t. He’s not the type to raise his voice. He taught me other things though. Growing up with images of the Second Intifada rolling on the little TV in the kitchen, of bloodied bodies, of grown men throwing rocks at tanks, I’d ask him for explanations. He would pause and explain some part of it, and we’d go on like this. We’d always get to a root ‘why?’ and he wouldn’t have an answer. I appreciate this now, that he allowed for the perversity of the status quo and didn’t try to rationalise the irrational just so he’d have all the answers, like some adults do.
He’d have made a good politician. He was a local councillor once, for the Tories. He still refers back to it now, 40 years later, because no experience since has felt more relevant or insightful. He saw how the sausages are made. A little while ago, I found an old Christmas gift tag at the back of a cupboard. A little square of paper with red and gold on one side and mum’s spider crawl writing on the other. To my little politician, love Wiffer.
***
In 1948, the family lost their business, their homes, warehouses and offices, and their nation. Even their currency disappeared – the British Treasury withdrew the Palestinian pound as legal tender with a slender three months notice. The business was mourned most of all, because it amounted to life: decades worth of days invested and lost.
My family intended to go to the US, but got as far as the UK. There they rebirthed the company in a three-storey store front in South London. It is still there, still trading under the family name, though marriage means none of us go by that name anymore.
When Dad tells stories he says my brother’s name when he means my great uncle, or replaces his mother’s name with my mother’s. He only does this when the people have done the same role – both risk-taking entrepreneurs leading the family, both administrators in the back office – as if those roles have been continuous over time, the individual people simply inhabiting them for a season.
I’m not in any of these roles. I do not exist across generations. My accolades sit like a jar of marbles. I was a CEO once, but it was in the charity sector. It doesn’t count.
***
My father’s father was able to remake his life by rebuilding his business. My father’s mother had no such outlet. While he marked the passage of time through new contracts, new employees, new products, she stayed home. A stream of immigrants and exiles passed through the house, ever pulling her mind back to Haifa. She could not start again. She was lost to her loss, her bitterness covering her over like a crust. The day I learnt this about her, coaxed unwillingly from my father, I dreamt of a pipe, one end open to the air, the other stabbed into the earth. There is a body deep underneath it. I blow into it, trying to reinflate the buried woman back to life.
***
We turn onto Piccadilly. The Ritz, the Sheraton, the Wolseley. It’s nearly Christmas and some of the hotels are sparkling inside, giving them a warm glow against the grey afternoon and the persistent pathetic rain that slowly soaks through my coat. Staff stand in entrance ways, looking nervous, defiant or just annoyed. They watch us like we are a fanged snake that might turn and strike at any moment.
Bobbing my placard over the crowd gives me a little confidence, and soon enough I am shouting just like everyone else. I’m not sure where to look or who we are shouting at, but I feel awkward not joining in so I keep going, letting the sensation settle.
Among the chants of a Free Free Palestine, I feel false. I feel like I’m misleading someone. The solidarity is beautiful to witness. I’m glad to be here among this crowd and see such support for a place I was once scared to talk about outside the house. But permeating it all is a belief that resistance brings victory, despite so much history to the contrary. In his memoir We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, Raja Shehadeh quotes Eliahu Sassoon, then a minister in the new Israeli government. ‘Don’t speak to me of justice, law, rights… these words have no place in our dictionary. It is power that determines the destiny of nations.’ The history of Palestine since the British Mandate bears this out. And no matter our number today, we will not be heard by our Government. We have no power, save our embodied compassion. My fellow protestors seem to disregard history in favour of hope. My father is too much of a pragmatist to be here at all. I am caught between the two.
***
Sixty years on from the Nakba, we sought out the family’s buildings in Haifa. We had trouble finding them. Towering billboards obscured the lot. They depicted a young woman with her finger to mouth, urging silence. I forget what she was selling. The buildings were still there, still empty, beautiful grey stone framing big windows covered with IDF-imprinted metal shutters. The door was ajar. We picked our way across a floor littered with needles, trying to breathe against the sour smell of human waste. The offices remained furnished as they had been, rotting papers on the tall bookshelves.
Even though the buildings remain, my father knows there is nothing to return to. Palestinian lawyer Muhammad Nimr Al-Hawari returned to his home as an Israeli Arab. ‘It was as though I had come to a new country, not at all like the one I knew and had fought for.’ Dad’s country does not exist, anymore than his parents do. Ghosts, all.
***
At Piccadilly Circus, the usual backed-up traffic is gone, the whole square pedestrianised by the march. The fountain, normally a blackened bronze, is a pyramid of red and green, every climbable spot taken by boys holding flags. The passing protestors point and smile and take photos. I wordlessly disapprove. The statue at its centre is Eros, the god of passion who – writes its sculptor Alfred Gilbert – raises his bow ‘sending forth indiscriminately, yet with purpose, his missile of kindness.’ It’s all we can do.
Rain trickles down my upheld arm and has soaked through my coat. My placard is rippled and flopping at the edges. The protest is so big that it moves slowly, in small shuffling steps and the lack of movement is leaving me shaking with cold. I wonder if it’s acceptable to go home before we reach the end but I decide against it. I’m caught between the grand arc of social justice and the small, immediate pulls of the body. I’d be too ashamed to let my discomfort win out.
Once we’re at Trafalgar Square and the march is done, we huddle under the portico of the proud, old building that now houses Waterstones. Vendors tout watermelon badges, t-shirts, prayer beads. I am quick to say my goodbyes, but I don’t go straight home. I want a buffer between this experience and home. I go to the Poetry Library on the Southbank and read Momtaza Mehri: Diaspora is witnessing a murder without getting blood on your shirt.
***
After dinner, Dad and I call up our cousin in Tel Aviv. She’s old, unmarried and blunt. Where we expect sadness, we find inconvenience.
‘I would like to go away at Christmas. To Egypt. I have a friend, we like to go away.’ She relates some of the holidays they’ve been on together. ‘With the war on, it might be difficult. But,’ she says with a little smile audible down the phone, ‘maybe I should be adventurous.’
One year later
We are taking our seats at the Royal Festival Hall. The room is warm and dimly lit as they introduce a series of speakers to reflect upon the life of Edward Said, a Palestinian-American academic and activist famous for throwing stones at Israeli tanks while holding a PhD from Harvard. He’s long dead, but they say A voice can be felt as much in its absence as in its presence and immediately I feel his loss.
Dad settles in and I pass him his paper cup of black coffee. His eyes sweep the hall.
‘All these people…’” He looks around in awe, wide eyes giving him sudden youthfulness. He’s not been on the streets, and activism gets little reported. How was he to know there had been a swell, that people were coming out for Palestine after so long?
We don’t make friends, we don’t smile and put our hands on each other’s backs in welcome. This is central London. But we are here, we have come, we are reminded that there is a we.
***
They get our shame out early. A young, low-definition Edward Said comes on the screen: …the humiliation of having to say We Do Exist.
Said’s life was shaped around questions of justice, but he also embraced exile. This is a knot: who gets to speak, how much distance makes you distant. He lived in New York City and said he wasn’t sure he’d go back, even if Palestine was liberated. Exile had become life, so that he was no longer in exile. This was his success. His son is at the podium now, says he’s not so sure his dad would have stayed away, says it was an escape mechanism, that the father was protecting himself from heartbreak. Why are we, the children, so desperate for our parents to hold on?
It feels unfair to me that Dad and his parents got all the destruction and none of the credit for their own survival, and my generation, the second generation on, are handed microphones. We have not suffered, but are given all the nobility of oppression.
Perhaps this is because the second generation are the most familiar type of other. We belong, but we have good stories to tell, or perhaps re-tell. We carry our home culture but we fold it into British manners. We bring our difference as a gift, something offered, with none of the threat of our foreign-born parents. The second generation are ours but different.
***
Edward Said said I came to the Palestinian cause not because I am Palestinian but because it is just. My cheeks flush in the half-dark. I would not have come to this cause for justice’s sake. Life is too heavy already. Had I been able to choose, I would not choose to hold this.
The rest is easier to agree with. A string of speakers tell us Palestine is the ground zero of liberal thought, that there is a battle for the Palestinian ‘genre’ to be categorised under righteous justice rather than terrorist, that history tells us partition – in any land, for any people – does not bring resolution. Dad falls asleep around speaker number three, his coat balled up on his lap.
Max Porter does a poetic monologue on his trip to the occupied territories. What literary style beyond a scream can survive this moment? Part way through, dad’s not-quite empty cup of coffee falls to the floor, jarring him back awake. When Porter is done, dad leans over and says, a bit too loudly, ‘I didn’t think much of him at all.’
***
Towards the end, a Palestinian poet comes on, long curly hair coming down over his face. ‘In resistance, you win if you do not disappear entirely,’ he says. His voice is deep and seems to come from much further within than his mouth or throat. His big body is curved over the plinth. He lays out a chain of logic that ends, ‘And then they win!’ for which there is loud applause. It wakes Dad, who joins in.
He leans over to me. ‘Who wins?’
‘The Palestinians.’ I say this with too much disdain.
‘I wasn’t sure.’ I am often angry with him these days, but it’s not his fault.
The last speaker comes on, a slender woman who sounds a little embarrassed to be offering pragmatism after the roaring declarations of victory that came before her.
‘The only recognisable feature of hope is action. Protest, boycott, write to your MP.’ She lists successes – the BDS movement, arms protests including the Greek dock workers who blocked a shipment of arms to Israel – and applause erupts again. Dad doesn’t join in this time.
***
The quote from Muhammad Nimr Al-Hawari is taken from We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I by Raja Shehadeh. Quotes from the ‘Edward Said: The Question of Palestine’ event at the Southbank Centre in November 2024: the poet is Tamim Al-Barghouti; the last speaker quoted is Ahdaf Soueif.
About Giselle Cory
Giselle focuses on life writing, in particular how the small acts of life add up to our identity or come into conflict with it. They particularly enjoy work that tries to understand social history through the lens of personal experience. Recent favourite authors include Claire Keegan, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Maggie Nelson and Guadaulpe Nettel. Giselle splits her time between writing and a career in the charity sector, most recently leading a small charity.
Giselle said; “I can’t believe someone is commissioning me to write! This will be my first commission and publication, and it feels really good to be engaged as a writer in this way. I hope that being on the programme will help me better situate myself as a writer, build my confidence and most importantly, produce some work I’m proud of. I’m particularly excited for the mentoring element, and look forward to working with an experienced writer who can help me take the work from draft to fully formed thing.”