22. FIL MISH MISH

This expression I have heard translated in just one way but interpreted in two and I will explain both of these idioms to you now. One version is my father’s, who thinks about this phrase quite literally; the other has lived inside me for many years. Fil mish mish means in the time of the apricot, something I learn in 2005, when I see Divine Intervention and when I hear a Turkish Cypriot poet discuss this film. My encounter with the poet is a glorious chance, I see flyers announcing her talk in the lifts of the John Medley Building, and the date has not passed, and I am astonished to find that a film nearly no-one has heard of in Australia could be a whole field of study for people elsewhere.

There is a scene in Divine Intervention when the auteur and filmmaker, Elia Suleiman (who appears in many of his films, maybe all of them) is driving his car in the West Bank on a road demarked for Palestinian cars, which are forced to drive long perilous routes in a vivisected homeland. Where he is driving is near a checkpoint (never far between checkpoints for Palestinians) and along the length of the monstrosity which Israelis have called the separation fence and which we call Pathetic (see: Amro). On his drive, Suleiman is eating an apricot, and when the flesh is all gone and the stone is the only artifact remaining, our auteur throws the pip right hand to left window, since cars arrive to Palestine in Ottoman times, and despite intervention the Mandate is too late to change this (though one wishes that the small matter of drive-sides could have been the Mandate’s most lasting legacy rather than what it is). In the next scene we see a colossal explosion, like a planned detonation, rip through the length of the wall that Suleiman is passing.

The visiting poet directs her participants to examine this scene, which she says is an articulation of the concept, fil mish mish, an idea that performs our fantasies of restoration (an idiom in English you might be familiar with is when pigs fly, which I admit as a child I viewed not as an expression of hopelessness, but an enticing invitation). Maybe I misunderstand her meaning but I carry fil mish mish with me as a more elegant expression of the general use concept inshallah, which is also deployed (politely) when Palestinians have no real intention of carrying through on a suggestion.

Divine Intervention is a cinematic work punctuated by what is described at the time as magical realism (though I have since learnt that this genre is too often imposed on real magic and also multivalent reality). But even with these misgivings, the form works well for the narrative of Palestinians, and it sets me to thinking about reality and why it is that colonial structures beat imaginative multiplicities out of us (if they can). Which is to say that for Palestinians, the most unlikely part of a story is in a superlative sense the most accurate, such as when our diaspora hero, Edward Said, describes the true but unbelievable instance of the society of sheep raisers in Israel who are sent half the funds requested for immunising their fold, since the Ministry of Agriculture has no certain knowledge about mixed marriages among the sheep, and that lately some difficulties about the conversion to Judaism were encountered. In this example, Said teaches us, we must reject comparisons to Kafka, because life for Palestinians, or anyone, is a life (not a parable), and because this is the possessive exclusivism which has been imposed upon reality and by which only an occupation is served when we do not chase dreams.

My father and Vera remember this expression quite differently (and I have already said, quite literally) as a very brief period when apricots arrive to Ellen’s tree and have to be harves- ted quickly – too many to eat, so Ellen makes jam to preserve them. When I say fil mish mish to my father he says, ‘That’s a very brief period of time’, a halcyon moment, perhaps metaphorical, which can exist in real life but disappears if you are not looking before you have noticed it. Apricot season is summertime, and Mirls Street is hot, notwithstanding the Kelvinator which fills a good portion of the wall in the lounge room, above the couch with the tear where Pa sits with his key and remembers his own fil mish mish in Palestine. Dad remembers that during this season, late at night, Ellen would stir large pots of the cut-up flesh of the apricots, and she had bare arms and the puree would spit and leave angry red welts where it hit her.

One year when Ellen is making jam in apricot season, and fortunately in several batches, the children discover that one packet of sugar, a packet she is already using, has become a destination for a whole colony of ants. Ellen is distraught but my father comes up with a solution, which he laughs about now on the phone as he tells me, ‘It was quite brilliant, really’. Joey says to his mother, ‘Let’s put two crosses on the labels of all the jam jars that have apricot jam without ants’, and Ellen gasps, ‘Imfadaheen! (you embarrass me) What will we say when people ask what do these crosses mean?’. And Dad is still laughing when he reflects, ‘I suppose it would have meant we re-lived this embarrassment as many times as we gave people jam and they asked what do these crosses mean? And we would have said that these are the jars without ants in them!’. I ask what becomes of the second-class conserves and Dad says, ‘Well, in the end we put the crosses on those ones, and we ate them, but we knew how to pick out the ants’.

There is also a story of Ellen and eggs that her eldest son brings her, and when he arrives he discovers either there are too many eggs in the fridge (why don’t you eat them?) or none (why do you give them away?) and one time my father arrives before Tony, and Ellen says, ‘Well, your brother is coming for lunch, better put those eggs in the car’, and when Tony arrives Dad says he spends the whole lunch amusing himself by subtly referring to them. After Tony leaves and Dad is still there, Ellen heaves a sigh of relief and says to him, ‘Fadah-nah, I was holding my breath all the time, I thought you were going to embarrass us!’.

After the talk I attend by the Turkish Cypriot poet, Alev Adil, I fruitlessly search for her book, until finally the scholar who hosts her finds me a copy, Venus Infers, and the poet writes a beautiful note on the endpapers. I cannot remember that our meeting was one in which we exchanged personal words, but she writes (and I am surprised to see the warmth of this inscription some fifteen years later) with much love for the shared dream of new worlds. In approximately the middle of this work is a poem called ‘Refugee Memories: Baggage’, and it shocks me, the opening line posed as a question, one which I recognise and which is a question I have lived with all of my life: Do you still wake up in the night / and start listing what you’ d take …

As a child I grow up in a house with an outdoor toilet that someone, before we live there, has renovated to make it inside, and the floor is concrete and quite wide, and there is always a pyramid of toilet paper there, some hundreds of rolls neatly stacked in this shape. And when you walk into the laundry to wash your hands, should you open a cupboard, then you chance the possibility of tens of stacked-up boxes of Omo Matic falling on top of you, a cupboard Dad fills with products bought at the best prices on pink-slipped rain-checks, and which he drives all over the city collecting on Saturday afternoons after closing the pharmacy. I live at this time with the knowledge that this is unusual (no pyramids or heaving cupboards at other friends’ houses) and also with the knowledge that this is how we live (mundane but also special). And later I am telling Sary and he says, ‘Oh yeah, us too, we stored hundreds of cleaning products’, and when Nasser moves recently he says, ‘My god! Mum had thousands of tins and I said, do we have to move these? And she said, they’re not hurting anyone’.

These products are not (since you’re asking and I’m telling) the things we would take, but the things we surround ourselves with, we Palestinians, to be prepared (we are trapped, don’t forget, for a time in Jerusalem and I have mentioned this before and I will say more later). When my family takes flight they take with them some scant array of possessions, they take armfuls of photographs (I’ve told you) and the beads of a broken necklace – and it is said that some Palestinians leave meals on the table, and that the Israeli government moves in Jewish families so quickly that the meals are still warm and they eat them. There’s also a rug (in my parents’ house) and a Bible (or several) that Pa writes in, and there are many things they don’t take and things they regret not keeping. When I am born I am born with this in me, this word which precedes me, this knowledge that that which seems permanent is also an illusory state of being. And what I can say is this: that there isn’t a Palestinian living who hasn’t considered this question, of what they would take in the night if a Nakba should ever befall us twice, and we could grab only this one small suitcase before we took flight.