‘the tug of life’s sustaining banalities’ … these words were written by Susan Abulhawa in her novel The blue between sky and water, a beautiful piece of literature telling the story of a Palestinian family driven off their ancient land holdings into Gaza in the late 1940s early fifties. She describes the temporary camps where the people of Beit Daras waited, having fled their village in the face of Israeli bombardment.

Their husbands put up laundry lines for them, and built communal kitchens and underground ovens to make bread. In the congestion of national upheaval and collective sorrow that would deepen the roots of history and expand through multiple generations, the refugees of Beit Daras went back to their jokes and scandals. And while they waited to go home babies were born and weddings were planned. The tug of life’s sustaining banalities pulled them from their cots into communal spaces where they prayed together, drank the morning’s coffee and afternoon’s tea together. The war had been a great equaliser and put everyone, no matter their family name or fortune, into the same canvas tents lined in equally spaced rows in open shadeless fields. … The scoundrels, saints, gossips, mothers, whores, pious, communists, egoists, pleasurists and all the other ists went back to their former ways in this new, misshapen fate.

Like its precursor, Mornings in Jenin, it dragged my heart and mind back to the plight of the Palestinians, who for so many years have suffered the lot of all the dispossessed people all over the earth, the losers in the struggle for land, for power, for dominion, for place. It is nothing new. It has been the course of history for as long as it has been recorded by myth-makers/disciples of the powerful/ western historians/religious fanatics/dreamers. But this, like the Australian Aboriginal dispossession, the Rohingya, the Sahawis, …. so many peoples  all over the globe … is part of our everyday lives right now. These are not Homeric tales, not the clinical unfolding of historical trends. They are here and now. In front of us. 

And to my shame, the Palestinian dispossession was happening when I, as a young woman, was living in Israel in the mid 1960s, marvelling at what the people from the German concentration camps, who had suffered such terrible losses at the hands of their Nazi persecutors, who were struggling to find a home in their ‘promised land’, were managing to achieve in their kibbutzim in spite of the horrors they had experienced. Theirs was indeed an epic tale, but it was done at such a cost, a cost that I, then, didn’t recognise, did not want to see: a people whose land was taken from them, whose ancient ways and culture were uprooted, and over the years were deliberately squeezed in the increasingly small enclaves now known as the West Bank and Gaza. A solution manufactured by the West. Was it guilt, a quick way to rid Europe of a problem that seemed unsolvable at the time? How much of it was driven by a deep-seated residual anti-semitism? By giving the Zionists what they were asking for, at the expense of the Palestinians, was it designed to salve the European conscience, pass the problem over to somewhere else? Whatever it was – and there were many forces driving it – it certainly has come back to plague western democracies, along with all the other arbitrary borders that remain as remnants of the ‘Colonial Era’. Things fall apart as we shamble through what is now post-colonial times. 

Ah, the human spirit. Today, many of the people I worked with in Chin State, which borders India in the north-west of Myanmar, have fled their homes as the Myanmar military, the Tatmadaw, continue their air strikes, burning and destroying villages in an attempt to quell the resistance of the people to the military government, which seized power in February 2021. The Chin Human Rights Organisation reports that there have been four airs strikes since Christmas. They report that around 200 refugees crossed the border into India in the past week. It is estimated that some 52,000 civilians have fled to India since the coup,  44,000 trying to survive in Mizoram State. The remainder are making their way to New Delhi, more than 2,000 kilometres to the east, where it is possible to register with UNHCR as refugees. The number of people hiding in the mountainous forests (internally displaced persons – IDPs) is unknown. 

It is not only war that displaces people. I remember descending down the dirt steps cut into the steep hillside near the Indian-Myanmar border at the insistence of a young Chin woman so proud of the room she had struggled so long to find, a small dark space formed with scraps of corrugated iron around the narrow poles that supported the bamboo clad house perched on the mountain slope above. The dirt floor had been swept, the bedding was neatly folded in one corner, a pot sat on a small gas burner beside two metal plates. She had been forced out of her village because of fear of a misunderstood disease.  She was one of the lucky ones. She had managed to secure antivirals to slow the progression from HIV to full blown AIDS. 

The tug of life’s sustaining banalities. It is what human beings do, one way or the other, to survive. We revert back to the daily habits that we know, the little things that make up the flow of living in spite of what is happening outside us. The human spirit never ceases to amaze me and give me courage.