No One Knows Their Blood Type (Excerpt)

The following is an excerpt from No One Knows Their Blood Type (CSU Poetry Center, October 2024), published with permission of the publisher.

From the Translator’s Afterword

Hazem Jamjoum:

What first struck me about this book, and urged me to translate it into English, was what the text was not, what it is not. Unlike a great deal of writing that emerges from communities bonded by dehumanizing, racializing trauma, it is not a text that aims to argue for the humanity of its characters, or outline the brutality of colonialism and the inalienable rights of the colonized, or attempt to illustrate the cruelty of gender or any other kind of oppression. It wasn’t written to illustrate victimhood. It does not plead. It just assumes the grotesque facets of the workings of power, and conducts its conversation with whoever recognizes themselves as already in the fight.

What do we center when we want to speak to us? When we’re not trying to tell others about what we fight against and what we fight for when we fight for freedom? What questions do we want to ask together? Maya centers us around the body of the girl and woman rather than the battlefield of History and the dialectic of colonizer and colonized (though never pretending she has the privilege to ignore the colonial context in which that body is forced to exist). As she leads us in pursuit of the noisome workings of power behind closed doors, we’re left with a set of questions that don’t sit so comfortably on the national agenda: what is an anticolonial movement when it is at the expense of its people’s autonomy, and particularly women’s autonomy over their own bodies? Why do we lionize the figure of the revolutionary militant when that militant is, however understandably, transformed into a monster when it comes to those they supposedly love and cherish? Why aren’t questions about motherhood and fatherhood, sisterhood and kinship, love and friendship at the core of conversations about liberty and freedom? If they were, how would that change our notion of emancipation . . . should it change our conception of resistance?

These were questions I was asking myself, perhaps a bit incoherently at the time I first read this book, and more coherently since, and because of. But if these are our questions for us, and if we take “us” to mean “Palestinian,” why translate this to English at all? As a majority exile society, one whose colonizer’s strategic objectives revolve primarily around ensuring that as few of us remain anywhere near the land that unites us as possible, to be Palestinian is not necessarily to read Arabic. Now entering a fifth generation since the Nakba, many of us are in the non-Arabic-immersed shatat, the Dispersion, left to figure out for ourselves what it means to be us. That inside–outside dynamic across our society globally is one of the least discussed aspects of us-ness, between those that experience the effects of Zionism as the wildly variable experience of exile and statelessness, to those that experience it as the fascism of a settler majority planting its flags wherever the eye can turn, to those that experience it as direct military and settler occupation, ghettoization, and mass incarceration, to those that experience it as soul-crushing siege and now genocide. Maya’s story moves us across some of these positionalities, and my hope is that in English (and the other languages it will hopefully appear in) this book can reach not only the other diasporics, but also all the others to whom conversations about the darker side of a multigenerational collective struggle feel nothing less than crucial. Collective struggles have much to learn from one another, and the differences often have far more to teach than the similarities.

*

Jumana

Jerusalem, 2007

Malika, the midwife of East Jerusalem, dies. I scrub her with cheap wine. I scrub every part of her, but I can’t close her half-shut eyes or stop her glance wandering off to something else. She still wants to see everything, to make sure everyone is where they’re meant to be, doing what they ought to be doing. We try to do what she would have done in our place. We try and we fail. No one can be on top of everything like she always was. If she knew she’d be in a freezer until Monday she’d have thrown a fit and done everything in her power to prevent it. No one is thinking about that now; everyone is busy with the preparations. We try not to think about how it is Malika herself that we’re clothing with the white socks and satin chemise she would have bought especially for a day like today.

Her body, shriveled and dehydrated, is heavy now. The three of us try to lift her but we can’t. I try not to look at her private parts, but the few little hairlets sprouting there catch my eye. Her face yellowed on the left side from exsanguination, red blotches on her forearm, two pale breasts floundering right and left: everything dead, for a while now, and resisting.

She does not want to die, she doesn’t.

This woman from the Greek community who birthed half the men and women of Jerusalem and never gave birth to anyone herself, she lies before me in a barren room, a room on the floor of death in Hadassah Hospital. I, who stumbled on her by chance, never imagined that it would be me among those preparing her for departure, let alone be the one to choose her last dress, a dress she might not even like.

I exit the room, leaving Nina and Um ‘Aziz with that body, its metamorphosis into a white ghost complete. Nina has primped her sister’s cold lips with some of her fuchsia lipstick, like they did in the eighties, making Malika look like a Geisha doll. Suheil is outside trying to call someone to arrange the prayer service and the burial. I try to console him, but he doesn’t seem the type that needs it. From the moment the Hebrew-accented Arabic of the Mizrahi nurse announced Malika’s death, Suheil had diagnosed its cause as water in the lungs, failure of the heart, clogging of the arteries. He’d come to terms with the matter without any need of my sympathies.

I’ve only known Malika for the past two weeks. My father had been admitted to the Maqased Hospital for open-heart surgery, which sent him into a state of clinical death, so he had to be moved here to Hadassah. His state has not changed since. It was not only the hospital that brought me and Malika together, but also a glance I shared with Suheil, who had joined his mother and aunt in the move from their home to the hospital room. Both Malika and Nina had left no uncertainty as to the fact that Suheil had spent the past five years in search of a wife. The search that has now accompanied him into his sixth decade.

I didn’t need more than that glance to know I would share a lifetime with this man. That was all I could think whenever I saw him, whether he was drinking that American coffee I can’t stand, or in the hospital hallway, or seated at Malika’s bedside and getting ready to leave.

I started to visit her as an escape from my regimen of waiting for my father to either wake up or die, hoping to see Suheil, who visited at the same hour every evening. My own visits became a near daily activity: I’d sit beside Nina, who would follow Malika’s instructions like a robot. I would sit there trying to fathom this woman on her deathbed, with a heart that burned with the fire of a twenty-year-old, and whose ambitions in life remained . . . everything.

Everyone in the geriatric ward loved Malika. Everyone introduced her to their visitors, children and grandchildren, including the woman who wore a thick woolly cap on her head and only spoke in Hebrew.

Malika listened to their stories so she could tell her own, thoroughly describing the aches and pains that stretched from her nose, ulcerated by two oxygen tubes, to her legs, swollen with edema. She never forgot to add a deep and breathy “aakh” after each sentence, a sound emanating from the merciless itch of her psoriasis or the pain of the eroded cartilage that had bowed her spine, shrinking her to the size of a small boy.

Everyone in the room knew Malika’s medical chart by heart and could recite her life story, beginning with her work as a registered midwife at the Hospice Hospital in the early ’50s, all the way to her weekly visits to Hadassah over the past three years to rest her waterlogged legs. Both male and female nurses treated her like an authority who would determine whether they’d passed or failed a performance review. She gave them unflinching advice on the world of nursing in her not-bad-at-all English, never failing to wink at the young handsome nurse who bathed her every other day, assuring him with the occasional “I’m like your mother.” He responded each time with a big hearty laugh and a small cheeky kiss.

The smell of cleaning liquids, medicine, and the geriatric feces that saturated the cloths and bedpans didn’t discourage any of us from our evening visits. Nor did the smell prevent me from escaping my father’s lifeless room to this other one with its soulful verve. No one visits him and the evening hours at his bedside are disconsolate. This other room is inhabited by four women, and though one neither wakes up nor receives visitors, the groans of the rest are regularly silenced by the new stories carried in with visitors who tell them.

People don’t visit my father because anyone who would consider dropping by is not allowed to enter Jerusalem. No one visits the other man who shares his room, either. This other man doesn’t speak with us, as if frightened by our very presence. If you discount the incessant phone calls, the only words spoken in that room are those of me and Yara pestering each other, and the slumbered mutterings of the other man calling for someone in the Hebrew neither of us understands. Together these sounds are the background music to the thoughts in our heads. Yara leaves every evening to return to her children and husband, the man behind the incessant phone calls (calls motivated by jealousy not love). I am left with them: two alien men, one of them my father.

Malika passed away this evening. Visitation hours hadn’t yet started. Nina wasn’t there, and neither was Suheil, nor I, not e­­ven the handsome nurse. They tried to resuscitate her for a long time, hoping someone would come who could make things easier for that soul of hers that refused to leave. Nina had gone with Suheil for a change of clothes, but by the time they got back to the hospital it was all over. They saw her through the window that looks out into the hallway. I was there too, as if we had all agreed to arrive at the same moment. We all saw the glance in our direction. The look was not one of reproach, or joy, or even sadness. It was a glance that wandered in silence, death for a woman who was never silent.

Yara calls my cell phone to tell me off for interfering in the life of her family, and for leaving her alone with our father. She wants to go shopping on Yafa Street before heading home; she’d even said so that morning. I hurry to get to her before her anger drags us into another long unbearable conversation.

My father is still as he was: a large mass of surplus flesh with two oxygen tubes holding back his snores. Yara puts on what’s left of her brand-name lipstick with the help of the mirror above the hospital-room sink. The other man watches as she, oblivious, picks up her imitation Gucci bag and rushes out of the room, warning me that she’s in a hurry, and that I shouldn’t call to nag her home. I sit on the plastic chair farthest from the two beds, grateful that she’s finally left.

It’s cold despite the infernal heat from the radiator they never shut off. Lately I’ve stopped looking at my father; his body is just another part of the room now, like the bed, the chair, and the window onto the maternity ward. On this day, though, my head tilts in his direction. I’m afraid he might suddenly wake up and ask about Yara, or scold me for my tight-fitting clothes.

His face is shrouded behind a dark shadow, and saliva drips from the corner of his lips. The wart on his temple has gotten bigger. I close my eyes so I don’t have to see it, but another image appears from another time: my father sitting at the kitchen table in our home in El-Menzah V in Tunis with a smaller belly and less grey in his hair. He’s preparing baguette sandwiches with hardboiled eggs that will trigger the exodus of all the students within a ten-meter radius the moment we open our lunch bags at school. He takes his time with the assembly, not forgetting the tomato slices and pickles that will make the eggs and the bread disgustingly soggy. A smile creeps onto my face, a smile that willfully ignores just how much I hated those sandwiches, how I considered them punishment.

I move between the sink and the edge of the bed, closing my eyes and thinking of a return to the world of Suheil and Malika. There is death there, but the life that is here is unbearable.

I open my eyes to familiar sounds, sounds I haven’t heard in some time. Snores of a timbre I know well, but uncharacteristically long and uneven. All of a sudden, my father’s body begins to convulse, as if it had swallowed a piece of metal it needed to disgorge. In that moment he does not seem like my father. He is a thing that resembles my father, and I am afraid to get near it. I gather my courage and approach him. I scream. I try to hold him down, to restrain him without touching the bullet wound in his chest from the Beirut days, but his body falls to the floor with a tremor that wakes up the entire ward and rips the oxygen tubes from his nostrils. For a moment he opens his eyes and releases a soulful snore.

For that quick moment, he seems almost comfortable. The nurses and everyone else rush in. They lift him using the bedsheet that tumbled to the floor with him. They try to resuscitate him with CPR and shocks from the defibrillator, but he has snorted his last snore.

That night my father’s body is moved to the morgue to lie near Malika’s, and Suheil and I join in the preparations. Unlike Suheil, though, I am an emotional wreck. The sight of my father— wrapped in a hospital sheet flapping in the hands of a nurse on either end of his corpse—was terrifying. More terrifying than anything else is trying and failing to reach Yara. She isn’t answering her phone. Her permit only applies to the hospital’s vicinity, and my mind spirals down the thought of soldiers arresting her. When I see them examining his body to fill in the death certificate with some remaining details, I fall. I collapse, exhausted by tears I can’t explain.

I wake up in the emergency room of that same hospital. Suheil, looming with Yara above me, says I fell to the floor. They rushed me to the emergency room, where nurses carried out tests and found it was nothing more than a drop in my blood pressure. Yara is here, her face hovering over mine, her maquillage out of place pointing in every direction. And my father is someplace else.

There is so much we have to attend to now, and I still cannot believe that this man, this man who is my father, is gone from our lives forever. Is he really capable of dying? Do things this big actually die?

We sit on the ground floor of the hospital in silence. Yara calls my cousins in Amman and my father’s friends in Ramallah so we can move him to Nablus for burial. In his worry for me, Suheil picked up my father’s death certificate from the intensive care unit when he went to pick up his aunt’s. He also picked up my test results.

Suheil sits reading through the reports to confirm that the causes he’d determined for my father’s and his aunt’s deaths were correct. He then speaks the sentence that will change everything. He utters these words without considering the fact that such sounds should not be uttered so casually, or with such naïveté. He says, as if pointing out a remarkable coincidence or a mere cosmic error:

“Your father’s blood type is O positive, and yours is AB positive. That can’t be right.”

*

Born in 1980 in Lebanon, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is an Arabic-language Palestinian novelist, poet, and children’s book author. She edited The Book of Ramallah, an anthology of short stories published by Comma Press in 2021. An English translation of her poetry appeared from Milkweed Editions under the title You Can Be the Last Leaf, translated by Fady Joudah and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Hazem Jamjoum is a cultural historian completing his doctorate at NYU, and an audio curator and archivist at the British Library.