An excerpt from the chapter "The Language of the Heart" from the bookFrom the River to the Sea. The Story of My Family Divided Between Two Peoplesby the writer and our collaborator, Widad Tamimi. The memoir, which intertwines family memory and civil reflection from an author with a unique perspective – the daughter of a Palestinian refugee and a woman of Jewish descent – is released today in the Scintille series by Feltrinelli (176 pages, 16 euros)
***
For me, there exists a language that is neither the mother tongue nor the one learned in school. I do not speak it well, I only grasp fragments, yet it has always inhabited me – like background music that you recognize even after years of silence. Just a syllable, an accent, and something inside me stirs. Sometimes I even have the impression of understanding it entirely, as one understands dreams: not through logic, but through intimacy.
I am moved to hear it in conversations between strangers on the subway. It both touches and irritates me, because in those sounds I find affections, snapshots, small wounds of childhood. And every time, in a Middle Eastern city, the muezzin calls to prayer, my body reacts as if it is aware: hands to the chest, breath changing.
The whispered voices in the mosques flow over the carpets, bringing me back every time to the dawns of Amman: my grandmother praying next to me, the murmur I tried to imitate, her finger tapping on my thigh to give me the rhythm. I did not understand everything about that house, but I felt it was mine.
WHO GROWSbetween different worlds lives like this: it does not belong entirely to anyone, and perhaps for this very reason it knows how to recognize its home in the smallest details. Just a gesture, a smell, an intuition – and the body relaxes, finding a beloved place again. This happens, for example, when in a souk they offer me a stool and call a boy to bring the tea. The few words I speak in Arabic, the story of my father's origins, my last name open a door. It is a house not entirely mine, but it belongs to me enough to invite me to sit.
And so I speak: not to buy, but to enter the dance of negotiations, which in the Levant is a way to get to know each other. Arabic is a language that does not tolerate distance: it provokes, solicits, demands relationship. The price at the market is just a pretext: we measure ourselves, we tell our stories. This is what I love: the knowing look of the seller when he realizes I can follow him in the game. He stops, moves aside the hanging clothes, and finally looks at me.
Then there are the gestures: fingers closing to ask for patience, the “no” clicked on the tongue, eyebrows raising, the number three made with the index, middle, and ring fingers. It is a language within a language, a daily choreography.
Dad spoke Arabic with friends and distant family. With me, it was the language of affection but also of reprimands. Even today, I remember both curses and nursery rhymes. My first word was “mampa”: neither Arabic nor Italian, but perfect for calling someone who, for me and my sister, would be both a father and a mother. (…) In Italy, we had no other relatives, apart from our mother's father, whom I only began to visit regularly once he retired. I kept him company after he lost his sight, often accompanying him and his second wife for hospital check-ups, or we would go to the mountains for long periods when Grandma Marina went to visit her daughter in Brazil for eight weeks. During the walks, which he insisted on taking despite not being able to see, he would tell me about Trieste, America, and family.
I REBUILTmy story starting from two very different men, although united by a surprisingly similar fate. One was born very poor, the other rich; one had worked as a child, the other studied with tutors; one was impulsive, the other methodical; one expansive, the other reserved. Yet both had lost their homeland without finding another, both lived suspended between nostalgia and survival.
Exoduses do this: they tear apart the network of ties, leaving empty chairs around the table. My father and my grandfather were two lonely men in Italy – one being the only one who had left, the other because he was the only one who had returned – and they found themselves bound by an unlikely relationship: father-in-law and son-in-law united by the fragments of two exiles and two peoples destined to grapple with the tragedies and contradictions of History in the same patch of land. My mother was their point of contact, but also a source of deep unease for both.
She was a source of great turmoil, the result of intellectual and existential rebellion, certainly in line with the demands of the '68 movement, but also with insights that would prove to be far-sighted; she was someone who would never replace the upheavals of '68 with a bourgeois retreat. This cost her a dramatic break with her father, the source of multiple sufferings and an increasing malaise that would lead her to self-annihilation. She was uncompromising with herself, severe with the world, without compromises, an extremist of good principles. In debates against the unlawful expropriation of land by Israel to the detriment of the Palestinians, she declared herself Jewish to not exempt herself from responsibilities. (...)
THE DOMINANT PARTof my maternal family, but certainly not the one most endowed with that lightness understood as a positive quality of the spirit, was undoubtedly the Jewish one. The Weiss-Schmitz were imperious, elitist, boasting a solid culture that fascinated, moving in society like dancers from La Scala. The love for knowledge was strongly inscribed in my mother's genes to the point of constituting a salient character.
Her grandparents, my great-grandparents Ottocaro Weiss and Ortensia Schmitz, adored her for this, for her determined demeanor, insatiable curiosity, love for study completely disinterested in school grades, ability to speak languages, intransigence towards the world, and an unshakeable ethics. She was one of them, not a bit less Jewish despite her mother's different origins, to whose genetics little was granted except for kindness and natural amiability, characteristic traits of my grandmother Ginni. When my mother tragically died, it was uncle Piero, my grandfather's brother, along with his son Antonio, who communicated the news to great-grandmother Ortensia in her villa in Riverdale, New York. She had surpassed ninety, lived in a wheelchair, from which she let herself fall to the ground, screaming in despair. (…)
My mother was rebellious, rigorous, feverish, unable to back down an inch when it came to a principle. A child of '68, she broke with her father, chose a life far from any comfort, but found no peace. (…)
FROM MY MOTHER I BELIEVEI have partly inherited this often thankless task. Being born to a Jewish family on one side and Palestinian on the other, and carrying the name Widad – "love" in ancient Arabic – has marked my life more than any choice. Every time someone has asked me its meaning, since I was a child I have felt a calling: towards my roots, my wounds, my two peoples, and towards my parents' intention in choosing it.
I carry a name that reminds me every day where I come from and to which story – to which two stories – I belong. Love, on the other hand, as much as it sounds like the most desirable feeling, is not a taken-for-granted choice: it is not every day, and it is not in every season of History. (…)