...a tale from journals....
In the Fall of '81, Abu Msallam invited me to help him accustom his young three-year-old camel, Ga'ood, to a human rider. In the American West this activity is called "breaking-in" an animal. Perhaps you possess TV images of cowboys in a corral or a rodeo riding a wildly bucking horse as humans are tossed into the air and holding on for dear life with one hand. Well, believe me, the camel is just as stubborn and ferocious as a horse in his determination to be rid of the human burden on his back.

For the better part of a week, Msallam led us on long "walks" with a 5-meter rope tied around the camel's muzzle. In the beginning, his younger brother Dhaif Allah joined us for the adventure. Holding a similar rope he triangulated with Msallam against Ga'ood. I will carry to my grave an image of the two of them: pulled and braced like tent-stakes with the sand piling up their shins in waves or furrows as they attempted to subdue Ga'ood. I sat on the camel's rump and gripped for dear mercy a burlap sack looped around his little adolescent hump, cinched from underneath his belly. We spent hours and days walking more often thrashing up and down the valley.

The work was exhausting. Bouncing between Ga'ood and the ground, I accumulated a goodly number of scrapes and cuts and bruises which, when you live outdoors, you generally ignore. But one evening I discovered bloodstain on my robe and after some searching, I found a dry scab at the base of my spine. This wound was bewildering: I could not remember hurting myself in that location whereas every other bruise and cut had a memorable spin to it. I puzzled over the matter for days.

Weeks later, in the relaxed gathering of a group of men, I was invited to narrate the tale of subduing Ga'ood. I mentioned in passing my discovery of the wound. Well... a voice from the darkness quipped "hagfan," and all of a sudden each and every one of the men present broke into chortles, chuckles, and laughter. They were rolling back on their elbows, some with tears in their eyes. I was dumbfounded. And my chagrin only fueled their humor.

"Hagfan" means "You who or that which is dried up or shrivelled." In that instant though, I did not have a dictionary. Was this a familiar name for my injury? Something that every young boy experiences in the course of growing up or was I being "hoisted on my own petard?" The butt of a joke? Clearly, I was being royally teased. Msallam finally discovered his composure and took it upon himself to explain. "You see, Said, you wanted to learn our ways. Now we have gone and siphoned off the last drop of your American blood. That part of you is now all dried up. You are one of us now."

People around the world often use the language of "blood" to describe kinship and brotherhood. But as this incident shows, even illiterate folk recognize the mere convenience of this vocabulary. The Zalabi clan did not for a moment think that they had really managed to go where medicine has failed to go before, to separate ethnic strains of blood one from the other. They did not think they had erased my American mannerisms, accent, and bizarre thinking. But they recognized that we had crossed a threshold of experience that made me kin in a special special and acceptable way. We now shared a bond that made us more together than apart, less alien, less foreign. Because of the humorous fallacy of their language and the fact that everyone took it tongue-in-cheek, my transformation was clearly mental, or figurative. With the strength of our collective imagination, we had fabricated a new reality and way of thinking that included fraternity, trust, utility, and playfulness. Brotherhood is imaginable.

©2001 Said Nuseibeh