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Excerpt : from
the Introduction |
Page:
1,2,3,4,5
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How dare I, then?
This is the question that haunted me as I began this book. How dare I even think of a biography of someone so intimate, so integral a part of our culture, and yet simultaneously so remote? How dare I seek the flesh-and-blood woman behind the legend?
I knew that the simplicity of those three questions -- who was she? who must she have been? who could she have been? -- was deceptive. They lead straight into a minefield of deeply held beliefs, unwitting preconceptions, cultural assumptions, even vested interests. Yet once I had asked them, they couldn't be unasked. I wanted to know. There was no way to go but forward. And though I didn't start out with a detailed map, I had at least a clear idea of the lay of the land.
I lived in Jerusalem for thirteen years, working first as a psychologist and then as a political and cultural journalist. Those years gave me fluency in Hebrew, a rough grasp of Arabic, and the ability to decipher more Aramaic than I'd thought. More important, however, they gave me a strong
Middle Eastern sense of both place and time.
In most of the modern world, two thousand years ago seems an eternity. In the United States, twelfth-century Anasazi ruins are called prehistoric; a foreign visitor has to do a doubletake and remember that history is relative -- that this is 'the New World' and that so far as most Americans are concerned, their history only began in the fifteenth century.
Not so in the Middle East, where what happened two thousand years ago has a tangible presence: cultural, religious, and above all, political.
There are other places with ancient pasts, to be sure. But in Europe, say, Greek and Roman ruins have shed their religious and political significance. Tourists can admire a temple to Apollo with carefree ease; nobody believes in Apollo any more. In the Middle East, however, nothing ever seems to shed religious and political significance. What is prehistory in the States and archeology in Europe -- magnificent ruins ensuring a continuous flow of tourist revenue -- is everyday political reality in this part of the world.
Those years in Jerusalem either warped or strengthened my sense of time, depending on your point of view. Events of two thousand years ago seem close, familiar.
You live with history, just a short walk from the giant ashlar stones of the retaining walls of Herod's temple in Jerusalem, his pride and joy and the cause of as much trouble two thousand years ago as today.
How not have the long view of the present, reaching deep into the past, when a single olive tree can be a thousand years old or more? How not be aware of what happened in this land two millenia ago when the very place names -- Nazareth, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Capernaum, Galilee, the Jordan River -- are familiar to you from childhood, when you know them from bible stories, from Christmas carols, from the Koran, from the Passover Hagaddah, from Sabbath hymns, from folk songs and spirituals?
Everything is anachronism, not in the usual sense of being out-of-date, but in the more precise sense of being out of its place in time. Or rather, in two places at once: simultaneously past and present.
Sometimes, in fact, it seems there is no such thing as the past at all. In this history-soaked part of the world, you could well argue that history does not even exist.
Nothing is ever done with. Nothing ever past. Stones and slingshots, the weapons of biblical tales, were the weapons of the Palestinian Intifada in the late 1980s. For years, the most popular Israeli sandals -- basically just strips of leather on a leather sole -- were called tanachiot, 'biblicals'. Jewish settlers' claims to the land are based on Hebrew texts that originated 2,500 years ago. The hatred and violence on both sides have mounted to epic Old Testament dimensions. And in Nazareth, the most bitter source of tension in the past few years, pitting Moslems and Christians against each other, has been the attempt to move the shrine of a nephew of Salah ed-Din, known as Saladdin to Westerners -- the man whose forces routed the Crusaders on July 4, 1187.
This is the way of the Middle East. The past reverberates through the present; the present cannot shake off the past. There is none of the distance usually required for the historical view. Yet for me, this compression of time seemed to help rather than hinder.
When I began to think about who Mary really was, I could see her reflection all around me. Not in plaster statues and gold-flecked holy cards, nor in the richly decorated icons of the Eastern churches, nor even the masterpieces of Renaissance art. These were the Mary of devout imagination: a figure divorced from her time and her place, stripped of individuality and personality, of background and identity, of her language and even of her real name.
But Maryam was very close. I could see her face everywhere I looked. It was in the olive-skinned and dark-eyed faces of Sephardic Jewish women of Yemenite or Iraqi or Syrian or Egyptian descent. It was in the faces of Palestinian Arab women in the small peasant villages of the West Bank -- the ancient areas of Judea and Samaria. It was in the worn faces of Beduin women herding flocks out in the hills of Galilee and Judea and the Negev. These were Middle Eastern faces, belonging to people speaking two languages very similar to the one Maryam spoke: Hebrew and Arabic, sister languages of Aramaic.
Two thousand years may have passed, but Maryam was still very much alive in this land.
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(c) Lesley Hazleton, 2004
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