Palestine Blog 5 -On marsan mang informel and other thoughts
16.11.2023
Ragoo Lane has been “impacted” – a cruel metaphor that turns non-military acts into military ones – by two new informal sectors of the economy in recent years. Taken together, they remind me of the suffering of the people of Gaza. Everything does.
These two sectors of the modern working class labour away in shocking conditions, not only outside the law but, when push comes to shove, against it. One sector works at the grassroots for big iron-smelting capitalists by gathering bits of metal, large and small, discarded here and there, or nicked from here or there, piling them precariously on to rickety home-made carts and trolleys, adapted baby-prams and tricycles, and pushing and dragging these apparatuses long distances on variable road surfaces, to sell. The workers are wittily called “marsan feray”, people recognizing their work sector this way. The other sector, which I’m writing about today, is those called “marsan mang”, who scale into the heights of huge old trees on other peoples’ plots of land so as to collect shopping bags full of green mangoes to sell to fruit-sellers for zasar. Both sectors are manned – they are almost all men – exclusively by people suffering the pain of withdrawal from opiates or other drugs.
In Ragoo Lane, right next to our house is a vacant lot with two huge, old mango trees. So, in the season, you hear all the dogs in our street – including our two, Lock and Down – barking like mad. Then you start to worry that one of the informal mango dealers will fall from the height of the tree. So, the other day, the last day of the “Kolok Oktob”, I was particularly worried to see someone up a tree. It had been raining the day before, and the branches would be slippery. It was a lone, tall young man I saw way up in the tree. Then, it happened. I heard the terrible sound I had been dreading: someone falling through the branches, followed by the hideous thud of him hitting the ground. I tore out, climbed over the fence, and went to where he lay groaning. I asked his name, and said I would phone SAMU – he tried to stop me, saying he could not go to hospital because of his fear of withdrawal pain, but he could not move. He tried to drag his body along the ground. I stopped him, calmed him. He told me he was 30 years old. Clearly his back was injured. There was some blood on his mouth, too. So, soon all the neighbours gathered to care for him and I went to find his mother at the other end of Allée Tamarin, and she came with me to be at his side, waiting for an ambulance. He had meanwhile, I noticed dragged himself to his big plastic bag of mangoes and draped his arms lovingly over his mangoes. They would rescue him from the agony of his withdrawal symptoms.
The ambulance soon arrived, and the health workers lifted him on to a stretcher and took him to hospital.
The part of today’s true story from now on starts to bring up an issue that is a huge source of suffering in Gaza this past five weeks: it concerns information.
The next day we heard the young man had died. Everyone in the street knew he had died. I enquired how they knew and they said two other “marsan mang informel” had told them. I had told my work colleagues that I had been told by neighbours that he had died. We all felt sadness. So young. So brave. So trapped in life. And now in death.
Then the following day, I met his mother – to whom I had naturally become very close, as we waited for the ambulance, when I comforted her, telling her no need to berate him right now about his drug habit, and so on. And she was telling me how he had three children, how his wife had left, and how so she was left looking after them. As I was about to present condolences, I noticed she looked all serene, even happy, so I waited instead. And she said he was alive, a miracle, and had – suffering too much from withdrawal – signed himself out of hospital against the doctor’s orders, and was at home. She was taking care of him. The three children had been sent to their mother.
So, here we have a serious incident. A fall from the heights of an old mango tree. And it is followed by conflicting information about that one man’s state: whether he was dead or alive. Imagine in Gaza, where people are, in panic, trying to find out who amongst their relatives, their neighbours, their friends, their work colleagues have died, and who amongst them have survived. Imagine when you cannot go to the hospital to check. Nor even to the morgue. You cannot contact relatives. You cannot, often enough, use your phone because the Israeli army has cut network, and there is no place, anyway, to recharge it, because the Israeli army has turned the electricity off. You may have had to leave your neighbourhood already and had to move “southwards within Gaza”, as a million people have been forced by the Israeli army to do. Many pushing someone – the very young and very old, the very sick and the disabled – on a home-made cart or trolley, an adapted baby-pram or tricycle, for long distances on variable surfaces, already bombed by the Israeli army. Or on a donkey-drawn cart. Israel has barred the entry of fuel for cars and buses. And you are short on food. You are short of water. The Israeli army has prevented water and food being distributed. Is the Israeli army trying to push you and your family further and further southwards until, sick and tired and without hope, by then, be “ready” to be forced into the Egyptian desert for the rest of your lives? And, as you trudge with a big plastic bag towards a future refugee camp, another refugee camp – your family were already refugees when you came to Gaza, hounded out by the then new Israeli State in 1948, or later in 1967 – and you are still meanwhile trying to ascertain, for sure, who is dead and who is alive amongst your loved ones. You still do not know. You can’t keep up.
What we need is an immediate ceasefire! Unconditional! Stop the bombs and shells now! Lift the siege! Save Gaza! Save the whole of Palestine from the genocide!
I hear with a warm feeling in my chest that 300 lawyers, within 10 days, have joined together, representing associations and unions, and begun filing Court Cases against Israel for genocide – in international courts like the ICC and in national courts wherever it can be done. Led by senior French barrister M. Gilles Devers, with lawyers from all around the world supporting these associations and unions, they say they are an “army” for the Palestinians, who have no army to defend them. In the next 10 days they want to get 3,000 lawyers, world-wide, to tackle these cases. Let us all become Palestine’s army of supporters. Call on the Government to break off diplomatic ties with Israel to help force an immediate ceasefire.
Lindsey Collen
for LALIT
