FEBRUARY2007

the olive grove,
the harvest and the Oil

[by Bobbie]

It is late afternoon as we drive into the mountains. We stop to sit by the roadside and watch the village down below through the long grasses, as the call to prayer rises from the village and winds its way around the curves of the surrounding mountains. The sunlight scatters in a million drops on the million green silver leaves of the million million olive trees that cover the body of the mountains. The slopes are cut into careful terraces by the people who love them, each winding ribbon the step of a staircase that is a mountain. The grades do not violate its body contours but etch them, drawing out the elements of dark earth, white stone, grass brilliant from the winter rains. The trees throw down their shadows on the ground, and the terrace clefts fling their shadows out and up onto the mountains flanks. As the sun dips lower it thrusts the shadows deeper into the ledges and between the shadows and the leafy fur of the million trees are the secrets and body cavities of the mountains.

We tromp down off the road into the groves of quiet trees, loose rocks and soft earth under foot. We find the family busy at their life beneath the tree; a dozen people orchestrated to minister to this tree, whose time has come. They have waited for a year with their trees, watched the small fruits swell up with hard round bellies and quietly, imperceptibly grow and grow until the tree is in her final month, heavy, burdened, glorious, sucking the winter rain through her body for the fruits ready, now, to be harvested. This has been their life for a month, ministering to tree after tree; a family: a woman, her brother, his wives, her children and theirs, their mother and uncles, the children of children. The tree’s time has come, and it is the tree’s people that must go into labour for a month. Each one has a role; each one has a right; each one is born into a relationship that has existed between the family and the trees for longer than anyone knows.

The children sense this; they know that they bear responsibility for these trees and that the trees bear responsibility for them. We sit under the tree and gather the fruits that have been gently dropped down. The mother runs her hand along each branch to pull the fruits down, every fruit touching her skin as it comes off the tree. The father, high on a ladder in the tree, tugs them one by one and drops them down, they patter over our heads and backs, and the old woman sweeps her arms to gather them together. The boy, high in the tree, reaches the branches no one else can. The little girl plays with the olives, gathering them, scattering them.

There is much work to do. Many tiring weeks have already been spent in this work. But no one is hurrying. No one seems to care if there might be a more efficient way to do things; why not gather the fruits all at once, when the tree is harvested, instead of over and over, over and over?  They are living with their trees in their month; the time of the trees is part of them and all year long, this season is waiting inside each of them, like a husband who carries the reality of his wife’s pregnancy inside him as it slowly matures.

The man brings tea to us from the fire. It is smoky and sweet, the sun spills down on our faces and stomachs where we sit deep in the quiet grove and the beyond these groves the mountains, wrapped in their own groves, do not end. The sons load the horse and donkey with the harvested fruit and climb up. The family members, big and small, begin the long slow walk up and over the mountain to their homes. In the past years, past centuries, this family would stay with their trees, sleep there in the groves and begin again the next morning. But now it is too dangerous, the enemies of the land are also the enemies of its people.

I went north to see my friends and their new baby. Both come from generations in their village which cannot be counted. It is a small community. In the middle of town, the sheep of a family sleep in one room and the children in the other; in the morning the children take the sheep out and feed them in the hills through the day; in their turn the sheep will feed the children. In the bend of the lane a neighbor lady makes bread on a wood fire, and a man and his donkey wind through the streets with vegetables to sell.

My friends have all the wealth of their traditions and their lands, and these have not given them closed and mouldering minds but the fierce confidence of deeply rooted identities, capable of facing all the realities of this beautiful terrible world,  capable of realizing all their potential and creativity right here in this little village. They are satisfied with what their land, their families, have given them. But now it is not enough to be content; they have been forced to rise to the defense of their land, because their village is being eaten by the enemy, and they intend for their children’s children, and their children, to find their home here for generations that cannot be counted.

She is a teacher, and a poet, and a mother. She is the child of two strong farmers who fought and suffered so she could grow up in this village, who have strong traditions and independent minds, who fight to protect some things and to change others. The culture and tradition around her is strong; it can tell you how to be a mother. She has been bequeathed a million beliefs and assumptions to fall back on. She questions all of them. She loves her children with fierce intent; she examines her intentions. She talks with them and ponders deeply every aspect of their lives and development, and is not afraid to see what it has cost her, to imagine herself without them. She tells me that her labor and delivery of this fourth child was so terrible that she is afraid to remember it. About the exhausting first weeks when she could not stay awake to feed the baby and her husband combed her hair for her. She holds the tiny girl in her arms and I drink my coffee while she savors just one sip, the compromise she’s reached with her baby on the issue of caffeinating their milk, the milk her body makes and with which her baby’s body is made day by day.

But she and he, exhausted with the sleepless nights of a new baby, with endless hours of checkpoints to get to work and home, with the terrible battle for the survival of the land, still have room in their minds for the rest of the human family. She takes into herself the suffering of the people of Iraq, Sudan, and other places. She honors the resistance and questions it. She prays and fights the pain in her soul and it comes out of her in tears and poems.

He asks me about South Africa. I talk to them about things too strange to comprehend and they hear me. I tell them about the hundreds of thousands of motherless and fatherless children. They hear me, with shock but without judgment. I love them for our unspoken agreement to share with each other things we know the other cannot accept but seeks to understand. This tragedy of the South African people is worse than the tragedy that is happening to us, she finally says. I am dumbfounded by the capacity of their souls.

After dark, her parents come back from their land, from a long day of laboring with their olive trees, weary and delayed further by soldiers since their ancestral lands are now considered a closed military zone for the occupation forces. They invite me to come over. Their granddaughter leads me through the dark night to their house. In this little village with no street lights, the feet of every man, woman and child know their way. And in the distance are the village lands stolen to make Israel, a frenzy of glittering yellow lights all competing for space; illuminating a huge horrible carnival of thieves. The grandmother talks about her land, the trees, the day’s labour, and puts in front of me a steaming bowl of sweet curds. A special substance that comes from a new mother sheep for the first few days, she says, until the normal milk comes. Her granddaughter and I share a bowl, silenced by the sweet satisfying wonder of it in our mouths and stomachs.

The grandfather prepares his tractor, their only vehicle, for taking the olives to the press. I beg to tag along, and he gives me a place to stand on the hitch where I can ride clinging to the trailer, bouncing up the lanes and through the village and on out into the groves beyond the village, where there is nothing but a curious wind, the silver quiet trees in the endless groves, a sliver of moon and a million million stars. Then the smell of the press comes to us, the warm fragrance of the oil that has suckled this nation for generation after generation without number.

 .

 We arrive at the press and jump off the tractor and into a scene etched with the ceaseless labour of the past month. Sacks and sacks of olives piled high everywhere, men and their sons gathered talking, men catching some sleep on the sacks of olives, men and boys loading and moving the sacks. Their faces are lined with exhaustion, these men who have been in labour with their trees for a month, but the time is drawing to an end. They and the trees will rest, and the olives and the oil will make their families strong. We walk through the press, the floor a mass of olive residue, and watch as one family loads their olives into the chute where they are slowly sucked down, raised on a belt to where a fan lifts away the chaff, washed, crushed, and then refined twice. The residue is shunted out of the building where families can take it to use as fuel to warm themselves through the winter.

A family is finishing their load for the day and gathers by the spout where the olive oil finally comes gushing out, bright yellow and opaque. It is still alive. They open a bag of bread and open the pockets under the spout of the olive oil, where it fills and overflows the bread, running over their hands. They silently share the pieces of bread among the family and pass one to me.

A land covered, covered everywhere, with olive trees. Every olive tree covered with olives. Every olive touched by the hands of its people – the children, the women, the men, the old folks – and virtually every one of its people who have not been expelled sharing in the harvest of these trees, olive by olive, hand by hand, everyone of these people raised on the olives and oil of these trees. What does it mean? Something beyond my understanding. Something about human worth and its relationship to the earth; the worth of the earth and its relationship to mankind.

The grandfather told me once that the land could not reach its potential without its people; they care for it, and by doing so help the land become everything it is capable of being.  In the same way, the people could not reach their potential without their land; it cares for them and by doing so helps them become everything they are capable of being. This is something settler life in America and South Africa taught me nothing about. Standing there in the dirty, noisy pressroom with the rich oil of this nation -- whose wealth is measured in belonging to the land -- running down my throat and through my fingers, I find myself wondering about many things neither my mind nor my heart fully understand. About land. And trees. And fruit. About holiness. About the life that runs through the veins of men and trees. About blood, and oil, and mother’s milk.