The Ticket Seller

Author: Walid Daqqah

It is not an autobiography that a martyr, fighter, and intellectual like Walid Daqqah writes about his life, but rather, he may have written his life as a biography of suffering, and a tale of humanity. It is a memory that fueled his life and will become a sun illuminating the hearts of future generations. In every chapter of his story, we will find the narrative of Palestine, as if when he decided to be that revolutionary, and found the secret of oil in the land, he wrote a militant biography of what it means to be a true Palestinian, or what it means to be Khalid, not Khaldun or Dov as in Ghassan Kanafani's novel "Returning to Haifa."
He loved the land and the homeland not from a poem he read, as he says, and he did not hate the invaders only from history books. Rather, his grandfather, his wonderful father, and his struggling mother, with their ethical understanding of the meaning of struggle, were the text and the context.

In this novel, we feel how costly was the life he lived as a fighter from within the occupied territories, and how he shaped his identity through his genuine human commitment to his Palestinian cause, where the ambiguous identity of a Palestinian living and working in Tel Aviv played a role, becoming an incitement for his true struggle. The book comes in the form of stations from Walid's life that shaped him and his culture and his vision of the world, in a life he lived across many geographies, starting from his village Baqa al-Gharbiyye, then Tel Aviv where he found his individuality and anonymity and worked in a restaurant, to his life in prison.
Walid calls himself the ticket seller in the last part of the novelistic biography because he reads the body language of travelers and distinguishes between those traveling to escape and those truly traveling, saying: "I am the ticket seller, I started my work for free in the era of liberation movements." This difference between two journeys is a fundamental one, between being alienated and being truly free, as he deeply searched for the meanings and essence of commitment, and what it means to belong to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, after he realized that this left, to which many nationalities and ethnicities belong, intersects with his idea and his search for justice and equality. He understood early on what it means to be human above all else, and the Sabra and Shatila massacre constituted an important turning point, which made him move from working in a restaurant in Tel Aviv, which represented the colonial center, to a restaurant in Tulkarem. He felt then the futility and that he must do something against an usurping and savage enemy, but the feeling of people's pain is the essence of civilization, as he says, and at this turning point, we read a militant biography of a Palestinian from within the occupied territories, where Walid narrates how that ambiguous identity was sometimes misunderstood by many, especially since he is fluent in Hebrew and Jewish culture.

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