A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature (12 page)

For Hamid, the story’s protagonist, sixteen years of living as a refugee in Gaza have brought only bitterness, and he resolves to make the twelve-hour desert crossing to Jordan. For his sister Maryam, life in the camps has brought other pressures, and she feels obliged to give up hopes of a better life and to settle instead for the one she has, deciding to marry Zakaria despite the latter’s reputation as a collaborator. Hamid condemns her for this, all that’s left for her in his eyes being shame. ‘The slut couldn’t wait,’ he comments. ‘She came to me with a child throbbing in the womb. And the father? That dog Zakaria.’ One interesting feature of this story is its focus on a woman’s frustration, and not just a man’s, and this is told through the ebbing away, over time, of a young woman’s hopes of marriage. ‘Every morning, as I changed,’ Maryam reflects, ‘the clock would sound its melancholy chime.’ Marriage to Zakaria seems to offer her some hope of a future, since there is no other form of escape.

Kanafani’s work deals with the lives of Palestinian refugees in the decades after 1948, presenting an account of the results of dispossession and exile. Another writer presenting this experience is Emile Habiby, though his work is very different from Kanafani’s, and it is possibly
unique in its focus on the Arab citizens of Israel rather than on the Palestinian refugees. These people, the ‘Israeli Arabs’, are composed of Palestinians who remained within the borders of Israel after that state’s declaration. Habiby, born in 1922, was himself a leading member of them, becoming both a well-known journalist (editor of
El-Itchad
from 1972 to 1989) and a member of the Israeli Knesset (1951–1972 Communist Party List). His best-known work, the strangely titled
Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist
,
³
mixes pessimism with optimism about the Israeli Arabs’ situation, hence the novel’s title. So bizarre can this situation seem that Saeed, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, scarcely knows whether to laugh or cry.

Written in short sections, the book purports to be the story of Saeed’s life, beginning with his ‘claim to have met creatures from outer space’ and a ‘report [that] his life in Israel was all due to the munificence of an ass’. Yet, though employing a form of black humour for which Habiby became famous, the book touches on serious themes, such as the persistence of Palestinian memory despite attempts to uproot it and the connections between Palestinian history and the wider history of the Arabs. Indeed, Palestine, Habiby emphasizes, is not just a Palestinian concern. It is also an Arab one, and its history is a part of that of the wider Arab world. ‘Take Acre, for example,’ Saeed’s teacher instructs him. This ‘is not a new city’ but instead is one that has a long history behind it, which, until recently, was part of the history of the Arabs. In the medieval period the city often changed hands – when the Crusaders conquered it, for example, or when it was liberated by Saladin after the battle of Hittin (1187) – and it has continued to do so up until the present. However, the important thing, Saeed’s teacher tells him, is not the fact that Acre, like the rest of the region, has a colourful history of conquest and counter-conquest behind it, but rather that the conquerors, whoever they may be, tend to ‘consider as true history only what they have themselves fabricated.’ This entails a need to put together an alternative history, which is that of the
conquered. While Palestinian villages in Israel have been demolished or renamed in an attempt to deny the Arab history of the area, this does not mean that the memory of them has been lost. On the contrary, memory – history – returns under the most unlikely circumstances, as it does in Saeed’s narrative when people vie with each other to give the names of their obliterated villages. ‘Please do not expect me, my dear sir, after all this time, to remember the names of all the villages laid waste to which these figures made claim,’ says Saeed ironically, having just listed them. ‘We of Haifa used to know more about the villages of Scotland than we did about those of Galilee,’ used, that is, until they are reminded of them in Habiby’s novel.

Saeed refers to a form of storytelling he calls the ‘oriental imagination’, which connects to the habit of mind identified as ‘pessoptimism’. Isn’t this, he asks, what makes life for the Arabs in Israel possible? ‘Had it not been for their “oriental imagination”, would those Arabs of yours, my dear sir, have been able to live a single day in this country?’ he asks, giving the example of an Arab youth who, slamming into another car in traffic in Tel Aviv, screams out that the other driver is an Arab and thereby saves himself from the crowd’s hostility. ‘Wasn’t it his oriental imagination that saved him?’ There are other examples. ‘Shlomo works in one of Tel Aviv’s best hotels. Isn’t he really Sulaiman, son of Munirah, from our own quarter?’; ‘“Dudi”, isn’t he really Mahmud?’ How could these people ‘earn a living in a hotel, restaurant, or filling station without help from their oriental imagination,’ asks Saeed, pointing to the ‘pess-optimistic’ strategies resorted to by Palestinians in their attempts to get by as Arab citizens of Israel. Nevertheless, though often successful these strategies do not always work, and in one of the best-known instances of Habiby’s mordant humour Saeed describes how ‘a flag of surrender, flying on a broomstick, becomes a banner of revolt.’ Having heard instructions on Radio Israel during the 1967 war that the Arabs are to raise white
flags in surrender, Saeed raises his white flag even though he lives in Haifa in the heart of Israel. ‘You can’t have too much of a good thing,’ he says. But on this occasion he is betrayed by his ‘oriental imagination’. Raising a white flag under these circumstances is seen ‘as an indication that you regard Haifa as an occupied city and are therefore advocating its separation from the state’!

Much Palestinian literature captures the texture of Palestinian experience, whether in the refugee camps or as part of the diaspora, as in works by Kanafani, or within Israel itself, as in Habiby’s
Saeed the Pessoptimist
. Both sets of material make sometimes bitter criticisms of the treatment the Palestinians have received at the hands of the Arab states, as much as they have at those of Israel.
⁴
They also make criticisms of Palestinian society more generally.

In his novels published in the 1960s, for example, the Syrian-American writer and academic Halim Barakat takes aim at Palestinian society as well as at Israel. His
Six Days
, originally published in 1961,
⁵
describes the siege of a fictional city, Dayr Albahr, and suggests that ‘the enemy is not the only problem,’ for ‘our enemy is inside as well’ in the shape of traditionalist attitudes. The characters in this novel explore their options against a background of military threat and stale political rhetoric. Fareed, for instance, is frustrated, wanting ‘to rip the veils from the women, stab the men’s bloated stomachs, slap the constant smiling, oblivious faces, and spit on those who sell their property and run.’ He is tempted to emigrate to the West, or to go to the Gulf where money can be made, leaving behind ‘the rabble, the great traditions, the narrow streets, the veiled women, and the walled-off houses’ that for him are Palestine. Similarly Lamya, a young woman fed up with being treated like a ‘submissive lamb’ and with men who are ‘not interested in a woman except as an object to sleep with’, dreams of London, which for her represents personal freedom. Only Suhail decides to stay, though his decision is not made easily. On the contrary, ‘whatever made him think he could abandon his
culture,’ he asks himself. The truth is ‘he cannot escape it’ much as a part of him at least might wish to do so.

A later novel,
Days of Dust
, continues Barakat’s dissection of Palestinian society, this time in the context of the 1967 war.
⁶
The war resulted in Arab defeat and in the occupation by Israel of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights, as well as of the Sinai Peninsula until the Camp David Accords in the late 1970s. The novel is divided into six sections that reflect its six-day course, the first section capturing the atmosphere of ‘hope mixed with … profound fear’ that reigned in Arab capitals immediately before war broke out and criticizing what the narrator sees as the ‘underdeveloped and uncoordinated’ character of the Arab world, ‘living in the twentieth century only in outward appearance’ and given to vain and empty gestures. Even the political upheavals that had helped to modernize Arab societies in the 1950s, the narrator feels, were mere ‘revolts, not social revolutions’. These reflections on Arab society, part of the discourse of the time, swiftly give way to the reality of the war itself, which is seen from perspectives in Jericho, the West Bank, Jerusalem and Beirut, where Ramzy, the main narrator, lives. The novel criticizes the Israeli forces, as well as what is seen as the unquestioning support the West has given to Israel. At the end of the war, for example, the narrator comments on the ‘Zionists and their friends … jumping for joy in the streets of New York City.’

Nevertheless, the novel also makes bitter criticisms of Arab society. ‘We must reject the entire existing structure,’ Ramzy says. ‘All the “movements” that have arisen are in fact reactionary. They make no attempt to change our inherited customs and institutions,’ which the war has demonstrated must be changed. He wants ‘to destroy [his country’s] institutions and organizations, its fable-filled, otherworldly constitution imported without modification from days gone by.’ These hopes of change, however, are frustrated, and at the war’s end there are yet more Palestinian refugees, their lives now ‘the property
of governments, organizations, [and] associations’. Whereas before the war Ramzy ‘had not been able to visit Haifa or Jaffa or Acre or Safad or Nazareth or Ramla or Lydda’, since these originally Arab towns were located after 1948 in Israel, following Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank he is not able to visit ‘Jerusalem or Ramallah or Bethlehem or Hebron or Nablus or Jenin or Qalqilya or Tulkarum’ either, all of which are Palestinian towns and cities under Israeli military occupation.

Barakat’s work suggests that the failure of Palestinian and Arab society to modernize has left it open to attack. Other, mostly less polemical, representations of that society can be found in the work of Palestinian writers who have written personal testimonies, such as
A Mountainous Journey
by the poet Fadwa Tuqan, or
The First Well
by the novelist, poet and critic Jabra Ibrahim Jabra.

A Mountainous Journey
portrays ‘the struggle, deprivation and enormous difficulties’ faced by a woman growing up in traditional Palestinian society.
⁷
Born in Nablus on the West Bank in 1917, Tuqan was her mother’s seventh child, and her father, wanting a son, dated his daughter’s birth by the death of a male cousin. Her whole childhood, she says, was marked by ‘the social restraint and subjugation imposed on women’ in traditional society, blighting her emotional and intellectual development. Her mother’s distance from her children, her ‘hidden unhappiness’ was, Tuqan believes, the result of her never having had ‘the right to express her feelings or her views’. Later, when Tuqan herself withdraws into thoughts of self-harm and suicide, her mother is ‘unable to save me … her individuality [having] been so debilitated by subjugation.’ While Tuqan went on to become one of Palestine’s best-known poets, known for her commitment to the nationalist cause, the experiences of her early life seem never to have left her, her male relatives, with the exception of her brother Ibrahim (himself a well-known poet), apparently doing everything possible to frustrate her education. They represented ‘in the most
flagrant manner possible the rigidity of the Arab male and his absolute inability to maintain a personality that was healthy and whole.’

Tuqan suggests that many of these traditionalist attitudes were broken by the events of 1948. Indeed, ‘when the roof fell in on Palestine, the veil fell off the face of the Nablus women.’ Previously, a woman, even a member of the elite, ‘was at the mercy of her brother, even if he was unemployed and no use to himself’ or others. Her options outside the household were limited, and as for marriage, ‘it was either [to] a paternal cousin or virginity to the grave.’ Like the male members of her family, Tuqan was horrified by the ‘devilish British intrigue’ that led to her country’s break-up. Yet, when she came to write about such things she found it impossible to ‘compose political poetry’, since, as a woman, she was ‘shut up inside these walls’ and could not ‘participate in the turmoil of life outside’. These things began to change in the 1950s, when what Tuqan calls the ‘traditional structure of Arab society’ was shaken to the core, allowing new roles for women to emerge. Nevertheless, Tuqan was still an exception as far as Palestinian women were concerned, making her autobiography a remarkable document from the period.
⁸

Another view of what it was like to grow up in Palestine before 1948 is given in the first part of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s autobiography,
The First Well
.
⁹
Jabra, who died in 1994, has a reputation as a writers’ writer, and his novels, among them
The Ship
and
The Search for Walid Masoud
, are an acquired taste. The latter work,
¹⁰
for example, retells modern Palestinian history through a search for the eponymous Masoud carried out by Dr Jawad Husni, a friend. Masoud has disappeared while driving to Syria from Baghdad, leaving his car and a recorded tape, the contents of which are unclear. The search for him becomes an opportunity to reconstruct the meaning of his life. As Husni puts it, it is part of ‘an abstract intellectual search for the rejuvenation of the Arab nation, and, with that peculiarly Palestinian zeal, to examine the entire Arab way of life on every level.’ While the
flair and narrative experiment of Jabra’s novel are everywhere apparent, such an ‘abstract intellectual search’ may not appeal in translation. The novel’s conclusion is that Masoud was ‘the product of his life, and the lives of those around him, the product of his own particular time and of our time in general, all at once.’