Shifting Sands: The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East

by Raja Shehadeh

  Fiction invites us to remember (or to experience for the first time) pasts that are different from the normative version of the past most expedient to current interests. If we take this function of fiction seriously, it opens up for us the chance to consider otherwise disregarded (sometimes discarded) futures. Memories, images or narratives that contradict or interrupt those offered up as definitive, as set in stone, remind us that the world need not proceed as it happens to be proceeding at present. In the context of Kuwait, for example, what would it be like to remember that Andy Warhol exhibited at the Sultan Gallery in 1976? Or to remember that at the Gazelle Club, among other venues, drinking and dancing were not the exception? Or to remember that Kuwait University was not segregated when it was first founded and was co-ed until 1996? Or that in 1957 the Council for Education introduced a short dress with red ribbons as the school uniform for girls in place of the by then contested abaya? What would it be like to remember that, until 1991, 380,000 Palestinians lived in Kuwait, with little inconvenience to Kuwait and much mutual benefit? That Saudi Arabia was as much a threat to Kuwait’s sovereignty as Iraq? In other words, what would it be like to remember experimentation and pushing boundaries rather than rigidity and burying our heads in the sand? At a time when so much outside the world of fiction seems to be screeching, emphatically, ‘No!’, it is fiction we can rely on – as I have for most of my life – to insist, stubbornly, despite everything, ‘Yes!’

  Andy Warhol exhibited his work in Kuwait in 1976 (Sultan Gallery Archives).

  In addition to alerting us to alternative versions of the past, present and future, fiction also reminds us that our point of view is not the only viable point of view out there. Our life is one among billions. Other people’s individual stories matter as much as our own, though in this time of socially networked self-promotion, this reality is too easily ignored. And while social networking and access to electronic data may give the impression of being hooked into difference and/or otherness, of having an immediate connection to the world at large, this immediacy may, in fact, produce the opposite effect. In 24/7, Jonathan Crary writes, ‘Part of the modernized world we inhabit is the ubiquitous visibility of useless violence and the human suffering it causes. This visibility, in all its mixed forms, is a glare that ought to thoroughly disturb any complacency, that ought to preclude the restful unmindfulness of sleep.’ The problem with our 24/7 access to images and information is that it does not, in fact, disturb our complacency. Never was this insight proved truer than in the summer of 2014. This is not to say that the images we view and articles we read online about individuals, nations and events, among other things, do not touch us; simply that the outcome of this scrutiny is not always (or even often) ethical practice. As Crary puts it, ‘The act of witnessing and its monotony can become a mere enduring of the night, of the disaster.’6

  In contrast to the speed of digital time, the pace of fiction is slow. Fiction produces the conditions necessary for readers to inhabit different modes of life intimately because reading is a process that takes time. The attention and focus it requires produce this intimacy between reader and text. In one way or another, we, as readers, are invested in what we read or we wouldn’t do it. We come to care about the characters or the style or the place or whatever else in the book we happen to be reading. Fiction builds bridges between far-flung people and places and times in ways that might never be possible otherwise – certainly not through ever-shorter online articles, blogs, fluid news-feeds, 140-character Tweets, Instagram images and all the many other forms of digital detritus. Fiction, with its slower-paced (intransigent?) temporality, gives us the time we need to really explore difference – lives and experiences different from our own, times and places different from our own, beliefs and values different from our own. In so doing, it produces the conditions for an ethics of otherness. By inhabiting difference through fiction – slowly, closely – I would suggest we become less likely to want to attack, colonise, oppress or homogenise the unfamiliar, whether politically, economically, socially, culturally or militarily. When we read Ghassan Kanafani’s plangent short stories about Palestinian children, for example, the number of young civilian deaths in Gaza takes on an altogether different resonance. Instead of numbers and media abstractions, they become Kanafani’s children, singular lives and irreplaceable futures snuffed out.

  On this understanding, reading or writing fiction is no idealist escape from reality, no utopian castle in the sky. Fiction becomes a constituting factor in the production of an ethics of otherness, a global ethics we could put to work towards a more equitable common future. This may seem a heavy task to place upon the shoulders of fiction, but in my estimation fiction’s shoulders are broad enough to take it. In the face of a world that seemingly shuts its ears to the lament of intolerable life, in the Middle East among other regions, fiction listens to and relays, among other things, our shared humanity.

  Edward W. Said remained an unapologetic humanist to the end, albeit a refigured, post-Enlightenment humanist. For him, fiction was a humanising force whose power should not be underestimated. In Orientalism, he notes that Arabic literature was conspicuously absent from early Middle East Studies departments in the United States. This made it possible for experts to rely on ‘“facts,” of which a literary text is perhaps a disturber’.7 Literary texts disturb seemingly incontrovertible ‘facts’, rigidities of all sorts. Literary texts remind us of (or alert us to) alternatives to normative views and widespread perceptions. Bite-sized ‘facts’, digitally circulated at lightning speed, produce familiar dehumanising stereotypes, such as, ‘all Arabs are terrorists’ or ‘all Americans are infidels’. Literature – in its regular refusal to regurgitate such ‘facts’ as a matter of course – interrupts these counterproductive, dehumanising axioms. Never has this particular function of fiction been more urgent in relation to the Middle East than at this moment. Never has it been more urgent in the Middle East itself than now.

  WRITING THE MIDDLE EAST, WRITING GAZA

  Selma Dabbagh

  WHEN I WAS FIRST ASKED to participate in a panel entitled ‘Living and Writing in the Middle East’ I wondered if I was an impostor, as I don’t live in the Middle East any more, although I have lived there for more than half my life. I also write in English, which presents me with a separate set of challenges and advantages from those who write in Arabic. Born in Scotland and working in London, I am a British-Palestinian writer who has lived in a scattering of Arab countries – but only for a short time in Palestine. My first novel, Out of It, was set in an imagined Gaza that I had only briefly visited. The tension and interaction between the real and the imagined are fertile grounds for literature, but have particular resonance in writing Palestine. After all, my experience of imagining Palestine is not that different from the experience of many Palestinians in the diaspora – as well as so many other exiles and migrants. As an outsider looking in, a woman constantly on the move with a plethora of identities, am I an impostor or a writer whose vantage point can tell us something about the dilemmas and prospects of writing about the Middle East today?

  I briefly suggest that the terrain of fiction, or indeed other works of the imagination, from the Middle East, as received by Western audiences at least, has moved from sex to death: from the titillation of One Thousand and One Nights in the nineteenth century to an association of Middle Eastern literature with war, destruction and oppression.

  Contemporary writers from the Middle East are therefore presumed to be political. Cultural expectations differ as to whether this is a positive expectation when it comes to the role of the novel. In the Western tradition, the novel is traditionally assumed to be not political, whereas in the Palestinian novel, and to a lesser extent with novels about the Arab world in general, the presumption is reversed.

  When my novel started out, I wasn’t quite sure where I was going to place it. I began writing it when the Gulf War erupted in 2003. I had this image of a boy on a roof and he was leaping and th
ere was a fighter jet, but I had the idea that I would situate it in a place that was non-identifiable. Islamophobia was high at the time, and I thought that if I kept place names and the names of the characters out and had Xs and Ys instead, I could cut through a lot of prejudices about the region by explaining it as an unnamed place. I found that there was something in that idea, but I needed to bring it down to earth and locate it somewhere. I decided on Gaza because it felt to me that Gaza was the extremity of the Palestinian situation in terms of the siege by land, sea and air, and also because of the youth of the population, the number of refugees who lived there. The existence of different factions and the Palestinian leadership who had returned also brought to the fore other issues pertinent to where Palestinian society is now. So that was where I decided to place the novel.

  When I started, I had this idea that I would be writing a great Palestinian novel that was an epic – it would start in 1948 or just before and it would chart the major events in Palestinian history. But it felt very heavy to me; I didn’t want to go through that history again, having read many memoirs that had covered it already. I wanted to start now, and by starting now I also wanted to keep it light, and I wanted to have an energy and a youthfulness in my work. I decided to focus on the younger generations, as they captured the energy found in Palestinian society, and also because the population of Gaza, which is where I decided to base most of my novel, is so young.

  I also wanted to take young people from one extremity of Palestinian society – the children of PLO exiles – and bring them back to Gaza to expose the range of Palestinian identities within the book. I wanted to explore their youth and their energy with regard to political commitment. That was my idea, and I also wanted to write about people who were so competent and had so much energy and hope but no obvious outlet for any of it.

  I developed a fictional Gaza. I had a map on my desk that had ‘refugee camp’, ‘wall’ and ‘café’ on it, and my characters moved between these places. I researched it online, looking at blogs, by reading memoirs and talking to friends, but I researched it from the outside, so it was an impressionistic view constructed externally. I have occasionally met people who have said, ‘Well, there isn’t a café like that in Gaza’, but that was not the point – there might be one in Ramallah, I just transposed it. I had to have that kind of a canvas for place because of the nature of my novel and where I was. It freed it from a particular time period, which also meant that I had more flexibility and fluidity in allowing the characters to move, in terms of their not having to move around fixed historical events.

  It was a very strange experience going into Gaza after writing it fictionally. I had been there before, but it was odd visiting and seeing whether I’d got it right. I had a mental checklist, thinking, ‘Yes, there are boys with ponytails’ or, ‘Yes, people do these activities’ – things that you can’t research. I did, however, fluctuate a lot when considering whether I had got the tonality of the place right. I would speak to one particularly bright student and feel that I had been too pessimistic, whereas another person’s account would make me feel the situation was far bleaker. One Gazan journalist said I wrote about the place as though I had lived there all my life, which was, of course, deeply satisfying.

  The idea that the novel should be separated from politics and that novelists have no role in politics is an old debate in the West, but the pressures on Arab novelists to be political have never been more pertinent than they are now. During the Arab Spring, fiction writers from the Middle East were brought forward to be spokes-people, taking on the role of social commentator. How much fiction writers wish to embrace this role is a very individual matter and as people who write about areas in conflict writers are constantly having to come up with tests in their mind as to where they place themselves on that spectrum; how much they want to become overtly political, what they will and will not comment on, which platforms they will or will not appear on, essentially how much they are willing to pin their colours to the mast. Many fiction writers are not natural campaigners, because they are not skilled that way, or comfortable with the role, or equipped to carry it out.

  Writers may also be reluctant to turn themselves into campaigners because it may disrupt the space they need to inhabit to create and the potential of the space they wish to create. Milan Kundera described this aspect of the novel as ‘the imaginary terrain where moral judgement is suspended’. Part of the idea behind the world of fiction is that you are asking people to enter a non-judgemental space and to be carried by the movement of the characters, their personal emotional experiences and the moral conflicts that they face.

  A writer cannot exist without readers. English-language fiction readers, I have been led to understand by journalists and publishers, tend to veer away from the Middle East. It’s all too dark, too depressing, too political. At least Latin America has sex and magic. Middle Eastern books have no wizards or bondage and there’s an irrational sense that Arabs don’t really ever fall in love properly. An Arab name can be an albatross around the writer’s neck. It is a positive if you define yourself as an ‘authentic voice’, a spokesperson for the people from where your name originates, but it is unlikely that many publishers will encourage you to write a novel about adultery in Milton Keynes or a transvestite detective in Lisbon with a name like mine. Internationally these trends are starting to be challenged by writers like Michael Ondaatje, Kazuo Ishiguro and Aminatta Forna, who write successfully about characters and geographies distant from their place of origin. It is for Arab novelists writing in English to start opening up wider areas for themselves in the world of fiction, to enable greater experimentation and to challenge preconceptions, to allow for an international belief that artistic excellence is capable of stemming from this region (these names), not just in depicting the region but by analysing more broadly, in a stylistically innovative way, the human condition.

  By contrast, Arab novelists writing in Arabic and based in the Arab world can often develop strong localised followings. Their writing captures the nuance, dialectic variation and humour of specific locales. They can capture the spirit of the time and enrich their work with contemporary references. Their writing has a significant local or regional readership. These writers occupy a terrain off bounds to most Arab-origin writers who write in other languages or live outside the Arab world. There is neither the proximity nor the voice.

  These Arab-language, Arab-world writers are, however, not supported in the way writers are supported in the West and face additional obstacles when aspiring to reach a broader audience. There are few grants and little state investment in the profession. The film industry in Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria has had more success than the impoverished quaint band of writers of novels and short stories, who still very much go it alone. State censorship on matters sexual and political can demand a level of inventiveness that few Western writers have to even contemplate. Distribution channels in the Arab world are shoddy, copyright protection is weak, agents rarely exist, the idea of books being edited is a curious one. On top of this there is war, occupation, social and political uncertainty and economic austerity in many areas. If I compare myself with the students I met when I was in Gaza, I do not have to deal with electricity outages because the local power station has been bombed; I do not have to read at night by candlelight unless I am feeling particularly whimsical.

  If, after this huge struggle, an Arab writer manages to get his or her work to a significant readership the chances of its becoming an international work are small. The book will need to surmount the barriers of translation and publication, as well as the Who’s this Muhammad? Where’s the wizard? prejudices of the book buyer before it has any chance of being a success in the international market. And even then, if the writer succeeds, there’s no guarantee that things will go smoothly. Take Khaled al-Khamissi, who wrote the exceptional Taxi (2006), a work that documented with humour, imagination and wit the trials and tribulations of Cairo’s population at cracking poi
nt by depicting the immense potential and everyday heroism of Cairenes, even though he was invited to the Edinburgh International Book Festival, he was denied a visa to enter the UK.

  I am always aware of my advantages.

  Ahdaf Soueif is eloquent in articulating the idea that there are few people who inhabit the middle ground between the East and the West, and as an British-Palestinian English-language writer I place myself firmly in that mezzaterra. I am aware that there is a body of opinion that gained ground during the anti-colonial struggles of the last century that rails against the writing of the histories of formerly colonised people by people of the previously colonising nations. There was a resistance to histories being ‘appropriated’. Writers were encouraged to stay close to their country’s dialects and language and to ‘decolonise the mind’ of the language of the empire. The battle on this front has not ended, but as someone from a coloniser–colonised heritage in a globalised world, I am representative of how complicated a formulaic application of tests as to who can write what, and how, is likely to become.

  My own tests have focused more on content than on form, on authors’ levels of sensitivity towards their subject matter and their responsibility towards it. I concentrate on the way a writer writes rather than on who the writer is in terms of national origin.

  There are several difficulties with writing about Palestine. I heard an Israeli academic say that, if you are going to write about this region, there is nothing you can do, because whatever you do you are going to get it in the neck, which I thought was a rather fine way of putting it. However, I have since learned from writer friends that writing about Gaza is nothing compared to the troll activity that will set itself upon authors who write about Virginia Woolf or William Shakespeare. When I first started writing, I had an expectation that I would come up against the Zionist lobby very strongly. That was one concern. The other concern was about not being true or honest, or being somehow irresponsible with the subject matter I was dealing with. I was far more concerned about my Palestinian readership and they have been, in the main, extremely supportive. I was humbled by how much it meant to people in Gaza that I had tried to ensure their troubled land’s place on the literary map.