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.’
Jabra’s autobiographical writings, on the other hand, have great charm, and they help to explain the high reputation he enjoys in modern Arab letters. Born in Bethlehem in 1920, he was educated in Jerusalem and England, and he made frequent scholarly trips abroad, notably to the United States. He left Palestine in 1948 and lived for the rest of his life in Baghdad. He is the co-author of a novel, World Without Maps, written with Saudi novelist Abdelrahman Munif, and of a well-received account of modern Iraqi art. In The First Well Jabra gives an account of his boyhood in Bethlehem, writing of ‘the events of early childhood’ – the memoir halts with the family’s 1932 move to Jerusalem – ‘that reach us as a sort of mix of memories and dreams’. These things are the contents of ‘the first well’ of early childhood, to which in later life one may be tempted to return. In Jabra’s case, the ‘well’ contains his schooldays, his family’s early poverty and his memories of the religious life of Bethlehem, at the time a small town of just a few thousand inhabitants. He writes enchantingly of Christmas in Bethlehem and of the festivities that took place at the Church of the Nativity in honour of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, arriving from Jerusalem at the head of an immense procession. Easter was a time of flowers, and, in the afternoons, of ‘flocks of swallows that filled the azure air’. Looking out of his schoolroom windows, Jabra could see the ‘domes of the Church of the Nativity, and, beyond them, the surrounding hills’.
In a later volume of memoirs, Princesses’ Street, his last book,11 Jabra turns to his life as a student in England and his adult life in Baghdad, particularly in the early 1950s when the city was experiencing a ‘golden age with its creative aspirations and eagerness for change’. Jabra was caught up in that excitement, and he includes some fascinating vignettes from the period. These include an encounter with Agatha Christie, in Baghdad with her husband the archaeologist Max Mallowan, who was excavating at the time at Nimrud. Christie, like Mrs Ramsay in Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, spends her time knitting as her husband’s conversation swirls about her. Apparently, Jabra comments, she was ‘the only person in the room who was not suffering from the fever of writing and did not know its agonies and pains.’ There is much surprise when he discovers that ‘Mrs Mallowan’ is the author of novels that ‘I had read since my youth … [and that are] the delightful and exciting intellectual recreation for millions of people.’ (Christie is a popular author in the Arab world.)
However, more important than his encounter with Christie are Jabra’s reflections on Baghdad in the politically charged decade of the 1950s, the publication of his first work in Beirut, and his comments on the intellectual atmosphere of the time. In Baghdad ‘there were young women itching for their freedom … there were poets and short-story writers seeking to create new forms in everything they wrote. There were painters … [and] persons specializing in economic, social, political, philosophical, and historical thought … announcing the good news of a forthcoming modernity that would change the whole Arab world.’ This was all part of the sense of the ‘wonderful beginning’ that overtook the region in the 1950s with the crumbling of European colonialism. In the Iraqi case things soon began to go disastrously wrong.
The memoirs by Jabra and Tuqan contain testimony from the decades before and after 1948. More recent memoirs, such as the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, focus on the meaning of Palestine for generations that, having spent most of their lives abroad, have only distant memories of the country, if they have first-hand memories of it at all. It also raises the question of ‘return’, indicating that this is not a simple matter and not only because of the many obstacles that currently prevent it.12 Will the country answer to the hopes invested in it? Will the returnee, after years spent abroad, be able to find a home there? Such questions are explored in Barghouti’s account of his return to Ramallah after a life spent abroad, as they are in novels such as Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns.13
The latter work appeared in Arabic some ten years into the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and long before the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, that began against Israeli rule in the late 1980s.14 The novel begins with the narrator, Usama al-Karmi, returning from Jordan to the Occupied Territories. There is the usual brutality at the border, but what awaits him on the other side is not what he expected. True, there is the daily humiliation of occupation, reflected in the poor wages and few social protections afforded to Palestinian workers compared with their Israeli counterparts. However, there is also an apparent indifference on the part of the Palestinians ‘inside’ to the tide of political rhetoric reaching them from their compatriots ‘outside’ and from the surrounding Arab countries. It is easy, one character explains, for those abroad to urge resistance to the occupation, instructing those within to ‘bear all the burdens of risk and sacrifice’ when they do not themselves live in Palestine and have possibly never visited it. ‘Israeli cash is better than starvation’, and Palestinian workers in Israeli factories ‘stick up two fingers … when they hear all that pompous talk of “inter-Arab aid for Palestine”,’ preferring to get on with life ‘while the radio goes on spewing out songs of hope and fervour.’
The Israeli occupation is presented as having ‘corrupted’ Palestinian society in the Occupied Territories, distorting the economy by bringing in benefits unseen under Jordanian rule. It has also broken the rigid class structure that prevailed before 1948 in particular, attacked by writers such as Barakat and Tuqan. Israel’s occupation has brought money and employment to Palestinians who were previously tenant farmers. They did not own the land, and, that being so, one elderly farmer asks, ‘why should we care about it? Why should we die for it?’ It is sentimentality to suppose that it was ever really theirs. Khalifeh’s novel, like others before and after it, criticizes the Palestinian elites as well as the Israelis. ‘Who’s responsible for the country’s lack of industrialization? Who’s to blame for the backwardness of the workers?’ the narrator’s associates ask. The novel ends, like those by Barakat, on hopes of social reconstruction.
Complications attendant on return are also explored in Barghouti’s prize-winning memoir I Saw Ramallah.15 This records the author’s return to his hometown of Ramallah on the West Bank after some three decades in exile. Crossing the River Jordan, Barghouti remembers the last time he made this journey, in the other direction, immediately before the 1967 war: making it now, he meditates on his return to a homeland in which he cannot help but feel a stranger and on his return to a past
that he has outgrown. Such thoughts give way to a narrative, an ‘existential account of displacement’ according to Edward Said in his foreword, that mixes recognition with disappointment and views adult life through the lens of student hopes held thirty years before. Visiting Dar Ra’d, one of seven neighbouring villages that are home to his extended family, Barghouti looks in on ‘the room [in which] I was born four years before the birth of the state of Israel’. Outside, this village, like the settlements around it, has been marked by a lifetime’s events and by the facts of occupation and diaspora. ‘I greeted the neighbours, and I recognized none of them … Husbands, sons, and daughters have been distributed among graves and detention camps, jobs and parties and factions of the Resistance, the lists of martyrs, the universities, the sources of livelihood in countries near and far … Calgary to Amman, Sao Paolo to Jeddah, Cairo to San Francisco, Alaska to Siberia.’ That being so, what might it mean to return to a homeland that has changed almost beyond recognition? How to deal with the fact that one has oneself changed? Whatever the answers for others may be, for himself Barghouti suggests that life, a set of ‘temporary permanencies’, ‘will not be simplified’. Palestine is not the promised land. The ‘homeland [is not] the medicine for all sorrows.’
A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature Page 9
