by Jo Glanville
QISSAT
Short Stories by Palestinian Women
Edited by
Jo Glanville
TELEGRAM
Contents
Introduction
Glossary
Randa Jarrar, Barefoot Bridge
Huzama Habayeb, A Thread Snaps
Liana Badr, Other Cities
Selma Dabbagh, Me (the Bitch) and Bustanji
Basima Takrouri, Tales from the Azzinar Quarter, 1984–1987
Nuha Samara, The Tables Outlived Amin
Jean Said Makdisi, Pietà
Donia ElAmal Ismaeel, Dates and Bitter Coffee
Naomi Shihab Nye, Local Hospitality
Raeda Taha, A Single Metre
Laila al-Atrash, The Letter
Samah al-Shaykh, At the Hospital
Adania Shibli, May God Keep Love in a Cool and Dry Place
Nathalie Handal, Umm Kulthoum at Midnight
Samira Azzam, Her Tale
Nibal Thawabteh, My Shoe Size and Other People’s Views on the Matter!
Biographical Notes
Acknowledgements
Introduction
When I began looking for stories for this anthology, I had a number of aims and expectations. I wanted to include stories by some of the most distinguished and established Palestinian writers, but hoped to find younger, emerging voices as well. I also felt it was important not only to look for writers in Palestine but in the diaspora too. Since the creation of Israel in 1948, displacement has been the defining event of modern Palestinian life, and I wanted the spread of writers to reflect that reality. The authors’ addresses range from Texas to Ramallah. Some of them write in English and some in Arabic; some of them were children when the first intifada began and others are old enough to remember Palestine under the British Mandate; some have grown up under the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, while others have spent their lives wandering from one country to another. It is no coincidence that a number of the stories are about journeys. Most of the contributions are contemporary; many appear here in English for the first time; and some have been written specially for the anthology. I have also included a couple of stories by writers who are no longer alive – Samira Azzam and Nuha Samara. Although an anthology of this size cannot be comprehensive, I did not want to restrict the scope just to the present day. Azzam, who died in 1967, was a seminal author of her time and one of the first notable modern Palestinian short story writers. Nuha Samara was one of a group of Beirut authors whose response to the devastation of the Lebanese civil war left its mark on a generation of politically engaged writers.1
The celebrated poet and critic Salma Khadra Jayyusi believes that the great modern Palestinian novel has yet to be written – a narrative that will transform the extreme crisis of the past years into epic literature.2 Yet it is possible that the short story is currently the more appealing medium of literary expression. The novelist Liana Badr has taken to writing short stories since she returned to Palestine in 1994 after the Oslo Accords, because she feels that the atmosphere is not conducive to writing novels. I have certainly been struck by the many fragmentary, abbreviated pieces I have seen – particularly by younger writers based in Palestine – in my search for stories. Although it may be part of a wider fashion for very short short stories, it could also be a literary reflection of the impact of the second intifada and its aftermath. Whatever the reasons, short stories are one of the most popular forms in Palestinian literature. There is also far more opportunity for young, unknown Palestinian writers to get their stories published than there is for young European or American writers, as Palestinian newspapers regularly publish short stories and there are also a number of well-respected journals and publishing houses bringing out Arabic literature in the West Bank and Israel.
Little Palestinian fiction breaks through into the international mainstream – with a few notable exceptions such as Liana Badr and Laila al-Atrash, both included in this anthology. Over the past few years there has however been an increasing appetite for Palestinian memoir – part of the general trend in publishing for confessional, autobiographical literature. Some of these memoirs deserve to become classics, for instance Mourid Barghouti’s lyrical expression of exile and return, I Saw Ramallah, and Suad Amiry’s Sharon and my Mother-in-law, a surreal and even comic narrative of life in the West Bank. Both of these memoirs bear powerful testimony to the impact of displacement and occupation on Palestinian lives, but there is also a danger that, so long as the world outside limits its interest to factual accounts, then Palestinians will only ever be viewed in terms of the conflict, while culture, the wider society, remains unseen. This anthology then is a chance to engage with a broader perspective – through the literary imagination.
Some of the stories spring directly from current, political realities. Raeda Taha’s ‘A Single Metre’ and Liana Badr’s ‘Other Cities’ both deal with what has become one of the most pervasive features of Palestinian life – the checkpoint. Checkpoints not only control Palestinians’ freedom of movement from the West Bank and Gaza into Israel, they litter the Palestinian landscape, separating one community from another. Both stories give vivid accounts – and very different treatments – of how checkpoints can turn a routine journey into a Kafkaesque nightmare. Raeda Taha’s story is a black comedy, which playfully leaves the reader in the same state of suspended animation as the narrator. Liana Badr’s story follows a woman on a nerve-racking journey from Hebron to Ramallah. The detail of the narrative lays bare an impossible bureaucracy. She does not have identity papers and therefore cannot travel to the next town without risking deportation. From her position of extreme powerlessness she ultimately shows great courage and unwittingly engineers a moment of epiphany for an Israeli soldier. Badr’s novels are usually based on documentary fact and extensive research. Her best-known works, including A Balcony over the Fakihani and The Eye of the Mirror, are set in Lebanon and she has been described as a chronicler of the diaspora.3 This story marks a new phase in her writing since her return to Palestine, but her methods of approach remain the same, grounding her narrative in fact.
The experience of crossing a border or checkpoint is the moment at which what it means to be Palestinian is perhaps brought into sharpest relief. ‘What nationality did we want to be? Who was whose enemy? Who were we?’ asks Selma Dabbagh’s narrator in ‘Me (the Bitch) and Bustanji’ as she listens to her father and his friend discuss whether they have the right papers to leave Kuwait on the eve of the first Gulf War. In both Dabbagh’s story and in Randa Jarrar’s ‘Barefoot Bridge’ the tension of crossing a border is diffused with comedy. In Dabbagh’s story the border guard is distracted from noticing that the papers are out of date at a critical moment when he is told that one of the passengers is suffering from arthritis – in her nose. Jarrar’s young narrator watches all the women being strip-searched at Allenby Bridge by Israeli soldiers and is mystified when they are all made to remove their shoes. ‘First my land, now my Guccis. God damn it,’ snarls a woman after accusing the soldiers of stealing her sandals. Shoes, by the way, make an intriguing, repeated appearance in this anthology as objects of both humiliation and freedom. In Huzama Habayeb’s ‘A Thread Snaps’ Nuwwar is a Palestinian Cinderella who has to clean the slippers of the entire household. She hides one slipper in the porch to give her a pretext to go outside again later and catch a glimpse of the man she loves. Nibal Thawabteh devotes her whole story to shoes in an ironic hymn of liberation.
The impact of war and violence on individual lives is movingly explored in a number of stories which I have grouped together, as they echo and illuminate one another. Jean Said Makdisi’s well-to-do narrator finds herself confronted on the streets of Beirut by a woman who lives in the refugee camps and who has suffered like He
cuba – her sons are dead, her husband is dead, her daughters are gone. Faced with the stoicism of this living Greek tragedy, the narrator finds herself disintegrating. It is a haunting psychological study of grief and guilt. Nuha Samara’s protagonist is similarly forced to confront his position of privilege when he discovers that his closest friend is a militia fighter. Both of these stories vividly evoke a traumatic period in recent Middle Eastern history, the Lebanese civil war, and explore the moral choices faced by its victims and participants. Samia, in Makdisi’s story, is the widow of a shaheed, a martyr, who has died fighting in the war. Dependent on the Palestine Liberation Organisation for her livelihood, she becomes destitute once Yasser Arafat leaves Beirut for Tunis. Only the Islamic groups provide her with any welfare; so she adopts the veil as a matter of expediency. It is a revealing momentary glimpse into the future – the rise of Islamic influence and the decline of secular nationalism.
Donia ElAmal Ismaeel’s quietly ironic story ‘Dates and Bitter Coffee’ brings the theme of martyrdom, resistance and loss up to date. A distraught mother and father discover that their son has died fighting the Israelis. He also becomes a shaheed and his parents suddenly find themselves caught up in the machinery of martyrdom as Islamic Jihad takes over their neighbourhood: ‘His son’s mourning ceremony … had been transformed in the blink of an eye into a poster, a microphone and a death notice in a newspaper he never read.’ Dates and bitter coffee are served as part of the ritual of mourning.
The politics of being Palestinian runs through most of the stories. Even in Adania Shibli’s story of the breakdown of a relationship, which is about an anonymous young couple (we don’t know who they are or where they are from) when we are suddenly told that they met each other at the anniversary of the Nakba (‘the catastrophe’, the Palestinian term for the loss of Palestine in 1948) they immediately have a political identity. There is also a sense that the anniversary of the Nakba might not be the most auspicious start to a romantic relationship. Yet national politics actually features far less than I expected in the anthology. When I began looking for stories I certainly imagined it would dominate and was especially interested to see how the fall-out of the second intifada would find expression in fiction, but once the anthology was near completion I began to see other themes emerging more strongly – even if they are often intertwined with the politics of identity.
The most recurrent theme is loss of innocence. A number of stories are written from the perspective of a child or an adolescent who goes through a rite of passage. In Selma Dabbagh’s ‘Me (the Bitch) and Bustanji’, a bored teenager spends an idle summer in Kuwait, writing her diary and spying on her mysterious neighbour. The uneventful holiday becomes dramatic – and ultimately tragic – when Saddam Hussein invades. It is a beautifully observed story which touches on a now largely forgotten calamity – the expulsion of the Palestinian population from Kuwait after the first Gulf War, in revenge for Yasser Arafat’s support for Saddam Hussein.
The freshness of a child’s or adolescent’s viewpoint strips the most well-established political terms of their familiarity – and the reader of their prejudice. ‘We’re on our way to Palestine, which Baba calls the bank – el daffa …’ begins Randa Jarrar’s story ‘Barefoot Bridge’. ‘On the airplane I take out a map from the pocket in the seat in front of me, and on it Palestine is the country stuck next to Egypt, so I ask Baba, “Why can’t we just drive there, or take a plane straight there?”…’ For one exceptional moment, we don’t know where we are. Jarrar manages to make us see the territory as if for the first time, without any preconceptions, and question the absurdity of a situation which the outside world has almost come to take for granted.
By contrast to Jarrar’s getting of wisdom, Basima Takrouri’s story depicts a carefree Jerusalem childhood, where the greatest fear is getting into trouble with the neighbours. The story has a folkloric quality of timelessness. Only the title (‘Tales from the Azzinar Quarter, 1984–1987’) suggests that this is in fact a shortlived age of innocence, on the eve of the first intifada.
There is also a poignant sexual innocence in some of the stories. Laila al-Atrash’s little boy in ‘The Letter’ is a Palestinian version of the child in L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between – exploited by the illiterate neighbour he has fallen in love with, he ends up utterly disillusioned with the adult world. In Huzama Habayeb’s ‘A Thread Snaps’, which is set in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, Nuwwar is the drudge of the household, who finds comfort and refuge as she discovers the sensuality of her own body. When Habayeb’s story was first published in the journal Al Katiba the entire issue was banned in Jordan because of her story. When it then appeared in 2001 in her collection of short stories, Layl Ahla, the book was also banned in Jordan. It is a sharp reminder of the censorship which writers in the Arab world may face, and baffling when one considers the subtlety and lyricism of an exceptional story. Nuwwar has neither the vocabulary nor the experience to describe what she is feeling. The pleasure she experiences from her body is almost a happy by-product of the semi-slavery of her domestic chores. Water pours through the narrative as she cleans the house, does the laundry, scrubs her father’s feet – and water is her escape into reverie as it trickles between her legs.
The experience of being a woman in Arab society preoccupies almost every writer in this anthology. There is a strong tradition of feminism and political engagement amongst female Palestinian writers. Liana Badr once said that her struggle for emancipation as a Palestinian was inseparable from her struggle for liberation as a woman4 – ‘neither of them is valid without the other’ – and the same concerns emerge in the work of Samira Azzam, who was writing in the fifties and sixties. The tone of Azzam’s stories feels quite dated now, but the one I have included here is quite daring for its time. It is the story of a woman who is explaining to her brother how she fell into prostitution. She is in fact pleading for her life: her brother has come to kill her. Although the style of the story is almost operatic in its melodrama, its preoccupation with sexual propriety and independence remains utterly contemporary, two generations later.
When Maryam runs off with her taxi driver lover in Laila al-Atrash’s ‘The Letter’ the men in her family threaten to kill her. Her young admirer, Saad, has nightmares at the prospect of her murder. In Liana Badr’s story Umm Hasan lives under the control of her husband. Her journey to Ramallah is as much a challenge to his authority as it is to the Israelis. In Huzama Habayeb’s ‘A Thread Snaps’, Nuwwar’s only hope of escape from the domestic drudgery of her parents’ household is to find a husband. Yet many of the young, unmarried women in these stories do have more choices than Samira Azzam’s prostitute and they tackle inequality with humour, irony and rebellion. Selma Dabbagh’s narrator calls herself ‘the Bitch’ in ironic reference to the verbal abuse she receives from men (and women) in the streets of Kuwait. Nibal Thawabteh makes a mock heroic cry of freedom when she discovers that she has been wearing shoes one size too small all her life and realises that she has been attempting to conform to her society’s ideal of femininity. Nathalie Handal’s teenage romantic is shocked by the double standards of her culture, when she discovers pornographic magazines in her uncle’s drawer, hidden beneath a symbol of Palestinian nationalism, a kuffiyeh scarf, and makes her protest in an act of sexual defiance.
Although traditional society still looms large, there is affection as well as frustration at its hold. In a charming scene Randa Jarrar’s young narrator listens to her grandmother’s tales and then hears her stories of courtship. Later, her father tells her how he saw his sisters being married off as if going to their execution. He wants his daughter to escape that fate, just as he managed to escape the limitations of his background through education. That tension between the old world and the new world, between the diaspora and those who live in Palestine, is also explored in Naomi Shihab Nye’s ‘Local Hospitality’, when a young couple visit from America and find themselves caught up in competitive family entertaining.
It has been a great privilege working on this anthology. There is a particular responsibility, as an outsider, in representing writers from another culture, particularly when it is a culture that continues to be at the eye of a political storm. Throughout the process of editing, I have been aware of the many expectations which exist of Palestinian writers – above all the expectation that their writing will, or should, in some way address the Palestinian condition. One of the few stories in the anthology without any references to Palestinian culture or society, ‘At the Hospital’, is by a writer from Gaza, Samah al-Shaykh. Considering where she comes from and in the context of the other stories, it is immediately tempting to read her dreamlike piece as a metaphor, but it could equally be no more than the sum of its narrative – a response to a surreal experience everyone will understand, waiting in a hospital. In my conversations with some of the writers who have contributed to the anthology, it is clear that there is a desire to resist being typecast. One contributor commented that being Palestinian does not mean she is obliged to write about Palestinian issues. More than one writer has told me that they wished to escape the cliché within Arabic literature of portraying Palestinians as heroes. Some would prefer not to have their work categorised by gender or nationality at all. Nevertheless, although the writers come from around the world, are from different generations and have been shaped by a variety of influences, they do share preoccupations which may come from a common cultural heritage and consciousness as Palestinians. The many themes which have emerged, from the unexpected motif of shoes, to the less surprising refrain of borders, has given the anthology an additional coherence. I hope that it will be an engaging read.
Jo Glanville
1. ‘Arab Women Writers’, Miriam Cooke, The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, Modern Arabic Literature, M.M. Badawi, 1992, pp. 454–7.
