Literature and Nation in the Middle East

Jacket design: Cathy Sprent Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.eup.ed.ac.uk

studies, nationalism studies, and colonial/post-colonial studies. I strongly recommend it.’ Professor Joseph Massad, Columbia University

‘A study on the literary construction of the nation in the Middle East is most welcome today, particularly with its emphasis on Palestinian and Hebrew literature… this is an opportune moment to see how [Middle Eastern] writers perceive themselves and their identity.’ Dr P. C. Sadgrove, University of Manchester

SULEIMAN & MUHAWI

IBRAHIM MUHAWI is a fellow of the Edinburgh Institute for the Advanced Study of the Arab World & Islam. His published work is interdisciplinary and ranges over the areas of Arabic literature, folklore, and translation. He is author of Speak Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales (1989). He has also translated and introduced Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness (1995).

‘An excellent addition to the field of Arabic literary

LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

YASIR SULEIMAN is Director of the Edinburgh Institute for the Advanced Study of the Arab World & Islam and Professor of Arabic & Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He has written extensively on the Middle East and his books include The Arabic Language and National Identity (Edinburgh University Press, 2003), The Arabic Grammatical Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 1999) and A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East (2004).

ISBN 0 7486 2073 7

LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST Edited by Yasir Suleiman and Ibrahim Muhawi

LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

This compelling study presents an original look at how ‘the nation’ is represented in the literature of the Middle East. It includes chapters on Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine and Israel, drawing on the expertise of literary scholars, historians, political scientists and cultural theorists. Literature and Nation in the Middle East offers a synthesising contribution to knowledge, placing Arab literature within the context of emergent or conflicting nationalist projects in the area. Topics addressed include: • the roles played by literature and interpretation in defining national identity • conflicting nationalisms • conflict resolution • exile

Edited by Yasir Suleiman and Ibrahim Muhawi

The approaches taken by the authors range from textual and rhetorical analysis to historical accounts of the role of literature in contributing to national identity, and political analysis of the use of literature as a tool in conflict resolution. Genres covered include fiction (the novel), poetry and verbal duelling.

Edinburgh

This unique exploration of the subject of literature and the nation in the Arab world is of interest to anyone studying Middle Eastern literature and nationalism, as well as historians and political scientists.

Literature and Nation in the Middle East Edited by YASIR SULEIMAN and IBRAHIM MUHAWI

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

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© in selection and editorial matter, Yasir Suleiman and Ibrahim Muhawi, 2006 © in the individual contributions is retained by the authors Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Goudy by Koinonia, Bury, and printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 2073 7 (hardback)

The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

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Contents

Notes on the Contributors Acknowledgements

v vii

Introduction: Literature and Nation in the Middle East: An Overview Yasir Suleiman

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1 The Production of Locality in the Oral Palestinian Poetry Duel Nadia Yaqub

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2 Irony and the Poetics of Palestinian Exile Ibrahim Muhawi

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3 Gender and the Palestinian Narrative of Return in Two Novels by Ghassan Kanafani Amy Zalman

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4 Darwish’s ‘Indian Speech’ as Dramatic Performance: Sacred Space and Transformation J. Kristen Urban

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5 Israeli Jewish Nation Building and Hebrew Translations of Arabic Literature Hannah Amit-Kochavi

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6 Between Myth and History: Moshe Shamir’s He Walked in the Fields Shai Ginsburg

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7 Writing the Nation: The Emergence of Egypt in the Modern Arabic Novel Jeff Shalan

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8 Arabic Poetry, Nationalism and Social Change: Sudanese Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives Heather J. Sharkey

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9 Marginal Literatures of the Middle East Peter Clark

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contents 10 The Predicament of In-Betweenness in the Contemporary Lebanese Exilic Novel in English Syrine C. Hout

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11 The Nation Speaks: On the Poetics of Nationalist Literature Yasir Suleiman

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Bibliography Index

232 257

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Notes on the Contributors

Dr Hannah Amit-Kochavi teaches at Bar Ilan University and Beit Berl College in Israel. She received her PhD in translation from Tel Aviv University in 2000. Her teaching interests include Arabic-Hebrew translation history, ArabicHebrew translator and interpreter training, and classical and modern Arabic literature. Her research interests include Arabic-Hebrew translation history and Arabic teaching to Hebrew speakers in Israel. Peter Clark worked for the British Council for thirty years, mostly in the Middle East. He is an independent consultant and translator and has translated eight books from Arabic – history and fiction – as well as short stories and plays. He is currently translating Ard al-Sawad by Abdel-Rahman Munif.  Shai Ginsburg is an Assistant Professor of Hebrew and the Jess Schwartz Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at Arizona State University. He has published articles on Hebrew literature, cultural criticism and historiography, and on modern Jewish ideological practices. Syrine C. Hout is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University of Beirut. She is the author of Viewing Europe from the Outside and numerous studies of travel narratives. Her interest in contemporary Lebanese writings produced in exile has resulted in journal articles on Rabih Alameddine, Tony Hanania, Hani Hammoud, Nada Awar Jarrar, Emily Nasrallah, Nadia Tueni and Hanan al-Shaykh. Ibrahim Muhawi was born 1937 in Ramallah, Palestine, and received his education at the University of California. He has taught at a number of universities around the world, and is currently Allianz Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Munich. His major publications include Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales and a translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness. Jeff Shalan is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of Honors Studies at Union County College in Cranford, New Jersey. He recently completed his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is

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notes on the contributors currently working on a book manuscript, Writing the Nation and its others: Fictions of Community and Exile in the North African Novel. Heather J. Sharkey is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (University of California Press, 2003). Her articles have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of African History, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, and in many other journals and edited volumes. Yasir Suleiman is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Director of the Edinburgh Institute for the Study of the Arab World and Islam, and Head of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh. He has lectured nationally and internationally on various aspects of the Middle East. His numerous publications include The Arabic Grammatical Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 1999), The Arabic Language and National Identity: A Study in Ideology (Edinburgh University Press and Georgetown University Press, 2003) and A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Dr J. Kristen Urban has publishing and research interests in Middle East politics and conflict resolution. She has undertaken work in Gaza and the West Bank and has recently returned from Bahrain as a Senior Fulbright Scholar.  She holds an MS in Biology, a PhD in Political Science, and teaches International Studies at Mount St Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, MD, USA. Nadia Yaqub is Assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Culture at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Her research interests include intertextuality, identity, nationalism and trans-nationalism in the areas of oral Arabic literature, the novel and film. Amy Zalman received her doctorate in Middle Eastern Studies from New York University in 2003. Her articles, reviews and literary translation have appeared in Arab Studies Journal, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Middle East Report, Paintbrush: A Journal of Poetry and Translation, Women’s Review of Books and elsewhere. She is at present a founding partner of a consultancy, Oryx Communications.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the contributors to this book for their patience and understanding. Thanks are also due to Shahla Suleiman and Jane Muhawi who have helped in many important ways, to Sarah Artt who helped in preparing the manuscript, and to Nicola Ramsey, our EUP editor, for her patience, perseverance and understanding. Needless to say, all the errors in this book are our responsibility. We would also like to add that the views and terminologies of the contributors do not necessarily reflect those of the editors. Yasir Suleiman and Ibrahim Muhawi Edinburgh and Munich June 2005

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For Shahla and Jane

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Introduction 1

Literature and Nation in the Middle East: An Overview Yasir Suleiman Aldous Huxley writes that ‘nations are to a very large extent invented by their poets and novelists’ (1959: 50). Although by talking about ‘invention’ Huxley may have exaggerated the nature of the link between nation building and literature, this book subscribes to the broad thrust of his statement by examining the role literature plays in constructing, articulating or challenging interpretations of national identities in the Middle East. Thus, most of the chapters in this book are devoted to Arabic literature – here broadly defined as literature in Arabic by Arab writers – owing to the demographic dominance of the Arabs in this part of the world. The remaining chapters delve into Hebrew literature, Arabic literature in translation and Arab literature in its trans-national mode as expressed in a language other than Arabic, in this case English. In terms of genre, the book covers poetry and the novel in their capacity as the prime examples of high culture, as well as oral or ‘folk literature’ in the modern period as an expression of the localisation of the lived socio-political experience of a national group in a ‘here’ and ‘now’ that invokes the heroism of the past. In terms of provenance, a few chapters deal with the literary expression of Palestinian nationalism as the enunciation of a ‘stateless’ or ‘refugee’ nation, while other chapters cover the construction of national identity in Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon and Israel, thus providing an array of geographies and sociopolitical contexts that can add to our understanding of the interaction between literature and the nation in the Middle East. Drama is not dealt with in this volume because of its marginal position in the national cultures of the region, although a study of such playwrights as the Egyptian Tawfiq al-Hakim and Ahmad Bakathir, and the Syrian SaÆdallah Wannus would be revealing in charting the literary expression of the nation in the Arab context. In addition, the volume does not cover the short story or North Africa because of considerations of space. This book subscribes to a constructivist view of the nation, although it recognises that nation building cannot be an exercise in ‘invention’, if by invention is meant the fabrication of nations and national identities out of a void. Construction is not necessarily a form of ‘myth-making’, as it is sometimes made out to be in the literature on nationalism (see Gerber 2004). Construction —1—

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yasir suleiman is a purposeful activity that requires the identification and selection of existing cultural and experiential material that is reshaped, worked and reworked to advance the cause of the nation as the site of collective identification, allegiance and patriotism. Such material must answer to the criterion of resonance, in that it must ‘strike a chord’ with those at whom it is directed. Material that fails to do this cannot, ipso facto, belong to the realm of the national, regardless of how this is defined. Furthermore, the construction of national identities is an elite-mediated activity in which considerations of power and hegemony are implicated in the selection, valorisation and consecration of the canon of national literature which, as Corse writes, ‘is a product of human choice and contestation, not a natural choice’ (1997: 16). Academics, publishers, critics and those in control of the various channels of communication partake in this process of canon formation which, by its very nature, is always in a state of becoming. Men and women of letters participate in this cultural-cum-political process as members of the elite or counter-elite in their own communities, but the nature of their participation is contingent on the historical contexts and the political trajectories in which they find themselves. In some cases, they play a role that is confirming of the nation as a political or cultural entity, its uniqueness and its right to a state of its own. This is the case with the early pronouncements of pan-Arab nationalism which, in recent times, has confined itself to expressions of cultural nationalism. In other cases, for example in East and West Germany before re/unification in 1990, literature played a multiplicity of national roles, one of which was discrediting the cause of unity of the two parts of Germany as members of a single Kulturnation that is deserving of a single nation-state of its own (Brockmann 1999: 10). In yet other cases, literature can be used to deconstruct, or even subvert, a national project in favour of an alternative, typically irredentist, view of a putative ‘nation’ and its destiny. Literary expressions of state-nationalism in the Arabicspeaking world, for example Egyptian and Lebanese nationalism, have played this role vis-à-vis pan-Arab nationalism. This explains the references to Egyptian, Lebanese and Sudanese literatures as individualities in Arab cultural and political discourse, wherein the state takes on itself the task of promoting its own national identity through a set of unique symbols, motifs, anniversaries and cultural products, including having a literature that carries its name. National identities are complex phenomena that relate to national literatures in complex and myriad ways. This book gives expression to this multifarious link of nation to literature through a variety of perspectives. As a starting point, it does not assume that this link is unidirectional; rather, the book is based on an assumption of reciprocity, whereby the nation shapes its literature and is shaped by it in a shuttling mode of interaction. The chapters of this book reflect this reciprocity by sometimes approaching their subject matter through the —2—

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introduction literary lens, while at other times they do so through the nationalist perspective, but at no point do they decouple the two sides of the relationship from each other. Furthermore, one feature of this book is worth highlighting: we do not subscribe to the ‘reflection’ theory of literature in which, as cultural material, literature is said to ‘reflect’, ‘mirror’ or ‘capture’ the national character of a people. Reflection, which is popular in the media and dominates in the ethnic and cultural conceptualisations of the nation in modern Arab thought, smacks of naïve realism and of the reductive reliance on stereotypes. It additionally assumes that the nation predates its cultural expression in literature as the nonpolitical site of the political. Furthermore, reflection assumes the existence of an inherent and pre-existing meaning in the text which captures essential features of the national culture; it additionally assumes that this meaning is accessible to the members of the nation who can recover it with a high degree of intersubjective validity. Arabic writings on the connection between nation and literature tend to favour this outmoded perspective. Popular in the Marxist tradition, reflection is a defective theory of the relationship between nation and literature as categories of the social world and cultural production respectively (see Albrecht 1954). Not only does reflection deny the multiplicity of meanings – some of it may be hugely discordant – that the readers of a text can derive from it, but it further denies their role as active creators of meaning who can interpret and reinterpret the text concerned in ways that defy its initial or canonical reception. Put differently, reflection subjugates and tethers the reader to the text in an unwarranted fashion. It views the text as a closed semantic unit whose meaning is to a very large extent determined in advance of reading and is invariant both synchronically and diachronically. Furthermore, as Noble points out, the proponents of this theory never adequately explain ‘how the “optics” of reflection work’ (1976: 213). As a result, ‘reflection remains an image’ and ‘does not become a concept’ (ibid.). As a metaphor, reflection invites further modifications (for an expansion of the model, see Griswold 1981), such as refraction and distortion, to make it more viable as an instrument of explanation, but these modifications compound the metaphor by further accretions that render reflection even more problematic. Finally, reflection is based on the false premise that the national and the literary are ontologically separable. The constructivist view of the nation, to which this work is a contribution, rejects this premise in favour of an understanding of culture and social reality in which literature and the nation co-exist symbiotically. As Brockmann notes in his study of the role of literature in German re/ unification, ‘in the world of social constructions the boundary between the real and the fictional is not impermeable’ (1999: 19). Adopting a constructivist view of the nation implies a modernist understanding of the relationship between it and literature, although this relationship —3—

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yasir suleiman invariably invokes the symbols and motifs of pre-modernity insofar as these answer to the criterion of resonance mentioned above. Early pronouncements on nationalism in Western Europe in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century established the connection between nation and literature as a cornerstone of nation building. The German Romantics gave currency to this concept, although their ideas on the formation of national identities have a strong essentialist flavour. Giving literatures national names and treating them as discrete units were an expression of this mode of thinking in which the uniqueness of the nation and the ‘exceptionalism’ of its literature had to be proclaimed, affirmed and constantly cultivated. This trend gathered momentum in the twentieth century, wherein literatures came to be identified and studied in national units in a way that overrides the linguistic medium through which these literatures are expressed. This explains why, as literary categories, English, Scottish and Irish literatures, for example, are thought to have identities of their own, in spite of the fact that they are – albeit not universally in Scottish and Irish literature – expressed through varieties of the same language. The same applies to American and to Canadian literature in English in spite of their different histories and political trajectories (Corse 1995, 1997). It is therefore not surprising that the notion of ‘literary devolution’ (see Crawford 1992) had been utilised as the counterpoint of political devolution in the British Isles at least half a decade before the latter became a legal reality in Scotland in 1999. A minority of scholars deplore this effect of nationalism. Elie Kedouri condemns nationalism for disrupting ‘whatever equilibrium had been reached between the different groups [in a community], [by] reopen[ing] settled questions and … renewing strife’ (1966: 115). Kedouri further condemns nationalism for being the invention of ‘literary men who had never exercised power, and appreciated little the necessities and obligations incidental to intercourse between states’ (ibid.: 70–1). This one-sided view of nationalism remains the exception not the rule. Commenting on the role of poetry in nation building, Aberbach writes (2003: 271): Nationalism, though exposed in its potential for destruction, remains a major political force in civilisation. National poetry is not marginal but expresses much of what ordinary people feel. It tends to be vindicated by history, if not in its call for violent upheaval or revenge, then in its hope for national renewal, both political and spiritual. Poetry continues as a midwife to nationalism, though rarely with the undiluted violence and idealism of the past.

Rather than being on the wane under the onslaught of globalisation and post-modernity, the nation is entrenching itself as a fact of our social and political worlds. This is particularly true of the Middle East, wherein national literatures act as markers of the nation regionally and in the international arena. Although the concept of the nation-state is culturally, politically and socio—4—

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introduction logically ‘brittle’ in the Arab Middle East, and although it has to compete with alternative pan- or, to a lesser extent, regional models of the nation, the development of a national literature – regardless of how this is understood – is treated as a sign of cultural independence. As Corse points out, ‘national literatures have become identified within both the national and international communities as an essential characteristic of nation-states’ (1997: 24). The functionality of literature as a ‘central resource in the process of creating the necessary unity, loyalty and patriotism of national populations’ (ibid.: 25) is therefore pivotal in national task-orientation and mobilisation. Literacy and the mass media are the linchpins in this process because they enable the members of the nation to create bonds of allegiance and identity with each other across synchronic space. Conceptualising the nation as an ‘imagined community’ therefore is partially dependent on literature, which can create an experience of ‘unisonality’ between members of the nation. In the Arab context, the school curriculum is the major incubator of this ‘unisonality’ which, more often than not, is expressed through poetry rather than prose literature. This variation in the relative national merits of poetry and prose literature in the Arab arena calls for a revision of Benedict Anderson’s view of the novel as the prime carrier of nationalist meaning in the literary field (1991). In addition, this variation draws attention to the fact that literary form is as important as nationalist content in promoting the cause of the nation. Being associated with orality-cum-aurality through public performance in Arab culture, Arabic nationalist poetry enhances the experience of ‘unisonality’ which national literature aims to promote among the members of the nation. In this respect, poetry steals a march on the novel. The link between nation and literature in the Arab Middle East assumes great importance because of the tug of war between the nation-state and panArab nationalism. Each form of nationalism strives for authenticity and seeks to inscribe this in a literature that it calls its own. For pan-Arabists, statenationalism is a centrifugal force of political and cultural fragmentation that is at odds with the centripetal pull of pan-Arabism. Because it lacks political expression in a nation-state, pan-Arabism emphasises culture as a paramount attribute of the nation. As Brockmann observes, ‘culture is the primary way in which nations without political boundaries locate and identify themselves’ (1999: 10). Muhammad Husayn Haykal* expresses a similar view in his advocacy of the role of literature in Egyptian territorial nationalism: ‘Literature is the force which nothing else can vanquish or overcome as easily as an armed force can suppress political revolution’ (Gershoni and Jankowski 1986: 88). * Full transliteration is not used in the body of the text unless deemed necessary. Names and other terms will, therefore, be given the the form nearest to their full transliteration.

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yasir suleiman As we shall see below, this is also true of ‘refugee’ nations, of whom the Palestinians are a prime example. For culture and refugee nations, national identity is most strongly located in what the German Romantics have called the ‘republic of letters’. Thomas Mann captured this feature of the culture of divided nation when he declared during the Goethe celebrations of 1949: ‘Who should guarantee the unity of Germany if not an independent writer, whose real home … is the free German language, untouched by zones of occupation’ (quoted in Brockmann, ibid.: 9). Although Thomas Mann here refers to language, it cannot be lost on the reader that he does so from the position of an eminent man of letters. Günter Grass reiterated the same position in 1980 when he declared that the ‘only thing in the two German states that can be proven to be pan-German is literature’ (ibid.: 32). What Thomas Mann and Günter Grass have said about Germany is true of pan-Arabism which attributes the sense of difference promoted by the Arab nation-states to the strong similarities that exist between them. A similar tendency at differentiation existed in the deliberate process to fashion an American literature that is distinct from English literature. Joe Cleary raises this strategy of differentiation to the status of a general principle when he says that the anxiety ‘to distinguish a national culture may be most acute precisely where the substantive cultural differences between national Self and significant Other are least obvious’ (2002: 54). Cleary has in mind the Irish national literary experience vis-à-vis English literature, but his point has wider validity. The drive to establish nation-state cultures, including literatures, in the Arab world is surely motivated by the socio-political dynamics inherent in this principle. The similarities between the Arab and German situations vis-à-vis the role of literature in nation building are such that they do deserve a comparative study of their own. In the German Democratic Republic, which lacked a public space for free expression in the national domain, literature emerged as a surrogate channel for the promulgation, promotion and exchange of views that would otherwise have been subject to brutal censorship. This is true of literature in the Arab nation-state which, that is the state, tends to be intolerant of alternative national ideologies and their expression in literature. Commenting on the German Democratic Republic, Brockmann states that ‘where other avenues of discourse were blocked because of the Communist regime’s repression of open political dialogue, literature assumed a privileged role in enabling a more oblique form of communication’ (ibid.: 2). This is true of the situation in the Arab nation-state, as Hasan (2002) points out, where literature plays a counterhegemonic role often in favour of pan-Arabism. It is also true of the Palestinians in Israel who, in pursuit of their national claims through cultural modes of expression, do resort to various forms of self-censorship and ‘oblique means of communication’. As in the German Democratic Republic, allegory is used in —6—

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introduction Arabic and Palestinian literature as a preferred mode of articulating this obliqueness. Examples of this will be found in this work. Before re/unification Germany exemplified the position of literature in a situation of national partition. As we have pointed out above, the situation of Germany shares some important features with the position of the Palestinians as members of a refugee nation, in spite of the major objective differences that exist between the German and Palestinian cases. Living in the diaspora in a state of exile, the Palestinians too have relied on literature to fashion a national identity that can override their geographical dispersal and political fragmentation. Creating a public sphere in which being Palestinian can be given expression, literature has been instrumental in fostering a sense of national identity among Palestinians. In his illuminating study of literature, partition and the nation-state, Joe Cleary offers the following astute comment on the link between nation and literature in the Palestinian case (2002: 86): In the absence of an available nation-state, the development of a national literature has enabled the Palestinians to reinforce their sense of themselves as a distinct people and to express solidarity across the disjunctive locales of Palestinian existence in the face of repeated political reversals and calamities. Literature, that is, is one of the ways in which the scattered sectors of the Palestinian people can be imaginatively connected in the here and now even if actual statehood remains constantly deferred.

As a dispossessed and ‘de-territorialised’ community, the Palestinians embody the exilic experience of what Ibrahim Muhawi in this volume calls the ‘presentabsent’ or the ‘absent-present’. Edward Said captures this experience in the title of his autobiography Out of Place. As a nation in exile, or a refugee nation, the Palestinians, even when they live on their historical land, are ‘out of place’ as a political entity and as a community in which its present is so tragically out of kilter with its past. Nadia Yaqub gives an illuminating discussion of how this ruptured relationship between the ‘absent’ and the ‘present’ is reconstructed and enacted in the public performance of the oral Palestinian poetry duel in the Galilee in northern Israel. The context for this poetry, and its ‘unisonality’ in public performance, is the wedding eve party, the sahrah, in which Palestinians from different localities in Israel meet and interact in mock verbal duels that, on the surface, seem to be tied to the exigencies of the ‘here’ and ‘now’. Invoking the events, characters and place names of a heroic past, the oral poetry duel contrasts this past with the un-heroic present of the Palestinians in Israel whose lives are characterised by political, economic and cultural subordination to a hegemonic Hebrew-Zionist culture and political ideology. As an exercise in ‘phatic communion’, much of this poetry performs a restorative and therapeutic role in national terms, allowing the Palestinians in Israel to construct a positive vision of the national self and to cope with the trauma of their dispossession, de-territorialisation and dispersal. Nadia Yaqub —7—

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yasir suleiman expresses this with great precision when she writes that ‘Palestinian poetry is commemorative of an anterior time invested with a “Truth” that is absent from the present’ (p. 24). As performance, the oral Palestinian poetry duel extols the heroic qualities of the audience and invites them into a zone of signification in which ‘military imagery and epithets … run through the evening entertainment’ (p. 23). More importantly, however, this zone of signification is articulated through a Palestinian dialect that is free from Hebrew borrowings, although these borrowings do exist in ordinary Palestinian speech in Israel. The absence of these borrowings is all the more significant because Palestinian oral poetry occasionally embodies some English words, and similar borrowings are found in the neighbouring oral poetry of Lebanon. The absence of Hebrew words cannot therefore be read as the application of a general rule which disallows the use of foreign words in the oral poetry duel. Naming places and localities is a primary feature of the national semantics of the oral Palestinian poetry duel. The act of piling name upon name in this poetry may, from a critical point of view, be viewed as an exercise in listing; this is far from being the case. Naming helps tie the audience to locality and aims at asserting its claims of ownership over it. The fact that the names of the towns and villages in the poetry are paraded in Arabic constitutes a rejection of Hebrew semantic and cartographic hegemony, of the attempt to lay claim to the land by attaching alternative names to it (see Suleiman 2004). Dealing with the absent-present relationship as a case of hyphenated identity in the Palestinian national experience, Ibrahim Muhawi correlates identity with the structure of irony, which is a feature of some of the recent and most seminal writings by Palestinians. To effect this correlation, Ibrahim Muhawi moves away ‘from a purely semantic notion of … opposite meaning [in irony] to that of an absent meaning’ (p. 32). Understood in this way, irony becomes ‘metonymic’ of all situations of exile, of which the Palestinian national experience is a paradigm example in modern times in that it manifests the following conditions: ‘being literally out of place, needing to be elsewhere and not having that “elsewhere” where one would rather be’ (p. 198). But irony in the Palestinian context performs a lot more than just acting as a trope for the Palestinian national experience. It allows the writer to establish a communion with his readers by pretending that he is ‘revealing secrets that only they will understand’ (p. 37). In addition, this communion, as an act in construction, allows the writer to be critical of the national self without causing psychological injury or national offence. By appearing to take the readers into his confidence, the writer can surreptitiously blur the difference between the two poles of the textual relationship, especially when irony is laced with fantasy or elements of stereotypical humour that can engross the reader in the machinations of the writer. In Palestinian literature, irony creates a ‘community of sympathy’ in such —8—

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introduction a way that, ‘when [irony] ignites, all meanings are present, and the one that was absent before may acquire the greater significance’ (p. 40). In addition, irony in Palestinian literature accentuates both the sense of national failure and the possibility of repair through ‘negating negation’ and the therapy that humour so poignantly generates in the audience. Allegory offers another mode of narration in which the national as a category of the social world can come into being through the fictional in its capacity as a cultural artefact. Investigating the role of gender, particularly masculinity, in two canonical texts by Ghassan Kanafani, Amy Zalman emphasises the constructed nature of national and masculine identity in relation to the two preoccupations of national loss and national return. In Palestinian nationalism, the two tropes of loss and return are linked to the female figure as the symbol of a feminised land. This connection between nation and the land through the female figure reconciles male love to political resistance, thus allowing the student of nationalism to investigate the political content of emotional relations. In Men in the Sun, Ghassan Kanafani expresses in allegorical form the military, political and historical failure of the masculine figure through the protagonist Abul Khaizaran whose ‘body has been castrated’. However, what makes Ghassan Kanafani’s use of allegory so interesting in this novel is that he undermines the foundations upon which allegory is based: its presumption of ‘obviousness’ owing to the ‘shared set of terms’ holding the writer and reader, and the belief among readers that the reality ‘to which the fictional text affixes is a stable one’ (p. 55). Ghassan Kanafani challenges this assumption of stability by suggesting that, contrary to the traditional poetics of loss and return, national identity in the Palestinian context is not isomorphic with masculinity. This rupture implies a view of Palestinian national identity and destiny that is ‘always shifting, always-in-the-process’ (p. 56). In All That’s Left to You, Ghassan Kanafani does not disrupt the structure of male virility he so perceptively depicts in Men in the Sun, but offers a vision of the national Self that ‘shifts the focus to the female body’ in a new poetics of return (p. 7). In this poetics, women shed their constructed negative uni-dimensionality and are characterised as being both ‘aggressive and passive, sexually voracious and sexually submissive, redemptive and shameful, threateningly present and positively absent’ (p. 72). In its most neutral form as an activity in inter-cultural communication, translation acts as a bridge between cultures by making the literature of one nation available to another. In situations of conflict and nation building, literature can create empathy in a secondary audience by locking into its myths and motifs in ways that make this audience uncomfortable and, consequently, more amenable to explore itself as other or to construct the other as Self. Through translation, literature can creatively blur the boundaries between nations by creating a space for understanding and empathy that may be absent —9—

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yasir suleiman from the murky arena of public politics in which national interests dominate. In her contribution, Kirsten Urban explores how these themes are articulated through the encounter of American international politics students with Mahmoud Darwish’s poem ‘Indian Speech’ in translation. Using the Native American experience with the white man – represented by Columbus – as a metaphor, Mahmoud Darwish, the foremost Palestinian poet, injects the Palestinian national trauma into the North American sphere to render members of the secondary audience more able to understand and empathise with what it means, and how it feels, to be a Palestinian coming face to face with Zionist national ideology. In doing this, Mahmoud Darwish appeals to the humanity of the secondary audience whom he enlists, through translation, as members of his ‘extended tribe’, a tribe that rejects injustice and accepts the responsibility of helping to put an end to it. The interaction between nation and literature in the Middle East is played out through translation in another way. Hannah Amit-Kochavi explores this by reference to how the translation of Arabic literature into Hebrew was used, paradoxically, to construct, consolidate and promote a Jewish national identity in Palestine before and after the establishment of the state of Israel. In the early stages of Jewish immigration to and settlement in Palestine, Zionist Jewish nation building, which was in the main an East European creation, sought inspiration and authenticity for itself in the native Arab as a ‘practical model’ that can replace ‘the miserable diaspora Jew with a brave one’ (p. 103). Literature was thought to provide access to this model, hence the early translations of some pre-modern Arabic literature to Hebrew. Translations of Palestinian literature into Hebrew after the establishment of Israel were initially made for government organisations to understand how and what the enemy within thinks. Later, translations were made for the literary market. Hannah Amit-Kochavi examines the complex reception of these translations in the host Hebrew culture, which looked with surprise at the very existence of this literature and its high quality, a response that underlines the gulf between Israel and its neighbours. In one case, Anton Shammas’ translation of Imil Habibi’s The Pessoptomist, the reception of the novel revealed ‘covert prejudice, as wonder was expressed at an Israeli Arab’s (the translator) perfect mastery of Hebrew style’ (p. 106), the assumption being that only a Jew can achieve such mastery of Hebrew as the Jewish language. To avoid giving credence to the suffering of the Palestinians, or at least to stunt its credibility, Israeli critics assimilated and compared this suffering to that of the Jews. In this way, Palestinian suffering was, to use a common expression, ‘lost in translation’. The point was made above that canon formation is always in a state of becoming. This opens up the possibility of reinterpreting canonical national texts in a way that challenges and undermines their received or sanctioned — 10 —

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introduction readings. Shai Ginsburg does that in his interrogation of Moshe Shamir’s novel He Walked in the Fields, which is often read as a founding expression of the struggle of the native Hebrew youth in Palestine to ‘realise Jewish nationality’ through the creation of the state of Israel. This consecrated reading of the novel was in fact read into it by overriding the history of the events that unfold in the narrative in favour of a defining historical moment – the creation of Israel in 1948 – that postdates the events in question. In addition, the consecrated meaning of the novel and its canonical status do override the mixed reception it had when it was first published in 1948. Shai Ginsburg’s exploration of these ‘infringements’ in the history and reception of the text shows the constructed nature of the nation and how literature can be pressed to serve in this construction. By ignoring these ‘infringements’ and by going back to the text itself, Shai Ginsburg reassesses the ascribed heroism of the protagonist and shows it to be bogus. The protagonist does not die in action and he does not sacrifice himself in the defence of his nation. Rather, his death seems like a ‘wish fulfilment designed to overcome personal distress and [not] an outcome of ideological conviction or [an] altruistic act of bravery’ (p. 116). Nation building invites ‘mythification’ in the literary arena, and the hegemonic reading of He Walked in the Fields is an element in this mythification. We have pointed out above that, in the Arab milieu, poetry is an important instrument in nation building, and that the popularity of poetry in this project calls for revising the assumption in nationalism studies that favours the novel as that literary instrument par excellence. The contribution of literature in the articulation of national identity varies from context to context and from period to period within the same context. In Sudan at the beginning of the twentieth century, poetry was the main carrier of national meanings in the literary arena. More precisely, this task was in fact the domain of poetry in its oral, not written, mode owing to the low level of literacy in the country. The oral nature of this poetry meant that both men and women were able to contribute to it and that the promulgation of this poetry in public performance was instrumental in enhancing the feeling of ‘unisonality’ between members of the putative nation. During this period, poetry was used for educational purposes, for spreading the notions of material progress and social development, for helping to imagine Sudan in its colonial borders as a free and independent nation, for cleansing the term ‘Sudanese’ as a national appellation from some of its most negative connotations, for making the concept of the Sudanese nation the subject of pride and heroism, for spreading anti-colonial feeling and, finally, for getting around the censorship imposed by the colonial authority. In addition, being the most venerable of all verbal art forms in Arabic, poetry was instrumental in casting an identity for Sudan that was Arab, although the non-Arab among the Sudanese population later challenged this Arab hegemony. The musicality and — 11 —

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yasir suleiman rhythmic nature of this poetry enhanced its effectiveness as a tool of national mobilisation. However, the rise of journalism and the increasing popularity of prose writing conspired to sideline poetry later, or at least to reduce its importance in the emerging Sudanese national culture. This was to some extent occasioned by a move in this culture from oral, dialect-inspired poetry to poetry in the fusha (Standard Arabic), which was seen as the preserve of a small constituency of educated Sudanese. Pan-Arab nationalism benefited greatly from the power of poetry. In particular, poetry was used to connect the past with the present for reinforcement, legitimation and inspiration in the nationalist project. This is reflected in the use George Antonius makes of the first hemistich of Ibrahim al-Yaziji’s (1847– 1906) famous ode tanabbahu wa-stafiqu ayyuha al-Æarabu (‘Arise, ye Arabs, and Awake!’) as an epigraph, in beautiful Arabic calligraphy, on the title page of his classic study The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (1938). Using poetry as an instrument of political mobilisation, poets with pannationalist leanings developed a poetics of literary expression in which intertextuality, repetition and the dynamism of the ‘verb’ as a category of signification were exploited. Yasir Suleiman investigates these stylistic practices in relation to the poetry of the Iraqi Nazik al-Mala’ika, who chronicled some of the most important themes in the life of the Arabs in the second part of the twentieth century. This study also considers how the religious and the national impulses in this poetry fuse together to create a tapestry of national spirituality that exploits the position of Jerusalem as a potent symbol in the national endeavour. This ‘national spirituality’ replaces the earlier secularism of the poet in a way that presages the ascendance of Islam as a primary source of political organisation in the Arab world in the second half of the twentieth century. In The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement, George Antonius stresses the role culture played in stirring an Arab nationalist consciousness in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, the age of the nahda (modern Arab renaissance). Highlighting the role of literature during this critical period of modern Arab history, Antonius argues that the ‘Arab awakening’, as he calls it, was ‘borne slowly towards its destiny on the wings of a nascent literature’ (Antonius 1938: 60). Schools and the press were instrumental in disseminating the Arab nationalist idea during this period. But so was the novel as a new genre of literary expression. Albert Hourani highlights the role of the novel in creating an Arab national consciousness when he comments on the contribution Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914) made in this regard: ‘Jurji Zaydan … did more than any other [writer of the nahda] to create a consciousness of the Arab past, by his histories and still more by his series of historical novels, modelled on those of Scott and creating a romantic image of the past as Scott’s had done’ (1983: 277). In spite — 12 —

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introduction of this, critical discussions of how the novel promoted the nationalist idea in the Arab Middle East are sketchy. This is partly because of the lack of data on the ‘circulation’ of the novel, the ‘constitution of reading publics’ (p. 130) and the way literary expressions of the nationalist idea, whether cultural or territorial in character, are interpreted and internalised by individuals as socio-political agents. These difficulties notwithstanding, Jeff Shalan investigates how Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zainab and Tawfiq al-Hakim’s ÆAwdat al-ruh (Return of the Spirit), two of the most important novels in the canon of Egyptian national literature, offered a vision of Egypt in which the participation of the peasantry in constructing the nation is problematised at the level of national discourse. In Zainab, this participation is circumscribed in two ways. On the one hand, the peasantry are said to be able to contribute to constructing the nation to the extent that their contribution responds to the needs of the community. On the other hand, the peasantry can do this only if they yield their agency to an elite class whose ethos is definitely male-oriented. This analysis in the novel applies with equal force to the participation of women in nation building, who are said to be ‘doomed to tradition’, and therefore pre-modernity, ‘without the leadership of a male intellectual elite’ (p. 143). In ÆAwdat al-ruh, Tawfiq al-Hakim tackles the concepts of solidarity and national unity and focuses them around the notion of an Egyptian territorial nationalism that is rooted in the ancient past, with the peasantry as its objectified symbol: ‘If the towns and cities of Egypt are to unite in the name of a single nation, they must seek to reclaim that “pure heart”, the ancient Egyptian spirit of solidarity that resides … with the peasantry’ (p. 152). Tawfiq al-Hakim further believes that for national unity to be realised, the Egyptians must oppose ‘the remnants of Ottomanism, the encroachment of European values, and deleterious effects of wealth on the community’ (p. 150). Clearly, al-Hakim offers a more optimistic, albeit more populist, vision of the Egyptian nation than does Haykal. Jeff Shalan concludes his consideration of Zainab and ÆAwdat al-ruh by saying that ‘these two texts not only represent the dominant focus and trajectory of the nationalist thought of the period; they also provide valuable insight into the rhetorical appeal as well as the ideological limits and contradictions, of the territorialists’ nation building project’ (see Suleiman 2003 for a discussion of Egyptian nationalism). Nationalism is based on ideas of solidarity and unity. By the same token, nationalism does not encourage diversity and heterogeneity. These impulses in nationalism operate in politics as they do in the cultural arena. In the Middle East, the rise of Arab nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had an ecological impact on existing cultures and their expressions in literature. Thus, the diversity that once existed in the Ottoman and Mediterranean worlds, with their rich tapestries of languages and ethnicities, gave way to homogenising — 13 —

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yasir suleiman pressures which grew less and less tolerant of cultural expressions that were judged schismatic. Peter Clark deals with this aspect of Arab nationalism, pointing out that it marginalises cultural voices that in the past had their own legitimate niche in society. However, the picture is not all negative according to Peter Clark. Post-colonialism and post-modernity have stepped into the breach, as it were, and created conditions that promoted the emergence of new ecologies of cultural diversity in the Arab body-politic. Literature by ‘Arab’ writers in languages other than Arabic, particularly literature in the metropolitan languages of France and the Anglo-Saxon worlds, has created new zones of marginality and diversity. It has also created new categories of cultural product that defy the imposition of a monochromic taxonomy based on language. It is as though, by developing in this way, the ecology of diversity started to reassert itself. To capture this new diversity, some critics make a distinction between Arabic literature as literature composed in Arabic, and Arab literature as literature composed by ‘Arabs’ about Arab themes in a language other than Arabic. The latter description may be applied to what Syrine Hout calls the ‘Lebanese exilic novel’ in this volume. As a category of definition, this novel simultaneously expresses belonging to the nation as a source of ‘stability and centrality’ and alienation from it as a condition of the ‘anxiety and marginality’ of the exile (p. 192). As a statement of cultural and national in-betweenness, the exilic novel is, at some deep level, an attempt to reconcile nation and exile psychologically without, however, eliminating the existential difference between them. Memory, particularly nostalgic memory, plays an important part in this reconciliation, as do peculiarities of speech which the exile preserves to express his attachment to the originary point of departure. Syrine Hout expresses this by saying that ‘while it may be [physically] easy to extricate oneself from one’s home-country, it is a lot harder to expunge one’s national traits from one’s appearance or psyche’ (p. 197). Exilic nostalgia is not a yearning for a place per se, but for the intense personal relationship that the exile has with that place which others call ‘home’ or ‘national homeland’. Thus, the two novels Syrine Hout studies, Koolaids by Rabih Alameddine and Unreal City by Tony Hanania, do not portray nation and exile as two antithetical realities, but as ‘realities coexisting within the individual, the nation and the host country’ (p. 206). The above discussion, and the chapters that follow, show the rich pickings to be had from understanding how literature helps construct the nation and how the nation can shape literature. We offer this volume as an initial step on the road to developing this understanding in Middle Eastern studies. The volume examines poetry and the novel, but does not cover other genres. It delves into how translation can extend the role of literature in nation building into secondary settings which may be beyond the intended horizon of the text in its — 14 —

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introduction original language. The volume also shows how cultural diversity can be injected into the ecology of nation and literature through emerging forms of expression whose hybridity is one of their chief hallmarks. In particular, a comparative orientation is necessary to extend and refine our understanding of literature and nation. The participation in this of sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, literary critics and students of nationalism, in disciplinary and crossdisciplinary activity, would help yield further insights.

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1

The Production of Locality in the Oral Palestinian Poetry Duel Nadia Yaqub At the end of his introduction to Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha regrets that he has not included the voices of those who, and I quote, ‘have not yet found their nation: amongst them the Palestinians.’ Their voices, he goes on to say, ‘remind us of important questions: When did we become “a people”? When did we stop being one? Or are we in the process of becoming one? What do these big questions have to do with our intimate relationships with each other and with others?’ (1990: 7) These questions are, of course, too broad to be addressed in the present article, especially for Palestinians whose varied experience, as a minority group whether in Israel, under occupation or in diaspora, means that any serious treatment of their national identity will be especially complex. Moreover, individual Palestinians, like other people, belong to different groups, enjoy diverse relationships with various ethnic, cultural and political entities, and at different times and places may express and, indeed, feel differently vis-à-vis their Palestinian-ness. We cannot hope, then, to answer Bhabha’s questions for Palestinians (When did they become ‘a people’? When did they stop being one? Are they in the process of becoming one, and so on) in any definitive or complete way. Rather, to understand the ‘people-hood’ of Palestinians generally we must begin by considering how that notion is engendered locally, among discrete groups of Palestinians. Towards this end, I will explore how some Palestinians use a traditional poetic genre, namely the oral Palestinian poetry duel, continually to create and maintain their Palestinian-ness and to define it, at least among themselves, on their own terms. Intimately related to the question of national identity is that of locality, the process of locating the subject, a concept discussed at length by Arjun Appadurai in Modernity at Large (1996). Because he is concerned with global cultural flows and the production of locality on the part of the dispossessed, the de-territorialised and the transient, he is careful to distinguish between location in a given place which may or may not be coincidental with locality, but which is not a necessary component of it, and a relationship with place which is a vital element of locality (1996: 199). People may define themselves in relation to places in which they do not reside, have never resided, and may never reside. — 16 —

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the production of locality in the oral palestinian poetry duel Appadurai describes locality as ‘a complex phenomenological quality, constituted by a series of links between the sense of social immediacy, the technologies of interactivity, and the relativity of contexts.’ What is of interest here is Appadurai’s notion of the fragility of locality. Locality, he says, is ‘ephemeral unless hard and regular work is undertaken to produce and maintain its materiality’ (1996: 180). I will be arguing that Palestinians, living and performing in the Galilee, the Triangle and parts of the West Bank are using their traditional oral poetic genres as both a tool in that ‘hard and regular work’ and a medium through which their locality can be defined and communicated. I will begin by describing in very general terms the poetry in question. The Palestinian poetry duel consists of two or more poets who compose and sing in turn, each following strict rules of rhyme, metre, form and musical melody. There are various types of poetry duelling associated with Palestinian weddings. The poetry studied here is typically performed in northern Palestine (The Galilee, parts of the Triangle, and northern areas of the West Bank).1 The duel can be performed in a number of contexts, but is generally associated with public celebrations, most often village weddings where it is performed at the groom’s celebration on the eve of the wedding (the sahrah) as well as on the wedding day itself in conjunction with the wedding procession. The poetry is traditionally a rural phenomenon and is performed by and for men, although increasingly one finds it performed at folk festivals, rallies and other gatherings that may include women as well. Performances take place outdoors in a large open space. The poets stand facing each other, surrounded by the saff, a ring of men usually numbering in the hundreds. The poetry is sung, usually without musical accompaniment. Several types of poetry are performed on any given occasion, and there is no set pattern for their performance. The duel is usually preceded by music and dance. The poetry session will often begin with qusdan (s. qasid), long sung odes which are formally similar to the classical Arabic qasidah. This introduction will be followed by duelling in shorter poetic genres (usually four hemistiches) which the poets trade for anywhere from one to over 100 turns. One form, the farÆawi, which is always performed extensively at weddings, does not consist of a duel between two poets. Rather, one poet recites to the audience who respond to each line by singing a refrain. Audience participation, in the form of clapping, dancing, and singing refrains, is an important part of the entire performance. Indeed, several poets have told me that they could not compose without an audience. The poets move periodically from one genre to the next, usually spending no more than twenty minutes on any one form. A performance ends as it began, with the recitation of a qasid or other more sombre verses followed by music, dancing and the ritual of dressing and shaving the groom. One of the most striking features of the oral Palestinian poetry duel are the — 17 —

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nadia yaqub long stretches of praise and greeting of hosts, guests and their families and villages. The greetings can occur in any genre and at any time during the performance. A typical wedding will include a long greeting section during the first half of the evening. If there is a debate, insult and boast exchange, or composition contest to the performance, this will usually occur during the second half of the duel, after a great deal of praise and greeting. However, a less elaborate greeting section will also occur towards the end of the evening. It is not uncommon for a performance to consist almost solely of praise and greeting, or for greetings to be interspersed with boasting, description and platitudes. These lengthy passages are generally viewed by both poets and audience as the least ‘poetic’ sections of a given performance. They generally lack entextuality, that is, they are completely context-dependent in that they are not quoted outside of the performance context as other, more memorable, lines may be (Bauman and Briggs 1990). Most striking is that many of the lines in these sections are borrowed directly from the most mundane of phatic exchanges from Palestinian daily speech. However, as we shall see later, it is within these sections of the performance, at least in part as a result of their phaticity, that the production of a distinctly Palestinian locality takes place. During the praise and greeting sections, poets may mention a specific event or accomplishment, but generally the praise and greeting will be generic in nature. Often, nothing specific is said about a given family or village. Rather, it is simply welcomed by the poet. Thus, what is said about a particular village or family is much less important than the mentioning of the village itself. As a result, the poetry takes on the character of a list, a list of proper names. Consider, for example, the following excerpt: The youths of the town are around me Here are my family and friends To ÆAyn Mahil, my brothers To al-ÆUzayr and Rummanah I came riding my horse Long live Bayt Jann Where did the residents of Maghar go? And all the people of al-Mashhad I want to send my greetings Shafa ÆAmr, I call And Shafa Hamadah, we greet Our party is a party of entertainment And the Zaynah’s are with us and the Sarur’s We have light, good light And to Farad and Sakhnin God grant a long life to people of Jinin We came to the party, we came And the people of the town are around us

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the production of locality in the oral palestinian poetry duel Abu ÆAmar, [as dear to us as] our eyes To Taha I send greetings God preserve you, [Kafr] Manda residents I count on the Merciful Oh Ramzi, light of my eyes Oh ÆAlam family, strong To Salih al-ÆAlam, [as dear as] my eyes Where are you now? Long live the people of Nazareth, the strong Abu Fakhri, [you are] a righteous sword Where are the TurÆan residents the good people The houses of al-Farash we greet And the houses of ÆAtur we greet Dayr Hanna and its buildings And ÆArrabah, we come to it Nazareth and its people Welcome in ÆAylabun The Dayr al-Asad residents and the Qublan The SaÆad family are well defended And the Hammud family, my brothers Welcome, Bayt Jann.

In this excerpt, which in performance lasts approximately three minutes, the poet mentions twenty-seven Palestinian village and family names. Listing of Palestinian villages and families is more than just a way of mentioning Palestinian proper names. Appadurai reminds us that naming is a complex and important act: ‘The large body of literature on techniques for naming places … is substantially literature documenting the socialization of space and time. More precisely, it is a record of the spatiotemporal production of locality’ (1996: 180). To give a name to a person, object or place is to lay claim to it, to assert one’s right to do so. We name things and places which we own or which we in some way control. Once a name has been given, its repeated use becomes important. A name, like any other word, develops associations and connotations with use. In the case of place names, their continued use over time can give rise to historical associations embedded with special meanings for those who use them. Thus, Hittin is for Palestinians irrevocably associated with the famous victory of Salah al-Din over the Crusaders which took place there. Dayr Yasin brings to mind the massacre of its Palestinian residents in 1948. To utter the Palestinian names of Palestinian villages in the course of a sahrah, then, is to assert Palestinian presence in the areas in which wedding participants live and to lay claim to their right to reside there and make their mark on the landscape.2 To understand fully the import of the Palestinian phenomenon, it must be juxtaposed against the Israeli policy of renaming Palestinian towns and villages after the creation of the state of Israel, a process known in Israel as ‘redeeming — 19 —

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nadia yaqub the names’ (Swedenburg 1995: 50).3 Thus, the destroyed town of Al-Saffuriya becomes Zippori on Israeli maps. æAyn Hawd, which was not destroyed but occupied and turned into an artists’ colony, has become Ein Hod.4 Many towns and villages although still populated largely, or even solely, by Palestinians have been given new names by the state of Israel as a mark of historical claim to the sites in question. One might have difficulty locating the Palestinian West Bank town of Nablus, for example, unless one knows that the Israeli occupation authorities have renamed it Shekhem and identify it as such on tourist maps and road signs. Likewise, the Palestinian town of al-Khalil is given its biblical name Hebron. Shafa ÆAmr, which contains an old synagogue but has not had Jewish residents since the 1920s, is identified as Shefar Am. For the Israeli state, the attachment to local towns and geographic areas of Hebrew place names, names that resonate with Jewish history in the region, has been a conspicuous part of its appropriation of the territory identified by these names, and historical justification for that appropriation. For Palestinians, the continued use of Palestinian names rather than Hebrew ones for their villages constitutes a denial of this appropriation. Their Palestinian place names are important precisely because they resonate with a Palestinian Arab, rather than a Jewish, history of the area. Significantly, neither Jewish Israelis nor Palestinians are interested in imposing names on sites that have no connection with their own history. Many villages in the Galilee have neither Jewish residents nor ruins and as a result have been allowed to keep their Palestinian names. Similarly, Palestinians do not give names to the Jewish settlements that have been built in the Galilee since 1948. The use by Palestinians of Palestinian place names, then, must not be seen merely in negative terms as a rejection of the Israeli state or of the Jewish presence. Rather, it is most accurately interpreted as an affirmation of Palestinian history and presence on the land. In this social and political context, the listing of Palestinian place names in the poetry duels carries a special significance, reminding wedding participants of the Palestinian character of the region, of local Palestinian history, and of their own legitimacy as Palestinian residents on the land. However, just as important as the presence of the names in the poetry is the way in which they are listed. Listing is a near universal, and unfortunately understudied, phenomenon in oral poetic traditions. Places and people are listed in the wedding praise songs of the Griots. We find it in Irish ballads and various Polynesian traditions. Perhaps the lists best known in the West are the catalogues in Homer’s epics. Atchity mentions some of the ways in which these catalogues, most notably the catalogue of Achaian ships in Book Two of the Iliad, have been analysed, noting that the latter serves as a dramatis personae, that it presents a microcosm and prefigure of the Trojan War, and, most importantly, serves to memorialise a — 20 —

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the production of locality in the oral palestinian poetry duel period anterior to both the narrating and narrated present whose world of social upheaval differed markedly from Homer’s. ‘It [that is, the catalogue] may represent Homer’s attempt to define the synthesization of society in a world, unlike his own, which had not yet accomplished it completely’ (1978: 277).5 As fellow bearers of a shared Palestinian identity, participants are also defined as a community. In this regard, the Palestinian poetry duel is similar to other folklore genres which serve culturally to bind members of a society. The phatic nature of many lines is relevant here. Discussion of phaticity is complicated by a terminological confusion that has existed since Malinowski first coined the term in 1923. As Muhawi has pointed out, Malinowski uses the term ‘phatic communion’ to refer to both a type of meaningless small talk employed solely to keep conversation going and to all types of utterances in which ‘ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words’ (quoted in Muhawi 1999: 268). Whereas most subsequent research on phaticity has focused on the ‘small talk’, Muhawi, interested primarily in the ‘ties of union’, seeks to divorce the concept of phatic communion from small talk in his exploration of the phaticity of an expressive genre, the proverb. The division is necessary to reconcile a contradiction in Malinowski’s own description of phatic communion as ‘a speech event which does and does not have the ability to act upon the world by creating and not creating bonds of sympathy and union …’ (Muhawi 1999: 268). What is interesting about the Palestinian poetry is that it inserts ‘small talk’ within an expressive genre precisely, I would argue, as a means of exploiting its phaticity. In one performance, for instance, the poet chooses as a refrain the phrase ‘Greet the guest, Abu Ibrahim (hayy al-dayf yabu brahim).’ In performance, the saff’s chanting of the refrain alternates with the poet’s offering of greeting to various guests. By extending greetings to guests, families and villages, by employing the formulas that are used by Palestinians on a daily basis to greet each other, poets invoke the phaticity that is inherent in those greetings, thereby strengthening the bonds of community (and producing the locality) that emerge from the sahrah. The sense of community that emerges from performance will affect anyone who attends or participates in the event. Atchity’s analysis of the Homeric catalogues is also relevant here. For Atchity, the catalogue of ships is also about subordinating the individual to the communal in a time of social crisis. ‘From the largest group to the smallest collective … the poet’s emphasis is upon community’ (1978: 277). Moreover, Atchity says, individuals are named as generic representatives, usually of the troops that they bring with them. Similarly, the listing of Palestinian villages and family names defines sahrah participants as a group, one that is obliquely described in the performance as Palestinian. Furthermore, like the individuals in the Homeric catalogue of Achaian ships, the mention of Palestinian sahrah participants in the perform— 21 —

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nadia yaqub ance bears a metonymic relationship with the social groups (that is, their families and villages) to which they belong. As a result, the list of personal and geographical names which is the hallmark of the praise sections of the poetry duel serves to extend the Palestinian community created in the performance well beyond the few hundred men who attend the wedding to all members of the families mentioned in the poetry and to residents of all named villages. The host village, both as host village and as the home of the largest number of guests, is praised most extensively. Villages and towns in the immediate vicinity of the host village will also be mentioned repeatedly. As one moves farther away from the host village, the pattern of mentioned villages becomes more scattered. The naming of villages, then, defines a specific geographic area. Because the lists of names follow the pattern of attendance at the wedding, the place names mentioned are those most closely connected with wedding participants. The space created in the poetry is not merely a Palestinian one, but one most intimately tied to their concepts of home, family and belonging. The area defined by a given performance is usually relatively small (for example, the north-central Galilee). However, it is not uncommon for poets to mention other regions (the Negev, the Triangle, the West Bank and Gaza) in a clear attempt to extend the boundaries of the Arab Palestinian space created in the performance to include all of historical Palestine. At least some poets, then, seem to be aware of the political significance of their practice, even as they avoid direct references to Palestinian nationalist sentiments.6 Conspicuously absent from the Palestinian wedding poetry is any mention or allusion to Israel or Israeli culture and society. In his discussion of neighbourhoods, Appadurai notes that every neighbourhood is created against an Other.7 ‘… [N]eighborhoods’, he says, ‘are inherently what they are because they are opposed to something else and derived from other, already produced neighborhoods’ (1996: 183). The Galilee Palestinian’s Other, the larger (non-Palestinian) Israeli presence, is conspicuously absent from the Palestinian poetry duel. The cities and settlements which Palestinians see and interact with on a regular basis, the Hebrew words borrowed into the Palestinian dialect never occur in the poetry.8 One might suspect that the art form itself would be resistant to the use of foreign words, but such is not the case, generally. English words occur occasionally in the poetry, and the closely related Lebanese poetry duel can also include English, and more commonly French. Oral poetry from other parts of the Arab world also exhibits a great deal of flexibility which allows for the inclusion of foreign borrowings (albeit in an Arabised form). There also seems to be little resistance to incorporating modern elements into oral Arabic dialect poetry.9 Palestinian poets will talk frankly about loudspeakers, bombs, cars and tape recorders in their poetry duels. Current events may arise, although often rather obliquely. One cannot argue, then, that the absence from the poetry duel — 22 —

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the production of locality in the oral palestinian poetry duel of Hebrew and of any mention of the Israeli non-Palestinian presence that surrounds Galilee residents is due to any generic restrictions. In performance, then, Palestinian poets create an imaginary Palestine, one defined through both the language of performance (the Palestinian dialect) and the abundance of Palestinian family and village names as distinctly and purely Palestinian. But the poetry performance does more than delineate a Palestinian space; it also connects that space and wedding participants who are located within it to a larger cultural construct. In most performances there is a distinct thread of military imagery and epithets that runs through the evening entertainment. We find that the space which the saff creates by and for the performance is called al-maydan or al-sahah, terms which alone mean plaza or square, but which can also refer to the arena of war. The performance space may also be referred to as al-maÆrakah (the battle). The sahrah itself is called yawm al-maÆrakah (the day of battle) or hima al-haflah (the defence of the party), while the reciting of poetry is compared with the brandishing of swords and the piercing of spears. The town in which the wedding celebration occurs may be described as an Arab fortress and great city, the glory of the nation and a protector of virgins. Not surprisingly, a good part of the poetry treats the audience’s heroic qualities; they are described as glorious Arabs who have travelled a great distance to attend the celebration. They are referred to alternatively as carriers of swords or pact-making men, as victorious, loyal knights and horsemen who defeat the aggressor. Known for their generosity, fidelity and trustworthiness, they are protectors in the service of their nation, resolute riflemen, people of honour and fierceness. They are described as both lions and hunters of lions, men of zeal and firmness, noble freemen and princes, the bearers of banners and flags. Their actions are described as military manoeuvre. In a word, they are men of chivalry. Poets describe themselves in much the same terms, although they may be even less reserved in their praise. They are the knights of speech with voices like cannons. They compare favourably to heroic poet warriors and military leaders of the past. They are the leaders of the cavalry, an inspiration to various military heroes, rulers, able to ram mountains of rock with their heads. The performance space, then, is a battleground, the saff its heroic Arab warriors who are led by the poets. The poetry is their weapon. From the performance, an Arab heroic construct emerges. To understand the importance of this imagery, I turn to Eugene Vance’s work on the Chanson de Roland. Vance describes an identity between the hero of the epic and the jongleur who gives the epic life:10 We know nothing definite about what we commonly call the historical origins of the poem, but we may be fairly certain that the Roland as we possess it is a coagulation of disparate narrative materials that once perpetuated themselves in oral performances during which the poet and his heroes would be simultaneously reborn together,

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nadia yaqub thanks to the memory and voice of the poet. Thus the heroes of the Roland, like those of the Iliad and the Odyssey, speak in the same metrical formulas as the poet; they employ the same epithets, the same lists, and they even share the same foreknowledge of events. The fact that these heroes live only by the memory and the voice of the poet ensures, in other words, a strong cognitive identification between them, and this is evident in the motivation imputed by the poet to the heroes themselves. For if it is the antique glory of the hero that animates the voice of the poet, inversely, it is the commemorative posterity of the singer that inspires the epic blows of the hero. (1993: 380)

Vance describes not merely the expression of the poet’s identity through the song, but the possession of his identity by the actions of the heroes about whom he sings (1993: 380). The operative factor for Vance is commemoration, which he describes as: any gesture, ritualised or not, whose end is to recover, in the name of a collectivity, some being or event either anterior in time or outside of time in order to fecundate, animate or make meaningful a moment in the present. Commemoration is the conquest of whatever in society or in the self is perceived as habitual, factual, static, mechanical, corporeal, inert, worldly, vacant, and so forth. (1993: 374–5)

I would like to argue that, like the Chansons de Roland of France in the Middle Ages, the Palestinian poetry is commemorative of an anterior time invested with a ‘Truth’ that is absent from the present (Vance 1993: 375). Vance quotes Vernant on this point: The activity of the poet is oriented almost exclusively toward the past. Not his individual past, nor a past generalized as if it were an empty framework independent of the events that have occurred there, but ‘ancient times’ with its own contents and qualities: a heroic age, or still further, a primordial age, the origin of time. (1993: 377)11

The poetry not only reflects or relates the events, characters and characteristics of ‘ancient times’, but has a transforming, revitalising effect on the present, the moment of performance, which is characterised by deficiency and lack (1993: 382). How is this transformation realised in the Palestinian context? We have already seen how the poetic performance is characterised by an overarching heroic construct. We note that the heroic construct created in the performance is defined as explicitly Arab and bedouin, harking back to an age in which warfare was conducted with horses, swords and lances, when battles occurred on the more human level of single combat, when heroism was clearly defined and hence attainable. An idealised ‘ancient time’, whether it be the semi-historical times of the pre-Islamic hero-poet ÆAntara, that of the Bani Hilal of the Arab conquests in Africa, or a more generic, mythical past is clearly evoked through the performance. — 24 —

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the production of locality in the oral palestinian poetry duel This heroic time evoked in the performance contrasts starkly with the present in which most Palestinians in Israel lead their lives, a present characterised by loss of honour and land, by cultural marginalisation in a society whose dominant culture is not Arab, by political and economic disempowerment. Their lives unfold in a distinctly un-heroic context, their present characterised by Vance’s deficiency and lack. There is a disjuncture, then, between the present of the performance, what I will call the signifying context, and the signified context created mimetically within the performance. Not only do participants in the wedding sahrah face the wide gap that separates the two contexts of the performance, but through the speech acts of the poets they are prevented from forgetting for any length of time the existence of both contexts. Herein lies the transforming nature of the poetry. It is not merely the evocation of an ideal Arab, mythic past, but its intimate linkage on a number of linguistic levels with the un-heroic present which effects the transformation. To begin with, the Palestinian wedding eve performance is characterised by an inordinate amount of commentary that is in some way metacommunicative.12 In any given performance, approximately 25 per cent of all lines will be ‘meta-poetic’. That is, they are explicitly about the poets as poets, their poetry or the performance. Poets boast of their fame and compositional skill, of the beauty and force of their verses, of the distance they have travelled to attend the celebration, and of the excellence of the sahrah itself. Another 30 per cent are meta-performative, meaning they include specific mention of the guests at the sahrah and their home villages, calls to the saff, and praise for the excellence of the sahrah itself. A significant percentage of these lines are greetings and as such are, at least in their use in their quotidian context, phatic. Thus, more than half of the lines of a typical performance refer to the signifying context. Other oral poetic traditions in the Arab world also contain a high frequency of metacommunicative or phatic utterances. Both Reynolds, writing about the oral epic in Egypt, and Caton, describing oral poetry in Yemen, also note the phenomenon in the oral poetry they study. Reynolds describes the way in which the mood of the evening affects the performance’s text: Part of the dynamic of the sahrah context is the weaving of elements from the performance situation first into the performance text and then back into the sahrah setting. Over and over again an evening gathering develops around an idea or a mood that is reiterated in different forms. To some extent this quality is found in any human dialogue or conversation, but the sahrah context seems to invite such participation in a more formalized, more performance-oriented manner. (1993: 185)

Caton expresses the same idea in terms of the speech acts inherent to the poetry’s verbal formulas:

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nadia yaqub Besides its [that is, the formula’s] poetic function of building a regular metre, it performs various speech acts whose primary relevance is for the wedding celebration. These are quintessentially social speech acts, among them the greeting of members of the audience; thus, social interaction becomes poeticized … (1990: 99)13

On the surface, these direct references to the performance context are similar to the metanarrative discourse that can occur in storytelling (Bauman and Briggs 1990: 69). There are a number of such devices at the disposal of a skilled narrator. Tellers may, for example, interject into their narration comments about the credibility of the tale (‘Now you may not believe this, but …’) or make deliberate comparisons between elements in the tale and their counterparts in the performance situation (‘It was about as tall as that tree over there’). Such commentary draws the audience members’ attention to the here and now, transporting them momentarily from the mimetic world into which they have been psychologically drawn by the narration, back to the present of the performance. One can argue that such language operates as a trope similar to literary allusion in that it results in the coexistence of two contexts for a single utterance (Conte 1986: 38–9; Riffaterre 1983: 120).14 In the Palestinian poetry performance, however, in which more than half the lines explicitly mention elements of the performance context, something very different is happening. The poetry performance does not transport the audience psychologically to a fictional world and then jerk them back to the present through metacommunicative commentary. Indeed, to a large extent, we can argue that the performance itself becomes a central theme of the performance. There is so much ‘meta’ discourse in the poetry that the audience is never permitted to forget exactly where they are (at a wedding sahrah) and what they are doing (celebrating the approaching nuptials of their friend or kinsman, the groom). The performance context is never allowed to slip into the background, but forced to be present in the minds of participants even as an Arab heroic context is constantly evoked through the language of chivalry. Here, too, phaticity has a role to play. Muhawi, following Babcock, has noted the phatic function of ‘meta’ discourse. Like the greetings mentioned above (and, indeed, as we have already noted in the context of performance, the greetings are themselves metacommunicative) the ‘meta’ discourse that permeates the poetry not only binds the sahrah participants to the poetry in performance, but also serves to bind them psychologically to one another. The simultaneity of the two contexts is in part created through the equation between performance and battle that is explicitly enunciated in the poetry itself. In a number of lines, poetry and performance are specifically linked to battle. The poets are the ‘knights of speech’, their poetry is a weapon – ‘the sword of Æataba’ – which serves as ‘a support on the day of battle’. Through the performance an identity is created between laylat kayf (a night of enjoyment) and yawm al-maÆrakah (the — 26 —

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the production of locality in the oral palestinian poetry duel day of battle), both of which are formulaic epithets for the wedding sahrah. The nature of the speech acts employed in the poetic performance also helps to create this identity. The typical Palestinian wedding poetry performance includes a great deal of what Jacobson calls conative language, and what Hymes defines as directive language, that is, language directed at the audience (Jacobson 1960: 355; Hymes 1974: 23). Some lines consist of instructions to the saff or the audience as a whole, and others of explicit performatives. I have been using the term participant to refer to audience members, not only because of the active role that the saff plays in the performance, but also because so much of the typical performance consists of this type of direct address. In this sense, the Palestinian wedding poetry duel differs markedly from a theatrical performance in which audience members stand outside of the interaction that makes up the performance. As the addressees of so many lines, they are drawn directly into the context created by the poetry, that is, into the heroic Arab construct. The creation of this heroic Arab construct in performance and its relationship to the transforming nature of that construct add a complexity to the notion of locality which Appadurai does not address. Appadurai discusses the contexts of locality primarily in terms of the relationships that can exist between multiple neighbourhoods in a non-hierarchical setting and the limitations on locality production that can occur when a nation-state imposes itself onto neighbourhoods. Speaking of the Yanomami villages of Brazil, for example, he says that ‘while they are still in a position to generate contexts as they produce and reproduce their own neighbourhoods, they are increasingly prisoners in the context-producing activities of the nation-state, which makes their own efforts to produce locality seem feeble, even doomed’ (1996: 186). Palestinian residents of Israel find their locality similarly challenged by the activities of the state of Israel, but what of the wider context of the Arab world? Through creation of the Arab heroic construct, we find Palestinians voluntarily defining their locality to a larger cultural entity – the Arab nation. In the process, it is Israel, a non-Arab society, which is marginalised, at least for the duration of the performance. Most important is the way that sahrah participants are drawn into the signified context. They are not made temporarily to forget their presence at the sahrah and identify with characters in a fictional world created by the poetry. Indeed, the poets through the use of conative language and relentless references to the performance context prevent anything of the sort from happening. Rather, the fictional world of chivalry created by the overarching heroic Arab construct that characterises the poetry is brought squarely into the present of the performance. The wedding sahrah itself is transformed into a heroic, Arab event, and the participation of poet and audience is redefined as a heroic, Arab act. We are reminded of Genette who, in discussing a very different sort of — 27 —

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nadia yaqub verbal art, says, ‘to keep his thoughts fixed on two moments at the same time is almost always, for the Proustian creature, to consider them identical and to merge them …’ (1980: 143). Like Marcel in The Remembrance of Things Past, Palestinians at the wedding sahrah are asked to keep their thoughts fixed on two contexts, and like Marcel, they succeed in doing so by rendering them identical. The distance between the signifying context and the signified context in the Palestinian case – between the present of performance and the mythic past created mimetically within the performance – is psychologically removed. Situated squarely within the heroic Arab construct, the sahrah itself becomes a heroic context, and to participate in the sahrah becomes a heroic deed. If the lists of Palestinian family and village names create an imaginary Palestinian space, the heroic construct created in performance defines that space as Arab. By defining the scope and nature of their locality through the poetry, Palestinians can, at least for the duration of the performance, reject their marginal position within Israeli society and situate themselves and their Palestinian-ness at the core of an Arab cultural centre. Myerhoff describes a similar transformation in her discussion of ritual: … The invisible referents or realities to which ritual symbols point become our experience and the subject may have the sense of glimpsing, or more accurately, knowing the essential, accurate patterns of human life, in relation to the natural and cosmic order. (1990: 246)

This reminds us of Geertz’s comment that rituals have the effect of fusing the dreamed-of and the lived-in order. Thus transformation is a multidimensional alteration of the ordinary state of mind, overcoming barriers between thought, action, knowledge and emotion. The invisible world referred to in ritual is made manifest and the subject placed within it. Indeed, it is within the ritual nature of the Palestinian poetry duel that the relationship between locality and phaticity lies. The Palestinian poetry duel itself displays many of the features of ritual as defined by Schechner, including efficacy, link to an absent Other, symbolic time, audience participation and collective creativity (Beeman 1993: 378). At the same time, the greeting sections of the performance borrow heavily from another set of rituals from Palestinian society, that is, the rituals of phatic ‘small talk’, and most particularly the rituals of phatic greetings (Coupland et al. 1992: 212). In other words, embedded within the larger ritual of the wedding eve performance are the small rituals of phaticity. And it is precisely within ritual that Appadurai finds the ‘hard and regular work’ that must be carried out to produce locality. ‘[S]pace and time are themselves socialized and localized through complex and deliberate practices of performance, representation, and action’ (1996: 180). Phaticity, then, works to produce locality. It is no accident that an increased popularity for the Palestinian oral poetry — 28 —

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the production of locality in the oral palestinian poetry duel in the 1990s has coincided with more active participation on the part of Palestinians in Israeli politics. But the poetry performance is not essentially about politics. In part through the work of producing locality in their wedding eve celebrations, Palestinians are in a continual process of becoming. When Jews begin to attend Palestinian weddings, then the lists of names that are so central to the poetry will include Hebrew names as well.

notes 1. Poetry duelling of one sort or another is widespread throughout the Arab world, especially in the context of weddings. See Caton for a detailed description of poetry duelling among the Khawlani tribe of Yemen. The Galilee and the Triangle are within the geographical borders of the present state of Israel. 2. Bowman (p. 33) recognises the importance of place names in Palestinian identity formation, although he does not discuss the relationship between the act of naming and the affirmation of a cultural or political identity. 3. Swedenburg notes that in 1990, Israeli government-run television and radio banned the use of Palestinian names for towns and villages in the Occupied Territories, replacing them with their biblical equivalents (p. 74). 4. See Slyomovics for a discussion of the renaming of this village and subsequent relationship between the original village (now Ein Hod) and the new ÆAyn Hawd where original inhabitants of the Palestinian village now live. 5. Atchity also draws an interesting comparison between the catalogue and genealogy. Since the Palestinian lists include not only village names, but also families, the suggestion of genealogy is also strongly present here. Palestinians are praised within the context of their ancestral and familial affiliations: sons of Palestinian families, who are also sons of ÆAdnan, IsmaÆil, and Ibrahim. 6. That Palestinian Israelis are aware of the political implications of the village lists can be seen from the following incident. At one duel performed shortly after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in Jericho, a poet included that city in his listing of Palestinian towns, inciting considerable excitement among the audience. ‘Jericho, did he say Jericho?’, ‘Jericho? We’ll spend tonight in prison!’ were some of the comments the mention elicited. 7. Appadurai defines neighbourhoods as the existing social forms in which locality is realised (p. 179). 8. My corpus of sixty hours of recordings includes one mention of the city of Haifa, a mixed Arab/Jewish city. Israel and the Jewish settlement town of Karmiel are each mentioned once, both times by a poet who, during his interview with me, expressed great satisfaction as a citizen of the State of Israel. 9. See, for instance, the vocabulary of the poetry cited in Caton (1990), Bailey (1974) and Sowayan (1985). 10. Atchity makes a similar point about Homer and his relationship with Agamemnon in the Iliad. ‘By drawing attention to the role of the poet of memory, finally, Homer equates himself with Agamemnon. As the king protects and serves the community in time, the poet assures the interests of human continuity’ (p. 278). Reynolds makes

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nadia yaqub

11.

12. 13.

14.

a similar argument in his study of the relationship between poet and text in the oral Arabic epic, sirat bani hilal. Atchity’s interpretation of Homer’s Iliad also rests in part on the notion that the thematic continuity of the work relies at least in part on the importance of the events as remembered. In studying the poetry duels of the Gayo in the highlands of Sumatra, Bowen notes a similar use of metacommunicative discourse (p. 36). Interestingly, Caton attributes what he perceives to be a marked linguistic difference between the baah and the epic genres like that studied by Reynolds at least in part to the narrative nature of the latter. However, as Reynolds’ study shows, a narrative genre can also be characterised by a significant amount of metacommunicative language. In fact, any meta-level commentary can be seen as allusive since by definition it introduces into a given discourse elements from a context at one level removed from that discourse.

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2 1

Irony and the Poetics of Palestinian Exile Ibrahim Muhawi

No, I do not have an exile To say that I have a homeland – Mahmoud Darwish1

The subject of this study was inspired by the seemingly unanswerable question asked by a colleague at a conference. ‘Where is Palestine, then?’ she wanted to know.  The more thought I gave it, the more I realised Palestine has remained a question whose answer was like the Hindu meditational practice called ‘neti, neti’. Whenever a thought comes into the mind, you negate it by saying to yourself ‘neti, neti’, meaning ‘not this, not this’. Thus Palestine is not the West Bank, and it is not Gaza; and it is not the West Bank and Gaza combined. It is not the Palestinian Authority; and it is not Israel. It is not even historic Palestine except as a dream. Palestine exists in exile as a signifier whose signified does not match its shape or magnitude. To a large extent then, this nation exists in the dream of signification projected on it by its members because the historical process that would create a correspondence between signifier and signified seems to be endlessly postponed. Like the Buddhist Self, it is something that is, and is not; it is both present and absent. More than anything else, it is perhaps a metaphysical condition resembling Hamlet’s dilemma. ‘Nothing is left for us,’ says Mahmoud Darwish, ‘except the weapon of madness [al-junun]. To be, or not to be. To be, or to be. Not to be, or not to be. Nothing is left except madness’ (1995: 118). The difference is that Hamlet faced only the first question, while the Palestinians, as we shall see in the course of this chapter, are faced with all possible combinations of being and not being. Homeland is not this, or that; not the negation of this, or that; or, ultimately, the negation of that negation – as we can see from the epigraph to this chapter. The Palestinian people entered European history through the event that led to the establishment of the state of Israel on the land of Palestine in 1948. This act of negation, referred to by the Palestinians as the nakba (catastrophe), resulted in their fragmentation, dispersal and exile. The consciousness of exile is an intense awareness of absence, of being present where one does not necessarily want to be. Edward Said encapsulates this state in the ironic double-entendre of his autobiography’s title, Out of Place. An exile is a present-absent, or an absent— 31 —

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ibrahim muhawi present, person. He is out of place regardless where he finds himself, and he no longer has a place he can call his own. In other words, an exile by definition lives in a state of existential irony, where the lived present is characterised by a longing for an absent meaning. The exiled Palestinians who populate the refugee camps of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria exemplify the state of the present-absent par excellence. UN General Assembly Resolution 194 gives them the right of return to the part of Palestine that has now become Israel, and to the extent that they live in that expectation they remain present where they are but absent from their homeland.2 Whether or not the negation of the negation of Palestine will amount to something historically positive remains to be seen, but it does point to a heightened sense of irony in Palestinian literature. ‘Time has taught me wisdom,’ Darwish declares in a recent publication, ‘and history has taught me irony’ (2000: 12). The rupture in the middle of this expression makes room for an interpretive balance between the two parts such that one elucidates the other. We can draw this equation out by rephrasing the expression thus: ‘Wisdom is to time, as irony is to history.’ In other words, irony is a form of historical wisdom. If history has made an exile of you, then a poetics based on irony is a suitable strategy for coping with that exile, for it allows you to reinterpret your exile in creative ways, transforming it back into history as literature. Needless to say, the literature on irony is immense, and there are almost as many theories of irony as there are theories of literature. To some extent, the modern movement in literary criticism which began with the rise of New Criticism early in the twentieth century saw a vital connection between irony and literature: for this criticism irony was at the heart of practically all literary experience. And, as Wilde (1981) argues, irony is one of the shaping principles of post-modern literary theory and practice as well. It is perfectly understandable why Darwish should say that history has taught him irony, for the very structure of irony resembles the condition of exile in that it embodies a rhetoric of presence and absence. In an ironic text an absent meaning is waiting to rise from a present one. Booth (1974), Muecke (1969) and S’hiri (1992) and other studies clearly demonstrate that the classical rhetorical definition which saw irony as a form of semantic antiphrasis, or conveying ‘the opposite of what one actually says’ (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969: 207), has long been shown as too narrow. In moving away from the purely semantic notion of an opposite meaning to that of an absent one, my understanding of irony construes antiphrasis in the widest possible sense as a condition of existential contradiction. This connection between irony and the Palestinian condition is the most concise expression of a Palestinian poetics of exile that I know of, and it will provide an existential/historical basis for my analysis of irony in three Palestinian writers: Samih al-Qasim, Nasri Hajjaj and Imil Habibi. — 32 —

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irony and the poetics of palestinian exile As Hutcheon notes, there is ‘little disagreement among critics that the interpretation of irony does involve going beyond the text itself … to decoding the ironic intent of the coding agent’ (1985: 52–3). Beyond that, critical perspectives diverge. Studies of irony tend to fall into broad categories, such as the philosophical/existential (Kierkegaard), the taxonomic (Muecke), the rhetorical (Booth), the pragmatic (Hutcheon, Sperber and Wilson), the stylistic (S’hiri), the phenomenological (Wilde), and the perspective that sees irony as a principle of structure in literature (Frye, Brooks). These differ widely in approach as well as in the understanding of irony, and (Wilde excepted) tend to disengage irony from specific historical contexts, though several have commented on the general irony of existence. Frye, for example, notes that the ‘archetype of the inevitably ironic is Adam, human nature under sentence of Death’ (1957: 42); similarly Booth, ‘If the universe is ultimately an absurd multiuniverse, then all propositions about or portraits of any part of it are absurd …’ (1974: 267); and Muecke, ‘We do not need to imagine either a malignant or an indifferent deity in order to see the world as in an ironic predicament …’ (1969: 150). Muecke aptly distinguishes between verbal irony and what he calls ‘situational irony’ in the one book (1970: 28) and the ‘irony of events’ in the other (1969: 102). ‘It is ironic’, he notes, ‘when we meet what we set out to avoid, especially when the means we take to avoid something turn out to be the very means of bringing about what we sought to avoid’ (1969: 28). Certainly the Palestinian people did not choose to be exiled. The loss of the land and subsequent dispersal came about in spite of all Palestinian efforts to avoid them. The harder the Palestinian people have worked to get back to their homeland, the farther away it seems to get. With Palestine seen as the desired centre of resolution for conflicts in Europe that had nothing to do with the Palestinian people, and world powers like the British Empire and the United States ranged against them, it is not difficult to see why Palestinian writers might see, not the universe but history itself as absurd. As Said notes, ‘What to many Palestinians is either an incomprehensible cruelty of fate or a measure of how appalling are the prospects for settling their claim can be clarified by seeing irony as a constitutive factor in their lives’ (1991: 5). I have already touched on the subject of irony in Palestinian literature in my introduction to Memory for Forgetfulness (pp. xii–xiii). This is a more extensive treatment of the subject, and its purpose is to focus on irony as a practice that unites literary form with historical experience – in this case the exilic presenceabsence experience of the Palestinian people. This approach highlights the importance of specific contexts to the study of irony because to a large extent the absent meaning depends on, and arises from, them. Following Hutcheon (pp. 52–3) and others, I also insist on the pragmatic dimension of irony. The first official designation of Palestinians as ‘present-absent’ was used by the — 33 —

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ibrahim muhawi nascent state of Israel to refer to that segment of the population who ended up away from their villages when the fighting stopped, and whose lands it wanted to confiscate. They were absent from their property, but were still present in the country. Not having been allowed to return to their homes these groups of Palestinians thus constitute an internal diaspora, just as the refugees who live outside the homeland constitute an external one. The ‘present-absent’ label applies to all Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel as well, whether or not they form part of that internal diaspora. They live in an internal exile, caught on the horns of a dilemma (to which I will return in my discussion of Habibi). The land on which they live is their homeland, but the dominant culture is not their culture and the country is not their country. Their civic status as citizens is compromised by the fact of their not being Jews. Referring to his ambiguous status in the country, Darwish describes this state of affairs thus: ‘Here, I’m not a citizen, and I’m not a resident. Then where, and who am I?’ Later in the same passage, he asks, ‘Am I here, or am I absent? Give me an expert in philosophy so that I can prove to him I exist’ (1973: 94). The present-absent contradiction has been a dominant feature of Western discourse about Palestine since at least the middle of the nineteenth century. It has been used to de-legitimise the national rights of the Palestinian people by making them absent when and where they should be seen as being present. The first such example in modern times was the manifesto of the First Zionist Congress (1897) in Basel: ‘The aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a home in Eretz-Israel secured under public law.’ Here, though the reference is to Palestine, the country and its indigenous people have been made totally absent. The Balfour Declaration issued by the British Government in 1917 adopted a modified version of this manifesto in favouring ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.’3 In referring to the Arab majority in negative terms as the ‘existing non-Jewish communities’, the Declaration defines them as a minority consisting of disparate groupings, and not as a people. And, in identifying them negatively as non-Jews, the Declaration adopts the rhetorical strategy of making them absent while they are still present, thus turning them into a diasporic people while they are still living in their homeland and long before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Absentification, of course, is a common strategy used by colonisers intent upon dispossessing indigenous people of their land. As Rundstrom et al. note in relation to the experience of Native American tribes: Dispossession is more than a physical act, for it occurs in rhetorical strategies that anticipate the action. Randy Bertolas (1998: 98–111) examined such a strategy in the redefinition of Cree places as ‘wilderness.’ He argued that imagining a place as empty of humans, although only a dream, allows the coloniser-dreamer to then

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irony and the poetics of palestinian exile separate people from their own socially constructed landscapes, causing seemingly less pain for the coloniser. (2000: 91)

In this light then, the Basel Programme and the Balfour Declaration are comprehensible as rhetorical strategies that anticipate actual dispossession.4 Even before Balfour this formation was helped along by religious travellers who came to Palestine in the nineteenth century, armed with the Bible and intent on equating the historical present with a mythical past. In innumerable books and pamphlets, these travellers opened a discursive space for the later conquest of Palestine. A typical example in this respect is William Thompson’s The Land and the Book (1886). In this book the relationship between historical reality and myth is turned upside down, or inside out. As the author trudges through the land, meticulously describing the scenery, he translates the actual landscape unfolding before him into the mythico-historical perspective of the Bible. Standing before the gates of Jaffa, for example, the author calls upon Old Testament past to validate the present: ‘I remember that righteous Lot,’ he says in one instance, ‘intent on deeds of hospitality, sat in the gate of Sodom towards the close of the day, somewhat as these Arabs are now seated’ (Vol. 1: 28). Here myth and legend take the place of history. Between the book and the land the people – ‘these Arabs’ – disappear, or at best are turned into curious anthropological specimens. Irony in Palestinian literature redresses the imbalance in the equation of presence and absence in a number of ways, most of which are based on some sort of reversal – reversal of course being the condition that creates the presentabsent state of affairs in the first place. The simplest reversal is to negate the negation by means of a heroic or mock-heroic affirmation. Thus Samih alQasim’s ‘Persona Non Grata’ (shakhs ghayr marghuub fihi), the poem whose name (in English and Arabic) is also the title of the collection in which it occurs, assumes an ironic heroic tone to reflect the Palestinian dilemma. The poet is proud to be a persona non grata. In this poem, the poet’s persona is a heroic figure referred to only in the first person pronoun, which we assume to be the collective voice, or the figure, of the Palestinian people – a figure which stretches across the expanse of the Arab world, with its head in one place and the different parts of the body in other places: ‘My head is here and my hands are there/Between me and me, nations have passed.’ This figure suspended in place and time is an embodiment of the present-absent paradox, as we can see from the following lines: There is no solution in the solution, peace or war I am the riddle I am the songs, the ears of wheat I am the rocket throwers I am the shells No good other than me

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ibrahim muhawi No evil other than me I am the possible impossible the ugly the beautiful the short the tall the outsider enemy the honourable friend I am the muddy brook the strong the abject the rogue the true the gross the heavy the fat the thin the sands the palm tree the lightning the floods the deserts the ruins I am the skyscrapers the clouds the absence the solution the ascent The descent I am the possible impossible. (1986: 117)

The possible-impossible, the riddle, is another version of the present-absent and the successful failure. The irony comes from the heroic tone, the assumption of god-like qualities by the heroic figure – qualities that enable him to embrace both sides of a contradiction at once. Muecke notes that ‘overstatement plays a very large part in ironic writing’ (1981: 81). The ironic reversal here consists in the heroic, or mock-heroic, affirmation that the weak is the strong. We can also find strains of this magnification of the Palestinian self in other work by al-Qasim as well as in many of Darwish’s poems. There is an ironic reversal here as well, though it is easy to miss if one were not paying close attention, and that reversal consists in equating the book (Persona Non Grata) with a person. Samih al-Qasim makes us painfully aware of this synecdochic replacement of the person by the text, a replacement that expresses itself in a textual state of hyphenated identity. It is as if he is saying, ‘this book is a texthyphen-person’, and by the very fact that you are reading it you are sharing in the experience of its contradiction and redeeming its non-grata status. While al-Qasim embraces both sides of the presence-absence equation, glorying in embodying a riddle with mythical dimensions, an opposite type of ironic reversal is manifest in the work of Nasri Hajjaj, who was born in the diaspora at Ain el-Hilwe refugee camp in southern Lebanon. The Hajjaj self is more tenuous than that portrayed by Darwish or al-Qasim; more often than not it is devoured by the idea of a nation that has eaten so many young men without being born. In a series of very short stories that clearly reflect the influence of Zakaria Tamer and Franz Kafka, Hajjaj employs fantasy ironically to re-enact that annihilation. Here is the complete text of a story called ‘A Hungry Orange’. I am a martyr. I was killed in a small war for the sake of the homeland. Before enemies killed me, I used to love many-coloured butterflies – friends of red, yellow, white, and purple flowers. I loved birds that sang in open skies. And I loved oranges. After life left me I started to dream in death. I climbed an orange tree to reach for the sky and gather a star, but a hungry orange saw me and devoured me. In front of a crowd of people a grim-looking man stood up and said, ‘The martyr was a hero.’ Then he drank a glass of orange juice.

In al-Qasim the Palestinian ego is ironically magnified to such an extent that death becomes heroic, but in Hajjaj there is no hero. If we were to attach a

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irony and the poetics of palestinian exile label, we would have to describe him as an anti-hero. Even that seems to be something of an exaggeration, for he is not left in peace, even in death. Hajjaj’s story exemplifies another side of the reversal, which forms the basis for irony; the eater is eaten, not only once but three times, first by the struggle for the homeland when he was alive, then by the orange after his death and finally by the man drinking the orange juice. He is consumed by what he loves; he has been made triply absent. The irony lies in the fact that the present is made absent by the homeland (al-watan) – the very thing that was supposed to bring about a change in the equation from present-absent to present-present. The issue of martyrdom is certainly a sensitive one, especially in a society that values children so highly, and one cannot deal with it directly without offending. The indirect path of irony is essential here. The phatic dimension of irony allows writers to establish a community of harmony with readers, taking them into their confidence and pretending they are revealing secrets that only they will understand. I think al-Qasim’s ironic exaggeration is meant to serve this purpose. Its communicative force is to challenge the readers to a duel in hyperbolic speech, or boasting. The phatic element in irony also allows the writer to criticise without seeming to do so, especially when the element of fantasy is added, as in the work of Hajjaj. The ironic translation of the almost sacred notion of martyrdom in terms of the atavistic activity of devourment lends Hajjaj’s fiction a psychoanalytical significance that connects it with the domain of the dream and the unconscious.5 In another story, the writer introduces a variation on the theme of devouring that amounts to cannibalism. In the story, called ‘Soup for the Children’, the writer’s persona goes before dawn to the Martyr’s cemetery on the Day of the Martyr in order to wash his brother’s grave and lay flowers on it, only to find that thousands of others are already there waiting by the locked gate to do exactly the same thing. Then dawn breaks, bringing birdsong and butterflies. We have already encountered this ironic constrast between the freedom of the butterflies and the silence of the grave in the story I cited above. In ‘Soup for the Children’, when the sun comes up the restless crowd rush into the cemetery, smash up the graves and dig up the bones of the dead. Then they walk out in a huge procession, each carrying the bones of their dead martyr in the black plastic bags that are used for the disposal of rubbish. The crowd then walk down Martyr Street first, and from there into Liberty Avenue, until they reach Independence Square. There they halt, not knowing what to do. Then the voice of a man rises above the crowd, and he speaks out in stentorian tones: ‘Today, you have carried out one of the most glorious deeds for the sake of the homeland. You have gotten rid of the graveyard. He who has died is dead, and the homeland is in need of every square inch of land for housing the living and planting their food so that we can be in a position to build a free and independent economy. Bless you, and bless — 37 —

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ibrahim muhawi your hands!’ (We note here in passing the ironic equation between the cemetery and the homeland.) Everyone cheers, but they wonder what they are to do with the bones. ‘Grind them,’ says the wise man in a calm, confident voice, ‘and make them into soup for your children.’ The story ends with a simple statement of fact: ‘And that’s exactly what we did.’ Undoubtedly, there is a Palestinian cult of the shahid, or martyr, and Palestinians have paid a terrible price in human life. Hajjaj’s younger brother was a ‘martyr.’ The Palestine Liberation Organisation maintains a fund for the families of martyrs. Many PLO functionaries are children of martyrs. One is frequently introduced to someone as the son or daughter of such and such a martyr. In Memory for Forgetfulness, Darwish ironically refers to the rivalry among PLO factions (fasa’il) to sacrifice fighters as the ‘martyr trade’. There is a cemetery for martyrs in Beirut which was repeatedly shelled by the Israeli air force during the invasion of 1982. Darwish wryly notes in Memory that it was not enough killing the living, it seemed as if it was necessary also to kill the dead again. As Kanaana has demonstrated (1993), a considerable number of martyr legends sprang up during the Palestinian intifada. When a youth was killed by the Israeli army, he became a ‘martyr’ and his family did not show outward signs of mourning. People did not come to pay condolences, but to offer congratulations. The existential irony implied in this behaviour is deeply rooted in Palestinian culture. Palestinians traditionally held a wedding celebration instead of a wake when a young man died before he had the chance to get married and have children. The body of the dead young man was given a traditional zaffe, or wedding procession, with dabke dancing and singing, on the way to church or mosque.6 The gap in an ironic text between present and absent meaning is a space of phatic communion in which the writer calls upon the reader to draw out the absent meaning(s). As noted earlier, irony always functions with reference to a specific context, and an ironic text represents an appeal to the reader to supply the context and share in the experience of the victim. The pragmatic function of irony, then, resides in its social purpose of creating community between writer and reader in the hope of raising awareness about a situation. The Arabic proverb says, ‘An intelligent person, from a mere nod will get the point’ (allabibu min al-isharati yafham) and so with irony – a secret sharing between writer and reader (S’hiri 1992). Booth emphasises this point as well: ‘Often the predominant motion when reading stable ironies is that of joining, of finding and communing with kindred spirits’ (1974: 28). This particular connection, or bond, between reader and writer is more important in an ironic text than in an ordinary one. As practically all writers on this subject have noted, irony is deeply implicated in the aesthetics of reception, bringing the reader to the foreground of the critical act. Its critical significance arises from the challenge it poses to the New Critical doctrine which goes by the name of the ‘intentional — 38 —

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irony and the poetics of palestinian exile fallacy’, promulgated by Wimsatt and Beardsley initially in Shipley (1964) and later elaborated into a full article which has been reprinted frequently in literary-critical anthologies. ‘We argued’, they say in this essay, summarising the entry in Shipley, ‘that the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a literary work of art’ (Adams 1971: 1014). New Criticism is far from being dead; it remains the most useful heuristic tool in the teaching of literature, especially as a healthy antidote to the rampant subjectivism (this time involving the reader’s subjectivity rather than the author’s) which has found room in the post-modern space. It is therefore ‘ironic’ that New Criticism should banish the author’s intention while at the same time focusing on irony as one of the shaping structures of literature.7 To the extent that irony is a mode, the form itself assumes the function of ironic deixis if there are no other obvious indicators. Readers who are not particularly attuned to irony may not consider Hajjaj’s work ironic, but if we consider it from the perspective of Frye’s theory of modes, the manner in which the irony works here becomes immediately obvious. Frye observes that if ‘inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode’ (1957: 34). The death of the character in the story renders him inferior in power, but not necessarily in intelligence, to the living author and to us as readers. The other three elements, though, are present in Hajjaj’s fiction: bondage to the idea of the nation, frustration at not being able to achieve it, and the absurdity of dying for it. Still following Frye’s argument, we can refine our view of the writer’s method a bit further by seeing it as a form of tragic irony. According to Frye, the ‘central principle of tragic irony is that whatever exceptional happens to the hero should be causally out of line with his character’ (1957: 41). The character in ‘A Hungry Orange’ is sketched with very few strokes, but we have enough information to feel some identification with his romanticism and innocence. These are the very qualities that set him apart from his environment. Dying prematurely as a martyr for one’s homeland (in a small war, no less) is absurd, but if his first death made some sense, his second and third certainly did not. Frye’s perceptive remarks about the significance of tragic irony are most appropriate here: ‘Irony isolates from the tragic situation the sense of arbitrariness, of the victim’s having been unlucky, selected at random or by lot, and no more deserving of what happens to him than anyone else would be. If there is a reason for choosing him for catastrophe, it is an inadequate reason, and raises more questions than it answers’ (1957: 41). If we agree that the pragmatic purpose of irony is to create a community of sympathy, then clearly the reader must, as Hutcheon notes in the quotation given earlier, be able to perceive an ironic intention on the part of the author for that communion to take place. The intention acts as a deictic device — 39 —

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ibrahim muhawi pointing to the absent meaning, or context, or both. The deictic element, the signal, is necessary for the secret communion to take place. When Said, the protagonist in Habibi’s The Pessoptomist, says at the beginning of the novel that, as a result of a donkey having been shot in his place during the events of 1948, his life in Israel was fadlat that poor beast, we understand he wants us to think he is saying he owes his life to (fadlat) the donkey, and that is the way it is interpreted in the available translation of this novel. But we are also aware that a pun is intended here, and puns serve the purpose of irony very well because they too create a gap between a present and an absent meaning. As Redfern notes, ‘Though often classified with tongue twisters, acrostics and other verbal sports, their [the puns’] natural place lies with metaphor, irony: the very foundations of all rhetoric’ (1984: 178). The ironic intention is triggered by the word fadlat, which can also mean remains and excrement; hence what Said says could mean that his life in Israel was equivalent to donkey’s excrement, or equally likely, that he himself became the remains of the donkey – that he assumed the characteristics of the donkey – himar, which is used in Arabic with exactly the same connotations as the word jackass in English. When the irony ignites, all meanings are present, and the one that was absent before may acquire the greater significance. Imil Habibi’s satirical novel The Amazing Events Leading to the Disappearance of the Hapless Said, the Pessoptomist is a much more extended ironic work than those we have dealt with so far, and we will not be able to deal with it at length here. What I therefore intend to do is to explore in greater detail, and with reference to it, the major issues we have so far encountered, focusing on phatic communion – what is traditionally called ‘identification’ with the character – deixis and reversal, closing the discussion with an analysis of the all-important problem of identity for an Israeli Palestinian.8 Habibi’s novel has enjoyed tremendous popularity among Palestinian readers in particular and Arab readers in general. Though published (in three parts) between 1972 and 1974, its popularity has not waned, and it continues to stir debate. It would be safe to say that it has achieved the status of an Arabic classic. Its popularity, I believe, stems not only from the importance of its subject, which is the vexed question of Palestinian identity in Israel, but also from the character of its hero, Said, and the humorous manner in which Habibi presents him. There is probably no communicative strategy more conducive to phatic communion than humour, and Habibi captures readers by making them laugh at and with Said. In reading the novel they see a picture which is not necessarily flattering, but one in which we all see a bit of ourselves. But in laughing at Said, Palestinian readers in particular will also be laughing at themselves and at the impossibility of their situation. An Arabic proverb says, ‘The worst disaster is the one that makes you laugh’ (sharr al-baliyyat ma yudhik). — 40 —

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irony and the poetics of palestinian exile However, the kind of humour we are dealing with in this novel is not necessarily the type one finds in jokes. Rather, it is a humour based on Said’s characterisation (who, as we shall see, is not so much a hero as an archetype of the traditional Palestinian), on the author’s use of language, and on a sustained ironic vision that sometimes engages the reader in double ironies from which there is no exit. The title tells us a great deal about Habibi’s method. We observe first the standard Palestinian contradictions that apply to this archetypal hero. His name is Said, which ordinarily means ‘happy,’ but which when coupled with abu al-nahs alerts us to another meaning for this word: Said also means one who is possessed of sa’d (good omen), which is the contradictory of nahs (bad omen). So now we have a character who exists in a state of complete contradiction. The translation of abu al-nahs as ‘ill-fated’ does not convey the full cultural impact of the notion of nahs, or unremitting bad luck. There is behind this name the weight of Arab belief in destiny, exemplified in the Palestinian proverb, il-manhus manhus, walaw Æallaqu Æa-dhahro Æishrin fanus (‘The one dogged by bad luck is destined to remain unlucky even if twenty lanterns are hung from his back’). Further, the Arabic word rendered as ‘opti-pessimist’ (or ‘pess[i]-optimist’), al-mutasha’il, is a neologism that creatively combines parts of the two words, mutafa’il (optimistic) and mutasha’im (pessimistic). Neither of the English renderings is an exact morphological equivalent since they do not combine the lexical items or parts of them in the same way. There is no sense of a hyphen in the Arabic word; it does not sound as if it is composed of parts of two words, but as one word in which the states of pessimism and optimism are perfectly intertwined.9 Turning now to the ‘hero’ of the novel, the simplest way to explain Said is to say that Habibi made him a folk character (shakhsiyya sha’biyya) whose behaviour can be easily associated with that of the traditional Palestinian villager. In her introduction to the translation of the novel, Salma Khadra Jayyusi rightly compares Said (1982: xiv–xv) to the folk hero Juha (Khodja, Mulla Nasreddin), but her comparison of him with the clever trickster aspect of Juha, or the ‘wise fool’, as she calls him (who can extricate himself from difficult situations through wit) is not quite apt. Said is not witty, or heroic; he is more often the object of the irony rather than its subject. He is more properly compared to the selfseeking anti-heroic aspect of the Juha of the story in which he is first informed that a battle is raging in his country, and he answers, ‘As long as my village is safe, let the battle rage.’ The story then proceeds to narrow down the scope of the battle to the village (‘As long as my quarter is safe, let the battle rage’), then his quarter (‘As long as my house is safe …’), then his house (‘As long as I am safe …’). This is exactly the character of Said, who is proud to have been saved by a donkey while the rest of his family were gunned down as they were escaping during the events of 1948. Said’s association with Juha is also made explicit — 41 —

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ibrahim muhawi iconographically through the donkey, which figures in many Juha stories and whose image (with Juha riding backwards) appears on the covers of books or booklets containing them. Throughout the first part of the book Said is constantly associated with a donkey. First he ‘owes his life’ to one, then immediately after the establishment of the state (of Israel) he makes his way to the offices of the military governor Juha-wise, riding his donkey. Also, as I hinted earlier concerning the meaning of fadlat as remainder, and judging from Said’s subsequent jackass-like behaviour, the author leads us to believe that the donkey, in dying, may have been reincarnated in Said. From the very first page of the novel, where Said describes himself as a nadl, Habibi emphasises the cowardly aspect of Said’s personality. The word nadl is accompanied by an ironically (mis)leading footnote that explains its meaning as ‘waiter.’ This is not exactly true, for the correct Arabic word for a waiter is nadil, not nadl, which means ‘coward’ in the urban dialects of Palestine. There is absolutely no reason for the writer to insert a footnote here, as there is nothing obscure about the word nadil (waiter); the only way this footnote can be read is ironically, for its purpose is precisely to draw attention to the absent second meaning – ‘coward’. The kind of cowardice and self-justifying resignation that Said exhibits are exemplified by his Panglossian acceptance of any catastrophe because things could be worse. There are innumerable other instances of these ironic double-entendres in the work, but I shall single out only one other such instance where the author uses humour to engage the reader into the work by making him laugh at Said. In Chapter 2, entitled ‘Said Traces His Descent’ (said yantasib), Said traces his genealogy to the Tweisat Arab tribes (Æarab al-tweisat). The humour here and the double-entendre will be entirely missed if the reader is not familiar with the Palestinian dialect, where tweisat is the plural of the diminutive of tes – literally ‘goat’ but used in ordinary speech to mean ‘thickheaded’. (There is added humour here touching on the names of actual Arab tribes, but it lies outside our area of inquiry.) Later in the novel (Chapter 16, Part One), after Said is beaten and verbally abused for having gone to check on the house his family evacuated but which is now occupied by Jewish immigrants, he berates himself thus, ‘ana teis! ana teis!’ (‘I’m a jackass! I’m a jackass!’), whose communicative meaning here is ‘How stupid of me!’ but which humorously brings us back to his genealogy. We see Said’s cowardice on many occasions in the novel – aside from his turning informer for the Israelis – where action is required but all he does is to find an excuse for doing nothing. An outstanding example occurs in Chapter 6 of Book One, where the Israeli officer he was travelling with forces a woman and her two children from the village of Birwe (significantly, the birthplace of Mahmoud Darwish and one of the four hundred or so villages to be destroyed by the new state) to flee east to Jordan at gunpoint. Here Said feels anger at the — 42 —

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irony and the poetics of palestinian exile scene of the Jewish officer with his gun at the woman’s head, and wants to jump to her rescue, but then he remembers his parents’ advice and does nothing: At this I tensed, ready to spring at him, come what may. After all, the blood of youth surged hot within me, at my age then of twenty-four. And not even a stone could have been unmoved at this sight. However, I recalled my father’s final counsel and my mother’s blessing and then said to myself, ‘I certainly shall attack him if he fires his gun. But so far he is merely threatening her.’ I remained at the ready. (Jayyusi and Le Gassick 1992: 15)

In this example we see at work the double irony I referred to earlier. If Said waits to act till the Jewish officer fires his gun, then it will have been too late for the woman and her two children. Yet in this incident we also see the other side of the equation. It is perhaps equally cowardly of the officer with the gun to hold it against the head of a helpless Palestinian refugee, and thereby force her to leave her village and flee her country. But then in nation building it is not the moral equation that counts, but the political, for in the end the country was emptied and the gun was the victor. Of course, from his perspective the Jewish officer is also faced with a dilemma. The Palestinian woman being a persona non grata in the state that is being established, he too faces a difficult moral choice, so he makes the choice that relieves his conscience by saving her life but forcing her to flee her country. We see here a refugee problem being created, and something else that is not to the officer’s liking. True, he has forced the woman to leave and emerged the winner in this situation, yet ‘the race is not always to the swift’. As the woman and her child walk east towards Jordan, Said observes an amazing event: At this point I observed the first example of that amazing phenomenon that was to occur again and again until I finally met my friends from outer space. For the further the woman and child went from where we were, the governor standing and I in the jeep, the taller she grew. By the time they merged with their own shadows in the sinking sun they had become bigger than the plain of Acre itself. The governor stood still there awaiting their final disappearance, while I remained huddled in the jeep. Finally he asked in amazement, ‘Will they never disappear?’ (Jayyusi and Le Gassick 1992: 16)

The ironies multiply. This woman has been made absent, but she is not absent completely; she is still present even if only as a tall shadow. She is present-absent in her shadow. The hyphenated identity we encountered in al-Qasim is not necessarily a bad state of affairs, except when the terms on either side of the hyphen represent mutually contrary, or contradictory, states. The hyphen is a generative boundary; one can add any term to the left of or to the right, and each addition is an accretion in identity; for example, it is possible to be a Palestinian ArabAmerican, a Scottish Palestinian Arab, or even a Palestinian Arab-American — 43 —

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ibrahim muhawi Canadian. One can share in all the subjectivities on both sides of the hyphen without contradiction. This situation holds true for countries that do not define identity in terms of ethnicity, or religion, or both, as does Israel, which Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled define as an ethnic democracy.10 The pressing question here is this: ‘Is it possible to bridge the gap across the hyphen of identity for Palestinian Israelis?’ Darwish wrestled with this question in his autobiographical memoir, Journal of an Ordinary Grief. Darwish’s family had escaped to Lebanon in 1948, and sneaked back into the homeland after the establishment of the state of Israel, too late to be included in the census of Palestinian Arabs. He was therefore never given official papers, and was constantly hounded by the police. In his reflection on the question of his identity, he arrives at the conclusion that its most characteristic feature is ambiguity: Once at Le Bourget Airport in France, and again in one of the streets of Sophia. Your destiny was insisting on being defined. And your identity, ambiguous on paper but shining clearly in the heart, was demanding that you put yourself in harmony with it. As if you had to arrive in one single movement from the beginning of your life to this question: ‘Who are you?’ The French police could not understand something which the Israeli police itself did not understand. Your travel document says you are of ambiguous nationality. And in vain you try to explain to the French police the meaning of this ambiguity, for your clarification does not help him absorb the added ambiguity imposed by his colleague in Tel Aviv. Where were you born? In Palestine. And where do you live? In Israel. Therefore you are ambiguous. (1973: 9)

This state of existential ambiguity is, I think, the best explanation for the impulse towards irony in Palestinian literature. To some extent, irony itself is an ambiguous mode. It is not always obviously there; some may see an ironic intention in a text while others may not. It may also be that irony arises out of extreme conditions where there is a negation of identity, or where it is threatened. Habibi’s Said, the Palestinian-Israeli hero, or anti-hero, is characterised by a double ambiguity; having become a citizen of Israel, he is no longer a Palestinian, but he cannot be a genuine Israeli for all his informing. In this novel, the hyphen of identity becomes a generative metaphor, a trope, which conflates identity and boundary, acting as a marker not only of a geographical boundary between Israel and Palestine but a psychological one as well. In using the word Palestine here I am not referring to the West Bank, but to the Palestine that exists underneath and side by side with Israel and within Israel. (The best literary entrée to Palestine-Israel as palimpsest is Anton Shammas’s Arabesques, particularly the opening section, the most lyrical in the novel, where the author re-creates his childhood in the Galilee.) The terms on both sides of our notional hyphen constitute the basis of identity in the novel. We thus have Palestinian subjectivity on one side, and

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irony and the poetics of palestinian exile Israeli citizenship on the other. The strange, or amazing, events leading to Said’s disappearance are those that bridge the gap across the identity hyphen, the movement from being a Palestinian to being an Israeli. They are nothing more than repeated encounters with the Israeli state system. To Said, they appear amazing, sometimes stranger than the strangest fiction, such as the Arabian Nights, or Voltaire’s Candide, both of which are cited as models for the type of things that happen to Palestinians in Israel. As there is not enough space to discuss the novel in more detail, I shall restrict my comments here to a discussion of its overall structure. Commentators have already drawn attention to similarities between Voltaire’s Candide and The Pessoptomist, but what has not been observed is Habibi’s ironic parodying of Voltaire’s novel. We only have to compare chapter headings for both works to see the extent of Habibi’s reliance on Voltaire’s method. Here are some examples from Candide: ‘How Candide Escaped from the Bulgarians and What Befell Him Afterward’; ‘Candide and His Valet Arrive in the Country of El Dorado – What They Saw There’; ‘The History of the Old Woman’; ‘Candide’s Voyage to Constantinople’. Compare these with the following examples from The Pessoptomist: ‘How Said Becomes a Leader in the Union of Palestinian Workers’; ‘Said Becomes Possessed of Two Secrets’; ‘The Story of the Golden Fish’; ‘Said Relates How Crocodiles Once Lived in the Zarqa River’: ‘Said at the Court of a King’. Here we see clearly a similarity in the manner in which the novel is presented. Habibi himself draws attention to this similarity in the chapter entitled ‘The Amazing Similarity Between Candide and Said’. Said is a more complex character than Candide because there is a gap in the two parts of his identity that do not fit together so well. That hyphen across the Palestine-Israel or Israel-Palestine line is extremely unstable. The chapter on the similarity between the two novels strikes me as being disingenuous; it could only have been written by a master ironist whose purpose was to acknowledge a debt to Voltaire and also to show he was not plagiarising Candide but putting it to his own use. What Habibi has produced is, I believe, an ironic parody of Voltaire. First there is the manner of presentation, as we can see from the chapter headings; and secondly, the connection between the two works highlights a fact which I think the author wanted to emphasise, namely, that the events that befall Said are just as amazing as those that befall Candide. In both novels, the adventures are described in a similar manner. Clearly, Voltaire also was a master ironist, the irony in Candide consisting in the comparison between a Utopian way of life in a place like the legendary country, El Dorado, and the way life is lived in Europe. Voltaire’s irony arises from the disparity between what is and what is desirable. To parody an ironic work successfully is to produce a doubly ironic one. The irony in Habibi incorporates Voltaire’s irony, adding another level to it by means of inter-textual reference. Habibi’s irony, like Voltaire’s, also arises — 45 —

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ibrahim muhawi from the difference between what is and what is desirable, between the Utopian implications of the establishment of Israel for Jews and its dystopian effect on Palestine and Palestinians. We know that the ironic inter-textual echoing of Candide was part of Habibi’s purpose because in the chapter heading already cited he refers to the similarity between the two books as amazing. Here again we are faced with a double irony. What is amazing about this similarity is that it is part of the narrative structure of the novel, as if it too was one of the strange events leading to the disappearance of Said. However, when we compare the events in Candide with those in Said, we do not note a similarity but a contrast: while everything that befalls Candide is fictional, all that befalls Said is fact. From this perspective, the fact appears stranger than fiction, and that, I think, was the entire purpose behind Habibi’s use of Candide. Said, the Palestinian-Israeli, is a doubly ironic character. As a bungling idiot, he bears the brunt of the irony on the Palestinian side. We look down on him for all his efforts to bridge the identity gap, his zealousness in conforming to the requirements of citizenship, including becoming an informer, so that he can share in Israeli subjectivity. At the same time, his very simplicity and incomprehension allow the novelist to portray Israeli state practices and attitudes towards Palestinians from the Palestinian viewpoint. The magnitude of Israel’s failure to include its Palestinian citizens in its polity is portrayed very graphically at the end of the novel, where Said, having decided that he can no longer be a true subject of Israel but not being able to construct a separate identity for himself, finds himself sitting on a khazuq (roughly, a pointed fence post), from which no one can rescue him except the creatures from outer space who take him under their wing. To the extent that Said is an emblematic figure representing all Palestinian citizens of Israel, his khazuq, I believe, is also emblematic of the position of the whole Palestinian community in the country.

notes 1. These lines occur towards the end of the long poem, madih al-zill al-’ali (‘In Praise of the Tall Shadow’). See Darwish 1984: 161. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this paper are by me. 2. General Assembly Resolution 194 (1948) is available on a number of websites, such as <miftah.org/Documents/Statements/194.html>. It stipulates, among other things, that refugees wishing to return to their homes ‘should be permitted to do so at the earliest practical date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property …’ 3. The Balfour Declaration is available on a number of websites, including
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4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’ After the failure of the Palestinian-Israeli summit at Camp David in July 2000, another antithesis term entered the Palestinian political lexicon: success-failure. Thus, for example, Elias Khoury calls his first first weekly column for al-Quds alArabi after the summit (August 2000. Vol. 12, Issue 3491, p. 20) ‘The Success of Failure’ (Najah al-Fashal). Another variant which occurs in the article is ‘successful failure’ (al-fashal al-najih). In Hajjaj’s fiction, the fantasy mediates the irony. On ‘fantasy-theme’ criticism and the connection of irony and fantasy, see Foss and Littlejohn. The mystique of ‘martyrdom’ cannot be overestimated. It can turn up at unexpected and in unexpected places. Thus in answer to a question about her career, the Palestinian singer Abeer Sansour says in an interview: ‘Don’t forget that I am a Palestinian young woman and the Palestinian woman is distinguished from other Arab women and women in all parts of the world, for she has proved herself in all areas – political, cultural, and social. She is the mother of martyrs, the sister of heroes, the wife of [political] prisoners … She is the only woman in the world who walks in the funeral procession of her martyr while trilling out ululations of joy (tamshi fi janazat shahidiha w-hiya tuzaghrid). (Al-Quds Al-Arabi, 29/30 July 2000, Issue 3489, p. 12). Booth also addresses the question of the intentional fallacy in a long footnote on p. 156. For a more thorough analysis of the concept of phatic communion from a sociolinguistic perspective, see Muhawi 1999. Actually, there is in American usage which is an exact equivalent for abu al-nahs, the Yiddish word schlimazel, defined in the Unabridged Edition of the Random House Dictionary as ‘an inept bungling person who suffers from unremitting bad luck’. So, perhaps our proverb may be put thus: ‘Once a schlimazel, always a schlimazel.’ It should be noted that in their clearly argued article concerning theories of citizenship and their possible application to Israeli society, Shafir and Peled deal only with the question of citizenship but do not touch on the thorny issue of identity. Thus it is possible for them to discuss the stratification of Israeli citizens into various strata, without touching on the inherent contradiction between Israel being an ethno-religious democracy (that is, a Jewish state) and Palestinian Arab identity within that framework.

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1 3

Gender and the Palestinian Narrative of Return in Two Novels by Ghassan Kanafani* Amy Zalman Late twentieth-century Palestinian literature is generally divided into two periods, that between 1948 and 1967, and that after 1967. Within these two major divisions, however, the period of the early 1960s stands out. It is in this extended moment that the idea of returning to Palestine is given narrative form: in the first visible stirrings of broad political organisation and armed struggle, through the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and in literature. The exemplary literary expression of this narrative may be found in two novels by Ghassan Kanafani, Rijal fi al-Shams (Men in the Sun), published in 1962, and Ma Tabaqqa Lakum (All That’s Left to You), which appeared in 1966. Kanafani was arguably the key Palestinian literary intellectual of the 1960s and his literature played a significant role in shaping how the post-1948 Palestinian experience has been understood. This chapter argues that gender is intrinsic to the narratives established in these novels, and that in them new forms of masculinity are constructed in relation to national loss and national restoration. Moreover, a fuller analysis of the mutual construction of masculine and national identity reveals a dynamic and historically specific symbolism at work in the well-known association between land and woman. Born in Acre in 1936, Kanafani left with his family for Lebanon in 1948. Following his attendance at Damascus University, he went to teach in Kuwait. He returned to Lebanon in 1960 and worked for several newspapers. When George Habash founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine following the 1967 war, Kanafani became its spokesman and the editor of its newspaper, al-Hadaf. Despite Kanafani’s lifelong activity as a journalist, he was equally prominent if not more so as a novelist, short story writer and literary critic. In all of these endeavours, he considered his literary effort indissoluble from his political goals; indeed, when asked of their relative priority in his life, he stated that literature had shaped his politics (as quoted in Wild 1975: 13). In 1972, he was killed in Beirut by a car bomb for which Mossad claimed responsibility. * This chapter is reprinted with the permission of Arab Studies Journal 10/11 (2002/ 2003): 17–43, in which it first appeared.

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gender and the palestinian narrative of return Kanafani’s first novel established the idea that national loss is a particularly male trial, his second that return to the land is a male endeavour. The masculine qualities of loss and return are underlined in a well-noted trope within Palestinian literary expressions of nationalism in which women are associated with an enduring and feminine land, and fused in expressions of yearning for a feminine beloved. Images that feminise the land of Palestine establish the idea that women, like the land itself, have never left but await male return. One of the first chroniclers of the beloved’s role in nationalist literature was Kanafani. As a journalist and a literary critic he was active in bringing Palestinian literature to the attention of the rest of the Arab world in the late 1960s. At the Third Conference of Afro-Asian Writers in 1967, speaking on the topic of ‘Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine’, he observed that the apparently contradictory themes of romantic love and political resistance are mutually consistent. Using Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry as an example, Kanafani traced the increasing incorporation of national themes in love poetry of the late 1950s and early 1960s.1 Spoken in a romantic lexicon, Darwish’s lyric return narratives manipulated feminine objects to achieve masculine return. Such manipulation is visible, for example, in the eponymous poem of Darwish’s third collection A Lover from Palestine, published in 1966. In it, the speaker’s return to Palestine is enabled by a dynamic to which the beloved is crucial, but from which she is increasingly distant and finally absent. As the speaker narrates his pursuit of a beloved first experienced as a thorn in his heart, then a song on his lips, then a traveller in a port, the distance of the beloved also comes to signify the vastness of her presence. He sees her everywhere, ‘in the stones and the streets’ (Elmessiri 1982: 121–7) and ‘in the salt of the sea and in the sand’ (ibid.). The speaker admits the beloved’s presence by naming her ‘Palestine’ (ibid.). But having named her, his own presence becomes more tenuous. Finally, he acknowledges his own absence: ‘I am the exiled one behind wall and door’ (ibid.). At the moment of his admission of absence, an exchange of their positions occurs. By the end of the lyric narrative, the speaker has taken on not only the beloved’s power, but her beauty – ‘I know/that I am the flower of youth and knight of knights’ (ibid.) – while mention of the beloved named Palestine has disappeared. While the political theme of return can be expressed in the voice of a lover yearning for his beloved, the terms of this return appear to require the dismissal of the feminine beloved herself. In recent feminist analyses, the role of femininity as a passive symbol of land, or active only as a redeemer or mother of men, has been contrasted with the active, public roles of actual women in the struggle to achieve national selfdetermination.2 Clearly, the image of women as passive land or as a willing mother attempts to construct femininity in a particular way with respect to a political order. Just as clearly, the ideals of femininity put forward in such — 49 —

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amy zalman images are often at odds with the roles that women actually play. Given this dissonance between literature and reality, produced by a predominantly male literary establishment, against the background of a preponderantly male-led nationalist movement, it seems worth asking how these idealised images of women serve to construct a particular conception of masculinity. If a dominant image of women has outlasted, or never reflected, a truth about women’s lives or desires, then why has it remained such a preoccupation among male Palestinian writers? Fantasies of femininity (as well as masculinity) mediate desire. Projected into the realm of symbol, they instruct people not only whom to want, but how to want by directing desire towards its object through circumscribed routes. As the dominant image of woman-as-land suggests, these images exist firmly in the public domain as aspects of what R. W. Connell has called ‘the gender order’ (2000: 24–5). Like other institutions that shape and are shaped by gender, such as relations of production, emotional relations can also be investigated for their political content. In the context of Palestine after 1948, collective rituals that formerly organised desire, as well as conventional relations of power and production, were in disarray. In such periods, the circuits through which emotional relations flow, and which in part structure gender, may flood with an intensified political meaning. It is these circuits that most interested Kanafani as a fiction writer, and through which he articulated a return in terms at once erotic and political. A map precedes the 1995 Three Continents Press English edition of Kanafani’s 1962 novel Men in the Sun. There, drawn accurately to scale above the caption, ‘the route traveled by the men in the sun’, is the wriggly black line of the H4 highway. It extends eastwards from Amman across a wide expanse of desert to Iraq, then winds southwards beside the Tigris river to Basra before finally looping slightly westwards again to its endpoint in Kuwait. By this route, the novel’s Palestinian characters hope to travel from their respective homes in Jaffa, Ramleh and a refugee camp to Kuwait, and thus from displacement and poverty to new status and employment. Presumably, the map has been put in the English-language edition to help the reader unfamiliar with the region orient him or herself to the geographical context of the tale. The route depicted on it, however, does not strictly correspond to the tale that follows; it is not the route travelled by the men in the sun, who never reach the highway’s marked endpoint in Kuwait but die trapped in a water-transport truck’s empty tank at the Iraq–Kuwait border. The scene in which this takes place is a famous one in modern Palestinian letters. The novel as a whole sealed Kanafani’s reputation as a talented fiction writer, and was given renewed life when it was made into a film by Egyptian director Tawfiq Salih in 1972. Today the novel is a canonical work in the Palestinian oeuvre. — 50 —

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gender and the palestinian narrative of return The map preceding the translation could as easily appear in a geography textbook of the period. The view is aerial and there are careful shadings to distinguish the Mediterranean Sea from the land it borders, Israel drawn to its pre-1967 boundaries. The map encourages the reader to think of the imaginary narrative in reference to the geopolitical reality it graphically elaborates. This would not be an exceptional reading; since its publication, Men in the Sun has held meaning for its readers because of its artful representation of the social, political and historical crisis of a nation. Nevertheless, the incongruous relation of the map to a story it purports to tell, but does not quite, helps pose the question of how the narrative inside the fictional tale and the national narrative beyond it relate. It reminds us with its forthright claim to reality how powerfully a dominant extra-literary narrative (loosely termed political reality) can shape the terms of literary interpretation. In order to read an old work in a new way, readers must therefore return not only to the narrative inside it, but to the existing maps outside it. The plot of Men in the Sun is relatively simple. It is set in 1958, ten years after the establishment of the state of Israel. Economically and socially dislocated in the wake of national dispossession, three Palestinian men decide to go to Kuwait where they hope they will find work. Strangers to one another at the outset, Abu Qais, Assad and Marwan find their way independently to Basra, where the novel begins (with flashbacks telling us how each arrived there). In Basra they begin their search for a driver who will take them the last part of their trip by illegally smuggling them over the Iraq–Kuwait border. They meet through their search. Within a few days they jointly decide to travel with Abul Khaizuran, who is not a professional smuggler but a fellow Palestinian who drives a truck that transports water, and who has been detained in Basra for truck repairs. When Abul Khaizuran learns that Marwan, Assad and Abu Qais are looking for a way to Kuwait, he offers them his services for less money than a professional smuggler. Abul Khaizuran has few compunctions about profiting from the desperation of his fellow Palestinians. He is a cynical and disillusioned man, traumatised by his surgical castration following his injury fighting in the 1948 war. The memory haunts him, and he relates it to himself in a compulsively reiterated internal monologue about how he lost his country and his manhood in one blow: ‘What good did patriotism do you? You spend your life in an adventure, and now you are incapable of sleeping with a woman! Let the dead bury their dead. I only want more money now, more money’ (Kanafani 1995/1994: 47/131).3 His first strategy for making extra money is to use his truck when its water tank is empty as a vehicle to smuggle Palestinians over the Iraq–Kuwait border. The scheme he offers Abu Qais, Assad and Marwan in exchange for his cutrate deal is dangerous. At both of the two border checkpoints, they will have to — 51 —

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amy zalman hide in the empty metal water tank of his truck, which at midday is so hot that a man inside it can only survive for six or seven minutes before suffocating. Desperate, the men agree to the offer. The first checkpoint is passed without complication. At the second, a bored Iraqi official detains Abul Khaizuran with ribald joking about an alleged affair with a prostitute. Flustered by the impossible story of his own racy antics, Abul Khaizuran hedges. Finally, trapped in the web of the official’s elaborate joking, he pretends that he has been having an affair, asserting a virility that he, and we, know he cannot enact. Nevertheless, by the time he does, he has been detained so long that the men have died in the airless tank. In the years since its publication, Men in the Sun has gained its status as a classic of modern Palestinian literature for having lyrically dramatised the national mood of failure in and following the war of 1948.4 The stark story and literary quality of Men in the Sun struck a forceful chord among readers when the novel was published. The narrative itself was given an extended life when Salih’s filmed production, The Betrayed (al-Makhdu’un), was released in Syria in 1972. The tragic end at which the novel arrives has often been seen as an illustration of ‘the futility of the effort by the uprooted Palestinian refugees to look for a new home, a new future, and ultimately a new identity by moving away from Palestine’ (Siddiq 1984: xiv) after 1948. The characters appear to be lost as they travel the route of an uncertain national identity in an extended moment of displacement and despair. It is unsurprising that along this route their effort culminates in failure. (A contemporary reader of the novel, Fadl Naqib, noted as much when he remarked that readers knew from the opening pages that the characters’ attempt to flee would fail, and that the outcome of the tale surprised no one.)5 I would like to suggest that the journey taken by the men in the sun is structured by a crisis related to prevailing notions of manliness in the same degree that it is by the sense of national crisis. The men are guided by two maps, not one; their failure to reach their predicted endpoint occurs when the directions of these two maps diverge. The tragic outcome of the tale results not only from the general problem of Palestinian refugees, as they are represented in Kanafani’s prose, but from the specific attempt of Palestinian men, disoriented on the post-1948 landscape, to rely on cultural conventions of masculine behaviour to guide their actions. As they set forth uncertainly on a new geopolitical landscape, the characters rely on habits of masculine behaviour to guide their movements. The narrative is flooded with commentary about disruptions in the travellers’ sexual, familial and work lives – those places where gender makes itself most visible. In Kanafani’s hands, these disruptions in their personal lives are rendered as functions of the national crisis that do not have their own trajectory. Nevertheless, the narrative journey grinds to a halt when — 52 —

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gender and the palestinian narrative of return it is discovered that the customary habits of manly behaviour are not necessarily useful guides to resurrecting a national identity and that gender identity is not automatically a function of national identity. Without appearing to intend it, the novel proposes that gender identity must be constructed in relation to national identity. Moreover, it suggests that the relationship between gender and national identity must be constructed anew on the post-1948 landscape. With this map in hand, the schema of a particularly male journey becomes evident. The narrative operation of the text implies the masculine theme: the linear trajectory, the sudden interruption, the unproductive and despondent end. Metaphorical relations are established between the castrated male body and the forestalled national story. The land of Palestine, an always present backdrop to the men’s movement away from it, is predominantly represented in the novel as a castrated space whose productive population – the men who farmed the land and supported their women and children – has been literally cut off from it, and forcibly compelled to seek productive connections to other lands. The Palestine-as-castrated-man image finds its parallel in the man-as-nation embodied by Abul Khaizuran. The only Palestinian character to survive the events of the narrative, his body disfigured as the result of a lost war, Abul Khaizuran is a map in miniature of the nation itself at a formative juncture, marked with loss, shame and impotence. When the writer’s society arrives at a historical crossroads as it gropes for a viable definition of its identity and destination, the serious writer can ill afford to remain uninvolved and merely watch history march by from his aesthetic ivory tower (Siddiq 1984: xi). Writing with specific reference to Kanafani, Muhammad Siddiq remarks on the impulse to political commitment that inspires writers at moments of historical transition. In the process, he also comments on the retrospective fiction that history marches on its own independent path. But in the moment of Men in the Sun’s publication, the author does not appear to be stepping down to join an inevitable march, but rather to be actively shaping history’s direction. Kanafani’s incision into history seemed so prescient to some readers that they perceived Men in the Sun as having spliced reality and representation into a borderless continuity, as if the symbolic language of fiction were a word-for-word translation of the historical moment. Many were therefore quick to identify allegorical overtones in Abul Khaizuran’s impotence and to interpret its function in determining the events of the novel. Fadl Naqib noted in 1972 that the plot in which ‘the truck driver who is suspected of sexual hijinks even though he’s sexually impotent symbolizes the Arab armies suspected of a passion for war and ravishing Israel even though they were militarily impotent’, was so much like reality that it verged on being artless, for ‘this vulgar symbolism didn’t surprise anyone. Facts that everyone knew didn’t arouse interest when they appeared newly veiled in symbolism’ (Naqib 1972: — 53 —

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amy zalman 198). Rather, in his view, the novel was considered extraordinary for how well it captured the Palestinian mood of exhaustion in the early 1960s. Another contemporary of Kanafani’s, Ihsan Abbas, found a similar meaning in Abul Khaizuran’s impotence, but thought the character’s weakness represented the frailty of Palestinian leadership (1972: 17). This view has been replicated more recently by Barbara Harlow, who observed that Men in the Sun can be read as a pure allegory, in which ‘Abul Khaizuran … represents Palestinian leadership at the time, emasculated and impotent, having “lost his manhood” in 1948 in the first Arab–Israeli war surrounding the creation of the State of Israel’ (1996: 48– 9). The Lebanese writer Elias Khoury suggested that the tragic dimensions of the tale lay in how easily Abul Khaizuran was distracted from his goal by the trivial matter of his virility. In this allegory, Khoury added, ‘[the] symbols are clear and evident. The Palestinian people die every day in the tank without crying out; it falls upon the land to cry out now’ (1972: 174). In Radwa ÆAshur’s subtle reading, Abul Khaizuran is a nuanced character who is difficult to reduce to purely symbolic terms, and serves multiple allegorical uses: Abul Khaizuran has good intentions, but he leads those dependent on him to their deaths anyway. As a leader, he does not keep his promises or fulfill his responsibilities. He is a symbol of the insufficiency of the Palestinian leadership during the nakba and immediately afterward in assuming responsibility. There is also symbolism here with respect to the Arab leadership – the kings and Arab heads [of state] in the 1948 period. It’s also certain that Abul Khaizuran is one of the people whom he drives to their doomed end. He is criminal and victim, and we commiserate with him to the same extent that we judge and reject him. His richness as a character and Ghassan’s success in creating a meaningful portrait in him make it difficult for us to limit him to a political signifier with a unitary meaning. (1977: 69–70)

As these variant interpretations of the novel suggest, the allegorical trends in the novel did not accord strictly with a particular historical event, but more generally to the ineluctable sense of an overdetermined failure in 1948 and its aftermath. What the reading public could agree on, however, was the idea that the novel translated a failure – whether military, political or historical – into the easily legible figure of a man whose body is a failure because it has been castrated. Northrop Frye has pointed out that allegory, as a ‘structural principle in fiction’ requires a ‘narrative basis’, for ‘we have allegory when the events of a narrative obviously and continuously refer to another simultaneous structure of events or ideas, whether historical events, moral or philosophical ideas, or natural phenomena’ (1974:12).6 As usual with the things that seem most obvious, allegory’s obviousness is a function of a collective presumption that its terms are natural. This presumption is necessarily invisible; it is its invisibility that creates the sense of perfect structural sympathy between a fictional literary narrative and another, and that bridges two narrative worlds. When writer and reader

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gender and the palestinian narrative of return share a set of terms, the passage across the border of the novel, from inside to outside, and vice versa, can seem effortless. With respect to Men in the Sun, the bridge term that makes Abul Khaizuran so ‘obvious’ as an allegorical reference to political and historical failure is a presumption that the exemplary expression of masculinity is the virile male body, and that the castrated male body signals a compromised self. These views extend across the border between the novel and the world in an apparently seamless way, making physical castration a natural sign of political impotence. In order to function, allegory must be obvious in another way, which relates to the ‘narrative basis’ on which it rests. Of the two narratives bound by shared assumptions that together produce an allegorical text, one is always presumably fixed, or ‘obvious’. Allegory functions for a community of readers because the community can agree that the event to which the fictional text affixes in allegorical relationship is a stable one.7 This is a situation that does not entirely obtain with respect to Men in the Sun, for the very situation of national identity that Kanafani allegorises is in the process of becoming in a new way. Siddiq’s image of the writer stepping into a moment of national uncertainty fruitfully illustrates the writer’s role in projecting, as well as reflecting, the terms of national identity in the realm of culture. Another way of saying this is that Kanafani inverts common sense about the relationship that is supposed to obtain between the inside and outside of a novel: in the case of Men in the Sun, the more stable narrative exists inside the novel. At the moment of its writing, the extra-literary ground (that accurate-looking map of the region), the ground beneath the Palestinian reader in Lebanon, or Jordan or Syria, or on his way to Kuwait, must have felt literally in flux. It is into this murky moment that Kanafani inserted his narrative. The historian Rashid Khalidi has depicted these as the ‘lost years’ of twentiethcentury Palestinian identity, sandwiched between a discrete period of expression during the British Mandate that ended with the loss of the first Israeli–Arab war, and its visible re-emergence with the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1964. In the period in between, from 1948 to 1964, ‘the Palestinians seemed to many to have disappeared from the map as an independent actor, and indeed as a people’ (Khalidi 1997: 178). Men in the Sun was of course conceived without the benefit of hindsight. In hindsight, national identity could be viewed as momentarily submerged, and predating a renewed national consciousness primarily focused through the PLO, which promoted a unified national identity both to Palestinians and to others. Khalidi lists some of the problems that contributed to the view from outside, and the sense from inside, that Palestinian identity was on an uncertain path. By 1948, the Palestinian effort to resist Zionism had failed; the attempt of the combined forces of the Syrian, Egyptian and Iraqi armies to launch a war against Israel had also — 55 —

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amy zalman failed, and was riddled by complex objectives related to the regional balance of power; in the process of these losses and as their result, half of the Palestinian population had left their homes and landed in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Gaza, where they were assigned new nationalities8 or given refugee status; although underground resistance movements existed, they were small and scattered; finally, the ideology of pan-Arabism promoted with great success by Egyptian president Gamal ÆAbd al-Nasir muffled the articulation of a specifically Palestinian identity until the mass disillusionment of the 1967 war. Men in the Sun appeared in the midst of these ‘lost years’, although Kanafani himself had already arrived at the belief that Palestinian nationalism would have to be a crucial component of anti-colonial struggle, and more specifically at the ‘unshakeable conviction … that the only way for the humiliated and exploited Palestinians in the camps to achieve dignity and a life worth living was a return to their homeland, Palestine’ (Wild 1975: 16). The tragic force of an inevitable failure that limns the events in Men in the Sun emerges from this authorial stance: Kanafani appears to stand not so much behind his characters, or to hover omnipotently above them, as to be in front of them, pulling them along a narrative he unfurls before them, but on which they will inevitably fumble. Kanafani’s work appeared prophetic because he wrote into it not only the content but the terms of national allegory. In order to fix one narrative, the imagined one, in an obvious relation to a second in transition, an identity coming into being, Kanafani’s novel projects virility and masculine self-conception as crucial and stable aspects not only of male, but national character. When Abul Khaizuran affirms his masculinity instead of his national loyalty, the choice appears less as a frivolous preoccupation than as a grasping to assert selfhood in a public context, before the Iraqi border officials (and, it could be said, before the implied reader of the text). The precise failure in the narrative is the failure of masculine and national identity to cohere. In order to make his national identity a priority, Abul Khaizuran would have to abandon his masculine identity, a move that he is not prepared to make. Abul Khaizuran’s moment of hesitation seems to reflect a similar hesitation on the part of his author, who is not yet prepared to establish new terms of masculinity (but will be in his next novel). Men in the Sun marks the fact that the old terms will no longer do. This breach between gender and national identity makes visible an instance of what Homi Bhabha calls ‘the ambivalent margin of the nation-space,’(1990: 4), an always shifting, always inprocess, border at which the terms of national identity are negotiated, and where it is determined what kinds of bodies will be permitted into the national enclosure. Cultural discourse plays a part in policing this border, sometimes in accordance with dominant political discourse, often in opposition to the dominant terms that establish the boundaries of ‘nation-space’. Men in the Sun — 56 —

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gender and the palestinian narrative of return brings its readers to the edge of this space at a particular historical moment when so many of the terms of national identity are abraded that no seamless border is possible. Here, masculinity and national identity should meet up to mutually constitute each other and create a seamless stretch on the contours of Palestinian identity, but they do not. Each falls away from the other leaving, for the reader, the revealed gap between them. National identity and masculine identity, both under reconstruction as they are portrayed in Men in the Sun, intertwine in the character of Abul Khaizuran, whose failure comes of self-doubt that he can perform a masculinity to which he feels his body does not attest, and for whom that identity is more primary than a national affiliation. This character literalises the simultaneous instability of national and masculine identity, and the drastic effects of such instability.9 Abul Khaizuran’s difficulty performing normative masculinity is always ‘explained’ in critical rewriting in allegorical terms. Abul Khaizuran’s difficulty, in the allegorical retelling, is really a political problem, not a gender problem. Castration is transformed into a symbolic rather than a historical event in the narrative. At the core of these readings is the belief that masculinity’s exemplary expression is virility, a belief so self-evident, apparently, that it completely underwrites the construction of Men in the Sun as a national allegory, while remaining invisible itself. However, as a reading strategy, allegorical commentary is not a neutral lens helping magnify the nature of the text in question, but a prosthetic device that may help minimise a collective sense of injury to the collective (masculine) national body. R. W. Connell points out with respect to physical disability and gender that ‘the construction of masculinity through bodily performance means that gender is vulnerable when the performance cannot be sustained, for instance, as a result of physical disability’ (2000: 54). Citing a study in which physically disabled men attempted to accommodate their compromised sense of masculinity in a range of ways, Connell observes that despite the different routes of accommodation men took, they were consistent in their inability to ignore the insult to their bodily sense of masculinity. One might conclude that there is an analogy to be made to this process of accommodation in collective cultural expression; in this instance it is a critical move that allows the absorption (and thus disappearance) of Abul Khaizuran’s castration into allegory in critical texts. With a now retrospective glance at Kanafani’s next novel, All That’s Left to You (1965), it would appear that in the period between the first and second novel Kanafani recognised the centrality of masculine identity to the construction of national identity, as well as the irreversibility of the national castration he posited in Men in the Sun. All That’s Left to You takes place in Gaza and the Negev Desert. In it, Kanafani not only offers his characters a return to the land of Palestine, but adjusts the problematic split between masculinity and national — 57 —

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amy zalman identity that plagued his characters in Men in the Sun by wholesale transformation of the male deficiency (castration) that was associated with the land, and its men, in his first novel, into female potential (fertility). Fertility is emphatically yoked to both land and the female protagonist of the novel. That novel emerged shortly after the issuance of the PLO’s founding documents, the National Charter and the Nationalist Charter. In his analysis of these documents and PLO communiqués, Joseph Massad demonstrated the degree to which preexisting values of masculinity and the emergent articulation of national identity were fused by declaring Palestinian identity in terms of paternity.10 These documents rhetorically displace the evidence of national virility onto the fertile female body, while leaving the relationship between national and male identity intact. The National Charter included the rhetorical flourish that Zionist victory constituted a rape of the land, and thus emphatically affixed nationalist intentions to the male prerogative and duty to protect female honour. In Massad’s terminology, these documents establish the way in which ‘masculinity is nationalized’ (Massad 1995: 469), a process that courses in the same time period through Kanafani’s literary works. To expose the fugitive moment in Men in the Sun in which gender and national identity do not cohere need not mean the important history of the book as a political allegory must be abandoned, but rather that gender should be incorporated as a political term into the allegorical reading. Xeuping Dong usefully suggests with respect to recent Chinese literature that this means putting ‘men as gendered individuals back into the scheme of allegory, thus expanding an allegorical reading of … literature by including, rather than displacing, such an equally important (and political) approach as a gendered one’ (2000: 9). To this end, Kanafani’s novel must also be read as a tale of men who must forge new understandings of what their bodies signify and do when their privileges and duties as men are in flux. The actors that Kanafani animates in fiction exemplify the dilemma of a society at a crossroads: for the men in the sun, there is no discernable future path. The terrain of ‘hard patches of brown rocks like splinters’ and ‘low hills with flattened tops of soft yellow earth like flour’ become landmarks on a road only by the travellers’ own ‘firm decision to go forward, doggedly’ (Kanafani 1995/1994: 18/59). The past has left arrows and signs, and patterns of behaviour so ingrained that the body follows them instinctively. But formerly understood signs do not function, as Abu Qais’s hands do not, left idle without his grove of ten olive trees. Other signs are disappeared entirely; Abul Khaizuran’s body marks just such a loss. In 1958, the year of the events in Men in the Sun, as Kanafani writes it, incipient signs marked ‘nation’ begin to appear. The men in their dogged forward motion try to follow the directions that would lead them to conscious self-determination. The problem in the novel is that the signs of — 58 —

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gender and the palestinian narrative of return masculinity and the signs of nationalism do not all point in the same direction. The narrative implodes at the crossroads. The paradoxical situation in which the men find themselves can be described by way of Benedict Anderson’s well-known diction. While the signs of the ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’ (1991: 7) that characterises nationalism are immanent in them, they are more immediately attuned to recently lost affiliations on a hierarchical matrix of categories. They calibrated their status and their direction with regard to class, generation, membership in a trans-national Arab community, and gender. Their physical move away from Palestine testifies to the tension that obtains. The men are literally driven in contradictory directions, suspended temporally between disappeared and impendent forms of affiliation. What drives them from behind – from unemployment, from the land – are known signs which gave their lives not simply existential or communal, but specifically masculine meaning. The men move with nearly bodily instinct to fulfil duty, even though behind each lies ‘broken or disrupted family tradition’ (Harlow 1996: 51). Their urge to support and protect family is charged with an idea that is national, in the basic sense that their families constitute the nation, but it is not ideologically nationalist. Abu Qais, frail and old, goes to Kuwait as a desperate measure of his male duty to care for his wife and their children, and only then after prodding by his wife, perpetually pregnant and tired by his nostalgic dream of his former dominion of olive trees. For the younger Assad, the trip to Kuwait and the 50 dinars he accepts from his uncle to fund it constitute a reluctant acceptance of his father’s promise to marry him to a cousin to whom he’s been betrothed since birth. Marwan, the youngest of the three men, inherits masculine duty prematurely after his older brother already in Kuwait marries and stops sending money, and his father abandons the family for a younger, wealthier woman in order to leave the refugee camp.11 Abul Khaizuran, estranged from the familial order (but not from the masculine order, as asserted by his fury that he can’t sleep with a woman), pursues status by way of money. For all of the men, implicit notions of masculine honour infuse their beliefs about what their bodies mean and should do. Their attempt to fulfil obligation propels them into movement, even though masculine privilege within the family, and the tacit ideals of honour that bound Arab men across nation and class lines have fallen away. (You could question whether these ideals were ever fulfilled in reality, but they are primarily presented in the novel as formerly functioning social mechanisms now broken.) In this new world, the signposts that tell them how to act as men no longer correspond to what their bodies are able to achieve. Thus they move. Abul Khaizuran, if he signals the extreme limit of male loss, also indicates potential, the possibility of moving forward into a new history, as a man, in a body that does not signify in conventional terms as male. — 59 —

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amy zalman The penultimate chapter of Men in the Sun is marked by the crisis that will unfold within it from the beginning. The apparent contrast of the chapter’s title, ‘Sun and Shade’, is misleading, since, while the sun is hot, shade will be even hotter for the characters. The dislocation of language from its everyday associations signals the displacement between language and action to follow. The men are silent as the truck heads for the second checkpoint: The huge lorry was carrying them along the road, together with their dreams, their families, their hopes and ambitions, their misery and despair, their strength and weakness, their past and future, as if it were pushing against the immense door to a new, unknown destiny, and all eyes were fixed on the door’s surface as though bound to it by invisible threads. (Kanafani 1995/1994: 6/129)

Despite the catalogue of what stands to be lost, the moment offers a potentially hopeful narrative. History, a dimension that encompasses time and space, seems imminent. If the men can penetrate the closed door of destiny, they will embody its essence and thereby control it with their own movements. Lighting a cigarette as he stops the truck, Abul Khaizuran suggests that they all ‘rest a little before we begin the performance again’ (Kanafani 1995/1994: 48/ 132). The remark is peculiarly inappropriate to the scene. Abu Qais, Assad and Marwan do not feel like performers, and their stage will be an enclosed and isolated space. Abul Khaizuran, in contrast, reveals the degree to which for him being is a continuous performance of normality in defence against the moment, ten years earlier, ‘since they took his manhood from him’ (Kanafani 1995/1994: 37/109), and after which he has ‘lived that humiliation, day after day and hour after hour’ (Kanafani 1995/1994: 38/109). Abul Khaizuran enters the compound in a rush, but instead of the brisk interaction he anticipates, he gets a leisurely greeting. ‘“Aha! Abu Khaizurana!” shouted the official, as he slid the papers to one side with deliberate carelessness, and crossed his arms on the metal desk. “Where have you been all this time?”’ (Kanafani 1995/1994: 49/135). Having addressed Abul Khaizuran using a feminine form of his name, the Iraqi official Abu Baqir and his cronies quiz Abul Khaizuran about why he was detained in Basra, tell him that his boss, Haj Rida, has asked after him six times, and suggest that he sit down and have a cup of tea. Abul Khaizuran, increasingly distraught, simply pushes the pen towards Abu Baqir. Finally, a story emerges – the officials all believe that Abul Khaizuran has spent his days in Basra with a prostitute named Kawkab. ‘“Abu Khaizurana, you devil. Why do not you tell us what you get up to in Basra? You make out to us that you are a decent, well-behaved fellow, and then you go to Basra and commit mortal sins with that dancer, Kawkab … Tell us about this dancer. The Haj knows the whole story and he’s told it to us. Come on.”’ (Kanafani 1995/1994: 51/137–8). The other men feminise Abul Khaizuran in ways that extend beyond their — 60 —

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gender and the palestinian narrative of return derisive modification of his name. The affair itself, as they recount with salacious zeal, has made Abul Khaizuran a feminine figure. They report that they have heard that Kawkab loves Abul Khaizuran so much that she writes him cheques for the pleasure of his company. In other words, Abul Khaizuran is the real prostitute. The (not very) veiled challenge to his manhood reveals the minuteness of the conceptual economy in which sexuality can be expressed for, in this scene, if a man is not a man he is by definition – in the matrix of social relations, and in language – a woman. The competitive play of the jockeying between men is reminiscent of the verbal jousting Michael Gilsenan observed of the North Lebanese community he studied in the 1970s where, as in many parts of the Arab world, manhood was composed as importantly of word as of deed: ‘A “real man” was always alive to the occasions he might seize to provoke a contest; looking for opportunities to develop an argument, to close off another’s rhetorical alternatives and to drive him … to the broken, incoherent language that signified helpless exasperation and loss of self-control’ (Gilsenan 1996: 206). Abu Baqir’s apparently giddy celebration of virility, and his request that Abul Khaizuran ‘tell … how she has shown her love’ masks a hostile verbal challenge. Abul Khaizuran participates because he knows the rules of the conventional challenge. That he loses the game is less significant than the fact that ultimately he decides he must play it. Finally, testily, with no time to waste, Abul Khaizuran replies to Abu Baqir’s challenge in a straightforward way: ‘Idha rawaha al-hajj lakum … fa-limadha turiduni Æan arwiha marra ukhra?’ [If the Haj told it to you, why do you want me to tell it again?] The narrative fragments exactly here, exposing several fault lines at once. The more time Abul Khaizuran spends talking, the more likely it is the men in the tank will die. This emergency in the plot, related to time, artfully embeds a narrative crisis, related to History. Haj Rida has told a story about Abul Khaizuran that celebrates virility and prowess among men. It is not the story’s truth (it isn’t true, as we and Abul Khaizuran know), but its repetition that gives it currency. Indeed, it has already been several times repeated. Abu Baqir ‘had thought about it day and night, endowing it with all the obscenity created by his long, tormenting deprivation’ (Kanafani 1995: 51). Abul Khaizuran asks the right question when he inquires with irritation why he should tell it again; he acknowledges with a nascent consciousness that to repeat the narrative as it has already been told would not acknowledge the historical shifts that gave it meaning, because the world has changed. There has been a war, and an injury, and a loss to which Abul Khaizuran’s body irrevocably testifies. But Abul Khaizuran does not have a new story to tell yet. The rhetorical performance of masculinity as it exists does not admit his tale of national community and national suffering. To borrow Massad’s terminology, the rhetoric of masculinity is not nationalised. Rather, masculinity is entirely severed from — 61 —

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amy zalman the nation, whose actors are Abul Khaizuran, shifting from foot to foot in the uncomfortable moment, and the three men in the tank. Abul Khaizuran knows he does not want to repeat the story that has already been told, and we can guess that he would like to move forward into the story that awaits him outside into a self-determined history he’ll author himself. But when Abu Baqir, holding Abul Khaizuran’s passage papers behind his back, asks him to introduce him to Kawkab on his next trip to Basra, Abul Khaizuran gives in. Defeated, he tells a lie, and says he will. ‘On your honour?’ ‘On my honour.’ Abul Khaizuran’s failure at this moment extends beyond an incompetence of character, or even of the political will he represents. His rejoinder – ‘If Haj Rida has already told you the story, why do you want me to tell it again?’ – offers a linguistically precise representation of the cleavage between gender and national identity. Abul Khaizuran’s attempt at rejoinder splits, almost too easily, into equal halves divorced by a comma. On one side of the cleaved phrase (‘If Haj Rida has already told you the story’) is repetition without alteration, possibly told by a rich Kuwaiti businessman to a bored Iraqi official (although that too might be a fabrication), about masculinity that expresses itself by sex with prostitutes. On the other side of the comma (‘Why do you want me to tell it again?’) lies potential: a question, an attempted refusal to repeat the repetitive narrative, an inchoate attempt by Abul Khaizuran to speak masculinity as he lives it, in relation to his history. In the few seconds it takes to utter the sentence, the mechanics of narrative history are revealed, as is the structural rupture, that space between the phrases, that would permit the admission of a new kind of story about what has happened to this Palestinian man. Jean Luc Nancy points out that the seamlessness with which historical narrative typically presents itself is itself a giveaway that it is not seamless, for ‘history, fulfilled, enclosed within its own closure, indicates by itself that the closure has to “give” in one point … and that in this point, consequently, meaning does not link up with its own presence. To be the meaning that “is,” it defers itself and differs from itself’ (1990: 104–5). This permeable enclosure out of which history’s meaning is always seeping, in excess of the story History proposes to tell, is structurally akin to Bhabha’s vision of the nation-space edged by a pervious, negotiable border. But Abul Khaizuran, almost embodying a new history, almost telling a new story, or in the most hopeful scenario, almost leaving the compound for the men outside, does not make it across the border, or even across the sentence. When he gives in to Abu Baqir and agrees to tell the story again, he also refuses the historical possibility he has just posited. But nor is everything as it was before. In the split second between the two clauses he creates a breach that will not be closed up again. When he attempts to step back into the tired story of masculinity defined by claims to virility, the men outside in the truck have already died. In his moment — 62 —

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gender and the palestinian narrative of return of failure he slides as if down the comma itself, into the unexpected abyss. Were he to have crossed it, he would have had to take his body, unquestionably male but marked by historical loss, with him. That leap, and the acknowledgement that masculinity is implicated in national identity, is not taken by Kanafani’s protagonist, whose attempt to counter his sense of loss as a man through bravado leads to a tragedy he cannot fully understand. As a sort of retrospective footnote to what cannot be said in the context of the early 1960s, Yahya Yakhlif’s 1991 novel A Lake Beyond the Wind, about the life of a village on the edge of Lake Tiberias (often referred to as the Sea of Galilee in English), presents a nuanced portrait of male bravado comprised of fear, idealism and anxiety. Set in the muddled months of the British withdrawal from Palestine and the first Arab–Israeli war, the novel explores the feelings of young men from Iraq, Syria and Palestine who join the volunteer army in 1948. They are all poorly armed and manipulated by their commanders’ own political objectives. Yakhlif returns to the scene to critique these internal politics, and in the process he portrays the flimsy construction of masculinity in the context of the first Arab-Israeli war. He does this in large part through stories of objects whose power lies in their symbolism. Like the heroic but fruitless dreams of the novel’s most powerless characters, these objects appear to promise victory, but do not. The novel’s several narratives are threaded by the story of a bulletproof vest purchased by one of Samakh’s residents from a passing British. The vest is passed on as a gift to a local army commander, and eventually plays a large role in constructing a lie: the local commander tells someone higher up that the bulletproof vest was war booty, when in fact the battle to which he refers had been a definitive defeat. When Najib, a young soldier from Samakh, is ordered to give the vest to the inspector general, he chooses instead to walk away from the camp with it. In much the same way, the most prominent romance in the novel, between a Syrian volunteer and a neighbour of his family in Damascus, is marked by objects, most prominently an amulet that she has made up for him and which he draws out periodically to look at. Both the bulletproof vest and the amulet have an equivalent use in the novel: each has a nearly magical reference to an unrealisable dream, military victory and romantic union with a far-away woman. The novel appropriately ends with the contemplations of a demobilised Iraqi soldier walking, with Najib, to the north end of Lake Tiberias as refugees stream northwards and eastwards from the region: ‘I realized then that everything had been lost, and that all paths led to exile and dispersion. Such a melancholy prospect. Such a lonely road’ (214). This is the road that Abul Khaizuran travels, too. By 1966, when All That’s Left to You was published, the concept of return was emerging as the dominant motif in nationalist thought in conjunction with — 63 —

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amy zalman calls to armed struggle. The concept of return, although framed in terms of the entire nation of Palestinians, was primarily and most publicly enacted by men and in activities that resonated with masculine notions of bravery and honour. The necessity of return as a condition for liberation steered the political goals of the most visible Palestinian organisation of the early 1960s, Fatah.12 Formed in Kuwait in the late 1950s by a group of men who met as students in Cairo, Fatah was, by the mid-1960s, prepared to enact that return, and in January 1965 the group’s military wing al-Asifa (the storm) made its first armed incursion into Israeli territory. Kanafani was himself affiliated with the Arab Nationalist Movement, a pan-Arabist association closely tied to Egyptian president ÆAbd alNasir’s politics. In 1964, it too created a Palestinian wing (National Front for the Liberation of Palestine) whose own military sector began armed raids into Israel around the same time as Fatah, near the end of 1964 (Cobban 1984: 142–3). Although there are a few notable women, such as Leila Khaled, who participated in military action, guerrilla activity was primarily made up of male participants. Women were considered important participants in national rejuvenation, but they were not necessarily encouraged to participate in enacting return to Palestine. In her 1973 autobiography, Khaled described her attempt to join the military wing of Fatah in Kuwait, where she was living in 1965. After joining, she chafed at the fundraising goal she had been given, and Fatah members suggested that she assist by helping mothers in the camps and visiting families of Palestinians considered martyrs for having died fighting. This was not satisfactory, as Khaled observed drily: ‘Social work … is not social revolution. I want to participate fully in the revolution’ (1973: 106). The situation she described illustrates how the roles of women, even in exile, could be constructed in terms of political nationalism, but not related specifically to the concept of return, or to actions directly related to return. Organisations such as Fatah and the NFLP’s military wing transformed male absence into male presence through force. They thus brought to a culmination in action a characteristic of twentieth-century Palestinian historiography which Rashid Khalidi has called ‘the narrative of failure as triumph’ (1997: 195). But if military action commutes failure into triumph by dint of stealth and force, these same strategies can be treacherous on literary geography, whose roads and landmarks are often unconscious desire and its symbols. Attempts to cross legal boundaries, or flout established paths, lead to unmarked territories of taboo and repression. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argued persuasively in AntiOedipus, the unconscious is a dynamic, productive machine whose capacities are more multi-vocal and less determined than the Freudian elaboration of Oedipal drives would have them. But the idea of the Oedipal scenario, and the constricted pathways for desire it predicts, draws its persuasive force in large part from its historical collision, and collusion, with the organisation of social — 64 —

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gender and the palestinian narrative of return production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In that scenario, every set of relations – familial, economic and political – is characterized by a tripartite division on which desire, an object of desire, and the law that governs the interaction of desire and its object are distributed. In the familial triangulation which is the basis for all other patterns of relationship, the not-yet-sexed child desires the mother but restrains from enacting that desire by agreeing to abide by the father’s law. Through the alliances children make, they become sexed bodies: boys fear castration and ally themselves with the father’s law, while girls, peering down hopelessly, realise that it is too late for them, and appropriately shift their desires to the father. Oedipalised relationships, replicated across a range of institutions beyond the family, function when the legitimacy of the father’s law, or the legitimacy of a father-like authority such as the state, is not in question. When structures that facilitate Oedipal socialisation are either absent or perceived as illegitimate, as in conditions of exile or occupation, those processes of socialisation grind to a halt. The result for children of such a situation is a tangled confusion of impulses ungirded by structures that legitimate them, and a suspended existence in an unresolved castration complex. If there is a psycho-sexual component to the political narrative of return it lies in the promise to condense normal avenues of socialisation and desire. Instead, as the narrative of failure-as-triumph conveys, the terror of absence (and its peculiar resonance for men in Freudian terms) can be countered by connecting masculine desire to revolutionary ends. Masculine desire is given a positive character as it is transformed from a futile gesture that reminds men of what is not there into the serious pleasures of return and liberation of the land. But, with its close attention to desire’s pathways, Kanafani’s novel reveals the near impossibility of achieving that transformation when the family, and male authority within it, is devastated. Femininity emerges as the mechanism that negotiates male return. Understood from a male perspective, feminine presence is viewed competitively as having supplanted male presence, which in turn can only be achieved by converting feminine presence into feminine absence. Given that Kanafani’s first formulation of exile was as a specifically male condition, and that his representation of the male nation was as one unable either to express desire or admit impotence, it is perhaps not surprising that Kanafani’s return narrative reconstructs masculinity so that the expression of male desire can have effect. One of the ways in which absence from the land was demarcated as emphatically masculine in Men in the Sun was by opposing it to presence on the land, and correlating such presence to women left behind. All That’s Left to You provides an excellent illustration of how representations of femininity are used to construct masculine, as well as feminine, desire in the context of a burgeoning nationalist movement. The novel, which begins as — 65 —

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amy zalman a narrative of exile, concludes with the triumphant return of a young man poised at its end to liberate his homeland. In the process of telling this story, Kanafani rendered both the female body and Palestine as interchangeable metaphors of a ‘fertile land’, whose fecundity must be yoked to the national cause. In proffering the female body as a national symbol, Kanafani dramatically shifted the meaning he attached to bodies in Men in the Sun, which emphasised the castrated male body as the sign of permanent national loss. The formal complexity of Kanafani’s novel makes extracting its plot a tricky matter. Only a few events happen in the narrative time of the novel, which is about a brother and sister living in Gaza. Maryam, the sister, becomes pregnant by and marries Zakaria, a traitor twice over. Zakaria already has a wife and five children, and also once betrayed an underground resistance member to the Israeli army, causing the man’s death. Hamid, furious at the shame his sister has brought on their family, decides to walk across the Negev Desert to his mother in Jordan. Maryam sits anxiously in her house in Gaza, listening to the repetitive ticking of Hamid’s wall clock, hearing in them his footsteps. Hamid in the Desert throws his watch away, a gesture which may be read as a step out of calendar time. In keeping with the consistent characterisation of the Desert as a maternal and eroticised female character (who has a speaking part) and Hamid’s stated goal of reaching his mother, the tossing of his watch suggests a step into something like fetal time, from which he will be reborn.13 Like Jonson’s brave infant of Saguntum, so horrified by a world under siege that he refuses to be born, Hamid too nurses the hope that he can simply turn around and go back. Events take a turn for both brother and sister simultaneously. Hamid comes upon an Israeli soldier who has lost his own way in the Desert and lit flares to announce his presence. Hamid does not know who it is that lights the flares, but he treats him as an intruder. A struggle involving all three actors – Desert, soldier and Hamid – ensues: ‘Suddenly he was on me; I felt the ground hurl me up towards him and we fell together … and at once I was sure I was the stronger of the two. Carefully and precisely I raised my knee and put it between his thighs. He began moaning faintly and said something I couldn’t understand’ (Kanafani 1990: 32/205).14 The land takes sides, or at least Hamid perceives the land as actively assisting his struggle. Hamid relieves the soldier of his flare gun and machine gun, and takes the soldier’s long knife. The soldier leaps up to attack Hamid. Hamid, in possession of the knife, holds it against the soldier’s stomach and the man retreats. But the cycle of psychic combat is not yet over. The soldier tries to crawl on his backside towards a water flask, but Hamid throws the flask even further away, underlining the infantile position of the soldier, who is now dependent on him. At the same time, in Gaza, Maryam senses that her brother is in danger and wakes up from a fitful sleep. Shortly afterwards, Zakaria awakens as well, and in — 66 —

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gender and the palestinian narrative of return their ensuing argument threatens Maryam with the choice of either divorce or abortion of the baby Maryam has already decided to name Hamid. In the kitchen, as in the Desert, the survival of someone named Hamid hangs in the balance. At exactly the moment that Zakaria demands that Maryam abort her child, Maryam hears another voice, ‘welling up in my body, echoing there, screaming into my head … “We can’t dispose of him now, we can’t get rid of him now.”’ The voice, coming from inside her but not quite her own, suggests the impulses for survival of the fetus itself, but refers ambiguously to both the fetus and Zakaria. In both scenes, the female figure – the Desert and Maryam, respectively – mediates a male contest, and holds the power to decide the victor. Maryam, having betrayed her brother once by having become pregnant by Zakaria, redeems herself and her brother by making the choice to kill Zakaria and save the unborn Hamid. Separated, but sharing the same consciousness, Maryam and Hamid finally act in harmonious tandem to throw off enemies from within and without, while a formerly threatening incestuous link between brother and sister is now expressed as one between mother and son. What is left, in Kanafani’s novel, is Hamid lost in the belly of a feminine Desert, and Maryam, in her kitchen in Gaza, pregnant with a child she has already decided to name Hamid. The novel closes with the image of the clock on the wall, beating out the same cyclical time it always has, and beneath which Maryam sits over the corpse of her husband. Hamid may have thrown his watch away, but he will be reborn into a new time, the time of return. But while it is Maryam’s militant decisiveness that ensures Hamid’s return, she is not offered rebirth or the chance to toss away the clock that ticks out her waiting. Rather, her status and her body are newly yoked to the cyclical time of reproduction. The vignette that closes the novel, of Maryam between murder and reproductive labour, or more starkly as a figure with power over both death and life, displays the ambivalent position she will occupy for the foreseeable future. Her power over men is tremendous, and it is constructed in equally tremendous terms, for she both imperils and delivers life itself. The dull repetitiousness of the clock takes on an ideological force; it sounds a refusal to admit Maryam’s presence into history. The few events of the novel are related through a complex structure veined by flashback and repetition. The causal logic that normally drives a chronological narrative ceases to operate at moments of historical trauma. In addition to the human characters, Maryam, Hamid and Zakaria, there are two metaphorical ones, Time and Space (in the figure of the Desert) who also narrate. As the author explains to the reader in an introduction to the formal characteristics of his novel: ‘the five characters in this novel, Hamid, Maryam, Zakaria, Time and the Desert, do not move along parallel or conflicting lines’ (Kanafani 1990: xxi/159).15 Rather, as Kanafani clarifies, the novel progresses — 67 —

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amy zalman by a series of disconnected lines which fuse in different combinations. Speaking in turns (shifts in the speaking voice are indicated by different typefaces) the voices of the five characters interdependently weave a narrative from which none can be extracted if the narrative as a whole is to make sense. Voices interrupt one another, finish each others’ sentences and thoughts, and extend verbal images sown in the text by characters far away in time or space. Not only are there no clear distinctions between places and times, there are not always distinctions between Maryam and Hamid as speaking subjects, who share and interpenetrate each other’s consciousness. In overall effect, the novel’s formal characteristics highlight the collective and interdependent relations between people, and how time and space can seem to be themselves agents in creating a collective reality. Kanafani explains in his introduction that the reason for writing the novel in this way is so that its story can be told ‘in a single burst’. That ‘single burst’ is the moment in which the murder of Zakaria by Maryam, in hearing distance of the wall clock, and the confrontation in the Desert between the soldier and Hamid simultaneously occur, thereby drawing on all the characters at once. As Kanafani renders them, these are not merely parallel events, each made more emphatic by its structural likeness to the other. It is actually one event – Maryam’s decisive act recovers Hamid, lost in the womblike Desert, and ensures him a rebirth as her future child. Whether or not this is seen as a real event in the world of the novel, or a metaphor, the point is that Maryam’s shame is absolved by her wilful and partisan violence, in which she herself de-emphasises her various roles as a woman to highlight, at the end, her heroic role as a mother. Both the tangled interweave of language and the knotted structures of desire which are resolved through the odd resurrection of Maryam’s brother as her son ultimately refer to the traumatic moment in 1948 in which they were forged. Edward Said has contended that the construction of a scene is the defining problem of Arabic literature after 1948. Unable to draw on an established present as the backdrop against which the mutable human personality expresses itself, the writer is constrained to construct a new present. As he puts it with specific regard to Kanafani’s style: ‘The paradox of contemporaneity for the Palestinian is very sharp indeed … If the present cannot be “given” simply (that is, if time will not allow him either to differentiate clearly between the past and his present or to connect them because the 1948 disaster, unmentioned except as an episode hidden within episodes, prevents continuity), it is intelligible only as achievement’ (1980: 153). Like Said’s own expository framing of ‘the 1948 disaster’, as a parenthetical linguistic event around which a sentence distends in order to achieve continuous sense, All That’s Left to You lays out the lives Hamid and Maryam as repetitive circlings of a parenthesised trauma. The bracketed episode in which the children’s parents – the representatives of law and object — 68 —

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gender and the palestinian narrative of return necessary for Oedipal socialisation – were lost, and around which the novel’s events implode, gives the novel its particular form as much as its story. Maryam and Hamid were in effect orphaned in 1948. Their father died fighting for the national cause, and the children were separated from their mother on the evening of their flight from their hometown of Jaffa. Maryam and Hamid went with their aging aunt to Gaza, while their mother ended up in Jordan in circumstances that remain unelaborated. Separated from their mother by two national borders, Maryam and Hamid raise each other. Hamid spends his youth hell-bent on trying to enforce his father’s last dictate, ‘Do not talk about marriage before our national cause has been decided’ (Kanafani 1990: 19/189), by avoiding romantic interests himself, and hoping to steer Maryam clear of erotic entanglement too. Maryam, aware of the prohibition’s import, nevertheless finds herself plagued by its implications, since she knows she faces ‘a trivial world unprepared to accommodate another spinster’ (Kanafani 1990: 18/187). Beset by yearning for their mother, and prohibited by their father from pursuing relationships beyond the family, the brother and sister have little choice but to coerce their adolescent desires onto the circumscribed circuit of their relationship with each other. In the absence of parents behind them, or a known future before them, they flood the small space of the family with substitute longings for each other, both as parents and as symbolic lovers. Like Hamid, who sees Maryam as a substitute mother/lover,16 Maryam loves her brother with a longing that borders on the illicit. For Maryam, however, it stops at that border as she matures. The elder of the two siblings, Maryam finds the paradox of their relationship increasingly difficult to bear: ‘How can Hamid possibly understand? For all his wonderful manhood, he was my brother’ (Kanafani 1990: 18/187). Maryam eventually breaks the family rule when she gets involved with Zakaria, but every time she gets into bed (the bed itself is Hamid’s) with Zakaria, she is overcome by the memory of her brother. Until Maryam’s disobedient act, there seems to be no way out of this constraint for the children, suspended in the liminal space of their father’s until, the undecided national cause before which there can be no marriage. But the consequence of Maryam’s entanglement with the traitor Zakaria has the tinge of miscegenation about it, highlighting the particular nature of the crisis into which her father’s logic pitches her. Ungoverned by father or nation, Maryam’s desire is dangerous because it may lead her to reproduce for an enemy, whether internal or external. At the same time, if there will be no marriage in the absence of a state, there will soon be no nation if there is no marriage, or reproduction, at least. The claustrophobic psychic constraints under which Maryam and Hamid grow up are mimicked by the similarly confined verbal operations permitted in the novel. Events and their narration are not so much caused in All That’s Left to You as triggered by their structural similitude to something else. Words and — 69 —

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amy zalman images beget their own likenesses in other contexts. Thought is never productive but circular. Hamid’s recollection of his father’s arm, hanging limply by his side in death, recalls the memory of his father’s arm around his mother in lovemaking. The unachievable condition embedded in the phrase, ‘if only our mother were here’ structures both every disappointment and every celebration in the lives of Hamid and Maryam. Their repertoire of words and images is a small one; with a whirlpool’s force, they always return the narrative to 1948, the moment at which national and family disaster intersected, and the world contracted for Hamid and Maryam into one traumatic reference point of ungraspable loss to which all experiences and utterances repetitiously refer. If physical space has been colonised, so has inner life; each time Hamid or Maryam want to think a new thought, they find they have no language for it, and that there is nowhere to go but the limited vocabulary of childhood and its unrealisable desires. In both their verbal and erotic exchanges, then, brother and sister recycle a finite amount of psychic and linguistic material which always returns them to their father’s condition: there will be no licit expressions of desire until the national cause is decided. Hamid’s decision to leave Gaza and walk the Desert to his mother, far from being a step out of this cycle, is a step into it. Not only does he return to the geographic site of national loss, but to the psychic moment of desire’s contraction into a tangled family romance from which there seems to be no exit. Another way of saying this is that the novel as a whole distorts linguistic structures, if lyrically, to accommodate the prohibition of marriage: the pairing of terms never produces a third term. Instead, the novel contains dizzying repetitions of the same triangulated relationship in which three terms are always reduced to an unproductive and in some way illicit pairing. The evocation of the prohibition in the text is itself arrived at via a jagged, but almost schematic, movement through triangulated relationships reduced to pairings. Maryam and Zakaria lie in bed together on their first night of marriage. The couple lie in Hamid’s old bed, establishing a triangular relationship between Maryam, Hamid and Zakaria. Maryam asks Zakaria to tell her the name of his first wife (to whom he is still married, and with whom he has five children), which reminds the reader of a second triangulated relationship, Zakaria’s with Maryam and his first wife, Fathiyya. The mention of the name leads Maryam to recall her childhood friend of the same name. This girlfriend, Fathiyya, had always joked with Maryam that one day she would marry her off to her brother, Fathi. While Maryam’s mother found the idea of the match amusing, its mention made her father shout instead, ‘Do not talk about marriage before our national cause has been decided!’ (Kanafani 1990: 19/189). While Maryam’s train of thought leads her to her father’s pronouncement, the dizzying multiples of names and roles can also be seen as resulting from it. — 70 —

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gender and the palestinian narrative of return (Fathiyya and her brother Fathi share the same name; Fathiyya is the sister of a man meant to become her friend’s wife, but in her offer to give her brother away, Fathiyya also acts the parent to her own brother; and in a third instance, Fathiyya is the wife of a man to whom Maryam is also married.) In the compressed space of the post-1948 world, it makes little difference which comes first: all relationships collapse into structural similarity in which sisters, wives and mothers, and brothers, husbands and fathers play substituting roles, making any erotic pairing a potentially polluted one. In the end, Maryam in her kitchen, and Hamid in the Desert (and inside the Desert) will combine forces to excise a third party who threatens their existence, and in that moment gender roles will congeal for the foreseeable future. With the Desert and Maryam already interchangeably fixed as ‘fertile land’, Hamid is reborn as a son of the motherland when Maryam kills Zakaria. Through rebirth on the land, Hamid is given a way out of the inverted terms of the castration complex with which his father left him. For, if the desire for incest is resolved by the fear of certain punishment in the form of castration, Hamid finds that the punishment for national castration is illicit desire. Hamid’s illegitimate yearning for his mother and his sister is purified by its transformation into revolutionary desire to return to the land. However, unlike Maryam’s capacity to effect her desire by giving birth, Hamid cannot achieve revolutionary return by himself. All That’s Left to You leaves the focus on male virility intact by going around it; since nothing is to be done, at least yet, about the male shame of national castration, focus shifts to the female body. As a primarily maternal geography which in its own fertile potential lacks nothing, the female body becomes the sign of an imminent male virility, which will be achieved through return to, and control of, the land. Motherhood itself was held in high esteem by Kanafani, who when asked by a friend to name his highest ideal, replied (in a letter) that it was his mother, who although semi-literate, was highly intelligent, taught him in indirect ways, and was a ‘genuine person – ethical … and without pretension’ (Habib 1990: 13). He would go on to write Um Saad (1969), a novel which celebrates just such a mother. At the same time, the problem of female desire posed by Kawkab, flickering in the distance in Men in the Sun, is brought into sharp focus in All That’s Left to You. Feminine desire, constructed as inherently indiscriminate, voracious and governed by passion more than reason, must be curtailed and brought into line with the contours of the masculine return. Femininity must be trained to wait, it must be re-domesticated and reminded that its objective is partisan and reproductive. It must not assert desire independently, as Kawkab appeared to, lest it threaten the extremely tenuous, only imminent, assertion of masculine presence. In All That’s Left to You, the degree to which, from a male perspective, feminine presence appears to threaten the possibility of masculine presence is demonstrated — 71 —

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amy zalman by Hamid’s encounter with the Desert, who is arguably the most powerful character in the novel. The Desert is powerful because she belongs to no nation, and because she transcends the historical sequence of male claims to her vast territory, whether Palestinian or Israeli, by rendering all men helpless. She threatens ‘death, night’s solitary song that parades my body’ (Kanafani 1990: 8/172) and offers ‘a breast that … holds nothing but terror’ (Kanafani 1990: 8/172), but upon which Hamid has no choice but to throw himself when he hears a car passing in the desert. Indiscriminate in her appetites, the Desert’s threat lies in her capacity to assimilate any man who wanders into her. As Hamid ruminates: There isn’t a steel blade in the world which wouldn’t be shattered if it were to graze your naked yellow breast … Mine and theirs … All the steel blades of the world could never hack down one root of your surface, but would shatter … in the face of your firm harvest which grows bigger and bigger as a man strides further and further into your depth, step-by-step, until he himself turns into a nameless, deep-rooted stem that thrives erect on your juices. (Kanafani 1990: 14/179–80)

From the perspective of Hamid, the potency of the Desert is paradoxical. The Desert’s presence guarantees his survival, because it can nourish him, but in the process of nourishing she also threatens to erase his own autonomy, making his return also a form of subjugation to her. It is here, in the space between the opposing values placed on feminine desire, that the mechanics of masculine return are enacted. As Hamid struggles with the Israeli soldier, he begins to project nationalist sentiment onto the Desert. He subjugates the threat that her voraciousness and presence embody by imagining them as directed against the soldier. He emerges victorious over the Israeli soldier by re-ascribing the Desert’s capacity to nourish in relation to himself only. When it is viewed from within the specific contours of the return narrative, the paradoxical characterisation of femininity in the trope of land-as-woman appears much more dynamic than it might otherwise. Women are often characterised as both aggressive and passive, sexually voracious and sexually submissive, redemptive and shameful, threateningly present and positively absent as a figure of maternal potential (an emptiness that signifies future presence). But, although these contradictory attributions may coexist, they can also be seen as traces of a narrative process in which different projections of femininity as dominating and subjugated are used as levers to facilitate masculine return. Masculine return is instigated through an encounter with a dominating feminine presence, and achieved by fantasising its subjugation to masculine desire. In the process of this narrative, masculine absence is exchanged for presence, and feminine presence commuted to feminine assistance in the task of masculine return. One of the striking characteristics of All That’s Left to You is the author’s attentiveness to the consequences of this process for its female protagonist, — 72 —

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gender and the palestinian narrative of return Maryam. We are reminded that Maryam, like her brother, is also trying to follow the example of a parent in their absence, and to provide for herself the role for which she was prepared, and to which her desires lead her. Like Hamid in his quasi-erotic encounter with the Desert, Maryam too experiences a potential loss of autonomy in her own erotic encounters. Her experience of sexual intercourse is depicted as the mirror-image of Hamid’s fears on entering the Desert. For her, the sensation of being ‘squeezed, kneaded, and soaked in water in a terrifying mélange of heat and cold’ (Kanafani 1990: 16/185) – is as fearful as Hamid’s sensation of being swallowed by the Desert. Shaking under Zakaria’s hands, Maryam is reminded of Hamid’s hands in childhood, shaking her shoulders in a small boat off the Jaffa shore, and explaining that their mother will follow them later. But, shaped by historical circumstance and the necessity of male return, it is Maryam’s desires that are ultimately designated as dangerous. All That’s Left to You leaves off not only with a renewed sense of national consciousness for Hamid, but with a renewed value attached to the domestication of female desire. Kanafani’s novels suggest that the association of woman with land, although it may be an old one, is also mobilised in specific ways depending on the social and political context. The construction of territorial loss in masculine terms after 1948 sets the stage for the enactment of masculine return in the early 1960s. Both the narrative of loss and that of return indicate the interdependence of masculine and feminine symbols in structuring national narratives. An analysis of masculine narratives may help produce new answers about why associations between land and woman have such enduring and powerful resonance, both within and beyond literature. Such analysis requires recognition, in the first place, that gender refers to men and masculinity as much as it does to women and femininity, as well as to the relations between them. At the same time, recognising that the relationship between masculine and national identity is constructed in specific historical contexts raises new questions about the mutual exclusivity of masculinity and femininity in shaping national identity. Kanafani’s novels are good places to explore these questions. His influential narratives provide answers that are relevant to both the specific circumstances of Palestinian national identity after 1948, and to the broader circumstances out of which territorial nationalism emerged. The struggles of men in his novels to assert national identity are played out on other Arab and on Israeli national territories, and in the presence of the political and military might of other men. Yet the implicit context in which dominant and subordinate masculinities vie to assert presence are explicitly displaced onto interactions between men and women in which women and femininity are perceived as powerful, threatening and in need of subordination. The assumptions about feminine desire and — 73 —

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amy zalman sexuality that give these interactions credence play important roles in constructing a viable Palestinian masculine identity. Kanafani’s novels are also usefully read in light of the recognition unfolding across the social sciences and humanities that nations are gendered, and that gender shapes politics ‘through men and their interests, their notions of manliness, and masculine micro and macro cultures’ (Nagel 1998: 243). In Kanafani’s literary elaboration of national identity, the limited economy of the nation is given expression on both a geographical and a psychic landscape. Conscious action and unconscious desires are mutually constituted. A close look at the interactions in Men in the Sun and All That’s Left to You reveals stories of characters whose humanity is given concrete physical expression in time and place, as men and women, and as members of national communities. They usefully elaborate the insight that the ‘discovery’ of the boundaries of the modern nation and the modern unconscious, History and psychoanalysis, unfolded in tandem,17 and of the particular resonance of these nineteenth-century claims in specific national settings. The 1967 war decisively ended the triumphal masculine return proposed by All That’s Left to You. It also punctured the romantic vision of women whose dangerous desires could be subordinated to a masculine national will. In post1967 literature, women as authors and heroes critiqued the masculine narrative of return for its failure to achieve results, and carved out narrative spaces that permitted the entry of feminine narratives as nationalist narratives.18 Nearly a generation after the men in the sun first set off for Kuwait, another fictional scene at the crossroads of masculinity and national identity takes place. This time, in Sahar Khalifeh’s 1974 novel, Wild Thorns, their paths cross at the border between Jordan and the West Bank occupied by Israel in 1967. A young Palestinian man, Usama, is returning from his work as a translator in an unnamed ‘oil country’ of the Gulf region to his family home in Jerusalem. En route to the border he chats with an older man, Abu Muhammad, who displays an expensive watch with pride to Usama, explaining that several of his sons are successfully working in Kuwait. The gift, he tells Usama, is a present for his youngest son, Khalid, ‘the last of the line’ (Khalifeh 1994: 7). Khalid, his father reports, is ‘the only one who’s been a problem. He got out of prison on bail. They’d tortured him in every part of his body, even down there.19 They loosed a dog on him that went for his genitals. He may be infertile [Æaqir, a term that usually refers to a woman].’ Usama corrects the older man: ‘You mean impotent [Æaqim, which usually refers to a man].’20 Abu Muhammad shrugs at the difference and says he’s an uneducated man. The linguistic correction, if slight, is nevertheless telling. It enfolds a narrative relating masculinity to national identity that spans the uncertain generation of Abul Khaizuran and Abu Muhammad to their descendants in the next — 74 —

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gender and the palestinian narrative of return generation. Their national sons, men like Khalid and Usama, are educated, imbued with national consciousness, and clear in their certainty that although they may be described as impotent, they are without question men. For Usama, the bodily condition of his fellow national requires no glossing over or ignoring. Instead, it is language itself that must be recut from its existing fabric (and its pre-existing associations with gender) to fit the new reality of how men’s bodies are. Khalifeh’s realignment of masculinity bears significantly on the terms of femininity. At once, her recasting forecloses the option of derogating masculinity as a kind of femininity, and opens a space in which the particularities of the female body, and its forms of potency and impotence, might claim a unique linguistic and nationalist space. The scene in Khalifeh’s novel questions the finite terms in which territorial and psychic presence have been formulated, and suggests that to constrain desire’s potential to shape human reality is, at the least, a failure of imagination.

notes 1. Ghassan Kanafani, ‘La Littérature de la Resistance en Palestine Occupée’, in Oeuvres Afro-Asiatiques 2–3 (1968), pp. 65–81. 2. See Ilham Abu Ghazaleh, ‘Gender in the Poetry of the Intifada’, in Palestinian Women of Gaza and the West Bank, Suha Sabbagh (ed.), (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 91–113. See also Mary Layoun, ‘Telling Spaces: Palestinian Women and the Engendering of National Narratives’, in Nationalisms and Sexualities, Andrew Parker et al. (eds) (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 407–23; and Suha Sabbagh, ‘Palestinian Women Writers and the Intifada’, in Social Text 22 (1989), pp. 62–78. For a contemporary account of the roles of women, see Ghazi AlKhalili, Al-Mar’a Al-Filatiniyya wa-al-Thawra: Dirasa Ijtima’iya Maydaniya Tahliliya (Beirut: PLO Research Center, 1977). 3. The first page number refers to Kilpatrick’s translation of Men in the Sun, from which quotations are taken. I have also used the transliterations of character names as they are spelled in the English translation. The second page number refers to the Arabic, which can be found in Ghassan Kanafani’s Al-Athar al-kamila: Al-Ruwayat (Mu’assasat Al-Abhath Al-Arabiyya, 1994). 4. In broad strokes, the chronology of failures against which Men in the Sun is generally read spans the period between the war of 1948 and the decade or so following it. On 29 November 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations proposed the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. Neither group found the proposal ensconced in Resolution 181 satisfactory, and Jewish-Arab military confrontations ensued over the next six months. These resulted in unequivocal losses for the Palestinian fighters. At the same time, Palestinian civilians left villages and cities in significant numbers, either through forcible expulsion or propelled by an accurate sense of the danger war held for non-combatants. Immediately following the declaration of an Israeli state on 14 May 1948, the armies of several Arab states entered the conflict, but they did not pose a successful military challenge to the

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amy zalman nascent but well-organised Israeli army. At the same time, Palestinian civilians continued to leave the country until 1949, when armistices between Israel and the Arab countries who had sent troops were signed. 5. Fadl Naqib, ‘ÆAlam Ghassan Kanafani’, in Shu’un Filastiniyya 13 (1972), pp. 198, 200. 6. Kanafani’s novel would appear at first glance to be a historical allegory, since it is unmistakably in some way ‘about’ the period around the 1948 war. But that reference is in fact not strict, as the multiple interpretations of the terms of the allegory suggest. Kanafani’s novel is more like philosophical or moral allegory than historical, designed to warn and urge his readers to consider the state of Palestinian national identity. Abul Khaizuran’s final address to the men whose corpses lay at the bottom of his truck, ‘Why didn’t you knock on the walls of the tank?’, may be taken as an appeal from the novelist, who had already arrived at the conclusion that armed resistance would be necessary in the assertion of national identity. 7. Both issues related to allegory were at the root of Frederic Jameson’s proposal that Western readers approach all Third World novels as national allegories (in Social Text 15, Fall 1986, pp. 65–88). Addressing an American audience, and using the terminology of First and Third worlds, he urged readers to reappraise the apparently naive or simplistic ‘socially realistic Third World novel’ (66). What makes this dismissive reading possible, Jameson charged, is our privileged (first worldly) distance from politics. Because we can take national and economic stability for granted, and have been able to do so for some time, we have the luxury of reading fiction as a key to our private, psychological status. First World readers therefore do not share the same assumptions, in Jameson’s view, as a Third World reading community. He offered – as a way of building that bridge between fiction and world across which the reader must travel for a meaningful reading experience – the suggestion that a conscious link between the economic and political assumptions that underwrite the First World reader’s encounter with literature constitute an interpretive strategy. Jameson went beyond proposing an interpretive method, however, but also addressed the problem of having a stable, target narrative (an extra-literary text, ‘reality’) that allegory, to be legible, requires. He offered one: Third World culture is dominated by the collective struggle for political and economic autonomy, organised primarily through the expression and experience of nationalism. He therefore suggested not only that privileged readers read Third World novels as allegories, but that Third World novels actually are national allegories, always written in necessary relation to a one public issue, ‘the experience of the collectivity’ (86). Jameson’s broadly stated proposal engaged a number of problematic assumptions, among them the idea of the essential unity of and essential difference between what he calls the ‘First’ and ‘Third’ worlds. These problems, and others, are treated eloquently in Aijaz Ahmad’s reply, ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”’ in Social Text 17 (1987), pp. 3–27. At the same time, Jameson’s intervention was a provocative challenge to the insistent transformation of non-Western fiction into ‘universal’ tales in order to make them palatable to an English-speaking audience. This is precisely the tactic of the English introduction to Men in the Sun, which proposes that: Such a close involvement as we know to have been Kanafani’s in his struggle for

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gender and the palestinian narrative of return the recognition and restitution of Palestinian rights might lead us to expect that his novels and short stories would be no more than a vehicle for the preaching of these principles, albeit in an indirect form. Part of Kanafani’s achievement lies in the fact that he avoided this pitfall, for rather than transfer experience directly to the page he reworked it to give it a profounder, universal meaning. (Hilary Kilpatrick, p. 2)

8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

Notwithstanding its excellent intentions, this kind of preface has a bleaching function. It promises the reader a clean, safe reading experience by assuring him/her no unsettling or difficult-to-digest specifics about a different culture appear in the pages to follow, and that the work is in effect safe to consume. In Jordan, Palestinians were given Jordanian citizenship. Palestinians in Israel were given Israeli citizenship. For a variety of treatments of the relationship between gender and national identity, see the collection Nationalisms and Sexualities, Andrew Parker et al. (eds), (New York: Routledge, 1992). For specific discussions of the construction of masculinity in Middle Eastern communities, see Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East, Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb (eds), (London: Saqi Books, 2000). Almost all of the essays in Imagined Masculinities deal directly or touch significantly on the relationship of gender to nationalism. Joseph Massad, ‘Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism’, in Middle East Journal 49 (1995), pp. 468–83. The woman that the errant father marries makes a striking female counterpoint to Abul Khaizuran, as she lost a leg at the thigh when Jaffa was bombed. The injury makes her an unappealing marriage partner to most men; Marwan’s father accepts the marriage in order to secure the house that comes with her. In Tawfiq Salih’s filmed version of the narrative, the woman’s prosthetic leg is shown as an eerie silhouette on a wall as she undresses for her wedding night, making the association between her injury and presumably compromised sexual function as unmistakable as Abul Khaizuran’s. The rather unsubtle rendition of specifically male castration imagined onto a female body suggests the depth at which the image of the intact male body serves as a template for imagining the communal body. At the same time, the ease with which this template is relayed in female terms and references the way a national crisis rebounds on women (by disrupting marriage) indicates how flexible and essentially indeterminate the collective psychic imagination is in relation to the bodies on which it is projected. For further discussion, see Helena Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organization: People, Power, Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Muhammad Siddiq’s reading takes account of these same characteristics of Hamid’s trek, and fruitfully suggests that these ‘illustrate the transfer of Hamid’s sexual energy from the images of his real sister and mother to the Desert.’ Siddiq sees the throwing away of the watch as the beginning of an initiation rite, in which the initiate must be isolated from the world of normal time (Siddiq, p. 32). Radwa ÆAshur views Hamid’s disposal of his watch as an act which frees him from the past, and allows him to begin to confront the present. All quotations are from Jayyusi and Reed’s translation, All That’s Left to You: A Novella and Other Stories (Austin: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of

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15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

Texas at Austin, 1990). The first page number references their translation, and the second the Arabic text throughout. Quotations from the introduction are translated by Roger Allen. For further comments on this point, see Muhammad Siddiq’s Man is A Cause, pp. 25–31; and Nedjma Khalil Habib’s al-Namudhaj al-insani fi adab Ghassan Kanafani (Beirut: Bisan li-Nashr wa-li-Tawzi’ wa-li-Tawzi’ wa-li-I’lam, 1999), pp. 51–2. This insight is forcefully explored in Anne McClintock’s Imperial leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1991). Leila Khaled’s autobiography offers one such critical voice. Others can be found in Imtithal Juwaydi’s Shajarat al-Subbar (Beirut: Dar Al-Tali’a, 1972), Egyptian author Abd Al-Rahman Sharqawi’s lyric play Watani Akka (Cairo: Dar Al-Shuruq, 1970), and Syrian writer Layla Usayran’s ÆAsafir al-Fajr (Beirut: Dar al-Tali’a, 1968). For an anthropological account of how the bodily signs of torture function in the construction of masculinity among Palestinians, see Julie Peteet’s ‘Male Gender and the Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada’ in Imagined Masculinities, op. cit. From LeGassick’s and Fernea’s translation. The Arabic can be found in Al-Subbar (Damascus: Dar Al-Jalil, 1984), p. 9.

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1 4

Darwish’s ‘Indian Speech’ as Dramatic Performance: Sacred Space and Transformation J. Kristen Urban The paradox underlying national movements based on ethnic-religious-cultural claims is that, short of a distinctly zero-sum outcome in which one group survives at the expense of the other, there is a need both for clear boundaries and for coexistence. At the level of geographic identity, concern for physical boundaries makes political sense: physically separating populations can enhance the reality of self-determination, as was the logic of the Dayton Accords in Bosnia. However, at the level of psychic and cultural identity, the drawing of clear boundaries – boundaries which distinguish us from them, and which promote group solidarity, giving it political momentum – also makes coexistence of such clearly delimited groups more difficult. Self and other become brittle constructs. It is of interest then, that a ‘national’ poet of the status of Mahmoud Darwish writes poetry that both galvanises Palestinians around the Palestinian national enterprise and provides a means by which the boundaries can be bridged, making coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis imaginable. As well, his is a poetry that reaches beyond the frontiers of Palestinian nationalism. It speaks not only to a broad literary audience, but in translation, to an audience of peace educators whose focus (in effecting peace) is on the possibilities resident within blurred boundaries. Mahmoud Darwish, the national poet of Palestine, whose people ‘chant his odes in their fields, in their schools, on their marches, and in their miserable tin shanty-towns’ (Darwish 2000: 19), taps universal concerns with identity when he explores the paradox of being Palestinian. The Palestinian question itself is riddled with paradox, the paradox of being and not-being. The British of 1917 officially defined Palestinians in negative terms when they issued the Balfour Declaration affirming that Palestine (under a future British mandate) would become a ‘national home’ for the Jewish people among the existing ‘non-Jewish communities’ – despite the fact that such communities at the time comprised 90 per cent of the population of Palestine. Negating the Palestinian presence continued with Israel’s early Zionists, whose slogan for the new state was ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’. More recently, the Peace Process, — 79 —

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j. kristen urban framed by the Oslo Accords, has required Palestinians still under military occupation and without the trappings or legitimacy of statehood, to play the role of a nation-state as a means towards achieving that very reality, while sharing the stage with an Israeli state which has spent half a century honing its skills in statecraft. Thus, in the last century, Palestinians have had to repeatedly assert the fact of their physical and political identity, living with the paradox of existing while remaining officially unrecognised. For Palestinians residing within Israel, the question of identity and the paradox surrounding it has been even more acute. What does it mean to be Palestinian if you are Israeli? Conversely, to be Israeli if you are Palestinian? Ethnocultural considerations aside, there are few answers from official political quarters to help unscramble the paradox: Israeli passports read tellingly, ‘Arab’ or ‘Jew’. Like Shammas, Mahmoud Darwish has also lived with this paradox. Born in 1942 in the Galileean village of Birweh, he fled with his mother to Lebanon in 1948 as Israeli forces closed in on the village, which they later destroyed. As Muhawi recounts in his Introduction to Memory for Forgetfulness, the family ‘stole back into the homeland, but too late to be included in the census of the Palestinian Arabs who had remained in the country’ (1995: xii). Darwish then lacked the necessary identity papers even to travel within the country, and for the decade of the 1960s he was repeatedly imprisoned and/or placed under house arrest. As the poet observed in 1974 from the vantage of exile, living with the daily consequences of this paradox had its own ironies, for at some point ‘you realize that philosophically you exist, but legally you do not’ (1995: xiii). The dialectics of this ‘present-absence’ is dealt with more fully by Muhawi in Chapter 2 of this book. Of course it is impossible to separate the poet from the man, but the fact of Darwish’s experience in living the Palestinian paradox – and, significantly, his recognition of that fact – has impacted his writing in a number of ways that reflect a blurring of boundaries. That he has been influenced by Israeli poets such as Hayim Bialik or Yehuda Amichai should not be surprising: this is part of the paradox of the Palestinian identity, and the genius of this poet. Like Bialik (Carmi 1981: 40–8), who wrote in Palestine, but before the reality of the Israeli state, Darwish has also sought to find a modern voice for the people of a statein-the-making. As with Amichai (ibid.), Darwish draws on the tensions of everyday life, juxtaposing them with memories of a shared historico-cultural heritage. Darwish reflects upon his Palestinian-Israeli identity in a documentary by Israeli film-maker Simone Bitton: The military judge who punished me for my poetry was Jewish; the woman teacher who taught me Hebrew and inspired my love for literature was Jewish; my English teacher, a stern man, was Jewish; the woman who presided over my first trial was Jewish; my first lover was Jewish, my next door neighbour was Jewish, and my political

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darwish’s ‘indian speech’ as dramatic performance comrades were Jewish. I did not look on Jews as a separate entity. From the beginning, for me, coexistence has seemed possible both psychologically and culturally. The main problem is political. (Darwish 2000: 45) [Emphasis added]

Where others might be overwhelmed by the cognitive dissonance in a Palestinian-Israeli identity, Darwish has drawn upon this to enrich his style, his language, his imagery, and the myths and symbols he employs, many of which also reside in modern Hebrew poetry: ‘What is ironic and inexplicable’, writes Munir Akash in his Introduction to The Adam of Two Edens, ‘is that Darwish’s enthusiastic Arab audience accepted these Israeli symbols and myths as an integral part of Palestinian Resistance Poetry itself!’ (Darwish 2000: 21). Perhaps not so inexplicable when the pains of the Palestinian national experience are compared with those of Jewish national history: loss of lands, culture, family and identity are shared historical realities for both. While the political has been ever-present in Darwish’s writings throughout the past thirty years, he has often (as Akash notes) drawn on ‘myths’ and other literary and cultural traditions to expand the range of his own expression. Fluent in French and English as well as his native Arabic and Hebrew, he reads constantly, fully engaged in new literary trends and movements. As well, he dips into the past, drawing upon Epic, mythic, historic, ritualistic, hymnal, divinely radiant and prophetic [traditions], as found in The Epic of Gilgamesh, Inanna, Dumuzi’s Dream, The Descent of Ishtar to the Nether World, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the Biblical Book of Jeremiah … [Hence, while hailed by Palestinians as a resistance poet], it often seems that his work stands out best when read in the context of Yeats, Saint-John Perse, the Surrealists, the Greeks, or the Hebrews. (Darwish 2000: 39)

His is a coherent eclecticism. Whether consciously or not, Darwish explores the dimensions of Palestinian identity through the incorporation of myth and tradition which speak metaphorically. Myths of lost realms, such as Adam’s expulsion from Eden, speak for the Palestinian experience – as do myths which embody life’s possibilities such as those of the Sumerian and Canaanite Moon goddesses. More recently, the American continent has provided a mythology for Darwish’s metaphors when he encountered Native American spirituality. This, coupled with the historical record of the Native American experience with the ‘West’, led him to contemplate the extent of their loss. Reflections on the meaning of historicity within this context, ‘enabled the exiled poet’s imagination to respiritualize the Palestinian universe in a healing way …’ (ibid.: 40). The narrative poem ‘Indian Speech’ (Darwish 1993: 59–84) is one outcome of this creative cross-cultural reflection. Published in 1992, it speaks not only to the universal condition of man, but metaphorically to the particular concerns of the Palestinians, concerns which reflect the reality of life under an occupation

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j. kristen urban which is becoming ever more permanent, threatening the historic reality of the Palestinian people. Harshly governed by military occupiers after 1967, Palestinians saw themselves living in a history being increasingly narrated by the West.1 For many, hopes raised during the first years of the intifada in the late 1980s were dashed with Yasir Arafat’s acceptance of the 1993 Oslo Accords. In response to the quincentennial commemoration of Columbus’s voyage to the New World, and in protest of the Oslo negotiations, Darwish wrote two narrative poems in 1992, ‘Eleven Planets Over Andalusia’2 and ‘Indian Speech’. This discussion will focus first on an English translation3 of the poem ‘Indian Speech’ which, within a narrative format, operates as a dramatic performance.4 In so doing, the performance creates empathy with two audiences through the blurring of boundaries and within the sacred space reserved for the rituals of the performance. It will argue that the poem, which employs a metaphor of the Native American experience for that of Palestinians, not only resonates with Palestinians, but is accessible to a broader audience, that of American college students who can appreciate concerns for social justice raised by this metaphor. The second part of this chapter explores the pedagogical rationale for using literature as a means to build empathy. In ‘Indian Speech’, for example, the poet is able to establish empathic connections between both his primary and secondary audiences. In the process of achieving such empathy, the boundaries between self and other become blurred, enhancing possibilities for creating understanding. Ciardi (1959) understood this in the same way that Darwish understands it, and ‘Indian Speech’ is dramatic performance at its best, for it establishes conflict in universal terms; it addresses itself to an audience, inviting participation, and it recognises the concept of ‘sacred space’, within which such conversation can occur and through which levels of empathy are created, depending upon the boundaries between poet and audience. It is a script Darwish’s audience understands. In this it must be recognised that there are, in fact, two audiences: the first (and most immediate, from the poet’s perspective) will be an audience placed within the Palestinian – and larger Arab – world; the second, and one at issue for the present purposes of pedagogy, will be from the Western world of academics. This chapter will argue that meaning for the second audience derives from their ability to understand and empathise with the meanings evoked among the poet’s more immediate audience. The conflict around which this poetic discourse devolves is universal in that it calls upon the Promethean dilemma of alienation. The ontological state of man derives from two sources: one is the spiritual essence from which he springs, and the other relates to the terrestrial domain wherein he resides. Durand (1979) describes these as the vertical or synchronic dimension, which highlights man’s metaphysical (celestial?) connections, and the horizontal or — 82 —

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darwish’s ‘indian speech’ as dramatic performance diachronic dimension, which catalogues man’s historicity as homo sapiens, biological and social man. Prometheus, in appropriating fire from the heavens to bring life and new possibilities to mankind, found himself alienated across both dimensions. Condemned by Zeus to leave the realm of the gods and chained to the rock at Mount Caucasus, he was separated from both his celestial origins and from mankind, to whom he had bequeathed material gains and ‘progress’. Alone against the rock, his liver consumed daily by predatory birds, the pain of his double alienation was excruciating – and enduring. For Darwish, this conflict between the spiritual truth (the synchronic dimension) and that of the material world (the diachronic dimension) is played out by means of a metaphor which places the spirit-centred culture of the American Indian against the dominating materialist culture of the white man. In the larger global historical setting, this is a confrontation between the colonised and the coloniser; and as a subtext, in the particularist setting, it is the confrontation between the displaced Palestinians and the West. Consider the narrator’s opening: So we are who we are as the Mississippi flows. Ours still what remains of yesterday but the color of the sky has changed, the sea to the East has changed. What is it that you want, then, white master, Lord of the horses, from those on their way to the woods of night? Sacred our pastures, our spirits high, the stars luminous words in which you can read our tale entire if you’d only lift up your eyes and gaze: Here, between water and fire we were born. And, in clouds, on the azure shore as the Judgement Day comes to pass we are reborn. Don’t slaughter the grass much, too much more, for it possesses A soul in us, that could shelter the soul of the earth. [Section 1]

From the beginning of the discourse, the imagery associated with the American Indian is that of essences: ‘sacred our pastures’, ‘spirits’, ‘stars’, ‘luminous words’, ‘here between water and fire we were born’, ‘clouds’, ‘azure shore’. Imagery associated with the white man (read: the West) on the other hand invokes (later in the poem) terrestrial images, images of plunder, dominance, material gain: ‘horse-master’, ‘your’s the iron’,5 ‘take all the gold’, ‘flaming horses’, ‘clash of steel’, ‘English guns, French wine, and Influenza’, ‘this is the iron age’, ‘here the strangers triumphed’. The wholeness of man (alternatively, the integrity of the ontological status — 83 —

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j. kristen urban of man) is not beyond possibility. Integration along both the synchronic and the diachronic axes can be trans-individual and trans-cultural: … but he [Columbus] can’t seem to believe that all men are born equal, like air and water, outside the domain of his map! That they are born the same as people in Barcelona are born, except that they happen to worship nature in everything, not only gold. [Section 2]

Yet because the white man has chosen the course of materialism and conquest, abandoning his synchronic, or essential nature, the possibility of wholeness seems at this point, remote. Further, since as human beings we are interconnected (from the point of view of the American Indian, who for Darwish lives metaphysically along the synchronic dimension), the self-destructive path of the white man spells destruction for the rest of humanity as well: Isn’t it time, stranger, for us to meet in the same age, same land strangers both who happen to meet at the tip of an abyss? We have what is ours, what you have of sky. [Section 2] Where, white master, O where are you taking my people, and yours? Into what abyss is this robot bristling with aircraft-carriers and jets carrying the earth? To what fathomless pit will you ascend? [Section 6]

This is the tragedy, the enduring pain. Resigned, the drama closes with: Have it your way. A new Rome, a technological Sparta and ideology for the insane. But we’d rather depart an age We have not made our minds to accept. [Section 6]

This is not a concern for vengeance but a recognition of historical facts – a preservation of the memories – surrounding the way in which the American Indian (and any colonised people) view their pain. It lays itself out as a bridge between the two cultures in an historical paradigm, prophesying what the destructive orientation of the West’s ‘progress’ will ultimately mean, if it continues to move forward in this fashion. The irony is that progress has not brought understanding: the achievements along the diachronic axis have not led to comparable achievements in the realm of the synchronic. Audience and Participation.6 While a contemporary Arab poet who integrates a wide variety of poetical forms, Darwish also writes for an audience still — 84 —

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darwish’s ‘indian speech’ as dramatic performance aware of its oral culture, echoing the drama of the pre-Islamic qasida. Edward Said writes: In Darwish, the personal and the public are always in an uneasy relationship, the force and passion of the former ill-suited to the tests of political correctness and policy required by the latter. But careful writer and craftsman that he is, Darwish is also very much a performing poet of a type with few equivalents in the West. He has a fiery and yet also strangely intimate style that is designed for the immediate response of a live audience … Darwish is also a wonderful technician, using the incomparably rich Arabic prosodic tradition in innovative, constantly new ways. This allows him something quite rare in modern Arabic poetry: great stylistic virtuosity combined with a chiseled and finally simple (because so refined) sense of poetic statement. (1995: 114)

His audience, then, knows what he is about.7 As the narrator of ‘Indian Speech’ is telling a story – the history of the clash of two cultures – so the audience of the poem understands this to be their story: the qasida was used to relate the history of the tribe, to recount its glories and triumphs, and it was performed with a momentum which built on the excesses of its imagery, repetitions and language.8 In ‘Indian Speech’, the images carry meaning that is understood in terms of a community that has also suffered injustice. The initial use of imagery organised denotationally around nature: ‘as the Mississippi flows’, ‘color of the sky’, ‘sacred pastures’, ‘our spirits’, ‘stars’, ‘water and fire’, works in conjunction with the connotational imagery. The total sensory suggestion of the opening passage, therefore, is one of ‘essential’ spirituality – a quality transcending the triviality of daily experience and which resists fragmentation. Set within this passage, however, are other nature images which carry a different connotational meaning: ‘Lord of the horses’, ‘don’t slaughter the grass’, ‘horse-master’, and in jarring the audience’s sensibilities, prepares them for the conflictual drama about to unfold. Other images draw on past meanings, common understandings and experiences. Columbus, in discovering the New World (like Prometheus delivering the gift of fire) also delivers destruction, as progress and change overtake cultures which once existed in balance with one another. For the Palestinian (and the larger Arabic) audience, the beginning of the end was first the Crusades and secondly Napoleon’s short-lived invasion of Egypt in 1798. Progress and technology offered by France and Great Britain (later Germany, Russia and others) led to economic exploitation and the displacement of Arabic/Islamic values and way of life (from the point of view of the colonised, here, the primary ‘audience’). Further betrayals of trust rest with the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the imposition of the Mandatory System following World War I; the implementation of the Balfour Declaration; the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 on Arab lands; Western acceptance of the outcome of the 1967 Israeli

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j. kristen urban attack on front-line Arab states (which brought about the acquisition and occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights); and the double standard evidenced in the West’s position towards Iraq and Israel in the 1990s. Repetition, utilised frequently in ‘Indian Speech’ as it is in the oral tradition generally, serves both for emphasis and to move the poem forward.9 These lines are from Section 2: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Take what you need of night but leave us a couple of stars to bury our celestial dead. Take what you want of the sea but leave us a few waves to catch some fish. Take all the gold of earth and sun but leave us the land of our names. Then go back, stranger, to resume your search for India once more.

The repetition in the first seven lines establishes the motion with a momentum that is continued through line 7; but the motion stops with line 8 (a fulcrum is positioned here), and reverses itself in the resolution of this section. Repetition also takes a more elaborate form, as in Section 3: You may sleep in the shade of our willows and like a dove begin to fly: this is what our forbearers did after all when they flew away in peace, when they returned in peace. You will lack the memory of leaving the Mediterranean, eternity’s solitude in a forest, not on the edge of a cliff; the wisdom of defeat, losing at war, a rock unbending to the rush of time’s fast river – an hour of reverie for a necessary sky of dust to ripen inside: an hour of hesitation between one path and another, this is what you lack.

Here we find the repetition and interplay of both images and ideas in a contrapuntal form that not only moves forward but in its enhanced complexity develops the intensity of the poem emotionally. The momentum and energy build as the passage continues with, ‘You will lack the memory’ and a series of phrases are appended, one against the next, and so on, until the motion stops abruptly (a fulcrum) and a prophetic voice intones: an hour of hesitation between one path and another, this is what you lack.

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darwish’s ‘indian speech’ as dramatic performance A countermotion takes over, affirming the falseness and self-destructive path of the West, which is ‘going the wrong way’, and again repetition and parallel structures accelerate the movement – with a fulcrum halting the motion before the delivery of the final line: Euripides, one day, will be lacking and also the hymns of Canaan and Babylon. Solomon’s Song of Songs for Shulamith lily of the valley that yearns: you will lack a memory, white men, to tame the horse of madness, a heart polished by rock in a flurry of violins this, and a hesitant gun, you lack. If you must kill, don’t slay other creatures that befriend us. Don’t slaughter our past. You will lack a treaty with our ghosts on sterile winter nights, a less bright sun, less full moon, for the crime to appear less glamorous on the screen. So take your time as you dismember god. [Section 3]

And finally, participation is enhanced in this performance because of the poet’s traditional role in preserving the values and ideals of his age.10 ‘You will lack a memory’ (above) is prophesying, you will no longer exist – even as historical artefact, because the memory of the past also ensures that there is a present and a future. Darwish’s audience understand this. Words have meaning and power; words outline the collective memory. He develops this notion further in Section 4 with: Winds will recite our beginning and end although our present bleeds, our days are buried in ashes of legend. We know Athens is not ours and know the color of your days from the rising smoke: Athens is not yours.

Not only are the values of the poet and his audience different from those of the white man and his progressive materialism, but an actual inversion of values has occurred for those living as the colonised: What the stranger says, is strange; he digs a well into the earth in order to bury the sky. Strange is what the stranger says! He hunts down our children, and butterflies as well. What promises to our garden, stranger, can you make? Brass flowers prettier than our own? As you wish. But do you know a deer will not approach grass that has been stained with our blood? [Section 4]

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j. kristen urban In fact, so convoluted has the set of operative values become that, to preserve themselves, the audience of ‘Indian Speech’ are faced with the dilemma of reconciling themselves to the contradiction that their noble past has somehow lived beyond itself. What then, is the point of memory? In order for us to live through out time then leave, and return: return the spirits, one by one, to her. We keep the memory of our loved ones in jars, like oil and salt – whose names we tied to the wings of waterbirds. We were the first, no ceiling to separate our blue doors from the sky, no horses to graze where our deer used to graze. No strangers to intrude on the night of our wives. Let the wind have the flute to weep for the people of this wounded place, and tomorrow weep for you. And tomorrow, weep for you. [Section 4]

In order for this drama to become a participatory dialogue between the poet and his audience, it must be understood that there is a public space dedicated to such conversation.11 The anthropological principle of sacred space suggests that from early historical times, human communities have understood the importance of ritualised performance through which, as participants, they experienced a shared power of community, the effects of which transcended time and place. At the particularist level, the meaning of this experience would rest with the degree to which empathic exchange has occurred. Levels of empathy, in turn, depend upon the perceived distance between the performer and his audience, which is also reflective of the extent to which boundaries between the two are drawn. In the present instance, the space is sacred precisely because it invites a narration of stories, stories which define the meaning of the tribe – and here, the tribe is the audience. Thus the boundaries between the performer and his audience are blurred, the level of empathy is high, and the experience resonates with a transcendent power of community. Darwish is a member of the tribe. He speaks not only with empirical credibility – having shared the Palestinian experience of suffering – but with the force of a visionary, sensitive to the universals which exist through time. In this sacred space, the one in which the poet narrates his story, the audience understands what this means. He writes in Section 5: Tending our last fires, we neglect to acknowledge your greetings: don’t write the commandments of your new god, the steely one, for us. Don’t demand a peace treaty from those

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darwish’s ‘indian speech’ as dramatic performance who are dead, none left to greet you in peace, which is nowhere to be found. Here we flourished before the onslaught of English guns, French wine, and Influenza living as we should, side by side with the people of the deer, learning our oral history by heart. We brought you tidings of innocence and daisies, but you have your god and we have ours.

The audience, knowing what has gone before – having experienced for themselves the legacy of the French and the British – are challenged, as in such recitation centuries before, to complete the poem, to transform the story of the narrator and give meaning to it for themselves. The future is in fact all but written. These seem to be men of a different race, a different ordering of humanity: boundaries are starkly drawn. Both saddened and exasperated, the narrator asks: Don’t you memorize a few lines of poetry, perhaps to make you refrain from massacre? Weren’t you of woman born? Didn’t you suckle the milk of longing to a certain mother like us? Didn’t you ever put on wings to chase the swallows as we did? [Section 5]

What is required, then, is an assessment of the present in terms of the past. For the Native American this means – within the dimensions of this story – safeguarding what is precious, what is celestial, the synchronic dimension of life: A long time will pass for our present to become past, like us. We shall go on our way, but first we will defend the trees that we wear; a bell of night, the moon we venerate over our shacks. We will defend our cavorting deer, we will defend the clay of our jars, our feathers in the wing of last songs. [Section 6]

It is in the metaphysical reality that this people will be reborn, the brash materialism of the white man ultimately destroying not only itself, but the meaning of humanity as well. In the end, Time will judge the Ends: Let’s give earth enough time to say the truth, the whole truth about you and us … about us and about you! [Section 6]

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j. kristen urban But there is an inversion in the final chapter of this story. Section 7 stands as an Epitaph, reflecting a present beyond time. The poet, ‘venerated as the protector and guarantor of honour of the tribe and a potent weapon against its enemies’ (Gibb: 29), is left – finally, it would seem – with nothing to defend. In its entirety, this section reads: In rooms you will build, the dead already sleep. Over bridges you shall construct, the dead are already passing. There are those dead who light up the night of butterflies, the dead who come at dawn to drink your tea, tranquil as on the day they were mowed down by your guns. You who are guests in this place, leave a few chairs for your hosts to read you the conditions for peace in a treaty with … the dead.

A paradox exists in this time beyond being, for it is the dead who are the only beings retaining an ontological integrity – the only beings to re-emerge from the celestial sphere, the synchronic dimension. The survivors in the diachronic dimension, lost spiritually (as in Section 2), and ‘in the shadow’s reign’, condemned to life without meaning across ‘sterile winter nights [highlighted by] a less bright sun, less full moon’ (Section 3), theirs is an existence without meaning. So in what respect is the poet here, the ‘protector and guarantor of honour of the tribe’? This performance turns on a second inversion – a fulcrum at the end of line 8 splits the final section abruptly. What follows, the final four lines, lays out what can be understood as a bleak agenda: You who are guests in this place, leave a few chairs for your hosts to read you their conditions for peace in a treaty with … the dead.

In the final scene of this historic drama, the guests are the acting hosts; but these new hosts were never guests, coming as horse-masters to command and to subdue. Caught in their Lethean slumber – a slumber from which they will never awaken – these acting hosts will have no ‘memory’, leave no trace of meaning attached to their existence. It is here, then, that the poet offers resurrection, acts as guarantor of the honour of the tribe, for by ritualising the drama in his performance, he has posited within the sacred space meaning for his tribe: ‘Our days are buried in ashes of legend,’ he says in Section 4. Theirs has been an existence that will continue to elicit meaning throughout the millennia ahead. — 90 —

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darwish’s ‘indian speech’ as dramatic performance For Columbus in 1492, the irony was that his explorations took him around the world, yet he failed to understand the meaning of his discoveries. This audience – Palestinians five hundred years later – face an exploratory agenda of their own, as they undertake to discover Palestine within the boundaries of Oslo.12 Darwish, having begun the story, twists the ending back on them, requiring them to define its meaning in terms of a future. As the spirit-hosts, that is, the diachronically ‘dead’ (lacking an historical dimension), but spiritually awakened synchronicity, in what sense do Palestinians today have relevance? What is the meaning of their future? In closing the drama by opening it, the poet has left his audience with a paradox that almost – but not quite – circles back onto itself. It is a story that his audience must complete for itself. One of the most troubling dimensions of the Palestinian struggle has been the apparent absence of good will among Western – especially American – policy makers on the question of Israel and Palestine. This chapter now turns to a discussion of how Western educators might use literature coming out of national struggles to build understanding among their students, themselves perhaps future policy makers. It is grounded in the belief that the resolution of ‘intransigent’ conflicts can be aided through the creative imaginings of the artist, which promote alternative ways of conceiving solutions. Such an approach has been advanced by Martha Nussbaum, who asserts in her book Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life that literature serves an essential role in its relation to politics: I make two claims, then, for the reader’s experience: first, that it provides insights that should play a role … in the construction of an adequate moral and political theory; second, that it develops moral capacities without which citizens will not succeed in making reality out of the normative conclusions of any moral or political theory, however excellent … novel-reading [for example] will not give us the whole story about social justice, but it can be a bridge both to a vision of justice and to the social enactment of that vision (1995: 12).

In bolstering these claims, she argues that literature enables readers ‘to acknowledge their own world and to choose more reflectively in it’ (31). Moreover, literature reflects the complexity of the lives it presents to its reader, reinforcing the necessity of exploring the non-commensurability of ‘goods’. Such insistence discourages simple utopian political solutions and suggests an approach that both focuses on freedom and leaves much room for diversity. But it is aware that freedom has material conditions and can be strangled by material inequality. In its insistent focus on these facts, it inspires compassion and the passion for justice (34).

The effect of such exploration is to conceive of the cultural other both as another (that is, as one with whom we share commonality) and as an other (that

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j. kristen urban is, as a contextualised human being). Literature facilitates this exploration by imaginatively varying different aspects of human beings and through its narrative, in drawing its readers into the decision-making processes of day-today lives. The reader finds herself engaged in a dialectic between self and other, wherein the sensibilities of self are subject to redefinition as she is exposed to alternative ways of understanding. Possibilities for self-understanding as well as understanding the cultural other are thus expanded through the creative imagination of the artist. Nussbaum’s goal is, among other things, to affect approaches to problemsolving at the level of public policy and to broaden options for governments in addressing questions of social justice.13 Rooted in Aristotelian definitions of ‘the good’, her own concern is to promote an agenda which locates ‘human flourishing’ near the top of the list of policy concerns. What is puzzling for a political scientist in this, is that the project is to be undertaken by means of re-perceiving alone, and relies wholly upon fostering a generosity of spirit among those in key decision-making capacities. This is in fact a criticism Elaine Scarry makes when she argues that the complexity of lives presented to us within novels or poems enhances difficulties in imagining the other as a contextualised human being: Presented with the huge number of characters one finds in Dickens or in Tolstoi, one must constantly strain to keep them sorted out; and of course their numbers are still tiny when compared with the number of persons to whom we are responsible in political life. (1996: 104)

It is challenging enough generously to imagine friends, let alone enemies or faceless ‘others’. Scarry asserts that, ‘The action of injuring occurs precisely because we have trouble believing in the reality of other persons’ (102). Such scepticism can be applied to peace-making approaches at the international level, like the Harvard Negotiation Project of Herbert Kelman, which has seen misperceptions and misunderstandings between Palestinians and Israelis as central to the maintenance of their conflict;14 likewise, the techniques used by Leonard Doob in Northern Ireland and Africa focused on the need to reimagine the other.15 But the generous imaginings required to promote solutions resonant with the values of social justice have been largely absent from this approach even at the scholarly level – let alone in the practical arena of politics itself. As Scarry observes, Nussbaum’s ‘cosmopolitan largesse [which] relies on the population to spontaneously and generously “imagine” other persons, and to do so on a day-by-day basis’ is incomplete, in that it ignores the overtly political aspects of the conflict, elements often themselves maintained through structural realities. Scarry’s solution is to ‘solve the problem of human “otherness” through constitutional design [which itself seeks to] eliminate altogether the inherently aversive structural position of “foreignness”’ (98), since under democratic

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darwish’s ‘indian speech’ as dramatic performance assumptions of the rule of law, all individuals stand equally before its precepts. Indeed, her concluding statement, that ‘the work accomplished by a structure of laws cannot be accomplished by a structure of sentiment: constitutions are needed to uphold cosmopolitan values’ (110), is a compelling statement for a political scientist. But who writes constitutions? Who drafts the treaties of peace? In the process of drafting the documents which lay out the precepts of a people, whose values prevail? It would seem that the one solution – Scarry’s legalism – requires the other – Nussbaum’s generous understandings. This was the dilemma addressed by the 1999 Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies (PAWSS) at Amherst College in Massachusetts.16 Kevin P. Clements, Secretary of International Alert (and the Vernon and Minnie Lynch Chair of Conflict Resolution at the Institution of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University), argued that it is critical for students to come away from their classrooms both energised and carrying visions of themselves as peacemakers, ‘integrated beings in a world capable of integration’. His ‘Radical Pedagogy’ highlighted four challenges to American professors. First we – and by extension, our students – must become aware of what affects our world-view. To understand our own realities and what defines us as Americans in an interdependent world requires that we ‘immerse ourselves in other realities … we must engage in empathy. [For example], what does it mean to be a Palestinian now, isolated in peace and identified by fragmentation?’ Second, it is essential to develop a radical empathy in our students to ensure that new policies reflecting new visions will arise. Third, fulfilling (1) and (2) requires a creative estrangement: that is, we must ourselves become discontent – alienated – to find the motivation for the implementation of a transformative process. It is only in the throes of alienation that we are forced to re-think, re-frame, and to become genuinely creative problem-solvers. Fourth (and finally), we and our students must engage in what Clements calls ‘prophetic poem-making’: we need to develop new metaphors to express our identities – and thence, behaviours – within the global commons. If the United States is to assume a leadership role globally, ‘it must place itself in the shoes of those who have no hope of ever becoming a global leader, and to examine what is therefore required to build a sustainable peace’, beginning with the examination of how situations today characterised by violence and fear can be reconciled with principles of social justice while participatory democracy (itself destabilising!) takes root. As educators of our future policy makers (changeagents), we must undertake this project at all levels: within our towns, our states, and finally, throughout the world. Darwish’s ‘Indian Speech’ is exemplary of how an engagement with poetry can work towards these ends. It is important to realise that for this particular poem there are two audiences to the poetic performance – Darwish’s primary — 93 —

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j. kristen urban (Palestinian and Arab) audience and a secondary (Western, principally academic) audience – and that meaning for the secondary audience will rest with its ability to understand and empathise with the meanings evoked among the poet’s primary audience. This necessitates the reader’s willingness to view the narration through alternate lenses and to begin to reflect upon new understandings of both self and other, a feat which will ultimately require the reader to view self-as-other, if Clements’ call to ‘prophetic poem-making’ is taken seriously. It also necessitates an acknowledgement of the poet’s role in facilitating possibilities for transformation within his audience. For the remainder of this analysis I will acknowledge (in the first person) that I belong to Darwish’s secondary audience (Western, academic), and that my comments reflect the way I would use ‘Indian Speech’ pedagogically. My students are generally American Political Science/International Studies majors. In the manner of Nussbaum’s cosmopolitanism (and at the risk of fulfilling Scarry’s objections that literature often further complicates our understanding of reality!), this poet presents his secondary audience with a nest of lenses that call up a number of others. First, he speaks with the voice of a Native American (albeit, a generalised, romanticised voice), providing us with his view of that other, a view with which many in this (Western) audience will likely have empathy from the outset of the narration. Second, in this voice he presents the other responsible for the demise of the Native American culture/identity, that ‘other’ being Columbus, the West – indeed, ourselves. So the initial dialogue of this performance between the poet and his secondary audience (us) is one that makes us uncomfortable: viewing self-as-other is no less disturbing than being asked to understand other-as-self. But this particular story is one we have heard before, and does not at this point qualify as engendering the ‘creative estrangement’ called for by Clements, an estrangement necessary to provoke radical change. Besides, this story happened in the ‘past’, and therefore requires no real effort from us now; moreover, the poet himself is – for us – an other talking about a story alien to himself (in part, our story), so while we feel genuine sadness (even empathy) by this accounting of our past, we can afford to be somewhat dismissive as we read at this level. We realise there can be few – if any – overt policy implications for us here. But a second dialogue in this performance takes over when the reader becomes aware that the Native American-Columbus narrative is a metaphor for the plight of Palestinians, a people whose culture and identity have been challenged since the turn of this century. In this dialogue, the secondary audience (again, ourselves) find themselves more culpable: in the first place, the Peace Process (the Oslo Accords) is occurring in the present, so there is the possibility of acting meaningfully to write a new ending to the story; in the second place, the United States bears significant responsibility for its role as less-than-honest — 94 —

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darwish’s ‘indian speech’ as dramatic performance broker in designing such a peace. Finally, the poet’s ‘legitimacy’ to speak to this issue is greatly strengthened, since this is his story. For us then – American students of international politics – this does become a traumatic encounter. We find ourselves not only discontent, but alienated from values we formerly espoused. In Clements’ radical pedagogy, by ‘immersing ourselves in other realities’ we have begun the process of understanding our world-view, which itself opens the way for replacing such a view with the necessity of developing a new vision. This is no small step: coming to acknowledge that justice is a crucial – yet absent – part of the Palestinian-Israeli peace under negotiation is an extraordinary admission. Policy implications here are immanent. Such a transformation rests with the abilities of the poet-as-performer to narrate his story compellingly, and with his ability to utilise the space dedicated to such performance in ways that diminish boundaries between himself and his audience, thereby enhancing possibilities for empathy. In the present instance, and with regard to Darwish’s secondary audience (ourselves), this was achieved in part through the use of the Native American-Columbus narrative. Our own reflections upon such actions in our past predispose us to an empathic response and an acceptance of blurred boundaries. But in the tradition of the qasida, the poet is ‘venerated as the protector and guarantor of honour of the tribe and a potent weapon against its enemies’ (Gibb: 29). It is through his stories, ritualised in performance, that tribal history defines meaning for the tribe; it is within the sacred space dedicated to such conversation that the audience – his tribe – is challenged to complete the poem for themselves, transforming his story in ways that bring meaning to themselves. Put another way, the question arises, how does the poet/performer diminish the boundaries between himself and us (his Western audience) to such an extent that we also come to complete the story for ourselves, in transformative ways? It is clear that we are not of his tribe. Part of the answer lies with the universality of the conflict he presents. On one level, this involves the question of national identity, which resonates loudly with any audience. But Darwish goes beyond this to explore the material and spiritual elements that define each of us, individually, as well as along our ‘national’ dimensions. In this exploration, we understand that justice in any setting will address needs beyond the physical/material definitions of a people: that identity itself is surely grounded in the metaphysical. Elements of cosmopolitanism? Perhaps, but also a respect for the other as an other, having a distinct historicity, and recognising the dialectic inherent in describing the question of human identity. It is in fact by appealing to our shared humanity that Darwish is successful in drawing outsiders into this sacred space with him: indeed, it is here that we — 95 —

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j. kristen urban become part of his tribe. Yes, we do understand that ‘all men are born equal, like air and water,/ outside the domain of this map’ [Section 2]; we have all memorised ‘a few lines of poetry’, and find art to be transformative in our lives; we are all ‘of woman born’; and we too can recall that we have chased swallows with abandon [all from Section 5]. We are swept into the acknowledgement that in the recounting of this history, we – both the poet’s audiences – have lost enormously through the pursuit of our narrowly defined identities, our predilections with either the material or the spiritual, our inadvertent retreat from an appreciation for the holistic. Hence, we find in the end that we share in Darwish’s deep sadness for the way the story unfolds – and we want to somehow act in ways to change its ending. Through his performance, the poet has empowered us to become ‘prophetic poem-makers’, and by means of the experience we are becoming – in Clements’ words – ‘integrated beings in a world capable of integration’,

notes 1. For discussions of other Palestinian and Arab writers addressing the question of Palestine, see: Salma Khadra Jayyusi (ed.), Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); M. M. Badawi (ed.), Modern Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Denys Johnson-Davies (trans.), Modern Arabic Short Stories (London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Reprint, London: Heinemann, 1978); Mohammad Shaheen (ed.), The Modern Arabic Short Story (London: Macmillan Press, 1989); Issa J. Boullata (ed.), Modern Arabic Poets, 1950–1975 (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1976); Issa Boullata (ed.), Critical Perspectives in Modern Arabic Literature (Colorado Springs, CO: Three Continents Press, 1980); Issa Boullata (ed.), Tradition and Modernity in Arabic Literature (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1997); Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction (Contemporary Issues in the Middle East) (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994); Roger Allen, Modern Arabic Literature (New York: F. Ungar Books, 1987); Abdelwahab M. Elmessiri and Kamal Boullata (eds), A Land of Stone and Thyme: An Anthology of Palestinian Short Stories (North Hampton, MA: Interlink Publishing Group, 1998). 2. Edward Said, ‘On Mahmoud Darwish’, Grand Street 48, pp. 112–15. See Said’s ‘Introduction’ for a brief discussion of ‘Eleven Stars Over Andalusia’. 3. This author realises that working with translations is operating in a literary minefield. It is for that reason that in discussing the English translation of this poem, I have focused principally on ideas and imagery in an effort to minimise the methodological ‘damage’, though certainly distortions resulting from ‘voice’ are concerns to which I cannot speak. 4. The assumption here is that all poetry is at its heart performative, part of the power resident within poetry being the tension between the written and the oral. As Charlotte I. Lee and Timothy Gura explain in their hallmark text on performance, Oral Interpretation: Sixth Edition (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), ‘one may

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

say that poetry is the particular province of the oral interpreter, because it reaches its ultimate objective only when it is read aloud’ (323). Recall Prometheus: he brings fire, which in turn fosters growth, development and progress, here symbolised by ‘iron’. One need not go back to the tradition of the qasida to understand the dynamic relationship between poet and audience. Indeed, as Ronald J. Pelias writes in Performance Studies: The Interpretation of Aesthetic Texts (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1982), ‘performance, like all communication events, is a complex process calling upon the participants’ interpretive and behavioural skills’ (15). Performance, understood more generally, also requires that members of the audience ‘fill in, complete, or put flesh upon utterances as they create meaning’ (145); in this, it builds upon ‘a shared understanding of how language typically functions as [members of the audience] construct the meaning of events’ (144). Originally panegyrics, the complex odes or qasidas which appeared suddenly around 550 ce across north Arabia, pitted tribe against tribe in poetic tournaments which took on the aura of battle. The ultimate objective of the tribal poet in such contests was, within the confines of a strict poetic form, to recast exploits of the tribe, lavishing the narration with embellishments which were woven around a specific theme, and to deliver this ‘history’ in so grandiose a manner as to surpass all competitors (Reynold A. Nicholson, A History of the Arabs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 76ff). It is obvious that the poet’s delivery and personality were not insignificant factors. Such performance, relying as it does upon hyperbole, represents the heights of an oral tradition. Indeed, ‘the whole [art of the qasida] lies in the untranslatable manner of saying it’ (H. A. R. Gibb, Arabic Literature: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 21). Darwish, a distinctly modern Arab poet, utilises the modern free verse form, ignoring the rigid rules of rhyme, meter and form imposed on the pre-Islamic odes, but (whether purposively or instinctively) he draws upon a tradition of orality inherent in the older form. The manner of the telling, as in oral tradition generally, involved repetition of themes and ideas, the idealisation of portrayals both in content and expression, and the drawing of vivid and concrete images which carried with them the values and ideas of the age itself. In the truest sense of the word, the ancient ode was a performance, and as such the poet was engaged in a dialogue with his audience. If he were successful, he would stimulate the audience to grasp the ‘hints and illusions’ which he supplied during his performance, therein enabling them ‘to complete his portrait of thought for themselves’ [Gibb: 26]. The poet thus offered his audience the power of transformation: to begin with a given reality and then to complete the story – or to transform the telling of the events – in ways that would deliver meaning for themselves. Admittedly, some of the poet’s power came from the belief that words had power. The pre-Islamic Arabs, believing that stories arose under the inspiration of the jinn, heavenly beings, concluded that words in and of themselves retained ancient mystical and magical powers. Words in oral cultures in general have power because they are associated with motion. Words are accompanied by breath, by movement of air, by a physicality that is absent in understandings of text-based cultures. For oral peoples, sound implies the presence of a living, moving being – or some natural force

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

– and understanding of words distinctly different for text-based cultures, wherein words are static symbols printed upon a page. (See Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982.)) Orality itself is by nature conservative, upholding traditional values and aesthetic standards because it relies so heavily upon repetition and stylisation: structures that are easy to remember and re-tell in the absence of written ‘cues’. In upholding traditional values and aesthetic standards of his culture, however, the poet-asperformer was also in the unique position of transmitting these values and standards to the next generation, and in so doing, he gave them contextual meaning. The process of narration being a process of naming (a thing, an event, an experience), the narrator posits meaning; in preserving these ‘tribal memories’, he is preserving the collective memory of the past. Moreover, in defining the past, he is giving meaning to the present and bringing a sense of continuity to what otherwise would have been an inevitable present. (Again, see Ong, note 7 above, for a richer discussion of oral tradition.) Again, as in note 3 above, see Pelias for discussions of the relationship between audience and performer. Of particular interest here would be the sections relating to ‘Exploring the Aesthetic Communication of Others’ (47–99) and ‘The Performative and Evaluative Roles of the Audience’ (141–67) See, for example, publications from the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine (Washington, DC), especially ‘The Palestine National Authority: A Critical Appraisal’ (May 1995); ‘Beyond Rhetoric: Perspectives on a Negotiated Settlement in Palestine’ (June 1996); ‘Honest Broker? US Policy and the Middle East Peace Process’ (April 1997); ‘The Legitimacy of Resistance: Options for Palestinian Survival’ (December 1998); and ‘May 4, 1999: Implications of Declaring the State’ (March 1999). Nussbaum has addressed such questions in numerous venues: the Alexander Rosenthal Lectures for 1991 at Northwestern University Law School; the Hanna Lectures at Hamline University; the Arthur Leff Fellow’s Lectures at the Yale University Law School; and the Donnelan Lectures at Trinity College in Dublin. In 1994 she was visiting professor for a course, Law and Literature, at the law school of the University of Chicago. Finally, from 1986–93, she was a consultant at the World Institute for Development Economics Research in Helsinki. As co-director with economist Amartya Sen, she helped direct ‘a project on quality of life assessment in developing countries. Our project was to show how debates in philosophy – about cultural relativism and anti-relativism, about utilitarianism and its strengths and weaknesses – were relevant to the work of policy makers as they attempt to find ways of measuring and comparing that elusive thing, “the quality of life,” in a nation’ [Nussbaum: xv]. I am thinking here especially of work undertaken by Herbert C. Kelman in discussions between Palestinians and Israelis, and exemplified through articles such as: ‘Creating Conditions for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations’, Journal of Conflict Resolution (1986) 26: 39–75; ‘Overcoming Barriers to Negotiation of the IsraeliPalestinian Conflict,’ Journal of Palestine Studies (1986) 16: 13–28; and ‘Acknowledging the Other’s Nationhood: How to Create a Momentum for the Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations’, Journal of Palestine Studies (1992) 22: 18–38.

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darwish’s ‘indian speech’ as dramatic performance 15. For example, Leonard W. Doob, ‘The Belfast Workshop: An Application of Group Techniques to a Destructive Conflict’, Journal of Conflict Resolution (1989) 33: 676– 99; and earlier work by Doob and William J. Foltz, Resolving Conflict in Africa: The Fermeda Workshop (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). 16. The 1999 Summer Faculty Institute, ‘Violent Conflict in the 21st Century: Causes, Dynamics, and Prevention’, was held on 14–18 June at Amherst College, and was sponsored by the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies. In addition to disseminating information and stimulating interest in interdisciplinary research approaches more sensitive to peace making, it was a primary concern of this institute (which brought together some fifty academics – and a wide range of global policy makers as speakers) to conclude with commitments to address pedagogy. This concern is perhaps best reflected in the question, ‘How do we as scholars and teachers in the field of international relations (and related disciplines), facilitate the exploration of values related to peace amongst our students and thereby participate in fostering a generation of policy makers more responsive to creating a sustainable global peace?’

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1 5

Israeli Jewish Nation Building and Hebrew Translations of Arabic Literature Hannah Amit-Kochavi Literature is a highly effective vehicle of expressing national energies, conflicts and aspirations. Literary translation may help to get them across to another nation where they will be received and interpreted according to the state of political and inter-cultural contacts between source and target literatures at the time when a particular translation is made and published. In fact, it is precisely the nature of these contacts that rules two complementary elements critical to both the creation and reception of literary translations. It is responsible for answering, first the question of whether a particular text is to be translated at all, and if so – why, by whom, where it will be published – and next, the question of how it will be received by target readers – whether ignored, praised or rejected. The present chapter will try to answer these questions with regard to two important segments of translation, of both classical and modern Arabic literature into Hebrew, representing two opposite poles from the advent of Zionism in Palestine to the present day (1868–2005). The first pole demonstrates the way translations from Arabic into Hebrew were used to help consolidate Jewish identity during the earliest stage of Jewish nation building in Palestine (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). The second demonstrates the earliest stage of recognition of the Palestinian national identity by Israeli Jewish culture (1970). Thus the two politically opposed sides of the Jewish (later Israeli)-Arab conflict in Palestine found within the same literary system some support for their respective national claims of their right to exist, though separated by almost a century and under completely different political circumstances. My data draw on a comprehensive bibliography (collected by me) comprising over seven thousand translated items, as well as book reviews of translations of Arabic literature published in literary supplements of Hebrew dailies and weeklies, as well as literary magazines. The theory applied here is a modified combination of the work of two Israeli translation scholars, Itamar Even Zohar and Gideon Toury, both of Tel Aviv University. Even Zohar’s polysystem theory (Even Zohar 1990, 1997) may be used to describe the constant struggle of foreign literatures, among other cultural powers, to enter recipient cultures through translation. The target literature is described by Even Zohar as one of many systems (or, metaphorically speaking, — 100 —

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israeli jewish nation building circles) that combine together to form a cultural polysystem. Each of these systems, as well as the polysystem itself, has a centre, where more prestigious activity takes place and where cultural influence may be exerted, and a periphery, from which people, institutions and powers active within the system constantly try to advance towards the centre. At the same time similar elements are constantly pushed away from the centre. All of this incessant activity is effected through the influence of cultural, political and financial powers that may act separately or jointly. Translation, according to Even Zohar, is often used to fill generic, stylistic and intellectual voids within the recipient system. Thus the recipient or target culture may use translation for its own ends, absorbing foreign literature or even feeding upon it where it cannot provide for itself out of its own resources. In the present chapter Hebrew culture serves as the polysystem, Hebrew literature is one of its systems, literary translation is a sub-system of Hebrew literature, while literary translation from Arabic into Hebrew is an independent segment of that sub-system, namely the smallest circle of all. Even Zohar, then, draws a rather Darwinistic picture of survival of the fittest and, to use Theo Hermans’ term (1985), the manipulation of literature through translation. Whereas polysystem theory draws a picture of the playground and the rules of the game of literary translation, Toury’s norm theory (1980, 1995, 1998) describes the way this game is played. He defines two kinds of translation norms – preliminary norms and operational norms. The first kind, dealing with translation policy and directness of translation (Toury 1995: 58), will be applied and elaborated in my discussion of why and how translated Arabic texts were used to uphold both Jewish and Palestinian nation building. The second kind, operational norms (ibid.: 58–60), dealing with actual translation performance in terms of text segmentation, textlinguistic properties and source text–target text equivalence, are beyond the scope of the present chapter that looks at literary translations as agents acting within a system, describing the way they have acted within the target culture rather than how they were performed as linguistic and textual entities. In order to make the final part of my discussion possible, I suggest that I add a third new translation norm category which I call ‘reaction norms’ to Toury’s first two. Reaction norms reflect the ways translations are either accepted or rejected by the target culture and may be deduced out of the only overt expression of target culture reaction as reflected by written reviews of the translations published in the journalistic slots allotted to them by the target culture. Any discussion of literature and nationalism in the context of translations of Arabic literature into Hebrew must take into consideration that Jews and Arabs in the Middle East each have their own national identity opposed to the other’s. Thus the national aspirations of the Jews in Palestine as represented by early — 101 —

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hannah amit-kochavi official Zionism saw Palestine as the once historical, now revived homeland of the Jewish people exclusively allocated by the biblical God to the sons of Abraham’s younger son Isaac. This view completely excluded the Arabs, sons of Abraham’s older son Ishmael, whose presence as natives of the land was either ignored by the Jews, romantically idealised or described as an imminent physical and psychological threat to them. Later separation between the two communities as the result of wars and the mass evacuation of most Palestinian Arabs from their homeland in 1948 turned the Arabs as a whole, for most Israelis, into remote enemies. Numerous studies in such fields as history (Gorny 1985; Morris 1991), sociology (Horrowitz and Lisak 1986), psychology (Lieblich 1982), history of literature (Shaqed 1977, 1983a, 1983b, 1988, 1993), art (Zalmona and Manor-Friedman 1998), the theatre (Orian 1996) and cinema (Shohat 1991) amply support this sad picture. Arab nationalism, in turn, totally rejected the Jewish (later, Israeli) presence as foreign and alien in the Middle East. Only in recent years, most notably since the Oslo Agreement in 1993, have both sides begun to realise that mutual recognition and consequent peace making may contribute to the respective well-being and prosperity of both. This harsh political background raises a number of grave questions – why, then, would Israeli Jewish culture consider the translation of Arabic literature, representing an enemy nation’s life and aspirations, at all, and how would it receive the translated works? Why should that culture, dedicated to its own nation building and its own grave problems of ever-changing national identity, spend effort, time and money on recognising, perhaps promoting, the nationality of its gravest enemies through the translation of their literature? The answer to these questions is extremely complex and seemingly selfcontradictory. In fact, the very same political forces that have made translations of Arabic literature into Hebrew scant and marginal (so far thirty-three novels, thirty-three plays and fifty-seven anthologies out of over seven thousand translated titles) have simultaneously worked in the opposite direction. It was those few institutions and individuals that thought that Israeli Jewish nationalism must and can include the Arab presence to some extent that strove to translate Arabic literature as a depiction of the unrecognised and unfamiliar neighbour and out of their ardent wish for peace and coexistence. Translations from Arabic into Hebrew were by and large not felt by the recipient Hebrew culture to fulfil a ‘real’ need, unlike texts from other modern literatures such as those from Russian and American cultures that have served it as models for imitation (Even Zohar 1990). We may therefore say that Hebrew culture had to be lured into accepting translations from Arabic. This partially accounts for the first preliminary norm of choosing Arabic texts of high literary quality by writers occupying prestigious positions in the source literature. — 102 —

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israeli jewish nation building Translators and anthologists thus often presented their own translations in prefaces, afterwords and media interviews as ‘the best possible choice’ out of texts written during a certain literary period. This predominant norm is followed by two others – an academic one and a political-national one. All three were often applied together, particularly since the few main figures active in ArabicHebrew literary translation were often involved in the Israeli academic system where the high quality norm has prevailed. At university level this norm has been applied in the choice of texts to be taught and researched since the establishment of the Oriental Studies Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1926 up to the present. The academic norm has dictated the translation of both classical and modern Arabic works either taught as part of the academic curriculum or serving as the object of study by academic scholars. This, for example, combined with the source-language quality norm, mainly accounts for the fact that eleven Arabic novels out of a total of thirty-three translated into Hebrew have been novels by Naguib Mahfuz.1 The last preliminary norm, the political-national norm that sometimes contradicts the former ones, has dictated preference for particular Arabic literatures. Later discussion in the present chapter will demonstrate the interaction of all preliminary norms as applied to two prominent cases. During the earliest phase of Zionist Jewish nation building in Palestine, Zionism sought to build up a new Jewish identity replacing the miserable diaspora Jew with a brave new one. This objective was surprisingly promoted through selective translations of classical Arabic poetry with clear preference for the Hamasah [bravery] genre that depicts such personal qualities as valour, courage and undaunted devotion to one’s tribe. Thus the ancient brave Arab depicted by that poetry was chosen as a model to be imitated by the modern brave Jew. Most of these translations were published in Luah Eretz Yisrael [The Palestine Almanac], a periodical published in Jerusalem (1896–1916) by publisher-scholar Avraham Moshe Lunz (1854–1918). It included various scholarly texts and reports for the small Hebrew readership in Palestine and Eastern Europe that served, at the time, as the cultural centre of the young revived Hebrew culture as well as that of Zionist activity. The Luah was intended to encourage Jewish national aspirations through reports of current Zionist achievements, articles reporting archeological and historical discoveries, with an emphasis on the old-new connection between the Jewish nation and its land and literary texts. These included ancient Jewish legends about holy sites in Palestine as well as Arabic texts, both folk tales and Jahili poetry. Strange as it may seem, the same practice was followed in daily life where Russian Jewish immigrants used the native Arabs as a practical model (Even Zohar 1986), adapting Arab clothes (such as the kufiyyah gown and Æabah cloak), food (such as Arab bread and coffee, olive oil and olives), work instruments (such as the — 103 —

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hannah amit-kochavi wooden plough), weapons (such as the gun, the sword and the shibriyyah dagger) and social values (such as courage and hospitality). Avraham Shalom Yehezkel Yahuda (1877–1951), a Jerusalem-born scholar of ancient Arabic poetry, wrote in his preface to Nedivei ve Giborei ÆArav [Arab noblemen and heroes], a collection of translated ancient Arabic poetry he published in the Luah: Hebrew readers are sure to enjoy learning the ways of the Arab people, their customs and habits since they became a single people upon the earth … for they were much like those of our ancestors in manner, habit and generosity, feeding the hungry and faithfully defending their neighbour and those seeking shelter in their tents … at the time when they were still peacefully sitting upon their land. Hebrew readers may further rejoice to learn that many of our brethren, the children of Israel, then peacefully lived among the Arabs … and that they, too, were no inferior to the Arabs, for like them they begot such great noblemen as ÆAdayah and Shmuel [alSamaw’al]2 his son who dedicated their entire lives to do good to their neighbours as well as to the people amongst whom they were living, that out of them, too, sprang up some heroes, and that they too made themselves a great name in the history of the Arabs though their ventures, faith, bravery and poetry. (Luah 1986: 89–90)

This sentimental elaboration of the figure of the single known pre-Islamic Jewish Arabic poet overtly advocates the Arab model to be imitated while covertly propagating coexistence between the two nations on the basis of a presumed shared glorious past. Arabic literatures, to use Ami Elad-Bouskila’s definition (1999: 3–8), are hierarchically graded both chronologically and by quality. Egyptian literature is the earliest and most prolific Arabic literature, while Palestinian literature is the youngest and weakest in all genres except poetry. The Hebrew translated inventory, however, while retaining quantitive Egyptian priority, also demonstrates preference for Palestinian literature from both the Occupied Territories and Israel, in clear contrast to its relative scantness and weakness. This has been true since the 1970s, which marked a change in the attitude of Israeli Jews towards the Palestinian people. Between 1948 and 1967 Palestinians were the absent ‘other’ and Arab refugees were referred to by Israeli Jewish press, radio and official authorities as ‘infiltrators’, and later as ‘terrorists’. Israeli Arabs were metaphorically seen as present-absentees (Grossmann 1992) or subtenants rather than fully fledged citizens (Benziman and Mansour 1992), since Israel kept its Arab population under confining military government (1948–64). All marks of Palestinian national identity, including literature, were labelled as ‘dangerous’ and ‘a threat to state security’. The earliest translations of poems by Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim were therefore made by and for governmental bodies in charge of so-called ‘Arab affairs’. Some of these ‘dangerous’ materials were later published as part of studies of Israeli Arab literature in Hamizrah he-Hadash [New Orient], an academic publication of the

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israeli jewish nation building Hebrew University of Jerusalem, since the closed academic milieu was considered as trustworthy of such materials that the general readership could not be exposed to. It took more than thirty years for two collections of Darwish’s poetry to be translated, published and received as normal literary texts. By this time translations of more than six hundred of his poems had been individually published in literary newspaper sections and magazines, and yet a number of publishing houses still considered the publication of a collection of them as unsuitable, due to Darwish’s affiliation with PLO cultural institutions. The 1967 war partially changed this attitude – the euphoria that followed Israeli victory over the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan was eventually followed by a slow but steady realisation that those Palestinian Arabs who had conveniently turned since 1948 into the abstract ‘refugee problem’ were, in fact, real people living in the now Israeli Occupied Territories. This aroused a growing interest in both newly occupied Palestinians and their Israeli Arab counterparts largely ignored so far. The earliest fruit of this changed attitude was the publication by Shimon Ballas,3 Hebrew writer and scholar, of two complementary volumes in the same year, 1970 – an anthology of Palestinian Stories and a Hebrew version of his doctoral thesis, Arabic Literature under the Shadow of War, that included hundreds of translated fragments of literary works. In the preface to his anthology Ballas expressed his political opinions, extremely brave at the time, as follows: Through the present collection I have attempted to draw a representative picture of Palestinian literature. I did not seek solely to find the best of what there is but also [sought to include here] the best of the representative short stories. I was therefore forced to include some stories of mediocre quality or even much less. I wish to make Hebrew readers familiar with the mind, life and thought of the Palestinian who, although still separated from us by walls of estrangement and enmity, is our partner over this land and under the blue sky above. (Ballas 1970: 18) [Emphasis mine]

Preliminary norms, then, served to promote the two conflicting nationalities at two different points in time. Reaction norms can only be studied with regard to the second phase since there were no literary reviews in the Luah, as at the time it was published Hebrew cultural activity in Palestine was at its initial stage and did not possess the full inventory of the instruments necessary for fully fledged literary activity. Reviews of translations from Arabic into Hebrew have been common since the publication of the first translations from modern Arabic literature.4 Although they usually refer to full-length texts such as novels, anthologies, collections and plays, all of which constitute only about two per cent of the translated inventory, they are important as the only available tool for studying readers’ reactions to the translations. Like preliminary norms, reaction norms, too, may vary. In spite of the gradual accumulation of a certain body of translations, some — 105 —

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hannah amit-kochavi of which was easily available to readers, Israeli Hebrew culture has by and large remained ignorant of Arabic culture and literature. The most current reaction to the translations expressed in reviews has therefore consistently been surprise, almost always at the very existence of Arabic literature, and sometimes also at its unexpected high quality. It should be noted that critics had obviously internalised the preliminary norm stating that translations of Arabic literature into Hebrew ought to be made for political and ideological reasons. Reaction norms therefore include a seeming contradiction – requiring high quality of the translations and waiving this demand. The latter was justified by the claim that the introduction of Arabic literary works into Hebrew culture was not necessarily a beneficial reading experience but should be seen as a moral duty. It was meant to relieve Israeli Jewish conscience of its guilt of ignorance of the Arabs, in the naive belief that literature directly reflected real life and that socalled Arab nature and ways of life could be learnt through reading translated literature. The contradiction between the call for quality and its rejection represents the opposition between two Israeli Jewish cultural points of view – seeing Arabs and their culture as equal to other nations’ and fit to compete with Hebrew readers’ time and money, or seeing them as an inferior oriental culture. The latter view was often expressed in well-intentioned but condescending terms. The quality requirement was made mostly by those personally active in the field of Arabic-Hebrew translation as translators, initiators and editors, while the condescending view was mostly expressed by critics unfamiliar with Arabic, who also invariably wrote reviews of original Hebrew literary works as well as translations from other languages. A typical example is Heda Boshes, a minor Hebrew writer and journalist, who repeatedly admitted her total ignorance of Arabic language and literature in her reviews, all the while heartily apologising for it. Thus in a review of a short story anthology translated from Arabic (1971) she commented: Reading this collection is extremely disappointing from the literary point of view. This is literature in the most superficial sense of the word. And yet it is a collection worth reading, despite the limitations demonstrated by its writers and its unexciting level, in order to at least partially understand Arab writers’ mentality. (Haaretz, 16 January 1972)

Surprise and admiration were expressed at the few cases judged to be good literary texts and/or translations. Hebrew translations made by Israeli Arabs (most notably Anton Shammas’ translations of Imil Habibi’s novels in general and The Pessoptimist in particular) met with special acclaim. This too reveals covert prejudice, as wonder was expressed at an (Israeli) Arab’s perfect mastery of Hebrew style, as if this were some sort of extraordinary miracle. Finally, an overtly political parameter was used in reviews of translations — 106 —

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israeli jewish nation building from Arabic to an extent unequalled in reviews of translations from any other language, due to the special nature of the political background and Jewish-Arab contacts elaborated earlier. Since the vast majority of the critics were keen on getting to know Arabic literature and culture despite their professed ignorance of it, and as most of the reviews were published by newspapers and magazines that favoured peace and mutual understanding, most of those reviews that demonstrated a political overtone were positive rather than negative with regard to the political aspects of the translated texts. Israeli Jewish critics often expressed extreme sensitivity to the depiction of Israel and Jews by Arabic literature, consequently exaggerating the importance of that element in the works under discussion. This was equally true of the negative depiction of Israeli and Jewish figures (like the unfavourable description of a fat Jewish woman in the novel I will Live by the Lebanese writer Laylah Ba’albaki where that character is only mentioned in passing) and of its positive opposite. The most prominent positive example is the expression of a favourable view of Israelis in Palestinian writer Sahar Khaleefah’s novel The Sunflower. This happens on two different occasions – first a Palestinian woman journalist expresses her wish to meet and talk with Israeli Jewish intellectuals, then a suggestion of Arab-Jewish cooperation in publishing a journal is made at a Jerusalem editorial board meeting in the same novel. What reviews of that novel completely ignored was its end, where Sa’adiyyah, a Palestinian woman of Nablus whose long dreamed of house was demolished by Israeli soldiers, encourages her young son to throw stones at them by way of protest. An even more obvious example of Israeli Jewish self-centredness is the reaction of Israeli critics to literary works that depict the plight and suffering of the Palestinians by assimilating and comparing it to the suffering of the Jews. Reactions to Imil Habibi’s The Pessoptimist in Hebrew and to its performance on the stage by Muhammad Bakri are a case in point. Thus theatre critic Havah Novak wrote after watching the Hebrew version: Paradoxical as this may seem, both the play and its characters reminded me of Sholem Aleichem [Jewish writer]’s characters, those pessoptimists who accept their fate with one eye crying and the other laughing, those who must survive any catastrophe since a worse one may soon follow. It is precisely this parallelism that made watching this play an extremely heavy and ambivalent experience for me.

After referring to the political dilemma of the double right of Palestinians and Jews, she concluded by saying that ‘The last word will be said by history. Meanwhile we’ll try to go on living with our conscience and truth as well as we can. Watching this play may prove helpful’ (Davar, 12 December 1986). Israeli paranoia vis-à-vis the Arabs (another typical Israeli emotional reaction) is openly reflected in a review by Shimon Zandbank, professor of comparative literature at the Hebrew University and acclaimed translator of the Hebrew — 107 —

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hannah amit-kochavi version of Palestinian writer and political leader Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Men in the Sun (see Amy Zalman’s chapter in this collection). This famous short piece of prose describes the desperation and tragic fate of Palestinian refugees who seek work in Kuwait and die when they have almost reached their aim. Zandbank was appalled by Kanafani’s strong metaphor of the cruel sun and ended his review with an emotional outburst. He expressed a combination of profound shock at the anti-Israeli content of the novella, his fear at the despair and violence it advocated, and his doubt with regard to the possibility of IsraeliPalestinian dialogue. Interpreting the literary images of the novella as expressing strong erotic attachment to the land, he compared this to the extremism of the Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories. He ended his review by denying the possibility of any dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, giving the political background and content of the work priority over its artistic and aesthetic qualities (Davar, 10 November 1978). Both preliminary and reaction norms then reflect the brave struggle of those who try to promote translations of Arabic literature in the Israeli Hebrew cultural polysystem against all cultural odds directly affected by a negative political situation. With the Middle Eastern peace process now reaching one of its decisive peaks, it may prove both useful and interesting to go back in ten years’ time and study the state of Arabic-Hebrew literary translation, to try to find out whether (and how) the new balance between the Jewish and Arab nations has helped this literature to get closer to the centre of Hebrew culture. To see whether, and to what extent, Palestinian nation building has been further promoted through Hebrew translation of Arabic texts, and whether both preliminary and reaction norms in this field have consequently changed.

notes 1. Such researcher-translators have included Professors Menachem Milson, Sasson Somekh and Mati Peled, as well as Dr Ami Elad-Bouskila. 2. Al-Samawal, a Jahili Jewish poet and Sayyid [tribe leader], is considered by Arabic culture to be the epitomy of faithfulness. This goes back to an ancient story reflected by the saying ‘awfa min al-Samawal’ [more faithful than al-Samawal]. He is said to have kept his faith to his friend, prince-poet Imru al-Qais, when the latter, fleeing his enemies, left his family, weapons and money in his keep. Al-Samawal refused to hand them over to his friend’s enemies even when they killed a son of his whom they had captured (Diwan al-Hamaasah, vol. 1, p. 36). 3. Ballas (1930– ), an Iraqi-born Jew, immigrated to Israel in 1951 and became both a writer of Hebrew novels and a professor of modern Arabic literature. Like a number of Iraqi Jewish immigrants, and unlike immigrants from other Arab countries who submitted to the Zionist ‘melting pot’ ideal that made them give up their original Arab culture, he too managed both to preserve his Arab linguistic and cultural identity and occupy a respectable position in Israeli Hebrew culture.

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israeli jewish nation building 4. The first modern novel translated into Hebrew was the first volume (of two) of Taha Hussein’s al-Ayyam [Childhood memoires], translated in 1931 by Menahem Kapeliouk (1901–75), a journalist specialising in so-called Arab affairs who had immigrated to Palestine from Russia. He had read the novel (first published in 1929) as a student of Arabic in Beirut.

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1 6

Between Myth and History: Moshe Shamir’s He Walked in the Fields 1

Shai Ginsburg ‘History’ has been a stumbling block for recent attempts to give a theoretical account of the rise of nationalism in modern times. Questions – such as how theory could coherently address divergent historical experiences without effacing the historical particularity of each experience, how the North African and the Indian national experiences compare, or what the relation between ‘first-world,’ ‘second-world’ and ‘third-world’ nation-building is – continue to haunt attempts to ‘theorise’ nationalism. While such attempts underscore the historicity of the processes that gave rise to nationalism as well as national consciousness itself, one region often remains outside the realm of history, that of literary meaning. In the 1960s and early 1970s, theoreticians such as Hans-Georg Gadamer (1993) and Hans Robert Jauss (1986) explored the historical operations that produce meaning.2 Still, their insights appear all but forgotten by more contemporary attempts to discuss literature in the context of modern nationalism. Major figures such as Edward Said, Frederic Jameson, Stephen Greenblatt, Homi Bhabha or Benedict Anderson, who in every other aspect of their work introduce history into the reading of a text, read the literary text as if its meaning is always already set and determined, beyond history.3 In this chapter, I would like to address the question of history and theory by examining one case study from the history of modern Hebrew literature in the context of Zionist nationalism. In Israeli cultural memory, Moshe Shamir’s novel He Walked in the Fields occupies a prominent place. The novel was first published in February 1948, and it gained an immediate commercial success.4 Within just a few months, the novel sold some 3000 hardcover copies and 20,000 paperback copies.5 To appreciate fully its extraordinary popularity, the reader should bear in mind that the Jewish population in Palestine at the time was about 650,000, many of whom were recent immigrants and could not read a Hebrew novel. In the second part of this chapter I shall address the critical reception of this novel in detail. At this point, I shall treat the critical response to the novel in general terms only. Many read the novel as an attempt to portray the Hebrew youth, the natives of Palestine, during the decisive moment in the Zionist struggle to realise Jewish nationality in Palestine. In particular, readers saw in the novel’s male prota— 110 —

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between myth and history gonist Uri a symbol of that youth, which – according to the formative Israeli myth – bore the burden of the military campaign during the Israeli War of Independence.6 Indeed, Uri became a synonym for the archetypal sabra warrior, who in his life, and particularly in his death, paved the way for a renewed Jewish independence.7 The novel as a whole was thus perceived as an expression of a hegemonic Zionist ideology and culture, which the novel’s characters do not only fully accept, but also attempt at realising in their lives as well as in their deaths. Approaching the novel today, however, leaves the reader uneasy. Examining it from the perspective of the present exposes a gap between the idyllic image of the novel and a complex, often unflattering image of Uri in the novel. One may ask, then, what determined the idealising reception of the novel and its protagonist, and what the functions of such a reception of the novel were. The discussion addresses this question within two poles. First, I explore the novel as questioning, rather than reaffirming, the Zionist myth of the native Hebrew. I argue that it examines the tension between myth and history that structures the image of the New Hebrew Man; given that tension, the novel’s protagonist is doomed to fail, as he indeed does. Second, I juxtapose the critical reception of the novel with the public reading of death and mourning in the young state of Israel. I argue, moreover, that one can understand the reception history of the novel as informed by the same tension between myth and history so crucial to the novel itself. He Walked in the Fields takes place towards the end of World War II.8 Its protagonist Uri is the first-born son of a kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley. Returning to the kibbutz after having spent two years in an agricultural school, Uri comes across Mika, a young refugee from occupied Europe. As a result of their love affair, Mika becomes pregnant. Before she herself learns of her pregnancy, however, Uri is summoned to a training camp of the newly formed Palma’h – shock troops that were to serve as the core of the Jewish military force in the anticipated armed conflict with the Palestinian-Arabs and with Arab armies. Uri’s absorption in the Palma’h convinces Mika that she cannot tell him about her pregnancy and that she has to undergo an abortion. While a note from his mother makes Uri aware of the matter, he fails to act upon it. Preoccupied with his personal affairs, he commands a live ammunition training session during which one of the soldiers drops a hand-grenade. Uri jumps on it and dies of his wounds the same day Mika goes to the abortion clinic and decides nevertheless to have the child. From his physical appearance as a young, tanned and muscular man to the details of his biography, Uri seems like an archetypal realisation of the New Hebrew, the ideal of Social-Zionist discourses. Not only is he a native of the land, but he is also one of its firstlings: the first-born child (and son) of a kibbutz — 111 —

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shai ginsburg in the Jezreel Valley. Both the kibbutz in general and the geographical location of this particular kibbutz were symbols of the success of Social-Zionist ideology, the success of transforming both land and man and creating an organic relationship between them. Uri’s name is likewise saturated as one of the names most identified with Zionist discourses. Over and against the popular image of the passive and detached exiled Jew, Uri seems to embody the Zionist ideal of the native Hebrew: an instinctive farmer, an instinctive scout, a natural fighter and commander. Moreover, many critics saw in Uri more than just an individual character. Shamir describes Uri as follows, leading his subordinates on a training session: Leading a company or a platoon, Uri was as if walking alone. The more of a commander he was – the more egotistical he was. […] He was a continuous-move of couples of strikes on a line that previously was incidental – and following them, a new path in the mountains. He was hips that divided bushes and slaughtered their dry stems, he was for women here and there, the unknown wives of his subordinates, an objective necessity, a part of what is called in life independent circumstances, interference, external factors. […] He was a vintager. And maybe, one day, he would return to this. Then he would be alone with his vine, making sure not to hurt its clusters. He was the one who would force a polished French-wrench to fix in their place stubborn screws in a ‘corn-lister’ and leave the stamp of a lying body behind him on the ground. […] He was a tanned, young Jew on the Majdal–Kurum road for a British police-car passing quickly, for Arab gasoline-drivers. He was a mischievous thief who penetrated a few yards in the Banias village, untied donkeys from their knots, and afterwards left plucked-feather-marks all the way to Mansura. (Shamir 1947: 169– 70)9

This quote is but a segment of a longer section that displays a tight rhetorical structure with the repetition of the anaphora ‘he was’ that appears more than twenty times within the span of three pages. Reading this paragraph, Dan Miron argues that Uri ‘is not [only] a private individual, a soul with a particular experience and development, but also the essence of the phenomenon of Uri, the new historical factor […]. At the moment he is nothing but a force, movement, action. In fact, “he is a hundred young men, if not more,” the New Hebrew youth’ (Miron 1975: 447). Indeed, the paragraph reads like a paean to Uri. The repetition of the existential ‘he was’ inculcates Uri’s presence as something transcending the merely human. The rhythm of these sentences, added to the accumulative effect of the anaphora, transfers Uri’s figure from the historical realm to a mythological one. Ultimately, Uri emerges as a mythological hero, a native god of the land. Uri’s death was seen primarily as the decisive moment of his mythical biography. Critics commonly perceived this death not as a personal one, but rather as representing the willingness of the Hebrew natives of Palestine to take upon themselves the national struggle for independence and even to sacrifice their lives heroically for the

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between myth and history sake of that struggle. In fact, they often read the whole plot of the novel from the perspective of Uri’s death; from this perspective, the character’s tribulations and conflicts are rendered insignificant. Such sentiments on the part of the critics are not surprising considering the time of the novel’s publication, during the first months of the armed conflict between Palestinian Jews and Arabs when the outcome of the conflict was still uncertain. What is surprising, however, is that Uri’s death in the novel is much more ambiguous than the heroic death that so many critics perceived.

Uri’s death cannot be dissociated from the Palma’h, the elite unit of the Jewish military force in Palestine. The Palma’h was associated mainly with the young Hebrew natives, children of the Zionist agricultural settlements, although its recruits represented a wider range of the Jewish population in Palestine of the time. Following its participation in the 1948 War, which was often underscored at the expense of other military units, and the heavy casualties it suffered (more than one-sixth of its men), it was commonly identified with the Israeli victory in that war as well as with the price of blood paid for it. Consequently, a nexus was established between the native Hebrew, the Jewish military force, victory, the dead of the 1948 War, and Israeli independence.10 Shamir’s novel itself played an important role in forming and circulating the Palma’h myth. As mentioned above, Uri joins the Palma’h, becomes an officer, and ultimately gets killed while commanding his men. Indeed, as the Israeli critic Gershon Shaked notes, more than anything else ‘the novel was conceived […] as a portrait of the fighter as a young man’ (Shaked 1993: 248). Uri’s association with the Palma’h, then, serves as yet another sign for his symbolic status that ends with his apotheosis as the national dead soldier.11 Early in the novel, however, the reader finds out that for Uri the life of the Palma’h is not one of hardship required for the realisation of national ideals but rather something like a boy-scout summer camp. Life in the Palma’h, as it is described in the novel, lacks all of its more unpleasant aspects: hard labour, financial shortage, physical difficulty, and especially battle, death and bereavement. As a young platoon commander, Uri enjoys commanding other people, idling in bed, and flirting with the women while his subordinates are working: Dina’le is a hot woman, and what a concentrated joy is awoken within you when you’re late because of her, first in the common-tent and later among the pine avenues, in the orange-groves, alone – that is, coupled! And in your heart the parasitic contentment of the one who knows that he doesn’t have to wake up early the following morning, since the men work, and we – meaning the ‘riders’ – ride hard and sleep as much as the heat allows […] (Shamir 1947: 272–3)

It should be noted here that descriptions such as this were not only common in ‘high’ and ‘popular’ literature of the time, but they were also instrumental in creating the popular myth surrounding the life of the Palma’h. In the popular imagination, the life of the Palma’h fused together everyday personal careless— 113 —

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shai ginsburg ness and dependability, reliability, and self-sacrifice whenever circumstances required it. Yet, in the context of the novel, I would argue that such moments have a double signification and also serve to undermine the very same myth in which they participate. Such moments both belong to the genre of the Palma’h myth that they helped to establish and also question it. The Palma’h provides Uri, then, with the opportunity not to struggle for national goals but rather to delight himself with the pleasures of sex and authority. Moreover, his pleasures come at the expense of his community, represented here by his subordinates, and undermine a sense of mutual responsibility. He thus fully enjoys his parasitic state of being – an aspect of his life that most critics of the novel suppressed, underscoring instead his final self-sacrifice as confirmed by his death. Ultimately, the Palma’h allows Uri to celebrate his egotism and escape responsibility. The clash between Uri’s joyful life of the Palma’h and his responsibility towards others comes into relief in the novel’s last chapter, which juxtaposes Uri’s death and the pregnancy of his lover Mika. As mentioned before, towards the end of the novel, Uri realises that Mika is pregnant with his baby. He now faces a difficult decision. He may leave the Palma’h and return to the kibbutz; however, an abortion would solve his problems, enabling him to continue his life in the Palma’h. Here is how he first thinks of the matter: This affair, misfortune – no, this is vulgar. This thing of Mika, the thing – well, he doesn’t want this thing. Every time it crosses his mind […] he panics. He would not ask himself what is the nature of this panic. No, he doesn’t want it and that’s it. The thing is clear, clear in the light of this distress, in the light of some insipid and sad guilt-feeling. He does not want. It’s bad, bad and bitter, it’s a disaster. It’s disgrace! Maybe that is where his hatred for this thing lies. The disgrace, the shame in it. This doesn’t suit him. What does it mean ‘doesn’t suit him’? This meagre word is a mockery. What is the reason? Mika – a mother? And he himself? Isn’t it enough that it’s bad and bitter and even worse. (Shamir 1947: 326–7)

The possibility of having a child disrupts Uri’s life and tarnishes his selfimage. The ‘vulgar’ affair breaks into his ‘genteel’ life of leisure. From his dignified position, he is unable to name Mika’s pregnancy, and he repeatedly refers to it as the thing or as it. Throughout, he remains alienated from Mika’s pregnancy and treats it as an external force, hostile to his own essence and will. Yet what kind of external force is it? The pregnant female body threatens Uri’s freedom. It threatens to expel him from the Garden of Eden of his life in the Palma’h, and like the biblical story, guilt and shame accompany the expulsion. The pregnant female body thus signifies a fall from grace, which Uri identifies with being chained to the kibbutz and to a family. Throughout the story, Uri expresses anxiety precisely about such a life. Within the kibbutz Uri feels compelled to prove that he can successfully rival his father, one of the founding fathers of the kibbutz. It is not the singular, revolutionary,

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between myth and history heroic act of the creation of the kibbutz as a social community, ex nihilo as it were, that terrifies Uri.12 Rather, he is alarmed by the realisation that a kibbutz means a mundane, everyday, continued struggle to maintain a life of agricultural labour as the foundation of family and communal life. In short, the kibbutz makes Uri anxious because it marks quotidian historical time. Whereas Uri could imagine himself performing the heroic acts of the mythical hero, he fears that he is not up to the task of participating in the everyday struggle that the kibbutz represents. In this context, Uri sees the pregnant female body as signifying the historical time of the kibbutz and identifies in it the demand to enter historical life: a life of toil, responsibility, and death at an old age. And Uri rebels against such a destiny. Only a radical solution would undo this radical disruption of his life. Abortion, Mika’s death or his own would undo the demands of human history, and Uri considers all three. Uri first considers abortion and Mika’s death, but he immediately realises that in these fantasies he exempts himself from responsibility for their affair and its outcome. Thus, these fantasies are soon transformed into the fantasy of Uri’s own death: He must take part in her suffering. It’s not possible that she’d suffer alone. You must suffer, must, in some way or another, be as miserable as she is, more than she is, more than her – to be the victim of something horrible, of something that will make people forget all of her things, so they’d say – who would say? – so they’d say: – well, poor Mika – but Uri, see, – Uri fell. […] And everybody would look at Mika and indicate with great interest and she would be so bereaved and proud. […] There you have it, how a strong, sturdy fellow fell. (Shamir 1947: 331)

Uri abandons himself to the fantasy of his death, for it would solve several problems simultaneously: First, it would exempt him from the need to give up the life of the Palma’h and return to the kibbutz. Second, as he imagines, it would compensate for Mika’s suffering as well as for his irresponsibility. Ultimately, his death would save Uri from the shameful circumstances within which he finds himself, relieve him from the impending threat of historical time, and transfigure him into a mythical hero. Uri’s death would accomplish this only if it were not just a ‘simple death’; rather, it must be a heroic one, realising the myth of the fallen hero. That is, Uri’s death would satisfy his desire only if he indeed fell while defending Palestine as the Jewish homeland. His actual death, however, is ambivalent: a training accident in the best of cases, suicide in the worst. Uri commands handgrenade training. After he presents his subordinates with ‘the most wonderful throw he had ever seen’ (Shamir 1947: 338) of a live grenade, Uri summons the worst soldier in the platoon for the first throw. The soldier personifies a reversal of Uri’s image: a new immigrant from Germany, untidy and ridiculous. When he drops the ignited grenade two steps away from the trench, Uri jumps, catches — 115 —

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shai ginsburg the grenade, and throws it. The exploding grenade kills him. Within the myth of the war hero, Uri’s death appears to be straightforward; nevertheless, it is overdetermined. While it is true that in his death Uri saves his subordinates, including the new immigrant who caused the tragedy, the overdetermination of his death triply compromises it and thus removes it from the heroic death he imagines for himself. First, it should be noted that Uri does not die fighting those who oppose the Zionist struggle for Jewish independence, Arab or British. He does not fall in battle but rather in training, in the unreal semblance of battle, which turns out to be all too real. Second, the accident results from Uri’s own error of discretion. After hazing his soldiers, and despite objections from his non-commissioned officer, he picks the worst soldier of the platoon for the first throw and then verbally abuses him. The soldier is so frantic that he drops the grenade two steps from the trench where the other soldiers are lying. Last, textually and temporally, the accident occurs shortly after Uri dwells at length on the image of his own death as a solution to his qualms of conscience and his unwillingness to give up the free life of the Palma’h for the kibbutz and Mika. Hence, his death may be seen as a wish fulfilment designed to overcome personal distress rather than as an outcome of ideological conviction or altruist act of bravery. He Walked in the Fields exposes, then, a tension between two grids of signification.13 On the one hand, the reader finds Uri to be a mythological god or the ‘new historical factor’ in Palestine. On the other hand, there is Uri as a particular protagonist, subject to the indeterminacy and ambiguity of everyday life. While in Uri’s imagination his death would mythically fix him as the fallen soldier, the overdetermination of his death interrupts the apotheosis of his death and undermines its fixation. Nevertheless, Uri’s death does not solve that tension but rather underscores it. The troubling question of the relation between the two aspects of Uri’s character remains. The novel does not end with Uri’s death; rather, it ends with Uri’s father and Mika. Uri dies on the same day Mika is to have her abortion. Upon learning of Uri’s death, Uri’s father rushes to the abortion clinic in an attempt to stop Mika: tell her about Uri, beg, tell her that she must bear this to the end, because she’s ours, us all, all the living […] the main thing is that she will be their [Uri’s parents’] daughter, their daughter. […] Your hair wouldn’t turn completely white before a cedar son of cedars will stand in our yards, Uri’s son. There would still be their matters, they would take him again for their matters? Life would stand forever. Just don’t murder them with your own hands. Uri is an only child. And he will leave behind him an only child. (Shamir 1947: 346)

Like the double grid structuring Uri’s character, this scene plays two signifying frameworks against each other. As Uri’s father notes, his son’s death represents a destructive force, opposing the creative power of succeeding — 116 —

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between myth and history generations. How, then, could Uri and his death be incorporated and co-opted into the context of life? In the name of continuity and procreation, Uri’s father expropriates Mika herself and her fate from her own hands and takes them over. In the name of historical life as it is realised in the kibbutz, he demands that she give herself and her child to them – that is, to Uri’s parents. It is telling, of course, that historical life, as the life of continuity and procreation, depends not upon the native Hebrew man as its agent but rather upon the refugee woman from Europe. The perpetuation of the whole system depends on her: without her child, there would not be another Uri, and without Uri, ‘they’ – presumably representing the historical circumstances of Jewish life in Palestine that require human sacrifice – would not have the material upon which to feed. Finally, appropriating Mika and her unborn child, Uri’s father fulfils and complements Uri’s fantasy. The woman is left behind to mourn the dead warrior, thereby reaffirming the male fantasy of heroism within history. What, then, is the status of this fantasy in the light of Uri’s dubious death? In the above, I describe He Walked in the Fields in terms of its critical reception. I show the latter to be short-sighted, for it overlooks the complexities that Uri’s character presents. The critical reception I refer to, however, deserves more attention. In fact, many critics did identify a tension in the novel centred on the character of Uri. In order to draw out the intricacies of the novel’s reception history, I will now examine the relation between ‘history’ in the reception history and the novel’s struggle with myth and history. I would like to set my own discussion against two possible critical reactions to the novel. On the one hand, it could be argued that critics failed to notice the tension at the centre of the novel. In contrast, it could be argued that critics did recognise such a tension but chose for whatever reasons to silence it. In both cases, critics are ultimately blamed for consciously or unconsciously producing a hegemonic reading of the literary text that conceals the tensions within the text as well as within the social and political reality of the time. Nevertheless, as the public debate surrounding the publication of the novel shows, quite a few critics of the time observed the disparity between Uri’s character and the ideal of the new Hebrew man. Still, rather than locating the tension within the novel, they explained it away by asserting that the friction lies between the novel and reality, between the fictive character and the historical young Hebrew man. By examining the reception history of the novel, I argue, in fact, against two reductive readings: first, of the novel and its characters as one-dimensional, and second, of the critical scene as uniform and univocal. Hence, in this section, after reviewing the range of critical reactions to the novel, I juxtapose them with one of the historical sources to the myth of the new Hebrew – the figure of Joseph Trumpeldor. I suggest that the interpretative mechanisms that were formed through the circulation of the myth of — 117 —

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shai ginsburg Trumpeldor informed the interpretation of Shamir’s novel. Finally, I argue that addressing the reception history of the novel opens a space that allows us to examine the formation of literary meaning itself as mythical. Many critics saw Shamir’s He Walked in the Fields as an exemplary expression of hegemonic Zionist ideology and culture, which its characters not only fully accept but also attempt to realise in life and death. Such an ideological commitment was applauded as a necessary component of the Jewish struggle for independence.14 A few critics, however, censured the novel for precisely this reason. They denounced what they identified as the characters’ unreflective acceptance of both Social-Zionist ideology and the historical circumstances in which the characters find themselves. Baruch Kurzweil, for instance, sees in Uri ‘a good fellow, primitive, willing for self-sacrifice’ and argues that ‘Shamir raises the primitive young man to a level of an ideal. In this he, together with all those that approve of the work, participates consciously or unconsciously in a certain spiritual process that succeeded in destroying a considerable portion of the values of culture’ (Kurzweil 1982: 143). Overall, Kurzweil blames Shamir for failing to create an epic plot that would transform the immediate reality that he describes into an aesthetic work that would affirm cultural values. For my purposes here, however, another group of critics is of greater interest still. Shamir’s He Walked in the Fields was harshly attacked by critics who were identified with the cultural establishment of the left.15 In fact, criticism was raised against the novel even before its actual publication. Shamir wrote the novel when he was a member of a kibbutz belonging to Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa’ir, a Marxist Social-Zionist movement, and he was to print and distribute his novel through the publishing house of the movement.16 However, Meir Yaari and Yaakov Hazan, two of the most prominent leaders of the movement, refused to authorise its publication, since, among other reasons, they felt that the novel represented the kibbutz and its life in a negative light. As a result, the novel was shelved for some four months before its printing was finally allowed.17 Following the publication of the novel, critics further blamed the novel for failing to represent accurately the social processes that led to the establishment of the State and for misrepresenting the Hebrew youth. Sh. J. Pnueli complains, for instance, that Shamir: exposes Uri and empties him of every human dignity. He has eyes, but he does not see man’s sorrow; he has a heart, and he does not know love; he has a brain, but he is enslaved to his own egotism. He is a kind of an ancient-modern man, who knows the art of war […] and the rest of his qualities are but like the rooster’s male feathers […]. Is this the truth of man in the kibbutz, […] is this our youth and is this its face? (Pnueli 1950: 76)

Pnueli goes on to affirm that, despite its rough appearance, the HebrewIsraeli youth is full of hidden virtues: ‘devotion, love, grace, kindness, God’s — 118 —

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between myth and history imprint, and human yearnings’ (Pnueli 1950: 76). Shamir’s novel, Pnueli argues, fails to penetrate beneath the misleading appearance of the Hebrew youth to expose its inner truth and so does it injustice. Following the same argument, another critic asks worriedly: ‘How could [the reader] comprehend the existence of the [Zionist] project […] how could he believe in its future, facing such a young generation?’ (Aran 1952).18 The novel was thus criticised not only for perverting the image of the Hebrew youth but also for discrediting the Zionist national project as a whole. I would like to note that later critics mainly adopted Kurzweil’s attitude towards the novel. Indeed, critics pulled away from the debate of whether or not Uri represents an ideal Hebrew man; recognising a tension at the centre of the novel, critics often identified it as the conflict between individual and collective values, which the characters struggle to reconcile. Nevertheless, most accepted unquestionably that ‘for all the assumptions of Jewish patriotism and the singlemindedness of the necessary struggle, there is no attempt made […] at a ratiocination of the ideology. Neither by the narrator […] nor by the characters. They live their lives in this way as though there is no choice, and so no selection of options’ (Yudkin 1977b: 3). Furthermore, later critics interpreted what they perceived as the characters’ ideological one-dimensionality as a reductive characterisation and condemned it for standing in the way of ‘aesthetic fullness’. While conflicting critical reviews of the novel at the time of its publication called into question Uri’s character, very little of this tension has remained in later discussions, even for those critics who examined the reception history of the novel.19 Generally, in later decades the novel and its protagonist were perceived as the stereotypical and idealising symbols of the 1948 generation.20 Two implications of the above discussion should be noted. First, in the early years following the publication of He Walked in the Fields Uri’s symbolic and mythic value was not determined and set. On the contrary, the public debate focused on the question of whether or not Uri stands as a symbol for or as a mythical embodiment of the Hebrew youth during the 1948 war. It seems, then, that the myth of Uri was not fully established until after the debate following the initial reception of the novel had subsided, probably towards the end of the 1950s. In this respect, later critics were more instrumental in disseminating the myth than earlier ones. Second, on a more theoretical level, the above discussion underscores the fact that the attempt to idealise Uri cannot be located in He Walked in the Fields itself. Instead, such an idealisation appears to result from an interaction between the novel and its readers and between the different readers of the novel. The discussion thus questions the tendency of literary interpretations (my own included) to locate the meaning they present within the literary text itself. Introducing the reception history of the novel into its interpretation — 119 —

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shai ginsburg then interrupts the location of literary meaning; the reception history undermines the equation of the literary text and meaning as the product of interpretation. In fact, the reception history in my argument functions analogously to the way history threatens to undermine Uri’s myth in the novel. We are thus drawn to look at a space between the critical text and the novel. To interrogate that space, I would like to introduce here a third text and argue that Uri’s character, and particularly his death, comment upon the image of Joseph Trumpeldor, one of the best-known Zionist figures, and upon the reception of the latter’s death. I juxtapose the two despite the fact that one is historical and the other literary.21 Trumpeldor was born in 1880 in Russia. Though he opposed militarism, he made no attempts to escape military service (as many Jews did) in order to prove that Jews were not cowards. He was drafted in 1902 and distinguished himself in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) in which he also lost his left arm. Recovering from his injury, he requested to be sent back to the front, and his request was granted. He was promoted to a non-commissioned rank, which was rare for Jews in the Tsarist Army, and was cited for bravery. After the war he was promoted to a reservist Second Lieutenant and became one of the few Jews ever to be appointed to a commissioned rank in the Tsarist Army. He was a leading Zionist figure both preceding and following World War I, a proponent of various socialist/communist plans to settle Palestine by Jews. When he arrived in Palestine for a second time in 1919, he was asked to inspect the Jewish settlements in Upper Galilee, which were subjected to frequent attacks by the Bedouins in the area. The precarious conditions that he found there persuaded him to accept the command of the defence of three settlements: Metula, Kefar Giladi and Tel Hai. On 1 March 1920, Trumpeldor was fatally wounded in Tel Hai during an armed conflict between the settlers and Arabs. As the Jewish settlers were forced to evacuate the outpost, Turmpeldor’s last words reportedly were ‘never mind, it is good to die for our land.’22 Mourning Trumpeldor’s death, Berl Katzenelson, a prominent Zionist leader of the time, wrote the following eulogy: May the People of Israel remember the pure souls of its faithful and brave sons and daughters, people of work and peace, who followed the plough and risked their lives for the glory and love of Israel. May the People of Israel remember and be blessed in its seed and mourn the splendour of youth and the preciousness of courage and the holiness of will and self-sacrifice that perished in the heavy campaign. Do not be pacified, do not be consoled, and do not let the mourning grow faint until Israel will have returned to liberate its robbed land.

Katzenelson uses here the yizkor, the traditional religious prayer over the dead, secularising and nationalising it. This yizkor became one of the cornerstones of national consciousness and of the self-image of the Jewish public, and — 120 —

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between myth and history with minor changes it was accepted as the official Zionist eulogy for the Jewish victims in the armed conflict in Palestine and later in the State of Israel (Segev 1999: 107). Moreover, it sets, in fact, an interpretative model effective for what it says as much as for what it does not say. Changing the traditional model, Katzenelson’s eulogy appropriates the acts and death of individuals for the community via the establishment of a communal commemorative act. This is done not only by identifying the dead with a community, but also by turning their death into a symbol of the communal ideology. The latter is marked here by such catchwords as ‘labour’, ‘plough’, ‘peace’, and ‘glory’ in a hegemonic discourse that equates the Zionist project with the agricultural settlement and colonisation of the land – that is, Social-Zionist ideology. At the same time, the transformation of the individual death into communal symbols leaves nothing personal in this eulogy: all individual attributes are turned into nouns that function as generic adjectives (sons and daughters, people of work and peace), and even personal names are omitted. For my discussion, it is of particular interest that the precise circumstances of death are erased here. What remain are the reality of death, on the one hand, and the memory of the community, on the other hand. Drawing together Trumpeldor, Uri and the critics, I would argue that critics examined He Walked in the Fields and its protagonist against Katzenelson’s yizkor. Despite the ambiguities marring Uri’s death, its reception is surprisingly similar to the reception of Trumpeldor’s. Faced with the massive killing in the Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine, critics looked to the novel for a reaffirmation of the myth of the Zionist settlement of Palestine, as Trumpeldor represented. Those who approved of the novel read Shamir’s Uri as a literary realisation of the archetypal image of the eulogy’s Zionist settler: the man who was forced from behind the plough to protect his land and home. Not the least among Uri’s archetypal characteristics is his symbolising power, not unlike that of Trumpeldor and his comrades, of a hegemonic Zionist ideology. Following Yael Zerubavel’s discussion of the formation and function of the myth of Trumpeldor within Zionist culture, one can note structural similarities in constructing the myths around both Trumpeldor and Uri. First, in both cases, the characters’ personal sacrifice is seen as breaking away from traditional Jewish martyrdom, which is centred on Jewish passivity and victimisation. Second, in both cases, the individual death is elevated beyond its immediate historical (or textual) context into a symbolic text that serves as a paradigm for understanding other communal experiences.23 Third, both cases present a certain ambiguity between the actual (or textual) death and the myths corresponding to it. As Yael Zerubavel notes, in the case of Tel-Hai, the actual withdrawal from the outpost was erased from the ‘official’ story and transformed into a myth of successful defence and a historical edict never to abandon a — 121 —

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shai ginsburg Jewish settlement (Zerubavel 1995: 222). In both the cases of Trumpeldor and Uri, the ambiguity in question is erased from the final account by extending the conclusion of the story and locating it in a different historical (or textual) context that diminishes the significance of the immediate failure. The death’s circumstances do not define the fallen as heroes. The fallen are heroes because they realise an ideal according to which the individual has to sacrifice everything for the nation; thus, they express the ultimate sacrifice of an ultimate commitment to the national struggle. The fallen do not serve as ideals in their own right; rather, they symbolise the heroic sacrifice.24 Two interpretative mechanisms in particular have enabled the above reading of Uri. First, the narrative is displaced from World War II to the Israeli War of Independence: while the novel takes place during World War II, it is commonly read as if it takes place during the War of Independence. The two periods are fused together and the time separating them is erased. Thus, Yaakov Malkin, reviewing the book in May 1948, writes that ‘such is the quality of our life today; such is the book’ (1948a). Malkin sets Shamir’s novel within a historicalcultural continuity that erases the historical specificity of the novel. Second, Uri is identified with the dead of the War. This was helped by the fact that Moshe Shamir dedicated the novel to his brother Elik who was killed during the first weeks of clashes between Palestinian Jews and Arabs. In 1951 Shamir published a biography of his brother, With His Own Hands. In it, Shamir idealises his brother and his generation in terms far less ambiguous than the ones he uses in his earlier novel.25 From the moment of its publication, and despite the differences in genre, tone and complexity, Uri was often identified with Elik, and many critics read them as one and the same. For example, Gershon Shaked affirms that ÆElik and […] Uri were made of the same substance’ (Shaked 1971: 30).26 In sum, the dramatic effect of the establishment of the State invited a mythification of events in an attempt to produce an explanation and give meaning to the moment.27 In this case it means the collapse of history into a singular moment, the moment of death. While the reception and interpretation of He Walked in the Fields were no doubt shaped and formed by these and similar cultural texts and forces, again it should be noted that not all critics accepted such an apotheosis of Uri. For most critics of the time, the events of the Israeli War of Independence confirmed that the ‘new Hebrew man’ was not a myth but a reality. The main bone of contention between those who commended and those who condemned the novel was, then, whether in Uri’s character one could equate the idealised image of the Hebrew settler and the historical Hebrew youth. The above discussion deals extensively with those critics who idealised Uri. The critics who questioned Uri’s character pointed to his inability to reflect on the circumstances in which he finds himself, or, more seriously, to his defective character and egotistical — 122 —

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between myth and history behaviour, mainly as manifested in his relationship with Mika. In other words, Uri’s flaws as are expressed in his life taint, for these critics, the value of his death. In short, Uri’s ‘life’ interrupts his idealisation in death. What is surprising, though, in the debate surrounding the novel is that the moment of Uri’s death remains obscure and most critics do not read it.28 Indeed, in the critical discussion of the novel, Uri’s death is a moment of ‘un-reading’, rather than one of reading, a moment that critics consciously or unconsciously circumvent. By this I do not mean, of course, that critics neglect to note Uri’s death, but rather that they fail to examine its ‘logic’ and the precise circumstances in which it occurs.29 The singularity of the moment of Uri’s death lies, therefore, not only in the collapse of historical time and the fusion of myth and history, but also in the blindness of reading itself. The obscurity of this moment thickens in later critical discussions by another kind of un-reading: the erasure of the reception history of the novel. I am not suggesting here that critics are unaware of the diverging interpretations of the novel. Still, rather than inferring from the novel’s conflicting reviews that it presents a complex structure, most critics ignore the reception history of the novel, and this allows them to insist on the novel’s univocality. Even those critics who acknowledge the complexity of the novel’s reception history do not allow that complexity to inform their overall evaluation of the novel.30 The obliteration of that history thus supports three complementary claims of these later critics: the first claim is that the novel fails to interrogate the ideology of its characters and ultimately establishes them as one-dimensional. The second is that the novel was uniformly received at the time of its publication, and the third – that that uniformity reproduces the ideological simplification of the novel. What I am, in fact, arguing is that the reception of the novel presents a structure of obscurity that permeates its history and that can ultimately be ‘traced back’ to Uri’s death in the novel. In other words, the obscurity of Uri’s death doubles and re-doubles itself in the reviews and critical discussions of the novel and finally in the history of its reception. In this chapter, I tried to make transparent both Uri’s death and its place within the reviews of the novel and its reception history as a whole. What is the meaning of the visibility of that doubled moment in my own reading of the novel? My point of departure in approaching the novel assumes the myth of Uri, both as a protagonist of the novel and as a cultural symbol. Introducing ‘history’ into my reading serves, then, to undermine three myths: of Uri’s death, of the novel’s reception, and of meaning.31 I have already discussed the first two, and I turn now to the third. I have suggested above that literary interpretation tends to locate the meaning it produces within the text it reads.32 In that, it effects a mythification of meaning. Yet, if meaning is produced through and in history, locating it within the literary text erases the historicity that marks the production of meaning; that is, it collapses the representations of divergent historical — 123 —

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shai ginsburg moments of interpretation into one non-dialectical moment. Both meaning and the history of meaning are thus condensed into a point of singularity, outside of time and history. My own interpretation of Uri oscillates between moments of mythical reassurance and historical doubt. For me, this movement suggests that reading the reception history of the novel may be utilised to contravene the tendency to transfigure both the novel and its protagonist into a transcendental realm. By erasing the tension constitutive of historical representations, such a transfiguration allows for the equation of Uri’s and the new Hebrew man. Indeed, Uri’s death and its interpretations are revealed as complex only when seen as an interaction between a series of representations and erasures: in the case of this chapter, as the interaction of my own interpretation with others’; the interaction of the representation of the reception histories of the novel and the myth of Trumpeldor, and so on. In short, the singularity or non-singularity of Uri’s death is an effect of a play of mirrors and distortions. In the end, it seems that it is the position of myself as reader within this play of mirrors that determines what I see, what I determine as (provisional) ‘Truth’, and what remains obscure, waiting for yet another reader.33

notes 1. I am grateful to the participants of Literature and Nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa conference for their comments on the first version of this paper. I am especially thankful to Ayelet Ben-Yishai and Nirmala Singh whose comments on the paper have proven to be invaluable. 2. See, for instance, Jauss 1986; Gadamer 1993. 3. See, for instance, Said 1979; Jameson 1981; Greenblatt 1988, 1991; Bhabha 1994; Anderson 1991. 4. While the first edition was ready for printing during the last months of 1947, the actual publication of the novel was delayed for several months. I am dealing with this issue in detail below. In the following I am quoting from the first edition. A second edition with a few changes was published in 1955 (Shamir 1966) and later critics commonly refer to this edition. These changes, however, do not affect my argument here. 5. The data is cited in Shaked 1993: 393. 6. This is the Hebrew-Israeli name for the armed conflict between Palestinian Jews, on the one hand, and Palestinian Arabs and the Arab countries, on the other hand, which lasted from November 1947 until July 1949. In this paper I focus exclusively on the Jewish-Israeli perspective of literature and history. Hence, I adopt the terminology current in the Zionist-Israeli discussion of the period. 7. Zionist discourses often described the modern Zionist project as re-establishing Jewish independence, following the independent Jewish entities of antiquity. 8. For the sake of clarity, I give account here only of the main plot-line of the novel. 9. Here and in the following, all translations from the Hebrew are mine.

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between myth and history 10. Both Oz Almog’s and Emmanuel Sivan’s books examine this nexus in detail. 11. For the cult of the dead soldier and its relation to the construction of modern nationalism, see Mosse’s Fallen Soldiers (1990). 12. Mikhal Arbel argues that at the core of the world of the kibbutz lies the ethos of creatio ex nihilo, of a refusal passively to accept the given. While she maintains that Uri understands that in order to authentically return to the kibbutz he has not merely to return, but also to repeat the act of heroic creation, I argue that this is not Uri’s major concern (Arbel 1999). 13. I am here indebted to Dan Miron’s work on Shamir’s novels, which underscores the preoccupation with questions of history and historical forces. At the same time, Miron underscores what he identifies as Shamir’s anti-historicist attitude, especially as manifested in Shamir’s later work (Miron 1975: 466), while I argue that this is but one aspect of the structure of the novel. 14. See, for instance, Lea Goldberg (1948); David KnaÆani (1955: 145); Yaæakov Malkin (1948a, 1948b); Shalom Kraemer (1959); David Merani (1948); H. M. Rottblatt (1951); Zila Rubin (1948); A. B. Yafe (1950); Yisrael Zemora (1948); and Moshe Zilbertal (1948). 15. It should be noted here that I do not argue that one could politically map the critics who reviewed He Walked in the Fields according to party lines. There are a few important exceptions that would undermine any such attempt. 16. For the Marxist component in the ideology of Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa’ir, see, for instance, Yaari 1972: 21–6, 31–43, 223–5. 17. See Shamir (1999: 148–9); Mohar (1973); Halperin (2000). The publication of the novel was allowed, in fact, only after a play based on the novel was staged. Significantly enough in the play, Shamir modified the end and Uri actually falls in battle (Shamir 1989). The play gained enormous success, was produced abroad, and finally filmed in 1967. Two points should be noted here. First, that the play is hardly ever mentioned in the critical discussion of Shamir’s work. Second, to the extent that it is mentioned, no one, to the best of my knowledge, discusses the discrepancies between the novel and the play (see, for instance, Gat 1966; Shoham 1974). From the journals and newspapers of the time, it is difficult to gauge not only whether the audience was aware of such discrepancies but also how the reception of the play affected the reception of the novel and vice versa. A full discussion of the play in relation to the novel is, however, beyond the scope of this paper. 18. For similar reading of Shamir’s novel, see, for instance, Yehuda Burla (1954); Avaraham KnaÆani (1950); Avraham Shea’anan (1948); Shelomo Zemach (1952; 1956: 254–5); and Shlomo Zui (1948). 19. Nurit Gertz (1978) and Gershon Shaked (1971, 1993) are the most noticeable among these critics, but see also Reuven Kritz (1978); Reuven and Ori Kritz (1997); Zevi Luz (1970) and Eliezer Schweid (1957). Hillel Weis is unique among these critics in paying attention to the paradoxical structure of Shamir’s earlier works. However, as do the critics mentioned above, he ends his essay by reaffirming the image of Shamir’s protagonists as the people’s agents during the political conflict (1983: 75). Only recently have critics begun to pay attention to the ideological ambiguity at the foundation of the novel. See, for instance, Mikhal Arbel (1999); Michael Gluzman (2002).

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shai ginsburg 20. See, for instance, the use of the novel in Oz Almog’s historical/sociological portrait of the Sabra (1997: 24); in YaÆakov Shabtai’s attempt to trace the literary roots of his novel Past Continuous (1983); and in Emmanuel Sivan’s historical research into the myth surrounding the 1948 dead (1991: 56). 21. The following biographical notes are based on Shulamith Laskov’s biography of Trumpeldor (1995). 22. The word artsenu in Trumpeldor’s maxim could be translated as land, soil, country, territory, and so on. The precise circumstances leading to his death remain unclear. As Tom Segev remarks, one of the earliest (Jewish) reports of the incident talks of ‘mutual misunderstanding’ (Segev 1999: 106). Similarly, Trumpeldor’s last words remain a matter of debate. The physician who treated the dying Trumpeldor quoted him as saying, ‘Never mind, it is worthwhile to die for the Land of Israel.’ It was finally Y. H. Brenner, a leading Hebrew writer of the time, who in his eulogy of Trumpeldor gave the words the form in which they were popularised (Laskov 1995: 237–8; Segev 1999: 107). For the way the myth of Trumpeldor played was used in the construction of a Jewish national consciousness in Palestine, see Zerubavel 1995. 23. See Zerubavel’s corresponding discussion (1995: 9–10, 16–21, 43–7). 24. See in this context Maoz Azaryahu’s discussion of the cult of the fallen soldier in Israeli civil religion, and in particular, his discussion of the mythification of the dead soldier (1995: 10, 123–4). 25. For such readings of Shamir’s With His Own Hands, see, for instance, Gurfein (1952); Kraemer (1957); and Tuchner (1952). 26. See also Miron (1975: 439–71) and Almog (1997: 24). 27. See, for instance, Maoz Azaryahu (1995: 3, 117). 28. Among the critics I read here there are only three exceptions. Shlomo Zui and David Aran, reviewing the novel in 1948 and 1952 respectively, criticise the novel for its failure to give expression to the Hebrew youth’s more ideal characteristics. Gershon Shaked in his second treatment of the novel also notes the ambiguities and overdetermination of Uri’s death, but in his conclusion still constructs Uri as the Heroic character (Shaked 1993: 248–9, 266–8). Shaked’s reading here deviates significantly from the terms in which he reads the novel the first time as a simple idealisation of the 1948 generation (Shaked 1971: 27–46). 29. Interestingly enough, even those critics who explicitly question the necessity of Uri’s death, who confusedly look for its roots and justification, still avoid examining its different contexts within the novel and ultimately accept it as unambiguous. See, for instance, Schweid (1957: 26); Shlomo Zui (1948). 30. See, for instance, Dan Miron (1975: 439–71); Gershon Shaked (1993: 235–52). 31. By the myth of the novel’s reception I mean the impression of a uniform reading of the novel by earlier critics. 32. Even those critics that underscore meaning as the production of the reader or the community of readers, such as Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish, end up by locating the meaning they offer for the literary texts they read within the literary text itself. See, for instance, Iser (1974); Fish (1980). 33. My objection, then, to the attempt to read the novel allegorically is that, once more, such a reading establishes a realm of uninterrupted meaning. I could think of two distinct allegorical readings in the context of this novel: first, as it was done

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between myth and history traditionally, by equating Uri and the self-sacrifice of the Hebrew youth during the war; second, as symbolising the failure of the pre-war native generation to establish independence and a call to integrate the survivors of the Jewish Holocaust into the Jewish community in Palestine to guarantee its regeneration. Both allegories, however, erase, in fact, the tension between the different temporal grids in favour of one ‘transcendental’ meaning.

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1 7

Writing the Nation: The Emergence of Egypt in the Modern Arabic Novel Jeff Shalan In his classic study on the rise of Arab nationalism, George Antonius writes: ‘Without school or book, the making of a nation is in modern times inconceivable’ (1946: 40). Of course, modern nations are not built in schools and books alone; but one need not discount nationalism’s socioeconomic determinants, nor its historical specificity, to accept the premise of Antonius’s argument: that is, the effect of culture and cultural institutions on the political formation of the nation-state. Though the nature of that effect is itself overdetermined, its location can in part be inferred from what Antonius then goes on to write concerning certain educational reforms initiated in Syria in 1834: ‘[They] paved the way, by laying the foundations of a new cultural system, for the rehabilitation of the Arabic language as a vehicle of thought’ (ibid). In other words, one might say, a modern nation is inconceivable apart from a language in which it can be conceived and communicated as such. By articulating this linguistic link between nation and thought, Antonius thus points to the site of culture, or a cultural system, as the specifically ideological field in which nationalism is sown and from which national identities are reaped. I draw attention here, through the above metaphor, to the organic character of this relationship between culture and nationalism not because, as Ernest Gellner argues, there is anything natural about it, but because it is almost invariably from the field of culture that proponents of nationalism first posit an idea of the nation as an organic entity, one which pre-exists its geopolitical formation.1 Whether it be language, territory, race, religion, ethnicity, the presumed historical continuity of a people, or any combination thereof, which serves as the organic and unifying principle of the nation, the idea itself typically takes shape in and is transmitted by way of a cultural system. In this sense, then, the ‘vehicle’ of a rehabilitated language becomes as important as the thought it carries.2 If a standardised Arabic were eventually to come to serve as one of the pillars of modern Arab nationalism, around which a people could be gathered, and through which they could communicate and come to identify with one another as members of a nation, then it would have to be made accessible to more than a select few schooled in its classical idiom. And together with the rise of an indigenous print media, schools and books became the primary means towards this end. — 128 —

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writing the nation I do not mean to imply in this way an inversion of the historical chronology of events. Clearly, as Antonius argues, it is only after the nineteenth-century nahda, or Arab cultural renaissance, is well underway that the first glimmers of what could be called a national consciousness become visible. And it is only after that point that the link between nation and language could then be consciously forged as one of the central tenets of Arab nationalist thought. What Antonius thereby makes apparent in his analysis is that a nation does not spring forth of its own in the minds of a people, full-grown from the earth, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Rather, in both Western and non-Western nationalism, it has typically first taken shape in the heads of a cultural elite, as a tentative and ill-defined response to the crises and disruptions in social relations and modes of production resulting from modernisation and often, as concerns the non-West, the encroachment of Western imperialism. In the case of Arab nationalism, it was the nineteenth-century nahda, itself already set in motion by such changes, that provided fertile ground for the burgeoning national consciousness of that cultural elite. But generalising references to a cultural system cannot alone explain the manner in which an emergent ideology, whose formation can to some extent be located among a cultural elite, achieved the hegemony that allowed for its transformation into various political movements and parties with substantial popular support. The institutions of a rejuvenated cultural system, such as schools and the press, can account for the method of transmission, but not for the equally important modes of internalisation whereby a nationalist ideology takes root in the lives of individuals to become an essential part of their worldview. And the importance of this process of internalisation cannot be underestimated insofar as nationalism’s success as an ideology is predicated on the collective appeal it makes to an inclusive group of individuals, many of whom may in fact have no knowledge of and little or nothing in common with one another.3 It is for this reason that I have chosen to focus here on a relatively neglected but arguably significant offshoot of the relationship between the nahda and the rise of Arab nationalism: the emergence of the modern Arabic novel. Even as Antonius himself made a courageous if perhaps misplaced attempt to locate the beginnings of Arab nationalism in a poem inscribed on the famous placards of his narrative, studies on the nahda in its relationship to Arab nationalism, such as Albert Hourani’s seminal work, typically touch upon the novel, and literature in general, in only the most cursory way.4 Likewise, studies devoted to the rise of the modern Arabic novel, where they even broach the issue of nationalism, do so, at best, in schematic or incidental fashion.5 Without inflating its importance in this context, it nonetheless seems apparent that the modern Arabic novel developed in conjunction with a specifically nationalist mode of thought, and that it was instrumental not only in the — 129 —

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jeff shalan dissemination of that thought, but in its very formation as well. In the case of Egypt, for instance, where many leading writers and intellectuals of the 1910s and 1920s believed cultural independence would provide the necessary insurance for political and economic independence, narrative prose was singled out as the artistic genre best suited to express the essence of the emergent nation and the character and aspirations of its people.6 Thus ensued a quite conscious and concerted effort to create a new national literature as the basis of a broader cultural movement to ‘transform the value system and the collective mentality of the Egyptian people’ (Gershoni and Jankowski 1986: 87).7 As Muhammad Husayn Haykal, one of the leading figures of this movement wrote: ‘[L]iterature and its course constitute the most authentic hallmark of a nation’s civilization. Literature is the force which nothing else can vanquish or overcome as easily as an armed force can suppress political revolution’ (ibid.: 88). While Haykal’s exaggerated claim overstates the case, his words nonetheless attest to the ideological significance granted to literature in the context of nationalist thought. Such significance notwithstanding, the lack of critical attention devoted to the subject is understandable in light of the problems it poses for analysis, most especially the problematic relationship between, on the one hand, ideas and cultural productions and, on the other, material conditions and social change. To quote Beth Baron in a related context, establishing such connections frequently entails a ‘leap of faith’, insofar as what that ‘leap’ broaches is the specific ideological space of peoples’ lived experience.8 And yet this is precisely the point, I think, at which the relationship between the modern novel and Arab nationalism becomes significant and warrants closer study, since the discourse of nationalism is an ideological formation whose success depends on its internalisation at the level of the individual, and it is at that same level that the novel, more so than other traditional cultural forms, operates on the reader.9 To what extent literature can be credited with such transformative power, however, remains a question. At the very least, then, a thorough consideration of the relationship between the modern Arabic novel and the rise and development of Arab nationalism would necessitate not only a theory of ideology to account for the complexities of the relationship between cultural productions and social movements, as well as substantial empirical data on the circulation of literary texts and the constitution of reading publics, but also a method for locating the specificity of literature’s place and effect within the context of a broader cultural system.10 Envisioned as such, the full scope of that study extends beyond my present means; and for the purposes of this chapter I will therefore aim only to establish the importance of a more extensive study of the subject, informed by the general belief that a critical reading of the applicable literature would provide a useful — 130 —

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writing the nation and, indeed, necessary supplement to any study concerned with the larger question of Arab nationalism. Such a study might help one to better locate nationalism’s persuasive appeal for the individuals who comprise its intended audience, as well as its contradictions, elisions and limits as a guiding agent of socio-political change. With this aim in mind, I will limit my approach to what might well serve as that larger study’s logical point of departure: an analysis of the ways in which specific literary texts ‘announce’ their own modernness by encoding in their narratives an emergent nationalist discourse or, in other words, how such texts, in effect, write the nation. My analysis will centre on two works in particular, whose seminal influence in the rise of modern Arabic literature, together with their subject matter and widespread popularity, would necessarily grant them an essential place in such a study: Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zainab and Tawq al-Hakim’s ÆAwdat al-ruh (Return of the Spirit).11 But before I turn to the first of these, my choice bears one further comment. It is no coincidence, with respect to the subject of this chapter, that I have chosen the works of two Egyptian writers as the focus of my study. For whether the nahda can be traced to a specific group of nineteenth-century Lebanese Christians, as Antonius claims, or whether, as A. L. Tibawi (with whom I agree) contends, it was a far more diffuse phenomenon with multiple and overlapping points of departure,12 a self-consciously modern and distinctly nationalist literature emerged first in Egypt in the 1920s (Gershoni and Jankowski 1986: 95). That its emergence, as mentioned, coincided with the rise of a specifically Egyptian brand of cultural and political nationalism should not, however, lead to the conclusion that literary developments in Egypt at this time were without influence elsewhere in the region. The Iraqi writer Jamil SaÆid makes that plainly apparent when he writes: ‘Iraqi writers did not produce much fiction because their colleagues in Egypt and Syria were ahead of them. Iraqi readers preferred to read books on whatever subject written by Egyptians rather than Iraqis; they even preferred books printed in Egypt rather than in Iraq’ (quoted in Allen 1982: 26). Thus, while not discounting the specificity of this moment in Egypt’s literary and national history, neither is it my intention to cast Egypt in an entirely isolated light. Rather, I have chosen to focus on the literature of this period precisely because the specificity of this period in Egyptian history is what allows the question of nationalism’s ideological content to be raised for the first time in the Arab world.13 And insofar as narrative prose was identified as a privileged means of response to that question, my analysis of the manner in which two representative literary texts help to articulate that content is intended to encourage further consideration of the ways in which developments in Egypt may or may not have prefigured related developments elsewhere in the Arab world. Originally published anonymously in 1913 under the pseudonym of Misri — 131 —

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jeff shalan Fallah (an ‘Egyptian peasant’), though written a couple of years earlier while Haykal was studying in France, Zainab is considered by many critics to be the first modern Egyptian novel and one of the first modern novels in Arabic. And since Hamilton Gibb initially dubbed it as such, Zainab has been the subject of considerable discussion, centred largely on the question of whether its artistic value merits this distinguished epithet.14 What is seldom mentioned, though, is the significance of the subsequent and gradual revelation of this Misri Fallah’s real identity. Although those associated with al-Jarida, the newspaper in which Zainab was first published in serialised form, knew from the start that Haykal was the author, it was not until 1922 that his name first appeared on some copies of the text, and only in 1929 did he finally republish it under his own name (Sakkut 1971: 12). But Zainab’s popularity, which led to a film version in 1930, is perhaps less the cause than the result of this gradual identification of the author with the text, the explanation for which must instead be sought in generic developments themselves (Gibb 1962: 294). Without a clear antecedent in the traditional forms of Arabic prose narrative (maqama, hadith, sira, qissa, khurafa, ustura) it was for the most part a group of Syrian Christians who first introduced the novel to the Arab world through nineteenth-century translations of European works, often adapted to the rhymed prose form of the maqama (Allen 1982: 17). But as consequence of the Syrian migration that followed the Lebanese massacre of 1860, and the strict code of censorship imposed by the Ottoman administration in Syria, the centre of literary activity had shifted by the latter part of the nineteenth century to Cairo where the climate was more conducive to literary freedom, especially after 1882, when the British protected it by law (Allen 1982: 21, 24; Moosa 1983: 172). With a still small but growing readership, the popularity and thus demand for these translations and adaptations increased, and this in turn gave some writers the incentive to begin writing ‘novels’ of their own (Badawi 1985: 130– 1). But by and large, these early experiments in the genre were unable to break free from the formal and thematic constraints of the traditional prose forms (Allen 1982: 29–31). And in spite of the popularity of such works, generic developments on the whole were further restricted by the stigma attached to narrative fiction in general. As with the development of the novel in Europe, such work had long been held in contempt by the educated classes, who viewed it as not only inferior to the tradition of classical Arabic poetry but morally suspect as well (Connelly 1986: 12; Brugmar 1984: 205). And in the eyes of a conservative Islamic elite who felt increasingly threatened by the encroachment of Western values, the belief that fiction was a corrupting force could not but be confirmed once it began to take shape in the specifically Western form of the novel (Badawi 1985: 130). In this context it is understandable, as Haykal later claimed, that as a young — 132 —

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writing the nation advocate from a wealthy landowning family he would not want to jeopardise his own social standing and professional rank by claiming authorship of Zainab, especially because one of the novel’s two central characters, Hamid, is clearly an autobiographical portrait of a young and sentimental Haykal (Badawi 1993: 105). By 1929 Haykal, having long since abandoned a career in law, had become one of Egypt’s pre-eminent intellectual and political figures and would thus have had even greater reason to dissociate himself from Zainab had the novel as a genre not since acquired a certain degree of legitimacy among the educated classes. But as a study of the history of the European novel suggests, such legitimacy is never conferred in response to aesthetic developments alone.15 Indeed, as Haykal’s own words, which I quoted above, make perfectly clear, the perceptible change in the novel’s status around this time, from popular genre to the beginnings of a canonical art form, was politically motivated as well. In this respect, Haykal’s authoritative signature on the 1929 edition of Zainab can itself be seen as part of a process of legitimation, and one which in fact continued up until quite recently (Moosa 1983: 24). How the modern novel and a nationalist ideology emerge together in Zainab might best be suggested, then, by returning to the question of Zainab’s place in modern Arabic literature and why it is considered to be among the first real novels as such. There are essentially four interrelated features which, taken together, distinguish Zainab from virtually all its predecessors and help to establish the text as the prototype for a national literature: plot, characterisation, setting and social commentary. Briefly, the novel centres around the figures of Zainab, a beautiful peasant girl who works in Sayyid Mahmoud’s cotton fields, and the landowner’s son, Hamid, a student in Cairo who returns home for vacations – primarily, it seems, for amorous pursuits. Hamid’s affections are torn between Zainab, who initially responds to his flirtatious advances, and his cousin Aziza, with whom he eventually carries on a sort of love affair through letters because she has since reached the age of veiling and seclusion. Zainab, for her part, falls in love with Ibrahim, the foreman of the fields, but her parents have arranged for her to marry Hassan, the son of a neighbouring landowner who has fallen on hard times. When Aziza’s parents also arrange a marriage for her, a dejected Hamid returns to Zainab in the futile hope of consolation. But she has since spurned him out of love for Ibrahim, and so Hamid departs and finally disappears from the story, leaving his parents only a letter in his wake and no indication of his whereabouts. When Ibrahim is then conscripted into the British colonial army and sent to the Sudan, a now hopeless and unhappily married Zainab sinks into despair. She soon contracts tuberculosis and dies in the end with Ibrahim’s name on her lips. Although at times digressive, the plot is clearly delineated, and its sustained development allows Haykal to weave together the stories of Zainab and Hamid — 133 —

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jeff shalan with careful attention to detail and a good deal of narrative poise. The structural coherence of the plot itself represents a marked advance in the development of the Arabic novel, breaking as it does with the predominantly episodic style that its predecessors had inherited from the traditional forms of Arabic prose. This break, in turn, is in no small part enabled by the characters themselves. Haykal leaves behind the familiar stock types associated with the maqama, folktales and legends, and, at least in the figures of Zainab and Hamid, offers two individuals whose characters are drawn with unprecedented depth and complexity. Their nearly flesh and blood existence owes something in its turn to the environment in which they find themselves. Parting with a narrative tradition that was centred on a distant and highly imaginative past, Zainab is set in the modernday Egyptian countryside. By choosing this site as the setting for his novel, Haykal thus presents not only one of the very first fictionalised accounts of contemporary rural life, but in so doing allows his characters to experience and embody the conflicts that emerge as modernity begins to encroach upon the values, practices and customs of traditional village life.16 And even if Zainab’s romantic yearnings and independence of thought seem at times unrealistic for a girl in her position, the novel itself offers a realistic portrait of the conditions of the peasantry around the turn of the century. Taken together, the particularities of plot, characterisation and setting allow the narrator of Zainab to engage in a good deal of social commentary on the problems of contemporary Egyptian society. Prose fiction as a vehicle for social critique is not itself a necessarily new development here, nor is the didactic tone of an often intrusive narrative voice. But the two primary subjects of Zainab’s critique – the hardships and injustice of peasant life and the social conventions of sexual relations as they pertain to issues of love, marriage and the status of women – enhance the modern orientation of the novel and help to situate it firmly within an emerging trend of liberal nationalist thought embodied by the Umma Party and two of its leading figures, Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid and Qasim Amin (Smith 1979: 250–1). Lutfi, in particular, had a tremendous influence on Haykal’s own intellectual development, and the former’s secularist notion of a territorial nationalism rooted in the peasantry finds perhaps its first literary expression in Zainab.17 It is not surprising, then, that Zainab first appeared on the pages of the same journal that Lutfi founded and that, as the leading theorist of the Umma Party, he used to promulgate his party’s reformist programme. And in this context, Haykal’s choice of a pen name seems quite appropriate as well. It is nonetheless important to note that Zainab was published at a time when alJarida expressed what was still a minority viewpoint, one that would only attain widespread popular support in the decade following the 1919 revolution against the British occupation, and only after the collapse of the Ottoman empire had rendered obsolete the more popular pro-Ottoman appeal of Mustafa Kamil’s — 134 —

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writing the nation Watani Party (Baron 1991: 274–5). The subsequent hegemony that the territorial nationalists established through the liberal reformist agenda of the new Wafd Party was predicated on precisely this turn of events, as they cleared the ground for a specifically Egyptian brand of nationalism, and one which could then confidently invoke Egypt’s long-standing agrarian past, as Zainab does, to legitimate the claim to a national entity and identity distinct from Islam and from the Arab lands and peoples to the East. Qasim Amin’s influence on Haykal is no less apparent in the pages of Zainab. As the author of two controversial works on the emancipation of women in Egyptian society, Tahrir al-mar’a (The Liberation of Women [1899]) and Al-Mar’a al-jadida (The New Woman [1900]), Amin inaugurated with the turn of the century a widespread debate on the subject. But even in his own time, Amin’s position was not an especially innovative one. As Leila Ahmed notes, Muslim intellectuals like Rif’at Rafi’ al-Tahtawi and Muhammad ÆAbduh had argued for women’s primary education and advocated similar reforms in the divorce and polygamy laws a generation earlier (Ahmed 1992: 144). And given the emergence of a women’s press in the 1890s, Amin can hardly be credited with giving rise to what was in fact an already burgeoning feminist movement.18 The significance of his argument lay rather in the link it forged between the status of women and the state of the nation, whereby the progress of the former became a necessary barometer for the moral and material advancement of the latter.19 Through the figures of Zainab and Aziza, Haykal, in turn, gives Amin’s argument and how it comes to bear on questions of love, marriage and conventional sexual relationships central thematic importance in his novel. What I would thus like to examine in more detail now is the novel’s treatment of these issues of class and gender, and the ways in which the narrator’s and Hamid’s positions with respect to them cast a distinct light on a certain emergent strain of nationalist thought. Despite its appropriateness, Haykal’s choice of Misri Fallah as his pen name for the original text evinces from the start an ambivalent relationship between author and subject. For, as we know, Haykal was not a peasant and neither, for that matter, is the narrator of his story, judging by his employment of literary Arabic as the dominant medium of expression, a literary Arabic that would have been inaccessible to a largely illiterate peasantry. Thus, as Pierre Cachia notes, a more accurate rendering of Misri Fallah needs to take account of the usage of the period in which it ‘conveyed the sense of “an Egyptian of native stock,” and has nationalist connotations, for it stands in contradistinction to “an Ottoman subject residing in Egypt” who, if of Turkish extraction, would until then have claimed some social superiority’ (Cachia 1990: 113). Consequently, if an identification is to be forged between the author and his subject matter, it is not via the peasantry, who with the exception of Zainab serve — 135 —

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jeff shalan largely as a backdrop for the story, but via Hamid who wanders through that backdrop from the privileged perspective of the landowner’s educated son. It is from a similar perspective that both narrator and author approach their subject, and in the same way that the mobility of Hamid’s class position distances him from the peasantry, the narrator’s use of literary Arabic distances him from the peasants who employ colloquial in the dialogue which itself was a nonetheless innovative advance at the time (Brugman 1984: 240). Thus, Haykal’s pen name might be seen as the first instance of a semantic transference that works to bridge, if not efface, this distance by shifting the focus from class difference to a common national identity. A similar transference is enacted in the narrator’s imaginative opening address to the reader: If fortune favoured, you might step into a moonless night … Soon you would find yourself following a path without knowing why, attracted by a force which you could not resist, your feet following your impulse … Moving on in pursuit of your heart’s desire, you would reach a spot where your feet refuse to take you further … you would be overwhelmed by the beauty of the world … Continuing on your journey … you would see the young girls and boys … In their right hands they hold their sickles – those semicircles of iron which have been in use from the time of the Pharaohs up to the present day. (Haykal 1989: 6–7)20

As the reader is drawn into the story, he is implicitly reminded of the fact that he is an outsider to this world and that he finds himself on its unfamiliar terrain only at the behest of the narrator, who thereby positions himself here as the mediating agent between the reader’s world and the world of the story. One can thus assume through this rhetorical invitation that the intended reader is neither a peasant nor one familiar with the ways of rural life. But the reader’s figurative placement within the actual scene of the story here works, in turn, to counter the distancing effect of his status as an outsider to the action of the story. By placing the reader within the scene, and indeed suggesting its irresistible attraction, the narrator in a sense encourages him to step beyond his role as observer and to in some way partake in this world. For if he, too, is one of Egyptian stock, then this world is also his world, as the historical continuity of the concluding phrase suggests, the sense of which is then underscored a few pages further on: ‘Their steadfastness, with its roots in history passed on from generation to generation from the time of the Pharaohs through the rule of Ismael to the present day’ (Haykal 1989: 15). It is thus possible to see in the narrative strategy of this passage the beginnings of Haykal’s attempt to construct for his reader a community centred on the land and the agrarian life of the peasantry. But the reader’s momentary identification with the romantic depiction of this seemingly timeless life is quickly disrupted by the contrasting image that immediately follows it: — 136 —

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writing the nation However much they suffered they had become accustomed, like their fathers before them, to this environment and heritage which was their lot. They were used to that state of eternal bondage in which they lived their lives and submitted to it without complaint or misgiving. Toiling endlessly, they would regard the results of their work with shining eyes while the proprietor alone gathered the fruits of their labour. His only concern was to sell the cotton at the highest price and rent out his land for the best return while at the same time exploiting the farm workers in accordance with their lowly status. The thought never occurred to him to raise them from the miserable conditions in which they lived as though he did not realize that his workers might be more efficient if their standard of living was improved or if they had an incentive to work in order to live at a more humane level … He was also accustomed to accepting things as they were and never considered for a moment to exchange the customs of his forefathers. (Haykal 1989: 8–9)

The peasantry is still cast in a timeless light here, but the romantic veneer has suddenly been stripped away and in its place we find a more realistic portrait of endless toil and exploitation. As such, the reader is discouraged from identifying too closely with this life and is instead encouraged to adopt the narrator’s critical point of view, which distinguishes him from both peasant and landowner in their uncritical acceptance of custom. Haykal’s ambivalent treatment of the peasantry, as evident in these opening passages, is one that pervades the novel. A persistent desire to romanticise peasant culture is repeatedly short-circuited by a lucid critique levied against the totality of the social order from corrupt landowners and greedy moneylenders to an inept government that further alienates the peasants through excessive taxation and forced military conscription, and from the arbitrariness of British rule to a hypocritical practice of Islam that can thus no longer serve as the moral centre of society.21 In this sense the social critique marks the limits of the desire for a national community constructed around the image of the peasant and the land. The realization of that desire, Haykal seems to suggest, is contingent on wide-scale social change and, most especially, an improvement in the living conditions of the peasantry. But the persistence of the romantic desire can be seen, in turn, to mark the limits of the social critique and the bourgeois nature of Haykal’s essentially reformist argument. For despite what appears at times as a quite trenchant critique, Haykal is by no means advocating a fundamental change in the relationship between the peasant and landowning classes, but only a more humane maintenance of it through higher wages and better working conditions. Indeed, a more radical argument for change, such as substantial land reform, peasant collectives or a redistribution of income, could represent a potentially serious disruption of that relationship and thus strike at the very core of the territorialist’s image of the Egyptian nation as embodied in the eternally unchanging ways of the peasant. And even in the rare instance where the possibility of a — 137 —

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jeff shalan more radical alternative is in fact broached, the narrator ultimately resorts to the common refrain of fatalism: There was nothing that Ibrahim could do to prevent the rich and powerful tyrants disposing of his life until sufficient cooperation existed among his fellow workers for them to defend themselves and rise up against the unjust oppressors. Then they would be forced to listen to what he had to say … But Ibrahim was poor, destined to be sent away … Yet if he had possessed but twenty pounds he could have saved himself from this. What injustice could be greater, or rather what hostility could equal it? There is no escaping fate. (Haykal 1989: 155–6)

Is the great injustice here that Ibrahim is conscripted against his will to participate in the military campaign in the Sudan, or is it that he simply lacks the money to buy his way out? Either way, the corruption that promotes this injustice is consigned to fate. From a certain perspective, the rhetorical appeal to fate has its point, since the Hamids who see in this campaign the chance for future national glory are certainly not the ones who will fight and die in it. But if that appeal does not quite exonerate the social causes of corruption here, it certainly enervates the critique. And more importantly, perhaps, it compromises the agency of the very peasants whose interests the text purports to represent. And this, in fact, seems to be the real injustice of the manner in which the narrative repeatedly renders the peasants and workers impotent through its continuous evocation of fate. In contrast to later works like Abdel Rahman alSharqawi’s Al-Ard (The Earth [1954]), where the peasants actively combat corrupt officials at both the local and national level, or Yusuf Idris’s Al-Haram (The Taboo [1959]), which offers a more nuanced and individualised portrait of the peasantry internally differentiated between those who own or rent land and those who subsist as migrant labourers, Haykal’s peasants are deprived of any political agency in the process of modernisation and social change. The result is that, as a class, the peasantry is effectively neutralised through its objectification as symbol. From a literary perspective, it might be tempting to explain this depiction of the peasantry in terms of the novelty of Zainab’s form and subject matter. For as Reinhard Schulze notes, it was only around the turn of the century that the ‘literary world began to discover and study the Egyptian peasant’ (Schulze 1991: 182). But the utter absence in the text of any allusion to the incipient workers’ movements or to the peasant protests and uprisings which dotted the nineteenthcentury landscape, culminating but not concluding in the 1882 ÆUrabi revolt, suggests the inadequacy of this explanation.22 Haykal’s particular representation of the peasantry seems rooted, rather, in his own class position and an intellectual elitism inherited from Lutfi al-Sayyid in which a sincere desire for social reform was mitigated by a distinct fear of mass movements (Smith 1979: 250). In a fatalistic portrait that preserves the romantic image as it argues for — 138 —

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writing the nation change, we can read both an expression of that fear and one which seeks the reader’s allegiance against such movements, the implication being that if the peasants are powerless to change their lives, then change must be initiated and orchestrated from elsewhere. One might recall here, by way of comparison, an oft-quoted line from Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1898): ‘They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’ (1984: 124). In Marx’s analysis of the 1848 French revolution, the small peasant proprietors could not represent their own political interests because they were not conscious of themselves as a class and thus aligned themselves, against their own best interests, with Bonaparte’s reactionary agenda. But as Gayatri Spivak points out in her insightful discussion of this passage, representation carries a strong double sense in Marx’s text, meaning both ‘proxy’ and ‘portrait’ (Spivak 1988: 276). And following the distinction Spivak draws, what we can then see in Zainab is an instance of the rhetorical power that derives from the collation of the two meanings: the literary representation, or portrait, of the peasantry standing in as the political representative, or proxy, of their class interests by constructing those very interests through a portrait that leaves the peasantry bereft of all agency. As such, the novel can offer the reader an image of a community centred on the image of the peasant without having to worry about the ways in which the actions and demands of the peasantry might in fact challenge that image of the community.23 For as an objectified symbol of the nation, the peasantry will only participate in its construction to the extent that they are constructed to fit the needs of a community whose agency and power will evidently reside elsewhere. To arrive at such a conclusion may seem extreme in light of Zainab’s relentless critique of tradition and the way it contributes to and helps to maintain the miserable social conditions of the peasantry. But what I am suggesting here is that this critique is, in a sense, contaminated by its very object in such a way as to defer to a now more distant future its argument for fundamental social change. In other words, by rhetorically excluding the peasantry from taking an active role in the process of social transformation, the text implicitly advocates the continuation of a traditional class structure. What first appears in Zainab as the inclusive appeal that nationalism makes on behalf of the majority might thus be better seen as the articulation of an exclusionary pact between narrator and reader. That pact does not foreclose the possibility of change so much as it defines the terms of change by projecting a vision of the nation under the tutelage of an intellectual elite whose power is predicated on maintaining its privileged distinction from the masses. This vision becomes, in turn, even more pronounced through the figure of Hamid as the ‘fallah-intellectual’ who embodies what Charles Smith sees as the novel’s central conflict: love and the impossibility of its fulfilment in Egypt — 139 —

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jeff shalan under present conditions (Smith 1979: 251).42 In his discussion of Zainab, Smith sees love itself as a metaphor of Haykal’s own desire for ‘personal happiness and a position of intellectual and political leadership’ (Smith 1979: 250). Following Smith’s point here, it is thus possible to see how Haykal invests his vision of the nation in Hamid’s search for love, a search which leads from city to country and back again, and which thus allows Haykal to link the distinct classes and cultures of these two worlds through a common indictment of that which foils the quest and thus necessitates reform – the traditional constraints placed upon women: [Aziza’s] education ended when she started to wear the veil and this also prevented her from further meetings with many of her acquaintances … Zainab would raise her head to the sky as if to lament the injustice of life or to seek refuge in God from her oppressive family who expected her to agree [to a marriage] for which she had no desire. (Haykal 1989: 13, 36)

It is Aziza’s veiling and seclusion, in fact, that first leads Hamid to Zainab in search of his ‘object of desire’. As a peasant girl, Zainab is necessarily less restricted in her movements than her urban, upper-class counterpart Aziza, and she thus represents for Hamid a seemingly more realistic opportunity to satisfy his desires: ‘However much the peasant mind may tremble at the mention of the word honour, the natural instinct of the human heart to love is a compulsion much stronger than social convention, as long as the deed remains out of sight, safe from the judgement of men’ (Haykal 1989: 17). But Zainab is not just an ordinary peasant girl, for it is this distinctly romantic sentiment, coupled with her extraordinary beauty, that distinguishes her from the backdrop of her companions. And while Hamid is drawn to her above all by her beauty, it is the romantic depiction of her character underscored by repeated references to the ‘unveiled moon’, suggesting a symbolic link with Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility, that allows the presumably middle-class reader to entertain what would otherwise appear as a scandalous affair. Here again, then, is another instance of what I have referred to as that semantic transference which momentarily bridges class differences by shifting the reader’s attention to a point of common identification, in this case a romantic image of and desire for love as the unifying force of the nation. But even before Hamid’s and Zainab’s brief affair comes to a close, the narrator alludes to the essential problem in such a relationship: ‘[M]an can only attain what his social position allows him to. Thus to a greater or lesser extent, he lives in a permanent state of conflict according to the amount of freedom his situation grants him in the way of achieving his aims and desires’ (Haykal 1989: 17). Although the narrator does not present it explicitly at this point, the problem here is precisely one of Hamid’s and Zainab’s respective social positions. While the amount of freedom accorded to each does indeed allow them to carry — 140 —

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writing the nation on an affair ‘safe from the judgement of men’, the curious way in which they act out those positions in their relationship permits Hamid to reaffirm his own class distinction from Zainab through his exploitation of her beauty. Hamid himself seems half-conscious of the fact when he attempts to justify his desire for Zainab: ‘As a result he found that he could kiss her from time to time without being shaken by shame, saying to himself: “Isn’t it natural for a boy to kiss a girl whose beauty pleases him?”’ (Haykal: 1989 17). Natural perhaps but, for Haykal, undesirable in this case because the relationship is not one of love but passion. At this point Hamid is seemingly too consumed by his passion to recognise the difference, and it is Zainab, rather, who almost instinctively senses the problem: ‘Zainab enjoyed listening to Hamid and conversing with him but she needed someone to whom she could give herself. Her aimless love needed somewhere to rest, in the heart of another to whom she could devote her life’ (Haykal 1989: 29). The narrator then quickly intervenes to define, in no uncertain terms, the nature of this longing: As though the human heart, in its search for love, strives to find a partner of equal status so that the compatibility between the two may assist their chances of happiness … A relationship exists between us and them which we do not experience with people from a different class … So it was from among the workers that Zainab would find the companion she wanted. Indeed, she had been feeling for some time that she had already discovered her partner in Ibrahim. (Haykal 1989: 29–30)

Thus, Hamid’s predicament becomes apparent as well: while passion may indeed be natural among individuals of different classes, love is only natural among members of the same class. To a great extent Zainab is the story of Hamid’s struggle to understand and come to terms with the narrator’s argument here.24 If Hamid is to find love, according to this argument, his natural choice should therefore be his cousin Aziza, to whom he does indeed return at this point. But his desire for Aziza is now further complicated by the effect of those very conventions that led him to seek out Zainab in the first place. For as the narrator informs us at the start, Hamid is a romantic dreamer: In this Egyptian environment and with an upbringing such as Hamid’s, it is not uncommon for young men to grow up with a false view of life. They often live in a land of fancy, creating their own happiness and suffering while painting the present and future with their own desires. Relying on such imaginings to get them through their work, many boys colour the outside world in a contradictory manner. Although their senses may belie their imaginings, the power of their fantasies is strong enough to overcome them, making them disbelieve what they see or distorting their judgement and estimation of what stands before them. (Haykal 1989: 13)

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jeff shalan to be everything he wanted’ (Haykal 1989: 14). But what is crucial to their relationship is the manner in which Aziza’s seclusion is itself implicated in the construction and maintenance of the image Hamid nurtures: ‘[U]pon becoming secluded at home something awakened in the soul of one of her relatives [Hamid], who had always been kind to her as a child’ (Haykal 1989: 14). Hamid’s romantic image of Aziza is allowed to flourish precisely because the social conventions of veiling and seclusion preclude the kind of intimate contact that might otherwise dispel such an image. And like Zainab before her, it is Aziza herself who, in a series of letters, must now awaken Hamid to the reality of her own condition: Brother Hamid, do you believe that girls like me are happy in this outmoded prison of ours? You might think we are content but God alone knows the vexation of our bitter existence which we are forced to put up with and become accustomed to as a patient gets used to her illness or sick bed … Don’t remind me of the veil for the very mention of it ruins me. I cannot even think about it without suffering intolerable anguish so I have grown accustomed to ignoring my situation, accepting my fate as it is … However much our hearts are kindled by the fire in our breast we are forced to conceal and repress it until finally it dies, having eaten away the dearest and most beloved part of our lives. (Haykal 1989: 134–6)

This confession comes as a revelation to Hamid who, like ‘everybody else’, had ‘believed that veiled women were quite content to stay at home’ (Haykal 1989: 135). But the subversive potential that thus opens for Aziza in this clandestine correspondence is undercut by the resignation of her words, which echo, in no uncertain terms, the fatalistic outlook of the peasantry. And after a single brief encounter where the fantasy of love that each has construed in the absence of the other clashes with the awkward reality of their sudden intimacy Aziza resigns herself to fate: ‘Forget me Hamid … leave me in my cell. I am content with my life or at least I am forced to be … I am not cut out for love nor has love anything to do with me’ (Haykal 1989: 140). Then, as if to underscore the helplessness of her situation, a final letter arrives a few weeks later in which she announces that a marriage has been arranged for her. With Aziza condemned to the fate of social convention, Hamid’s desire must remain unfulfilled, and Haykal’s vision for the nation remains but a vision: marriage based on a love naturalised in terms of class is unattainable in this social climate, no more possible for Hamid and Aziza than for Zainab and Ibrahim. With Zainab’s arranged marriage to Hassan, she too has since fallen victim to the same tradition. And so, like Ibrahim, both women are consigned to a customary fate and rendered powerless to oppose it. Only Hamid is free to depart and continue his search elsewhere; and after a vain attempt to return to Zainab, he quite literally vanishes from the sterile terrain of the novel’s purview. But in the letters to his parents that follow his departure, Hamid establishes

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writing the nation himself as a staunch critic of the conventions that have foiled his search thus far and as the novel’s central voice of reform: Turning my back on the establishment, I rejected the values which those who adhere to our traditions are so proud of, and the whole concept of marriage in my eyes became a subject of bitter criticism. (To this day I consider the institution of marriage defective, on account of the conditions that are attached to it. Indeed I believe a marriage which is not based on love and does not progress with love to be contemptible). (Haykal 1989: 174)

Thus, it seems, Hamid has learned the narrator’s lesson. And as the fallahintellectual, his refusal to settle for marriage under present conditions suggests the significance of his departure from the scene of the story: marriage based on love will become possible only if the nation follows his lead and breaks with those destructive effects of tradition that culminate in the symbolic portent of Zainab’s death: ‘Tomorrow or the day after I shall die and I warn you mother, when the time comes for my sisters to marry, don’t force them against their will for as you can see, it is a mortal mistake’ (Haykal 1989: 211). Although Haykal’s treatment of the status of women and relations between the sexes is more complex and compelling than his treatment of the peasantry, Zainab’s dying warning, like Aziza’s confession, seems ultimately ineffectual. The women who bear the primary burden of tradition can voice their sufferings and misgivings in private, but only the male intellectual is at liberty to depart from the conditions of tradition, and thus only he is in position to initiate reforms in the socio-sexual order. Without question, Egyptian men of a certain class were indeed at much greater liberty to do so. But in adhering to Amin’s argument, Haykal overlooks the contributions Egyptian women of the time made in putting the question of their own status on the agenda of social reform.25 As a result, like the peasantry, the women in the novel are deprived of the chance to play an active role in the course of social change, and the question of their own status is consequently made subservient to Haykal’s vision of the nation and his privileged place within it as represented through Hamid’s search for love. One is left to conclude that without the leadership of a male intellectual elite, women are doomed to tradition. And it is then only by adhering to a specifically male vision of the nation, based on a modern bourgeois conjunction of love and marriage, that women can hope for their own liberation. That a burgeoning women’s movement did in fact employ the rhetoric of that nationalist agenda in order to legitimate its own emergence into the traditionally male-gendered public space of Egyptian society should not, however, lead to the conclusion, as Haykal would have it, that women were entirely in accord with the terms of that agenda.26 Rather, as I have tried to suggest here, a critical reading of Zainab might encourage one to look instead at the ways in which a certain vision of the nation centred around the needs and desires of the male — 143 —

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jeff shalan intellectual can work to silence the expression of other, perhaps conflicting, needs and desires – especially those of women and the peasantry, who together are assigned, or consigned to, a central symbolic role in that vision. If Zainab marks the literary inauguration of Egypt’s first phase of cultural nationalism, Tawq al-Hakim’s ÆAwdat al-ruh represents its culminating artistic achievement. Written in 1927, ÆAwdat al-ruh met with immediate popular acclaim when it was finally published six years later; and, according to several critics, it was the first Arabic novel to warrant comparison with the best of the European tradition (Brugman 1984: 281; Moosa 1983: 179; Sakkut 1971: 89). Although al-Hakim is better known as a prolific playwright, and perhaps the most renowned dramatist in modern Arabic literature,27 ÆAwdat al-ruh remains his most influential work. Gamal ÆAbd al-Nasser himself read it as a boy, and was said to have been not only moved but purportedly influenced by its populist depiction of the 1919 revolution.28 And al-Risala, the leading magazine of the day, even proclaimed it to be the first genuine Egyptian novel (Brugman 1984: 281). Given the appearance of Zainab twenty years earlier, however, and several other novels in between, such a claim cannot be substantiated. But ÆAwdat alruh and its author do bear other striking parallels with their respective forebears here. Like Haykal before him, al-Hakim was the son of a wealthy landowning family who passed his early years in the rural environs of the peasantry. AlHakim also studied law in Cairo and later in Paris, which is where both writers wrote their respective works. And from what can be inferred concerning Haykal’s decision to republish Zainab, al-Hakim’s decision to publish ÆAwdat alruh was motivated by similar considerations. In his own words, ‘the country needed the novel form to give shape to new subjects which were necessary in this important phase of our development’ (quoted in Brugman 1984: 281). ÆAwdat al-ruh is, likewise, an autobiographical text that recounts the author’s coming of age, in this case during the year or two leading up to the events of 1919. And though al-Hakim never championed a particular political party or became actively involved in politics himself, ÆAwdat al-ruh bears the imprint of Haykal’s own profound influence on al-Hakim’s intellectual development and his nationalist orientation. Indeed, ÆAwdat al-ruh picks up on and develops many of the same thematic concerns that we find in Zainab – relationships between the classes and sexes in a modern setting, the concomitant need for social reform, and, most importantly, the role of the peasantry and women in the construction of a national community. But the two novels also differ from one another in notable ways. In its highly realistic and comically endearing treatment of character, if not necessarily in the symbolic content of its subject matter, ÆAwdat al-ruh departs from its romantic predecessor. And al-Hakim’s rich and witty use of dialogue, evidence of his — 144 —

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writing the nation obvious dramatic skill, allows him to avoid what Haykal resorts to, perhaps for want of that same skill: an excessively descriptive style which tends to mar Zainab’s overall effect. Consequently, the intrusive voice of Haykal’s narrator is virtually absent from al-Hakim’s text. In place of that controlling voice, and the vision it articulates, largely through Hamid as the figure of the budding intellectual, al-Hakim offers us a self-portrait of the aspiring artist in search of his voice and the voice of the nation. And if the text itself represents the fulfilment of al-Hakim’s own quest for mature artistic expression, it is no doubt a consequence of his acute attention and commitment to the formal matter of composition which is usually not a priority for a didactic writer like Haykal, and which makes ÆAwdat al-ruh, as a result, a far more convincing and finely wrought portrait of various aspects of Egyptian life. Perhaps the most significant difference between the two novels, however, lies in the advantage of hindsight afforded to al-Hakim. Writing in 1910–11, Haykal could not possibly have foreseen the events of 1919 and what would follow. Al-Hakim, on the other hand, was writing at the height of the cultural nationalist movement, after Egypt had secured at least its nominal independence and at a time when the ideological content and direction of the new nation-state had thus become a paramount concern for artists, intellectuals and politicians. And in the Pharaonicist spirit that swept through Egypt upon the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb, al-Hakim found the motif which would respond to that ideological concern as it addressed the significance of the 1919 revolution.29 What Haykal could thus only allude to through a romantic image of the peasantry, al-Hakim was, in turn, able to weave through his text as the unifying symbolic thread for its otherwise prosaic subject matter; and in so doing, he created the first masterpiece of modern Arab literature: an allegory of the 1919 revolution as the rebirth of the eternal spirit of the Egyptian nation. But it would be misleading the reader to suggest that ÆAwdat al-ruh is the story of the 1919 revolution. In fact, the mass uprisings which broke out in response to the British banishment of the Egyptian statesman SaÆd Zaghlul are recounted only briefly in the final pages of the novel. Furthermore, at the literal level, the text provides the reader with no preparation for this narrative moment, remaining entirely mute on both the great historical events that precede it – World War I and the subsequent collapse of the Ottoman empire – and the obvious signs of social unrest in Egypt in the years leading up to 1919 (Beinin 1981: 19; Beinin and Lockman 1988: 84–5). The narrative effect, consequently, is one of a spontaneous, almost unconscious, awakening of nationalist fervour that seems to erupt exclusively in response to Zaghlul’s forced exile.30 But far from a mere appendage to the main story, the depiction of this event marks, both aesthetically and ideologically, the climactic moment of the novel. And while its particular representation here might in part be accounted — 145 —

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jeff shalan for in terms of the narrative perspective of the youthful protagonist, who may well have experienced it in this spontaneous light, its textual significance – analogous to the text itself as the culminating achievement of this first phase of cultural nationalism – can better be explained by first attending to the story itself. For it is there that al-Hakim lays the figurative groundwork for, and from which he forges, this renewed image of the Egyptian nation and its eternal spirit miraculously reborn in the collective expression of a single moment. ÆAwdat al-ruh is set in a middle-class neighbourhood in Cairo where Muhsin, the 15-year-old protagonist, has come to study. Having left his parents’ estate in the country, he now lives in a small apartment with his uncles Abduh, an engineering student, and Hanafi, an arithmetic teacher and the absent-minded head of the household; Zanuba, his illiterate aunt who was sent along to look after his uncles; their cousin Salim, a policeman temporarily relieved of duty for some mysterious escapade with a Syrian woman; and Mabruk, a childhood friend and the servant of the household. In the house next door lives Dr Hilmi, a retired government employee, with his wife and their beautiful 17-year-old daughter Saniya, who becomes the novel’s erotic centre of attention – drawing the affections first of Muhsin, then Abduh and Salim, and finally Mustafa Bey, a neighbour of Turkish descent who has inherited a firm from his father but who spends most of his time at the local coffeehouse observing the others and being observed, in turn, by Zanuba. But like Haykal’s Zainab, Saniya is more than a mere object of male desire. She is both a catalyst for the novel’s humorous portrayal of the male characters and, more importantly, the one who generates the narrative’s construction of, or movement towards, a national community, as well as Muhsin’s aspiration to be its voice. And given the novel’s Pharaonic underpinnings, Saniya’s character, much more so than her romantic counterpart, evokes a comparison with the mythical Isis, charged with the task of resurrecting her dead and dismembered brother-husband, Osiris or, in this case, the Egyptian nation itself. But whether Saniya’s character can, in fact, support the symbolic weight of her role becomes, in turn, a crucial question for a novel whose powerful rhetorical appeal for national unity derives from an allegorical meaning deftly woven into the fabric of the story. And, as I will go on to argue, by problematising the seamless appearance of this weave, Saniya’s figure raises fundamental concerns about the nature of that appeal. The leitmotif of unity is announced at the start, as the ‘Prologue’ presents an isolated image of a national community writ in miniature. The five male members of the household have taken ill, and when the doctor enters their home, he finds them jammed together in a single bedroom. Why, he wonders aloud, did they put up with this crowding when there was room elsewhere in the apartment – the sitting room at least? … A voice which rose from the depths of a bed replied, ‘We’re happy like this!’

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writing the nation … A person scrutinizing [the reply] would sense an inner joy at this communal style of life. It might even have been possible to read on their pale faces the glow of a secret happiness at being sick together. They were submitting to one regime, taking the same medicine and eating the same food. They suffered the same fortune and destiny … He turned to the invalids stretched out there and said, ‘You must be from the country.’ … His imagination had sketched a picture of subsistence farmers … He started saying to himself, ‘Only a dirt farmer could live like this, no one else. No matter how spacious his house, he will sleep with his wife, children, calf, and donkey colt in a single room.’31

These invalids are indeed from the country but, with the exception of Mabruk, they no longer hail from the class of subsistence farmers. In fact, as recent arrivals to Cairo, they are largely representative of a new urban middle class; and, taken together, they embody an even wider cross-section of a changing Egyptian society and signify several aspects of the emergent nation-state apparatus. Hanafi offers a comic revision of the traditional patriarch as petitbourgeois schoolteacher; Abduh, the engineering student, is representative of a new technocratic class; Salim, the policeman, stands in as the figure of state law; and Mabruk’s character suggests the uprooted peasantry’s transition into an urban working class. And while Muhsin foregoes the luxuries of family wealth, inherited by a mother of Turkish descent, to live here with the others, his literary studies mark him off as a future member of the intellectual elite. Zanuba, as the displaced peasant woman, is noticeably absent from this communal scene, figuratively if not literally. It is thus difficult to overlook the symbolism of this representative group introduced as a family of invalids – the nation, evidently, is in need of a cure. And though the household quickly recovers, each of its members, with the possible exception of Muhsin, is plagued by a general level of incompetence that reinforces this opening impression. In this light, the doctor’s inability to comprehend his patients’ curious behaviour as anything but the product of peasant life suggests, paradoxically, that the nation’s ills are rooted in an otherwise non-existent sense of solidarity. And it furthermore foreshadows what Muhsin will derive from his later encounter with and musings about the peasantry: a traditional image of unity as the basis for a new national community. But it is Saniya who first emerges as Muhsin’s muse; and as her effect on him reveals, without that clearly defined basis, the unity that now exists among the members of the household is necessarily a frail one. The ‘folks’, as the male members of the house affectionately refer to themselves, are all infatuated with Saniya, but Muhsin is the first to meet her. One day while in the company of his Aunt Zanuba, who is on friendly terms with Saniya, Muhsin is introduced to her as a singer; and because Saniya plays the piano, she immediately invites him in. Although the propriety of this invitation — 147 —

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jeff shalan is questioned, the educated and cultured Saniya is an emblem of the new Egyptian woman; and since Muhsin is in the company of his aunt, the invitation is deemed acceptable. Saniya’s effect on Muhsin is quickly apparent. In school the next day, he first explains to his friends, against their objections, why he has chosen the arts over the sciences: I don’t care about money and wealth … Tomorrow we’re going to be the eloquent tongue of the nation … Our occupation tomorrow will be to give expression to what is in the heart of the entire people … If you knew the value of the ability to express what is in the soul … to express what is in the hearts … Think of the maxim in our book of memory pieces: ‘A man is known by two of his smallest parts: his heart and his tongue’ … The nation too has a heart to guide and a tongue to direct the material forces within it … Wealth by itself is nothing. (79)

Then, later in class, when the teacher asks Muhsin to speak extemporaneously on a topic of his choice, he can think of only one: love. His choice creates a minor scandal in the classroom, but after much insistence from his peers, the teacher allows him to proceed: The class fixed their eyes on Muhsin … It seemed they were hearing something they had all sensed for a long time but had not dared express, or realized they felt … being ignorant of the existence of beauty in the world. They were ignorant of the heart’s role in their lives … They did not know the sublime meaning of life. Muhsin felt that about them. He also felt that the secret of their amazing attentiveness and overwhelming pleasure with him and what he was saying to them clearly visible in their eyes was based on a single thing: he was expressing what was in their hearts. (81–2)

Obviously, Muhsin is also expressing the feeling that has suddenly claimed his own heart in the presence of Saniya’s beauty. And when he visits her again later the same day, the mythic import of her inspirational beauty is made explicit: ‘A picture came to Muhsin’s mind. It was one he looked at frequently in the year’s text for ancient Egyptian history and one he loved a great deal … That picture was of a woman. Her hair was cut short too and was a gleaming black as well … and rounded like an ebony moon: Isis!’ (86). The aspiring artist thus seems to have found in his love for Saniya the mythical key to the nation’s heart and the fulfilment of his own desire to be its voice. But Saniya’s role here as the generative matrix of the solidarity that Muhsin establishes among his peers is called into question through his private response to this sudden presence of love in his life. Returning home after their initial meeting, Muhsin went straight to bed, seeking the solitude and independence which only a person with a private room can feel. For the first time Muhsin resented that style of living: five individuals in a single room. For the first time he felt exasperated by that communal living which had always been a source of happiness, contentment, and joy for everyone; … Muhsin hid his head under the covers. He attempted to block out the cold, merciless sound of his

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writing the nation comrades till he would hear nothing but the beautiful, enchanting, musical voice of Saniya. (69–70)

Muhsin’s desire to be left alone now produces an immediate rift in the household, compounded, in turn, by Abduh and Salim’s competitive jealousy which surfaces in response. And when Abduh and then Salim succeed in getting themselves invited into their neighbour’s house, the one to repair an electrical problem, the other to tune the piano, each returns with the same feeling of resentment towards the other ‘folks’ and their communal living arrangement and feels the same subsequent need for privacy and solitude. Saniya’s generative power of unity doubles as a disruptive force, alienating the members of the household from one another. And so whereas Isis resurrected her brother-husband by piecing together his mutilated body, Saniya’s presence threatens to tear the familial community apart. In her self-contradictory capacity, Saniya thus becomes the novel’s primary site of conflict, and not only for the contesting desires of Muhsin, Abduh, Salim, and later Mustafa. At a more general level, Saniya functions as a vehicle for the development of the novel’s central thematic conflict: the tension that exists between the needs of the individual and the needs of the community.32 In her symbolic role as an inspirational idol, she represents the needs of the community and the power of myth, channelled through art, to call that community into being. But in her literal role as a desirable young woman, she represents the needs of individuals (albeit, in this case, male individuals), which are often at odds with one another and thereby pose a potential threat to the community. To a great extent, then, the resolution of the thematic conflict hinges on the reconciliation of Saniya’s contradictory position in the narrative. Without that reconciliation, the novel’s argument for unity remains necessarily weak, as must the allegory on which it is based. But the dilemma posed by Saniya’s character is placed in dramatic abeyance at this point, as Muhsin receives a letter from his parents requesting that he pay them a visit. With the subsequent shift in setting from Cairo to the countryside, some critics see an abrupt diversion from the main storyline.33 The epigraph that introduces this section of the novel suggests otherwise, however: ‘Arise Arise, Osiris. I am your son Horus./I have come to restore life to you./You no longer have your true heart, your past heart’ (153). In keeping with the Pharaonic motif, the meaning of these lines, taken from the sacred Egyptian text, Book of the Dead, is transparent enough: they foreshadow the coming insurrection/resurrection and the casting of Zaghlul in the leading role as the symbolic son of modern Egypt. But placed as it is here, this reference to Horus, and not Isis, as the restorative agent also signals the dominant narrative strategy that al-Hakim will go on to employ in response to the conflict discussed above: a strategy of displacement. In this respect, the shift in scenes is something other than a convenient diversion that allows al-Hakim to develop the allegorical — 149 —

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jeff shalan meaning of the plot. Rather, just as Isis is displaced by Horus, who usurped her (re)generative power in myth, so too is Saniya’s disruptive power displaced by the change in setting and by what Muhsin will discover upon his return to the country: the real heart of Egypt in the solidarity of peasant life.34 Al-Hakim’s fluid orchestration of the symbolic (from Isis to Horus), thematic (from Saniya to the peasantry), and literal (from city to country) shifts in focus at this point is further evidence not of an abrupt diversion, but of an essential turning point in the narrative and another instance of his artistic brilliance. The literal means of transition, for instance the train that carries Muhsin home, provide the transitional site for the thematic turn, as Muhsin listens to the conversation of the passengers who share his compartment: … the emotion of mercy, a goodness of hearts, a union of hearts. These were emotions to be found in Egypt and not in Europe. … The people of Egypt are a deeply rooted nation. Why, we’ve been in the Nile Valley for seven thousand years. We knew how to plant and cultivate, had villages, farms and farmers at a time Europe had not even achieved barbarism. … Yes, Sir … we are without doubt a social people by instinct, for we have been an agricultural people since ancient times. Back then other peoples lived by hunting in a barbarous and solitary fashion with each tribe or family in a different place. We, however, from prehistory on, have had villages of a civilized type and have dwelt in the Nile Valley. Social organization was in our blood. Social life is a characteristic that has developed among us through many generations. (156–7)

Upon Muhsin’s arrival, however, the general mood of solidarity established in transit and around the subject of the ancient unity of the Egyptian people is quickly shattered by the appearance of his aristocratic mother whose Westernised lifestyle has claimed his father’s devotion as well. Muhsin had always been embarrassed by the wealth that marked him off from his peers, but his parents’ arrogance towards the peasants who work their land now awakens something else within him: He detected a rebellious spirit he had not been conscious of before … Secretly he rebelled against his father … Wasn’t he a peasant too, first and foremost … a man of the earth? … How had he changed? Did his clothes, his expensive walking stick, his shoes and socks, and his diamond ring alter him? … Wasn’t it his mother of Turkish heritage who had influenced his father in the name of civilization? … Yes, what right did he have now to look down on the peasant? Because the peasant farmer was poor? … Was poverty a fault? (161–2)

Although Muhsin’s rebellion is directed against his father, it is clear that his mother embodies all that the nation must now oppose – the remnants of Ottomanism, the encroachment of European values, and the deleterious effects of wealth on the community. His father, by contrast, has simply gone astray. By arming his father’s originary identity as a peasant, the rebellious Muhsin thus

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writing the nation sets himself up as another symbolic son whose task it is to restore the ‘true heart, [the] past heart’ of the father of the epigraph. And the near demonisation of his mother, which effectively excludes her from any place in a new national community, reflects, in turn, the narrative shift away from woman as the symbolic source of national renewal.35 Muhsin’s rebellion leads him, naturally enough at this point, to seek communion with the peasantry – a movement that, at the individual level, now dovetails with the narrative turn away from woman as the thematic centre. For when an expected letter from Saniya does not arrive, Muhsin responds to his own uncertainty about her feelings for him by rushing out into the fields with the intention of ‘inhaling love from this pure, clean air and seeing it in all the pure, innocent creatures surrounding him’ (168). And when Muhsin then wanders into a barn where he finds a cow nursing not only her calf, but a small child who has crawled up to her udder, the symbolic centre shifts as well: The calf and the child both seemed to be her children. What a beautiful picture! What a striking concept! … Muhsin was delighted by this scene. It meant something to him at a deep, mysterious level … If one attempts to translate Muhsin’s feelings into the language of logic and intellect, one can say he responded in his soul to that union between the two different creatures, joined together by purity and Innocence. But sadly, tomorrow that child will grow up and as he does his human nature will increase while his angelic qualities diminish. His feeling of union between himself and the rest of creation will be replaced by desires and wishes that make him scorn everything differing from him. They will blind him to all their resemblances. For that reason the angelic light which manifests itself as purity, innocence, and a feeling of unity and of the spirit of the group, leaves him. Its place is taken by man’s blindness manifest in desires and passions and selfish, egotistical feelings … But there was one thing Muhsin was able to grasp with his intellect and that was thanks to his study of the history of ancient Egypt. This scene reminded him suddenly, without there being any particularly strong link, that the ancient Egyptians worshipped animals or at least portrayed the one god with images of different animals … [D]id not the ancient Egyptians know that unity of existence and that overall union between the different groups of creatures? If their symbol for god was half man and half animal, was it not a sign of their perception that existence is nothing but a unity? They did not scorn animals any more than this child would scorn the calf … The feeling of being merged with existence, that is, of being merged in God, that was the feeling of that child and calf suckling together. It was the feeling of that ancient, deeply rooted Egyptian people. Even now, the farmers of Egypt had a heartfelt respect for animals. They did not disdain to live with them in the same house or to sleep together in a single room. Was it not an angelic Egypt with a pure heart which survived in Egypt? She had inherited, over the passing generations, a feeling of union, even without knowing it. (169–70)

In its richly allusive texture this passage stands as the novel’s pivotal moment. First, it recalls the opening scene as it reverses its effect. What the urban doctor

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jeff shalan had looked upon with disdain there is revealed here as, in fact, the ‘pure heart’ of the nation, suggesting the thought which then comes immediately to Muhsin’s mind: ‘Possibly life in the town and in the capital had corrupted his heart’ (171), corrupted no doubt by those ‘desires and passions and selfish, egotistical feelings’ which breed division. If the towns and cities of Egypt are to unite in the name of a single nation, then, they must seek to reclaim that ‘pure heart’, the ancient Egyptian spirit of solidarity that resides here with the peasantry. Furthermore, as the site of Muhsin’s epiphany, this scene provides the young artist with the new inspirational source for a voice that longs to speak on behalf of the national source whose mythical and historical dimensions give it the power to overcome as it displaces his previous source of inspiration, whose disruptive effects are manifest in those same desires and passions. And, finally, by revealing its ‘mysterious’ meaning to Muhsin alone, a meaning not entirely accessible through the ‘language of logic and intellect’, this scene legitimates his own claim (as well as al-Hakim’s, and that of a national culture in general) to speak for the ‘heart’ of the nation. For if even the peasants themselves lack the self-conscious awareness of their own privileged position as the living locus of this mystical knowledge, then who but the artist can reawaken that still pure but slumbering heart? Informed now by the revelation of this scene, Muhsin proceeds to find, in the scenes that follow it, the confirmation of his vision and the essence of national unity. He first encounters a group of peasants mourning the death of a water buffalo; and apparently unaware of the animal’s importance to the peasant economy, he cannot understand the tremendous outpouring of grief. But when the carcass is skinned and butchered, and each mourner steps forth to buy a piece of the meat, the event acquires a new-found significance for Muhsin: Everyone came forward to buy without any haggling or hesitation. They seemed to think they had a duty to provide more than spoken consolation. They had to lighten the burden on its owner by getting its price together and giving that to him in compensation for its loss. One of the farm workers told Muhsin that this was the normal practice, the custom followed whenever one of them suffered a loss from his livestock. They were not, like the people of the district capital, a people who stopped at talk. They shared the grief in a way that was more than phrases to be repeated. It was an actual sharing to lessen the burden. Each of them sacrificed part of his wealth for the sake of the other. Muhsin was silent in astonishment. That luminous happiness, the essence of which was beyond his ken, returned to him. It came back to him this time from sorrow, like life coming from death. What an amazing nation they were … these Egyptian farmers … Was there still left in this world solidarity as beautiful as this and a feeling of unity like this? (171)

When he then wanders into a neighbouring field where other peasants are harvesting the crop, he is struck by this same sense of communal sacrifice:

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writing the nation Were they chanting a hymn for the morning, to celebrate the birth of the sun the way their ancestors did in the temples? Or, were they chanting in delight at the harvest. It was what they worshipped nowadays. They had sacrificed for it: with work, toil, hunger, and cold all year long. Yes, they had given all they had for the sake of this deity … He began to look at them and at their faces in wonder. Their features and expressions all conveyed the same sense. Despite their differences they seemed a single person with regard to this sense of work and hope … They were looking at the collected harvest with loving interest, as though they were saying, ‘Toil and suffering are of no concern so long as they are for you whom we worship.’ (172)

In each instance, one sees how Muhsin’s previous revelation leads him to read these events in a particular light, and thereby ascribe to them a significance of near mythic proportion. And it is only the assurance he derives from his conclusions here that then allows him to raise the telltale question: ‘Would he, too, be able to sacrifice for the sake of Saniya … to plunge himself in pain and suffering because of her? Or was he not of the same blood as these Egyptian farmers?’ (172). For Muhsin, herein lies the secret of solidarity and renewal. The realisation of his desire to speak the pure and eternal heart of the nation, and thereby awaken it in others, hinges on precisely his ability to make this sacrifice, without which he can only remain among the dead and corrupted souls of the city. Thus emboldened by his discovery of Egypt’s embalmed source preserved in the body of the peasantry, Muhsin returns to Cairo in the spirit of sacrifice. But as he prepares for his departure, we catch a glimpse of another and rather more troubling source only briefly alluded to above: the source of Muhsin’s knowledge of the history of ancient Egypt that enabled the translation of his visionary experience into the language of the intellect. I am referring here to the body of knowledge produced by European Orientalists and Egyptologists, whose origins can be located in the complex and contradictory ideology of Romanticism and its need to see in Egypt, and specifically in the Egyptian peasant, the image of an eternally unchanging world. It is this same knowledge that later served as the basis for the textbooks that Egyptian students, like Muhsin and al-Hakim, studied in school.36 The French archaeologist who, along with a British agricultural inspector, pays a visit to Muhsin’s family at this point in the novel personifies the general tenor of the Orientalist discourse on Egypt. A few excerpts from his private debate with the inspector should, in turn, be sufficient to problematise the nature of Muhsin’s epiphany: ‘Ignorant … These ignorant people, Mr Black, know more than we do.’ The Englishman laughed and said with more sarcasm: ‘They sleep in the same room with their animals!’ The Frenchman answered seriously: ‘Yes, especially because they sleep in one room with the animals … Yes, this people you consider ignorant certainly knows many things, but it knows by the heart, not the intellect. Supreme wisdom is in their blood without their knowing it … This is an ancient people. If you take one of these peasants and remove his heart, you’ll find in it the residue of ten thousand years of

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jeff shalan experiential knowledge, one layer on top of the other, but he’s not aware of it … This explains for us Europeans those moments of history during which we see Egypt take an astonishing leap in only a short time and work wonders in the wink of an eye … The power of Egypt is in the heart which is bottomless … Yes, this is the one difference between us and them: they don’t know the treasures they possess.’ At that, the Britisher rose and said sarcastically, ‘The French nation to which you belong thinks nothing of sacrificing facts to eloquence … I am convinced that those creative thousands who built the pyramids were not herded in against their will the way the Greek Herodotus stupidly and ignorantly asserts. They rather came to work in droves, singing a hymn to the beloved in the same way their descendants go to bring in the harvest. Yes, their bodies suffered, but even that gave them a secret pleasure, the pleasure in sharing pain for a common objective … This pleasure in communal pain … had a single cause which all shared: the emotion of belief in the beloved and of sacrifice … this was their power … Do you hear these voices in unison which are coming from numerous hearts? Wouldn’t you think they all flow from a single heart? … When the Egyptian peasants suffer pain together they feel a secret pleasure and happiness about being united in pain. What an amazing industrial people they will be tomorrow.’ (179–82)

The fact that the Frenchman’s words echo almost verbatim Muhsin’s own thoughts on the subject contests the initial depiction of Muhsin’s personal awakening as the result of a near-mystical vision. Rather, it seems in retrospect now to have been the product of a powerful imagination acting on and shaped by a pre-existent and internalised body of knowledge. The veracity of what a series of existential encounters had hitherto revealed the ancient and eternal source of the Egyptian nation is thus implicitly called into question here. And, at least for a moment, the purported source of the nation is displaced by the derivative source of the nationalist discourse itself – the self’s (Egypt’s) reading of the other’s (Europe’s) reading of the self.37 Consequently, we are left here with a quite different and compromised image of a unison of hearts – not that which exists between the peasants, but the one established between Europe’s and Egypt’s cultural elite.38 And just as the former had ‘awakened’ the latter to its own ‘identity’, the latter can now, in turn, perform that task for its own people. But if this particular revelation undermines the credibility of Muhsin’s epiphany, it fails to negate its effect. In fact, it is precisely the force of the young artist’s imagination that gives him the strength to make the necessary sacrifice once back in Cairo.39 The necessity of that sacrifice is, of course, enhanced by the fact that Saniya and Mustafa have since fallen in love with one another. But that fact cannot negate the ennobling significance of Muhsin’s sacrifice, as revealed through the reactions of the other members of the household to this new romance and its effect on him. Zanuba responds first by calling Saniya a ‘whore’. Having formally squandered the family’s savings on magical potions designed to win Mustafa’s love, she now resorts to mischievous pranks in order — 154 —

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writing the nation to disrupt the relationship. In marked contrast, Salim and Abduh’s response evolves in a quite different direction: Extraordinarily enough, Salim changed into another person. Muhsin’s sensitive heart had enough of the sacred fire in it to suffice to fill Salim’s heart and to make up for the deficiencies of Abduh’s … Was it then contagious? Or a question of imagination and suggestion? Is the heart not a frighteningly powerful source? A single sensitive heart may suffice to inspire a wide diversity of others. Thus Abduh and Salim’s feelings began as admiration and sympathy and ended as a shared participation. The deeper Muhsin got into his pain and the more they shared it with him they felt raised by that much above their original status. With the passing days as they lived with Muhsin and his beautiful grief, every evil or hateful feeling in them toward Saniya or Mustafa evaporated … They were witnesses and elegists for the torment of this young person who had given up so much for the sake of his beloved. (248–9)

Thus, the original divisiveness of individual needs in the specific shape of male desire is displaced onto the superstitious Zanuba, who, as the figure of a reactionary tradition, has become another national outcast or target of reform. And, in exchange, it is the sensitive heart of the artist, inspired by his vision, that now becomes the new source of male solidarity and the agent of communal sacrifice and the collective sublimation of those needs. By elevating his beloved to the status of an idol, but an idol for whom he now suffers, Muhsin removes Saniya from the earthly realm of competitive desire and thus appears to resolve the conflict between individual needs and the needs of the community. But insofar as Muhsin’s symbolic appropriation of the peasants’ ‘treasures’, aided by his imagination, is what empowers him to make the sacrifice, Saniya’s own contradictory position in the narrative is not really reconciled. Rather, in raising her to an idol, Muhsin seems almost to supplant her in her symbolic role, since it is around his suffering, and not her image, that the others now unite. And while his image of the suffering peasantry as the source sustains, as it competes with, his image of Saniya as the beloved Isis, it is his imagination, ironically enough, that now refuses to relinquish its grasp on the literal Saniya, the desirable woman: Not even the truth could destroy those imaginings and fantasies which he had constructed for so long around that letter [from Saniya]. Imagination is at times more powerful than fact … He clung to it and to its familiar phrases as though imagination through its persistence lent it the force of truth, or fantasy had changed into belief. How can truth defeat belief unless the intellect defeats the heart? (249)

What the others seem able to sublimate through Muhsin, he seems finally unable to sublimate himself. And in the link established through his desire here between imagination, the heart and belief, the artist’s vision reveals its doubleedged effect, rallying the nation around an image which is itself represented as a fiction. It is thus perhaps only the faith in fiction, in the artist’s voice and the product of his vision, that can will the nation miraculously into being. ÆAwdat — 155 —

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jeff shalan al-ruh is itself testimony to the rhetorical power of such action of the work of art which, as I’ve tried to suggest in this case, can in a quite literal and selfconscious way write the nation into being. When the climactic moment of the insurrection at last arrives, it is then perhaps more than coincidence that it bursts forth in the ‘season of creation’, since this ‘resurrection’ of the Egyptian nation is also the realisation of the young artist’s vision: the work of art itself. But in al-Hakim’s representation of the event, we can also see more clearly what is at stake in an argument for national unity predicated not only on sacrifice but on the power of imagination and belief. It is the Frenchman’s opinion which the ‘[f]acts bore out’, a narrative fact that itself comes as no surprise at this point: Perhaps this archaeologist who lived in the past saw the future of Egypt better than anyone else … The Egypt that had slept for centuries in a single day arose to her feet. She had been waiting, as the Frenchman said, waiting for her beloved son, the symbol of her buried sorrows and hopes, to be born anew. And this beloved was born again from the body of the peasant … Each group and band thought that it had initiated the uprising, in response to a flaming, new emotion. No one understood that this emotion had flared up in all their hearts at a single moment because all of them were sons of Egypt, with a single heart … Fourteen million people were thinking of only one thing: a man who expressed their feelings, who arose to demand their rights to freedom and life. He had been taken and imprisoned and banished to an island in the middle of the seas. (272–3)

Without question, Zaghlul’s banishment was the catalyst for the uprisings. But far from being a singular expression of anti-British nationalist sentiment, the popular uprisings were fuelled as much by diverse and contradictory currents of internal discontent. By casting Zaghlul in the image of the nation’s ‘beloved’, expressing the hopes of one and all, the narrative effectively silences those other dissenting voices – a gesture whose textual representation occurs at numerous points in the novel (the symbolic appropriation of the peasantry, which can function as an apology and indeed justification for exploitation, the demonisation of Muhsin’s mother, the rejection of Zanuba), but most notably in this culminating displacement of Saniya as the ‘beloved’. In a sense, the terms of the narrative’s argument for unity make Saniya’s displacement inevitable, but not because the ‘beloved’ must be ‘born again from the body of the peasant.’ Rather, as Muhsin has shown, it is because there is finally no way to reconcile oneself to the dilemma posed through Saniya’s character. Self-sacrifice cannot alone resolve the problem of the individual’s place in the community, and so it seems one can only imagine the dissolution of the problem by making its disruptive agent, like those dissenting voices, disappear. Interestingly, it is a relative outsider to the community who provides us with the final insight:

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writing the nation Amazingly Abduh, Muhsin, and Salim rushed and plunged into the revolution with abandon. Perhaps Zanuba was the only person who noticed that. It seemed to her she understood the secret of that a little. Those three who not long before were still and silent … Their gloom and melancholy had departed and been replaced by concern, struggle, and zeal … All the bitterness of unrequited love had been transformed in [Muhsin’s] heart into fervent nationalist feelings. All his desire to sacrifice for the sake of his personal beloved had changed to daring sacrifice for the sake of his nation’s beloved. This was what happened to Abduh and Salim as well, to a lesser extent. (274–5)

Unity, thus, is not only contingent on self-sacrifice, or what it is in the self that might preclude the emergence of a unison of hearts; as a figurative reading of Saniya’s final displacement suggests, it may well necessitate the sacrifice of others as well. And while the imaginative vision of the artist may serve as a powerful agent for the former, the latter evokes the image of some less benign force. Through al-Hakim’s near flawless weaving of the artistic vision and the textual allegory into the fabric of the plot, whereby his young protagonist merges with the community for whom he speaks, ÆAwdat al-ruh succeeds where Zainab had failed: it constructs a genuinely populist image of the nation with tremendous rhetorical appeal. But the nature of the solidarity argued for and engendered in the text should trouble us. At its worst, the image of the Egyptian people as a single orchestrated entity marching in an almost instinctive beat portends the excesses of Nasserism.40 And even at its best, the text remains conspicuously silent on the direction of that march. Thus, this image of national unity leaves us with a final question: Who or what, exactly, are the people sacrificing for other than an image of the nation itself?41 Naturally, one does not look to novels for political programmes; but given the power and influence of this particular novel, it is a question well worth asking. For in spite of its widespread success, ÆAwdat al-ruh could not rekindle the nationalist spirit that had already begun to wane by the time of its publication. Nevertheless, and despite some clear differences and al-Hakim’s obviously more lasting accomplishment, Zainab and ÆAwdat al-ruh are exemplary products of Egypt’s, and the Arab world’s, first phase of cultural nationalism. As bookends for this particular moment in Egyptian history, these two texts not only represent the dominant focus and trajectory of the nationalist thought of the period; they also provide valuable insight into the rhetorical appeal, as well as the ideological limits and contradictions, of the territorialists’ nation-building project. And while one cannot draw substantial conclusions on the basis of two novels, these two influential texts do shed light on some of the less tangible reasons for the ultimate failure of that project and the disillusionment with the programme of secular reforms which by the 1930s had led many of Egypt’s leading intellectuals, including Haykal and, to a lesser extent, al-Hakim, to finally abandon the territorialist argument. — 157 —

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jeff shalan

notes 1. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). 2. The idealist assumption that thought is independent of and precedes language, which then serves as a mere vehicle or transparent medium for it, is a highly problematic and largely discredited one, but I am following the terms of Antonius’s argument here. 3. See Benedict Anderson’s argument in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). The importance of Anderson’s theory of the nation as an imagined community cannot be overstated. But the fact that Anderson, along with numerous other critics and theorists of Western nationalism, seems unaware of the similar insight that Antonius arrived at several decades earlier is indicative of the power of such ‘imagined communities’ to circumscribe even their own critical discourse. 4. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 5. Hilary Kilpatrick’s detailed study of the novel’s relation to its socio-historical context in The Modern Egyptian Novel: A Study in Social Criticism (London: Ithaca, 1974) most closely approximates my own concerns here. But as the subtitle of her work suggests, Kilpatrick addresses a broad range of issues of which nationalism, as one, is touched upon only in passing. And whereas Kilpatrick’s sociological approach situates the novel in an essentially mimetic relationship to its context, I see the novel’s relationship to its context as ideologically more complex. 6. Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 209–10. 7. Egypt, of course, was by no means unique in this respect. For an insightful and compelling analysis of the subject and related issues in the comparative contexts of Arab, Greek and Japanese cultures, see Mary Layoun, Travels of a Genre: The Modern Novel and Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). For a discussion of a similar phenomenon in the Latin American context, see Doris Sommer, ‘Irresistible Romance: The Foundational Fiction of Latin America’, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 71–98. Also see Kemal H. Karpat, ‘Contemporary Turkish Literature’, The Literary Review 4.2 (Winter 1960– 1), 287–302, which is especially pertinent here given the profound influence of Kemalist reforms on a generation of Egyptian intellectuals. For a summation of this influence, see Gershoni and Jankowski, 82–3. 8. Beth Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 8. Even Baron’s admirable and thoroughly researched attempt to link this turn-of-the-century ‘awakening’ in Egypt to the emergence of a women’s press ultimately fails to be conclusive in any empirical sense. 9. The novel’s earlier emergence in Europe coincided with the rise of a new bourgeois class, and of all literary genres the novel is arguably the most expressive of the value of the individual in Western bourgeois thought. See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 3–40. See, too, Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books,

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10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

1968), 83–109; and Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Baron’s work suggests a possible methodology but is not concerned with literature per se. For a brief comment on Egyptian literary tastes in the early twentieth century, see Hamdi Sakkut, The Egyptian Novel and Its Main Trends from 1913 to 1952 (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1971), 19. On the specificity of literature’s function as providing an ‘escape’ from the political realities of late nineteenthcentury Egypt, see Matti Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction (Washington, DC: Three Continents P, 1983), 24. On the influence of these two novels, see M. M. Badawi, A Short History of Modern Arabic Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 109–10; and Sakkut, 89. A. L. Tibawi, ‘Some Misconceptions About the Nahda’, Middle East Forum 47.3–4 (Fall/Winter, 1971), 15–22. Although Tibawi seems to have a particular axe to grind with Antonius and Hourani, his argument nonetheless offers a necessary corrective to their overly narrow contentions. As Philip S. Khoury notes, it is not until the eve of World War II that this question really becomes a concern for Syria. See his Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1860–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 98. Gibb, Hamilton A. R., Studies on the Civilization of Islam, eds Stanford J. Shaw and William R. Polk (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 294. On the discussion generated by Gibb’s evaluation, see, for example: Sakkut, 17; Moosa, 173; Badawi, Modern Arabic Literature and the West (London: Ithaca Press, 1985), 133; J. Brugman, An Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984), 211. See, for example, Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). Terry Lovell’s Consuming Fiction (New York: Verso, 1987) offers, in turn, an important feminist corrective to Watt’s otherwise still cogent argument. I am inclined to agree with Bakhtin when he argues in ‘Epic and Novel’ that one of the defining traits of the novel which, at least initially, distinguished it from other literary genres is its temporal orientation towards the present and future. It is for this reason that Zainab might well be considered the first Egyptian novel. Evidence of Lutfi al-Sayyid’s influence on Haykal’s thought can be found in Charles Wendell, The Evolution of the Egyptian National Image from Its Origins to Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 275–90. Haykal, in turn, went on to become one of the leading theorists of territorial nationalism, encouraging Arabs elsewhere in the Middle East to adopt the same ideology (Gershoni and Jankowski: 89, 142). For the European origins and influences on Haykal’s thought, especially the environmental determinism of the French literary historian and philosopher Hippolyte Taine, see Gershoni and Jankowski, 34–9. Baron’s The Women’s Awakening in Egypt offers ample evidence for this point. See Qasim Amin, The Liberation of Women, trans. Samiha Sidhom Peterson (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1992), ch. 3: ‘Women and the Nation’. Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Zainab, trans. John Mohammed Grinsted (London: Darf, 1989). Subsequent references are from this translation and will be cited parenthetically by page number. Kilpatrick speculates on other possible reasons for the tension between Haykal’s romanticism, fashionable at the time and perhaps accentuated by the nostalgia of

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jeff shalan writing while abroad, and his realist critique (23–5). Ultimately, she arrives at a conclusion similar to my own, which sees in this tension the contradictory expression of nationalist ideology in the hands of a liberal intellectual, be it Haykal or Hamid. 22. On the relationship of labour movements to the nationalist struggle, see Joel Beinin, ‘Formation of the Egyptian Working Class’, MERIP Reports 94 (February 1981): 14– 23; and Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988). For a good overview of the peasant protests and uprisings, see Edmund Burke, III, ‘Changing Patterns of Peasant Protest, 1750–1950’, in Peasants and Politics in the Modern Middle East, eds Farhad Kazemi and John Waterbury (Miami: Florida International University Press, 1991), 24–37. 23. To what extent the peasants envisioned their own uprisings of 1919 in nationalist terms is debatable (Brugman, 306; Schulze, 188–9). But what is not debatable, I think, is that the Wafd’s establishment of hegemony was predicated on the British suppression of these uprisings, which allowed the indigenous elite to consolidate their power (Schulze, 196). 24. In her otherwise insightful analysis of Zainab, Kilpatrick neglects the importance of the narrative voice at this point. Contrary to the Rousseauian influence she sees here, in a conflict that situates Hamid between the opposing forces of social convention and ‘natural’ law (22), the narrator implicitly argues for the very naturalisation of that convention. 25. For those contributions, see Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society and the Press, 169–88; and Afaf Lutal-Sayyid Marsot, ‘The Revolutionary Gentlewomen in Egypt’, in Women in the Muslim World, eds Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 261–76. 26. For the limitations this form of legitimation imposed on the women’s movement, see Thomas Philipp, ‘Feminism and Nationalist Politics in Egypt’, in Women in the Muslim World, 277–94. 27. For a detailed study of al-Hakim’s plays, see Richard Long, Tawfiq al-Hakim: Playwright of Egypt (London: Ithaca, 1979). Paul Starkey’s From the Ivory Tower: A Critical Study of Tawfiq al-Hakim (London: Ithaca, 1987) also offers an excellent overview of al-Hakim’s life and work. 28. Badawi, A Short History of Modern Arabic Literature, 120. Nasser even inscribed a copy of his The Philosophy of the Revolution (1954) for al-Hakim with the following very telling words: ‘To the reviver of literature, Ustaz Tawq al-Hakim, in anticipation of a second, post-revolutionary return of the soul’ (quoted in Long, 65). 29. For the influence of Pharaonicism on the nationalist orientation of Egyptian artists and intellectuals in the 1920s, see Gershoni and Jankowski, 184–90. 30. This explains, no doubt, why some critics see the novel’s closing episode as a ‘mere appendage’ (Starkey, 220), ‘out of tune with the rest of the book’ (Long, 28). 31. Tawq al-Hakim, Return of the Spirit, trans. William M. Hutchins (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1990), 27. Subsequent references are from this translation and will be cited parenthetically by page number. 32. To see individual needs here solely in terms of romantic love, as Starkey does (89–91), is to lose sight of the larger significance of this conflict and how the themes of social and political frustration, contrary to his assertion (220), are thus in fact connected.

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writing the nation 33. See, for instance, the translator’s ‘Introduction’, 14. 34. The appropriation of the traditionally female power of (re)generation by male heroes and deities is a common occurrence in the myths of many cultures, and one which some feminists see as representing an historical transition from matriarchal, or at least matrilineal, societies to patriarchal and patrilineal societies. Compare, for instance, the Sumerian epic Inanna with the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh. Also see Hesiod’s Theogony. 35. Long sees al-Hakim’s own relationship with his mother clearly depicted here, and in it the source of the misogynistic current that runs through much of his work (2–3, 132–43). 36. Despite its many problems, Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) remains the classic statement on the subject. 37. On the derivative nature of third-world nationalisms, see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 38. This is why the novel’s apparent elaboration of the familiar romantic opposition which pits the heart as emblem of Eastern spirituality against the mind as emblem of Western materialism is finally untenable. For a discussion of this opposition, see Starkey, 118–29. 39. On the necessary sacrifice of love in the pursuit of artistic creation as a recurring theme in al-Hakim’s work, see Long, 138–40. I attempt to tease out the further significance of this romantic motif in what follows. 40. It is worth noting that despite Nasser’s admiration for al-Hakim, the latter was in his later work increasingly critical of Nasser’s rule. See Long, 152–62, and Starkey, 180–1. 41. Kilpatrick’s observation, that the novel’s depiction of the 1919 revolution reflects both the general tendency of the time to see independence itself as a ‘panacea for the country’s problems’ and the attitude of the majority who were thus ‘intoxicated by nationalism for its own sake’ (43–4), is quite pertinent here.

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Arabic Poetry, Nationalism and Social Change: Sudanese Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives Heather J. Sharkey In an essay published in Khartoum in 1934, Muhammad Ahmad Mahjub, a colonial government-employed engineer, spare-time poet and future Prime Minister of Sudan, lamented the lack of national sentiment around him. Declaring that nationalism required active construction, Mahjub urged his Arabic-speaking peers to create a national poetry (Mahjub 1970: 113–16). Living in a political context shaped by European colonialism, Sudanese Arabic poets were not unique in pressing their art into the service of nationalism. By the time Mahjub wrote, poets in Egypt, such as Mahmoud Sami al-Barudi, Ahmad Shawqi and Hafiz Ibrahim, had been presiding over a nationalist literary nahda, or ‘awakening’, for more than half a century (Khouri 1971, Badawi 1993). Meanwhile, in India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bengali poets in Calcutta were conscious of their own literary awakening, or nabajagaran (Sarkar 1997: 160), with luminaries like Rabindranath Tagore composing verse on behalf of the nation. Poet-nationalists emerged later in sub-Saharan Africa, after World War II. The Swahili poet Shaaban Robert, for example, helped to foster Tanganyikan (later Tanzanian) nationalism, while the French-language poet, Leopold Sedar Senghor, did much the same in Senegal (Iliffe 1979: 379; Ba 1973). These commonalities were not accidental. In the Middle East, South Asia and Africa alike, poetry was conducive and important to nationalist expression in this period, for at least four reasons. First, in its oral forms, poetry had traditionally served political and educational functions, transmitting information and opinion in addition to entertaining or morally edifying. Before the mass literacy of the mid to late twentieth century, this remained equally true in societies that had low rates of literacy (for example, the Arabic- or Bengali-speaking world), as in communities that had lacked writing systems entirely (for example, parts of pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa). Recited in rhymed prose or set to music as song, poetry was a potentially popular medium, capable of spreading messages, such as nationalism, widely. Poetry was also memorable, with its rhyme, rhythm and (in the case of song) melody serving as mnemonic aids (Finnegan 1977, Ong 1991, Goody 2000). — 162 —

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arabic poetry, nationalism and social change Second, as an esteemed verbal medium, poetry was well-equipped to ennoble the nation through creative use of language and imagery. Poems could evoke ideals such as cultural pride and heroism, and thereby give the abstract concept of the nation a glorified, imaginative substance. Third, and in the colonial context, poetry could be a useful tool in anticolonial, nationalist activity. By relying on metaphor, allusion and symbolism, poetry could be politically charged and possibly escape government censors in a way that the prose essay, with its more forthright language, could not. Fourth and finally, as a respected art form that had strong ties to cultural tradition, poetry could make social change seem more palatable, or less ominous. Poets had the authority and prestige to call for new developments, such as railway travel and girls’ schools, that would transform social practices and lifestyles. By welcoming and guiding change in the early twentieth century, poets showed a faith in constructive social reform and progress that was as important to Asian and African nationalisms as the goal of political liberation. The following pages elaborate and illustrate these ideas about poetry, nationalism and social change, by focusing on the history and development of Arabic culture in the Northern Sudan.1 Starting with the assumption that poetry played pivotal roles in Sudanese culture, and that its history can therefore reflect wider social and political trends, this essay assesses the influence of poetry on incipient Sudanese nationalism in the early twentieth century, as well as its continuing relevance in the decades that followed. In certain general respects, Sudanese Arabic culture before the twentieth century resembled its counterparts in other low-literacy societies: traditions of oral poetry thrived in both rural and urban settings, while writing had limited uses and audiences. Yet within its own setting, Sudanese Arabic had evolved over several centuries in response to local conditions. Some basic points about Sudanese history can help to explain the distinctive features of its Arabic culture and its position in the region. Arabic and Islam first came to the Sudan together, in the early Islamic era, through waves of Arabian nomadic migration (Hasan 1967). In the riverain North (roughly, from the border with Egypt to the Gezira region south of the Nile junction), Arabic and Islam spread slowly among indigenous peoples, partially supplanting Nubian languages, and displacing Christianity and local religions (Adams 1977). Around 1500, the region’s first Islamic state took root, with the founding of the Funj sultanate at Sennar on the Blue Nile. By this time, too, itinerant Sufis had begun to convert more widely, from the Red Sea inland to Darfur and beyond (O’Fahey and Spaulding 1974, McHugh 1994). Soon Islamic culture spread farther than Arabic culture; that is, people embraced Islam and became acculturated to Muslim practices without becoming Arabised. Three hundred years had passed after the founding of the Funj sultanate — 163 —

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heather j. sharkey when, in 1820, the armies of Muhammad Ali of Egypt invaded the Sudan. Under the aegis of the Turco-Egyptian colonial regime, the Northern Sudan edged more closely into the cultural orbit of Egypt and, by extension, the Ottoman imperial world. This colonial episode ended in the 1880s, when the millenarian Mahdist movement launched a jihad in the name of Islamic reform and justice. Overthrowing the Turco-Egyptian regime, Mahdists established an Islamic state based at Omdurman. Mahdist rule ended, in turn, in 1898 when British and Egyptian troops invaded the Sudan, bringing the country under the sway of the British Empire at a time when European powers were pursuing their ‘Scramble for Africa’. When the nineteenth century ended, Arabic was one of several languages spoken in the overwhelmingly Muslim regions of the Northern Sudan. In the far north, east and west, for example, Nubians, Beja and Fur peoples continued to speak distinct non-Semitic languages. Arabic was nevertheless dominant as a mother tongue in the riverain North and Kordofan, and as a lingua franca in long-distance trade. Endowed with a system of writing (uniquely, among Sudanese languages), Arabic was a useful tool for statecraft. Finally, as the medium of the Qur’an, Arabic was also the language of Islamic learning and scholarship, and commanded prestige through its religious connections. Taken together, these features ensured that native Arabic-speakers, at the start of the twentieth century, were the best placed among Sudanese to benefit from new educational and professional opportunities that would translate, in the long run, into political and economic power. Arabic in the Sudan would maintain and even reinforce its hegemony in the twentieth century, as a language of government, academic study and communication in a wider region stretching from the Maghrib to the Arabian peninsula and Iraq. The only language that could possibly compete with Arabic was English – the language of the British colonisers – which also had a trans-regional scope and powerful written tradition. By 1900, the rich culture of Sudanese Arabic poetry was taking three main forms. First, and particularly in rural areas, there was an oral culture of folk and Bedouin poetry, capable of expressing praise and censure, bravery, love and grief, or recounting histories of battles. Second, and especially in settled farming areas along the Nile, there was a vibrant culture of Sufi devotional poetry, often combining colloquial and literary forms; this Sufi poetry was primarily an oral medium, though fragments were recorded beginning in the late eighteenth century (reflecting the relatively late development of a local Arabic written tradition). Third, and among learned men who came under Turco-Egyptian influence in the nineteenth century, new forms of fusha poetry were taking shape as Sudanese poets were becoming more aware of Arabic literary (that is, written) works from the Islamic heartland’s pre-Islamic, Umayyad and Abbasid periods (Badawi 1964, ÆAbidin 1967). These three forms began in some cases to — 164 —

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arabic poetry, nationalism and social change overlap in the late nineteenth century, notably in Mahdist panegyric and propaganda poetry, which official poets composed for recitation in the 1880s and 1890s (Hasan 1974, Sharkey 1994). Local applications for Arabic writing and for prose literature were relatively limited by 1900. Funj rulers had begun to use writing on a limited basis in their administration in the mid-seventeenth century, with surviving Funj documents consisting largely of charters and of travel passes for visitors or emissaries (Spaulding and Abu Salim 1989). The mid-eighteenth century witnessed the birth of Arabic history writing, as a few scholars began to chronicle the deeds of Sufi sheiks and rulers, as well as the occurrences of natural and environmental phenomena, such as floods, famines and eclipses (Ibn Dayf Allah 1982, Holt 1999). Record-keeping became more systematised under the Turco-Egyptians and later the Mahdists (reflecting an elaboration of bureaucracy), while private individuals, such as merchants and landowners, began to keep records too (Hill 1959, Abu Salim 1969, Holt 1970, Abu Shouk, Ibrahim and Bjørkelo 1996). Printing, meanwhile, made a limited debut some time after 1820, when the Turco-Egyptians brought a lithographic press to Khartoum to publish official documents. Years later, in 1885, the Mahdists seized this press and printed proclamations and prayer books, but faced a practical restraint on their output in the form of a shortage of paper (Salih 1971). Three points stand out about the status of Arabic culture at the dawn of the twentieth century. First, literacy was a rare skill, so that written sources (manuscript or printed) were reaching small audiences that consisted primarily of Islamic scholars. In such a context, only oral communication could be mass communication; by extension, only oral poetry could be popular poetry. Second, the use of prose writing was steadily expanding, and would continue to develop in the twentieth century – arguably, and in the long run, at poetry’s expense. Third, Sudanese Arabic culture was not stagnant and convention-bound in 1900, as a critic, praising Europe’s literary interventions, once claimed of Egyptian Arabic poetry on the eve of the Napoleonic conquest of 1798 (Badawi 1975: 1). On the contrary, the Sudan’s Arabic literary ‘traditions’, if one can even use a term which implies such fixity, were and had been steadily evolving. British colonialism thus brought new influences to bear on a cultural system that had been in motion for centuries. The Anglo-Egyptian conquest of 1898 ushered in an era of changes that had dramatic and far-reaching consequences for virtually every aspect of political, economic, and social life in the region. From 1898 to 1956, the Sudan functioned as a de facto British colony, notwithstanding the 1899 partnership agreement that framed the regime as a de jure Condominium under joint British and Egyptian control. In the Sudan as in the rest of Africa, European imperial powers imposed new — 165 —

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heather j. sharkey and arbitrary borders following the land-grabs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the Sudanese case, these borders reconciled British territorial ambitions with competing Belgian, French, Italian and Abyssinian claims in the vicinity. Outlined clearly on international maps, the AngloEgyptian Sudan emerged as the largest country in Africa, binding an Arabicspeaking and Muslim riverain zone to culturally and linguistically diverse regions in the south, east and west. Before thirty years had passed, poet-nationalists were striving to make sense of a Sudan in these borders, by conceiving of the nation as a community congruent with the colonial territory, and fortified by Arabic and Islamic foundations. The Anglo-Egyptian conquest rapidly affected Arabic culture, much like the Napoleonic conquest of Egypt a century before. In 1798, the French had introduced the printing press in Egypt, paving the way for the birth of the first Arabic periodicals under Egyptian government auspices (Ayalon 1995). In 1899, the British did much the same in the Sudan, by importing a printing press – the first in the region with moveable type – to publish official proclamations in Khartoum. Four years later, in 1903, Greek and Lebanese entrepreneurs began to develop Khartoum’s commercial press, publishing Arabic periodicals for the Egyptian and Lebanese expatriates who had come to work in the colonial administration or military, or in private businesses. These journals, which featured both poetry and news stories, soon attracted Northern Sudanese readers and contributors, some of whom went on to establish the first Sudanese-owned and -edited newspaper in 1917 (Sharkey 1999). In the years that followed, and among the highly educated, the development of journalism began to affect the creative process and social function of poetry in at least two ways. First, while Sudanese poets initially recited poems in front of friends and colleagues before submitting them for publication, some in the 1920s began to compose verse in written form, assuming individual readers – not groups of listeners – as their audience. Some indeed were beginning to regard poetry less as a social event and more as a private experience. Second, whereas poets had conventionally composed verse for specific occasions – to mark an Islamic holiday, for example, or to elegise a friend just deceased – some poets now composed poems for publication and perusal at an unspecified date. In the long run, these two developments may have contributed to a growing abstraction in the content of poems, explaining, for example, the debut in the late 1920s of a ‘nature poetry’ which, unusually for this time, was more likely to comment on cloud formations than on human affairs. Under the dual influence of colonialism and print culture, Sudanese Arabic poets (and not only poetry) changed as well. Those contributing to journals differed in their social profile from the leading poets of the generation before, in that few were Sufi shaykhs and none were poet-professionals, like the official — 166 —

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arabic poetry, nationalism and social change praise-singers who had served the Mahdist state. On the contrary, almost all of these new poets were employees of the Anglo-Egyptian state – schoolteachers, clerks, engineers, accountants, and even qadis in the reformed Islamic judiciary (El-Shoush n.d., Mikha’il n.d.). Moreover, of those who came of age after 1900, nearly all were graduates of colonial government schools that taught new subjects, such as English and world geography, in addition to Arabic and Islam. Many attended one school in particular – Khartoum’s Gordon College – which favoured candidates from elite Muslim, Arabic-speaking families and groomed them for the highest bureaucratic jobs available to Sudanese. These governmentschool graduates or khirrijin, as they often called themselves proudly in English or Arabic, went on to lead the Sudanese nationalist movement and to take control of the country upon decolonisation in 1956 (Sharkey 1998a). The modern educated classes, from whose ranks poet-nationalists emerged, were also exclusively male. Since only men had access to advanced literacybased educations throughout the colonial period, only men could participate in print culture and the budding nationalist movement it stimulated. By contrast, in rural areas where oral traditions prevailed and where literacy was irrelevant to performance, women had often emerged as formidable poets and social critics (ÆAbidin 1967: 188–9). Advances in girls’ education in the late 1940s laid the foundations for wider female participation in print culture in the postcolonial period, so that at independence in 1956, an estimated 4 per cent of the Sudanese female population could read and write to some degree – a significant advance from a generation before (Sanderson 1968: 120–1). In any case, since literacy rates for both men and women were minute in the first half of the twentieth century, the writing, publication and reading of poetry was perforce an elite endeavour. However inadvertently, government employment facilitated the Arabic literary output and nationalist imagination of the educated Northern Sudanese. Scattered in postings far from Khartoum, and kept on the move through frequent transfers, these men contributed and subscribed to journals from afar. Instead of constraining their nationalist thought, the obligation to communicate long distance, from ever-changing posts, helped them to conceive of the colonial territory as a spatial, national whole (Sharkey 1998a). The isolation of many government job posts also fostered literary activity. Often living in remote district centres where boredom posed a challenge, Northern Sudanese employees tended to focus on literary pastimes for pleasure and solace. Gathering in groups after hours, they composed and shared poems as part of daily routine. The most serious poets sent poems by mail to Khartoum, for publication in a journal; a few even wired poems to friends by telegram, affirming in the process their grasp of new technologies and their power to cut across physical distances (Sharkey 1998a). — 167 —

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heather j. sharkey In the big towns of the North, and in the Three Towns (the conurbation of Khartoum, Khartoum North and Omdurman) most of all, employees also gathered for literary endeavours, building social circles from friendships forged at school and in the course of government service. Meeting in clubs or cafés, they lavished time and energy on poetry, experimenting in the process with the structure, style and content of their compositions. They drew inspiration partly from the works of colleagues; partly from what they were reading in newspapers and printed books (the latter now imported from Cairo and sold in bookstores in Khartoum or by mail order); and partly from changing conditions around them. As the cultural pacesetter of the Arabic-speaking world, Egypt exerted a critical influence on its thought, providing models for the use of poetry in the service of modern causes (al-Hardallu 1977, Babiker 1979, Osman 1987, Sharkey 2000). Among the educated Northern Sudanese of the early twentieth century, the composition of Arabic poetry was a way of life and passion. This was not surprising in a society where men and women had traditionally set their finest thoughts and sentiments to verse, where big events in life (religious holidays, deaths, even job promotions) occasioned the recitation of odes, and where poets could wage political battles (ÆAli 1969). Moreover, in a culture where competence in poetry was an index of accomplishment, talented poets were social leaders, as the Sudan’s first locally printed Arabic books – all poetry anthologies with biographical sketches – make clear (Sharkey 1998a: 301–2).2 Thus it was natural that the new poets of the early twentieth century (educated in modern schools, employed in government jobs, and mutually connected through new print and communications media) led the way as early nationalists. If colonial government employment facilitated literary output, then it also constrained it significantly. Poets after 1898 could not criticise the British regime or question the British presence, while even praising Egyptians – whom the British were increasingly anxious to contain or shunt aside – had limits. (Nominally, the Egyptians were co-domini, with a right to a Sudan presence; in practice, they had been struggling to undo their own British colonialism since the Occupation of Egypt in 1882. British efforts to contain Egyptian influence in Sudan were rooted in a fear that anti-colonial nationalism in Egypt would infect the Sudanese.) To enforce the ban on open dissent and to curb shows of Egyptophilia, British authorities policed the press, requiring editors to submit pre-publication proofs to the Intelligence Department for censorship (Sharkey 1999). Sometimes they also stationed informants and observers in clubs or at special events (such as Islamic new year, or mawlid, celebrations), where poets recited odes before audiences (Najila 1964: 74; Abu’l-ÆAzayim, n.d.: 45–6). Sanctions were simple for those who went out of bounds: deportation for Egyptian and Syrian expatriates (Najila 1964), and professional penalisation for — 168 —

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arabic poetry, nationalism and social change Northern Sudanese, almost all of whom (that is, about 98 per cent of living Gordon College secondary-school graduates in 19293) were government employees. Authorities accomplished the latter by calling errant poets before Boards of Discipline, which left permanent records in personnel files, regardless of the outcome of a case. To challenge the regime in poems, essays or speeches was to endanger prospects for salary raises, promotions and job security – a risk not worth taking for most men, who often supported extended families on their incomes (Sharkey 1998a: 237–330). Politics nevertheless slipped into poems obliquely. In 1914, for example, the Egyptian editor of a Khartoum newspaper sponsored a contest which called for odes in praise of the first ‘Turkish’ airplane landing in Cairo – an exercise meant to evoke sympathy for the idea of the Ottoman caliphate while highlighting the technical capacity of Muslim peoples (Najila 1964: 16–19). It undoubtedly helped, from the government’s point of view, that the Sudanese winner was not a young effendi (modern educated type) who might be susceptible to Egyptian nationalist ideas, but rather a placid, respectable sheik of the older generation. (The man in question, Muhammad Umar al-Banna, had in fact been an official Mahdist poet in his youth.) The newspaper was able to print the winning entry, although British authorities were generally wary lest Egyptian expatriates interest the Sudanese in a wider Arab nationalist or pan-Islamic cause. By the time World War I had ended, British concerns about Egyptians were growing as widespread discontentment mounted within Egypt. In 1919, Egyptians of all social classes rose in revolt against the protectorate in Egypt and demanded the right to self-determination. The young educated Northern Sudanese drew inspiration from these uprisings, and in the next four years began increasingly to question the British presence on their own soil. Thus emboldened, some composed incendiary poems, which a few dared to recite in the open or sent to Cairo for anonymous publication, while others gathered clandestinely to criticise the regime (Najila 1964, Jibril 1991, ÆAbd Allah 1991). Khalil Farah (1892–1932), a Post & Telegraphs employee by day, became a sub rosa poet-resister by night, as a member of the secret League of Sudan Union, which flourished in the early 1920s. After work in Khartoum, he and his friends gathered at a café where they shared poetry, listened to music and talked politics into the early morning hours, and where they sometimes prepared inflammatory anti-British proclamations for posting around town at dusk. Khalil Farah not only composed poems, but set them to musical accompaniment as songs, using the Æud as his instrument. In addition to love songs, he composed many songs for the nation, extolling the country’s beautiful landscapes, noble people and magnificent Nile river. Much to the dismay of Intelligence Department officials, some of Khalil Farah’s nationalist songs (notably those in colloquial Arabic) became popular in northern cities, where they propagated — 169 —

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heather j. sharkey ideas of Nile Valley unity and of Sudanese-Egyptian brotherhood. Indeed, when anti-British revolts broke out in the Northern Sudan in 1924, many demonstrators and army mutineers sang his songs as they marched (Najila 1964: 149–54; Farah 1977). In this way, more than any other poet among his peers, Khalil Farah helped to extend nationalist ideas beyond male reading elites, and towards illiterate or semiliterate men and women. Precisely because the 1924 Sudanese uprisings posed the greatest challenge to the British presence since the colonial conquest, the government’s response was swift and strong. British authorities expelled Egyptian army units along with many Egyptian civilian employees (on the grounds of their subversive influence); sentenced dozens of Northern Sudanese agitators to prison terms (many under bleak conditions in southern jails, where death tolls were high); and executed four army mutiny leaders by firing squad. With their ties to local elites, most members of the modern educated classes were able to escape punishment by drawing on family connections, but nonetheless suffered from a loss of trust and status which had professional repercussions. Namely, after the uprisings, British authorities turned towards Indirect Rule and the cultivation of notables in the governance of rural areas, and began to rely less (psychologically if not always in practice) on the administrative assistance of effendis. After 1929 and the onset of the world Depression, economic woes compounded job insecurity. To keep their positions and still, perhaps, rise on the job ladder at a time of widespread cutbacks, the educated Northern Sudanese had to remain on good behaviour. By practical necessity, young nationalists became quietists after 1924. Far from challenging the British authorities in verse, employees after 1924 were more likely to compose and recite praise poems for their British superiors, as they came or left on transfer. In this way they replicated a practice of their elders (some of whom had submitted rhymed oaths of allegiance to the British conquerors right after the 1898 conquest),4 signalled their cooperation in government, and more generally, demonstrated local standards of courtesy. In the climate of repression that followed the 1924 uprisings, the educated Northern Sudanese focused renewed efforts on literary activity. Withdrawing, for the most part, from anti-colonial agitation, they turned their attention to social reform, literary experimentation and modernisation – the last reflecting a faith in new technologies (such as electricity), and in the higher living standards they promised. In this period, taqaddum or progress became the goal of poetnationalists, and applied to everything from the content of newspapers to the extension of paved roads and piped water systems. Increasingly convinced that poetry could both reflect and propel national progress, poets chronicled, evaluated and encouraged socially constructive developments, praising in the 1920s, for example, the construction of Sennar Dam, the marvels of photography and, more controversially at the time, the — 170 —

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arabic poetry, nationalism and social change value of girls’ schools (which many eminent men of the period still considered a dubious enterprise). In the early 1930s, one poet even applied the traditional praise poem to the Swedish actress Greta Garbo, revealing the growing influence of European and American films on young educated men in Khartoum. Others praised graduate-sponsored charities, such as the Piaster Orphanage in Omdurman, that reflected support for the ideal of national self-help as advocated in India by Gandhi (with whose writings and deeds the graduates were familiar, thanks to the periodical press) (al-Banna 1976, al-Nahda 1931–2, al-Fajr 1934–7). Against this context of social reform and improvement, poets coaxed the growth of early nationalism by discussing what it meant to be Sudanese. It was a poet, in 1927, who first suggested the idea of a ‘Sudanese’ Arabic national literature – and by implication, of a ‘Sudanese’ national identity. The unlikely champion of Sudanese Arabic was a government tax-collector named Hamza alMalik Tambal (1897–1951), who was born in Aswan, Egypt and who spoke Nubian, not Arabic, as his mother tongue. Tambal argued that poets could make their work distinctively or authentically ‘Sudanese’ by incorporating references to indigenous themes, settings and customs – an agenda he applied in a series of innovative nature poems that evoked mountains in Kordofan and sunsets near Dongola (Tanbal 1931, Tambal 1972, al-Shush 1971: 149–76, Sharkey 1998b). Tambal’s ideas about ‘Sudanese’ literature initially caused an uproar, but eventually caught on. For members of the educated Northern elite, who took pride in their Arab pedigrees, the term ‘Sudanese’ or sudani implied slave origins and was conventionally applied to dark-skinned peoples from non-Muslim southern regions – not to noble Arabs. One of the fascinating developments in modern Sudanese history is the transformation of the term ‘Sudanese’ from a comment on low social status to a badge of national pride (Sharkey 1998: 34– 80) – a situation paralleling, in some respects, the nationalist rehabilitation of ‘Turk’ – which had implied a boor or yokel – in late Ottoman Anatolia (Lewis 1968: 1). Poets worked to make the term ‘Sudanese’ or sudani more palatable, though it undoubtedly helped first that it was a convenient adjectival form based on the colony’s name (referring to a territory, not a social group), and second, that nationalists were able to coin a new plural form from the singular – sudaniyyin, connoting Sudan nationals, rather than sud, meaning blacks. This variant plural made its way into a political slogan of the late Anglo-Egyptian period: ‘Sudan lil-Sudaniyyin’ – Sudan for the Sudanese. Two literary journals of the 1930s became the forum for the new literature of ‘Sudanese’ national identity and social reform. These were al-Nahda (1931–2) and al-Fajr (1934–7), which by their very titles touched on common nationalist themes. (ÆAl-Nahda’ evoked the ideal of national revival, while Æal-Fajr’ evoked a new dawn.) Their formats included poetry as well as new genres – editorial — 171 —

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heather j. sharkey essays, book and film reviews, stories and plays. Both journals agreed that a poem or other literary creation was nationalist (qawmi), or served the national cause, if it was locally descriptive or socially relevant – rooted in the experiences, customs and physical settings of the Sudan. Two types of poetry fit this agenda: nature poetry (portraying Sudanese environments) as introduced by Hamza al-Malik Tambal; and praise poetry in support of new social and technological developments. For social criticism (as opposed to praise), however, prose forms began to take over from poetry. For example, in essays and short stories contributors questioned Sudanese marriage customs and stirred up heated and sometimes angry debate. Some argued radically that wives should be highly educated, that prospective spouses should meet before marriage, and that husbands should treat wives as partners and not as underlings (Sharkey 1998a: 351–8). More than any other publications of the colonial era, al-Nahda and al-Fajr sought to highlight features and values that made the Sudan Sudanese, realising that the Sudan as a territorial entity was too new to have a manifest primordial logic. Muhammad Ahmad Mahjub was one of those who used their pages to confront nation building head on. Bearing such titles as ‘Nationalist Sentiment and Our Need for It’, ‘The Duty of Writers to Their Nation and Their Art’ and ‘National Poetry’, Mahjub’s essays testify to a time when literary activity offered the highest forms of political and social debate (Mahjub 1970). Nationalist poetry had its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s – years when the British banned open political organisation, but also when the locally-run periodical press was just beginning to develop. From the late 1930s, periodicals continued to flourish, though poetry became less central to them: instead news stories, domestic and international, took centre stage, along with editorial essays. This trend had even become more obvious in al-Fajr, towards the end of its run, when its editors decided to reduce literary content for the sake of greater news coverage. With independence still years ahead (and not even visible on the horizon), nationalism by the late 1930s had not reached its logical conclusion, with liberation from colonial rule. So why then did poetry wane in importance, even among the most ardent proponents of nationalism, when there was so much left to do? A few points stand out. For a start, in 1938 the regime allowed the formation of the Graduates General Congress, a consultative assembly in which only educated Northern men could serve. In this way, the government relaxed its ban on organised political activity and enabled the graduates to participate in governance in a very limited manner, by discussing and offering suggestions on certain domestic issues, such as education. Arabic poetry and literary activity in general came to seem less important as leading intellectuals focused new energies on political — 172 —

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arabic poetry, nationalism and social change alignments, conscious that power and influence within the Congress were at stake. Meanwhile, parties and factions formed (particularly around the adherents or affiliates of two religious sectarian groups, the Ansar or neo-Mahdists and the Sufi Khatmiyya). Sectarianism in turn eroded the ideal of Sudanese unity that nationalist poets had espoused, in the days when political repression and opposition to the British had drawn the graduates, inevitably, together (Abu Hasabu 1985). In any case, after the foundation of the Graduates General Congress, the questions for debate had changed. Leading thinkers were no longer asking, ‘What was the Sudan, as a nation?’ (a question that poets had broached), but rather, ‘Who should lead the Sudan, as a state?’ The latter question gained currency during and after World War II, as British policy makers began to discuss plans for administrative devolution (foreshadowing the final transfer of power that occurred in 1956). As colonial government employees who were stuck on bureaucracy’s middle rungs, nationalists stood to benefit from these changes. Illustrative in this regard is the career of Muhammad Ahmad Mahjub, the poet, essayist and short story-writer who had argued in the early 1930s that the Sudan’s Arabic literary movement and nationalist movement were one and the same. First a government engineer, then, after 1938, a civil judge, Mahjub threw himself into Graduates General Congress politics and became a leading supporter of the Umma Party and its affiliates, which had links to the neoMahdists and opposed ideals of union with Egypt. Mahjub became a Foreign Minister in 1956, the year of independence, Prime Minister in 1965, and UN diplomat in 1967 (Abu Salim 1991: 9–61; Bashiri 1991: 291–3). For Mahjub as for others, poetry had been a passion of youth, but careers and party politics took precedence as time went on. The sidelining of poetry was in some sense inevitable: by the late 1930s, prose was clearly taking over. Young, leading thinkers were beginning to frame many of their best ideas in essays rather than verse – a natural development in a context where cheap printed materials and office supplies (and even the personal typewriter) made writing (as opposed to oral communication) so important. The periodical press had, of course, contributed significantly to this change, by providing a regular forum for printing and disseminating news and opinion editorials. By the late 1930s, too, poetry’s social functions had changed among the learned. For an older generation of educated men, who had reached adulthood before the British conquest, poetry had been a mnemonic tool for record-keeping. Babikr Bedri, for example, a Mahdist army veteran and educator, recalled that when he opened a small-town school around 1910, he set all his lessons to verse, so that his students could retain them (Bedri 1980: 115). His school, in other — 173 —

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heather j. sharkey words, had been practically paperless, aside from the Koran. For the generation of nationalists, however, trained in modern schools, poetry increasingly lost its mnemonic functions – cheap books were theirs for reference. Finally, other communications media began to compete with poetry as a source of entertainment and edification. In the mid-1930s, commercial cinemas came to Khartoum showing Egyptian, Anglo-American, and later Indian films, and offering visual, as well as aural stimulation (Sharkey 1998a: 347–51). Radio followed a few years later, in 1940, when the Sudan Intelligence Department, fearing a wartime threat from Italy via Abyssinia or Libya, set up ‘Radio Omdurman’ – initially to broadcast war propaganda, later to broadcast general news (Boyd 1993). Given the competition from cinema and radio, no wonder poetry lost ground in the late colonial period; it was no longer the only source for news, analysis and entertainment rolled together. Without a doubt, poetry played a critical role in the development of early Sudanese nationalism. And yet, its appeal had limits, even though its influence endured to reach new generations of literate Arabic speakers. For a start, Arabic nationalist poetry did not appeal to non-Arabic speakers, who have collectively accounted for a majority of the Sudanese population. According to various estimates, ‘Arabised’ peoples made up only 40 per cent of the country’s population in the late twentieth century (Lesch 1998: 17, Metz 1992, CIA 2000). As the Sudanese civil war (1955–72, 1983–present) has shown, the nationalism of the educated Northern Sudanese, and not only their nationalist poetry, has had ethnic limitations too. The Sudan’s early nationalists were generally high-status, Arabic-speaking Muslims of the country’s riverain North, whom the British groomed to serve in government jobs. Rising to power at independence in 1956, they claimed leadership over a country that contained speakers of scores, or by some estimates, hundreds, of different languages (with the South accounting for much of this diversity). Emphasising Arabic and Islam as platforms of national culture, their nationalism failed to attract many nonArabic speaking and non-Muslim peoples – however universally ‘Sudanese’ it had purported to be. Rooted in literary Arabic (fusha) with its formal vocabulary and syntax, some of the poetry of the early nationalists may have been little understood, even in the riverain North. With only 13 per cent of the population literate to any extent at independence in 1956, and with literacy remaining low in years thereafter (El Beshir 1967: 71; International Migration Project 1978: 3–7), few were able to read the periodicals or books where this poetry had first been printed. Even when recited, the fusha poetry may have eluded many Arabic-speaking listeners, because of its literary language.5 Yet, despite its difficulty for the illiterate, fusha poetry had prestige. The mere agreement that it stood at the apex of Arabic learning and accomplishment would have helped to unite its listeners. — 174 —

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arabic poetry, nationalism and social change Notwithstanding the limited appeal of early Sudanese Arabic nationalist poetry, some poems of the 1920s and 1930s became increasingly read after independence, for the simple reason that the early nationalists, at decolonisation, became architects of educational policy and enshrined some of their generation’s works in school curricula. As the Sudanese educational system expanded in the postcolonial period, successive cohorts of schoolchildren read anthologies of the founding fathers. Meanwhile, once British repression had been lightened or lifted, some members of the nationalist generation confirmed this trend by publishing memoirs that chronicled the nationalist movement, and asserted their own central role in its heroic resistance – largely through the exchange of poems (Najila 1964, Kisha 1963, Khayr 1991, Mahjub and Muhammad 1986, ÆUthman n.d., Hamad 1980). Still other nationalist poets received attention posthumously, as historians (not literature experts) published specialised volumes on their life and work (al-Banna 1976, Jibril 1991, ÆAbd Allah 1991). Judging by the spate of Arabic literary studies, biographical dictionaries and posthumous poetry compilations that have been published in the past twentyfive years, the Sudan’s poet-nationalists of the 1920s and 1930s are retaining their pride of place in the country’s Arabic literary canon – perhaps, in part, because their heady optimism, and their faith in national unity and self-help, now seem so appealing in a region beset by political and economic crises. Taken together, these works suggest that poetry is still important to the country’s high Arabic culture, in spite of the growth of prose forms and of film and sound media. Biographical dictionaries are especially fascinating in this regard (Sharkey 1995). Profiling early nationalists in anecdotal essays while describing their professional and political trajectories, they confirm verbal prowess and poetic skill as marks of intellectual distinction among educated, Arabic-speaking Sudanese. Early nationalist poetry may be prestigious, but its mass appeal is still open to question. As the twentieth century closes and the colonial era further recedes, perhaps the only really popular nationalist poems, among those from the 1920s and 1930s, are the songs of Khalil Farah, lyricist and Æud player extraordinaire. In Khartoum Arabic newspapers, and even in English-language webpages (the latter catering to Sudanese migrant trans-nationals and to those interested generally in Sudanese affairs), Khalil Farah continues to receive homage and praise, not so much as an early nationalist, but as the ‘father’ or ‘pioneer’ of modern Sudanese music (Sidahmed 1996, Verney 1999).6 The colloquial language of Khalil Farah’s songs has undoubtedly contributed to their appeal. In the 1920s, his songs were able to reach broad audiences because even the illiterate could understand them; the same would be true today. For while the Sudanese government has made enormous strides in expanding the educational system in the postcolonial era, some analysts estimated that — 175 —

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heather j. sharkey over half the population was illiterate in the 1990s (CIA 2000).7 From this situation, a difficult question arises: Can the high culture of the literary language or fusha, revered as it is, ever be truly popular in Arabic-speaking regions where dialects vary and where literacy remains such a privilege? In his seminal work on nationalism, Benedict Anderson upheld novels and newspapers – not poems – as the literary forms that most strengthened nationalist perceptions. By linking individuals across distances of time and space, he argued, both prose genres fostered ‘imagined communities’ of readers (Anderson 1991: 22–36). Successive critics have continued to hail the novel, in particular, as ‘a sort of proxy for the nation’ (Gandhi 1998: 151) – representing its communal ideals, physical settings and mundane concerns within a single narrative frame. The novel, however, came late to the Arabic-speaking world, as a European import, whereas Arabic poetry was heir to a venerable and vibrant tradition that stretched back to pre-Islamic times (Badawi 1993, Allen 1995). Throughout the Arabic-speaking world in the early twentieth century, poetry was still the gold standard for verbal and intellectual skill, so that poetry – not the novel – was the nation’s early proxy. In the Northern Sudan, poetry had solid credentials for serving the cause of nationalism. It had a ceremonial and dignifying force, a strong following and a reputation for social commitment. Endowed with these strengths, poetry made a smooth transition into print in the early twentieth century, as the periodical press first developed. At a time when periodicals were only a few pages long, poems fitted easily into the journal format along with short news articles or essays. Poetry was so all-embracing as a vehicle for expression that even some early newspaper advertisements took rhymed, poetic form (Salih 1971: 44). When the first Sudanese-owned press faced the challenge of publishing whole books in the early 1920s, poets and poetry provided the natural subject for these ventures. In short, poetry was an idiom in which educated men were fluent. And yet, as Sudanese Arabic print culture developed, prose achieved increasing prominence. Nurtured by the periodical press, short essays proliferated in the form of news articles, editorials, critical essays (on cultural and social topics), and book and film reviews. Many years passed, however, before periodicals accommodated narrative fiction. The credit for this development goes to alNahda, which began its short run in 1931. With twenty-four-page issues that were six times as long as the Arabic periodicals published before World War I, and four times as long as the major Khartoum paper of the 1920s, al-Nahda was able to encourage writers to experiment with the short story genre and, moreover, to publish the results. It helped that many contributors had read English-language fiction, such as Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, at Gordon College,8 so that models for emulation were available (Babiker 1979: 54–98). Arabic novels, however, had to wait until the postcolonial period before — 176 —

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arabic poetry, nationalism and social change Sudanese presses took them on. Boosted by government funding, book production of all kinds increased after 1956. This trend reflected both the expansion of higher education (and hence the increase of reading audiences), as well as a demand for national history and literature texts that could prove the nation’s cultural, and not merely political, autonomy. When the masterwork of the Sudanese Arabic novel – al-Tayyib Salih’s Mawsim al-hijra ila shamal (Season of Migration to the North) – appeared in the late 1960s, it was postcolonial in mood and substance, and not only in its timing. In other words, Season of Migration to the North explored the kind of cultural dislocation and doubt that distinguishes what some critics have called the ‘postcolonial condition’ of the late twentieth century (Gandhi 1998: 4). In the early twentieth century, by contrast, poetry had been the mouthpiece for the colonial condition. Living under a British regime in a period of dramatic social changes, educated men had turned to its familiar patterns and rituals to make sense of the world around them. On the one hand, they used poetry to chart the local developments that occurred as the region, under Britain’s imperial aegis, moved more closely into a Western-dominated global order. On the other hand, they used poetry to rationalise the new territorial and political structure of the ‘Anglo-Egyptian Sudan’, within which a Sudan republic was born at independence. In this milieu, a generation of poet-statesmen flourished, using the power and beauty of words to apprehend and define a nation.

notes 1. The term ‘Arabic culture’ is here used as a more general term than ‘Arabic literature’. For while the former may include oral and written genres, the latter, through its Latin etymology, implies a lettered tradition or written practice alone. 2. The first locally-printed Sudanese Arabic books appeared between 1922 and 1924. 3. The Gordon Memorial College at Khartoum, Reports and Accounts to 31st December, 1929: 23. A copy of this report is preserved in the Sudan Archive at Durham University. 4. A whole file of such praise poems is preserved in the Sudan Archive at Durham University. SAD 100/6 [AR]: F. R. Wingate Papers. File of addresses of welcome and verses in praise, in Arabic, composed in honour of the Sirdar and GovernorGeneral, Wingate, dated 1900–6. 5. According to one source from the early 1970s, Arabic speakers in the western Sudan reportedly had so much trouble understanding the fusha radio broadcasts from greater Khartoum that many preferred listening instead to the colloquial Arabic radio broadcasts emanating from Chad (Metz 1992). 6. In 1995, a Khartoum newspaper published a tribute to Khalil Farah on the sixtythird anniversary of his death in 1932, entitled ‘Khalil Farah: You Will Remain Immortal throughout the Passage of Time’, al-Sudan al-Hadith (Khartoum), 29 Jumada al-Ula 1416/ 24 October 1995: 7.

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heather j. sharkey 7. The CIA World Factbook asserted in its year 2000 edition that the proportion of the Sudanese population, age fifteen years and over, that could read and write, was still below 50 per cent (46.1 per cent average total, including 57.7 per cent male literacy and 34.6 per cent female). However, the rates would probably be higher in the riverain North, where Arabic speakers prevail and where the postcolonial government has focused educational resources. 8. Sudan Archive, Durham University, SAD 606/5/45–46: E. A. Balfour Papers. Letter from E. A. Balfour (teacher at Gordon College) to his mother, dated 9 October 1936.

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1 9

Marginal Literatures of the Middle East Peter Clark

In the last hundred years the Arab world has been given a unity that has been more ideological than real. Most Arabs both within the Arab world and beyond acknowledge to some extent some idea of cultural unity. The idea is reinforced by the existence of the Arab League and other regional organisations and has, by and large, been accepted by all Arab governments. Other Arab countries are shaqiq ‘brother’ rather than sadiq ‘friend’. Modern Standard Arabic, Arab Clubs among students in British, mainland European and American universities, tapes of Umm Kulthum, the novels of Naguib Mahfouz, the poetry of Nizar Qabbani and the issue of Palestine all contribute towards this cultural unity. Arab newspapers treat news of other Arab countries as of greater relevance than news of Europe, the Far East or the United States. It is easy to see this successful idea, with its emphasis on the territory of the Arab world, as somehow deep-rooted and everlasting. The Arabic language, as the language of Islamic revelation, suggests an unchanging nature of Æuruba, Arabness. Its status is within the realm of sacred geography, and cannot be subject to academic examination or scientific analysis like secular languages. Study of the colloquial Arabic is seen as divisive (Suleiman 1994: 12). Even the study of local history can open old wounds and conflicts to the detriment of Arab unity (Jabbur 1993: 11–12). Yet this victorious ideology is, we must remind ourselves, very new. If we look at the Arab world a century ago we can discern three different cultural worlds that transcended the convergence of territory and language. Each had its distinctive characteristics. Each overlapped with others. I refer to the Ottoman world, the Mediterranean world and the Indian Ocean. The Ottoman Empire was probably the most successful Islamic political institution in history. It occupied major areas of the Arab world for up to four centuries. Greater Syria, Egypt and North Africa up to but excluding Morocco were all deeply affected by the nominal political unity of the Ottoman world. Islamic legitimacy was reinforced by political suzerainty of the Holy Places of the Hijaz. One of the titles of the Ottoman Sultan, Servant of the Two Sacred Places, is now adopted by the Kings of Saudi Arabia. Elites in the Ottoman Empire, political, religious and educated, were mobile. The colloquial Arabic of — 179 —

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peter clark each country has Turkish words – belki ‘perhaps’ in Damascus, kubri ‘bridge’ in Egypt, hastahane ‘hospital’ in Iraq, yalek ‘waistcoat’ in Yemen or mekteb ‘school’ in Tunis. In the first generation of Arab independence an education at the Istanbul Law School or service in the Ottoman army provided a unity of common experience for many Arab politicians. The first Hashemite rulers of Iraq and Transjordan had grown to adulthood in Istanbul. Their families were linked by marriage to the Ottoman aristocracy. I remember in 1970 President Suney of Turkey, an old soldier, made a state visit to Jordan. One evening was spent with elderly Palestinians and Jordanians, including senior members of the ruling family. All had memories of World War I and, I was told, the evening ended with the singing of old Ottoman army songs. Contemporary Arabs are often ambivalent in their attitudes towards Turkey and the Turks. In the University of Damascus the Turkish language is taught only in the Department of History. There is a political repudiation of the Ottoman Empire from whose occupation Arab countries liberated themselves. On the other hand Turkish architecture and interior decoration is admired, and it is rather chic to have a Turkish grandmother. There is still a branch of the Syrian ÆAzm family in Istanbul. The Mediterranean world overlapped with the Ottoman. But the major ports of the Mediterranean, from Barcelona to Haifa, all had features in common. They all had international communities and a perspective that looked away from the territory. Until the nineteenth century transport was always easier and cheaper by sea than over land. For two millennia Alexandria had large Jewish and Greek populations. Istanbul had Greeks, Italians and Armenians. Beirut and Haifa had strong European and American communities. Salonica had its Jewish and Donme community. Palermo has a church still with an old Byzantine rite. Pisa, Venice, Naples, Marseilles and Barcelona have flourished as a result of trade with the Ottoman and Arab worlds. Tunis had a quarter known as La Petite Sicilie. The cosmopolitanism of the ports contrasted with the nationalism of the inner cities – Cairo, Ankara, Damascus. The idea of omerta in southern Italy is identical with ideas of family honour in many Arab societies. The Ottoman and Mediterranean worlds also overlapped linguistically. A number of commercial words, such as sigorta ‘insurance’, entered Turkish and colloquial Arabic. There were even hybrid words, such as the Syrian colloquial gommaji ‘puncture repairer’ that uses the Italian for rubber with the Turkish agent suffix. The Indian Ocean also had an economic and cultural homogeneity. There was a generic similarity in its ports on the northwest shores from Karachi to Mombassa via Kuwait and Aden. Arabia, the Gulf and to some extent Iraq were part of this cultural world. Until 1970 the countries operated with one unit of currency – the Indian rupee. Those who were educated into the modern world — 180 —

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marginal literatures of the middle east received their education in India. Bahrain and Bombay were the great commercial transit centres for the pearl trade. The British government of India had a foreign policy that was almost separate from that of imperial government in London. The Colony of Aden was run from India. British consuls and agents in Arabia, Iraq and Iran were appointed from the Indian military and civilian services. Just as Maltese could be found in every Mediterranean port, so Somalis were ubiquitous on the northern and western shores of the Indian Ocean. The ideologies of Arab nationalism have denied these rich heritages. The twentieth century has seen the triumph of the territorial nationalism of the cities of the interior. The kaleidoscopic mix of communities that were in all the cities and ports has yielded to a more monochrome uniformity. The Ottoman Empire was a multi-ethnic polity. The successor states have worked towards a unified culture. Those who have had a country to return to – Greeks, Maltese, Italians – have gone home. Those Armenians who survived early twentieth century Anatolia have contributed to forming the largest non-Arab communities in cities like Beirut and Aleppo. Others have moved to Armenia that for seventy years was under Moscow’s influence. Ottoman Kurds and Jews have had contrasting fortunes. So many Jews of the former Empire have moved to Palestine, at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians, that it could be argued that the State of Israel is a succession state of the Ottoman Empire. From outside the Arab world, people of South Asia – Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans – have however increased in numbers in Arabia and the Gulf, albeit on sufferance. Most countries of the area achieved independence only in the twentieth century. A major target of the elites of each country was to establish their own legitimacy. This legitimacy has been based on a mono-ethnic identity. Other foci of loyalty – national or linguistic – have been discouraged. The national ideologies of Israel and Turkey have been similar. Even the more internationalist ideology of the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran enshrines Iranian nationality as a condition for full citizenship (Zubaida 1997: 105). In all these countries illiteracy has been effectively eliminated with an emphasis on a national language. Marginal languages – Armenian, the Circassian languages, Nubian, Coptic, Berber, the languages of Southern Arabia or Southern Sudan – are not taught in government schools, though English and French are. An official mainstream culture has been promoted through schools, universities and the official media, and backed by the resources of the state, through censorship and ultimately force. There is nothing exceptional in the Middle East about this. Countries have been following the practices of most European countries in identifying a national identity with territory and language. In nineteenth century Italy and France only a small minority spoke standard Italian or French (Al-Azmeh — 181 —

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peter clark 2000: 73). In the Arab world perhaps an even smaller minority speak the prescribed taught formal Arabic (Parkinson 1994: 207–10). The teaching of literature in schools and universities has been similarly nationalistic. Most literature is taught according to the language in which it is written – English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, and so on. The student and common reader have generally had to discover world literature, usually in translation, on their own. But when we look at writers who have an impact and an influence we find they often defy the concurrence of language and territory. Arabs of North Africa have long expressed themselves in French. The French educational and cultural influence from the 1930s onwards in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco was overwhelming. A nationalist writer, such as Kateb Yacine, thought the French ‘wanted to destroy our nationalism … Thus, whoever wanted an education had to attend French schools.’ Algerian literature, written in French, argued Yacine, was ‘independent of the language it uses, and has no emotional or racial relationship’. Yacine wrote initially in French in order to address the French directly, showing them what was wrong with the colonial system, rather than telling his people about a situation they knew in a language they did not read (Salhi 2000: 102, 149). Some North African writers in French, such as the Moroccans Tahar bin Jelloun and Driss Chraieb, have won French literary prizes. The Egyptian Albert Cossery has written from the 1930s to the 1990s in French. Others, such as the Algerian Rachid Boujedra, have switched to Arabic in the 1980s and 1990s. Kateb Yacine’s later work was in the Algerian Arabic and Berber dialects. But is their work only Arabic if it is written in Arabic? Is their French work part of Arabic or French literature? In the last ten years we have witnessed a growing literature of Arab consciousness expressed in English. The Sudanese Jamal Mahjoub, the Jordanian Fadia Faqir and, above all, the Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif have all received critical acclaim in their English novels. We must get this in proportion. The British are today insular and are singularly fortunate in having English as a global language. But most people in the world have a choice of languages in which to express themselves. Seventy per cent of the world’s population operate in two languages, forty per cent in three. Early in the twentieth century the Pole Joseph Conrad and the Russian Vladimir Nabokov mastered the English language to the extent that their works have entered the canon of English literature. In earlier centuries even the British had a choice of languages in which to express themselves. In the eighteenth century the first published work of that master of English prose, Edward Gibbon, was in French. In the seventeenth century John Milton wrote poetry in Latin. In the centuries before that writers from Britain were part of a Latin-writing European civilisation. Again throughout the twentieth century there have been Arabs writing in — 182 —

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marginal literatures of the middle east English (Nash 1998). There is a library of academic writing by Arabs in English. Eighty years ago Khalil Gibran Khalil and Amin al-Rihani adopted an American English to express their Arab consciousness. In the 1940s another Lebanese, Edward Atiyah, wrote novels about Lebanon and Sudan in English. The Palestinian Jabra Ibrahim Jabra wrote novels equally in Arabic and English. The Egyptian Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Room, published in the 1950s, has recently been reprinted. These writers have all come from the older Ottoman and Mediterranean cultural worlds, but use of a European language was not restricted to these. The Bahraini poet, the late Ibrahim al-ÆUrayyid, was born in Bombay in 1908. His father was a Bahraini pearl-merchant, his mother from Iraq. His first education was in Urdu and English and he went to Bahrain for the first time in his teens. But he became a distinguished poet in Arabic, arguably his third language. He represents too an Indian Ocean culture, having written poetry also in English and Urdu, and having translated ÆUmar Khayyam from Farsi into Arabic (Sarhan 1998). The number of Arab writers of quality who are writing in English today has become a critical mass. This is a distinctive phenomenon requiring an explanation. The phenomenon reflects aspects of the contemporary culture of the Arab world. Individuals have not complied with the orthodoxies prescribed by different Arab regimes. The monopoly of truth assumed by Ministries of Information and Education, and backed by Ministries of the Interior and security systems, is challenged by the availability of alternative sources of information, from satellite television to the internet. Millions of Arabs have in the last thirty years migrated as never before, either within the Arab world to oil-richer states or to Britain, mainland Europe or the Americas. Tens of thousands have gone outside the Arab world – to east and west Europe and North America – for higher education. Students return. Families reunite. Experiences are exchanged. The authority of the propaganda from the home country crumbles, if it does not collapse. This weakening of the authority of the domestic education and information apparatus has coincided with the emergence of English as a global language. English has become the commercial language of Arabia and the Gulf. Commercial contracts between Japanese and Arabs are drafted in English. It is the language of numerous international professions. It is the language of the major international news agencies. Most Arab countries have English television channels and English-language daily newspapers. Al-Ahram has an English edition. It is not surprising, therefore, that English has become a language of creative expression for many Arabs. Some Arabs find a formality in modern standard Arabic that inhibits freedom and also style of expression. A Syrian journalist and academic who writes with equal fluency and distinction in Arabic and English has said that she has a sense of humour when she writes in English, but not when she writes in Arabic. This emerging critical mass of Arab writers — 183 —

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peter clark writing on Arab themes in English has some similarity to those North Africans who have written in French. Although most are subject to anglophone cultural influences by living outside the Arab world, they do not have to write in English. The Syrian Zakaria Tamir, the Sudanese al-Tayyib Salih, the Jordanian Amjad Nasir and the Lebanese Hanan al-Shaykh have long lived in Britain but continue to write in Arabic. With four daily newspapers that circulate widely throughout the Arab world, London has become a centre of Arab journalism. But we are seeing an Arab literature in English that is parallel to Indian or Caribbean literature in English. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra probably spoke for them all when he wrote, in an essay, ‘Why Write in English?’ that ‘my work could only be, in the final analysis, Arabic in the profoundest sense. Cultures have always interacted, but never to the detriment of a nation conscious of its own vital sources, of the complexity of its own identity’ (Jabra 1988: 15). The contemporary writers I have mentioned have all been writers of fiction, and their work has first been published in Britain. There have been no first rank English-medium poets in Britain from the Arab world. This is in contrast to the United States, which has produced an Arab consciousness expressed through poetry. I may mention here the Libyan Khalid Mutawwa‘, the Iraqi Sargon Boulos and the Palestinians Naomi Shihab Nye and Suheir Hammad whose Palestinian consciousness has been grafted onto a tradition of American black poetry (Hammad 1996). I have so far been talking of Arab writing in French and English. But a century ago Middle Eastern cities were multi-lingual. Members of the British Levant Consular Service were expected to be familiar with Latin, French, Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Persian. Italian, German and Spanish were optional (Wratislaw 1924: 2–3). Today most British diplomats serving in the Middle East do not even have Arabic. I have mentioned how Alexandria had a huge Greek population. There was an Alexandrian Greek literature. The work of Cafavy is well known. His life and work are intimately connected with the city. Greeks were in most cities and towns of Egypt and the Sudan in the early years of the twentieth century. I would like to pause and consider the interesting case of Stratis Tsirkas. Born Iannis Hadjiandreas in Cairo in 1911, the son of a second generation Greek barber, he worked in industry in Upper Egypt, and started publishing poetry in the 1930s, and was active in the Communist Party until the 1960s. He was no part of the Greek plutocracy and his feelings for Egypt could have been expressed by any Egyptian nationalist: And I sing of Egypt because she shelters and nourishes me like a mother, because she hurts, like a mother and because she hopes like a mother (Karampetsos 1984: 42)

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marginal literatures of the middle east His novella, Nourredin Bomba, was published in 1957. It is about the Egyptian revolt against the British in 1918 and was written in honour of the revolution of 1952. But his major work was a trilogy, translated into English as Drifting Cities. Although the main themes are based on the Egyptian Greek community, there is a portrait of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic city neighbourhood with a shared humanity. In one scene, the muezzin has called for the sunset prayers, an announcement to all that it is the end of the day. Arab women came out on their doorsteps and called their children in singsong tones. ‘Tolbah, Hassan, Felfel, where are you hiding?’ From the balconies, other voices called: ‘Marco, Nicola, Virginia, come home now.’ (Karampetsos 1984: 47)

The trilogy is unquestionably an Egyptian novel, part of Middle Eastern literature. Tsirkas migrated from Egypt and settled in Greece in 1966, dying in 1980. His work is an example of what I call marginal literature. Today the Greek community of Egypt is a shadow of a shadow, yet up to fifty years ago they were a vital element at all levels of society. To overlook their literature is to overlook an essential ingredient of twentieth-century literary Egypt. I would like to turn to another fictional work that even more defies easy categorisation. Mohammed Cohen by Claude Kayat was published in Paris in 1981. The author was a Jew from Sfax in Tunisia who migrated to France and became a teacher of French and English. The novel, written in French, tells the story of the child of the union of a Sfax Jewish barber and his Bedu wife. Having swallowed the improbability (but not impossibility) of that union, we follow the narrative of the Sfaxian childhood and youth of Mohammed who lives to the full on the margins of Tunisian nationalism. He has three passions in life: French literature, Arab music and Jewish cuisine. The boy is involved in Tunisian Zionist camps and he migrates with his family to Israel. He resists pressure to change his name from Mohammed to something more Hebraic. Mohammed experiences the difficulties of a Tunisian Jew in Israel and becomes disillusioned with Zionism. He gets a scholarship to Sweden, stays on, takes Swedish nationality and marries a Swedish girl. He has problems explaining that he is an exIsraeli Tunisian half-Jew. When he tries to explain his attachment to his Arab heritage, someone says to him: Alors, tu te sens a moitié juif et a moitié arabe? Non. Cent pour cent juif et cent pour cent arabe. [Then you feel half Jewish and half Arab? No. One hundred per cent Jewish and one hundred per cent Arab.] (Kayat 1981: 263)

He and his Swedish wife take a holiday in Tunisia and pay what is for Mohammed a sentimental visit to Sfax. Just as they identify the flat where Mohammed was born, the wife has labour pains and, of course, gives birth in that flat: a satisfying completion of the circle. — 185 —

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peter clark The novel is a great read, but also an intriguing and revealing account of Tunisian provincial life, of the dilemmas of a disillusioned Zionist and of the issue of multiple identities. Is it a Tunisian novel? A Jewish or an Israeli novel? A French novel? Should such pigeon-holing matter? A real writer who, like the fictional Mohammed Cohen, may also see himself as 100 per cent Jewish and 100 per cent Arab is Samir Naqqash. Naqqash was born in Baghdad in 1936 and has written plays, novels and short stories, often using the Baghdad Jewish Arabic of his childhood. He migrated to Israel as a teenager but has resisted submission to Israeli Hebrew culture. He sees himself as part of the Arabic cultural world and has expressed the wish to live in an Arab country (Elad-Bouskila 1999: 137). He looks back to Iraq with a certain nostalgia. In his Baghdad childhood he had access to the literature of the world. Coming to Israel meant a narrowing of horizons and a submission to a dominant European Jewish culture (Alcalay 1996: 105). His works have limited print runs and, inevitably, the number of readers who will understand the Baghdad Jewish dialect of the 1940s must be declining annually. Fortunately his works often have a detailed glossary. Nevertheless his work has received critical acclaim, not least among Arab critics. He is happiest when he visits Egypt and meets Egyptian writers, and keeps in touch with trends in contemporary Arab literature. He keeps abreast of Palestinian literature but finds it too focused on one political issue touching the chords of dispossession, nostalgia, loss and grievance. Take that away, he argues, and not a lot is left. Literature should be either personal or universal, uncommitted to any political issue (Clark 2000: 15). Is his work part of Arab literature? Israeli literature? Does it matter? Samir Naqqash is one of a group of Israelis of Iraqi origin who have written in Arabic. Yizhak Bar-Moshe and Shimon Ballas long continued to write in Arabic – ‘It is the language in which we lived,’ said the former (Berg 1996: 51) – but like North Africans in the 1970s and 1980s have for national reasons switched to Hebrew after twenty or thirty years. Iraqis who migrated to Israel often did so to escape political persecution in Iraq, rather than from any messianic Zionism. Jews such as Murad Mikha’il and YaÆqub Bilbul were pioneers of the Iraqi novel and short story. There is often a sentimentality, perhaps best represented in Sami Mikha’il’s novel, Victoria, for a mythic Baghdad that may never have existed. Nissim Rejwan, in his memoirs, recalls working in al-Rabita bookshop in Baghdad which became a meeting place for intellectuals and bookworms, and adjourning to the Café Suisse with Buland al-Haydari and other Iraqi writers (Rejwan 1996: 48, 50). If the number of Israeli Jews writing in Arabic is declining, the number of Palestinian Israelis writing in Hebrew is increasing. The success in 1986 of the Hebrew novel, translated into English as Arabesques, by Anton Shammas, was an outstanding but not an isolated phenomenon. Atallah Mansur had published — 186 —

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marginal literatures of the middle east a Hebrew novel in 1966. But Anton Shammas is one of a group of Palestinian writers – NaÆim ’Araydi, Nazih Khayr, Siham Da’ud, Samih al-Qasim, Muhammad Hamza Ghana’im, Salman Masalha – who are translating between Arabic and Hebrew, and writing poetry in Hebrew. All were born after the foundation of the State of Israel. The revival of Hebrew was a pillar of twentiethcentury Zionism. The incoming Jewish migrants came speaking numerous languages. Just as a people needed an exclusive territory, so they needed an exclusive language. Other languages associated with Jews – Yiddish or Ladino – were seen as languages of the Diaspora. Hebrew would help to cement the new nation. Conversely many Arabs outside saw the adoption of Hebrew as a language of literary expression by Palestinians as a kind of cultural treason. But Palestinian Hebrew is not simply an attempt to challenge and undermine the Jewish monopoly of the Hebrew language. It is an example of an interaction between Arabic and Hebrew culture that is taking place in contemporary Israel, that defies mainstream Arab and Israeli ideologies. ‘I do not know’, NaÆim ’Araydi has written, ‘if I, who write in Hebrew, am writing Hebrew literature. But I do know that I am not writing Arab literature in Hebrew’ (Elad-Bouskila 1999: 146). Palestinians choose to write in Hebrew out of convenience rather than for ideological reasons. This should not come as a surprise. The Palestinians in Israel have, like Arabs in most other countries, enjoyed universal schooling in the last generation. In their case they have learned Hebrew from primary school. They live in a Hebrew-medium environment. All their dealings with police and officialdom are in Hebrew. They are exposed every day to radio and television in Hebrew. Palestinian lawyers, doctors, civil servants and academics have to work in Hebrew. In all this their situation resembles that of North Africans fifty years ago. Hebrew for Palestinians, like French for North Africans, is the imperial language, the language of access to authority. The isolation of Palestinians from the rest of the Arab world has made Hebrew an inescapable option as a language of literary self-expression. The language has become internalised. Unlike most of the Israelis of Iraqi origin who have shifted from Arabic to Hebrew, the Palestinians are not writing exclusively in Hebrew or abandoning the use of Arabic. But do we define the novels and poetry produced by Israeli Palestinians as Arabic literature? Israeli literature? Hebrew literature? Enough has now been said to indicate that there is a huge amount of what I call marginal literature emanating from the contemporary Middle East. It may also be defined as the literature of exile, of ghurba, of ightirab. This may include Arabs expressing themselves in French, English or Hebrew – or, like the Syrian Rafik Schami, in German. It may be the literary expression of minorities who have been eclipsed. It may be Israelis and Palestinians indulging in linguistic cross-dressing. Is it valid to group these disparate writings under one label? — 187 —

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peter clark Perhaps not, but they all represent different aspects of a common Middle Eastern experience and narrative. And I think they do reflect other cultural developments in the Middle East. The experience of many people from the Middle East in the twentieth century was one of dramatic change, of upheaval, dislocation, exile. I have referred to the fact that most Middle Eastern states are creations of the twentieth century, and from the early part of the century had to assert their own legitimacy, in repudiation of either long Ottoman centuries or the overwhelming international, economic and technical power of the British and French empires. The infancy of the new states coincided with developments in effective techniques of state control and of propaganda. Within most Middle East states freedom of expression is often severely curtailed. There are of course nuances from state to state, and the situation is neither monolithic nor unchanging. But imprisonment, unemployment or exile have been common experiences for most writers in the Arab world. Some writers have found hospitality in other Arab countries: Jabra Ibrahim Jabra in Iraq, ÆAbd al-Rahman Munif in Syria. Nizar Qabbani and Adonis were for many years based in Lebanon. Very few Palestinian writers have avoided imprisonment, expulsion or exile. Physical and cultural dislocation has been a fact of life and not just for writers. Among the thousands who have been educated outside the Middle East many have taken spouses from abroad. Their offspring composes a generation that is growing up belonging to more than one culture. Multiculturalism is not a matter of public policy, but of personal experience, an experience that is constantly being reinforced by the information revolution. The assumptions of nationalism – the convergence of state, territory, people and language – that nourished mainstream literature have broken down. But the aspects of a Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism of a century ago have reasserted themselves in these marginal literatures. It is these literatures that touch on universal themes of change, identity, dislocation and adjustment. The marginal should be mainstream and the mainstream should be marginalised.

appendix

Getting to Know a Friendly American Jew: Conversation Tell me, you’re from Israel? Yes, I’m from there. Oh, and where in Israel do you live? Jerusalem. For the last few years I’ve lived there. Oh, Jerusalem is such a beautiful city. Yes, of course, a beautiful city. — 188 —

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marginal literatures of the middle east And do you … you’re from West … or East … That’s a tough question, depends on who’s drawing the map. You’re funny, and do you, I mean, do you speak Hebrew? Yes, of course. I mean, that’s your mother tongue? Not really. My mother’s tongue is Arabic, but now she speaks Hebrew fine. Oh, Ze Yofi, I learned that in the kibbutz. Not bad at all. And you are, I mean, you’re Israeli, right? Yes, of course. Your family is observant? Pretty much. Do they keep the Sabbath? Me, no, depends actually … Do you eat pork? No, that, no. Excuse me for prying, but I just have to ask you, are you Jewish or Arab? I’m an Arab Jew. You’re funny. No, I’m quite serious. Arab Jew? I’ve never heard of that. It’s simple: Just the way you say you’re an American Jew. Here, try to say ‘European Jews.’ European Jews. Now, say ‘Arab Jews.’ You can’t compare, European Jews is something else. How come? Because ‘Jew’ just doesn’t go with ‘Arab,’ it just doesn’t go. It doesn’t even sound right. Depends on your ear. Look, I’ve got nothing against Arabs. I even have friends who are Arabs, but how can you say ‘Arab Jew’ when all the Arabs want is to destroy the Jews? And how can you say ‘European Jew’ when the Europeans have already destroyed the Jews? (Chetrit 1996: 362–3)

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10 1

1

The Predicament of In-Betweenness in the Contemporary Lebanese Exilic Novel in English Syrine C. Hout The last few years of the twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of Anglophone and Francophone novels by Lebanese-born, and in many cases first-time, authors whose childhood and adolescence were fully or partially spent in wartorn Lebanon between 1975 and 1991. Rabih Alameddine, Tony Hanania, Hani Hammoud and Alexandre Najjar1 top the growing list of post-1995 literature produced in and about exile,2 thus dealing not only with the civil strife but with one of its most crucial and long-lasting by-products: expatriation.3 The post-war novels characterise a new literary and cultural phenomenon, and have founded what one may predict to become a full-fledged branch of Lebanese exilic (mahjar) literature. Elise Salem Manganaro opines that ‘it is necessary to examine the everbroadening definition of what constitutes a Lebanese literature’ and argues for a ‘literary pluralism’, as many authors with no Lebanese identification papers have nonetheless ‘consciously sought to identify themselves with some aspect of this amorphous Lebanon’ (1994: 374–5).4 A new group of mahjar writers, she states, emerged during the war between 1975 and 1991 in the US, Canada, Western Europe and Latin America. In addition to the geographical distance enjoyed by immigrant authors, the post-war exilic narratives are written with the hindsight necessary to create a critical distance from the immediacy of violence and chaos. Emerging a few years after peace had been achieved in Lebanon, these texts exhibit a more recent consciousness, one replete with irony, parody and scathing critiques of self and nation. Notwithstanding their exilic condition, the relatively young authors of the post-1995 mahjar literature share with their immediate literary predecessors, in Lebanon and abroad, what Marianne Hirsch calls the survivor memory. Despite their differences in age and experience, their collective work does and will continue to embody, for a while at least, the memories of the first generation of war survivors. Second-generation writers who grow up dominated not by the traumatic event itself but by narratives that preceded their birth display what Hirsch terms ‘postmemory’. Qualitatively, this literature is different because it is — 190 —

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the predicament of in-betweenness connected to its object of study ‘not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation’ (1998: 420). In light of this definition, Lebanese war literature based solely on postmemory, if there is to be one, cannot be expected to come into full force before the middle decades of the twenty-first century. Elie Chalala claims that ‘writing from exile and in different languages marginalizes and limits the effectiveness’ of the work of intellectuals living abroad. Further, he argues that ‘segments of the literary and artistic communities have … failed to match the commitment of their pre-1975 predecessors’, as ‘some have chosen a post-modernist, post-structuralist, and post-colonial approach, producing works accessible only to Western elitist audiences’ (2000: 24). While works written in languages other than Arabic may be inaccessible to a strictly Arabic-speaking readership, it is erroneous to suggest that the aforementioned approaches to literature, especially the third, are peculiar to Western intellectualism and, therefore, are fake and/or pretentious when adopted by writers of Arab origin. Chalala’s term commitment betrays his penchant for realism as the only serious method for analysing the Lebanese war. What he fails to appreciate are the subjectivity, selectivity and self-referentiality of literature, irrespective of the language and the region in which it is produced. Although French is the ex-colonial language of Lebanon, many Lebanese have perfected English as their second language.5 André Chedid writes that there is ‘in each Lebanese a double inclination for both Europeanization [and Americanization] and Arabization; a complex situation, sometimes contradictory, often harmonized’ (quoted in Accad 1990: 28). What is the relationship between exile and nationalism? Almost all postcolonial Third World fiction raises questions about the nation. Timothy Brennan argues that as a result of insurgent nationalism, international capitalism, and cultural globalism, postcolonial novels are unique in portraying the topics of nationalism and exile as two realities ‘unavoidably aware of one another’ (1991: 62). In one particular type of this literature, he contends, ‘the contradictory topoi of exile and nation are fused in a lament for the necessary and regrettable insistence of nation-forming, in which the writer proclaims his identity with a country whose artificiality and exclusiveness have driven him into a kind of exile – a simultaneous recognition of nationhood and an alienation from it’ (63). Edward Said states that nationalism is ‘an assertion of belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage. It affirms the home created by a community of language, culture, and customs; and, by so doing, it fends off exile, fights to prevent its ravages’ (1994: 359). Unlike the national, he argues, exile is ‘fundamentally a discontinuous state of being’ (360). Both Brennan and Said think of the nation and exile as opposite realities. Further, while the nation is viewed as an entity and exile as a particle ejected or self-expelled therefrom, the — 191 —

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syrine c. hout former acquires the attributes of stability and centrality, while the latter becomes synonymous with anxiety and marginality. For both critics, the exile is always ‘out of place’ (Said 362) or ‘ec-centric’, someone who feels his difference as ‘a kind of orphanhood’ (Said 1984: 53). Other critics depoliticise the concept of exile by emphasising its philosophical and psychological, specifically its existential, dimensions. Hamid Naficy explains that after having been associated in the past either implicitly or explicitly with a present or absent home, or a homeland, as referent, the idea of exile is ‘now in ruins or in perpetual manipulation’, free ‘from the chains of its referent’ (1999: 9). Martin Tucker equates ‘exilism’ as a universal state of being, with a ‘plurality of referents’ (1991: xi). In its post-modern guise, ‘exile’ itself seems to have been exiled from its original home or meaning. As a ‘discontinuous state of being’, to quote Said again, it fulfils one’s desire for displacements, dislocations and detours in post-modern culture. In Strangers to Ourselves (1994), Julia Kristeva contends that everyone is becoming a foreigner to himself or herself in a world that is becoming increasingly heterogeneous and fragmented beneath its ostensible technological and media-inspired oneness. In this context, humanity as a whole is orphaned. This chapter focuses on two Anglophone novels, Rabih Alameddine’s Koolaids: The Art of War (1998) and Tony Hanania’s Unreal City (1999),6 with the aim of analysing the post-war exilic sensibility conveyed by these two unique yet comparable contemporary works. The questions to be raised are the following: how is nationalism (re)defined in the context of a civil war caused, among other factors, by the very absence of collective national identity and civic-mindedness? In such a fragmented nation, what constitutes home? And how is one’s original home viewed from a geographical and temporal distance? Evidently, both narratives betray a certain degree of nostalgia evinced in the very fact of having been published. Nationalism, defined in psycho-social terms as the devotion and loyalty to one’s own nation – that is, patriotism – assumes the sense of personal as well as communal belonging to derive from some kind of conformity or continuity. If so, how does nationalist sentiment suffer or change when such conformity and/or continuity are neither possible nor perhaps even desirable? Borrowing Rosemary George’s terms in The Politics of Home, I show both Koolaids and Unreal City to be neither nationalist nor immigrant texts, as neither one deals with the nation exclusively as ‘object and subject’ (1996: 12) or entirely ‘unwrites nation and national projects’ (186). Instead, both novels display the predicament of cultural and national in-betweenness. The same critic argues that there are several factors – such as home, gender/sexuality, race and class – which act as ideological determinants of the human subject (2). In German, the etymological link between Heim (home) and Heimat (nation), — 192 —

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the predicament of in-betweenness signifying respectively the private and the public spheres, is much more obvious than in English. For George, ‘home-country’ is the ‘intersection of … individual and communal that is manifest in imagining a space as home’ (11). It is this intersection of the personal and the collective that constitutes the focus of my reading and, more specifically, how it largely determines the protagonists’ attitudes towards both their original (nation) and adopted (exile) homes. As Eva Hoffman explains, ‘within the framework of postmodern theory, we have come to value exactly those qualities of experience that exile demands – uncertainty, displacement, the fragmented identity’ (quoted in Tirman 2001: par. 6). Koolaids and, to a lesser degree, Unreal City cannot but be read in relation to literary post-modernism. In both novels, exile neither dampens nor strengthens nationalistic feeling. Instead of pitting exile against ‘original home’ or nation as two diametrically opposed realities – as Said and Brennan do – and singing the praises of the one or the other, Alameddine and Hanania show exile to be independent of geography by locating it within the individual, the nation and the host country, as theorised by the second group of critics mentioned earlier. Feeling at home is associated with freedom, a sense of belonging and personal dignity, wherever and whenever these may be found and enjoyed. Exile, by contrast, is a state of cognitive and emotional dissonance, whether generated by war and political/sectarian division in one’s own nation or induced by physical uprootedness abroad. Both novels portray a complex relationship between self-love and love for a bleeding nation. Staying in Lebanon does not prove love for one’s country of birth anymore than leaving it affirms indifference towards it. As a novel which draws parallels between the Lebanese civil war and the AIDS epidemic in the US, Koolaids has attracted the attention of readers and reviewers in the East and West.7 As Michael Denneny states, fiction responding to AIDS has become more ambitious in the last few years by ‘seeing this epidemic in the wider context of humanity and history’. He equates Alameddine with ‘the great Latin American masters of fiction … who confront the concrete historical dilemmas of their own people with a soaring, almost metaphysical imagination that irradiates the ultimately particular with universal meaning’ (1999: 21). Sarah Schulman’s comment that Koolaids’ ‘content reflects the need for justice’8 is compatible with Adnan Haydar’s reading of the novel as one engaged in an endless critical process aimed at a grammar of truth but whose content, in a true post-modernist fashion, is rendered absurd through irony and parody. Thus, the text is not about the Lebanese civil war but rather about conditions of war, furnishing a view of global history and common destiny. Leo Spitzer argues that in the twentieth century nostalgia – which had been used earlier to describe the emotion of ‘homesickness’9 – came to signify ‘an incurable state of mind’ in which the feelings of absence and loss could no — 193 —

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syrine c. hout longer be replaced by those of presence and gain except through reconstructive memory (1998: 376). In underscoring the positive aspects of what he calls ‘nostalgic memory’, Spitzer cites French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who views nostalgia as the mechanism which frees individuals and groups from the constraints of time by allowing them to transcend its irreversibility and thus focus on the positive in their traumatised past. Nostalgic memory is crucial for the reconstitution and continuity of individual and collective identity of all kinds. By contrast, critical memory, according to Spitzer, incorporates ‘the negative and bitter from the immediate past’. But this type of memory is equally significant to the retrospective act of self-definition (384). Alameddine weaves both forms of memory – nostalgic and critical – into his literary collage. Sweet and bitter memories exist side by side. Interestingly, unlike all other fragments whose narrators may be determined upon a second reading, those expressing nostalgia for happier times remain anonymous, articulating perhaps the covert homesickness of the Lebanese characters abroad. In one segment, pining for the scent of pine is triggered by either imagining or encountering its smell, which ‘calls the [narrator] home’ (Alameddine 1998: 83). As Margaret Morse explains, the memory of home can be evoked by certain sensory experiences, the olfactory one being the most prominent. Thus, parts of home ‘can be chanced upon, cached in secret places safe from language’ (1999: 68). Elsewhere, the nameless narrator declares: ‘Lebanon is a piece of land … but it’s our land, our home (even if actually we are not living there). It’s our Sweet Home, and we love it. So we are called Lebanese’ (Alameddine 183). The unidentified voice seems to speak for those Lebanese exiles whose love for their country is genuine and inclusive, that is, free of any political and/or religious bias. In a letter excerpt posted on the internet, Wayne Kasem, a LebaneseAmerican, writes: ‘I agree with many of the writers that Lebanese are free to be Arabs if this is their cultural identity, and they are free to be Western if that is their cultural identity, or even Aramaic. This is the point. In Lebanon, one should be free to be different. This is the essence of being Lebanese and the essence of being American’ (Alameddine 71–2). One of these writers, I believe, is Alameddine himself. In his acknowledgements, he describes himself as ‘an errant non-conformist’ (viii). While he may be referring to his homosexuality, this self-labelling may also be understood as a lack of commitment to a particular religious sect and/or political ideology. According to Kasem and Alameddine, cultural identity is different from national identity in two ways: first, it is inculcated in the maturing Lebanese individual by his or her immediate social milieu; second, it should be secondary to, albeit larger than, that individual’s inherited nationality. Therefore, while cherishing one’s acquired cultural identity, including one’s religious beliefs, — 194 —

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the predicament of in-betweenness every citizen should be ‘a Lebanese first’ (71), that is, open-minded enough to be respectful of other Lebanese irrespective of their cultural allegiances. Only the distinction between these two types of identity would guarantee collective loyalty to the idea(l) of Lebanon as a pluralistic yet unified nation.10 But unlike Kasem, and as may be gleaned from the novel as a whole, Alameddine does not view the war in retrospect as ‘a legitimizing event … the crucible in which the nation of Lebanon was born’ (Alameddine 70). Nor does he see wars in general as having any positive effects. The character Mohammad, who comes closest to representing the author himself, quotes James Baldwin by saying that ‘[p]erhaps the whole root of … the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have’ (124). Despite its atheistic, stoical and/or cosmopolitan spirit, this statement is neither antinationalistic nor anti-religious; it simply bewails the drowning of human life, happiness and freedom in the quagmire of jingoism and religious fanaticism. Like AIDS, war destroys one’s life, claims the lives of loved ones, and kills large numbers of people at random. Despite their different behaviours and attitudes, the conduct of all the Lebanese characters in the novel is tinged by the war. The physical exiles among them exhibit what Edward Said calls ‘contrapuntal consciousness’, that is, the inevitable double or plural visions which exiles acquire as a result of being aware of two or more cultures (1994: 366). While Mohammad’s perception is dominant, Samir’s and Makram’s contribute to the novel’s polyphony. Their homosexuality aside, Mohammad (a Muslim), Samir (a Druze), and Makram (of a Christian Maronite father and a Muslim mother) represent not what the reader may think of as the (stereo)typical attributes of their religious sects but rather three possibilities of personal reactions to the war situation. Familial relationships, psychological makeup and physical distance from Lebanon shape their nationalistic sentiments or lack thereof in various combinations. Mohammad, born in Beirut in 1960, eventually overcomes his ‘childhood of complete and utter confusion’ (Alameddine 8) after his family relocates to and then back from West Africa to Lebanon. But he is soon pressured to join his uncle in Los Angeles, and so leaves in 1975 at the age of fifteen. Financially insecure and dismayed by his father’s unwillingness to support his education at an art school in San Francisco, he never returns. After gaining financial independence as a painter, he ‘lost [his] roots’ (122). Samir Bashar, born in Washington, DC in 1960, moves back at the age of seven to Beirut, and leaves in 1978 to study at a university in Paris. In 1983, he returns to Washington, his ‘hometown, so to speak’ (81), to pursue a PhD in history at Georgetown University. After resettling in the US, he continues to revisit Lebanon — 195 —

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syrine c. hout periodically. Unlike Mohammad, Samir is painfully aware before and after each visit that he ‘had separated [him]self for too long’ (208). Makram is born in Beirut in 1970 and is killed, without ever having left, in 1989, along with his mother. All three men die, whether of AIDS or during the war. Also, Mohammad loses two brothers, and Makram his father in war-related accidents. Although Mohammad and Samir avoid possible physical annihilation by departing, they do not end up ‘in ivory towers’ as some of those who never left Lebanon might think (Alameddine 219). For unlike immigrants who start new lives in a new home, ‘exiles never break the psychological link with their point of origin’ (Pavel 1998: 26). Notwithstanding the possibility of returning home, expatriation – that is, voluntary exile – is quite similar to involuntary exit, if what ensues is the ‘pattern of exilic behavior’ (Tucker 1991: xv). Estranged from his disapproving father and submissive mother, who cut off all communication with him, Mohammad adopts and practises the belief that ‘[w]e build our own family’ (Alameddine 115) by devoting ten years of his life and some of his artwork to his American lover Scott, whose last words are ‘I love you, Mohammad’ (13). Despite the love he receives from Scott, his own sister Nawal, his Guatemalan housekeeper Maria, and a handful of compassionate Americans and Lebanese, Mohammad never surmounts his obsession with his original home and country. John Tirman states that the three core constituents of memory, which serves as the ‘emotional channel to the homeland’, are language, culture and history. In Mohammad’s case, his memory is revealed by his unconscious in three areas: his dreams, his paintings (culture) and his ‘slips’ into Arabic (language). As Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s personal experience in his prologue to Strange Pilgrims demonstrates, while in exile some night dreams fulfil the dual purpose of allowing the expatriate, first, to bridge past (nation) and present (exile) and, second, to conscientiously examine his or her own identity (1994: viii). Similarly, although Mohammad ‘can’t touch home’ (Alameddine 166) physically, his four dreams transport him to an earlier time in Beirut, once where he meets his adolescent self, and his family welcomes him without recognising his older version, causing him to decide once again to take off. As Chénieux-Gendron explains, in a state of self-loss, the exile searches for that which, in childhood, foreshadowed the exile to come (1998: 164–5). Arguing that visual language is more transportable than language to a place of exile, Linda Nochlin maintains that visual artists, using concrete materials, find it easier to translate their familiar worlds than writers, for whom the loss of native language is more devastating (1998: 37). In keeping with this theory, Mohammad, while clearly traumatised, succeeds as a painter but fails as a writer. Scott and Samir, individuals with whom Mohammad shares respectively his — 196 —

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the predicament of in-betweenness sensibility and nationality, see in his work his ‘dreams … fears … mother … father [and] the war which tore [his] life apart’ (Alameddine 13). In what American art critics interpret as Mohammad’s abstract art, Samir sees Druze, Christian and Muslim village houses and admires his compatriot for having realistically ‘captured Lebanon’ and told ‘the tale of [his] home’ (101). Later, to the mythological, psychoanalytical, philosophical and metanarrative interpretations of American critics, Samir adds a nativist one when he sees a jackass on canvas as a symbol of an outmoded means of Lebanese transportation, and the painting as a whole as ‘mourn[ing] the death of a country’ (190). As may be seen, nostalgic memory, to borrow Spitzer’s concept, permits Mohammad through the cultural medium of his paintings to bypass the war years and reconnect himself to the untarnished image, if not the reality, of a simpler and religiously harmonious nation. As Svetlana Boym demonstrates, bilingual exiles can rarely shed an accent, and their ‘[e]rrors betray the syntax of the mother tongue’ (1998: 244). English, spoken with an accent, slips away in Mohammad’s moments of delirium, drunkenness and anger. Here, Arabic as a whole takes over, re-attaching him to his linguistic roots. Mohammad, nicknamed Mo, often refers to this linguistic condition as a predicament. Fitting in America without belonging there, and belonging in Lebanon without fitting there epitomises his linguistic, emotional and mental state of cultural in-betweenness. Interestingly, Mohammad’s location of home keeps shifting. Critical memory, the opposite of the nostalgic kind, is exhibited when he declares that he hates his sister’s cooking because it ‘reminds [him] of home’ (Alameddine 17). Later, however, when she ‘talks to [him] of home’, he insists that he is ‘home’ (212). Here, the distinction between original and adopted home discussed earlier comes to mind. Although Mohammad insists that his happiest day was when he became an American citizen and tore up his Lebanese passport, in his last moments he curses Lebanese and Americans alike. Further, he expresses his exilic mood as follows: I tried so hard to rid myself of anything Lebanese. I hate everything Lebanese. But I never could. It seeps though my entire being. The harder I tried, the more it showed up in the unlikeliest of places. But I never gave up. I do not want to be considered Lebanese. But that is not up to me … Nothing in my life is up to me. (243–4)

Clearly, while it may be easy to extricate oneself from one’s home-country, it is a lot harder to expunge one’s national traits from one’s appearance or psyche. Boym argues that there are two types of nostalgia, depending on whether the stress is laid on the nostos – which implies the desire to return to a mythical home – or algia – which is enthralled by the distance, and not by the referent itself. This ironic nostalgia is fragmentary in that it ‘accepts (if it does not enjoy) the paradoxes of exile and displacement’ (1998: 241). Mohammad’s — 197 —

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syrine c. hout estrangement from Lebanon and later from America is symptomatic of his ironic nostalgia. By contrast, Samir demonstrates a modified version of tender nostalgia by shuttling back and forth between two homes. His good relationship with his father and mother, who come to accept his homosexuality and illness, helps him in maintaining his physical connection to Lebanon. Unlike many Lebanese whose professed love for their country shrank or remained tied to specific territories, defined by their respective religious sects, Samir’s grew while continuing to be secular and apolitical. With his mother and his long-time American lover on his side, Samir dies in peace, ‘at home’ with himself. Makram, by contrast, dies at home but not in peace. The eventual elimination of Makram’s interfaith family symbolises the erasure of hope for a politically and religiously harmonious nation. Raised on the principles of tolerance and love, Makram dies too young to effect any positive changes in members of his generation, let alone posterity. Luckily, however, hope for a better future for Lebanon lurks in two of Makram’s female friends: Nawal, Mohammad’s young sister, and Marwa, her best friend, both born in 1972. Both are ambitious, principled and highly educated. Ironically, however, their academic success abroad lowers their chances of refitting into Lebanese society. In the US, they ‘were never able to completely shed their indigenous relationship with their culture’ (Alameddine 79). Conversely, they refuse to abide by patriarchal Lebanese mores and customs, especially those of marriage. Mohammad wonders why his sister ‘kept going home at least twice a year’ but admits that, in doing so, she remained ‘the family bridge’ (156). In wishing to go back permanently after he dies and carry the fruits of their exilic lives to a country which needs them, Nawal and Marwa represent ‘a new breed, a new species’ (79), that is, a new hope for Lebanon. Unlike Mohammad and Samir, who spend their lives, shortened by AIDS, reacting to their past centred on one or two turning points, these two women manage to bridge the gap between home and abroad by evolving into responsible individuals. If anything, exilic life has strengthened their nationalistic feelings and sense of duty. Whether this achievement is due to gender and/or sexual orientation is not made clear, as their voices are mediated mostly through Mohammad’s consciousness. Unlike most aforementioned characters, several others suffer from internal exile. As Susan Rubin Suleiman states, ‘All travelers are outsiders somewhere … but not all outsiders are travelers’ (1998: 3). Zygmunt Bauman corroborates this view by equating exilic existence with three modes: being literally out of place, needing to be elsewhere, and not having that ‘elsewhere’ where one would rather be. From this perspective, exile becomes a place of compulsory confinement, one that is ‘itself out of place in the order of things’ (1998: 321). David Bevan takes this opinion one step further by suggesting that ‘exile within — 198 —

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the predicament of in-betweenness a place is often still more poignant than exile from a place or exile to a place’ (1990: 3). In Koolaids, Samia Marchi – a thirty-year-old Muslim wife and mother, born on the Christian side of the so-called Green Line between Christian East and Muslim West Beirut – sees herself as ‘a true Beiruti … no matter what others say’ (Alameddine 85). But a militiaman at a checkpoint, speaking in French, insists that she is no longer from East Beirut although her French would allow her to fit in under the bizarre standards that applied during the war. Her extramarital affair with Nicola Akra, a handsome Christian thug, is a symbolic crossing from West to East Beirut and a union of two religions, cut short by political division and moral corruption. Other characters – like the Greek Catholic Mr Suleiman, the Palestinian Fatima and the Muslim Amin Baghdadi – are killed randomly or deliberately on their way home or while visiting their hometowns. The loss of the safety associated with home turns the entire country into an exile with no exits. These tragic stories are captured by a roving eye and strewn, like the bodies of their victims, throughout the text. More significantly, they show the complementary, not the contradictory, nature of exile and nation; the civil war transforms life in one’s homeland into a state of exile, or a ‘discontinuous state of being’ (Said 1994: 360). Benedict Anderson argues that modern communications, particularly the internet and e-mail, create what he terms long-distance nationalism, that is, the technological capacity of diasporic national groups to participate in the political life of their nations. Thus, a new or post-modern form of nationalism, namely diasporic nationalism, is born (Tirman). The dates of the sundry letters and e-mails that Alameddine scatters throughout Koolaids range between 19 March and 2 August 1996. They encapsulate concurrent, discrepant views on what constitutes Lebanese nationalism. Depending on the speaker, anti-Arab, antiSyrian, anti-Muslim, anti-Hizbullah, anti-Christian or anti-Israeli sentiments are prerequisites for being a true Lebanese. While electronic correspondence facilitates discussion, some mailing lists are limited to like-minded recipients. The result is a cacophony in tune with the splintered narration of this mosaic novel. What Alameddine is showing us, again, are the immense danger and disastrous consequences of confusing cultural and national identities and mistaking the former for the latter. Positioning oneself with or against an external, larger national/cultural group (here, Arab, Syrian or Israeli), a religious one (Christian or Muslim) and/or a political one (Hizbullah) in the name of ‘true’ Lebanese nationalism is, in fact, the very negation of enlightened and tolerant nationalism. Like Koolaids, Unreal City is ‘a novel about division – cultural, religious, political, and physical’ (Vinten 1999: 22). It has been dubbed ‘a Lebanese War and Peace, with the personal and national tragedies intertwined’ (Padel 1999). — 199 —

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syrine c. hout Hanania sees himself as ‘an exile’ who writes about ‘doomed youth, … exile, alienation, loss, and the consolations of worldly sensuality’ in relation to ‘the false consciousness of politics, religion, and public ethics.’ He states: ‘Through the idea of Lebanon, through Lebanon as an idea, I explore exile as alienation. To this extent, the modern everyman is a Lebanese’ (interview). But unlike Alameddine, Hanania weaves the themes of exile and nationalism into the firstperson account of a nameless protagonist, thereby refraining from making any discursive and/or direct statements about either topic. Although Hanania has been known to identify himself as a Palestinian, his main character is a Lebanese Shiite; therefore, my discussion of nationalism will be tied to Lebanon. The novel’s three books – Sidon, Dark Star and Homecoming – are subdivided into sections indicating the place(s) and month(s) and/or year(s) of action. The events – stretching from the pre-war years to July 1990 – are presented in a more or less linear fashion from the vantage point of one full day in the present – 3 February 1992 – which frames the text and on which the narrator is expected to assassinate a ‘renegade’ Muslim writer living in London in a suicide mission. Thus, all the narrative threads are made to converge on this anticipated climax. The autobiographical account, written outside of Lebanon, contains metanarrative references to its genesis, evolution and approaching end as a ‘testimony’ (Hanania 1999: 19) to a life wasted but about to be redeemed in a final act of self-sacrifice for a common cause. The narrator’s reliability and truthfulness are compromised, however, by years of drug use, as he ‘would discover pages [he] did not remember writing, in a hand [he] barely recognized as [his] own.’ Due to its ‘unbidden’ nature, he keeps it hidden but ‘[t]o [his] dismay the text [finds] its way into the hands of … a Yemeni radical, and [is] copied, and circulated first among dissident student groups, and then among the wider expatriate community’ (197–8). Besides being too high on opium to control his writing, the narrator cannot decide the influence his words will have on his own life. Initially intended as a cathartic transcription of his personal history and a search for some sort of meaning, the text, in an ironic twist of events, decides the narrator’s fate by paving his way towards ultimate meaning in death. The only child of a half-Palestinian, half-English mother and a Lebanese university professor, the narrator splits his time between Lebanon and England. Having lost his mother at a young age, he suffered from ‘a lonely upbringing’ (Hanania 194) in a villa within a short radius with the campus of the American University of Beirut as its centre. Between ‘the cold exile of boarding-school’ (196) in England and ‘those dreary … afternoons in the years before the war’ (221) in Lebanon, the narrator has led a sheltered and repressed childhood. Restrictions on food and drink, movement and behaviour due to his higher socio-economic class make him wish not only to taste sweets he ‘had been — 200 —

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the predicament of in-betweenness forbidden as a boy’ (126) but to savour freedom by rebelling against familial authority and going ‘beyond the boundaries prescribed’ (53). Rebellion manifests itself in many forms: the addiction to opium and sleep aids (Nembutal), the ‘unveiling’ of emotions via writing, the contradiction of parental wishes, and taking refuge in political extremism by joining the Shiite party Jihad al-Binaa. What leads to defiance is primarily guilt deepened by regret. The narrator is the victim not of the civil war but of ‘the remote [my emphasis] insouciance that comes to those who have survived a war in which they have not participated’ (Hanania 194–5). He feels inferior to ‘the names of former students of [his] father … who had died defending the strongholds in Tyre and Beaufort Castle’ (168). But cowardice underpins his passivity. He writes: ‘I would never have the courage to go out into the [Palestinian refugee] camps’ (142) and ‘would lose my nerve beyond the Commodore [Hotel]’ (179). To assuage his guilt, however, he gives money and cigarettes to his friends and poor villagers, and powdered milk, chocolate, old clothes, toys and even his Nembutal tablets to needy and injured children. Guilt is instigated by several facts: the narrator’s privileged status as a member of two cultures – resulting from his mixed parentage, ‘mobile’ (extended) family and Western schooling – on the one hand, and his belonging to an oppressive feudal family from southern Lebanon, on the other. As a boy, he wished to know from his Lebanese friend Ali, whose ancestors had served his own, about ‘the crimes of the old beys [chiefs]’ (Hanania 56), a fact of which he is later reminded when his room in the Ealing Husseinya in London is ransacked by boys whose ‘families had suffered under the beys’ (259). After joining the Shiite military organisation, he is he told by Ali’s father, Musa-al-Tango, how the latter ‘had always known … that the last of the beys [that is, the narrator] would redeem the crimes of all his forefathers’ (253). The narrative re-ordering of his past from his point of view in the present makes the reader anticipate a teleological development of events despite the aimless and precarious existence led by the narrator. As he puts it, his ‘conversion has been the only child of fate’ (30). The road to redemption is not smooth but ‘wrinkled’ by spatial and temporal gaps, as the narrator spends the war years shuttling between Madrid, London and Beirut. Three characters – his two British companions, Leighton and Verger, and later Ali – help connect the narrator’s disjointed experiences by appearing in both Beirut and London at various points. The narrator’s psychological mobility, vouchsafed by his cultural and national in-betweenness, makes him at different times spurn requests by his father, his Palestinian girlfriend Layla, and Ali for him to stay in any one place, whether that be Europe or Lebanon. After his mother’s death and his father’s remarriage to an American, the idea of a fixed home has been replaced for him by what James Clifford calls ‘dwelling-intraveling’ (1997: 36). His self-indulgent travelling is contrasted with the — 201 —

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syrine c. hout involuntary exit of many villagers who have fled from blood feuds and famines to West Africa and South America and sometimes returned with fortunes made abroad. The narrator’s memories of Lebanon, resurfacing during the ‘seven years since [he] had been home [here, Lebanon]’ (Hanania 197) and given narrative shape between 1985 and 1992, are nostalgic, not critical. He fondly remembers listening to martyr plays and old Abu Musa’s tales, and touching the fountain’s carved lions. Familiar sights, sounds, tastes and smells encountered during his childhood spell ‘home’ for him. He frequents the Lebanese restaurant Al-Bustan in Ravenscourt Park so that he can savour the ‘Shish’Taouk in the old village way’ (15). The ‘sweet juices running over the gums and tongue’ evoke the ‘heraldic blue of the sky and the terraced hills and the distant margin of the sea, all that could never change there’ (16). According to Ghassan Hage, nostalgia can be active and always functions metonymically. Furthermore, it is not so much a yearning for a place as it is for an intensely personal experience associated therewith. Not only does this alimentary experience trigger the recollection of that which is naturally and consistently beautiful due to its indestructibility by war but also that of eating forbidden foods offered to him by Ali’s mother but never served in his uncle Samir’s house in Sidon. The memory is so precious and precarious that dessert at Al-Bustan is shunned lest it threaten ‘to take away the taste of what [he] had just eaten’ (17). Specific tastes and smells are also attached to certain childhood friends who remind him of home. For the narrator, Lebanon is never just a symbol or an ideal – as is sometimes the case in Koolaids – but a lived reality or, to reiterate George’s term, a home-country in which the personal and the public overlap and contribute equally to ‘imagining a space as home’ (11). As Morse explains, ‘home’ here is a repertoire of familiar sensory experiences. Later the war, partly spent in his Beirut residence overlooking the sea, becomes associated in the narrator’s mind with a set of peculiar and unpleasant sights, smells and sounds: the ever-higher heaps of rubbish – alternatively rotting and burning – the humming of generators and the din of explosions. Hage explains that although the object triggering the memory may itself be disagreeable, the resulting recollection is always sweet. In the days of heavy shelling and restricted movement, rationing becomes necessary and hunger makes the narrator crave ‘foods [he] had always hated, some [he] did not know [he] had ever eaten’ (144). But life outside of Lebanon, too, is associated with certain alimentary habits. At the supermarket in Beirut, the narrator buys ‘the last supplies of those staples [he] had developed a taste for at [his English] boarding-school [and] which like the apples of [Layla’s brother] Harun seemed mysteriously to augment in flavour the further from England they travelled. Marmite, digestive biscuits, Cadbury’s Drinking Chocolate’ (126). — 202 —

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the predicament of in-betweenness The abnormal circumstances and daily deprivations of the war strengthen the desire for that which is not readily available. The narrator confesses that what he missed the most while in war-torn Lebanon was not ‘the England [he] had known, [that is] the mildewed country houses [and] his schoolfriends’ drinking and smoking in pubs’ but the ‘the electricity and looking out at the snow from a hot bath and the spiteful tidiness of the pavements in that little house off the Brompton Road where the bey owned the house he never used.’ At night in Beirut he dreams ‘of a country [he] had never left behind, a bey’s England of summer hats and swizzle-sticks and concinnous buttonholes and garden parties where Layla strolls’ (Hanania 135). When in England, as the opening and ending of the novel show, he dreams of Layla in the ‘land she has never left’ (5 and 267). Ten years later, he still hears ‘the old ringing in [his] ears from the summer of the siege’ (14) when alone in Leighton’s house. Whenever he leaves his country, whether that is England or Lebanon, he never leaves it behind but carries it with(in) him in his ‘contrapuntal consciousness’, to quote Said again. The atrocities of the war compound the narrator’s guilt towards his Lebanese and Palestinian friends who, due to poverty, political commitment and/or national status, do not have the option of going into exile. To assuage his culpability, he lapses into drug-induced numbness. Protected by the snow in Yorkshire (his mother’s birthplace) while attending university in 1982, he ‘no longer took the papers [or] watched the news’ (Hanania 159) despite his attempts to communicate via letters with his friends. After learning about the Israeli invasion, he returns to Beirut for the summer before starting to work at an auction-house in Madrid. For the following five years he lives in Madrid and in London, where as a junior curator at the Tate Gallery he leads a ‘solitary … immured life’, immersed in ‘a discipline of forgetting’ (193). With no news from the Red Crescent offices about his friends after the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps, he ‘saw the newspapers in the kiosks, and looked away’ as all ‘the names that had played as refrains in the long song of [his] childhood return[ed] like strange blooms to these foreign walls’ (191). In his attempt to overcome his guilt towards Layla – whom he had ‘strung … along for three summers with gifts and visions and promises’ (Hanania 118) and who is now rumoured to have turned to prostitution – the narrator pursues ‘brief and barren affairs’ with fashionable women and succumbs to ‘the rigours of the pipe’. Sex and substance abuse prove insufficient, however, in guarding him against his mounting ‘self-disgust’ (195). Despairing of finding Layla, and thus losing a sense of direction, he starts looking for an alternative atonement. Before joining the brotherhood, however, he shows hesitation by avoiding contact with the ‘bearded men’ (198) – who loiter around the bey’s house in London – and paradoxically ‘escaping’ through the back window to Lebanon in — 203 —

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syrine c. hout 1987. After returning to London in 1990, he ‘avoid[s] all [his] old acquaintances … [from] the old days’ (30–1). But his radicalisation is sealed when news of Asad’s gruesome death reaches him. In addition, with his father’s death, ‘the last weight had been lifted’ (261). The narrator’s love for his wounded country, so far manifested in his devotion to a few friends and attachment to certain locales, habits and objects – like his mother’s painting which symbolises the pre-war years – is transformed into a partisan ideology whose idea(l) of national loyalty is based on that of Islamic jihad. And so the secular, drug-addicted and womanising art connoisseur burns his books and begins ‘a new regime of washing’ (Hanania 260), praying and fasting and adopts the idea of martyrdom as the only means for his spiritual purification. Having done little besides ‘dream[ing] through the years of the war’ (266) and fruitlessly searching for ‘the faces war and time [that is, exile] had stolen’ (260) from him, he responds to what he now perceives to be his call of duty towards his suffering nation by assuming his newly discovered religious identity. As in Koolaids, the difference between cultural/religious and national identity comes to the fore, albeit in novelistic garb. For the narrator, joining this sectarian but also political and military brotherhood allows him to accomplish two goals simultaneously: to re-affirm his (misunderstood) ‘Lebaneseness’ and to rebel against his upper socio-economic class, which had partly protected him against direct danger and involvement by offering him, in hard times, an alternative nation (England). If, as George argues, home and class are two factors, among several others, which shape the individual’s ideological constitution, then what we see the narrator doing is undermining the latter in order to deepen, however fallaciously, his nationalistic roots. Looking back on his life, the narrator had perceived himself as ‘a comical imposture’ (Hanania 27), devoid of substance and value. In a dream shortly before his suicide mission, he had seen his self – as the writer of a play about the civil war – split between a ‘garish marionette’ – with ‘features not entirely dissimilar to those of [his] own person’ blaspheming on the stage – and the ‘actual’ playwright who congratulates him on his convincing performance of trying to control the disorder caused by the puppet. Like some of Mohammad’s dreams in Koolaids, this one reveals his unconscious to contain contradictory selves. Thinking/wishing himself to be the author of a theatrical production, he ‘discovers’ that he is but the unwitting star in someone else’s drama, like the ‘clown’ whom he destroys in front of the audience. One may interpret the dream as expressing his desire to be in charge of his life (and art) but failing to be so due to the war and his chemical dependency. As one reviewer put it, the ‘narrator is mostly out of the action, and nearly always out of his head’ (Vinten 1999: 22). So, his antidote to drifting through life is politicised action against — 204 —

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the predicament of in-betweenness well-defined and easy-to-reach targets such as ‘irreverent’ writers. Killing a scapegoat is a highly distorted example of active nationalism, not only because of its aggressive nature but also because of its religious motivation. The novel has for its title a line from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). The narrator is the modern ‘hollow’ man, to use Eliot’s metaphor, whose empty life in the ‘unreal city’ of his inner landscape finds eventual fulfilment, however brief, in a party ideology which allows him to prove his love for his country by proving himself loyal to one of his few surviving childhood friends: Ali. While assassinating a writer for religious reasons thousands of miles away from Lebanon may hardly qualify as evidence of patriotism, it is certainly an act of allegiance to Ali, whose charisma turns him into a quasi supernatural figure and a pseudo prophet, especially when he vows to the young narrator that ‘on the appointed day [they] would go together to the cave’ (Hanania 56). This cave, we are told, had protected Fakr-al-Din, the Lebanese dwarf emir (prince), who hid inside from the Turks. As foretold, the narrator’s curiosity to visit this hollow is satisfied inadvertently years later when, as a Jihad al-Binaa ‘soldier,’ he finds refuge from the Shiite Amal militiamen in the same cavern. Like the isolated emir, for years he ‘had hidden in his cave, and peopled the walls with his imaginings, and though he remembered the world he had no longer trusted his memories’ (Hanania 266). In States of Fantasy, Jacqueline Rose discusses the enormous importance of collective fantasy in nation building. ‘Fantasy is a way of re-elaborating and therefore of partly recognizing the memory which is struggling, against all odds, to be heard’ (quoted in Tirman 2001: par. 21). Reduced to a personal level, fantasy may be seen here as helping the narrator fill in his memory gaps about his home-country. Again like the emir, he is now ready to step out of his proverbial cave into the sunlight by assuming his ‘national’ responsibility and accepting his fate in the form of imminent yet dignified death. Earlier, the narrator had stated that people must exist a little less if they cannot be certain that others have remembered them. If living on in people’s memories is a testimony to one’s existence, then dying with a bang cannot but serve as a reminder of a man whose fall was a fitting end to a purposeful life. Like Koolaids, Unreal City is post-modern in that it refuses to convey a single objective truth about the Lebanese experience of coping with the war. Uncertainty and ambiguity equally pervade the narrator’s account in the latter. He confesses: ‘I remember little of those times now, and what I remember is not fit matter to record’ (Hanania 195). The discrepancy between experiences and their textual (re)construction is attributed here not to AIDS but to drug abuse. Ironically, however, in both texts foggy and fragmentary memories portray acutely as well as broadly the inner complex reality of various Lebanese characters torn between two homes, two identities and ultimately two life choices. — 205 —

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syrine c. hout Both novels exemplify the Borgesian post-modernist notion that ‘historical truth is not what took place; it is what we think took place’ (Alameddine 12), making it ‘possible [that] everyone was right’ (190). The truth is indeed subjective and consequently multiple, contradictory and shifting. Human existence, as Nabokov maintains, ‘is but a crack of light between two eternities of darkness’ (122). How bright or dim our lives are, however, depends on our decisions and actions. Perhaps no one is fully responsible as no one is fully exempt. But one thing is certain. Deconstructing myths of religio-ethnic superiorities bidding for political supremacy would be the first step towards reconstructing the fragmented nation and fostering what Miriam Cooke calls humanist nationalism. Unlike statist nationalism, which is absolute, inherently violent, and ‘requires a binary framework of differentiation and recognition, positing the nation out there from time immemorial and awaiting discovery by those who naturally belong to it, humanist nationalism construes the nation as a dialectic, as both produced and productive’ (1996: 270–2). The latter is not predicated on a collective ideology but is the expression of individual states of mind (290). Indeed, various expressions of individual states of mind with regard to Lebanese nationalism are presented in Koolaids and Unreal City. As I have argued, neither novel portrays exile and the nation as antithetical entities but as realities co-existing within the individual, the nation and the host country. Nonetheless, the general impression that until Lebanon emerges as a democratic, tolerant, peaceful and just nation, contemporary Lebanese exilic literature will continue to be, for many Lebanese writers and readers everywhere, their substitute nation is quite unshakable.

notes 1. Hammoud was born in 1963, Hanania in 1964 and Najjar in 1967. Alameddine is in his early to mid-forties. 2. See I, The Divine: A Novel in First Chapters (2001), Koolaids: The Art of War (1998) and The Perv: Stories (1999) by Alameddine, Homesick (1997), Unreal City (1999) and Eros Island (2000) by Hanania, L’Occidentaliste (1997) by Hammoud, and L’école de la guerre (1999) by Najjar. 3. Between 1975 and 1989, approximately 40 per cent of the multi-sectarian Lebanese citizenry, representing different socio-economic classes, found refuge abroad. About one half left for North America, Europe, Africa and Australia, while the other half went to oil-producing Arab countries as well as Syria and Jordan. In 1989, as a result of the declining Lebanese pound and the continuing civil unrest, the rate of emigration went back to its 1975 level, when 15 per cent of the population fled the war (Labaki 1992: 607–9, 621). Currently, the ratio of Lebanese abroad to those in Lebanon is five (or six) to one (Cooke 1996: 269). 4. She cites, for example, Samuel Hazo, Gregory Orfalea, Elmaz Abinader and Ron David.

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the predicament of in-betweenness 5. This is the result of mixed marriages and/or attending British or American schools and universities in Lebanon or abroad. 6. The paperback editions came out in 1999 and 2000 respectively. 7. It has been placed on the list of Selected Gay and Lesbian Titles for Spring 1998: Buyers’ Guide. But as Michael Bronski explains, novels with gay or lesbian content started being marketed as ‘literary fiction’ – ‘with an eye to their national or ethnic content’ – and not exclusively as ‘gay fiction’ around 1994 (1999: 38). 8. The blurb is from the 1998 Picador edition. 9. Alsatian Johannes Hofer, he explains, coined the term in a 1688 Swiss medical thesis. 10. Lebanon has seventeen official religious denominations.

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11 1

The Nation Speaks: On the Poetics of Nationalist Literature 1

Yasir Suleiman The title page of George Antonius’ classic study The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement, published in London in 1938, carries as an epigraph in beautiful Arabic calligraphy the first hemistich of Ibrahim al-Yaziji’s (1847–1906) famous ode: tanabbahu wa-stafiqu ayyuha al-Æarabu (‘Arise, ye Arabs and Awake!’). As I have argued elsewhere (Suleiman 2003: 96), this choice was not fortuitous: it was ‘intended to highlight the cultural nature of this nationalism in its initial stages’ in the nineteenth century; in addition, it was meant to draw attention to the fact that the nationalist idea was, as Antonius expresses it, ‘borne slowly towards its destiny on the wings of a nascent literature’, in which, it may be added, poetry played a leading role (Antonius 1936: 60). This reference to literature is echoed in the metaphorical use of the term ‘story’ in the subtitle of Antonius’s book and in the ‘poetic’ flavour of his prose, of which the preceding quotation is an example. Although one may disagree with Antonius’s narrative on periodisation and agency in the evolution of Arab nationalism, his views on culture and literature as sources of this nationalism are still as valid today as they were at the time of writing. In fact, I would go further and say that no account of Arab nationalism would be complete without understanding the contribution literature made, and still makes, to its articulation or to its role in group mobilisation. The same is also true of literature, in prose and in poetry, in expressions of territorial and pan-Islamic nationalisms in the Arabic-speaking world.2 To take one example from Egypt, Ali al-Ghayati, a minor poet, published in 1910 a collection of patriotic poems, Wataniyyati (‘My Patriotism’), to which the nationalist leader Muhammad Farid (1868–1919) wrote an introduction under the title ta’thir al-shiÆr fi tarbiyat al-umam (‘The Influence of Poetry on the Education of Nations’). In this introduction, Muhammad Farid – who was tried in a criminal court and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment by the British authorities for his composition – writes: ‘When the vanquished nations awoke to their situation, they made the first of their principles the composition of patriotic qasidas (odes) and rallying songs … It pleases me that this blessed awakening has spread in our country’ (cited in Khouri 1971: 90). He further adds, stressing the mobilising role of poetry in Egypt and expressing his pan— 208 —

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the nation speaks Islamist nationalist orientation, ‘Peace upon the one who listens, heeds, and succeeds in serving his country, and who strives; for his effort will be observed and his recompense will be of the highest’ (ibid.). Ali al-Ghayati’s collection was special not because he was an accomplished author, but because he culled it from poetry that was published in the Egyptian press by obscure or aspiring poets who responded to the national crises of their time, hence Muhammad Farid’s reference to the ‘awakening’ of his own people. This awareness of the role of literature, particularly poetry, in resisting occupation and in nation building is symptomatic of the discourse of nationalism to this day. Spontaneous expressions of this kind can be found in compositions in the pages of the Arabic daily newspapers, especially at times of crisis such as, in recent years, the war against Iraq or, even, the death of President Arafat. In 2004, I collected over thirty such compositions, over a period of two months, from one paper only, the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi. This number indicates the scale of this phenomenon. The importance of literature in nation building relates to its ability to function as a channel of communication through which a national consciousness, a national sentiment, a shared cultural inheritance and a shared destiny can be fashioned in a shared idiom. In nation building, a national literature is as important in articulating ‘nationhood’ as the national broadcasting media, the national orchestra, the national museum or the national gallery. In the theories of nationalism, literature shares this communicative function with other semiologies of signification which, typically, include rituals (for example, parades, marches, processions, funerals and inauguration ceremonials) and objects of symbolic representation (for example, flags, anthems, monuments, postage stamps and coins). In fact, literature has a greater semiotic reach because it can be used to talk about these rituals and objects of representation, but not vice versa. And for nations in the diaspora, literature is a particularly potent force because of its ability to link the members of a refugee nation across state borders and to encode their ‘exilic’ experience in different linguistic idioms. In the West, the novel is considered as the primary vehicle for delivering this nationalist function.3 In the Arab context, this function is allocated to poetry which has a long and highly respected position in Arab culture and which, by virtue of its compact expression, sonorous cadences and implicit orality is better suited than the novel to deliver an immediate and memorable impact on audiences, typically through shared public performances. Arab nationalists have been quick to exploit these qualities of poetry, particularly its diachronic depth, by assimilating it into their constructed nationalist historiographies. To take one example, in April 1980 a conference was held in Baghdad to discuss the role of literature in forming and sustaining the Arab national consciousness (Dawr al-adab fi al-waÆy al-qawmi al-ÆArabi, 1980). In a mode typical of Arab — 209 —

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yasir suleiman conferences, the participants summed up their findings in a final communiqué (al-bayan al-khitami, ibid.: 23–5). Not only did these findings telescope literary history and cast it in unambiguously nationalist mode, but they constituted an exercise in national ‘myth making’ in a seamless progression from the past to the present. Thus, the findings of the conference were written in a thoroughly modern nationalist idiom which, to say the least, is at odds with the facts as the literary critic might recognise them. These so-called ‘findings’ included the following points:4 (1) pre-Islamic poetry discharged its nationalist duties and affirmed the existence of an Arab self (al-dhat al-Æarabiyya, ibid.) by using poetry as a weapon to fight the enemies of the Arabs;5 (2) Arab literature in the early Islamic period succeeded in discharging its nationalist tasks (muhimmatihi alqawmiyya, ibid.: 24) and in keeping pace with the Islamic revolution (al-thawra al-islamiyya, ibid.), which through the Arab liberation wars (hurub al-tahrir alÆarabiyya, ibid.) – that is, the Islamic conquests – carried the national and universal values of the Arabs to the newly liberated lands;6 (3) in the Abbasid period, Arabic literature delivered its expanded national functions by affirming Arab unity (wihdat al-wujud al-Æarabi, ibid.) and rebutting the claims of the newly emerging anti-Arab movements (al-harakaat al-shuÆubiyya al-munahida liruh al-umma al-Æarabiyya wa-jawhar risalataha al-insaniyya, ibid.);7 and (4) Arabic literature in the modern period continues the above trends of national consciousness formation, advocacy of Arab unity, and mobilisation against external powers and the forces of decline and fragmentation. The participants at the conference concluded by calling Arabic literature in its re-christened nationalist mode throughout history as a ‘literature of struggle’ (adab siraÆ, ibid.: 25). According to this reading, there is hardly any difference, in nationalist literary terms, between what the students of nationalism call the formative age, the golden age, the dark age and the age of struggle in nation building. Moreover, the Arabs of today are fused in the Arabs of pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabia at the stroke of a pen, and the lands which the early Muslims acquired by conquest are declared as ‘liberated lands’ rather than conquered territories. This mode of ‘packaging the past’, as Coakley calls it (2004: 540), serves a variety of functions in the nationalist enterprise. For our purposes here, reinforcement, legitimisation and inspiration are the most important of these functions (ibid.: 541). The first, reinforcement, is intended to instil a sense of pride in past achievements as ‘part of a psychological search for symbols of confidence in the present’ (Rustow 1967: 42). This search tends to intensify when there is a crisis or when the nation feels under attack from external forces. The nationalist historiography of Arabic poetry outlined in the preceding paragraph provides a perfect example of this practice. The conference alluded to above was held in Baghdad at a time when Iraq was engaged in a bitter war with its non-Arab — 210 —

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the nation speaks neighbour and regional arch-rival, Iran, the cradle of the modern Islamic revolution par excellence; hence, the intensely nationalist reading of the early history of Arabic poetry and the casting of this reading in a modern nationalist idiom that is out of place within the confines of that early history. Hence, also, the resort to literary production by political leaders at times of national crises, as shown by Colonel Qaddafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein of Iraq who found in prose fiction, particularly the latter, an outlet for their national concerns.8 The second function, legitimisation, serves the aim of validating the nationalist enterprise in the literary domain by endowing it with an authenticating genealogy that links the past with the present in literary production. Finally, inspiration is forward looking and mission-oriented; it relates to the destiny of the nation and aims to underline the message in the nationalist literature of the inevitability of a bright future for the nation, provided that it lives up to its reputation in the past. As a ‘packaging of the past’, nationalist literary historiography is therefore a purposeful activity: it responds to the Orwellian formulation in 1984: ‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’ (cited in Coakley 2004: 554–5). ‘Packaging the past’ is a pervasive ‘myth making’ tool in all nationalist movements, although it may be more intense in some movements than in others depending on the socio-political context. Historians of literature and literary critics who pour scorn on it as anti-literary or misguided construction therefore miss the point, as do scholars of nationalism who deplore the involvement of men of letters in the construction of nationalist thinking. Elie Kedouri provides the best-known example of the latter attitude when he describes nationalism as the creation of ‘literary men who had never exercised power, and appreciated little the necessities and obligations incidental to intercourse between states’ (1966: 70–1). A more productive approach to nationalist literary historiography than either of the two above is to acknowledge this historiography for what it is: as a form of ‘sociology of literature’ which primarily attends to the extra-literary uses of literary production rather than to its internal composition or to its strictly literary qualities. This, however, does not mean that the ‘internal composition’ and the ‘literary qualities’ of a piece of literature are not important to nationalist historiography;9 they are, but they do not act, when not available, as a ‘criterion of exclusion’ from the scope of the literary. According nationalist literature respectability in the eye of the literary critic is therefore not an easy task. It is, however, possible to make some progress in this direction by rejecting the generalising attitude towards this literature which nationalist ideologues tend to exhibit, as we have seen above. The idea that all nationalist writers of a particular persuasion speak with one voice on all, or almost all, nationalist issues is a non-starter. Recognising variation within nationalist literature is therefore as necessary as recognising commonalities or — 211 —

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yasir suleiman points of contact and interaction. This anti-generalising attitude must also be extended to the work of individual writers. Recognising variation, dissonance or contradiction in a writer’s nationalist oeuvre is often closer to the truth than establishing a counterfeit or bland uniformity. The Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi (1868–1932), the Iraqi poet MaÆruf al-Rusafi (1877–1947) and the Jordanian poet Mustafa Wahbi al-Tal (1897–1949) spoke in myriad voices on a host of nationalist issues.10 Finally, studies of the national in the literary can serve both enterprises – the national and the literary – by concentrating on ‘content’ and ‘form’, on what is of immediate interest to the nationalist thinker and that which is highly valued by the literary critic respectively. The following study of the poetics of the national in the literary in Nazik al-Mala’ika’s poetry aims to follow this approach.11 It will pay attention to ‘content’ and to ‘form’, that is, issues of style.12 It will also avoid the generalising pitfalls of nationalist literary historiographies. Western studies of Arabic poetry pay little attention to its rich national content, with the exception of Palestinian poetry in which the national is regarded as an inescapable part of the literary.13 By contrast, the ‘national in the poetic’ is the subject of great interest in the Arab literary polysystem.14 It is not my intention to deal with the causes of this difference in orientation here. Suffice it to say that ignoring the ‘national in the poetic’ in studying Arabic literature provides a truncated view of this component of Arab culture to Western audiences and that, in an age of inter-disciplinarity in research, it deprives the students of nationalism in the West of a rich source of information about the construction of national consciousness in the Arabic-speaking world, the channels of communication that are used to foster this consciousness and about nation building generally. Surveying Arabic works about the ‘national in the poetic’ in Arabic literature provides interesting insights into the ‘manipulation’ of literary fame. First of all, one notices how much these works are subject to the generalising tendency mentioned earlier. In one respect, these works are canon-driven in that they reproduce the dominant classificatory schemas as to who is counted as a ‘nationalist’ poet and who is not. Thus, instead of looking for expressions of nationalism in the poetry of a particular poet, and treating these accordingly – particularly when they are of a substantial kind – these works tend to start with preconceived notions of who belongs to the category of ‘nationalist’ poets and use these as a blueprint for inclusion and exclusion. I believe this is responsible for ignoring the nationalist component of Nazik’s poetry in the historiography of the ‘national in the poetic’ in the Arabic polysystem.15 For most critics and historians of literature, Nazik has not been associated with the nationalist trend in Arab culture, in spite of the fact that (1) her last three collections in particular, as I shall show below, are devoted to nationalist themes of an — 212 —

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the nation speaks interesting kind, and (2) she participated in well-publicised debates about Arab nationalism on the pages of the hugely influential monthly al-Adab (al-Mala’ika 1960a, 1960b).16 Second, women poets tend to be under-represented in works on the ‘national in the poetic’ in Arabic literature. The male gendering of nationalist poetry has its culturally bound reasons, but these do not justify excluding women poets. I believe that the dominance of ‘masculinity’ as a trope of nationalist poetry is responsible for ignoring Nazik’s contribution to this literary genre. At the centre of Nazik’s nationalist poetry stands her abiding commitment to pan-Arab nationalism as an intuitively conceived and self-evident ideology. Hovering between a perennialism that asserts the antiquity of the Arab nation and a primordiality that assumes its naturalness,17 Nazik espouses a view of this ideology that conceives of it, to borrow a term from Roland Barthes (1977: 47), as the ‘Voice of Nature’. Although Nazik would accept Ernest Gellner’s (1983: 6) formulation that, in today’s world, ‘a man must have a nationality as he must have a nose and two ears’, she would nevertheless reject his modernist views on the socio-historical construction of nations, particularly as this applies to nations that are rooted in antiquity, of which the Arab nation is cited as an example.18 Nazik set out her views on this issue in her two articles in al-Adab (al-Mala’ika 1960a, 1960b), and she used these views to claim that poetry, being intuitive and subliminal, is most perfectly suited to comprehending the inner nature of the nation and its deepest liminal secrets. Being natural and amenable to comprehension by the most intuitive of means, the nation, Nazik argues, is not in need of deliberate definition. In the 1980 Baghdad conference mentioned above, SaÆdun Hamadi, one of the nationalist thinkers of the BaÆth party, promoted a similar view of literature in the nationalist enterprise. He believed that literature is as valid in understanding the nation as the rationalist approach which culls its definition out of the careful sifting of historical and social facts. Literature, he says, comprehends through inspiration (ilham). Nazik would agree. The commitment to Arab nationalism characterises the work of two other Iraqi women poets whose poetry had an influence over Nazik in the nationalist literary domain, as we shall see later. The first is ÆAtika al-Khazraji19 whose nationalist poetry is full of compositions in support of (1) Arab unity as a political ideal that is animated by the ties of culture, history and religion between the Arabic-speaking people, (2) the Algerian struggle against French colonialism in pursuit of independence, and (3) the liberation of Palestine as the most pressing issue on the Arab political agenda. In all three domains, the poet believes that Arab political regeneration is dependent on the interweaving of the national and the religious. This double trajectory is particularly apt for the Algerian context because of the fusion of Arabism with Islam in North African expressions of national identity. It is also suitable for the Palestinian — 213 —

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yasir suleiman situation because of the rich associations Jerusalem has with Islam. It is, however, at odds with mainstream expressions of Arab nationalism which tend to be secular in character, or, at least, pay no more than lip service to religion.20 This fusion of the national with the religious finds rich expression in many of ÆAtika al-Khazraji’s poems. To take one example, in Surakh al-Zulm (‘Cries of Oppression’) the two currents are lexically woven to create a double force for mobilisation purposes. Religious terms – such as Qur’an, Islam, iman (faith), haqq (truth), shahada (proclamation of belief in Islam), shariÆa (religious doctrine, law) baÆth (resurrection), rushd (right-guidance), khulud (eternal life), huda (right-guidance), Zalal (error), kufr (unbelief) and fasad (corruption) – are placed in nationalist frameworks which give their meanings a new identity that is neither exclusively religious nor exclusively national but one that stands at the intersection of both. The second poet to influence Nazik is Umm Nizar, Nazik’s mother who died in London, where she was buried, in 1953. Umm Nizar had one collection of poetry to her name, Unshudat al-majd (‘The Song of Glory’), which was published posthumously in Baghdad in 1965. This collection is dominated by three nationalist themes. The first focuses on the major crises that faced Iraq in the first half of the twentieth century. One example is the revolt Rashid ÆAli alKailani led in 1940/1 against the Iraqi authorities and their British backers.21 Umm Nizar wrote poems in which she urged the Iraqis to continue their struggle against these two parties and against those Iraqis who sided with them for opportunistic reasons. The second theme focuses on the dismemberment of the Arab nation at the hands of the colonial powers, Britain and France, into separate political entities. Umm Nizar calls on the Arabs to fight the forces of political fragmentation in their societies and to wage a struggle for regaining their unity. Like ÆAtika al-Khazraji before her, Umm Nizar believes that liberation and unity are dependent on the interweaving of the national and the religious in political activism. The mixing of these two political currents dominates her third theme: the liberation of Palestine, to which she devoted the bulk of her collection Unshudat al-majd. Thus, Umm Nizar reminds her readers of the doctrinally elevated position of Palestine in Islam as the land of isra’ and miÆraj (the Prophet’s nocturnal journey to Jerusalem and his Ascension therefrom to Heaven), and, also, of its historical significance as the land of martyrdom and peace in an obvious reference to the Crusades.22 In addition, Umm Nizar engages, in a spirit of political activism, with the events of her time in Palestine. Thus, she lampoons Lord Balfour, British Secretary of State, whose Declaration in 1917 laid the cornerstone for a British colonial policy that ‘stabbed’ the Arabs in the ‘heart’. She also attacks the United Nations for sponsoring the Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947. In a similar vein, she attacks the UN for the armistice — 214 —

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the nation speaks agreements between Israel and the surrounding Arab countries in 1949 because these agreements consecrated the status quo and deprived the Palestinians of their rights. In fact, Umm Nizar reserves her most biting poetry to deliver bitter attacks against the Security Council, which she calls Majlis al-Ifk (‘The Council of Falsehood’), and the United Nations, which she calls ÆUsbat al-Dhull (‘The League/Gang of Disgraceful Humiliation’). This list of poems shows the degree to which Umm Nizar was involved in the events of the day. Two facts are interesting about Unshudat al-majd. First, the title. The term unshuda conveys the meaning of ‘song’, ‘hymn’ and ‘anthem’ in one; the term thus conflates the lyrical, the sacred and the national respectively as important aspects of mobilisation and activism in the political struggle of the nation. The term al-majd (glory) has a Janus-like function. On the one side, al-majd looks back to the ‘golden age’ of the Arab nation and seeks to locate it, through the poems in the collection, in two historical epochs: the rise and expansion of Islam and the victories over Franks in the Crusades. On the other side, al-majd looks forward to the destiny of the nation, to what awaits it if it heeds the message of the poet and acts in a way that is true to its self, as this self was manifested through the glories of the ‘golden age’. As an operative term, al-majd ties the future to the past via the present and through the inspirational function of literature as a nationalist means of expression. Second, it is most likely that Nazik chose this title, as she was responsible for preparing the collection for publication which, as has been pointed out above, was published posthumously. If so, Nazik can claim a share of authorship over Unshudat al-majd. This claim to authorship extends to the way Nazik arranged the poems in her mother’s collection. It is therefore a matter of great interest that Nazik placed the poems on Palestine at the beginning of the collection. By front-loading these poems and giving them textual visibility in the collection, Nazik reflects the symbolic weight her mother accorded the Palestine cause in the nationalist enterprise and in her poetry.23 It is therefore no accident that Nazik followed in her mother’s footsteps in her last two collections, as I shall explain below. In 1968, Nazik published her fifth collection, Shajarat al-qamar (‘The Moon Tree’), in which she incorporated poems she had written over a decade earlier.24 Many of the poems in this collection deal with Arab nationalist issues, the trigger for which seems to have been the ‘revolution’ of 14 July 1958, which put an end to the British-backed Iraqi monarchy and replaced it by a republican system of government.25 Nazik celebrated the institution of this new form of government in her poem Tahiyya li-l-jumhuriyya al-Æiraqiyya (‘A Salute to the Iraqi Republic’, 1968: 445–50), in which she welcomed ‘the republic’ as an ‘orphan welcomes a fatherly embrace’ or a ‘thirsty man welcomes a drink of water’ (1979: 445). In a series of syntactic equative frames, the poet concatenates the — 215 —

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yasir suleiman newly established Iraqi republic with joy (jumhuriyyatuna, farhatuna, ibid.: 446), with childhood (jumhuriyyatuna, tiflatunaa, ibid.: 448) and with the beauty of nature (jumhuriyyatuna, wardatuna, ibid.: 448). These equative images convey fragility because of the symbolic associations of the second item in each pair with tenderness and delicacy, but, through the repetition of the plural possessive suffix -na, they also convey a sense of ownership and responsibility. Iraq, Nazik is telling us, is no longer for the ruling class as it was before; it now belongs to the entire Iraqi people and, indirectly, the whole of the Arab nation. However, Nazik soon had reason to doubt the sincerity of the leadership of the newly-born republic when ÆAbd al-Salam ÆArif, who was known for his panArab nationalist convictions, was imprisoned in the same year. In another poem, Nazik describes ÆArif as a man who spoke the language of Arabism (kana Æarabiyya al-shifah, ibid.: 476), as a supporter of Arab unity (Ya nasira al-Æurubati … wa-l-wihdati, ibid.) and, through the play on the word nasir (‘supporter’), as the Gamal Abdel-Nasser of Iraq. In the political idiom of the time, Nazik could not have chosen a more flattering epithet to describe ÆArif: Nasser was the undisputed champion of the cause of Arab nationalism, the man who established the union of Egypt and Syria and, as a result, the ‘darling’ of the Arab masses. Nazik blames the fate of ÆArif – who went on to become President of Iraq in 1963 – on the Iraqi communists who came into prominence during the rule of ÆAbd alKarim Qasim (1914–63), the President of the new Iraqi republic (1958–63). In her poem Thalath ughniyat shuyuÆiyya (‘Three Communist Songs’, ibid.: 566–72), Nazik expresses her derision towards the conspiratorially paranoid mentality of the communists and their repugnant machinations against the cause of Arab nationalism. Turning the redness of the anemone (shaqa’iq al-nuÆman, ibid.: 568) into a symbolic motif for the tyranny of communism, she mocks the brutality of the communists and their readiness to nourish the red colour of their ‘beloved’ flower with the blood of innocent children (min ajli hadha al-lawn nujri al-najiÆa jadawilan tanthal, 1979: 569); but she also warns them that the forces of Arabism are on the march and that they will finally triumph. In Shajarat al-qamar, Nazik is consumed with the events in Iraq and in the way these unfold on the wider Arab scene. In comparison, her interest in the Palestine issue is muted. There is also little interest in Islam as a force in Arab nationalism in Shajarat al-qamar. Nazik’s Arab nationalism in this collection is of the secularist kind, in line with the general articulations of this ideology at the time. In these two respects, Palestine and secularism, Nazik differs at this stage in her poetic career from ÆAtika al-Khazraji and Umm Nizar. However, this difference disappears in her last two collections, as will be explained later. Unlike Palestine and Islam, Algeria is not so excluded in Shajarat al-qamar: it is a subject of strong emotional interest for the poet. One such poem that expresses this interest is Nahnu wa Jamila (‘Jamila and Us’), which carries as a — 216 —

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the nation speaks date of composition the year 1957. The poem is addressed to the Algerian freedom fighter Jamila Buhayrid who achieved huge fame in the Arab world when she was ruthlessly tortured by the French occupying authorities.26 The poem is not, strictly speaking, a celebration of Jamila’s courage in the face of French savagery, but a fierce attack on the Arab political system which failed her by substituting rhetoric and empty talk for effective action. Nazik accuses this system of moral and national bankruptcy, and she reserves her sharpest attack for political leaders, songwriters, musicians and fellow poets who ‘cynically’ and ‘brutally’ plucked their words and musical notes out of Jamila’s wounds. Nazik ends her poem by expressing her shame for this shameless behaviour (fawa khajalata min jirahi Jamila, 1979: 508). There is no doubt that Nazik thought she was speaking for millions of Arabs, her subaltern constituency, who felt as angry as she had done but lacked the voice or the courage to express themselves. For these people, Nazik fulfilled the traditional role of the poet in Arab culture – albeit in reverse – as the spokesperson of her people. Traditionally the poet is supposed to broadcast the triumphs of his own people, not to publicise their failures. In Nahnu wa Jamila, Nazik turns this principle upside down. In nationalist terms, therefore, Nahnu wa Jamila is an ‘anti-poem’. It does not celebrate the achievements of the nation, but criticises its shameful failures. It is anchored to the trope of the brave hero in the nationalist ‘age of struggle’, but sets this against another trope of this age: that of the despicable opportunist who, vulture-like, cynically and immorally appropriates the suffering of his fellow nationalists for reasons of blatant self-advancement. But is not Nazik open to the same criticism? Is not she also blatantly and hypocritically taking advantage of Jamila’s suffering to occupy a moral high ground from which she can proclaim a ‘holier than thou’ attitude? And what makes Nazik’s sentiments of national self-flagellation more credible and worthy of respect than the celebratory sentiments of her rivals? Does not the nation in the age of struggle need to balance the kind of self-critical attitude that Nazik adopts against the selfcongratulatory position of her rivals? Is Nazik’s act of remembering more credible than her rivals’ act of forgetting, when it is in the nature of nationalism for the two acts to co-exist in nation building?27 The answer to these questions is not easy, but the title gives us a few clues. In it, Nazik sets the Ænahnu’ (we, us) of the nation against the ‘them, she’ that is Jamila. In this equation, Nazik is as distant and divorced from Jamila as her rivals are. Both Nazik and her rivals therefore belong to the Ænahnu’, the despicable collectivity in the age of struggle, rather than to the figure of the brave hero which Jamila represents in that same age. The nahnu of the title is inclusive of all that is not Jamila. If so, it makes little difference where Nazik positions her subjectivity in relation to the people she criticises. She is as guilty of inaction as they are. Like their pens, words and musical notes, her poetry is not mightier — 217 —

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yasir suleiman than Jamila’s sword. Under this interpretation, the title yields another interesting layer of meaning. Instead of expressing togetherness and concomitance (maÆiyya), the wa- (and) that conjoins nahnu and Jamila in the title in fact expresses disjunction and opposition. As such the dictionary meaning of ‘wa-’ as ‘and’ is at odds with its rhetorical force as ‘versus’. A more appropriate translation of the title therefore is not ‘Jamila and Us’, as I have suggested above, but ‘Jamila versus Us’. Better still, ‘Us versus Jamila’ to underline through the grammatical fronting of ‘Us’ the Arab readers’ complicit agency in her suffering. Either way, Nazik is part of this ‘Us’ and, therefore, is on the other side of ‘versus’ from Jamila. Nazik believes that by failing to help Jamila the Arabs were guilty of complicity in her suffering and oppression. In expressing this and other themes, Nazik resorts to inter-textuality to underpin what she says. Inter-textuality is an effective tool for this purpose: it acts as a ‘bonding agent’ by helping to satellite a text in the orbit of those canonical texts which it unambiguously recalls, thus giving the text in question historical depth and a validating authenticity. This may be done, mutatis mutandis, by the direct quotation of an expression or a word, by paraphrasing an idea or exploiting an image or, in poetry, by exploiting rhyme schemes. In the domain of nationalist literature, inter-textuality is perfectly suited to relating the past to the present, to connecting the age of struggle to the golden age or to the peaks of the literary canon for, as has been said above, validating, reinforcing and inspirational purposes. In Nahnu wa Jamila, Nazik links the Arabs’ failure in the age of struggle to a poetic aphorism from the literary canon. Thus, when she says that the ‘wound inflicted by a relative is the deepest and hardest to bear’ (wa-jurhu al-qarabati aÆmaqu min kulli jurhin wa-aqsa, 1979: 508) she deliberately invokes al-Mutannabi’s (AD 915–65) famous line of poetry, immediately recognised by most educated Arabs, in which he says ‘the injustice committed by a relative is more painful than the wounds inflicted by a sword made of Indian steel’ (wa-Zulmu dhawi al-qurba ashaddu maDaDatan, Æala al-fata min waqÆ al-husami al-muhannadi). Nazik uses inter-texuality to support her case in Nahnu wa Jamila by ranging the weight of tradition and the force of the literary canon against her rivals. Nazik exploits inter-textuality to full nationalist effect in her poem Ughniya li-l-atlal al-Æarabiyya (‘A Song for the Erased Arab Encampments’, ibid.: 465–9) which she wrote in 1963 after the dissolution of the Union between Egypt and Syria at the hands of the BaÆthists a year earlier. This was a cataclysmic event for the Arabs. It shook their confidence in Arab unity as a political objective, as Nazik acknowledges. The ‘erased encampments’ that Nazik has in mind, therefore, are the political ruins of the failed Union. However, Nazik’s message is an optimistic one. She tells her readers that unity would be well within their grasp if they re-enacted the glories of the past which, in this particular case, are — 218 —

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the nation speaks embodied in great literary achievements rather than in feats of political unity. To underpin this message, Nazik connects the present to the past by borrowing immediately recognisable expressions from some of the best-known odes of preIslamic Arabia, namely the muÆallaqas of Imru’ al-Qays (siqt al-liwa), Tarafa Ibn al-ÆAbd (burqat thahmad), Zuhayr Ibn Ibi Sulma (dimna) and Labid Ibn RabiÆa (aramiha), in which the erased encampment is an important poetic motif. This networking of the present with the past for inspirational purposes delivers another objective: it serves to signal to the readers that Nazik’s belief in Arab nationalism is rooted in a secularist paradigm. Her point of reference is pre-, not post-, Islamic Arabia. On a formal level, inter-textuality is a kind of repetition, a topic in which Nazik was interested as a literary and cultural critic, as is clear from her long study on the subject in her book Qadaya al-shiÆr al-muÆasir (‘Issues in Modern Poetry’, 1981b: 263–91). In this study, Nazik highlights the role of repetition in achieving what she calls al-handasa al-lafziyya al-daqiqa in poetry (‘precise linguistic engineering’, ibid.: 278). In addition to this artistic/structural function, repetition is an important tool in nationalist poetry as an aid to memory. The poet resorts to it for message and impact reiteration, which are essential elements in national mobilisation and in contexts of oral public performance. To take one example, in her poem Thalath ughniyat Æarabiyya (‘Three Arab Songs’, 1979: 492–8), the poet exploits repetition at two levels. On the formal inter-textual level, Nazik frames her poem in relation to Nasser’s famous call in the 1960s – which the Egyptian broadcasting media turned into a well-known song and used as the theme tune in some of its daily programmes – ‘the hour of revolutionary work has struck’ (Ædaqqat saÆat al-Æamal al-thawri).28 There is no way that readers at the time could have read Nazik’s poem without being drawn into the popular nationalist culture of the day, or at least were reminded of it. Nazik’s exploitation of inter-textuality in this case is purposeful and mobilisation-oriented.29 On another level, Nazik uses sub-word structures, involving gemination and reduplication, to create another layer of communication to boost the above effects. In particular, she uses action verbs exhibiting gemination and reduplication, to convey vigour and urgency, as in daqqat (struck), dajjat (yelled), dawwat (reverberated), talawwat (zigzagged), hazzat (shook), jaljalat (rang out) and ghalghalat (penetrated). In Arabic, the term for ‘verb’ is fiÆl, which lexically means ‘action’. Nazik is aware of this connection between the name of this grammatical category and its lexical meaning, and she exploits this deliberately for mobilization purposes in the nationalist enterprise. I believe this explains her statement in Qadaya al-shiÆr al-muÆasir that ‘the verb is the most honourable part of the [Arabic] language’ (al-fiÆl ashraf juz’ fi al-lugha, 1981: 329). Nazik is not alone in holding to this view of the Arabic verb, but she is the only poet I — 219 —

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yasir suleiman know of who explicitly makes the connection between the verb as a grammatical category, its lexical meaning and the role of poetry in promoting mobilisation in the nationalist project.30 In view of the importance of repetition for Nazik as a literary critic and poet, it would be useful to dwell a little further on this phenomenon in her poetry by highlighting three other types. The first consists of placing a repeated item in patterned slots within the same poetic frame. This creates balance and rhythm, which are important as aids to memory retention and recall in nationalist literature owing to its interest in mobilisation and its reliance on oral public performance. We have observed this earlier in the use of jumhuriyyatuna (our republic) in Nazik’s poem Tahiyya li-l-jumhuriyya al-Æiraqiyya (‘A Salute to the Iraqi Republic’) in such frames as jumhuriyyatuna, farhatuna (Our Republic, Our joy), jumhuriyyatuna, tiflatuna (Our Republic, Our child) and jumhuriyyatuna, wardatuna (Our Republic, Our flower/rose). This item is repeated six times in the poem. The second type is used for closure. It typically consists of repeating an item at the end of a poem to add emphasis to closure. To use a common expression, the poet applies this style of repetition to ‘go out with bang rather than a whimper’. An example of this occurs in Thalath ughniyat Æarabiyyaa, to which we have referred earlier. The last two stanzas of this poem end with the word Æarabiyy (Arab). However, there is a subtle difference between these two tokens in that the former functions as an agent and the latter as a patient in grammatical terms. The poet uses this grammatical difference to signal the distinction between the active and the passive in the nationalist narrative, between the ‘doer of the action’ and its ‘receiver’. The third type involves the use of an item, typically a function word (for example, a preposition) or a morpheme, to draw attention to a set of adjacent items (preceding or following), thus highlighting their meaning through semantic layering. An example of this is the repetition of the preposition Æan (‘for’) in the poem Hudud al-raja’ (‘The Limits of Hope’, ibid.: 513–17), whose subject is Arab unity: nahnu Æabarna kulla ufqin maÆa: nabhathu Æanha, Æan shadhaha al-jamil, Æan lawniha, Æan ruhiha, Æan sada … (‘We roamed the distant horizon together looking for it, for its sweet scent, for its colour, for its soul, for its echo …’, ibid.: 516). Nazik considers this to be one of the most subtle types of repetition and, in her critical study Qadaya al-shiÆr al-muÆasir (1981: 273), she highlights the following example from a poem by the well-known Tunisian Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi (1909–34) as a particularly successful one: Æadhbatun anti ka-l-tufulati, ka-l-ahlami, ka-l-lahni, ka-l-sabahi aljadidi … (‘You are sweet like childhood, like dreams, like musical tunes, like the new morning’). In her last two collections, li-l-Sala wa-l-thawra (‘For Prayer and the Revolution’, 1978) and Yughayyiru al-wanahu al-bahru (‘The Sea Changes its Colours’, 1977), particularly the former, Nazik moves in a new direction: the mixing of — 220 —

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the nation speaks spirituality with nationalism in a thematic framework dominated by Palestine, although not all her poems about Palestine are cast in this mode.31 This direction brings Nazik closer to ÆAtika al-Khazraji and, particularly, to Umm Nizar with whom we dealt earlier. Nazik signals this radical shift in ideological outlook in one important way: she dates her poems in these two collections using the Islamic calendar first and the Gregorian calendar second, whereas before she used the latter exclusively. This may look like a cosmetic matter, but it is not. It takes mental effort for an Arab accustomed to the Gregorian calendar to match it with its Islamic counterpart. In fact, many Arabs, even those who would consider themselves ‘good’ Muslims, cannot always remember the correct Islamic month of the year outside Ramadan (the month of fasting) and, to a lesser extent, Dhu al-Hijja (the month of pilgrimage). Some find it even difficult to name the correct Islamic year. Nazik’s use of the Islamic calendar, therefore, requires a change in ingrained habits of thought and schooled practice in the marking of time. Her new time is the time of Islam, the time of spirituality and the time of inner revolution in a different process of nation building; hence, the use of sala (prayer) and thawra (revolution) in the title of one of her collections above. The mixing of spirituality/religiosity with nationalism represents a move away from Nazik’s earlier secularism. Here again, Nazik was in tune with the general orientation of the time. The Arab defeat in 1967 at the hands of the Israelis dealt a humiliating blow to the Arab nationalist idea, at least in its secular form.32 In the personal and collective stocktaking that followed, people looked to Islam as a place of succour, a source of inspiration and as an authenticating voice in acts of political revisionism. Literature itself, including nationalist literature, became an arena for two competing ideologies: the secular nationalist and the Islamist.33 Nazik straddled both. Understandably, she could not fully divest herself of the old nationalist idea in which she invested so much psychological, intellectual and literary capital. As a result, she was unable to accept a full-blooded Islamism. Her answer, therefore, was to opt for spirituality as a compromise between the national and the completely religious. Palestine, as we shall see below, proved to be the perfect poetic topos for her in effecting this compromise. Nazik charts her new outlook purposefully. She tells her readers in li-l-Sala wa-l-thawra that sala (prayer) is ‘the symbol of spirituality in actions’, and that it is like ‘a rose that grows in a man’s soul through contact with God’ (1978: 8). Thawra (revolution), on the other hand, represents the ‘total rejection of falsehood, corruption, servitude, evil, tyranny, ugliness and oppression in human life’ (ibid.: 9). Nazik then associates sala with thawra by saying that the genuine and sincere acceptance of the power of the former inevitably leads to realising the latter: ‘In fact,’ she says, ‘I believe that sala is the same as thawra’ (ibid.). She — 221 —

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yasir suleiman later refers to sala as the ‘throbbing equivalent to revolutionary values’ (ibid.: 10). Nazik then connects these ideas to Palestine as follows (ibid.: 10–11): I have named this collection li-l-Sala wa-l-thawra to call on the Arabs to rise high through spirituality and struggle, with which Islam armed man in all places and at all times, to reach the highest peaks of his humanity [and] thus … achieve his freedom [and] the freedom of his nation … [In this context], the victory of the Arab over oppression in Palestine is the [revolutionary] equivalent to the call to prayer from the Dome of the Rock.

In her poem Sawsana ismuha al-quds (‘Jerusalem, Lily of the Valley’, ibid.: 39– 44) the scene is the Day of Resurrection. Before passing judgement on His own people (the Muslim Arabs in this case), God reminds them of the covenant they made with Him to defend their homeland against all aggressors. The poet answers on their behalf, telling Him that they had failed to do so, before she asks for compassion and mercy. In the process, she acknowledges the gravity of their guilt in view of the special place Jerusalem, and by extension Palestine, have in Islam as the land of isra’ and miÆraj (the Prophet’s nocturnal journey from Mecca and his Ascension to Heaven). But the poet reads more into this failure. She considers it as a sign of bondage to a state of servitude that negates the gift of freedom God has bestowed on His people. The continued occupation of Jerusalem therefore has a double meaning. On the one hand, it represents failure to uphold an important religious duty. On the other hand, it is synonymous with the loss of freedom as a defining characteristic of man’s humanity, as that which makes man human. In this way, Nazik fuses the national with the religious and both of these with the spiritual, in so far as freedom is the quality that enables man to fulfil God’s design and will. This atmosphere in which the national fuses with the spiritual is at the centre of the poem that gives its name to the collection li-l-Sala wa-l-thawra. In this long poem (ibid.: 149–65) the poet addresses the Dome of the Rock in a series of overlapping thematic expressions which highlight the spirituality of Jerusalem and the surge of revolutionary impetus this spirituality creates: ‘[You are] a mosque that is thirsty for the Qur’an and Prayer’ (ya masjidan Æatshana li-lqur’an wa-l-sujud, ibid.: 152); ‘[You are] a symbol, a history and an idea’ (ya ramzu, ya tarikhu, ya fikra, ibid.: 161); and ‘[You are] an explosive mine, a hurricane and a dangerous prisoner’ (ya lughmu, ya iÆsaru ya sajinatan khatira, ibid.: 162). The poet then declares that ‘when man triumphs, the call to prayer will rise from the Dome of the Rock’ (yantasiru al-insan, yartafiÆu al-adhan, ibid.: 163). It is significant that the poet does not refer here to the triumph of the Muslim or the Arab man, but to the triumph of ‘man’ in his unqualified form, to the fact that when freedom as the highest spiritual value triumphs then Jerusalem will be liberated. It is in this context, a context of freedom, that prayer will be most effective (ibid.: 159): — 222 —

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the nation speaks When will we pray? Our prayer will be an explosion Our prayer will make the sun rise, Will arm the defenceless And cause the banner of the revolution to fly. Our prayer will ignite the hurricane, Will make the arms and the irises grow in the wilderness Turning resignation into victory.

The repeated use of the vocative ‘ya’ in this poem shifts its focus from being one about prayer to becoming an act of prayer in its own right. The vocative ‘ya’ is typically used in prayer in Arabic to address God, to ask for His forgiveness or to seek His help and support. This strong spiritual atmosphere is found in other poems in the collection. In al-Hijra ila Allah (‘Migration to the Lord’, ibid.: 68– 78) Nazik addresses God in a mood of complete supplication, telling Him, using repetition again, that her journey towards Him had taken her a very long time (maliki talat al-rihlatu talat, ibid.: 74), no doubt in reference to that period in her career and poetry when God seemed absent. Mixing the spiritual with the national through the topos of Palestine, Nazik tells God that she came on her long journey carrying with her the grief of Jerusalem, the wounds of Jinin – a small town in the Occupied West Bank – and the humiliation inflicted on the Aqsa Mosque (the first qibla in Islam) in a period of history that lacked leaders of the calibre of Saladin or the Abbasid Caliph al-MuÆtasim, whose victory over the Byzantines in ÆAmmuriya (Amorium) in 833 is etched in the minds of all school children, not least because it was encoded in one of the masterpieces of the Arabic poetic canon. She also tells him that she came carrying with her the wounds inflicted on the fida’iyyin (Palestinian freedom fighters) whose blood was spilled in Amman and Beirut in the 1970s. This poem is full of quiet anger which, unlike the fiery anger the poet displays in her earlier poetry, is more effective and haunting. The poem also speaks of God’s anger at His own people who, by failing to follow His right path, the path of freedom, have accepted oppression in their own lives and, in the process, negated their humanity. This weaving of the spiritual with the national takes a new turn in Aqwa min al-qabr (ibid.: 58–67). In this poem, the poet injects a strong personal element that connects her with her dead mother who, as we have seen above, championed the Palestinian and other nationalist causes in her poetry. Upon hearing a recording of one of her mother’s poems in her own voice, memories and associations came flooding back to the poet (ibid.: 64): Your bleeding poems: Their salt ignites sadness and fire in my bones And I feel the surge of your boiling [anger] Running through me

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yasir suleiman And (ibid.: 61): The echo of your poetry will wake the slain. It will challenge [the enemy’s] rockets And it will challenge their guillotines. The echo of your poetry will make the streams flow.

In this poem, Nazik deploys a religion-soaked lexicon, including such terms as: shahid (martyr, ibid.: 62), dima’ al-Æaqida (the blood of faith, ibid.), tasabihana (our hymns, ibid.: 63), ma’adhin (minarets, ibid.: 64), Æatabat (holy shrines, ibid.) with its strong Iraqi ShiÆa associations, qara’in (texts of the Qur’an, ibid.) and takbira (glorification of God using the formula Allahu akbar, ibid.: 65). But she also uses expressions with a clear Arab nationalist flavour of the old kind: qabraki al-Æarabiyy al-hazin (your sad Arab grave, ibid.: 65) and Æarabiyyata aljada’il (your Arab tresses, ibid.: 67). In the same poem, Nazik uses a military lexicon culled from terms that were fashionable in the armed struggle for Palestine in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including: lughm (explosive mine, ibid.: 65), qanabil (bombs, ibid.), sarukh (rocket, ibid.), midfaÆ (artillery gun, ibid.: 66), lahab (fire, ibid.), khanjar (dagger, ibid.) and sikkin (knife, ibid.: 65). Underpinning this are her references to filastin (Palestine, ibid: 59 and 60), alquds (Jerusalem, ibid.: 60 and 65), jalil (Galilee, ibid.: 65) and Æasifa (the military wing of Fatah in pre-Oslo days). To strengthen the association of the national with the spiritual Nazik resorts to inter-textuality, using the Qur’an as her anaphoric reference. She does this in two ways. First, she encodes fragments from the Qur’an in her poetry to extend its meaning and to lock the national into the spiritual and vice versa. There are many examples of this kind in her poetry, but the following two, which she uses to talk about God’s enemies, will suffice:34 1. Nazik (ibid.: 164): wa-yamkuruna makrahum wa-yamkuru al-rahman (They make their plans, and God makes His) Qur’an (30:8): wa-yamkuruna wa-yamkura Allahu wa-Allahu khayru al-makirin (They plan and God plans, and God is the best planner) 2. Nazik (ibid.): wa-yazahaqu al-batilu wa-l-buhtan (Deception and slander have come to nothing) Qur’an (81:17) wa-qul ja’a al-haqqu wa-zahaqa al-batilu inna al-batila kana zahuqa (And say: Truth has come and falsehood has disappeared, falsehood is bound to perish)

The second type of inter-textuality consists of using rhyming schemes which evoke similar assonance schemes in the Qur’an. One such example occurs in Nazik’s poem Aqwa min al-qabr (‘Stronger than the grave’) which, as we have seen above, fuses the spiritual and the personal with the national via the topos of Palestine. This example of inter-textuality ‘bonds’ all these interests with the Qur’an to generate a holistic unit of signification which ‘spiritualises the national’ while ‘nationalising the spiritual’. Nazik writes (ibid.: 59): — 224 —

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the nation speaks Min matahati landana, haythu al-duja wa-l-dukhan Jathimani Æala sadriha jathiman Wa-Æala qabriha yanhani kawkaban Wa-tariffu Æala huznihi wardatan (From the labyrinths of London, where the darkness and the smoke crouch nightmarishly over her grave with two stars bending and two fluttering roses)

The above rhyming scheme immediately recalls the assonance scheme in the bulk of Chapter 55 in the Qur’an (Surat al-rahman) where the verse fa-bi-ayyi Æala’i rabbukuma tukadhdhiban (‘Which one of the favours of your Lord will you twain deny?’) is repeated thirty times. Another example is the use of the rhyming scheme –ah in al-Malika wa-l-bustan35 (ibid.: 80–1), which recalls the same assonance scheme in Chapters 79, 80 and 90 in the Qur’an. These Qur’anlinked examples of inter-texuality inject a religious dimension into the national. The fact that most of these inter-textual links are located in the early chapters of the Qur’an, which are characterised by short and sonorous verses, enhances the vigour and impact of Nazik’s compositions. While reading these compositions, the reader cannot but hear echoes of the Qur’an in his head, which provide another layer of meaning and musical cadences of a strong spiritual nature. This mixing of the spiritual with the national is found in Nazik’s other collection, Yughayyiru al-wanahu al-bahru (‘The Sea Changes its Colours’, 1977).36 I will deal with two poems from this collection only to show how this is done. The first is Maraya al-shams (‘Mirrors of the Sun’, ibid.: 95–107), which the poet wrote after her husband, the Iraqi academic ÆAbd al-Hadi Mahbuba, presented her with a map of Palestine. At the beginning of the poem, Nazik tells her readers that she had dedicated her life to the mission of liberating Palestine. This act of dedication is signalled through the use of the verb Ænadhartu’ (ibid.: 95), which has strong spiritual and devotional meanings, in addition to implying that the poet had entered into a covenant with her Lord. The poem then proceeds by offering a four-stop tour of the map of Palestine which she organises around the themes of ‘love’, ‘sadness’, ‘resistance’ and ‘faith’. The poet ends the poem by telling her readers that, although love and sadness are important ingredients for resistance as the tool for liberating Palestine, these three elements are bound to fail if they are not bonded together with faith as the single most important factor of liberation. The poem is interspersed with intertextual references which will not detain us here,37 except to say that the reference to the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan brings the two most accomplished modern female poets together in the nationalist project through the topos of Palestine. — 225 —

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yasir suleiman The second poem is al-Ma’ wa-l-barud (‘Water and Gunpowder’, ibid.: 25– 51). This is a long poem, which suits its reliance on narration as a poetic technique. The poet does this by inter-textually anchoring a modern story to an archetypal event in the Islamic tradition. On one level, the poem relates how, in the 1973 (Ramadan) War between Egypt and Israel, the Israelis mistakenly hit a hidden water supply in Sinai causing it to leak. The Egyptian soldiers who, we are told, were fasting at the time took advantage of this and used the water to break their fast and to quench their thirst in the blistering heat of the desert. On another level, this theme is developed in tandem with the story of Hajar and her son Isma’il – son of Abraham and ‘father’ of the Arabs – who were able to quench their thirst only when water, through divine intervention, miraculously gushed out from under their feet. This is the story of the well of Zamzam which, to this day, gives its ‘blessed’ water to the pilgrims to Mecca. The two stories are projected as examples of how God never forgets His own people and that He is quick to come to the aid of those among them who obey His will: la yakdhibu Allahu wa la yu’akhkhiru (God does not lie and he does not delay the fulfilment of His promises, ibid.: 47). Hajar and Isma’il’s story acts as the frame to the modern-day event which, in symbolic terms, emerges as its echo and enactment. Through inter-textuality the present is woven into the past and projected as a continuation of it in a double trajectory that ‘nationalises’ the past and ‘spiritualises’ the present. This, as we have seen above, is one of the most important themes in Nazik’s last two collections. The ‘spiritual’ and the ‘national’ envelop each other within a context that exploits the special place of Palestine in spiritual and national terms. Jerusalem occupies a special place in this topos, and this accounts for its textual visibility in Nazik’s poetry. One of the key concepts in the poetics of nationalist literature is the matching of ends to means. Literature is an important channel of communication in nation building. As I have pointed out earlier, it helps foster a national consciousness, a national sentiment, a shared cultural inheritance and a shared destiny, and it does so through a shared idiom that resonates with members of the nation. To achieve this, nationalist literature aims at mobilisation and political activism by bonding the present to the past for reinforcement, legitimisation and inspiration purposes. Nationalist literature therefore is not a reflection of reality, although reflection is a dimension of it;38 it is, more importantly, an exercise in acting on reality, of constructing it, to fashion it in a way that gives the nation literary form and socio-political substance. So, what literary means does the nationalist writer deploy to give expression to his nationalist ends? Put differently, what kind of literary devices does the nationalist writer use to promote his extraliterary aims or objectives? The above analysis of Nazik’s nationalist poetry offers some answers as to how this matching of means to ends is done. We have seen how Nazik deploys — 226 —

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the nation speaks inter-textuality to relate the past to the present. In doing this, the poet contrasts the pitiful state of the Arabs in the present with the glorious achievements of their forebears in the past. Inter-textuality here performs two contradictory rhetorical functions. On the one hand, it suggests the existence of rupture between the past and the present, between the glories of the golden age and the traumas of the age of struggle. On the other hand, inter-textuality suggests the possibility of repair, the potential for the continuity of the past into the future, but it makes that conditional on overcoming the traumas of the present by cleansing the age of struggle from its debilitating failures. To bond the past with the future via the present Nazik creates inter-textual links to the canonical texts of the past in poetry and in the Qur’an. These links are immediately recognised by the reader, and their contents and contexts as pre-texts are read into her compositions in a way that adds meaning, impact and motivational force to them. The disjunction between these inter-textual links, the poetry and the Qur’an, however, indicates the change in nationalist outlook Nazik underwent in her career. Whereas the former links dominate her early poetry, which followed the secular nationalist schema, the links to the Qur’an indicate a new phase in her nationalist thinking, in which the national and the spiritual are interwoven together. This change of outlook is further marked in a new lexicon in which religious terminology plays an important part in tying the national to the spiritual. The combination of the Qur’an-centred inter-textual links and religious terminology, when it works well, has the effect of turning Nazik’s later poems into devotional ‘hymns’ that work through the power of suggestion and spiritual atmosphere to promote their national aims. Inter-textuality serves another aim of nationalist literature: mobilisation. Nazik promotes this by framing her poetic compositions against elements from the popular culture at the time of writing. The reference to the popular tune ‘the hour of revolutionary work has struck’ in her early nationalist poetry is an example of this, as is the application of a lexicon of popular struggle, based around the Palestinian guerrilla movement, in her later poetry. Mobilisation for the nationalist poet is of the ‘here and now’, hence Nazik’s utilisation of the culture of the day as a conduit for spreading her nationalist message. In most of her nationalist poetry, particularly her early compositions, Nazik is more interested in resonance than in the longevity and the reception of her poetry by future generations, not that this reception is totally immaterial to her. In fact, one of the intended effects of moving the national in the direction of the spiritual in Nazik’s later poetry must have been to create a reception horizon that loosens the ties of her poetry to the exigencies of the ‘here and now’ and bestows on them greater longevity. Whether Nazik has succeeded in doing this or not is another matter. Mobilisation as an end of Nazik’s nationalist poetry is tied to repetition. We — 227 —

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yasir suleiman have discussed examples of this above. Repetition delivers a number of functions in nationalist poetics. It is an aid to memory, particularly in oral performance which, unlike reading, is a collective and participatory activity that promotes inter-subjective interaction and, therefore, helps bridge the distance in socio-psychological terms between members of the nation. As a form of reiteration, repetition offers the nationalist message cyclically to ensure that it has reached its target audience. And when cleverly executed, repetition can work subliminally at a variety of levels to infuse urgency and vigour into the nationalist message. Gemination and reduplication, which we have identified above as examples of sub-word repetition, work in this way, as do reiterative syntactic frames and equative constructions of the kind we have highlighted in our discussion of Nazik’s poem Tahiyya li-l-jumhuriyya al-Æiraqiyya above (‘A Salute to the Iraqi Republic’). It is no coincidence, however, that most of the examples of gemination and reduplication in Nazik’s nationalist poetry are verbs. For Nazik, verbs are action-full, which explains her reference to them in the nationalist paradigm as the ‘most honourable part of the [Arabic] language’ (1981: 329). Verbs, for Nazik, are the linguistic engines of nationalist mobilisation. Their dynamic force contrasts with the static inertia of the nominals. It is therefore through the ‘verb’ that the nationalist ‘subject’, both as grammatical entity and human actor, exercises agency and moves to action; hence, the respect which Nazik accords to the verb. In matching ends to means, the poetics of nationalist literature does not claim the means as its sole preserve. These means exist in other literary genres and are used for other purposes. As far as the ends are concerned, the poetics of nationalist literature is neutral as to the veracity of the claims this literature makes or to the constructions which nationalist historiography places on them. On both fronts, literature may be exploited to package the past or to create myths, to make claims or to rebut counter-claims. This is part and parcel of the sociology of literature in the nationalist domain. At its worst, nationalist literature can descend into crass propaganda, but even this can provide interesting material for the student of nationalism.39 At its best, nationalist literature can elevate the national to the status of the humanist and universal, but for it to do so it would need to move away from open mobilisation. This is a matter of contents and contexts, and of balancing the former against the latter. As a mass movement for nation or state building in the here and now, nationalism cannot always afford that kind of subtlety in literature which so excessively undermines its populism and ability to mobilise. Dealing with nationalist literature is therefore a precarious scholarly business. As an exercise in hyphenation, it risks alienating the literary critic and the student of nationalism at one and the same time. The former may be tempted to discount the national in the literary as a form of propaganda that downgrades — 228 —

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the nation speaks the value of literature as art. The latter may consider the attention given to the literary in the national as a form of elitism that peels away at the social message of literature. It is therefore important to proceed in a way that preserves for the literary and the national their integrity. But it is also important that the two are tied together. Getting the right balance is the challenge.

notes 1. For the purposes of this research, we will adopt Hrushovski’s characterisation of poetics as ‘the systematic study of literature’ insofar as it relates to a ‘particular poet’s “art” or “language”’ and ‘how literary texts embody “non-literary” phenomena’ (1976: xv, cited in Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 2). 2. For ‘territorial nationalism’, see Suleiman (2003: 162–223). 3. See Anderson (1991). 4. See Dawr al-adab fi al-waÆy al-qawmi al-Æarabi (1980: 23–5). 5. See al-Qaysi (1980). 6. See al-Bayyati (1980). 7. See ÆAli (1980). 8. See Qaddafi (1996) and Hussein (2004). Saddam Hussein is claimed as author of four novels. 9. Nationalist thinkers stress the importance of ‘quality’ in nationalist literature not as an attribute for its own sake, but as a means to creating a more effective literature in mobilising terms; see Hamadi (1980) for a discussion of the ‘beauty’ (jamal) in nationalist writings. 10. This is true of prose literature, including the novel; see ÆAbd al-Ghani (1998) for a discussion of the Arab novel from this perspective. 11. Nazik al-Mala’ika is an Iraqi poet. She was born in Baghdad in 1923 and educated in Iraq and the US; see Sharara (1994) for a biography of Nazik. 12. This paper has its genesis in Suleiman (1995), from which it differs substantially. 13. Commenting on the study of nationalism, Hutchinson and Aberbach point out that ‘studies of artistic nation builders are thin on the ground’ (1999: 502). They ascribe this to the fact that ‘nation building is … excessively associated with political and social processes’, partly because the ‘effects of culture are not as clearly quantifiable as those of politics’ (1999: 501). 14. See, for example, al-Daqqaq (n.d.), al-Dasuqi (n.d.), Husayn (1983), ÆIzz al-Din (n.d.), al-Jayyusi (1964), al-Jundi (1962), al-Maqdisi (1982), Sallam (1959), Sharara (1988), al-Tarabulsi (1957), Dawr al-adab fi al-waÆy al-qawmi al-Æarabi (1980), alAdab al-Æarabi (1987). 15. See, for example, al-Daqqaq (n.d.) who ignores Nazik as a nationalist poet in his comprehensive survey al-Ittijah al-Qawmi fi al-shiÆr al-Æarabi al-hadith. 16. These contributions have been recently anthologised in an influential publication by the Centre for Arab Unity Studies in Beirut: al-Qawmiyya al-Æarabiyya, fikratuha wa-muqawwimatuha (2 vols, 1993). 17. For perennialism and primordialism, see Smith (2001). 18. Ibid. 19. See Tabana (1974) and Simrin (1990).

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yasir suleiman 20. See Suleiman (2003). 21. See Tripp (2000: 99–107) for information on Rashid ÆAli al-Kailani. 22. The Crusades were the topic of many poetic compositions that celebrated the victories of the Muslim campaigns against the Franks; see ÆAbd al-Mahdi (1989) for examples. 23. See Tabana for some insightful comments on this issue (1974: 83). 24. Nazik al-Mala’ika published seven collections of poetry: ÆAshiqat al-layl (‘Lover of the Night’, 1947), ShaZaya wa ramad (‘Shrapnel and Ashes’, 1949), Qararat almawja (‘The Depth of the Wave’, 1957), Shajarat al-qamar (‘The Moon Tree’, 1968), Ma’sat al-haya wa-ughniya li-l-insan (‘The Tragedy of Life and a Song to Man’, 1970), Yughayyiru alwanahu al-bahru (‘The Sea Changes its Colours’, 1977), and li-l-Sala wal-thawra (‘For Prayer and Revolution’, 1978). 25. The fall of the monarchy in Iraq was a source of joy for many Arabs who believed that this system of government was a relic of the past. I still remember how excited we were as little children in Jerusalem when we heard the news. The fact that the ruling class in Iraq were seen to be on the side of the British damned them in the eyes of most Arabs at the time. 26. I remember as a little boy going to see an Egyptian film about Jamila with my cousins in al-Zahra’ Cinema (or was it Cinema al-Hamra?) in Jerusalem in the late 1950s. The whole cinema was in tears and people spoke about Jamila’s legendary courage and the barbarity of the French for weeks after that. The film helped make the struggle of the Algerian people ‘real’ and made us all feel ‘Algerian’. When we related the story of the film to my mother, she said kulna fi al-hawa sawa (We are all in the same boat). We all understood what she meant: Algeria is Palestine, and Palestine is Algeria. As a tool of mobilisation, the film was very successful indeed. There is no doubt that Nazik was locking into feelings of this kind in this poem. 27. See Billig (1995) for the function of remembering and forgetting in nation building. 28. This was a famous song at the time. As young boys we used to sing it while playing or flying our kites. I can still remember it to this day. In fact, I am finding it difficult to get it out of my head at the time of writing, almost forty years on. 29. See Street (1997) for the role of popular culture in politics and nation building. 30. See Shusha (1993) for a similar view about the verb. 31. See Suleiman (1995: 104–5) for a discussion of some of these poems. 32. This shift seemed very sudden at the time. In 1968 I observed an event in the city centre in Amman (in Jordan) which illustrated the impact of this shift on the ordinary person in the street. Two young women stepped out of a taxi wearing the jilbab (ankle-length dress) and the veil. They then walked down the street with confidence and, it was clear, with purpose and the intent to display/model the new way of dressing. I still remember how we were all stunned by this, for none of us had seen that mode of dressing before. Literally, the whole street came to a standstill as if, in the context of today, the women stepped out of the taxi wearing a ‘skimpy’ skirt and proceeded to model this to onlookers in the same street. 33. For a manifesto-like study of the role of literature in Islamist thinking see alÆAshmawi (2002). 34. For more examples, see Suleiman (1995: 107–8). 35. In this poem (1978: 77–83) Nazik attacks Queen Elizabeth II for accepting as a gift

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the nation speaks

36.

37. 38. 39.

in April 1974 an ‘orchard’ (bustan) which, the poet tells us, belonged to Palestinian refugees who fled their country in 1948. Although this collection bears a date of publication prior to that of li-l-Sala wa-lthawra (1978), the later collection is in fact older; its publication was actually held back because of the Civil War in Lebanon, where it was printed. For more information on these inter-textual references, see Suleiman (1995: 109– 10). For the theories of reflection in national literature, see Corse (1997). In one such example, a 331-page collection of forty poems under the title Diwan almilad al-shiÆri (‘The Christmas of Poetry’, 1987), Saddam Hussein is described, among other things, as ‘a moon in the sky’, a ‘star in the sky’, ‘muse of the poets’, ‘the maker of joy’, and ‘descendent of the Prophet’ (hashimi al-Æiraq). The last poem is entitled ‘A Christmas ode’ (muÆallaqat al-milad), in which the term muÆallaqa (ode) recalls the pre-Islamic poetry compositions.

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Index

Abbas, Ihsan, 54 ÆAbduh, Muhammad, 135 Aberbach, David, 4 absent-present experience, 7, 8 and ironic reversal, 36–7 and possible-impossible riddle, 36 Aden, 181 Ahmed, Leila, 135 al-Ahram newspaper, 183 AIDS, fictional response to, 193 Akash, Munir, The Adam of Two Edens, 81 Alameddine, Rabih, 190 Koolaids: the Art of War, 192, 193–9 Alexandria, 180 Greek literature in, 184 Algeria, 182 independence struggle, 213, 216, 230n allegory, 6–7, 9 in al-Hakim, 149–50 in He Walked in the Fields, 126–7n in Men in the Sun, 54, 56, 57 in Third World novels, 76–7n Amherst College (US), Five-College Program in Peace and World Security Studies, 93, 99n Amichai, Yehuda, 80 Amin, Qasim, 134, 135 Al-Mar’a al-jadida (The New Woman), 135 Tahrir al-mar’a (The Liberation of Women), 135 Anderson, Benedict, 59, 110, 158n, 176, 199 anti-colonialism, 163, 168–70, 214 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari), 64 Antonius, George and Arabic language, 128, 129 The Arab Awakening, 12, 128, 208 Appadurai, Arjun and locality, 16–17, 22, 27 Modernity at Large, 16 Arab League, 179

Arab literature in English, 183–4 as inspiration for nationalism, 211, 213 as legitimisation of nationalism, 211 as literature of struggle, 210 ‘national in the poetic’, 212–13 in other languages, 182 in Sudan, 165, 174 translations into Hebrew, 102–3, 104–5 see also Arabic language; poetry Arab nationalism, 5 and Arabic language, 128 effect on cultural diversity, 13–14, 181–2 failures of, 217–18 and Islam, 213–14 and literature, 5, 129–30, 208–9 and nahda (cultural renaissance), 129, 131 and poetry, 5, 12, 162, 209–10, 215–29 and recognition of Jews, 102 and role of novel, 130 secular, 216, 230n see also pan-Arab nationalism Arab Nationalist Movement, 64 Arab world, diversity and links, 179–81 Arabic language, 128, 177n, 179 colloquial, 179–80 Jewish literature written in, 186 in Sudan, 164, 174 verbs, 219–20, 228 see also dialect Arafat, Yasir, 82 ’Araydi, NaÆim, 187 ÆArif, ÆAbd al-Salam, 216 Armenians, 181 Atchity, K. J., 20, 21–2, 29–30nn Atiyah, Edward, 183 audiences, 82, 84–90 for Darwish’s ‘Indian Speech’, 84–5, 93–4, 95–6

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index Baghdad, conference on role of literature (1980), 209–10, 213 Balfour Declaration (1917), 34, 35, 46–7n, 79, 85, 214 Ballas, Shimon, 105, 108n, 186 al-Banna, Muhammad Umar, 169 Bar-Moshe, Yizhak, 186 al-Barudi, Mahmoud Sami, 162 Bauman, Zygmunt, 198 Bedri, Babikr, 173–4 Bevan, David, 198 Bhabha, Homi, 110 Nation and Narration, 16 and nation-space, 56, 62 Bialik, Hayim, 80 Bilbul, YaÆqub, 186 Boshes, Heda, 106 Boujedra, Rachid, 182 Boulos, Sargon, 184 Boym, Svetlana, 196 Brennan, Timothy, 191 Brooks, Cleanth, 33 Buhayrid, Jamila, Algerian freedom fighter, 217, 218, 230n

‘Indian Speech’ (poem), 82–4, 85–91 and irony, 32 Journal of an Ordinary Grief, 44 A Lover from Palestine, 49 Memory for Forgetfulness, 38, 80 Da’ud, Siham, 187 Deleuze, Gilles, 64 Denneny, Michael, 193 desert, as female, 72, 73 destiny, Arab belief in, 41 diachronic–synchronic (material–spiritual) connections, 82–4, 89–90 dialect, 22, 42 in poetry, 8, 12 directive language, 27–8 Dong, Xeuping, 58 Doob, Leonard, 92

Cafavy, Constantine, 184 calendar, Islamic, 221 Chalala, Elie, 191 Chanson de Roland, 23–4 Chedid, André, 191 Chraieb, Driss, 182 Cleary, Joe, 6 Clements, Kevin P., 93 Clifford, James, 201 collective memory, 87–8 colonialism, in Sudan, 165–6 colonists, and dispossession of indigenous peoples, 34–5 Columbus, Christopher, 82, 85, 91, 94 communism, in Iraq, 216 community, and performance, 21–2 conflict resolution, 92–3 constructivism, 1–2, 3–4 Cossery, Albert, 182 cultural diversity, 14, 15 effect of Arab nationalism on, 13–14, 179– 81 and marginal (multi-ethnic) literature, 185–8 cultural identity, 194, 204

education, Sudan, 167, 171, 174, 175–6, 177 Egypt 1919 revolution, 134, 145, 161n, 169 Arabic literature in, 166, 186 cultural nationalism, 144, 157 nation-building, 146–7, 155–6 oral epic poetry, 25 rise of nationalism, 131, 134–5, 157 and Sudan, 164, 165–6, 168 and Syria, 218 unity in ancient history, 150–4, 157 see also Sudan Egyptian literature nationalist poetry, 208–9 role of novels, 13, 130, 185 translations into Hebrew, 104 Eliot, T. S., The Waste Land, 205 English language, 182, 183 Arab literature in, 183–4 in Lebanon, 190, 191, 207n in Sudan, 164 Europe, 4 national identity and language, 181–2 novel in, 132, 158n Even Zohar, Itamar, 100–1 exile and absent-present experience, 31–2, 192 and gender in literature of return, 49 internal, 198–9 and multiculturalism, 188 and nationalism, 191–2 and nostalgic memory, 14, 190, 192

Darwish, Mahmoud, 31, 79, 80 Hebrew translations of, 104–5

al-Fajr (Sudanese journal), 171–2 fallah-intellectual, role of, 139, 143–4

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index Faqir, Fadia, 182 Farah, Khalil, 169–70, 175–6 Farid, Muhammad, 208, 209 Fatah organisation, 64 femininity in All That’s Left to You, 65–75 and male return, 64, 65–6 and problem of female desire, 71–4 feminist analysis, 49; see also feminity; women folk heroes, Palestinian, 41–2 France, 166, 182 French language Arabic literature in, 182 in Lebanon, 190, 191 Frye, Northrop, 33, 39, 54 Funj sultanate (Sudan), 163–5 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 110 Gandhi, Mahatma, 171 Gellner, Ernest, 128 gender and Palestinian narrative of return, 48, 49– 50, 52–3 and political allegory, 58 George, Rosemary, The Politics of Home, 192, 193 German Romanticism, 4 ‘republic of letters’, 6 Germany, before re/unification, 2, 6–7 Ghali, Waguih, Beer in the Snooker Room, 183 Ghanayim, Muhammad Hamza, 187 al-Ghayati, Ali, Wataniyyati (poetry collection), 208, 209 Gibb, Hamilton, 132 Gibran Khalil, Khalil, 183 Grass, Günther, 6 Great Britain national literatures in, 4 and Sudan, 164, 165–6, 167, 168–70, 172 Greek literature, in Egypt, 184–5 Greenblatt, Stephen, 110 Guattari, Felix, 64 Habash, George, 48 Habibi, Imil, The Amazing Events Leading to the Disappearance of the Hapless Said, the Pessoptimist, 40–6 comparison with Candide, 45–6 Hebrew translations of, 106 Hajjaj, Nasri ‘A Hungry Orange’ (story), 36–7, 39 ‘Soup for the Children’ (story), 37–8 al-Hakim, Tawfiq, 144–5

ÆAwdat al-ruh (Return of the Spirit), 131, 144–57 Halbwachs, Maurice, 194 Hamadi, SaÆdun, 213 Hammad, Suheir, 184 Hammoud, Hani, 190 Hanania, Tony, 190 Unreal City, 192, 199–206 Harvard Negotiation Project, 92 Haydar, Adnan, 193 al-Haydari, Buland, 186 Haykal, Muhammad Husayn, 5, 130, 132–3 compared with al-Hakim, 144–5 use of pseudonym, 132–3, 135–6 Zainab, 131, 133–44, 157 Hazan, Yaakov, 118 Hebrew culture, and literary translation, 101 Hebrew language Arabic literature translated into, 102–3, 104–5, 106, 187 Palestinian Israeli writing in, 186–7 Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Oriental Studies Institute, 103 heroic construct, in poetry, 23–5, 27–8 Hirsch, Marianne, 190 history and myth, 122–4 and nationalism, 110 Hoffman, Eva, 193 home and country, 192–3 and nostalgia, 194 Homer, place names in, 20–1, 29–30nn Hourani, Albert, 12, 129 humour, 40–1 Hussein, Saddam, 211 Hussein, Taha, al-Ayyam (novel), 109n Hutcheon, Linda, 33 Huxley, Aldous, 1 Ibrahim, Hafiz, 162 identity ambiguous, 44 hyphenated, 8, 43–5 multi-ethnic, 185–9 Idris, Yusuf, Al-Haram (The Taboo), 138 imagery, 23–4, 85, 97n India, 162, 181 Indian Ocean, cultural world of, 180–1, 183 inter-textuality, 218–19, 224–5, 226, 227 Iraq, 180, 215–16 Egyptian literature in, 131 Jews in, 186

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index women nationalist poets, 212–15 Ireland, national literature, 6 irony, 8–9 as deictic device, 39–40 double, 41, 43, 46 interpretations of, 33, 39 in literature, 32, 33, 38–9 and martyrdom, 38, 39 in Palestinian literature, 32, 35 phatic dimension of, 37, 38 Isis, imagery of, 146, 149–50 Islam and Arabic culture, 163–4, 210 and Arabic language, 179–80 and Arabism, 213–14 Israel, and peace process, 93–5 Israel, state of, 47n, 100, 181, 187 1967 War, 85–6, 221 foundation of, 11, 31, 85 immigrants, 103–4 interaction of Arab and Hebrew culture, 187 kibbutz movement, 112, 118, 125n and myth of New Hebrew youth, 112, 117–22 renaming of Palestinian places, 19–20, 29nn status of Palestinians in, 34, 80 Israeli army, Palma’h unit, 113–14 Istanbul, cultural diversity, 180 Italy, Ottoman links in, 180 Jabra, Jabra Ibrahim, 183 Jameson, Frederic, 76–7n, 110 al-Jarida (journal), 134 Jauss, Hans Robert, 110 Jelloun, Tahar bin, 182 Jerusalem, 214, 222, 223 Jewish national identity, and translations from Arabic, 10, 100, 103–8 Jews in Ottoman Empire, 181 writings in Arabic, 186 see also Hebrew language; Israel Jordan, Hashemite rulers of, 180 journals, Sudan, 166–7, 171–2, 173, 176 al-Kailani, Rashid ÆAli, 214 Kamil, Mustafa, Watani Party, 134–5 Kanafani, Ghassan, 48, 108 Ma Tabaqqa Lakum (All That’s Left to You), 48, 57–8, 65–75 Rijal fi al-Shams (Men in the Sun), 48, 50–7, 58–63, 74 Um Saad, 71

Kapeliouk, Menahem, 109n Kasem, Wayne, 194 Katzenelson, Berl, 120–1 Kayat, Claude, Mohammed Cohen, 185 Kedouri, Elie, 211 Kelman, Herbert, 92 Khaled, Leila, 64 Khalidi, Rashid, 64 Khalifeh, Sahar, Wild Thorns (novel), 74 Khayr, Nazih, 187 al-Khazraji, ÆAtika, Iraqi nationalist poet, 213– 14 Surkh al-Zulm (‘Cries of Oppression’), 214 Khoury, Elias, 47n, 54 Kristeva, Julia, Strangers to Ourselves, 192 Kurds, 181 Kurzweil, Baruch, 118 language, 6, 70, 158n and cultural diversity, 14, 181 and nationalism, 128, 181–2 use of borrowed (foreign) words, 22 visual (art), 196 words and motion in oral tradition, 97–8n writers’ choice of, 182 see also Arabic language; dialect; English language; Hebrew language; translation League of Sudan Union, 169 Lebanon civil war, 193, 195, 200, 202–3 exiles from, 190, 206n exilic novel in, 14, 190–206 and identity, 194–5 literature in English and French, 190 literacy, 5, 162 Sudan, 165, 167, 174, 176, 178n see also oral tradition literary criticism, 32, 211–12 literature and Arab nationalism, 5, 129–30, 208–9 and censorship, 6–7 and common language, 6 of exile, 14, 187 marginal (multi-ethnic), 185–8 nationalist, 211–13 New Criticism, 32, 39 and politics, 48, 58, 91–3 reflection theory of, 3 taught in national language, 182 see also Arab literature; novel; poetry locality, 16–17 and phaticity, 28 London, Arab journalism in, 184

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index Luah Eretz Yisrael (journal), 103 Lunz, Avraham Moshe, 103 Mahbuba, ÆAbd al-Hadi, 225 Mahfuz, Naguib, 103 Mahjoub, Jamal, 182 Mahjub, Muhammad Ahmad, 162, 172, 173 al-Mala’ika, Nazik, Iraqi nationalist poet, 212– 13 al-Hijira ila Allah, 223 al-Ma’ wa-l-barud, 226 Aqwa min al-qabr, 223–4 Hudud al-raja’, 220 influences on, 213–15 inter-textuality in, 218–19, 224–5, 226 li-l-Sala wa-l-thawra (poetry collection), 220, 221–2 Maraya al-shams, 225 Nahnu wa Jamila, 216–18 nationalism and spirituality, 221–6 Qadaya al-shiÆr al-muÆasir (Issues in Modern Poetry), 219 Sawsana ismuha al-quds, 222–3 Shajarat al-qamar (poetry collection), 215 Tahiyya li-l-jumhuriyya al-Æiraqiyya, 215–16, 220, 228 Thalath ughniyat Æarabiyya, 219, 220 Ughniya li-l-atlal al-Æarabiyya, 218–19 use of repetition, 219, 220, 227–8 use of words, 216, 218, 219, 224 Yughayyir al-wanah al-bahr (poetry collection), 220–1, 225–6 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 21 Malkin, Yaakov, 122 Manganaro, Elise Salem, 190 Mann, Thomas, 6 Mansur, Atallah, 186–7 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 196 martyrdom, 36, 37–8, 47n Marx, Karl, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 139 Masalha, Salman, 187 masculinity and castration, 51, 53–4, 55, 65, 71, 77n and force, 64 and national identity, 52–8, 59, 63, 73–5 and nationalist poetry, 213 rhetoric of, 60–2 Massad, Joseph, 58 media English newspaper editions, 183 Sudan, 174 Mediterranean, and Arab world, 180

memory collective, 87–8 food and, 202 nostalgic, 14, 190, 192 survivor, 190–1 metanarrative discourse, 26–7, 30n Middle East concept of nation in, 4–5, 188 multi-lingualism in, 184 peace process, 93–5, 108 Mikha’il, Murad, 186 Mikha’il, Sami, Victoria, 186 modernism, 3–4, 32 Morse, Margaret, 194 Muecke, D. C., 33 multi-lingualism, 184, 197 MutawwaÆ, Khalid, 184 Myerhoff, Barbara, 28 myth, Darwish’s use of, 81 myth-making, 1, 11, 35 and heroic construct, 24–5, 115–17 of New Hebrew youth, 112, 117–22 nahda (Arab cultural renaissance), 129, 131, 162 al-Nahda (Sudanese journal), 171, 172, 176 Najjar, Alexandre, 190 naming, 6, 18, 41 in oral tradition, 98 and renaming of places, 19–20 Nancy, Jean Luc, 62 Naqib, Fadl, on Men in the Sun, 52, 53–4 Naqqash, Samir, 186 narrators, of poetry, 25, 26 Nasir, Amjad, 184 Nasser, Gamal Abdel-, 144, 216 nation constructivist view of, 1–2, 3–4 reciprocal relations with literature, 2–3, 226 nation building, 1, 110 and boundaries, 79 and culture, 129 and ethnicity, 181 role of literature, 209–10, 211, 226, 228–9 role of poetry, 4, 162 symbolic, 146–7, 150–1 and use of literary translation, 100–1 National Front for the Liberation of Palestine, 64 national identity and cultural identity, 194–5, 204 culture and, 2, 181–2

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index national self-determination, 49, 58–9, 79 nationalism as divisive, 4, 6, 79 and exile, 191–2 home and, 192–3 and language, 128 mobilisation and, 219–20, 226, 227–8 and spirituality, 221–6 see also Arab nationalism Native American tribes, 34–5, 81 and Darwish’s ÆIndian Speech’, 82–4, 85– 91 Nedivei ve Giborei ÆArav (collection of Arabic poetry in translation), 104 negotiation, political, 92 New Criticism, 32, 38–9 Nochlin, Linda, 196 North Africa, 182, 213 nostalgia, 193–4, 197–8 nostalgic memory, 14, 190, 192 Novak, Havar, theatre critic, 107 novel(s) Egyptian, 13, 130, 131–2 exilic, 14, 190–206 introduction of, 132, 176 modern Arabic, 129–30 role of, 11, 12–13, 159n, 176 Sudan, 176–7 Nussbaum, Martha, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, 91, 94 Oedipal relationships, 64–5 oral tradition Arab, 25–6, 85, 97–8nn Palestinian oral poetry duel, 7–8, 16–29 Sudan, 164, 166–7 Orientalism, 153–4, 221 Ottoman Empire, 132, 134 cultural diversity in, 179–81 Palermo, 180 Palestine and Camp David summit (2000), 47n cult of martyr in, 38 historical experience of, 85–6 Jewish population (1948), 110 liberation movement, 214–15 and narrative of return, 48, 49–50, 51–7 negation of, 31, 32 northern, 17, 22 Oslo Accords, 79–80, 82, 94 partition plan (1947), 75n, 214 and peace process, 93–5

place names, 19–20, 29nn as state of exile, 31, 33 war of 1948, 52, 55–6, 68–9, 75–6n, 111, 122, 124n, 215 see also Palestinians Palestine Liberation Organisation, 48, 55, 58 Palestinian literature in Hebrew translation, 105 and national identity, 7–9 political dimension, 48 Palestinian oral poetry duel, 7–8, 16–29 character of performance, 17–19 heroic construct, 24–5, 27–8 imagery, 23–4 place naming in, 19–22, 29n ritual nature of, 28 Palestinians, 6, 7 and absent-present experience, 7, 8, 31–2, 33–4 and concept of return, 32, 63–4 hyphenated identity of, 43–5, 80 and Israeli politics, 28–9, 81 ‘lost years’ of identity, 55–6 and national identity, 7–9, 79–81 use of Hebrew language, 186–7 pan-Arab nationalism, 2, 5, 12, 213 and Palestinian identity, 56, 64 peace studies, 92–3, 99n peasants, 160 in al-Hakim, 144, 147, 150–4 in Haykal, 135–7, 138–9 performance of poetry, 7, 25–7, 87–90, 96–7n see also oral tradition; Palestinian oral poetry duel ‘phatic communion’, 21, 38, 40 phaticity, 7, 18, 21, 28 and irony, 37, 38 and metanarrative discourse, 26–7 place names, 6, 18, 19 poetic listing of, 20–1, 29nn Pnueli, Sh. J., 118–19 poetry, 163, 210 Abbasid period, 210 Arabic nationalist, 5, 12, 162, 208–9 Arabic oral tradition, 25–6, 85, 97–8nn, 162 and audiences, 82, 84–90, 95–6 in English, 184 fusha, 164, 174, 177n heroic construct in, 23–5, 27–8 Islamic Arab, 210 and nationalism, 4, 162, 163, 214–15, 226–7

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index oral Palestinian duel, 7–8, 16–29 performance of, 7, 25–7, 87–90, 96–7nn pre-Islamic, 210, 219 Sudanese Arabic, 164–5 Sudanese nationalist, 11–12, 164–5, 168– 9, 170–2, 173–7 Sufi, 164 politics and influence of literature, 91–3 and nationalist poetry, 214–15 in Sudanese poetry, 169–70, 173 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, 48 postmodernism, 205–6 print culture, Sudan, 165, 166 ‘prophetic poem-making’, 93, 94, 96 proverbs, Arabic, 40, 41 puns, 40 Qaddafi, Colonel Muammar, 211 qasida, pre-Islamic tradition of, 85, 95, 97nn Qasim, ÆAbd al-Karim, President of Iraq, 216 al-Qasim, Samih, 43, 104–5, 187 ‘Persona Non Grata’ (poem), 35–6 al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, 47n, 209 Qur’an, inter-textual links to, 224–5, 227 refugee nations, 6, 16; see also Lebanon; Palestinians Rejwan, Nissim, 186 repetition, use of, 86, 97n, 219, 220, 227–8 al-Rihani, Amin, 183 ritual, 28, 209 Robert, Shaaban, 162 Rose, Jacqueline, States of Fantasy, 205 al-Rusafi, MaÆruf, Iraqi poet, 212 sacred space, concept of, 88–9 Said, Edward, 31, 33, 85, 110, 191–2 SaÆid, Jamil, 131 Salih, Tawfiq, film director, 50 The Betrayed, 52 Salih, al-Tayyib, 184 Salonica, 180 al-Samaw’al, poet, 104, 108n al-Sayyid, Ahmad Lufti, 134, 138 Scarry, Elaine on Nussbaum, 92–3 Schami, Rafik, 187 Schulman, Sarah, 193 Schulze, Reinhard, 138 Second World War, Sudan, 174 Senegal, 162 Senghor, Leopold Sedar, 162

al-Shabbi, Abu al-Qasim, Tunisian poet, 220 shahid (martyr), cult of, 38 Shamir, Elik, 122 Shamir, Moshe, He Walked in the Fields, 110– 24, 125n critical reaction to, 117–20 interpretations of, 122–3 and Zionist heroic ideals, 111–14, 115–16, 119–20 Shammas, Anton, 106 Arabesques, 44, 186–7 al-Sharqawi, Ahmed Rahman, Al-Ard (The Earth), 138 Shawqi, Ahmad, 162, 212 al-Shaykh, Hanan, 184 Shibab Nye, Naomi, 184 Siddiq, Muhammad, on Men in the Sun, 53 Smith, Charles, 139–40 Soueif, Ahdaf, 182 spirituality, mixed with nationalism (in Nazik’s poetry), 221–6 Spitzer, Leo, 193–4 Spivak, Gayatri, 139 Sudan, 170, 173, 174 Anglo-Egyptian conquest, 164, 165–6 anti-colonialism, 169–70 Arabic culture in, 163–5, 174–5, 176–7 biographical dictionaries, 175 colonial rule in, 166–7, 168–9 education, 167, 171, 174, 175–6, 177 Gordon College, Khartoum, 167, 169 Graduates General Congress, 172–3 growth of nationalism, 170–3, 174–5 Mahdist regime, 164, 165 national(ist) poetry, 11–12, 164–5, 168–9, 170–2, 173–7 nature poetry, 172 praise poetry, 172, 177n written poetry, 166, 167–8, 173–4 Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 198 Suney, President of Turkey, 180 survivor memory, 190–1 Sykes-Picot Agreement, 85 Syria, 128, 132, 218 Tagore, Rabindranath, 162 al-Tahtawi, Rif’at Rafi’, 135 al-Tal, Mustafa Wahbi, Jordanian poet, 212 Tambal, Hamza al-Malik, 171, 172 Tamir, Zakaria, 184 Tanganyika, 162 Thompson, William, The Land and the Book, 35

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index Tibawi, A. L., 131 Tirman, John, 196, 199 Toury, Gideon, norm theory of translation, 101 translation, 9–10 choice of texts, 102–4 Jewish national identity and, 10, 100, 103– 8, 187 and nation-building, 100–1 polysystem theory of, 100–1 preliminary norms, 102–5, 108 reaction norms, 105–6 reviews of, 105, 106–7 Trumpeldor, Joseph, 117–18, 120–2, 124, 126n Tsirkas, Stratis (Iannis Hadjiandreas), 184–5 Drifting Cities, 185 Nourredin Bomba, 185 Tucker, Martin, 192 Tunisia, 185–6 Tuqan, Fadwa, 225 Turkey, 180, 181 Turkish language, 180 Umm Nizar, Iraqi nationalist poet, 214–15 Unshudat al-majd (‘The Song of Glory’), 214, 215 Umma Party, liberal nationalism of, 134 UN General Assembly Resolution 181, 75n Resolution 194, 32, 46n ‘unisonality’, 5, 11 United Nations, 214–15 United States, 93–5, 184 al-ÆUrayyid, Ibrahim, 183 Vance, Eugene, on Chanson de Roland, 23–4 Voltaire, Candide, 45–6

Wafd Party, 135, 160n Watani Party, 134–5 weddings Palestinian oral poetry duel at, 17–18, 22, 25 role of saff (male participants), 17, 21, 23, 25, 27 sahrah (groom’s celebration), 17, 21, 23, 25, 27–8 women emancipation in Egypt, 135 and Islamic social conventions, 140–3 Palestinian, 47n, 64, 65–6 as (passive) symbol of land, 49–50, 58, 66, 73 as poets, 213 in Sudan, 167, 171, 172 Yaari, Meir, 118 Yacine, Kateb, 182 Yahuda, Avraham Shalom Yehezkel, 104 Yakhlif, Yahya, A Lake Beyond the Wind (novel), 63 al-Yaziji, Ibrahim, tanabbahu wa-stafiqu ayyuha al-Æarab, 208 Yemen, oral poetry, 25 Zaghlul, SaÆd, 145 Zandbank, Shimon, translator, 107–8 Zaydan, Jurji, 12 Zerubavel, Yael, 121–2 Zionism, 79, 100, 121 heroic ideals of, 111–14, 115–16, 118–19 and Jewish population of Palestine, 110–11 and view of Palestine, 101–2 Zionist Congress (First), Basel (1897), 34, 35

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