Category: Arabic

The truths we know and those we don’t: No One Knows Their Blood Type by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat

I don’t know which night I was conceived, but I do know that when nine months had passed, my life started to get complicated. All that I will relate here is not confirmed truth—these are stories I pass on from motley sources. None of them are entirely correct or straightforward, they follow the meandering intentions and motives of the storytellers.

Jumana, the central figure of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s debut novel No One Knows Their Blood Type is,  as she tells us in an account of her early years living with an unloving aunt in 1980s Amman, a collector of secrets. The more she discovers, be it the rumour that her mother did not in fact die in the war in Lebanon, or the unwanted advances of a male cousin, the less certainty there is in her life.  As the story unfolds, shifting speakers and perspective backward and forward across more than three decades, it becomes clear that she is not the only member of her family haunted by secrets, doubts, and insecurity.

This slender, fragmented, nonchronological novel opens in a hospital in Jerusalem in 2007 where Jumana is assisting with the cleansing of the body of Malika, the gregarious midwife who has just passed away. She only knew this elderly Greek woman for less than two weeks—the time that she has been coming to visit her own dying father—but already she has fallen in love with her nephew Suheil, so she is almost family, so to speak.  However, when her father dies shortly after, the shock of attending to his body causes her to collapse and end up in emergency—a detour that will suddenly call into question her own relationship to the family she grew up in. Her father’s death certificate and her lab results reveal his blood type is O positive whereas hers is AB positive. While Suheil calmly shrugs it off as an error, Jumana is not so sure.

From here the novel moves back to Jumana’s account of her childhood in Amman. She and her older sister Yara were born in Beruit, but, at the ages of nine months and three years respectively, they are shipped off to live with their father’s sister in Amman. Their aunt treats them very poorly and the fate of their mother remains a mystery, while their father who in Spain with the PLO, is little more than a voice on the phone and a very occasional visitor. Then, in the early nineties when he has been exiled to Tunisia, the girls are packaged up and sent to join the father they barely know.

From here the narrative shifts to Tunisia in 1993. First, from the perspective of Abu al-Saeed, we see a man struggling with sudden single parenthood, anxious to protect—and if necessary, control—the honour of his two teenaged daughters. He goes to head with the eldest who is as stubborn as he is and, as a result, often incurs his wrath, while Jumana remains an enigma. He can’t figure her out, so he resents her. Meanwhile at work and among his fellow exiles he is frustrated, resentful, at odds with the world, and in turn he carries this frustration back home. When Yara picks up the thread, still in Tunisia, she details the close bond she and her sister have as security against their father, but even she notes, often with jealousy, how different Jumana seems. And then, when the signing of the Oslo Accords cements her father’s intent to return to Palestine, she not only feels despair at the thought of leaving her first love, but she wonders what it means to go “home” to a place she has never been.

Yet another angle to the story of this splintered and displaced family is offered from Amhal, the girls’ mother, as she gives her account of her life in Beruit from 1979 to 1982. She speaks of her unwanted and unhappy marriage to Abu al-Saeed, his disappointment with her failure to produce sons, and her longing to be with Omar, the young Lebanese man she truly loves. When her daughters are sent off to Amman she makes some effort to follow, but borders are difficult to cross and her direct account comes to an end. Jumana will later be in contact with her mother, but answers to the question that haunts her as she marries and has her own child, can only be addressed through DNA testing, but even then the whole question of her identity, not to mention her nationality, will be at risk if her father, or the man she knew as her father, was not related at all.

In his Afterword, translator Hazem JamJoum explians that his immediate attraction to this novel lay not in what was, but what it was not. Rather than writing to make grand statements against colonialism and oppression, or illustrate victimhood, he says: “It just assumes the grotesque facets of the workings of power, and conducts its conversation with whoever recognizes themselves as already in the fight.” He goes on to consider the questions might be more appropriate to ask, including:

Why do we lionize the figure of the revolutionary militant when that militant is, however understandably, transformed into a monster when it comes to those they supposedly love and cherish? Why aren’t questions about motherhood and fatherhood, sisterhood and kinship, love and friendship at the core of conversations about liberty and freedom? If they were, how would that change our notion of emancipation . . . should it change our notion of resistance?

If we ask such questions, and we should, this is a novel that raises more concerns than it settles. Which is okay. It is a story that is inextricable from Palestinian history, occupation, war, and exile, but its focus is on one girl and woman in particular, and the complex and delicate balance of relationships within the extended family network that surrounds her. The fragmented nature of the narrative gives us often conflicting interpretations and perspectives, and as such does not inspire an immediate empathy with any one character, even the primary protagonist. Siblings clash as much as they conspire, mothers struggle to connect with their infants, fathers respond in ways that often reflect their own upbringing, and decisions are made that may or may not be justified. But, in the end, what No One Knows Their Blood Type demonstrates so clearly, is that so often truth is not only relative, but ultimately elusive and perhaps there are times when it is better to leave it that way.

No One Knows Their Blood Type by Maya  Abu Al-Hayyat is translated from the Arabic by Hazem Jamjoum and published Cleveland State  University Poetry Center.

To translate the human experience: Arabic, between Love and War edited by Yasmine Haj and Norah Alkharashi

We live in a world that is always in flux. Conflict, natural disasters, and political destabilization are continually reshaping our world and threatening our future on an intimate, community and global scale. An element of the universality of the human condition unites us in our response to these factors while privilege, culture, and history set us apart. To begin to understand where others have come from, what they have been through, their trials and their dreams, we must be able to speak to one another, learn to listen, and read their words. This is why translation matters.

The art of literary translation is often said to be both impossible and necessary. Impossible because no linguistic code is commensurable with any other—particularly so in the case of poetic language which, being among the most refined and expressive of literary forms, is expected to have myriad and complex nuances. Yet translation remains necessary. Without it there would be no conversation across linguistic and cultural barriers, no prospect of the mutual understanding that remains a prerequisite for the peaceful, emancipated life towards which we are all striving.

These are the words of translator and scholar Norah Alkharashi from her introduction to arabic, between love and war, a distinctive collection of poetry co-edited with Yasmine Haj and newly released by the independent Canadian publisher trace press. This anthology, which gathers the work of poets and translators from across the Arabic speaking world and its diaspora, arose from a series of creative translation workshops, facilitated by the editors, that allowed translators from varying backgrounds the time and space to explore the “processes of loss and unlearning encountered on their path to translation as critical creation.” This unique collaborative engagement ultimately led to the selection of thirty-seven thematically linked poems, presented alongside their translations—Arabic to English or English to Arabic—that comprise the first release in the trace: translating  [x] series.

The title and theme of this project illustrates one of the central challenges of the art of translation: how to reflect the nuances implicit in one language within the context of another. In Arabic, only one extra letter separates the word for “love” حب from the word for “war” حرب , a distinction that can have many implications in poetic discourse, especially when the two realities are often so deeply entwined in the lived experience of so many in the Arabic speaking world. Here the collected poems are divided into three sections: Love, Interval, and War, but the boundaries cannot be so clearly drawn. War frequently lingers in the background, even when a poet speaks of love; while love is a persistent life force even in the face of loss, loneliness, and displacement. And once again, the memory and fear of war haunts, even in the quiet in between conflicts—in the interval.

The poems of the first section, “Love,” tend to be tinged with sadness and longing, be it for for an imprisoned child or a lost lover:

I remembered you!
.              I remembered the silence growing slightly wet,
.              and the trees that shaded us,
.              and the fragrance drawing near.

.              I didn’t know
that we were on the edge of everything
and that one word
alone was enough to wither a tree,
.              that silence turns into shade,
.              and the heart a safe haven for pain.

– from “One Word” by Ali Mahmoud Khudayyir
Translated from Arabic by Zeena Faulk

Meanwhile, the longest section, “Intervals,” casts the widest emotional net, speaking to the most fundamental elements of human experience—birth, death, hope, despair—in a world that can seem to turn without reason, or as the epigraph to this part says, those “liminal spaces where wars of flesh and love—ongoing, past, or yet to pass—have lingered. Holding hearts and words in limbo, with beats yet to be translated.” Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s “Time Travel,” originally written in English, captures this unsettled sense succinctly:

. . . We travel because
motion is more comfort

than settling, calcifying.
We travel because it means

we haven’t gotten to where
we’re going yet, the story

is still being written and
our fractures aren’t done setting.

There is still a chance
we’ll turn out different

or better or—best of all—
like our parents without

knowing we’ve become
who they were. . .

Finally, it is sadly no surprise that the poems in the “War” section are the most direct and unequivocal. But they are not without a promise, however faint, and hope for a future free from the ravages of war:

I wish I could, I wish it were in my hands
to uproot injustice
and dry the rivers of blood
off this planet.
I wish I could, I wish it were in my hands,
to hold for this man, tired
in the path of confusion and sorrow,
a lamp of prosperity and serenity
and grant him a safe life.
I wish I could, I wish it were in my hands,
yet all I have at hand is a ‘but’.

– from “This Earthly Planet” by Fadwa Tuqan
Translated from Arabic by Eman Abukhadra

These are but three brief excerpts. The poems gathered here represent the work of fifteen poets chosen for translation by fourteen translators (some translate more than one poet or are also poets themselves), and together the contributors come from varied Palestinian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Saudi Arabian, Lebanese, Sudanese, Tunisian, Egyptian, Syrian, Canadian, American and British backgrounds. Some of the poets write in English (and are thus translated into Arabic), whereas some of the translators are scholars specializing in Arabic. This rich range of perspectives and differing Arabic literary traditions must have contributed to a vibrant workshop environment which is distilled in this elegant and vital anthology.

arabic, between love and war is edited by Yasmine Haj and Norah Alkharashi, and published by trace press.

The invisible man’s story: Children of the Ghetto II: Star of the Sea by Elias Khoury

The first volume of Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto trilogy, My Name is Adam, presents itself as a collection of writings by a Palestinian falafel maker living in exile in New York City. Never intended for publication, they include an aborted attempt to write a novel about a seventh-century Yemini poet and the unedited attempt by the author, Adam Dannoun, to understand himself by writing his own story. After a lifetime of trying to leave history, his own and his people’s, behind, two events—the screening of a film based on Khoury’s famous novel Gate of the Sun, and a conversation with a man he has not seen since he was seven years old—motivate this decision to finally commit an account of his life to paper. He will then set the stage for his own death. Elias Khoury supposedly comes into possession of Adam’s notebooks after he has died and, following some consideration, decides to publish them as they are, unedited. The result is an often troubled and circular narrative beginning in New York and making its way back in time in an effort to reconstitute what he knows of his earliest years, during and in the immediate aftermath of the Nakba. Born in Lydda in 1948 he wants to piece together as much as he can about the horrific events of the massacre in the city, the containment of the Arab residents in what the Israeli soldiers labelled a “ghetto,” and the harsh conditions he and his mother endured.

The double-authorship of the first volume—Khoury as the custodian of Adam’s writing—is assumed to be understood, but not mentioned, in Star of the Sea. Rather, the entire tone and approach of the work shifts as Adam steps back from his own story to adopt a distanced perspective: Point of Entry: the Third Person, or the Absent Conscience. That the narrator and author of the novel (and he does call it a novel at this point) is also the protagonist is not a secret, but as he makes clear in the opening passages, it does raise certain challenges:

The question keeping the writer of these stories awake at night is the following: how can the absentee write? Can they tell their own story using “I,” thereby writing as though remembering? Or should they employ the third person to write in their place?

Pronouns in Arabic are extraordinarily supple, unmatched in any other language. The written letters that take a person’s place are called “consciences”, but since the conscience is also an invisible  moral compass, how can a novelist write using the conscience of one who is absent? And finally, what does its corollary—that the conscience must be absent in order for a person to tell their story really mean?

So, although Adam’s account now takes a more straightforward and generally chronological quality, the multi-layered reflective and metafictional elements of the first volume persist, now that the present self (the writer) has separated himself from his past invisible, absent self and reluctant hero of his story.

Although he made passing references to his adolescent and young adult years in the first part of his grand life writing exercise, the primary focus of My Name is Adam was on a period of his life  history of which he had either no direct memories or only a child’s recollections. Now, Adam is on much firmer ground, memory-wise, and in a position to try to face his conflicted emotions about the choices he faced as he navigated life in a country to which he could never fully belong. This is, then, a story of one man’s relationship to his own identity and his desire to live without any history or nostalgia. Even if it means living a lie.

This second volume begins in 1963, with fifteen year-old Adam’s decision to leave home. He had moved to Haifa with his mother, Manal, following her marriage to Abdallah al-Ashal, and, after years of watching his relentless abuse drive her further into a lifeless shell, he knew it was time to get away. Manal seemed to know too and, on the night Adam left, she quietly saw him off, handing him his father’s will before he disappeared into the stormy night. He was now on his own.

With a short detour, Adam makes his way to the garage of mechanic named Gabriel, a Polish Jew who had picked him up one night when he was hitchhiking. Struck by the boy’s fair hair and skin, Gabriel saw in Adam the image of his deceased younger brother. He had promised that he could help him out, thinking of possibly teaching him his trade. But Adam was determined to continue his schooling. So the mechanic not only offered him a place to stay in return for odd jobs in the shop, but also helped him get into a Jewish school. His old life now behind him, this period marked the beginning of Adam’s new story. He changed his name from Dannoun to Danon, and with it he assumed a new identity. He looked the part, spoke Hebrew well, and his existing ghetto origin was malleable:

If the heroes of novels could break through the fourth wall (page) and speak without an intermediary, then Adam could very well have told his story not as the invisible man, but a man formed from his imagination. And indeed he had imagined an entire personality that both matched his true nature and was completely different. From the moment he left his mother’s house on the night of the rain, Adam realized that he could represent himself however he wanted by using certain true events to create a compelling background.

This new story follows the reinvented Adam through his first teenage love—unfortunately for him, it is with Gabriel’s daughter Rivka, a situation not destined to end well—into his university years and beyond. Although he enjoys new freedoms with his assumed Israeli identity, he cannot escape his official Arab designation so he often straddles the Jewish and Palestinian communities, spending his days in one and working and living in another. Along the way he meets an assortment of interesting individuals who will influence his life in varying ways, but the central focus of this second volume of Children of the Ghetto lies with the ghetto he where allows others to believe his origins actually lie—in Warsaw.

As a student of Hebrew Literature, Adam develops a close friendship with his German-born professor Jacob Ebenheiner, a relationship based on shared intellectual curiosities and interests. Jacob does not pry into Adam’s life, and the latter offers no details. But a class trip to Warsaw at the end of the first term will ultimately lead to a betrayal of his secret. The visit to Poland has huge impact on the eighteen year-old Palestinian-in-disguise—walking through the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto and listening, through a translator, to the stories of the guide and survivors. But it is an evening spent in the company of Marek Edelmann, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and life-long anti-Zionist who remained in Poland and became a famed cardiologist, that unsettles him most. Adam is not only left questioning who he is and where he belongs, but it brings to light the extent of the gap that exists between himself and his defiantly proud Israeli teacher.

Throughout this book, Adam relies on a degree of invisibility afforded by his appearance to continue to live a lie into his adult professional life, but in his personal life the balance is more difficult, and not all ghosts can be left in the past, no matter how much he may want them to be. For many years he will keep to himself as much as possible, the personification of the “present absentee.” That is, until he meets Dalia, the young woman who turns his world upside down when he is in his mid-forties, the woman who finally makes him believe in love. But we know, for he has often told us, that it will not last.

Although familiarity with the first volume is assumed, Star of the Sea is building on a much wider story with a fresh angle on questions about what it means to write about one’s own life, about truth, and about what one can really tell. Given his reluctance to talk about his past, Adam does not detail his early experiences, nor does he explain things we as readers know about his true origins, facts that he himself was unaware of until much later in life. Here is focused on telling this aspect of his story in a specific manner. Yet, by the time the novel ends he has glossed over much of what will be the most significant romantic relationship of his life, so one can only assume that Dalia will take centre stage in volume three. But where will Adam be standing as he tells this part of his story? The final part of the trilogy only came out in Arabic in 2023, so it seems that Anglophone readers will have to wait for a translation to find out.

Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea by Elias Khoury is translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies and published by Archipelago Books.

Looking back at a year of reading: 2024 edition

Each year when I review the list of books that I have read, I face the same challenge deciding what to include and what to leave out of a final accounting. As usual there are the books that I know, even as I am reading them, will be among my favourites for the year. Just as I know the ones I don’t like, the ones I won’t even mention or take the time to review. Basically, everything else that I have reviewed, was a good book.

This year, my count far exceeds a respectable “top ten” or “baker’s dozen” and there are some striking factors at play. One is that the ongoing  violence in Gaza has heightened my focus on Palestinian and Arabic language literature—long an area of interest and concern. Five of the Palestinian themed books I read made my year end list. As well, I have paired several titles, typically by the same author or otherwise connected, because the reading of one inspired and was enhanced by the reading of the other (not to mention that such pairings allow me to expand my list). Finally, as reflected by my top books, I read and loved more longer works of fiction this year than usual (for me). No 1000 page tomes yet, but perhaps I’m overcoming some of my long book anxiety.

And so on to the books.

Poetry:
I read far more poetry than I review, but this year I wanted to call attention to four titles.

Strangers in Light Coatsevokes by Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan (Arabic, translated by Robin Moger/Seagull Books) is, perhaps, a darker than his earlier collections. Comprised as it is, of poems from recent releases, it actively portrays a world shaped by the reality of decades of occupation and war.

My Rivers by Faruk Šehić (Bosnian, translated by S.D. Curtis/Istros Books) is a collection particularly powerful for its depiction of a legacy of wars in Bosnia/Herzegovina including the genocide in Srebrenica. His speakers carry the burden of history.

Walking the Earth by Tunisian-French poet Amina Saïd (French, translated by Peter Thompson/Contra Mundum) is such a haunting work of primal beauty that I can’t understand why more of her poetry has not been published in English. Perhaps that will change.

Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Rainwater by Irma Pineda is one of a number of small Latin American poetry collection from poets and communities that have not been published in English before. This book, a trilingual collection in Didxazá (Isthmus Zapotec) and Spanish with English translations by Wendy Call (Deep Vellum & Phoneme Media) was particularly special.

 

Nonfiction:
This year, my favourites include a mix of memoir and essay and a couple of works that defy simple classification.

The Blue Light / Among the Almond Trees by Palestinian writer Hussein Barghouthi (Arabic, translated by Fady Joudah and Ibrahim Muhawi respectively/Seagull). Blue Light chronicles Barghouthi’s years in Seattle as a grad student and the eccentric circles he travelled in, whereas Among the Almond Trees is a much more sombre work written when he knew he was dying of cancer. The two books complement each other beautifully.

French intellectual, critic, ethnographer and autobiographical essayist Michel Leiris is a writer who means so much to me that the occasion of the release of Frail Riffs (Yale University), the fourth and final volume of his Rules of the Game in Richard Sieburth‘s translation, was not only an excuse to pitch a review but an invitation to revisit the earlier volumes. Definitely a highlight.

I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti (Palestinian/Arabic, translated by Ahdaf Soueif/Anchor Books) is a moving memoir detailing the author’s return to his homeland after thirty years of exile. Reading it reminded me that I had a copy of Scepters by his wife, Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour (Arabic, translated by Barbara Romaine/Interlink Books). This ambitious work blends fiction, history, memoir, and metafiction and I absolutely loved it, but my decision to include it here, like this, rests on the memoir element which complements her husband’s in its account of the many years he was exiled from Egypt—a double exile for him—especially the years in which she travelled back and forth with their young son to visit him while he was living in Hungary.

Candidate for the book with the best title, perhaps ever, Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears by Hungarian scholar  László Földényi (translated by Ottilie Mulzet/Yale University) was an endlessly fascinating collection of essays exploring the relationship between darkness and light (and similar dichotomies) through the ideas of a variety of writers, thinkers and artists.

 

Fiction:
As usual, fiction comprised the largest component of my reading and, as I’ve said, I read more relatively longer works than in the past. Normally I have a special fondness for the very spare novella and, of course, my list would not be complete without a few shorter works, including one more pair.

The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales  / Noone by Turkish writer Ferit Edgü—translated by Aron Aji (NYRB Classics) and Fulya Peker Cotra Mundum) respectively—who is sadly one of the writers we lost this year. His work, which draws on the time he spent teaching in the impoverished southeastern region of Turkey in lieu of military service, is filled with great compassion for the people of this troubled area. But his prose is stripped clean, bare, and remarkably powerful.

Recital of the Dark Verses by Luis Felipe Fabre (Mexico/Spanish, translated by Heather Cleary/Deep Vellum) is an award wining translation that seems to have garnered less attention than it deserves. This comic Golden Age road trip follows the misadventures of the body of John of the Cross on its clandestine voyage to Seville. Brilliant.

Celebration by Damir Karakaš (Croatian, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać/ Two Lines Press) is an exceptionally spare, unsentimental novella about the historical forces that pulled the residents of Lika in central Croatia into World War II.

Spent Light by Lara Pawson (CB Editions) is a book I’d been anticipating since reading her This Is the Place to Be. Strange, at times disturbing, often hilarious and always thoughtful, this is one of those books that (thankfully) defies description.

If Celebration is historical fiction at its most spare, Winterberg’s Last Journey by Czech writer Jaroslav Rudiš (German, translated by Kris Best/Jantar Publishing) is the exact opposite. Ambitious, eccentric, and filled with detail, it follows a 99 year-old man and his male nurse as they travel the railways with the aid of 1913 railway guide. What could possibly go wrong?

Children of the Ghetto I: My Name is Adam by Lebanese author Elias Khoury who also died this year (translated by Humphrey Davies/Archipelago Books) is the final Palestinian themed work on my list. This is a challenging and rewarding novel about a man born in the ghetto of Lydda during the Nakba that examines complex questions of identity.

Star 111 by Lutz Seiler (German, translated by Tess Lewis/NYRB Imprints)is the autobiographically inspired story of a young East German would-be poet’s experiences among an eccentric group of idealists in Berlin in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Wall. I was familiar with Seiler’s poetry before reading this, but I liked this novel so much that it lead me to follow up with his essays and the work of other poets important to him—the best kind of expanding reading experience.

Mauro Javier Cárdenas’ third novel American Abductions (Dalkey Archive) imagines the latest iteration of his hero Antonio in a future in which Latin American migrants are systematically sought out, separated from the children and deported. With a stream of single sentence chapters, he creates a tale that is both fun and uncomfortably too close for comfort. Quite an achievement!

Last but not least, my two favourite books this year are Hungarian:

In The End by Attila Bartis (translated by Judith Sollosy/Archipelago Books), a fifty-two year old photographer looks back on his life—his successes and his failures. He reflects on his relationship with his mother, his move to Budapest with his father in the early 1960s following her death, life under Communism and the secrets held by those around him, and the role the camera played in his life. Presented in short chapters, like photographs in prose each with its “punctum,” the 600+ pages of this book just fly by.

Like Attila Bartis, Andrea Tompa also comes from the ethnically Hungarian community of Romania’s Transylvania region and now lives in Budapest. Her novel Home (translated by Jozefina Komporaly/Istros Books) follows a woman travelling to a school reunion, but it is much more. It is a novel about language, about what it means to belong, to have a home and a mother tongue. It’s probably not surprising that my two favourite novels involve protagonists in mid-life, looking at where they are and how they got there. As to why they’re both Hungarian—I suppose I’ll have to read more Hungarian literature in the new year to answer that.

So that is my 2024 wrap up. I’d like to think 2025 will be better than I fear it will, but at least I know there are countless good books to look forward to.

Happy New Year!

Memory is a wound in the soul that never heals: Children of the Ghetto I: My Name is Adam by Elias Khoury

I want to clarify things for myself first. What I write now, and what I shall write, isn’t a novel or an autobiography and it isn’t addressed to anyone. It would be logical not to have it published as a book, but I don’t know. I shall let myself address itself as it desires, without rules, I will not change names to make myself think that I am writing a work of literature, and I shan’t cobble together a framework. I shall tell things as I told them to my young friend.

These are the directives the narrator of the first volume of Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto sets for himself as he abandons his past literary ambitions to dedicate himself to his own story. But as he allows memory, investigation, and reflection to guide his pen, he is inadvertently, and unintentionally, moving toward something much grander even if the result, My Name is Adam is presented as an unedited collection of writings never intended for publication. In a post-dated fictional introduction, Khoury claims that these notebooks were passed on to him after the death of Adam Dannoun, a Palestinian born falafel seller living in New York City, by a mutual acquaintance, Sarang Lee, who was the young friend Adam refers to above and a student of Khoury’s. By his own admission, Adam himself was neither a friend nor an admirer of the famed Lebanese novelist. It was his contention that Khoury had “stolen” the stories of his friends and used them to write his epic novel Gate of the Sun which had then been turned into a movie. When Khoury comes to possess Adam’s texts—which include a series of attempted approaches to a novel he had hoped to write, along with an extended autobiographical effort that combines remembered detail with information gathered from a range of sources—his first inclination is to rework the material into a formal novel and pass it off as his own. At the last minute though, he decides to simply send Adam’s writing, as is, to his publisher in Beirut.

The resulting novel is a masterful, unconventional work, and a complex, multilayered meditation on the nature of memory—individual and collective—truth, and the search for meaning. Adam is a man trying to find himself within the history of his family and his own people. Although he is only in his fifties, he has already decided he wants to die, but first he needs to write his own story, not for posterity but for his own ends. He had long dreamed of writing a novel based on the tragic fate of seventh century Yemini poet Waddah al-Yaman, a man driven to a silent death, buried alive for love—an effort preserved in its formative stages in the earliest sections of My Name is Adam. But this task is set aside for his personally directed endeavour as the result of two events: an unexpected meeting with Blind Ma’moun, an important figure from his childhood who reveals an unsettling truth about his parents, and the screening of the film based on Gate of the Sun in which he sees the story of Dalia, a woman he once loved. He realizes that he must reclaim his story, and that of his friends, from the darkness of the past and the distortions of literary accounts.

I don’t like playing games with life. We aren’t heroes of novels that our fates and stories should be played around with like that. I’m not a child and I hate heroes. I’m just a man who has tried to live and has discovered the impossibility of doing so. I’m not saying life has no meaning, because meaning has no meaning and looking for it seems to be boring and trivial. I’m a man who’s lived all his life in the postponed and the temporary.

Yet, to resolve this suspended state, even if he is only writing toward his own death, the tale he will need to address is one that involves loss, historical tragedy, assumed identity, and ultimately, self-imposed exile from his homeland.

The central focus of Children of the Ghetto I: My Name is Adam is the brutal massacre at the city of Lydda in July 1948 and the trials of the months that followed when the remaining Palestinian survivors were forced to live in an area enclosed within barbed wire fences, described, by the Jewish Israeli soldiers guarding them, as the “ghetto.” Adam, thought to be the first child born within this space—hence his unconventional name—was an infant during this period, but he grew up as the child of a honoured martyr and carried with him a legacy born of the stories told to him by his mother and many others. Blind Ma’moun’s late revelation shatters the foundations of his identity (even if it was something he was never quite at ease with) and drives him to work his way back to lay bare the details of one of the many horrifying and disturbing incidents that accompanied the forced formation of the new Jewish state. When the IDF moved into Lydda—an ancient town recognized as the martyrdom site of a figure revered by Orthodox Christians and Muslims alike, Saint George or Al-Khadr—hundreds of residents were killed and 50,000 were forcibly displaced. But, that is just the beginning, Adam knows, recalling, Blind Ma’moun’s powerful New York University lecture some fifty years or so after the massacre:

“I shall not fall into the trap of saying that the Nakba was a unique historical event. History, ancient and modern, is a series of catastrophes afflicting numerous peoples. I might tell you the story of the corpses we had to collect from the alleyways, fields, and houses of Lydda, or I might tell you about the men who were executed in al-Tantoura and how the soldiers of Israel’s Alexandroni Brigade ordered the Palestinian men of the village to dig their own graves using their hands—but what benefit would there be in that? The issue isn’t just the crime of the expulsion of the Palestinians from their land, because a bigger crime followed—the crime of the imposition of silence on an entire people. . . the silence imposed by the victor on the vanquished through the power of the language of the Jewish victim, which dominated the world, meaning the West, following the crimes of the Second World War and the savagery of the Nazi Holocaust. No one listened to the cries of the Palestinians, who died and were dispossessed in silence. This is why literature came to forge a new language for the victim, or in other words to proclaim a literature of silence, and to take us, with Mahmoud Darwish, to ‘wherever the wind blows.’”

As a child of the Nakba, Adam believes that only by going back to his own origins can he hope to make sense of where he comes from and who he is, and begin to understand the relationships and choices that have shaped his life. His autobiographical journey may have started with a cynical attitude toward the notion of “meaning,” but as he fills the pages of his notebooks with memories and research, the more existential questions he asks, of himself and those he loved. It is not just the unspeakable pains his mother endured or the secrets that may have been kept from him that trouble his inquiry, he is also struck by the resilience and resourcefulness of the inhabitants of the Lydda ghetto who are forced to secure their own food and water, and share limited resources and accommodation. He wonders at the human capacity to keep living against the odds.

Because this a work that evokes the often unstructured gathering and reworking of remembered elements, “derived from the scraps of stories that I patch together with the glue of pain and arrange using the probabilities of memory,” Adam’s narrative is one that tends to circle back on itself, digging deeper, and going farther with each turn, while bringing up references to aspects of his youth and adult life that he continually places aside as “a story for later.” If that sounds frustrating, it is not, for the momentum is maintained as he pushes closer to a fuller picture of the extent of the massacre, the deprivation that ensued, and the deeply buried scars borne by those who survived. And, of course, in light of the current situation in Gaza, the parallels are clear even though, in 1948, the displaced still had a place to go and the escaped had a place to run to.

My Name is Adam is an imaginative, prescient novel that lives within the literary, artistic and historical threads of Palestinian history. Adam is likewise well-versed in Arabic and Israeli literature, while at the same time being aware of himself as both a protagonist and an insecure writer. “Am I merely a story, fashioned out of words?” he asks. He is much more. And his story, beyond his early years in the Lydda ghetto, will cross paths with that of the occupier—he will change his identity and pass as an Israeli Jew (“from the ghetto,” implying Warsaw) for a period of time, revealing his truth only for love. But that is, one would guess, primarily a tale for book two. In the meantime, as he is composing his autobiographical account, in wintery New York City, years after leaving the Middle East, he is writing to reframe a Palestinian identity that goes beyond simply making falafel and other authentic dishes. He is writing, he says, to forget. Perhaps he also is preparing to make peace with the past, but if so, that too awaits the second volume.

Children of the Ghetto I: My Name is Adam by Elias Khoury is translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies and published by Archipelago Books. Children of the Ghetto II: Star of the Sea will be released in November 2024.

God is in the details: Among the Almond Trees – A Palestinian Memoir by Hussein Barghouthi

Nothing comes to the surface in solitude except that which is already deep within us. I suddenly became aware of many fears. In front of me was a meadow, ploughed and moonlit, reaching all the way to the wall of the Monastery. And a human being, any human being, is afraid of emptiness. I was afraid to enter the meadow that was exposed from every direction. There were some olive saplings that looked like faint shadows, like ancient monks in their dark habits…

In his mid-forties, with the bittersweet weight of a cancer diagnosis on his heart and mind, Palestinian poet, writer, and philosopher Hussein Barghouthi made the decision to return to the village near Ramallah where he was born after what he describes as thirty years of self-imposed exile. If “bittersweet” seems an unlikely adjective for such a serious circumstance, it is appropriate only because Barghouthi was initially led to believe his symptoms might be indicative of AIDS—a condition he feared he would have most certainly passed on to his wife and young son. So when news that he was, in fact, dealing with cancer came, he greeted it with joy. At least at first. But as someone who had, by his own admission, “perfected ‘beginnings,’” his journey home would be an “imperfect ending.” Among the Almond Trees, his meditation on life, death and rebirth, captures his thoughts and experiences as this ending nears.

Barghouthi’s only other work currently available in English translation is The Blue Light, a weird and wild account of his years as a graduate student in Seattle in the late 80s and early 90s, interspersed with recollections from his childhood and earlier adult years. But with the off-beat urban terrain he frequents, the eccentric, marginalized characters he befriends, and the exploration of mysticism and madness that he pursues, it can best be described, as I noted in my review, as a memoir with hallucinations.  By contrast, Among the Almond Trees, composed around the same time, has a much more contemplative, grounded tone. This is still a work with strong spiritual, mystical and philosophical elements, but here he is focused on memory, family mythology, and the longing to understand himself within the cycles of life and death. All of this is deeply rooted in the land.

Having intentionally kept himself apart from the village of his birth for so many years, Braghouthi’s return inspires him to embrace his ancestral connection this location, with its mountains, valleys and trees. He is seeking to reinforce a spiritual connection to his family history, a line which reaches into the past and will extend into the future. Central to this exploration is Qaddura, an uncle of his family’s, who had adopted his mother when she was orphaned. Qaddura is a near mythical character, an imposing figure, known to have been a robber, who lived, it was said, with his brother in an abandoned Byzantine monastery on the mountain above the village. The stories of Qaddura and Snuffie, the woman who was married to both brothers in succession, run through this meditation, and the Monastery itself, as an actual ruin and as an inner mystical space, is an important image. The other key figure is the almond tree, notably the orchard outside his mother’s house.

This is, then, a lyrical monologue steeped in memory and emotion (including the occasional exclamation mark), woven with the history and folktales of his family and his people, insights drawn from Sufism, Buddhism, Egyptian mysticism and Western literature, and threaded with lines of poetry and song—especially that of Mahmoud Darwish and the Lebanese singer Feiruz. Much of the “action,” such as it is, takes place on moonlit nights, like the account of a nighttime pilgrimage Barghouthi makes to the Monastery during which he reflects not only on the importance of this site in his family lore, but on his childhood memories of the mountain, its promises and legends. Yet there are also the realities of the present day—the settlements ever expanding in the valley, the ongoing second intifada, and the disease spreading through his body that often keeps his moonlit wanderings closer to home:

As for why I am now recalling these tales of the Mountain while walking, as always, among the moonlit almond orchards around our house, barely breathing and facing the spectre of death because of a new swelling in my lungs—that is another matter. Perhaps with these tales I can breathe the air of other places and other times in order to sense another moonlit space inside my being and return to whatever inner monastery there was in my spirit that would grant me the strength of beginnings so as to face the cruelty of endings. For imagination is power.

Subtitled A Palestinian Memoir, Among the Almond Trees is, of course, more than one man’s search to come to terms with his “beginnings” to prepare for what is coming, it is the story of a husband and father thinking beyond his death, no matter how painful the idea may be. As someone with a longstanding interest in Buddhism and Sufism and ideas of reincarnation, Barghouthi looks to his young son Áthar, as a guide, so that he may “return to the dormant child” within, “so as to walk the earth as a child-prophet, if not in this life then in the next one.” He marvels at the enchanted eyes through which a child sees the world, and the ability to ask, as Áthar does, magical questions even when an Israeli warplane is passing overhead. Peace is, he knows, elusive, but when he decides he wants to build a house for his wife and son to live in, below the Mountain, he has come full circle and will be leaving them in the best place he knows of. Rather, he won’t be leaving them at all, he will be resting nearby, among the almond trees

As a poetic text rich with literary and traditional allusions, Among the Almond Trees benefits from (but does not strictly require) a detailed translator’s introduction and extensive footnotes. Ibrahim Muhawi, as a Mahmoud Darwish scholar and a folklorist, is perfectly suited to bring to the reader’s attention some of the finer details of the material Barghouthi is referencing. This is a short work—the text is only about 80 pages long—but filled with so much wisdom and beauty, even with the shadow of cancer looming over it, that it welcomes and rewards rereading on its own and alongside The Blue Light.

Among the Almond Trees: A Palestinian Memoir by Hussein Barghouthi is translated from the Arabic by Ibrahim Muhawi and published by Seagull Books.

Poetry as an act of resistance: A River Dies of Thirst by Mahmoud Darwish

A great poet is one who makes me small when I write, and great when I read.

A River Dies of Thirst, the last volume of Mahmoud Darwish’s work to be released in Arabic, just eight months before his death in 2008, offers a precious opportunity to spend a little more time with a great poet as he casts a sorrowful eye at his beloved Palestine, and reflects on love, life, time, and memory. But more than anything this collection of poems, reflections, and journal fragments is a meditation on what it means to be a poet. And for him that is a distinctive vision, for Darwish was not only one of the most remarkable and humane poets of our time, but he gave  voice to the Palestinian consciousness and was someone who believed that “every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.”

To read this final collection now, more than eleven months into the longest, deadliest sustained attack on Palestinian citizens since the creation of the Israeli state, is to hear that voice of resistance resounding so clearly that it is almost unsettling. So many of the pieces here feel as if they could have been written yesterday, beginning with the opening poem “The girl/The scream”:

On the seashore is a girl, and the girl has a family
and the family has a house. And the house has two windows
.       and a door.
And in the sea is a warship having fun
catching promenaders on the seashore:
Four, five, seven
fall down on the sand. And the girl is saved for a while
because a hazy hand
a divine hand of some sort helps her, so she calls out: ‘Father
Father! Let’s go home, the sea is not for people like us!’
Her father doesn’t answer, laid out on his shadow
windward of the sunset
blood in the palm trees, blood in the clouds

The girl becomes the endless scream, echoing without echo across the land, as an aircraft returns to bomb the house with two windows and a door, silencing her family’s story.

This heartbreaking  image is followed by a series of poems and short prose pieces that speak to war and Palestinian suffering in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank. The uncanny timelessness of his poetry betrays the truth: there is nothing new about what we are witnessing today save for the intensity. And as Darwish reminds it, the violence is not just directed at people—it is an attack on the land, on nature, and the memory held in the soil. Consider the olive tree, the venerable grandmother-like figure, “modest mistress of the hillside.” She is spoken of with reverence: “In her restrained silvery greenness is a colour too shy to declare itself openly, a glance toward something beyond description, for she is neither green nor silver. She is the colour of peace, if peace needs a colour to distinguish it.” It is message lost on the occupying forces:

But these soldiers, these new soldiers, surround her with bulldozers and uproot her. They crush our grandmother, so that now her branches are in the earth and her roots in the air. She did not weep or shout, but one of her grandsons who witnessed the execution, threw a stone at a soldier and was martyred alongside her. When the soldiers left triumphantly, we buried him there, in the deep hole, our grandmother’s cradle. For some reason we were convinced that after a while he would become an olive tree, spiky and – green!

(from “The second olive tree”)

As a late work by a poet who is simultaneously conscious of his timelessness and his mortality, it feels as if Darwish is allowing himself to focus his attention on what is most important to him as he knows, not necessarily that his own end is as near as it would happen to be, but that time, and the heart, has its limits. As such, the themes that recur throughout these pieces reflect elements common to all his work, but are tinged with the melancholy that comes with age and a long life marked by exile and the ongoing occupation of his homeland.

Amid the poems that reference war and occupation directly—the more political pieces—are quieter reflections on the poetic existence, that is, on poetry as a way of being and engaging with world. Darwish is a poet immersed in his environment, the sights, scents and sounds all echoing longing and loss, but now the atmosphere evoked is more ephemeral, his awareness more attuned to the spaces between sleep and waking, in the flickering shadows where words might be found:

Leaves in summer whisper modestly, call out shyly, as if to me alone, stealing me away from the burden of material existence to a place of delicate radiance: there, behind the hills, and beyond the imagination, where the visible equals the invisible, I float outside myself in sunless light. After a short sleep like an awakening, or an awakening like a short sleep, the rustling of the trees restores me to myself, cleansed of misgivings and apprehensions.

(from “Rustling”)

There is also a more direct engagement with the idea of writing  poetry and recollections of his past encounters with other prominent poets, their conversations and interactions. And the two sections of fragments that round out this collection contain many wise observations about the  life, identity, perception and, of course, poetry.

With a total of 127 short pieces—including fully finished poems (both prose poems and verse), commentaries, and assorted observations and aphorisms—A River Dies of Thirst is a collection that may be best read slowly, taking in a little at a time. There is so much beauty in the language and so much to reflect on. It might also serve as a good introduction for those who have yet to hear Darwish’s masterful voice. And this certainly is the time to listen.

A River Dies of Thirst by Mahmoud Darwish is translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham and published by Archipelago Books.

Suspended between two lives: Specters by Radwa Ashour

To the young, because they are young, everything looks bigger, taking on proportions relative to their age and to the space their bodies occupy, amidst other bodies heavier, taller, and broader than theirs. The tallest person is the oldest, and the uncle or aunt who has reached the age of thirty is of such an advanced age that it is difficult to grasp the concept of this “thirty,” based on the five fingers, or even ten, that the child will hold out to indicate his age. As for the grandfather or grandmother, that’s another story, combining reality and fantasy, the perceptible and the obscure, for the stories they tell of the past place them between two worlds, one foot here and the other there, with this mysterious “there” reaching into a past of which God alone knows the beginning and the end.

Scepters, by Egyptian novelist and academic Radwa Ashour, is a work that is ever seeking to place itself in relation to time and place, history and memoir, fiction and metafiction. Complex, multilayered, and dynamic, it explores the many ways truths can be approached, examined, and understood. This novel opens with the portrait of Shagar, a strong-willed woman, widowed young, who refused to remarry, raised three children on her own and became the matriarch of her community with, later in life, an uncanny ability to hear the voices of ghosts. The story then turns to her great granddaughter, and namesake, whose unusual appellation (meaning “tree”) was given at the insistence of her grandfather despite strong opposition in the family. As such, the name would align her with her paternal grandfather whose “inexhaustible supply of stories” would have a significant and lasting influence on her life.

But then, the narrative voice shifts. Radwa, the author, enters and immediately raises questions:

What happened? Why did I leap so suddenly from Shagar the child to middle-aged Shagar? I reread what I have written, mull it over, stare at the lighted screen, and wonder whether I should continue the story of young Shagar, or return to her great grandmother, or trace the path of her descendants to arrive, once again, at the grandchild. And the ghosts—should I consign them to marginal obscurity, leaving them to hover on the periphery of the text, or admit them fully and elucidate some of their stories?

She considers erasing what she’s written and starting over with her own story. She then debates whether she should keep Shagar and interweave two separate stories into one. “Who is Shagar?” she asks. Before the chapter is out, Shagar, the now fifty year-old professor of history is back. But not for long.

Moving between memoir, novel-in-progress, metafictional asides, and historical research, Scepters tells the story of two women born on the same day, growing up in Cairo on opposite sides of the Nile. One will become a novelist, the other an historian writing a book called The Scepters about the 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin in Palestine. They will attend the same university, and become involved to varying degrees with the student protests of the 1970s and 80s. However, although both author and character share birthdates and professions, if in different disciplines, and are writing books with similar names, this is not autofiction, nor is Shagar an alter ego. Shagar remains single and much of her story reflects her need to find meaning through political action, and through the lives of her students and a young boy who lives next door. There is an inherent emptiness that she will not find an answer to until the close of the novel. Radwa, by contrast, marries Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, exiled from his native country in 1967, and then deported from Egypt ten years later when their son Tamim is an infant. Much of her personal story recounts the complications—emotional, practical, and bureaucratic—of trying to maintain family life divided between countries during the precious time afforded by summer and holiday breaks. As such, it is a vital and deeply personal complement to Barghouti’s own account of the same period in his moving memoir I Saw Ramallah.

Generally, the fictional and nonfiction streams that comprise Specters unfold in alternating chapters, one or two at a time. Shagar’s academic life, as a student and as a professor, is central to her story. As is her often disruptive existence within the academic environment. She is political, active in protests, and will spend time in prison, briefly during her graduate years and again later. It is something that she does not necessarily see as a negative:

In September 1981, when she was dismissed from the university, she didn’t panic; after all, she was no longer under pressure to write a thesis or dissertation. There was nothing in the decision that threatened a transformation in the course of her life.

In prison there was ample time to consider the particulars of a life dispersed randomly in the press of daily concerns. In prison there is time, because the days and the nights as well, take their time: each hour has its own sphere, through which she passes in stoic endurance, and into which the succeeding hour does not crowd. Perseverant, country hours that know none of that feverish haste, the constantly ringing telephone, or the harried pushing and shoving in the city’s streets and its overflowing buses, its chaotic rhythms.

Shagar is determined, self-reliant, but not without doubts. About her students, and about changes she observes in the youth. The motivation to political protest of her own younger years now seems to pull promising young people to more radical and dangerous pursuits. Eventually she will turn her attention fully to her research and the subject she has wanted to explore since she first switched from ancient to modern history in the final year of undergrad studies: the massacre at Deir Yassin.

Shagar’s story naturally contains more direct historical and documentary materials—from the notebook filled with reflection her grandfather leaves her to testimonials of survivors of the massacre. But of course, the research is ultimately Radwa’s, a fact that leads at one point to a discussion of her approach to writing her well-known historical novel set in late fifteenth century Granada. This is but one of many places in which the lines between memoir and fiction are openly crossed. Shagar is someone she sometimes loses track of and she finds herself wondering what Shagar is up to or what she would think about something. The explicit and playful metafictional element of this inventive novel within a memoir (or is it a memoir within a novel?) is not only essential to its coherency, but the key to its richness and depth.  Blurring the boundaries between the personal and the political—witnessed in Shagar’s life as much as in Radwa’s—highlights the inability to separate the creative process from the research involved or the characters created. Yet, set against the backdrop of ongoing protest, conflict, and instability—in Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq—real lives can only find so much anonymity through fiction. The memoirist can chose what and how much she wishes to reveal, whereas for the documentarian, truths, especially the voices of survivors of violence, must be respected and preserved as faithfully as possible. These are the sorts of concerns Radwa Ashour seeks to balance in Specters. Where one life lived ends and another imagined begins cannot be clearly defined with a simple shift from first to third person, for such shifts occur, on occasion, within each thread, but at the end of the day, one is left to wonder if it is ultimately through the lens of fiction that ghosts can ever truly be heard.

Specters by Radwa Ashour is translated from the Arabic by Barbara Romaine and published by Interlink Books.

“There is something priming itself in these shadows” Strangers in Light Coats: Selected Poems, 2014 – 2020 by Ghassan Zaqtan

The wooden bell that hangs in the dark is struck.
Is struck.
No one sees it
but it is struck.
No one is there
and the bell is struck.

It is struck on the front porch of the dream and in its shadowed corridors.

There is something priming itself in these shadows.

There is someone waiting.

Natures that never made it past the line are being shaped in vain.

A blind creature walks on air and collides with butterflies.

(from “The wooden bell”)

The poetry of Ghassan Zaqtan elicits images that seem to emerge, take shape, shift, and evaporate on the page. As if deeply rooted in the soil, yet present only in passing, and in the memories they inspire.  His poems are home to rivers, birds, strangers, and ghosts of the dead. A chorus of voices rise and fall away. The Palestinian poet bears witness. To the spirit of his people, the beauty of his homeland, and the long history of displacement and conflict. But he does so with the same folkloric melancholy that characterizes his prose, the novellas that address political and personal loss through characters and settings that blur, to a greater or lesser extent, the boundary between fact and fable, myth and materiality.

Strangers in Light Coats, his latest collection to be published in English, gathers a selection of poems written between 2014 and 2020. Although drawn from work originally published in four volumes, Robin Moger’s sensitive translation presents the selected poems as a cohesive work divided into six sections. Together, they unfold against a backdrop of mountains and valleys, in a melancholic world shaped by memories, dreams, and the painful reality of occupation and war. His poems speak to lost lovers, reimagine a collective history that is fading, wonder about the fate of exiles, conjure up djinns, and call out to the forces of nature:

River, river,
.  soften your breeze
as the daughters wade the fords into the twin darknesses
.  of temptation and patience;
be still as the muezzin’s daughter crosses at the ford, be
as a carpet laid out for her by the birds
.  as she steps down, out of his voice,
.     into the prayers and the dawn.

(from “The river hymn”)   (30)

War is an ever present motif, both as a remembered event, and as a possibility that is never far away. In the lull there is an abiding unease, the silence of waiting for something to happen or the inability to find silence at all, as in “It happened during the mountain war,” which tells of a man who is haunted by a memory that carries with it sounds, smells, and the sensation of the weight on his shoulders of “the body of a young man heavy with death”:

This happened in autumn,
during the mountain war that no one wants to remember,
the war in which many were killed
before it was covered over by other, more senseless wars,
the war which they, whenever they dug to bury it,
would find another war down there taking shape,
the war which was dropped from memories
like an eighth daughter who should have been a son.
In his solitude, even he would forget those weeks and push them aside.

This is a strangely beautiful and deeply unsettling collection. One that raises questions about what history and territoriality mean under occupation, in migration, in exile. Memory, imagined and reimagined through a mythic and elegiac landscape reaches for possible answers at a time when Palestine and the Palestinian people are facing ever increasing uncertainty.

Strangers in Light Coats: Selected Poems, 2014 – 2020 by Ghassan Zaqtan is translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger and published by Seagull Books.

“I do not live in a place. I live in a time.” I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti

When his name is finally called after waiting for hours, he grabs his small bag and steps on to the Allenby Bridge to cross, for “the first time in thirty summers,” from Jordan to the West Bank:

Is this a political moment? Or an emotional one? Or social? A practical moment? A surreal one? A moment of the body? Or of the mind? The wood creaks. What has passed of life is shrouded in a mist that both hides and reveals. Why do I wish I could get rid of this bag? There is very little water under the bridge. Water without water. As though the water apologized for its presence on this boundary between two histories, two faiths, two tragedies. The scene is of rock. Chalk. Military. Desert. Painful as a toothache.

Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s thoughts are flooded with questions as crosses into the land he has been barred from entering for three decades. The year is 1996. His account of his visit, one that necessarily looks back on his many years of exile and the changes to his homeland that confront him on his return, is vividly captured in his memoir I Saw Ramallah. First published in Arabic in 1997 (and three years later in Ahdaf Soueif’s English translation), this is a work that speaks passionately and unapologetically to the reality of existence of the Palestinian people today, of their displacement and their lives under the Occupation.

Barghouti does not enter the West Bank alone. He carries the weight of the memory of the long years of exile, of family and friends scattered near and far. And he’s haunted by the ghosts of all of those who are buried in distant lands, those who never managed to return, either as a visitor or as a resident, especially his older brother Mounif:

After how many more thirty years will the ones who never came back return? What does my return, or the return of any other individual mean? It is their return, the return of the millions, that is the true return. Our dead are still in the cemeteries of others. Our living are still clinging to foreign borders. On the bridge, that strange border unmatched on any of the world’s five continents, you are overwhelmed by your memories of standing at the borders of others.

As he takes in the altered landscape, the ever expanding Israeli settlements, and the once familiar hills, now alien, the connection and disconnection is profound. He stays with a family member, explores the city, and visits his birthplace, Deir Ghassanah, where he reads poetry to an assemblage of villagers unfamiliar with poetry readings but responding to his words and images nonetheless.

But, of course, thirty years does not vanish just in the act of returning. As much as Palestine and her people have changed and are continuing to be changed under the forces of Occupation, Barghouti’s life has been impacted by his identity no matter where he has lived. Nor is it his first return from exile, so to speak.  In the 1970s, his involvement in earlier student protests against Sadat in Cairo led to his forced separation from his wife and infant son when all non-Egyptian participants were deemed to be infiltrators and removed from the country. The prohibition lasted seventeen years, his family-time suddenly telescoped into winter and summer holiday breaks wherever he was living at the time. By the time he was able to return to live in Egypt, his child was long out of diapers and ready to start shaving! And when that exile within exile came to an end he realized:

You do not arrive unchanged at the moment of joy dreamt of for so long across the years. The years are on your shoulders. They do their slow work on you without ringing any bells for you.

Now, one of his primary goals during his time in Ramallah is to obtain the necessary permit to allow his son Tamim to finally see the land of his ancestors.

Moving, poetic, and beautifully written, this is, nonetheless, a narrative dotted with question marks. Barghouti regularly questions the descriptions, the emotions, and the meanings that he grasps at as he tries to articulate the strange in between state in which has found himself over and over throughout his life—in Occupied Palestine, Cairo, Budapest, Amman and elsewhere. So many places, so many pillows beneath his head:

My relationship with place is in truth a relationship with time. I move in patches of time, some I have lost and some I possess for a while and then I lose because I am without a place.  I try to regain a personal time that has passed. Nothing that is absent ever comes back complete. Nothing is recaptured as it was.

A memoir recounting the return to one’s homeland after thirty years, is necessarily a story of exile, of the Diaspora, and of the way the Occupation has closed in on the land and claimed the freedom of the Palestinian people. Focused as he is on the present moment, that of his precious time in Ramallah, Barghouti is also continually looking back—to the Nakba, to the 1967 War, to the Intifada. Yet to read this book in 2024, one cannot but look ahead through further wars to the escalating incursions into the Occupied West Bank, to the conflict in Gaza. To genocide. For a book first published twenty-seven years ago, it reads like it could have been written yesterday. Netanyahu was prime minister then, he is still prime minister now.

After the popular Intifada on the land of Palestine we went to Oslo. We are always adapting to the condition of the enemy. Since ’67 we have been adapting. And here is Benyamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, calming America’s fears for the current agreement by saying that the Arabs will in the end adapt to his harshness because they always adapt to whatever they have to.

And what if they refuse to adapt? When speaking to the spirit and resilience of his people, Barghouti often calls attention to the Palestinian inclination to seek the comic in the tragic, but he is keenly aware that for the generation after his—those who grew up in the aftermath of the 1967 war—the tone has shifted, something he witnesses in the appeal of resistance movements: Fatah, Communism, the Front, and Hamas. This is the legacy of the Occupation itself.

I Saw Ramallah is not exactly a work infused with nostalgia. It is searching and existential in nature, a memoir tinged with sadness and a measure of grief. And as he nears the end of his account, he refuses to hold his anger at bay. He is blunt in his assessment of his people’s circumstances and the history that has been thrust upon them, as a man born four years before the Nakba who, now in his fifties, is determined to ensure his son’s right to a space in a land that now carries two conflicting and interconnected stories:

But I cannot accept any talk of two equal rights to the land, for I do not accept a divinity in the heights running political life on this earth. Despite all this, I was never particularly interested in the theoretical discussions around who has the right to Palestine, because we did not lose Palestine in a debate, we lost it to force. When we were Palestine, we were not afraid of the Jews. We did not hate them, we did not make an enemy of them. Europe of the Middle Ages hated them, but not us. Ferdinand and Isabella hated them, but not us. Hitler hated them, but not us. But when they took our entire space and exiled us from it they put both us and themselves outside the law of equality. They became an enemy, they became strong; we became displaced and weak. They took the space with the power of the sacred and with the sacredness of power, with the imagination, and with geography.

This is an important, affecting, and highly readable memoir for anyone who wishes to have a clearer understanding of the situation in the Middle East. But, if you have read other Palestinian literature, it may sound eerily familiar. These stories are not new; they have been expressed in literary works—poetry, fiction, nonfiction—for many decades now and, as we have seen, Palestinian voices continue to refuse to be silenced.

I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti  with a Foreword by Edward Said, is translated from the Arabic by Ahdaf Soueif  and published by Anchor Books. In the UK, a new edition is forthcoming from Daunt Books in August 2024.