Tag: Palestine

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.

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.

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.

“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.

Lament for a lost land: Journal of an Ordinary Grief by Mahmoud Darwish

A place is not only a geographical area; it’s also a state of mind. And trees are not just trees; they are the ribs of childhood. The tears flowed freely from my fingers as the bus passed quickly by. Upon our return, the sadness of my childhood came back. This dream standing before me, why didn’t I just wrap it around myself even once so I could say I have felt the joy that kills? The soldiers were guarding the dream, but I will enter it when they sleep.

2017-02-09-15-32-49Journal of an Ordinary Grief, the first of three major works of prose spanning the career of late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), is a work of intense, heartbreaking loss and pain. Yet this collection of autobiographical essays is more than simple memoir. He chronicles his family’s history, meditates on the meaning of homeland, and focuses on the horror visited upon Arabs in the occupied territories. He talks about being under house arrest, his confrontations with Israeli interrogators, and his time in prison. He talks of the life of the refugee and the exile. As the translator, Ibrahim Muhawi, points out in his Foreword, Darwish makes it clear that Palestine is his cause. He equates his self with his country; the pronouns he uses—I or you—can represent his own personal experience or those of his people. Here the poetic is merged with the political, and the memoir becomes a requiem for a nation, up close and immediate: “In Journal, as in all of Darwish, we are placed in the middle of an encounter between writing and history where writing gives shape to the homeland.”

He approaches the telling, as a poet, with a lyrical force that levels one powerful image after another. The opening piece, “The Moon Did Not Fall into the Well,” sets out as a dialogue, presumably between a father and son:

—What are you doing, father?

—I’m searching for my heart, which fell away that night.

—Do you think you’ll find it here?

—Where else am I going to find it? I bend to the ground and pick it up piece by piece just as the women of the fellahin pick olives in October, one olive at a time.

In the end we realize that this is the poet’s younger self interrogating his older self. The latter speaks of his family, driven into exile in 1948, only to return to find themselves exiles in their own land. Childlike curiosity meets the sorrow born of experience and loss, wisdom and despair.

Attention to the quality and shape of the sentence informs Darwish’s poetic prose. He frequently, and efficiently, employs a dramatic dialogue in a number of his essays. The title piece is largely composed of a series of “conversations”—commonly ironic in tone—that cast light on the political dynamics of racial discrimination and oppression. The impact is strikingly effective:

—Where are you from, brother?

—From Gaza.

—What did you do?

—I threw a grenade at the conqueror’s car, but I blew myself up instead.

—And . . .

—They arrested me and charged me with attempted suicide.

—You confessed, of course.

—Not exactly. I told them the attempted suicide didn’t succeed. So they liberated me out of mercy and sentenced me to life.

—But you were intending to kill, not to commit suicide?

—It seems you don’t know Gaza. Distance there is an imaginary thing.

—I don’t understand.

—It seems you don’t know Gaza. Where are you from?

—From Haifa.

—And what did you do?

—I threw a poem at the conquerors’ car, and it blew them up.

—And . . .

—They arrested me and charged me with mass murder.

And so it goes. Thus the reader/listener is brought into the heart of the political struggle. Later on in this piece, the narrator addresses his audience directly to illustrate the losses of basic freedoms he has experienced: You want to travel to Greece? You want to rent an apartment? You want to visit your mother on a feast day? Other voices enter and play devil’s advocate. There is bitterness and defiance running through the sections of this essay, but the language carries a frightening beauty: “They place you under arrest when you are committing a dream.”

The poetic spirit and sensibility with which Darwish explores the fate of Palestine, and what it means to live, as he does, as an exile in Israel, pushes this memoir closer to the heart, generating more emotional energy than a more conventional first-person narrative essay format would typically allow. As such, the reading experience becomes more intense as one moves through the essays. And, of course, this work is sadly as relevant today, as it was when it was first published in 1973—speaking not only to the roots of the ongoing tensions between Israel and Palestine, but to broader concerns facing Arab refugees forced out of divided and troubled homelands throughout the Middle East, and of those who dare to speak out who risk detention, or worse, in many states:

You write to your imaginary lover: “I wish you despair for you, my love, that you may excel for the desperate are creative. Don’t wait for me. Don’t wait for anyone. Wait for the thought; don’t wait for the thinker. Wait for the poem; don’t wait for the poet. Wait for the revolution; don’t wait for the revolutionary. The thinker may be wrong, the poet may lie, and the revolutionary may get tired. This is the despair I mean.”

By making individual experience universal, and personifying historical tragedy and loss, Mahmoud Darwish—though his poetry and his prose—stands witness to the fate of his people under occupation. “The homeland,” he claims, “is always at its most beautiful when it is on the other side of the barbed wire fence.” He grieves, and his grief is anything but ordinary.

Journal of an Ordinary Grief, translated by Ibrahim Muhawi, is published by Archipelago Books.

Ever returning: Describing the Past by Ghassan Zaqtan

She is my loss and she knows this. She is my absence and knows this too.

From the earliest passages, there is an abiding transience to the narrative flow of Ghassan Zaqtan’s novella, Describing the Past. The language is delicate, the imagery fragile and dream-like. The world his characters inhabit has an eerie timelessness. The past—immediate or distant—is tangible. Ghosts wander the streets, and memories are brought into being as ethereal images or objects that hold a vital presence in the room, breathe, come alive at night. We are among people who have been uprooted once and will be uprooted again; their dreams and recollections sustain them, give them something to hold on to.

ghassan_zaqtanZaqtan, a Palestinian poet, was born a refugee. In 1961, at the age of seven, his family was relocated (for the second time since 1948) from Beit Jala, in the West Bank, to the Karameh refugee camp across from Jericho, in the Jordan River Valley. But, as Fady Joudah indicates in his Foreword, the camp would be burned with the Israeli invasion in 1968. Zaqtan’s tale is set in this community, yet re-imagined and filtered through the chimerical memory of a place, like childhood itself, that no longer exists.

The narrative is carried by three separate voices—designated I, He, and She—each speaking in first person. The central narrator is nicknamed Christian (his mother was Christian, his father Muslim), and his friend, the other young man, is known as the Iraqi’s son after an uncle who identified himself as Iraqi due to his brief role helping the Iraqi Army at the end of the 1948 war, an experience he built into a sustaining myth that coloured his entire family’s identity. The young woman who holds their attention is, at the outset, married to an elderly man who takes her and her mother into his home. When he dies, she will marry the Iraqi’s son and bear him a child before he drowns, leaving her alone. As such, the outline of the plot is simple, much of it alluded to in the first chapter. However, the story is unwrapped slowly, moving back and forth in time, and relying on poetic imagery and the vagaries of memory to sketch out the spaces that exist between these three individuals.

And that is where the magic lies. In the opening section Christian inadvertently chances to see “her”, the young wife of the old man, naked in her room. He had come seeking some tea leaves for his mother and had not realized she was home. Transfixed by the sight of her body he watches her in hiding until she begins to sob and he runs away, terrified and exhilarated by what he has seen. Of course he must tell his friend, who beautifully describes the vividness of the account:

At first I didn’t believe it, it was not his voice. There was a strand of fantasy that glimmered in his words, some current of rash hunger and desire, of fear and fraud. Little by little, like dust growing slowly and insistently into heaps, she started to gather there in the voice toward the point of completion. She became clear and close. I saw her in his voice reclining nude and whole. Her knee flashed at a distance. At the centre of her figure a dark spot of light amassed, turning and breathing. I was there. I saw her in his voice with a clarity that did not exist for him; she was clearer and more complete in his voice than anything he had looked at and beheld.

The narrative glances forward and retreats in time. The voice of the Iraqi’s son who meets an early demise, disappears from the discourse about halfway through. But the dead are never gone. They are greeted in the street. They emerge from photographs. One has the sense of a world crowded with memories, individuals weighed down by what they have lost. The level, steadily-paced poetry of the language enhances this sensation. This novella, only 84 pages long, is best if savoured slowly, allowing the words to be absorbed.

As each of the narrators picks up the pieces of their own stories, the temporal distortion, shifting from chapter to chapter, can be disorienting. “Here” and “now” are terms without a fixed frame of reference. This is intensified because Christian, as the central narrator, rather than providing structure, is the most abstract and philosophical in his manner of being in the world. He is most sensitive to a past that extends beyond his experience. To ghosts. At one point his father had crept into forbidden territory in search of his village, only to find it in ruins, home now to a curtain of cacti and one remaining pomegranate tree. Stuffing his pockets with pomegranates he arrived home covered in juice, clutching one whole fruit:

He placed it on our only table, and the fruit stayed there. We were unable to wound it. We were afraid to cause it, or him, pain. It was in front of us—breathing and remembering—on that squat table, next the knife that my youngest sister had brought and about which we quickly forgot. It was impossible for us to go beyond that. The fruit was completely alive and necessary for him, his only means to make us believe him, to make us believe all those stories he had brought to us—of his house, his village and his land.

Our house, our village, our land.

There is a sense that the three young characters at the centre of Describing the Past are trapped, suspended in lives they cannot control. It is not clear how much time passes. Hopes and ambitions are fleeting when you face an uncertain future in a refugee camp—when the land you live on is shared with ghosts, haunted by memories, and liable to turn to dust without warning. Yet, circular, the dream-like narrative returns, in the end, to complete the fragmentary images that the set up by central narrator in the opening passages. The mood is gently haunting, beautiful and sad.

And it leaves you with chills.

Describing the Past by Ghassan Zaqtan is translated by Samuel Wilder and published by Seagull Books.

Conversing in verse: Voice Over by Breyten Breytenbach

when you die, Mahmoud
when your aorta thrashing
all sluggish and crinkled
like a purple snake bursts
because the lines can no longer
slither the perfect metaphor.

A selection of stunning new translations of the poems of Mahmoud Darwish posted today, March 13, on the blog Arabic Literature (in English) marking the late Palestinian poet’s birthday inspired me to take a little time to re-read Voice Over by Breyten Breytenbach. The South African writer and painter had last seen his friend and fellow poet in France only a few weeks prior to learning of Darwish’s death during open heart surgery in Houston, Texas, on August 9, 2008. He was on Gorée Island off the coast of Dakar in Senegal at the time and, as he travelled from there through Catalonia to Friesland to attend a literary festival, Breytenbach took the time to meditate on his friend’s passing and engage with his work reporting that it was “refreshing to be bathing in Mahmoud’s verses.” The twelve poems in this slender volume are a reflection on this time in the form of a poetic communion. As he notes in an afterword:

“MD had always been a prolific poet. One could interact with him forever. The present ‘collage’ touches upon transformed ‘variations’ of his work, at times plucked from different poems and then again by way of approaching a specific verse, with my own voice woven into the process. The images, and to an extent even the rhythms and the shaping, are his.”

voiceoverThe first poems play with images of death, burial and moving on, but the tone is not sombre. There is a distinct sense of a conversation not ended but continued beyond the grave, a call for a celebration of life – music, not weeping, and a glass raised high. Midway through the journey, the verses take a turn to the political with the plaintive call “we shall be a people” that echoes throughout the 6th piece and continues in the 7th where Breytenbach tells his friend:

identity is gospel talk. Mahmoud
when as in a dream you hear
what others tell
and imagine you understand/exist

to be is to move
through a spectrum of volcanoes
and the spectacle of wars
              and poetry in catastrophic times

blood
              and blood
                            and blood
in your homeland

Small but powerfully affecting, this collection of poetic engagements acts as a kindling of the spirit of a voice silenced too soon. My favourite piece in this collage, to use Breytenbach’s term, is the 8th and longest entry. Here the question of the possibility and validity of this communication across the boundaries of language, and of death itself, is explored. Here, for me, lies the heart of the grief and the expression of fellowship:

who is writing this poem face
by face      in black blood
neither raven’s ink nor voice
pressed from an errant tongue?
luck’s hand snatches everything from night

Mirage leads the wanderer through the wasting
so that he may continue hailing the holy crocodiles
Mirage seduces him with sweet words read
if you can       write if you can
read       water / water / water

and write this one line in the sand
that if it weren’t for Mirage
I’d long since have died    for it is
the traveler’s talisman that hope and despair
be twinned in the blood of poetry

Ah yes, twinned in the blood of poetry. A gift, verse to verse, this heartfelt collection is a treasure.

darwish1Voice Over: a nomadic conversation with Mahmoud Darwish by Breyten Breytenbach is published by Archipelago Books.

 

Mahmoud Darwish, March 13, 1941 – August 9, 2008