Each summer night in Nablus was just like the next: breezes pregnant with the scent of jasmine, dew and whiffs from the sewers. The municipality went to great pains: every morning the marketplace smelt like a freshly cut bouquet of the most fragrant flowers; however, by the time the afternoon rolled round—when the hustle and bustle had died down and the shops had closed and the rugs and carts had disappeared along with the cries of the hawkers—the city became a rubbish tip: crumpled papers, plastic bags, used tissues, piles of trampled fruit.
This is the setting of Sahar Khalifeh’s Passage to the Plaza. But Nablus is a city on edge. Originally published in 1990, this novel is not only set during the First Intifada (1978–1993), it was written and published in the middle of this period of upheaval marked by sustained Palestinian protests and rioting in Gaza and the West Bank. Born in Nablus in 1941, Khalifeh is one of the most prominent Palestinian women writers. As the fifth of eight daughters, she was well aware of the fate that awaited members of her sex but sought early refuge in reading and writing. Married off against her will, she endured a difficult thirteen year marriage in Amman, Jordan, during which she found it impossible to write. This changed in the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967—she not only published her first novels, but returned to school in her early thirties. Her work, which is centred around the lives of women, offers a wider female narrative than that often associated with resistance literature.
Passage to the Plaza, translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain, is a very immediate response to the circumstances of the Intifada through the intersection of the lives of three women and one man who come together in one unlikely location. There is Sitt Zakia, the midwife, an older woman who, by virtue of her chosen profession, is at once on the margins of society and yet central to the lives of the countless children she has brought into the world. She crosses class boundaries but, at the end of the day returns to the comfort of her hookah and her prayers. Her beloved nephew, Hussam, is a freedom fighter whose political indoctrination began young, inspired by his infatuation with a fashionable teacher. Samar, the baker’s daughter is a young woman with a university education and decent job. She is also an activist with a women’s movement. And, finally, Nuzha, living alone in a house rumoured to be a brothel, is the daughter of a woman who was accused of being a spy and publicly murdered. She is a true social outcast with a complicated past. When Hussam is wounded and finds himself at her door, her home becomes an unexpected sanctuary.
The three women in this novel represent different facets of the conditions women face in Palestinian society. Samar, a patriotic and hopeful twenty-six year-old, is conducting research into the impact of the Intifada on women’s lives and the answers her questions elicit from Sitt Zakia and Nuzha are telling. When asked how her life has changed, the midwife responds: “Honestly nothing much has changed for us except more worries. More worrying means more burning hearts. I pray for God to help us women!” She sees women out on the streets protesting, throwing stones and protecting the militants. But all of the old worries women have always carried still exist. Sitt Zakia’s own daughters are married and living in other countries and she hasn’t heard from them at all since the uprising began. Her more immediate worries involve her militant nephew who is on the run.
When Samar arrives at Nuzha’s house, survey in hand, her inquiries are greeted with anger and bitterness directed at Palestine, at the men who have let her down and at a community that has rejected her. Only one year older than Samar, her life has been impacted by a very different set of circumstances beyond her control. She is defiant and combative and slow to trust any kindness. Her greatest concern is for her younger brother Ahmed, a resistance fighter who is hiding somewhere outside the city; she longs for his return. While she shares her past with Samar, the wounded and feverish Hussam is in another room, listening from behind the door.
Hussam comes from a “family that was mediocrely rich, educated to a mediocre standard, mediocre in their claims to nobility and prestige.” His uncles went abroad and achieved success while his father took unethical advantage of their portions of the family land to present himself as a much richer man then he was. For Abu Azzam, his unconventional sister Zakia and rebel son were his sole sources of shame, not his own duplicity. For Hussam, his rebellion was fueled not only by his unrequited love for the beautiful and politically active Sahab, but reinforced by a series of arrests and periods of administrative detention—”a rite of passage for all young men”—that freed him from his boyish fears, ultimately pushing him toward the resistance. However, as the situation in Nablas deteriorates with an increased presence of Israeli soldiers, the imposition of curfews, establishment of checkpoints and construction of barriers, Hussam’s condition worsens, leaving him bedridden in Nuzha’s house, drifting in and out of consciousness. The female characters are the ones who must negotiate the challenges and dangers of the streets and the social expectations of their gender on their own.
As in all of Khalifeh’s work, women’s enslavement, lack of rights and fight for equality are important themes, but her female characters are complex, their motivations often at odds with one another. The pious Sitt Zakia, for example, despite her independence and estrangement from her brother, worries about protecting his reputation when her sister-in-law arrives begging for refuge from his cruelty. She sends Um Azzam back to her own house, insisting that it is where she belongs. Nuzha, abused by the men in her life, has been forced into a situation that causes her and her late mother to be despised by other women. She is rightly fed up with both sexes. Meanwhile, Samar, for all her ideological optimism, still dreams of love and a handsome husband to come home to her each night.
Khalifeh allows much of her story to unfold through interactions between her primary protagonists, occasionally punctuated with direct access to brief internal monologues that reveal emotions that often contrast with what is otherwise expressed or described. A natural tension builds by virtue of the complicated emotional responses the characters have to one another and to their own predicaments, but outside the particular house where most of the engagement takes place, action explodes in periodic episodes of violence—the women’s collaborative efforts to dismantle a barrier the soldiers have built, a beating Samar receives at home from one of her brothers, a deadly ambush—that raise the tension suddenly and intensely. This narrative style has an almost theatrical feel; the story moves quickly, shifting in unexpected directions. It is all reflective of Khalifeh’s in-the-moment manner of setting a story in motion amid critical historical events as they are happening rather than waiting for the dust to settle. If it creates a degree of uneasiness, if certain details are left unexplained, so be it. Through it all, the voice of the poet of resistance rings out, reminding us what is most critical:
Golden days like those of a birthday. In a revolution, one is born a hundred times and dies a thousand more. The revolution isn’t a rocket but a river that flows and pours forth. Sometimes foreign aid sinks, rain becomes scarce, the river goes through difficult times, drying up, seeming fine as a silk thread. Other times it breaks forth, like a turbulent volcano, sweeping away all in its path, deafening. Oh generous sky, oh angry earth, anger that, like a storm, chooses its hour. Then the cycle comes to an end and goes back to how it was: the river becomes an oscillating thread again, the revolution returns to reality, the boulder tumbles back to the bottom of the river and Sisyphus picks up his load once more.
Reading this book while Israel is waging war in Gaza offers a reminder that nothing is new. One is forced to remember this novel was published in 1990. There are lines uttered here, during the Intifada, that could just as easily appear on social media today. The desperate plea Nuzah utters toward the end of the book hits especially hard, some thirty-three years later: “Enough of God, Mohammed, Essa, Musa, Red Cross and the UN. No one sees or hears. Since when has the world thought of us as humans?”
Passage to the Plaza by Sahar Khalifeh is translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain and published by Seagull Books.
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