Tag: Sawad Hussain

The revolution isn’t a rocket but a river that flows and pours forth: Passage to the Plaza by Sahar Khalifeh

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.

The weight of emptiness: The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion by Akram Musallam

This is my life, my story: it has a lot of drama, successive doses of profound distress, and a lot of peculiarity, to the extent that I continually imagine myself a mere character in the novel, choreographed by the hand of a brilliant writer, but he overburdens me with unusual loads. I don’t mean in a literary sense—that’s for the critics—I’m talking on a human and personal level. He always puts me in the most complex scenarios, boiling over with seemingly cosmic plots, or at least in pivotal points of tearful collective historical plots, always overturning places on my head.

The narrator of The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion, Akram Musallam’s metafictional meditation on loss, identity and emptiness, is at the mercy of his own pen as he endeavours to commit his own story to the page, a story which finds him at the intersection of a lineage bound by village and familial legend and a series of events that define the history of Palestine in the first decade of the twenty-first century. He is his own anti-hero, haunted by successive losses, disappearances and absences that undermine his efforts to write himself into being. The resulting novel-about-a-novel-about-loss, by turns melancholic and absurd, thus becomes a mirror of much larger questions haunting the Palestinian imagination.

Born in 1972 in Talfit, near Nablis in the West Bank, Musallam is a journalist for the Ramallah daily Al-Ayyam. The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion, first published in Arabic in 2008, is his second novel, his first to be translated into English. And although its premise may sound bleak, this playful tale manages to be both sorrowful and fun to read. The magic lies in its charming and determined narrative voice.

The novel opens with a dream-like account of a night in late 1988 when our protagonist, a teenager working in a hotel across the border in Israel, has his first sexual encounter with a young woman who has a freshly tattooed scorpion at the base of her spine. At one point he asks her to stand, naked, facing the mirrored wall behind the carpeted stage in the “dance hall” where he slept each night. He traces her hips on the reflective surface with lipstick. The girl, a visitor from Paris, would leave for home the next day, disappearing from his life forever. However, she and her scorpion would begin to revisit him in his dreams, lying beside him once more. As he stroked the deep-blue design on her lower back the creature would come to life, slip off her skin and struggle to climb up the mirror to find its place between the lipstick lines drawn there. This scorpion in its desperate attempts to reclaim a perch on something that no longer exists, haunts the narrator, who adopts it as an identity for his story’s hero. “Isn’t this a novel-esque dream, or a dream of a novel?” he asks himself and the answer, he knows, is yes. Which I suppose means it’s both.

It is mid-2006 when he finally commits himself to realizing this novel-esque dream. He arrives at a parking lot in Ramallah and offers to rent a particular stall although he has no car to park there. He simply wishes to sit there, on the ground or on a plastic chair, think and maybe even write a novel. The attendant is uncertain, but the parking lot manager, a former political “prisoner” jailed for his actions during the Uprising, is smitten by the idea of hosting a writer. As the author-narrator’s story unfolds—that which we are reading and/or that which he is writing—the “prisoner” becomes his audience, his cheerleader and his challenger to the truth of the narrative as presented. But, just as real-life has dictated the narrator’s story, the liberties he takes in recording it are often the only way to begin to adequately—and safely—address the huge gaping holes that fate and history keep placing in his way.

‘Names aren’t that important, believe me, usually there are no names in my novel, haven’t you noticed that? Names are constraints for the characters and me, I don’t like them. I prefer to describe my characters according to what sets them apart. Then, my friend, you want a novelist to write “real-life things.” Listen: in order to be able to speak the truth, you have to wait for a lot of people to die; in the same way, speaking the truth may end up killing a lot of people.

The Scorpion’s earliest life memories are charged with absence. When he was very young his father lost his leg, the result of a workplace injury attended not by doctors but by construction site “first aid” of a much more basic sort. As the only child it would fall to our hero to scratch his father’s missing foot—not the stump, but the space where his foot once was. It was an early, tangible experience of emptiness and perhaps began to condition him for life in a time of conflict in a land under occupation, insofar as one can ever be prepared to have the places most important to you, your key touchstones, destroyed or irrevocably altered—to have your history erased. He would have preferred that the war would stay out of his life, but it kept intruding, driving the plot. For the narrator of The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion, his connection to lost places may seem exaggerated at times due to the magical tone of his tale and his tendency to limit or avoid identifying details, but they are not only fundamental to his sense of self and his ability to tell his own story, they echo the broader collective concerns that haunt the Palestinian people.

This is, then, a deceptively quirky, light tale filled with eccentric characters and family legends woven against historical events—the Passover Massacre in Netanya, the Second Intifada, the 2002 Invasion—that is deeply concerned with the stories we tell ourselves to address loss and emptiness, to remind ourselves that we do exist. As the narrator insists “my game, our game is a game of stories.” It is also about the stories we can dare to tell, especially in dangerous times. So, as his own manuscript takes shape, it isn’t completely clear where the novel we are reading and the novel being written diverge, if in fact they do. The scorpion is an enigma. Who is the scorpion? The narrator or his self-protagonist? Or a dream symbol of the impossible? A scorpion that can sweat, struggling to hold on to a memory and an idea of a time, a place and a nation that holds an increasing amount of absence as time goes on.

The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion by Akram Musallam is translated by Sawad Hussain and published by Seagull Books.