Readings from and of Palestine (3)
Below are recommendations of three extraordinary works of prose, by writers across generations and nationalities.
In these brief recommendations/micro-reviews, I’m trying to point to the literariness of each work: how each book is a work of art; how each performs the work that defines art. Too often literature in translation is treated as if it were “news from elsewhere” being delivered in a convenient package for Western readers. Palestinian literature in particular is often read in political terms defined by an Anglo-American publishing industry and readership, its reception and existence in English heavily constrained by the limits thereof (one very small example: many of the early blurbs of Hammad’s The Parisian noticeably do not include the word “Palestine” or “Palestinian”—as if that were not the book’s subject, not the identity of the protagonist and author). Raja Shehadeh, writing in the Nation over a decade ago, describes this situation succinctly:
As Edward Said frequently observed, part of being Palestinian is being denied the right to narrate one’s own experience. The same burden of proof under which Palestinian historians have labored applies with equal force to novelists and poets, whose evocation of the Nakba is almost always approached with suspicion—the suspicion being that the objective behind the work is propagandistic rather than artistic. As a result, imaginative writing by Palestinians is often assessed by Western critics according to narrowly political rather than aesthetic criteria, something few novelists would welcome, even if the reviews were favorable. It is no wonder that the number of literary works by Palestinians that have been published and become well-known in the United States is very small indeed.
—Hilary Plum, h.plum [at] csuohio.edu
1.
THE PARISIAN
Isabella Hammad
Novel. Grove Atlantic, 2019
Unfortunately for me the phrase “astonishing debut” is already a cliché. I heard of this novel when it came out and—window into my own personal flaws—it was so widely praised that I guess I was sort of suspicious. Turns out I’m a fool. It was so widely praised because it’s astonishing. And this is a book of and for Palestine (and which won the 2019 Palestine Book Award). The Parisian is a historical novel of remarkable scope—World War I to the brink of World War II, the British occupation, the rise of Palestinian and Syrian national movements, moving from Paris to Nablus to Cairo and beyond—written in an illuminatingly anachronistic mode, a classic mode, newly embodied by this subject and its precise vulnerable dreaming characters. When reading this novel I was teaching a workshop on writing book-length works of fiction. For that reason I was thinking often in terms of the “project” of a book: what a writer set out to do; how they approached the task; how the needs of the task took form. There is something so bold and insistent about what Hammad set out to do here, the ambition of her project—in your first novel to tell the story of Palestine, but beginning 100 years ago, attending carefully and deeply to the colonial dynamics of the time, of your protagonist’s specific path, of the long genre tradition in which you are working. The imagination of this writer feels endless; the novel’s details are so lush and intimate, it is as if she is demanding this world into life. The dreams of each character—their responsive contingent interiority, their human limits and errors—are here, the light and shadow of their consciousness reflecting and reflected by their world. Reading, I felt as if this young writer had looked at everything around her, all the trends and styles of any one moment, and turned away to write a book toward and of the past, for the future.
Hammad’s new novel Enter Ghost is just out, I haven’t read it yet but will this winter and recommend it to us all.
2.
GATE OF THE SUN
Elias Khoury
trans. Humphrey Davies
Novel. Archipelago Books, 2006
If you have not yet read the novels of the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, so much awaits you. I’ll let some reviews speak of this novel, his best-known:
John Leonard, writing in Harper’s:
After Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun (Archipelago Books, $26), readers can no longer pretend that Palestine is merely a fugitive state of mind, a convenient Arab myth, a traumatic tribal memory, and somebody else’s problem. This remarkable novel out of Lebanon, a skillful reshuffling of the 1001 Nights with a doctor in a refugee camp playing the part of Scheherazade, fills in the blank spaces on the Middle Eastern map in our Western heads—Palestine as history, as literature, as casualty list, as psych ward, as inferiority complex, as principality of exile. Yunes, a hero of the resistance, a legend of Fatah, lies comatose in Shatila, attended by a self-doubting motormouth named Khalil, more a nurse than a doctor by virtue of several months medical training in revolutionary China, who seems to believe that he can bring Yunes back to consciousness by telling him stories: “This way we can save some time and kill it before it kills us.” These stories, moving through time from body to body and place to place, across borders and genders, from the living to the dead, recapitulate more than half a century of atrocity and oppression, defeat and displacement, betrayal and recrimination. It is one long catastrophic exodus, with hundreds of victims and thousands of alibis. Yes, there is an excess of politics, death, and polemic; of Amman, Beirut, Algiers, and Tunis; of quicklime on puffed-up corpses and martyrs on the threshing floor. There is, on purpose, an excess of everything, up to and including the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Each story is a cave, within which nest other stories—of olive trees and blood clots, arak and sesame, wild chicory and columbine; bags of bones, Sufi poets, the music of Fairouz, and pillows full of thorns; temporary doctors in temporary hospitals in temporary countries and photographs that die unless they’re watered—not to mention a troupe of theatrical French, hoping to mount a play by Jean Genet that will tell the truth about the Arabs. But with Gate of the Sun, the Arabs no longer need Genet, if they ever did.
And Raja Shahadeh, writing in the same essay in the Nation excerpted above:
Khoury is a Lebanese writer who has listened very carefully to the testimony of people who have been living in refugee camps in Lebanon since they were driven out of Palestine by Zionist forces in 1948. … Gate of the Sun is a novel of prodigious ambition, seeking to evoke the full sweep of Palestinian history. Most Palestinian novelists have preferred to illuminate specific aspects of the Palestinian experience, and for good reason. That experience has been so eventful, so turbulent, so fragmented and so complicated–intertwined with the two World Wars, the Holocaust, the cold war, inter-Arab politics, the events of Black September in Jordan, the Lebanese Civil War and the 1991 Gulf War–that it seems to defy dramatization, even while inviting it. The story unfolds on an almost mythic plane, a plane much vaster than that of the novel. Khoury seems aware of this problem; his narrator observes at one point that the novelist Ghassan Kanafani didn’t write about Yunes’s experience of the Nakba “because he was looking for mythic stories, and yours was just the story of a man in love.” Yet Gate of the Sun is not so much the intimate story of a man in love as the allegorical tale of an entire people.
3.
PRISONER OF LOVE
Jean Genet
trans. Barbara Bray
Essay/memoir. 1992; NYRB Classics, 2003
Genet of course is a French writer. John Leonard, as quoted above, takes pains to liberate Palestine from the need for a European advocate, for external representation. Yet I think this book belongs on this list. Perhaps especially for how its form resists description and remains unstable, open to the future, since the author died before composition was complete or finally ordered—composition he had always intended as “deliberately subversive,” in the words of translator Barbara Bray, resulting in a manuscript whose “level of anarchy [was] unusual even for Genet.”
This is Genet’s final book, written in the 1980s while he was dying of cancer, about a decade after the time it records, when the writer lived in and amid (attempts at) Palestinian revolution, at bases in Jordan with the fedayeen. In her introduction to the NYRB edition, Ahdaf Souief writes: “This is a book about the Palestinian revolution (with some pages about the Black Panther movement), but it is also about art and about representation.” The opening epigraph, below, emphasizes the central role of image itself. (And today we continue to witness problems of image and representation that can make Palestinian national movements illegible to or suppressed within Western media.) Prisoner of Love is a dense, difficult, often beautiful, profoundly unruly book, which Edward Said called upon publication “surely one of the strangest and most extraordinary books of the decade.” I sometimes imagine teaching a course called “Difficulty” in which we read only one or two books, books whose form is indeterminate and refuses reduction or summary, books that demand the most open and ongoing forms of reading, and I am always thinking of this book. I find it an immeasurably moving incarnation of what Said elsewhere calls “late style”—the dynamics of style in which dying artists find themselves working—though I can’t remember off-hand if Said himself included it among his examples. According to Souief, Genet began the book shortly after he published the famous essay “Four Hours in Chatila,” his account as one of the first foreign witnesses to the 1982 massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila/Chatila. By the time this book was published, many of the young men portrayed within it were dead, and the author had followed them. And what of its work? “The book I decided to write in the middle of 1983 weighs less than the furtive gleam of a fedayeen stealing away from Ajloun,” Genet says. The work belongs to readers, who must go and look, in a world beyond the skeleton of the text:
They remain dead, the people I try to resuscitate by straining to hear what they say. But the illusion is not pointless, or not quite, even if the reader knows all this better than I do. One thing a book tries to do is show, beneath the disguise of words and causes and clothes and even grief, the skeleton and the skeleton dust to come. The author too, like those he speaks of, is dead.
