Imaginary Homelands

by Salman Rushdie

  SALMAN RUSHDIE: The need to be perpetually told.

  EDWARD SAID: Exactly. The other narratives have a kind of permanence of institutional existence and you just have to try to work away at them.

  SALMAN RUSHDIE: This is one of the things that you criticize from within Palestinianness: the lack of any serious effort to institutionalize the story, to give it an objective existence.

  EDWARD SAID: That’s right. It is interesting that right up to 1948, most of the writing by Palestinians expressed a fear that they were about to lose their country. Their descriptions of cities and other places in Palestine appeared as a kind of pleading before a tribunal. After the dispersion of the Palestinians, however, there was a curious period of silence until a new Palestinian literature began to develop in the fifties and, above all, the sixties. Given the size of this achievement, it is strange that no narrative of Palestinian history has ever been institutionalized in a definitive masterwork. There never seems to be enough time, and one always has the impression that one’s enemy—in this case the Israelis—are trying to take the archive away. The gravest image for me in 1982 was of the Israelis shipping out the archives of the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut to Tel Aviv.

  SALMAN RUSHDIE: In the context of literature rather than history, you argue that the inadequacy of the narrative is due to the discontinuity of Palestinian existence. Is this connected with the problem of writing a history?

  EDWARD SAID: Yes. There are many different kinds of Palestinian experience, which cannot all be assembled into one. One would therefore have to write parallel histories of the communities in Lebanon, the occupied territories, and so on. That is the central problem. It is almost impossible to imagine a single narrative: it would have to be the kind of crazy history that comes out in Midnight’s Children, with all those little strands coming and going in and out.

  SALMAN RUSHDIE: You have talked of The Pessoptimist as a first manifestation of the attempt to write in a form which appears to be formlessness, and which in fact mirrors the instability of the situation. Could you say some more about this?

  EDWARD SAID: It’s a rather eccentric view, perhaps. I myself am not a scholar of Palestinian and certainly not Arabic literature in general. But I am fascinated by the impression made on everyone by, for instance, Kanafani’s novel Men in the Sun, whose texture exemplifies the uncertainty whether one is talking about the past or the present. One story of his, called, I think, ‘The Return to Haifa’, follows a family who left in 1948 and resettled in Ramallah. Much later they return to visit their house in Haifa, and to meet again the son they had left behind in a panic and who was adopted by an Israeli family. Throughout the novel there is a powerful sense of endless temporal motion, in which past, present and future intertwine without any fixed centre.

  SALMAN RUSHDIE: Perhaps we could now turn to the lengthy discussion in After the Last Sky about the unheard voices of Palestinian women. You write: ‘And yet, I recognize in all this a fundamental problem—the crucial absence of women. With few exceptions, women seem to have played little more than the role of hyphen, connective, transition, mere incident. Unless we are able to perceive at the interior of our life the statements women make: concrete, watchful, compassionate, immensely poignant, strangely invulnerable—we will never fully understand our experience of dispossession.’ The main illustration you then give is a film, The Fertile Memory, by the young Palestinian director Michel Khleifi, which deals with the experience of two Palestinian women.

  EDWARD SAID: Yes. This film made a very strong impression on me. One of the most striking scenes revolves around the older woman, who is actually Khleifi’s aunt. She has a piece of property in Nazareth which a Jewish family has been living on for many years, but one day her daughter and son-in-law come with the news that this family now wants to buy up the title deeds. She makes it clear that she is not interested. ‘But what do you mean?’ they insist. They are living on it; it’s their land. They just want to make things easier for you by giving you money in return for the deeds.’ ‘No, I won’t do that,’ she replies. It is a totally irrational position, and Khleifi registers the expression of stubbornness, almost transcendent foolishness, on her face. ‘I don’t have the land now,’ she explains. ‘But who knows what will happen? We were here first. Then the Jews came and others will come after them. I own the land and I’ll die, but it will stay there despite the comings and goings of people.’ She is then taken to see her land for the first time—it had been left to her by her husband, who went to Lebanon in 1948 and died there. Khleifi records her extraordinary experience of walking on the land that she owns but does not own, treading gently and turning round and round. Then suddenly her expression changes as she realizes the absurdity of it all and walks away. This scene typified for me the persistent presence of the woman in Palestinian life—and, at the same time, the lack of acknowledgement which that presence has elicited. There is a strong misogynist streak in Arab society: a kind of fear and dislike existing alongside respect and admiration. I remember another occasion when I was with a friend looking at a picture of a rather large and formidable yet happy Palestinian woman, her arms folded across her chest. This friend summed up the whole ambivalence with his remark: There is the Palestinian woman, in all her strength … and her ugliness.’ The picture of this woman, by Jean Mohr, seems to say something that we have not really been able to touch upon. That experience is one that I, as a man, in this Palestinian sort of mess, am beginning to try to articulate.

  SALMAN RUSHDIE: In After the Last Sky you say that, having lived inside Western culture for a long time, you understand as well as any non-Jew can hope to do what is the power of Zionism for the Jewish people. You also describe it as a programme of slow and steady acquisition that has been more efficient and competent than anything the Palestinians have been able to put up against it. The problem is that any attempt to provide a critique of Zionism is faced, particularly nowadays, with the charge that it is anti-Semitism in disguise. The retort that you are not anti-Semitic but anti-Zionist is always, or often, greeted with: ‘Oh yes, we know that code.’ What you have done in this book and in The Question of Palestine is to offer a very useful, emotionally neutral critique of Zionism as an historical phenomenon. Perhaps you could say a few words about this.

  EDWARD SAID: In my opinion, the question of Zionism is the touchstone of contemporary political judgement. A lot of people who are happy to attack apartheid or US intervention in Central America are not prepared to talk about Zionism and what it has done to the Palestinians. To be a victim of a victim does present quite unusual difficulties. For if you are trying to deal with the classic victim of all time—the Jew and his or her movement—then to portray yourself as the victim of the Jew is a comedy worthy of one of your own novels. But now there is a new dimension, as we can see from the spate of books and articles in which any kind of criticism of Israel is treated as an umbrella for anti-Semitism. Particularly in the United States, if you say anything at all, as an Arab from a Muslim culture, you are seen to be joining classical European or Western anti-Semitism. It has become absolutely necessary, therefore, to concentrate on the particular history and context of Zionism in discussing what it represents for the Palestinian.

  SALMAN RUSHDIE: The problem, then, is to make people see Zionism as being like anything else in history, as arising from sources and going somewhere. Do you think that Zionism has changed its nature in recent years, apart from the fact that it has become subject to criticism?

  EDWARD SAID: One of my main concerns is the extent to which people are not frozen in attitudes of difference and mutual hostility. I have met many Jews over the last ten years who are very interested in some kind of exchange, and events in the sixties have created a significant community of Jews who are not comfortable with the absolutes of Zionism. The whole notion of crossing over, of moving from one identity to another, is extremely important to me, being as I am—as we all are—a sort of hybrid.

  SALMAN RUSHDIE: I would
like to ask you a couple of more personal questions. You say that to be a Palestinian is basically to come from a Muslim culture, and yet you are not a Muslim. Do you find that a problem? Have there been any historical frictions in this respect?

  EDWARD SAID: All I can say is that I have had no experience of such frictions. My own sense is that our situation as Palestinians is very different from Lebanon, where conflicts between Sunnis, Shiites, Maronites, Orthodox and so forth have been sharply felt historically. One of the virtues of being a Palestinian is that it teaches you to feel your particularity in a new way, not only as a problem but as a kind of gift. Whether in the Arab world or elsewhere, twentieth-century mass society has destroyed identity in so powerful a way that it is worth a great deal to keep this specificity alive.

  SALMAN RUSHDIE: You write: ‘The vast majority of our people are now thoroughly sick of the misfortunes that have befallen us, partly through our own fault, partly because of who the dispossessors are, and partly because our cause has a singular ineffectuality to it, capable neither of sufficiently mobilizing our friends nor of overcoming our enemies. On the other hand, I have never met a Palestinian who is tired enough of being a Palestinian to give up entirely.’

  EDWARD SAID: That’s rather well put!

  SALMAN RUSHDIE: This brings me to my final point that, unlike your previous three books, which centred on the dispute between Eastern and Western cultures, After the Last Sky focuses much more on an inner dispute or dialectic at the heart of Palestinianness. After a period of extroversion, you suggest, many Palestinians are themselves experiencing a certain turning inwards. Why is this so? What has been your own experience?

  EDWARD SAID: Well, obviously much of it has to do with disillusion. Most people in my own generation—and I can’t really speak for others—grew up in an atmosphere of despondency. But then in the late sixties and early seventies, a tremendous enthusiasm and romantic glamour attached to the rise of a new movement out of the ashes. In a material sense it accomplished very little: no land was liberated during that period. Moreover, the excitement of the Palestinian resistance, as it was called in those days, was a rather heady atmosphere, forming part of Arab nationalism and even—in an ironic and extraordinary way—part of the Arab oil boom. Now all that is beginning to crumble before our eyes, giving way to a sense of disillusionment and questioning about whether it was ever worthwhile and where we are to go from here. It was as an expression of this mood that I wrote After the Last Sky. The photographs were important in order to show that we are not talking just of our own personal, hermetic disillusionment. For the Palestinians have become a kind of commodity or public possession, useful, for example, to explain the phenomenon of terrorism. I found myself writing from the point of view of someone who had at last managed to connect the part that was a professor of English and the part that lived, in a small way, the life of Palestine. Luckily Jean Mohr had built up quite a large archive of pictures since he worked for the Red Cross in 1949. We came together under strange circumstances: he was putting up some pictures and I was working as a consultant for the United Nations. Since they would not let us write what we wanted, we said: ‘Let’s have a book and do it in our own way.’ It represented a very personal commitment on both our parts.

  SALMAN RUSHDIE: The picture on the cover is really quite extraordinary—a man with a kind of starburst on the right lens of his glasses. As you say, he has been blinded by a bullet in one eye, but has learned to live with it. He is still wearing the spectacles … and still smiling.

  EDWARD SAID: Jean told me that he took the photo as the man was en route to visit his son, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment.

  * * *

  *‘The Earth is Closing on Us’, translated by Abdullah al-Udhari, in Victims of a Map, A1 Saqi Books, London, 1984, p. 13.

  *From the poem ‘The Twenty Impossibles’, by Tawfiq Zayyad, cited by Said in After the Last Sky.

  7

  NADINE GORDIMER

  RIAN MALAN

  NURUDDIN FARAH

  KAPUŚCIŃSKI’S ANGOLA

  NADINE GORDIMER

  Something Out There

  Great White sharks, killer bees, werewolves, devils, alien horrors bursting from the chests of movie spacemen: the popular culture of our fearful times has provided us with so many variations on the ancient myth of the Beast, the ‘something’ lurking out there that hunts us and is hunted by us, as to make it one of the defining metaphors of the age. In the jungle of the cities, we live amongst our accumulations of things behind doors garlanded with locks and chains, and find it all too easy to fear the unforeseeable, all-destroying coming of the Ogre—Charles Manson, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Blob from Outer Space. Clearly, many of these forebodings are the product of affluence and of power. The haves and the powerful, fearing the uprising of the have-nots and the powerless, dream of them as monsters.

  There is a wild animal roaming around the affluent white suburbs of Johannesburg in the long novella which gives its title to Nadine Gordimer’s new collection; but Gordimer is the least lurid of writers, and her creature’s worst offence is to bite a woman on the shoulder. Her prose is cool and meticulous, and the sightings of her Beast—probably a baboon, it is said—are for the most part low-key, even domestic: a leg of venison stolen from its hook in Mariella Chapman’s kitchen; a photograph of thrashing tree-tops taken by the thirteen-year-old schoolboy Stanley Dobrow at his bar mitzvah; a shape, a pair of eyes seen in the vegetation at the edge of an exclusive golf course. And at the end of the piece the creature is quite matter-of-factly demystified; dead in a lane, it is no nightmare monster, but ‘only a baboon, after all; not an orang-utan, not a chimpanzee—just a native species.’ White South Africans have no need of dreamogres: it is reality that they fear, and the something out there is the future. The Naas Kloppers, the van Gelders and all the other rather stupid, somewhat caricatured bigots with whom Nadine Gordimer populates her tale go to some trouble to protect themselves, but the baboon shows them a most uncomfortable truth: ‘The Bokkie Scholtz’s house is burglar-proofed, has fine wires on windows and doors which activate an alarm … They have a half-breed Rottweiler who was asleep, apparently, on the front step, when the attack came. It just shows you—whatever you do, you can’t call yourself safe.’

  This quality of subversion, this deliberate use of banality in order to disturb, is what sets Ms Gordimer’s version of the Beast myth apart. The pulp fiction and cinema which exploit this theme usually offer no more than an enjoyable scare, a sanitized frisson; they actually reassure us while pretending to terrify. Something Out There concentrates, by contrast, on the minutiae of the real world. The art lies in the refusal of all exaggeration, all hyperbole. From this refusal springs the story’s authority, its unsettling menace. ‘Whatever you do, you can’t call yourself safe.’

  A second narrative counterpoints that of the baboon. The other ‘something’ out there beyond the white suburbs is a cell of four terrorists, two black men and a white couple or rather, a white man and woman who are no longer lovers. Here again, Nadine Gordimer’s purpose is to demystify a kind of twentieth-century Beast. The four insurgents, listening to anti-terrorist rhetoric on the radio, ‘were accustomed to smile as people will when they must realize that those being referred to as monsters are the human beings drinking a glass of water, cutting a hang-nail, writing a letter, in the same room; are themselves.’

  While the terrorists wait for the right time to blow up a power station, Ms Gordimer brings them expertly to life, not as beasts, not orang-utans or chimpanzees. Just a native species. She gives us, in effect, portraits of two rather differently odd couples: the white man and woman, Charles and Joy, awkward both with their black colleagues and with each other; and the black men, Eddie, the outgoing one, who jeopardizes their mission by hitching a ride into town for a night among the bright lights, and Vusi, the battle-hardened one, the still centre of the group. The stilted, damaged humanity of this foursome is set against the bluff inhumanity
of the inhabitants of the rich suburbs. Mr and Mrs Naas Klopper, the estate agent and his biscuit-making wife, with their split-level lounge and their arsenal of labour-saving devices and their impala-skin bar stools, are perhaps the story’s real beasts.

  The tone remains muted to the very end. The climax of the terrorist plot is made to happen, so to speak, off-stage; the lives of Charles and Joy and Eddie and Vusi fade into hints, rumours, readings between the lines of the news. And the baboon, as we have seen, is simply shot. But then, in the last couple of pages, comes a brilliant stroke. Rising above its characters’ essential unknowability (‘Nobody really knows … whom they believed themselves to be’), and also their ignorance of their own histories and genealogies, the narrative, in a kind of rage against this excess of unknowing, places them all upon the map of history—puts them firmly in their context, or place. And just as Dr Grahame Fraser-Smith, when he looked into the baboon’s eyes on a golf course, fancied himself to be looking ‘back into a consciousness from which part of his own came,’ to be closing a circle, so the novella at its conclusion closes a circle, joining the far-off past to the approaching future; and both of them (ominously for all the Kloppers caught within the circle’s closing jaws) are black.

  There are nine other stories in this collection, not all of them of the same distinction as the novella. One seems to me an unmitigated disaster. Ms Gordimer has taken upon herself the task of writing, on Hermann Kafka’s behalf, a reply to his son’s famous and never-sent ‘Letter to His Father.’ ‘Letter from His Father’ is a twenty-page arch embarrassment, full of Homely Wisdom (‘Well, we had to accept what God gave’), Literary Nudging (‘Some say you were also some kind of prophet’) and occasional fits of Thigh-Slapping (‘Hah! I know I’m no intellectual, but I knew how to live’). It may well be the case that Franz was unfair to Papa, but I am afraid Ms Gordimer has not done the old man any favours, either.