I have had some negative feedback, which is to be expected: people’s beliefs get rattled, they feel threatened. These were mainly knee-jerk reactions of an ill-informed, rather stupid variety. Who you are, where you stand and how you deal with your subject matter are important, and they affect style.
Another aspect of writing novels about this part of the world is that people have this anticipation of dullness. They feel that they have to go into it with a heavy heart; they would perhaps rather have their teeth pulled than read about Palestine and Israel. The writer needs to inject energy, colour and life, to bring in an emotional story that resonates. I had always wanted to be a writer, but in my mid-twenties I read a book (The Long Night of White Chickens by Francisco Goldman) that was an amazing love story set in Guatemala, and after that I became obsessed with Guatemala – I took to scanning the papers for stories about Guatemala, when I had known nothing of the place before I read the novel.
I’ve developed some personal views with regard to what role literature has in our highly politicised environment, and I’ll list them now.
One is quite obvious: to bear witness and to reclaim history. We are forgetting our own histories. I’ve met Palestinian journalists who grew up in Jordan and didn’t know that Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait in 1990 and 1991. This is the challenge of reclaiming the very recent past, in a way that brings it to life.
Another is to help visualise the future: to find ways of encouraging hope, strength and endurance. A project called ‘Decolonizing Architecture’ made this point very strongly to me. The architects proposed ways of converting installations serving the Israeli military occupation to places for the occupied population. How the walls around settlements would come down, how watchtowers could be converted into bird sanctuaries, how skate parks could replace checkpoints. At first I thought this was nonsense; it was never going to happen, so what were the funders thinking? But my initial rejection was precisely the reason why I ultimately embraced it. I realised how mentally blocked I was at seeing beyond the current impasse and how much of what I read and mulled over focused on problems and not future solutions.
The trouble with translating such positive thinking into literature is that you can easily move towards writing that has a whiff of propaganda about it. Margaret Atwood has a warning for writers: ‘Beware the leitmotif.’ My warning is: ‘Beware the message.’ It’s very difficult for works of fiction to sustain heavy messages, for the reason that I mentioned before – the need for lightness and a belief by the readership that they’re entering a world where they’re being led by characters, not by an outside force that’s driving them one way or the other. Less is sometimes more in terms of presenting political realities in fiction.
Another role of the writer is to create the ‘psychiatric notes’ of a society – to see all elements of one’s society from the most marginalised to the most central within it, to create an awareness of who we, as a people, have become, how we treat each other, how our behaviour impacts upon others.
A writer can also provide solace or comfort through an expression of a commonly shared experience. It was extremely satisfying for me to have Palestinian friends read my book and say to me, ‘I knew exactly who that character was. It was Aboud. It was Foulan.’ It wasn’t Aboud or Foulan, I didn’t know anyone with those names, but they could feel that they knew the characters so well. It’s about not feeling so alone. But it is also very important to me that literature challenges and interrogates society. It’s not just about making people feel comfortable about the way things are, because the situation has never been worse. It’s about how we can change things that are under our control, even if the most critical aspects of our life are not under our control at all (as in the case of Gaza).
The last challenge is actually quite controversial, although it doesn’t sound it. It’s the idea of creating beauty. What is the space for creating beauty in literature and other work when you’re under situations of such extreme strife? There’s a poem by Pablo Neruda that says in effect, ‘How can I write about flowers and volcanoes when there’s the blood of children in the streets?’ But in the Palestinian situation, when such a protracted, brutal set of circumstances is being faced by generation after generation, one starts to think of the role of the artist as being someone who creates something that you’re fighting for and not just someone who expresses what you’re fighting against – someone to portray what is already good, heroic and in many cases absurdly funny about your current reality.
As a writer, you’re never sure when you write on Palestine whether you have any value as a craftsperson. If somebody praises your work you think, ‘Well, you’re only praising it because you like my politics’, and if they hate it you think, ‘You’re only hating it …’ You never feel that you’re really being viewed as a person with a skill who made innumerable decisions to arrive at that particular piece of work. When I occasionally meet someone who says, ‘I thought that opening section was a bit like Dylan Thomas’, or something along those lines, I get very excited.
Palestinian writers are also learning to accept the unacceptable, that their writing will sometimes just get blocked, or censored in incomprehensible ways. To dwell too much on this can turn you into a conspiracy theorist, but it does happen. Judgements have to be taken as to which battles to fight. In the meantime, you just need to try harder the next time, to be strategic, to hope the stars are configured differently, to trust that you have readers who value your work. And to remember that it is easier now than it was in the past and that we will open the way for others. Try again, fail again, fail better, as the Samuel Beckett postcard above my desk advises me.
There’s one more specific issue and that concerns hybridity. I believe it can strengthen a writer’s vision to be always a little bit outside the subject they are covering, to have an insider/outsider viewpoint and to be are aware of different cultures. Michael Ondaatje has talked about the growth of ‘mongrel literature’. I like this expression. More and more of us are becoming mongrelised. There’s more and more intermarriage and greater movements of people across borders. There’s a global awareness, a growing cosmopolitanism, that allows for a greater understanding and more of a global identity, free of ethnic, religious and racial suspicions. I subscribe to that. I write for that.
FICTION’S HISTORIES: WRITERS AND READERS IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Marilyn Booth
STANDING IN Muhammad Mahmoud Street, near Cairo’s Tahrir Square, one year after the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak, I watched political banners waving in the light breeze. Satirical puppets of old-regime personalities were greeted with amusement by passers-by. Commemorative T-shirt hawkers, school-children, soapbox orators and their audiences, police vans and bicycles, all sought their place, not only at Tahrir but throughout the downtown. As I wandered around before settling down in the library for my research on nineteenth-century Egyptian literature, I absorbed a kaleidoscope of images.
Along one side of Muhammad Mahmoud Street, just off the square, the high outside wall of the American University in Cairo’s old campus had become a vivid, ever-changing, visual palimpsest, an emotionally charged commentary on the Egyptian people’s resistance to authoritarianism over months – and years – of speaking truth to power with their bodies and voices. Artists young and old painted and scratched their visions on to the rough wall in a twenty-first-century equivalent to the eloquence of ancient rock paintings. Likenesses of the young martyrs of the revolution, with birth and death dates and loving tributes, seemed startling rebirths of the beautifully vital Coptic death-mask images of many centuries ago.
Another form of artistic tribute was a contemporary rendering of iconic figures from Egypt’s pharaonic eras, so widely familiar from tomb paintings and temple carvings. Revolution-inspired artists painted Egyptian goddesses and pharaohs to challenge imperial authoritarian rule. ‘Pharaoh’ as an image of political power has a very long artistic history in Egypt. If it’s an image that sparks pride,
it can also gesture to ethically bankrupt authoritarian rule. One hundred and more years ago, Egyptian poets embraced the image to attack and to satirise the pretences and the very presence of British imperialist officials with their rhetoric of ‘benign’ colonial tutelage. The image has powerful critical purchase partly because ‘pharaoh’ appears in the Qur’an as an image of cruel and arrogant worldly power.
But it was the images of the ancient Egyptian goddess Nout that transfixed me. Nout is the life-giver who births the sun every morning and takes it once again into her body in the evening for safekeeping. She appears in many a pharaoh’s or high official’s tomb, watching over the mummy that was meant to repose there for ever. Today, Egypt’s artists take icons that in ancient times supported a regime of top-down power, such as Nout, and transform them into symbols for vernacular democratic practices: Nout’s sun shines down on all. A mythic history of the nation was recreated to make a new narrative, as Egyptians were striving to produce a new, just, ethically strong form of governance, not only through the state but also in institutions of social and civic life and the family, a revolutionary vision that will demand years of hard work to realise.
Throughout most of my thirty years’ acquaintance with Egypt (as a student, a researcher and a sometime resident) I could have only imagined such sights occurring in fiction. This can’t be happening here! But what I term ‘fiction’s histories’ offer another insight: much of the fiction produced in Arabic over the past century suggests convincingly how ready Egyptians, and others, were for what seemed in 2011 to promise a systemic upheaval.
Indeed, the art that had taken over walls throughout central Cairo has much in common with Arabic fiction, today and in the past. Challenging ‘top-down’ history-writing is as central to literature as it is to visual art, post-2011 but also long before. Our series of conversations at the Edinburgh International Book Festival sought to think through the attempted unmaking or ‘unravelling’ of a century-old order in the Middle East. As much as we see the signs of that on the walls of Cairo, we must also remember the persistence of seemingly intractable, yet never completely impervious, obstacles to people’s freedom to make themselves. That’s evident in Arabic fiction from the 1890s to our own time. There seems no guarantee that a ‘new order’ (for better or for worse) is on the way. But fiction, in the company of the other arts, offers pathways to interrogate the persistence of old orders (such as patriarchal thinking and authoritarian structures). Reading today’s fiction against the backdrop of Arabic novels written a hundred years ago is one of many ways to enrich our field of vision.
It seems no accident that in recent years the historical novel has featured prominently among Arabic fiction titles, just as it did in the late nineteenth century, early in the Arabic novel’s history. Revisiting major political events or tracing a family’s or a community’s more intimate paths, which might intersect with or depart from the official historical narratives of the nation, historical fiction (like recreations of ancient Egyptian myth-figures) can pose a critical, alternative history of communities. It can ask, or redefine, who the subjects of history are or should be: perhaps they’re not ‘national subjects’ but something else, or both. Selma Dabbagh’s fictional Gaza, the setting for her novel Out of It (2011), is about a place and a community and its history or histories. It’s also about diaspora as loss and community both, a situation that hovers over all Palestinian histories, as the nicely ambiguous meaning of Dabbagh’s title suggests.
What is a fiction writer’s responsibility to history? And how does she come to inhabit the spaces – physical, mental, imaginary – that allow her to respond to the ways history may be suppressed or narrowed or misrepresented by politicians or media discourse with historical narratives of her own making, based on imagining other lives?
Preparing for and then chairing the session at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on ‘Living and Writing in the Middle East’, I was struck by how the discussion we had – Mai al-Nakib, Selma Dabbagh, myself and our audience – kept on returning to history, or histories. In different ways, Mai and Selma both talked about losing the ‘historical cosmopolitanism’ (in Mai’s words) of their nations’ pasts, and how memory and collective narratives of earlier times may be lost in agendas for the present.
Now as always, at a time of ongoing crisis, retrieving – and rethinking – the narratives of history and myth, as conflictual or fanciful as these narratives may be, could be persuasive political acts. They could encourage readers to think about a future that honours many voices from the past. Dabbagh highlights fiction’s ability to reanimate these narratives. A character in Out of It finds his meaning as a political person in rewriting the archival and oral histories of Palestine: history is a character who insists on answers. Al-Nakib’s stories write history partly through objects we take with us when we go places, the meanings those objects have for us, the personal histories of connection and alienation they evoke.
As a translator and scholar, I have been so drawn to novels that are historical, not always in obvious ways. Sometimes history is front and centre, as, for example, in the great activist, scholar and writer Latifa al-Zayyat’s classic novel of coming-of-age feminism, The Open Door (1960), set in an earlier revolutionary period, the 1940s–50s, in Egypt’s national history.1 But national revolution is also – as al-Zayyat’s young characters insist – about revolution in the family, about young women’s and young men’s right to choose their futures. The theme wasn’t new in 1952, or in novels by women, but it was a liberatory moment that was celebrated, tested and criticised in fiction.
At other times history can creep in at the edges. Even when they aren’t ‘historical novels’ in the classic sense, novels (and short stories) in the Arab world today (and in diaspora, and whether written in Arabic or in many other languages Arabs speak) are grappling with questions of history. A novel I translated recently from the Arabic, Lebanese author Hassan Daoud’s The Penguin’s Song, traces displacements that Beirut’s downtown populace suffered during Lebanon’s civil war (1975–90) and in its inconclusive aftermath.2 In an isolated block of flats overlooking the old downtown, where he lived as a boy, the young-adult narrator returns obsessively to his dark shelf of old books that now mostly gather dust. Receptacles of the past, those books are where imagined lives reside, and he wonders, a bit wistfully, whether reading the same old texts could give a reader new meanings. (He thinks they can, but he doesn’t open them much.) This young, disabled man brings paltry income home to his parents from proofreading, but we never learn the content of the pages he peruses for a scruffy, stingy little publishing operation stuffed into the stifling top floor of a crowded high-rise in the rebuilt city. These pages might as well be blank. They hold none of the promise of the old volumes that he cherishes (even if he rarely rereads them). The Penguin’s Song invites readers to think about how states and political elites, as they banish people to the social and physical margins of their society, and dispossess them, destroying the old urban landscape to rebuild it for their own commercial interests, also destroy community histories. They leave young people culturally rootless, when they are already, and perhaps more than ever in recent times, socially and economically vulnerable.
How and why novelists rewrite history is a question that’s led me to dwell not only in novels on the past but in the past of novels. As a scholar drawn to the Arab nineteenth century and a translator who lives, reads and translates in and of the twenty-first century, I’m struck by the continuities in themes, as well as the differences in the ways those themes are enacted in fiction. In the decades before the First World War, the Arabic novel was a new genre drawing vigorously on popular Arabic oral storytelling and its written manifestations, and equally though controversially on European traditions of realism, romance and the Gothic. It emerged and became popular in another long moment of political crisis and possibility, when well-educated reformists, some of whom (the men!) had studied in Europe, were simultaneously excited and cr
itical about what they saw there. In both historical novels and fictions set in their own time and place, writers took up issues of personal political liberation and freedom of choice under the many and particular stresses of the time. There was political domination under European ‘tutelage’, financial hardship as the Middle East was drawn more intensively into a European- and North American-centred capitalist economy, and social stress as new ways of thinking about personal – individual, family – life clashed with a firmly ensconced patriarchal family structure. Increasing educational opportunity (for some) meant that young people were asking questions in the 1890s as they do now. Arab women and men wrote fiction that explored tensions between self-making and the expectations or strictures that young women and men faced (and how those expectations differed according to whether one was female or male). Some fictions made explicit links between political tyranny and an implacable patriarchal ‘right’ to determine young people’s futures. Novels by women highlighted the psychic, physical and social costs to young women of coerced marriage (also a theme in novels by men). The young woman who could read and write was the heroine who could – though not always – prevail. Given persistent stereotypes of Arab women – which like all stereotypes have a toehold in reality but are never all, or even most, of the reality – it may come as a surprise to readers now that turn-ofthe-twentieth-century Arab women were publishing novels (and advancing decidedly feminist ideas). They were. Fictions like Zaynab Fawwaz’s Good Consequences, or the Radiant Maiden of al-Zahira (1899),3 Labiba Hashim’s Man’s Heart (1904), Adele Jaridini’s The Young Eastern Woman (1909) or Afifa Karam’s Fatima the Bedouin (c. 1910)4 highlighted for Arabic-reading audiences the resourcefulness, outspokenness, professional aspirations and personal desires of young (and not always elite) Arab women. Some were fiercely didactic conduct-novels, earnest attempts to shape the behaviour and the expectations of young readers.
Shifting Sands: The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East Page 13