Politics and Palestinian Literature in Exile

Gender, Aesthetics and Resistance in the Short Story

Joseph Farag, Joseph R. Farag

• Editore: I.B. Tauris
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786721808
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Gender Studies

Despite, or even because of their tumultuous history, Palestinians are renowned for being prolific cultural producers, creating many of the Arab world's most iconic works of literature. In particular, the Palestinian short story stands out for its unique interplay between literary texts and the political and historical contexts from which they emerge. Palestinian Literature in Exile is the first English language study to explore this unique genre. Joseph Farag employs an interdisciplinary approach to examine the political function of literary texts and the manner in which cultural production responds to crucial moments in Palestinian history. Drawing from the works of Samira Azzam, Ghassan Kanafani and Ibrahim Nasrallah, Farag traces developments in the short story as they relate to the pivotal events of what the Palestinians call the Nakba ('catastrophe'), Naksa ('defeat') and First Intifada ('uprising'). In analysing several as yet un-translated works, Farag makes an original contribution to the subject of exilic identity and subjectivity in Palestinian literature. This book offers the opportunity to engage with literary works as well to learn from a literary account of history.It is a subject of interest for students and scholars of both Arabic literature and Middle East studies.

CHAPTER 1

NAKBA

Narrating the Nakba: History, Testimony and Re-Membering

It is impossible to overstate the centrality of the Nakba in modern Palestinian consciousness. Meaning simply ‘catastrophe’ or ‘disaster’, the Nakba saw the majority of the Palestinian population dispossessed of their homes and land and scattered into exile. The term ‘Nakba’ is often used to refer specifically to the Israeli declaration of independence on 14 May 1948 or to the period of armed conflict between 30 November, 1947, when the United Nations passed resolution 181 calling for the partition of Palestine, until the cessation of armed hostilities in early 1949, from which the nascent state of Israel emerged decidedly victorious.¹ However it is historically located, though, the Nakba ultimately refers to the Palestinians' loss of their homeland, their decimation as a cohesive and contiguous community, and the dispersal of their overwhelming majority into an exile which has now lasted nearly seven decades. Understood in such terms, the Nakba can be seen not simply as a historical moment or event, pivotal though it may be, but also as a process of denial that continues to this day: a denial of the Palestinians' land, right to self-determination, lives and livelihoods, and even their existence.² As Elias Khoury observes:

the idea that when we speak about the Nakba, we are dealing with the events and atrocities that happened in 1948, is misleading. The Nakba is not only a memory, but it is a continuous reality that did not stop since 1948. Dealing with it as a history of the past, is a way to cover the struggle between presence and interpretation that never stopped since 1948.³

Against and motivated by this ongoing Nakba, Palestinians have undertaken a process of reclamation. As Ahmad H. Sa'di and Lila Abu-Lughod note in the introduction to their volume, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory:

Palestinians' memories of the Nakba, which provide a nagging counter-story of the myth of the birth of Israel, can indeed be said to criticize the present in the name of a trauma that has hardly begun to be recognized by those outside the Arab world and awaits some form of redress.⁴

The ‘myth of the birth of Israel’ to which Sa'di and Abu-Lughod refer is that of what Israeli historian, Avi Shlaim, has called the ‘doctrine of Israel's immaculate conception’.⁵ It is against this triumphalist narrative of Israel's sinless birth, rising phoenix-like from millennia of Jewish dispersal in exile and centuries of European anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism culminating in the attempted genocide of the Jewish people in the Shoah, that Palestinians have struggled to put forth their own counter-narrative – one that gives due acknowledgement to the Palestinians' own tragedy and loss.

These competing narratives have given rise to a search for the historical ‘truth’ of the Nakba in which Palestinians are at a distinct disadvantage. For, as Sa'di and Abu-Lughod put it, ‘history is always partial and always written by the victors. The narratives, documents, and archives of the victors as well as the realities they have imposed on the ground, are what, in the final analysis, count as historical truth’.⁶ This phenomenon is amply demonstrated by Benny Morris in what is widely considered the definitive work on the Nakba and the factors underlying the Palestinians' flight into exile, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947–1949 first published in 1987.⁷ The result of meticulous archival research through recently declassified Israeli government and military archival documents, Morris, while acknowledging the impossibility of arriving at a definitive figure, determined that approximately 700,000 Palestinians had been made refugees by the end of armed hostilities in 1949.⁸ Moreover, Morris famously concluded that ‘the Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab’, arguing against both the narrative that Arab partisans to the conflict had sought to artificially create a refugee crisis by bidding the Palestinians to leave their homes, as well as the argument that the emptying of Palestine of its native inhabitants was a conscious strategy by the Zionists.⁹ And while Morris's findings went a long way in supporting the Palestinian version of events and undermining the myth of Israel's immaculate conception, both in terms of the sheer magnitude of the refugee exodus and of the brutal violence that precipitated it, Morris nonetheless displays a decided contempt for Palestinian oral histories and for other means of conveying the Palestinians' historical narrative beyond the empirical ‘proof’ of the archive. Thus, in his 2004 revised and expanded follow-up to The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem … Morris writes:

I believe in the value of documents. While contemporary documents may misinform, distort, omit or lie, they do so, in my experience, far less than interviewees recalling highly controversial events some 40–50 years ago. My limited experience with such interviews revealed enormous gaps of memory and terrible distortion and selectivity born of ‘adopted’ and ‘rediscovered’ memories, ideological certainties and commitments and political agendas. I have found interviews occasionally of use in providing ‘colour’ and in reconstructing a picture of prevailing conditions and, sometimes, feelings. But not in establishing ‘facts’.

The value of oral testimony about 1948, if anything, has diminished with the passage of the 20 years since I first researched the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem. Memories have further faded and acquired memories, ideological precepts, and political agendas have grown if anything more intractable; intifadas and counter-intifadas have done nothing for the cause of salvaging historical truth.¹⁰

Morris draws a bold line between historical memory and the testimony it produces on the one hand, and historical evidence provided by the archive on the other, ultimately deciding upon the superiority of the latter. Arguably, however, the case is hardly so clear-cut. As Edward Said writes:

Memory and its representations touch very significantly upon questions of identity, of nationalism, of power and authority. Far from being a neutral exercise in facts and basic truths, the study of history, which of course is the underpinning of memory, both in school and university, is to some considerable extent a nationalist effort premised on the need to construct a desirable loyalty to and insider's understanding of one's country, tradition, and faith.¹¹

Morris's unwavering faith in the archive leads him to search (in vain) for what Joel Beinin terms a smoking gun:

The critical question for [Morris] is the existence of a document that would constitute a ‘smoking gun’ – a blanket order to expel Arabs in 1948. The nonexistence of such a document (or at least his inability to find it) looms far larger in his understanding of the Palestinian refugee question than the fact, which he readily acknowledges, that the great majority of the Palestinian Arabs who lived in the territory that became Israel fled or were expelled as a result of actions of the Israeli armed forces. The preoccupation with what Jews thought or intended to do rather than the consequences of what they actually did – a continuation of the dominant idealist approach of Israeli historical writing on Zionism and the Arab-Zionist conflict – is related to the rejection, shared by most traditional Israeli historians, of the notion that proper scholarly methods have political implications.¹²

Beinin's observations on the political implications of scholarly methods are of paramount importance here. As Beinin makes explicit, Morris's focus is on the Zionists' intent ‘rather than the consequences of what they actually did’. Since the archives can reveal no definitive document (i.e. the ‘smoking gun’) outlining Zionists' pre-meditated intention to systemically expel all or the vast majority of Palestinians from their land, then the fact, uncontested by Morris, that this is precisely what occurred is somehow rendered moot. In fact, however, as historian Nur Masalha argues, ‘it is difficult, using Morris's own evidence, not to see on the part of the leaders of mainstream labor Zionism a de facto, forcible transfer policy in 1948’.¹³

Responding to Morris's narrow focus on Israeli archival documents and his eschewing of Palestinian testimony, Ahmad Sa'di observes that ‘since Palestinian society disintegrated as a political entity during the war, and thus has not established national archives, it is unable, according to Morris, to put together a credible narrative regarding its own Nakba’.¹⁴ Joel Beinin, meanwhile, argues that Morris's ‘empiricist and positivist historical method excludes Palestinian Arab voices’, adding, ‘because Morris found no Palestinian documents (and in any case could not read them if he did) comparable to Israeli documents, the experiences and understandings of Palestinians and other Arabs are rendered obscure, if not incomprehensible’.¹⁵ By limiting the problem to one of archival evidence, Morris can conveniently skirt Palestinian oral and unofficial histories, rendering mute the Palestinian narratives of the loss of their homeland and displacement into exile.

A key challenge faced by Palestinians, then, has been to elucidate through testimony that which has been rendered obscure by the absence of archives; to make intelligible that which has been made incomprehensible. And while the Palestinians may lack the formal apparatuses of the state through which to transmit their narrative, they have found ample alternative means of doing so, not least of which has been the corpus of literature Palestinian authors have produced. Whether referencing the Nakba directly, through a depiction of its events, or obliquely through exposition on the condition of the Palestinians in the Nakba's wake, Palestinian literary production gives valuable testimony into the traumatic events of the Nakba, ultimately elucidating the experiences of the Palestinians which would otherwise be obscured by too narrow an empirical emphasis on archival documents. For instance, Benny Morris asserts that ‘the keys to the Yishuv [read: Zionist] victory were its vastly superior motivation, a stronger economy, superior armaments, better military and administrative organisation, and its qualitative edge in manpower (better educated and militarily more experienced)’.¹⁶ In short, the Zionists were superior to their Palestinian adversaries in every significant respect, a fact that belies the popular perception of the war of 1948 as one between an Israeli David against an Arab Goliath. But (as shall be discussed in further detail below), the literary record is replete with references to the discrepancy of power between Zionist and Arab forces. One need only look at Samira Azzam's ‘Fī al-ṭarīq ilā birak sulaymān’ (‘On the Way to Solomon's Pools’) or ‘Khubz al-Fidāʾ’ (‘Bread of Sacrifice’), or Ghassan Kanafani's ‘Arḍ al-burtuqāl al-ḥazīn’ (‘The Land of Sad Oranges’) to get a sense of the futile desperation the Palestinians experienced in fighting their superior foe.¹⁷ And yet, in Morris's methodology, there is no room for such forms of testimony.

Memory, both collective and individual, and its obverse, testimony, in its myriad forms, therefore emerge as being of crucial importance. In the words of Lila Abu-Lughod and Ahmad H. Sa'di, ‘memory is one of the few weapons available to those against whom the tide of history has turned. It can slip in to rattle the wall. Palestinian memory is, by dint of its perseveration and social production under the conditions of its silencing by the thundering story of Zionism, dissident memory, counter-memory. It contributes to a counter-history’.¹⁸ The most obvious example of such ‘mnemonic practices’¹⁹ are oral histories passed on informally between family and friends, or formally through compilation projects such as the Al-Nakba Oral History Project.²⁰ Similarly, Palestinian literary production both generally and specifically in the immediate post-Nakba period, has played a vital role in articulating the Palestinian experience of the Nakba and tribulations that ensued from it. For the Palestinians, remembering the Nakba ultimately becomes a crucial act of re-membering Palestine and its native community, dismembered and scattered after 1948.²¹ For while the Nakba undoubtedly constituted a cataclysmic tragedy for the Palestinians, embodied most literally in the dispersal of Palestinians into far-flung exile, so too did it unprecedentedly unite the Palestinian people. As Abu-Lughod and Sa'di posit, ‘for many Palestinians, the Nakba is touchstone of a hope for a reconstituted or refigured Palestine and a claim to rights’.²²

Form and Function in Arabic Literature: Realism and the Nation

In June of 1947 Jean-Paul Sartre published a series of articles in his journal, Les Temps Modernes, which would, in 1948, be collected into a volume entitled Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (What is Literature?).²³ The essays (hereafter referred to by their collective title, What is Literature?) were a prolonged meditation on the role in society of the author and the literature s/he produces. Central to this was the notion of littérature engagée, or committed literature in which Sartre elucidates the dialectical nature of literary production as, in fact, a co-production between author and reader. ‘The literary object’, writes Sartre, ‘is a peculiar top which exists only in movement. To make it come into view a concrete act called reading is necessary’.²⁴ Therefore, ultimately:

It is not true that one writes for oneself. That would be the worst blow. In projecting one's emotions on paper, one barely manages to give them a languid extension. The creative act is only an incomplete and abstract moment in the production of a work […] But the operation of writing implies that of reading as its dialectical correlative and these two connected acts necessitate two distinct agents. It is the joint effort of author and reader which brings upon the scene that concrete imaginary object which is the work of the mind. There is no art except for and by readers.²⁵

Confronted by a notion such as ‘committed literature’, the logical question is ‘commitment to what?’ For Sartre, the answer is relatively simple: commitment to freedom – freedom of the author, freedom of the reader, human freedom broadly defined:

For, since the one who writes recognizes, by the very fact that he takes the trouble to write, the freedom of his readers, and since the one who reads, by the mere fact of his opening the book, recognizes the freedom of the writer, the work of art, from whichever side you approach it, is an act of confidence in the freedom of men. And since readers, like the author, recognize this freedom only to demand that it manifest itself, the work can be defined as an imaginary presentation of the world in so far as it demands human freedom.²⁶

Later, Sartre writes ‘whether he is an essayist, a pamphleteer, a satirist, or a novelist, whether he speaks only of individual passions or whether he attacks the social order, the writer, a free man addressing free men, has only one subject, freedom’.²⁷

It is easy to see the appeal the notion of literary commitment would have had on the mid-twentieth-century Arab world. By 1950, when the concept of literary commitment, translated into Arabic as iltizām, started to have common currency among Arab intellectuals, many Arab countries had only very recently succeeded in their quests for national independence and, even then, complete autonomy was oftentimes curtailed.²⁸ In Egypt, for instance, the Arab world's metropole of literary and cultural thought and production at the time, Britain maintained a military presence along the Suez Canal zone that would only be grudgingly and unwillingly withdrawn after the 1956 Suez Crisis/Tripartite Aggression.²⁹ Elsewhere in the Arab world, European colonization continued challenged but unabated. Finally, and...