A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature (13 page)

Jabra’s autobiographical writings, on the other hand, have great charm, and they help to explain the high reputation he enjoys in modern Arab letters. Born in Bethlehem in 1920, he was educated in Jerusalem and England, and he made frequent scholarly trips abroad, notably to the United States. He left Palestine in 1948 and lived for the rest of his life in Baghdad. He is the co-author of a novel,
World Without Maps
, written with Saudi novelist Abdelrahman Munif, and of a well-received account of modern Iraqi art. In
The First Well
Jabra gives an account of his boyhood in Bethlehem, writing of ‘the events of early childhood’ – the memoir halts with the family’s 1932 move to Jerusalem – ‘that reach us as a sort of mix of memories and dreams’. These things are the contents of ‘the first well’ of early childhood, to which in later life one may be tempted to return. In Jabra’s case, the ‘well’ contains his schooldays, his family’s early poverty and his memories of the religious life of Bethlehem, at the time a small town of just a few thousand inhabitants. He writes enchantingly of Christmas in Bethlehem and of the festivities that took place at the Church of the Nativity in honour of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, arriving from Jerusalem at the head of an immense procession. Easter was a time of flowers, and, in the afternoons, of ‘flocks of swallows that filled the azure air’. Looking out of his schoolroom windows, Jabra could see the ‘domes of the Church of the Nativity, and, beyond them, the surrounding hills’.

In a later volume of memoirs,
Princesses’ Street
, his last book,
¹¹
Jabra turns to his life as a student in England and his adult life in Baghdad, particularly in the early 1950s when the city was experiencing a ‘golden age with its creative aspirations and eagerness for change’.
Jabra was caught up in that excitement, and he includes some fascinating vignettes from the period. These include an encounter with Agatha Christie, in Baghdad with her husband the archaeologist Max Mallowan, who was excavating at the time at Nimrud. Christie, like Mrs Ramsay in Woolf’s novel
To the Lighthouse
, spends her time knitting as her husband’s conversation swirls about her. Apparently, Jabra comments, she was ‘the only person in the room who was not suffering from the fever of writing and did not know its agonies and pains.’ There is much surprise when he discovers that ‘Mrs Mallowan’ is the author of novels that ‘I had read since my youth … [and that are] the delightful and exciting intellectual recreation for millions of people.’ (Christie is a popular author in the Arab world.)

However, more important than his encounter with Christie are Jabra’s reflections on Baghdad in the politically charged decade of the 1950s, the publication of his first work in Beirut, and his comments on the intellectual atmosphere of the time. In Baghdad ‘there were young women itching for their freedom … there were poets and short-story writers seeking to create new forms in everything they wrote. There were painters … [and] persons specializing in economic, social, political, philosophical, and historical thought … announcing the good news of a forthcoming modernity that would change the whole Arab world.’ This was all part of the sense of the ‘wonderful beginning’ that overtook the region in the 1950s with the crumbling of European colonialism. In the Iraqi case things soon began to go disastrously wrong.

The memoirs by Jabra and Tuqan contain testimony from the decades before and after 1948. More recent memoirs, such as the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s
I Saw Ramallah
, focus on the meaning of Palestine for generations that, having spent most of their lives abroad, have only distant memories of the country, if they have first-hand memories of it at all. It also raises the question of ‘return’, indicating that this is not a simple matter and not only because of the many
obstacles that currently prevent it.
¹²
Will the country answer to the hopes invested in it? Will the returnee, after years spent abroad, be able to find a home there? Such questions are explored in Barghouti’s account of his return to Ramallah after a life spent abroad, as they are in novels such as Sahar Khalifeh’s
Wild Thorns
.
¹³

The latter work appeared in Arabic some ten years into the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and long before the Palestinian uprising, or
intifada
, that began against Israeli rule in the late 1980s.
¹⁴
The novel begins with the narrator, Usama al-Karmi, returning from Jordan to the Occupied Territories. There is the usual brutality at the border, but what awaits him on the other side is not what he expected. True, there is the daily humiliation of occupation, reflected in the poor wages and few social protections afforded to Palestinian workers compared with their Israeli counterparts. However, there is also an apparent indifference on the part of the Palestinians ‘inside’ to the tide of political rhetoric reaching them from their compatriots ‘outside’ and from the surrounding Arab countries. It is easy, one character explains, for those abroad to urge resistance to the occupation, instructing those within to ‘bear all the burdens of risk and sacrifice’ when they do not themselves live in Palestine and have possibly never visited it. ‘Israeli cash is better than starvation’, and Palestinian workers in Israeli factories ‘stick up two fingers … when they hear all that pompous talk of “inter-Arab aid for Palestine”,’ preferring to get on with life ‘while the radio goes on spewing out songs of hope and fervour.’

The Israeli occupation is presented as having ‘corrupted’ Palestinian society in the Occupied Territories, distorting the economy by bringing in benefits unseen under Jordanian rule. It has also broken the rigid class structure that prevailed before 1948 in particular, attacked by writers such as Barakat and Tuqan. Israel’s occupation has brought money and employment to Palestinians who were previously tenant farmers. They did not own the land, and, that being so, one
elderly farmer asks, ‘why should we care about it? Why should we die for it?’ It is sentimentality to suppose that it was ever really theirs. Khalifeh’s novel, like others before and after it, criticizes the Palestinian elites as well as the Israelis. ‘Who’s responsible for the country’s lack of industrialization? Who’s to blame for the backwardness of the workers?’ the narrator’s associates ask. The novel ends, like those by Barakat, on hopes of social reconstruction.

Complications attendant on return are also explored in Barghouti’s prize-winning memoir
I Saw Ramallah
.
¹⁵
This records the author’s return to his hometown of Ramallah on the West Bank after some three decades in exile. Crossing the River Jordan, Barghouti remembers the last time he made this journey, in the other direction, immediately before the 1967 war: making it now, he meditates on his return to a homeland in which he cannot help but feel a stranger and on his return to a past that he has outgrown. Such thoughts give way to a narrative, an ‘existential account of displacement’ according to Edward Said in his foreword, that mixes recognition with disappointment and views adult life through the lens of student hopes held thirty years before. Visiting Dar Ra’d, one of seven neighbouring villages that are home to his extended family, Barghouti looks in on ‘the room [in which] I was born four years before the birth of the state of Israel’. Outside, this village, like the settlements around it, has been marked by a lifetime’s events and by the facts of occupation and diaspora. ‘I greeted the neighbours, and I recognized none of them … Husbands, sons, and daughters have been distributed among graves and detention camps, jobs and parties and factions of the Resistance, the lists of martyrs, the universities, the sources of livelihood in countries near and far … Calgary to Amman, Sao Paolo to Jeddah, Cairo to San Francisco, Alaska to Siberia.’ That being so, what might it mean to return to a homeland that has changed almost beyond recognition? How to deal with the fact that one has oneself changed? Whatever the answers for others may be, for himself
Barghouti suggests that life, a set of ‘temporary permanencies’, ‘will not be simplified’. Palestine is not the promised land. The ‘homeland [is not] the medicine for all sorrows.’

Nevertheless, though a life spent looking back on a lost homeland cannot be a satisfying one, trying to forget that homeland, or never having had it, are not solutions either. Barghouti reflects on the experience of Palestinians, born in exile, who have no memories of home. While his own memories may be distorted, and a habit of looking back on loss may have ‘forced us to remain with the old’ at the expense of the new, at least he has memories of a childhood home, a ‘first well’ in Jabra’s terms, to which in adult life he can return. Israel, on the other hand, ‘has created generations without a place whose colours, smells, and sounds they can remember: a first place that belongs to them, that they can return to in their memories in their cobbled-together exiles.’ The occupation of the West Bank in particular ‘has created generations of us that have to adore an unknown beloved: distant, difficult, surrounded by guards, by walls, by nuclear missiles, by sheer terror.’

Finally, no account of modern Palestinian literature would be complete without mention of Palestine’s poets, at least one of whom, Mahmoud Darwish, has an international reputation. While modern Palestinian poetry can scarcely be understood without reference to modern Arabic poetry more generally, its specific feature is its ‘Palestinian’ character. This can lead to a temptation for Palestinian poets to write about Palestine at the expense of everything else, or to present themselves as ‘spokesmen’ for the people from whom they come.

Darwish himself has perhaps not been immune from this temptation, the danger of which is that it can lead to poetry drawing on stock motifs. In the Palestinian case the dangers of political ‘platform poetry’ are acute, and they are referred to by Barghouti in
I Saw
Ramallah
. While Palestinians can scarcely ignore politics, he says, this does not ‘justify the overt political approach of Palestinian poetry, in the homeland or the Diaspora. Comedy is also necessary … Our tragedy cannot produce only tragic writing. We are also living in a time of historical and geographical farce.’ This was also Habiby’s insight, and it led him to write
Saeed the Pessoptimist
. However, Barghouti goes on to suggest that ‘the political approach’, if this is understood to mean writing only about politics, or, worse, being close to politicians, is all the more dangerous for poets in that poetry naturally entails ‘displacement’. The poet strives ‘to escape the dominant language to a language that speaks itself for the first time’, which can mean writing about almost anything but a narrow conception of politics.

12. Mahmoud Darwish, national poet of Palestine

In his best work Darwish has explored similar issues. Born in 1941 in a village in Galilee, he and his family were forced into exile in 1948, and he has lived since in various Arab capitals, including Cairo and Beirut. He has been the editor of an important literary review,
al-Karmel
. Darwish’s poetry can be read in various English translations,
¹⁶
and it contains textbook examples of poems of Palestinian loss and exile, pieces such as ‘We Travel Like Other People’ (‘We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere’) or ‘Athens Airport’ (‘Athens Airport changes its people every day. But we have stayed put … waiting for the sea’) from the 1986 collection
Fewer Roses
, capturing
such experience. However, his work also contains material that attempts larger reflections, including an ambitious memoir,
Memory for Forgetfulness
, written after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut.
¹⁷

This book, a long work of ‘prose poetry’, connects the author’s experience of being trapped in his flat in war-torn Beirut to the fate of the Palestinian refugees around him, who, deprived of work and equal rights in their host country of Lebanon, are seen as the problem, ‘making trouble, violating the rules of hospitality,’ and now allegedly responsible for the war. ‘Why don’t you go back to your own country?’ he is asked. Israel will then have less reason to invade. Making coffee in his flat, walking through the streets, visiting friends as the bombs rain down, what, Darwish asks, is the role of the Palestinian poet under such circumstances? ‘Palestine has been transformed from a birthplace to a slogan,’ and one that all too often does not even serve the Palestinians’ interests, now that Beirut, ‘birthplace for thousands of Palestinians who know no other cradle’, is being evacuated under the impact of Israeli bombs. ‘No one wants to forget. More accurately, no one wants to be forgotten,’ he writes, and as a result he chooses to ‘join battle’, in his translator’s words, ‘against oblivion’, producing a memory for forgetfulness that is ‘not chronicle, journey, history, memoir, fiction, myth, or allegory, but all of them together’.

Darwish’s work can be understood as an act of memory and a set of meditations on the role and responsibilities of the Palestinian poet. But he himself has been ambivalent about that role, and he has criticized his earlier poems for being too direct, too crude, insufficiently poetic and too rhetorical. Darwish, in fact, is a man of enormous literary culture, and he has reflected deeply about the relationship between Palestinian poetry and Arabic poetry and between Arabic poetry and world poetry, as well as about his responsibilities to himself, to his audiences and to Palestine. Reading a recent collection of interviews with Darwish, one is reminded strongly of W. B. Yeats, whose developing responsibilities to Ireland
similarly lay at the root of much of his poetry.
¹⁸
Being the ‘Palestinian national poet’ is an enormous responsibility calling for a certain distance if one is not to be imprisoned in the role. Less well known, but well worth reading, is Samih al-Qasim, who, born a few years earlier than Darwish (in 1939), nevertheless has not achieved anything like the latter’s international reputation. Like Habiby, he has spent his life in Israel. Al-Qasim writes short, pointed lyrics, such as ‘Travel Tickets’, which perhaps well summarizes the hopes and fears of a whole generation: