Literature and Nation in the Middle East

Jacket design: Cathy Sprent Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.eup.ed.ac.uk

studies, nationalism studies, and colonial/post-colonial studies. I strongly recommend it.’ Professor Joseph Massad, Columbia University

‘A study on the literary construction of the nation in the Middle East is most welcome today, particularly with its emphasis on Palestinian and Hebrew literature… this is an opportune moment to see how [Middle Eastern] writers perceive themselves and their identity.’ Dr P. C. Sadgrove, University of Manchester

SULEIMAN & MUHAWI

IBRAHIM MUHAWI is a fellow of the Edinburgh Institute for the Advanced Study of the Arab World & Islam. His published work is interdisciplinary and ranges over the areas of Arabic literature, folklore, and translation. He is author of Speak Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales (1989). He has also translated and introduced Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness (1995).

‘An excellent addition to the field of Arabic literary

LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

YASIR SULEIMAN is Director of the Edinburgh Institute for the Advanced Study of the Arab World & Islam and Professor of Arabic & Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He has written extensively on the Middle East and his books include The Arabic Language and National Identity (Edinburgh University Press, 2003), The Arabic Grammatical Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 1999) and A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East (2004).

ISBN 0 7486 2073 7

LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST Edited by Yasir Suleiman and Ibrahim Muhawi

LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

This compelling study presents an original look at how ‘the nation’ is represented in the literature of the Middle East. It includes chapters on Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine and Israel, drawing on the expertise of literary scholars, historians, political scientists and cultural theorists. Literature and Nation in the Middle East offers a synthesising contribution to knowledge, placing Arab literature within the context of emergent or conflicting nationalist projects in the area. Topics addressed include: • the roles played by literature and interpretation in defining national identity • conflicting nationalisms • conflict resolution • exile

Edited by Yasir Suleiman and Ibrahim Muhawi

The approaches taken by the authors range from textual and rhetorical analysis to historical accounts of the role of literature in contributing to national identity, and political analysis of the use of literature as a tool in conflict resolution. Genres covered include fiction (the novel), poetry and verbal duelling.

Edinburgh

This unique exploration of the subject of literature and the nation in the Arab world is of interest to anyone studying Middle Eastern literature and nationalism, as well as historians and political scientists.

Literature and Nation in the Middle East Edited by YASIR SULEIMAN and IBRAHIM MUHAWI

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

SuleimanMuhawi_00_Prelims

1

12/1/06, 9:56 am

© in selection and editorial matter, Yasir Suleiman and Ibrahim Muhawi, 2006 © in the individual contributions is retained by the authors Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Goudy by Koinonia, Bury, and printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 2073 7 (hardback)

The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

SuleimanMuhawi_00_Prelims

2

12/1/06, 9:56 am

Contents

Notes on the Contributors Acknowledgements

v vii

Introduction: Literature and Nation in the Middle East: An Overview Yasir Suleiman

1

1 The Production of Locality in the Oral Palestinian Poetry Duel Nadia Yaqub

16

2 Irony and the Poetics of Palestinian Exile Ibrahim Muhawi

31

3 Gender and the Palestinian Narrative of Return in Two Novels by Ghassan Kanafani Amy Zalman

48

4 Darwish’s ‘Indian Speech’ as Dramatic Performance: Sacred Space and Transformation J. Kristen Urban

79

5 Israeli Jewish Nation Building and Hebrew Translations of Arabic Literature Hannah Amit-Kochavi

100

6 Between Myth and History: Moshe Shamir’s He Walked in the Fields Shai Ginsburg

110

7 Writing the Nation: The Emergence of Egypt in the Modern Arabic Novel Jeff Shalan

128

8 Arabic Poetry, Nationalism and Social Change: Sudanese Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives Heather J. Sharkey

162

9 Marginal Literatures of the Middle East Peter Clark

179

SuleimanMuhawi_00_Prelims

3

12/1/06, 9:56 am

contents 10 The Predicament of In-Betweenness in the Contemporary Lebanese Exilic Novel in English Syrine C. Hout

190

11 The Nation Speaks: On the Poetics of Nationalist Literature Yasir Suleiman

208

Bibliography Index

232 257

— iv —

SuleimanMuhawi_00_Prelims

4

12/1/06, 9:56 am

Notes on the Contributors

Dr Hannah Amit-Kochavi teaches at Bar Ilan University and Beit Berl College in Israel. She received her PhD in translation from Tel Aviv University in 2000. Her teaching interests include Arabic-Hebrew translation history, ArabicHebrew translator and interpreter training, and classical and modern Arabic literature. Her research interests include Arabic-Hebrew translation history and Arabic teaching to Hebrew speakers in Israel. Peter Clark worked for the British Council for thirty years, mostly in the Middle East. He is an independent consultant and translator and has translated eight books from Arabic – history and fiction – as well as short stories and plays. He is currently translating Ard al-Sawad by Abdel-Rahman Munif.  Shai Ginsburg is an Assistant Professor of Hebrew and the Jess Schwartz Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at Arizona State University. He has published articles on Hebrew literature, cultural criticism and historiography, and on modern Jewish ideological practices. Syrine C. Hout is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University of Beirut. She is the author of Viewing Europe from the Outside and numerous studies of travel narratives. Her interest in contemporary Lebanese writings produced in exile has resulted in journal articles on Rabih Alameddine, Tony Hanania, Hani Hammoud, Nada Awar Jarrar, Emily Nasrallah, Nadia Tueni and Hanan al-Shaykh. Ibrahim Muhawi was born 1937 in Ramallah, Palestine, and received his education at the University of California. He has taught at a number of universities around the world, and is currently Allianz Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Munich. His major publications include Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales and a translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness. Jeff Shalan is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of Honors Studies at Union County College in Cranford, New Jersey. He recently completed his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is

—v—

SuleimanMuhawi_00_Prelims

5

12/1/06, 9:56 am

notes on the contributors currently working on a book manuscript, Writing the Nation and its others: Fictions of Community and Exile in the North African Novel. Heather J. Sharkey is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (University of California Press, 2003). Her articles have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of African History, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, and in many other journals and edited volumes. Yasir Suleiman is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Director of the Edinburgh Institute for the Study of the Arab World and Islam, and Head of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh. He has lectured nationally and internationally on various aspects of the Middle East. His numerous publications include The Arabic Grammatical Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 1999), The Arabic Language and National Identity: A Study in Ideology (Edinburgh University Press and Georgetown University Press, 2003) and A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Dr J. Kristen Urban has publishing and research interests in Middle East politics and conflict resolution. She has undertaken work in Gaza and the West Bank and has recently returned from Bahrain as a Senior Fulbright Scholar.  She holds an MS in Biology, a PhD in Political Science, and teaches International Studies at Mount St Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, MD, USA. Nadia Yaqub is Assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Culture at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Her research interests include intertextuality, identity, nationalism and trans-nationalism in the areas of oral Arabic literature, the novel and film. Amy Zalman received her doctorate in Middle Eastern Studies from New York University in 2003. Her articles, reviews and literary translation have appeared in Arab Studies Journal, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Middle East Report, Paintbrush: A Journal of Poetry and Translation, Women’s Review of Books and elsewhere. She is at present a founding partner of a consultancy, Oryx Communications.

— vi —

SuleimanMuhawi_00_Prelims

6

12/1/06, 9:56 am

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the contributors to this book for their patience and understanding. Thanks are also due to Shahla Suleiman and Jane Muhawi who have helped in many important ways, to Sarah Artt who helped in preparing the manuscript, and to Nicola Ramsey, our EUP editor, for her patience, perseverance and understanding. Needless to say, all the errors in this book are our responsibility. We would also like to add that the views and terminologies of the contributors do not necessarily reflect those of the editors. Yasir Suleiman and Ibrahim Muhawi Edinburgh and Munich June 2005

— vii —

SuleimanMuhawi_00_Prelims

7

12/1/06, 9:56 am

For Shahla and Jane

SuleimanMuhawi_00_Prelims

8

12/1/06, 9:56 am

Introduction 1

Literature and Nation in the Middle East: An Overview Yasir Suleiman Aldous Huxley writes that ‘nations are to a very large extent invented by their poets and novelists’ (1959: 50). Although by talking about ‘invention’ Huxley may have exaggerated the nature of the link between nation building and literature, this book subscribes to the broad thrust of his statement by examining the role literature plays in constructing, articulating or challenging interpretations of national identities in the Middle East. Thus, most of the chapters in this book are devoted to Arabic literature – here broadly defined as literature in Arabic by Arab writers – owing to the demographic dominance of the Arabs in this part of the world. The remaining chapters delve into Hebrew literature, Arabic literature in translation and Arab literature in its trans-national mode as expressed in a language other than Arabic, in this case English. In terms of genre, the book covers poetry and the novel in their capacity as the prime examples of high culture, as well as oral or ‘folk literature’ in the modern period as an expression of the localisation of the lived socio-political experience of a national group in a ‘here’ and ‘now’ that invokes the heroism of the past. In terms of provenance, a few chapters deal with the literary expression of Palestinian nationalism as the enunciation of a ‘stateless’ or ‘refugee’ nation, while other chapters cover the construction of national identity in Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon and Israel, thus providing an array of geographies and sociopolitical contexts that can add to our understanding of the interaction between literature and the nation in the Middle East. Drama is not dealt with in this volume because of its marginal position in the national cultures of the region, although a study of such playwrights as the Egyptian Tawfiq al-Hakim and Ahmad Bakathir, and the Syrian SaÆdallah Wannus would be revealing in charting the literary expression of the nation in the Arab context. In addition, the volume does not cover the short story or North Africa because of considerations of space. This book subscribes to a constructivist view of the nation, although it recognises that nation building cannot be an exercise in ‘invention’, if by invention is meant the fabrication of nations and national identities out of a void. Construction is not necessarily a form of ‘myth-making’, as it is sometimes made out to be in the literature on nationalism (see Gerber 2004). Construction —1—

SuleimanMuhawi_01_Intro

1

12/1/06, 9:57 am

yasir suleiman is a purposeful activity that requires the identification and selection of existing cultural and experiential material that is reshaped, worked and reworked to advance the cause of the nation as the site of collective identification, allegiance and patriotism. Such material must answer to the criterion of resonance, in that it must ‘strike a chord’ with those at whom it is directed. Material that fails to do this cannot, ipso facto, belong to the realm of the national, regardless of how this is defined. Furthermore, the construction of national identities is an elite-mediated activity in which considerations of power and hegemony are implicated in the selection, valorisation and consecration of the canon of national literature which, as Corse writes, ‘is a product of human choice and contestation, not a natural choice’ (1997: 16). Academics, publishers, critics and those in control of the various channels of communication partake in this process of canon formation which, by its very nature, is always in a state of becoming. Men and women of letters participate in this cultural-cum-political process as members of the elite or counter-elite in their own communities, but the nature of their participation is contingent on the historical contexts and the political trajectories in which they find themselves. In some cases, they play a role that is confirming of the nation as a political or cultural entity, its uniqueness and its right to a state of its own. This is the case with the early pronouncements of pan-Arab nationalism which, in recent times, has confined itself to expressions of cultural nationalism. In other cases, for example in East and West Germany before re/unification in 1990, literature played a multiplicity of national roles, one of which was discrediting the cause of unity of the two parts of Germany as members of a single Kulturnation that is deserving of a single nation-state of its own (Brockmann 1999: 10). In yet other cases, literature can be used to deconstruct, or even subvert, a national project in favour of an alternative, typically irredentist, view of a putative ‘nation’ and its destiny. Literary expressions of state-nationalism in the Arabicspeaking world, for example Egyptian and Lebanese nationalism, have played this role vis-à-vis pan-Arab nationalism. This explains the references to Egyptian, Lebanese and Sudanese literatures as individualities in Arab cultural and political discourse, wherein the state takes on itself the task of promoting its own national identity through a set of unique symbols, motifs, anniversaries and cultural products, including having a literature that carries its name. National identities are complex phenomena that relate to national literatures in complex and myriad ways. This book gives expression to this multifarious link of nation to literature through a variety of perspectives. As a starting point, it does not assume that this link is unidirectional; rather, the book is based on an assumption of reciprocity, whereby the nation shapes its literature and is shaped by it in a shuttling mode of interaction. The chapters of this book reflect this reciprocity by sometimes approaching their subject matter through the —2—

SuleimanMuhawi_01_Intro

2

12/1/06, 9:57 am

introduction literary lens, while at other times they do so through the nationalist perspective, but at no point do they decouple the two sides of the relationship from each other. Furthermore, one feature of this book is worth highlighting: we do not subscribe to the ‘reflection’ theory of literature in which, as cultural material, literature is said to ‘reflect’, ‘mirror’ or ‘capture’ the national character of a people. Reflection, which is popular in the media and dominates in the ethnic and cultural conceptualisations of the nation in modern Arab thought, smacks of naïve realism and of the reductive reliance on stereotypes. It additionally assumes that the nation predates its cultural expression in literature as the nonpolitical site of the political. Furthermore, reflection assumes the existence of an inherent and pre-existing meaning in the text which captures essential features of the national culture; it additionally assumes that this meaning is accessible to the members of the nation who can recover it with a high degree of intersubjective validity. Arabic writings on the connection between nation and literature tend to favour this outmoded perspective. Popular in the Marxist tradition, reflection is a defective theory of the relationship between nation and literature as categories of the social world and cultural production respectively (see Albrecht 1954). Not only does reflection deny the multiplicity of meanings – some of it may be hugely discordant – that the readers of a text can derive from it, but it further denies their role as active creators of meaning who can interpret and reinterpret the text concerned in ways that defy its initial or canonical reception. Put differently, reflection subjugates and tethers the reader to the text in an unwarranted fashion. It views the text as a closed semantic unit whose meaning is to a very large extent determined in advance of reading and is invariant both synchronically and diachronically. Furthermore, as Noble points out, the proponents of this theory never adequately explain ‘how the “optics” of reflection work’ (1976: 213). As a result, ‘reflection remains an image’ and ‘does not become a concept’ (ibid.). As a metaphor, reflection invites further modifications (for an expansion of the model, see Griswold 1981), such as refraction and distortion, to make it more viable as an instrument of explanation, but these modifications compound the metaphor by further accretions that render reflection even more problematic. Finally, reflection is based on the false premise that the national and the literary are ontologically separable. The constructivist view of the nation, to which this work is a contribution, rejects this premise in favour of an understanding of culture and social reality in which literature and the nation co-exist symbiotically. As Brockmann notes in his study of the role of literature in German re/ unification, ‘in the world of social constructions the boundary between the real and the fictional is not impermeable’ (1999: 19). Adopting a constructivist view of the nation implies a modernist understanding of the relationship between it and literature, although this relationship —3—

SuleimanMuhawi_01_Intro

3

12/1/06, 9:57 am

yasir suleiman invariably invokes the symbols and motifs of pre-modernity insofar as these answer to the criterion of resonance mentioned above. Early pronouncements on nationalism in Western Europe in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century established the connection between nation and literature as a cornerstone of nation building. The German Romantics gave currency to this concept, although their ideas on the formation of national identities have a strong essentialist flavour. Giving literatures national names and treating them as discrete units were an expression of this mode of thinking in which the uniqueness of the nation and the ‘exceptionalism’ of its literature had to be proclaimed, affirmed and constantly cultivated. This trend gathered momentum in the twentieth century, wherein literatures came to be identified and studied in national units in a way that overrides the linguistic medium through which these literatures are expressed. This explains why, as literary categories, English, Scottish and Irish literatures, for example, are thought to have identities of their own, in spite of the fact that they are – albeit not universally in Scottish and Irish literature – expressed through varieties of the same language. The same applies to American and to Canadian literature in English in spite of their different histories and political trajectories (Corse 1995, 1997). It is therefore not surprising that the notion of ‘literary devolution’ (see Crawford 1992) had been utilised as the counterpoint of political devolution in the British Isles at least half a decade before the latter became a legal reality in Scotland in 1999. A minority of scholars deplore this effect of nationalism. Elie Kedouri condemns nationalism for disrupting ‘whatever equilibrium had been reached between the different groups [in a community], [by] reopen[ing] settled questions and … renewing strife’ (1966: 115). Kedouri further condemns nationalism for being the invention of ‘literary men who had never exercised power, and appreciated little the necessities and obligations incidental to intercourse between states’ (ibid.: 70–1). This one-sided view of nationalism remains the exception not the rule. Commenting on the role of poetry in nation building, Aberbach writes (2003: 271): Nationalism, though exposed in its potential for destruction, remains a major political force in civilisation. National poetry is not marginal but expresses much of what ordinary people feel. It tends to be vindicated by history, if not in its call for violent upheaval or revenge, then in its hope for national renewal, both political and spiritual. Poetry continues as a midwife to nationalism, though rarely with the undiluted violence and idealism of the past.

Rather than being on the wane under the onslaught of globalisation and post-modernity, the nation is entrenching itself as a fact of our social and political worlds. This is particularly true of the Middle East, wherein national literatures act as markers of the nation regionally and in the international arena. Although the concept of the nation-state is culturally, politically and socio—4—

SuleimanMuhawi_01_Intro

4

12/1/06, 9:57 am

introduction logically ‘brittle’ in the Arab Middle East, and although it has to compete with alternative pan- or, to a lesser extent, regional models of the nation, the development of a national literature – regardless of how this is understood – is treated as a sign of cultural independence. As Corse points out, ‘national literatures have become identified within both the national and international communities as an essential characteristic of nation-states’ (1997: 24). The functionality of literature as a ‘central resource in the process of creating the necessary unity, loyalty and patriotism of national populations’ (ibid.: 25) is therefore pivotal in national task-orientation and mobilisation. Literacy and the mass media are the linchpins in this process because they enable the members of the nation to create bonds of allegiance and identity with each other across synchronic space. Conceptualising the nation as an ‘imagined community’ therefore is partially dependent on literature, which can create an experience of ‘unisonality’ between members of the nation. In the Arab context, the school curriculum is the major incubator of this ‘unisonality’ which, more often than not, is expressed through poetry rather than prose literature. This variation in the relative national merits of poetry and prose literature in the Arab arena calls for a revision of Benedict Anderson’s view of the novel as the prime carrier of nationalist meaning in the literary field (1991). In addition, this variation draws attention to the fact that literary form is as important as nationalist content in promoting the cause of the nation. Being associated with orality-cum-aurality through public performance in Arab culture, Arabic nationalist poetry enhances the experience of ‘unisonality’ which national literature aims to promote among the members of the nation. In this respect, poetry steals a march on the novel. The link between nation and literature in the Arab Middle East assumes great importance because of the tug of war between the nation-state and panArab nationalism. Each form of nationalism strives for authenticity and seeks to inscribe this in a literature that it calls its own. For pan-Arabists, statenationalism is a centrifugal force of political and cultural fragmentation that is at odds with the centripetal pull of pan-Arabism. Because it lacks political expression in a nation-state, pan-Arabism emphasises culture as a paramount attribute of the nation. As Brockmann observes, ‘culture is the primary way in which nations without political boundaries locate and identify themselves’ (1999: 10). Muhammad Husayn Haykal* expresses a similar view in his advocacy of the role of literature in Egyptian territorial nationalism: ‘Literature is the force which nothing else can vanquish or overcome as easily as an armed force can suppress political revolution’ (Gershoni and Jankowski 1986: 88). * Full transliteration is not used in the body of the text unless deemed necessary. Names and other terms will, therefore, be given the the form nearest to their full transliteration.

—5—

SuleimanMuhawi_01_Intro

5

12/1/06, 9:57 am

yasir suleiman As we shall see below, this is also true of ‘refugee’ nations, of whom the Palestinians are a prime example. For culture and refugee nations, national identity is most strongly located in what the German Romantics have called the ‘republic of letters’. Thomas Mann captured this feature of the culture of divided nation when he declared during the Goethe celebrations of 1949: ‘Who should guarantee the unity of Germany if not an independent writer, whose real home … is the free German language, untouched by zones of occupation’ (quoted in Brockmann, ibid.: 9). Although Thomas Mann here refers to language, it cannot be lost on the reader that he does so from the position of an eminent man of letters. Günter Grass reiterated the same position in 1980 when he declared that the ‘only thing in the two German states that can be proven to be pan-German is literature’ (ibid.: 32). What Thomas Mann and Günter Grass have said about Germany is true of pan-Arabism which attributes the sense of difference promoted by the Arab nation-states to the strong similarities that exist between them. A similar tendency at differentiation existed in the deliberate process to fashion an American literature that is distinct from English literature. Joe Cleary raises this strategy of differentiation to the status of a general principle when he says that the anxiety ‘to distinguish a national culture may be most acute precisely where the substantive cultural differences between national Self and significant Other are least obvious’ (2002: 54). Cleary has in mind the Irish national literary experience vis-à-vis English literature, but his point has wider validity. The drive to establish nation-state cultures, including literatures, in the Arab world is surely motivated by the socio-political dynamics inherent in this principle. The similarities between the Arab and German situations vis-à-vis the role of literature in nation building are such that they do deserve a comparative study of their own. In the German Democratic Republic, which lacked a public space for free expression in the national domain, literature emerged as a surrogate channel for the promulgation, promotion and exchange of views that would otherwise have been subject to brutal censorship. This is true of literature in the Arab nation-state which, that is the state, tends to be intolerant of alternative national ideologies and their expression in literature. Commenting on the German Democratic Republic, Brockmann states that ‘where other avenues of discourse were blocked because of the Communist regime’s repression of open political dialogue, literature assumed a privileged role in enabling a more oblique form of communication’ (ibid.: 2). This is true of the situation in the Arab nation-state, as Hasan (2002) points out, where literature plays a counterhegemonic role often in favour of pan-Arabism. It is also true of the Palestinians in Israel who, in pursuit of their national claims through cultural modes of expression, do resort to various forms of self-censorship and ‘oblique means of communication’. As in the German Democratic Republic, allegory is used in —6—

SuleimanMuhawi_01_Intro

6

12/1/06, 9:57 am

introduction Arabic and Palestinian literature as a preferred mode of articulating this obliqueness. Examples of this will be found in this work. Before re/unification Germany exemplified the position of literature in a situation of national partition. As we have pointed out above, the situation of Germany shares some important features with the position of the Palestinians as members of a refugee nation, in spite of the major objective differences that exist between the German and Palestinian cases. Living in the diaspora in a state of exile, the Palestinians too have relied on literature to fashion a national identity that can override their geographical dispersal and political fragmentation. Creating a public sphere in which being Palestinian can be given expression, literature has been instrumental in fostering a sense of national identity among Palestinians. In his illuminating study of literature, partition and the nation-state, Joe Cleary offers the following astute comment on the link between nation and literature in the Palestinian case (2002: 86): In the absence of an available nation-state, the development of a national literature has enabled the Palestinians to reinforce their sense of themselves as a distinct people and to express solidarity across the disjunctive locales of Palestinian existence in the face of repeated political reversals and calamities. Literature, that is, is one of the ways in which the scattered sectors of the Palestinian people can be imaginatively connected in the here and now even if actual statehood remains constantly deferred.

As a dispossessed and ‘de-territorialised’ community, the Palestinians embody the exilic experience of what Ibrahim Muhawi in this volume calls the ‘presentabsent’ or the ‘absent-present’. Edward Said captures this experience in the title of his autobiography Out of Place. As a nation in exile, or a refugee nation, the Palestinians, even when they live on their historical land, are ‘out of place’ as a political entity and as a community in which its present is so tragically out of kilter with its past. Nadia Yaqub gives an illuminating discussion of how this ruptured relationship between the ‘absent’ and the ‘present’ is reconstructed and enacted in the public performance of the oral Palestinian poetry duel in the Galilee in northern Israel. The context for this poetry, and its ‘unisonality’ in public performance, is the wedding eve party, the sahrah, in which Palestinians from different localities in Israel meet and interact in mock verbal duels that, on the surface, seem to be tied to the exigencies of the ‘here’ and ‘now’. Invoking the events, characters and place names of a heroic past, the oral poetry duel contrasts this past with the un-heroic present of the Palestinians in Israel whose lives are characterised by political, economic and cultural subordination to a hegemonic Hebrew-Zionist culture and political ideology. As an exercise in ‘phatic communion’, much of this poetry performs a restorative and therapeutic role in national terms, allowing the Palestinians in Israel to construct a positive vision of the national self and to cope with the trauma of their dispossession, de-territorialisation and dispersal. Nadia Yaqub —7—

SuleimanMuhawi_01_Intro

7

12/1/06, 9:57 am

yasir suleiman expresses this with great precision when she writes that ‘Palestinian poetry is commemorative of an anterior time invested with a “Truth” that is absent from the present’ (p. 24). As performance, the oral Palestinian poetry duel extols the heroic qualities of the audience and invites them into a zone of signification in which ‘military imagery and epithets … run through the evening entertainment’ (p. 23). More importantly, however, this zone of signification is articulated through a Palestinian dialect that is free from Hebrew borrowings, although these borrowings do exist in ordinary Palestinian speech in Israel. The absence of these borrowings is all the more significant because Palestinian oral poetry occasionally embodies some English words, and similar borrowings are found in the neighbouring oral poetry of Lebanon. The absence of Hebrew words cannot therefore be read as the application of a general rule which disallows the use of foreign words in the oral poetry duel. Naming places and localities is a primary feature of the national semantics of the oral Palestinian poetry duel. The act of piling name upon name in this poetry may, from a critical point of view, be viewed as an exercise in listing; this is far from being the case. Naming helps tie the audience to locality and aims at asserting its claims of ownership over it. The fact that the names of the towns and villages in the poetry are paraded in Arabic constitutes a rejection of Hebrew semantic and cartographic hegemony, of the attempt to lay claim to the land by attaching alternative names to it (see Suleiman 2004). Dealing with the absent-present relationship as a case of hyphenated identity in the Palestinian national experience, Ibrahim Muhawi correlates identity with the structure of irony, which is a feature of some of the recent and most seminal writings by Palestinians. To effect this correlation, Ibrahim Muhawi moves away ‘from a purely semantic notion of … opposite meaning [in irony] to that of an absent meaning’ (p. 32). Understood in this way, irony becomes ‘metonymic’ of all situations of exile, of which the Palestinian national experience is a paradigm example in modern times in that it manifests the following conditions: ‘being literally out of place, needing to be elsewhere and not having that “elsewhere” where one would rather be’ (p. 198). But irony in the Palestinian context performs a lot more than just acting as a trope for the Palestinian national experience. It allows the writer to establish a communion with his readers by pretending that he is ‘revealing secrets that only they will understand’ (p. 37). In addition, this communion, as an act in construction, allows the writer to be critical of the national self without causing psychological injury or national offence. By appearing to take the readers into his confidence, the writer can surreptitiously blur the difference between the two poles of the textual relationship, especially when irony is laced with fantasy or elements of stereotypical humour that can engross the reader in the machinations of the writer. In Palestinian literature, irony creates a ‘community of sympathy’ in such —8—

SuleimanMuhawi_01_Intro

8

12/1/06, 9:57 am

introduction a way that, ‘when [irony] ignites, all meanings are present, and the one that was absent before may acquire the greater significance’ (p. 40). In addition, irony in Palestinian literature accentuates both the sense of national failure and the possibility of repair through ‘negating negation’ and the therapy that humour so poignantly generates in the audience. Allegory offers another mode of narration in which the national as a category of the social world can come into being through the fictional in its capacity as a cultural artefact. Investigating the role of gender, particularly masculinity, in two canonical texts by Ghassan Kanafani, Amy Zalman emphasises the constructed nature of national and masculine identity in relation to the two preoccupations of national loss and national return. In Palestinian nationalism, the two tropes of loss and return are linked to the female figure as the symbol of a feminised land. This connection between nation and the land through the female figure reconciles male love to political resistance, thus allowing the student of nationalism to investigate the political content of emotional relations. In Men in the Sun, Ghassan Kanafani expresses in allegorical form the military, political and historical failure of the masculine figure through the protagonist Abul Khaizaran whose ‘body has been castrated’. However, what makes Ghassan Kanafani’s use of allegory so interesting in this novel is that he undermines the foundations upon which allegory is based: its presumption of ‘obviousness’ owing to the ‘shared set of terms’ holding the writer and reader, and the belief among readers that the reality ‘to which the fictional text affixes is a stable one’ (p. 55). Ghassan Kanafani challenges this assumption of stability by suggesting that, contrary to the traditional poetics of loss and return, national identity in the Palestinian context is not isomorphic with masculinity. This rupture implies a view of Palestinian national identity and destiny that is ‘always shifting, always-in-the-process’ (p. 56). In All That’s Left to You, Ghassan Kanafani does not disrupt the structure of male virility he so perceptively depicts in Men in the Sun, but offers a vision of the national Self that ‘shifts the focus to the female body’ in a new poetics of return (p. 7). In this poetics, women shed their constructed negative uni-dimensionality and are characterised as being both ‘aggressive and passive, sexually voracious and sexually submissive, redemptive and shameful, threateningly present and positively absent’ (p. 72). In its most neutral form as an activity in inter-cultural communication, translation acts as a bridge between cultures by making the literature of one nation available to another. In situations of conflict and nation building, literature can create empathy in a secondary audience by locking into its myths and motifs in ways that make this audience uncomfortable and, consequently, more amenable to explore itself as other or to construct the other as Self. Through translation, literature can creatively blur the boundaries between nations by creating a space for understanding and empathy that may be absent —9—

SuleimanMuhawi_01_Intro

9

12/1/06, 9:57 am

yasir suleiman from the murky arena of public politics in which national interests dominate. In her contribution, Kirsten Urban explores how these themes are articulated through the encounter of American international politics students with Mahmoud Darwish’s poem ‘Indian Speech’ in translation. Using the Native American experience with the white man – represented by Columbus – as a metaphor, Mahmoud Darwish, the foremost Palestinian poet, injects the Palestinian national trauma into the North American sphere to render members of the secondary audience more able to understand and empathise with what it means, and how it feels, to be a Palestinian coming face to face with Zionist national ideology. In doing this, Mahmoud Darwish appeals to the humanity of the secondary audience whom he enlists, through translation, as members of his ‘extended tribe’, a tribe that rejects injustice and accepts the responsibility of helping to put an end to it. The interaction between nation and literature in the Middle East is played out through translation in another way. Hannah Amit-Kochavi explores this by reference to how the translation of Arabic literature into Hebrew was used, paradoxically, to construct, consolidate and promote a Jewish national identity in Palestine before and after the establishment of the state of Israel. In the early stages of Jewish immigration to and settlement in Palestine, Zionist Jewish nation building, which was in the main an East European creation, sought inspiration and authenticity for itself in the native Arab as a ‘practical model’ that can replace ‘the miserable diaspora Jew with a brave one’ (p. 103). Literature was thought to provide access to this model, hence the early translations of some pre-modern Arabic literature to Hebrew. Translations of Palestinian literature into Hebrew after the establishment of Israel were initially made for government organisations to understand how and what the enemy within thinks. Later, translations were made for the literary market. Hannah Amit-Kochavi examines the complex reception of these translations in the host Hebrew culture, which looked with surprise at the very existence of this literature and its high quality, a response that underlines the gulf between Israel and its neighbours. In one case, Anton Shammas’ translation of Imil Habibi’s The Pessoptomist, the reception of the novel revealed ‘covert prejudice, as wonder was expressed at an Israeli Arab’s (the translator) perfect mastery of Hebrew style’ (p. 106), the assumption being that only a Jew can achieve such mastery of Hebrew as the Jewish language. To avoid giving credence to the suffering of the Palestinians, or at least to stunt its credibility, Israeli critics assimilated and compared this suffering to that of the Jews. In this way, Palestinian suffering was, to use a common expression, ‘lost in translation’. The point was made above that canon formation is always in a state of becoming. This opens up the possibility of reinterpreting canonical national texts in a way that challenges and undermines their received or sanctioned — 10 —

SuleimanMuhawi_01_Intro

10

12/1/06, 9:57 am

introduction readings. Shai Ginsburg does that in his interrogation of Moshe Shamir’s novel He Walked in the Fields, which is often read as a founding expression of the struggle of the native Hebrew youth in Palestine to ‘realise Jewish nationality’ through the creation of the state of Israel. This consecrated reading of the novel was in fact read into it by overriding the history of the events that unfold in the narrative in favour of a defining historical moment – the creation of Israel in 1948 – that postdates the events in question. In addition, the consecrated meaning of the novel and its canonical status do override the mixed reception it had when it was first published in 1948. Shai Ginsburg’s exploration of these ‘infringements’ in the history and reception of the text shows the constructed nature of the nation and how literature can be pressed to serve in this construction. By ignoring these ‘infringements’ and by going back to the text itself, Shai Ginsburg reassesses the ascribed heroism of the protagonist and shows it to be bogus. The protagonist does not die in action and he does not sacrifice himself in the defence of his nation. Rather, his death seems like a ‘wish fulfilment designed to overcome personal distress and [not] an outcome of ideological conviction or [an] altruistic act of bravery’ (p. 116). Nation building invites ‘mythification’ in the literary arena, and the hegemonic reading of He Walked in the Fields is an element in this mythification. We have pointed out above that, in the Arab milieu, poetry is an important instrument in nation building, and that the popularity of poetry in this project calls for revising the assumption in nationalism studies that favours the novel as that literary instrument par excellence. The contribution of literature in the articulation of national identity varies from context to context and from period to period within the same context. In Sudan at the beginning of the twentieth century, poetry was the main carrier of national meanings in the literary arena. More precisely, this task was in fact the domain of poetry in its oral, not written, mode owing to the low level of literacy in the country. The oral nature of this poetry meant that both men and women were able to contribute to it and that the promulgation of this poetry in public performance was instrumental in enhancing the feeling of ‘unisonality’ between members of the putative nation. During this period, poetry was used for educational purposes, for spreading the notions of material progress and social development, for helping to imagine Sudan in its colonial borders as a free and independent nation, for cleansing the term ‘Sudanese’ as a national appellation from some of its most negative connotations, for making the concept of the Sudanese nation the subject of pride and heroism, for spreading anti-colonial feeling and, finally, for getting around the censorship imposed by the colonial authority. In addition, being the most venerable of all verbal art forms in Arabic, poetry was instrumental in casting an identity for Sudan that was Arab, although the non-Arab among the Sudanese population later challenged this Arab hegemony. The musicality and — 11 —

SuleimanMuhawi_01_Intro

11

12/1/06, 9:57 am

yasir suleiman rhythmic nature of this poetry enhanced its effectiveness as a tool of national mobilisation. However, the rise of journalism and the increasing popularity of prose writing conspired to sideline poetry later, or at least to reduce its importance in the emerging Sudanese national culture. This was to some extent occasioned by a move in this culture from oral, dialect-inspired poetry to poetry in the fusha (Standard Arabic), which was seen as the preserve of a small constituency of educated Sudanese. Pan-Arab nationalism benefited greatly from the power of poetry. In particular, poetry was used to connect the past with the present for reinforcement, legitimation and inspiration in the nationalist project. This is reflected in the use George Antonius makes of the first hemistich of Ibrahim al-Yaziji’s (1847– 1906) famous ode tanabbahu wa-stafiqu ayyuha al-Æarabu (‘Arise, ye Arabs, and Awake!’) as an epigraph, in beautiful Arabic calligraphy, on the title page of his classic study The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (1938). Using poetry as an instrument of political mobilisation, poets with pannationalist leanings developed a poetics of literary expression in which intertextuality, repetition and the dynamism of the ‘verb’ as a category of signification were exploited. Yasir Suleiman investigates these stylistic practices in relation to the poetry of the Iraqi Nazik al-Mala’ika, who chronicled some of the most important themes in the life of the Arabs in the second part of the twentieth century. This study also considers how the religious and the national impulses in this poetry fuse together to create a tapestry of national spirituality that exploits the position of Jerusalem as a potent symbol in the national endeavour. This ‘national spirituality’ replaces the earlier secularism of the poet in a way that presages the ascendance of Islam as a primary source of political organisation in the Arab world in the second half of the twentieth century. In The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement, George Antonius stresses the role culture played in stirring an Arab nationalist consciousness in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, the age of the nahda (modern Arab renaissance). Highlighting the role of literature during this critical period of modern Arab history, Antonius argues that the ‘Arab awakening’, as he calls it, was ‘borne slowly towards its destiny on the wings of a nascent literature’ (Antonius 1938: 60). Schools and the press were instrumental in disseminating the Arab nationalist idea during this period. But so was the novel as a new genre of literary expression. Albert Hourani highlights the role of the novel in creating an Arab national consciousness when he comments on the contribution Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914) made in this regard: ‘Jurji Zaydan … did more than any other [writer of the nahda] to create a consciousness of the Arab past, by his histories and still more by his series of historical novels, modelled on those of Scott and creating a romantic image of the past as Scott’s had done’ (1983: 277). In spite — 12 —

SuleimanMuhawi_01_Intro

12

12/1/06, 9:57 am

introduction of this, critical discussions of how the novel promoted the nationalist idea in the Arab Middle East are sketchy. This is partly because of the lack of data on the ‘circulation’ of the novel, the ‘constitution of reading publics’ (p. 130) and the way literary expressions of the nationalist idea, whether cultural or territorial in character, are interpreted and internalised by individuals as socio-political agents. These difficulties notwithstanding, Jeff Shalan investigates how Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zainab and Tawfiq al-Hakim’s ÆAwdat al-ruh (Return of the Spirit), two of the most important novels in the canon of Egyptian national literature, offered a vision of Egypt in which the participation of the peasantry in constructing the nation is problematised at the level of national discourse. In Zainab, this participation is circumscribed in two ways. On the one hand, the peasantry are said to be able to contribute to constructing the nation to the extent that their contribution responds to the needs of the community. On the other hand, the peasantry can do this only if they yield their agency to an elite class whose ethos is definitely male-oriented. This analysis in the novel applies with equal force to the participation of women in nation building, who are said to be ‘doomed to tradition’, and therefore pre-modernity, ‘without the leadership of a male intellectual elite’ (p. 143). In ÆAwdat al-ruh, Tawfiq al-Hakim tackles the concepts of solidarity and national unity and focuses them around the notion of an Egyptian territorial nationalism that is rooted in the ancient past, with the peasantry as its objectified symbol: ‘If the towns and cities of Egypt are to unite in the name of a single nation, they must seek to reclaim that “pure heart”, the ancient Egyptian spirit of solidarity that resides … with the peasantry’ (p. 152). Tawfiq al-Hakim further believes that for national unity to be realised, the Egyptians must oppose ‘the remnants of Ottomanism, the encroachment of European values, and deleterious effects of wealth on the community’ (p. 150). Clearly, al-Hakim offers a more optimistic, albeit more populist, vision of the Egyptian nation than does Haykal. Jeff Shalan concludes his consideration of Zainab and ÆAwdat al-ruh by saying that ‘these two texts not only represent the dominant focus and trajectory of the nationalist thought of the period; they also provide valuable insight into the rhetorical appeal as well as the ideological limits and contradictions, of the territorialists’ nation building project’ (see Suleiman 2003 for a discussion of Egyptian nationalism). Nationalism is based on ideas of solidarity and unity. By the same token, nationalism does not encourage diversity and heterogeneity. These impulses in nationalism operate in politics as they do in the cultural arena. In the Middle East, the rise of Arab nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had an ecological impact on existing cultures and their expressions in literature. Thus, the diversity that once existed in the Ottoman and Mediterranean worlds, with their rich tapestries of languages and ethnicities, gave way to homogenising — 13 —

SuleimanMuhawi_01_Intro

13

12/1/06, 9:57 am

yasir suleiman pressures which grew less and less tolerant of cultural expressions that were judged schismatic. Peter Clark deals with this aspect of Arab nationalism, pointing out that it marginalises cultural voices that in the past had their own legitimate niche in society. However, the picture is not all negative according to Peter Clark. Post-colonialism and post-modernity have stepped into the breach, as it were, and created conditions that promoted the emergence of new ecologies of cultural diversity in the Arab body-politic. Literature by ‘Arab’ writers in languages other than Arabic, particularly literature in the metropolitan languages of France and the Anglo-Saxon worlds, has created new zones of marginality and diversity. It has also created new categories of cultural product that defy the imposition of a monochromic taxonomy based on language. It is as though, by developing in this way, the ecology of diversity started to reassert itself. To capture this new diversity, some critics make a distinction between Arabic literature as literature composed in Arabic, and Arab literature as literature composed by ‘Arabs’ about Arab themes in a language other than Arabic. The latter description may be applied to what Syrine Hout calls the ‘Lebanese exilic novel’ in this volume. As a category of definition, this novel simultaneously expresses belonging to the nation as a source of ‘stability and centrality’ and alienation from it as a condition of the ‘anxiety and marginality’ of the exile (p. 192). As a statement of cultural and national in-betweenness, the exilic novel is, at some deep level, an attempt to reconcile nation and exile psychologically without, however, eliminating the existential difference between them. Memory, particularly nostalgic memory, plays an important part in this reconciliation, as do peculiarities of speech which the exile preserves to express his attachment to the originary point of departure. Syrine Hout expresses this by saying that ‘while it may be [physically] easy to extricate oneself from one’s home-country, it is a lot harder to expunge one’s national traits from one’s appearance or psyche’ (p. 197). Exilic nostalgia is not a yearning for a place per se, but for the intense personal relationship that the exile has with that place which others call ‘home’ or ‘national homeland’. Thus, the two novels Syrine Hout studies, Koolaids by Rabih Alameddine and Unreal City by Tony Hanania, do not portray nation and exile as two antithetical realities, but as ‘realities coexisting within the individual, the nation and the host country’ (p. 206). The above discussion, and the chapters that follow, show the rich pickings to be had from understanding how literature helps construct the nation and how the nation can shape literature. We offer this volume as an initial step on the road to developing this understanding in Middle Eastern studies. The volume examines poetry and the novel, but does not cover other genres. It delves into how translation can extend the role of literature in nation building into secondary settings which may be beyond the intended horizon of the text in its — 14 —

SuleimanMuhawi_01_Intro

14

12/1/06, 9:57 am

introduction original language. The volume also shows how cultural diversity can be injected into the ecology of nation and literature through emerging forms of expression whose hybridity is one of their chief hallmarks. In particular, a comparative orientation is necessary to extend and refine our understanding of literature and nation. The participation in this of sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, literary critics and students of nationalism, in disciplinary and crossdisciplinary activity, would help yield further insights.

— 15 —

SuleimanMuhawi_01_Intro

15

12/1/06, 9:57 am

1

The Production of Locality in the Oral Palestinian Poetry Duel Nadia Yaqub At the end of his introduction to Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha regrets that he has not included the voices of those who, and I quote, ‘have not yet found their nation: amongst them the Palestinians.’ Their voices, he goes on to say, ‘remind us of important questions: When did we become “a people”? When did we stop being one? Or are we in the process of becoming one? What do these big questions have to do with our intimate relationships with each other and with others?’ (1990: 7) These questions are, of course, too broad to be addressed in the present article, especially for Palestinians whose varied experience, as a minority group whether in Israel, under occupation or in diaspora, means that any serious treatment of their national identity will be especially complex. Moreover, individual Palestinians, like other people, belong to different groups, enjoy diverse relationships with various ethnic, cultural and political entities, and at different times and places may express and, indeed, feel differently vis-à-vis their Palestinian-ness. We cannot hope, then, to answer Bhabha’s questions for Palestinians (When did they become ‘a people’? When did they stop being one? Are they in the process of becoming one, and so on) in any definitive or complete way. Rather, to understand the ‘people-hood’ of Palestinians generally we must begin by considering how that notion is engendered locally, among discrete groups of Palestinians. Towards this end, I will explore how some Palestinians use a traditional poetic genre, namely the oral Palestinian poetry duel, continually to create and maintain their Palestinian-ness and to define it, at least among themselves, on their own terms. Intimately related to the question of national identity is that of locality, the process of locating the subject, a concept discussed at length by Arjun Appadurai in Modernity at Large (1996). Because he is concerned with global cultural flows and the production of locality on the part of the dispossessed, the de-territorialised and the transient, he is careful to distinguish between location in a given place which may or may not be coincidental with locality, but which is not a necessary component of it, and a relationship with place which is a vital element of locality (1996: 199). People may define themselves in relation to places in which they do not reside, have never resided, and may never reside. — 16 —

SuleimanMuhawi_02_Chap 1

16

12/1/06, 9:58 am

the production of locality in the oral palestinian poetry duel Appadurai describes locality as ‘a complex phenomenological quality, constituted by a series of links between the sense of social immediacy, the technologies of interactivity, and the relativity of contexts.’ What is of interest here is Appadurai’s notion of the fragility of locality. Locality, he says, is ‘ephemeral unless hard and regular work is undertaken to produce and maintain its materiality’ (1996: 180). I will be arguing that Palestinians, living and performing in the Galilee, the Triangle and parts of the West Bank are using their traditional oral poetic genres as both a tool in that ‘hard and regular work’ and a medium through which their locality can be defined and communicated. I will begin by describing in very general terms the poetry in question. The Palestinian poetry duel consists of two or more poets who compose and sing in turn, each following strict rules of rhyme, metre, form and musical melody. There are various types of poetry duelling associated with Palestinian weddings. The poetry studied here is typically performed in northern Palestine (The Galilee, parts of the Triangle, and northern areas of the West Bank).1 The duel can be performed in a number of contexts, but is generally associated with public celebrations, most often village weddings where it is performed at the groom’s celebration on the eve of the wedding (the sahrah) as well as on the wedding day itself in conjunction with the wedding procession. The poetry is traditionally a rural phenomenon and is performed by and for men, although increasingly one finds it performed at folk festivals, rallies and other gatherings that may include women as well. Performances take place outdoors in a large open space. The poets stand facing each other, surrounded by the saff, a ring of men usually numbering in the hundreds. The poetry is sung, usually without musical accompaniment. Several types of poetry are performed on any given occasion, and there is no set pattern for their performance. The duel is usually preceded by music and dance. The poetry session will often begin with qusdan (s. qasid), long sung odes which are formally similar to the classical Arabic qasidah. This introduction will be followed by duelling in shorter poetic genres (usually four hemistiches) which the poets trade for anywhere from one to over 100 turns. One form, the farÆawi, which is always performed extensively at weddings, does not consist of a duel between two poets. Rather, one poet recites to the audience who respond to each line by singing a refrain. Audience participation, in the form of clapping, dancing, and singing refrains, is an important part of the entire performance. Indeed, several poets have told me that they could not compose without an audience. The poets move periodically from one genre to the next, usually spending no more than twenty minutes on any one form. A performance ends as it began, with the recitation of a qasid or other more sombre verses followed by music, dancing and the ritual of dressing and shaving the groom. One of the most striking features of the oral Palestinian poetry duel are the — 17 —

SuleimanMuhawi_02_Chap 1

17

12/1/06, 9:58 am

nadia yaqub long stretches of praise and greeting of hosts, guests and their families and villages. The greetings can occur in any genre and at any time during the performance. A typical wedding will include a long greeting section during the first half of the evening. If there is a debate, insult and boast exchange, or composition contest to the performance, this will usually occur during the second half of the duel, after a great deal of praise and greeting. However, a less elaborate greeting section will also occur towards the end of the evening. It is not uncommon for a performance to consist almost solely of praise and greeting, or for greetings to be interspersed with boasting, description and platitudes. These lengthy passages are generally viewed by both poets and audience as the least ‘poetic’ sections of a given performance. They generally lack entextuality, that is, they are completely context-dependent in that they are not quoted outside of the performance context as other, more memorable, lines may be (Bauman and Briggs 1990). Most striking is that many of the lines in these sections are borrowed directly from the most mundane of phatic exchanges from Palestinian daily speech. However, as we shall see later, it is within these sections of the performance, at least in part as a result of their phaticity, that the production of a distinctly Palestinian locality takes place. During the praise and greeting sections, poets may mention a specific event or accomplishment, but generally the praise and greeting will be generic in nature. Often, nothing specific is said about a given family or village. Rather, it is simply welcomed by the poet. Thus, what is said about a particular village or family is much less important than the mentioning of the village itself. As a result, the poetry takes on the character of a list, a list of proper names. Consider, for example, the following excerpt: The youths of the town are around me Here are my family and friends To ÆAyn Mahil, my brothers To al-ÆUzayr and Rummanah I came riding my horse Long live Bayt Jann Where did the residents of Maghar go? And all the people of al-Mashhad I want to send my greetings Shafa ÆAmr, I call And Shafa Hamadah, we greet Our party is a party of entertainment And the Zaynah’s are with us and the Sarur’s We have light, good light And to Farad and Sakhnin God grant a long life to people of Jinin We came to the party, we came And the people of the town are around us

— 18 —

SuleimanMuhawi_02_Chap 1

18

12/1/06, 9:58 am

the production of locality in the oral palestinian poetry duel Abu ÆAmar, [as dear to us as] our eyes To Taha I send greetings God preserve you, [Kafr] Manda residents I count on the Merciful Oh Ramzi, light of my eyes Oh ÆAlam family, strong To Salih al-ÆAlam, [as dear as] my eyes Where are you now? Long live the people of Nazareth, the strong Abu Fakhri, [you are] a righteous sword Where are the TurÆan residents the good people The houses of al-Farash we greet And the houses of ÆAtur we greet Dayr Hanna and its buildings And ÆArrabah, we come to it Nazareth and its people Welcome in ÆAylabun The Dayr al-Asad residents and the Qublan The SaÆad family are well defended And the Hammud family, my brothers Welcome, Bayt Jann.

In this excerpt, which in performance lasts approximately three minutes, the poet mentions twenty-seven Palestinian village and family names. Listing of Palestinian villages and families is more than just a way of mentioning Palestinian proper names. Appadurai reminds us that naming is a complex and important act: ‘The large body of literature on techniques for naming places … is substantially literature documenting the socialization of space and time. More precisely, it is a record of the spatiotemporal production of locality’ (1996: 180). To give a name to a person, object or place is to lay claim to it, to assert one’s right to do so. We name things and places which we own or which we in some way control. Once a name has been given, its repeated use becomes important. A name, like any other word, develops associations and connotations with use. In the case of place names, their continued use over time can give rise to historical associations embedded with special meanings for those who use them. Thus, Hittin is for Palestinians irrevocably associated with the famous victory of Salah al-Din over the Crusaders which took place there. Dayr Yasin brings to mind the massacre of its Palestinian residents in 1948. To utter the Palestinian names of Palestinian villages in the course of a sahrah, then, is to assert Palestinian presence in the areas in which wedding participants live and to lay claim to their right to reside there and make their mark on the landscape.2 To understand fully the import of the Palestinian phenomenon, it must be juxtaposed against the Israeli policy of renaming Palestinian towns and villages after the creation of the state of Israel, a process known in Israel as ‘redeeming — 19 —

SuleimanMuhawi_02_Chap 1

19

12/1/06, 9:58 am

nadia yaqub the names’ (Swedenburg 1995: 50).3 Thus, the destroyed town of Al-Saffuriya becomes Zippori on Israeli maps. æAyn Hawd, which was not destroyed but occupied and turned into an artists’ colony, has become Ein Hod.4 Many towns and villages although still populated largely, or even solely, by Palestinians have been given new names by the state of Israel as a mark of historical claim to the sites in question. One might have difficulty locating the Palestinian West Bank town of Nablus, for example, unless one knows that the Israeli occupation authorities have renamed it Shekhem and identify it as such on tourist maps and road signs. Likewise, the Palestinian town of al-Khalil is given its biblical name Hebron. Shafa ÆAmr, which contains an old synagogue but has not had Jewish residents since the 1920s, is identified as Shefar Am. For the Israeli state, the attachment to local towns and geographic areas of Hebrew place names, names that resonate with Jewish history in the region, has been a conspicuous part of its appropriation of the territory identified by these names, and historical justification for that appropriation. For Palestinians, the continued use of Palestinian names rather than Hebrew ones for their villages constitutes a denial of this appropriation. Their Palestinian place names are important precisely because they resonate with a Palestinian Arab, rather than a Jewish, history of the area. Significantly, neither Jewish Israelis nor Palestinians are interested in imposing names on sites that have no connection with their own history. Many villages in the Galilee have neither Jewish residents nor ruins and as a result have been allowed to keep their Palestinian names. Similarly, Palestinians do not give names to the Jewish settlements that have been built in the Galilee since 1948. The use by Palestinians of Palestinian place names, then, must not be seen merely in negative terms as a rejection of the Israeli state or of the Jewish presence. Rather, it is most accurately interpreted as an affirmation of Palestinian history and presence on the land. In this social and political context, the listing of Palestinian place names in the poetry duels carries a special significance, reminding wedding participants of the Palestinian character of the region, of local Palestinian history, and of their own legitimacy as Palestinian residents on the land. However, just as important as the presence of the names in the poetry is the way in which they are listed. Listing is a near universal, and unfortunately understudied, phenomenon in oral poetic traditions. Places and people are listed in the wedding praise songs of the Griots. We find it in Irish ballads and various Polynesian traditions. Perhaps the lists best known in the West are the catalogues in Homer’s epics. Atchity mentions some of the ways in which these catalogues, most notably the catalogue of Achaian ships in Book Two of the Iliad, have been analysed, noting that the latter serves as a dramatis personae, that it presents a microcosm and prefigure of the Trojan War, and, most importantly, serves to memorialise a — 20 —

SuleimanMuhawi_02_Chap 1

20

12/1/06, 9:58 am

the production of locality in the oral palestinian poetry duel period anterior to both the narrating and narrated present whose world of social upheaval differed markedly from Homer’s. ‘It [that is, the catalogue] may represent Homer’s attempt to define the synthesization of society in a world, unlike his own, which had not yet accomplished it completely’ (1978: 277).5 As fellow bearers of a shared Palestinian identity, participants are also defined as a community. In this regard, the Palestinian poetry duel is similar to other folklore genres which serve culturally to bind members of a society. The phatic nature of many lines is relevant here. Discussion of phaticity is complicated by a terminological confusion that has existed since Malinowski first coined the term in 1923. As Muhawi has pointed out, Malinowski uses the term ‘phatic communion’ to refer to both a type of meaningless small talk employed solely to keep conversation going and to all types of utterances in which ‘ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words’ (quoted in Muhawi 1999: 268). Whereas most subsequent research on phaticity has focused on the ‘small talk’, Muhawi, interested primarily in the ‘ties of union’, seeks to divorce the concept of phatic communion from small talk in his exploration of the phaticity of an expressive genre, the proverb. The division is necessary to reconcile a contradiction in Malinowski’s own description of phatic communion as ‘a speech event which does and does not have the ability to act upon the world by creating and not creating bonds of sympathy and union …’ (Muhawi 1999: 268). What is interesting about the Palestinian poetry is that it inserts ‘small talk’ within an expressive genre precisely, I would argue, as a means of exploiting its phaticity. In one performance, for instance, the poet chooses as a refrain the phrase ‘Greet the guest, Abu Ibrahim (hayy al-dayf yabu brahim).’ In performance, the saff’s chanting of the refrain alternates with the poet’s offering of greeting to various guests. By extending greetings to guests, families and villages, by employing the formulas that are used by Palestinians on a daily basis to greet each other, poets invoke the phaticity that is inherent in those greetings, thereby strengthening the bonds of community (and producing the locality) that emerge from the sahrah. The sense of community that emerges from performance will affect anyone who attends or participates in the event. Atchity’s analysis of the Homeric catalogues is also relevant here. For Atchity, the catalogue of ships is also about subordinating the individual to the communal in a time of social crisis. ‘From the largest group to the smallest collective … the poet’s emphasis is upon community’ (1978: 277). Moreover, Atchity says, individuals are named as generic representatives, usually of the troops that they bring with them. Similarly, the listing of Palestinian villages and family names defines sahrah participants as a group, one that is obliquely described in the performance as Palestinian. Furthermore, like the individuals in the Homeric catalogue of Achaian ships, the mention of Palestinian sahrah participants in the perform— 21 —

SuleimanMuhawi_02_Chap 1

21

12/1/06, 9:58 am

nadia yaqub ance bears a metonymic relationship with the social groups (that is, their families and villages) to which they belong. As a result, the list of personal and geographical names which is the hallmark of the praise sections of the poetry duel serves to extend the Palestinian community created in the performance well beyond the few hundred men who attend the wedding to all members of the families mentioned in the poetry and to residents of all named villages. The host village, both as host village and as the home of the largest number of guests, is praised most extensively. Villages and towns in the immediate vicinity of the host village will also be mentioned repeatedly. As one moves farther away from the host village, the pattern of mentioned villages becomes more scattered. The naming of villages, then, defines a specific geographic area. Because the lists of names follow the pattern of attendance at the wedding, the place names mentioned are those most closely connected with wedding participants. The space created in the poetry is not merely a Palestinian one, but one most intimately tied to their concepts of home, family and belonging. The area defined by a given performance is usually relatively small (for example, the north-central Galilee). However, it is not uncommon for poets to mention other regions (the Negev, the Triangle, the West Bank and Gaza) in a clear attempt to extend the boundaries of the Arab Palestinian space created in the performance to include all of historical Palestine. At least some poets, then, seem to be aware of the political significance of their practice, even as they avoid direct references to Palestinian nationalist sentiments.6 Conspicuously absent from the Palestinian wedding poetry is any mention or allusion to Israel or Israeli culture and society. In his discussion of neighbourhoods, Appadurai notes that every neighbourhood is created against an Other.7 ‘… [N]eighborhoods’, he says, ‘are inherently what they are because they are opposed to something else and derived from other, already produced neighborhoods’ (1996: 183). The Galilee Palestinian’s Other, the larger (non-Palestinian) Israeli presence, is conspicuously absent from the Palestinian poetry duel. The cities and settlements which Palestinians see and interact with on a regular basis, the Hebrew words borrowed into the Palestinian dialect never occur in the poetry.8 One might suspect that the art form itself would be resistant to the use of foreign words, but such is not the case, generally. English words occur occasionally in the poetry, and the closely related Lebanese poetry duel can also include English, and more commonly French. Oral poetry from other parts of the Arab world also exhibits a great deal of flexibility which allows for the inclusion of foreign borrowings (albeit in an Arabised form). There also seems to be little resistance to incorporating modern elements into oral Arabic dialect poetry.9 Palestinian poets will talk frankly about loudspeakers, bombs, cars and tape recorders in their poetry duels. Current events may arise, although often rather obliquely. One cannot argue, then, that the absence from the poetry duel — 22 —

SuleimanMuhawi_02_Chap 1

22

12/1/06, 9:58 am

the production of locality in the oral palestinian poetry duel of Hebrew and of any mention of the Israeli non-Palestinian presence that surrounds Galilee residents is due to any generic restrictions. In performance, then, Palestinian poets create an imaginary Palestine, one defined through both the language of performance (the Palestinian dialect) and the abundance of Palestinian family and village names as distinctly and purely Palestinian. But the poetry performance does more than delineate a Palestinian space; it also connects that space and wedding participants who are located within it to a larger cultural construct. In most performances there is a distinct thread of military imagery and epithets that runs through the evening entertainment. We find that the space which the saff creates by and for the performance is called al-maydan or al-sahah, terms which alone mean plaza or square, but which can also refer to the arena of war. The performance space may also be referred to as al-maÆrakah (the battle). The sahrah itself is called yawm al-maÆrakah (the day of battle) or hima al-haflah (the defence of the party), while the reciting of poetry is compared with the brandishing of swords and the piercing of spears. The town in which the wedding celebration occurs may be described as an Arab fortress and great city, the glory of the nation and a protector of virgins. Not surprisingly, a good part of the poetry treats the audience’s heroic qualities; they are described as glorious Arabs who have travelled a great distance to attend the celebration. They are referred to alternatively as carriers of swords or pact-making men, as victorious, loyal knights and horsemen who defeat the aggressor. Known for their generosity, fidelity and trustworthiness, they are protectors in the service of their nation, resolute riflemen, people of honour and fierceness. They are described as both lions and hunters of lions, men of zeal and firmness, noble freemen and princes, the bearers of banners and flags. Their actions are described as military manoeuvre. In a word, they are men of chivalry. Poets describe themselves in much the same terms, although they may be even less reserved in their praise. They are the knights of speech with voices like cannons. They compare favourably to heroic poet warriors and military leaders of the past. They are the leaders of the cavalry, an inspiration to various military heroes, rulers, able to ram mountains of rock with their heads. The performance space, then, is a battleground, the saff its heroic Arab warriors who are led by the poets. The poetry is their weapon. From the performance, an Arab heroic construct emerges. To understand the importance of this imagery, I turn to Eugene Vance’s work on the Chanson de Roland. Vance describes an identity between the hero of the epic and the jongleur who gives the epic life:10 We know nothing definite about what we commonly call the historical origins of the poem, but we may be fairly certain that the Roland as we possess it is a coagulation of disparate narrative materials that once perpetuated themselves in oral performances during which the poet and his heroes would be simultaneously reborn together,

— 23 —

SuleimanMuhawi_02_Chap 1

23

12/1/06, 9:58 am

nadia yaqub thanks to the memory and voice of the poet. Thus the heroes of the Roland, like those of the Iliad and the Odyssey, speak in the same metrical formulas as the poet; they employ the same epithets, the same lists, and they even share the same foreknowledge of events. The fact that these heroes live only by the memory and the voice of the poet ensures, in other words, a strong cognitive identification between them, and this is evident in the motivation imputed by the poet to the heroes themselves. For if it is the antique glory of the hero that animates the voice of the poet, inversely, it is the commemorative posterity of the singer that inspires the epic blows of the hero. (1993: 380)

Vance describes not merely the expression of the poet’s identity through the song, but the possession of his identity by the actions of the heroes about whom he sings (1993: 380). The operative factor for Vance is commemoration, which he describes as: any gesture, ritualised or not, whose end is to recover, in the name of a collectivity, some being or event either anterior in time or outside of time in order to fecundate, animate or make meaningful a moment in the present. Commemoration is the conquest of whatever in society or in the self is perceived as habitual, factual, static, mechanical, corporeal, inert, worldly, vacant, and so forth. (1993: 374–5)

I would like to argue that, like the Chansons de Roland of France in the Middle Ages, the Palestinian poetry is commemorative of an anterior time invested with a ‘Truth’ that is absent from the present (Vance 1993: 375). Vance quotes Vernant on this point: The activity of the poet is oriented almost exclusively toward the past. Not his individual past, nor a past generalized as if it were an empty framework independent of the events that have occurred there, but ‘ancient times’ with its own contents and qualities: a heroic age, or still further, a primordial age, the origin of time. (1993: 377)11

The poetry not only reflects or relates the events, characters and characteristics of ‘ancient times’, but has a transforming, revitalising effect on the present, the moment of performance, which is characterised by deficiency and lack (1993: 382). How is this transformation realised in the Palestinian context? We have already seen how the poetic performance is characterised by an overarching heroic construct. We note that the heroic construct created in the performance is defined as explicitly Arab and bedouin, harking back to an age in which warfare was conducted with horses, swords and lances, when battles occurred on the more human level of single combat, when heroism was clearly defined and hence attainable. An idealised ‘ancient time’, whether it be the semi-historical times of the pre-Islamic hero-poet ÆAntara, that of the Bani Hilal of the Arab conquests in Africa, or a more generic, mythical past is clearly evoked through the performance. — 24 —

SuleimanMuhawi_02_Chap 1

24

12/1/06, 9:58 am

the production of locality in the oral palestinian poetry duel This heroic time evoked in the performance contrasts starkly with the present in which most Palestinians in Israel lead their lives, a present characterised by loss of honour and land, by cultural marginalisation in a society whose dominant culture is not Arab, by political and economic disempowerment. Their lives unfold in a distinctly un-heroic context, their present characterised by Vance’s deficiency and lack. There is a disjuncture, then, between the present of the performance, what I will call the signifying context, and the signified context created mimetically within the performance. Not only do participants in the wedding sahrah face the wide gap that separates the two contexts of the performance, but through the speech acts of the poets they are prevented from forgetting for any length of time the existence of both contexts. Herein lies the transforming nature of the poetry. It is not merely the evocation of an ideal Arab, mythic past, but its intimate linkage on a number of linguistic levels with the un-heroic present which effects the transformation. To begin with, the Palestinian wedding eve performance is characterised by an inordinate amount of commentary that is in some way metacommunicative.12 In any given performance, approximately 25 per cent of all lines will be ‘meta-poetic’. That is, they are explicitly about the poets as poets, their poetry or the performance. Poets boast of their fame and compositional skill, of the beauty and force of their verses, of the distance they have travelled to attend the celebration, and of the excellence of the sahrah itself. Another 30 per cent are meta-performative, meaning they include specific mention of the guests at the sahrah and their home villages, calls to the saff, and praise for the excellence of the sahrah itself. A significant percentage of these lines are greetings and as such are, at least in their use in their quotidian context, phatic. Thus, more than half of the lines of a typical performance refer to the signifying context. Other oral poetic traditions in the Arab world also contain a high frequency of metacommunicative or phatic utterances. Both Reynolds, writing about the oral epic in Egypt, and Caton, describing oral poetry in Yemen, also note the phenomenon in the oral poetry they study. Reynolds describes the way in which the mood of the evening affects the performance’s text: Part of the dynamic of the sahrah context is the weaving of elements from the performance situation first into the performance text and then back into the sahrah setting. Over and over again an evening gathering develops around an idea or a mood that is reiterated in different forms. To some extent this quality is found in any human dialogue or conversation, but the sahrah context seems to invite such participation in a more formalized, more performance-oriented manner. (1993: 185)

Caton expresses the same idea in terms of the speech acts inherent to the poetry’s verbal formulas:

— 25 —

SuleimanMuhawi_02_Chap 1

25

12/1/06, 9:58 am

nadia yaqub Besides its [that is, the formula’s] poetic function of building a regular metre, it performs various speech acts whose primary relevance is for the wedding celebration. These are quintessentially social speech acts, among them the greeting of members of the audience; thus, social interaction becomes poeticized … (1990: 99)13

On the surface, these direct references to the performance context are similar to the metanarrative discourse that can occur in storytelling (Bauman and Briggs 1990: 69). There are a number of such devices at the disposal of a skilled narrator. Tellers may, for example, interject into their narration comments about the credibility of the tale (‘Now you may not believe this, but …’) or make deliberate comparisons between elements in the tale and their counterparts in the performance situation (‘It was about as tall as that tree over there’). Such commentary draws the audience members’ attention to the here and now, transporting them momentarily from the mimetic world into which they have been psychologically drawn by the narration, back to the present of the performance. One can argue that such language operates as a trope similar to literary allusion in that it results in the coexistence of two contexts for a single utterance (Conte 1986: 38–9; Riffaterre 1983: 120).14 In the Palestinian poetry performance, however, in which more than half the lines explicitly mention elements of the performance context, something very different is happening. The poetry performance does not transport the audience psychologically to a fictional world and then jerk them back to the present through metacommunicative commentary. Indeed, to a large extent, we can argue that the performance itself becomes a central theme of the performance. There is so much ‘meta’ discourse in the poetry that the audience is never permitted to forget exactly where they are (at a wedding sahrah) and what they are doing (celebrating the approaching nuptials of their friend or kinsman, the groom). The performance context is never allowed to slip into the background, but forced to be present in the minds of participants even as an Arab heroic context is constantly evoked through the language of chivalry. Here, too, phaticity has a role to play. Muhawi, following Babcock, has noted the phatic function of ‘meta’ discourse. Like the greetings mentioned above (and, indeed, as we have already noted in the context of performance, the greetings are themselves metacommunicative) the ‘meta’ discourse that permeates the poetry not only binds the sahrah participants to the poetry in performance, but also serves to bind them psychologically to one another. The simultaneity of the two contexts is in part created through the equation between performance and battle that is explicitly enunciated in the poetry itself. In a number of lines, poetry and performance are specifically linked to battle. The poets are the ‘knights of speech’, their poetry is a weapon – ‘the sword of Æataba’ – which serves as ‘a support on the day of battle’. Through the performance an identity is created between laylat kayf (a night of enjoyment) and yawm al-maÆrakah (the — 26 —

SuleimanMuhawi_02_Chap 1

26

12/1/06, 9:58 am

the production of locality in the oral palestinian poetry duel day of battle), both of which are formulaic epithets for the wedding sahrah. The nature of the speech acts employed in the poetic performance also helps to create this identity. The typical Palestinian wedding poetry performance includes a great deal of what Jacobson calls conative language, and what Hymes defines as directive language, that is, language directed at the audience (Jacobson 1960: 355; Hymes 1974: 23). Some lines consist of instructions to the saff or the audience as a whole, and others of explicit performatives. I have been using the term participant to refer to audience members, not only because of the active role that the saff plays in the performance, but also because so much of the typical performance consists of this type of direct address. In this sense, the Palestinian wedding poetry duel differs markedly from a theatrical performance in which audience members stand outside of the interaction that makes up the performance. As the addressees of so many lines, they are drawn directly into the context created by the poetry, that is, into the heroic Arab construct. The creation of this heroic Arab construct in performance and its relationship to the transforming nature of that construct add a complexity to the notion of locality which Appadurai does not address. Appadurai discusses the contexts of locality primarily in terms of the relationships that can exist between multiple neighbourhoods in a non-hierarchical setting and the limitations on locality production that can occur when a nation-state imposes itself onto neighbourhoods. Speaking of the Yanomami villages of Brazil, for example, he says that ‘while they are still in a position to generate contexts as they produce and reproduce their own neighbourhoods, they are increasingly prisoners in the context-producing activities of the nation-state, which makes their own efforts to produce locality seem feeble, even doomed’ (1996: 186). Palestinian residents of Israel find their locality similarly challenged by the activities of the state of Israel, but what of the wider context of the Arab world? Through creation of the Arab heroic construct, we find Palestinians voluntarily defining their locality to a larger cultural entity – the Arab nation. In the process, it is Israel, a non-Arab society, which is marginalised, at least for the duration of the performance. Most important is the way that sahrah participants are drawn into the signified context. They are not made temporarily to forget their presence at the sahrah and identify with characters in a fictional world created by the poetry. Indeed, the poets through the use of conative language and relentless references to the performance context prevent anything of the sort from happening. Rather, the fictional world of chivalry created by the overarching heroic Arab construct that characterises the poetry is brought squarely into the present of the performance. The wedding sahrah itself is transformed into a heroic, Arab event, and the participation of poet and audience is redefined as a heroic, Arab act. We are reminded of Genette who, in discussing a very different sort of — 27 —

SuleimanMuhawi_02_Chap 1

27

12/1/06, 9:58 am

nadia yaqub verbal art, says, ‘to keep his thoughts fixed on two moments at the same time is almost always, for the Proustian creature, to consider them identical and to merge them …’ (1980: 143). Like Marcel in The Remembrance of Things Past, Palestinians at the wedding sahrah are asked to keep their thoughts fixed on two contexts, and like Marcel, they succeed in doing so by rendering them identical. The distance between the signifying context and the signified context in the Palestinian case – between the present of performance and the mythic past created mimetically within the performance – is psychologically removed. Situated squarely within the heroic Arab construct, the sahrah itself becomes a heroic context, and to participate in the sahrah becomes a heroic deed. If the lists of Palestinian family and village names create an imaginary Palestinian space, the heroic construct created in performance defines that space as Arab. By defining the scope and nature of their locality through the poetry, Palestinians can, at least for the duration of the performance, reject their marginal position within Israeli society and situate themselves and their Palestinian-ness at the core of an Arab cultural centre. Myerhoff describes a similar transformation in her discussion of ritual: … The invisible referents or realities to which ritual symbols point become our experience and the subject may have the sense of glimpsing, or more accurately, knowing the essential, accurate patterns of human life, in relation to the natural and cosmic order. (1990: 246)

This reminds us of Geertz’s comment that rituals have the effect of fusing the dreamed-of and the lived-in order. Thus transformation is a multidimensional alteration of the ordinary state of mind, overcoming barriers between thought, action, knowledge and emotion. The invisible world referred to in ritual is made manifest and the subject placed within it. Indeed, it is within the ritual nature of the Palestinian poetry duel that the relationship between locality and phaticity lies. The Palestinian poetry duel itself displays many of the features of ritual as defined by Schechner, including efficacy, link to an absent Other, symbolic time, audience participation and collective creativity (Beeman 1993: 378). At the same time, the greeting sections of the performance borrow heavily from another set of rituals from Palestinian society, that is, the rituals of phatic ‘small talk’, and most particularly the rituals of phatic greetings (Coupland et al. 1992: 212). In other words, embedded within the larger ritual of the wedding eve performance are the small rituals of phaticity. And it is precisely within ritual that Appadurai finds the ‘hard and regular work’ that must be carried out to produce locality. ‘[S]pace and time are themselves socialized and localized through complex and deliberate practices of performance, representation, and action’ (1996: 180). Phaticity, then, works to produce locality. It is no accident that an increased popularity for the Palestinian oral poetry — 28 —

SuleimanMuhawi_02_Chap 1

28

12/1/06, 9:58 am

the production of locality in the oral palestinian poetry duel in the 1990s has coincided with more active participation on the part of Palestinians in Israeli politics. But the poetry performance is not essentially about politics. In part through the work of producing locality in their wedding eve celebrations, Palestinians are in a continual process of becoming. When Jews begin to attend Palestinian weddings, then the lists of names that are so central to the poetry will include Hebrew names as well.

notes 1. Poetry duelling of one sort or another is widespread throughout the Arab world, especially in the context of weddings. See Caton for a detailed description of poetry duelling among the Khawlani tribe of Yemen. The Galilee and the Triangle are within the geographical borders of the present state of Israel. 2. Bowman (p. 33) recognises the importance of place names in Palestinian identity formation, although he does not discuss the relationship between the act of naming and the affirmation of a cultural or political identity. 3. Swedenburg notes that in 1990, Israeli government-run television and radio banned the use of Palestinian names for towns and villages in the Occupied Territories, replacing them with their biblical equivalents (p. 74). 4. See Slyomovics for a discussion of the renaming of this village and subsequent relationship between the original village (now Ein Hod) and the new ÆAyn Hawd where original inhabitants of the Palestinian village now live. 5. Atchity also draws an interesting comparison between the catalogue and genealogy. Since the Palestinian lists include not only village names, but also families, the suggestion of genealogy is also strongly present here. Palestinians are praised within the context of their ancestral and familial affiliations: sons of Palestinian families, who are also sons of ÆAdnan, IsmaÆil, and Ibrahim. 6. That Palestinian Israelis are aware of the political implications of the village lists can be seen from the following incident. At one duel performed shortly after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in Jericho, a poet included that city in his listing of Palestinian towns, inciting considerable excitement among the audience. ‘Jericho, did he say Jericho?’, ‘Jericho? We’ll spend tonight in prison!’ were some of the comments the mention elicited. 7. Appadurai defines neighbourhoods as the existing social forms in which locality is realised (p. 179). 8. My corpus of sixty hours of recordings includes one mention of the city of Haifa, a mixed Arab/Jewish city. Israel and the Jewish settlement town of Karmiel are each mentioned once, both times by a poet who, during his interview with me, expressed great satisfaction as a citizen of the State of Israel. 9. See, for instance, the vocabulary of the poetry cited in Caton (1990), Bailey (1974) and Sowayan (1985). 10. Atchity makes a similar point about Homer and his relationship with Agamemnon in the Iliad. ‘By drawing attention to the role of the poet of memory, finally, Homer equates himself with Agamemnon. As the king protects and serves the community in time, the poet assures the interests of human continuity’ (p. 278). Reynolds makes

— 29 —

SuleimanMuhawi_02_Chap 1

29

12/1/06, 9:58 am

nadia yaqub

11.

12. 13.

14.

a similar argument in his study of the relationship between poet and text in the oral Arabic epic, sirat bani hilal. Atchity’s interpretation of Homer’s Iliad also rests in part on the notion that the thematic continuity of the work relies at least in part on the importance of the events as remembered. In studying the poetry duels of the Gayo in the highlands of Sumatra, Bowen notes a similar use of metacommunicative discourse (p. 36). Interestingly, Caton attributes what he perceives to be a marked linguistic difference between the baah and the epic genres like that studied by Reynolds at least in part to the narrative nature of the latter. However, as Reynolds’ study shows, a narrative genre can also be characterised by a significant amount of metacommunicative language. In fact, any meta-level commentary can be seen as allusive since by definition it introduces into a given discourse elements from a context at one level removed from that discourse.

— 30 —

SuleimanMuhawi_02_Chap 1

30

12/1/06, 9:58 am

2 1

Irony and the Poetics of Palestinian Exile Ibrahim Muhawi

No, I do not have an exile To say that I have a homeland – Mahmoud Darwish1

The subject of this study was inspired by the seemingly unanswerable question asked by a colleague at a conference. ‘Where is Palestine, then?’ she wanted to know.  The more thought I gave it, the more I realised Palestine has remained a question whose answer was like the Hindu meditational practice called ‘neti, neti’. Whenever a thought comes into the mind, you negate it by saying to yourself ‘neti, neti’, meaning ‘not this, not this’. Thus Palestine is not the West Bank, and it is not Gaza; and it is not the West Bank and Gaza combined. It is not the Palestinian Authority; and it is not Israel. It is not even historic Palestine except as a dream. Palestine exists in exile as a signifier whose signified does not match its shape or magnitude. To a large extent then, this nation exists in the dream of signification projected on it by its members because the historical process that would create a correspondence between signifier and signified seems to be endlessly postponed. Like the Buddhist Self, it is something that is, and is not; it is both present and absent. More than anything else, it is perhaps a metaphysical condition resembling Hamlet’s dilemma. ‘Nothing is left for us,’ says Mahmoud Darwish, ‘except the weapon of madness [al-junun]. To be, or not to be. To be, or to be. Not to be, or not to be. Nothing is left except madness’ (1995: 118). The difference is that Hamlet faced only the first question, while the Palestinians, as we shall see in the course of this chapter, are faced with all possible combinations of being and not being. Homeland is not this, or that; not the negation of this, or that; or, ultimately, the negation of that negation – as we can see from the epigraph to this chapter. The Palestinian people entered European history through the event that led to the establishment of the state of Israel on the land of Palestine in 1948. This act of negation, referred to by the Palestinians as the nakba (catastrophe), resulted in their fragmentation, dispersal and exile. The consciousness of exile is an intense awareness of absence, of being present where one does not necessarily want to be. Edward Said encapsulates this state in the ironic double-entendre of his autobiography’s title, Out of Place. An exile is a present-absent, or an absent— 31 —

SuleimanMuhawi_03_Chap 2

31

12/1/06, 9:59 am

ibrahim muhawi present, person. He is out of place regardless where he finds himself, and he no longer has a place he can call his own. In other words, an exile by definition lives in a state of existential irony, where the lived present is characterised by a longing for an absent meaning. The exiled Palestinians who populate the refugee camps of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria exemplify the state of the present-absent par excellence. UN General Assembly Resolution 194 gives them the right of return to the part of Palestine that has now become Israel, and to the extent that they live in that expectation they remain present where they are but absent from their homeland.2 Whether or not the negation of the negation of Palestine will amount to something historically positive remains to be seen, but it does point to a heightened sense of irony in Palestinian literature. ‘Time has taught me wisdom,’ Darwish declares in a recent publication, ‘and history has taught me irony’ (2000: 12). The rupture in the middle of this expression makes room for an interpretive balance between the two parts such that one elucidates the other. We can draw this equation out by rephrasing the expression thus: ‘Wisdom is to time, as irony is to history.’ In other words, irony is a form of historical wisdom. If history has made an exile of you, then a poetics based on irony is a suitable strategy for coping with that exile, for it allows you to reinterpret your exile in creative ways, transforming it back into history as literature. Needless to say, the literature on irony is immense, and there are almost as many theories of irony as there are theories of literature. To some extent, the modern movement in literary criticism which began with the rise of New Criticism early in the twentieth century saw a vital connection between irony and literature: for this criticism irony was at the heart of practically all literary experience. And, as Wilde (1981) argues, irony is one of the shaping principles of post-modern literary theory and practice as well. It is perfectly understandable why Darwish should say that history has taught him irony, for the very structure of irony resembles the condition of exile in that it embodies a rhetoric of presence and absence. In an ironic text an absent meaning is waiting to rise from a present one. Booth (1974), Muecke (1969) and S’hiri (1992) and other studies clearly demonstrate that the classical rhetorical definition which saw irony as a form of semantic antiphrasis, or conveying ‘the opposite of what one actually says’ (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969: 207), has long been shown as too narrow. In moving away from the purely semantic notion of an opposite meaning to that of an absent one, my understanding of irony construes antiphrasis in the widest possible sense as a condition of existential contradiction. This connection between irony and the Palestinian condition is the most concise expression of a Palestinian poetics of exile that I know of, and it will provide an existential/historical basis for my analysis of irony in three Palestinian writers: Samih al-Qasim, Nasri Hajjaj and Imil Habibi. — 32 —

SuleimanMuhawi_03_Chap 2

32

12/1/06, 9:59 am

irony and the poetics of palestinian exile As Hutcheon notes, there is ‘little disagreement among critics that the interpretation of irony does involve going beyond the text itself … to decoding the ironic intent of the coding agent’ (1985: 52–3). Beyond that, critical perspectives diverge. Studies of irony tend to fall into broad categories, such as the philosophical/existential (Kierkegaard), the taxonomic (Muecke), the rhetorical (Booth), the pragmatic (Hutcheon, Sperber and Wilson), the stylistic (S’hiri), the phenomenological (Wilde), and the perspective that sees irony as a principle of structure in literature (Frye, Brooks). These differ widely in approach as well as in the understanding of irony, and (Wilde excepted) tend to disengage irony from specific historical contexts, though several have commented on the general irony of existence. Frye, for example, notes that the ‘archetype of the inevitably ironic is Adam, human nature under sentence of Death’ (1957: 42); similarly Booth, ‘If the universe is ultimately an absurd multiuniverse, then all propositions about or portraits of any part of it are absurd …’ (1974: 267); and Muecke, ‘We do not need to imagine either a malignant or an indifferent deity in order to see the world as in an ironic predicament …’ (1969: 150). Muecke aptly distinguishes between verbal irony and what he calls ‘situational irony’ in the one book (1970: 28) and the ‘irony of events’ in the other (1969: 102). ‘It is ironic’, he notes, ‘when we meet what we set out to avoid, especially when the means we take to avoid something turn out to be the very means of bringing about what we sought to avoid’ (1969: 28). Certainly the Palestinian people did not choose to be exiled. The loss of the land and subsequent dispersal came about in spite of all Palestinian efforts to avoid them. The harder the Palestinian people have worked to get back to their homeland, the farther away it seems to get. With Palestine seen as the desired centre of resolution for conflicts in Europe that had nothing to do with the Palestinian people, and world powers like the British Empire and the United States ranged against them, it is not difficult to see why Palestinian writers might see, not the universe but history itself as absurd. As Said notes, ‘What to many Palestinians is either an incomprehensible cruelty of fate or a measure of how appalling are the prospects for settling their claim can be clarified by seeing irony as a constitutive factor in their lives’ (1991: 5). I have already touched on the subject of irony in Palestinian literature in my introduction to Memory for Forgetfulness (pp. xii–xiii). This is a more extensive treatment of the subject, and its purpose is to focus on irony as a practice that unites literary form with historical experience – in this case the exilic presenceabsence experience of the Palestinian people. This approach highlights the importance of specific contexts to the study of irony because to a large extent the absent meaning depends on, and arises from, them. Following Hutcheon (pp. 52–3) and others, I also insist on the pragmatic dimension of irony. The first official designation of Palestinians as ‘present-absent’ was used by the — 33 —

SuleimanMuhawi_03_Chap 2

33

12/1/06, 9:59 am

ibrahim muhawi nascent state of Israel to refer to that segment of the population who ended up away from their villages when the fighting stopped, and whose lands it wanted to confiscate. They were absent from their property, but were still present in the country. Not having been allowed to return to their homes these groups of Palestinians thus constitute an internal diaspora, just as the refugees who live outside the homeland constitute an external one. The ‘present-absent’ label applies to all Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel as well, whether or not they form part of that internal diaspora. They live in an internal exile, caught on the horns of a dilemma (to which I will return in my discussion of Habibi). The land on which they live is their homeland, but the dominant culture is not their culture and the country is not their country. Their civic status as citizens is compromised by the fact of their not being Jews. Referring to his ambiguous status in the country, Darwish describes this state of affairs thus: ‘Here, I’m not a citizen, and I’m not a resident. Then where, and who am I?’ Later in the same passage, he asks, ‘Am I here, or am I absent? Give me an expert in philosophy so that I can prove to him I exist’ (1973: 94). The present-absent contradiction has been a dominant feature of Western discourse about Palestine since at least the middle of the nineteenth century. It has been used to de-legitimise the national rights of the Palestinian people by making them absent when and where they should be seen as being present. The first such example in modern times was the manifesto of the First Zionist Congress (1897) in Basel: ‘The aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a home in Eretz-Israel secured under public law.’ Here, though the reference is to Palestine, the country and its indigenous people have been made totally absent. The Balfour Declaration issued by the British Government in 1917 adopted a modified version of this manifesto in favouring ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.’3 In referring to the Arab majority in negative terms as the ‘existing non-Jewish communities’, the Declaration defines them as a minority consisting of disparate groupings, and not as a people. And, in identifying them negatively as non-Jews, the Declaration adopts the rhetorical strategy of making them absent while they are still present, thus turning them into a diasporic people while they are still living in their homeland and long before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Absentification, of course, is a common strategy used by colonisers intent upon dispossessing indigenous people of their land. As Rundstrom et al. note in relation to the experience of Native American tribes: Dispossession is more than a physical act, for it occurs in rhetorical strategies that anticipate the action. Randy Bertolas (1998: 98–111) examined such a strategy in the redefinition of Cree places as ‘wilderness.’ He argued that imagining a place as empty of humans, although only a dream, allows the coloniser-dreamer to then

— 34 —

SuleimanMuhawi_03_Chap 2

34

12/1/06, 9:59 am

irony and the poetics of palestinian exile separate people from their own socially constructed landscapes, causing seemingly less pain for the coloniser. (2000: 91)

In this light then, the Basel Programme and the Balfour Declaration are comprehensible as rhetorical strategies that anticipate actual dispossession.4 Even before Balfour this formation was helped along by religious travellers who came to Palestine in the nineteenth century, armed with the Bible and intent on equating the historical present with a mythical past. In innumerable books and pamphlets, these travellers opened a discursive space for the later conquest of Palestine. A typical example in this respect is William Thompson’s The Land and the Book (1886). In this book the relationship between historical reality and myth is turned upside down, or inside out. As the author trudges through the land, meticulously describing the scenery, he translates the actual landscape unfolding before him into the mythico-historical perspective of the Bible. Standing before the gates of Jaffa, for example, the author calls upon Old Testament past to validate the present: ‘I remember that righteous Lot,’ he says in one instance, ‘intent on deeds of hospitality, sat in the gate of Sodom towards the close of the day, somewhat as these Arabs are now seated’ (Vol. 1: 28). Here myth and legend take the place of history. Between the book and the land the people – ‘these Arabs’ – disappear, or at best are turned into curious anthropological specimens. Irony in Palestinian literature redresses the imbalance in the equation of presence and absence in a number of ways, most of which are based on some sort of reversal – reversal of course being the condition that creates the presentabsent state of affairs in the first place. The simplest reversal is to negate the negation by means of a heroic or mock-heroic affirmation. Thus Samih alQasim’s ‘Persona Non Grata’ (shakhs ghayr marghuub fihi), the poem whose name (in English and Arabic) is also the title of the collection in which it occurs, assumes an ironic heroic tone to reflect the Palestinian dilemma. The poet is proud to be a persona non grata. In this poem, the poet’s persona is a heroic figure referred to only in the first person pronoun, which we assume to be the collective voice, or the figure, of the Palestinian people – a figure which stretches across the expanse of the Arab world, with its head in one place and the different parts of the body in other places: ‘My head is here and my hands are there/Between me and me, nations have passed.’ This figure suspended in place and time is an embodiment of the present-absent paradox, as we can see from the following lines: There is no solution in the solution, peace or war I am the riddle I am the songs, the ears of wheat I am the rocket throwers I am the shells No good other than me

— 35 —

SuleimanMuhawi_03_Chap 2

35

12/1/06, 9:59 am

ibrahim muhawi No evil other than me I am the possible impossible the ugly the beautiful the short the tall the outsider enemy the honourable friend I am the muddy brook the strong the abject the rogue the true the gross the heavy the fat the thin the sands the palm tree the lightning the floods the deserts the ruins I am the skyscrapers the clouds the absence the solution the ascent The descent I am the possible impossible. (1986: 117)

The possible-impossible, the riddle, is another version of the present-absent and the successful failure. The irony comes from the heroic tone, the assumption of god-like qualities by the heroic figure – qualities that enable him to embrace both sides of a contradiction at once. Muecke notes that ‘overstatement plays a very large part in ironic writing’ (1981: 81). The ironic reversal here consists in the heroic, or mock-heroic, affirmation that the weak is the strong. We can also find strains of this magnification of the Palestinian self in other work by al-Qasim as well as in many of Darwish’s poems. There is an ironic reversal here as well, though it is easy to miss if one were not paying close attention, and that reversal consists in equating the book (Persona Non Grata) with a person. Samih al-Qasim makes us painfully aware of this synecdochic replacement of the person by the text, a replacement that expresses itself in a textual state of hyphenated identity. It is as if he is saying, ‘this book is a texthyphen-person’, and by the very fact that you are reading it you are sharing in the experience of its contradiction and redeeming its non-grata status. While al-Qasim embraces both sides of the presence-absence equation, glorying in embodying a riddle with mythical dimensions, an opposite type of ironic reversal is manifest in the work of Nasri Hajjaj, who was born in the diaspora at Ain el-Hilwe refugee camp in southern Lebanon. The Hajjaj self is more tenuous than that portrayed by Darwish or al-Qasim; more often than not it is devoured by the idea of a nation that has eaten so many young men without being born. In a series of very short stories that clearly reflect the influence of Zakaria Tamer and Franz Kafka, Hajjaj employs fantasy ironically to re-enact that annihilation. Here is the complete text of a story called ‘A Hungry Orange’. I am a martyr. I was killed in a small war for the sake of the homeland. Before enemies killed me, I used to love many-coloured butterflies – friends of red, yellow, white, and purple flowers. I loved birds that sang in open skies. And I loved oranges. After life left me I started to dream in death. I climbed an orange tree to reach for the sky and gather a star, but a hungry orange saw me and devoured me. In front of a crowd of people a grim-looking man stood up and said, ‘The martyr was a hero.’ Then he drank a glass of orange juice.

In al-Qasim the Palestinian ego is ironically magnified to such an extent that death becomes heroic, but in Hajjaj there is no hero. If we were to attach a

— 36 —

SuleimanMuhawi_03_Chap 2

36

12/1/06, 9:59 am

irony and the poetics of palestinian exile label, we would have to describe him as an anti-hero. Even that seems to be something of an exaggeration, for he is not left in peace, even in death. Hajjaj’s story exemplifies another side of the reversal, which forms the basis for irony; the eater is eaten, not only once but three times, first by the struggle for the homeland when he was alive, then by the orange after his death and finally by the man drinking the orange juice. He is consumed by what he loves; he has been made triply absent. The irony lies in the fact that the present is made absent by the homeland (al-watan) – the very thing that was supposed to bring about a change in the equation from present-absent to present-present. The issue of martyrdom is certainly a sensitive one, especially in a society that values children so highly, and one cannot deal with it directly without offending. The indirect path of irony is essential here. The phatic dimension of irony allows writers to establish a community of harmony with readers, taking them into their confidence and pretending they are revealing secrets that only they will understand. I think al-Qasim’s ironic exaggeration is meant to serve this purpose. Its communicative force is to challenge the readers to a duel in hyperbolic speech, or boasting. The phatic element in irony also allows the writer to criticise without seeming to do so, especially when the element of fantasy is added, as in the work of Hajjaj. The ironic translation of the almost sacred notion of martyrdom in terms of the atavistic activity of devourment lends Hajjaj’s fiction a psychoanalytical significance that connects it with the domain of the dream and the unconscious.5 In another story, the writer introduces a variation on the theme of devouring that amounts to cannibalism. In the story, called ‘Soup for the Children’, the writer’s persona goes before dawn to the Martyr’s cemetery on the Day of the Martyr in order to wash his brother’s grave and lay flowers on it, only to find that thousands of others are already there waiting by the locked gate to do exactly the same thing. Then dawn breaks, bringing birdsong and butterflies. We have already encountered this ironic constrast between the freedom of the butterflies and the silence of the grave in the story I cited above. In ‘Soup for the Children’, when the sun comes up the restless crowd rush into the cemetery, smash up the graves and dig up the bones of the dead. Then they walk out in a huge procession, each carrying the bones of their dead martyr in the black plastic bags that are used for the disposal of rubbish. The crowd then walk down Martyr Street first, and from there into Liberty Avenue, until they reach Independence Square. There they halt, not knowing what to do. Then the voice of a man rises above the crowd, and he speaks out in stentorian tones: ‘Today, you have carried out one of the most glorious deeds for the sake of the homeland. You have gotten rid of the graveyard. He who has died is dead, and the homeland is in need of every square inch of land for housing the living and planting their food so that we can be in a position to build a free and independent economy. Bless you, and bless — 37 —

SuleimanMuhawi_03_Chap 2

37

12/1/06, 9:59 am

ibrahim muhawi your hands!’ (We note here in passing the ironic equation between the cemetery and the homeland.) Everyone cheers, but they wonder what they are to do with the bones. ‘Grind them,’ says the wise man in a calm, confident voice, ‘and make them into soup for your children.’ The story ends with a simple statement of fact: ‘And that’s exactly what we did.’ Undoubtedly, there is a Palestinian cult of the shahid, or martyr, and Palestinians have paid a terrible price in human life. Hajjaj’s younger brother was a ‘martyr.’ The Palestine Liberation Organisation maintains a fund for the families of martyrs. Many PLO functionaries are children of martyrs. One is frequently introduced to someone as the son or daughter of such and such a martyr. In Memory for Forgetfulness, Darwish ironically refers to the rivalry among PLO factions (fasa’il) to sacrifice fighters as the ‘martyr trade’. There is a cemetery for martyrs in Beirut which was repeatedly shelled by the Israeli air force during the invasion of 1982. Darwish wryly notes in Memory that it was not enough killing the living, it seemed as if it was necessary also to kill the dead again. As Kanaana has demonstrated (1993), a considerable number of martyr legends sprang up during the Palestinian intifada. When a youth was killed by the Israeli army, he became a ‘martyr’ and his family did not show outward signs of mourning. People did not come to pay condolences, but to offer congratulations. The existential irony implied in this behaviour is deeply rooted in Palestinian culture. Palestinians traditionally held a wedding celebration instead of a wake when a young man died before he had the chance to get married and have children. The body of the dead young man was given a traditional zaffe, or wedding procession, with dabke dancing and singing, on the way to church or mosque.6 The gap in an ironic text between present and absent meaning is a space of phatic communion in which the writer calls upon the reader to draw out the absent meaning(s). As noted earlier, irony always functions with reference to a specific context, and an ironic text represents an appeal to the reader to supply the context and share in the experience of the victim. The pragmatic function of irony, then, resides in its social purpose of creating community between writer and reader in the hope of raising awareness about a situation. The Arabic proverb says, ‘An intelligent person, from a mere nod will get the point’ (allabibu min al-isharati yafham) and so with irony – a secret sharing between writer and reader (S’hiri 1992). Booth emphasises this point as well: ‘Often the predominant motion when reading stable ironies is that of joining, of finding and communing with kindred spirits’ (1974: 28). This particular connection, or bond, between reader and writer is more important in an ironic text than in an ordinary one. As practically all writers on this subject have noted, irony is deeply implicated in the aesthetics of reception, bringing the reader to the foreground of the critical act. Its critical significance arises from the challenge it poses to the New Critical doctrine which goes by the name of the ‘intentional — 38 —

SuleimanMuhawi_03_Chap 2

38

12/1/06, 9:59 am

irony and the poetics of palestinian exile fallacy’, promulgated by Wimsatt and Beardsley initially in Shipley (1964) and later elaborated into a full article which has been reprinted frequently in literary-critical anthologies. ‘We argued’, they say in this essay, summarising the entry in Shipley, ‘that the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a literary work of art’ (Adams 1971: 1014). New Criticism is far from being dead; it remains the most useful heuristic tool in the teaching of literature, especially as a healthy antidote to the rampant subjectivism (this time involving the reader’s subjectivity rather than the author’s) which has found room in the post-modern space. It is therefore ‘ironic’ that New Criticism should banish the author’s intention while at the same time focusing on irony as one of the shaping structures of literature.7 To the extent that irony is a mode, the form itself assumes the function of ironic deixis if there are no other obvious indicators. Readers who are not particularly attuned to irony may not consider Hajjaj’s work ironic, but if we consider it from the perspective of Frye’s theory of modes, the manner in which the irony works here becomes immediately obvious. Frye observes that if ‘inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode’ (1957: 34). The death of the character in the story renders him inferior in power, but not necessarily in intelligence, to the living author and to us as readers. The other three elements, though, are present in Hajjaj’s fiction: bondage to the idea of the nation, frustration at not being able to achieve it, and the absurdity of dying for it. Still following Frye’s argument, we can refine our view of the writer’s method a bit further by seeing it as a form of tragic irony. According to Frye, the ‘central principle of tragic irony is that whatever exceptional happens to the hero should be causally out of line with his character’ (1957: 41). The character in ‘A Hungry Orange’ is sketched with very few strokes, but we have enough information to feel some identification with his romanticism and innocence. These are the very qualities that set him apart from his environment. Dying prematurely as a martyr for one’s homeland (in a small war, no less) is absurd, but if his first death made some sense, his second and third certainly did not. Frye’s perceptive remarks about the significance of tragic irony are most appropriate here: ‘Irony isolates from the tragic situation the sense of arbitrariness, of the victim’s having been unlucky, selected at random or by lot, and no more deserving of what happens to him than anyone else would be. If there is a reason for choosing him for catastrophe, it is an inadequate reason, and raises more questions than it answers’ (1957: 41). If we agree that the pragmatic purpose of irony is to create a community of sympathy, then clearly the reader must, as Hutcheon notes in the quotation given earlier, be able to perceive an ironic intention on the part of the author for that communion to take place. The intention acts as a deictic device — 39 —

SuleimanMuhawi_03_Chap 2

39

12/1/06, 9:59 am

ibrahim muhawi pointing to the absent meaning, or context, or both. The deictic element, the signal, is necessary for the secret communion to take place. When Said, the protagonist in Habibi’s The Pessoptomist, says at the beginning of the novel that, as a result of a donkey having been shot in his place during the events of 1948, his life in Israel was fadlat that poor beast, we understand he wants us to think he is saying he owes his life to (fadlat) the donkey, and that is the way it is interpreted in the available translation of this novel. But we are also aware that a pun is intended here, and puns serve the purpose of irony very well because they too create a gap between a present and an absent meaning. As Redfern notes, ‘Though often classified with tongue twisters, acrostics and other verbal sports, their [the puns’] natural place lies with metaphor, irony: the very foundations of all rhetoric’ (1984: 178). The ironic intention is triggered by the word fadlat, which can also mean remains and excrement; hence what Said says could mean that his life in Israel was equivalent to donkey’s excrement, or equally likely, that he himself became the remains of the donkey – that he assumed the characteristics of the donkey – himar, which is used in Arabic with exactly the same connotations as the word jackass in English. When the irony ignites, all meanings are present, and the one that was absent before may acquire the greater significance. Imil Habibi’s satirical novel The Amazing Events Leading to the Disappearance of the Hapless Said, the Pessoptomist is a much more extended ironic work than those we have dealt with so far, and we will not be able to deal with it at length here. What I therefore intend to do is to explore in greater detail, and with reference to it, the major issues we have so far encountered, focusing on phatic communion – what is traditionally called ‘identification’ with the character – deixis and reversal, closing the discussion with an analysis of the all-important problem of identity for an Israeli Palestinian.8 Habibi’s novel has enjoyed tremendous popularity among Palestinian readers in particular and Arab readers in general. Though published (in three parts) between 1972 and 1974, its popularity has not waned, and it continues to stir debate. It would be safe to say that it has achieved the status of an Arabic classic. Its popularity, I believe, stems not only from the importance of its subject, which is the vexed question of Palestinian identity in Israel, but also from the character of its hero, Said, and the humorous manner in which Habibi presents him. There is probably no communicative strategy more conducive to phatic communion than humour, and Habibi captures readers by making them laugh at and with Said. In reading the novel they see a picture which is not necessarily flattering, but one in which we all see a bit of ourselves. But in laughing at Said, Palestinian readers in particular will also be laughing at themselves and at the impossibility of their situation. An Arabic proverb says, ‘The worst disaster is the one that makes you laugh’ (sharr al-baliyyat ma yudhik). — 40 —

SuleimanMuhawi_03_Chap 2

40

12/1/06, 9:59 am

irony and the poetics of palestinian exile However, the kind of humour we are dealing with in this novel is not necessarily the type one finds in jokes. Rather, it is a humour based on Said’s characterisation (who, as we shall see, is not so much a hero as an archetype of the traditional Palestinian), on the author’s use of language, and on a sustained ironic vision that sometimes engages the reader in double ironies from which there is no exit. The title tells us a great deal about Habibi’s method. We observe first the standard Palestinian contradictions that apply to this archetypal hero. His name is Said, which ordinarily means ‘happy,’ but which when coupled with abu al-nahs alerts us to another meaning for this word: Said also means one who is possessed of sa’d (good omen), which is the contradictory of nahs (bad omen). So now we have a character who exists in a state of complete contradiction. The translation of abu al-nahs as ‘ill-fated’ does not convey the full cultural impact of the notion of nahs, or unremitting bad luck. There is behind this name the weight of Arab belief in destiny, exemplified in the Palestinian proverb, il-manhus manhus, walaw Æallaqu Æa-dhahro Æishrin fanus (‘The one dogged by bad luck is destined to remain unlucky even if twenty lanterns are hung from his back’). Further, the Arabic word rendered as ‘opti-pessimist’ (or ‘pess[i]-optimist’), al-mutasha’il, is a neologism that creatively combines parts of the two words, mutafa’il (optimistic) and mutasha’im (pessimistic). Neither of the English renderings is an exact morphological equivalent since they do not combine the lexical items or parts of them in the same way. There is no sense of a hyphen in the Arabic word; it does not sound as if it is composed of parts of two words, but as one word in which the states of pessimism and optimism are perfectly intertwined.9 Turning now to the ‘hero’ of the novel, the simplest way to explain Said is to say that Habibi made him a folk character (shakhsiyya sha’biyya) whose behaviour can be easily associated with that of the traditional Palestinian villager. In her introduction to the translation of the novel, Salma Khadra Jayyusi rightly compares Said (1982: xiv–xv) to the folk hero Juha (Khodja, Mulla Nasreddin), but her comparison of him with the clever trickster aspect of Juha, or the ‘wise fool’, as she calls him (who can extricate himself from difficult situations through wit) is not quite apt. Said is not witty, or heroic; he is more often the object of the irony rather than its subject. He is more properly compared to the selfseeking anti-heroic aspect of the Juha of the story in which he is first informed that a battle is raging in his country, and he answers, ‘As long as my village is safe, let the battle rage.’ The story then proceeds to narrow down the scope of the battle to the village (‘As long as my quarter is safe, let the battle rage’), then his quarter (‘As long as my house is safe …’), then his house (‘As long as I am safe …’). This is exactly the character of Said, who is proud to have been saved by a donkey while the rest of his family were gunned down as they were escaping during the events of 1948. Said’s association with Juha is also made explicit — 41 —

SuleimanMuhawi_03_Chap 2

41

12/1/06, 9:59 am

ibrahim muhawi iconographically through the donkey, which figures in many Juha stories and whose image (with Juha riding backwards) appears on the covers of books or booklets containing them. Throughout the first part of the book Said is constantly associated with a donkey. First he ‘owes his life’ to one, then immediately after the establishment of the state (of Israel) he makes his way to the offices of the military governor Juha-wise, riding his donkey. Also, as I hinted earlier concerning the meaning of fadlat as remainder, and judging from Said’s subsequent jackass-like behaviour, the author leads us to believe that the donkey, in dying, may have been reincarnated in Said. From the very first page of the novel, where Said describes himself as a nadl, Habibi emphasises the cowardly aspect of Said’s personality. The word nadl is accompanied by an ironically (mis)leading footnote that explains its meaning as ‘waiter.’ This is not exactly true, for the correct Arabic word for a waiter is nadil, not nadl, which means ‘coward’ in the urban dialects of Palestine. There is absolutely no reason for the writer to insert a footnote here, as there is nothing obscure about the word nadil (waiter); the only way this footnote can be read is ironically, for its purpose is precisely to draw attention to the absent second meaning – ‘coward’. The kind of cowardice and self-justifying resignation that Said exhibits are exemplified by his Panglossian acceptance of any catastrophe because things could be worse. There are innumerable other instances of these ironic double-entendres in the work, but I shall single out only one other such instance where the author uses humour to engage the reader into the work by making him laugh at Said. In Chapter 2, entitled ‘Said Traces His Descent’ (said yantasib), Said traces his genealogy to the Tweisat Arab tribes (Æarab al-tweisat). The humour here and the double-entendre will be entirely missed if the reader is not familiar with the Palestinian dialect, where tweisat is the plural of the diminutive of tes – literally ‘goat’ but used in ordinary speech to mean ‘thickheaded’. (There is added humour here touching on the names of actual Arab tribes, but it lies outside our area of inquiry.) Later in the novel (Chapter 16, Part One), after Said is beaten and verbally abused for having gone to check on the house his family evacuated but which is now occupied by Jewish immigrants, he berates himself thus, ‘ana teis! ana teis!’ (‘I’m a jackass! I’m a jackass!’), whose communicative meaning here is ‘How stupid of me!’ but which humorously brings us back to his genealogy. We see Said’s cowardice on many occasions in the novel – aside from his turning informer for the Israelis – where action is required but all he does is to find an excuse for doing nothing. An outstanding example occurs in Chapter 6 of Book One, where the Israeli officer he was travelling with forces a woman and her two children from the village of Birwe (significantly, the birthplace of Mahmoud Darwish and one of the four hundred or so villages to be destroyed by the new state) to flee east to Jordan at gunpoint. Here Said feels anger at the — 42 —

SuleimanMuhawi_03_Chap 2

42

12/1/06, 9:59 am

irony and the poetics of palestinian exile scene of the Jewish officer with his gun at the woman’s head, and wants to jump to her rescue, but then he remembers his parents’ advice and does nothing: At this I tensed, ready to spring at him, come what may. After all, the blood of youth surged hot within me, at my age then of twenty-four. And not even a stone could have been unmoved at this sight. However, I recalled my father’s final counsel and my mother’s blessing and then said to myself, ‘I certainly shall attack him if he fires his gun. But so far he is merely threatening her.’ I remained at the ready. (Jayyusi and Le Gassick 1992: 15)

In this example we see at work the double irony I referred to earlier. If Said waits to act till the Jewish officer fires his gun, then it will have been too late for the woman and her two children. Yet in this incident we also see the other side of the equation. It is perhaps equally cowardly of the officer with the gun to hold it against the head of a helpless Palestinian refugee, and thereby force her to leave her village and flee her country. But then in nation building it is not the moral equation that counts, but the political, for in the end the country was emptied and the gun was the victor. Of course, from his perspective the Jewish officer is also faced with a dilemma. The Palestinian woman being a persona non grata in the state that is being established, he too faces a difficult moral choice, so he makes the choice that relieves his conscience by saving her life but forcing her to flee her country. We see here a refugee problem being created, and something else that is not to the officer’s liking. True, he has forced the woman to leave and emerged the winner in this situation, yet ‘the race is not always to the swift’. As the woman and her child walk east towards Jordan, Said observes an amazing event: At this point I observed the first example of that amazing phenomenon that was to occur again and again until I finally met my friends from outer space. For the further the woman and child went from where we were, the governor standing and I in the jeep, the taller she grew. By the time they merged with their own shadows in the sinking sun they had become bigger than the plain of Acre itself. The governor stood still there awaiting their final disappearance, while I remained huddled in the jeep. Finally he asked in amazement, ‘Will they never disappear?’ (Jayyusi and Le Gassick 1992: 16)

The ironies multiply. This woman has been made absent, but she is not absent completely; she is still present even if only as a tall shadow. She is present-absent in her shadow. The hyphenated identity we encountered in al-Qasim is not necessarily a bad state of affairs, except when the terms on either side of the hyphen represent mutually contrary, or contradictory, states. The hyphen is a generative boundary; one can add any term to the left of or to the right, and each addition is an accretion in identity; for example, it is possible to be a Palestinian ArabAmerican, a Scottish Palestinian Arab, or even a Palestinian Arab-American — 43 —

SuleimanMuhawi_03_Chap 2

43

12/1/06, 9:59 am

ibrahim muhawi Canadian. One can share in all the subjectivities on both sides of the hyphen without contradiction. This situation holds true for countries that do not define identity in terms of ethnicity, or religion, or both, as does Israel, which Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled define as an ethnic democracy.10 The pressing question here is this: ‘Is it possible to bridge the gap across the hyphen of identity for Palestinian Israelis?’ Darwish wrestled with this question in his autobiographical memoir, Journal of an Ordinary Grief. Darwish’s family had escaped to Lebanon in 1948, and sneaked back into the homeland after the establishment of the state of Israel, too late to be included in the census of Palestinian Arabs. He was therefore never given official papers, and was constantly hounded by the police. In his reflection on the question of his identity, he arrives at the conclusion that its most characteristic feature is ambiguity: Once at Le Bourget Airport in France, and again in one of the streets of Sophia. Your destiny was insisting on being defined. And your identity, ambiguous on paper but shining clearly in the heart, was demanding that you put yourself in harmony with it. As if you had to arrive in one single movement from the beginning of your life to this question: ‘Who are you?’ The French police could not understand something which the Israeli police itself did not understand. Your travel document says you are of ambiguous nationality. And in vain you try to explain to the French police the meaning of this ambiguity, for your clarification does not help him absorb the added ambiguity imposed by his colleague in Tel Aviv. Where were you born? In Palestine. And where do you live? In Israel. Therefore you are ambiguous. (1973: 9)

This state of existential ambiguity is, I think, the best explanation for the impulse towards irony in Palestinian literature. To some extent, irony itself is an ambiguous mode. It is not always obviously there; some may see an ironic intention in a text while others may not. It may also be that irony arises out of extreme conditions where there is a negation of identity, or where it is threatened. Habibi’s Said, the Palestinian-Israeli hero, or anti-hero, is characterised by a double ambiguity; having become a citizen of Israel, he is no longer a Palestinian, but he cannot be a genuine Israeli for all his informing. In this novel, the hyphen of identity becomes a generative metaphor, a trope, which conflates identity and boundary, acting as a marker not only of a geographical boundary between Israel and Palestine but a psychological one as well. In using the word Palestine here I am not referring to the West Bank, but to the Palestine that exists underneath and side by side with Israel and within Israel. (The best literary entrée to Palestine-Israel as palimpsest is Anton Shammas’s Arabesques, particularly the opening section, the most lyrical in the novel, where the author re-creates his childhood in the Galilee.) The terms on both sides of our notional hyphen constitute the basis of identity in the novel. We thus have Palestinian subjectivity on one side, and

— 44 —

SuleimanMuhawi_03_Chap 2

44

12/1/06, 9:59 am

irony and the poetics of palestinian exile Israeli citizenship on the other. The strange, or amazing, events leading to Said’s disappearance are those that bridge the gap across the identity hyphen, the movement from being a Palestinian to being an Israeli. They are nothing more than repeated encounters with the Israeli state system. To Said, they appear amazing, sometimes stranger than the strangest fiction, such as the Arabian Nights, or Voltaire’s Candide, both of which are cited as models for the type of things that happen to Palestinians in Israel. As there is not enough space to discuss the novel in more detail, I shall restrict my comments here to a discussion of its overall structure. Commentators have already drawn attention to similarities between Voltaire’s Candide and The Pessoptomist, but what has not been observed is Habibi’s ironic parodying of Voltaire’s novel. We only have to compare chapter headings for both works to see the extent of Habibi’s reliance on Voltaire’s method. Here are some examples from Candide: ‘How Candide Escaped from the Bulgarians and What Befell Him Afterward’; ‘Candide and His Valet Arrive in the Country of El Dorado – What They Saw There’; ‘The History of the Old Woman’; ‘Candide’s Voyage to Constantinople’. Compare these with the following examples from The Pessoptomist: ‘How Said Becomes a Leader in the Union of Palestinian Workers’; ‘Said Becomes Possessed of Two Secrets’; ‘The Story of the Golden Fish’; ‘Said Relates How Crocodiles Once Lived in the Zarqa River’: ‘Said at the Court of a King’. Here we see clearly a similarity in the manner in which the novel is presented. Habibi himself draws attention to this similarity in the chapter entitled ‘The Amazing Similarity Between Candide and Said’. Said is a more complex character than Candide because there is a gap in the two parts of his identity that do not fit together so well. That hyphen across the Palestine-Israel or Israel-Palestine line is extremely unstable. The chapter on the similarity between the two novels strikes me as being disingenuous; it could only have been written by a master ironist whose purpose was to acknowledge a debt to Voltaire and also to show he was not plagiarising Candide but putting it to his own use. What Habibi has produced is, I believe, an ironic parody of Voltaire. First there is the manner of presentation, as we can see from the chapter headings; and secondly, the connection between the two works highlights a fact which I think the author wanted to emphasise, namely, that the events that befall Said are just as amazing as those that befall Candide. In both novels, the adventures are described in a similar manner. Clearly, Voltaire also was a master ironist, the irony in Candide consisting in the comparison between a Utopian way of life in a place like the legendary country, El Dorado, and the way life is lived in Europe. Voltaire’s irony arises from the disparity between what is and what is desirable. To parody an ironic work successfully is to produce a doubly ironic one. The irony in Habibi incorporates Voltaire’s irony, adding another level to it by means of inter-textual reference. Habibi’s irony, like Voltaire’s, also arises — 45 —

SuleimanMuhawi_03_Chap 2

45

12/1/06, 9:59 am

ibrahim muhawi from the difference between what is and what is desirable, between the Utopian implications of the establishment of Israel for Jews and its dystopian effect on Palestine and Palestinians. We know that the ironic inter-textual echoing of Candide was part of Habibi’s purpose because in the chapter heading already cited he refers to the similarity between the two books as amazing. Here again we are faced with a double irony. What is amazing about this similarity is that it is part of the narrative structure of the novel, as if it too was one of the strange events leading to the disappearance of Said. However, when we compare the events in Candide with those in Said, we do not note a similarity but a contrast: while everything that befalls Candide is fictional, all that befalls Said is fact. From this perspective, the fact appears stranger than fiction, and that, I think, was the entire purpose behind Habibi’s use of Candide. Said, the Palestinian-Israeli, is a doubly ironic character. As a bungling idiot, he bears the brunt of the irony on the Palestinian side. We look down on him for all his efforts to bridge the identity gap, his zealousness in conforming to the requirements of citizenship, including becoming an informer, so that he can share in Israeli subjectivity. At the same time, his very simplicity and incomprehension allow the novelist to portray Israeli state practices and attitudes towards Palestinians from the Palestinian viewpoint. The magnitude of Israel’s failure to include its Palestinian citizens in its polity is portrayed very graphically at the end of the novel, where Said, having decided that he can no longer be a true subject of Israel but not being able to construct a separate identity for himself, finds himself sitting on a khazuq (roughly, a pointed fence post), from which no one can rescue him except the creatures from outer space who take him under their wing. To the extent that Said is an emblematic figure representing all Palestinian citizens of Israel, his khazuq, I believe, is also emblematic of the position of the whole Palestinian community in the country.

notes 1. These lines occur towards the end of the long poem, madih al-zill al-’ali (‘In Praise of the Tall Shadow’). See Darwish 1984: 161. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this paper are by me. 2. General Assembly Resolution 194 (1948) is available on a number of websites, such as <miftah.org/Documents/Statements/194.html>. It stipulates, among other things, that refugees wishing to return to their homes ‘should be permitted to do so at the earliest practical date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property …’ 3. The Balfour Declaration is available on a number of websites, including