The Village of Oz

Review By Laura Phillips

 
                                                  

  Story telling is bred in Amos Oz’s bones. In his remarkable memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, he describes his time as a “poor Scheherazade”, fending off playground bullies with stories of suspense, told in instalments in the hope of diverting his “sneering tormentors” from their malicious pleasures for as long as possible.  He was bequeathed this power by his sad, lonely and ultimately suicidal mother, who, from his earliest years, told him stories “arousing alienation or pangs of fear”.  From the American Sherwood Anderson, whose story cycle Winesburg Ohio “freed [Oz’s] writing hand”, he inherited a tradition of setting a series of stories in a community with a central character of one story reappearing in the background of another.  As Oz states in his memoir: “where you [the writer] are is the centre of the universe.”

 All except one of his new collection of surreal, disquieting tales, Scenes from Village Life, take place in the century-old “pioneer” village of Tel Ilan, surrounded by fields and orchards, its tiled roofs “bathed in the thick greenery of ancient trees”.  Some residents still farm, but the village has become a tourist ‘honeypot’ with boutiques, galleries, restaurants, and a reproduction antique furniture manufactory – a magnet for bargain hunting outsiders.  But from the off it is clear that not all is well in this seeming paradise.  Not all outsiders are benign, and the villagers themselves are variously eaten up by loneliness, fruitless searches for connection, and are prey to a sense of threat or grief that allows them no rest.  The outside world of Israel’s fractious politics and its unending hostilities with its neighbours is glimpsed only fleetingly, through the prism of more pressing concerns in the villagers’ bleak daily lives.

 In the opening story, Heirs, an uninvited, ingratiating stranger called “Wolff”, flatters his defensive, reluctant host that Tel Ilan is “a little bit of Provence in the State of Israel…the loveliest village in this entire Levantine state”.  And he is quick to proclaim: “There was nothing here…There were not even any Arab villages in this valley”.  Yet the story is all about the appropriation of space: the householder, a formerly fearless naval commander, whose wife left him for another woman, had “come to dread the darkness of an empty house”.  To dampen his fear he moved back to his elderly mother’s house, but dreams of sending her to a “suitable institution”, remodelling the house and making a new life.  The sweat-ridden, repulsive intruder seems to read these unworthy thoughts and gradually installs himself, until he, the householder and the old woman end up lying side by side in her bed.

 In Digging, another child – Rachel, a widowed, middle-aged teacher – lives with an elderly parent – her irascible, hunchbacked widowed father, a bitter, disillusioned former member of the Israeli Knesset – in a house abutting the cemetery.  An Arab student, son of a family friend, lives in a shed in their garden, doing chores in exchange for his board, playing mournful tunes on a harmonica and planning a book that will compare life in a Jewish village with life in an Arab village.  The old man starts to hear digging sounds beneath the house each night and blames the student, suspecting him of digging “under the foundations” until “the walls start shaking, and then he demands some right, a share in the property, an ancestral claim.”  His daughter dismisses his complaints: “There’s no one burrowing down there, except perhaps your bad conscience.”  But it emerges that the student also hears digging.  Rachel dismisses this as dreaming.  Then one night, she is roused by scratching, gnawing sounds and is left, “trembling alone in the dark under the blurred stars.”

 The villagers’ intense sense of isolation and thwarted yearnings for human connection are palpable.  In Relations an unmarried family doctor waits in vain “in the premature darkness of a February evening” at the bus stop for her nephew, whom she has loved and cared for intermittently since childhood, on the rare occasions when his mother (her estranged sister) has sent him to stay.  He is now in the army, but has a kidney problem and she expects him to visit.  Instead of him, she returns home with “shapeless bundle” – an overcoat left on the last bus from Tel Aviv – and faces a moment of “near unbearable pain.”    

 In Waiting the amiable village mayor receives a cryptic note from his wife of 17 years, delivered by the Arab student in Digging.  On a scrap of paper torn from the notepad in their kitchen she has written simply: “Don’t worry about me”.  The mayor begins searching the village for her, and in the process we are given a deeply discomforting portrait of a marriage.

  The last story set in Tel Ilan, Singing, is recounted in the first person by an unnamed narrator.  To relieve their loneliness some of the villagers gather every six weeks for an evening of communal singing at the house of a couple whose only son has committed suicide.  While the group sings, a winter rainstorm rages outside, with thunder rolls – or are they Air Force planes flying low, returning from bombing enemy targets?  The narrator is seized by an irresistible need to leave the singing and goes upstairs to the abandoned marital bedroom where the boy died.

 Oz’s bleak mission, to face despair, and to cast the powerful beam of his artistic imagination into the darkest places, reaches its apotheosis in the chilling final story, In a faraway place at another time.  It is an apocalyptic vision of a society putrefying physically and morally, watched in growing impotence by the narrator, an ageing official from the “Office for Underdeveloped Regions”.  We are confronted with the horrifying outcome of the world view of the bitter old man in Digging: “Now all the hearts are dead. It’s finished.”

SCENES FROM VILLAGE LIFE, By Amos Oz
265pp. Chatto and Windus £12.99
9780701185503

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
               

 

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Lady Macbeth Smells of Sardine

By Kamal Boustany

 

Al-Rashidia Refugee Camp

 

‘The world is what it is; those who are nobody, who allow themselves to be nobody, have no place in it.’
V. S Naipaul, Bend in the River

 We knew early enough that we were nobody. We knew, but never had the courage, nor the humility, to overcome the pride that prevented us from acknowledging this fact. We probably thought that by denying it we were simply rejecting it as our final destiny. There is nothing easier than refusing one’s destiny; refusing, however, doesn’t mean, or indeed lead, to acquiring a better fate. The options were limited: luck or a life of crime and violence.

- How about hard work? you might wish to ask, my dear reporter.
- Well, the only hard work that was available then was slavery.

 But they, my lot, were not lucky, and nor did they resort to a life of crime and violence. No violence, especially no political violence: my uncles warned my father against getting mixed up with Fedayeen. They didn’t hate Fedayeen, but nor did they want to do anything with political factions and politics. The fact that their sheer daily existence was political – was overtly politicised – didn’t impinge on their consciousness; they were still living in a pre-political state. The only politics that counted was the politics of the family, looking after the family, being on the side of the family: ‘My brother and I against our cousin; my cousin and I against that stranger.’  And that stranger could be the neighbour next door.

 But still they had a place: the margin of the conveniently invisible, dragging themselves along, evading the light. Life as one long episode of evasion! They stayed there cherishing the hope of a better life, a less miserable one. They were not stoical or peaceful; they just waited for a chance, any kind of chance, an opening; and when it happened, some of them were able to pretend to accept their fate as nobodies, but never really resign themselves to it. When the war, the so-called Civil War of 1975, broke out, and houses and flats of wealthy people were abandoned, they went out looting expensive things and heavy furniture, for which they had neither sufficient room nor any use. Nature was adjusting itself, balancing things, and they were merely its hands, looting and destroying, shitting in the middle of expensively furnished lounges and smearing the walls with shit and piss.

- Why would men who have wives and children behave that way?
- They were only answering the call of nature!

From Acre they came
They left North of Palestine
They had left in haste,
But not a single word, they never told me
Not a word, they said
I waited but no, nothing
They just sighed heavily
My uncles and aunts,
Not like the ones in films and books,
Not like the ones in the street
Never said much
Never liked to hear anybody saying anything
‘Ask!’ You say?
Ask, I did.
Yes, ask, but they never knew,
What a question is for
What to do with a question.
They just sighed heavily.
My lot, my dear reporter, were indifferent to politics, to public concerns, to anything that took place beyond the range of their bodies, their clothes, the shirts on their backs.

*


The clothes smelled of Sardine,
Lady Macbeth washed them and washed them,
But they still reeked of the nasty smell.

 One day the poet’s father was angry, having failed to satisfy his desires for meaty food or fucking; he raged – not by beating his wife and children, as he often did, but by rushing to the cupboard, snatching armfuls of drying clothes and carrying them out to the pit in which the washing and dirty water ended up.

 That day the poet’s mother had been gutting and cleaning sardines and the pit was full of a mixture of soapy water and fishy residue. He dipped the clothes into the dirty pit and swore at her and rushed out. Where to? She didn’t ask. She didn’t care. It didn’t matter as long as he was gone.

 The woman rushed to fish out the drenched clothes. She washed them once, twice, but the smell, the king’s blood on the hands of Lady Macbeth, wouldn’t go. The smell of soapy water and stinking fish were symbols of anger and frustration, of the unsatisfied desires for meat and fucking; those were the signs that the poet bore with him for many years to come. The smell of cooked meat or the sight of his parents getting up in the morning half naked; it was a sign of relief, no shouting, no beating, at least for that day. When the man managed to stuff his stomach with meat and stuff his wife with his own meat, life looked bearable.

 But did the sad, weeping woman understand what was happening? You might wonder, my dear innocent reporter. She did but pretended not to. She just frowned; she was good at frowning, scowling, glaring, grimacing, pulling a face, sulking; she had a PhD in all that.
The clothes drenched with dirty water, and the white shirt was covered with mud.
That day, the day after, or the day before, or perhaps a week later or earlier, time was of no importance in that kind of life.

- I can see them now, the poet tells the impatient reporter.
The frowning woman, hanging the washing on the wire in front of the house, while the angry man in a white shirt digs. Digging is a pretext for starting a fight with the neighbours. He digs and digs, penetrating the dusty surface of the soil, fucking the soil, doing to the soil what he’s been deprived of doing to his wife. The rising dust lands on the sweat-drenched shirt and becomes mud. The body, dust and sweat. The sweating body, the shirt drenched with sweat. The dust becomes mud. There is a peace agreement with mortality. The angel of death would not pay us a visit as long as we stayed within his reach. And where would he take us anyway? We are already down in hell; we are an easy hunt, safe customers!

- But let’s get back to that image, the poet tells the reporter.
Our poet remembers the white shirt of his father. The man was dressed to go out; his wife was relieved, his children were relieved, the trees in the back yard looked relieved. But hope is short lived and the sense of relief comes to an abrupt end.

 His sister called him. She called in a faint, sad voice, the voice of a loving sister seeking consolation from her older brother. She didn’t often call him, not in a loving voice, not in any voice. She only yelled at him, mocked him and complained about his wife and children. ‘Your wife did this. Your son did that. Your daughter…’

 Now she was calling as a sister. The man was happy, happy to be treated as a brother, and more so to be called as a needed brother.

 The sister was about to be engaged to be married. But the groom-to-be was advised by his relatives against it.

 ‘Those people are trouble-makers and you don’t want to marry them. Look at her brother! He’s a loony. He keeps beating his wife and children. As for her eldest sister, do you really want her to be you sister-in-law? You must be mad.’

 The sister called her brother in the voice of a helpless sister; the brother, upon hearing the story, sprang out to action. He forgot that he was wearing a clean white shirt, forgot that he was going to the coffee-house to play cards and with some luck win and thus feel happy, to be a winner in something in life. He decided to provoke the guilty relatives of the groom-to-be, to start a fight with them, attack them in their own homes, beat them, beat, beat them with a good piece of wood. They were the neighbours to the west side of the garden fence, and the man thought the best way to start a fight would be to push the fence into their garden. They’d try to stop him and then he’d have the opportunity to punish them.
He was hoping that they would come out fighting so he’d fight back, pursuing them right into their own home. There was nothing he loved to do more than attack a whole family in their own home so people in the street would talk about him; how brave he was, give him something to be proud of. The head of the family was an old man, but had grown-up men of his own, and our digging man was hoping they would all come out for him so he could fight back. He had the will and energy of a madman, one who, when he gets angry, forgets sense and reason and consequences, while his foes don’t, and therefore emerges the winner, talked about with great admiration. Cautiously the head of the neighbouring family came out to enquire as to what the madman was doing. The madman ignored him. The neighbour kept asking ‘What are you doing? What are you up to?’
He prodded him.

 Bending down, the madman rushed towards him yelling, ‘Hit me! Come on, hit me!’
Anybody who saw the crazy man charging at his poor neighbour like a randy bull would not for one second have failed to guess who was most likely to get hit.

- I don’t want to hit you. Why would I want to hit you? I just want to know what you are doing. Just tell me!

- Hit me! Go on hit me!

 The police were called. All the neighbours gathered around to watch. The required audience was present; the madman was happy. When the case was put before the police, the officer in charge didn’t understand. ‘So you are pushing the fence from here to here?’ he pointed to where the wooden post of the barbed wire fence used to be and then to where the madman was trying to place it now, which was a distance of no more than ten centimetres. ‘So what do you want to do with this strip of land? Grow watermelon in it?’

- That’s not the point.

- Of course it’s not the point. But what exactly is the point?

 - They know what the point is.

 - What’s going on? the officer asked the old neighbour.
- I have no idea. I wish he’d just tell me.

  The police arrested the madman and kept him in custody for several hours.

*

 Attention the man needed and demanded; he needed and sought an audience so he could bellow and rant as much as he liked. He had no knowledge, no sense of humour, though he often made jokes, without a punch-line or with one badly timed. He believed himself to be a great orator; an audience was sought, but the audience didn’t turn up to listen but rather to see him making fun of his own family. He forced his wife and children to say things that would amuse his audience and make them think he was clever and funny.

 Once the wife felt humiliated; he tried to make fun of her in front of his sisters, her sworn foes, and she rebelled. He whipped her with a leather belt and she snatched the belt from his hand. The belt was in her hand, but would the stupid woman use it? No, she was far too cowardly to whip him, to hit back and thus change the course of history, hers and theirs. Om Salim did, so why didn’t she? Their neighbour, Om Salim, snatched the belt from her husband and beat him with it; all the people in the street saw Abu Salim running while his wife pursued him, hitting him with his own belt.

 Abu Salim was a nice man, but then his wife did something bad and he believed that it was his duty to punish her in the most traditional way, giving her several blows. But Om Salim wouldn’t accept that, and after the first blow she snatched the belt off her husband and started beating him.

Why didn’t the poet’s mother do that? Because, unlike Om Salim, she did not object to being beaten, but rather to public humiliation.

 Astounded, the man saw what his wife had done; he was more aware of the fact that others, his youngest sister and her fiancé, had seen what had happened. The show was spoiled; the man felt totally humiliated that his wife has rebelled in such an open way in front of the public; his anger was now doubled .

This man is angry
He beats and beats and beats
His wife is angry
His sister is angry, his brothers are angry; the neighbours are angry, the clouds in the sky are angry. If anger could be sold as a commodity, my lot would have lived the life of Riley.

*

 But the man could only shoot his wife,

 And this man, our neighbour, did just that, but then again he wanted to die. They all wanted to die. Why can’t I die? I wish I were dead! I want to die! They cried day after day, morning and night, but, my dear reporter, the angel of death was not a fool. And this man, the one who eventually killed his wife, sat among us and said that the only basic right, the natural right that humans possess, is the right to violence, and our book must say that all men are equal by virtue of their equal right to violence and that all possible rights came from this basic right and when you don’t have money don’t be frightened or intimidated for you still have your right to violence, provided you’re willing to retreat into a state of nature in order to practise it. And this man got married and retreated into a state of nature and his wife was a shrew and one day he shot her but his family said that it was an accident and the faction to which he belonged claimed that it happened by mistake but her family said that it was no mistake and demanded compensation and when they didn’t get anything they threatened to kill the husband but the faction to which the husband belonged was bigger and stronger than the one to which his in-laws belonged and then those lot claimed it was their daughter’s mistake; she was actually a shrew and never respected her husband, the bitch deserved to be killed and everybody was happy. And the following day it was Mother’s Day and the boys on our street stood at the edge of the roofs and pissed down upon the passers-by and when our protagonist grew up and became a poet he wrote a poem about it but the literary editor turned it down saying that it was a vulgar poem and he and the editor had a long debate about vulgarity in literature and our poet insisted that though it was vulgar it was good and the editor insisted that it was a lousy poem and he lost his temper and reached for his pistol and shot the piece of paper on which the poem was written and handed it back to our hero saying, ‘there, a vulgar and lousy poem which is now a dead poem too!’

Write, son, write,
Events and news
News and events
Which is first?
Which is the cause of the other?
Write, son, write!
Write, comrade, write!
Write about us!
Our people,
And our just cause and struggle
The leader of his cell urged him,
Write about our history
Our homeland
Urged the teacher,
About our right to use violence,
Demanded the man who’d shot his wife,
Write, produce flowers
With scent and bright colours so nobody could ignore them!
But, brothers, the poet argued back,
A poem is a tree
Not a flower!

 And our poet wouldn’t give up and one day he came back to the editor with a new poem called Penis and Politics and it was about a neighbour of theirs who always swore by the most precious thing that he possessed, which was his penis, and nobody believed what he said unless they saw him pointing at his penis and swearing with its life and one day he was swearing – he had actually taken his penis out to assure the public  – when a car with a loudspeaker appeared at the end of the street urging people to be vigilant and strong, to persevere in the face of the frequent hostile assaults of the Zionist enemy, and everybody applauded and the man whose penis was sticking out didn’t know whether to tuck it back into his trousers and then start clapping or just start clapping, and the car passed him by and the driver saw that the man had his penis out and thought that the man was making fun of them and two days later a few armed men came to the neighbourhood asking about the man who had his penis out while a car of theirs was going around instructing people as to how to stand up to the ruthless Zionist enemy, but everybody pretended that they didn’t know what those men were talking about and swore that none of the men around here had done such a thing and the armed men swore at them all and said that it was impossible to defeat the Zionist enemy and liberate Palestine as long as there were people like the people of our neighbourhood.

So write, Comrade, write!
But what, and for whom?
Life was one long episode of ranting
But then we were advised to be light
To be smart
To be friendly and accommodating
And buy our way into success
But our currency was not recognised, was invalid.

 

 

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Khirbet Khizeh Revisited

By Ian Black

 

 In September 1949, a few months after the end of Israel’s war of
independence, a young writer published a novella that has become
associated, more than any other work of Hebrew literature, with the
founding events and myths of the Jewish state. Sixty years on,
S.Yizhar’s Khirbet Khizeh retains an extraordinary power. Its
examination of one emblematic episode of what the Palestinians came to
call their “nakbah” (catastrophe or disaster) poses harsh and
troubling questions. No-one enjoys hearing the answers.

 The story is simply told. On a clear winter’s morning a squad of bored
Israeli soldiers lie in wait on the outskirts of an Arab village—
Khirbet Khizeh — watching as young and old prepare for work in
the fields. By the end of the day, the soldiers have fired a few rounds
at distant, fleeing figures, occupied the village without resistance,
destroyed some houses and escorted the remaining inhabitants, “in a
paralysis of despair,” to trucks that are waiting to take them away.

“We came, we shelled, we burned, we blew up, we pushed and we shoved
and we sent into exile,” intones the unnamed narrator – the repeated
Hebrew verb endings hammering out a confessional rhythm that is less
evident in the widely-admired English translation published
in the UK by Granta in February last year. Continue reading →

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Ranting Joumana

Review by Toby Lichtig

 
 Joumana Haddad is angry. She is angry with the West for stereotyping Arab women and she is angry with the Arab world for creating those stereotypes in the first place. She is angry with the media for its sensationalism and she is angry with modern religion for its prudishness. She is angry that no-one seems to read poetry any more and she is angry that her sons are more interested in 50 Cent than in Chopin.
 
 Haddad has had enough. It is time to throw off the shackles and stand up for her rights. It is time to deride the politicians and venerate the writers. It is time to kill Scheherazade: “Her character, I am convinced, is a conspiracy against Arab women in particular, and women in general.” It is time, most of all, to celebrate the body and denigrate the narrow labels of “Arab” or “Westerner,” “woman” or “man.” There are some labels, however, that Haddad does enjoy: those of the Sonia Rykel boutique in Paris, for example, with its “stylish and seductive dresses” and eight-hundred euro bags. There are some concessions to gender equality that she is not prepared to make: “I hate having to pay a restaurant bill when a man takes me on a date.”
 
  Haddad is a bold and uncompromising writer with an admirable refusal to let the chauvinism of others put her down. Based in Beirut, her magazine JASAD (or “body”) has caused a stir across the Arab world. “Controversial” and “erotic,” it looks past current taboos to an Arab literary heritage “loaded with works that would make even the most liberated Western writer blush.” Haddad wonders, not unreasonably, why “us Arabs” are happy to “applaud the nudes of Robert Mapplethorpe . . . the greatness of Henry Miller . . . the genius of Picasso” but react with apparent disgust to the discussion of their subjects in an Arab cultural magazine. JASAD’s logo is a broken handcuff and it “aims to reflect the body in all its representations.” It has, Haddad tells us, been denounced as “immoral, dissolute, unethical, sinful, debauched,” and worse. She herself has been threatened with violence, including the hope that “someone throws acid at you.”
 
  Her bravery, then, is not to be taken lightly. But there is an unfortunate elephant trumpeting from the confines of her rant: her position of very real privilege. Haddad isn’t just any “typically” subjugated Arab woman. She is urbane, well-educated and, one surmises, wealthy. It isn’t just a superficial question of the Parisian boutiques and tab-grabbing suitors. It isn’t just the home in metropolitan Beirut. Haddad is able to confound apparent “stereotypes” because she has access to a life and lifestyle, a world and social circle, denied to the vast majority. Yes, not all Arab women are veiled, silenced and oppressed. Yes, not all Arab women collude in the religion of their coercion. Yes, many Arab women wear mini-skirts and drive. But nor are they all solvent, well-travelled and multilingual. This is a champion of the subjugated who finds her endless jet-setting a bore: “I get tired, worn out, fed up.” But it’s worth, because “[I] love new things.”
 
 None of this would be a problem if Haddad were willing to contextualize her status. There is nothing wrong with being privileged and angry on behalf of the impoverished. But there is something that doesn’t ring true about her diatribe and she ultimately extrapolates too much from her personal position. The main problem, for Haddad, seems to be that more people aren’t like her.
 
 She starts with an open letter. “Dear Westerner,” she writes, I am not going to confirm “your Orientalist views” and “your anti-Arab prejudices.” I am the “other” Arab woman who deserves to be “acknowledged.” Fair enough – but her subsequent address “to my fellow Arab citizen” and demolition of their “traditional” world merely seems to confirm the “views” of her mysterious “Westerner” stereotype (a stereotype who, bizarrely, appears to believe that Lebanon contains a desert). At one moment Haddad is lashing out against the “institutionalized paedophilia” in certain Muslim states. In another, she wonders why the Western media get so cross about stories of brutal and atavistic behaviour.
 
 This is not to dismiss the courage of Haddad’s very real fight. She is a pugilist of the first order and her battle is a vital one. She writes well on the difficulties of being a female writer in the Arab world. She is convincing on the belief of Fernando Pessoa that “poetry is proof that life is not enough.” Particularly arresting are her descriptions of a conservative Christian upbringing in Lebanon by “very traditional parents” and her access to the life of the mind afforded by furtive visits to her father’s library. It was the Marquis de Sade who instigated the “corruption.” He taught her the vital lesson that “Your imagination is your kingdom.”
 
 The best parts of I Killed Scheherazade underline the power of art and literature to forge the path to liberation. But before such things are possible, mass literacy would be a decent goal. If only Haddad were more self-aware. Self-commiseration,” she self-commiserates, is “not my style.” Her anger at appalling sexism is entirely justified, as is her anger at the West for continuing to pigeonhole those it perceives as “Other.” But in the crossfire of her ire we too often lose sight of those who really suffer. One can’t help thinking that it’s easy to be angry when the worst life has to offer is the prospect of another thankless flight to Paris.

  • I KILLED SCHEHERAZADE: Confessions of an angry Arab woman, by Joumana Haddad,
    160pp. Saqi Books. Paperback, £8.99.
    978 0 86356 427 7 
     
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Jad El Hage

   Human Dust   

From the diary of Hana Yazeed, a thirteen year old refugee during the 2006 War on Lebanon

 
 The voice calling for expulsion
  
  Is heard from the hoarse throat of the oppressor—
  
  A sure sign that the Jew has entered a foreign country

   
                                                           Aharon Shabtai

 

 
 
 May a thousand Arab children die rather than my mother get a scratch. Words that walk with me, sleep with me, eat with me, and sit with me on the roof all night. Words that jump with me each time I go outside to play. They are also written in the header on every page of my note-book together with the TV image of sunny Israeli girls my age writing on missiles and rockets Greetings to the children of Lebanon. To them, we are human dust. We don’t exist. We don’t count. We don’t have souls. Our names are nothing. They don’t imply bodies, feelings, memories, hopes, dreams, life. So it makes no difference if we live or die. On the contrary we must die. It is the only good thing we can ever do. And they revel when we die. The problem is; we don’t die enough. Worse even, we shall never die.
 If a thousand of us are not worth a single, scratched mother of theirs, how should we evaluate the death of a thousand of our mothers? If the value of each human being is different, in which stock market are we to look for our own value? Perhaps people in the first world are more valuable than those in the second world, and the third world people are merely worth one scratch perthousand.
 I need to understand this, and why was I born in this part of the world; this country; this beautiful, doomed country. And why God chose to make me a victim of his chosen people. In my head, especially during the sleepless nights, I dwell a lot on this question. I talk to them.  I write them letters. I tell them: I don’t know how exactly God picked you to be his chosen people. I see you everyday across the border. You don’t seem different from us. Actually we look alike. So you must be special on the inside. Beacons of light, I’m told. How is that possible when I, your next door neighbour, am writing this by candle light because you keep bombing our power plants? At school we were told that you had a rough time throughout history; isolated, hated, chased out everywhere. You suffered a lot. Yet every time our houses are demolished it’s your tractors. Every time a man is taken from his family it’s your army. Every time a piece of our land is stolen it ends up on your map. Every time a child is riddled with bullets it’s your guns. I beg your pardon; tell me how are you hoping to survive in this neighbourhood if you carry on like this? I’m sorry but I don’t believe God has chosen anyone to be his favourite people, I believe that any people can be the chosen if they prove themselves worthy of Him. True, I’m only thirteen, but that much I know for sure.  Continue reading →

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Munich Games

Fiction By Rachel S. Harris

 He leaned against the goal post and wondered how it had come to this. His thighs were chaffed from the heat and sweat. Watching the security detail smoking a little way from the field, he thought that if he didn’t have a cigarette soon he might have to kill someone. Suddenly, the game taking place down the far end of the field changed direction and he realised that the ball was thundering towards him. ‘Oh Shit!’ he thought  and before he could return to his regular lamentation ‘Couldn’t those damned Germans think of a better idea than this’, he found himself running forward and trying to protect a net he had no interest in or compassion for. He moved his right foot and realising that he was tripping over his own ankle he stepped out to stop himself falling awkwardly, instead he accidentally stopped the ball with his pronounced stomach. The flying missile ricocheted off with surprising force bouncing to the undefended left and rolling out of bounds. The final whistle blew. ‘Thank God’ he thought, as he regained his standing.
 He’d spent most of the last hour struggling to catch his breath and that final wallop suggested to him that perhaps he was about to lose the battle after all. His knees began to crumple and as the grass moved towards his face he felt himself suddenly lifted ‘Man of the Match, Man of the Match’ chanted the Palestinian forward as two defenders grabbed the exhausted and demoralised goalie. ‘Oh Shit’ he thought – as they tried to lift his bulk in the air. ‘0:0, a tie’ yelled the Israeli team. ‘It’s a draw’ cried the Germans – we must arrange a rematch’. ‘Oh Shit’ thought the now elevated and gasping Captain.
 A week of discussing literature in Germany had seemed like a nice idea. Israelis, Palestinians – they were all writers after all, and it’s not as though anyone else read their material (except the Germans of course). The German retreat promised good food, alcohol and a week off from having to pay the electricity bill. Conversation had been good, actually it had been best outside, when the Germans weren’t around and the Israelis were bumming cigarettes off the Palestinians at the breaks between sessions. But who thought that a football match could possibly be a good idea for a sedentary group of artists.    Certainly it was rigged from the start. The Palestinians were all heavy smokers, whereas the Israelis only smoke when on army reserve duty. The younger ones, who still did reserve duty were even more or less fit. But who ever heard of a gym in Gaza or Arabs out for a Sunday morning jog along the separation fence. Worse, the Palestinian writers were exactly those who’d opted out of anything that smacked of physicality, choosing literature as the only respectable profession for someone discretely rejecting life as a revolutionary.  The only real advantage they had was a week watching the Israelis stuff their faces with all the German sausage and shellfish they could manage – which had paid off with a bout of food poisoning from the shrimps on the fourth day. The Israeli striker and midfield had been hit particularly hard, and they still hadn’t properly recovered, leaving a big gap for Palestinian advancement.
 Despite all the cheering once the game was over, it had been the Palestinian forward that was most useless of all. They never seemed to be in the right place, they didn’t seem to have any ammunition, and when they finally set up the perfect shot, the striker missed the undefended goal by miles.
 He’d known that being appointed team Captain wasn’t quite the right fit, but he had the best command of English and the Germans were definitely banking on communication over sporting prowess. He’d been chosen because the referee, a Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Munich, heard somewhere that he liked Heine: ‘German and Jewish’ the Professor thought ‘Maybe he can serve as a bridge’. But in zealous haste the lineman, an official at the Goethe institute, had moved the Captain’s jacket with his inhaler and, as the goalie’s lips began to turn blue and he gasped for air atop the shoulders of the oblivious and riotous players, the referee began to realise that unless something happened soon, news coverage of the event would accuse the nearby Jewish Studies department of a Zionist plot by Mossad agents, and tasteless “Munich Games” headlines would appear the world over.  ‘Oh Shit!’ he thought.
 ‘Oh Shit’ came the strangled sounds from the Captain’s lips as he was lowered to the ground.
 The security officer reached out and proffered his own inhaler to the now choking Captain of the Palestinian team. ‘Perhaps’ he whispered quietly in the goalie’s ear ‘we can arrange political negotiations or maybe a war when they try to schedule the rematch’.
‘Thank God’ thought the writer, as he quietly blacked out.

 

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Being Palestinian Being Israeli

By Ayman Sikseck

 Last year, as a likely declaration of an independent Palestinian state drew near, Arabs born in Israel faced again the complex questions regarding their personal and national history. It made me think back of my own childhood; growing up as a Muslim Arab in the nationally and religiously diverse city of Jaffa, when Palestinian state was still considered a far-fetched idea upheld only by religious extremists, and ridiculed by Jews and Arabs alike.
 My parents were born before 1948, the year in which Israel succeeded in an over-publicized endeavor, similar to this made by Palestinians now, to be recognized as an independent Jewish state. Born Palestinians, my parents were nevertheless compelled to hold documentation by the newly founded country, thus virtually, overnight, becoming Israeli. They were later labeled as the lucky ones; the remaining few Palestinians, spared the fate of the rest who had not been driven out of their villages into refugee camps in the neighboring Arab countries. They belonged to those who had resided in central cities and where Israeli evacuation operations were relatively less successful.
 The Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories in the West Bank and Gaza grew stronger over the years, creating generations of victims on both sides. Hence the Israeli identity, which had been enforced upon Palestinians living in Israel, gradually became desirable. What had been initially perceived as depriving Arabs of a core element of their national identity, proved later to have shielded them from a life of hardship and humiliation suffered by family members and neighbors in Palestinian Territories. A noiseless and slow process of assimilation thus started to take place. Palestinians like my parents who were born in Palestine but brought up children into what have already become Israel, learned to keep their own history to themselves. Recognized by the State as an Israeli-Arab, I was sent to an Israeli school; World War II and the Holocaust were two major lessons in my education about the history and establishment of the country. Hebrew became the language habitually used by me and my peers, while Arabic language was steadily pushed aside which made it more difficult to use in our daily life. Ironically, I owe much of my becoming a Palestinian author who writes exclusively in Hebrew to this very process of interchanging identities. Only four of us contemporary Arab authors born in Israel have been published thus far, and one has already left the country and no longer writes in Hebrew.
 Young Arabs who were born in Israel to Palestinian parents are having now to independently retrace the record of their national history. As issues of Palestinian heritage, testimonies and culture became pressing, in the light of Palestinian bid for statehood, a generation of young Arabs born in Israel, as Israeli citizens, is now reclaiming their Palestinian past. Palestinians on both sides of the Israeli wall of separation are now sharing a sense of hope for a Palestinian state. For young Arabs in Israel, this is a fundamental step towards recognizing themselves and their communities as Palestinians; for their parents, it is a display of unity which has not been witnessed between the two Arab societies since 1948.
 For Palestinians on both sides of the border, an independent Palestinian state is their basic right to political autonomy and freedom from an occupying and oppressing foreign authority. But it is also a matter of reclaiming their right to their national and historical identity. The identity which has long been renamed, delegitimized, and repressed, is slowly re-emerging through a new generation, different in its ideals and context, yet intrinsically familiar to its new generation of claimants. The stories of our parents were not handed down to us, but we have insisted on discovering them still, and are now trying to retell them in our daily lives, to our children and the children of our Israeli friends, and in our artistic work and fiction. A vote for an independent Palestinian state is a vote for the persistence of these stories; and for a free and sovereign home for the stories yet to be told.

  • Ayman Sikseck’s debut novel, To Jaffa, which explores the paradoxical and problematic life of a young Palestinian-Israeli was published in 2010.

 

 

 

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Amstel

Fiction By Edna Shemesh

(Translated from Hebrew by Sara Kitai)

 Every Friday at one thirty, Tuli comes for lunch, just as he has been doing every week since his father died. And just as she has been doing for so many many years, every Friday she bakes him an almond date loaf cake with a hint of cinnamon and clove, a crumbly cake that melts in your mouth and whose recipe she keeps a closely guarded secret. The buzzer on the oven sounds. She slips her right hand into a stiff oven glove, leans over, and pulls out the aluminum pan, testing the cake with a pale wooden toothpick. She breathes in the intoxicating aroma, returns the cake to the grate, and slams the oven door shut. Turning the heat down, she sets the timer for another ten minutes to make sure it’s golden brown. By the time the buzzer goes off again, she has finished washing the dishes and passing a damp cloth over the veined marble countertop. She switches off the oven and places the cake on the round wooden cutting board to cool, then absent-mindedly wipes her hands on her apron, sliding them down over her hips. Seeing the thick steam rising over the stove, she turns to check on the chicken simmering in a brown sauce, shaking the pot gently to make sure the meat doesn’t burn, tilting it slightly and basting the browning chicken parts with the sauce from the bottom. Then she stirs the potatoes in the frying pan, seasoning them with a little more paprika and the crushed garlic waiting on the counter. She stirs the pan once more. Tastes. It needs salt. She sprinkles some on and tastes it again. Perfect. She looks around in satisfaction. Everything is almost ready.
 Reaching behind her back, she undoes the bow of the apron and hangs it on a hook. Then she smooths out her skirt and sits down on the chair between the dinette and the kitchen, her back to the wall. From the wall opposite, Leon smiles at her inscrutably from the old wooden frame, his Mona Lisa smile following her like a faithful dog wherever she goes. She dismisses him with a wave of her hand and lights a cigarette. The loud voices of the children coming home from school reach her from the street below, and grey smoke rises in front of her as she remembers those other Fridays, happy days, outwardly at least, when her Tuli was still a little boy. Instantly, she is drowning in memories. She used to get up early in the morning with an energy and diligence whose source or motive she still does not fully understand. Very early, so as to cook and bake, clean and tidy the house, and have time to get to the store to buy a sweet challa loaf, seltzer water, and a newspaper, and be ready before Leon returned from work. Soon afterwards, the odors rising from the pots on her stove would fill the house and then descend into the street. Around noontime, the air would fill with the bittersweet scent of cloves, cinnamon, and honey from the cake in the oven. At precisely twelve o’clock, she would hear the clanging of the bell in the trusty hand of the janitor in the school across the road, just at the edge of the dusty field. Within seconds, the street would fill with noisy flocks of children bursting through the rusty iron gate, their battered brown school bags bouncing on their backs, streaming into the street on their way to freedom. She would wipe her hands on a cloth and lean on the windowsill, watching the sweaty unkempt urchins with a heavy heart, scanning their faces and their clothes, knowing she would not see her son among them.

  • From a book of stories with the same title, published in Israel in 2007.

 

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SOON

Adoring Imam Khomeini

Lebanese writer Hazem Saghieh recalls times when he was still young and innocent.

‘Without being a believer, I nevertheless believed. My daily consumption of whiskey doubled, as things grew worse in Beirut, yet I couldn’t help being gripped by the myth of Khomeini, in images and illustrations as much as in politics. For example, I fancied believing that Khomeini was taller than the average man, and when I realised that he was actually short I felt that there must have been something unruly in the world’s design. In such fits of idolisation, unquestioned assumption dragged reason behind it, and rubbished it; thus the plights of the dark rooms of the psyche stipulated solutions beautified as categorically valid and good for the whole of humanity. The Pale Imam reached me in a way that the working class couldn’t; for the working class I had known, and believed in, was only the product of books and imagination. The Imam, however, had managed to reunite me with old intimate surroundings which I’d thought I’d managed to leave behind.’

 

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The Tigris Flows Through London

Review By Toby Lichtig

 

Iraqi poet Fawzi Karim

 “Poetry does not deal with history but with myth . . . . A poet has to neglect historical time and go beyond it.” An Iraqi émigré who has been living amid the suburban calm of London’s Greenford for the past three decades, Fawzi Karim is a political poet by dint of his refusal to be political. As he explains to Marius Kociejowski in a fascinating interview at the end of Plague Lands and Other Poems, his inability to believe in any one thing, “either religiously or ideologically,” and his determination to stand up for this “inner necessity” of ambiguity and multiplicity, was a radical act in Ba’athist Iraq and one that led him on the path to exile.
 Modernist in its infusion of the classical and contemporary, stylistically free but indebted to a rigorous literary tradition, Karim’s poetry seethes with the very real agonies of his native country’s recent past while insisting on its eternal qualities and refusing the bitterness of particular experience. “My sufferings,” he writes in the collection’s eponymous entry, “Had me in knots from which / My poems kept aloof / Untainted by the soul’s contamination.” For Karim, personal responsibility and the acceptance of fate are central to the role of the poet. After all, “I can’t fault the sun for scorching me.”
 “Plague Lands,” with its titular nod to T. S. Eliot, is an elastic, dramatic, seven-part poem, epic in scope, pungently personal, stoically eternal, a lament for a lost city, a lost country, a lost past, an ancient civilization as tangible as it is mythological. The Tigris features heavily. And the Tigris is, for Karim, a river that flows through London. Indeed, by the ethereal banks of his Greenford home, it flows “even stronger . . . than at its source in Turkey because it belongs to memory rather than to reality.” Back in Baghdad, the poet runs into a disguised Gilgamesh, who warns him: “What happened before will happen again.” The poet wants to know: “Why the modern dress?” And Gilgamesh replies: “The present masks the past / In this long-extant polis, where humanity / dies of a broken heart, / Though the despair that’s broken it survives.” The present masks the past: but in the right hands, this disguise is immediately transparent.
 “Plague Lands,” writes Kociejowski, is in many ways “a template for [Karim’s] life.” It begins with his birth in 1945, “On the day . . . A world war ground to its halt,” and follows his journey from childhood to revolution, from literary blossoming to political hell in a country where “A few light words can wreck a reputation,” from Beirut to London (“When I arrived in Victoria Station, I knew immediately this was my city”) to a Baghdad return, where, in a haze of sorrow and nostalgia, the poet determines to ”get drunk for a fucked up country.” Karim finds the city tragically denuded, his former neighbourhood stripped of its vegetation, “the lotus-tree, the mulberry, / the eucalypt, the oleander” – and his chief reaction is a lament for language: “No shadows left for any secrets.” In ripping down these trees, Saddam Hussein removed something greater even than life: a safe-haven for words.
 “Plague Lands” is a sensory feast and Karim beautifully evokes the sights and sounds and smells of his childhood, the fleetingness of his senses accorded an eternal quality. The “dung, palm pollen, rushes and clay” owe more to ancient Mesopotamia than to 1950s Baghdad, and the palm trees removed by Saddam to make way for his hubristic palace linger in the memory long after the dictator has finally been deposed. The reek of corpses, meanwhile, quickly evaporates from the streets, but “the smell disappeared within us.”
 The collection has been translated by Abbas Kadhim and reversioned by Anthony Howell, and there is a vibrancy to its English in harmony with the Arabic original; the freshness does not feel forced. Other poems build on the themes of exile, memory, history and myth, and although not all are successful – the insistence on the “infinite” time of the sands in “History,” for example, left this reader wishing for a more surprising analogy – there is much to be admired. Particularly memorable is “A Soldier,” in which Karim paints a vivid portrait of a victorious “scarf-swathed” army marching to rapturous applause, only to recast it as “furred” with rust, its story “unravelled in stagnant water.” “My house is a stack of those moments,” writes Karim, the solidity of the “stack” brilliantly undermined by his later comment that “A single touch can disrupt it all.” Poetry, we might conclude, makes things happen – things about which armies could only ever dream.

  • PLAGUE LANDS AND OTHER POEMS, By Fawzi Karim,
    116pp. Carcanet Press. £12.95
    978 1 84777 063 9
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