The Palestinian paradox

January 18, 2006 I have always been puzzled why Arabs are so prolific in their literature and poetry, yet at the same time appear to read so little. Reading is seen as an antisocial activity and hence frowned upon. I have given up on bringing a book to a bus or train station in Egypt, Syria or whatever Arab country to make best use of my time while waiting. Without any respect for the privacy which I had carefully tried to create by holding up the book in front of me, people will come up and talk to me. It is not so much a matter of not being allowed to read, but more a concern with my self-inflicted solitude, which is interpreted as loneliness. So they come to cheer me up, encourage me to talk to people and be part of my environment. That I had engrossed myself in a world of my own, while reading my book seems hard to comprehend. This is not the rule for all Arabs, of course; many books are indeed read – but only by a few.

For a while this had led me to the conclusion that most Arabs have little sense for, or interest in, literature. This turned out to be a premature observation. Where I would pride myself in the number of books on my bookshelf, most Arabs I have met would take pride in in the poetry they have stored in their hearts. Whether an illiterate street vendor or highly educated medical doctor, everyone knows poetry, either in the form of songs by the incomparable Umm Kalthoum, poems from numerous famous poets, or even as love letters composed by the reciter himself. Moreover, recital of poetry, I noticed, is not considered a higher culture as it is for westerners but a part of every-day life. It is a spontaneous activity, which can take place at any gathering, whether in a café, a bus stop or a birthday party. Beautiful rhymes, catchy phrases or gracefully versed thoughts are to be shared with others, and not reserved for a single reader. The pleasure of poetry lies in the common enjoyment with other listeners.

The same applies to prose. But the tradition of telling stories is unfortunately dying out under the strong competition of the television. The numerous soap series – musalsalat – with their many plots, characters and undercurrent of social criticism have replaced the hakawaty, the professional storyteller who used to be present in nearly every coffee house. But it appears that this tradition still lives on in the needs of Arab readers. As one teacher of English literature in Kuwait once told me: “My students prefer Western writers like Charles Dickens, with a narrative style and human drama. Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is particularly popular among the female students.” And at the annual book fairs in Damascus and Cairo I could detect an increasing preference for translations of South-American writers like Gabriel García Marquez and Isabelle Allende.

All this came to mind when I read the stories and poems of contemporary Palestinian writers in the latest issue of Banipal. Magazine of Modern Arab Literature. At first they seem to fit perfectly in the western tradition of literary prose and poetry. However, while reading one after the other, the stories and poems seemed to come off the pages and circle not in my head, but outside it, around me. These were stories and poems that had to be told and recited for other people to hear, not to be read by a solitary reader. Like the beautiful story of the old man Abu Shawkat who tells his sixty and seventy year old friends in the coffee shop how he had been spying on Umm Bassam, “the instigator of daily strife among the neighbours, arguing with taxi drivers, dropping in on people with or without pretext, confiscating the worn-out footballs the children in the neighbourhood kicked into her garden; Umm Bassam who disembowelled the footballs with a big knife, deaf to the dismayed cries of the boys and their begging that she would stop the wicked act she was intent on.” And while the elderly men bow their grey heads closer and closer together, Abu Shawkat tells them the long-spun tale of how he had spied upon Umm Bassam walking in her garden in her nightie and then squatting right in front of him to pee, giving him full sight of her naked buttocks. “Abu Shawkat then demonstrated with his hands a round shape, moving and swaying his open hands to indicate vastness, expanse, heaviness, fullness.” The story is full of erotic tension and images that leave the old men “mumbling with new energy.”

Almost all stories and poems in the magazine are told by a single person, resembling something close to monologues. This is what gives them such a strong narrative character. The content, however, varies enormously. Few are as hilarious as the story of Abu Shawkat. The ‘Testimony of a carpenter called Walid’ by Jamil Hatmal (1955-1995), for instance, is a monologue by a frightened young man who is interrogated for having rented out a room to someone who was politically involved without Walid’s knowledge. It is prose yet reads as a poem. Here we have the start and the end of that monologue:

“Oh Sir, God knows I did not mean that. You command that I should start from the beginning. Very well... (...)
When I came into the world I cried for a long time - so Mother tells me - but I cried just like any other baby. God knows I am not implying anything else!
(...)
I do not understand these things. I only understand carpentry, and that rising damp in the house has given me arthritis.
Sir, I usually go straight home after finishing work and sit with my elderly mother, who must, by now, be quite frightened.
When you permit me, Sir, to leave this place, and sort out my arthritis, which is becoming painful now, I will return to work and will never consider renting out the room ever again. To hell with the tools and whoever needs my work!
Sir, I swear I had nothing to do with it. Mother must be waiting for me, she is ill and old and I...”

This is also a fine example of how the heroic and nationalistic Palestinian literature of the 1970s and 1980s has been replaced by personalised miniatures. This refined style yields very powerful images. No mention is made of ‘Palestine’, ‘homeland’ or similarly grand terms. The authors or their leading personas merely tell what village they come from, who their parents are and where they come from. The celebrated Mahmoud Darwish (1944), renown throughout the Arab world, goes to the heart of the matter of identity:

This is your name
a woman said
and vanished in the corridor of her whiteness
This is your name: memorise it well!
Do not argue about any of its letters
ignore the tribal flags,
befriend your horizontal name
experience it with the living
and the dead, and strive
to have it correctly spelt
in the company of strangers and carve it
into a rock inside a cave
(...)

(from ‘Mural’)

And here we come to what all these Palestinian poets and novelists have in common: a feeling of loss and being lost, of being alone. This is shared by both Palestinians still living in the Palestinian territories, and those living in diaspora. Most authors describe their solitude in the kind of prose which could easily be read as poetry. The poets, on the other hand, tend to express themselves in prose-like poems. As Mahmoud Abu Hashhash writes in ‘Vague Question’:

My distant and safe friends
in their houses
on their streets
in their offices
and their playgrounds
sent me messages asking: “Are you still alive?”
They did not write again
once they received
my vague
answers

And the young poet Sammer Abu Hawwash conveys his solitude and detachment from the outside world as follows:

A cold day
I didn’t think at all
to turn on the heat
wear a third sweater
or stand by the window
and wait for the rain
because it won’t fall today
it will fall tomorrow
and I won’t ask ever
how old I’ve become
at this hour
it is sometimes sufficient to sit
and think
it is a cold day

(‘A cold day’, Sammer Abu Hawwash)

I can only hope that the readers of this edition of Banipal may once enjoy the experience of having some of these stories or poems read out loud, preferably in the company of friends, with coffee or tea and a plate of halwayat.




Banipal. Magazine of Modern Arab Literature. Feature on Palestinian Literature. (No. 15/16, Autumn 2002, Spring 2003)

Maurits Berger (1964, The Netherlands) has studied Arabic and law, and lived for many years in the Middle East, where he worked as a researcher and journalist.