The work of Emile Habiby (1921-1996) is one of the decisive
examples of a Palestinian literary oeuvre which has recently
attained an important status within Hebrew culture. Translations of
several of his works, among them stories from his volume
Sextuplets of the Six-Day War, his famous novel The
Opsimist, his book Ah'atia, and his tale Saraia,
Daughter of the Evil Demon ¬the latter three in Anton
Shammas's translation - have earned Habiby a central place in the
cultural consciousness of Hebrew readers. The epitome of this
process of acceptance was the awarding of the Israel Prize for
Arabic Literature to Habiby on Independence Day, 1992. From the
perspective of the Hebrew reader, his place in the canon of
Israeli/Hebrew literature had been confirmed both through his
public prestige as an Israeli intellectual and by the presence of
his works in translation in the present-day Hebrew
literature.
In his story "Rubabeka," which appeared in the volume Sextuplets of
the Six-Day War written after the 1967 war, Emile Habiby describes
a character, a second-hand-goods saleswoman, who insisted on
remaining in the homeland in 1948 in Haifa's Wadi Nisnas district,
and never left there since: Now, after 1967, she yearns to reunite
with her people who are living as refugees. The narrator praises
Rubabeka as someone who in her own special way has carried on the
struggle of Palestinian nationalism, one who was ready to sacrifice
the most important things in her life just to be part of the
national struggle and remain close to the homeland.
Through the description of the impressive character of Rubabeka,
the writer criticizes his fellow Palestinians who were not able to
appreciate her and accused her falsely of living off of her
countrymen's suffering by selling the goods that the refugees had
left behind when they fled: ''When you were involved in political
issues, she would get excited and was ready to fulfill any role
given to her. And when one of you was arrested, she was at the jail
to visit him even before his mother. She would bring you food and
do your laundry." On the allegorical level the story is extremely
critical of those who attacked the Palestinians who remained in the
State of Israel after 1948 and saw them as traitors and
collaborators. You, the author claims, were so involved in high
politics, while she took upon herself the really important action,
the act of survival.
Rubabeka's story is told from a universalistic perspective: her
contribution to the Palestinian struggle is presented on the same
level as the self-critique of the author against the weakness
exhibited by his fellow countrymen. All is judged not only from a
narrow, particularistic angle of national interests, but from a
universal value system of morality and justice. The validity of
these values is presented in the story as being beyond any specific
historical, national context, even if by remaining loyal to them
the author is forced to criticize his own people. On the one hand
the Palestinians slander Rubabeka, their own countrywoman, and on
the other hand they themselves do not behave very well. Through
this device Habiby produces narrative patterns acceptable to the
majority Hebrew-speaking culture. Habiby's text has a self-critical
approach and a sympathetic presentation of women's issues. This
theme is given at least as much weight if not more than the theme
of the national struggle in the story, making it very suitable for
the universalistic expectations of a majority culture that wields
the power, and demands that all those under its control adhere to
these universal, Western values.
The story of Rubabeka, the particular, individual woman, is no less
important than her status as an allegorical representation of the
struggle. Placing a woman as a central character alongside the
self-critical approach that Habiby presents, made his writing
appeal more strongly to the majority Jewish culture: The
Opsimist and Ah'atia were well received by the Jewish critics
when they appeared as novels and when the former was put on as a
one-man show by the actor Muhammad Bakri. The reaction of the
majority culture stressed the universal element common to Jews and
Arabs in these works.
Many critics emphasized repeatedly that the character of the
"opsimist," the Palestinian who survives under Israeli rule, is
very similar to the character of the evasive Jew surviving through
his wits in the gentile world - a character immortalized in the
works of Mendele Mocher Sfarim and the stories of Sholom Aleikhem.
Thus the majority culture's spokespeople have created a universal
base common to Jew and Arab alike. The emphasis on the artistic
achievement as a universal one obliterated and repressed the fact
that in reality what was being shown was a power relationship
between an oppressive majority and an oppressed minority, which was
being vehemently attacked by the Palestinian author. The
universalistic rhetoric was just a way of hiding this attack.
He is writing a minority national literature that is co-opting
itself into the majority literature, gaining its acceptance, yet
paying the political price for it. However, he also uses the
universal representation to subvert the pillars of faith of that
majority culture. He places universalism on the surface of his
story and uses it to gain acceptance by the majority culture. But,
in the final analysis, this is only the surface level of the
narrative. In the background, behind the scenes, there is often a
completely separate drama which aims its subversive action in a
totally different direction. Thus the very same technique, the tale
of the woman, while making the narrative universalistic, is at the
same time, producing the subversion of that universalistic code,
questioning it, dismantling it and violating it, through the device
of an alternative story which refuses to accept the narrative
framework suited to the universalistic demand of the majority
culture.
The story of Rubabeka is, as already mentioned, the story of a
woman who participates in the national struggle, but, at the same
time, it is the story of someone who carries on the struggle in her
own independent way and, as such, is scorned by Palestinian
society. Rubabeka is a representation of the national mother figure
who is exalted as an accepted national symbol which presents
motherhood as a kind of national service. But in the final
analysis, we discover through Habiby's narrator, she achieves her
role as national mother symbol at the price of her family role as
real mother: "When her husband emigrated and took the children, she
insisted on staying with her paralyzed mother." In order to achieve
her national role, Rubabeka is ready to pay the price of
disconnection from the family framework. Furthermore, "After five
years, when her mother had died, we heard that her husband refused
to acknowledge her and wasn't interested in having her back. You
never believed her when she said she had no interest in leaving her
house. The rumor got around that she was having an affair, that's
what you were saying. You claimed that it was impossible for her to
remain in the Wadi for no apparent reason."
Palestinian society is presented in the story as unable to accept
the possibility of the woman's story having a purely national
motive, not connected to some private tale of love. The real story
of Rubabeka is neither a national story nor a private love story.
Rather it remains a riddle, a secret. This is the feminine secret
which, here, is serving the purpose of presenting the option of a
private tale which refuses to fit in simply with one of the
narrative options, either the national one or the private one - or
a combination of the two. Through this device the feminine story
contributes to the undermining of the unity of the universalistic
tendency. The feminine story of Rubabeka refuses to fit in with the
demands made of it and, in so doing, it undermines and dislocates
the stability of the universalistic generalization which sees a
common ground between men and women and between Palestinian and
Jew.
Saraia, Daughter of the Evil Demon, Habiby's last book to be
translated into Hebrew, is in many ways a prime example of a
minority literary work which infiltrates into the majority
literature. Saraia is exposed in the story but, similarly to other
women in Habiby's oeuvre, she also always remains a secret which
refuses to be fully unraveled. The central thematic device of
apportioning the female character a double role of both expressing
the universal ethic and, at the same time undermining it, is
brought here to its fullest development. Saraia, the woman, the
demon's daughter, is given the central role in the khurafiya, the
traditional folk tale, that Habiby relates.
However, from the beginning, she performs a dual function. On the
particular level, Saraia is an essential element of the biography
of Habiby, the author and the narrator, and she is also a partial
allegory for the Palestinian nation. But she is also a
universalistic symbol of utopian longings and dreams. On the one
hand, she cries out allegorically: "The homeland has missed its
sons, o Abdallah. Have you forgotten us so quickly?" On the other
hand, using the language of personal biography, the narrator tells
us that if his friend should return from his impossible quest to
start his life with Saraia again from the beginning, then he will
relate the continuation of this khurafiya to us. Yet, in the second
ending, which is placed right next to the first one, the narrator
signs off the story with the blessing to his readers: "See you in
the next khurafiya."
The time: summer of 1983. The days of the Lebanon War offer the
narrator, the fisherman/author (Habiby's alter-ego in the story), a
chance to reassess his personal biography and the local Palestinian
history. Among the hallucinatory images that appear to him as he
sits and fishes on a reef off the coast of Akhziv, he attempts to
bridge the gap of a generation and recreate the memory of his
relationship on Mt. Carmel (Haifa) with Saraia, the daughter of the
demon. Between him and Abdallah, his alter-ego, both as a partner
in the story and as a co-narrator, there develops a familial and
national web of memories, forgetfulness and repression, in which
the longings for Saraia and the feelings of guilt for not having
been there for her fill a central role.
The story shifts between a desire to face the historical and
personal truths in a sane and balanced manner, and the systematic
attempt to evade them. The fate of the refugees of 1948 is
represented, for example, by the story of Brother Jawad and the
breakdown of his mother who could not bear to see her family
separated as a result of the war. The collapse of authority and of
the spiritual and political tradition of Palestinian society and
the longing for its reinstatement, are raised through the nostalgic
evocation of Uncle Ibrahim and his mysterious cane.
The love story of the hero (heroes) with Saraia, the mysterious
daughter of the demon, which apparently moves towards its linear
end, disrupts the expectation that it generates in the reader for
an ending to the khurafiya. But the real disruption that is
generated here is the actual denial of the formal demand for (or
convention of) an ending. The ending as the signifier of the formal
boundaries of the plot is questioned, and, in its stead, the reader
is offered two alternatives. As in the storytelling technique of
Scheherezade, the narrative framework in this story is only a
kernel for a broader framework, which in itself is a part of a
larger structure. Thus Habiby plays with a series of conventions
that direct the expectations of a Western reader: source vs.
translation, reality vs. imagination, the story vs. its process of
creation, the folk tale vs. its modernist adaptation. As against
his earlier books, Habiby has suggested that, in Saraia,
Daughter of the Evil Demon, the book was written with the
Hebrew reader already in his thoughts. With this in mind, Habiby,
with the assistance of Anton Shammas, the translator, applies
techniques that undermine and reexamine the hierarchic division of
labor between writer, translator and reader. Thus, for instance,
the presence of the translator, Shammas, is thematized as in the
body of the text, and in full view of the readers of the
translation, Habiby discusses the abilities of the translator,
Shammas. In so doing, Habiby extracts Shammas from his invisible
status as translator, who normally remains behind the scenes, and
reinstates him in the foreground of the text. Instead of the usual
union between reader and translator as against the author, in this
action, the author creates a pact with the readers over the head of
the translator.
As before, in this story Habiby utilizes the ambivalence of the
Israeli/Hebrew discourse. Once again, he struggles with the use of
double meaning in Israeli discourse when he describes the current
Israeli landscape alongside the repressed Palestinian memory
landscape. He shows sensitivity in his awareness that the evidence
of the memories of the repressed past in the Hebrew names upholds
the act of repression as an ambivalent act. The repeated use of the
double semantics which presents the Hebrew Akhziv in close
proximity to the Arab El-Ziv, for example, or Tel Shikmona and Tal
El-Shamakh, burst through this gap of double-meaning: it cancels
the sense of normalcy and naturalness of the act of repression and
turns it into a temporary, artificial decision which could be
reconsidered. In so doing, he expropriates the "natural" authority
and primacy of the national majority group (who hold the power), to
allot names to the sites of its own home landscape.
This dual, subversive status of the language is strongly apparent
in the book in the purposely artificial Hebrew devised by Shammas:
the spiraling syntax, which at times gives a sense of being
incorrect; the exaggerated and sly use of quotes from Hebrew
literary works ("From one year to the next this," a quote from a
poem by Nathan Zach is attributed, of all things, to a song about
the refugees by Lebanese singer Fairuz); and in general a language
which repeatedly jars with the assumed tolerance of the Hebrew
reader. As it questions the limits of tolerance, the language
produces a two-pronged effect. On the one hand, it is a heightened
and artificial language which calls attention to itself as a
conscious imitation of Hebrew, the language of the dominating power
culture. On the other hand, it tries to enter into the linguistic
network in order to undermine and subvert it and its political
presuppositions. Once more, it creates for itself a special
borderline existence, which is subversive and provocative,
managing, at one and the same time, to be a part of the canon norm
and outside of that norm.
The flexible position of the story and its unclear boundaries allow
Habiby, via the translator Anton Shamrnas, to enter into a tense
and provocative dialogue with the Hebrew reader. As in his earlier
books that had been translated from Arabic into Hebrew, and some of
his short stories, in Saraia, Daughter of the Evil Demon,
Habiby challenges the Hebrew reader in the format of a dialogue
between two narrators who describe their personal story as against
the Palestinian history, but also as a part of it. On the one hand,
this is a story written by an author from a national minority
culture, whose clear political commitment and typical use of
national allegory do not appeal to the Western aesthetic norms that
dominate the majority Israeli culture. Yet, on the other hand, this
is also a story that is meant to arouse sympathy in the Hebrew
readers and, perhaps, even solidarity based on universalistic
truths. Habiby primarily is telling an internal, autobiographic
story in which he once more defines the suffering of his people
through a distancing irony, mixed with a deep pain. Yet the
critique of the Israeli actions during the War of Independence -
the destruction of Arab villages, the horrors of the expulsions and
turning the Palestinians into refugees ¬all these do not deter
him, at times they even encourage him, to develop in his story a
wholesome dose of universalistic self-criticism against his own
people - the collaborators, etc. Thus, once more, from a
universalistic position of distance, he observes the Eastern folk
tale as a Western aesthetic, literary possibility.
This dualism exposes the Hebrew reader to a text which is very
difficult to categorize. Habiby can be read by the Hebrew reader
both internally and externally, both as part of the Israeli canon
and as external to it. Whether consciously or not, Habiby's writing
is designed to attack the shifting boundaries of the Israeli canon,
a boundary that Habiby's writing in translation has been
instrumental in opening up. The way Habiby infiltrates the majority
culture and literature as a minority author is through his activity
in the linguistic/ cultural heart of the majority culture.
The question of the political presence of the book in the gray zone
between the dominant Jewish-Israeli culture and the
Israeli-Palestinian culture is often foregrounded throughout the
book. The possibility of infiltrating into the majority culture via
this duality of particularism and universalism is presented, from
the start of the book, as a dilemma which Habiby had already dealt
with several times in the past: that of the minority author, who is
forced to carry two watermelons in his arms, the watermelon of
politics and the watermelon of literature.
In this book, Habiby turns this dilemma into the central axis of
his writing. This is a book about the limits and possibilities of
the political and cultural action of the Palestinian national
minority that survived in Israel after the War of Independence as
second-class citizens and as objects of official persecution. The
tension between the two watermelons is maintained, and his
universalistic self-critique doesn't lead him to deny his
responsibility as a committed writer towards bettering the fate of
his people. His self-criticism of his political path, especially in
the Israeli Communist Party, does not lead him to deny the
necessity for political commitment in his writing, but rather to a
redefinition of his political commitment as an author and of the
political role of the author.
The actual narrative plot line, with its reversals and
contradictions, gives rise to the possibility of taking a political
stand and finding a path of action by walking a tightrope. As
already mentioned, the ending is also the basis for the ongoing
story. The act of writing is often likened to digging a tunnel
which constantly runs into dead-ends and thus "I have no other
choice if I want to save myself, but to go on digging." This is a
fluid position which attempts to hold on both to a clear and
unequivocal political and moral commitment, as well as a space for
individual liberty. The story is thus an obstinate striving along
the unpaved route to the dual solution. On the one hand, it is an
expression of the effort to supply answers to the suffering of the
wars. Yet, on the other hand, it is a suggested solution which once
more breaks the direct and immediate commitment to the suffering.
One wonders whether "we have already become so accustomed to the
sounds of war, and we can differentiate between one war cry and
another. Have we become addicted to the war cries, from one war to
the next ( ...) to such an extent that we cannot hear the other
music? Can we not decipher the other wavelength?"
Habiby is both a strong opponent of the policies of the Israeli
establishment, and yet, one who accepted the Israel Prize for
Arabic Literature (for which he was widely condemned in the Arab
world). Thus his stories are characterized by his duality which is
faithful to the special suffering of his people, while it is being
simultaneously undermined by his commitment to a universalistic
value system.
This article is an abridged version of a chapter in Minority
Discourse in Modem Hebrew Fiction. New York University Press,
forthcoming.