Excerpts
Literature and War
by Runo Isaksen
Etgar Keret: “I was speaking to the Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan, who is a good friend of mine, and he told me that my book had sold out in Ramallah. I commented that people were probably just curious about Israeli literature. He replied, ‘No, they buy your books because your work is different from other Israeli authors and it’s what they want to see.’ As an Israeli author, I’m more interested in Palestinian literature that is not directly about the conflict. Similarly, Palestinians don’t want to read Israeli books that tell them who they are, but rather ones that might tell them who I am—that is what is interesting. Apropos of South Africa, Nadine Gordimer always tries to deal with the conflict and find solutions, and I tend to find her books rather uninteresting. But it’s quite the opposite with J.M. Coetzee. He really captures the complexity of the situation and that is a valuable contribution. I don’t need someone to show me what’s right and wrong, I know what is wrong. Instead I need someone who says, ‘This is reality.’ So what I would look for in the Israeli–Palestinian dialogue is something that is normally denied, something that people think, but don’t say. Because what we hear today is nothing more than a bunch of clichés. If you gathered together the work of all Israeli and Palestinian writers over the past 30 years, and fed their texts into a PC, you would see that 90 percent of the words they use are identical. I do it too. Every time I’m asked to write an article or an essay, the first thing I do is sit down in front of my computer and write a paragraph, before reading it through and discovering all the familiar words: ‘tragedy,’ ‘unbearable,’ etc. So many words that are supposed to describe the situation, but in fact what they do is build a wall between you and reality. Because the truth is—even now, during the second intifada—life here is not unbearable. It is tragic, but life elsewhere is tragic as well. There is no inherent difference between my fear of being blown to bits by a suicide bomber and your fear of developing cancer or getting fired. We’re both human and we’re both frightened of dying. But here the situation binds us together with a sort of chain of clichés.”
Amos Oz: “What is interesting and ironic is that both the Jews and the Arabs have been the victims in relation to Europe, but in different ways. The Arabs have been subjected to imperialism and colonialism, exploitation and degradation. The Jews have been persecuted, discriminated against, and the target of genocide. But the fact that both sides are victims of a common oppressor does not automatically mean that they love each other or will develop a sense of solidarity. Only in Brecht’s plays do the suppressed march together to the barricades. In reality—and this is something that everyone knows—some of the worst conflicts often arise between victims of the very same suppressor. When two children who have the same cruel father look at each other, what do they see? They don’t see the other one as a victim, but rather as an image of the cruel father. And that, broadly speaking, is the situation is here. So obviously it doesn’t help that the Jews have a traumatic history. To expect Jews to be more sensitive to other people’s suffering because they have a traumatic history is a sentimental misconception. Okay, we know that some victims do develop a higher degree of sensitivity to others’ suffering, whereas others simply become more bitter, angry, and unreliable. Both these responses to suffering are very human, even if they are not equally humane. We have problems seeing the Palestinians’ suffering because, in times of trouble, people have a tendency to see only their own suffering. This is a general truth: when a couple fight, they are both blinded by their own pain.”
From the interview with Dorit Rabinyan: I ask Dorit Rabinyan if these Iranian and Middle Eastern elements are reflected in her novels and if so, whether this implies that the gap between the Jewish and the Arab is in fact closing somehow.
“Generally, you could say that literature projects something about life. If there is no dialogue between the Jews and the Palestinians, you don’t write about it, except perhaps as a wistful dream. But I really do see some interesting similarities in Hebrew and Palestinian literature, especially the literature written by second generation Mizrahi Jews and post-1948 Palestinians. The two have a lot in common, or rather a lot of parallels, as their paths do not cross and they never refer to each other. But they deal with the same subjects, the same set of issues. So you could say that we are on the same track, just using different languages.”
Rabinyan’s novel Persian Brides takes place over the space of two days in a fictitious Persian village around 1920. It portrays a minority Jewish community in a predominantly Muslim country, and focuses on two young Jewish girls. It addresses the position and role of women, and how society expects women to behave. The style is brutal and direct. I ask how she would describe the novel, as Jewish or Middle Eastern?
“Persian Brides is about a Jewish community, but that isn’t what’s most important. For me, it is an Iranian book. It could have been written in any language, but it just happens to be written in Hebrew because my parents decided to settle in Israel. I was born in Israel and Hebrew is my language, but since I have been brought up by Iranian immigrants, the core of my identity is Iranian. So I am a very cosmopolitan person, I have been educated within the framework of Western culture and I deeply appreciate that. But at the same time, I already carry with me the baggage that my parents were never allowed to open in public. The metaphorical suitcases that they brought with them from Iran were a large and important part of my childhood and youth. The differences between me and an author like Etgar Keret, who has parents who survived the Holocaust, are obvious—but so are the similarities. In a way, we are both telling the stories of those who were silenced by Israeli hegemony. There was a conformity that said, ‘Let bygones be bygones! We will create a new country! We want the children here to be proud and magnificent!’ But this is not a fair game. And there is a great opportunity for literature here, to give voice to those silenced voices.”
Zakariyya Muhammad: “It’s very difficult to be a writer here these days—if you want to be good. We are denied access to so much. We have no proper libraries, so doing research is hopeless. No proper cinemas or art exhibitions. No new books have been allowed in for a couple of years. And on top of that, we’re locked into a situation where we’re forced to be interested in politics, because politics is our life here. But I’ve always said, right from the start, that I would not let the occupation dictate the scope of my work. Because if all you write about is torture and checkpoints, it means the other side has won and is influencing your poetry. They can occupy my house, my street, my country, but I will not let them occupy my poems. I will write about what I want to write about. So I write as if I’m a poet anywhere else in the world, as if the occupying forces weren’t on my back. Why should a Norwegian poet have the privilege of writing about a rose, when I have to be satisfied with tanks? So, I’ve kicked the tanks out of my poems. And yes, I do absolutely belong to the generation of poets that has abandoned politics.”
From the interview with Yahya Yakhlif: “After the Oslo Accords many writers and intellectuals came back, and they really invigorated the cultural life here. So before September 2000, when the second intifada started, we actually had a very active cultural life, with theater, music, and art. An infrastructure was built up, with museums and art centers. And now there has been a real backlash. We’re not allowed to import books anymore, neither Arabic nor English. They have demolished the museums and parts of the old towns, as in Nablus. Several cultural events have had to be cancelled because of this aggression. But, in spite of the terrible situation, Palestinian intellectuals are still trying to create room for hope; they try to carry on painting, making music and theater—and writing. Many Palestinian authors are now writing about their new life in Palestine, as well as striving to highlight universal values and what it means to be part of the human race. But if you want to know about trends in recent literature, it may be a bit early to say. You may have to wait five or ten years to discover what this new literature looks like.”
“And how have you developed as a writer, yourself, since 1994?”
“I’ve written lots of books about life in Palestine and life in exile. After I came back in 1994, I wrote a novel about an experience I had here. It’s about a journey from Gaza to the village of Samakh by Lake Tiberias (now in Israel), where I was born in 1944. The village was destroyed in 1948 when the Israelis occupied the whole area. I was four years old, and we fled to Jordan, where I grew up in a refugee camp. I was trying to imagine what actually happened back then. So I traveled back to Samakh 46 years later and then wrote a novel about it. There aren’t even any ruins there because the Israelis built their houses on top of our old ones. All that’s left are a few bits of the old railway station. I wanted to see the place where I grew up, but I was also looking for an old Jewish lady. Before 1948, she worked in a nightclub and fell in love with a Palestinian called Khatura. In 1948, Khatura was forced to flee and ended up in a refugee camp in Damascus. This Jewish woman followed him and lived with him in the refugee camp. When the Syrian authorities discovered that she was a Jew, she was put in prison. And then when they realized it was a love story, she was sent back to Israel.”
“Was the Palestinian man allowed to return as well?”
Yakhlif gives a wide, almost patronizing grin.
“No. Israel did not let him back in, so he stayed in Damascus. But they wrote to each other. He died about ten years later. And she kept the memory of him in her heart. When I went to Lake Tiberias about eight years ago, I had a friend with me who was related to Khatura. We looked for the woman, and after two days we found her. She was very old, deaf and dumb with a wrinkled face. I wrote a novel about the experience.”
From the interview with Sahar Khalifeh: Wild Thorns is about different ways of dealing with reality when you live under an occupation. The action takes place in Nablus in the 1970s, with two cousins at the center of a varied and polyphonic gallery of characters. One of them travels into Israel every day to work for a pittance, and the other becomes a dedicated freedom fighter. “His destiny was no longer a matter of personal choice or whim… he’d become a link in the chain of the cause.”
I must just point out that the freedom fighter is called Usama—a strange precursor of the US war on global terrorism in general and Osama bin Laden in particular. Early on in the book, Usama stabs an Israeli officer, in front of the officer’s wife and young daughter.
The reason that the novel was such an experience for me to read is that, time and again, it comes into conflict with itself, yet never once opts for black or white, but plays on a whole range of colors. One possible interpretation is that it is circumstances that decide whether a person becomes a murderer. But the book also says that people must fight for their humanity, despite their circumstances.
With hindsight—and in reality—we of course know that the first intifada broke out eleven years after the book was first published in 1976. You could read the book and say: hate doesn’t grow out of nothing. If you look at what the occupation and Israeli oppression have done to the individual Palestinian, then the novel has probably the same message as The Yellow Wind, David Grossman’s report from 1986: that the whole thing is about to explode.
However, Khalifeh does not agree that she portrays the Jew as a whole person.
“Israelis are always minor characters in my books. Why? Because in reality we only come into contact with soldiers and other representatives of the occupation. We have minimal contact with Israeli civilians. How can I write about somebody or something I don’t really know? Despite my best intentions and feelings for them as fellow human beings, I can’t capture them as full-rounded figures. After all, what is literature? It reflects life, society, and the people who live there. Not in the same way that a photograph does, of course, since the author’s personal feelings and opinions will be blended in. An author also strives to transcend reality and make it more beautiful and valuable. You could say that I have one obligation in my writing and that is to reflect the lives of people living under the occupation. My literature is highly political, as our lives are dominated by politics. But it is not dry or rigid, as you might easily imagine. My characters are full of life. They are flesh and blood. You can feel them, smell them, and touch them.”