Odd Jobs (105 page)

We expect, perhaps, a Palestinian novel to be about the present Palestinian problem, much as some foreigners feel that an American novel has a duty to grapple with our race problem or the horrors of capitalism. But
Arabesques
is fundamentally nostalgic: its most affecting scenes render the narrator’s childhood experiences in the small Galilean village of Fassuta, and its principal narrative thrust is toward the past, toward the unravelling of the tangled past lives of the boy’s parents, aunts, and uncles. There is war in the background, but much of it is the war to drive out the British before 1948, and some of it is the old and continuing civil/religious war in Lebanon, where Anton’s mother comes from and her family, the Bitars, still lives. There is scarcely a Jewish character in the book, nor is Jewish clout felt until the epilogue, wherein an Israeli demolition expert is called in, by Uncle Yusef Shammas’s grandson Yusef, to blow up a rock that, village superstition has it, conceals the mouth of a treasure trove over which
djinn
have appointed a magical rooster called Ar-Rasad to stand guard. The explosion reveals no treasure, but a crimson feather descends from the sky, symbolizing, let’s hope, bright future possibilities in this long-disputed land, and demonstrating, once more, the international appeal of Latin-American magic realism.

The author is an adroit and suave negotiator between the real and the
unreal, between family legend and personal epiphany, between objective mystery and subjective illumination. He titles the book’s sections either “The Tale” or “The Teller”; under the latter head comes scenes in Iowa City, where the foreign writers are housed, amid the alien corn, in an eight-story student dormitory called the Mayflower. The writing program there, complete with a real-life Paul Engle, is done in the colorful strokes that befit the exotic:

Again colorfully, in the international writers’ little Tower of Babel Anton finds himself caught between a venerable and touchy Jewish Israeli writer, Yehoshua Bar-On, and a Palestinian Arab, called Paco Rabanne, after the pungent cologne he wears. On the romantic level, Anton is caught between his beloved mistress back in Jerusalem, Shlomith, a red-haired Jewish woman married to an Army officer, and his inamorata in Iowa City, Amira, a dark-haired native of Alexandria who lives in Paris. All this seems much as it would be, but when Bar-On tries to strangle Amira because she tells him, in Hebrew, that it’s an act of
chutzpah
for him to smoke in an Amish house they are visiting, or when a female university student, after a night of some festivity, abruptly takes off her clothes, climbs up on a table (“The ivory down of her young triangle is wonderfully precise in the middle of the small room”), and sings an old Irish song, either behavior in Iowa has loosened up since I was last there or a touch of Palestinian blarney has tweaked the telling.

More deeply felt images emerge from the teller’s memories of Fassuta, and in their oddity they evoke a people queerly caught between the past and the present. When Anton’s grandmother dies, his father lays an iron sickle on her stomach, to hold down its swelling. Every fourth Sunday, Anton’s father ritually cleans their intricate kerosene lamp, with its “magical fragile mantle” and tiny jet hole. An uncle in Argentina sends by sea a wooden box of clothes and includes a pair of scissors, which in the three months’ boat passage rust and wander
among the clothes, leaving “crazy patterns” of rust stain. When a mother rebukes her son with how much she suffered when she nursed him, he calculates the quantity of milk he suckled and presents her with two full dairy cans. A man drags his mattress into the street and pelts it with stones, “cursing it for all the hours of sleep he had wasted upon it.” A priest labors for years composing and calligraphing a “unique and unparalleled work, which would glorify the Catholic Church among all the Arabic-speaking peoples,” only to have his cat push it into a crock of olive oil, where the calligraphy returns “to its liquid state.” And Anton, at the age of ten, is lowered by rope into the family cistern to clean it; the village tomboy, Nawal, is sent down the rope after him, and while he is bracing her buttocks to help her scrape the sides of the round cistern she has an orgasm.

The world where these things happen lies on the edge of the modern, but its interconnections are not electronic; the threads of kinship and family legend hold the Shammases together. In this Holy Land where the Jews, the Romans, the ancient Christian church, the Muhammadans, the Crusaders, the Mamelukes, the Turks, the British, and now the Zionists have all exerted hegemony, the threads are tangled and knotted. At the center of the tangle is the figure of Laylah Khoury, a blond village girl who in 1936 was placed with the Bitar family in Beirut, removed nine months later by the sinister, nunlike Mademoiselle Sa’da to another family, and brought back to Fassuta in 1948, only to be expelled by the Israeli Army to Jordan, where she converted to Islam and married the son of Al-Asbah, an Arab rebel leader. At a point in her youth, she lived with the Abyad family, whose adopted son, Michel, seems to be the son of Uncle Jiryes Shammas; the child was kidnapped from the hospital by agents of the Abyads, and his mother, Aunt Almaza, was told he was dead. Laylah (which means “night” in both Hebrew and Arabic and has the esoteric meaning of “poet’s lady” in Arabic) unrequitedly loved this Michel, who is really the first Anton Shammas, after whom our apparent narrator was named and who now, under the name of Michael Abyad, is an American-educated doctor who works for the Palestinian Center for Research in Beirut and has written the book we are reading, about the Anton Shammas who resembles the fellow on the dust jacket. He, the second Anton, in 1983, at the age of thirty-three, embraces (perhaps merely with a magic-realist, wishful-thinking sort of hug) the blond Muslim convert, now a fifty-seven-year-old widow and the mother of mute twins, and the sexual cistern returns:

But it’s been a long way around, and the English-language reader, wearied by the effort of keeping the names straight and bringing his slender knowledge of Near Eastern history to bear on the tumble of chronology, may be too exhausted to relish the epiphanic ambiguity and the ingenious play of recurring motif. Or maybe not. Perhaps primal nostalgia can be smuggled into us only by an elaborate cleverness; certainly an investigation, like
Arabesques
, into a writer’s own being must be in honesty a layered affair, a tale with a visible teller. In a world whose political trend is always toward strident simplification and brute loyalty, this almost stiflingly complex confession of complexity is a brave attempt, all the braver for the adopted language in which it has been composed.

F
OREST OF A
T
HOUSAND
D
AEMONS
, by D. O. Fagunwa, translated from the Yoruba by Wole Soyinka. 140 pp. Random House, 1983.

T
HE
W
ITCH-
H
ERBALIST OF THE
R
EMOTE
T
OWN
, by Amos Tutuola. 205 pp. Faber & Faber, 1981.

D
OUBLE
Y
OKE
, by Buchi Emecheta. 163 pp. Braziller, 1983.

The shift from spoken to written narrative is nowhere complete; there is always a voice, and in the case of exemplary modern novelists like Proust and Henry James it seems sometimes there is
only
the voice, coaxing us on to another page and another brandy, in these readerly circumstances of strange nocturnal intimacy. When we turn, however, to works markedly
nearer the beginnings of writing than the outpourings of these two elegant and highly self-conscious scribes, we experience a dismay, a disorientation, for which the lucid epics of Homer and the oft-retold chronicles of the Bible have not quite prepared us. We do not know the language, the code of mythology and tradition, and feel oppressively confused, as when we look at the Tibetan pantheon arrayed on a
thang-ka
, while an equally populous mural, say, of the Last Judgment or the Battle of Waterloo quickly sorts itself out. There is always a code, and oral narrative disconcertingly assumes that we know it.

Forest of a Thousand Daemons
, by D. O. Fagunwa, was first published in 1939—just yesterday, on the calendar of Western literature. A man of this century, Fagunwa was born in 1903 and died in 1963. Yet this first of his five novels in the language of the Yoruba—a black people concentrated in southwestern Nigeria—takes us back to a time when narratives existed only in the memories and utterances of their tellers. The opening page instructs the readers how to read a novel: “Firstly, whenever a character in my story speaks in his own person, you must put yourself in his place and speak as if you are that very man.… In addition, as men of discerning—and this is the second task you must perform—you will yourselves extract various wisdoms from the story as you follow its progress.” Even so, the narrative, as if to soften the strangeness of its existence as a text, is presented as an oral tale that the writer has taken from the dictation of another. The writer, on a morning of benign beauty (“A beatific breeze rustled the dark leaves of the forest, deep dark and shimmering leaves, the sun rose from the East in God’s own splendour, spread its light into the world and the sons of men began their daily perambulations”), is seated in his favorite chair, “settled into it with voluptuous contentment,” when an elderly stranger comes up to him, chats, sighs, and then commands: “Take up your pen and paper and write down the story which I will now tell.… I am concerned about the future and there is this fear that I may die unexpectedly and my story die with me. But if I pass it on to you now and you take it all down diligently, even when the day comes that I must meet my Maker, the world will not forget me.” So, its double-edged reward established (for the reader, “various wisdoms”; for the teller, immortality), the tale begins.

The teller identifies himself as “Akara-ogun, Compound-of-Spells, one of the formidable hunters of a bygone age,” and relates how his mother, a witch momentarily in the shape of an antelope, was fatally shot by his father, who within a month himself died, of no named
disease—he simply “followed her.” Akara-ogun, then, an orphan in his twenty-sixth year, travels to Irunmale, the Forest of a Thousand Daemons, where he survives a welter of horrific encounters, mostly with supernatural creatures called ghommids, which the translator’s glossary describes as “beings neither human nor animal nor strictly demi-gods, mostly dwellers in forests where they live within trees.” A fair specimen is Agbako: “He wore a cap of iron, a coat of brass, and on his loins were leather shorts. His knees right down to his feet appeared to be palm leaves; from his navel to the bulge of his buttocks, metal network; and there was no creature on earth which had not found a home in this netting which even embraced a live snake among its links, darting out its tongue as Agbako trod the earth. His head was long and large, the sixteen eyes being arranged around the base of his head, and there was no living man who could stare into those eyes without trembling, they rolled endlessly round like the face of a clock.” The procession of such patchwork monsters at times aspires to be a version of
The Pilgrim’s Progress;
Akara-ogun comes to the city called Filth, “a city of greed and contumely, a city of envy and of thievery, a city of fights and wrangles, a city of death and diseases—a veritable city of sinners.” What strikes the reader, however, in these moralistic apparitions is the redolence of certain details: many of these citizen-sinners “wore their clothes inside out.… Every garment shone with filth, it was more like the inside of a hunter’s bag.” Later, our hero wearily sits on a dead and bloated goat: “The moment my buttocks hit the carcass, it burst, and the gall bladder and intestines flushed my buttocks with their fetid fluids.”

The earthy seethe toward which Fagunwa’s imagination tends is tugged skyward on nearly every page by a pious interjection: “evil cannot fail but end a heart of evil. Thus did this woman die the death of a dog and rot like bananas: even thus did the King of Heaven raise this righteous king in triumph above their schemes.” When, in the last long episode, the hero finds himself privileged to spend seven days with the saintly and immortal Iragbeje in his sublime house with seven wings, the rigors of enlightenment wear out the narrator, who after two days of fable and preachment declares, “there remained five days of our stay with Iragbeje, but I cannot tell you all the marvels which our eyes witnessed and our ears heard during these five days, for time is flying.” On the seventh day, in a room whose “floor, ceiling and walls alike and every furnishing or article … were all white as cotton fluff,” Iragbeje talks about the Creator and concludes, “Therefore when it is good for us, let
us remember our Lord.” Morals leap into being at every level of the narrative. Akara-ogun offers this wisdom to his audience, which in the course of three days of public dictation has grown quite large: “If a man overreaches himself, he crashes to the ground.… If a nation is self-satisfied it will soon enough become enslaved to another; if a powerful government preens itself, before a bird’s touchdown its peoples will disperse before its very eyes.” And the author-scribe concludes with a prayer that “we black people will never again be left behind in the world.”