Qissat (2 page)

The experience of being a woman in Arab society preoccupies almost every writer in this anthology. There is a strong tradition of feminism and political engagement amongst female Palestinian writers. Liana Badr once said that her struggle for emancipation as a Palestinian was inseparable from her struggle for liberation as a woman
⁴
– ‘neither of them is valid without the other’ – and the same concerns emerge in the work of Samira Azzam, who was writing in the fifties and sixties. The tone of Azzam’s stories feels quite dated now, but the one I have included here is quite daring for its time. It is the story of a woman who is explaining to her brother how she fell into prostitution. She is in fact pleading for her life: her brother has come to kill her. Although the style of the story is almost operatic in its melodrama, its preoccupation with sexual propriety and independence remains utterly contemporary, two generations later.

When Maryam runs off with her taxi driver lover in Laila al-Atrash’s ‘The Letter’ the men in her family threaten to kill her. Her young admirer, Saad, has nightmares at the prospect of her murder. In Liana Badr’s story Umm Hasan lives under the control of her husband. Her journey to Ramallah is as much a challenge to his authority as it is to the Israelis. In Huzama Habayeb’s ‘A Thread Snaps’, Nuwwar’s only hope of escape from the domestic drudgery of her parents’ household is to find a husband. Yet many of the young, unmarried women in these stories do have more choices than Samira Azzam’s prostitute and they tackle inequality with humour, irony and rebellion. Selma Dabbagh’s narrator calls herself ‘the Bitch’ in ironic reference to the verbal abuse she receives from men (and women) in the streets of Kuwait. Nibal Thawabteh makes a mock heroic cry of freedom when she discovers that she has been wearing shoes one size too small all her life and realises that she has been attempting to conform to her society’s ideal of femininity. Nathalie Handal’s teenage romantic is shocked by the double standards of her culture, when she discovers pornographic magazines in her uncle’s drawer, hidden beneath a symbol of Palestinian nationalism, a
kuffiyeh
scarf, and makes her protest in an act of sexual defiance.

Although traditional society still looms large, there is affection as well as frustration at its hold. In a charming scene Randa Jarrar’s young narrator listens to her grandmother’s tales and then hears her stories of courtship. Later, her father tells her how he saw his sisters being married off as if going to their execution. He wants his daughter to escape that fate, just as he managed to escape the limitations of his background through education. That tension between the old world and the new world, between the diaspora and those who live in Palestine, is also explored in Naomi Shihab Nye’s ‘Local Hospitality’, when a young couple visit from America and find themselves caught up in competitive family entertaining.

It has been a great privilege working on this anthology. There is a particular responsibility, as an outsider, in representing writers from another culture, particularly when it is a culture that continues to be at the eye of a political storm. Throughout the process of editing, I have been aware of the many expectations which exist of Palestinian writers – above all the expectation that their writing will, or should, in some way address the Palestinian condition. One of the few stories in the anthology without any references to Palestinian culture or society, ‘At the Hospital’, is by a writer from Gaza, Samah al-Shaykh. Considering where she comes from and in the context of the other stories, it is immediately tempting to read her dreamlike piece as a metaphor, but it could equally be no more than the sum of its narrative – a response to a surreal experience everyone will understand, waiting in a hospital. In my conversations with some of the writers who have contributed to the anthology, it is clear that there is a desire to resist being typecast. One contributor commented that being Palestinian does not mean she is obliged to write about Palestinian issues. More than one writer has told me that they wished to escape the cliché within Arabic literature of portraying Palestinians as heroes. Some would prefer not to have their work categorised by gender or nationality at all. Nevertheless, although the writers come from around the world, are from different generations and have been shaped by a variety of influences, they do share preoccupations which may come from a common cultural heritage and consciousness as Palestinians. The many themes which have emerged, from the unexpected motif of shoes, to the less surprising refrain of borders, has given the anthology an additional coherence. I hope that it will be an engaging read.

1
. ‘Arab Women Writers’, Miriam Cooke,
The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, Modern Arabic Literature,
M.M. Badawi, 1992, pp. 454–7.

2
. Salma Khadra Jayyusi,
Modern Arabic Fiction,
New York, 2005, pp. 2930.

3
. Therese Saliba, ‘A Country Beyond Reach’: Liana Badr’s ‘Writings of the Palestinian Diaspora’, in
Intersections – Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Novels,
eds. Lisa Suhei Majaj, Paula W. Sunderman and Therese Saliba, New York, 2002, pp. 132—61.

4
. Bouthaina Shabaan, Both Right and Left Handed:
Arab Women Talk about their Lives,
London, 1988, p. 164.

We’re on our way to Palestine, which Baba calls the bank –
el daffa
– to bury my Baba’s baba.

We have to fly to Jordan, and then drive to this
daffa
and cross a bridge. On the airplane I take out a map from the pocket in the seat in front of me, and on it Palestine is the country stuck to Egypt, so I ask Baba, ‘Why can’t we just drive there, or take a plane straight there?’ He tells me to be quiet and fasten my seat belt before the stewardess comes and kicks me off the plane. I remember that his Baba died and I should really be quiet. I want to hold his finger like the times we walked along the beach next to our apartment, the mud squishing underneath our sandals, my hand wrapped around his hairy finger. When the plane is in the sky, my ears feel like there’s a person inside my head pulling at them with a string. Gamal must feel this way too because he’s crying and throwing a fit.

In Jordan we take a taxi from the airport to the border. Baba sits next to the driver and looks straight ahead. I look all around me, at the rocks sticking out of the mountains that fly past us and the sand and the green trees lining the road. We go down a mountain and my ears finally pop. I feel like we’re on a roller-coaster, except we have windows.

I ask Mama for some paper and a pen, and she fishes them out of her bag. I’d like to draw what I see: the leather in the taxi, the cucumber sandwich my brother half-ate, Baba’s stubble, the dried skin around his eyes, Mama’s lipstick-lined mouth, her face, the face of the rocks outside, the wind whipping in through the window. I realise I can’t draw all these things, so I make a list of them. I don’t write numbers or anything, just list the things I’d like to record. After I’m done, I give Mama the sheet of paper, and she folds it in half without looking at it. Now I wish the wind would whisk the list I made and place it in Baba’s lap. Then he’d open it up and read it, and he’d feel better. Mama brings out a brush from her giant purse, which holds five years’ worth of receipts and eyeliners, and she brushes my hair impatiently. I want to say, ‘Ouch! It’s not my fault Baba’s baba died,’ but I don’t. Mama’s coral lips twitch as she brushes. I want to make her lips transform into a smile. I’ll write funny lists for her. The taxi goes all the way down the mountain, the wind rustling through the glass and whipping through my hair and messing it up again.

The car slows down and everyone inside it seems nervous. I look ahead and see yellow and black stripes on something that looks like a gate, and there’s a soldier there dressed in green. My father gives him papers and the man lets us out. We sit with several other families on benches by the road. Mama and Baba don’t talk, and I just look at the soldier and his shiny rifle. We sit for a long time, then a bus pulls up next to us, and we are allowed to get on.

The bodies on the bus sway back and forth, and from where I’m sitting I can barely see the people’s faces. Their bodies look like the dresses and T-shirts I saw a few days ago hanging up on wires at the
souk.
Two women start talking about what village they’re from, and then they smile because they are distant relatives. The driver stops the bus at another yellow and black gate and steps out for a moment. I follow him with my eyes, and watch him get a cigarette from the soldier who is coming up the steps. The soldier inspects all our passports with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth. He never takes it off his lips. I think this is a neat trick, but I’m worried about the long piece of ash hanging from it.

When the soldier’s done looking at papers, the bus driver gets back into his seat and drives again. We approach a bridge and the driver tells us we can get off. I ask Baba if this is
the
bridge and he nods his head and pats my shoulder.

Where we get off, there are many soldiers, boy ones
and
girl ones, standing outside a grey building. I walk past a girl soldier and admire her, her long curly hair tied up in a ponytail. Inside, we stand in a line with our luggage. After maybe an hour they check our bags, dumping their contents onto the wooden counters, and ask us where we live. Baba answers them and they zip up the bags and keep them, telling us to sit down and await inspection. I ask Baba how long all this will take, and he says, ‘All day,’ and looks over at the soldier. It seems like he and the soldier are talking, but they’re not saying a word. I go to Mama and she lets me take Gamal from her so she can rest. He is heavy and I can feel him farting through his underwear.

After a while Mama, my brother, and I are separated from Baba. We have to go to an area off to the side of the building and take our shoes off. There are many other girls there, and they have their shoes off as well. There are women in pretty dresses, women in jeans, women in veils, women in short skirts, women in traditional dresses with gold bracelets lining their arms and blue tattoos on their chins, women with big bug-eye sunglasses and big purple tinted eyeglasses like Mama’s, women in khaki shorts and tank tops, all women with no shoes on. Barefoot. It’s hot now, the sun in the centre of the sky, and the roof of the building is made of metal.

The girl soldiers tell us to step into the makeshift corridors that separate into rooms resembling fitting closets at a store. The rooms are sealed off with cream-coloured fabric. Inside the room I take my dress off and stand in my white underwear and my pink undershirt. I’m almost naked, and barefoot. Mama takes off her skirt and blouse and is left in tight underwear that is meant to tuck her tummy in, and a see-through bra. She’s almost naked, and barefoot. The girl soldier, I notice, looks like a boy, and I would think she’s a boy if it weren’t for her chest. She runs a black machine over Mama’s body and I feel embarrassed for her, who’s naked in front of this rough-handed stranger. As though she’d heard my thought, the stranger brings the black machine over to my armpits and runs it all over my body. It feels like a black snake. Then Mama farts a huge silent fart that stinks up the fitting room and forces the soldier to leave for a few seconds.