Like last year’s winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian, this year’s winner also starts with death — but in this case, it’s a death foretold.
In Rabai al-Madhoun’s ambitiously titled Masair: Concerto al-Holocaust wal Nakba (Destinies: Concerto of the Holocaust and the Nakba, 2015), an elegant and wealthy woman surprises her dinner guests in London with news of her terminal illness and desire to have her ashes scattered in her native city of Akko. The woman is the mother in-law of Walid Dahman, hero of Madhoun’s previous novel, El Sayeda men Tel Abib (The Lady of Tel Aviv 2009, shortlisted for the 2010 IPAF).
In a short introduction before releasing the reader to follow his perpetual Palestinian revenant Dahman, Madhoun announces that this novel is a tale about Palestinians who stayed in their homeland after the war of 1948, “and thus, as a new reality was imposed on them, became citizens in the state of Israel, having acquired its ‘citizenship’ in a historical and unjust process which has resulted in a double ‘affiliation’. Strange, contradictory and unprecedented.”
Though Destinies is a sequel to The Lady from Tel Aviv (translated into English and published by Telegram in 2013), it can be read without knowledge of the latter, though the reader will miss out on being introduced to Madhoun’s sympathetic alter ego, Walid Madhoun (the Arabic letters of the names Madhoun and Dahman are almost identical).
In the previous novel, Dahman — like his inventor, a journalist and novelist born in 1945 in Palestine who holds British citizenship — returns to see his mother after having been barred from his home country for 38 years. It’s an almost fantastical occurrence, reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), in which eccentric day-dreamer Florentino Ariza has to wait 51 years before being reunited with his long-lost fiancée. Madhoun’s — or Dahman’s — emotional reunion with his mother, who was internally displaced and ended up in Gaza, is documented in The Lady from Tel Aviv.
In Destinies, Dahman returns to his hometown, Al-Makdal Askalan, 65 km west of Jerusalem, which is now mainly inhabited by Israelis, and visits Haifa and Jerusalem. For me, this homecoming from exile is even more powerful than Mourid Barghouti’s acclaimed autobiographical novel Raeit Ramallah (I Saw Ramallah, 1997), because Madhoun forfeits Barghouti’s heavily emotional poetic language.
Unlike many Palestinian works of literature published in recent decades, like the short stories of Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972) or Edward Said’s memoir Out of Place (1999), The Lady from Tel Aviv and Destiny are void of bitterness and self-pity, and do not seem primarily concerned with underlining the Nakba and the tragic consequences of Palestinians’ loss of their homeland. Madhoun is a masterful narrator, acknowledging that fiction should not be overly preoccupied with documenting historical events and shedding light on Israeli crimes to the detriment of the writing. Madhoun’s fiction captivates with the steady cohesion of its language and the intimacy of its stories.
In both relatively short novels — The Lady from Tel Aviv has 324 pages and Destiny 266 — not a single sentence seems redundant or shallow. The text is brilliantly clear and the reading progress unhampered, as if Madhoun has weighed his sentences on a scale before laying them out for us. Some passages are interlaced with beautiful metaphor, like in Destiny: “Ivana left on a warm summer’s day for which Britain had imported its sun from India.” Others contain humorous dialogue between Dahman and his mother in Gaza, or his wife Julie, who cannot pronounce Arabic properly. The author also incorporates Hebrew words and sentences in the dialogue with Israeli characters, accenting Dahman’s estrangement in traversing what had been once his homeland.
In Lady from Tel Aviv, Madhoun experimented with narration techniques by first introducing an omnipresent narrator, then narrating events from the perspective of Dahman and an Israeli actor, before finally opting for a first-person narrative when Dahman enters Palestine to create personal feelings of belonging. Madhoun experiments even further in Destiny by breaking the plot into four chapters (or concerto movements, as he claims in his introduction). Each chapter follows two main protagonists who slip into the background in other chapters, all to be united in the fourth and final chapter. While the first and fourth chapters, relating Dahman’s return, form a solid and compact framework for the novel, the second and third chapters resemble a funky jazz improvisation in which the narration jumps back and forth in time and space, moving between characters, at times obliterating the borders of fiction and reality — in one passage, Dahman believes he is sitting in front of the author Madhoun who invented him, but doesn’t dare speak to him.
I must admit that for me, The Lady from Tel Aviv was more thrilling to read than Destinies. The relentless narrative flow of Dahman’s extraordinary journey back to Palestine contrasts with the cluttered polyphony of Destiny. The first novel also contains unforgettable scenes, like Dahman’s Kafkaesque trials at an Israeli checkpoint, related with a sense of the comic despite the impositions Palestinians endure at the mercy of intimidating Israeli soldiers, and the reunion with the estranged mother. Any other writer would have played on our heartstrings, describing such an emotional scene at length. Madhoun allows his protagonists to shed a few tears but defiantly negates grief with humor.
Resistance to the occupation takes on various forms in the two novels, from Palestinians bearing children, which is by itself an existential act of resistance, to disseminating the smell of zaatar and kunafa in Jerusalem and refusing to adopt Israeli names of cities and regions. Of course, the land also plays an elementary factor. Israelis and Palestinians compete with each other to be buried in a land they claim as their own, and Dahman jokes in Destiny that the “sky is filled with Israeli settlers who compete with Palestinians in life and want also to scrounge their shares in the afterlife.” In order to preserve a piece of home with him, he picks up dust from the streets of Akko and stows it in a bag.
Despite the brilliant originality of The Lady from Tel Aviv and Destinies, neither are without minor flaws. As the mysterious title suggests, an Israeli actor called Dana Ahova takes center stage in The Lady from Tel Aviv. When she meets Dahman on a plane, he decides to integrate her into his novel, yet she never springs to life and rarely transcends the clichés of naïve vulnerability often associated with beautiful women. In Destinies, a character called Baki Henak (“he who stays there”) likewise falls flat. The second chapter — revolving around a Palestinian-Israeli novelist called Janine whose marriage to a Palestinian with an American passport means she cannot find a job in Israel — is the weakest of the four. Janine’s father Baki Henak, who refused to flee to Gaza during the 1948 war, is overinflated with a mystical symbolism embodying the torment of Palestinians living in Israel. And when he also becomes the protagonist of Janine’s book, the matryoshka element of a novel within a novel becomes one too many.
Another flaw of Destinies is the stereotypical depiction of Israelis. Baki Henak’s neighbor is portrayed as manipulatively profiteering from the fact that his wife is a Holocaust survivor, and all Israeli government employees and soldiers are moody and unpredictable hawks. Dahman’s contrasting visits to the Holocaust museum (Yad Vashem) and to a museum commemorating the memory of Palestine left me dissatisfied, almost disappointed, as Madhoun does not offer anything new on the subject. Dahman tells an Israeli visitor: “Madame, if you do not understand what happened in Deir Yassin [a Palestinian village emptied by Zionists through a massacre in 1948] and memorize the lesson well, the others will not understand what happened to the victims of Yad Vashem.”
Like The Lady from Tel Aviv, Destinies is ultimately about homecoming, and that’s where Madhoun’s power lies. His emotional returns are tours de force that have been building up for decades, like when Dahman phones his stranded mother in Gaza to announce that he is actually walking the streets of Askalan, whereupon his mother urges him to kiss the walls of a mosque, but if he cannot find it to kiss a stone instead.
The climax of Destinies is the fourth part of the book, which relates two parallel journeys to Haifa and Jerusalem. His nostalgic depictions of the ancient mosques and coffee shops and the odor of streets, with the sight of the ravishing sea and the music of Fairouz resonating in his head, is a balance of keen observation, flowing narration and lasting impressions that evoke a vivid picture of Palestine. In this way, Madhoun perpetuates in his prose the Palestine he was barred from entering for 38 years.
