Readings from and of Palestine (2)
Further recommendations (part 1 here) of writing from and of Palestine. Today, an extraordinary novel from thirty years ago, newly reissued. More to come.
—Hilary Plum, h.plum [at] csuohio.edu
ARABESQUES
Anton Shammas
trans. Vivian Eden
Novel. Harper & Row, 1988; University of California Press, 2001; NYRB Classics, 2023
“In order to translate… Palestinian pain the act of translation doesn’t only have to cope with the inbuilt inability of language to articulate pain…, but, moreover, with the inbuilt failure of translation to make us listen to the suffering of others,” Anton Shammas writes in the essay “Torture Into Affadavit, Dispossession Into Poetry: On Translating Palestinian Pain.” Shammas—Palestinian novelist; critic; translator across Arabic, Hebrew, and English; professor at the University of Michigan—is known internationally for his novel Arabesques, which he wrote in Hebrew, “the first Arab to write a novel in Hebrew,” the back cover of the UC Press edition states (though the scholar Anna Bernard notes that this description fits Atallah Mansour in 1966), and which was translated into English by Vivian Eden and published in 1988—perhaps, from the distance of 2023, surprisingly so—by the major New York house Harper & Row. Perhaps also surprisingly, for a novel of astonishing formal complexity and Palestinian origins, it was praised on the front page of the New York Times’s book review section, by William Gass, who among other things said that “[the] aim of this impressively beautiful piece of prose is the discovery and definition, even the creation, of a self, not merely an account of a self already made.” Upon the occasion of the novel’s reissue by NYRB Classics in 2023, Raja Shehadeh wrote in the Nation that “Arabesques is one of the finest novels about the 1948 Nakba, when an estimated three-quarters of a million Palestinians were forced out of their homes and off their land to make way for the Jewish state. Not only did Shammas powerfully describe these tragic events, but he did so in Hebrew instead of Arabic so that an Israeli public could finally confront this story too.”
Shammas was born in 1950 in a Palestinian Christian village in the north of what had recently become Israel, making him a Palestinian citizen of the state of Israel. His novel is seemingly autobiographical, in a fragmented, highly postmodern mode whose intricate recursive structure answers to the patterning for which the book is named. Arabesques is divided into parts named alternately “The Tale” and “The Teller.” The former relate the intertwining stories of the family of the protagonist, who is also named Anton Shammas and is also a writer; the narration moves fleetly through time, across generations of displacement and dispossession, from British Mandate Palestine to the early 1980s, when Shammas returns to travel through the villages and checkpoints of Israel and occupied Palestinian territory. The labyrinthine narrative reveals the existence of yet another Anton Shammas, for whom the protagonist was named: an older cousin who was thought to have died as an infant, but survived, adopted and renamed, now a doctor, a double, named Michel/Michael Abyad, who haunts or in turn composes the novel. Abyad will reappear in a key moment as witness to the massacre of the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon in 1982. I always think of this novel as being in a key way “about” the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, though those events appear only briefly, yet seem in my memory to be placed at the novel’s heart.
The parts of the novel called “The Teller” include a handful of perspectives, all first-person except for that of Anton Shammas. In “The Tale” he had narrated in the first person, but now in “The Teller” he is removed to the third, as though he is someone else’s subject more than his own. Other characters, including an Israeli writer, narrate our protagonist, and the story takes us from Iowa City’s International Writing Program to Paris and through a continued rereading of Cather’s My Antonia. This is an intertextual novel profoundly aware of the contexts of cultural production. I would say, this is not a novel about information, about what; this is a novel about reading, about how. So this is not simply a work about suffering, but about how to see or hear or comprehend suffering.
In writing this short note today, I found at least 20 pages of critical writing I’d once composed about this novel, and many more pages of loose notes, as part of a book manuscript I spent years on, then discarded. In those 20 pages, I focused perhaps too much on, first, an echo of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying that Shammas sets in mysterious motion on the first page (see below; Shammas has written of Faulkner elsewhere, Faulkner’s innovations to novelistic discourse in English)—and which also sets in motion one of the novel’s motifs of sound and silence—and second, on persistent echoes of Auden’s 1938 poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” and thus of Breugel’s 1555 painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. “About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position.” These echoes of Auden and Breugel in the novel occur via carefully placed imagery included in both the witnessing of Sabra and Shatila and the onset of the Nakba. When I taught this novel six or seven years ago, I spent forever excavating, in front of students, the role that the Auden poem plays as an underlying structure—a British soldier who plummets like Icarus from the roof of a church in Haifa in 1947, shot, landing in front of a young boy, who is playing in a courtyard while wearing a gas mask he has donned for fun, to “frighten a neighbor’s daughter.” With a thud the falling soldier marks the end of the boy’s father’s dream of opening a shoemaker’s shop in the city and living a peaceful, prosperous life—hereafter, war and displacement. And then, the appearance of a horse in photographs of the horrors of Sabra and Shatila, photographs which the novel tells us are published in Time magazine, a horse as if transported from Breugel’s painting to Auden’s poem to this Palestinian representation (the novel) of an American representation (Time magazine) of a Palestinian catastrophe—suggesting that it will inevitably be true of observers in the US: “everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster.” And then, the winking phrase in English “innocent behind” showing up for no other reason in a scene in Iowa City. These echoes are easy to miss and are of course nonessential, or essential but decentered (not unlike the repeating patterns of an arabesque?)... My insistence on tracing them, as a reader, began to seem to me like an essential folly, a loop I couldn’t escape, in which the novel led ever deeper into its questions and then outward, into its intertextual multilingual multinational origins, an endlessly refracting self-making that renarrates the world.
This not-too-defensible critical pursuit of mine—futilely pursuing small patterns because I could reconcile them, as the whole of history could not be reconciled—came to seem like a far echo, a distant dialogic pursuit, of something of the reason that Shammas, having written what I believe is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, a masterpiece of form and possibility and memory, has not yet published a second novel. In 2023, Shehadeh writes, “When I read [Arabesques] back [in 1988], it represented a bold and promising departure suitable to the revolutionary times that Palestine was going through,” and then notes the eventual collapse of this promise: “The hope reflected in Shammas’s experiment of writing a Palestinian novel in Hebrew now seems to have vanished almost entirely; certainly there are no similar experiments happening in the other direction.” Already in 1988, interviewed for the piece in the New York Times, Shammas notes that his government, that of the state of Israel, “cannot and will not grant me equal social and political rights,” and that his book may be read as a request for a definition that would free his identity to fully exist—but the article ends with his fear, underlined by Gass in composing the piece, that as a Palestinian Israeli “[his] case is hopeless.”
Among the many precisely evocative epigraphs that appear throughout this novel is one by Walter Abish, from How German Is It: “Still, writers are not terribly reliable as witnesses for either the defense or the prosecution. They are also not to be relied upon as lovers. They lack patience. They seem to have certain difficulty in taking pleasure from what they are doing. Like chess players, they are inwardly preparing themselves for the inevitable end game.” What else can I say? A friend gave me this novel about twenty years ago, it took me five years to finally take it off the shelf and read it, and I have not stopped reading it since. This novel holds a lost world, it holds many fragmented worlds that are our world, and via metafiction witnesses the silence with which the speech of suffering is received. Abish’s quoted phrase “end game” shadows the present, foreshadows the ongoing siege on Gaza, pointing toward events whose violence is both brutal and “advanced”—and whose redirection is our desperate, ever-redoubled charge.
