{"id":29699,"date":"2023-11-13T09:02:50","date_gmt":"2023-11-13T07:02:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=29699"},"modified":"2023-11-19T14:25:32","modified_gmt":"2023-11-19T12:25:32","slug":"the-fiction-of-palestines-ghassan-zaqtan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/the-fiction-of-palestines-ghassan-zaqtan\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fiction of Palestine’s Ghassan Zaqtan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ghassan Zaqtan writes with a measured tranquility, whether wistfully recalling a bygone romance or recording the traumas faced by Palestinians. The abuses can be gut-wrenching, but his evocations of them are not intended to shock or to incite. He is merely bearing witness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

An Old Carriage With Curtains<\/em>, a novella by Ghassan Zaqtan
\nTranslated from the Arabic by Samuel Wilder
\nSeagull Books<\/a> 2023
\nISBN 9781803092348<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cory Oldweiler<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

As atrocities of the past are once again being invoked to justify atrocities in the present, the specter of history\u2019s attendant comforts may be unwelcome territory to many readers. Yet as Hala Alyan cautions in her poetry collection The Twenty-Ninth Year<\/em>, \u201cThe worst ghosts are the ones that don\u2019t come back.\u201d If being haunted by the past is perhaps inescapable, being freighted with forgetting is even worse; being unable to reflect, to revisit, or to remember, that is the real curse. By this heuristic, the fiction of Palestinian poet and author Ghassan Zaqtan, compelled as it is by a multitude of spirits, is truly blessed. Though he is approaching his 70th birthday, Zaqtan\u2019s writing teems with the ghosts of his childhood and youth, uncertain and often perilous times when he and his family were repeatedly forced to relocate, but years that also clearly held a balm of adolescent love and friendship that has lingered long past the point those physical bonds were frayed or torn asunder.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
An Old Carriage with Curtains<\/em> is available from Seagull<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Zaqtan was born in 1954 in the Bethlehem suburb of Beit Jala, where his parents settled after fleeing the village of Zakariyya, some 25 miles southwest of Jerusalem, during the Nakba. In 1961, the intransigence of local religious leaders, who objected to his headmaster father\u2019s insistence on educating girls, drove the family further east, beyond the River Jordan to the Karameh refugee camp. Again their stay was short lived, however, as seven years later, Israeli forces razed the camp during the War of Attrition. For the next quarter century, Zaqtan moved around the region, living in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Tunisia, before returning to Ramallah in 1994, where he has remained.<\/p>\n

While his poetry has been celebrated in the West, sharing the International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2013<\/a> with his longtime poetry translator Fady Joudah, Zaqtan\u2019s prose is lamentably unremarked upon in the English-speaking world. Over the past seven years, Seagull Books has released three of Zaqtan\u2019s novellas as part of their Arab List series, all three translated by Samuel Wilder with a consistent ear toward the lyricism inherent in Zaqtan\u2019s thoughtful poetic prose. Each book is easily read in a single sitting, but the images and set pieces within them will resonate much longer. For readers who have never encountered these events from a Palestinian perspective, Zaqtan\u2019s fiction is incredibly accessible because it is neither didactic nor does it rely overly on specifics. An unfamiliar term or event may spark further investigation, but the stories themselves are not dependent on these intricacies nor do they hide behind historical trivia. Zaqtan consistently writes with a measured tranquility, whether wistfully recalling a bygone romance or almost pragmatically recording the traumas faced by Palestinians dating back to the first World War. The abuses can be gut-wrenching, but his evocations of them are not intended to shock or to incite. He is merely bearing witness.<\/p>\n

His latest English-language work, An Old Carriage with Curtains<\/em>, is a poignant piece of autofiction originally published in Arabic in 2011. It addresses the constricted past and present of Palestinian life in Area C of the West Bank, with its omnipresent permits and checkpoints, through storylines that channel the ghosts of Zaqtan\u2019s family, friends, and lovers, acknowledged at the beginning of the novel as the narrator is walking in the \u201cvalley of the shadow of death,\u201d in the wadi on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho. \u201cThey all walked beside him, the dead and the living, in a caravan in which no one dies, in a caravan that never arrives.\u201d The new work is also deeply invested in fundamental questions of narrative, such as the mutability of memory, and how these voices from the past shape the story Zaqtan is writing and those he has previously written, especially his 2015 novella Where the Bird Disappeared<\/em>, published in Wilder\u2019s translation in 2018, which contains several storylines that are also present in Old Carriage<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The first of Zaqtan\u2019s prose works to appear in English was 1995\u2019s Describing the Past<\/em>, published in Wilder\u2019s translation in 2016. Much of Zaqtan\u2019s writing has an eavesdropping quality to it, as if he is spying on his memories, a trait that is never more present than in this slim, gently dreamlike volume. The story is set, per a foreword from Joudah, in the valley surrounding the Karameh camp, though the location is never specified in the text. Neither are the identities of the novel\u2019s trio of narrators \u2014 I, he, and she. \u201cI\u201d is nicknamed the Christian, because of his mother\u2019s religion, though his father is Muslim. The character \u201che\u201d is referred to as the Iraqi\u2019s son, because his uncle talks endlessly about guiding the Iraqi army in 1948. \u201cShe,\u201d only ever she, is initially married to a much older man, referred to as the Hadj, who provides for her and her mother. The Christian sneaks into their garden and watches the young woman while she sleeps, then tells his friend the Iraqi\u2019s son about her, and soon he too comes to watch. Both young men fall in love, but after the Hadj dies, it is the Iraqi\u2019s son who has a child with her.<\/p>\n

In addition to somnolent images of watching the woman sleep and of nighttime trysts in the garden, Describing<\/em>\u00a0the Past<\/em> is the most overtly lyric of Zaqtan\u2019s three English-language works, its abundant olfactory imagery adding to the feel of almost floating past these scenes: the \u201cscent of wet mud and ground shadows,\u201d the \u201cscent of guava, orange and mint fanned from the river,\u201d the \u201cpenetrating scent\u201d of a row of basil bushes, \u201cthe scent of soap when she passed by me,\u201d \u201cher scent, a taut body washed with olive soap,\u201d and the \u201coil scent\u201d from the bicycle renter\u2019s hair and face.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Khaled Hourani, in “The Colors of the Palestinian Flag,” watermelon is the fruit of resistance, 2014 (courtesy of the artist).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

All of Zaqtan\u2019s writing is concerned with the idea of returning, if not the idea of return, stated here straight off the bat in the novella\u2019s second sentence \u2014 \u201cI had to return.\u201d In this case, the return is both physical, to see her after the Iraqi\u2019s son has drowned, and metaphorical, to revisit the memories that make his \u201chemmed-in and blockaded life [\u2026] bearable and believable.\u201d Though the Christian\u2019s love remains unrequited, his memory of watching her sleep sustains and obsesses him over the years, providing \u201ceverything I needed, what I think about, what I cannot stop thinking about.\u201d This freedom through memory is fundamental to Zaqtan, for whom place and time are as critical to recall as lost friends and lost lives because, as the Christian says, \u201cThings evaporate and die if they don\u2019t find someone to remember them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Describing the Past<\/em> focuses on the deaths of the woman\u2019s mother, husband, and lover, but also acknowledges the specter of death that hangs over the refugee camp as a whole. The most haunting memory is the woman\u2019s story of her father, who was killed in 1948 by the Haganah after being forced, along with five other men, to dig his own grave; a seventh man was left alive to pass on the story. \u201cThere were so many murdered, everywhere, in 1948,\u201d the young woman recalls, \u201cMen, women, children, whole villages with names and traits and memories \u2014 they ended and died.\u201d In fact, while the Christian is visiting this ghost town (whether in person or in his mind is difficult to discern), he sees these spirits all around him: \u201cAt the thresholds of houses, on the low walls, on irrigation works and pools, the dead sat quietly, smiling under the weight of their dust and staring as my small demonstration passed by.\u201d<\/p>\n

The interrelationship between I, he, and she is mirrored in Where the Bird Disappeared<\/a><\/em> by the characters of Zakariyya, Yahya, and Sara. Again the two men are friends, and both have feelings for Sara. The story opens in the village of Zakariyya as almost an idyl of youth, with the three meeting and exploring their love of discovery \u2014 intellectual, sexual, historical, religious \u2014 often along with other young men, including Yunis, Yasin, and Idris. Yahya has a \u201ctouch of sacredness\u201d about him, feels called or guided, much like his namesake John the Baptist, who was the son of another Zakariyya. (As much as I could determine, every male character shares their name with an Islamic prophet, and I would guess that perhaps the story contains many correlations that someone more familiar with the Koran would recognize.) Quite suddenly these youthful activities come to an end as \u201carmed Jewish forces\u201d began shelling and invading the village, which is subsequently \u201cmigrated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yunis doesn\u2019t end up in a whale, but in a cave, where he is called upon to lead the gathering ranks of women and children in prayer as \u201cghosts started to rise and arrange in ranks behind him in silence.\u201d Yasin has disappeared and Yahya and Zakariyya decide to go back to the village in search of him. During this time, Yahya is caught by Jewish troops and, after three days and nights of torture, shares the fate of his namesake by being beheaded. Again Zaqtan turns to the olfactory senses, by noting that Yahya\u2019s screams are so powerful and all-consuming that they prevent Zakariyya, secreted near by, from noticing the stench of another man crammed into his narrow hiding space.<\/p>\n

Zakariyya wanders alone and silent before ending up in a refugee camp in Arrub, where he receives a \u201cblue identity card which claimed his existence to a world that did not see him or know him.\u201d He thinks, \u201clike the others,\u201d that the migration is \u201ctemporary,\u201d though the displacement is given physical force: the Nakba \u201chad taken him too far,\u201d \u201chad heaved him,\u201d \u201chad shoved him, without mercy.\u201d He spies Sara, for whom Yahya\u2019s death has become another aspect of \u201cher enduring grief, her life that became a deep fissure of bad fortune,\u201d but is unable to bring himself to talk to her.<\/p>\n

Like the Christian in Describing<\/em>\u00a0the Past<\/em>, Zakariyya returns to his former village, now called Kffar Zakariyya. He is in his 80s and exchanges stories with a Jewish man from Casablanca who \u201cwas past anger, satisfaction, curiosity, fear and regret. He had arrived where nothing happens.\u201d One question Zakariyya asks the man is the location of Yahya\u2019s grave, leading to a chillingly banal image of the erasure of time and the casual minimization of Palestinian death.<\/p>\n

A very similar scene recurs early in An Old Carriage with Curtains<\/em>, when the narrator, newly arrived back in Zakariyya, asks an \u201cold Jewish man, whom he guessed was Iraqi or Moroccan,\u201d about the \u201cSalihi Tomb, where the Muslims had buried the dead from the Battle of Ajnadayn.” It\u2019s a brief encounter, but serves to tie the narrator to the pages of Zaqtan\u2019s earlier fiction, which is intriguing because it also becomes clear that the narrator is a third person stand-in for Zaqtan himself. He explains that Zakariyya is \u201cwhere his father and mother were born.\u201d And later on, he says that Beit Jala \u201cwas where he was born and spent his earliest years.\u201d It is likely that there are more such biographical correlations between author and narrator, but the novel\u2019s main concern is not one of degree but of mechanics \u2014 how we access stories whose voices have been lost and how memory and fiction intertwine. An early indication of this focus comes when the narrator reveals that the village of Zakariyya carries the burden of both history and artistic license. \u201cIt could barely exist under the pressure of the cruel importance placed on it, the dependence of all those contradictory memories, and the longing that pervaded all their stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cthey\u201d here specifically refers to the narrator\u2019s family. His father and uncle have died, and with them their ability to relate their remembrances \u201cwith a speaker\u2019s present consciousness.\u201d His mother is still alive, and she and her memories figure prominently in the novel. The narrator is trying to secure her a visitation permit from Amman, where she lives, so she can return to Zakariyya one last time. As she anticipates her impending journey, previously unuttered memories start to impinge on her familiar stories, starting with a railway station in Artouf, which had been visible from Zakariyya before it was destroyed. \u201cThis was the first time that the train station entered her stories, to which it became like a secret key.\u201d It is especially key to readers of Where the Bird Disappeared<\/em> because of that novel\u2019s storyline about the adolescent friendship between a Jewish woman from Artouf, named Rivka, and a Palestinian named Hagar. Before 1948, Rivka and Hagar used to meet at the train station near Zakariyya; afterward, Rivka comes looking for her friend but is told by Jewish soldiers that Hagar is gone, headed east. The link between Hagar and the narrator\u2019s mother is soon made explicit when she says in Old Carriage<\/em> that she \u201chad a Jewish Palestinian friend, she was from Artouf. Her name was Rivka. I don\u2019t know what happened to her after the migration.\u201d Much like appearance of the train station, the narrator writes that the mention of Rivka is the first time a Jew had appeared in his mother\u2019s story. \u201cBefore that, they appeared only in the deaths and ruinous destinies of others. \u2018The Jews killed him,\u2019\u2018the Jews took him,\u2019\u2018the Jews burned him,\u2019 \u2018the Jews kidnapped him.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Another Jewish character plays a critical role in Old Carriage<\/em> as well, a female soldier at the Allenby Bridge border crossing near Jericho, which is a site that the novel returns to repeatedly. The narrator is crossing into Jordan and watching as an elderly man steadily sheds all his possessions, and eventually his clothes, in his attempt to pass through the metal detector. \u201cHe watched the old man\u2019s awkward hand movements and the confusion that washed through his look, which now lost the confidence that had brought him from the door of his home to the threshold of the machine.\u201d Because of his frequent crossings, the narrator and the border guard are familiar with each other, but he sees her as having crossed a line when she casually asks him whether he likes to travel. \u201cShe had trespassed her rights, he thought, to confront him with questions like these, these impartial sentences. [\u2026] She had transgressed a forbidden threshold.\u201d<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s final narrative thread concerns Hind, an actress with whom the narrator has a relationship, though he \u201chad never been able to guess what she had desired from him.\u201d As he is recalling her stories and their time together, he shows his authorial cards. \u201cIt was not clear to him if this was exactly what she said, or if these were also additions that he authored as he watched her sitting, as usual, on the leather rocking chair.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the narrator wrestles with the fidelity of these voices, as well as the exile stories of Naim Kattan, Emile Habibi, Imre Kert\u00e9sz, and Muhammad al-Qaysi in a standalone chapter that is almost a literary essay, Zaqtan also offers a tantalizing glimpse of the moment that his writing career began, the moment that the marriage of memory and narrator, of story and ghost, first occurred. It is the fall of 1994, and the narrator is in a car riding from Gaza to Ramallah. \u201cOn the road, without him noticing, stories began to appear that he imagined he had long forgotten. The stories arrived in the voices of narrators whose gestures and voices were also reborn.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a recent appreciation<\/a> of the Pulitzer prize\u2013winning poet Louise Gl\u00fcck, the Irish writer Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn wrote that Gl\u00fcck, much like Emily Dickinson, \u201clived with the dead as constant presences.\u201d While the same can be said for Zaqtan, there is one stark but critical difference \u2014 the ghosts of the past that visit Zaqtan sadly do not have far to travel. Every Palestinian who has grown up under occupation has been surrounded by death their entire lives, and it continues to this day. At this point, as the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is blithely encouraged and enabled by many Western governments, it feels that all that can be hoped for in the hopelessness is that once the killing ends, Zaqtan and others will remain to receive the ghosts of the dead and share their voices.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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