The Arab-Israeli Book Review

A man smoking a shisha pipe in Gaza. (Photo: Reuters)

Reporting from the Palestine literature festival, Selma Dabbagh describes the darkness and fear which permeate everyday life in Gaza. This is the second of two articles commissioned by English PEN; you can read the first one here. The author of the acclaimed novel Out Of It, Dabbagh will be a guest at our next Arab-Israeli Book Club event in London this Thursday (17 May).

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Selma Dabbagh

The combined effect of Israel’s bombing of the Gaza power plant in June 2006, and its imposition of a land, air and sea blockade, is that there is not enough electricity or fuel in Gaza. Eight hours of electricity a day from the grid is the norm. Those who can afford to do so, back up their supply with generators, which in turn need fuel to run, and almost all the petrol stations we see are roped off waiting for fuel. It only takes one person to generate a rumour that they might have a delivery on the way, for the petrol stations to become blocked up with queues of cars, tractors, motorbikes and pedestrians that stretch for miles and can last all day. “From the time I came to the festival, until I left at night, they were there waiting; a long, long line,” said one student volunteer from Deir El Balah refugee camp. “I could not even see my town as I approached it since everything was so dark. Only when the car’s headlights shone on it, did I realize we were at my house.”

Light now also comes in the form of enemy surveillance. Ominous floodlights, spaced apart in the sea, shine inland enforcing the unilaterally imposed Israeli three-mile limit for fishermen at sea. At night, in Gaza City, men smoke shishas in cafes lit by candles stuck on tiled surfaces; small stacks of coals glow upon inhalation.

Generators on pavements spread fumes into areas where people used to stroll in the evenings. Occasionally, these generators blow up. Badly made, ineptly used, in a country of chain smokers, they are hazardous. Because of the dangers, the mother of one Al Aqsa student refuses to have one in their apartment. “When the electricity is on, I use the internet, but I read books by candlelight,” she says. Donkeys, camels, bicycles and horses are on the rise. Gaza, as the character Khalil says in Out of It, is being bombed back into the Middle Ages.

On the first night in my hotel room, where a ghoul, in the guise of urine-saturated bedding, crouches shapeless in the cupboard (I lock him in), the power cuts out. Complete blackness: I can’t even see the edge of the bath. I think I hear the roar of a fighter plane above me.  Possibly it is a jet breaking the sound barrier, but that type of blackout distorts noise. My imagination, ever prone to swell uncontrollably with visions of possibilities, imagines a bombing. I remember the line from the Gaza Youth Manifesto for Change, “We are sick of being caught in this political struggle; sick of coal-dark nights with airplanes circling above our homes,” and I, quite simply, don’t want to be there. I have the vulgar luxury of options and I feel self-conscious of this wealth in Gaza. It is rare to find someone there who has anything close to alternatives.

“We are in a big prison. You know, sijun, prison. We. Are. In. A. Big. Prison.” Everyone says this: students, boys at the Rafah crossing trying to get to Turkey for a couple of days, a short-story writer with a teething baby. “You don’t know how unusual that music concert at the Shawwa Centre was,” they say. “Boys sitting next to girls on the floor, standing, dancing. That never happens. What does it feel like to be free?” ask the students. “What’s it like?”

One of the most talented (and modest) writers on the PalFest delegation, Tarik Hamdan, (“He looks like the young Jean Genet,” the novelist Youssef Rakha observes to me) reads poetry to a university class by the light of his mobile phone. At night, the city without electricity is a ghost town. During the day, its underutilized spaces – hotel lobbies, restaurants, cafes, shops – are populated by solitary men who appear to have been abandoned. There is a sense of unanticipated loss in these attendant figures, as though they have all been jilted and still reel internally with their heartache.

People have taken to cheering as the lights go out, as if it’s a big joke. “Ha ha! It’s done it again!” This happens on Thursday night when we pile upstairs into the fifth floor of our hotel after plain-clothes security from Hamas close down our closing ceremony. This is denied by Hamas government officials later, and multiple apologies are given both that night and the next morning. “Bullshit,” says a Palestinian writer, ‘that’s bullshit.” Whoever was behind the decision, someone obviously wanted a shot fired across our bow.

We continue the curtailed event on the top floor of the hotel. “Let’s be constructive,” says one young woman from Diwan Ghazza who obviously finds life too short to watch dust settle. “How do you recommend we set up this competition for bloggers?” She asks this as we all still trying to find out what happened to the tiny girl whose phone was snatched, abruptly, vindictively, from her by ‘security’ as she sat in the audience while another girl read a poem of thanks to us from the stage. We had been gathered below ground level in the partially restored El Basha house, an attractive, rectangular pit of sandstone with arches and stairs that led down to it on the right hand-side of the stage. At the top of the stairs, armed men gathered, suited or shirted, legs apart with their phones held at arm’s length, scanning and photographing the protesting crowd with their phones. “You do this for Palestine?” shouts Hamdan in a voice somehow bigger than him and the cage of my chest feels cleaved apart. Don’t tell me we’ve come to this. Is this what happens when authorities are empowered to crack down and disempowered from providing?

From the moment of the rabid, random phone grab and the armed men shouting how it is forbidden to film security, the questions begin: “Where has she gone? Did they take her? Did she get her phone back? Why her? Was she filming the stage? Why did they say she was filming security? See how they spread fear? You see? It’s good that you saw this. This is what we live with every day. It is good you are here. If you weren’t, they would beat us all and destroy the building. I am sorry you saw this, we are not like this.” The girl, a porcelain miniature figurine in skinny jeans and a pink headscarf, is finally tracked down, distraught, at home and persuaded to come back to the hotel for the poetry readings of Haddad and Hamdan, and the oud playing of Eskanderella. “It’s like a dream having you here,” says a short-story writer, whose five-year-old draws a picture for my five-year-old in London, “and you’ll leave and we’ll be left to a nightmare, a horrible nightmare.”

“We used to have one authority when the Israelis were here, one authority and one enemy, now with Fatah and Hamas, we have three authorities and this makes our lives hell.”

And in the darkness, light.

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore about these tunnels,” says one of the many students who has been in the tunnel industry, working the pulleys at the top of the well like openings for $50 per day ($100 if you go down, but you could get gassed or otherwise killed down there, as a friend of his was), “or about drugs.” (I am trying to find out more about the craze for a highly addictive upper, Trimadol, that has taken off since the relative ‘opening’ of the border with Egypt.) “I want to talk to you about literature,” he says. “‘She walks in beauty like the night.’ Who wrote this?” “Byron,” someone says. “Ah yes, Lord Byron. I love this,” he says with the most amazing smile, as though he wrote the lines himself.

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This blog was originally published by English PEN as part of their PEN Atlas series, which commissions weekly literary dispatches from around the world.

About the author
Selma Dabbagh is the author of Out of It (Bloomsbury, 2011). Her short stories have been published by Granta and the British Council. Based in London, Dabbagh has lived in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Bahrain and the West Bank. She has recently been working on a feature film with the director Azza el Hassan. Her website is here.

Palfest posters on a street in Gaza. (Photo: Mohamed Adham Abu Samra)

The British Palestinian writer Selma Dabbagh is currently in Gaza with the Palestine Festival of Literature (Palfest). In this blog, the first of two commissioned by English PEN and published here with permission, Dabbagh describes her feeling of having ‘snuck into a secret garden, a forbidden city’. Dabbagh will be a guest at our next Arab-Israeli Book Club event on Thursday 17 May.

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Selma Dabbagh

Up to two days before we leave we are not sure if we will get in, as permission has not been granted by the Egyptian authorities for their nationals to travel. There is mention, without any detail (steps and mud? possible collapse or attack?) of tunnels. A media campaign is launched, postponed by a day because of violence outside the Ministry of Defence in Cairo. But then, “Yay!”, communicates the jubilance Tweeted and Facebooked from Cairo and Gaza, we get the okay and we are off. Slowly off: seven hours to the border and four sitting at it (electrocutory sounding buzzers going off with semi-official shouters calling out names, a man in a white uniform yelling from a desk stranded at the side).

An oud player from Cairo from the revolutionary band Eskandarella starts strumming softly from one of the moulded plastic seats, next to the wheelchair bound women and the waiting, smoking, pacing crowd that we have become; and the holding station of the Rafah border crossing is momentarily transformed. It is as if a network of vivid magical circuitry runs now throughout that large, unloved space: a communication of something deep and connective that we feel for a transient moment, until it stops. The oud player must put the instrument away. He is not to get through the border. He and one other Egyptian, a blogger, are to be returned to Arish because they do not have the papers to show that they are exempt from conscription. Fruitless negotiations: logic on our side, rules on theirs.

We move on without those who are to follow the next day.

The swinging coach lurches and it’s a ‘Welcome to Palestine’ sign and we all cheer even though we are not so dim that we don’t know there is a sad, ironic disappointment in this proclamation. But it is a sign that was fought for, a forbidden word that is now writ high. I, for one, was once harassed and sent back to Cairo after seven hours with Israeli security because they found a Palestinian flag the size of a Smartie in my bag, back in the days when that alone was a statutory offence.

Officials await us at the border, fruit juice with bits in it, references to the struggles of Mandela, celebration of the fact that this is the first delegation of that size from the new Egypt, national PR and emotion. Hard seats and handshakes (or lack of thereof, if you are female).

And then, Gaza.

By now it is dark: dark in a deep, soft way that makes the sky and the moon, full within it, appear like a felt collage. We pass an abandoned missile-struck building, grinning toothlessly out to sea, and then, it is a meditative journey up the coast, where much of the land is agricultural, or fallow, with breeze from the sea catching in rushes and billowing in the walls of greenhouses shaped like modernist oriental tents, made of a translucent fabric glowing from within. I feel as though we have snuck into a secret garden, a forbidden city.

We must be driving through the least densely populated part of the most densely populated strip of land in the world, as it takes some time before we see signs of habitation, but they come with rows of shops: solitary boys manning large desks in furniture showrooms, motorbikes parked up against walls, tractors in fields, umbrellas on fruit stands and paintings of Mickey Mouse on nursery walls. ‘It’s like Egypt,’ says one of the Egyptian writers, which is as it should be, since the countries neighbour each other, the shops, cafes, children are the same. Marriages with bands beeping through the streets take place, women lift their skirts to paddle in the sea and men sit under trees seduced by the moon.

The global porthole for viewing Gaza is the news media and it shows us a place that exists only in times of crisis: at the moment of a missile strike, at times of political unrest and violence, depicting inhabitants as victims of attacks, as though this is a population brought up to suffer, rather than people who are desperate to just get on and do stuff  like everyone else.

And this, to my mind, is where the fiction writer comes in: to introduce lives, relationships, aspirations beyond and against political events, or even in the complete absence of political events, to introduce a different truth, to say, there were people here first, before the violence of the missile, of the gun battle, before men were taken away to prisons and never seen again. Feel who we were loving, what we were hoping for, look at what we were doing and building before all this came, while this came, despite the fact that these horrors came, intruded and tried to muck it all up.

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This blog was originally published by English PEN as part of their PEN Atlas series, which commissions weekly literary dispatches from around the world.

About the author
Selma Dabbagh is the author of Out of It (Bloomsbury, 2011). Her short stories have been published by Granta and the British Council. Based in London, Dabbagh has lived in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Bahrain and the West Bank. She has recently been working on a feature film with the director Azza el Hassan. Her website is here.

There are few books in Arabic which openly discuss sexuality. Fewer still talk about homosexuality, and none have dared to mention transsexuals. None, that is, until Lebanese journalist Hazem Sageigh wrote a biography about a pioneer of the Arab underground transgender movement, telling her story of becoming a woman in Algeria. Published in 2010, ‘Muzakerat Randa Al-Trans’ (‘The Memoirs of Randa the Trans’) describes Randa’s struggle to forge her identity while battling family, society, country and religion. Both beautiful and brutally candid, the book traces Randa’s life from boyhood to her first sexual experience with a man, an episode which is described in this extract below, translated exclusively by the Arab-Israeli Book Review.

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‘My name is Randa’

I constantly wished to change my name. I felt what colonised countries must have felt when, upon gaining independence, they hastened to choose a different name from that which the coloniser had given them. One’s existence, I felt, couldn’t become complete unless her name were identical with her personality; nor could she genuinely present herself to the world, or properly identify herself, if her name remained contrary to who she really is.

Once I thought of renaming myself Miriam. The revered statue of Miriam (Mary), and her symbolic representations in Christianity, didn’t put me off, even though I am a Muslim. A burning obsession overtook me to get rid of Fouad, my male name: Fouad must die; I must kill and bury him. I settled on Randa. It was the name my mother once told me she would have chosen had I been born a girl.

'Fouad must die; I must kill and bury him.' (Photo: AFP)

I had been deprived of my name the same way I was deprived of being the person I loved to be. When I was fourteen, I loved to sew clothes for my siblings and myself. I thought of myself as a good tailoress, but I was rebuked because sewing, I was told, was for girls. Even now my thwarted desire leads my memory back to our sewing machine, to the scissors, needle and thread.

I liked cooking too. I prepared delicious recipes which were loved by everyone who tasted them. But I was told that for a man to stand in the kitchen is shameful beyond description. I used to wait for my family to go out so I could go into the kitchen and prepare the recipes I’d dreamt about. I carried out all this as though it were some secret activity totally prohibited by common laws, and once finished I’d rush to conceal all traces, washing pots and dishes, and airing the whole house to get rid of the smell, so that my family wouldn’t come back and catch me red-handed. The more complicated the recipes were, the more I liked preparing them.

It was the same when I once fancied belly-dancing. I loved to dance, performing delicate movements, especially ones through which femininity and sensual signs are clearly revealed. The desire to practice belly-dancing lingered with me for a long time. I used to watch dancing programmes on the telly, wishing to learn, but of course this was not a wish I could contemplate fulfilling. This sort of thing was for women. And I, alas, was a man.

I also wanted to be a fashion designer. Again I was rebuked. This is not a bread-winning career, I was told. Most importantly, it’s not for men. But I persevered, though it felt as if I were climbing a mountain barefooted. It felt as if only with tears and blood could I forge my right identity and occupy the space which my imagination sought.

'When he penetrated me and I had an erection, I felt embarrassed; I was meant to be a woman.' (Photo: AFP)

It’s expected that women eat less than men to look slim, so I starved myself until I became anorexic. Like all those obsessed with being skinny, I felt dirty and guilty every time I ate, and rushed to throw up. Being full of food disgusted me and made me want to cleanse myself. If I couldn’t control the insides and depths of my body, I could at least take charge of it from the outside. I could make sure it didn’t look like that of a man.

These concerns over my appearance aside, existential questions persisted. I constantly asked myself: who was I? Who was the person whose name and gender and will seem to go against her? Who was deprived of possessing her own body, deprived of hobbies and sources of pleasure? And where do you expect me to start searching for meaning in a narrow-minded world, a world which is particularly ungenerous with meaning?

It’s impossible to exist among the people of Algeria, at work or in the street, being nothing but a ghostly figure, who cannot acknowledge her interior demands. Who might look at herself and suspect there is no self there. Worse still, who lives among such strictness and ignorance that she might be tempted to believe all this and give up.

My search for names and meaning met with little success in a world which kept persecuting and rejecting me; not allowing me the slightest acceptance.

I was fourteen when I first heard the word gay. It was said in English, probably because homosexuals’ names, and homosexuality generally, are often mentioned abusively in Arabic. I thought then that every gay-bottom thought of himself a girl, and that his whole body language became feminine.

I was confused. My mind was suspended in a vacuum. The link between words and things remained unsettled, shaky. The freedom which was available for me didn’t really mean much; it was their freedom. As for my freedom to enjoy myself, the freedom I desperately sought but couldn’t possess, I had lost its meaning. I felt as if I had been kept in a freezer. My freedom had been frozen and postponed. My awareness of it came slow and late.

But something happened when I was sixteen. A crack in the life of secrecy appeared, and a new light shimmered through. I began watching porn films. In my room I’d lower the TV sound and watch the adult channels. I especially enjoyed seeing the male organ of the actor, erect and potent.

When the actor took the woman in public, I used to fantasize that he was taking me instead. Right there in public, in the sunlight, in front of all those people. He’s the man and I’m the woman. During such sessions of fantasy I’d gently touch up my body, avoiding my penis. This was for me alone, and not for it. I’d fantasize about the actor’s penis penetrating me, in whatever orifice he wished. I was willing to welcome him anywhere in my body.

Male domination became a source of excitement and joy for me. Male force and potency thrilled me, awakening what had been dormant. The man who could dominate me best would be a typical brown-skinned stud. I wanted him to be strong, to touch my backside and excite me, but not to hurt me. I’m not a masochist; I never fantasized about being raped. I wanted him to be strong, yet friendly, passionate and caring; someone who lusts and loves, but still respects his partner.

'I’d believed that Islam condemns homosexual relationships. But was I a man?' (Photo: AFP)

It seemed I had made up a man who is impossible to find in the real world. Someone who, on the one hand, represents our myth of the first man, the cave-man; but who, on the other hand, could restrain the first, tame him until he takes the shape of the second, another mythical and yet non-existent man. I don’t know whether I was trying to link the past to the future, tying up the man who I wished would invade me with the woman that wanted to defend herself against his invasion. The adult TV carried me into a world which stimulated all sorts of ideas, letting my imagination travel and grow.

In spite of all the ups and downs, I found myself getting into my first serious relationship. Malek seriously loved me, but he had a weird temper and a relentless propensity for self-destruction. Whenever I rejected one of his requests he’d punish me, or himself, lacerating his body with sharp objects. It was terrible and absurd, yet it engendered in both of us an extraordinary desire in which death was compounded with love and lust. It wasn’t easy for me. It was my first relationship and I was still reluctant. I always hesitated before surrendering my body to him. I’d believed that Islam condemns homosexual relationships. But was I a man? And why does Islam designate me as a male? Indeed, what does my religion say about this?

With Malek I knew my body better. I recognised its peculiarities as mine. When we slept together, Malek treated the whole thing as a simple homosexual relationship. I didn’t. When he penetrated me and I had an erection, I felt embarrassed; I was meant to be a woman. Malek didn’t understand my reaction, nor did my closest friends, who wouldn’t concede that a man’s source of pleasure is his penis, while for a woman it’s her whole body. It lasts longer for a woman; that’s what men fear and won’t admit. Reaching climax remained a costly process; either it was mixed with great pain or followed by it. And things only got worse.

One night I returned home from an evening with Malek and found my father sitting in the kitchen, smoking. I assumed that his staying up had nothing to do with me, that he was just suffering a slight insomnia or because he had some troubles relating to his work. But then without any forewarning he started telling me how one’s reputation is established from one’s childhood onwards, and how I, Fouad, didn’t come from an ordinary family but from a well-known clan. He went on, asking rhetorical questions: what will people say if you keep behaving this way? Do you want them to make fun of you? To treat you the way they treated the mayor?

The mayor of the town was homosexual, and people called him Pamela, after Pamela Anderson. I switched off. I stopped hearing his voice, or the voices in the street of people not yet asleep. I only saw his lips moving, appearing in different forms and shapes as if they were a rubber band, while I felt as if I were in a silent film. Mechanically and nervously I started eating, hoping he’d leave me alone. But when I raised my eyes and saw his lips still going on, I left him without asking his permission and rushed up to my room. I tore down posters and threw my books and ornaments across the floor.

I was furious. If I were so bad, I thought, then it was only because of my parent’s education, or because of something they had done or that was done to them. My anger seemed like it would never end. I threw myself over the things I had broken and scattered across the room. I didn’t know whether I was punishing my parents or myself, whether I meant to attack my tendencies and moods, or just to exhaust my body throughout that long night. I slept.

The surprise happened the day after. I’d expected mother to tell me off for what I had done with my room. I’d been getting ready for an inescapable confrontation, rehearsing for the expected row: ‘If she says this I’ll say that, and if she accuses me of this I’ll reply with such and such. If she raises her voice, I’ll raise mine!’

But to my utter surprise I saw her laughing in an unusually cheeky way, as if nothing serious had actually happened. She seemed to be saying, ‘No problem now, it’s finished and gone!’ I suspected it was actually her, the stronger of my parents, who had put my father up to it. And perhaps because of that, she felt that she needn’t be angry for what I had done. The point that she wanted made had been made, and that was the end of the matter.

But who’s to say that’s the end, who’s to decide the end of a matter that concerns my life and body and desires? The inevitable question recurred: what felony was I being punished for? If I believed in reincarnation, I would have suspected that I had previously been a tyrant or murderer, and had to suffer for this in my present life.

The story needed an ending, and that ending must mean my own, I believed. So I borrowed my father’s car, pretending that I was going to do some shopping, and tried to run myself down a high hill. The car crashed but, ironically enough, because I didn’t put on the safety belt I got stuck between the two front seats and, unfortunately, survived.

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Samir El-Youssef on the Arab-Israeli author who escaped his destiny of “writing for the trees”, whatever the costs

Sayed Kashua (Credit: The New York Times)

Once upon a time, back in 2005, a group of Arab and Israeli writers met on the Israeli-Jordanian border with the intention of building a cultural bridge. It was a noble attempt and like most noble attempts it came to virtually nothing. Agreement was not totally absent though; a Jewish Israeli and an Arab Israeli agreed on one thing: attacking one of the participants.

The Jewish Israeli, who’s known for his comically dogmatic nationalism, claimed that people must only write in their own language. Arabs must write in Arabic; Israelis must write in Hebrew. The Arab Israeli complemented his fellow citizen by making the grand claim that language is a matter of ideology; the language one chooses to express oneself in is an ideological choice.

So what are you saying, some of the restless audience asked; that Conrad, Edward Said, Paul Celan, among many others, have actually failed to write well because they didn’t use the language of their original or national identity? And should we conclude that a writer such as Edward Said, in spite of all he has written, was actually an advocate of British and American imperialism? Or that Celan, whose family was annihilated in Nazi concentration camps, was actually a German nationalist?

No, of course not. The two goats were not trying to introduce a theoretical argument about language and literature. They just wanted to attack Sayed Kashua, an Arab Israeli who has decided to write in Hebrew. Worse still, or what made the attack so venomous, is the fact Kashua has actually succeeded in becoming popular in Israel and abroad. Envy is the motive-mother of all disputes, especially among writers!

Kashua replied that it’s pointless to write for the trees. Within the isolated Arab community of Israel there is no such thing as a book industry. Indeed reading has remained a relatively marginal practice among even the educated of that community.

A gifted satirist, Kashua probably didn’t want to spoil the punch-line by expanding on the pointlessness of writing for trees. Nor were the two grim zealots in a generous mode of interpretation. Otherwise they would have grasped that Kashua was talking not only about his personal ambition of going beyond the borders of a small and readerless community; but also about the very business at hand: building a cultural bridge.

Trees are very useful for many things, including building bridges, but believe it or not, there is no hope whatsoever that they could become readers. Unlike trees, people of the opposite side, the enemies, are readers and potential readers. If one aims to build a bridge, then obviously one needs to understand and speak the language of those on the opposite bank.

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