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Qissat: Short Stories By Palestinian Women
Edited by Jo Glanville
Telegram Books
2006, Paperback
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Editor: Jo Glanville
is
a writer, journalist and radio producer who has made documentaries
about the Middle East and contributed articles on the subject to
various publications such as The Guardian and New Statesman.
Authors
:
Randa Jarrar, Huzama Habayeb, Liana Badr, Selma Dabbagh, Basima
Takrouri, Nuha Samara, Jean Said Makdisi, Donia El Amal Ismaeel, Naomi
Shihab Nye, Raeda Taha, Laila al-Atrash, Samah al-Shaykh, Adania
Shibli, Nathalie Handal, Samira Azzam and Nibal Thawabteh. Translators: S V Atalla, Catherine Cobham, Rima Hassouneh, Nancy Hawker, Randa Jarrar and Christina Phillips
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"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."
Reviewed by Mira Mattar
While
all the authors in Qissat share a political and cultural identity as
Palestinian women writers living in the shadow of the Nakba, "the catastrophe" of 1948, the stories in this collection edited by
journalist Jo Glanville are diverse, brave and show some moments of
striking prose. Being a collection also allows for a rich array of
voices which go beyond collective identity or victim status into a
wider world literature.
Qissat
opens with Randa Jarrar's Barefoot
Bridge in
which a little girl narrates the journey her family are making from
Egypt via Jordan to Palestine for her grandfather's funeral. Because
she lacks full knowledge of the historical and political situation
her childish point of view allows for honest and unbiased
observations of anxieties that occur at the checkpoint between Jordan
and Palestine. She notes everyone's nervousness and captures the
menacing presence of an Israeli soldier in observing the "long piece
of ash hanging" from his cigarette and describes the handheld search
machine as like "a black snake". Jarrar creates an atmosphere of
oppression and control through the sensitivities of an unknowing
child.
Similarly tense is Liana Badr's Other
Cities in
which a headstrong mother determined to take her children out of
Hebron to Ramallah for a visit despite laws forbidding Palestinians
to travel without appropriate ID. Confined amongst Israeli settlers
who have set up home amongst a Palestinian majority she embarks on a
nerve-wracking journey where "it seemed that the soldiers were intent
on checking not just ID cards but every cell of every hair". The
story ends in a moment of clarity for a soldier who feels is "only
punishing himself, out here in this hostile wilderness". An
interesting and original point of view from a well known writer.
The
checkpoint features again in Raeda Taha's short and striking A
Single Metre where
a girl hitches a ride with someone she suspects is a suicide bomber,
bringing the idea of martyrdom to the fore which is again prominent
in Donia El Amal Ismaeel's Dates
and Bitter Coffee. At
the mourning ceremony of a so-called martyr his grieving father
ironically observes the manipulation of death into "a poster, a
microphone, a death notice in a newspaper he never read".
In
Jean Said Makdisi's remarkable Pietà
a
middle-class woman encounters a lower-class acquaintance in Beirut
whose sons have all died in the Lebanese Civil War - some as
resistance fighters, some as victims. The interplay between the
speaker's practical concerns and stoicism and the narrator's
emotions, empathy and guilt is striking and well handled. Makdisi
shows a real style and voice of her own in writing.
Dying for a cause
and conflicts internal to the Arab world are unflinchingly discussed
in Nuha Samara's The
Tables Outlived Amin in
which
a "dreamer and idealist" does not notice his closest friend Amin's
involvement within the Lebanese civil war. Samara details the
disintegration of their friendship as they become divided over the
justification of violent action. A violence which seems inherent is
playfully but dangerously discussed in Basima Takrouri's Tales
from the Azzinar Quarter 1984-1987 where
child gangs play essentially harmless war games which are discussed
with the language of battle and war adding a knowing and portentous
tone.
Flirting
with similar themes of loss of innocence and internal violence comes
Selma Dabbagh's stand out story Me
(the Bitch) and Bustanji in
which a teenage girl spends her boring summer in Kuwait avoiding
studying by spying on her glamourous neighbour, smoking and writing
in her diary. Perhaps it is because this story was not translated
that the tone and voice is so well captured and evocative of a sweet
edge of rebellion or perhaps it is because of the accurately observed
solipsism of a teenager (complete with newly pierced nose with which
she is constantly playing) that the full impact of Saddam's invasion
of Kuwait is so intensely portrayed. The futility of her father when
she asks how the invasion has happened is epitomized in a simple
action, he "raised his hands as though I were asking about a letter
that got lost in the post". The bustanji
(gardener)
of the title refuses to escape to Jordan, "the world's biggest
refugee camp" and continues working on the garden while the
neighbouring
gardens slowly turn brown. We learn of his probable death at the end
of the story.
Similarly
well written is Nathalie
Handal's Umm
Kulthoum at Midnight, a
daring and sensual story about the hypocrisies underlying Arabic
morals and traditions. A young female narrator discovers a soft porn
magazine of her uncle's and, shocked, no longer feels guilty about
her own sexual desire and acts on it instead. Sexual rebellion and
loss of innocence also feature in Laila al-Atrash's The
Letter
in which a young boy writes letters for his uneducated and beautiful
female neighbour
to whom he is attracted, to her secret lover under the assumption
that the letters are for her brother. Fear of sexual deviation is
frighteningly discussed in Samira Azzam's Her
Tale which
discusses honour
killing.
Another excellent story, perhaps my favourite,
is Huzama Habayeb's well translated A
Thread Snaps. We
follow Nuwaar cleaning her parents' house in an unglamorous and
unapologetic narrative full of graphic descriptions of unpleasant
chores viscerally intertwined with sexual attraction and
masturbation. Femininity in the form of smooth legs and manicured
nails is what Nuwaar yearns for but comes alive in her own blemished
body when she lets water trickle between her legs as she is scrubbing
soiled underwear and finds a mysterious pleasure that transcends and
strangely compliments her menial chores. This story was banned on its
first publication not only because of the unashamed descriptions of
female desire but because of the sticky and stained reality with
which it is described.
A charmingly melodramatic and humorous though
somewhat heavy handed story complements this one; in Nibal
Thawabteh's My
Shoe Size and Other People's Views on the Matter a
woman finally admits her actual shoe size after having competed for
so long with her school friends about whose feet were the smallest
and therefore most feminine. She liberates herself from years of
physical pain which, though self inflicted, are societal in origin.
Freedom
is bound to be a theme in such a collection, and freedom for many
Palestinians involved seeking refuge in other parts of the world,
often the West where some of the writers including Naomi Shihab Nye
now live. In Nye's Local
Hospitality
a couple return to Palestine from America for a visit which reveals
the inherent hypocrisies of Arabic culture where narrow mindedness is
masked as loyalty and judgement as righteous anger. Nye writes with
some style about a difficult topic. Interesting also because it shows
Palestinians, although defined in part by their political identity,
also without it – a necessity which sometimes gets stifled in fact.
Similarly Adania Shibli's May
God Keep Love in a Cool and Dry Place is
a study of a marriage more than it is a study of a specifically
Palestinian marriage. It is an excellent portrait of a relationship
where love is sometimes present and sometimes absent captured in a
strong voice - perhaps because the translation was revised by the
author.
Such
stories act as great dispellers of myths founded in ignorance or
politically manipulative portrayal which surround Palestinians and
Arabs in general, as well as rising above the sometimes oppressive
labels of national identity and bringing Palestinian literature into
its own. This idea is well suggested in Samah al-Shaykh's At
the Hospital, a
dreamlike description of being in hospital waiting room which makes
no mention of politics – direct or indirect – whatsoever.
All
of the stories in Qissat start, as stories tend to, with a kernel of
the personal. And as is often but not always the case, demand to be
read against their inescapable political and historical backgrounds.
However, what is important about a collection such as this is that
while the Nakba
provides a particular background, the stories in this collection are
as different to each other as those which share no such similarity,
or at least show the possibility of a wide and richly developing
contemporary Palestinian literature.
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