The World Feels So Much Closer Now

by

Nicki Leone

When I first became interested in Middle Eastern literature back in college, in the early eighties, my options were pretty limited. Luckily, I lived in Boston at the time, or my options would have been well nigh nonexistent. To find literature in translation from what was still at that point being called “the third world” required patience and perseverance. I developed a habit of combing university and college bookstores, even if I wasn’t a student, because some would offer classes in “Middle Eastern Studies” and some of those classes would be assigned novels. (To this day I wonder if I ever caused some poor student to fail a test because I had bought the last copy of an assigned text they might have needed for class.) I dug through the shelves of the one foreign language bookstore in the city—Schoenhof’s, a place of great magic and wonder—because I would occasionally find books in French that had been translated from the Arabic, and I could muddle through the former better than I could the latter. And if there was nothing new at Schoenhof’s, and the university bookshop shelves were end-of-term empty, then there was always special orders. I found a couple of publishers whose catalogs specialized in fiction in translation, so I wrote for order forms (actual letters, composed on bonafide typewriters), and mailed them checks for cost plus shipping and handling. Four to six weeks later, I’d get my books in the mail. Sometimes it took longer if the publisher was waiting on an overseas shipment.

In fact, I owe much of my early introduction to Middle Eastern fiction to a company called Three Continents Press, which had a mission to publish, in English, popular authors of, well, other places: Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, just to name a few on one of the three continents in its purview. It was thanks to Three Continents that I discovered Naguib Mahfouz (several years before he came to the attention of the rest of the country when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1988), Tayeb Saleh, Ghassan Kanafani, Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad. My classes on the political situation in Lebanon were confused and sometimes hopeless attempt to grasp the totality of foreign interventions and nationalist philosophies, agendas of “terrorist” groups and religious pressures. The situation was so volatile that things we learned at the beginning of the semester often had to be revisited and revised before the end of term. I eventually learned to read foreign newspapers if I wanted to know what was happening. And to read foreign novels, if I wanted to know what was really happening. Reports of PLO terrorist attacks were one thing. Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad’s novel Death in Beirut, Ghassan Kanafani’s Palestine’s Children, something else entirely. I think I eventually purchased the entire Middle Eastern section of the catalog of Three Continents, indiscriminately. Books have always been more important to me than food. Or rent.

I still sometimes think about those days of filling out order forms and mailing (how quaint!) letters of inquiry to obscure publishers for equally obscure books. If there is one thing I’m grateful for about the Internet it is not the endless chatter of Twitter or the postcard-like interactions on Facebook, it is that the worldwide web has brought so many of these writers so much closer, so easily. Now, instead of university bookshops I haunt Web sites like Words Without Borders and The Three Percent. Now there are many publishers who specialize in fiction in translation, and it doesn’t take weeks of correspondence to get to them: Archipelago Press, Europa Editions, Open Letter Books, Interlink.

So when I hear about a new author who is “the most talked about writer on the West Bank” (according, at least, to Ahdaf Soueif,  an old(er) writer whom I admire very much) it no longer takes me eight weeks of searching and writing letters to find the book. No, all I had to do was type “Adania Shibli” into the search bar, and she and her book, Touch, was just a click away. So close!

Touch is a small novel—a novella, really—of a young Palestinian girl’s life from that strange indeterminate moment we all experience when we realize for the first time that we exist, a self-defined entity (and oh, what a lonely epiphany that is), to the moment when she is married—when, in fact, she ceases to exist as a self-defined person and becomes . . . something else.  Although divided into sections that evoke the senses—color, silence, language, movement—the story is told not linearly, but in the way we each think of our own lives; a series of brief moments and events that are ordered in our minds not by time so much as by significance and emotional clarity. In this young girl’s life, the colors of the sky on a road trip up the mountain are as vivid as the first time she is kissed in a field. And that moment itself is possibly less significant than the day of the fight she with her older sister in the bath.

The facts of the girl’s life—the things important to chroniclers and historians and biographers—must be teased out of small hints and references, because they are not important to a child. Children don’t tell themselves the story of their life, they live in the present. Touch is written in the present, or at least in the immediate past. The girl does not say to the reader, “My name is so-and-so and I am the youngest of nine sisters.” One learns that she is the youngest, and has eight older sisters, because it is the eighth sister she has the fight with on bathing day. The girl’s name we do not know, because she is not in the habit of calling herself by name.

What we do know is that she lives an internal life in a wide open world:

The girl walked off toward the trees, continuing her search for the traces of the rainbow. Beneath the trees nothing but wispy, dry leaves gathered. Their crunching underfoot was the only sound on top of the mountain, until a breeze came, shuddering other leaves and bringing the sun closer to the end of the sky.

Around, all the trees and the paths looked alike, so the little girl followed the path of the sun’s movement, chasing after it so that it would not get dark and all the colors disappear. Then she started to fun, faster and faster until she reached the edge of the mountain.

And there, from the edge of the mountain, the sky stretched out to the distant fields, while the sun was about to disappear, dragging behind it a long ray of purple, the last color of the day.

We learn that she is troubled by ear infections and loud noises hurt her. That because of this she is somewhat isolated from the rest of her siblings—she avoids their constant arguing and chattering. That she is closer to her father than her mother. That she learns about sex the way most girls who are left alone too much learn about sex—in the backseat of a car and behind the buildings of the family farm. We learn that she had only one brother, because when he dies, the mother (all the girl’s family is referred to this way—“the mother,” “the father,” “the first sister”) retreats to a bedroom and never comes out again. We learn this story must take place in the early eighties because she hears the words “Sabra and Shatila”* for the first time on her way to school. We know, then, that however the brother died, it was probably from violence.

But all these things are deduced from hints and comments at the edges of the story. In the center is simply a series of vignettes of a young girl which build upon each other to create an entire life—the life a Palestinian daughter up until the point she is married. The life of a girl told not like a story with a beginning, a middle and end, but more like a diorama, which one turns constantly round to see things from different angles. For such a small book, it is quite a stunning and exquisite piece of work. As a story, it is over very quickly—it is only seventy-two pages long, after all. But you get entranced by each small piece of it. As a reader, you find yourself going back and forth, back and forth, turning the diorama back around to look again. It’s quite . . . mesmerizing, actually. And not just because the language is so very pretty:

The mother did not perform the ablution because she had not touched anything foul since the noon prayer. She headed directly to the sewing machine, where she kept the tattered green prayer rug. The new red prayer rug was still in the closet, where it waited to come out on the two feasts—the short one and the longer one—of each year.

She picked up the two sides of the rug, flipped it into the air, then moved her hands away, letting it fall onto the floor freely. Sometimes one of the front edges would fold, and when she lowered herself onto the rug, she would fix the folded edge with a gentle movement that was not part of the prayer.

People in the English-speaking world, especially people in America, tend to read fiction from repressed or disenfranchised cultures as a kind of witnessing or statement of identity. Such cultures have been denied a place in the history books, left out of the political process. Fiction, storytelling, becomes their historical record. Certainly, that is part of what Khanafani was doing in his story collection Palestine’s Children. What Awwad meant to do in Death in Beirut.

But it is not precisely what Shibli has done in Touch. She is not concerned with claiming or justifying an identity—the identity, Palestinian, is a fact. Like water is wet is a fact. When asked in an interview once how she felt about having to hold an Israeli passport, Shibli answered “. . . the passport I’m given, it is an attempt of appropriation, which is a mere sign of lack of injustice, deprivation etc, but this does not prevent from me relating to that landscape I have grown up with as being mine.” (1)

Touch, then is a story not about a Palestinian girl, but about a little girl growing up in a place that will always be Palestine, no matter where the powers that be draw the lines or make the borders, or what passport she is forced to carry. It is a very intimate picture. The land and the life of the little girl feels very, very close.

* * *

*An infamous massacre of Palestinian refugees living in camps on the outskirts of West Beirut in 1982. The massacre was carried out by a Christian militia group, but the camps of Sabra and Shatila were under Israeli control at the time and Israeli forces were implicated in allowing the militants access to the camps, providing them with weapons, and refusing to allow refugees to escape. Estimates of the number killed range between 300 and 3000—including many women and children.

(1) Adania Sahibli to Janet De Neefe, Bali Advertiser, September 2007

Books mentioned in this column:
Death in Beirut by Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad (Three Continents Press, 1990)
Palestine’s Children by Ghasan Kanafani (Three Continents Press, 1984)
Touch by Adania Shibli (Clockroot Books, 2010)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.