LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

irony and the poetics of palestinian exileseparate people from their own socially constructed landscapes, causing seeminglyless pain for the coloniser. (2000: 91)In this light then, the Basel Programme and the Balfour Declaration arecomprehensible as rhetorical strategies that anticipate actual dispossession. 4Even before Balfour this formation was helped along by religious travellerswho came to Palestine in the nineteenth century, armed with the Bible andintent on equating the historical present with a mythical past. In innumerablebooks and pamphlets, these travellers opened a discursive space for the laterconquest of Palestine. A typical example in this respect is William Thompson’sThe Land and the Book (1886). In this book the relationship between historicalreality and myth is turned upside down, or inside out. As the author trudgesthrough the land, meticulously describing the scenery, he translates the actuallandscape unfolding before him into the mythico-historical perspective of theBible. Standing before the gates of Jaffa, for example, the author calls upon OldTestament past to validate the present: ‘I remember that righteous Lot,’ he saysin one instance, ‘intent on deeds of hospitality, sat in the gate of Sodom towardsthe close of the day, somewhat as these Arabs are now seated’ (Vol. 1: 28). Heremyth and legend take the place of history. Between the book and the land thepeople – ‘these Arabs’ – disappear, or at best are turned into curious anthropologicalspecimens.Irony in Palestinian literature redresses the imbalance in the equation ofpresence and absence in a number of ways, most of which are based on some sortof reversal – reversal of course being the condition that creates the presentabsentstate of affairs in the first place. The simplest reversal is to negate thenegation by means of a heroic or mock-heroic affirmation. Thus Samih al-Qasim’s ‘Persona Non Grata’ (shakhs ghayr marghuub fihi), the poem whose name(in English and Arabic) is also the title of the collection in which it occurs,assumes an ironic heroic tone to reflect the Palestinian dilemma. The poet isproud to be a persona non grata. In this poem, the poet’s persona is a heroic figurereferred to only in the first person pronoun, which we assume to be the collectivevoice, or the figure, of the Palestinian people – a figure which stretches acrossthe expanse of the Arab world, with its head in one place and the different partsof the body in other places: ‘My head is here and my hands are there/Betweenme and me, nations have passed.’ This figure suspended in place and time is anembodiment of the present-absent paradox, as we can see from the followinglines:There is no solution in the solution, peace or warI am the riddleI am the songs, the ears of wheatI am the rocket throwers I am the shellsNo good other than me— 35 —www.taq.ir