LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

ibrahim muhawiNo evil other than meI am the possible impossible the ugly the beautiful the short the tall the outsiderenemy the honourable friend I am the muddy brook the strong the abject therogue the true the gross the heavy the fat the thin the sands the palm treethe lightning the floods the deserts the ruinsI am the skyscrapers the clouds the absence the solution the ascentThe descentI am the possible impossible. (1986: 117)The possible-impossible, the riddle, is another version of the present-absentand the successful failure. The irony comes from the heroic tone, the assumptionof god-like qualities by the heroic figure – qualities that enable him toembrace both sides of a contradiction at once. Muecke notes that ‘overstatementplays a very large part in ironic writing’ (1981: 81). The ironic reversalhere consists in the heroic, or mock-heroic, affirmation that the weak is thestrong. We can also find strains of this magnification of the Palestinian self inother work by al-Qasim as well as in many of Darwish’s poems. There is anironic reversal here as well, though it is easy to miss if one were not paying closeattention, and that reversal consists in equating the book (Persona Non Grata)with a person. Samih al-Qasim makes us painfully aware of this synecdochicreplacement of the person by the text, a replacement that expresses itself in atextual state of hyphenated identity. It is as if he is saying, ‘this book is a texthyphen-person’,and by the very fact that you are reading it you are sharing inthe experience of its contradiction and redeeming its non-grata status.While al-Qasim embraces both sides of the presence-absence equation,glorying in embodying a riddle with mythical dimensions, an opposite type ofironic reversal is manifest in the work of Nasri Hajjaj, who was born in thediaspora at Ain el-Hilwe refugee camp in southern Lebanon. The Hajjaj self ismore tenuous than that portrayed by Darwish or al-Qasim; more often than notit is devoured by the idea of a nation that has eaten so many young men withoutbeing born. In a series of very short stories that clearly reflect the influence ofZakaria Tamer and Franz Kafka, Hajjaj employs fantasy ironically to re-enactthat annihilation. Here is the complete text of a story called ‘A Hungry Orange’.I am a martyr. I was killed in a small war for the sake of the homeland. Before enemieskilled me, I used to love many-coloured butterflies – friends of red, yellow, white, andpurple flowers. I loved birds that sang in open skies. And I loved oranges. After lifeleft me I started to dream in death. I climbed an orange tree to reach for the sky andgather a star, but a hungry orange saw me and devoured me.In front of a crowd of people a grim-looking man stood up and said, ‘The martyrwas a hero.’ Then he drank a glass of orange juice.In al-Qasim the Palestinian ego is ironically magnified to such an extent thatdeath becomes heroic, but in Hajjaj there is no hero. If we were to attach a— 36 —www.taq.ir