LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

ibrahim muhawiyour hands!’ (We note here in passing the ironic equation between thecemetery and the homeland.) Everyone cheers, but they wonder what they areto do with the bones. ‘Grind them,’ says the wise man in a calm, confidentvoice, ‘and make them into soup for your children.’ The story ends with a simplestatement of fact: ‘And that’s exactly what we did.’Undoubtedly, there is a Palestinian cult of the shahid, or martyr, and Palestinianshave paid a terrible price in human life. Hajjaj’s younger brother was a‘martyr.’ The Palestine Liberation Organisation maintains a fund for the familiesof martyrs. Many PLO functionaries are children of martyrs. One is frequentlyintroduced to someone as the son or daughter of such and such a martyr. InMemory for Forgetfulness, Darwish ironically refers to the rivalry among PLOfactions (fasa’il) to sacrifice fighters as the ‘martyr trade’. There is a cemetery formartyrs in Beirut which was repeatedly shelled by the Israeli air force during theinvasion of 1982. Darwish wryly notes in Memory that it was not enough killingthe living, it seemed as if it was necessary also to kill the dead again. As Kanaanahas demonstrated (1993), a considerable number of martyr legends sprang upduring the Palestinian intifada. When a youth was killed by the Israeli army, hebecame a ‘martyr’ and his family did not show outward signs of mourning.People did not come to pay condolences, but to offer congratulations. Theexistential irony implied in this behaviour is deeply rooted in Palestinian culture.Palestinians traditionally held a wedding celebration instead of a wake when ayoung man died before he had the chance to get married and have children.The body of the dead young man was given a traditional zaffe, or weddingprocession, with dabke dancing and singing, on the way to church or mosque. 6The gap in an ironic text between present and absent meaning is a space ofphatic communion in which the writer calls upon the reader to draw out theabsent meaning(s). As noted earlier, irony always functions with reference to aspecific context, and an ironic text represents an appeal to the reader to supplythe context and share in the experience of the victim. The pragmatic functionof irony, then, resides in its social purpose of creating community betweenwriter and reader in the hope of raising awareness about a situation. The Arabicproverb says, ‘An intelligent person, from a mere nod will get the point’ (allabibumin al-isharati yafham) and so with irony – a secret sharing between writerand reader (S’hiri 1992). Booth emphasises this point as well: ‘Often thepredominant motion when reading stable ironies is that of joining, of findingand communing with kindred spirits’ (1974: 28). This particular connection, orbond, between reader and writer is more important in an ironic text than in anordinary one. As practically all writers on this subject have noted, irony isdeeply implicated in the aesthetics of reception, bringing the reader to theforeground of the critical act. Its critical significance arises from the challenge itposes to the New Critical doctrine which goes by the name of the ‘intentional— 38 —www.taq.ir