LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

irony and the poetics of palestinian exileHowever, the kind of humour we are dealing with in this novel is notnecessarily the type one finds in jokes. Rather, it is a humour based on Said’scharacterisation (who, as we shall see, is not so much a hero as an archetype ofthe traditional Palestinian), on the author’s use of language, and on a sustainedironic vision that sometimes engages the reader in double ironies from whichthere is no exit. The title tells us a great deal about Habibi’s method. Weobserve first the standard Palestinian contradictions that apply to this archetypalhero. His name is Said, which ordinarily means ‘happy,’ but which whencoupled with abu al-nahs alerts us to another meaning for this word: Said alsomeans one who is possessed of sa’d (good omen), which is the contradictory ofnahs (bad omen). So now we have a character who exists in a state of completecontradiction. The translation of abu al-nahs as ‘ill-fated’ does not convey thefull cultural impact of the notion of nahs, or unremitting bad luck. There isbehind this name the weight of Arab belief in destiny, exemplified in thePalestinian proverb, il-manhus manhus, walaw Æallaqu Æa-dhahro Æishrin fanus (‘Theone dogged by bad luck is destined to remain unlucky even if twenty lanternsare hung from his back’). Further, the Arabic word rendered as ‘opti-pessimist’(or ‘pess[i]-optimist’), al-mutasha’il, is a neologism that creatively combines partsof the two words, mutafa’il (optimistic) and mutasha’im (pessimistic). Neither ofthe English renderings is an exact morphological equivalent since they do notcombine the lexical items or parts of them in the same way. There is no sense ofa hyphen in the Arabic word; it does not sound as if it is composed of parts oftwo words, but as one word in which the states of pessimism and optimism areperfectly intertwined. 9Turning now to the ‘hero’ of the novel, the simplest way to explain Said is tosay that Habibi made him a folk character (shakhsiyya sha’biyya) whose behaviourcan be easily associated with that of the traditional Palestinian villager. In herintroduction to the translation of the novel, Salma Khadra Jayyusi rightlycompares Said (1982: xiv–xv) to the folk hero Juha (Khodja, Mulla Nasreddin),but her comparison of him with the clever trickster aspect of Juha, or the ‘wisefool’, as she calls him (who can extricate himself from difficult situations throughwit) is not quite apt. Said is not witty, or heroic; he is more often the object ofthe irony rather than its subject. He is more properly compared to the selfseekinganti-heroic aspect of the Juha of the story in which he is first informedthat a battle is raging in his country, and he answers, ‘As long as my village issafe, let the battle rage.’ The story then proceeds to narrow down the scope ofthe battle to the village (‘As long as my quarter is safe, let the battle rage’), thenhis quarter (‘As long as my house is safe …’), then his house (‘As long as I amsafe …’). This is exactly the character of Said, who is proud to have been savedby a donkey while the rest of his family were gunned down as they were escapingduring the events of 1948. Said’s association with Juha is also made explicit— 41 —www.taq.ir