LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

ibrahim muhawiiconographically through the donkey, which figures in many Juha stories andwhose image (with Juha riding backwards) appears on the covers of books orbooklets containing them. Throughout the first part of the book Said is constantlyassociated with a donkey. First he ‘owes his life’ to one, then immediately afterthe establishment of the state (of Israel) he makes his way to the offices of themilitary governor Juha-wise, riding his donkey. Also, as I hinted earlier concerningthe meaning of fadlat as remainder, and judging from Said’s subsequentjackass-like behaviour, the author leads us to believe that the donkey, in dying,may have been reincarnated in Said.From the very first page of the novel, where Said describes himself as a nadl,Habibi emphasises the cowardly aspect of Said’s personality. The word nadl isaccompanied by an ironically (mis)leading footnote that explains its meaning as‘waiter.’ This is not exactly true, for the correct Arabic word for a waiter is nadil,not nadl, which means ‘coward’ in the urban dialects of Palestine. There isabsolutely no reason for the writer to insert a footnote here, as there is nothingobscure about the word nadil (waiter); the only way this footnote can be read isironically, for its purpose is precisely to draw attention to the absent secondmeaning – ‘coward’. The kind of cowardice and self-justifying resignation thatSaid exhibits are exemplified by his Panglossian acceptance of any catastrophebecause things could be worse. There are innumerable other instances of theseironic double-entendres in the work, but I shall single out only one other suchinstance where the author uses humour to engage the reader into the work bymaking him laugh at Said. In Chapter 2, entitled ‘Said Traces His Descent’ (saidyantasib), Said traces his genealogy to the Tweisat Arab tribes (Æarab al-tweisat).The humour here and the double-entendre will be entirely missed if the readeris not familiar with the Palestinian dialect, where tweisat is the plural of thediminutive of tes – literally ‘goat’ but used in ordinary speech to mean ‘thickheaded’.(There is added humour here touching on the names of actual Arabtribes, but it lies outside our area of inquiry.) Later in the novel (Chapter 16,Part One), after Said is beaten and verbally abused for having gone to check onthe house his family evacuated but which is now occupied by Jewish immigrants,he berates himself thus, ‘ana teis! ana teis!’ (‘I’m a jackass! I’m a jackass!’), whosecommunicative meaning here is ‘How stupid of me!’ but which humorouslybrings us back to his genealogy.We see Said’s cowardice on many occasions in the novel – aside from histurning informer for the Israelis – where action is required but all he does is tofind an excuse for doing nothing. An outstanding example occurs in Chapter 6of Book One, where the Israeli officer he was travelling with forces a womanand her two children from the village of Birwe (significantly, the birthplace ofMahmoud Darwish and one of the four hundred or so villages to be destroyed bythe new state) to flee east to Jordan at gunpoint. Here Said feels anger at the— 42 —www.taq.ir