LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

irony and the poetics of palestinian exilescene of the Jewish officer with his gun at the woman’s head, and wants to jumpto her rescue, but then he remembers his parents’ advice and does nothing:At this I tensed, ready to spring at him, come what may. After all, the blood of youthsurged hot within me, at my age then of twenty-four. And not even a stone couldhave been unmoved at this sight. However, I recalled my father’s final counsel andmy mother’s blessing and then said to myself, ‘I certainly shall attack him if he fireshis gun. But so far he is merely threatening her.’ I remained at the ready. (Jayyusi andLe Gassick 1992: 15)In this example we see at work the double irony I referred to earlier. If Saidwaits to act till the Jewish officer fires his gun, then it will have been too late forthe woman and her two children. Yet in this incident we also see the other sideof the equation. It is perhaps equally cowardly of the officer with the gun to holdit against the head of a helpless Palestinian refugee, and thereby force her toleave her village and flee her country. But then in nation building it is not themoral equation that counts, but the political, for in the end the country wasemptied and the gun was the victor. Of course, from his perspective the Jewishofficer is also faced with a dilemma. The Palestinian woman being a persona nongrata in the state that is being established, he too faces a difficult moral choice,so he makes the choice that relieves his conscience by saving her life but forcingher to flee her country. We see here a refugee problem being created, and somethingelse that is not to the officer’s liking. True, he has forced the woman toleave and emerged the winner in this situation, yet ‘the race is not always to theswift’. As the woman and her child walk east towards Jordan, Said observes anamazing event:At this point I observed the first example of that amazing phenomenon that was tooccur again and again until I finally met my friends from outer space. For the furtherthe woman and child went from where we were, the governor standing and I in thejeep, the taller she grew. By the time they merged with their own shadows in thesinking sun they had become bigger than the plain of Acre itself. The governor stoodstill there awaiting their final disappearance, while I remained huddled in the jeep.Finally he asked in amazement, ‘Will they never disappear?’ (Jayyusi and Le Gassick1992: 16)The ironies multiply. This woman has been made absent, but she is not absentcompletely; she is still present even if only as a tall shadow. She is present-absentin her shadow.The hyphenated identity we encountered in al-Qasim is not necessarily a badstate of affairs, except when the terms on either side of the hyphen representmutually contrary, or contradictory, states. The hyphen is a generative boundary;one can add any term to the left of or to the right, and each addition is anaccretion in identity; for example, it is possible to be a Palestinian Arab-American, a Scottish Palestinian Arab, or even a Palestinian Arab-American— 43 —www.taq.ir