LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

ibrahim muhawiCanadian. One can share in all the subjectivities on both sides of the hyphenwithout contradiction. This situation holds true for countries that do not defineidentity in terms of ethnicity, or religion, or both, as does Israel, which GershonShafir and Yoav Peled define as an ethnic democracy. 10 The pressing questionhere is this: ‘Is it possible to bridge the gap across the hyphen of identity forPalestinian Israelis?’ Darwish wrestled with this question in his autobiographicalmemoir, Journal of an Ordinary Grief. Darwish’s family had escaped to Lebanonin 1948, and sneaked back into the homeland after the establishment of thestate of Israel, too late to be included in the census of Palestinian Arabs. He wastherefore never given official papers, and was constantly hounded by the police.In his reflection on the question of his identity, he arrives at the conclusion thatits most characteristic feature is ambiguity:Once at Le Bourget Airport in France, and again in one of the streets of Sophia.Your destiny was insisting on being defined. And your identity, ambiguous onpaper but shining clearly in the heart, was demanding that you put yourself inharmony with it. As if you had to arrive in one single movement from the beginningof your life to this question: ‘Who are you?’The French police could not understand something which the Israeli police itselfdid not understand. Your travel document says you are of ambiguous nationality. Andin vain you try to explain to the French police the meaning of this ambiguity, for yourclarification does not help him absorb the added ambiguity imposed by his colleaguein Tel Aviv. Where were you born? In Palestine. And where do you live? In Israel.Therefore you are ambiguous. (1973: 9)This state of existential ambiguity is, I think, the best explanation for theimpulse towards irony in Palestinian literature. To some extent, irony itself is anambiguous mode. It is not always obviously there; some may see an ironicintention in a text while others may not. It may also be that irony arises out ofextreme conditions where there is a negation of identity, or where it is threatened.Habibi’s Said, the Palestinian-Israeli hero, or anti-hero, is characterised by adouble ambiguity; having become a citizen of Israel, he is no longer a Palestinian,but he cannot be a genuine Israeli for all his informing. In this novel, thehyphen of identity becomes a generative metaphor, a trope, which conflatesidentity and boundary, acting as a marker not only of a geographical boundarybetween Israel and Palestine but a psychological one as well. In using the wordPalestine here I am not referring to the West Bank, but to the Palestine thatexists underneath and side by side with Israel and within Israel. (The bestliterary entrée to Palestine-Israel as palimpsest is Anton Shammas’s Arabesques,particularly the opening section, the most lyrical in the novel, where the authorre-creates his childhood in the Galilee.)The terms on both sides of our notional hyphen constitute the basis ofidentity in the novel. We thus have Palestinian subjectivity on one side, and— 44 —www.taq.ir