LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

amy zalmanthe nation, whose actors are Abul Khaizuran, shifting from foot to foot in theuncomfortable moment, and the three men in the tank. Abul Khaizuran knowshe does not want to repeat the story that has already been told, and we can guessthat he would like to move forward into the story that awaits him outside into aself-determined history he’ll author himself. But when Abu Baqir, holding AbulKhaizuran’s passage papers behind his back, asks him to introduce him toKawkab on his next trip to Basra, Abul Khaizuran gives in. Defeated, he tells alie, and says he will. ‘On your honour?’ ‘On my honour.’Abul Khaizuran’s failure at this moment extends beyond an incompetence ofcharacter, or even of the political will he represents. His rejoinder – ‘If Haj Ridahas already told you the story, why do you want me to tell it again?’ – offers alinguistically precise representation of the cleavage between gender and nationalidentity. Abul Khaizuran’s attempt at rejoinder splits, almost too easily, intoequal halves divorced by a comma. On one side of the cleaved phrase (‘If HajRida has already told you the story’) is repetition without alteration, possiblytold by a rich Kuwaiti businessman to a bored Iraqi official (although that toomight be a fabrication), about masculinity that expresses itself by sex withprostitutes. On the other side of the comma (‘Why do you want me to tell itagain?’) lies potential: a question, an attempted refusal to repeat the repetitivenarrative, an inchoate attempt by Abul Khaizuran to speak masculinity as helives it, in relation to his history.In the few seconds it takes to utter the sentence, the mechanics of narrativehistory are revealed, as is the structural rupture, that space between the phrases,that would permit the admission of a new kind of story about what hashappened to this Palestinian man. Jean Luc Nancy points out that the seamlessnesswith which historical narrative typically presents itself is itself a giveawaythat it is not seamless, for ‘history, fulfilled, enclosed within its own closure,indicates by itself that the closure has to “give” in one point … and that in thispoint, consequently, meaning does not link up with its own presence. To be themeaning that “is,” it defers itself and differs from itself’ (1990: 104–5). Thispermeable enclosure out of which history’s meaning is always seeping, in excessof the story History proposes to tell, is structurally akin to Bhabha’s vision of thenation-space edged by a pervious, negotiable border. But Abul Khaizuran,almost embodying a new history, almost telling a new story, or in the mosthopeful scenario, almost leaving the compound for the men outside, does notmake it across the border, or even across the sentence. When he gives in to AbuBaqir and agrees to tell the story again, he also refuses the historical possibilityhe has just posited. But nor is everything as it was before. In the split secondbetween the two clauses he creates a breach that will not be closed up again.When he attempts to step back into the tired story of masculinity defined byclaims to virility, the men outside in the truck have already died. In his moment— 62 —www.taq.ir