LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

amy zalmanimages beget their own likenesses in other contexts. Thought is never productivebut circular. Hamid’s recollection of his father’s arm, hanging limply by hisside in death, recalls the memory of his father’s arm around his mother inlovemaking. The unachievable condition embedded in the phrase, ‘if only ourmother were here’ structures both every disappointment and every celebrationin the lives of Hamid and Maryam. Their repertoire of words and images is asmall one; with a whirlpool’s force, they always return the narrative to 1948, themoment at which national and family disaster intersected, and the worldcontracted for Hamid and Maryam into one traumatic reference point ofungraspable loss to which all experiences and utterances repetitiously refer. Ifphysical space has been colonised, so has inner life; each time Hamid orMaryam want to think a new thought, they find they have no language for it,and that there is nowhere to go but the limited vocabulary of childhood and itsunrealisable desires. In both their verbal and erotic exchanges, then, brotherand sister recycle a finite amount of psychic and linguistic material whichalways returns them to their father’s condition: there will be no licit expressionsof desire until the national cause is decided. Hamid’s decision to leave Gaza andwalk the Desert to his mother, far from being a step out of this cycle, is a stepinto it. Not only does he return to the geographic site of national loss, but to thepsychic moment of desire’s contraction into a tangled family romance fromwhich there seems to be no exit.Another way of saying this is that the novel as a whole distorts linguisticstructures, if lyrically, to accommodate the prohibition of marriage: the pairingof terms never produces a third term. Instead, the novel contains dizzyingrepetitions of the same triangulated relationship in which three terms are alwaysreduced to an unproductive and in some way illicit pairing. The evocation ofthe prohibition in the text is itself arrived at via a jagged, but almost schematic,movement through triangulated relationships reduced to pairings. Maryam andZakaria lie in bed together on their first night of marriage. The couple lie inHamid’s old bed, establishing a triangular relationship between Maryam, Hamidand Zakaria. Maryam asks Zakaria to tell her the name of his first wife (to whomhe is still married, and with whom he has five children), which reminds thereader of a second triangulated relationship, Zakaria’s with Maryam and his firstwife, Fathiyya. The mention of the name leads Maryam to recall her childhoodfriend of the same name. This girlfriend, Fathiyya, had always joked withMaryam that one day she would marry her off to her brother, Fathi. WhileMaryam’s mother found the idea of the match amusing, its mention made herfather shout instead, ‘Do not talk about marriage before our national cause hasbeen decided!’ (Kanafani 1990: 19/189).While Maryam’s train of thought leads her to her father’s pronouncement,the dizzying multiples of names and roles can also be seen as resulting from it.— 70 —www.taq.ir