WRITING THE MIDDLE EAST, WRITING GAZA

Selma Dabbagh

WHEN I WAS FIRST ASKED to participate in a panel entitled ‘Living and Writing in the Middle East’ I wondered if I was an impostor, as I don’t live in the Middle East any more, although I have lived there for more than half my life. I also write in English, which presents me with a separate set of challenges and advantages from those who write in Arabic. Born in Scotland and working in London, I am a British-Palestinian writer who has lived in a scattering of Arab countries – but only for a short time in Palestine. My first novel, Out of It, was set in an imagined Gaza that I had only briefly visited. The tension and interaction between the real and the imagined are fertile grounds for literature, but have particular resonance in writing Palestine. After all, my experience of imagining Palestine is not that different from the experience of many Palestinians in the diaspora – as well as so many other exiles and migrants. As an outsider looking in, a woman constantly on the move with a plethora of identities, am I an impostor or a writer whose vantage point can tell us something about the dilemmas and prospects of writing about the Middle East today?

I briefly suggest that the terrain of fiction, or indeed other works of the imagination, from the Middle East, as received by Western audiences at least, has moved from sex to death: from the titillation of One Thousand and One Nights in the nineteenth century to an association of Middle Eastern literature with war, destruction and oppression.

Contemporary writers from the Middle East are therefore presumed to be political. Cultural expectations differ as to whether this is a positive expectation when it comes to the role of the novel. In the Western tradition, the novel is traditionally assumed to be not political, whereas in the Palestinian novel, and to a lesser extent with novels about the Arab world in general, the presumption is reversed.

When my novel started out, I wasn’t quite sure where I was going to place it. I began writing it when the Gulf War erupted in 2003. I had this image of a boy on a roof and he was leaping and there was a fighter jet, but I had the idea that I would situate it in a place that was non-identifiable. Islamophobia was high at the time, and I thought that if I kept place names and the names of the characters out and had Xs and Ys instead, I could cut through a lot of prejudices about the region by explaining it as an unnamed place. I found that there was something in that idea, but I needed to bring it down to earth and locate it somewhere. I decided on Gaza because it felt to me that Gaza was the extremity of the Palestinian situation in terms of the siege by land, sea and air, and also because of the youth of the population, the number of refugees who lived there. The existence of different factions and the Palestinian leadership who had returned also brought to the fore other issues pertinent to where Palestinian society is now. So that was where I decided to place the novel.

When I started, I had this idea that I would be writing a great Palestinian novel that was an epic – it would start in 1948 or just before and it would chart the major events in Palestinian history. But it felt very heavy to me; I didn’t want to go through that history again, having read many memoirs that had covered it already. I wanted to start now, and by starting now I also wanted to keep it light, and I wanted to have an energy and a youthfulness in my work. I decided to focus on the younger generations, as they captured the energy found in Palestinian society, and also because the population of Gaza, which is where I decided to base most of my novel, is so young.

I also wanted to take young people from one extremity of Palestinian society – the children of PLO exiles – and bring them back to Gaza to expose the range of Palestinian identities within the book. I wanted to explore their youth and their energy with regard to political commitment. That was my idea, and I also wanted to write about people who were so competent and had so much energy and hope but no obvious outlet for any of it.

I developed a fictional Gaza. I had a map on my desk that had ‘refugee camp’, ‘wall’ and ‘café’ on it, and my characters moved between these places. I researched it online, looking at blogs, by reading memoirs and talking to friends, but I researched it from the outside, so it was an impressionistic view constructed externally. I have occasionally met people who have said, ‘Well, there isn’t a café like that in Gaza’, but that was not the point – there might be one in Ramallah, I just transposed it. I had to have that kind of a canvas for place because of the nature of my novel and where I was. It freed it from a particular time period, which also meant that I had more flexibility and fluidity in allowing the characters to move, in terms of their not having to move around fixed historical events.

It was a very strange experience going into Gaza after writing it fictionally. I had been there before, but it was odd visiting and seeing whether I’d got it right. I had a mental checklist, thinking, ‘Yes, there are boys with ponytails’ or, ‘Yes, people do these activities’ – things that you can’t research. I did, however, fluctuate a lot when considering whether I had got the tonality of the place right. I would speak to one particularly bright student and feel that I had been too pessimistic, whereas another person’s account would make me feel the situation was far bleaker. One Gazan journalist said I wrote about the place as though I had lived there all my life, which was, of course, deeply satisfying.

The idea that the novel should be separated from politics and that novelists have no role in politics is an old debate in the West, but the pressures on Arab novelists to be political have never been more pertinent than they are now. During the Arab Spring, fiction writers from the Middle East were brought forward to be spokes-people, taking on the role of social commentator. How much fiction writers wish to embrace this role is a very individual matter and as people who write about areas in conflict writers are constantly having to come up with tests in their mind as to where they place themselves on that spectrum; how much they want to become overtly political, what they will and will not comment on, which platforms they will or will not appear on, essentially how much they are willing to pin their colours to the mast. Many fiction writers are not natural campaigners, because they are not skilled that way, or comfortable with the role, or equipped to carry it out.

Writers may also be reluctant to turn themselves into campaigners because it may disrupt the space they need to inhabit to create and the potential of the space they wish to create. Milan Kundera described this aspect of the novel as ‘the imaginary terrain where moral judgement is suspended’. Part of the idea behind the world of fiction is that you are asking people to enter a non-judgemental space and to be carried by the movement of the characters, their personal emotional experiences and the moral conflicts that they face.

A writer cannot exist without readers. English-language fiction readers, I have been led to understand by journalists and publishers, tend to veer away from the Middle East. It’s all too dark, too depressing, too political. At least Latin America has sex and magic. Middle Eastern books have no wizards or bondage and there’s an irrational sense that Arabs don’t really ever fall in love properly. An Arab name can be an albatross around the writer’s neck. It is a positive if you define yourself as an ‘authentic voice’, a spokesperson for the people from where your name originates, but it is unlikely that many publishers will encourage you to write a novel about adultery in Milton Keynes or a transvestite detective in Lisbon with a name like mine. Internationally these trends are starting to be challenged by writers like Michael Ondaatje, Kazuo Ishiguro and Aminatta Forna, who write successfully about characters and geographies distant from their place of origin. It is for Arab novelists writing in English to start opening up wider areas for themselves in the world of fiction, to enable greater experimentation and to challenge preconceptions, to allow for an international belief that artistic excellence is capable of stemming from this region (these names), not just in depicting the region but by analysing more broadly, in a stylistically innovative way, the human condition.

By contrast, Arab novelists writing in Arabic and based in the Arab world can often develop strong localised followings. Their writing captures the nuance, dialectic variation and humour of specific locales. They can capture the spirit of the time and enrich their work with contemporary references. Their writing has a significant local or regional readership. These writers occupy a terrain off bounds to most Arab-origin writers who write in other languages or live outside the Arab world. There is neither the proximity nor the voice.

These Arab-language, Arab-world writers are, however, not supported in the way writers are supported in the West and face additional obstacles when aspiring to reach a broader audience. There are few grants and little state investment in the profession. The film industry in Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria has had more success than the impoverished quaint band of writers of novels and short stories, who still very much go it alone. State censorship on matters sexual and political can demand a level of inventiveness that few Western writers have to even contemplate. Distribution channels in the Arab world are shoddy, copyright protection is weak, agents rarely exist, the idea of books being edited is a curious one. On top of this there is war, occupation, social and political uncertainty and economic austerity in many areas. If I compare myself with the students I met when I was in Gaza, I do not have to deal with electricity outages because the local power station has been bombed; I do not have to read at night by candlelight unless I am feeling particularly whimsical.

If, after this huge struggle, an Arab writer manages to get his or her work to a significant readership the chances of its becoming an international work are small. The book will need to surmount the barriers of translation and publication, as well as the Who’s this Muhammad? Where’s the wizard? prejudices of the book buyer before it has any chance of being a success in the international market. And even then, if the writer succeeds, there’s no guarantee that things will go smoothly. Take Khaled al-Khamissi, who wrote the exceptional Taxi (2006), a work that documented with humour, imagination and wit the trials and tribulations of Cairo’s population at cracking point by depicting the immense potential and everyday heroism of Cairenes, even though he was invited to the Edinburgh International Book Festival, he was denied a visa to enter the UK.

I am always aware of my advantages.

Ahdaf Soueif is eloquent in articulating the idea that there are few people who inhabit the middle ground between the East and the West, and as an British-Palestinian English-language writer I place myself firmly in that mezzaterra. I am aware that there is a body of opinion that gained ground during the anti-colonial struggles of the last century that rails against the writing of the histories of formerly colonised people by people of the previously colonising nations. There was a resistance to histories being ‘appropriated’. Writers were encouraged to stay close to their country’s dialects and language and to ‘decolonise the mind’ of the language of the empire. The battle on this front has not ended, but as someone from a coloniser–colonised heritage in a globalised world, I am representative of how complicated a formulaic application of tests as to who can write what, and how, is likely to become.

My own tests have focused more on content than on form, on authors’ levels of sensitivity towards their subject matter and their responsibility towards it. I concentrate on the way a writer writes rather than on who the writer is in terms of national origin.

There are several difficulties with writing about Palestine. I heard an Israeli academic say that, if you are going to write about this region, there is nothing you can do, because whatever you do you are going to get it in the neck, which I thought was a rather fine way of putting it. However, I have since learned from writer friends that writing about Gaza is nothing compared to the troll activity that will set itself upon authors who write about Virginia Woolf or William Shakespeare. When I first started writing, I had an expectation that I would come up against the Zionist lobby very strongly. That was one concern. The other concern was about not being true or honest, or being somehow irresponsible with the subject matter I was dealing with. I was far more concerned about my Palestinian readership and they have been, in the main, extremely supportive. I was humbled by how much it meant to people in Gaza that I had tried to ensure their troubled land’s place on the literary map.

I have had some negative feedback, which is to be expected: people’s beliefs get rattled, they feel threatened. These were mainly knee-jerk reactions of an ill-informed, rather stupid variety. Who you are, where you stand and how you deal with your subject matter are important, and they affect style.

Another aspect of writing novels about this part of the world is that people have this anticipation of dullness. They feel that they have to go into it with a heavy heart; they would perhaps rather have their teeth pulled than read about Palestine and Israel. The writer needs to inject energy, colour and life, to bring in an emotional story that resonates. I had always wanted to be a writer, but in my mid-twenties I read a book (The Long Night of White Chickens by Francisco Goldman) that was an amazing love story set in Guatemala, and after that I became obsessed with Guatemala – I took to scanning the papers for stories about Guatemala, when I had known nothing of the place before I read the novel.

I’ve developed some personal views with regard to what role literature has in our highly politicised environment, and I’ll list them now.

One is quite obvious: to bear witness and to reclaim history. We are forgetting our own histories. I’ve met Palestinian journalists who grew up in Jordan and didn’t know that Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait in 1990 and 1991. This is the challenge of reclaiming the very recent past, in a way that brings it to life.

Another is to help visualise the future: to find ways of encouraging hope, strength and endurance. A project called ‘Decolonizing Architecture’ made this point very strongly to me. The architects proposed ways of converting installations serving the Israeli military occupation to places for the occupied population. How the walls around settlements would come down, how watchtowers could be converted into bird sanctuaries, how skate parks could replace checkpoints. At first I thought this was nonsense; it was never going to happen, so what were the funders thinking? But my initial rejection was precisely the reason why I ultimately embraced it. I realised how mentally blocked I was at seeing beyond the current impasse and how much of what I read and mulled over focused on problems and not future solutions.

The trouble with translating such positive thinking into literature is that you can easily move towards writing that has a whiff of propaganda about it. Margaret Atwood has a warning for writers: ‘Beware the leitmotif.’ My warning is: ‘Beware the message.’ It’s very difficult for works of fiction to sustain heavy messages, for the reason that I mentioned before – the need for lightness and a belief by the readership that they’re entering a world where they’re being led by characters, not by an outside force that’s driving them one way or the other. Less is sometimes more in terms of presenting political realities in fiction.

Another role of the writer is to create the ‘psychiatric notes’ of a society – to see all elements of one’s society from the most marginalised to the most central within it, to create an awareness of who we, as a people, have become, how we treat each other, how our behaviour impacts upon others.

A writer can also provide solace or comfort through an expression of a commonly shared experience. It was extremely satisfying for me to have Palestinian friends read my book and say to me, ‘I knew exactly who that character was. It was Aboud. It was Foulan.’ It wasn’t Aboud or Foulan, I didn’t know anyone with those names, but they could feel that they knew the characters so well. It’s about not feeling so alone. But it is also very important to me that literature challenges and interrogates society. It’s not just about making people feel comfortable about the way things are, because the situation has never been worse. It’s about how we can change things that are under our control, even if the most critical aspects of our life are not under our control at all (as in the case of Gaza).

The last challenge is actually quite controversial, although it doesn’t sound it. It’s the idea of creating beauty. What is the space for creating beauty in literature and other work when you’re under situations of such extreme strife? There’s a poem by Pablo Neruda that says in effect, ‘How can I write about flowers and volcanoes when there’s the blood of children in the streets?’ But in the Palestinian situation, when such a protracted, brutal set of circumstances is being faced by generation after generation, one starts to think of the role of the artist as being someone who creates something that you’re fighting for and not just someone who expresses what you’re fighting against – someone to portray what is already good, heroic and in many cases absurdly funny about your current reality.

As a writer, you’re never sure when you write on Palestine whether you have any value as a craftsperson. If somebody praises your work you think, ‘Well, you’re only praising it because you like my politics’, and if they hate it you think, ‘You’re only hating it …’ You never feel that you’re really being viewed as a person with a skill who made innumerable decisions to arrive at that particular piece of work. When I occasionally meet someone who says, ‘I thought that opening section was a bit like Dylan Thomas’, or something along those lines, I get very excited.

Palestinian writers are also learning to accept the unacceptable, that their writing will sometimes just get blocked, or censored in incomprehensible ways. To dwell too much on this can turn you into a conspiracy theorist, but it does happen. Judgements have to be taken as to which battles to fight. In the meantime, you just need to try harder the next time, to be strategic, to hope the stars are configured differently, to trust that you have readers who value your work. And to remember that it is easier now than it was in the past and that we will open the way for others. Try again, fail again, fail better, as the Samuel Beckett postcard above my desk advises me.

There’s one more specific issue and that concerns hybridity. I believe it can strengthen a writer’s vision to be always a little bit outside the subject they are covering, to have an insider/outsider viewpoint and to be are aware of different cultures. Michael Ondaatje has talked about the growth of ‘mongrel literature’. I like this expression. More and more of us are becoming mongrelised. There’s more and more intermarriage and greater movements of people across borders. There’s a global awareness, a growing cosmopolitanism, that allows for a greater understanding and more of a global identity, free of ethnic, religious and racial suspicions. I subscribe to that. I write for that.