Afterword

The loneliness of the Palestinian [in Israel] . . . is the greatest loneliness of all.

—Anton Shammas, Arabesque

The Book of Disappearance is a novel about the Palestinians who survived the nakba of 1948 and remained in Palestine. They did not become refugees, like those who are still scattered in a vast diaspora and in refugee camps in Palestine itself and in neighboring countries. Those who survived inside Palestine live(d) (under military rule until 1966) as second-class citizens in the state of Israel. The author herself is a descendant of those survivors. One branch of her family was forced out of their home in Jaffa and were internally displaced. Her short stories and novels (Sifr al-Ikhtifa’; The Book of Disappearance is her second) are informed by imagination, of course, but by living memories and visceral personal experiences too.

“Survivors are lonely,” writes Alaa, one of the two main narrators in the novel, when he remembers his late grandmother. He, too, suffers from and has inherited a version of this immense loneliness. Because he lives in the ruins and remains of a Palestine that was. A Palestine that survived intact only in his grandmother’s memory. He, after all, was born in the state of Israel, a settler-colonial state premised on the destruction of Palestine and the negation of the existence and history of its indigenous population. More than 400 villages were destroyed and/or depopulated in 1948 and 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes.¹ Major Palestinian cities that were the centers of a dynamic and integrated sociocultural life were occupied and their populations forced to flee. A small percentage of those who remained were herded into fenced neighborhoods (this is what happens to the grandmother and her generation). The Israeli state erased neighborhood and street names and replaced them with new ones. Israel cannibalized Palestinian land and property.

The stories Alaa’s grandmother recounts and the characters in them inhabit a Jaffa and a Palestine Alaa struggles to recognize. The sense of acute alienation a Palestinian inside Israel feels, particularly one who knew and lived in Palestine before 1948, is poignantly crystallized in the grandmother’s statement: “I walk in the city, but it doesn’t recognize me.” The relationship with one’s surroundings is disfigured and forever severed.

There are two Jaffas, Alaa writes. “Your Jaffa resembles mine, but it is not the same. Two cities impersonating each another. You carved your names in my city and so I feel like I am a returnee from history. Always tired, roaming my own life like a ghost. Yes, I am a ghost who lives in your city. You, too, are a ghost, living in my city. We call both cities ‘Jaffa.’”

Only belatedly, and retroactively, does Alaa begin to fully understand his grandmother’s trauma and that of her generation. He begins to actively unlearn and debunk the official Zionist history he had to internalize in the educational system to pass. He preserves his grandmother’s memory and deploys it as an oral history to counter and resist Zionist history and the official narrative of the colonial state—a narrative where he is, for all intents and purposes, absent. The Palestinians who were displaced from their villages in 1948 and who were internally displaced were designated by Israeli law as “present-absentees.” Alaa removes street signs and crosses out colonial nomenclature, giving streets (back) their Palestinian names.

The central event that triggers and sustains the narrative structure of the novel is the inexplicable disappearance of all Palestinians. The effects of this event on Israelis and the spectrum of reactions and responses in the forty-eight hours that follow occupies a significant part of the novel. What the author imagines and narrates is the colonial fantasy par excellence. The most often quoted motto in Zionist discourse is, “A land without a people for a people without a land.” Zionist leaders in the last century have offered variations on this theme. Golda Meir (1898–1978), who was the prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, stated that “[t]here is no such thing as Palestinians.” Another prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin (1922–1995) hoped that “Gaza would sink into the sea.” The native as a nuisance, obstacle, and threat is a typical colonial trope. But the natives’ total disappearance is as disquieting and threatening as their presence. One is reminded of Cavafy’s lines in “Waiting for the Barbarians”: “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians/Those people were a kind of solution.”

The Israeli responses to the disappearance range from indignation and feelings of betrayal to relief and joy. If the religious zealots rejoice and consider the disappearance a miracle, the secular liberals, believers in the state’s secular miracles, think it is a military or intelligence operation. There is also the lone voice of the radical leftist, an endangered species.

Ariel’s mother doesn’t sing and dance to celebrate divine intervention, but she goes to Haifa to find one of those empty beautiful houses “abandoned” by the absent Palestinians. Ariel is uncomfortable with the vulgarity of the settlers who rush to occupy and consecrate the spaces vacated by Palestinians. But it doesn’t take him too long to feel at home in Alaa’s apartment. He sleeps there to wait and see, but as the state’s deadline approaches, he seems to be comfortable in his friend’s place and we can assume that he will make it his own.

The material and discursive colonization of the geographic place called Palestine continues. The nakba, “that year” as Alaa’s grandmother calls it, is still ongoing in its effects and practices. Having taken over the land and the houses and changed the names, what remains to be usurped is memory, collective and individual. But memory is the last trench and refuge, and a space that cannot be expropriated by law or force.

“The old will die and the young will forget,” is a saying attributed to David Ben Gurion (1886–1973) about how Palestinians will react to Israel. The grandmother’s death and Alaa’s longing for her compel him to start writing. He writes in his journal to recall his conversations with her, maintain the bond, and remember Jaffa and Palestine. The old have died, but the young have not forgotten and will not forget—this is what Alaa demonstrates. His red notebook, like the novel’s end, remains open.

The ghosts of the dead will continue to haunt, demanding justice and recognition, and the living will write and remember.

Ariel wants to appropriate Alaa’s words and memories and claim the narrative as his own. This novel itself is another red notebook, but it has not fallen (exclusively) into Ariel’s hands. It will be open for all to read. Art here achieves one of its most powerful effects: preserving memory and defending life with beauty.

Sinan Antoon

October 2018, New York

1. For more, see Illan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (OneWorld Publications, 2006).