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<\/a>I started a new novel not too long ago,\u00a0Verses of Forgiveness<\/i><\/a>,<\/i>\u00a0by Myriam Antaki and translated from the French by Marjolin de Jager<\/a>. Antaki<\/a>\u00a0is a Syrian novelist who writes in French. Verses of Forgiveness, <\/i>which is narrated in a lyrical, dream-like prose by Ahmed, a Palestinian suicide bomber preparing his attack,\u00a0<\/i>is her first book to be translated into English.<\/p>\nI\u2019ve read the first 30 or so pages of Verses\u00a0<\/em>and I am fascinated. The first section of the book is Ahmed\u2019s lyrical evocation of his own identity. \u201cI am,\u201d he begins, \u201ca terrorist, a dreamer. I have removed my mask of bliss for that of fear and sweat. I have lost.\u201d He hints at his first loss, that of his parents, on the very first page, pointing out that they did not name him, but the loss he spends the most time talking about in this section is of Iman, \u201cthe most beautiful girl in the Baalbek brothel.\u201d He loves her, or at least thinks he does, despite the fact that he has shared her \u201cwith so many others,\u201d and he seems to regret the fact that his feelings for her, rooted in the sex they\u2019ve had, are not strong enough to sway him from his course.<\/p>\n Forgive me, I cannot change my way of thinking despite your body and your pleasure. Do not forget me, it is easier to remember someone who is dead than someone alive who loves another. I am taking our night cries with me. (4)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It\u2019s interesting that Antaki chooses to begin Ahmed\u2019s meditation with this farewell not just to a woman, but to the pleasures of sex and the human connection sex creates, or, perhaps more accurately, the\u00a0humanizing effect of sex on him. In this way, Antaki both reveals and begins to critique the hypermasculinity of terrorism, while at the same time, because Ahmed\u2019s voice is so lyrical and poetic, rendering the beauty terrorism has, the allure and inevitability it has because of that beauty, for those who choose to enter into its ideology.<\/p>\n It would be easy to deny Ahmed\u2019s meditation as mere, if nonetheless dangerous sentimentality, except that doing so would mean failing to read his words in the context of the similarly hypermasculine Israeli occupation. He is, in other words, his ideology is, a product of his time and place. Both he and it, therefore, need to be taken seriously, not just because terrorists kill innocent people\u2014so do the Israelis in pursuing and maintaining their occupation (and it does not matter for my purposes here whether you think this pursuit is justified in the name of self-defense or not); we need to take Ahmed seriously also because the question of how to step outside his\u00a0hypermasculine logic is one to which the Middle East, and the world in general, desperately need an answer.<\/p>\n Antaki confronts her character with this question by throwing him a real curveball. His Palestinian mother, whom he thought was dead and who, after a long search, finds him one day in the arms of Iman, hands over to Ahmed his Jewish father’s diaries. It turns out that his father escaped the Nazis during World War II.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are not many Jews in your town, but your name is David, I cannot believe it. The joy of finding you and then suddenly losing you, obliterating you. Father, you are a Jew! It is you whom I deny and assassinate. Life\u2019s effrontery produces buried mysteries, trembling and shouting voices. I am afraid of the truth, it sometimes delineates accursed and irreparable destinies.\u201d (21)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I assume that much of the rest of the novel will be about Ahmed\u2019s coming to terms with this truth. At this point, all he does is imagine his father\u2019s childhood in Europe at time of the Nazi occupation of France. What interests me here is Ahmed\u2019s evocation of the Shabbat services his father attended and the how, in Ahmed\u2019s imagination, the prayers connect the Jews who are praying under occupation to the land of Israel. \u201cIn the clergyman\u2019s words [the people at the service] unravel the mysteries of a distant land beyond the seas, a country of prophets where milk and honey flow\u201d (34).<\/p>\n As Ahmed understands it, it seems, Israel is a mythical place to the Jews of Europe, a place that exists only in their imaginations and that, in their imaginations, is<\/i> the \u201cland of milk and honey,\u201d not a contemporary place, inhabited by people, with an economy, a politics, a history of its own. I don\u2019t want to make more of this in terms of the novel itself, since I have not yet read enough to know what Antaki is going to do with it, but it struck a chord in me nonetheless because it is a central tenet of one argument people sometimes use to delegitimize Jewish nationalism\u2014and I use that term rather than Zionism simply because I want to name the feeling that I am talking about and not get caught up in the question of whether, given the actions and policies of the Israeli government, Zionism can only<\/i>\u00a0signify the political ideology of that government.<\/p>\n I am aware that what it means to say that the Jews are a people, a nation, is complicated, not least by the fact that European<\/i>\u00a0Jewish nationalism, with its focus on establishing the State of Israel, was not unequivocally embraced by Jews in other parts of the world. Nonetheless, to suggest that the feeling itself is purely fantasy, rooted only in ties to a mythical place and not in a felt cultural and historical connection between and among Jews is to deny the Jews\u2019 own understanding of our identity. I\u2019m not arguing that this feeling gives Jews the right to a Jewish state in the land of Israel. That\u2019s a whole other question. I am just wary of the kind of thinking Ahmed displays in quote above.<\/p>\n Like I said, I don\u2019t want to say more in terms of the novel itself. I am, however, very interested to see what Antaki does with this.<\/p>\n Cross-posted<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I started a new novel not too long ago,\u00a0Verses of Forgiveness,\u00a0by Myriam Antaki and translated from the French by Marjolin de Jager. Antaki\u00a0is a Syrian novelist who writes in French. Verses of Forgiveness, which is narrated in a lyrical, dream-like … Continue reading