![\"verses3.jpeg\"](\"http:\/\/richardjnewman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/verses3.jpeg\")
<\/a>I continue to be fascinated with this book\u2014part 1 of this\u00a0reading journal is here<\/a>\u2014and\u00a0with the effort Ahmed (the narrator) makes, even while he is planning a suicide attack against Israel, to imagine his Jewish father’s life. The author, Myriam Antaki, sets the two men up as almost mirror images of each other: Ahmed, the disenfranchised, exiled, oppressed, orphaned Palestinian; his father, the disenfranchised, exiled, oppressed, orphaned European Jew; each one\u00a0looking to reclaim for himself and his people a land he thinks of as home. But there is another parallel as well, this one involving a woman.\u00a0Ahmed loves Iman, the prostitute in whose arms his mother finds him when she reveals to him who his father was.\u00a0The fact that Iman\u00a0is a prostitute, a woman who survives by selling her body, is important\u2014or, to be more precise, the fact that Ahmed does not see her prostitution as a betrayal of his love, as a rejection of\u00a0who he is, is important, though I don’t know enough yet about how Ahmed became radicalized, about the actual circumstances of his life, to find this importance in more than the way Ahmed’s feelings about Iman form an interesting parallel and contrast to his father’s experience with Aline.<\/p>\nAline is a women\u2014it’s not clear to me whether or not she’s Jewish\u2014with whom\u00a0his father\u00a0has a brief encounter on the beach in the midst of the Nazi occupation. That encounter means a great deal to Ahmed’s father, who thinks of Aline, “her ivory skin, her face pale with pleasure” in order to “forget [his] pain…and [the pain]\u00a0of others” (39). On the very next page, however, Ahmed’s father sees Aline with Von Postel, the German in charge of the occupation.\u00a0His “nobleman’s hands\u00a0are\u00a0touching Aline, while she comes\u00a0“close to him…show[ing] him her eyes, her lips, her half-open blouse” (40).\u00a0Ahmed’s father experiences this\u00a0as a deep, deep betrayal on Aline’s part. For him, she “is the shimmering woman, a sea angel who crumples her underwear to give [him]\u00a0a thrust of that body, that heart which [he]\u00a0believe[s] to be celestial,” but, when he sees her with Von Postel, his “sadness plunges deep into [his] entrails” and the night’s stars slowly burn his heart (40).<\/p>\n
In offering herself to Von Postel,\u00a0Aline\u2014and from this perspective it doesn’t really matter whether she is Jewish or not\u2014is arguably doing precisely the same thing that Iman does in the brothel, selling herself to survive. So it’s interesting that Ahmed does not idealize Iman in the same way that his father idealizes Aline, that he does not feel the same betrayal as his father in the knowledge that the woman he loves also sells\u00a0herself to other men. (It’s not clear whether Ahmed pays Iman, though I suspect that he does.) I don’t know exactly what to make of this yet, but there\u00a0seems to be a connection between Ahmed’s father’s idealization of Aline and\u00a0the idealization of “the promised land” that Ahmed attributes to his father. On the other hand, Ahmed’s colder, more realistic, even more resigned stance towards Iman\u2014who, one might say, because of her profession and the role it plays in a male dominant culture,\u00a0has quite clearly been occupied\u2014seems to mirror what the novel depicts as the more\u00a0clear-sighted stance that the Palestinians have towards their occupied land.<\/p>\n
There is more to say about this, but I want to turn my attention to an\u00a0aspect of the novel that I mentioned in the very first sentence of this post: the way it\u00a0captures\u00a0the effort Ahmed makes to enter imaginatively into\u00a0his father’s life, to understand the circumstances\u2014as far as Ahmed can know them\u2014that brought his father to\u00a0what was then Palestine.\u00a0I was struck in particular by Ahmed’s rendering of his father’s and grandmother’s experience in one of the cattle cars the Nazis used to transport Jews to the camps:<\/p>\n
Meant for thirty men, eighty are crammed in. To perish by smothering is one way to die. It is a shorter death, happening with the same indifference as the wind falls or the star are extinguished. The people\u00a0imagine the pain in their bodies. Their eyes take on a color of peril and stone.<\/p>\n
Father, you try to help your mother, to support her as she mounts the last step into the car.\u00a0You fear that frailty that is turning her lips and eyes colorless…. Piled into the cars, going off to a place where people no longer have the\u00a0strength to stand up. The Germans refuse to leave a single door ajar. To survive you have to stay in a vertical position, motionless and silent. It is a sweating, shouting free-for-all. You understand that the least dangerous position is\u00a0tightly in a corner of the car where the\u00a0pressure of the others is less. That is where you put your mother and you form a screen to ward off any knocks against her….<\/p>\n
The men have swallowed the last bottles\u00a0of beer and wine and drink their own sweat to fight off thirst. The latrine buckets are overflowing. People relieve themselves on the floor if they can. Some are throwing up, others shout for\u00a0something to drink….<\/p>\n
People can no longer endure their skin, their sweat, their breathing. They go naked, and some feel an erotic desire in a last unhealthy sensuality. Others vomit and die. The corpses are stacked up in the back of the car. Your mother is silent, words remain glued to her suffering, to the abyss.\u00a0(45-47)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What strikes me here is\u00a0Ahmed’s\u2014and, of course, Antaki’s by extension\u2014commitment to rendering the suffering as fully as possible, a commitment which bespeaks a desire to understand,\u00a0an awareness that this kind of\u00a0understanding is somehow necessary, is what underlies our ability to see an Other as a fellow human being. At the same time, understanding this kind of suffering is, in some sense, easy. After all, not to see this suffering, not to apprehend it almost immediately, is at least implicitly\u00a0to excuse the Nazi ideology that underwrote it, which\u00a0would immediately remove pretty much any credibility from anything else Ahmed (and Antaki) had\u00a0to say.<\/p>\n
I do not mean by this that the effort Antaki makes through\u00a0Ahmed to imagine the Jewish experience of the Shoah\u00a0is in any way trivial or somehow of secondary importance. Indeed, I think you can measure just how important it is by how many people in the world are unwilling to\u00a0undertake that same humanizing effort\u00a0on behalf of the Palestinians, whose story may not include a dictator hell bent on wiping them entirely from the fact of the earth, but whose very human suffering for the sake of their land and their national identity is no less real than that of the\u00a0Jews.<\/p>\n
This imaginative act, of course, is not by itself enough to change anything about the situation between the Israelis and the Palestinians,\u00a0or between the people around the world who have lined up on either side of that conflict; but without this\u00a0act of imagination, I do not think any real change is possible.<\/p>\n
Cross-posted<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I continue to be fascinated with this book\u2014part 1 of this\u00a0reading journal is here\u2014and\u00a0with the effort Ahmed (the narrator) makes, even while he is planning a suicide attack against Israel, to imagine his Jewish father’s life. The author, Myriam Antaki, … Continue reading