12 - 18 July 2001
Issue No.542
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 12 - 18 July 2001 Issue No.542 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Souvenirs of the land to come
Le Bien des absents (Absentees' Property) Elias Sanbar, Paris: Actes Sud, 2001. pp141In his new book, Absentees' Property, Elias Sanbar, founder and editor of the French- language review Revue d'études palestiniennes (Review of Palestinian Studies), member since 1988 of the Palestinian National Council and member of the Palestinian delegation to the 1992 Washington peace negotiations, looks back on a life spent entirely within the Palestinian cause, fighting, as his earlier 1996 book Palestine, le pays à venir (Palestine: the Land to Come) made clear, for the recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people and for Israeli- Palestinian dialogue and eventual reconciliation. However, when compared to this earlier book, which as well as presenting recent history to a French-speaking audience also gave a generally optimistic account of prospects for a lasting peace within the framework of the Peace Process, Absentees' Property, Sanbar's memoirs, seems pessimistic about the future despite its charm and humour. This is a book haunted by the voices and images of the past, and absence and the figure of the absentee are motifs repeated throughout the narrative as Sanbar recollects friends he has lost over his life of enforced exile, finally asking himself when he returns to former family houses first in Beirut and then in Haifa "what is the traveler looking for when he returns to his country -- the place of his birth or of his death?" Arriving at his former family home and birthplace in Haifa in 1995 after an absence of more than 40 years, Sanbar finds it in the hands of the Israeli Agency for the Property of Absentees (the Direction israélienne des biens des absents), his former room cold and locked shut.
A Palestinian woman brandishing two militiamen helmets during a memorial service at the Sabra Camp in Beirut, Sept. 1982
Sanbar's autobiographical narrative is roughly chronological, though there are some significant gaps, and he chooses to concentrate on certain key episodes in it as well as various important friendships. The first of these episodes is, inevitably, his family's fleeing Palestine in 1948, when Sanbar was only 15 months old. This primary exclusion gives rise to the life in exile that follows it, as the young Sanbar becomes gradually aware of this first and most painful absence, that of his homeland. However, it also allows him quickly to demonstrate the humour that marks out his memoirs. Convinced that theirs would be at worst a temporary exile of a few months or so, in fleeing Haifa for Beirut Sanbar's parents had abandoned the family's prized mahogany furniture, which included an imposing art nouveau wardrobe and a "sideboard made of mogono with three drawers" ("mogono, I learnt by chance 30 years later is the Arabic term for mahogany, a variety of Caribbean wood"). As a result of the good offices of the Bishop of Galilee, some of these objects are later returned, though the bishop himself keeps others, much to the disgust of Sanbar's father: "The Jews have stolen our country, and now he's stolen our furniture!" However, in one of the wardrobe's drawers there are precious documents from the past: "the title deeds to our house, our birth certificates, the red passports with British Mandate for Palestine on the front, my father's pass for the port area where he worked and a few trinkets of my mother's folded up in a white linen handkerchief that she had put there the day she carried me with her to Lebanon. Our former life had just caught up with us."
From then on, Elias Sanbar's "former life" never leaves him, even though this was a life that he himself was not old enough ever to have lived, and his is a Palestine built, at best, outside that country's borders. However, the physical absence of Palestine does not stop Sanbar, as it did not stop others of his generation, from cultivating a strong Palestinian identity. In his early twenties in June 1967, from early adolescence in Beirut on Sanbar "never stopped going out into the streets" to demonstrate: "nationalisation of the Suez Canal, Tripartite Aggression against Egypt, Syrian-Egyptian unity, end of Syrian-Egyptian unity, Algerian independence, June 1967 defeat, support for the Palestinian revolution, Black September, death of Nasser, massacre of the fedayeen in the Ajloun forest, October 1973 War...." Absentees' Property contains a swift compte-rendu of these heady years, together with a thoughtful account of pre-war Lebanon, it being, he remarks "with the tacit agreement of neighbouring regimes, ... the successful marriage of wild commerce and political liberalism. Everybody did well out of it: businessmen, artists, bankers and militants, tourists and tour-guides...Nobody wanted to look behind the scenes towards the countryside ... or to the poor in the south of the country." Immediately following Arab defeat in 1967, Sanbar's father suffers a fatal heart attack having failed in his ambition to recover either the rest of his furniture or his Haifa olive groves. But "don't be sad," he tells his son. "No one will be able to get rid of us. Palestine is a blockage in the world's throat; don't worry, no one will be able to swallow it."
As the seventies wear on and the eighties arrive Sanbar finds himself in demand on the international conference-circuit, though he does not hold out much hope that this by itself will lead to the recovery of absent Palestine. In 1988, he spends some time in Athens, a guest of the Greek Government, which had first made available, and then withdrawn, a boat to take certain prominent Palestinians to the shores of Palestine in the glare of the international media. Hanging about the city's Intercontinental Hotel, Sanbar surveys the scene: "English lords and ladies, English Trotskyites handing out political tracts, representatives of Scandinavian non- governmental organisations, an imposing delegation of Egyptian writers and intellectuals, Israeli pacifists, Israeli journalists... priests, sheikhs, 'progressive' rabbis, a group of highly relaxed Dominicans, journalists from the American networks with their engineers, heavy equipment, boats and helicopters so they could broadcast the whole thing live..." Sitting next to Youssef Chahine in the foyer he spots Egyptian actress Tahiyya Cariocca wearing a tracksuit and sporting an impressive wig.
Though gently mocking affairs of this sort, Sanbar recognises the purpose of such "events." In general, he, however, takes a rather different path towards the recovery of Palestine, being that of writing, teaching and historical research. Much of the book therefore concerns his efforts to reconstruct a Palestine of the mind in the face of Israeli efforts to erase it; the Review that he founded and edits, together with the parent Institute for Palestinian Studies based in Beirut and Paris, are part of this memory work, which as Sanbar put it in Palestine: the Land to Come, will eventually come into its own as a vital foundation for the future, spanning the historical hiatus after 1948. The Review, however, like Sanbar himself, has long been more ecumenical than that; the current issue, that for Summer 2001, contains heartfelt tributes to the late Jérôme Lindon, for example, founder of the prestigious independent Paris publishing house Les Editions de minuit, publisher of figures as different as Beckett and Deleuze, a friend of Sanbar's and publisher of the Revue d'études palestiniennes.
Sanbar's memoirs also raise the question of their author's francophilia, it being by no means obvious that he would throw in his luck, linguistically speaking, with France, given that an elder brother had early on emigrated instead from Lebanon to the United States. However, Sanbar's adoption of French seems naturally linked to his cultural and literary ambitions, and these modulate into other significant collaborations and friendships, such as those with Jean Genet and filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, which are described here. Godard was making a film on the PLO in 1969 called "Until Victory" (Jusqu'à la victoire), and Sanbar was on the production team. His mother, intrigued by this Frenchman who wanted to film the "real Palestine," informs him that "you know, Monsieur Jean-Luc, Palestine is a dreeeeeeeam". Genet, who wrote a well-known piece on the 1982 massacres carried out at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut for the Review of Palestinian Studies and whose posthumous work Un Captif amoureux (Prisoner of Love, 1986) records, in inimitable fashion, his involvement in Palestinian affairs from the 1970s on, tells Sanbar that "I am for the Palestinians because they are the only ones to have welcomed me unconditionally"; "people ask me why I help the Palestinians. What a stupid question! They have helped me to live."
For his part, Sanbar, though up to now in perpetual exile seems almost at home in France. A visiting professor at Princeton University in New Jersey in the early 1990s ("the professor bit flattered me, but I liked the visiting best"), Sanbar apparently did not enjoy the United States, though most of the episodes he recounts here seem good-humoured enough. Appearing on an unlikely television debate on the Gulf War with the actor Charlton Heston and the British journalist Christopher Hitchens, mistakenly described as the editor of the New York weekly The Nation, "Ben Hur had just one idea: 'We must ex-ter-mi-nate.' After a long dialogue of the deaf, Hitchens asked him a question, 'Can you name the countries that border Iraq?' Ben Hur was outraged; the question was 'unfair'....[but] in this way I learned that Iraq was somewhere between Afghanistan and Mongolia. I counted the days before my return to Paris."
While Sanbar thus felt doubly exiled across the Atlantic, yearning instead for the more familiar terrain of that part of the world that stretches from Beirut to Paris and thus signaling, perhaps, an unfortunate, but very French, cultural snobbery, America did provide him with a new image for Palestine. "For as long as I can remember," he tells us, "I have been for the Indians and against the cowboys" in American westerns. "For the red-skins and against the blue-coats....because of a fascination with their panache. I was seduced by the posture of the Indians, by their solitary pride, which in my eyes was identical with certain grandeur of heart. What I liked even better was the fact that they expressed this through gestures and not through words -- a certain way of sitting on a horse, for example, or of watching their adversaries." This notion was important when Sanbar was asked by Yasser Arafat, engaged in receiving a delegation of American politicians, to provide "some photos of Red Indians," Arafat wanting to drive home the message that unlike the Native Americans "we won't finish our existence in reserves." Sanbar tried the old Roxy, Metropole and Dunia cinemas in Beirut, remembering that these had once been decorated with stills from American films. "And so it was that Arafat welcomed the American senators the next day surrounded by pictures of Hollywood 'braves'."
In 1995 Sanbar returned to the occupied territories, now being given patchy autonomy within the framework of the peace process, to observe the January 1996 Palestinian elections, the first ever held. Describing what he found in Palestine: the Land to Come, he underlines the importance of these multi-party elections for contemporary and future Palestine. Drawing up the electoral role was in itself an important act -- "for the first time in their contemporary history, the Palestinians were carrying out their own census" -- but far more important was the existence and character of the Legislative Council to follow, which signaled the "gradual taking of control by the Palestinians of their own society." Even the boycott of the elections carried out by some strands of opinion was a good sign, since such differences must be "wished for by all supporters of a true democracy." And in fact, this unprecedented experience had a wider importance outside the boundaries of Palestine, since Arab public opinion, he felt, would be studying these elections for lessons to be applied elsewhere.
Sanbar ends this chapter with the comment: "the Palestinian Authority should now be firm in its defense of peace without being transformed into a department of the Israeli police, and above all it should promote real grass-roots democratic participation." Later, he goes on to describe in detail some of the challenges that the new state might face. These included what for Sanbar was its most important task, namely the construction of a strong, pluralistic civil society as an essential democratic counter-weight to "bureaucratic tendencies" within the leadership. Problems here might include a lack of understanding between members of the returning Palestinian Diaspora and those of the interior, and a "generation gap" between the Palestinian intelligentsia and a younger generation disinherited by "30 years of occupation, censorship, the closure of schools and universities and deportation."
Five years later, one's impression from the new book, from which talk of contemporary and future Palestine has disappeared, is that these tasks have not lost their urgency even as Sanbar's eyes are fixed firmly on the experience of his generation, the one that he tells us was 20 years old in 1967, and not on that of the new and upcoming ones. Perhaps this accounts for a possible weakness in this book's narrative, which ends on a note of symbolic baton-passing as Sanbar stages himself passing on an experience he had had with his father in the 1950s to his daughter in the mid 1990s. The experience of his generation seems thus to have served as a kind of historical vector, leading from the loss of one Palestine back into sight of the Palestine to come.
Reviewed by David Tresilian
Genet in Beirut
In Autumn 1978 I returned to Paris from Beirut. Most of my friends having been either assassinated or killed by the Israeli bombardments, my life there had become unbearable. I was working on a book about the expulsion of the Palestinians from Palestine in 1948. When I had finished the manuscript, I sent it to Jean Genet and asked him if he would mind reading through it for me. He said yes, and two days later he phoned me at dawn, as usual."Your book is very good. I learnt a lot from it."
"That's all?"
"Yes, that's all."
"What do you mean, that's all?"
"That's all that matters. You'll have to be satisfied with that."
But I didn't allow that to stop me, and, running into him later in the day, I brought up the book again.
"You haven't told me anything about the style of the book."
"Literature is just crap."
"But you've spent your whole life doing literature!"
"Yes, but it's crap just the same. I'm going to give you three pieces of advice, three useful things."
"Things?"
"When you want to add an adverb to a verb, it's because you haven't found the right verb; don't use expressions from contemporary speech as they're useless; and you should be able to write without using any punctuation and still produce a perfectly comprehensible text. Go back over it and put in the punctuation where you take a breath in reading and not according to the rules. But you're so dim-witted, I'm sure you'll do the opposite of what I've said."
When he gave me back my manuscript I found without any great surprise that he had made copious annotations on it that were sometimes marginal asides, sometimes angry remarks.
Where I had written "The Mufti from which a reaction was expected," Genet had scribbled "I didn't know your national leader was some kind of thing," but errors in the French of this sort he didn't think the worse aspect of the book. For every time I used the academic term 'a problematic', and heaven knows I used it a lot, Genet begun scribbling in rage in the margins, so that when I got the manuscript back it was full of "No!", "No, No!", "Again?!", "Please! Enough!", and so on. I still don't know whether I've been able to use the "things" he told me, but the affair over "problematic" was such that I learnt my lesson. I was so traumatised by it, that I have never used this suddenly rebarbative word again.
Later, I found out that certain expressions, certain "formulas," were enough to make Genet quite beside himself. One of these was the expression "mise en abyme" [the taking away of foundations], which some people used to talk about his plays, thinking this was a way of flattering him. I can still hear the giggles when the "Jean, your theatrical practice is a real questioning of all established practices, a real demolition of the foundations" brigade would only get "that's enough bollocks" in reply, followed by a "we're leaving" thrown out in my direction.
In 1982 Genet decided to accompany Layla Shahid on a visit to Beirut, at that time under Israeli siege. Layla was on the editorial board of the Review of Palestinian Studies, and my wife went as well, since she couldn't bear to see her native city's destruction from so far away. The results of this trip are well known today. Genet used it to write about the fall of Beirut and Israeli entrance into a city that until then had been the principal bastion of Palestinian resistance. He was among the first to get into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, using his appearance as an eccentric old man to escape suspicion, and he was among the first to see the carnage carried out on the refugees there.
His Four Hours at Shatila came out of this experience. A kind of funeral ode with classical resonances, Genet's text went beyond the corpses pilled up in the narrow streets of the camp to praise the beauty of the resistance and that of the fighters in the Ajloun woods in North Jordan ten years earlier. I met Genet on his return to Paris and found him in a state that I had never seen him in before. He fulminated against the massacre, but at the same time he had a kind of gravitas that came from seeing death close up, and he seemed to be possessed of a kind of silent, stoic wisdom. A few days later I received the first draft of the text he had written for the Review of Palestinian Studies. It is hard for me to describe today the state I was in after reading what Genet had to tell in Four Hours in Shatila. But it wasn't enough to be overwhelmed by this text; it had to be published as a matter of urgency.
From Le Bien des absents by Elias Sanbar. Jérusalem, le sacré et le politique (Jerusalem: The Sacred and the Political), edited by Elias Sanbar and Farouk Mardam-Bey, was reviewed in Al-Ahram Weekly in November 2000.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page