Anthem for a lost land
Sura wa Ayquna wa 'Ahd Qadim (A Picture, an Icon and an Old Testimony), Sahar Khalifa, Beirut: Dar Al-Adab, 2002. pp263
Sahar Khalifa's latest novel is set during two critical periods in the history of the Palestinian occupation: the 1967 War and the second Intifada. The novel, divided into three parts following the title, recounts the story of the narrator, Ibrahim, a Muslim from Al-Quds (Jerusalem), and his journey spanning over three-and-a-half decades. In so doing, the novel raises important questions about Palestinian identity and about the presence of the past in shaping Palestinian futures.
In the first part of the novel, Ibrahim recounts his experiences as a young man who skipped home, fleeing an arranged marriage with his cousin, and his enchantment with Mariam, a Christian girl sent home by her brothers in Brazil after a scandal involving her seduction by a priest. Ibrahim gets involved with Mariam, whom he substitutes for Al-Quds in a love-hate relation that leads to her pregnancy. Chased by Mariam's revenge-driven brothers, Ibrahim then again leaves home, ending the novel's first section.
In the second part, Ibrahim, after an unfulfilled life of wealth and business deals in the Gulf, Europe and the United States and a handful of childless marriages, longs for his roots and thus returns to Al-Quds in search of Mariam and the child whom he had abandoned. He discovers that his child is now a monk, a sculptor of saints and decorator of icons, and a healer who heals through meditation. However, the son, Michel, who has also been deserted by Mariam, wants no part in the relationship that his father now attempts to establish with him. For Michel, despair and self-reliance are his true identity: "When I was a child I used to think I was nothing, for I was without parents and without identity; when I grew up I became the world, or the world became myself, for my selfhood is the world."
In the third part of the novel, Ibrahim finds Mariam in a convent, and, after a brief and distant meeting between them, he abandons all his illusions about her, since she seems to feel no guilt about deserting her child and no attachment towards him or her past. In this way, Khalifa points to the fact of loss and to the seeming impossibility for Palestinians to regain their land through Ibrahim's inability to regain his past, represented in the memories of his love for Mariam, or his future, represented by establishing a relationship with his son. Instead, what remains in the last scene of the novel is the nurse Jamila, the woman who had nurtured Michel as a child and is the voice of history in the novel, Ibrahim and a group of corpses left behind after "Friday prayers had turned into a feast of blood," as unfortunately happens so often in Palestinian reality. The son's destiny is unknown, being either lost or killed in the Intifada.
Khalifa's beautiful style in this novel, breathing a kind of religious aura, presents a narrative that gazes honestly into both Palestinian character and reality. Khalifa portrays Ibrahim as the prototype of the confused and deluded Palestinian, who, escaping after the 1967 War in search of personal fulfillment, forgets that the personal cannot be divorced from the national. As a result, since his departure the protagonist and narrator of this novel has become impoverished, much as has the land itself: from someone possessing a fertile mind, a poet and an aspiring novelist, he has become a sterile tycoon, rummaging in the past for the fragments of a lost identity.
The reader may well ask: is this another piece of the literature of resistance, another Arab novelist blaming the occupation for whatever evil that may befall him or her? First and foremost, the novel resists being a helpless cry of victimisation, instead probing the Palestinian dilemma of a mutilated identity caused by the coloniser, as well as by the colonised. The main events of the novel occur during the second Intifada, a fact that in itself is suggestive of Khalifa's intentions, for the Intifada, which literally means "awakening" or "uprising", occurs on the personal as well as on the national level. Often we hear Ibrahim mourning for his starved life and asking for a second chance: "I am the one who wasted his dreams, his love and the future. I am the one who wandered the face of the earth in search of a goal and a cause. I am the one who bears the name of his grandfather and the traits of his father, and who found no son to accept him or inherit his name."
For Ibrahim, awakening comes from the slumber of a hibernated existence wasted in the pursuit of material goods through the search for his son, for Mariam and for Al-Quds. For the nation, awakening comes from breaking the mesmerising effects of various political promises and futile agreements. By giving Ibrahim Alzheimer's disease, leading to a progressive and irreversible decline in his memory, Khalifa points to the forgetfulness of the Palestinians, as well as to the amnesia that has infected the collective memory of the international community that Ibrahim has belonged to since he substituted his identity and his passions for a red passport and a green card. Thus, loss of identity, loss of memory, loss of land and loss of the father are interchangeable concepts in Khalifa's novel.
Once abandoned by his father, Ibrahim in turn abandons his son. Escape becomes a mode of life. In their brief meeting together, Ibrahim asks Mariam "what are you doing in between", and this question points to the function of religion in Khalifa's novel: the monastery or the nunnery; a part of nowhere; a place between existence and non-existence; an identity with no land left to support it. A picture, an icon and ancient memories are all that are left of Ibrahim and Mariam's story and of their identities.
In the final scenes of the novel the reader sees Ibrahim assuming a Palestinian identity, albeit one seemingly forced upon him by Jamila who makes him carry a first-aid kit and tend to the wounded left by the bloody incident at Friday prayers. Ibrahim thus finally embodies the inability of Palestinian consciousness to let go of its essence: hope is still alive in a situation that resists closure. In ending the novel in this way, Khalifa once more confirms that land, son and identity are not choices easily or casually made. Indeed, the last words that Ibrahim and Michel share together underline this by expressing a kind of national anthem for a lost land: "I will not let you go; you are my son; you are love."
Reviewed by Alia Soliman
