Democratic Palestine : 45 (ص 33)
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- Democratic Palestine : 45 (ص 33)
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Ramleh, pre — 1948 Palestine
(The Arabic for nation, umma, is a direct derivative from um,
which means mother.)
At another point he writes, «Political and cultural
independence is incompatible with economic dependence.» He
then expounds his attitude both to the past and to the West, as
the major influences on the Arab society at present, as follows:
If we are to cast one look at the past, then we have to cast two at the
future; for we know perfectly well that time will not wait for us till we begin
where our predecessors ended, or where developed nations began. We have to
begin where these have so far reached, and thus make full use of the latest
achievements of civilization. We have to take from the West whatever can
stimulate our talents and breathe new life into our tradition.
Al Husseini concludes his book with the following remark:
«History has not ended. It is going on, and it will keep going on
so long as there is life on the face of the earth.»
The Short Story
This period witnessed the rapid development of the short
story. Many of the «symptoms» of immaturity that
characterized the short story in the previous periods, now
disappear. Most important of all, short story writers seem to
have learnt to be more subtle and less didactic, to pay more
attention to the form and the narrative technique, and to
achieve a formula whereby the content is well integrated into
the structure of the work.
The short story writers of this period include: Khalil Beidas,
Mahmud Seifeddin Al Irani, Najati Sidki, Isaac Al Husseini,
Abdul Hamid Yassin, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Jamal Al
Husseini. This period also witnessed the appearance of two
women writers, Najwa Ka’war and Asma Tube. But Najati
Sidki’s The Sad Sisters is perhaps the best collection of short
stories in the whole canon of pre—nakbah Palestinian
literature.
The collection consists of eighteen short stories, five of
which belong to the period we are dealing with. They are: «The
Living Corpse,» «The Sad Sisters,» «Days in a Lifetime» and
«Simon Bouzaglou.» Giving its title to the whole collection,
«The Sad Sisters» is the most representative work not only of
the author, but of that particularly sad chapter in the history of
Palestine. It was written in Jaffa in 1947, when the Zionists had
already seized a considerable portion of the city and a number
of its suburbs, notably Tel Aviv. In a symbolic manner, it tells
the story of the city and, by implication, the whole of Palestine.
At the literal level, it is the story of five sycamores that used
to stand in a row opposite an old Arab estate, maybe a house,
Democratic Palestine, August 1991
school or mosque, located among Arab plantations in a Jaffa
suburb, where Tel Aviv now stands. One morning, the five
trees find themselves in a totally different, distressing world,
with the old estate and plantations simply gone! Instead, they
find themselves surrounded by high buildings inhabited by
strangers (i.e., Jewish immigrants) and their cafes and clubs.
The trees are sickened to find themselves, overnight, strangers
in their own, age-old world, with the true strangers having,
overnight, made themselves perfectly at home. Besides this
heart — breaking irony, the trees that used to feel that they were
an integral and, therefore, very significant part of their world,
are now reduced to green things decorating a Tel Aviv
sidewalk.
The narrator, a displaced Palestinian who shares the fate of
the trees, sits beneath one of them, resting his head against its
trunk. He falls asleep and, in a wonderful dream, sees the trees
transformed into five sisters dressed in black, sitting in a circle,
wailing. When they have cried their throats and eyes out, they
decide to spend the night sharing memories with each other.
They take turns according to age, and the eldest one tells of her
infinitely happy past with her husband and children. So do the
second and the third. With the story of the fourth, misery
begins. She tells of the thuwwar (i.e., revolutionaries) who were
hanged on the sycamore standing by her house, henceforth
called the Martyrs’ Sycamore. They, then, wait for the
youngest, born in 1917 (when the Balfour Declaration was
signed), to start her story. She hesitates for some time and then,
pressed by their curiosity, she finally asks them, «Do you really
not know my story? Don’t you know why we are dressed in
black, and why we are called the Sad Sisters?»
«Enough, enough!» they retort, weeping, «Don’t tell us
anythirg. The morning has overtaken us.» The story ends with
the narrator saying, «As I woke I found myself lying beneath
the five sycamores. An autumn wind was blowing savagely,
blasting everything — man and bird and beast. Only these trees
were not shaken. They stood as firm as a mountain.» It is
interesting to note that the narrator’s optimism was not
ill— founded; for what are the fedayeen of the Palestinian
revolution, and the shebab of the intifada, but the offspring of
those sad, steadfast sycamores?
As was remarked at the outset of this series, pre—nakbah
Palestinian literature has not received sufficient research. The
reason for this lies, partly at least, in the fact that a considerable
part of this literature was physically destroyed during the
barbaric assaults launched by Zionist terrorist organizations in
1947-48 against the peaceful civilian population of
Palestinian towns and villages. The libraries thereby destroyed
(especially those owned by Jerusalem, Haifa and Jaffa
intellectuals) are said to have been the richest ones in the Arab
world. Moreover, pre — nakbah writers are now either dead, or
dispersed in all corners of the earth, which makes it all the more
difficult for the would—be researcher of that phase of
Palestinian literature to obtain the necessary data. Other
reasons relate to existing trends in literature research in this
part of the world. Students of Palestinian literature usually find
it safer and more rewarding, academically speaking, to address
post — nakbah literature, where no such difficulties exist.
Finally, mention must be made of two pioneering works on
pre—nakbah Palestinian literature, namely, The Life of
Modern Palestinian Literature (see full citation in DP no. 43,
1991) and Dr. Kamel Al — Sawafiri’s Modern Arabic Literature
in Palestine 1860 — 1960, published by Dar Al-—Mai’aref,
Cairo, 1975. Both works, especially the first, have provided me
with a considerable part of the data I so badly needed for the
writing of this series.
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- Democratic Palestine : 45
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- أغسطس ١٩٩١
- المنشئ
- الجبهة الشعبية لتحرير فلسطين
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