The Palestinian Nakba produced, alongside death and displacement, a generation of writers who came of age in its aftermath. The moment seemed to demand a funereal tone from artists who had witnessed the tragedy. For them, a version of Theodor Adorno’s maxim, that to “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” rung true. Few broke the taboo.
Born in Haifa 102 years ago, Emile Habibi was an exception. His 1974 masterpiece, The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist, dared to approach the Nakba with irreverence; the Palestinian catastrophe was for him a tragicomic saga, which he depicted with a firm sense of irony. “Had it not been for your Shoah . . . then the calamity that remains the lot of my people would not have been possible,” he wrote in a 1986 article.
Habibi grew up under the system of military rule imposed on Palestinians within the newly established state of Israel between 1948 and 1966 and brought to an end in 1967, when Israel launched the Six-Day War against its Arab neighbors. This regime was, for Palestinians, a segregationist one: land appropriation and restrictions on movement as well as political and intellectual expression were its defining features. For nearly two decades after the Nakba, these Palestinians were completely cut off from the Arab world, the rest of the Palestinian people, and each other. Stranded in the iron cage fashioned by military rule, the first generation of Palestinians in Israel lived in a state of national limbo and cultural alienation. Overnight they became strangers in their homeland.
The period was marked by a McCarthyite persecution of “communists” — a rather broad designation which the military government readily threw onto Palestinians still holding on to their national identity. Divide and rule — that age-old tactic of colonial government — was the modus operandi of military rule. Palestinian were either good or bad Arabs, collaborators or communists. The former were…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Seraj Assi
