In Nablus, the people either seek employment beyond the borders, leaving whatever institutions at home to rust and whither away, or depend on irregular external aid and donations from some neighboring countries, which again leave negative impact on the local institutions as it discourages them from depending on themselves in meeting their own needs. The failure and near collapse of the newspaper and the marginalization of the municipalities’ police force, and the collapse of local farming and trade are examples on what befell the city.
Trade and productive activity, requiring a minimum of legitimate and institutionally predictable legal frameworks to ensure their reproductive life, are not only compromised in such circumstances, but are turned into waste. Khalifeh’s reference to the “Bank, closed since the wind of occupation blew over the city, with spiders nesting their webs on its door and windows and the moss becoming dark on its stairs” is a cogent comment on the economic decline and the holocaust of the city resources.
Waste is everywhere in Nablus: economy is in shambles; urban structures are under constant threat of demolishing in retaliation for resistance; people are shut off from other places by means of fences, walls, barricades and curfews; arable and green land is confiscated; water resources are taken and the city water sources are mediated; the young men are either in jail, in the grave or in exile; women are widows, spinsters, and lost. In Adil’s view, not only the city, but also the whole region is a big prison. His pessimistic reflection on the condition of the city and the region shows the anguish of a person caught up in the web of waste:
The prison. … It is always the prison. If you go out to the street, the prison is waiting for you. And if you stayed at home, the prison is waiting for you. And there beyond the bridge there is an enormous prison, a vast prison, there are martial laws and deified rulers who once were from you and turned against you. And woes betide you as a subject, and woes betide you as a nation. It is by their commands that people live and die.
Lewis Mumford optimistically declares that the “chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.” Nablus, under occupation is incapable of producing any of these functions. The city’s remaining power lies in the hands and slingshots of underfed and frustrated teens who turn whatever energy they have into chaos and disorder during their endless demonstrations against occupation. The city’s energy is turning into a culture of chaotic resistance and violence that is totally different from the culture that Oswald Spengler perceives as leading to “civilization.” Sa’diye, the widow, the mother, the bee-like laborer, the symbol of the city before and after occupation is intuitively aware of the urban entropy that enfolds the city. Her desire to get out of the city reflects the true mother’s instinct of combating waste and protecting her children. The hills beyond the city, in Sa’diye’s words, are “safer, natural and abounding with clean air and sun with no menace of the occupation apparatuses” to herself and to her sons. Sa’diye eventually buys a piece of land on the hills overlooking the city.
In her attempt to justify buying the piece of land away from the center of the city to her youngest son who abhors the idea of leaving his stone-throwing pals downtown, she draws a dreary picture of the city for him. “Nablus”, she says, “is a source of darkness, dampness and gossip and horrendous eyes surveying every dweller in it.” “There on the hills” she tells her son appealingly, “you can shoot at birds with your slingshot, instead of shooting at soldiers.” The boy, refusing to understand his mother’s position, starts crying as he sees in their pending movement a detachment from the center where his father died fighting occupation.
However, Sa’diye’s momentary happiness at buying the land is marred by her phobia of occupation forces commandeering the land and or demolishing the small house of her dreams. Such is the power of occupation in Khalifeh’s novel that it holds great sway on the dreams of the most peaceful characters in the city. At the end of the narrative, Sa’diye’s phobia turns into nightmarish reality when the occupation forces confiscate her land for no reason what so ever and condemn her to go back to the system of waste she labored hard to exit.
Conclusion
In Lehan’s words, “as the city becomes more chaotic, less friendly and more hostile, the inhabitants become more alienated, more lonely and isolated, and the urban process itself more absurd.” Lehan and the other scholars who share such views refer to the inhabitants’ experiences in industrial and post industrial cities where chaos and disorder are imposed on them by their own consent or by systems of their own production as there is no doubt that the inhabitants of postindustrial cities reap some of the advantages the city life brings to them. When the imposition, however, comes from an alien power from without, the alienation and the isolation of the inhabitants become suicidal and destructive, as there are no advantages what so ever available to the inhabitants. In Nablus, even water, an essential substance of existence, is hardly available, and when scantly available, it is excessively polluted.
All the social structures and ‘physical spaces’ in the city are in ruins. And like wise the relationship among the inhabitants of the city is fraught with strife, discord and disharmony. Mona Fayad surprisingly asserts that the novel is “preoccupied with physical spaces as a way of organizing community. Whether it is the prison, the board-room of the newspaper, or the steam baths.” “It is there “ she adds “that communality is established and the testing of individual freedom takes place.” Fayad’s contention is unrealistic and does not reflect the waste of the city under occupation as she opts not to see and hear the acrimonious conflict among the inhabitants of these so-called ‘physical spaces’. Fayad’s term “the individual freedom” becomes an oxymoron in conjunction with occupation that confiscates and cancels everything, including dreams.
The prison firstly is not a legitimate city physical space. Like cancer, it is unnatural growth in the body of the city and a major cause of the decline of its energy. Secondly, the communality established there is one of discord and conflict as Khalifeh reflects it colorfully in the conflict between Islamists, Marxist, and non-aligned prisoners. Similar discord and disunity pollute the congregation of the editors’ board of the Newspaper, and the women’s gathering in the city’s dirty and crumbling public bath. The Newspaper’s board, with its tragicomic polemic over the most trivial matters, epitomizes entropy in action. The final state they always end up in is to agree on not agreeing. This situation does not only reflect the decaying condition of the city under occupation, but also becomes a blatant metaphor for the on going disunity among the Arab states at large.
Finally, the conglomeration of the women converging on the decayed, and cockroach-infested public bath, as a result of prolonged water cuts in their homes, proves fatal to the unity of the inhabitants of the city. Khadra, as a result of Sa’diye’s coldness and indifference to her, starts to taunt Nablus’ women about their place of origin and ethnicity. As a result a fight has ensued between Khadra and some women with Sa’diye passively watching and Khadra is badly bashed by the angry women in the bath. The chaos generated in the public bath episode reflects the death of the rational and the collapse of dialogue and is matched with the last scene in the novel when the occupation forces and the city inhabitants confront each other, after the confiscation of Sa’diye’s land along with all the hilly area around the city, and a cycle of violence is let loose with more waste and further loss to come.
Notes
Dr. Wisam Mansour is a professor of English literature at Fatih University in Istanbul, Turkey
June 1967 is the month in which Israel fought the 6-day war against its bordering Arab neighbors and occupied the West bank of Jordan along with the Golan Heights from Syria and the Sinai from Egypt.
Sahar Khalifeh, Ubbad ash-Shams (The Sunflower) (Amman: P.L.O. Press, 1985), 20. The translation of this and all subsequent quotes from the Arabic text of The Sunflower is entirely mine.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 6.
Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 62.
William Chapman Sharpe, Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot and Williams (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University press, 1990), 102.
Hasan Jarah, Thawrat al-Ardh (The Rebellion of the Land) (Cairo: Hasaneen publications, 1992), 7-22.; Samiya Odeh, Kitabatu Khalifeh ba’da Oslo (Khalifeh’s Writings after Oslo) (Nablus: Al-Jaghbir lil-Tiba’a, 1996), 41-53.; Zekrayat Amra, Al-Mar’a wa al-Thawra (The Woman and the Revolution) (Zerka: H. U. Press, 1998), 91-110., among others dwell in their writings on Khalifeh’s depiction of the various slices of the Palestinians under occupation without paying critical attention to Khalifeh’s in depth analysis of the impact of occupation on the psychology of the characters. These critics focus mainly on the relationship between politics and the day-to-day existence of Palestinians under occupation. Elizabeth Asfour, Sahar Khalifeh: A Step Forward (Baghdad: Nazik Press, 2000), 6-33.; Salma Mahfooz, Al-Ihtilal wa al-E’itilal: Quira’at fi Kitabat Khalifeh (Occupation and Malaise: Readings in Khalifeh’s Writings) (Amman: Matba’t Nancy and Nizar, 2001), 21-53 write about Khalifeh’s mediation of patriarchy in a dominantly conventional and Muslim society. However, in their writings they do not touch on tricky issues such as sexuality and its manifestation in and impact on Khalifeh’s characters. Rita Sakran, Tahlil al-khitab fi Kitabat al-Mar’a al-Filistiniyeh (Analysis of the Discourse in the Writings of Palestinian Women Writers) (Cairo: Shalhoub Press, 1995), 1-45.; Rana Mussas, Dirasat Muquarneh fi al Riwayeh al-Arabiyah al-Mu’asirah (Comparative Studies in the Contemporary Arabic Novel) (Beirut: Dar el-Noor lil-Nashr, 1996), 17-39.; and Suliman Khashram, Ishkaliyat al-Shakl inda al-Saman wa Khalifeh (The Problems of Form in al-Saman’s and Khalifeh’s Writings) (Cairo: Hasan Reis Press, 1992), 12-33 write insightfully about Khalifeh’s manipulation of language and her excellent skill of presenting characters through discourse and insightfully establish various links between her narrativity and that of many postmodern American and European writers.
Khalifeh 18.
Khalifeh 18.
Khalifeh 18.
Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 38.
Khalifeh 19.
1936 refers to an early Palestinian uprising against a decree by the British Mandate to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. Nationalists who opposed the decree became targets for the mandate authorities.
After the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the initial resistance movement in the city started in the form of demonstrations fueled mainly by boys in their early and late teens. The occupation forces dealt ruthlessly with these boys.
In Odeh’s view, the name is a pun on a major pre 1948 Palestinian resistance leader called Haj Amin el-Husseini. The word ‘Haj’ means pilgrim (a person who goes to Mecca to perform the Islamic Haj rites) In the colloquial of the region the adjective ‘Haj’ precedes a person’s name to indicate advanced age and to venerate the person addressed. See Odeh, 49. Sakran contends that the usage of the adjective ‘Haj’ in this quotation produces a comic effect by emptying the idiom of its sacrosanct meaning through attaching it to a sodomite. See Sakran, 17. Mussas reads in “Akho Eini” which translates as the ‘Brother of my Eye’ a euphemism for the male sexual organ. See Mussas, 24.
Khalifeh 50.
Richard Lehan, The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 123.
Lehan 123.
Lehan 123.
Jermey Rifkin, Entropy: A New World View (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), 129.
Khalifeh 20.
Khalifeh 38.
Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961), 87.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles F. Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1928), 36.
Khalifeh 228.
Khalifeh 227.
Khalifeh 227.
Lehan 153.
Mona Fayad, “Reinscribing Identity: Nation and Community in Arab Women's Writing,” College Literature 22. 1 (1995): 153.
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