Novelist Ibtisam Azem on Absence, Presence, and Disappearance
Last month, the UK edition of Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance appeared in Sinan Antoon’s translation from And Other Stories. Rahael Mathews took the opportunity to discuss this compelling speculative work — in which Palestinians suddenly disappear from across historic Palestine — with its author.
Rahael Mathews: The novel is centered around the sudden disappearance of all Palestinians living across historic Palestine, both in occupied territories and Israel. Typically, novels that try to illustrate possible futurities position themselves towards re-accommodating the displaced back into the annals of history. I found your orientation towards absence to be a unique one. I’d like to ask you why you took this specific position –– what propelled you to write from this tension in the mode of narration (I am thinking of Edward Said’s Permission to Narrate here) and why did you choose this as one of your modes of storytelling, a kind of disappearance that seems so inexplicable, so encompassing, almost impossible to imagine; at first, even to those who remain?
Ibtisam Azem: This tension arises from the fact that every Palestinian lives “in the presence of absence,” to borrow the words of the great Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish. There is absence/disappearance/marginalization/invisibility. That is, unless they appear as a problem. The consequences and meanings of this are manifested and inflected differently from one person to another, but they affect the lives of all Palestinians, individually and collectively.
At first, it may seem that the novel is grappling with a basic question: how would settler-colonial societies (in this case Israeli, but this applies to the US, or other cases), whose foundational myth is premised on the erasure of the “other” and the enemy? How would they deal with the sudden disappearance of this other?
But the novel goes further in trying to recenter marginalized narratives and their meanings. It delves into what befell Palestinians after the Nakba of 1948 and its continuity until today, and how it still affects their lives. It is at once a “fantastic” event and a warning of a future scenario that might very well take place (and is, in a way, taking place in Gaza now with all the annihilation and displacement), but also a reflection of what took place and is still taking place.
Your question took me back to my childhood and one of my first memories; the stories of my Jaffan grandmother, who was internally displaced in 1948 from her hometown of Jaffa to al-Tayibe, 30 km to the north, where I grew up. My mother was only a year old when her parents were forced to move. Only one other person from my maternal grandmother’s family remained in Palestine. The rest of the family were displaced to Jordan and Lebanon. Overnight, the Palestine she knew her entire life became “Israel.” She couldn’t return to Jaffa because of the military rule imposed on Palestinians by the new state, which remained in effect for 19 years. She lost everything, not only materially. The social fabric and networks were destroyed. She had to live her entire life with this absence/disappearance. This, in addition to the massive violence and the massacres and destruction and depopulation of more than 500 villages, and the ethnic cleansing of half of all Palestinians outside their country. It was the disappearance of a homeland, people, places, and a sense of safety. They weren’t even allowed to say “Palestine.” All this happened within a very short period.
When I used to accompany my grandmother to al-Manshiyye, the neighborhood where she used to live in Jaffa, there were no buildings left from that time. Israel had destroyed most of them, except for the Hasan Beg Mosque, which still stands today. The rest of the area is surrounded by fancy luxury hotels. But when we went there, my grandmother would take me by the hand when we walked. We’d leave the sea behind us and pass the mosque. She would take my hand when I was a child (and even later, when I became a young woman) as if she were afraid that I would get lost in the worlds we were about to enter. Or maybe she was afraid she’d be lost! She would speak of people, houses, street names, which were no longer on the map. She still recognized the place despite all the changes. I would see what she was seeing and would see the people and houses. She would stop, and then rush, relating one story after another. I was astonished every time. How could all that have happened? How did the world just stand by and do nothing? I grew up and the wars and massacres continued, the siege of Beirut in 1982, Sabra and Shatila, the Intifadas, the many wars and long siege against Gaza. The character of Huda in the novel is inspired by my grandmother, but the novel is not autobiographical.
There is another dimension in terms of liberating the Palestinian body. There is a power in the sudden act of disappearance in the novel, which takes place without a single drop of blood being shed. It is a power that gives the Palestinians control over space. Their disappearance means that for the first time since the Nakba, their bodies are beyond the Israeli colonial space and its control. This disappearance, which should relieve the Israelis, becomes a greater source of fear and anxiety for them. It also gives space for the Palestinians to reconstruct their bodies in relationship with the motherland, Palestine.
RM: Thank you for sharing your memories, their traces appear so beautifully in the novel. I want to come back to what you’ve said about ‘liberating the Palestinian body.’ I think this focus on the body-as-lived is a hugely important part of the work, and indeed the experience of Palestinians in an everyday context. I’m thinking here of Sara Ahmed’s work on whiteness as an orientation, she writes —
“If orientations are about how we begin from ‘here’, then they involve unfolding. At what point does the world unfold?” (Ahmed, 2007, p. 151)
You grapple with this unfolding in a very unique way, from multiple perspectives. From the Palestinian node of experience, you’ve explained how absence is a form of resistance — a move towards an identity and freedom that is not referential to oppression, an ‘exit’ of a certain kind. But as you’ve said, that disappearance has consequences on the Israeli psyche as well. It becomes increasingly clear that, while the mass disappearance is a source of celebration for some Israelis, the fear and confusion brought about by it far outweighs that. Could you elaborate a bit more on how this sudden removal of the ‘other’ essentially unravels the settler colonial identity?
IA: The relationship between the self and the other is always a dialectical and complex power dynamic. Between a colonized self and colonizer other, it is even more complicated. The individual and collective colonial self is constructed vis-à-vis an other who is a target and a victim, but also a mirror. The colonizer projects all their negative aspects onto the colonized and strips them of so much. The disappearance of this other unsettles and destroys the relationship between the two. Without this other, the colonizer can no longer perpetuate their presence as it was, fixed in power relations that were reproduced. The colonial “scene” and its dynamics can no longer function. There must be an other. Otherwise, the colonizer might be forced to see its truth. Or perhaps its ability to form a stable image or form new relations is shaken. However, there are others who can assume the position of the disappeared (the Mizrahim vis-à-vis the Ashkenazis or the settler vis-à-vis the secular). What matters is that the disappearance disrupts and confuses the equation.
I’ve been interested in the so-called “silent majority.” Those who accept and condone violations that are carried out in their name. Colonizers benefit from a colonial system in various ways and participate in it, of course in various roles. There is a military, political, economic, and cultural elite, who are a small percentage of the population, who crystallize colonial politics and power, but the silent majority is complicit and is invested in the system.
I wanted the act of disappearance to remain without explanation and to have implications and significance for both the past and the future. Instead of contending with the naked truth and seeing the monster colonialism itself created, the colonizer destroys the mirror.
RM: I like what you’ve said about reflection. In your novel, that mirror extends not only to the Palestinian body, but also the spaces these bodies inhabit — the city, and notably the sea. Al-Manshiyye is a layered entity, like several pieces of tracing paper placed atop each other. Alaa’s diary entries reconcile with this disconnection so beautifully as he struggles to align his grandmother’s Jaffa with the Tel Aviv he experiences daily. He writes:
“I leave Tel Aviv behind. I don’t see it, and it doesn’t see me. I leave its buildings and noise. The sound of the sea overpowers the sounds of the city.”
This motif of the sea reoccurs several times in your work, and indeed in other Palestinian writing (I’m thinking of Mahmoud Darwish’s Mural) that considers the politics of space. Could you elaborate a bit on the prominence of that motif?
IA: You are right. The first chapter ends with the grandmother sitting on a bench facing the sea. She preferred to die peacefully, close to it. The sea holds great importance for Palestinians, in their cultural expression in various genres, and in daily life. Many Palestinian cities were coastal. Zionist forces occupied most of these in the Nakba and depopulated most and at times all the Palestinians living in them. Jaffa, the city at the center of the novel, had around 100,000 inhabitants, mostly Palestinian, and ended up with 4000 Palestinians. The only coastal city (and region) to keep its inhabitants was Gaza. Gazans welcomed thousands of Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed from other parts of Palestine. A significant number of Gazans were displaced from Jaffa in 1948. And we see what is taking place now. The great majority of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, especially the youth, have never seen the sea, because of the restrictions of Israeli occupation, when it’s just half an hour away.
The relationship to the sea is complicated. On the one hand, it was a source of fear, and it acquired layers of symbolism in Palestinian imaginary and collective memory after the Nakba, particularly for those who lived in coastal cities and fled for safety. Some drowned and others survived. So it is a symbol of survival, but also departure and displacement. The exodus of the Palestinian resistance from Beirut after the 1982 Israeli invasion reinforced this. In the novel, the sea is also an element that frames the colonized and contested space. The sea’s symbolism is internalized by Alaa as he tries to decolonize his own being and reestablish his relationship with Palestine, as a homeland, away from the colonial state and its memory. The sea, and his grandmother’s memory, become the material tools to liberate his memory and begin to decolonize.
RM: Would you say the sea is a witness, in a sense?
IA: Yes…It’s a very good way to put it.
RM: I’ve been thinking about the figure of the witness, and the different shapes it can take. Like the sea, couldn’t language also be a witness of some kind? In the process of translation, do you think one language witnesses and overlaps another — Arabic and English, in this case. Could you speak a bit about the process that surrounded the translation of the novel?
IA: Witnessing is central, but what is more important is what takes place with it. Time and place are both witnesses to the event and part of it, but focusing on humans, we come to a complicated zone and must pose many questions about this witness. When does a witness become complicit if they stay silent? Is every silent witness complicit, even if they are part of the minority? How would we deal with this? This brings us to the majority and the “silent majority,” which enables the system of oppression and its continuation.
Language is, of course, itself an essential witness. Beyond literature, let’s look at the way mainstream western media represents the killing of Palestinians in the genocide against Gaza (and this applies to previous wars). The language is often in the passive. The perpetrator is not named. And there are constant attempts to erase the existence of a Palestinian homeland and Palestinians. There is even a disfiguring, literally, of language, for example, in Hebraizing the names of Arab towns and cities on street and traffic signs in Israel. To return to the question, the act of witnessing is incomplete if it’s not narrated, orally or in writing. But narrating orally, and writing is witnessing, but it also becomes an act of resistance. Translation provides a new home to the witnessing so it may continue in new languages.
In regard to translating the novel, I have great confidence in Sinan and there was no need for me to interfere. There is a personal bond. He is my partner, and this means he was privy to the text and my thoughts as I was writing. He was the first reader. And even if there was no personal relationship, his translations of Darwish and Saadi Youssef, as well as his own novels and poems, speak to his talent and experience.
RM: Your book does this work you have just spoken of — a constant, present narration. In the spirit of building community, could you point us to other writers, or artists that work with the same intention?
IA: Yes of course. Mona Hatoum, Taysir Batniji, Asma Azaizeh, Selma Dabbagh, Sahar Mustafa, Saleem Haddad, Adania Shibli, Carol Sansour, Ibrahim Jawabreh, Rana Bishara, Rawan Yaghi… among many others.