In the Details: Masks, Memory, and Narrative Defiance
On Bassem Khandaqji’s Prize-Winning Novel
By Fifi Bat-hef
“Colonialism is in the details,” Bassem Khandaqji’s novel declares early on. It then spends the rest of its narrative time showing us “all the little things that, put together, form a comprehensive, integrated structure” of colonial power—a structure built on denied permits, administrative detentions, checkpoint delays, curfews, timelines that must be inhabited, rockets that fall at the exact moment you think you’ve escaped. By placing this realization so early, Khandaqji immediately lays out the architecture of the struggle: what colonialism is, why it works, and how to “fight it with the same details…. of history, culture, psychology, and knowledge.”
Becoming Or to write Mary
The novel opens as Nur al-Shahdi, a Palestinian archaeologist living in a Ramallah refugee camp, is consumed by the idea of writing a novel about Mary Magdalene. He is fueled by Dan Brown’s “nonsense,” which gives the Galilean woman European bloodlines, asking “Why would a foreign writer uproot Mary Magdalene from her historical Palestinian context… to throw her into the abyss of the West?”
Nur’s planned protagonist is Naseem Shakr, an Israeli-Palestinian novelist. Like Khandaqji himself, Nur designs a character who, unlike either of them, can move freely. In the case of Nur’s protagonist, it’s by virtue of his Israeli ID card. Fiction collides with opportunity when Nur finds such a card belonging to an Ashkenazi man, Or Shapira. With his light features and fluent Hebrew, Nur slides into Or’s identity. He adopts the “mask” that allows him to enter restricted archaeological sites—spaces that he needs to access for historical details that will bring his Magdalene novel to life.
A series of voice memos, a unique feature in the novel, allow us to watch the story take shape in real time. Nur speaks into his phone, recording voice memos that begin as scholarly notes for his Magdalene project. He debates alternate plots and weighs how far to push the fictional Naseem’s discoveries. Different ways of grounding his story in Gnostic verses are tested, and ideas that feel too neat or too forced are discarded. Readers who prefer tighter pacing might find the meta elements drag, but it rewards immersion with the intimate sense of watching Nur build the very novel we are reading.
Narration as survival
These memos evolve into self-lacerating confessions on his identity, unsent letters to his imprisoned friend Murad, a diary of occupation’s violence, and a record of life in colonizer territory. They turn narration into a basic necessity for Nur. And, by extension, for Khandaqji, too. “Narration is life,” Nur says. “I talk to you so that I can live, like Scheherazade.” In that particular line the “you” he refers to transcends Murad, and reaches for the reader, as though Khandaqji were using the novel to bypass the jailer and address us directly.
The novel operates on three planes: the metafictional layer, as Nur works on a novel about Mary Magdalene; the archaeological dig, where Nur/Or uncover layers of history; and the psychological excavation, as Nur attempts to understand the Zionist mindset from within. This structure allows Khandaqji to explore what the IPAF judges identified as “three types of consciousness: that of the self, the Other, and the world.”
Addie Leak’s translation carries the full weight of Nur’s divided life. The voice memos where he builds his novel are nerdy, geeky, detailed, and true to Nur’s scholarly obsession without flattening it into exposition. The mental tension between Nur and Or, and the slow dissolution of one self into another, is handled with restraint, making the collapse all the more harrowing.
With his borrowed identity, Nur pursues the heart of his project: Mary Magdalene. In the Gospels, she was the first witness to the risen Christ, but the western (Latin) church recast her as a prostitute—a trope modern thriller writers still exploit as cheap fodder. Nur returns her to her Palestinian roots by grounding her story in the village of Al-Lajjun, one of hundreds erased in 1948. Khandaqji reimagines Mary Magdalene as Sama’ Ismail. It’s a name that fuses “sky”—a counter to burial and forgetting—with Ismail, (also Ishmael), the biblical outcast. “There is no room for coincidence… in the naming of my characters”, Khandaqji said in an interview with The New Arab, and the intentionality is unmistakable.
The renaming links Magdalene’s exile with Ishmael’s, as both figures were marginalized within the dominant Judeo-Christian story. A Mask the Color of the Sky reclaimls Mary Magdalene, and it also makes her a symbol for Palestine today. She was silenced by the same western-centric powers that continues to view Palestine as something to be redefined for colonial purposes. Here, a biblical figure becomes a symbol of the land’s ongoing fight to be seen on its own terms.
The price of the mask
This neat parallel deliberately falters. To reveal buried truth, Nur must bury his present identity beneath Or Shapira’s mask. What happens, the author asks, when the price of being seen is to disappear a little more? Khandaqji here celebrates reclamation, while also interrogating the costs and contradictions at its core. The identity card that meant access now becomes a kind of burial.
As Nur moves deeper into the colonizer’s territory in Or’s skin, small things shift in unsettling ways. The forest looks like recreation instead of erasure and house on Al-Lajjun ruins feels as if it has always belonged to the Jewish family inside. Hebrew rolls off his tongue with the right kha and r, and he even fantasizes about an Israeli woman, Ayala, in ways that mirror the colonizer’s objectifying gaze. The novel lets us live inside that unease, where we see the effects on Nur’s psyche.
“Had Nur al-Shahdi gone mad, or had the torrential flow of a time that wasn’t his swept him into the depths of a bottomless abyss?”
“Or” is the subjectivity that “Nur” must wear. He is over-confident, possessive, dismissive, and entitled. And the longer he stays as Or, the fainter Nur’s origins become. Nur extends Frantz Fanon’s warning that the colonized subject who mimics the oppressor’s ways risks self-alienation by exposing how the very word for mask in Hebrew, masekhah, twists into masekh in Arabic: a freak. A mis-shapen thing. The voice memos trace this erosion, fracturing into a kind of schizophrenia between Nur and Or.
A commitment to the details
Khandaqji’s commitment to the details extends even to the colonizers. A writer who has lived his whole life under occupation and administrative detention has every right to portray the occupiers as monstrous. That he chose complexity instead shows immense artistic control. He gives them depth, thus making the machinery of occupation more damning.
Ayala, for example, the most fleshed-out Other in the novel, is insecure about her Sephardic status, resents Ashkenazi superiority, cries during rocket sirens, and is generous with food and flirtation. Khandaqji lets us see her as a full person who is both oppressor and oppressed within her own society. Liberal enough to support gay rights and tribal enough to defend ethnic cleansing. By refusing caricature, Khandaqji forces us to see how seemingly ordinary people and complicity can coexist in the same body.
On the surface, the novel seems to hinge on a singular mask: the blue Israeli ID card. If that were all, we’d have a neat, tidy little tale of disguise and revelation. But this book is far more ambitious. Beneath the ID card lies the colonizer’s plausible decency, which masks their ease with displacement and ethnic cleansing. The land itself is a mask of pine forests and kibbutz laid over buried Palestinian villages. Peel that away, and you find the oldest mask: Mary Magdalene, a symbol of Palestine who was masked by centuries of Western retelling.
Colonialism, Khandaqji shows, is a system containing several masks of “history, culture, psychology, and knowledge.” These masks are nested and interlocking, each one making the next possible. Perhaps the biggest lesson in the book is that the process of unmasking is neither clean nor final.
‘Like dhikr under siege’
A Mask the Color of the Sky practices what it clearly laid out: using literature to engage obsessively with colonial details, to challenge them, and to insist on a Palestinian narrative. Nur’s drive to reclaim Mary Magdalene reflects this. The “details” are in the archaeological site not accessible to him, so he dons the mask, risking his freedom and sanity in order to reclaim a Palestinian root.
The author himself demonstrates a profound commitment to this cause. He wrote the novel in stolen predawn hours, on paper that guards frequently confiscated and destroyed. He immersed himself in places he has never physically been to, imagining their histories and landscapes in meticulous detail. Like his protagonist, Khandaqji’s obsessive reconstruction of Palestinian history and identity is an attempt to bridge the gap between absence and rootedness.
In this insistence on reclaiming, the novel echoes Sufism’s practice of remembrance, or dhikr, elements which appear briefly but meaningfully in the novel. Like dhikr under siege, the novel insists on remembrance when everything conspires to make forgetting the default.
It is possible
It is possible at least sometimes
It is possible especially now
To ride a horse
Inside a prison cell
And run away
It is possible for prison walls
To disappear
For the cell to become a distant land
Without frontier
“The Prison Cell” by Mahmud Darwish
Fifi Bat-hef is a literature enthusiast from Mombasa who revels in literary fiction and short stories, with a bias for postcolonial African and Arab narratives. Her reviews have appeared in Lolwe and Middle East Eye.