The Homeland Read online

  The Homeland

  by Hamida Na'na

  translated by Martin Asser

  The Homeland

  Published by

  Garnet Publishing Ltd,

  8 Southern Court,

  South Street,

  Reading,

  RG1 4QS.

  UK.

  www.garnetpublishing.co.uk

  Original text © 1979 Hamida Na’na.

  Translation © 1995 Martin Asser.

  The right of Hamida Na’na and Martin Asser to be identified respectively as the author and translator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  First English Edition.

  First published in Arabic as Dar al-Adaab.

  Series editor: Fadia Faqir.

  Literary editor: Georgina Andrewes.

  ISBN: 9781859644218

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Cover design by Cooper-Wilson.

  Cover illustration by Peter Hay.

  Typeset by Sarah Golden.

  Production by Sue Coll.

  Printed in Lebanon.

  Ezra Pound extract reproduced from ‘Ballata VIII’,

  The Translations of Ezra Pound with the kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

  Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Garamond.

  Introduction

  As an immigrant, you are usually confined to a specific space in that metaphoric country called exile. You walk around, a shadow in the background, your dreams of different homelands, your memories of torture, war and all the injustices you have suffered go almost completely undetected by the majority. I have chosen The Homeland for inclusion in the Arab Women Writers series, precisely because it brings the hidden history of the immigrant woman to the foreground.

  Nadia, the main character in this novel, is an Arab woman living in Paris in the 1970s. She appears ordinary and nondescript yet under her Moroccan jalaba lies a complete history of the Palestinian resistance movement and the role of women in it. An ex-guerrilla fighter who was dismissed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), she is completely detached from her previous existence and passes unnoticed in Paris. To counter this she begins to set down her story, to write herself into existence.

  Nadia’s story and her reaction to the West also shows the resentment of the immigrants who understand themselves to be more than the host society’s perception of them. “Living in Paris put the past in competition with the present … until the present and the past were locked up in a severe conflict. I refuse to take sides with either the East or the West. This continual conflict helps me discover and define myself.”1

  Further tension arises because Nadia is torn between her image of herself and what the traditional, tribal and conservative society perceives her to be. Her past attempts at conformity have led to her complete alienation from her true self. In an attempt to fit with her surroundings and do what she thinks is expected, she marries a famous plastic surgeon. Nadia discovers that they have different agendas and the marriage ultimately fails. That tension between the role of women as defined by society, whether eastern or western, and the role to which Nadia aspires have a severe affect on her mental health.

  During this low point in her life, she meets Frank and tries to be his ideal lover, but again discovers that he is not what she wants him to be. Consequently, Nadia loses her cultural and psychological stability: an ‘insect’ begins to gnaw at the map of her country and her inner map. In exile, she loses her identity without gaining a new sense of wholeness, so the self begins to disintegrate since it can no longer handle or control the ‘reality’ around it.

  While highlighting the marginalization of Nadia within a patriarchy, a position heightened by her exile, Hamida Na’na also sets out to show the ugly misogyny prevalent in Arab societies in particular. Nadia is continually discriminated against. She realizes that she speaks a different language from her male colleagues: she is interested in theoretical discussion while her ‘comrades’ are preoccupied with their past Arab glories. Even as a revolutionary, Nadia is disappointed with her organization. She believes that action should be centred on Palestine, that hijacking planes detracts from their main aims. Manipulated into becoming a pawn of the group’s public relations vehicle, she objects and is subtly dismissed from the organization, a move which leads her to question everything she believes in.

  The Homeland turns a critical face in several directions, scrutinizing the Arab world and its political organizations and the West and its repentant bourgeois revolutionaries. This latter criticism is pointed firmly at Frank. As a writer and former revolutionary, Frank has written of violent struggle in the jungles of the Congo and of armed men descending from mountains to occupy cities. Nadia is attracted to this mythical figure but Frank has changed; imprisonment in the third world has sent him running home like a prodigal son. He chooses to live in France where human rights are not violated and democracy reigns supreme. He becomes tame, joining the socialist party and starting work on a novel. Nadia realizes that the revolutionary that she had fallen in love with no longer exists and has been replaced by an establishment bourgeoisie. There is nothing to keep her in Paris and she ultimately decides to return home.

  Na’na succeeds in creating two narrative lines. She shows the tensions between an individual and a political organization within the Arab countries on the one hand, contrasting this with the Arab immigrant in confrontation with an old western civilization on the other.

  Much of Na’na’s narrative line set in the Arab world is based on the life of Leila Khaled2, the guerrilla fighter with the PFLP who was involved in the hijacking of TWA flight 840 from Rome to Damascus in 1969 and the attempted hijacking of an El-Al flight from Amsterdam in 1970. Khaled and Nadia have parallel experiences – like Khaled and indeed Hamida Na’na herself, Nadia is among the first women to join the Palestinian revolution and take part in military operations. Like Khaled, Nadia is a hijacker and both Khaled and Nadia undergo plastic surgery to disguise their identities. Leila Khaled and Nadia share a similar voice, they both believe in the rhetoric of Marxist-Leninist ideology, so much so that their opinions can seem simplistic or over-stated and Nadia seems to be a flat and plastic character. However she is fully rounded by the time we meet her again in Paris, where as an immigrant she suffers loneliness and invisibility and from this learns to identify herself.

  The wavering of the boundaries between fiction and reality can also be seen through Nadia’s influences. She has fed herself on the popular Marxist literature of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro but has been especially influenced by the writings of the French Marxist Regis Debray, a friend of the author, who was imprisoned in Bolivia from 1967–70. Debray’s book Revolution in the Revolution became a bible for young Marxist guerrilla fighters in the Arab world. The intermingling of the characters of Frank and Debray is obvious. Nadia falls in love with Frank in Paris, thus his writings and the actual relationship make the figure of Debray omnipresent in the novel.

  A further tension in this epistolary novel exists because Frank is completely unaware of Nadia’s past life in the Middle East. She decides to write him a long letter telling him about the part of her life which is hidden from him, the isolation she feels because of this denial is emphasized by the separation between the present narrative line in Paris and the past narrative line of the Arab world. The parallel lines of t
he woman guerrilla fighter and the life of the immigrant come together at the end when Frank reads her long letter. The two lines are no longer in confrontation with each other.

  The novel is written mainly in a lyrical interior monologue and in the first person. The outside reality is seen through the eyes of Nadia and the time scale is determined by her chaotic memory. The setting moves between two decades, and the cities of Paris, Aram (Damascus), Ayntab (Beirut) and Haran (Amman) to create a history absent from official accounts. The flashbacks, interior monologue, letters and dialogues seem to be disjointed, but the engagement with the question of revolution both in the Arab world and elsewhere provide the novel with structural cohesion.

  Women in this series create a different language where the patriarch is lampooned and ridiculed, and where their oral and daily experiences are placed at the epicentre of the current discourse. Since the formal language excludes them, they have pushed written Arabic closer to the spoken colloquial language in order to be able to present their experiences as completely as possible. They gnaw at the foundations of the societies which marginalize them and reject traditional notions of exclusively masculine or feminine languages. From a third space within the language they represent a culture which is based on exclusion, division and misrepresentation of their religious, sexual and political experiences.

  Arab women are treated as a minority in most Arab countries. They feel invisible, misrepresented and reduced. It is therefore vital that they be heard. In the absence of many good translators from Arabic to English, a problem partly responsible for the lack of Arab cultural intervention in the international arena, Martin Asser’s translation is significant.

  Now I invite the reader to open the book of Arab women’s ‘metaculture’. This book is part of a secular project, challenging the foundations of a patriarchal, tribal system. If you lift this double-layered veil, you will see the variant, colourful and resilient writings of Arab women, the fresh inner garden. You will also hear the clear voices of Arab women singing their survival.

  Fadia Faqir

  Durham, 1995

  1 This quotation is taken from In the House of Silence: Conditions of Arab Women’s Narratives, Fadia Faqir, ed., a collection of testimonies by Arab women novelists to be published by Garnet Publishing to complement this series.

  2 For more information on Leila Khaled please read My People Shall Live: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary, ed., George Hajjar, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1973.

  1

  You know it is wartime. Death-time. Time for conflagrations and far off lands. Time for vagrancy on the streets of exile. Time to be spent in strange cities, their faces clothed in the mist. All links to your distant homeland are broken. Only alienation remains. You gaze in the mirror and watch the woman in front of you dying slowly day by day, and the child within her blood being awakened.

  You know it is wartime. War and time. The night always brings you back to that bitter reality. You try to obliterate yourself, hurling yourself against the pavements of loneliness. You hear the sound of your voice issuing from your throat and echoing to you emptily from the thin air. The ink has ceased to attract you. The blank sheets of paper have lost that bewitching lustre. The keen urge to confess your secret is dulled.

  Where will you go? The town which you normally pass through, carrying the grand dream of return in your head, has become a prison. The wild jujube trees stick into the heart of your misfortune before vanishing under the pressure of the wind.

  Night, why can’t you stop your chatter?

  Why can’t you smother yourself in the gloom, and let me rest?

  Since when have I felt anything for the pavement cafés, or for the faces of strangers? Or for these pavements which are soaked in the blood of my comrades? Or for the sense of failure which plunges me back into the depths of myself, vanquished? The time has come to be a woman again.

  I know it is wartime. I know that it is also the time for rebirth. The time for trees seen in that hot Mediterranean country, each one clasping her daughter branches to her body, so that loneliness dies within her. But the branches must also die, since to soothe herself she crushes the life out of them.

  I come from a land where everything dies at the moment of its birth, and where everything lives in its own death. I come from a land where the heavens pour water into the earth for a hundred days, and where the sun draws the waters back up into the heavens for many hundreds more.

  That is where I come from, a place where war still teems at the source of every river.

  I know it is wartime. And I know that it is also the time of failure, and defeat, and surrender. And a time for questions which burn in my throat and echo from the abyss without being answered.

  The time for nameless fears and endless waiting.

  2

  Paris, 1977 – I run towards you feeling the rain beating against my face and my body. I see the snow dancing in front of the bridges linking the Ile de la Cité to the old town.

  Pulling my Moroccan cloak around me, I push forward into the darkness. You are standing under a riverside shelter by a street lamp. The mist eddies around you, like the music of gypsies coming up from valleys of joy. I approach:

  “Sorry I’m late. My boss kept on giving me more work to do. I am always telling him that he has to let me go on time. Six o’clock means freedom as far as I’m concerned.” I laugh, then carry on: “But he’s Arab of course, so he has a bit of trouble knowing what ‘on time’ means!”

  “I shouldn’t worry about it,” you reply with a smile. “Look what we did with time over here. Three world wars, God knows how many other local conflicts.”

  Stretching your hand out towards me, you start stroking my rainsoaked hair. Then you shelter me under your leather jacket and we set off towards the Place Dauphine. I stop on the Quai des Orfèvres opposite the Palais de Justice and look up at you. I cannot see you properly through the storm but, amidst the wind and rain, you look like a ship’s captain, undertaking an endless voyage without so much as a single stop at port. I say to you:

  “Two world wars. And we’re fighting a cause against hopeless odds … Sometimes I wish another war would start; at least we would know where we stood then.”

  I see a cloud of anger pass across your face. You have many different expressions and I can never quite tell what each one of them signifies. I feel you leaning on me a little more, trying to hug me.

  “Don’t be so stupid. You know it’s crazy to think like that.” Talking about war means delving into your past; talking about the Arab world means going into mine … my present too, I suppose. Whenever I look at maps of the region everything has changed. Towns getting bigger or smaller, territories being called by other names, even the passports have changed colours.

  At the entrance to your building, we both look at the face of the Algerian cook in the restaurant next door. He is singing that song which makes me think back to the past and all its wounds. How I long to forget! I try to get close to you and to say to myself that we are here to erase the past.

  We climb the steps leading to the wooden staircase up to your flat. I rest against you, trying to forget that face. We listen to our footsteps on the ancient wooden boards. Both of us look at the nameplate on the door of the first-floor flat. The name belongs to one of France’s leading actresses. I smile and repeat the first part of it. Then I stop and turn towards you:

  “Frank, isn’t she … ”

  You do not let me finish the question.

  “That’s enough! She’s French, and that’s that.”

  Awave of anger hits me and I become determined to finish what I was going to say. You look at me beseechingly, as though I have touched a wound which is festering in your body.

  I get very stubborn in moments of resolve, however. It is as though the whole world is welling up inside me, ready to burst out whenever I want it to. This has afforded me a certain self-possession in my life, verging on narcissism, even at the moments of great danger which m
y life has seen. I wait until we have passed the door on which we read the name and have turned to go to the second floor. Then I lean against the wall and say:

  “She’s Jewish, isn’t she?” You have a lot of trouble with the way I measure the world. A frown comes across your face and you put your hand on my shoulder, saying:

  “That’s all there is as far as you’re concerned, isn’t it: Arabs and Jews. Can’t you put all that behind you?”

  I remain silent, but a voice inside me says, No … Not if you are nursing a wound like mine. No.

  We listen to the River Seine outside. Through the window on the stairway it mixes with the sound of the rain. There are no explosions… no blood … no screams. What a dump Paris is!

  When we get to your flat, I take off my cloak by the front door and reach for the towel hanging on the wall. I wrap up my long hair and squeeze out the drops of rainwater.

  “Why do you start laughing every time I ask why you came here? I know about your studies, your job, your husband, and all of that; but what exactly made you choose Paris?”

  You put this question to me as you are sitting down on the sofa overlooking the river.

  “I’ve told you everything. I came here with my husband, and started studying after that. When we split up I decided to stay on a bit … before going back home.”

  “Do you want to go back?”

  “Very much.”

  “What have you got back there?”

  “What did you have back in France? I’ve read your memoirs. While you were in prison you became a perfect Frenchman.”

  You wince and I feel you did not want to be reminded of that time. You always try to avoid conversations about your past, as though those far-off days were no longer anything to do with you.