In this context, it is important to take a closer look at the protagonist’s own perception of home. Hijab believes that “Shammas does not have a problem with home, not having lost his” (1989: 184). From this perspective, Shammas is not an actual “migrant”: he did not leave the actual home place. Shammas himself states that “the real home, even though distant,
24 Peter Clark argues that Palestinian novelists who write in Hebrew may do so out of convenience
and not for any ideological reason since they are inevitably influenced by the language of schooling and the language employed in the media and in civic dealings (2006: 187). Clark thus draws some parallels between Palestinian Israeli novelists writing in Hebrew and North African novelists writing in French. Both chose to write in the language that allows them access to the authority of the imperial power by using Hebrew or French as a form of literary self-expression. Neither group may write solely in Hebrew or French, but both have been accused of committing “cultural treason” by some of their Arab counterparts who believed that they have succumbed to the power of the occupation or colonialism by abandoning their own language and cultural authenticity. One needs to recognize, however, that writing in the language of the occupation is not only an attempt to address the occupation in its own language in order to challenge it and probably undermine it, but it is, in fact, also a natural consequence of the interaction of the two languages that exist in the same space (Clark, 2006: 187).
estranging, and unwelcoming, is still Israel” (qtd. in Brenner, 1999: 98). While in the next chapters we will be dealing mostly with writers who are geographically away from the home countries in which the memory of the past diverges from the location of the present time, the complicated case of the Palestinians allows for estrangement to occur even while the writer resides in that very same place where the past memories have taken place. In fact, by blurring the lines between fiction and reality in his autobiographical novel, Shammas presented us with a good opportunity to weigh the degree to which the borders of the nation state coincide with home. The novel also depicts a considerable split between Anton Shammas the writer and The Teller and Anton Shammas who is himself part of The Tale. As The Teller, Shammas says upon his arrival in Iowa:
I never tried to describe my home. Because it isn’t just the southern window – the bab es-sir, as we called it – the chill of which is still in the palms of my hands, nor the smandra, the cupboard where we kept the mattresses and the blankets, which towered above our heads like a threatening castle, nor the turquoise-green cat hiding behind it when she was in heat, nor the dappled light dancing on the concrete floor, nor the taste of the salty water dripping all night from the linen sack that held the yoghurt for the labneh, the water that our crazy neighbour Ablah would drink, the taste of which rises now from under my tongue, as the villagers say here in the American Midwest.
My sense of home begins with the spoon knocking against the rim of the pot of lentil soup and spreads like ripples in the village pond and licks at the edge of the duwara and limns the view from the southern window and touches my skin from within. All of the houses I’ve lived in since then have hardly touched me (Arabesques 149).
Brenner’s review of another Palestinian Israeli writer highlights the novelty in Shammas’s approach to the perception of the home and homeland in Arabesques. Brenner argues that Emile Habiby’s fiction displays the motifs of sin and remorse, combines that with the representation of the homeland through the use of the metaphor of a “beloved, yet abandoned, woman”, and continues to remind himself of what Habiby sees as his “unforgivable betrayal” (Brenner, 1999: 95). Habiby – who also wrote in Hebrew – was indeed seen as a traitor by some of his Palestinian compatriots when he accepted an Israeli prize for one of his literary works (Ibid 91), an accusation that Habiby continuously tackled in his own writing. Reviewing novels by both novelists, Brenner argues that “the raison d’être of this act of writing is inextricable from the identity of the targeted reader, and the social function of this literature cannot be fully comprehended apart from its reception by Israeli Jewish readers”
(Ibid 89). There is a distinction then to be made between Habiby and Shammas: while Habiby might have been more concerned with resolving his sense of betrayal, or explaining his stance to readers on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Shammas seems to have already reconciled his own sense of home and homeland with his identity as a Palestinian Israeli citizen. To a large extent, Arabesques is the story that tells of the process of that reconciliation and resolution.
Hijab states that the main theme of Arabesques is the author’s search for identity; this act of searching then takes the form of wandering. Shammas wanders as a writer through “literary experience” and he wanders as well through the history and the characters of his family (1989: 183-4). Brenner offers an alternative reading. In his analysis of Arabesques, he explains that the love affair between Anton and his Israeli lover Shlomith, to whom he writes the letters which detail his childhood memories, his admiration for his militant cousin as well as the sexual affair with a married Israeli woman, that eventually get intercepted by her husband who is an Israeli military officer, all show how the novel itself, Arab in content, Hebrew in language, “validates the reader’s expectations of Arab treachery” (1999: 101-2). In this case, Brenner believes that Shammas’s novel itself is intended to infiltrate Israeli consciousness to confront it with its implications in the Palestinian displacement and oppression since 1948. While Brenner sees in Arabesques resistance on the part of Shammas to Israel and its legacy of oppression that reflects a desire to solidify the home in his own Palestinian homeland (Brenner does not make clear whether that solidification would then take the form of a Palestinian nation state or not), Hijab argues that the tone of Shammas in Arabesques is passive; she claims that his view is that of “what is past is past” (1989: 85), and she concludes that
Shammas’s identity problem has resulted in a missing link. He writes powerfully about the village, where his identity is secure, and fits comfortably into the world of literature, which is open to those who can write as he does, but he is shaky over the country/nation that lies between village and globe (Ibid 185).
Of course, Shammas places much emphasis on the question of the narrator’s identity. This emphasis is placed, as Balaban argued, in two main ways: being exposed to characters of different allegiances and nationalities, and the continuous suggestions of different identities for the narrator (1989: 419).