Ibtisam Azem: 'The reality that Palestinians live in goes beyond any dystopia'

Hindustan Times

06-05-2025

What was the genesis of the novel's central theme? Author Ibtisam Azem (Courtesy the subject)
The main theme is the disappearance of Palestinians from all of historic Palestine and the way Israeli society, like any settler colonial society, will deal with and react to the disappearance of this 'enemy.' However, as a Palestinian writer, I did not want my novel to be consumed solely with how to deconstruct the founding myths of a colonial society. I also wanted to centre the Palestinian narrative through Alaa's journal and his grandmother's stories. The novel is engaged with the choices that characters make and it tries to explore the psychology of colonialism. It also holds a mirror to historical events in which the majority of Palestinians, more than 750,000, were ethnically cleansed during the Nakba in 1948. And the destruction of more than 500 Palestinian villages and the depopulating of most of the coastal cities. The novel deals with the effects of all of this on the lives of people. The other side of the mirror was merely a warning over similar and possible future scenarios. Anyone who looks deeply into Israeli policies since the Nakba, will see that it is ongoing. 'A silent Nakba' is what I call the confiscation of land, successive wars and massacres and so on.
I also wanted to centre the destruction of Palestinian cities, particularly coastal cities, because more than 11 of them were depopulated. Jaffa was the most important and its population had reached almost 100,000 Palestinians. But after the Nakba its population was reduced to 4000. Jaffa is also a character in the novel, as opposed to Tel Aviv, the colonial city. Before the Nakba, Jaffa was one of the most important Palestinian cities. It was the centre of economy, culture and trade with a history that goes back thousands of years. The grandmother's character in the book is inspired by stories I heard from my own maternal grandmother who was forced out of Jaffa during the Nakba. But this is not an autobiographical novel. I did not grow up in Jaffa. I grew up in a small town 30 kilometers north of Jaffa called al-Taibe, to which my grandmother and mother, when she was a year old, were displaced. So, I did not grow up in Jaffa, but Jaffa grew inside me because of my grandmother's stories and our visits to the city and the centrality of displacement to our lives. 248pp, ₹1747; Syracuse University Press
What was the idea behind contrasting narratives as depicted through the friendship between the central characters of the young Palestinian man Alaa and his Jewish neighbour and journalist Ariel? How does it reflect the tensions between collective identity and personal memory in the context of the Palestine-Israeli conflict?
There are many Palestinian and Israeli characters in the novel that have different intellectual and poetical leanings. With Ariel, I wanted a liberal character to highlight the double standards of that group that might be against the occupation of 1967 areas, but don't question the founding myth of Israel as an empty land. Ariel represents the silent majority that allows and accepts crimes to be committed in its name. Their friendship is lacking as it is missing the most important part: equality. Alaa and Ariel exist in a historical and geographic context and their relationship both as individuals and members of collectives, is governed by colonial power. coloniser and colonized.
Was it challenging to authentically inhabit the character and themes explored particularly through Ariel's character, shown as a liberal Zionist critical of his country's military occupation and yet loyal to the Israeli national project?
There are always challenges in creative writing. Writing about a character whose politics I don't agree with is a challenge and requires setting aside the writer's ego and personal opinions in order to make sure the character is multidimensional and not superficial. But I should say that writing about a character one loves is also challenging. There is the possible trap of mythologizing. It is important in writing to reveal the complexity of inner worlds without necessarily passing judgment but letting the reader decide how they want to deal with the characters.
It is true that I live in New York, but I was raised and studied over there and my family still lives there. I have also known Israeli society very well. Before studying in Germany and the US, I studied at the Hebrew university in Jerusalem. Although our schools were Palestinian, the curriculum was controlled by Israel and most of the Hebrew literature we studied was Zionist. What we studied was governed by the perspective of the Israeli government. So, my knowledge of the world and society in which Israeli characters live was based on both personal experience and my studies and not based on theory or detached knowledge. So, writing Ariel as a character was a challenge like any other.
Ariel's behaviour reveals the inability or unwillingness of the coloniser to deal with his colonial past. If he were to do so, he would question many of the constants of Israeli society, including what it means to exist on stolen land. The coloniser claims that he wants to look at the future and accuses the colonized of being consumed with the past. But reality is quite the opposite. The colonized is engaged with the past because he wants to change the present and does not want the past to be repeated again. He wants to create a better world. I hope that a day will come when the Nakba is just 'a memory,' but we are very far from that. The coloniser refuses to dismantle the founding myth and thus refuses to build the future that is different from the past he created
The memories of Alaa's grandmother are central to the novel. What is the significance of such intergenerational story telling in preserving Palestinian identity?
Memory, as Alaa says in the novel, is the last lifeline. It is also a form of resistance against the coloniser's constant attempts to control collective memory and change history. The novel tries, on various levels, to centre and revive oral history and zoom in on the stories of survivors and accentuate them. Oral memory and history have always been a resource for colonized societies to resist cultural erasure and extinction. The novel chronicles survivor narratives so that they go on beyond individuals to be a counter and alternative history to official history.
The grandmother in the novel is a thread linking the past, that lives on despite visceral attempts to marginalize it, and a present and a future for coming generations to that resist amnesia. The dominant narrative in the West which adopts the official Israeli narrative, deals with the genocidal war as if it started on October 7th. But this is part of a long series of continuous wars against Palestine and Palestinians. The majority of the people who live in Gaza are refugees or descendants of refugees from the first Nakba in 1948.
The novel was written and published in 2014. How do you see the relevance and reception of the novel post the October 7, 2023 attacks and their aftermath?
The reality that Palestinians live in, particularly in Gaza, goes beyond any dystopia. Since the beginning of this genocidal war, I have lost the sense of time. I think we will need a very long time to read carefully what is written and what will be written. I'm focusing now on using any platform to talk about and shed light on the injustice that is befalling my people. I hope that literature and culture and art in general give more space to understand the lives of Palestinians from their perspective.
What are some other speculative fiction titles by Palestinians that you would recommend?
The landscape of Palestinian literature is quite extensive and rich and goes beyond what is written in Arabic. There's Palestinian literature written in other languages as well and it's difficult to keep up. What comes to mind is Emile Habiby's The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist and Palestine + 100, an anthology published by Comma press in the UK and edited by Basma Ghalayini.
Tell us about your collaboration with the English translator of the novel. How did Sinan Antoon go about preserving the cultural nuances, the speculative aspects, and emotional depth of the original Arabic text?
Literary translation is its own individual creative process. Sometimes there is author cooperation if need be. In this case, there wasn't. Sinan Antoon is a novelist, poet, and translator who has translated the works of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and the Iraqi poet Saadi Yusuf, in addition to his own works. He knew the text and its complexities intimately and he knew the target language and culture.
I read the drafts of the translation and loved it, but the translation was his work. Sinan happens to be my partner and my first reader, and he was aware of the various stages of writing the novel. I should say that unfortunately literary translation from the global South doesn't always get the attention it deserves from publishers and it always takes much longer to recognize. Small independent publishers and university presses carry the burden.
What did being longlisted for the International Booker Prize mean in terms of the larger discussions on displacement, identity and memory in the Israel Palestine context?
Being longlisted for the International Booker Prize impacted the novel's reception and made sure it reached a wider readership. Prizes play an important role in promoting literary works. I am grateful. I wish for the reader to approach the novel as a literary work and judge it on its artistic merits.
Majid Maqbool is an independent journalist based in Kashmir.