Translated by Suneela Mubayi

I previously published a lengthy interview with Raji Bathish in both Arabic and English on Makhzin. It is rare for a translator and their author (should the author be living) to have such a close friendship and meet up every so often on various continents. Perhaps this is due to Raji’s vision of what it means to be a Palestinian author, with all the semantic meaning of queerness, transgressiveness, and liberatory potential that “Palestinian” carries within it. He wrote this text in 2013 as part of a special feature in the Journal of Palestine Studies, where ten contemporary Palestinian writers were invited to offer their reflections on “where Palestinian literature is headed.” Raji immediately chose to butt heads with one of the thawabet of this literature, Ghassan Kanafani, by taking on the title of his famous novella (and most experimental piece of writing) All that’s Left to You by wondering what is left to him as a Palestinian writer living inside the schizophrenic reality of “Israel,” who wants to challenge everything we hold sacred, and it’s a challenge that Kanafani himself perhaps would have welcomed had his life and literary career not been cut short so brutally by the Mossad. I have been looking for a home for this text in English since then. Today, Palestinians and Palestine are more present than ever in the world’s collective consciousness, yet amidst the discussion of the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinian people, the Palestinian individual is not as easy to locate, which is perhaps why this text in its briefness remains so precious and relevant to me. Still, in the middle of a genocide, do we have the luxury or the moral right to pose such questions when it comes to the canon of the oppressed? Raji attempts to respond in an afterword, looking back ten years later at this text to see if anything still remains.

“Raji’s come out too Palestinian” – this is what my mother would say to friends and relatives in an attempt to justify and explain the features of this strange existence – my existence! My mother was not stupid in saying that; I do not think she was stupid in any case. Looking back now, I think rather that out of sheer love for me, she was attempting to soak up my “different-ness” in a society that, while being traditional, was not at all one that believed in being humble. On the contrary, the society that I grew up in depended on emphasizing the importance of maintaining social status through consumption and appearances (or rather, by making oneself appear a certain way), on distinguishing between those who could be considered part of society and who fell outside of it, and on stressing upon this distinction to exhaustion, i.e. one’s social existence could not be realized without the creation of an illusory structure for the center to distinguish itself from the periphery.

What my mother meant by my “having come out too Palestinian” is that I was different, an Other, that I did not want to be one of the pack, that my interests were different from my contemporaries and those around me. I would pose questions about oppression, racism, and social justice. Palestinianness, for me, was a cultural positioning and not a belonging inherited by birth. No mother in Egypt or Sweden says, “My son’s come out too Egyptian or Swedish.” My having come out “too Palestinian” translates as my having gone against the herd for good after my pathetic attempts to balance between my alterity and the herd’s rules.

I find my recent writings crying out with nostalgia for something I never knew. I try to recreate this source of nostalgia; that is to say, I try to reproduce a history that is richer, sexier, and more glamorous for me to feel nostalgic for, for a very simple reason - the birth pangs of producing a text grip a writer more powerfully than anything else whilst they sit in their office cubicle on a mundane Monday that seems to never end.

Nostalgia in the text is a text unto itself. It sarcastically mocks and derides a supposed past that was not strictly the way it was imagined. When I say in interviews that I used to sneak out from home to the hill overlooking the south – towards Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Egypt – I was not exactly sneaking out in a literal sense. And when I say that church literature, especially that of the Eastern churches (Maronite, etc.) that I used to recite along with the other local kids in the church of the home for the elderly adjoining our house, is what constituted the linguistic and psychic reference point for my texts, it may just be an exaggerated statement. Just as I am not sure that the romantic Egyptian films of the seventies, which I would go to watch as soon as they were released in the cinema whose cafeteria my father owned, were what molded that dreamy creature who was miles ahead of himself and where he actually was. It is when nostalgia becomes a metaphor and a recollection of a highly agitated and imprecise existence.

For a writer to be Palestinian means to live with the consequences of finding themselves torn between being Palestinian as a hereditary belonging and as an ethical quality one possesses. Hereditary belonging to a nation could have been something different had the region not been partitioned the way it was by the graces of the white man. I could have been a Syrian writer spared the misfortune of having an identity that at once provokes childish, erotic pity, while also being a trap. If the state of Israel had not been created, I don’t know where Nazareth would have been located and what larger entity it would have been part of. I have a feeling deep down that Palestinian identity has imprisoned those who claim it, just like the fabricated Israeli identity has done for its adherents. The Nakba and our common destiny as Palestinians created a kind of assumed identity that sometimes borders on kitsch, an identity that requires you to act according to a certain code of conduct. Your subjective core is taken away to a large extent for the sake of a collective cause that is not clearly defined. Our Palestinian project’s contours are unclear, for what goal are we aiming for? To establish an ethnically pure nation-state with a strong army controlled by powerful men who oppress the people, especially those who are different from the dominant, hypermasculine norm? Or, am I part of the project that (seriously) wishes to recreate Jaffa and Haifa in their entirety exactly as they were prior to April 1948, down to every tiny detail of every building and every street? Do we really know what these places were like so as to be able to recreate them in all their elements? Am I just a product of a germ of historical error or catastrophe? Call it what you like, but I am now contaminated by it, and sometimes I even like it. As a writer with a readership, one who is ideologically averse to the crime of humanizing his enemy and is in denial over his bilingualism and sometimes his moral schizophrenia, I cannot make myself appear as ethnically pure, as one who deems himself above the influence from the Other.

I don’t know why I have appointed myself a witness without consulting anyone, or getting approval from the establishment, any establishment. Indeed, my writing is propelled by a feeling that I am like a witness to painful details from the homeland, a land whose people were all expelled or wiped out (like in cheesy Hollywood sci-fi movies), and I am the only one who survived in order to narrate to the absent what they missed, and the paradise they lost, as well as the cacophony of that deprivation. There is a tremendous energy that pushes, propels me to write, to describe “the substance” in the sense of precisely describing what exists on the land now, with all its pain, and not what used to be or what I wish there were, or what I concoct to impress someone. I try to spew out “the substance”, or rather “the substantial reality” in the reader’s face even if it is contaminated, and usually it is.

In my texts and my daily life - the two are often inseparable - I wander through places as if I were a tourist guide to a [Palestinian] refugee of my age or younger, one who was born in the diaspora but still calls this place al-bilad -- the homeland. Sometimes, I explain to him what has become of these places based on what I imagine to be his memory. At other times, we fuse into one body, for me to contemplate these places anew, as if I were seeing them for the first time in my life, as if I obtained an entry permit for Palestine after much effort, and here I am entering it for the first time ever, relying upon a memory whose origin is shaky, but I still have trust in it. How often I feel the need for that tourist-refugee so that I can detach myself a little from my bastardized material existence and my bitter irony and cynicism, which are at times unbearable…and from my figurative Jewishness.

Just like others of my generation, I was greatly influenced by Ghassan Kanafani. I don’t know what this beautiful man would have gone on to do had he not been martyred, for he created two themes that were foundational not only for Palestinian literature but also for the Palestinian narrative as a whole and the collective Palestinian personality: the theme of the water tank in Men in the Sun and the returnee in Return to Haifa in all its aspects. I remember when I read his unfinished novel Who Killed Laila Hayek, I had a sense that had he completed it, it would have laid the foundations for a Palestinian fiction that is yet to be realized. For example, I think Return to Haifa was spoiled - a bit - by ideology and that Kanafani was still on his way to abandoning ideology as an inherent component of the narrative structure. There was also a phase in which I was taken by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s portrayal of the Palestinian as the rescuer, the holy savior in the novels In Search of Walid Masoud and The First Well. But that phase quickly passed, and, in my texts, I came to deliberately attempt the opposite, trying to dismantle this sacred and mythical image of the Palestinian. Palestinian writers are still trapped in this sacredness and in their readers’ gaze or what their audience expects from them. I have learned from Zakaria Tamer how to free myself from this sacredness and to transgress even further upon what we hold as self-evident. Therefore, as my work gets ever more twisted, and every time I get embroiled in writing a new text, I find myself turning for help to writers like Milan Kundera, who writes about sex, human stupidity, and violence with a forbidding brilliance that is akin to cold-blooded murder. I think that Palestinians’ inability to practice their “national self-determination,” then discover the flaws of this self-determination, after having had to submit to it for decades, and then rebel against it, has trapped them in an artistic and narrative impasse from which many others have been able to free themselves.

Journal of Palestine Studies no. 96 (Fall 2013)