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- Country of residence: British Virgin Islands
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A few years ago, I signed up for a college class to study “existential psychotherapy.” The title alone was attractive enough. A mixture of psychoanalysis and existential philosophy, Freud looks through the eyes of Kierkegaard, who preceded him, and his theory is upside down, where death has the upper hand and life is a sideshow to it. The basic reading list for the semester contained a large number of general references and more specialized books, but the responsible English lecturer advised the students to acquire one of these books, and not just look at it. Before the start of school, I went to buy it, but looking at the back cover of the small book made me hesitate.
The book "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl was about the Holocaust, and I was not prepared to read more about the suffering in Nazi camps, not only because of the horrific details, but also because of the over-saturation of readings and observations on the subject.
Despite my initial hesitation, Frankl's book became one of the most influential books on me, not because it reaches "meaning," but because he acknowledges the inability to reach it, and yet finds a justification for life and a motivation to survive, in the most horrific circumstances. This was all framed from within the Holocaust and its context.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the Holocaust, through a long line of literary and philosophical writings, films and other cultural products, became the cornerstone of understanding everything and theorizing about anything. For Adorno, history is determined by what came before and after Auschwitz, and for Hannah Arendt, in “The Banality of Evil,” we understand bureaucracy, the state, and totalitarianism from within the extermination camps, from Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate in literature, and the writings of the Frankfurt School, through the childhood diaries of Anne Frank, to “Is this the human?” Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl's logotherapy, and the cinematic classics "The Pianist," "Schindler's List," and "The Reader," the major European languages and translations into other languages, and the branches of the humanities and social sciences, are saturated with Holocaust reference. The Jewish Holocaust is framed as a tragedy, with "the “Definition: It is the tragedy of all of us and the fault of all of us. In one way or another, we are all survivors of Auschwitz, as well as participants in it.
Today we know clearly that this reference did not occur accidentally, or at least it was not left as such without subsequent employment. Empathy, the general feeling of guilt, and memory, all subject to mechanisms of sorting and hierarchy, are specific tragedies that have enjoyed recognition that others have not received. The Holocaust justifies the Holocaust, and excessive sympathy towards the victim of the past establishes the oppression of new victims and complete indifference towards their suffering. In addition to all of this, the absence of the Palestinian tragedy from international literature and art was a fundamental pillar of the policies of alienating them and denying their rights, or even their existence at all.
Early last month, British and American literary circles celebrated the publication of the novel “The Parisian” by Izabella Hammad, who was born in London to an Irish mother and a Palestinian father. The novel, which takes place during one of the most turbulent and decisive periods in the history of the Palestinian tragedy, received exceptional praise. The British newspaper The Guardian included it in its list of the best first novels by its writers for the year 2019. The famous British novelist, Zadie Smith, referred to it by saying that it is “a very sublime reading experience.” The New York Times also described it as offering “an alternative way to explore history.” Hammad’s novel, published in English, is unique in that it does not focus on the Nakba or its aftermath, like most fictional works dealing with Palestinian history. Rather, “The Parisian” begins with the outbreak of the first war and ends in the mid-1930s, painting a picture of a world reeling severely, before it collapses completely. The narrator's hero, Medhat Kamal, the young dreamer who leaves Nablus for Montpellier, France, to study medicine, presents us with a very close and personal picture of the history of the tragedy, with details of the stories of his love, confusion, and fate, a picture with which the reader can unite from intimate, individual, and human points of view, not from political motives related to its backgrounds. Historical only.
Hammad joins a series of contemporary Palestinian women writers, such as Hala Alian, Randa Jarrar, Salma Al-Dabbagh, and Suzan Abu Al-Hawa, who write in English about the Palestinian diaspora experience in the past and present. The uniqueness of what Hammad and her colleagues present comes in that their works are not what Edward Said would have called “Arabic literature written in English,” but rather they are actually English literature, in everything from technique and language to aesthetics and sensitivity. This is not an insignificant difference, but rather a displacement of the Palestinian issue from the scope of the margins to the scope of the metropolis itself, and raising it from the scope of the specific to the status of “humanitarian.”
“The Parisian,” and other literary works of later generations of the Palestinian diaspora, do not compete for the primacy of victimhood, or the right to the exclusive representation of tragedy. But it seeks, at least, an acknowledgment of existence, that the tragedy of their people have a share in the reference of pain and compassion in the world’s consciousness and morals.
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