The Electronic Intifada 13 April 2015
Haifa Fragments by khulud khamis (Spinifex Press)
With her debut novel Haifa Fragments, Palestinian Slovakian writer khulud khamis pens a compulsive narrative that examines the complex of nationality, gender, sexuality, religion and culture in Palestine.
Haifa Fragments opens with the protagonist, Maisoon, a Palestinian citizen of Israel raised within an affluent Christian family, struggling to gain credibility and success as a jewelry designer. Alongside exasperation with her faltering career, Maisoon has incurred the disapproval of her father by taking up with a young Palestinian Muslim man named Ziyad.
Despite the Palestinian backgrounds of both Ziyad and Maisoon, their respective families are unsupportive of the union and are locked in a mutual distrust of the other built on religio-cultural grounds. In further defiance of intra-Palestinian solidarity, both Ziyad and Maisoon live sheltered lives within Haifa, a city in present-day Israel.
This soon changes, however, after Maisoon’s chance encounter with Shahd, a Palestinian Muslim from the occupied West Bank. As a friendship between the two women blossoms, Maisoon learns more about a side of her country she had previously ignored.
She finds out about the day-to-day injustices and lack of freedoms that her companion suffers. By visiting Shahd’s home, Maisoon notes the similarities between her own Christian family and her friend’s Muslim family.
Fragments
Simultaneous with her transformative friendship with Shahd, Maisoon achieves belated career success as her jewelry garners the attention of a Jewish Israeli goldsmith named Amalia. Maisoon’s steady prosperity gains her the respect of her boss and, not before long, Amalia is forced to confront her ignorance towards Palestinians.
Amalia’s realization is part of the novel’s broader call-to-arms for female solidarity across national, religious and cultural divides. Thus, Amalia and Maisoon become painfully aware of the comparative lack of opportunities that Shahd is afforded simply due to the place of her birth and status as a West Bank-dwelling Palestinian Muslim.
To this end, the novel is an exposure of the various ways multiple ethno-cultural and religious identities exist and commingle within historic Palestine. Amid dominant perceptions of the intransigent difference between Christians, Jews and Muslims in the region, Haifa Fragments stresses the commonality between these identity groupings.
This multiple layering of different identity markers through female voices calls to mind many other feminist writers within the Middle East such as Egyptian writer Salwa Bakr or Algerian novelist Assia Djebar, both of whom have pursued similar goals in their fiction.
The novel’s titular reference to fragments becomes apparent in relation to the multiple female viewpoints. The idea of fragmentation and the fragmentary nature of identity permeates the text.
Maisoon’s occupation as a jewelry designer means she works with fragments of material. Some of the materials that Maisoon uses in her work are imbued with cultural significance, such as her use of old Palestinian coins.
Submission and dissent
The novel’s structure is also fragmentary as it oscillates between different timeframes and perspectives. At one point, fragments are openly addressed by Maisoon as she finds her father’s old notebooks and photography albums, discovering “fragments of his past” as a political dissident and poet.
Maisoon tries to piece these fragments together to build an encapsulating picture of her father, Majid. However, her efforts prove futile, therefore asserting the impossible task of rationally understanding another person’s various identities.
Even so, the discovery of her father’s politically fraught past is an engaging subplot and one which is never fully given space to develop. It emerges that despite Majid’s disapproval with his daughter’s choice of partner, he previously had a Palestinian Muslim lover.
His support for his ex-lover Asmahan caused him to take up armed resistance against Israeli forces. A long spell in an Israeli prison changes Majid’s worldview, however, and triggers his eventual submission, stupor and political apathy.
As well as Majid’s past, the novel also alludes to political dissent in Ziyad’s backstory. This sense of murky pasts is a bit overwhelming within such a short novel, especially as khamis chooses not to pursue these narrative threads in favor of foregrounding the experiences of the novel’s female characters. This leaves Majid and Ziyad’s tales feeling rather shapeless and unfinished.
Clumsy
There is no intended criticism in khamis’s choice to privilege narratives of female experience within a corpus of narratives that tend to typecast women as bereft mothers protesting on the sidelines. However, the novel’s appeal to a sense of cross-cultural female solidarity falls a little flat with the imposition of homosexuality into the narrative.
One evening — fueled by alcohol and the exchange of emotional hardships — Maisoon and Shahd make love with one another. The awkward morning after is dealt with in an unsatisfying half-page, where Shahd complains that she wants to marry men but also enjoy sexual encounters with women, before making some tea.
The implicit bisexuality revealed by Shahd’s comments is disappointingly dropped almost as soon as it’s picked up. The reader is left wondering why khamis has not taken to probing how her character’s sexuality impinges upon the otherwise complex texturing of identity patterns within the novel. Likewise, Maisoon’s happy complicity in same-sex love-making remains a stone unturned.
Homoeroticism within the novel takes another ill-judged turn when a white, Western traveler named Christine is introduced within the novel’s final segment. Christine, who is traveling around the West Bank as an artist, is rescued by Shahd after a traumatic experience at the hands of Israeli border control.
This results in Christine making a sexual advance on Maisoon. The reader is left wondering why many of the upsetting incidents within the narrative drive female characters to engage in acts of same-sex sexual intimacy.
Despite the rather clumsy introduction of homosexuality within the novel, this is an engaging read that goes far to examine the commingling of different identities within Palestine.
Peter Cherry is a PhD student in comparative literature at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Twitter: @peterjcherry
Comments
Clumsy? Or learning to walk?
Permalink Inaru replied on
Good review. On the critic's focus on "homoeroticism" (Can a bisexual be homoerotic? Doesn't that term exclude hetero eroticism?) and Shahd's father's subjugation, why are they seen as so "clumsy" and incomplete? As you say in your excellent review, fragmentation - of personal, political and work lives - and how it subjugates people by subtle or overt means is the theme. We tend to not question how institutional subjugation results in personal chaos and suffering until forced to by a deeply personal crisis, precisely because there are no easy solutions, so we "naturally" take the straightest path (pardon the pun) for self preservation. The introduction of same-sex attractions based on shared experiences between Shahd and Maisoon, and on Shahd taking on the role of protector of a privileged [presumably white?] woman rather than hope a man would defend her, is examined cursorily but at least addressed. It is just one segment of life in male centered monotheist societies which purposely separate males from nature as masters of nature, and associate the female with the nature that must be subjugated, that was ignored by Shahd until it was unavoidable. While men are expected to assert and insert themselves (again, pardon the pun) in all parts of everyone's lives, including women's, all monotheist religions with singular male gods relegate females to passive observers and obedience. Shahd's father's imprisonment for his militant activism is an example of incarceration as not just emasculation - as many men are loathe to admit after the experience - but of infantilizing the prisoner, male or female, so they will police themselves upon release to avoid more abuse in a solitary cell at the mercy of jailers, the most isolated experience of all. The question of why a person "cowers" after imprisonment and "abandons" radical resistance after imprisonment, be it by a jailer or for many women relegated to the home by religions, is answered within the question. In the USA, the massive increase of incarceration is THE most effective tactic to end militant activism by men of color especially and by women as well. It became the favored institutional tactic when monotheist religions lost their primacy in American lives, and when more women were able to earn and live independent of husbands. A parolee is the least likely person to take militant action to change institutions, just as a woman dependent on providing a husband with sexual release for her own sustenance is less likely to even question whether she might be bisexual, homosexual or transsexual. Thanks for the review, now to get the book!
The Fragments are Fragments
Permalink zztop replied on
"The reader is left wondering why khamis has not taken to probing how her character’s sexuality impinges upon the otherwise complex texturing of identity patterns within the novel." -Maybe it doesn't, bisexuality is not always an impingement to identity, and does not need to be cast as an issue or problem. I actually found the women's acceptance, particularly Shahd's, of their sexual encounter a refreshing deviation from the all too typical dramatization and problemitization of bisexuality, the author wove their love affair into the story without turning bisexuality into an issue, rather it was presented as another aspect of life, another piece of the fragmented picture.