NISANIT
Fadia Faqir
New York: Penguin, 1990
255 pp., $7.95
Fadia Faqir's bleak first novel is about love and torture in the Middle East. The protagonists are minor players in the Arab-Israeli conflict, so hate is never far form the surface. But enmity - and enemies - are blurred in this sincere yet flawed work, where politics and war are but a backdrop to the exploration of the raw, elemental forces of unconditional love and physical torture.
Faqir, a Jordanian living in England, creates a trio of political entities: one fanciful, two existing and overlapping-yet none quite real. The democratic state of Israel and occupied Palestine are well known, but for Faqir they are actually no less a state of mind than her fictional "democratic state of Ishmael" (read, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan). And her countries are all prisons: Ishmael, a repressive Arab Society; Israel, symbolized by a detention camp for Palestinians; and the occupied territories, chafing under Zionist occupation.
The book's three main characters are products of their separate, blighted locales. Shadeed Al-Falastini, a PLO fedayee, is from Nablus on the West Bank; Eman Saqi, daughter of a socialist revolutionary who is hanged as a traitor, grows up in a poor neighborhood of Rahmah (read, Amman); Polish-born David Dzentis lives in a middle-class development in Beersheba, in southern Israel. Shadeed, who surrenders rather than battle Israeli soldiers to the death, is a freedom fighter to his peers and his girlfriend, Eman. The same Shadeed is a terrorist to his captors, including David, a survivor of Auschwitz whose specialty as a prison guard is applying torture.
Faqir is at her best when she describes the though processes that define Shadeed's relationships: between the prisoner and his tormentor, and between the self-styled guerrilla and the girl flowering into womanhood. Faqir, who wrote this novel when she was thirty-one, is obviously on familiar ground when describing the dangerous initial romantic stirrings of a woman raised in a society that rejects and scorns the non virginal bride and views flirting as just cause for corporal punishment.
Oddly, she seems equally proficient at depicting the brutal mechanics of physical torture, and especially the maddening - literally, as Shadeed's mind snaps - consequences. Her images, such as when the broken Shadeed degenerates to the mental level of a child, are searing, if occasionally overwrought. Faqir's weaknesses are her character's awkward exchanges and her simplistic attempts to insert political arguments and convictions into contrived conversations. It is difficult enough to wade through all the literal translations of the divine blessings that puncture commonplace Arabic discourse; it is positively jarring to read of a twelve-year-old Israeli boy improbably telling a married friend of his portents, "You have a lovely figure, aunt."
The credibility of Faqir's Israeli scenes plummets further when she makes elementary mistakes in describing a Jewish wedding. Her grasp of Israeli attitudes indicates that she has a passing acquaintance with current trends of Israeli thinking, but she stumbles in articulating them, in way that suggests that she may
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