“How is it that the world is watching it and not stopping it?”
Anwar Hamed’s question, insistent in mid-July when Palestine -1, Comma Press’s new collection of Palestinian writing, was previewed at Liverpool’s Bluecoat, has – tragically – lost none of its urgency. Recent developments, such as assurances of recognition, have felt like promises deferred; like booking a defibrillator for September when the cardiac arrest is happening now.
Beneath the shadow of enforced starvation and murder disguised as self-defence, the unveiling of a collection of short fiction can seem too small and brief a light. It’s something that Hamed – one of the anthologised authors – concedes, admitting that “my words are too small”. Yet illumination is all the more necessary when a people’s stories are routinely eclipsed by the mass of media narratives that discount and dehumanise them.
Set around 1948, in the eye of the storm of the first Nakba – the word can be translated into English as ‘catastrophe’ – the stories of forced displacement, massacre and cultural suppression collected in Palestine -1 sound all too familiar, making it clear that its hurricane of racist cruelty has never truly abated, that it is ongoing and barely opposed.
At Liverpool Arab Arts Festival, they are read in the Arabic they were written in, with the English translation in back projection. They speak in the language of the dispossessed, maintaining their cultural identity, even as the very ground they live upon is removed from beneath their feet.
Hamed, who was born in the West Bank, offers a reading from Trapped, the stream in which a dying child’s consciousness is lost, a dream slowly poisoned by the nightmare of her reality. In his excerpt from A Chronicle Of Grandfather’s Last Days Asleep, Mazen Maarouf also adopts a child’s eye view, albeit one whose “father was going to come back in a box”. The fragment he shares emphasises the fatal absurdities of colonial oppression, and the narrowness of the differences that are prised apart to legitimise it. His protagonist, in his innocence, has not learned the lesson of discrimination. “I’m no good,” he admits, “at telling the difference between a lizard and a frog.”
Maarouf describes it as “the most difficult story I’ve ever written”, not least because the Palestinian town in which it is set is now an Israeli settlement.
Overwhelmed by murders, instantaneous and slow, the voices of Palestine -1 run the risk of being drowned out by the clamour of headlines that trumpet a different story. It is this disparity which makes them all the more vital. As editor Basma Ghalayini – who lived in Gaza until she was 27 – affirms, in times in which belief is increasingly tribal, stoked by the algorithmic bias to the divisive and the emotive, “fiction is more honest than journalism”.
By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent
Palestine – 1 is published by Comma Press For more information, click here.
