Copyright by Michal Raizen 2014

The Dissertation Committee for Michal Raizen Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Ecstatic Feedback: Toward an Ethics of Audition in the Contemporary Literary Arts of the Mediterranean

Committee:

Karen Grumberg, Supervisor

Tarek El-Ariss, Co-Supervisor

Elizabeth Richmond-Garza

Sonia Seeman

Blake Atwood Ecstatic Feedback: Toward an Ethics of Audition in the Contemporary Literary Arts of the Mediterranean

by

Michal Raizen, B.A.; B.Music; M.A.; M.A.

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin December 2014 Dedication

In loving memory of Polly Anne Raizen

Acknowledgements

This process truly takes a village, and it is with great joy and humility that I look back and acknowledge all those who accompanied me through this journey. To my dear friend and dissertation advisor Karen Grumberg, you pushed me to follow my intuition when I was consumed by self-doubt. You understood my project before I fully recognized its merits, and you encouraged me to own its idiosyncrasies. Ecstatic Feedback would not have come to fruition without your foresight, guidance, and unwavering faith in my scholarly potential. To my dear friend and co-advisor Tarek El Ariss, how I already miss those moments when I would enter your office with the spark of an idea and emerge with a stack of books. Your brilliant theoretical insights, astute readings, and unflinching support of my intellectual vision make you a prime enabler of this project. Elizabeth

Richmond-Garza, you once said that a scholar of comparative literature must possess a lunatic optimism. Ecstatic Feedback was born of lunatic optimism, and the end result speaks to the indelible mark that you have left on my life and work. Sonia Seeman, you taught me about rigor and integrity. It is through your seminars that I worked out the theoretical and methodological nuances of this project. Blake Atwood, thank you for your generous input both as a member of my committee and as an enthusiastic supporter of my entry into the professional world. Billy Fatzinger, thank you for recognizing those moments when the creative aspect of writing a dissertation muddled my ability to sort practical matters.

v To Kristen Brustad and Mahmoud Al-Batal, you had me at ahlan wa-sahlan. Seven years later, I found myself standing on a balcony one warm summer evening in Austin,

Texas, holding a philosophical conversation in Arabic about ṭarab. To Mohammed

Mohammed and Laila Familiar, you watched me shed tears of exhaustion during the Arabic

Summer Institute and tears of joy as I learned that I would be going to Cairo as a Fellow at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad. You are both so dear to me. Katherine Arens and

Samer Ali, thank you for your dedication and support as I made the transition from a student to a scholar. Faegheh Shirazi, your warmth and grace have lifted my spirits in more ways than you can know. Lital Levy and Nancy Berg, you have been my greatest advocates in the world of professional organizations. Sihem Badawi, you taught me about courage and perseverance. Thank you for opening a window unto the vast beauty of Egypt, with her rhythms and intonations, her ebbs and flows. Today when I stand up in front of a classroom, I recognize the Sihem in me, bold and impassioned. Hoda Barakat, your mentorship has impacted me in ways that I cannot begin to comprehend. You grasped my intellectual vision deeply and intuitively and challenged me to think through the broader implications of audition.

To the extraordinary team of healers who saw me through the physical and emotional challenges of completing this degree. Bindi Zhu, Gary Seghi, Joel Cone, and Rudy Aaron, thank you for your restorative touch. Robert Cantu, you encouraged me to laugh at myself, but you also possessed the skill and courage to see me through the darkness to the next laugh. Christie Sprowls, you are one of the most brilliant and compassionate souls that I have encountered. With your guidance, I found the strength to embark on remarkable vi intellectual and emotional journeys. Chirayu Thakkar, your unwavering support, healing presence, and mischievous sense of humor during my fellowship year in Cairo allowed me to find my strength and finish out the year. I will never forget our first meeting on the Nile houseboat, when you prescribed for me yoga and said, “Cairo will heal you if you let it.”

Your words and prescription continue to bring light and healing into my life. Dido Nydick, thank you for giving me the tools with which to restore my inner calm and focus. Your compassion and joie de vivre have been a true inspiration and a constant reminder to relish in the small and beautiful encounters of the day to day. Lisa Lapwing, I would not have persevered to the end without your healing touch. Your needling protocol for “focus” helped me push the reset button every week. Your boundless compassion taught me to treat myself with kindness at a time when I was prone to self-criticism. Holly L’Italien, I cannot thank you enough for helping me to find the foods that nourish me from within. You gave me back my life, and for that, I am eternally grateful.

To my Argentine tango communities in Tel Aviv and Austin, thank you for providing a support network and for restoring music and movement to my every day. Silvia

Rajschmir, you gave me an incredible gift by introducing me to the art of Argentine tango.

You welcomed me with open arms into your Tel Aviv community when I still had two left feet. My dearly departed friend Iaacov Tiyutin, you are a true gentleman without whom a night of dancing would have been incomplete. Edwin Yabo, muchas gracias for forcing me to stop looking at my feet, and for helping me to find stillness and calm within motion.

Daniela Arcuri, thank you for instilling me with a solid foundation in Argentine tango and guiding me toward a more nuanced sense of movement and musicality. Your humor and vii passion during our weekly lessons provided me with sheer joy during a most challenging of times. Michael Arbore, my dear friend and dance partner, thank you for patiently practicing molinette after molinette until I learned to turn on my own axis. Our weekly dose of practice and laughter kept me grounded through this process and helped me to laugh at myself. Lea Ves and Tien Brown, thank you for your friendship and support on the dance floor and beyond. Lea, you will always be the voice in my head saying that a good milonga is well worth a drive. Marina Flider, after several years, I finally listened to your words of wisdom and made the transition from playing tango on the cello to dancing tango. Between animated discussions of Walter Benjamin and all things space and place, we talked about the magic of tango. I have you to thank first and foremost for helping me find the courage to pursue what is now a great passion.

To the ladies of my dissertation reading group, you provided both the emotional support and critical insights to move me through this project from its very inception to its final moments. Somy Kim, your words of encouragement and contagious intellectual curiosity have given me infusions of energy when I thought that I had used up my reserves.

Johanna Sellman, your keen critical insights were pivotal in helping me to articulate both the broader framework of my project and the internal cohesion of my chapters. As both the dearest of friends and the most astute of readers, your unwavering support has been a tremendous source of fortitude. Ryan Skinner, Johanna, Nils and Elias, I am eternally grateful for your hospitality during my itinerant months. Tessa Farmer, you kept me on track with our virtual “work parties.” As my only reader from a discipline outside of comparative literature, you pushed me to articulate my arguments clearly and concisely, viii making my project relevant to a broader academic readership. Naminata Diabate, you are a pillar of strength and a true role model. I learned so much about perseverance and rigor from watching your own academic journey.

Katie Logan, Anna Ziajka Stanton, Drew Paul, Rachel Green, Lior Sternfeld, Itay

Eisinger, I am so privileged to have such talented and forward-thinking colleagues and friends. I have thoroughly enjoyed our conversations in the context of conference organization and graduate seminars. I look forward to future collaborations and eagerly await the day when your respective books line my shelves.

Lauren Apter Bairnsfather, your friendship means the world to me. As both a problem solver and a dedicated listener, you have lifted my spirits and propelled me forward innumerable times. Thank you for “puppy time” and tea on an “as-needed” basis. Together we took some daunting intellectual and emotional steps toward a better understanding of a place that we so desperately love but cannot fully accept.

To my brother and sister, Yuval and Karen Raizen, my love for you is boundless.

These past few years have presented us with many challenges, and together we have discovered our resilience as individuals and as siblings. Someone once described us as three little ducklings, following our mother and basking in a certain glow. Through we all live hundreds of miles away from each other, that glow continues to draw us close. And to my sister-in-law, Renee Raizen, thank you for being dear friend.

To my favorite little Raizens, Avi-Noah and Ilan, the sound of your laughter dispels all heartache. May you always place me with the “good guys” in the snowball fight of your dreams. ix To my mother Esther Raizen, well I suppose I do like your hat a little bit after all.

Ecstatic Feedback is the brainchild of a complicated soul. You had both the love and the courage to see me through to this day. I see more and more of you in me as the years pass, and nothing could delight me more.

x Ecstatic Feedback: Toward an Ethics of Audition in the Contemporary

Literary Arts of the Mediterranean

Michal Raizen, Ph.D.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2014

Supervisors: Karen Grumberg and Tarek El-Ariss

Ecstatic Feedback explores narrative and thematic engagements with the concept of “audition” in works from Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Morocco. My use of the term audition encompasses the act of listening, the trials and tribulations of hearing, and the performative aspects of lending an ear. The locale of Ecstatic Feedback is the contemporary Mediterranean, a designation that reflects both the geographical and linguistic orientation of the works discussed and the emergent disciplinary interest in

Mediterranean Studies. The regional specificity of this project is framed by my discussion of ṭarab, a musical phenomenon akin to ecstasy. I argue that ṭarab, as a musical form with a culturally-specific contextual base and a sui generis communicative mode capable of producing context, points to an acoustic geography that predates current sociopolitical mappings of the Mediterranean. In its literary and cinematic iterations, ṭarab presents a challenge to compartmentalized geopolitical and cultural visions of a Mediterranean structured around divisions such as secular/sacred, premodern/modern, or

xi Mashriq/Maghreb. The works discussed in Ecstatic Feedback use ṭarab as a narrative structure, casting it at the same time as a way of rethinking the historical traumas of the twentieth and twenty-first century Mediterranean. Emile Habibi’s vignettes The Sextet of the Six Days (1968); Hoda Barakat’s novel Disciples of Passion (1993) and her series of essays The Stranger’s Letters (2004); Eran Kolirin’s film The Band’s Visit (2007); and Elia

Suleiman’s film The Time That Remains (2009) all make explicit references to the world of ṭarab and its practitioners. Edmond El Maleh’s A Thousand Years, One Day (1986) situates ṭarab more abstractly, as a concept with tremendous performative and communicative potential in both its popular and mystical iterations. With a focus on Arab

Jews, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and exiles of the Lebanese Civil War, my project attends to the processes that underwrite a literary and cinematic intervention into the regional soundscape, with its attendant silences and elisions. By foregrounding instances of ṭarab and exploring the intersubjectivity inherent in the dynamic between muṭrib (a performer who elicits ṭarab) and listener, these diverse texts combine to highlight a line of cultural-regional poetics based on audition.

xii Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Toward an Ethics of Audition ...... 1 A Scene of Ṭarab ...... 5 Affect Theory Revisited ...... 9 Chapter Breakdown ...... 15 The Comparative Project in Dialogue ...... 20

Chapter 2: The Song That Fayruz Did Not Sing: Unspoken Voicings in Emile Habibi’s The Sextet of the Six Days ...... 26

Chapter 3: The Memory of Song: Listening as Individual Prerogative in Hoda Barakat’s Disciples of Passion and The Stranger’s Letters ...... 48

Chapter 4: The Text Without Rupture: Jewish Liturgical Counterpublics in Edmond El-Maleh’s A Thousand Years, One Day ...... 71

Chapter 5: My Heart is My Guide: On Silence and Song in Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains and Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit ...... 90

Conclusion ...... 109

Bibliography ...... 114

xiii Chapter 1: Toward an Ethics of Audition

Look, when you are an artist, you should have faith that first of all your experience is not local; it is a universal experience…When you compose an image you should never think about the boundaries of that image. But should this image exist in one locale, it should transgress the boundaries of that locale.

—Elia Suleiman “A Different Kind of Occupation”

In an interview for The Electronic Intifada, Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman suggests that his films, rather than “molding or summing up an experience located in

Palestine,” gesture toward the vast array of experiences that can be “conceptually,

Palestinian-ally, called so” (Haider). Broadly speaking, the locale of Ecstatic Feedback is the contemporary Mediterranean from the Maghreb to the Mashriq.1 The designation

“contemporary Mediterranean” reflects both the geographical and linguistic orientation of the diverse group of novels, vignettes, essays, and films discussed in this dissertation, as well as an emergent disciplinary and institutional interest in Mediterranean Studies. With its focus on musical affect, Ecstatic Feedback explores narrative and thematic engagements with the concept of audition. My use of the term audition encompasses the act of listening, the trials and tribulations of hearing, and the performative aspects of lending an ear. The regional specificity of this project is reflected in my discussion of ṭarab, a musical

1 The Maghreb generally refers to the region of Arabic-speaking countries in the western part of North Africa, and the Mashriq refers to the countries east of the Mediterranean and north of the Arabian Peninsula. Geographically, Egypt is not considered part of the Maghreb or the Mashriq, yet it is often grouped together with the Mashriq because of its ties to the Levant.

1 phenomenon with deep roots in the Arabo-Islamic poetic and mystical traditions. With a repertoire anchored in pre-World-War I Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean, ṭarab, a concept akin to musical ecstasy, grew out of urban centers such as Cairo, Alexandria,

Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus, Aleppo, and Jerusalem. I argue that ṭarab, as both as a musical form with a culturally-specific contextual base and a sui generis communicative mode capable of producing context, points to an acoustic geography that predates current sociopolitical mappings of the Mediterranean. In its literary and cinematic iterations, the concept of ṭarab presents a challenge to geopolitical and cultural visions of a

Mediterranean structured around divisions such as secular/sacred, premodern/modern,

Mashriq/Maghreb. The profound intervention of the texts discussed in Ecstatic Feedback rests not only in their use of ṭarab as a narrative structure, but in the means by which they cast ṭarab as a way of rethinking the historical traumas of the twentieth and twenty-first century Mediterranean. As a comparative project, Ecstatic Feedback indeed transgresses the boundaries of its locale, to reiterate Elia Suleiman’s artistic philosophy. My methodology is anchored first and foremost in close reading, hence my emphasis on ṭarab and its affective provenance. The regional specificity of this project, however, gives way to a broader set of considerations tied to the notion of audition as an ethical practice. In conversation with affect theory, psychoanalytic approaches to loss, Walter Benjamin’s historical materialism, and Deleuzian poststructuralism, Ecstatic Feedback foregrounds the following questions: How does audition, in the literary and cinematic context, test the limits of hegemonic narratives? How does performance highlight the incongruities of such narratives and allow for the emergence of silenced or marginalized voices? By inviting a 2 readership or audience to listen, how do literary and cinematic works generate alternate empathies?

Emile Habibi’s set of vignettes The Sextet of the Six Days (1968), Hoda Barakat’s novel Disciples of Passion (1993) and her series of essays The Stranger’s Letters (2004),

Eran Kolirin’s film The Band’s Visit (2007), and Elia Suleiman’s film The Time That

Remains (2009), make explicit reference to the world of ṭarab and its practitioners.

Edmond El Maleh’s novel, A Thousand Years, One Day (1986), situates ṭarab more abstractly, as a concept with tremendous performative and communicative potential, in both its popular and mystical iterations. Egypt, once a musical and cinematic hub and a leading political force in the Mediterranean region, occupies a crucial position in this dissertation. The works discussed in the following chapters, whether they assume a critical stance vis-à-vis Egypt’s long-standing acoustic hegemony, frame the golden years of ṭarab artistry in nostalgic terms, or highlight the tensions between pan-Arab and other postcolonial models of national auditory culture, engage Egypt’s legacy as a major player in the regional soundscape. It is against this backdrop of competing claims to a stake in this soundscape that a number of historical narratives were silenced, or refigured in popular discourse to match the parameters of identity conceived in strict ethno-national terms. With a focus on Arab Jews, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and exiles of the Lebanese Civil War, my project attends to the processes that underwrite a literary and cinematic intervention into the regional soundscape, with its attendant silences and elisions. By foregrounding instances of ṭarab, or ecstatic feedback, and exploring the element of intersubjectivity

3 inherent in the dynamic between muṭrib (a performer who elicits ṭarab) and listener, this diverse group of texts points to a line of cultural poetics based on audition.

I am using the phrase “ecstatic feedback” in accordance with A.J. Racy’s definition of ṭarab in Making Music in the Arab World: The Culture and Artistry of Ṭarab. Situating

ṭarab both “in context and as context,” Racy characterizes the musical event as “an interface between sound and society, a set of recognizable behaviors that link music to various broadening social and expressive spheres” (10-11). Despite its secular roots, the transformative potential of ṭarab as “musical affect per se,” links it to the concept of spiritual transcendence and Sufi notions of wajd or religious ecstasy (4-6). Racy further suggests that ṭarab “enjoys special symbolic significance as a supreme religious medium and an auditory link between the secular and the mystical realms” and ultimately

“combines an emotive literary idiom with an affective message that is purely musical” (89).

Given the tremendous overlap between ṭarab and the aesthetic sensibilities and textual attitudes of Sufi inshād (recitation), Racy settles on the word ecstasy as a working point of reference:

Ecstasy, like ṭarab, implies experiences of emotional excitement, pain or other similarly intense emotions, exaltation, a sense of yearning or absorption, feeling of timelessness, elation or rapturous delight. Moreover, the term ‘ecstasy’ tends to fit the various conditions associated with ṭarab as a transformative state, for example, those connected with intoxication, empowerment, inspiration, and creativity. (6)

The concept of “ecstatic feedback” then refers to an active encounter in which the vocal dynamism of the muṭrib feeds into the audience’s capacity for creative listening. In the world of ṭarab artistry, the process of creative listening hinges on the sammīʿa (listeners),

4 a select sector of the audience that exhibits a particular gift for attentive and emotionally sophisticated audition.2 In context of Ecstatic Feedback, the propensity for hearing nuances figures in the literary or cinematic work as an emblem of committed art. The engagé quality of ṭarab, and specifically the proclivity for creative listening among the sammīʿa, offers a rich theoretical base for the artistic phenomenon that I examine in this dissertation.

A SCENE OF ṬARAB

As a point of departure, I open with a scene from the 2005 semi-autobiographical novel Yasmine by the Iraqi-born Israeli author Eli Amir. Set in Israel-Palestine during the

1967 Arab-Israeli War, Yasmine responds to a set of considerations inextricably bound to the novel’s locale: the decline of Pan-Arab ideology, Israel’s annexation of territory in the

West Bank and Gaza Strip, the ongoing implications of reconstituted borders, the emergent opportunities for social mobility granted to Israeli speakers of Arabic, and the cultural schizophrenia that has accompanied such opportunities, particularly among members of the Israeli intelligence community. Yasmine features a scene in which the protagonist, Nuri, a reserve officer in the Israeli army, has been called to duty and awaits orders on the outskirts of Gaza City. To kill time and calm his nerves, he volunteers to translate the radio broadcasts out of Egypt. As the only Arabic speaker in his platoon, he is entrusted with the

2 Racy offers the following elaboration on the semantic purview of listening as an art in and of itself: “Derived from the verb samiʿa, ‘to hear’ or ‘to listen,’ this usage underscores the symbolic importance of listening in Arab and Near-Eastern civilizations in general. Musicians usually praise audiences and individual listeners through expressions that are linguistically and conceptually related to listening. Among such expressions are biyismaʿū, ‘they listen,’ and biyismaʿ kwayyis, ‘he listens well.” By the same token, a good listener may politely ask a musician to perform by using listening-related expressions such as sammiʿnā, ‘allow us to hear,’ or something like ‘delight our ears,’ and kullinā sāmʿīn, or kullinā sāmʿa, both meaning ‘we are all listening’ or ‘attentively ready to listen” (40). 5 task of faithfully relating sensitive information. All of a sudden, the news broadcasts are cut off to make way for a musical performance by the Egyptian diva Umm Kulthum, widely known as al-sitt (The Lady). The lieutenant in charge of communications turns to Nuri in a panic: “We lost the Egyptian broadcast, the radio waves are full of songs! What the hell are they singing about?” (Yasmin 44) Nuri lingers, soaking up the words and the melody:

“Your eyes took me back to bygone days/they taught me to regret the past and its wounds/what I saw before I set eyes on you/was a lifetime wasted.”3 The lieutenant cuts in: “What’s taking you so long?” Buying himself a little time, Nuri replies: “Just a minute, a little patience…let me understand what’s going on here” (44). For a moment, Nuri forgets about his duty as an Israeli officer gathering intelligence. He finds himself in a state of

ṭarab, transported by the music into an alternate reality. “How do we translate ṭarab?” Nuri asks himself. “Perhaps musical inebriation, a quiver of excitement, unfettered joy, intoxication by sound, bodily pleasures, spiritual transcendence, radiance of the soul…all these together are ṭarab.” Nuri turns back to the lieutenant: “I think that they muted the broadcasts and are playing Umm Kulthum. Someone is saying to his friend over the network that the connection will resume after the ḥafla.” Alarmed, the lieutenant asks: “Are you serious? How long will it take?” Nuri replies, “An hour, two, three, it depends” (44-

45).4 Ṭarab has no single-word equivalent, not in Hebrew, the language of Yasmine, and

3 All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. These lyrics come from the 1964 song, inta ʿumri (“You are my life”). Born of the tumultuous artistic collaboration between Umm Kulthum (ca.1904-1975) and the Egyptian composer Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab (ca.1901-1991), inta ʿumri remains one of the most cherished and widely circulated works of The Lady. 4 For more on the iconic Thursday night Umm Kulthum ḥafla (musical soirée) broadcast live throughout the Mediterranean, see Virginia Danielson’s The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthūm, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century (1997). During her five years of fieldwork in Egypt, Danielson 6 not in English, the language of this dissertation. The lack of a direct equivalent is both a source of anxiety, as we see from Nuri’s stolen moment, and a remarkably open-ended means of engaging history and memory.

Rather than suggesting a single-word Hebrew equivalent, Amir shows the reader what ṭarab can do. During the Thursday night Umm Kulthum ḥafla, life comes to a standstill. Not only does Nuri forget that he is in the midst of the 1967 War, gathering intelligence for Israel no less, but Egypt presses the proverbial pause button to let The Lady practice her art. This pause, this sacred time-out, if you will, has the effect of momentarily undoing the conceptual and geographical borders over which the 1967 War is being waged.

Amir’s literary enactment of a ṭarab moment points to the ways in which ṭarab can transcend the context of musical performance and take on a broader communicative function. By introducing an element of pathos and performativity to a military operation with seemingly fixed rules of engagement, Amir makes room for ambivalence and exposes the fault lines of the discourses that coalesced around 1967 and its aftermaths. Nuri does not, strictly speaking, confine his meditation on ṭarab to the realm of the musical. From

Umm Kulthum he moves to another cultural icon, Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser:

Nasser has an incredible voice. Soft and melodious when he speaks of Misr, Egypt, abounding in life force when he speaks of al-karama, dignity, wrathful when he speaks of al-istiʿmar, imperialism, resolute and aggressive when he speaks of alʿadu, the enemy, triumphant when he speaks of al-nasr, victory. A caressing and penetrating voice, he commands heard many sentiments that echo the very scene described in Yasmine: “By way of describing the impact of her Thursday concerts, many stories circulated: ‘Such-and-such military leader postponed a manoeuver because Umm Kulthūm was singing.’ ‘Life in the Arab world came to a stop.’ Detractors complained that ‘You couldn’t read about anything else in the newspaper that day except the color of Umm Kulthūm’s dress and what jewelry she would wear.’ On those Thursdays, ‘we lived in her world all day’” (1, emphasis mine). 7 its every string and uses it to hypnotize his listeners. There is no doubt that sawt al-ʿarab and the Egyptian theater have lost a great talent. (Yasmin 39- 40)5

Nuri is speaking from the moment in which the term al-naksa (the setback) has come into circulation.6 Attuned to the language of rupture and defeat ushered in by al-naksa, Nuri struggles with the cognitive dissonance between his desire to grieve over Nasser’s downfall and his sense of allegiance to the State of Israel. By refiguring Nasser as a muṭrib, Nuri carves out a new dimension in which his conflictual identities can exist side by side.7

Nasser’s voice is rife with melancholic potential and stirs up feelings of longing for an irretrievable past: “I am trying to focus on his words, not on his voice, but only when I focus on the tone and melody, do I manage to remember his words. For it was through the melody that his old speeches were engraved in me word for word, like an early coming into consciousness” (41). This reflection is followed by a flashback in which Nuri sits in his grandmother’s living room in Jerusalem and listens with his family to a live broadcast of

5 Sawt al-ʿarab (Voice of the Arabs) is a Cairo-based transnational Arabic-language radio station. The station saw its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s when it became the primary medium through which Nasser emerged as one of the preeminent political orators of his time. 6 In his introduction to Halim Barakat’s Days of Dust, Edward Said contrasts the semantics of al-nakba (the 1948 “catastrophe”) and al-naksa (the 1967 “setback”): “For the word [al-nakba] suggests in its root that affliction or disaster is somehow brought about by, and hence linked by necessity to, deviation, a veering out of course, a serious deflection away from a forward path. (This incidentally is in marked contrast to another, less commonly employed word for 1967: naksa, which suggests nothing more radical than a relapse, a temporary setback, as in the process of recovery from an illness)” (xvi). In Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political, Tarek El-Ariss expounds on Said’s argument and reflects on contemporary texts that subvert discourses in which 1967 figures as a “rupture in the Arab historical narrative of progress” (176). 7 In The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics, Charles Hirschkind elaborates on the musicality of Nasser’s voice: “Far from being bombastic, Nasser’s rhetorical style relied on subtle modulations of tone and vocal affect. By means of such vocal qualities, Nasser was able to mediate, in unparalleled fashion, between contrasting structures of sensibility and affect, between ethics and politics, creating a space of acoustic intimacy between himself and his audience” (51).

8 Nasser’s watershed 1954 speech in Manshiyya Square, Alexandria. Uttered moments after the attempt on his life, Nasser’s promise to die a martyr for the Egyptian people constitutes the pinnacle of his career as an orator. Nuri, an Iraqi Jew gathering intelligence for Israel in 1967, experiences Nasser’s defeat but hears Nasser’s glory.

AFFECT THEORY REVISITED

My understanding of affect is based on a number of sources from the fields of cultural studies, anthropology, and ethnomusicology. As a working definition, I start with a description from “An Inventory of Shimmers” by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J.

Seigworth in their edited volume, The Affect Theory Reader:

Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon. Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation as well as the passage (and the duration of passage) of forces or intensities...Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name that we give to those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, and generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension…Indeed, affect is persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations. (1)

As I suggested in my discussion of Making Music in the Arab World, the “capacity to act and be acted upon” plays a distinct role in the production of a feedback loop that is both context-bound and singular in its creative arc. The notion of “context bound” indicates the historical circumstances to which the literary or cinematic text is responding and the representational means through which these responses are articulated. Gregg and

Seigworth’s suggestion that affect can “drive us toward movement, toward thought and

9 extension” points to the ways in which creative listening gets refigured in the literary or cinematic text as an ethics of audition.

Indeed the studies that I am engaging in this dissertation, from affect theory to psychoanalytic approaches to loss, foreground the ethical possibilities that emerge when we consider historical events in terms of “impingement or extrusion” rather than linear narratives of progress or setback. Gregg and Seigworth expound on the notion of “the lateral choice,” a phrase coined by Roland Barthes in his 1978 lecture series “The Neutral.”

Barthes likens the Neutral and its correlate, the lateral choice, not to neutrality or indifference but rather to “intense, strong, unprecedented states” (7). The lateral choice constitutes for Barthes an intervention into paradigms that appear impervious to factors of outside of the realm of conscious knowing. Barthes, who presents the Neutral as a critical practice, suggests that the lateral choice constitutes “a manner—a free manner—to be looking for my own style of being present to the struggles of my time” (8).8 This idea of a singular and creative interface with historical circumstances anchors Barthes’ lateral choice, which he characterizes as a “neutrally-inflected, immanent pathos or patho-logy,” in ethical terms (77). Gregg and Seigworth, expanding on Barthes’ model, reflect on the nexus of affect as critical praxis and affect as theory:

Here affect theory is, at one level, an ‘inventory of shimmers’ while, upon another register, it is a matter of affectual composition (in a couple of senses of the word ‘composition’—as an ontology always coming to formation but also, more prosaically, as creative/writerly task). This is a passion for

8 Barthes offers the following reflection on his choice to situate the Neutral in the field of ethics: “Our project is obviously not disciplinary: what we are in search of is the category of the Neutral insofar as it crosses language, discourse, gesture, action, the body, etc. However, to the extent that our Neutral defines itself in relation to the paradigm, to conflict, to choice, the general field of our reflections will be: ethics, that is…the discourse of the other of choice, the other of conflict, of paradigm” (8). 10 differences as continuous, shimmering gradations of intensities. Making an inventory (of singularities). And, in the interval, is the stretching: unfolding a patho-logy (of ‘not-yets’). (11)

Gregg and Seigworth’s reading of Barthes points to a characteristic shared by all of the works discussed in Ecstatic Feedback, namely the idea that the “creative/writerly task” is aligned with the transformative potential of ṭarab. By engaging ṭarab on the level of communication and narration, each author or filmmaker is, in fact, articulating a manner of being present to the struggles of his or her time. Barthes’ notion of an “immanent pathos and patho-logy” introduces questions of symptoms, side effects, and therapeutics, all of which figure, with a great deal of critical overlap, in the theories of affect and psychoanalytic approaches to loss that I am referencing. In his discussion of audience reception, Racy notes that a successful ṭarab performance elicits particular interjections from the audience. “Such gestures,” writes Racy, “do not analyze or make evaluative statements about the music…they erupt as symptoms, or manifest ‘side effects,’ of the ecstatic condition and feed back into and energize the musical-evocative process” (76).

When considered in the broader context of literary and cinematic treatments of ṭarab, the notion of symptoms and side effects points to a culturally diffuse condition of grief couched in a regionally-specific web of catastrophic events. This condition of grief is met, in the texts of Ecstatic Feedback, with an emphatic nod to the recuperative and therapeutic potential of listening as both a creative and ethical practice.

My discussion of therapeutics draws upon Charles Hirschkind’s The Ethical

Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (2006). Hirschkind, in his study on the role of cassette sermons in the contemporary Islamic Revival, explores the

11 affective dimension of a collective listening practice aimed at challenging the moral structures of religious and civil authority in the modern Arab nation-state. According to

Hirschkind, the “capillary motion” of the cassette medium allows for the articulation of a counterhistory that functions on the level of the “human sensorium” and the “affects, sensibilities, and perceptual habits of its vast audience” (2). This counterhistory is responding to a number of epistemological claims, most notably the Western

Enlightenment discourse on the primacy of vision over audition. Following Dipesh

Chakrabarty’s concept of “minority histories,” or narratives relegated to the “margins of modern historical consciousness” by virtue of their departure from ocularcentric models of post-Enlightenment subjectivity, Hirschkind notes that the human sensorium constitutes an overlooked site of ethical self-fashioning (20). Critical attention to this site, as Hirschkind suggests, allows for a nuanced exploration of these “minority histories” and the challenges that they present to insular discourses on civil society in the postcolonial nation-state.

Along these lines, Hirschkind writes:

The senses are not a stable foundation upon which a singular and unassailable truth can be erected, as an empiricist epistemology would claim, but rather a space of indeterminacy, heterogeneity, and possibility. Both perceived objects and perceived subjects are sensorially plural, enfolding a set of possibilities that take on a determinant but not final form in a moment of perceptual completion. (20, emphasis mine)

It is at the level of the human sensorium that a practice of therapeutics unfolds. The therapeutic properties of the cassette sermon issue from a repeated engagement with the vocal qualities of the khatīb (Muslim orator) in a process akin to the ecstatic feedback

12 model of ṭarab. Hirschkind likens cassette sermon therapeutics to psychoanalytic formulations of attentive listening:

Listening establishes the conditions of intersubjectivity, of the transference, of affect and unconscious, enabling the reorganization of psychic elements by the analyzed…Not unlike psychoanalysis…cassette-sermon audition is also a technique of self-fashioning predicated on the therapeutic capacities of listening, albeit one elaborated in ethical (rather than psychological) terms and in relation to a theologically based form of reasoning (23).

Following Hirschkind’s model of sound-based therapeutics or self-fashioning, I argue that

ṭarab, as it figures in Ecstatic Feedback, takes on a recuperative function anchored in the storytelling endeavor itself. By accounting for affect and intersubjectivity, the authors and filmmakers of Ecstatic Feedback refigure the concept of the historical narrative to include the contingent and unpredictable aspects of the senses, with a particular emphasis on sound.

Drawing a distinction between listening and hearing, Hirschkind writes, “We are accustomed to think of listening as a cognitive act and often tend to ignore its practical and sensory dimensions” (25). To elucidate the concept of sensorial plurality, Hirschkind turns to Walter Benjamin’s 1969 essay “The Storyteller.” Benjamin’s essay, writes Hirschkind highlights the “embodied dimensions of listening and the shifting perceptual conditions that bear on its performance” (25). As Hirschkind notes, Benjamin traces the shift from storytelling, as a process of accrued meaning through multiple retellings, to information, a means of transmission that relies on immediacy and legibility of the speech act itself.9

9 Hirschkind offers the following elaboration on this point: “Listening in this context is a process of sedimentation: a narrative reveals its secret depths only in its multiple retellings, by the accumulation of layer upon layer within the soul of the listener, like coats of lacquer applied to a wooden box that becomes clearer with each new layer…The acceleration of temporal rhythms under capitalism, particularly in its technoindustrial phase, brings about a steady downgrading of the value of experience and hence of the practices by which experience is communicated. The time of the ear dooms it to obsolescence” (26-27). 13 Though Hirschkind takes issue with Benjamin’s reiteration of modernist discourses on the

“decline of the ear” in the age of technology, he finds value in the concept of the human sensorium as a site of encounter: “The entire sensorimotor apparatus, with its mnemonic layers of kinesthetic and visceral experience, will form the auditory membrane. In other words, within the model of absorptive listening figured in “The Storyteller,” it is in some sense the body in its entirety that constitutes both the medium of expression and the organ of audition” (27).

This emphasis on the entire body as an “organ of audition” is central to my project because I argue that the therapeutic function of ṭarab unfolds in both the realms of the psychic and the corporeal. The physical gestures that accompany a successful ṭarab performance, to reiterate Racy’s point, “erupt as symptoms, or manifest ‘side effects,’ of the ecstatic condition” (76). My reading of ṭarab as a decidedly melancholic and culturally diffuse mode of engaging with loss leads me to questions of melancholia and pathology.

To this end, I am drawing on a study, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, edited by David Eng and David Kazanjian, in which they revisit Sigmund Freud’s 1917 essay “Mourning and

Melancholia.” Eng and Kazanjian reconsider Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia. Freud characterizes mourning as a normal reaction to the “loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, and ideal, and so on” (4), regarding melancholia as a pathological and interminable extension of mourning. Eng and Kazanjian read Freud’s “so on” as

14 “melancholic excess” and identify in this excess the potential for production (4). Rather than seeing a normal and a pathological response to loss, they see two mutually predicated concepts that function in a dynamic relationship vis-à-vis the remains of that which is lost.

Eng and Kazanjian align their critical project with the practice of historical materialism introduced by Walter Benjamin in his 1940 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Historicism, they argue, involves an “encrypting” of the past from a hegemonic point of view, whereas historical materialism constitutes a creative process in which the past is imbued with “future significations as well as alternate empathies” (1).

Revisiting Sigmund Freud’s taxonomy, they explore the recuperative potential of melancholia: “By engaging in ‘countless separate struggles’ with loss, melancholia might be said to constitute, as Benjamin would describe it, an ongoing and open relationship with the past—bringing its ghosts and specters, its flaring and fleeting images, into the present”

(3-4). Indeed melancholia functions in the works of Ecstatic Feedback as a means of keeping the past “steadfastly alive in the present” or keeping the storytelling endeavor going. Following Benjamin’s formulation about the body as an organ of audition and reception, and bearing in mind the notion of meaning accrued through multiple retellings, we can begin to understand the urgency with which the authors and filmmakers discussed in Ecstatic Feedback insist on embodied forms of inexorable grief.

CHAPTER BREAKDOWN

Ecstatic Feedback opens with a discussion of Emile Habibi’s 1968 Sudasiyyat al- ayyam al-sitta (The Sextet of the Six Days), a collection of six vignettes set in the aftermath

15 of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.10 Habibi introduces each vignette with an excerpt from a song, identified with the parenthetical note ughnīyya Fayrūziyya (Fayruzian song). By placing a thematic emphasis on Fayruz’ 1955 Rājiʿūn (We Shall Return) in his depiction of the schisms that have typified Palestinian life within the Green Line since 1967, Habibi acknowledges the enduring attachments to return as both a political goal and an affective anchor for subject-forming narratives. I am reading the first vignette, “When Masʿud had the good fortune of receiving his cousin,” and the sixth vignette “The Love in My Heart,” as bookends for Habibi’s commentary on the ways in which the pan-Arab project, despite its rallying call for Palestine, alienated an entire sector of the Palestinian population, those who stayed behind and became Israeli citizens in 1948. Habibi navigates the complex weave of designations for music-makers, broadly conceived, and the attendant value judgments associated with the figure of the muṭrib, the mughanī (a singer or vocalist in the realm of popular music), the folkloric singer, the munshid (a vocalist in the Sufi tradition of recitation), and the sentimentalist crooner. I argue that Habibi’s thematization of the

“music-makers” opens the narrative field to the unspoken and unspeakable dimensions of

Palestinian experience.

My discussion of The Sextet is followed by a chapter on Hoda Barakat’s 2004 series of essays The Stranger’s Letters and her 1993 novel Disciples of Passion. In both of these works, Barakat probes the tension between ṭarab as a profoundly individual means of engaging history and memory and the ways in which musical icons such as Fayruz and

10 I will henceforth refer to The Sextet of the Six Days as The Sextet. 16 Umm Kulthum came to be aligned with political projects invested in codifying national or pan-Arab historical narratives. Both Habibi and Barakat frame the question of nostalgia in ethical terms and challenge the reader to consider the ways in which political projects are studied, imagined, and heard. The Stranger’s Letters and Disciples of Passion point to a triangulated relationship between the listener, the work of art, and the ideological substrate of the artistic endeavor. In her essays, epistolary writings, and fiction, Barakat places a thematic emphasis on Fayruziat al-hawa (Fayruzian love songs) and on the violence perpetrated in the name of the Rahbani Nation.11 I argue that Barakat, both through her fictional characters and as her writing persona, narrates deliberate subversions of ritual behaviors associated with Fayruz and enacts a willful misremembering of cultural iconicity. In doing so, she situates listening as individual prerogative and reclaims the license to remember and recover one’s bearings.

My chapter on Edmond El-Maleh’s 1986 novel A Thousand Years, One Day, adds the figure of the hazzan (Jewish cantor) to the cadre of ṭarab practitioners. By considering

Moroccan Jewish liturgical and mystical practices within the broader ecstatic feedback loop of the Mediterranean, El Maleh invites his readers to reflect on the multitude of networks that historically crisscrossed the region and left traces, both cultural and linguistic, on its diverse inhabitants. With a distinct emphasis on moments of encounter, A

Thousand Years, One Day simultaneously speaks to the dissolution of the Moroccan Jewish

11 “Rahbani Nation” is a phrase coined by Christopher Stone to describe the ideological underpinnings of the artistic collaboration between Fayruz and the Rahbani brothers. Rahbani musical theater, as Stone points out in Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon, became an artistic cornerstone for the political aspirations of right wing Christian nationalists. 17 community and its traumatic exodus, the absorption pains of Moroccan Jews in Israel, the

Palestinian refugee crisis, the civil war in Lebanon, and the post-colonial reconfiguration of the Mediterranean. My chapter on A Thousand Years, One Day features a close reading of a scene in which El Maleh depicts a hiloula or festival, in the Jewish Moroccan folkloric tradition, commemorating the life of a saint. By casting the figure of the hazzan as a “text without rupture,” El Maleh couches the ecstatic event in a heterodox approach to Jewish ethics, namely the idea of tikkun olam (the rectification of the world). Based on the mystical notion of the transmigration of souls, tikkun olam situates the concept of audition in the realm of the intersubjective.

The final chapter of Ecstatic Feedback attends to the role of silence as a requisite counterpart to notions of voicing and audition. My readings of Eran Kolirin’s 2007 film

The Band’s Visit and Elia Suleiman’s 2009 film The Time That Remains highlight the ways in which the respective filmmakers engage the ṭarab phenomenon and create uncanny events through which silences are staged and exposed. Like the novels and essays discussed in Ecstatic Feedback, The Band’s Visit and The Time That Remains show what ṭarab can do. I have chosen to close this dissertation with a chapter on film, a distinct narrative medium that lends itself to a simultaneity of sonic cues, visual imagery, and intertextual references. Owing to this simultaneity, the cinematic form offers a unique treatment of the technologies of sound, listening practices, and creative counterpublics that have coalesced around ṭarab culture. I am reading Egypt’s ubiquitous presence in both films as an aesthetic and acoustic prism through which narratives of loss are refracted and refigured. As a regional third party to local entanglements and histories of dispossession, Egypt brings to 18 bear aggregate forms of affect, thus opening the narrative field to alternate empathies, or moments of ethical audition. In The Time That Remains, a dramatization of the nakba that simultaneously functions as an exquisite eulogy for Suleiman’s parents, the voice of the

Egyptian songstress and cinematic icon Laila Murad figures prominently. By casting

Murad’s disembodied voice, a battleground for ethno-religious politics, as the

“soundtrack” to the nakba and to the moment of rupture from his homeland and family,

Suleiman points to the ways in which seemingly disparate narratives of loss resonate and feed back into each other. Specifically, I am referring to the respective narratives of dispossession among Palestinians and Arab Jews. Rather than calibrating these narratives as necessary correlates in a protracted cycle of population exchange, The Time That

Remains and The Band’s Visit explore the therapeutic potential of encounter. In The Band’s

Visit, the Golden Age of Egyptian cinema and song figures as a common affective referent for two individuals, whose serendipitous meeting “across enemy lines” allows for a breaking down of ego frontiers that gives way to a moment of profound human healing. I argue that ṭarab functions in The Band’s Visit as a means of refiguring silence and emptiness as a pause for reflection and a reverential nod to ecstatic temporality. Given the intensifying militarization of the region and the increasingly militant discourses on identity and ethno-national affiliation, the notion of a police orchestra playing Umm Kulthum becomes an urgent call for a reassessment of the role of affect in the realm of political discourse and intelligence.

19 THE COMPARATIVE PROJECT IN DIALOGUE

I situate Ecstatic Feedback among a growing body of scholarship that recognizes both the urgency of engagement with loss as a critical category and the innovative reading practices that emerge when loss is considered in terms of affect. My project is highly indebted as well to studies that rethink historiographies—Zionist, Arab nationalist, and postcolonialist—by looking at the historical traumas of the twentieth and twenty-first century Mediterranean through the critical lenses of Benjaminian historical materialism and Deleuzian notions of rhizomatics and planes of immanence. The full title of my dissertation, “Ecstatic Feedback: Toward an Ethics of Audition in the Contemporary

Literary Arts of the Mediterranean,” reflects the combined influence of such studies. As I noted earlier, “ecstatic feedback” refers to an active encounter in which the vocal dynamism of the muṭrib feeds into the audience’s capacity for creative listening. The concept of creative listening gets refigured in the literary or cinematic text as both an emblem of committed art and an ethics of audition.

In his discussion of the inception of Arabic free verse and the poem “Cholera” by the Iraqi Nazik Al-Mala’ika, Robin Creswell introduces the notion of “empathetic audition.”12 According to Creswell, Al-Mala’ika’s genre-defining moment grew out of an emotional encounter mediated through radio broadcasts out of Cairo. He characterizes

“Cholera” as an instance of pan-Arab “empathetic audition”: Al-Mala’ika was listening to the reports on the cholera epidemic in Egypt (her poem is peppered with verbs such as to

12 Keynote speech for the Jil Jadid conference, The University of Texas, February 22 2013. 20 listen, to lend an ear, to hear) and experiencing the suffering of her fellow Arabs as a rhythm and an intonation. Creswell claims that Al-Mala’ika’s “anecdote of audition, articulation, and reception” as a “scene of ṭarab.” His formulation of “empathetic audition” as a function of ṭarab has been pivotal in my understanding of the textual attitude that I am tracing in Ecstatic Feedback. By aligning the “creative/writerly task,” in this case the birth of Arabic free verse, with an act of listening, Creswell looks at one of the driving questions behind my own project: How does the work of art constitute a means of being, to quote

Barthes, present to the struggles of one’s time?13 Ecstatic Feedback builds on the notion of

“empathetic audition,” as a means of being present or engaged, and extends the concept of active listening into the realm of ethical audition.

Continuing with a breakdown of my title, the phrase, “Toward an Ethics of

Audition,” with its emphasis on movement, thought, and extension, to reiterate the point made by Gregg and Seigworth, implies a textual attitude always in the making. In other words, both the literary and cinematic works discussed in Ecstatic Feedback and the critical studies that I reference reflect a commitment to modes of reading, writing, and listening that go beyond conventional understandings of representation. Insofar as it constitutes a means of narrating events or experiences, representation persists a subject of inquiry in

13 Creswell elaborated on this very point in his discussion of jaww (atmosphere, in both the political and literary sense) and the resistance that Al-Mala’ika encountered when she presented her new poetry to her father: “The importance of jaww is also evident in the care with which [Al-Mala’ika] arranges the various parts of her story—geopolitical, generational, and personal—to fix the timeliness of her invention. The father’s censure of her poem and its music, “lam yuṭribnī” (literally, “it did not give me ṭarab”), indicates how difficult it is to be in tune with one’s time, and the unevenness of historical experience more generally.”

21 literature, film, and cultural studies. Central to my own project is the question of lending expression to experiences of loss that, in the depth of their devastation, elude representation. How then do we acknowledge the enduring importance of representation as a subject of investigation while shifting the grounds of our academic conversation?

Moneera Al-Ghadeer presents this exact set of concerns in Desert Voices: Bedouin

Women’s Poetry in Saudi Arabia:

What is representation? Is there a conclusive goal for critical or literary endeavors? A theoretical mode of reading demonstrates that language and representation complicate and disrupt both the notion of language transparency and the assumptions of a complete, linear, socio-historical discourse. Effectively, literary theory has taught us the limits of metanarratives and discourses. It has contested totalities and demonstrated a constant ‘arrest’ of representation, while deferring or differing the arrival at the represented and the signified. (3)

In Trials of Arab Modernity, Tarek El-Ariss considers theories of performativity and, along these lines, suggests that affect “[cannot] be reduced to a discursive moment subsumed in a model of representation but rather engaged as something that is constantly going in and out of representation, text, and modes of embodiment” (8).14 El Ariss references both the

Arab critic and poet Adonis, who argues that modernity constitutes a “process of innovation (iḥdath) in relation to tradition,” and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the

French philosopher and psychiatrist, respectively, who understand the event (ḥadath) “not as another moment within time, but something that allows time to take off on a new path”

(3). Building on these two sources, El Ariss offers a reading of Arab modernity (ḥadātha)

14 El-Ariss anchors his discussion of performativity in Eve Kosofsky Sedwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003).

22 as a “genealogy of symptoms and affects,” and a “somatic condition, which takes shape through accidents and events (aḥdāth) emerging in between Europe and the Arab world, the literary text and political discourse” (3).

In terms of rethinking regional historiographies, Lital Levy’s “Historicizing the

Concept of Arab Jews in the Mashriq” has been indispensable for my project. As I noted earlier, ṭarab culture, having grown out of urban centers such as Cairo, Alexandria, Beirut,

Baghdad, Damascus, Aleppo, and Jerusalem, reflects an acoustic geography that predates current socio-political mappings. Levy’s study calls for a reassessment of these mappings and an intervention into discourses that confine the conversation on the Arab Jew to the postcolonial moment. “To borrow an expression from Hans Jauss,” writes Levy, “I argue that any history of Arab Jews is the ‘prehistory of a post-history’: the history of Arab Jews in the period predating the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and postcolonial reconfiguration of the Middle East now necessarily doubles as the ‘prehistory’ of Mizrahim in Israel” (455).

Levy acknowledges the importance of “first-wave” Mizraḥi scholarship, noting that scholars such as Ella Shohat and Yehouda Shenhav ushered in a critical discourse that made it possible to talk about the Arab Jew. From Levy’s perspective, this discourse needs to be expanded through an engagement with Arabic sources that predate the Palestinian-

Israeli conflict and a shift in epistemological approaches to the concept of historical rupture:

Indeed, I believe it is particularly important for scholars from literature and cultural studies to understand that in using the term “Arab Jew,” they cannot assume the historic existence of a pristine Arab Jewish subject whose holistic identity was shattered by colonialism, Zionism, and Arab nationalism. In other words, post-Zionist discourse did not “recuperate” the 23 idea of the Arab Jew so much as it (re-)invented it…To put a spin on Albert Memmi’s oft-quoted formulations, I would say that in 2008, if we are now “Arab Jews,” it is not because we once were Arab Jews. Rather, we are “Arab Jews” because of what is at stake in defining ourselves as such today. (457)

Levy’s study, with its emphasis on the stakes of “defining ourselves” today vis-à-vis history, not as a linear progression, but rather as a constellation of moments open to multiple retellings, serves as a critical bridge between historiography and storytelling. As such, “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Mashriq,” has far-reaching implications beyond the concept of the Arab Jew, both in the context of this dissertation and in the broader academic discussion on the literary arts of the Mediterranean.

“Toward an Ethics of Audition” constitutes a nod to Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka:

Toward a Minor Literature. Ṭarab, as a cultural phenomenon that both retains a discreet profile and adapts in accordance with the times, demonstrates a “capillary motion,” to borrow a phrase from Hirschkind. The texts of Ecstatic Feedback, by staging scenes of

ṭarab as a means of narrating multiple and inextricably bound narratives of loss, exhibit some of the characteristics of a minor literature as defined by Deleuze and Guattari. As a counter-argument to the claim that Kafka, by “failing” to conclude any given work, was seeking a refuge in literature, Deleuze and Guattari note that the rhizomatic, or ever- proliferating but never-ending, signature of Kafka’s writing constitutes a means of keeping the narrative field open to alternate significations:

A rhizome, a burrow, yes, but not an ivory tower. An escape route, yes, but certainly not a refuge. The creative escape route involves the whole of politics, the whole of economics, the whole of bureaucracy and of justice…For the expression precedes the contents and is their precondition (provided of course it has no signification): living and writing, art and life, are only in opposition from the point of view of a major literature. (605) 24 The concept of rhizomatics, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari, offers a compelling framework with which to consider the inexplicable breadth of expression in works that frame situations of “no-escape” in terms of affect. In the regionally specific context of

Ecstatic Feedback, the world of ṭarab and its practitioners can be viewed as an endless series of burrows in which each performance and each moment of reception branches off in a singular creative arc. In this vein, the vast and varied experiences of Arab Jews,

Palestinian citizens of Israel, and exiles of the Lebanese Civil War, are presented in Ecstatic

Feedback as “sensorially plural,” to reiterate Hirschkind’s notion of the “human sensorium” as a site of self-fashioning. As a comparative project with implications beyond the contemporary Mediterranean, Ecstatic Feedback sketches the contours of a minor literature in which audition figures as a distinguishing feature.

25 Chapter 2: The Song That Fayruz Did Not Sing: Unspoken Voicings in Emile Habibi’s The Sextet of the Six Days

I experience politics as profession and literature as sense, and I attribute one to the other. I write stories in those moments, few and far between, when my chest tightens around its “ahhhh,” and no longer wields the strength to rein it in. And we, the men of politics, realize that sighing, like cursing, cannot be hastened nor postponed. For it is upon us to dispatch reality, however painful it may be, to propel it forward and not backward, toward plausible change, not improbable adventure. And yet for all our realism, can we prevent mankind from sighing, the oppressed from cursing?

To our homelands…we shall return We shall return, we shall return, we shall return

(Fayruzian Song)

—Emile Habibi, The Sextet of the Six Days

Between 1955 and 1967, the Lebanese musical icon Fayruz collaborated with the

Rahbani Brothers on a group of ten songs composed specifically for Palestine. These

“Songs for Palestine,” among them “We Shall Return” (Rājiʿūn, 1955), “Old Jerusalem”

(al-Quds al-ʿatīqa, 1966), and “Flower of the Cities” (Zahrat al-madaʾin, 1967), earned

Fayruz a singular place in the hearts and minds of Palestinian citizens of Israel and refugees of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War alike. Rājiʿūn, arguably the most celebrated composition of this song cycle, is quoted with ellipses in Emile Habibi’s 1968 Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al- sitta (The Sextet of the Six Days). A collection of six vignettes set in the aftermath of the

1967 Arab-Israeli War, The Sextet addresses one of the most enduring and problematic

26 facets of the discourse on Palestinian self-determination. I refer here to the fraught position of Palestinians citizens of Israel vis-à-vis the notion of Palestinian statehood, and to the ever present question of the right of return. Emile Habibi (1922-1996), born in Haifa to a middle class Christian Orthodox family, was a Palestinian member of the Knesset or Israeli

Parliament, a leading figure in the Israeli Communist Party, and a literary trailblazer who devoted his life’s work to forging a sustainable future for Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Among the striking features of the rich intertextual fabric of The Sextet is Habibi’s use of the ughnīyya Fayrūziyya, or Fayruzian song, as a prelude to each of the six vignettes.

By casting the Fayruzian song as a narrative structure, Habibi couches The Sextet in a regionally-specific web of political and aesthetic entanglements. Each vignette of The

Sextet opens with an original title followed by few lines from a song and a parenthetical note identifying the song as Fayruzian. Habibi does not make the reference explicit but rather invites the reader to draw upon a shared cultural memory in order to identify the song and set the tone for the vignette. Though it is beyond the scope of my project to discuss all six vignettes, such a study would no doubt illuminate further Habibi’s intervention into the acoustic politics of the region and the narrative innovations by which he lends expression to the rich and multifaceted histories of Palestinian citizens of Israel. I will focus in this chapter on the first vignette, “When Masʿud had the good fortune of receiving his cousin,” and the sixth vignette “The Love in My Heart.” These two distinct tableaus can be read as bookends for Habibi’s elaborate depiction of the schisms that have typified

Palestinian life within the Green Line since 1967.

27 In December of 1968, the Lebanese journal al-Ṭarīq released a special issue dedicated to Arabic literature in Israel. The Sextet was featured in this issue and garnered significant critical attention throughout the Arab world. The following year, the vignettes were published in Cairo under the auspices of Riwayāt al-hilāl, an affiliate of the Syndicate of Publishers Union in Beirut. The Sextet was originally published in al-Jadīd, the cultural supplement of the Israeli Communist Parties (RAKAH) Arabic language newspaper, al-

Ittiḥad. The al-Jadīd version, released by Habibi in 1968 under the pseudonym Abu Salam, went largely un-noticed by Arabic readers in Israel-Palestine until the text made its way back “home” via the Beirut-Cairo literary route. The journey of The Sextet from Israel-

Palestine to Beirut to Cairo and then back again to Israel-Palestine points to a trans-regional circuit of cultural exchange characterized by both expressive opportunity and the legitimizing function of the publishing scene in cities such as Cairo and Beirut. If we consider these cultural hubs anchor points for a trans-regional acoustic politics, we can see how Habibi, both in the text itself and in his introductory remarks, performs a critique of a

Pan-Arab acoustic chamber that privileges certain narratives over others. In his introduction to the Riwayāt al-hilāl edition, Habibi reflects on the remarkable turn of literary events that brought The Sextet back to its geographical birthplace and original readership via the Beirut-Cairo literary circuit. Habibi’s description of the text’s “return” highlights the role of broadcasting and the manner in which voice travels across borders:

Several broadcasting hubs in the Arab world, among them Cairo, began to feature the stories of The Sextet as radio shorts thereby rousing the interest of people here in Israel, many of whom had perhaps run across [the stories] in al-Jadīd without having noticed. This is human nature in general. So how then do we not understand it as a branch yearning for its trunk? (7) 28 Bearing in mind the predominance of Egypt’s Sawt al-ʿarab (Voice of the Arabs), we can read Habibi’s remarks as a critique of certain hegemonic modes of transmission associated with the Pan-Arab project. Habibi’s critique is performative in the sense that he draws attention to a particular problem through a series of dramatizations rather than an explicit articulation of the issue at hand. Moreover, he regularly employs what Judith Butler and

Jacques Derrida have termed “performative contradiction.”15 He offers a tongue-in-cheek meditation on a hypothetical name change for the 1967 Arab-Israeli War: “Suppose they had named the War the Seven Day War to make it a Septet…” (8). By appending an imagined seventh day to the 1967 War, Habibi draws attention to the possible implications of reaching the proverbial seventh day. Though he stops short of attaching a specific meaning to the advent of the seventh day, he suggests that such a scenario would serve to expose “the other face of the tragedy of this war.” To this other face Habibi fastens the image of a prisoner who, cut off from his people for twenty years, wakes up one day to a clamor in the courtyard of his prison. How does this prisoner make himself or herself heard over the clamor? Habibi’s acoustic imagery gestures to a profoundly thorny issue: If Israel were to withdraw from the territories occupied during the 1967 War in order to move toward the establishment of a Palestinian state, what would this scenario entail for

Palestinian citizens of Israel? The representation of such a tenuous position requires a

15 Jacques Derrida, in Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, defines performative contradiction in the following terms: “The performative gesture of the enunciation would in the act prove the opposite of what testimony claims to declare, namely, a certain truth…The lie belies itself by virtue of the deed it does [par le fait de ce qu’il fait], by the act of language. Thus it proves, practically, the opposite of what your speech intends to assert, prove, and give to be verified” (3). For Judith Bulter’s characterization of “performative contradiction,” see Butler and Spivak Who Sings the Nation State? (63). 29 narrative framework that allows for paradox, and this is precisely the role that the Fayruzian idiom plays in the context of The Sextet.

In “Fayruz, the Rahbani Brothers, Jerusalem, and the Leba-stinian song”

Christopher Stone discusses the Fayruz “Songs for Palestine” and points to some of the paradoxes that arise when different groups lay claim to her artistic legacy. As Stone argues,

Fayruz and the Rahbanis left an indelible mark on the Arab listening public through their songs for Palestine, yet these songs make up a small fraction of their artistic output, the bulk of which centers on the Christian mountain village of Lebanon. The musical theater of the Rahbanis typically featured such a village plunged into turmoil by outside forces and unified through a story of love and miraculous events meant to reinforce the redemptive values of the community in crisis. Though Fayruz and the Rahbanis did not consciously or actively participate in the rise of a right-wing Christian nationalism in Lebanon, the allegorical aspect of their musical theater offered the perfect artistic repository for the political aspirations of the Christian right. The largely Muslim Palestinian refugee population of Lebanon quickly came to represent the “outside” agent which corrupted the integrity of the community. The politicization of Rahbani musical theater had catastrophic implications during the Lebanese civil wars of 1975 to 1990 when the notion of restoring the community to an unadulterated state resulted in massive sectarian violence.

The first vignette of Habibi’s Sextet, “When Masʿud had the good fortune of receiving his cousin,” opens with the refrain from Fayruz’ 1954 song “A Sketch of

Strangers” (Iskitsh ghurabāʾ): “Why are we Oh Father / why are we strangers? / Have we not on this earth / friends and loved ones?” Written by the Palestinian poet Harun Hashem 30 Rashid and set to music by the Rahbanis, Iskitsh ghurabāʾ does not by most accounts belong to the group of works known collectively as the “Songs for Palestine.” This poetic

“sketch” does however present some of the thematic and stylistic hallmarks of an early

Fayruzian engagement with the question of a Palestinian homeland. The song opens with a chorus of male and female voices followed by a supplication sung by Fayruz. The chorus then echoes the question limādhā (why), and Fayruz offers one more contemplative limādhā before the song resumes with an instrumental interlude. Iskitsh ghurabāʾ, though not unusual for the period in which it was composed, stands out for its remarkable polyphony and ever-present tension between the voice of the collective and the various solo interjections. Ines Weinrich, in “Notes on Salvation and Joy: Reflections on the

Repertory of Fayruz and the Rahbani-Brothers,” lays out some of the distinguishing features of what many consider the first Fayruzian song for Palestine, Rājiʿūn. Weinrich, who characterizes Rājiʿūn as the “answer of the Rahbanis to al-nakba,” notes the dialogical nature of the musical exchange between a chorus, thought to represent the Palestinian people, and Fayruz, thought to represent the Palestinian conscience (486). Iskitsh ghurabāʾ follows a similar compositional style, but the history of the collaboration between the

Fayruz-Rahbani team and Harun Hashem Rashid lends a unique dimension to Habibi’s use of the song as an opening gesture. Born in Gaza in 1927, Harun Hashem Rashid belongs to the 1950s generation of Palestinian poets known as the “nakba poets.” In 1945 he began working as the director of Sawt al-ʿarab in Gaza, and in 1954 he published his first collection of poems Maʿ al-ghurabā (With the Strangers) through the Cairo League of

Modern Literature. Published under the rubric of kutub qawmīyya (nationalist books), 31 Rashīd’s collection foregrounds the theme of return. The collaboration between the

Rahbanis and Harun Hashem Rashid was initiated by Sawt al-ʿarab in Cairo. The highly politicized point of departure for this artistic venture marks Iskitsh ghurabā as a text deeply embroiled in the political acoustics of the region. By ensconcing the opening lines of this

“forgotten song for Palestine” within the story of how Masʿud had the good fortune of receiving his cousin, Habibi both establishes the polyphony of The Sextet and anchors the vignettes in a musical-poetic idiom that speaks to the nature of the demographic and cultural upheavals of the region.

Set in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, this first vignette captures the moment in which Palestinian citizens of Israel were able, for the first time since 1948, to reunite with Palestinians from the West Bank. Masʿud’s seemingly uncomplicated life in a sleepy Arab village within the Green Line is rocked one day when his cousin from the West

Bank pulls up at his doorstep in a “magnificent private car with wings like an airplane”

(13). The first person narrator, presumably a resident of the village, offers the following introductory remark: “Masʿud, who is known amongst us by the nickname ‘Radish,’ he is a child of our alley” (13). Bearing in mind Habibi’s direct reference to Naguib Mahfouz’

1959 novel Awlād ḥāritnā, I translated the phrase huwa min awlād ḥāritnā as “he is a child of our alley.”16 Mahfouz’ allegorical tale of the three monotheistic religions follows the

16 Awlād ḥāritnā was first published in 1959 by the Cairo daily al-Ahrām in serial form. The novel was banned in Egypt, where Nasser’s top circles regarded the novel as a direct criticism of the leader and his policies and Islamic authorities claimed that Mahfouz’ allegorical take on the three monotheistic religions insulted the Prophet Mohammad. Awlād ḥāritnā was published in Lebanon in 1967 and is currently in its ninth edition through Dar al-ādāb in Beirut. It was translated into English by Philip Stewart and published in 1981 under the title Children of Gebelawi. The second translation, by Peter Theroux, was published in 1996 under the title Children of the Alley. 32 oral histories of a modern-day Cairene neighborhood whose inhabitants are mired in the same bitter battle of inheritance that plagued their forefathers. In the opening passage of

Awlād ḥāritnā, an omniscient narrator who records the stories of the ḥāra or quarter describes his community in the following terms: “We were and still are one family, which no stranger has penetrated” (4). By bringing in a reference to Awlād ḥāritnā, Habibi foregrounds the question of community and paves the way for an exploration of both the affiliations and the exclusionary practices that grant a given community a sense of cohesion.

From Fayruz’ question, “Why are we Oh Father / why are we strangers?” (limādhā naḥnu yā abatī / limādhā naḥnu aghrāb?), and the characterization of Masʿud as “a child of our alley,” an alley which “no stranger (gharīb) has penetrated,” Habibi constructs an entire hermeneutics around the idea of the stranger. In the context of Masʿud’s encounter with his cousin from the West Bank, the proliferating references to the figure of the stranger underscore the angst-ridden position of the Palestinian citizens of Israel vis-à-vis a widely regarded corrective to the 1967 defeat, namely Israel’s withdrawal from the territories occupied during the war. The arrival of Masʿud’s cousin in a fancy private car causes a big stir in the impoverished village, but as the narrator points out, “matters are not without their deviations” (14). The word shawādh, which I translated as deviances, carries the specific connotation of existing outside of the community or tribe and typically refers to deviant individuals. The narrator, whose unusual word choice reveals a deep-seated anxiety over the presence of a stranger, proceeds with an explanation of Masʿud’s ambiguous position vis-à-vis the inhabitants of the village: “In this quarter we are all from a single clan, or shall 33 we say, parts originating from a single clan…we are all from a single clan with the exception of the Masʿud boy and his family” (14).

Masʿud, who resists being categorized as an exception (istithnāʾ), seizes the opportunity of his cousin’s arrival to proudly announce to the entire village that he is not a slippery character devoid of a family narrative and not “a stranger on this earth” (15).17 In characteristic form, Habibi makes light of a situation in order to draw attention to its gravity. The playful repartee with which Habibi approaches the character of Masʿud serves to expose what he characterizes, in his introduction to The Sextet, as “the other face of the tragedy of this war.” This point emerges most saliently with regard to the theme of return and Habibi’s treatment of the corresponding roots ʿayīn-wāw-dāl and rāʾ-jīm-ʿayīn.

Masʿud, who is always calculating the “return voucher” (ḥisāb al-rajʿa), finds himself in a delicate position when one of the locals picks a fight with his cousin over the role of

Jordan’s King Hussein in the 1967 defeat. Having always felt like an outsider due to his lack of family ties, Masʿud sees something of a blessing in the freedom of movement momentarily afforded to Palestinians in the wake of the 1967 War. Through a clever manipulation of a group of Arabic verbs known colloquially as “Kāna and Her Sisters,”

Habibi offers a linguistic performance of Masʿud’s fraught position. Known formally as incomplete verbs (afʿāl nāqiṣa) due to the requisite attachment of a predicate, “Kāna and

Her Sisters” includes verbs such as “to become” (aṣbaḥa, ṣār) and “to remain” (ẓalla, mā

17 I translated the colloquial phrase maqṭūʿa al-aṣl wa-al-faṣl, a phrase reiterated time and again in this vignette, as “a slippery character devoid of a family narrative.” To be precise, this phrase is used to describe a person whose background and lineage remain unclear, a person with no traceable past or family history to tie him to a given community. 34 zāla). The first play on “Kāna and Her Sisters” occurs in a description of how Masʿud came to be known by his proper name: “Radish acquired a cousin, from Uncle Lazm, from the

West Bank, and in a car with wings. And Radish went back to being Masʿud, and he felt that he wanted to distribute al-artīk to everyone. And if there was lapping, so be it” (17).18

Profoundly distraught by the quarrel between his cousin and the belligerent local Ibn

Ratiba, Masʿud sullies his shirt with the artik as his joy turns to apprehension over his cousin’s imminent leave-taking. While Habibi’s phrasing does not depart from standard grammatical form, two elements lend a certain idiosyncrasy to the passage and serve a particular performative function. First, in this passage and two corresponding passages that follow, Habibi uses the names Radish and Masʿud either as predicates or subjects of “Kāna and Her Sisters.” Second, Habibi uses the root ʿayīn-wāw-dāl (to return) as if it belonged to the same class of incomplete verbs: “And Radish went back to being Masʿud” (wa-ʿād fajla Masʿūdan). By working the names Radish and Masʿud into the grammatical weave of the text, Habibi draws attention to the individual and interpersonal dimensions of certain states of being such as becoming, remaining, and returning. This point is made all the more pronounced by the fact that the name Masʿud in and of itself signifies a state of happiness or good fortune. What, then, does Habibi accomplish by casting this group of verbs, and most significantly the historically fraught motion of return, in the self-contained universe

18 Habibi uses the word al-artīk to designate a frozen treat beloved of Israeli children. Hebrew has a formal word shelgon for this creamy confection, but Israeli children use the brand name artik which has entered the Hebrew language as a colloquial term for a creamy frozen treat. With this seemingly frivolous reference, Habibi once again presents a critical question in the form of a performative contradiction. The comical image of Masʿud distributing al-artīk draws attention to a more serious matter, namely the question of the Palestinian child who code-switches with Hebrew child-speak. 35 of Masʿud’s emotional purview? This question takes us back to the Fayruzian song as a narrative framework and aesthetic overtone through which Habibi approaches some of the overarching issues surrounding Palestinian self-determination. To reiterate Christopher

Stone’s characterization of the Fayruzian Songs for Palestine: “In the fuzzy and foggy

ḥanin/nostalgia of the Rahbanis, home becomes, simply, both wherever and whenever you are not” (Stone 165). If we apply this axiom to the character of Masʿud and his tenuous position as both a “child of the alley” and an exception within the close-knit community of the hamūla or clan, we can begin to trace a certain ambiguity vis-à-vis the notion of return and its implications for Palestinian citizens of Israel. Ahmad Baydun’s characterization of the Fayruzian idiom as an “almost perfect union between alienation and familiarity” also brings to bear on The Sextet, a text that foregrounds the concept of the uncanny (Baydun

156).19 In the following passage, Habibi offers a striking illustration of the uncanny as it pertains to his hapless/happy protagonist: “Masʿud went back to being Radish, and he went back to playing barefoot in the ḥāra. However, he started on occasion to pronounce the

[letter] qāf as a qāf, and he strove to enunciate [the letter] with the utmost precision. But

[the qāf] refused to come out from between his lips except as a stumbling kāf” (19).

In Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida discusses the significance of the hyphen in the appellation Franco-Maghrebi. Though the hyphenation of Palestinian and Israeli bears a unique set of historical circumstances, Derrida’s model offers a compelling

19 The word waḥsha, which I translated as “alienation” can also mean desolation, estrangement, or melancholy, and the word ͗ulfa² rendered here as “familiarity” carries the additional meanings of intimacy, friendship, and harmony.

36 framework with which to approach Masʿud’s linguistic predicament. “The monolingual of whom I speak,” maintains Derrida, “speaks a language of which he is deprived” (Derrida

60). Masʿud’s inability to pronounce the emphatic qāf points to a traumatic break with the

Arab world and its cultural-linguistic moorings. This rupture occurred in 1948, the year that the Abi Musʿad family became Israeli. Though Masʿud himself did not live through this moment, he nonetheless bears the scars of the hyphenation between Palestinian and

Israeli. Try as he might to enunciate the emphatic qāf, of which he has no direct memory, it is not within his phonetic capacity. Having been exposed to Hebrew, which only has the velar stop, to use the technical term for the “k” of the letter kuf, Masʿud is faced with a sort of aphasia when it comes to his identity as an Arab.20 What kinds of narrative strategies, then, must come into play in order for Masʿud to move past this aphasia? Derrida frames this question in terms of translation: “Because this monolingual is aphasic (perhaps he writes because he is an aphasic), he is thrown into absolute translation, a translation without a pole of reference, without an originary language, and without a source language [langue de départ]. For him, there are only target languages [langues d’arivée] (61). Habibi’s framing of The Sextet in Fayruzian terms constitutes precisely the type of translation to which Derrida refers. The “fuzzy and foggy ḥanin/nostalgia of the Rahbanis,” to reiterate

Stone’s point, becomes the langue d’arivée for Masʿud, the perpetual stranger and exception (istithnāʾ). Habibi’s proliferating use of “Kāna and Her Sisters” in the context of

20 I thank Alexander Magidow for calling my attention to another aspect of the qāf/kāf dichotomy, namely the guttural qāf as a pan-Levantine prestige feature. In this context, kāf represents the low register variant spoken by villagers. In the Palestinian context, major cities such as Nablus would feature the prestige variant while villages in The Triangle, Masʿud’s village being a prime example, would most likely feature the lower register kāf. 37 Masʿud’s encounter with his affluent cousin from the West Bank gestures emphatically to a hermeneutic enclosure in which being, becoming, remaining, and returning function within an echo chamber of melancholic longing for an irretrievable past. The motion of return, in particular, is never actualized and remains suspended in the domain of reverie, in the provenance of the Fayruzian idiom.

Habibi’s narrator, ever-fixated on Masʿud’s state of being offers one last passage rife with incomplete verbs: “I do not want for you, oh clever ones, to gather from this that

Masʿud went back to his former state in our quarter, for he became like the rest of the children, with uncles, maternal and paternal, and relatives. And he did not go back to being a slippery character devoid of a family narrative” (20, emphasis mine). If we consider once again the concept of performative contradiction, the emphasis placed on Masʿud “no longer being” without a family betrays an anxiety about the possibility that he could, in fact, go back to his former state should Israel withdraw from the territories. The vignette draws to a close with the image of Masʿud’s sister, known by the nickname al-falsafiyya (the philosophical one), tucking him into bed as he drifts into a blissful sleep. Leading up to this image, Masʿud explains how he, like his sister and others who understand politics, eagerly awaits Israel’s withdrawal and believes steadfastly in the inevitability of such an outcome. Habibi then makes explicit the contradictory overtones and anxiety embedded in

Masʿud’s words: “But [there remained] one question that he did not dare put forth before his sister al-Falsafiyya, for fear of a slap, a quarrel with his sister with whom he hated to quarrel, or for fear of something else in and of itself: When they withdraw, will I go back to being the way I was…without a cousin?” (20-21) Masʿud then falls asleep and dreams 38 of his cousin and his cousin’s brother Sameh who visited Cairo and saw Abdel Halim Hafez live in concert.

Plugged into the echo chamber of the Arabo-Islamic poetic tradition, Habibi’s sixth vignette al-hubbu fi qalbī (The Love in My Heart) opens by quoting the early Islamic poet

Hadba bin al-Khashram. In typical form, Habibi does not specify the reference but rather embeds this sliver of an expansive cultural cache between a title of his own creation and a nod to the Fayruzian idiom, or absence thereof:

The Love in My Heart Perhaps the agony with which I spent the night Behind it joy is close at hand For he is secure in his fear and unbound in his suffering And so come his remote and foreign kinfolk (A song that Fayruz did not sing)

By affixing the parenthetical designation, “a song that Fayruz did not sing,” Habibi marks the sixth vignette as a singular event and, in the vein of performative contradiction, gestures to the latent presence of Fayruz and her affective provenance. “The Love in My Heart” and

“When Masʿud had the good fortune of receiving his cousin” serve as bookends for The

Sextet in the sense that the narrative thread introduced as the question that Masʿud did not dare to ask resurfaces in the sixth vignette with the concept of the song that Fayruz did not sing (emphasis mine). Implicit in both of these refuting statements is the possibility that certain silences might find expression, though perhaps not within the frames of reference by which a given community, whether on the scale of the tribe, the village, the nation, or the region, perceives its political cohesion. When Masʿud wonders whether he will become

“without a cousin” in the event of Israel’s withdrawal from the territories, he is in fact

39 articulating that which he is forbidden to name—the idea that a Palestinian state in the West

Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital might have undesirable consequences for Palestinian citizens of Israel.

“The Love in My Heart” unfolds in a similar vein, with the persistent suggestion of an unspoken domain that exists alongside the realm of discursive permissibility. Habibi’s first-person omniscient narrator gestures to this possibility with the opening lines of “The

Love in My Heart”:

A song that Fayruz did not sing in words but that she sang with warmth. And this story too which you find between your hands now, I am not its author, but I re-wrote it once, and I re-wrote it twice and three times, in order to hide its features so as not to distress its owners, but they were distressed, in order to hide its features from their jailers so as not to provoke them, but they were provoked (75).21

This passage is striking most notably for the suggestion of an affective register that functions in tandem with the vocally articulated. Marked by the adverbial difʾan, this register serves as a placeholder for narratives of traumatic loss. By anchoring the sixth vignette in a classical Arabic poetic idiom characterized by evocative rather than explicit references to grief, Habibi sets up his text as a running commentary on the challenge of representing unspeakable sorrow.

To borrow musical terminology, I am reading Habibi’s unfolding imagery as a modulation by which he moves through several interrelated tonal areas, so to speak. Hadba bin al-Khashram’s expression of sorrow over the loss of the beloved modulates, through

21 The first line reads, “Ughnīyya lam tunshidaha Fayruz kalāman wa-lākinuha tunshidaha difʾan.”

40 the key word difʾan, into Fayruz’ musical-poetic world, which as previously noted, is characterized by a tension between ghurba/alienation and ḥanin/nostalgia. Habibi then draws an analogy between the image of rending one’s heart, an action most often associated with deep emotional upheaval, and the process of authoring a story. As Habibi notes in his introduction to The Sextet, a story is born when one’s “chest tightens around its ‘ahhhh’ and no longer wields the strength to rein it in” (8). While the motion of sighing clearly gestures to the affective dimension of the storytelling endeavor, Habibi insists on the interrelatedness of the affective and the political. By reiterating the roots mīm-zāʾ-qāf (to shred or rend) and shīn-qāf-qāf (to split or cleave) he creates a semantic palette which allows him to present a political statement through a regionally-specific poetics of loss and longing. Steeped in a dense weave of imagery, the opening of “The Love in My Heart” segues into a political narrative through the image of the lightning bolt: “When I was in

Leningrad this summer, the [city’s] clear skies split open with the gleam of a lightning bolt” (76). The phrase inshaqqat samāʾuha (her skies cleaved open) carries the additional meaning of allowing something to appear. Moreover, the word inshiqāq denotes rupture and points to the painful process by which Palestinian citizens of Israel became estranged from Palestinian refugees of 1948 and from the Arab world at large.

The vignette’s narrator, who exhibits a gnawing anxiety over his ability to relate a story too painful to articulate, finds himself in a storehouse for “relics attesting to the victims [of The Siege of Leningrad] and that which they endured” (78). We later discover that this storehouse, which the narrator characterizes as a “modest building,” is the Museum of Leningrad History. Upon entering the museum, the narrator is immediately drawn to a 41 photograph of an emaciated youth in shredded clothing (ṭifl mumazziq al-thiāb), who he likens to a “fig tree forgotten in one of the plundered fields of our country.” The child stands in a state of stupor amidst ruins (kharāʾib wa-aṭlāl), smoke, and death (78). With the word aṭlāl and its philological moorings in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, Habibi creates an iconographic pendulum that swings back and forth between the here and now of his

Palestinian narrator’s visit to Leningrad and the age-old grief of the Jāhilī poet whose yearning for the beloved finds expression through images of the desert encampment in ruins. In characteristic form, Habibi draws the reader back to the present moment with a statement that carries within its own ambivalence the possibility of an affirmative outcome:

“I don’t know whether it is possible to obtain a photographic image of lighting” (78). Like the question that Masʿud did not dare to ask and the song that Fayruz did not sing, the seeming impossibility of capturing a photographic image of lightning gives way to a contemplation of possibility: “And even if it were possible, you would not capture its gleam. Have you not noticed, when a lightning bolt flashes before your eyes, that you perceive what illuminates the veil of darkness around you more than the sight of the lightning bolt itself? But we did see a photographic image of lightning” (78). Even more significant than the possibility of capturing the proverbial gleam of a lightning bolt are the political implications of lending expression to such an elusive flash of emergence. If we recall, the narrator of “The Love in My Heart” re-writes his account multiple times so as to render its features unrecognizable to the story’s owners and their jailers. The narrator of the first vignette warns the reader, “You would do best not to scold Masʿud as if he were a child when you hear from him something that does not please you” (13). The notion that 42 Masʿud’s words might be disconcerting to the listener is granted a greater degree of urgency in the sixth vignette, where the narrator’s words become a source of distress and provocation. “The Love in My Heart” presents a portrait of a Palestinian couple coming face to face with devastation seemingly removed from their own tragic history. Unable to contain her sorrow, the wife exists the building weeping and her husband follows in suite perplexed by her emotional outburst. “Does [the child in the photograph] not resemble our

[own] child?” she asks, to which the husband replies, “No, no, these [people] do not resemble anyone. Nobody has endured what they have endured, what they continue to endure, what we continue to ask them to endure” (79). Though Habibi does not attach a particular ethnic or religious background to the child from Leningrad, the over-determined reaction of his Palestinian narrator calls to mind the ongoing comparison between the

Holocaust and the nakba.22 This association is made explicit when the couple’s local hosts insist that they cannot leave the museum without looking at the “Diary of Tanya

Savicheva” (79). Tanya Savicheva, a contemporary of Anne Frank, kept a small diary in which she detailed the tragic deaths of her family members.23 Profoundly distraught by

Tanya’s account, Habibi’s narrator vows to write about what he witnessed in Leningrad and agonizes over his inadequacy in the face of such a task. His only recourse is an act of translation by which he refigures Tanya’s story in Fayruzian terms, which in turn allows

22 This is an ongoing preoccupation in both Israeli and Palestinian literature. Ghassan Kanafani, in his 1970 novella Returning to Haifa, and S. Yizhar, in his 1949 short story Ḥirbet Ḥiz'a, both draw this analogy in their works. 23 Unlike the diary of Anne Frank, Tanya’s diary was never published, but it was presented during the Nuremberg trials as evidence of the crimes against humanity committed by the Third Reich during World War II.

43 for a remarkable breadth of expression. To reiterate Gregg and Seigworth’s definition of affect as “born in-between-ness and [residing] as accumulative besided-ness,” I am reading

Habibi’s use of the Fayruzian idiom as a way of emphasizing intersubjectivity and rejecting exclusivity (2).

Although Habibi’s narrator emphatically maintains that one cannot draw a comparison between what “they” have endured and what “we” have endured, he does ultimately place these two distinct narratives of loss in the same framework. Tanya’s diary consists of just a few sparse lines detailing the time of death of each relative:

Zhenya died on December 28th, 1941, at twelve noon. Grandma died on January 25th, 1942, at three in the afternoon. Leka died on March 17th, 1942, at five o’clock in the morning. Uncle Vasya died on April 13th, 1942, at two o’clock at night. Uncle Lesha died on May 10th, 1942, at four o’clock in the afternoon. Mama died on May 13th, 1942, at 7:30 in the morning. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. The only one left is Tanya. (Heberer 54)

Habibi’s narrator, agonizing over the horror of what he has witnessed, cannot bring himself to record the exact words of Tanya’s diary as related to him by his local guides, so he offers his own take on Tanya’s words:

Today my grandmother died… This morning my little brother did not wake up… Today they took my young friend to a march… I learned today that our neighbor died… Today they took away my sleeping mother, and she did not return… And the last line of the last page in the diary: Today I remained alone… (Habibi 80)

By re-writing Tanya’s account in his own language, he invites the reader to reflect on the frames of reference that would allow these two seemingly disparate accounts to exist side

44 by side. Notably, Habibi both gestures to the Holocaust and moves away from the comparison. Savicheva was a victim of the Third Reich, but not a Jewish victim of the

Holocaust like Anne Frank. Moreover, Habibi’s take on the Savicheva diary reads like an account of the forced evacuations of Palestinian villages during the nakba. By placing these two narratives side by side, without stripping either of their specificity, Habibi pushes back against discourses on the exclusivity of tragic loss.

The antidote to his misgivings over his shortcomings as a narrator comes in the form of the daily diary entries of a young Palestinian woman, a refugee of the 1948 War, who was accused of smuggling arms and detained in the Ramle Prison. Scrawled on cigarette paper and addressed to her mother, the daily entries of the young Jerusalemite (al- fatā al-maqdisiyya) reflect her hunger for “freedom, human dignity, tranquility, friends, food, sun, and affection” (82). Ever fearful of exposing the author’s identity, the narrator suggests that we call the young Jerusalemite Fayruz. “Why,” asks the narrator, “did we choose for her the name Fayruz and not Tanya, for example?” “We chose for her the name

Fayruz,” he continues, “because that name affects us, in the tranquility of its sound, in its lulling [quality] of its sound, like the effect of a mother on her child” (82). His use of the phrase yuʾathir fīnā, which I translated as “affects us,” ties back into the question of affect and the song that Fayruz did not sing in words but in warmth. Habibi’s choice of setting, the notorious Ramle Prison, calls to mind his opening depiction of the Palestinian citizen of Israel as a prisoner who, cut off from his people for twenty years, wakes up one day to a clamor in the courtyard of his prison.

45 The Jerusalemite’s letters to her family detail her encounter with her cellmate, the

ḥayfāwiyya, who she describes in the following terms, “She is not one of us but from Haifa, that is to say, an Arab from Israel” (86). The encounter between the two is framed almost entirely in musical terms as the two young ladies sit and talk about their preferences. The

Jerusalemite prefers the Egyptian Abdel Wahhab while the ḥayfāwiyya (the “Arab from

Israel”) prefers Fayruz and in particular, the song Rājiʿūn. The Jerusalemite asks: “What moves you in the song Rājiʿūn? You did not depart and you did not return but rather stayed in your homeland.” The ḥayfāwiyya: “My homeland? I feel that I am a refugee in a strange land. You all dream of return, and this dream sustains you. But me, where am I to return?”

(87) The political implications of this affective turn are made explicit when the ḥayfāwiyya

(as someone from “within”) is asked what is in store. She replies, “I need only to think of the future and the past flashes before my eyes. The future that I dream of is the past. Is this

[even] possible?” For the Jerusalemite, the actualization of Rājiʿūn or the return to a

Palestinian homeland remains a tenable political goal. For the ḥayfāwiyya (the “Arab from

Israel”), the actualization of Rājiʿūn would constitute a double rupture, a new wound.

Though the two young women experience (or hear, to be precise) Rājiʿūn differently, they nevertheless share a language—the language of ṭarab—with which to communicate these narratives which simultaneously diverge and converge.

“The Love in My Heart” ends with a description of how one of the Jewish-Israeli prison guards smuggles the letters of the Jerusalemite (Fayruz) to her parents. Habibi’s narrator comes to the conclusion that “angels exist even in Hell” (91). The friendship between the Jerusalemite and the ḥayfāwiyya, which is misconstrued in the press as an 46 attempt to organize a sleeper cell within Israel, constitutes, according to Habibi’s narrator,

“a mere distortion of an innocent friendship between two young women from one people, meeting after a long separation, under one roof, the roof of a prison cell” (92). The Jewish

Israeli prison guard is tried as an accessory to a terrorist plot, when in fact she represents the third level of empathetic audition. If we recall, it is the prison guard who, by circumventing traditional modes of communication, circulates the letters making them available to the narrator who in turn can convey to us (the readers) the story of Tanya

Savicheva. By suggesting that the Palestinian citizen of Israel is inextricably bound to her jailer and jail cell, Habibi takes the provocative step of including Israel in the “ecstatic feedback” loop.

Though the situation in Israel-Palestine may offer no escape, Habibi’s account of a

“listening that is a doing,” to borrow a phrase from Hirschkind, points to a form of ethics couched in the notion of audition. By opening each vignette with a Fayruzian Song, Habibi situates The Sextet within a specific hermeneutics of sound and ideology. Though Fayruz’

“Songs for Palestine” and the attendant politics of the Rahbani Nation suggest a closed system, Habibi offers his readers an alternative. The ellipses in each Fayruzian Song, aside from fulfilling the practical function of rendering a polyphonic song on paper, gesture to the unknown and the contingent. These contingent states of being can generate exceptional decisions which in turn lend expression to the unspoken dimensions of the Palestinian experience in all of its complexity.

47

Chapter 3: The Memory of Song: Listening as Individual Prerogative in Hoda Barakat’s Disciples of Passion and The Stranger’s Letters

Birds repeat their special song so they can find each other in the expanse of the forest. But the connecting and binding contract dissolves and disintegrates in two situations: when one loses the memory of song (or vice-versa), or when the song-catchers move to another forest.

—Hoda Barakat, The Stranger’s Letters

In a short essay titled shahāda (testimony), the Lebanese author Hoda Barakat reminisces about the cosmopolitan city center of a Beirut yet untouched by the ravages of civil war. “There were English, Russians, Bulgarians, and Egyptians,” she recollects,

“There were also Jews from our country” (shahāda 505). Barakat frames this admixture in acoustic terms and offers the vivid image of her aunt’s building as a polyphonic space:

My aunt’s building, which I loved to visit on Sundays, resounded with different music as one moved from floor to floor. My aunt would bathe in the plage and peruse the television channels, channel nine in particular, in order to improve her French. And she would invite me to accompany her to Baalbek, so that I may be overcome with emotion through [the music of] Umm Kulthūm…Today when I remember her home in Wadi Abu Jamil and I am gripped by a strong longing to visit this building, I restrain myself, fearful of a profound and sure disappointment. (505)

By fastening on the term ṭarab through the phrase “li-aṭrab li-Umm Kulthūm” (so that I may be overcome with emotion through [the music of] Umm Kulthum) in her description of Wadi Abu Jamil, Barakat anchors this cosmopolitan moment in the realm of the fleeting

48 and provisional. The ṭarab experience, by its very nature, constitutes an irreducible encounter between performer and listener. Barakat characterizes her aunt’s building as a

ṭarab community of sorts and imparts a profound sense of grief over the impossibility of revisiting a short-lived historical instant of coexistence. At the heart of her testimony is the question of memory and traumatic loss. Barakat, who left for France with her two young children during the last year of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), extends her metaphor to signal the impossibility of a recuperative gesture in the face of such loss: “My daughter will never know the splendid musical panoply between the floors of my aunt’s building, and I am completely powerless in helping my son recognize the features of an empty city center” (506).

This chapter examines what Barakat has termed, in her 2004 series of essays Rasā͗ il al-gharība (The Stranger’s Letters), the dissolution of the “connecting and binding contract”, or the moment in which a community becomes unintelligible to its members.

What types of recuperative gestures, if at all, are possible under such circumstances?

Through my reading of two texts by Barakat, her 1993 novel Ahl al-hawa (Disciples of

Passion) and The Stranger’s Letters, I explore the author’s engagement with the notion of a community of listeners struggling to retrieve the “memory of song”. How does Barakat approach the theme of the musical encounter, and what does a combined reading of these two texts reveal about the act of listening as a means of imagining a post-trauma community?

In her essays, epistolary writing, and fiction, Barakat exhibits a preoccupation with the creative process as a search for a language with which to represent the unspeakable. By 49 “unspeakable” I refer here to the traumatic events that unfolded during Lebanon’s fifteen- year civil war and the scars of those who lived through the attrition. Ṭarab, as a paradigmatic engagement with loss and longing, assumes precisely such a function in

Barakat’s oeuvre. The musical encounter becomes a means of intuiting rather than enunciating, an attempt to feel around for the contours of a community that purportedly no longer exists. The recuperative gesture in this case rests not so much in an attempt to define community but rather in the individual license to remember and recover one’s bearings.

Throughout this chapter, I contextualize my readings of the two primary texts with references to interviews, essays, and letters in which Barakat takes up the topic of the musical encounter as a means of repositioning oneself vis-à-vis history, memory, and the sensory experiences of the day to day that plunge the individual into the deepest recesses of memory.

As Christopher Stone notes in Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon, public discourse on the cultural life of the war-torn nation oscillates between a nostalgic vision of the 1960s as a golden age and the identification of a moment of return marked by a singular artistic event—Fayruz’ 1998 performance at the Baalbek Festival (2). In this context, the war constitutes a cultural caesura, a historical silence, a period of nearly fifteen years in which “nothing” happened. Two points bear mentioning with regard to Barakat’s engagement with this caesura as well as what came before and what came after. First, her account of a cosmopolitan pre-war Beirut reveals a profound malaise with regard to an unproblematic celebration of a pre-war golden age. Behind the fond recollection of her aunt’s building as a space characterized by the confluence of multiple cultures and 50 languages, rests a tacit acknowledgment of the violent processes through which such a confluence came to be and ultimately unraveled. Barakat specifically mentions the migration from the countryside to the city and the social hierarchies that determined who was granted access to the city center. Second, by linking Baalbek to Umm Kulthum rather than Fayruz, Barakat carries out a willful misremembering of cultural iconicity. As Stone notes, the Baalbek Festival was linked “almost tautologically” with Fayruz and the Rahbani

Brothers (2). By drawing an association between Umm Kulthum and Baalbek, Barakat performs a critique of social memory, in its most heavy-handed form.

Both Disciples of Passion and The Stranger’s Letters reflect a deep preoccupation with the boundaries between self and society. In Disciples of Passion this preoccupation surfaces in the context of mental illness and the distinction between the self and al-nās fī al-khārij or “the people outside” (The Stranger’s Letters 68). The Stranger’s Letters, as the title suggests, constitutes a running commentary on the exiled self and the need to establish an inner rhythm in an unfamiliar environment. Both texts make frequent reference to music and specifically to the affective provenance of the ṭarab experience.

Two distinct but interrelated terms, nostalgia and melancholia, surface in the context of ṭarab as an idiomatic engagement with an irretrievable past. Svetlana Boym, in

The Future of Nostalgia, draws the following distinction between nostalgia and melancholia: “Unlike melancholia, which confines itself to the planes of individual consciousness, nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory” (xvi). Though trauma and exile, with their attendant forms of violence and fragmentation, introduce an additional host of 51 considerations, Boym’s distinction between nostalgia and melancholia provides a working vocabulary with which to approach Barakat’s treatment of the two concepts. Boym continues with her carefully theorized reading of nostalgia by pointing to two discrete forms of nostalgia. “Restorative nostalgia,” she suggests, constitutes a mainstay of nationalist and sectarian movements seeking a “return to origins” narrative, whereas

“reflective nostalgia” is characterized by simultaneity rather than linearity (xviii).

Reflective nostalgia presents an “ethical and creative challenge” in the sense that individual memory and social memory function together yet allow for divergence (xviii). Barakat’s treatment of voice and listening practices in Disciples of Passion and The Stranger’s

Letters takes up the ethical and creative challenge of imagining a framework in which individual and social memory coincide without mapping precisely one onto the other.

In the context of civil war, restorative nostalgia assumes a particularly insidious function as the return to origins narrative becomes a pretext for sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing. Barakat, in her article al-kitāba khārij al-makān (Writing Outside of

Place), characterizes civil war as the most atomizing form of warfare:

For internal wars, civil [wars]…carry out the opposite of [wars with an external enemy] as their true and latent danger rests in unsettling identity and dismantling circles of belonging one after the other…the regression from the human to the citizen (in the first sense of the word) to the one who belongs to a particular region, city, quarter, to a particular religion, creed, sect, tribe, clan, family, home…and civil wars thrive on the fanatical spirit of tribal affiliation. (330)

It is against this backdrop that Barakat frames the writing process as an ethical imperative, an ongoing means of engaging the “fundamental questions” (330). “Choosing a place from which to launch one’s voice,” she continues, constitutes an act of resistance, a refusal to

52 accept the erasure of difference in defense of al-anā al-mazūma or the “self in crisis” (330).

Barakat’s idiosyncratic use of the phrase iṭlāq al-sawt (launching one’s voice) calls to mind the phrase iṭlāq al-nār (firing a weapon), and she goes on to make the reference more explicit: “For belonging to this fractured place means belonging to one of its fragments, i.e. to the combatant group, and defending its discourse through writing, much like the combatant does with his weapon.” (330) The concept of fragmentation is part and parcel of what Barakat identifies as the “true and latent danger” of civil wars, namely the dismantling of one’s sense of belonging to the degree that the individual becomes a sort of disembodied entity unable to distinguish between inside and outside, self and society. Her authorial persona is a disembodied to the point that she writes “against her hand” and

“against her memory” (330).

As Stone notes in Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon, the musical theater of the Fayruz-Rahbani team constituted a “powerful source of subject-forming narratives for the Lebanese in particular and speakers of Arabic in general” (11). Barakat’s treatment of the musical encounter in both Disciples of Passion and The Stranger’s Letters, as I will argue in this chapter, sheds light on the inherent violence of such subject forming narratives. Two iconic musical figures, Fayruz and Umm Kulthum, occupy a prominent position in Barakat’s writing. By constantly engaging the cult of personality that formed around these musical giants of the Arabic-speaking world, Barakat refigures writing as a means of listening. Through the historical advent of the pre-recorded performance, the increasingly pivotal role of radio, and the burgeoning cassette culture, the voices of Fayruz and Umm Kulthum assumed an omnipresence perceived by some as stifling. It is the very 53 inescapability of these two voices that allows Barakat to form a running commentary in her various works on the musical encounter as a means of rethinking the relationship between individual memory and subject forming narratives in their local and pan-Arab iterations. The technologies of sound that rendered Fayruz and Umm Kulthum household names throughout the Arabic-speaking world also contributed to a scenario in which the voices of the two musical all-stars became dislodged from their geographical and ideological moorings.

In order to lend some context to Barakat’s treatment of what I have termed the

“cultural caesura” of the Lebanese Civil War, I will briefly consider the dynamic between the Fayruz-Rahbani team as an artistic formation and what Christopher Stone has identified as the mimetic and metonymic function of their musical theater. “The whole in the case of the Lebanese Nights at the Baalbek Festival,” writes Stone, “is nothing less than the nation itself” (31). This nexus of art and political visions, the “Rahbani Nation” to borrow Stone’s collocation, is extremely problematic in the sense that it projects a very narrow vision of what it means to be Lebanese. Rahbani musical theater typically featured Fayruz as a lover and miracle-worker who reunited the community in crisis. If we extend the programmatic aspect of Rahbani musical theater into the realm of public discourse, we begin to see the outlines of a redemption narrative in which the artistic return of Fayruz to Baalbek in 1998 coincides with the historical return of a community shattered by civil war. One of the most troubling aspects of this direct mapping of art unto history is the element of nisyān

(forgetfulness or oblivion) in the construction of a post-war Lebanese identity. In this case, the act of forgetting is akin to turning a blind eye to the elite political and religious status 54 of Fayruz and the Rahbani Brothers, whose artistic activities were deeply implicated in the rise of sectarian strife in Lebanon. It is at this juncture that Barakat intervenes with her

“mis-remembering” of cultural iconicity in shahāda; her intimation, in Disciples of

Passion, of an unspoken counter-narrative to the Rahbani Nation; and her exploration, in

The Stranger’s Letters, of the ideational shortcomings of such an imagined nation for those who remained “on the outside”.

Barakat’s 1993 novel Disciples of Passion deals with the challenge of narrating events so traumatic that they obliterate the memory of a pre-trauma community. Set in

Beirut in the wake of the Lebanese Civil War, the novel unfolds as a stream-of- consciousness meditation by a nameless protagonist who is institutionalized for a nervous breakdown purportedly brought about by his kidnapping and torture during the war. The hospital where he is confined, Dayr al-Ṣalīb (the Cloisters of the Cross) plays a central role in the novel’s spatial and thematic organization. Situated in one of the hardest-hit areas of the city, Dayr al-Ṣalīb constitutes one of the only spaces that remained intact through the incessant bombings of a war that lasted for fifteen years. Unable to differentiate between memory and hallucinatory visions, Barakat’s protagonist wanders the grounds of Dayr al-

Ṣalīb and offers vivid descriptions of the visual and sensory qualities that characterize the space of his internment. The reader is first introduced to Dayr al-Ṣalīb through the protagonist’s contemplation of the hospital as a particular type of enclosure:

No matter where I stand, I will not truly see the walls that encircle and wholly contain this place because these outer walls of ours are not very high. From the outside though, passersby on the main road see only the upper stories of the buildings. When you are in here, the wall shows itself only if you walk quite close to the stones themselves, most of which are covered in 55 moss that has grown in the thick shadows cast along the wall by the towering trees clinging there. (4)

This ontological meditation on Dayr al-Ṣalīb gestures to the conditions of possibility for interpersonal or intrapersonal encounters in the post-traumatic moment. Most notably, this passage hints at a process by which traumatic loss renders people inaccessible to themselves and to others. The inhabitants of Dayr al-Ṣalīb do not even know that they are walled in unless they really pause to look closely at the stones. Barakat’s nameless protagonist describes the hospital in the following terms: “Dayr al-Salīb is a hospital for nervous disorders and mental diseases. When my family despaired of me, they brought me here, grieving deeply about a condition that they did not know how to mend” (4). This passage points to a certain pathology, the nature of which emerges in the context of the protagonist’s reflections on music and voice. His spells of amnesia give way on occasion to scenes from his childhood triggered by the memory of his father’s voice:

I can see my father as he raises his hand to his ear. He clears his throat and puts his hand to his ear and closes one eye. He is about to sing in his soothing, gentle voice, the little voice that is so like him. Our house, in these moments, would be crowded with people, but however many there were, everyone would grow quiet as soon as he called out his familiar ‘ooof.’ (7)

This characterization of his father as a muṭrib situates the protagonist’s recollections in the realm of the melancholic. Indeed melancholia constitutes the irremediable condition from which the protagonist suffers.24 This condition is perceived as a threat by the nurses of

24 In our discussion of Disciples of Passion in the graduate seminar at the University of Texas at Austin (November 2013), Barakat revealed to us that she invented the word nisyānāt. I have translated this invented plural form as “spells of amnesia,” but I see it functioning as a more nuanced intimation of the nexus between voluntary and involuntary memory, selective memory, and repressed memory. In the context of trauma, these elements function together in an ever-shifting web of associations and dissociations. 56 Dayr al-Ṣalīb, who rush to give him an injection when he sings to himself as a means of self-consolation. In a scene reminiscent of the most violent Surrealist paintings, Barakat depicts her protagonist as a broken body, an anguished pile of flesh, bones, and organs. In order to alleviate the pain and restore his equilibrium, he imagines himself singing like his father:

I will set about rocking [my head] gently, trying to adjust my whole body to a single rhythm that suits it. Little by little I can make my movements more precise and regular, like the heavy pendulum of a clock. I regulate the beat even more with my voice. It rises from my body, rolled up like the tight petals of a new rose, like a water lily, calmly rising and falling on the gentle waves of my voice. My voice floats upward from all parts of my body to gather in my throat and then returns to roam within me. I want to sing, like my father. I use my whole body: I put all of it firmly to my ear, and it seems to me then that I am singing like my father. (8)

Unlike his father, whose lilting voice brings about a spiritual sense of elation, the protagonist, who hears himself singing sweetly, agitates his listeners to the point that they resort to violence in order to subdue him. This passage points to a sense of indignation regarding the protagonist’s ability to imagine his voice as sweet. Unable to comprehend why the nurses continue to beat him long after he quiets down, the protagonist offers the following thoughts on their rage: “They didn’t hate me. They just hated my voice and my strength. And maybe they didn’t like that in my illness I was there among them, upright”

(8). In a second passage, the protagonist recollects his childhood fear of the dark and how he used to ask his father questions just to elicit the soothing voice that would restore his sense of place: “Talk, Father, so that the cloying heaviness of the night will melt and dissolve to nothing. Or sing your mawwāl loudly from the top of the sloping alley, to unlock the murky night and detect the walls that guide us home” (74). Read together, these two

57 passages situate voice and song as a means of self-consolation, an internal roadmap anchored in the memory of an external source of solace.

By introducing the theme of the mawwāl, an Arabic vocal genre characterized by improvisation on the phrase yā layl (Oh night), Barakat transports the reader to Baalbek where Fayruz became one of the most celebrated mawwāl singers through the folkloric showcase al-layālī al-lubnāniyya (The Lebanese Nights). Herein emerges a tension between memory as an individual prerogative and social memory in its most overbearing form. Though Disciples of Passion does not include explicit references to Fayruz, her ubiquitous presence in the novel constitutes a weighty social force against which memory as a function of individual experience struggles to emerge.

Svetlana Boym’s characterization of melancholia as an engagement with loss confined to the “planes of individual consciousness” provides a useful working definition with which to approach the ever-present tension in Disciples of Passion between authoritative forms of social memory and remembrance as individual license. The novel starts and ends with the protagonist’s nebulous recollections of a woman whom he took as a lover during the war. He imagines that he killed her out of passion, but through the course of the novel, he doubts his own memory of the events that took place. Disciples of Passion closes on a note of uncertainty regarding the lover’s whereabouts:

She might have gone back to her husband…Perhaps they are in their home, so far from here, of which I can’t form any image at all. Perhaps she is there while I stand here still, where she left me, on the night of the bombardment, contemplating my emptiness of her, a little before dawn, like all of love’s folk, passion’s disciples, the scorned, vessels of a special light. In the soft sweet night. O night. Yā layl … (136) 58 As previously mentioned, Barakat does not reference Fayruz directly, but the novel is rife with images that evoke her presence. In this particular passage, the phrase yā layl gestures to the mawwāl and, I would add, to the “Lebanese Nights” of Baalbek. Moreover, the time before dawn is associated almost exclusively with the practice of drinking a first cup of coffee while listening to Fayruz. By situating her protagonist as someone whose experience parallels that of kūl ahl al-hawā (all of love’s folk, passion’s disciples), Barakat hints at a community whose shared language constitutes a ritual engagement with melancholic longing. The root hā-wāw-yā carries two interrelated meanings: to love passionately and to fall or collapse. Having undergone the most horrific forms of violence, “love’s folk” are a fallen people whose only recourse is the search for an inner rhythm. The term hawā, in both senses of the word, functions in the novel as the distinguishing feature of the mentally ill. In contradistinction to al-nās fī al-kharij (the people out there), love’s folk exhibit a willingness to explore the innermost recesses of memory as it relates to what I previously characterized as the “cultural caesura” of the war. In their eagerness to dive headlong into what Barakat has termed bilād al-waḥshīyya (desolate country), they present a threat to those who wish to normalize violence by presenting the war as a void in which “nothing” happened.25 Though an analysis of Disciples of Passion with a focus on gender and

25 In al-kitāba khārij al-makān, Barakat brings up the phrase bilād al-waḥshīyya, which I have translated as “desolate country”: We write entirely alone, like the one who dies, and it is upon us to do so, to establish ourselves in the desolate country that is not for from the heart…” (331) The word waḥsha can also mean alienation, estrangement, or melancholy, and the word ͗ulfa² rendered here as “familiarity” carries the additional meanings of intimacy, friendship, and harmony.

59 sexuality is beyond the scope of this chapter, the element of sexual violence, as part and parcel of historical erasure, is so pronounced in the novel that it cannot be separated from other considerations. In “Writing Abroad,” Barakat discusses her decision to write from the vantage point of male protagonists. The man who does not obey the rules of engagement in a civil war, that is, the man who does not belong to a combatant group, suffers one of the worst fates. Such a man, maintains Barakat, is “suspended as a social being” and relegated to the “isolation of the mentally-ill and plague-stricken” (331). Unwilling or incapable of situating himself as a member or supporter of one of the armed militias, the protagonist of Disciples of Passion is perceived as a social deviant and a threat. He is brutalized, in some instances sexually, and in turn brutalizes and perhaps murders his lover.

In a striking meditation on the voice of Umm Kulthum, the protagonist positions the act of listening as a challenge to subject forming-narratives that reify the violent modes of categorization to which Barakat alludes in her discussion of the non-combatant male as a suspended social being:

This is why, I knew, I can listen so intently to Umm Kulthum, why her songs enchant me so. She is not a feminine singer, not at all. Her face lacks the prettiness appropriate to a woman’s face, and her lungs are extraordinarily large. Her breasts are massive, true; but her neck is thick as it encases her enormous throat. She draws me, too, because her voice encompasses more than one sex, soaring high as the dome of the womb and falling as low as the well of the testicles. Her voice is saltiness and sweetness—an asexual voice, but a bisexual one, too. The lyrics to her songs are in a masculine voice, but one that encompasses the feminine. She is even called “The Lady.” That’s all, just al-sitt, “The Lady,” as if to confirm all that is uncertain, equivocal, undecided; as if to decide once and for all, both to escape and to contain any remaining confusion…Women hear her as a man, and men hear her as a woman. Her voice offers the anger of a woman and the resignation of a man. Her voice is the exchange of lovers…The physiology of her voice is a careful carding and blending of hormonal 60 balance, yet also a parting, between the public street and the closed wooden balconies of the harem…It’s the voice simultaneously of a woman and a man. (64)

The Egyptian diva’s voice, with its gender ambiguity and category-defying timbre, constitutes a microcosm of the world inhabited by love’s folk. In this world, the individual license to listen, and indeed to remember, trumps any collective vision of a society neatly parsed into its constituent elements. Barakat’s depiction of Umm Kulthum as both masculine and feminine calls to mind Barthes’ definition of the Neutral (le neutre) as a function of “intense, strong, unprecedented states” (7).

When asked to present a few thoughts for a special issue of Qadita magazine dedicated to Umm Kulthum, Barakat points to the resistance of categorization as a major consideration in her thematic treatment of Umm Kulthum’s voice in Disciples of Passion.

At the heart of her meditation on listening as a daily ritual is the question of establishing an inner rhythm. “When Umm Kulthum entered my life,” she writes, “I would listen to her in the mornings, not at night like I knew others to do.” Just as she carries out a willful misremembering of cultural iconicity by associating Baalbek with Umm Kulthum in shahāda, her morning ritual of listening to Umm Kulthum rather than Fayruz suggests a certain resistance toward patterns of behavior governed by consensus. For Barakat, the music of Umm Kulthum constitutes a means of establishing an inner rhythm early in the day, before she is overcome by a barrage of sensory experiences. She describes how she puts on her headphones during her morning metro-ride and how the music of Umm

Kulthum totally dispels the noise of the emergency vehicles. Here we might pause to ask if she is referring to the emergency vehicles of Paris or to the memory of the sirens in a

61 war-torn Beirut. This doubling of memory and sensory input constitutes one of the central themes of Disciples of Passion. Love’s folk exhibit a tendency toward memory as a function of sensory experience and, by extension, a profoundly individualistic approach to history. The voice of Umm Kulthum, notwithstanding its stifling acoustic presence and pan-Arab ideological underpinnings, offers a remarkably open-ended means of rethinking the boundaries between self and society. In the context of Disciples of Passion, the theme of disembodiment reflects both the irremediable scars of war and the possibility of lending expression to individual experience.

In The Stranger’s Letters the concept of al-nās fī al-kharij (the people outside) comes to signify the Lebanese Diaspora in the European metropolis. The first letter, “The

Return of the non-Prodigal Sons,” opens with the line “We are not a community, we who stayed abroad.” (11).26 The phrase “We are not a community” (lisna nushakkil jamāʿa) functions as a refrain with each reiteration introducing a new thought about the purported non-existence of this community:

We are not a community, we who stayed abroad. We don’t resemble one another or share common bonds. We rarely meet, and when we do, for some occasion, we part ways and disperse, speaking of staying in touch…We are not a community, and we resent our resemblance or that which reminds us of it. Nothing in our homes here points to our belonging to our country of origin or to our attachment to it…We are not a community by any stretch of the imagination. And those who were our friends back home are precisely those who now cause us the most revulsion. We try to run away from them as if they were partners in an unsolved crime, the details of which we’d rather forget. Or, it is as if they were cherished lovers for whose presence or absence we no longer make room. As for those who come from the present there, we feel so distant from them that it becomes absurd to even consider bridging the gap that separates us…We are not a community, and

26 Translations of “The Return of the non-Prodigal Sons” are by Tarek El-Ariss. 62 we have no old friends whom we cherish or new ones whom we trust…We are not a community, but a thin thread infiltrates itself between us and ties us a little closer together when we realize that one of us is about to move back to the homeland…We are not a community, but we now realize that those who never left Beirut, just like those who return to it now, are reconciled with forgetfulness and forgiveness. (11-15)

In keeping with my notion of the text as an auditory experience, I am reading “The Return of the non-Prodigal Sons” as a dirge. While Barakat insists on the absence of a Lebanese community in exile, the musicality of her text and the repetition of the refrain points to something of an inter-subjective community formed, if nothing else, on the basis of each individual interiorizing his or her loss in solitude. The group intimated by the pronoun “we” in “The Return of the non-Prodigal Sons,” like love’s folk, engage in an act of mourning for a Lebanon that no longer exists. The phrase naḥn alladhīn baqaynā khārij al-bilād (we who stayed abroad) points, in its literal dimension, to the Lebanese Diaspora. If we consider once again the mimetic and metonymic function of the Rahbani Nation, the concept of those who remain “outside of the country” comes to signify the failure of the redemptive narrative codified through the Lebanese Nights of Baalbek. The refrain of “The Return of the non-Prodigal Sons” (we are not a community) is accompanied by another phrase naftarriq wa-natafarraq (we part ways and disperse). While the emphasis in Disciples of

Passion is placed on the tenacious will, among love’s folks, to remember, the group implied by the pronoun “we” in The Stranger’s Letters goes out of its way to not be reminded. Such an inclination, she continues, reflects a constant attempt on their part to “avoid those intonations that might take [them] back to the melodies of that place [they] left behind”

(13).

63 Barakat’s observation highlights a fundamental point, both within this chapter and in the broader context of the dissertation, namely the notion that language, on a very primal level, is endowed with a musicality that constitutes one of the most profound trigger points for memory. As previously mentioned, the Rahbani Nation, as metonym for a Lebanon emerging from the cinders of war, involved an element of nisyān or forgetting. In Disciples of Passion, love’s folk pose a threat in their refusal to succumb to the nisyānāt or the spells of amnesia that characterize their condition. The concept of nisyān, as it figures in The

Stranger’s Letters, emerges through the discrepancy between the content and form of the text. In “The Return of the non-Prodigal Sons,” it appears that the group in question consciously chooses nisyān as a modus operandi when in fact the structure of the text as a dirge and the insistence on a collective “we” suggests quite the opposite. Barakat likens the Lebanese exile in the European metropolis to someone who encounters a “partner in an unsolved crime” and prefers to forget the turn of events through which this crime unfolded

(12). Alternately, she offers the image of someone who encounters an old lover (ʿashīqan) and can no longer make room, not for the lover’s presence nor for his absence (13). This evocative chain of images calls to mind two critical points about the notion of nisyān in the context of Barakat’s essays, epistolary writing, and fiction. First, the concept of a “partner in crime” points to a measure of culpability amongst those who lived through the war. In al-kitāba khārij al-makān, Barakat offers a staggering description of this sense of culpability: “And I ask myself from time to time: to what extent am I untainted by the blood of the war if the one who is near and dear to me, the one with whom, as a child, I cultivated cherished memories, the one who resembles me to such an extent, if he was the sniper and 64 not me?” (Jayyusi 331) Second, her use of the word ʿashīqan situates “The Return of the non-Prodigal Sons” in the affective realm inhabited by love’s folk, namely the semantic field of hawa (to love passionately, to fall) and its attendant politics of mourning. Despite their concerted effort to forget the events of the war and any resemblance that they might bear to those who stayed behind, the “we” of “The Return of the non-Prodigal Sons” speak a language of loss and longing that compels them to mourn. By repeatedly declaring their intent to forget and their predilection for dhawabān (dissolution), they involuntarily perform a dirge. Like Barakat’s authorial persona who writes “against her own hand,” this disembodied group (al-jamāʿa al-mutafarriqa) retains a corporeal memory in the form of a rhythm and an intonation.

In a second essay titled “Dabkeh,” Barakat further explores the notion of embodied memory, and conversely nisyān, through her depiction of a failed performance of the quintessential folkloric dance of Lebanon. Set in a gallery owned by an American in Paris, this performance gestures once again to the shortcomings of the Rahbani Nation as a redemptive narrative. “Dabkeh” points to another preoccupation which runs through

Barakat’s oeuvre, namely, the fate of the second generation in exile. I reiterate here

Barakat’s observation in shahāda: “My daughter will never know the splendid musical panoply between the floors of my aunt’s building, and I am completely powerless in helping my son recognize the features of an empty city center” (shahāda 506). At the heart of her anxiety is the question of language and the inevitable disconnect, on the part of her children and their generation, from a language with which to speak about the Lebanon that she, Hoda Barakat, left behind. I call to mind shahāda because Barakat introduces in her 65 short testimony an alternative vocabulary, a means of refiguring the ideologically- constructed tripartite narrative of a pre-war golden age followed by a historical void (the war) and a return of the community in crisis. The alternative vocabulary to which I allude is the realm of ṭarab as an idiomatic engagement with an irretrievable past. The essay

“Dabkeh” features the motto with which I opened this chapter: “Birds repeat their special song so they can find each other in the expanse of the forest. But the connecting and binding contract dissolves and disintegrates in two situations: when one loses the memory of song

(or vice-versa), or when the scholars move to another forest” (The Stranger’s Letters 47).

Through her depiction of a failed dabkeh, Barakat offers a striking illustration of how an entire generation came to lose the “memory of song.” If we extend the concept of the

“memory of song” to include the language of ṭarab, we begin to see a scenario in which this second generation lacks the vocabulary with which to connect to the Lebanon of their parents or to any Lebanon for that matter. “They joined hands and embraced one another,” writes Barakat, “but the circle did not come together” (46). Though this inability to come together can be read as a loss of memory, and indeed the word nisyān appears time and again in the essay, the bodies of these hapless dancers do retain recollections of Lebanon in the form of rhythm and footsteps. Barakat attributes the failure of their performance to the fact that each dancer “remembers” a different variant of the dance: “Some of them said, oh no, we forgot! And some of them claimed only to master the dabkeh of his region…This one is from Baalbek, said some. No, this is the Southern one similar to that of Palestine minus one small step forward…so they said to one another.” (46)

66 This passage suggests that the generation with “no memory” has in fact inherited the scars of the Lebanese Civil War. The atomization of Lebanese society is actually programmed into the dancers’ movements, and the failure of the iconic folkloric dance to materialize points once again to the failure of the Rahbani Nation as a connecting and binding contract for those who “stayed abroad.” When they depart for the night, the “issue of the dabkeh” remains among the “forgotten details” (47).

I close my reading of The Stranger’s Letters with a look at the essay “Fayruziat”, a profound meditation on the musical encounter as one of the most enduring expressions of loss and longing. This essay constitutes a capstone for this chapter, as Barakat touches on the major points that I have discussed thus far: the language of ṭarab as a means of representing traumatic loss, engagement with the muṭribīn (Umm Kulthum and Fayruz) and their cultural legacy in a way that validates personal experience and facilitates the search for an inner rhythm, the tension between listening practices as an expression of cultural consensus and the individual prerogative to hear one’s own experience in a cultural formation with distinct ideological underpinnings, and the concept of inherited memory among the second generation of the Lebanese Diaspora in Europe.

Barakat offers a sharp criticism in this essay of the process by which fayrūziāt al- hawā (Fayruz’ love longs) came to represent an oligarchic vision of Lebanese identity.

With startling intensity, Barakat likens fayrūziāt al-hawā to “touristic propaganda for a country whose people flee like rats jumping from a sinking ship in a raging sea” (127).

During the nights of shelling, she recalls, “we would listen to foreigners who would take us far away…to other places and to other crises” (127). The voice of Fayruz became 67 insufferable in these moments, and they would listen instead to Umm Kulthum. Barakat describes this choice in terms of assessing danger: “We could listen to Umm Kulthum and experience ṭarab through her because we calculated that her time had elapsed to the point of no return, and that the designation ‘eternity’ in the songs that she sang had nothing to do with our time and our place” (127). Though she stops short of explicitly implicating

Fayruz and the Rahbani Brothers in the sectarian bloodshed of the Lebanese Civil War, her reference to the concept of al-abadiyya (eternity) introduces the concept of death. In that, she offers a pointed criticism, much in the vein of Walter Benjamin who famously stated that “all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).

When given the opportunity to attend a Fayruz performance during one of her visits to Lebanon, Barakat refused citing reasons that she herself could not fully comprehend. In

Paris, however, she accompanied her daughter Deema to a live performance and found herself overcome by a barrage of tears the moment Fayruz walked on stage:

Was I sad to feel that my young daughter was seeing Fayruz for the first time as a foreigner? Was it because my daughter didn't know Fayruz, and thus didn't know what I know about that country which is mine, and—perhaps—will never be hers in the future? Was it because my daughter was listening to Fayruz like she listens to other singers, and possibly not liking what she hears, or not understanding all that she says in our dialect? (128)

This heartrending passage points to a deep-seated anxiety, among those who fled Lebanon, over an inability to impart a particular structure of feeling to the second generation. By structure of feeling I refer to the affective realm of ṭarab as a means by which to remember and mourn. The notion that Deema might listen to Fayruz as she would listen to any other singer calls to mind Barakat’s comment from shahāda: “My daughter will never know the

68 splendid musical panoply between the floors of my aunt’s building, and I am completely powerless in helping my son recognize the features of an empty city center.” In the vein of the dabkeh that fails to come together, the inability of the second generation to experience

Fayruz as a muṭriba, rather than a singer like any other singer, points to a community that has lost the memory of song. In the face of such loss, nostalgia assumes a pivotal role as a recuperative gesture, yet as Svetlana Boym suggests with her distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia, the nostalgic impulse is often rife with violence.

I close this chapter by offering some observations on Barakat’s treatment of the word hanīn (yearning, nostalgia) and the way in which she situates the term with respect to the notion of a post-trauma community. In spite of the years separating the nights of shelling in Beirut and the night of the Fayruz concert in Paris, years spent resisting the voice of Fayruz on all fronts, Barakat finds herself unable to escape the nostalgic impulse, even though distance has made her fully cognizant of the violence behind this impulse: “I fell into the nostalgia that I hated…the most loathsome form of hanīn…she is a woman and not a country. Yet when she raises her small hand to bid us farewell and disappears behind the musicians, I think of my daughter with sadness and I say to myself: who would we take our children to see should something happen to Fayruz?” (129) This question carries the entire weight of Barakat’s ethical challenge in the sense that she recognizes the inescapable draw of the nostalgic impulse but wonders about the existence of alternative modes of dealing with loss that do not run the risk of replicating the cycles of violence through which confrontational nostalgias are pressed into the service of politics.

69 In Disciples of Passion the term ahl al-hawā (love’s folk) points to a community of listeners who come to constitute a group (or grouping) not on the basis of tribal affiliation but in terms of their acceptance of the improvisatory and fleeting nature of memory implied by the invented term nisyānāt. Barakat’s refrain “We are not a community” from The

Stranger’s Letters performs the opposite of what it declares. By reading the refrain as a dirge, I suggest that the group intimated in “The Return of the non-Prodigal Sons” engages in an act of mourning. Though each individual grieves alone, the mode by which they grieve imparts a vague sense of community solidarity. In conclusion, I ask what Barakat achieves on the level of representation, by casting ṭarab as narrative means by which to probe the questions of belonging and community. Ṭarab, in its literary articulation, does not offer an escape or a solution but rather invites the reader to listen ethically.

70 Chapter 4: The Text Without Rupture: Jewish Liturgical Counterpublics in Edmond El-Maleh’s A Thousand Years, One Day

Issaghar was singing plaintive love songs now. He was a cantor, sought after for the beauty of his voice. He was a market vendor by profession. He never left. He was the text without rupture. —Edmond El Maleh Mille ans, un jour

The novel Mille ans, un jour (A Thousand Years, One Day) by Edmond El Maleh draws to a close with a meditation on the “song that issues from beyond all memory”

(184).27 In a cedar box encrusted with mother of pearl, El Maleh’s Jewish Moroccan protagonist Nessim finds a bundle of letters from his grandfather, dated Cairo 1880. The word Cairo serves as a beckoning call for Nessim who, after a long sojourn in places as distant and varied as Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, and Paris embarks on a return trip to his birthplace in Morocco. Composed in Judeo-Arabic and written in Hebrew characters, these letters awaken in Nessim a fervent desire to return to the Maghreb, a space characterized in the novel as “closed off in its barbarism, forgotten in the darkness of time, cut off from the rest of the world” (10). The letters offer an intimate glimpse into the comings and goings of a North African Jewish community whose millennial history was ruptured in the mid-twentieth century. Among the striking features of El-Maleh’s labyrinthine meditation on this historical rupture is the author’s portrayal of the Mediterranean region as an acoustic

27 I will henceforth refer to Mille ans, un jour as Mille ans. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

71 chamber resounding with multiple and inextricably bound narratives of loss and displacement.

The idea of the hazzan (Jewish cantor) as the “text without rupture” recurs throughout Mille ans, allowing for a reading of the novel as a sustained commentary on the process of grieving and the liturgical traditions that undergird the act of mourning as both performance and practice. The fluidity between sacred and secular, popular music and hymnody, performance and faith-based practice, is significant in the context of Mille ans where the concept of historical rupture goes hand in hand with estrangement from a “pure” liturgical tradition. We are reminded time and again throughout the novel that Nessim does not know Hebrew, apart from a vague recollection of phrases from his Bar Mitzvah. When he arrives in Essaouira, he goes to the seaside cemetery where his grandfather is buried.

He wants to recite the mourner’s kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, but he does not know the words, nor does he have the requisite quorum (read community) to perform the rite of mourning.28 In the absence of a liturgy that remains intact, the process of mourning unfolds in the novel as part of a syncretic expression of faith in which the dislocated

Hebrew liturgy comes into contact with secular musical traditions, local forms of Sufi mystical expression, trance, and sacred music in a festival setting.

28 The kaddish, from the root kof-dalet-shin (holy), is a prayer in Aramaic sanctifying God’s name. A centerpiece of Jewish liturgy, the kaddish, in its varying lengths and variations, is recited at different points during prayer services as a communal articulation of commitment to God’s greatness and hopes for the acceptance of prayers and everlasting peace. The affirmation of God’s greatness gains a sense of accepting mortality in the version of the kaddish that is recited by mourners (the mourner’s kaddish, designated in Hebrew as kaddish yatom, the orphan’s kaddish)—this recitation takes place either within the community, where it is customary in some traditions for all mourners present at the service to stand and recite the kaddish together, or individually by an orphan after the death of a parent. In some communities, individual recitation after the death of a grandparent or child is also customary.

72 Though Nessim’s return trip to Morocco constitutes the framing narrative of Mille ans, the novel unfolds as a dense weave of epochs and locales, flashbacks and present tense narration, dreams, memories, and hallucinations. To borrow El Maleh’s imagery, the novel’s structure resembles a chbika, or cat’s cradle, “the game of children who have no toys” (156). As an idiom, “cat’s cradle” denotes complexity and intricacy. The game itself involves the transfer of a loop of string between two partners: With each transfer, a new geometric pattern is formed until “the moment arrives, when after several exchanges, the string becomes tangled, and the game comes to an end” (156). This extended metaphor points to an element of intersubjectivity and to the ways in which narratives take on new contours when they change hands. The word chbika is the Moroccan variant of the Modern

Standard Arabic word shabaka (web or network). By peppering his French text with local accents—words in dārija (Moroccan Arabic), chleuh (the Berber dialect spoken in the

Atlas Mountains), Judeo-Berber, Judeo-Arabic, and Aramaic—El Maleh invites his readers to reflect on the multitude of networks that historically crisscrossed the Mediterranean and left traces, both linguistic and cultural, on the populations that inhabited the region. With its emphasis on moments of encounter, Mille ans simultaneously speaks to the dissolution of the Moroccan Jewish community and its traumatic exodus, the absorption pains of

Moroccan Jews in Israel, the Palestinian refugee crisis, the civil war in Lebanon, and the post-colonial reconfiguration of the Middle East and North Africa.

I will be focusing in this chapter on a prolonged scene that serves as a microcosm of the critical project undertaken by El Maleh in Mille ans. In this scene, a group of

Moroccan Jews from the United States journeys with a tour company, New York Pilgrim, 73 to the Atlas Mountains, where they attend a hiloula, a festival commemorating the life of a saint. A hiloula typically lasts several days and features a feverish atmosphere of drinking, dancing, singing and reciting psalms. Though the ritual aspect of the hiloula derives from a Jewish Moroccan mystical tradition, the influence of the Sufi mawlid is readily discernible. In “Ṭarab in the Mystic Sufi Chant of Egypt,” Michael Frishkopf notes that one of the defining features of Sufi cosmology is the belief in ‘spiritual proximity’ or the ability to establish “emotional relationships with others irrespective of their physical world existence in time and space” (238).29 Central to my reading of the hiloula scene is the notion that the ṭarab experience, despite its fleeting and contingent nature, carries tremendous therapeutic potential. Frishkopf points precisely to this quality in his discussion of the social dynamics that typify a mawlid:

The lack of fixed ritual formats and attendees, regular meetings, or definite ritual boundaries means that the emotional power and unity of these events is more transient, and constructed largely through hadra performance alone. The emotional force of these rituals is sufficient to forge a kind of collective order, at least for the duration of the mawlid. That order is never manifested as social structure or rigid ritual form; rather, it is the order of shared mystical-emotional experience” (242).

The transient collective order of the hiloula and the ecstatic temporality introduced by the performance creates a space for storytelling, in the Benjaminian sense of the word. Indeed

29 Frishkopf places the Sufi mawlid under the rubric of “informal” Sufism. A commemorative event that takes place in a festival setting, the mawlid is open to both members of Sufi orders and non-Sufi onlookers (242). The fictional hiloula in Mille ans features a pilgrimage to the tomb of Rabbi Schlomo the Snake. In the Moroccan Jewish folkloric tradition, Rabbi Salomon Bel-Hench, who lived in the 16th century, was one of the most revered saints in the region, and festivals commemorating his life still take place at his tomb in the Valley of Ourika in the Atlas Mountain region.

74 the title A Thousand Years, One Day nods to A Thousand and One Nights, thus situating the storytelling endeavor as a lifeline. The ecstatic feedback loop in Mille ans involves not only the performers and participants of New York Pilgrim but the voices of past and present others. I argue that the novel unfolds as an ecstatic journey punctuated by moments of private solemn supplication and exuberant collective incantation. In keeping with El

Maleh’s image of the cat’s cradle, I suggest that this constellation of spiritual practices and performances points to a web of interrelated catastrophic events. By framing the act of mourning as a function of inter-subjectivity and “spiritual proximity,” El Maleh lays out a trans-Mediterranean ethics of audition. To reiterate Hirschkind’s argument about the role of samiʿ (listening) in the shaping of counterpublics, “Samiʿ….is not a spontaneous and passive receptivity but a particular kind of action itself, a listening that is a doing” (34, emphasis mine).30 Like the notion of samiʿ, the Hebrew shema (from the same root) is anchored in an active mode of listening. As the ultimate Jewish proclamation of faith, the shema carries an explicit set of expectations on how the proclaimer should perform the love of the “one and only God.” In terms of affect, the shema reaches its expressive peak when the individual or group reciting the shema is facing death. Under such circumstances, the shema constitutes a ritual engagement with impending loss.

The hiloula scene in Mille ans, though it does not feature an explicit recitation of the shema, shows how “a listening that is a doing” might function in the context of a Jewish

30 Citing E.W. Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon, Hirschkind offers the following reflection on the multiple valences of the root sīn-mīm-ʿayīn: “This active sense of hearing is evident in the range of meanings expressed by the Arabic word ‘samʿ.’ Samʿ can be translated not only as ‘to hear,’ but also as the more explicitly active verbs ‘to answer,’ ‘to comply with,’ ‘to accept,’ and to ‘obey’ (220). 75 ethical counterpublic. The cantor, described by El-Maleh as “the text without rupture,” serves in this scene as a muṭrib, in the religious sense of the term, and facilitates in his listeners a ritual engagement with catastrophic loss. Nessim characterizes this particular hiloula as a “paroxysm of our momentous times” (131). A sudden and uncontrollable burst of emotion, paroxysm also carries an additional meaning, namely, the intensification of pathological symptoms. This second definition leads us to the idea that certain melancholic attachments are deemed pathological in the current sociopolitical mappings of the Middle

East and North Africa, where laying claim to loss is part and parcel of the struggle over territory. The hiloula scene in Mille ans serves to stage and expose the mechanisms through which Zionism, Arab nationalism, and decolonization movements selectively characterized melancholic attachments as pathological while appropriating forms of nostalgia into narratives of progress and community building. Though the hiloula is staged for tourists, the participants of New York Pilgrim are not ordinary tourists in the sense that almost all of them belong to generation that left Morocco en masse in the 1950s. As such, they bear the memories and the scars of this historical trauma. The meticulously choreographed night of drinking, singing, and reciting psalms releases a torrent of emotion and unveils personal narratives that have been repressed—memories of violently tossing boats, sea-sickness, immigrant transit camps in Israel, the day to day struggles of carving out a life in the southern Israeli development towns, and for some, the abandonment of the Zionist dream and ultimate departure for the United States or Canada.

The notion of a Jewish ethical counterpublic is articulated in Mille ans vis-à-vis a running critique of the ways in which narratives of loss are misappropriated in the process 76 of legitimizing ethno-national claims to territory and patrimony. Among these misappropriations is the notion of population exchange, namely the idea that the dispossession of Palestinians was a necessary correlate to the expulsion of Arab Jews from their countries of origin and their absorption by Israel.31 In his article “Revisiting Bialik: A

Radical Mizrahi Reading of the Jewish National Poet,” the Moroccan-born activist, scholar, and poet Sami Shalom Chetrit discusses his fraught relationship with “el ha-tsipor”

(To the Bird) by Hayim Nahman Bialik. “Thanks to [Bialik],” writes Chetrit, “I fell in love with language as a young boy: not with Hebrew, but with the language of poetry itself, with its power to create worlds and imbue them with meaning by using just a few words”

(2). Chetrit ascribes his political “coming into consciousness” to two pivotal moments in his studies at Tel Aviv University. The first moment was an encounter with a professor who introduced Chetrit to the Black Panthers, a social movement spearheaded by second- generation Mizrahim in Israel and aimed at challenging institutionalized forms of economic and social oppression. The second moment involved a conversation with a Palestinian classmate about “el ha-tsipor.” When asked if he had trouble dealing with a poem that became one of the mainstays of Zionist discourses on Palestine as a “land without a people,” Chetrit’s classmate responded by reciting the poem “with slight adaptations, as if

31 The terms “Arab Jews,” “Sephardim,” “Mizrahim,” and “Oriental Jews” are often used interchangeably to refer to Jews of North African or Middle Eastern descent. “Mizrahim” is used in Israel to signify a collective identity distinct from that of Ashkenazim or Jews of Eastern European descent. The term “Arab Jew” has gained widespread currency in academic circles through the following works: Yehouda Shenhav’s The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity, Ella Shohat’s “Reflections of an Arab Jew,” Lital Levy’s “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Mashriq,” Gil Hochberg’s In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination, and Ammiel Alcalay’s After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture. By using the term “Arab Jew,” I am placing my readings in conversation with this line of inquiry. I will use the term “Mizrahim” when I am referencing studies that also employ the term. 77 they were spoken by a Palestinian exile who, yearning for the land from which he has been severed, seeks greetings from his brothers in Palestine with the help of a migrating bird, the asphoura” (3).32 As the anecdote goes, this classmate turned around and asked Chetrit how he, “a Jew from the Muslim world” could identify with the poem’s depiction of

Christian anti-Semitism in Europe. This eye-opening conversation on “el ha-tsipor” gave

Chetrit pause for thought. Eventually, he went on to explore the Hebrew poetry of North

Africa, and specifically, his natal Morocco. “I had grown up listening to North African piyutim (odes), which we sang on every holiday and at family celebrations,” writes Chetrit,

“but because I was taught in school to think of literature as being comprised of works that came from secularized Europe, it had never occurred to me that the songs we heard at home and in the synagogue were in fact Hebrew poetry (4-5).

“Revisiting Bialik” raises several points that coincide with my reading of Mille ans.

First, the notion of the Sephardic piyut as Hebrew poetry points to a Jewish literary tradition that, much like ṭarab, hinges around samʿ (engaged listening) and storytelling as a practice that involves the full “organ of audition.” The cantor, in this context, facilitates an encounter between the listener and the Hebrew poet, much as a munshid (a vocalist in the

Sufi tradition) facilitates an encounter between the listener and the Sufi poet.33 Second,

32 Chetrit notes that the Arabic asphoura (bird) shares a root with the Hebrew tsipor and that the motif of migrating birds figures prominently in Palestinian national poetry. 33 In “Ṭarab in the Mystic Sufi Chant of Egypt,” Frishkopf elaborates on the triangulated relationship between listener, performer, and poet: “Here I focus upon the role of the Sufi poet, the affective power of his poetry, and his relation to the munshid (‘Sufi singer’) and listener in creating ṭarab in performance. I argue that it is the shared domain of Sufi thought, feeling, and practice that enables a Sufi poet to communicate intensive mystical emotion, through the medium of language, to a munshid, who perceives the poet’s words so strongly as to experience the affective state that engendered them” (235). 78 Chetrit’s conversation with his Palestinian classmate is reminiscent of Habibi’s portrayal of the meeting between al-hayfāwiyya and al-maqdisiyya. Bialik’s poetry played a critical role in the ideological processes through which the personal family narratives and literary histories of both Arab Jews and Palestinian citizen of Israel were subsumed under the rubric of Ashkenazi conceptions of citizenship, statehood, and literary canon formation.34

Chetrit’s radical Mizrahi reading of Bialik foregrounds the ways in which the “Jewish national poet” constituted a figurehead in an effort to streamline the concept of kibuts galuyot (the ingathering of the exiles), a linchpin of the Zionist political narrative. In this vein, “Revisiting Bialik” reads as a scathing critique of the processes through which a heterogeneous exilic population was recast, particularly in the realm of education, as a culturally homogeneous bloc. By placing a Palestinian and a radical Mizrahi reading of

Bialik in dialogue, Chetrit, perhaps unwittingly, points to the ways in which Bialik’s poems, not unlike Fayruz’ Rājiʿūn, have accrued meaning through the diverse perceptual habits of their vast body of readers and, as such, have become in and of themselves part of an ecstatic feedback loop.

The critical scholarship on Mille ans centers predominantly on the notion of the

Arab Jew and the manner in which El Maleh frames Palestinian and Arab Jewish narratives of dispossession in terms of intersubjective identification rather than necessary casualties of reconstituted borders. The two studies that I am citing in this chapter, Ronnie

34 Edward Said’s “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” and Ella Shohat’s “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” as a critical extension of Said’s article, paved the way for postcolonial and post-Zionist readings of Palestinian citizens of Israel and Arab Jews as Israel’s “internally colonized.”

79 Scharfman’s “The Other’s Other: The Moroccan Jewish Trajectory of Edmond Amran El

Maleh” and Gil Hochberg’s In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs and the Limits of Separatist

Discourse, overlap in their emphasis on intersubjectivity. Scharfman takes as her point of departure the fraught position of the “postcolonial Moroccan-Jewish intellectual on the left

[who] writes from an impossible place” (136). The late El Maleh belonged to a group of writers and intellectuals, among them Abdelkebir Khatibi and Abdellatif Laâbi, who played an active role in the anticolonial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.35 As a “bicultural, diglossic Maghrebian subject” caught in the cross-currents of Zionist, Arab-nationalist, and anti-colonialist discourses on identity and statehood, El Maleh was divested of what

Scharfman terms the trait d’union, the hyphen that designated him as judéo-arabe or arabo-juif (136). The historical violence perpetrated against the Moroccan Jewish community, according to Scharfman, figures in Mille ans as a double colonization, “that of Morocco by France, and that of a vulnerable Moroccan Jewry by Ashkenazic Israel”

(138). Gil Hochberg takes Scharfman’s argument a step further, maintaining that Mille ans

“traces the vicious trajectory of violence accelerating from French colonialism and German fascism to the role of Israeli occupation over Palestinians” (Hochberg 30). The word

“itinerary” took on a particular meaning among the committed authors of Souffles.

According to Scharfman, Laâbi characterized itinerary as a “coming and going, within the same text, among the political, the narrative, and the discursive” (136). In Laâbi’s words,

35 This group, drawing inspiration from French deconstruction and poststructuralism, fashioned itself as a politically committed avant-garde with an anti-colonial rubric. Their journal Souffles, founded by Abdellatif Laâbi in 1966, called on both the readership and the contributing authors to draw alliances across national borders in order to take an ethical stance on issues such as human rights and political sovereignty. 80 the itinerary constitutes a “crossing, inscribed in the language of the writing, of a sociocultural field subjected to violence’” (136). Given this idiosyncratic literary usage, El

Maleh’s representation of Nessim as both itinerant and following an itinerary situates the novel in the realm of ethical inquiry.

As both Scharfman and Hochberg note, Mille ans, which was published only four years after the Sabra and Shatila massacre, opens with the cry “La guerre du Liban!” (The

Lebanon War). Though Nessim grieves for the dissolution of the Moroccan Jewish community, his thoughts are continuously punctuated by the image of a child wounded in massacre. In the absence of words with which to recite the Jewish prayer, Nessim repeats the word kaddish until it starts to constitute a dirge in its own right:

Pray, pray for the dead children, the children of the same land, Palestine. A journal clipping, framed, the word kaddish in the title, someone suggested this prayer. Nessim did not know how to pray, but that was not a major concern for him. He looked at the child, he looked for a return glance …He repeated the word kaddish like a slow and solemn meditation, because he felt the need for silence, for respect…A Hebrew word for an Arab child. (El Maleh 26)

Watching himself roaming through the wreckage of Beirut’s war-torn streets, Nessim gradually loses his ability to distinguish between himself and Hammed, the child for whom he recites the kaddish. Scharfman reads Beirut as the “noisy, bloody version of the silent erasure and disappearance” of Moroccan Jewry from history and memory (139). Hochberg turns to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “time of the now” (Jetztzeit), from his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” and offers a different reading of Nessim’s repeated psychic journey through the ravaged streets of Beirut and his preoccupation with Hammed:

81 The relationship between…the Palestinian exodus and the Moroccan- Jewish one…is based, I believe, not on analogy or symbolism, but on metonymy. The ‘there’ of Lebanon and the ‘here’ of Paris, the memories of the self and those of another, emerge side by side, fragmented and intertwined. They are no longer identifiable or analogous. They lose their independent status and hence can no longer be claimed, be compared, or symbolize each other. Similarly, the movement ‘out of the self’ does not result in the mirror identification of the self with itself through the other but, quite on the contrary, it results in ‘forgetting’: the momentary forgetting of the self enabled through the meeting with an other. (33)36

Mille ans, with its reiteration of the Arabic inshiqāq (splitting or cleaving) and the French ponctuer (punctuate) lends itself to a Benjaminian reading of time not as a linear progression (past, present, future), but rather as a series of past events flashing up and reanimating the present. To recap Habibi’s treatment of the word inshiqāq, the root shīn- qāf-qāf denotes rupture and carries the additional meaning of allowing something to appear. In The Sextet, the phrase inshaqqat samāʾuha (her skies cleaved open) expands the narrative field to include a simultaneous reflection on Tanya Savicheva, a young casualty of the Siege of Leningrad, and the meeting between al-hayfawiyya and al-maqdasiyya

(Fayruz) in the Ramle prison. In The Sextet, the relationship between Tanya and Fayruz is not based on analogy or symbolism, to borrow Hochberg’s phrasing, but rather on metonymy. In a similar vein, Mille ans opens and closes with a scene of inshiqāq. The cry

“The Lebanon War” rings through the streets of Paris on a hot stormy June day. Toward

36 Benjamin characterizes the “time of the now” in the following terms: “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again…To articulate this past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes…History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]” (Arendt 255-261).

82 the end of the novel, Nessim’s thoughts turn back to the newsflash in Paris: “The event erupts these days of June, information saturates the landscape, burning all around it. The event punctuates reality, [and] when it recedes, consumed, the punctuation mark is erased and cannot be reconstituted except through its absence” (183). Punctuation, in this sense, functions as both a perforation and an index of events as they unfold. Hochberg reads the concept of punctuation as a moment of fracture “marked by the calm comma behind which lies, hidden, the violence of history and its unaccountable cruelty” (29). “The sudden split by which the ‘one day’ breaks the continuity of a ‘thousand years’ (Mille ans, un jour),” writes Hochberg, “is emphasized by the repeated invocation of the phrase ‘one day, they left’” (29).

In line with Hochberg’s reading of Mille ans, I argue that the hiloula scene, a pivotal moment in a in a text rife with punctuation and perforation, constitutes a literary articulation of Benjamin’s “time of the now.” El Maleh presents the hiloula as a contemporary reenactment of an ecstatic encounter that happened long before Nessim’s time. We are first introduced to this encounter through Nessim’s reading of the itinerary outlined in his grandfather’s letters:

We were mixed, Jews and Muslims; the latter were headed to Mecca for their pilgrimage. We had a shoheit [ritual slaughterer] and so we could slaughter sheep and chickens, and our Muslim friends could partake with us. There were musicians, a singer with a voice of gold, and we would pass the nights listening to him…God willed that we would have more than twenty Jews in this caravan. And so, in this desert, in front of his tomb, we would don our taleths [Jewish prayer shawls] and we would pray, pronouncing le kaddish for the soul of Haj Thami so that he could ascend to Paradise by the will of God…When one morning at dawn, we set eyes on Cairo, that magnificent city, I fell to my knees and touched my trembling lips to the ground, this sand. I no longer knew in which dream I was 83 dwelling, everything was jumbled in a sort of drunken stupor…Lost, I did not know which language to speak, nor which sign would reassure me. (13)

The “singer with a voice of gold” returns in the hiloula scene as the cantor Issaghar, the

“text without rupture.” By casting Cairo as one of several points of spiritual arrival, El

Maleh challenges notions of teleological closure inherent in Zionist formulations of settlement in Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel). In “Revisiting Bialik” Chetrit points precisely to the tension between Eretz Yisrael as a way station, spiritual and physical, along a vast and varied network of trajectories, and Eretz Yisrael as a repository for ethno- national aspirations: “The Eretz Yisrael of contemporary Sephardic poets is an actual place to which they travel back and forth as part of life in the Mediterranean Middle-Eastern expanse…In these works, immigration to and settlement in Eretz Yisrael is a well-known religious commandment, but it does not evolve into a desire for territorial nationalist ideas”

(8). The kaddish recited by a Jewish quorum for a Muslim Haj in the time of Nessim’s grandfather, when read alongside Nessim’s solitary kaddish for Hammed, points to a

Jewish ethics of audition that takes shape as a counternarrative to the totalizing discourses of political Zionism. Within this counternarrative, El Maleh does not present the figure of the Jewish nomad as a political solution. Rather, in the hiloula scene, El Maleh acknowledges the geopolitical reality that is the State of Israel. By staging an instance of ecstatic feedback, El Maleh does not extricate Israel from the loop but reanimates the Israeli story to include silenced histories of dispossession.

My emphasis on the concept of staging serves to highlight the performative aspect of the hiloula, as both a commodified display of religiosity and a reenactment of an ecstatic

84 encounter from bygone days. Indeed, the overdetermined language with which the hiloula is characterized suggests a highly stylized display:

The Hiloula, the ingathering, the pilgrimage, the festival, the reconstitution of an opera in grand scenes, prayers, the flickering flames of the bunches of candles lit around the tomb of the venerable saint, songs, music, the tribe returned to its original state, the civilization behind bodies pressed against bodies, the rediscovered free and excessive movements, exuberant sensuality…The Hiloula, the spectacle is a paroxysm of these momentous times, the cataclysm of these ephemeral scenes, the grand sigh of the epic and its tragic mantle. (129-131)

As previously noted, the term paroxysm denotes an intensification of pathological symptoms. The hyperbolic nature of the hiloula serves to set into relief the rhetoric that was used to pathologize melancholic attachments to homelands other than Eretz Yisrael.

Such attachments, in mainstream Zionist discourse, were antithetical to the concept of kibbutz galuyot (the ingathering of the exiles). El Maleh refigures the concept of

“ingathering” to reflect the motion of return among a group of “tourists,” the majority of whom left Morocco in the 1950s under extreme duress. The resemblance between the hiloula and the Sufi mawlid situates the experience of these so-called tourists in the ambivalent space between the ecstatic event as performance and spiritual practice.

Performativity, in this case, does not undermine the transformative potential of the ecstatic state. To reiterate Frishkopf’s point about the dynamics of the mawlid, the collective order established during the event does not cohere into a rigid social structure but rather reflects an “order of shared mystical-emotional experience” (242). This transient social order situates the hiloula in the realm of therapeutics as theorized by Hirschkind in The Ethical

Soundscape. El Maleh’s emphasis on “rediscovered free and excessive movements,

85 exuberant sensuality” reestablishes the body as an “organ of audition” and the “human sensorium” as a site of self-fashioning, ethical and psychological.

Nessim, a solemn and introspective character, is juxtaposed in the hiloula scene with Teddy Yeshuouaa, whose theatricality borders on farce. Initially depicted as an aloof observer and a skeptic, Nessim is unwilling to wholeheartedly engage in the spectacle.

Teddy Yeshuouaa, in comparison, enters the scene as an eager and fully-absorbed participant: “Teddy, the young American who addressed the young guide in chleu, sprang forth with great animation from the Tower of Babel where language and desire collide, and proclaimed standing, an improvised actor: I am a son of the mellah, from here, don’t look for me in New York, I am not there anywhere, my whole family is from here, ask those who remain, [ask] Issaghar the market vendor” (131).37 Hochberg notes that the mellah

(the historical Moroccan Jewish quarter) emerges in Mille ans as a “site of contradictions and ambiguities, which, thanks to its endless and continual transformations, seems to escape any restrictive historical borders” (29). Though Teddy’s proclamation feeds into the melodramatic tenor of the event, his reference to the mellah and to Issaghar, the “text without rupture,” paves the way for a profound look into the circumstances that led up to the mass exodus of Moroccan Jews. In “The Other’s Other,” Scharfman characterizes the hiloula as a “breaking down of ego frontiers, a regression that is also a narrative” (145).

Indeed, the boundary between observer and participant, between Nessim and Teddy, starts to break down during the night of heavy drinking and musically-induced ecstasy. What

37 The Chleuh are a Berber people from Southwest Morocco. 86 follows is a process of storytelling that unfolds in and as a creative listening to the silences behind the phrase, “one day, they left.” As Hochberg notes, the question “Why did they leave?” is left unanswered in the novel, and common historical explanations emerge as clichés: “the Zionist agents tricked them and made them leave; the Arabs made them want to leave; they have always waited to leave” (29-30).

Though Nessim’s initial comments reflect an internalization of Orientalist perspectives on the animality of the senses, he is quickly and inextricably pulled into the exuberant sensuality of the event: “Nessim observed this heroic festival, this vortex of laughter and piercing words, acrid odors, dancing flames and cinders, this unbound flesh, these aroused sex organs, these black eyes. ‘Chir Ha Chirim’ the Song of Songs, Nessim

King Solomon, guilgoul” (130). As soon as he pronounces the Hebrew words “Chir Ha

Chirim” Nessim enters the realm of ecstatic temporality and begins to recite the Song of

Songs. The Hebrew word guilgoul, rendered here in French transliteration, denotes circularity and reincarnation. Like Benjamin’s “time of the now,” the notion of gilgul accounts for moments in which the past bursts into the present. Gilgul neshamot (the transmigration of souls) is a concept associated with Jewish mysticism, particularly with the 16th century Lurianic Kabbalah (a school led by Rabbi Isaac Luria and named after him) and later with Hassidic thought. In its association with mysticism, gilgul is not considered a tenet of traditional Judaism and is often rejected by mainstream Rabbinical practices. The concept of gilgul is associated with the rectification (tikkun) of the soul as it moves from body to body until it reaches its highest level of righteousness and can join

87 other souls in the quest for rectification of the world (tikkun olam).38 Nessim’s recitation of shir ha-shirim (Song of Songs) introduces a traditional text used extensively in Jewish mysticism as a point of reference for the intimate relationship between God and the Jewish people. King Solomon, beyond being perceived as the author of the text, is known in Jewish lore as a person with extraordinary wisdom and powers, among them the ability to travel across time and place and connect to spirits and demons.

The concept of tikkun olam plays a pivotal role in the hiloula scene and in the novel as a whole. Teddy Yeshouaa, who enters the scene as a caricature of sorts, is overcome by the plaintive love songs of Issaghar the cantor and journeys through the deepest recesses of memory and loss:

Teddy Yeshouaa was speaking now in his intimate interior voice, the tragic adventure of our departure…I’m tired, I’ll tell you another time about Dimona…Now you will become real Jews, you were idolaters, Avoda zara [the worship of foreign Gods]…Dimona, Dimona, Dimona our tears! The first city of the Negev, rocks, shanties, scorpions, serpents, we the troglodytes, the men of caves, descendants of the Atlas Mountains. (130)

His monologue vacillates between pained reflections on the traumatic process of settlement in the southern Israeli development towns, such as Dimona, and a rehashing of Zionist rhetoric on the settlement of a “land without a people.” Nessim, also affected by the voice of the cantor, stays up “with a keen eye and an attentive ear,” listening to Teddy’s intricate account of the circumstances that led to the exodus of Moroccan Jews (130).

In “Taboo Memories, Diasporic Visions: Columbus, Palestine, and Arab Jews,”

Ella Shohat discusses the process by which the Cairo Geniza was “discovered” by the

38 For more on the concept of gilgul see Simcha Paull Raphael Jewish Views of the Afterlife (2009). 88 British scholar of Rabbinical literature, Dr. Solomon Schechter, and shipped in its entirety to Cambridge. The Hebrew word geniza refers to a storage space in a synagogue where, in accordance with ritual practice, any documents bearing traces of the name of God are deposited for safekeeping until the proper burial rite can be performed. The Cairo Geniza, which was housed in the Ben Ezra synagogue in a room constructed in 1025 C.E., constitutes a window into the comings and goings of a centuries-old Jewish community.

As Shohat notes, this wealth of documents composed in a fluid mixture of Hebrew, Arabic, and Judeo-Arabic, was not conceived as an archive but came to function in such a capacity post factum. “The Geniza,” writes Shohat, “became ‘minutes,’ as it were, of a cultural meeting, a stenographic record of the historical interactions of this Cairo community”

(203).

In Mille ans, the notion of a geniza world figures on both the personal and political level. On the personal level, the bundle of letters enclosed in the cedar box reveals a family history tucked away for safekeeping, hidden from the public eye. Nessim, the inheritor of this family history, journeys to the contemporary Maghreb bearing a certain sensibility for traces of a cultural meeting that took place before his time. Nessim’s itinerary functions in the sense outlined by the contributing authors of Souffles, as a “coming and going, within the same text, among the political, the narrative, and the discursive” (Scharfman 136). If we consider the political orientation of El Maleh and his contemporaries, we can see how

Nessim’s personal voyage through the geniza world of his grandfather’s letters functions simultaneously as a sketch of a Jewish ethical counterpublic rooted in Mediterranean itineraries. 89 Chapter 5: My Heart is My Guide: On Silence and Song in Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains and Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit

“But…why police needs to play Umm Kulthūm?” “This is like asking why a man needs a soul.” —Eran Kolirin, The Band’s Visit

In an interview titled “With My Face to Cairo,” Israeli filmmaker Eran Kolirin offered illuminating remarks on the beginning of his creative journey with the 2007 film

The Band’s Visit: “Like everything that [I have] written so far [The Band’s Visit] was born from an image that [I] envisioned. It was a picture of a man, inscrutable and meticulously dressed in uniform, but when he opened his mouth, out came a heartbreaking, albeit restrained, Egyptian love song. I wanted the whole movie to have the breadth of these songs that I love so very much.” (Anderman) With the Egyptian love song as a leading image, and a fictional Egyptian police orchestra comprised of Palestinian and Arab Jewish actors speaking colloquial Egyptian Arabic, Kolirin sets up his film as a text that defies easy categorization. The Band’s Visit was disqualified from the Academy Awards as Israel’s

2007 “Foreign Language Film” submission because of its extensive use of English dialogue. The New York Times released a glowing review of the film and later issued a corrective: “A film review in ‘Weekend’ last Friday about The Band’s Visit, using information provided by the film’s public relations firm, referred incorrectly to the actor

Sasson Gabai, who plays the band’s leader. He is an Israeli Jew, not an Israeli Arab”

(Dargis). The need to establish Sasson Gabai’s ethnic profile and the inability of the United

States motion picture industry to make sense of the film’s linguistic orientation points to a broader anxiety over films out of Israel-Palestine that do not mark themselves as

90 exclusively Israeli or Palestinian. In his 2010 interview “A Different Kind of Occupation” with Sabah Haider for The Electronic Intifada, Palestinian director Elia Suleiman echoed

Kolirin’s sentiments about working from an image that frustrates the expectations surrounding a national cinema:

Look, when you are an artist, you should have faith that first of all your experience is not local; it is a universal experience…When you compose an image you should never think about the boundaries of that image. But should this image exist in one locale, it should transgress the boundaries of that locale…So this is not about molding or summing up an experience located in Palestine. This is about all the experiences that can be conceptually, Palestinian-ally, called so.

The ecstatic feedback model, as I argue in this chapter, makes room for the ambiguities and moments of “confusion” that typify such cinematic instances of boundary transgression. Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit (2007) and Elia Suleiman’s The Time That

Remains (2009) frame the narratives of Arab Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel, respectively, in terms of a soundscape anchored in loving memory of Egypt’s cinematic and musical golden age. Like the novels discussed in Ecstatic Feedback, The Band’s Visit and The Time That Remains demonstrate what ṭarab can do. I have chosen to close this dissertation with a chapter on film, a distinct narrative medium that lends itself to a simultaneity of sonic cues, visual imagery, and intertextual references. Owing to this simultaneity, the cinematic form offers a unique treatment of the technologies of sound, listening practices, and creative counterpublics that have coalesced around ṭarab culture.

Egypt’s ubiquitous acoustic presence in both films points to a process of mediation whereby narratives of loss feed into one another through the affective prism of a bygone sonic powerhouse. In fulfilling its mediating role, Egypt does not occupy a neutral position

91 in the sense of a politically disinterested third entity. Rather, Egypt functions in the vein of

Barthes’ formulation of the Neutral, that is, a “neutrally inflected immanent pathos or patho-logy” (77). As a regional third party to local entanglements and histories of dispossession, Egypt brings to bear aggregate forms of affect, thus opening the narrative field to alternate empathies, or moments of ethical audition.

Given ṭarab culture’s tremendous proclivity toward melancholia, it comes as no surprise that The Band’s Visit and The Time That Remains are steeped in melancholic longing. Eng and Kazanjian note in Loss: The Politics of Mourning that melancholia, in the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s historical materialism, constitutes “an ongoing and open relationship with the past—bringing its ghosts and specters, its flaring and fleeting images, into the present” (3-4). As Charles Hirschkind suggests in The Ethical Soundscape, Umm

Kulthum and Gamal Abdel Nasser represented an acoustic powerhouse for which there was no successor.39 In the absence of daily rituals governed by live broadcasts or performances, pre-recorded technologies rose to prominence, most notably the LP and the cassette tape. The concept of absence figures prominently in my exploration of the diagetic representations of technologies of sound in the two films. The Time That Remains carries the subtitle “Chronicle of a Present Absentee.” The notion of a “present absentee” has

39 “Just as the death of Nasser marked the end of a national audition in the political arena, Umm Kulthum’s death in 1972 coincided with the dissolution of the music industry in Egypt that had made such national superstars possible…The entire structure that had raised Umm Kulthum and a few other musicians to prominence, one grounded in a highly centralized control and coordination of film, record, and radio production, was in the process of crumbling…Nasser and Umm Kulthum had, in different ways, helped to define a modern national auditory practice that connected traditions of ethical listening with emerging media practices of political discourse and musical entertainment” (53).

92 significant implications for my critical project, most notably the idea that silences can make themselves heard given certain expressive windows of opportunity. Though the luminaries of the ṭarab world are all but gone, technologies of sound have given their voices afterlives that affect and feed into the ways in which individuals, groups, and nations continue to imagine their present lives. “Present absentee” also suggests that certain disenfranchised groups, despite having been “written out” of official histories, retain a discreet presence that flashes up in uncanny moments. By foregrounding melancholic attachments to the golden age of ṭarab artistry and highlighting the technological afterlives of preeminent muṭribīn, Kolirin and Suleiman anchor their films in an idiom of irremediable loss and ecstatic recuperation.

Postcolonial and post-Zionist readings of the situation in Israel-Palestine, in a critical move aimed at dismantling the binary between Arab and Jew, often draw parallels between Arab Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel. By discussing The Band’s Visit in conjunction with The Time That Remains, I am placing my work in dialogue with this body of scholarship and asking how affect theory introduces critical overlap and points of departure. I am anchoring my discussion of the cinematic medium in Hamid Naficy’s study

An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Naficy situates accented cinema as a politically engaged art form with both personal and collective dimensions:

If Third Cinema films generally advocate class struggle and armed struggle, accented films favor discursive and semiotic struggles. Although not necessarily Marxist or even socialist like the Third Cinema, the accented cinema is an engagé cinema. However, its engagement is less with “the people” and “the masses,” as was the case with the Third Cinema, than with specific individuals, ethnicities, nationalities, and identities, and with the experience of deterritorialization itself. In accented cinema, therefore, every 93 story is both a private story of an individual and a social and public story of exile and diaspora. These engagements with collectivities and with deterritorialization turn accented films into allegories of exile and diaspora—not the totalizing “national allegories” that Jameson once characterized Third World literature and cinema to be. (31).

In his discussion of Elia Suleiman’s 1991 film Homage by Assassination, Naficy explicitly addresses the connection between Arab Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel. Set during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the film captures a moment in which both groups were faced with the threat of Iraqi scud missile attacks on Israeli cities, from Nazareth (Suleiman’s home) to Ramat Gan, a suburb of Tel Aviv with a large Iraqi Jewish population. Homage by Assassination, as Naficy notes, exemplifies the category of “accented cinema” in the sense that exilic sensibilities are placed front and center both in terms of thematics and cinematic techniques. Naficy recounts a scene in which Suleiman sits in his New York apartment and engages with an “epistolary network consisting of computer, copier, fax, telephone, answering machine, radio, and television” (117). Suleiman places a bouquet of flowers on the copy machine and faxes the image to an Iraqi Jewish friend in Israel. Though not explicitly identified, this friend is understood as film scholar Ella Shohat. Her response via fax is narrated diagetically, with Shohat relating in her own voice the story of her family’s traumatic departure from Iraq, her experience as an Arab Jew in Israel, and her ultimate decision to go into exile in the United States. Suleiman’s emphasis on voice and the technologies that both inhibit and facilitate communication points to another characteristic of accented cinema, namely the emphatic treatment of acoustics. Naficy describes this quality in the following terms: “Stressing musical and oral accents redirects our attention from the hegemony of the visual and of modernity to the acousticity of exile

94 and the commingling of premodernity and postmodernity in the films. Polyphony and heteroglossia both localize and locate the films as texts of cultural and temporal difference”

(25).

My discussion of The Time That Remains looks at the role of voice, ecstatic feedback, and interference in a dramatization of the nakba. Simultaneously a period piece and an autobiographical sketch, this dramatization doubles as an exquisite eulogy for

Suleiman’s parents. By placing Egypt, an acoustic mega-presence in decay, front and center in the sonic texture of his film, Suleiman introduces what Racy has termed “ecstatic temporality.”40 As a close correlate of Barthes’ “lateral choice” and Benjamin’s “time of the now,” ecstatic temporality creates a space for reflection on the silences and untold narratives that function alongside and within normative discourses. The film opens with an arrival that quickly spins into a scenario of losing one’s way. Menashe, a character who makes two brief appearances, one at the beginning of the film and one toward the end, goes through the familiar motion of placing his luggage in the back of his car. Before he closes the car door, we catch a glimpse of a poster that heralds the uncanny. Reminiscent of the

1936 Franz Kraus “Visit Palestine” prints, this poster bears the caption eretz acheret

(another land).41 Menashe starts the car, picks up a police or intelligence handheld

40 In Making Music in the Arab World, Racy describes the ṭarab experience as a form of temporal transcendence: “The notion of ‘time splitting from time’ appears to imply the existence of two alternate modes of temporal awareness, one pertaining to ecstatic time and the other to nonecstatic time, or time proper” (125). 41 Franz Kraus, an Austrian émigré, designed the “Visit Palestine” poster in 1936 under the auspices of the Tourist Association of Palestine. Reprinted by the Israeli graphic designer David Tartakover and distributed by the Tel Aviv Museum, the piece became a popular commodity among Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The poster continues to spark debate over nostalgic appropriation.

95 transmitter, and proceeds to inform a certain Eli of his whereabouts: “Leaving airport, long trip. I am disappearing until further notice. Don’t look for me.” In the rearview mirror we see a silent E.S. played by Elia Suleiman.42 All of a sudden, a violent storm erupts, and

Menashe loses his way. Glancing back at E.S., Menashe starts to reflect on situation: “Say, do you know where we are? I have no idea. Where are all the kibbutzim, the agricultural cooperatives? They were here. Did the ground swallow them up?” Menashe pulls over and tries to re-establish contact with Eli, but he hears only the crackling of interference.

Growing more and more concerned, Menashe continues: “What’s going on here? What is this place? Where do I go now? How do I get home?” After a few frustrated attempts to reach Eli, he looks back at E.S. and asks in a forlorn tone, “Eli, where are you? Where?

Where am I?” Toward the end of the film, we encounter Menashe once again. E.S., having pole vaulted over the separation barrier in a wild feat of the imagination, now sits in the back seat of the car smoking a cigarette. Menashe, meanwhile, has fallen asleep on the steering wheel waiting out the storm.

Though Menashe’s second appearance does not constitute the final scene of the film, I am reading the two brief encounters with E.S. as a cinematic look at the uncanny.

The notion that E.S. and Menashe end up where they started calls to mind Freud’s image, from his essay “The Uncanny,” of an individual walking through the streets and coming to

42 In his three feature films (Chronicle of a Disappearance, Divine Intervention, and The Time That Remains) known together as the Palestine Trilogy, Elia Suleiman appears as the silent character E.S. In Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory, Nurith Getrz and George Khleifi liken E.S. to the character of Handala by the late cartoonist and political satirist Naji al-Ali: “The character [al-Ali] created, Handala, is a Palestinian child raised in the refugee camps. Handala observes the events delineated in the caricatures with great astonishment, which is expressed even though his face is not seen. In the caricatures, Handala represents the caricaturist himself, just as in Suleiman’s films, E.S. represents the director” (41). 96 the sinister realization that all roads lead back to the same spot. I am looking at the dramatic loop (the return of E.S. and Menashe) in The Time That Remains as a commentary on the difficulty of narrating the nakba without recourse to familiar discourses and tropes. Though the model of the uncanny offers no exit, the notion of a loop need not be sinister and can actually shed light on the ways in which disparate narratives feed into each other and then back into themselves.

In a scene that I am terming “Stealing Laila Murad,” the July 1948 surrender of

Nazareth to Israeli forces is depicted in Suleiman’s distinctive parodic form. Suleiman’s father Fuad, having narrowly escaped a barrage of gunfire, happens upon a group of Israeli soldiers looting a Palestinian home. Fuad watches from behind a corner as they load a truck with various family heirlooms, the first among them a gramophone. The soldiers proceed with the act of looting to the tune of Laila Murad’s anā albī dalīlī (My Heart is My Guide).

Suleiman’s depiction of the disembodied voice of Laila Murad in the context of the nakba references the profound malaise, in the Arab world, surrounding her Jewish background and the simultaneous ownership of her artistic persona as one of the most cherished cultural icons of the region.

In his article “The Return of Cinderella,” Eyal Sagui Bizawe untangles some of the perplexing circumstances through which Laila Murad rose to fame and became a cherished household name throughout the region, only to withdraw from public life in the wake of scandal. Bizawe’s article addresses the genre of the Ramadan musalsal (drama series) and the 2009 Syrian production of anā albī dalīlī, based on the life and musical career of Murad.

Bizawe groups this particular musalsal under the rubric of melodramas that focus on the 97 iconic figures of the modern Arab world. “These series, notes Bizawe, “generally have a somewhat nostalgic character, expressing a longing for days gone by, apparently never to return… A special place is set aside for the popular cultural heroes who symbolize the golden age of the great Arabic vocalists.” Murad, the daughter of a cantor and renowned composer, Zaki Murad, was and continues to be a contentious figure in terms of cultural ownership and political fidelity. Murad married the Egyptian actor Anwar Wagdi and converted to Islam. When their relationship fell apart, Wagdi purportedly started a rumor that Murad, in her divided loyalty as a Jew, secretly contributed a great sum of money to

Israel. This rumor prompted several Arab nations to boycott Murad’s films and songs. She received a presidential pardon, so to speak, when Nasser called on Syria to lift the ban as one of the preconditions for a 1958 unifying pact between Syria and Egypt, but the damage to her public persona was irremediable. According to Bizawe, the 2009 production of anā albī dalīlī represents a significant political and aesthetic turn in the sense that the question of an indigenous Jewish presence in the Arab world is being openly addressed through an artistic medium with a broad popular consumer base.43 Bizawe brings up another important figure, that of the hazzan or Jewish cantor. Though Laila Murad’s youth was steeped in the liturgical and musical traditions of Egyptian Jewry, this point is elided in the musalsal.

43 Bizawe offers the following reflection on the political agenda of the series: “The aim of the series is crystal clear: to show that Egypt was a paradise for Jews, Christians and Muslims, and it was only the Zionist activity always fermenting beneath the surface that led to the rifts and the violent dispute. This is a myth that many populist intellectuals try to foster both inside and outside Egypt. That being said, the very fact that a popular series broadcast during prime time portrays the Jews as part of the history of the Arab countries is both a new and a welcome development.”

98 Instead, she as portrayed as “loyal to her motherland, Egypt” and attracted from a young age to “the call of the muezzin through her bedroom window, and to the oil lamp that symbolizes the light of the month of Ramadan”. Bizawe’s reading points to a ubiquitous

Arabic media event with silenced Jewish liturgical undertones.

These undertones are not lost on Suleiman. “Cinderella of the Egyptian Screen,” as the songstress was affectionately known, occupies a pivotal role in The Time That Remains.

Her disembodied voice, a battleground for ethno-religious politics, makes two appearances in the film. First, anā albī dalīlī plays through the gramophone in the “Stealing Laila

Murad” scene. The gramophone, a nod to the golden age of Egyptian cinema and song, provides a “motion-picture soundtrack” to the nakba while echoing another, intimately related, narrative of catastrophic loss, the dispersion of Arab Jews. As a period piece of sorts, The Time That Remains meticulously catalogues technologies of sound. It comes as no surprise, then, that the next appearance of anā albī dalīlī is mediated through the cassette tape, a technology that rose to prominence in the 1970s.

In this scene, an aged and exhausted Fuad waits in the car while E.S. fetches his medication at the pharmacy. Fuad reaches into the glove compartment, pulls out a cassette tape of anā albī dalīlī, and inserts the tape into the player. Nodding his head to the music ever so gently, he slips into a state of ṭarab, while E.S. observes from the pharmacy window. By featuring both anā albī dalīlī, as a distinct constellation of affect, and the cassette, as a technology of sound with indelible ties to the emergence of acoustic counterpublics, Suleiman transforms a mundane scene into an instance of ecstatic feedback. On the personal and elegiac level, this scene functions as a quasi-spiritual 99 moment, a heart-to heart between the dying Fuad and the “cantor’s daughter,” to borrow

Bizawe’s characterization of Murad. In Making Music in the Arab World, Racy describes taxi cabs in Beirut of the early 1960s pulling over on the side of the road during the first

Thursday Umm Kulthūm ḥafla for an undisturbed listening. Cassette culture added a dimension of agency to this ritual in the sense that the act of “pulling over” could be achieved at any time. I am reading the pharmacy scene in The Time That Remains as a moment of “pulling over” or a deliberate engagement with ecstatic temporality. When E.S. returns to the car, he slides quietly into the driver’s seat and watches his father with a look of deep concern. We are left to wonder whether Fuad has fallen asleep or lost consciousness. Toward the end of the song, anā albī dalīlī switches from a waltz beat to a baladi rhythm. Fuad traces the change of beat ever so slightly with his head, indicating his continued engagement with the realm of ṭarab. Racy likens this type of reaction to a borderline state of consciousness: “The ṭarab state is not always trance-like, and as a rule does not lead to total transition, or loss of consciousness…More typically perhaps, ṭarab ecstasy exists as a ‘borderline’ state of consciousness. During the ṭarab state, listeners tend to retain a general, albeit modified, awareness of the world around them, and quite significantly, to remain fully cognizant of the musical stimulus that causes them to become ecstatic” (199-200). This second appearance of Laila Murad coincides with the moment in which E.S. must go into exile.44 The voice of Laila Murad, who doubles in this scene as

44 Suleiman was apprehended by Israeli security forces for his involvement in the 1976 Land-Day protests, a series of strikes and demonstrations in response to the Israeli government’s announcement of a plan to confiscate land for security and settlement purposes. When Suleiman refused to sign a statement acknowledging his affiliation with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, he was given a short window of time to leave the country or face imprisonment. 100 the cantor’s daughter and the “Cinderella of the Egyptian Screen,” marks a twofold departure articulated in elegiac terms: Fuad’s final departure from his body (death), and

E.S. departure from the body politic (exile). The setting of the pharmacy accentuates the therapeutic function of this ecstatic moment. Although the medications that E.S. picks up for his father have no power to stave off death, Suleiman’s retrospective constitutes a reanimation of past events.

From Suleiman’s retrospective, I move a depiction of another “closed and forgotten” chapter of history. As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, Kolirin’s creative journey with The Band’s Visit started with the image of a man dressed in uniform singing a plaintive Arabic love song. In an interview with Ha’aretz newspaper, Kolirin described the process by which this image accrued other layers of meaning that contributed to the screenplay in its final form. Foremost among the sources that influenced Kolirin’s textual layering was the travelogue A Drive to Israel: An Egyptian Meets His Neighbors by the

Egyptian playwright and humorist Ali Salem. Following the signing of the Oslo Peace

Accords in 1993, Salem made an audacious journey by car from Egypt to Israel. Abounding in pathos and humor, A Drive to Israel features a scene in which a nervous Salem loses his way and winds up in Netanya, some thirty kilometers north of his destination, Tel Aviv.

"In the book,” says Kolirin, “[Salem] describes all kinds of little things that happened to him that night. Nothing important, but small incidents with a great deal of charm”

(Anderman). These so-called “small incidents” give way to a much larger picture in which

Salem’s physical border crossing also constitutes the breaking of a sound barrier, a deliberate act of speaking about taboo subject matter. 101 The Band’s Visit, owing much of its narrative arc to Salem’s A Drive to Israel, opens with a “straying off course” scenario. The Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra arrives at the Ben Gurion International Airport. Scheduled to perform at the inaugural celebration of the Arab Cultural Center in Petah Tikva, they fail to locate their connecting bus. In linguistic mishap based on the lack of a “p” sound in Arabic, they erroneously board the bus to Beit Ha-Tikva, a fictional development town in southern Israel. With no place to stay and no outgoing buses for the night, they must rely on the hospitality of the locals.

In the first encounter between the band and the locals, Tawfik, the conductor, affectionately dubbed “General,” asks for directions to the Arab Cultural Center. Dina, the leading lady of the film, declares, “There is no Arab Center here…not culture, not Israeli culture, not

Arab, not culture at all.” Papi, one of the regular loafers at Dina’s café, mutters in Arabic, jahannam (hell). Tawfik looks at him incredulously. An Israeli Jew has just informed him in Arabic that he has arrived in hell. After reluctantly accepting Dina’s offer to accommodate them for the night, Tawfik addresses his beleaguered orchestra with a short speech that resembles a military directive: “Please bear in mind that we are here representing Egypt, and I expect you all to conduct yourselves with dignity. We need to carry out this mission together and prove to whoever needs proof what we are made of…tusbiḥuʿala khīr.” The colloquial tusbiḥʿala khīr is used to wish someone a good night and translates literally as, “May you reach the morning well.” Lending an air of sardonic humor to the situation, Tawfik refers to the orchestra’s mishap as al-ḥikāya dī, Egyptian colloquial for “this story.” In addition to its literal translation as “this story,” the phrase al-

ḥikāya dī also denotes something embarrassing, an incident, or a scandal best forgotten. 102 Like the “small incidents” to which Kolirin refers in his description of Ali Salem’s detour, the ḥikāya in The Band’s Visit gives way to a broader set of considerations.

One of the most striking acoustic features of the film is the profound silence that characterizes Beit Ha-Tikva. To reiterate Foucault’s formulation, silence “functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within overall strategies” (27).

Underlying the silences of Beit Ha-Tikva are notions of repressed cultural memory, geographical isolation, class-based marginalization, and lack of interpersonal communication. Development towns in Israel are spaces that get redefined and re-inscribed with meaning at particular historical moments. While the demographic makeup of these towns continues to be predominantly working class mizraḥim, these towns are by no means static in the sense that they can sometimes grow from a remote outpost in the desert to a densely populated urban center.45 The film sets Beit Ha-Tikva in stark contrast with Petah

Tikva, the urban destination of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra. Incidentally,

Petah Tikva, which literally translates as “gateway of hope,” was among the first Jewish agricultural settlements in Ottoman Palestine. Tawfik and his orchestra ultimately reach

Petah Tikva, where they perform for a receptive Arab Jewish audience. Petah Tikva is thus refigured in the film as a space where Arab culture in general, and ṭarab culture specifically, is alive and well in the heart of Israel. Beit Ha-Tikva, which translates as “the

45 Karen Grumberg, in Place and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature, gives a detailed account of the development town as a peripheral space where a “second” Israeli identity emerged. Citing Efraim Ben Zadok’s 1993 article “Oriental Jews in the Development Town: Ethnicity, Economic Development, Budgets, and Politics,” Grumberg writes: “Composed almost entirely of immigrants from Arab lands, these towns were intended to exemplify the heterogeneous kibuts galuyot (ingathering of the exiles) that characterized the Israeli self-conception. In fact, they became enclaves of ethnic and cultural homogeneity, ‘spatially isolated from their neighbors and fairly detached, socially, from the larger Israeli society’” (62). 103 place of hope,” initially appears as a cultural void, a point that Dina makes abundantly clear in her initial exchange with Tawfik. This assumption, however, starts to crumble when the two protagonists engage in a dialogue for which Egypt’s golden age of cinema and song stands as a common affective referent.

Their conversation begins at a local diner, where Tawfik sits across from Dina, growing visibly uncomfortable due to the gawking customers. “So what do you play in the orchestra? You play like in…army music?” Dina inquires, mimicking a drum roll. “No,” answers Tawfik, “We are a traditional orchestra. We play classical Arab music.” Dina asks in disbelief, “What, like Umm Kulthūm, Farīd?” Farīd, pronounced here with a heavy

Israeli accent, refers to the Syrian-born composer, singer, and ʿūd virtuoso, who made a name for himself on the Egyptian screen. “But...Why police needs to play Umm Kulthūm?”

Dina asks playfully. Tawfik pauses for a moment and then answers with great deliberation and gravitas: “This is like asking why a man needs a soul.” Dina, aware that she has just insulted her guest says earnestly, “Hey, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that…I mean it’s nice,” to which Tawfik replies: “It’s ok, you are not the only one who think that way. Music today is not that important anymore…People today care about other things…money, efficiency, worth.”

Tawfik’s comment reflects the current anxiety, among ṭarab afficionados, about the declining state of the musical phenomenon and its attendant cultural values. By cultural values I refer to the notion of samʿ or the propensity for listening well. At the end of Making

Music in the Arab World, Racy places ṭarab in a global perspective and offers some observations about the adaptability of ṭarab artistry: 104 In the early twenty-first century, the culture and artistry of ṭarab would appear to have lost a great deal of vitality. Some say that ṭarab has declined since the deaths of its major proponents…However, ṭarab endures in one form or another. It appears to do so through a dual pattern of adapting to current social and technological realities on the one hand, and keeping a rather discreet profile on the other. (223)

Though Dina has never encountered an Egyptian, much less a “General” who specializes in classical Arab music, she is able to fully and immediately grasp the urgency of Tawfik’s statement, “This is like asking why a man needs a soul.” In a gesture that says, “I understand,” Dina walks to the cashier station and makes a request. As she walks back to the table, a jazzy contemporary Arabic song issues from the cassette player. Through this diagetic representation of cassette culture, Kolirin references a distinct way in which working class mizraḥim embraced a collective identity that celebrated their North African and Middle Eastern cultural heritage.46

Given the intensifying militarization of the region and the increasingly militant discourses on identity and ethno-national affiliation, the notion of a police orchestra

46 Motti Regev and Edwin Seroussi, in Popular Music and National Culture in Israel, trace the history of musiqa mizraḥit (Mizraḥi music) and its proliferation via cassette tapes. The “mythological birth moment” of musiqa mizraḥit happened in a working class neighborhood in south Tel Aviv, incidentally called shekhunat ha-tikva (the neighborhood of hope). As the story goes, Asher Reuveni, the owner of a record and electronics shop, was forced to postpone his wedding celebration due to the untimely death of his fiancé’s brother in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. When the celebration ultimately took place, several of his friends were still at the front, so he made a cassette recording of the live wedding music. The recording was met with unparalleled demand and enjoyed wide circulation through cassette reproductions. As Regev and Seroussi note, cassettes were equated with inferior social status: “Until the mid-1980s, this marginal status was reflected in the terms used by the media to describe musiqa mizraḥit: musiqa qasetot (cassette music), or the equally derogatory term, musiqa shel ha-taḥana ha-merkazit (music of the Central Bus Station), which is a reference to the old Central Bus Station in south Tel Aviv, where most of this music was sold at open-air cassette stands that played the music over loudspeakers” (192). In “Dueling Narratives: Zehava Ben Sings Umm Kulthum,” Amy Horowitz traces the shift whereby cassette culture was refigured as source of pride and a “ghetto blasting” move: “A disenfranchised neighborhood music that had flourished at a grassroots level, despite being assigned to broadcast corners and heritage display, was now blasting out of the ghetto as the soundtrack to an emerging pan-ethnic political coalition” (216). 105 playing Umm Kulthūm takes on a particular urgency. One of the trademarks of the ṭarab experience, as both Racy and Hirschkind have noted, is a sound-based therapeutics. On an interpersonal level, the ecstatic feedback loop in The Band’s Visit provides a therapeutic framework for Dina and Tawfik to communicate their losses. In one of the most visually captivating scenes of the movie, they sit on a bench in the middle of a deserted concrete square. Dina asks Tawfik, “Tell me Tawfik, how does it feel? I mean, to do music, to have the orchestra…to have all the people waiting for you?” Unable to tell her in words, Tawfik enacts the moment of suspense when the conductor lifts his arms in an opening gesture to the orchestra. Dina mimics his movements as they embark together on a flight of the imagination that functions as an overture for a deeper, more painful conversation on personal loss.

Before entering the apartment for the night, Dina turns to Tawfik and gives an account of a weekly Israeli media event commonly referenced in both critical scholarship and literary works dealing with mizraḥiut or Arab Jewish identity: “You know, when I was young, we used to have here on television Arab movies, Egyptian movies. And every

Friday at noon, all the street in Israel was empty because Arab movie every Friday afternoon. And me and my mother and my sister, we sit and we see Egyptian movie and we cry our eyes out. We were all in love with Omar Sharif. We were all in love with…love.” Dina’s heartfelt description evokes another Israel, an Israel in which the streets clear out for “a pause, a quasi-sacred time out,” to reiterate my description of the

Umm Kulthum ḥafla from my opening chapter. At the beginning of The Band’s Visit, the silent emptiness of Beit Hat-Tikva is equated with a cultural void. Dina’s recollection of 106 the Friday afternoon Egyptian film refigures emptiness as an inroad for ecstatic temporality. Completely in tune with this form of reverence, Tawfik opens up to Dina about the circumstances that led to his son’s suicide. Ecstatic sound-based therapeutics functions in the film on both the level of personal loss, as we can see from the exchange between

Dina and Tawfik, and on the level of a corrective to insular discourses on community and nationhood.

In Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel,

Yaron Shemer argues that the notion of a peripheral mizraḥi identity is constructed vis-à- vis an “Ashkenazi Arab,” rather than an Ashkenazi Jewish, other (114). By “Ashkenazi

Arab,” Shemer refers to the ways in which Tawfik is presented as a proponent of “high culture” in contradistinction to the “low culture” proclivities of the mizraḥi characters.

“Against the locals’ provinciality,” writes Shemer, “these musicians from the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria are true Westerners” (118). Mati Shemoelof, in “The Band’s Visit:

Ethnicity and Stereotypes in Israeli Cinema,” makes a similar argument, noting that through a process of ideological “hybridization and purification,” the film presents a scenario in which mizraḥi characters are stripped of their Arab history, and “Arab characters are marked as the new Jew” (4). My reading, with its emphasis on affect, departs from these two studies anchored in theories of postcoloniality and postmodernity.

The Band’s Visit opens with the caption: “Once, not so long ago, a small Egyptian police band arrived in Israel. Not many remember this, it was not that important.” I argue that the exchange between the locals of Beit Ha-Tikva and the Alexandria Ceremonial

Police Orchestra, though seemingly a minor and forgettable incident in the grand scheme 107 of the regional conflict, points to a window of opportunity with tremendous transformative potential. The question, “Why police needs to play Umm Kulthūm?” points to the urgency of feeling and listening in an increasingly militarized world. Elia Suleiman’s The Time That

Remains also features a telling caption, “Chronicle of a Present Absentee.” The term

“present absentee” refers to Palestinian refugees of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War who remained within the borders of the new state and were granted citizenship. In his 1992 introspective titled Nokheḥim nifḳadim (present absentees), David Grossman reflects on the ways in which Palestinian citizens of Israel are removed from the purview of Jewish

Israelis:

In all that touches on the Arab minority, the collective Jewish consciousness in Israel is like that of a city obliged to house within it a large institution for criminal rehabilitation. On the face of it, life goes on as usual. But people learn to avoid the neighborhood where the institution is situated. Good citizens like us can live our whole lives without going near that neighborhood…There are no correct names—there are only a few terms created by the military, the bureaucracy, and the legal system, sterile forceps with which to grasp what the hand dares not touch. (310-312)

Motti Regev, in his 1995 article, “Present Absentee: Arab Music in Israeli Culture,” probes the underlying dynamics behind the systematic silencing of Arab music in the realm of

Israeli popular culture. By placing a thematic emphasis all-stars of Arabic song, Umm

Kulthum and Laila Murad, respectively, Eran Kolirin and Elia Suleiman point to the ways in which the small “forgettable” instances give way to larger unforgettable silences. In the realm of the figurative, the notion of the present absentee can refer to the untold or marginalized narratives of Arab Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel.

108 Conclusion

As I sit down to compose these final pages of Ecstatic Feedback in July of 2014, the Mediterranean about which I write is on fire. Israel has just launched a ground offensive in Gaza, sure to result in innumerable casualties. Those who survive this latest round of attrition will bear the irremediable scars of what they have witnessed, and in some cases, done. The extremist Islamist group known as ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham), has demolished hundreds of antiquities and sites of cultural heritage dating back to ancient

Mesopotamia. With control over large parts of Syria and Iraq, ISIS has issued a proclamation calling on Christians to convert, pay a protective tax, or face death. French

Jews are immigrating to Israel en masse after a series of attacks on synagogues and an alarming rise of anti-Semitic sentiment in France. In my own hometown, not far from Tel

Aviv, life proceeds in stark contrast to the wailing sirens and overhead explosions as Hamas missiles are intercepted by the Iron Dome. My dear instructor of Argentine tango is sending messages imploring people to continue dancing. The dance studio, she writes, has a bomb shelter.

In the most challenging of times, how do I, soon to be a professor of comparative literature, find a place from which to launch my voice, to borrow a phrase from Hoda

Barakat? My thoughts turn to Barakat’s talk “Universal Justice or the Trial of Innocence” at the University of Texas at Austin (November 18th, 2013), in which she reflected on the

Biblical character of Job in his contemporary incarnation as a figure caught in the crossfire between religious fundamentalism and increasingly insular forms of secular liberalism:

109 “We are witnessing today a bloody argument among the blind. An absurd conversation that happens over our heads, and which makes us pay the price of being innocent, from both sides. For our rejection of both sides. So we resemble, more and more, Job, who pays the price of a struggle that surpasses him and has nothing to do with him, between the Lord and the Devil; I mean, between two unjust powers” (Keynote Address).47

Barakat highlighted in her talk the historical fascination among artists, intellectuals, authors, and philosophers, with the Biblical figure of Job, who carried a tremendous capacity for resistance in the face of totalizing despair. Foremost among the thinkers who held a fascination for the figure of Job, as Barakat noted, was Antonio Negri, an Italian

Marxist who wrote The Labor of Job: The Biblical Text as a Parable of Human Labor

(1982) while serving a prison sentence for his political activities. From Barakat’s perspective, Negri’s materialist Marxist and atheist reading of Job introduces a remarkably spiritual dimension in the sense that Job’s struggle suggests “a rehabilitation of humanity, and specifically of human freedom” (Keynote Address).

My readings in Ecstatic Feedback highlight the ways in which a diverse group of authors and filmmakers from the contemporary Mediterranean have taken on just such a project of rehabilitation. By placing the notion of ṭarab front and center in their works and anchoring their respective narrative idioms in the realm of affect, these artists are moving toward an ethics of audition. As I noted in my introduction, the concept of ecstatic feedback refers to an active encounter in which the vocal dynamism of the muṭrib feeds into the

47 Transcribed and translated by Anna Ziajka Stanton 110 audience’s capacity for creative listening. The engagé quality of the ṭarab experience hinges on the propensity, among a select group listeners (sammīʿa), for hearing nuances.

This heightened capacity for listening figures in the texts of Ecstatic Feedback as an emblem of committed art and a means of lending expression to silences and “closed and forgotten” chapters of history.

Melancholia, in this context, occupies a productive and recuperative role. In one sense, the inability to let go of the lost object, a quality that typifies melancholic attachments, allows for a flashing up of the past in the present, in the vein of Walter

Benjamin’s “time of the now.” It is through this moment of emergence that the past becomes open for “future significations and alternate emphathies” (Eng and Kazanjian 1).

In another sense, melancholia is intimately tied to the storytelling endeavor, as I have theorized it in Ecstatic Feedback. Following Benjamin again, the act of storytelling involves the entire body as an “organ of audition” and unfolds as a process of sedimentation or accrued meaning. This notion is akin to El Maleh’s extended metaphor of the cat’s cradle, according to which narratives takes on new contours when they changes hands. The texts of Ecstatic Feedback, to various degrees, feature the body as a site of rupture and embodied forms of grief. By casting the body as an “organ of audition,” as it typically functions in the context of a ṭarab performance, these texts point to the multiple ways in which the act of listening can take on a therapeutic function, both on the psychic and corporeal, individual and collective levels.

I close by posing two questions. First, I extend the metaphor of the sammīʿa to include the authors and filmmakers who, by listening “well” themselves and moving 111 toward an ethics of audition, demand the same of their readership or audience. What are the broader implications of the fact that this group constitutes a minority within the larger listening public? To borrow Racy’s description, the sammīʿa can be viewed as an in-group, something akin to a Sufi order (40). My second question hinges on the staying power of

ṭarab as a transformative structure of feeling. Racy articulates precisely this concern in

Making Music in the Arab World: “In theoretical terms, do such transformative states such as ecstasy, or trance, which are emotionally distinct, as well as culturally relevant, or which embrace ‘feeling’ as well as ‘meaning’ grant the cultural practices that uphold them a sense of individuality or power? Are such practices empowered to modify or reverse conventional relationships and hierarchies?” (11)

To sketch out some preliminary answers to these questions, I suggest that the sammīʿa, though they represent a very select group, play a pivotal role in energizing the ecstatic-evocative process. Scattered among the larger body of listeners, these exceptional individuals do wield power in shaping public sentiment over time. Working with the extended metaphor, I suggest that the greatest potential for instilling an ethics of audition resides in the realm of education and of affect itself. As an educator and a committed listener myself, I hope to communicate to my students the importance of lending an ear to the silences that function within and alongside discourse. With regard to the second question, I believe that the transformative potential of such states can be realized over time and through multiple retellings and accrued layers of meaning. By adding my project to a growing body of scholarship that recognizes the importance of affect in the study of trauma, sadness, depression, melancholia and the physical aptitudes in which this constellation of 112 interrelated terms resides, I hope to contribute to a growing effort to shift the language with which loss is apprehended, toward a “shimmering gradation of intensities” rather than a vicious cycle of misapprehensions.

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