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Commitment and Beyond: Reflections On/Of the Political in Arabic Literature Since the 1940S

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Commitment and Beyond: Reflections On/Of the Political in Arabic Literature Since the 1940S Friederike Pannewick and Georges Khalil together with Yvonne Albers: Commitment and Beyond: Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940s Zeina G. Halabi : The Day the Wandering Dreamer Became a Fida’i: Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and the Fashioning of Political Commitment eISBN: 978-3-95490-613-0 Copyright Das Digitalisat wird Ihnen von perspectivia.net, der Online- Publikationsplattform der Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland, zur Verfügung gestellt. Bitte beachten Sie, dass das Digitalisat urheberrechtlich geschützt ist. Erlaubt ist aber das Lesen, das Ausdrucken des Textes, das Herunterladen, das Speichern der Daten auf einem eigenen Datenträger soweit die vorgenannten Handlungen ausschließlich zu privaten und nicht-kommerziellen Zwecken erfolgen. Eine darüber hinausgehende unerlaubte Verwendung, Reproduktion oder Weitergabe einzelner Inhalte oder Bilder können sowohl zivil- als auch strafrechtlich verfolgt werden. The Day the Wandering Dreamer Became a Fida’i: Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and the Fashioning of Political Commitment Zeina G. Halabi Events have become so momentous that all our faculties have shriveled up trying cope with them. The disasters we’ve suffered can’t be dealt with in verbal form; all the words have been pulverized. (Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Walid Masoud 74) Introduction In April 2010, a car explosion in Princesses Street near the Egyptian embassy in Baghdad killed seventeen people. It also destroyed a deserted two-story house and all that it con- tained. In the rubble, there were plays by Anton Chekhov, novels by Ghassan Kanafani (Ghassān Kanafānī), translations of Shakespeare and Faulkner, paintings by the Iraqi Sha- ker Hasan (Shākir Ḥasan), sculptures by Muhammad Ghani Hikmat (Muḥammad Ghanī Ḥikmat), countless classical music records, and a cornerstone brought from the debris of a home in Palestine (Shadid). Destroyed but not lifeless, the house spoke of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s (Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā, 1920‒1994) intellectual sophistication and trajectory from Palestine to his Iraqi exile. Originally from Bethlehem, Jabra pursued higher education in England, and eventually settled in Baghdad where, starting in the 1950s, he was at the cen- ter of the Arab and particularly Iraqi cultural vanguard. A novelist, poet, artist, critic, and translator, Jabra was, in the words of Issa Boullata “a true Renaissance man (who) has been rightly considered a strong force for modernism in the Arab world in the second half of the twentieth century” (215). Jabra saw in the exilic intellectual’s liminality an advantage that reinforced his critical sensibilities and enabled him to lead the desired leap into the modern. In his numerous es- says, novels, and poems Jabra engaged the themes of loss and displacement and represented exile, despite its tragic consequences, as the desired ethical position of an entire generation of Arab intellectuals, whether displaced or at home. Jabra’s literary discourse significantly drew on the archetype of the Palestinian intellectual, an exilic modern subject in a modern- izing yet troubled Arab world. Specifically, Jabra’s characters in Al-safīna (1970; The Ship, 1985), Al-baḥth ʿan Walīd Masʿūd (1978; In Search for Walid Masoud, 2000), and Yawmiy- yāt sarāb ʿaffān (1992; The Journals of Sarab Affan, 2007) are exilic Palestinian intellectu- als navigating an Arab world enchanted by the promises of modernity yet shackled by con- secutive political setbacks. Jabra’s oeuvre poses a set of critical questions: Why did Arabs lose Palestine in 1948? Why were they defeated again in 1967? And what exactly is the responsibility of the Pales- tinian exilic intellectuals toward Arab societies as they embrace modernization? Jabra sear- ched for answers to the first question in Arab culture, specifically in the question of moder- nity and tradition. He observed that the nakba was symptomatic of the multifaceted Arab defeat that was not only political and military, but also cultural and epistemological. If Ar- 158 Zeina G. Halabi abs had lost Palestine, it was because they were “cheated and betrayed by a thousand years of decay” (“The Palestinian Exile” 82). Arabs, he thought, “had confronted a ruthless mod- ern force with an outmoded tradition” (ibid.). Put differently, the Arabs’ retrograde political, cultural, and scientific institutions were accountable for the loss. Therefore, the problem was clear, and so was the solution: Arabs had to embrace modernity by inventing “a new way of looking at things. A new way of saying things. A new of way of approaching and portraying man and the world” (ibid.). Jabra believed that it was the responsibility of Pales- tinian exiles to lead the way. By the mid-1960s, the postcolonial hopes of modernization and emancipation were gra- dually thwarted by the militarization of regimes in Egypt, Iraq and Syria. The naksa in 1967 was thus the last installment of a series of consecutive political defeats that transformed the ways in which Arab authors conceived of themselves as agents of change. In what ways could these internal setbacks be explained? And what were the implications of these succes- sive losses on the role of the Arab writer? Jabra conducted another project of introspection, which this time was more inward and personal. He probed, not the state of archaic Arab traditions, but his understanding of aesthetics and politics. Jabra questioned the viability of his word-centered episteme and saw in his fascination with humanism, modernism, and aes- thetics the cause for the renewed experience of defeat that his writings conveyed. In In Search of Walid Masoud, I suggest, Jabra articulates his growing ambivalence toward his own literary discourse and reconfigures the role of the politically committed intellectual. In order to gauge the complexity of Jabra’s understanding of political commitment (ilti- zām), one needs to trace the multiple meanings of the concept in the context of the shifting ideological landscape of the Arab world from the 1920s to the 1970s. The commitment to a politically-oriented literature that engages the social and political realities of its time, had not been foreign to Jabra. It had been at the forefront of critical debates in Egypt and the Levant with the emergence of the nationalist anti-colonial cultural vanguard since the 1920s. The politically-driven writers of the time were predominantly nationalist intellectu- als addressing the budding national community as they construed an anti-colonial rhetoric. Their poetry, Jabra notes, was “oratorical, militant, and of an instantaneous effect” (“The Rebels” 191). The understanding of political commitment that we know today was popularized in the 1950s. Verena Klemm notes that iltizām1 became the governing literary ethos a few years following the 1948 publication of Sartre’s What is Literature? (51–52). Translated and de- bated on the pages of the Lebanese literary journal al-Ādāb, Sartre’s2 concept of littérature engagée provided the philosophical framework that positioned literature at the intersection of existentialism and emancipation ideologies.3 But the variant of iltizām that al-Ādāb pro- moted was continuously in dialogue with proponents of social realism who had been dissat- isfied with the individualistic sensibility of existentialism.4 The naksa in 1967 radicalized the scope of criticism and engendered a literary and critical discourse that promoted Pales- tinian armed struggle against Israeli occupation, a brand of iltizām that Ghassan Kanafani (Ghassān Kanafānī) had coined ‘resistance literature’ (adab al-muqāwama) in his seminal book Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine 1948–1966 (1966). It is in the context of this shifting understanding of political commitment—from anti-colonial nationalist rhetoric, to social realism, and ultimately resistance literature—that Jabra’s Walid Masoud appeared. The title character Walid Masoud is Jabra’s mirror image: an established Palestinian ex- ilic intellectual who left Palestine in 1947 and later became a catalyst for change and innova- tion in Baghdad. Following the 1967 war, Walid witnessed the limits of the discursive sepa- The Day the Wandering Dreamer Became a Fida’i 159 ration between aesthetics and politics. Unlike Jabra, who remained in Baghdad until his death in 1994, Walid disappeared a few years after the 1967 war amidst rumors that he had joined the Palestinian resistance in a refugee camp in Beirut. As such, the “mystique” of the Palestinian intellectual wandering in exile gave way to the Palestinian freedom fighter rooted in the refugee camp. As he reconstructs the disappearance of Walid Masoud, Jabra laments his alter ego and his own intellectual project that could not resist the political and epistemic aftershocks of the 1967 defeat. Furthermore, the novel reveals Jabra’s distinct understanding of political commitment in dialogue with—but also in opposition to—the multiple concep- tions of iltizām that his peers had fostered. In Walid Masoud, Jabra articulates a more idio- syncratic and nuanced conception of political commitment. By closely reading the discursive turn that the novel stages, I hope to show how Jabra challenges monolithic understandings of iltizām and reveals the concept’s dynamic, adaptive, and pluralistic nature. The significance of Jabra’s fashioning of iltizām in Walid Masoud becomes clear only when compared to his pre-1967 understanding of the role of the exilic Palestinian intellectual. The Wanderers In a seminal autobiographical essay, “The Palestinian
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