PALESTINIAN WALKS by Raja Shehadeh Published by Profile Books, 2007
Winner of the Orwell Prize of 2008 this beautifully written book by Ramallah-based writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh is by turn heartbreaking and enraging. As the title
suggests, Shehadeh describes walks he took in Palestine as a child and as a young man, walks that are no longer possible due to cement walls and the expropriation of land by Israel that has left Palestine fragmented into discrete and isolated stumps. Shehadeh writes of his despair; as a lawyer who has fought the land grab in Israeli courts, the results of which as he readily admits, were virtually always a foregone conclusion, and as a Palestinian man who stayed because he believed things would get better but whose belief has now become a distant dream. But he also writes of his disillusionment with the PLO, and the Oslo Accords which not only did nothing for Palestinian statehood, but as the PLO were seemingly interested in little more than gaining recognition for themselves, the disastrous outcome gave Israel more legal ammunition to expropriate even more land.
He asks himself why he does not leave and start a new life like others who have given up and left. But if he leaves he will not be allowed to come back, and under Israeli law his land and property will be forfeited by the Israeli state. When he is walking for solace in what is left of the hills – and it is so painfully clear that he loves this land - he cannot but note the hilltops dotted with neat Israeli settlements - the original inhabitants built in valleys with closer access to water and their villages have become invisible. His is not a story of self pity - these days he writes to assuage his feelings of anger, loss and frustration - but rather a treasured remembrance of what was, a record of what is, a memento mori of what might have been, and a bleak foretelling of what may yet come. His last walk of the book describes his uncomfortable encounter with two young masked Palestinian men, youngsters who had grown up only in the years of the intifada knowing nothing but violence, fear and death, yet who despite their shared ethnicity and history were as alien to their older compatriot as the young Israeli soldiers from Ethiopia or Russia who now owned his land. Such is the tragedy of Palestine.
THE ARABIAN NIGHTS Translation by Hussain Haddaway
Published by W.W Norton & Co. 2007
The fabled tales of
The Thousand and One Nights took place at the Baghdad court of Caliph Harun al-Rashid in the 8th century, although many are based on even older
Arab, Persian and Indian folktales. In the days before their written language, Arabs revered the spoken word, and until television came along and put paid to such entertainment, storytelling was an art.
The misogynist King Shahrayr sleeps with a different girl every night and kills her the following morning. Sheherezade marries him and must spin her stories to save her life; in conjuring up demons and kings, princesses and hunchbacks, dervishes, eunuchs, viziers and maidens in an alluring combination of fairy tales, fables and comedy amid a scattering of historic fact, replete with romantic encounters, drunken nights, and lots of sex, Shahrayr is spellbound and must hear the end of the story before he kills Sheherezade the next morning. But she always falls asleep leaving him hanging on yet another skillfully concocted plot with heroes and heroines who have faces like the moon, teeth like pearls, lips like garnets, cheeks of anemones and skin like silk, and the King must wait to learn the plight of the prince with ‘the slender figure like a bough’ who has been transformed into a netherworld figure half-man, half-stone, or the concubines and queens with ‘swelling breasts like pomegranates, and swaying hips’ who have bedazzled their suitors, poisoned their enemies or bewitched a sultan’s heir.
This translation based on a 14th century Syrian manuscript, one of the oldest still available, faithfully follows the original tales as opposed to later manuscripts which
were adulterated by translators who deliberately or unwittingly rendered them more ‘fitting’ for their audience. The work of a translator as Haddawi writes is “the transfer of a text from one cultural context to another by converting its language into the language of the host culture”. In Arabic language and Islamic culture, everyday speech is peppered with references to God; “Thank God, by God, God Willing….Haddawy has kept these expressions in the translation which those familiar with the language or the culture will recognize as an authentic pattern of speech. Being a native Arabic speaker familiar with the syntax and nuance of the language, not to mention the culture of the time, Haddawy has given us a fluid re-telling that reads as if we too were listening
to Sheherezade weave her tales.
The waterwheels or norias at night.
