MOTHER OF STRANGERS
by Suad Amiry
304 pp. Pantheon, $27.00
At the start, as I read the Palestinian novel, Mother of Strangers by Suad Amiry, I felt unclear about the direction of the narrative and coherence of its events. It is written from the standpoint of an omniscient third person narrator of selected events in the lives of a few people starting with the two young “heroes”: Subhi, a clever teenage mechanic from the city of Yafa whose father owns an orange grove (bayyara in Arabic), and Shams, a pre-teen girl from the neighboring village of Salama whose father works in tending that orchard. Shams and Subhi meet a couple of times before the Nakba at the annual Nabi Rubin Fest, fall in love and even kiss once.
Subhi’s father, Ismael, had not followed in the footsteps of his own father to become a fisherman. Instead, like so many ambitious Yafa natives, he went into orange farming. At the start of the novel, he “was beginning to have the means to buy the oranges of other groves. In other words, he was becoming a modest orange merchant above and beyond an orange grower.” By Subhi’s account, the class of a male resident of Yafa was best identified by the café he attended. Subhi, himself, visited Café il Tious, known as the Fools’ Café. There was also Café Dawoud, known as the Orange Merchants Café. “If there was one place in Jaffa that intimidated Subhi, it was Café il Inshirah. That was where most of Jaffa’s intellectuals, well-to-do merchants, and politicians, including members of the municipal council, gathered.”
Suad Amiry weaves a loosely connected web of events in the traumatized and separate lives of the two young heroes over the period of the Palestinian Nakba and the ensuing mayhem for the next three and a half years. As a reader I was not sure where this was leading. Till the end when the author artfully gathers all the seemingly loose ends into a true-life narrative. Here is the place to advise the reader to stick to the order in which Amiry had arranged her account which is truly stranger than most of us can imagine. It is the epilogue that finally, seven decades after the actual events, makes everything fall in place, a surprise that brought copious tears to the late-night end of my 2-day reading marathon.
So, please bear with the narrator while she leaves all the loose ends till that brief but eloquent epilogue brings it all together, with her chasing after the various real Palestinians who had little choice in playing their lifelong roles until Amiry chanced upon their Nakba story and presented them most artfully in a masterly novel. It should be obligatory reading for diplomats, politicians, historians, anthropologists and common people who have anything to do with Israel and, especially, with Palestine.
Slivers of a life before
Shams, a sweet preteen village girl, and Subhi, the teenage clever mechanic, are the heroes of this novel. Amiry manages to have the reader gain a realistic picture of the Nakba experience through a sliver of their early lives. Here is a typical paragraph from her informing the reader of such events:
Worse were the moans of the elderly, the shrieks of a mother in search of her lost child, the frantic screams of a child in search of his mother. Like a broken record, it all cyclically echoed in his ears in spite of the deadly silence of his long and lonely nights. Though most of the city’s inhabitants had disappeared beyond the horizon of the Mediterranean Sea, like ghosts, their souls were still hovering over the abandoned homes and haunted city. Their absence seemed to have more presence than their presence. From the balcony of his grandmother’s house, all that Subhi could see or hear all day and night was the deserted Palestinian homes being broken into. The new Jewish immigrants, whole families sometimes, were now joining in the organized robberies that had thus far been carried out by the Jewish militia. They were going into houses and taking every piece of furniture, to be either carried away on foot or loaded into trucks (P 143).
Then the author dwells at length on the particulars of the looting process to which Israel admitted only in recent years, particularly the clearly planned and well-organized theft of Palestinian private libraries. Amiry gives a page-long list of the typical valuables that Israeli civilians and officials participated in stealing from Palestinian homes, each item preceded by the cynical preface of “Gone was …”
She also details the method of the removal of items to their new destinations. As the narrative progresses, the author reverts repeatedly to long lists to emphasize her message. Here is an example:
To their right was Fawwaz, one of the two Arab collaborators. Subhi’s heart fell when he noticed the absence of his suit. He looked around, inspecting the room in vain. Like all Arab properties in Occupied Palestine, everything (land, orange groves, houses, villas, buildings, shops, schools, hospitals, cars, boats, factories, banks, even books and furniture) belonged to the newly established state until proven otherwise. While Subhi’s suit had become “a disputed” suit whose ownership had to be proven, Subhi himself had become “a criminal,” a “thief,” until proven otherwise. (P157).
Then again:
We’ve all become witnesses to the biggest robbery in the history of mankind. You steal our land, our cities, our oranges, our orchids, our homes, our shops, our garages, our fishing boats, our cars and buses, our livestock, our furniture, our books, our lives, and our souls. You steal a whole country, a fully furnished country, then have the chutzpah to accuse me of stealing my own suit! (P159).
In her inimitable reality-based fiction, Amiry touches on many aspects of life in Yafa and its surroundings. Because of their actual connections to the novel’s narrative, several interfaith relations are recounted with casual swiftness. Perhaps because of my own interfaith life (nominally, I am Muslim and my wife is Christian), or because of my awareness of Amiry’s own mixed marriage, I took notice of the phenomenon and of how each of the three monotheistic faiths fare in the life-based novel — all interfaith relations seem to be tender and successful, especially that of the Egyptian Muslim teacher, Abed, and his Jewish wife, Rifqa, a loving and humane couple par-excellence. They are the model adoptive parents of Shams and her two younger sisters, the three children having been lost in the Nakba’s mayhem and then saved in the nick of time from perishing in the massacre of refugees gathered in the Dahmash mosque of the city of Lyd.
The most negative portrayal in all of this is that of the Islamic Waqf’s actions: its agents “abduct” the three lost children and place them in the care of a deaf-mute Muslim woman who is a mentally disturbed hoarder of junk and stray animals. Abed and Rifqa shine in comparison, proving their loving care of the girls for over three years. I dare add that the Waqf system among Palestinian citizens in Israel has been one of the earliest among our communal structures to be targeted by the Israeli government, coopted and cheated out of much of its authority and properties.
Let me now offer my own take on this live account of a sliver of the Palestinian Nakba experience, and of the obligatory suffering that all Palestinians of my parents’ age group and younger, including me, had to experience so that Christian Europe (including America and the Soviet Union) can live with its past anti-Semitic crimes, up to and including the Holocaust.
We, the Palestinians, were forced to be the sacrificial offerings of Christian Europe to the Zionists. Here is a factual glimpse from our novel of the mechanics of performing such offerings:
The same fleet of British ships called “Liberty” that had until recently brought Jewish immigrants to Palestine was now carrying Palestinians away from their homeland. A new nation was being born as an ancient one was being annihilated. (P 139).
And we Palestinians still live that role to the present day, witness the daily Palestinian victims of Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. And there is the intentional and discriminatory ongoing neglect of our communities in Israel as its minority Palestinian citizens, racially segregated and legally dispossessed to such extremes that we have lost security in our homes and towns with the police intentional neglect.
My remote connection
I am a fellow Palestinian villager and nearly an agemate of Shams, our heroine. And I have a remote connection to Yafa, Mother of Strangers, and to its magnanimity other than the unforgettable flavor of its oranges of old. In the mess of the Nakba, Arrabeh, my home village in the Galilee, was one of the few Palestinian communities that remained miraculously intact. High school education and beyond was unknown to us except for the occasional son who attended an Islamic college. An older brother of mine, Mahmoud, who had the gift of a miraculous photographic memory, decided to attend a secular high school. His dream was beyond our parents’ means.
In the mayhem of the Nakba, he, still a teenager, escaped to Yafa with two agemates from the Galilee, found illegal employment in orange-picking in Yafa’s bayyaras (might he have had contact with any of Amiry’s characters?!) and saved enough cash to pay for the registration fees in the municipal high school of Nazareth. Thus, brother Mahmoud, may his soul rest in peace, opened the way for me, the youngest brother, to attend high school as well. From there, I made the next impossible jump, leaving home with $500 to study Medicine in the USA — and to return ten years later as my home village’s first MD.
Since my return, Arrabeh has produced more MDs per capita than any other community in Israel, Arab or Jewish. Perhaps even in the whole world. Perhaps a story for Suad Amiry’s next best seller.
