A COMPLAINT WORTH REPEATING
I beg forgiveness for stating my first reaction to Raja Shehadeh's secondd book
of hiking memoirs, this one with the emphasis provided by the desire to retrace
the steps of a respected forbearer: We have been through this before. I had
attended the author's reading in East Jerusalem and had my autographed copy for
keepsake. Especially as a fellow involved Palestinian who reads on daily basis
many a pained statement of our loss at the hands of the Zionist colonialist
project, I was tempted to put the book aside. Except that the tale of Raja's
legendary Ottoman uncle was compelling enough for me to keep on reading. Its
setting in Galilee and the adjacent environs of the upper Rift Valley kept me
going. After all, my own facination with Galilee and committment to its native
residents had launched me as an author with my "A Doctor in Galilee: The Life
and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel" thus, not unlike Raja, switching careers from a physician to a writer.
As I followed Raja and his wife Penny on their meanderings in and out of
Galilee, his frequent asides about our loss as Palestinians and about the
Zionists' well-planned and mercilessly executed dislodging of our people by
diliberate force and geographic fragmentation, the elimination of their cultural
and archeological heritage, and the spacial confinement and physical control of
those who remained gained in freshness and legitimacy with repetition. It
started with the bit of information about Najib Nassar, Raja's Ottoman uncle,
being the first Palestinian writer to address the potential threat of
the Zionist colonialist project to our people's future and continued clear through to the
end of the narrative that I managed to get through by the end of the night of
the same day I had started it: 'The best heir of the best forbearer' as we say
in Arabic, I had to admit with tears in my eyes as Raja stands at his great
great uncle's grave in Nazareth.
I was particularly taken by the artfully intermixed narrative of Raja's own
present day nature walks with that of the forced flight of his predecessor into
the wilderness: The two accounts are nearly seamlessly interwoven, so much so
that I found the repeated assertions of the similarities between the two
protagonists in thought and predilictions perhaps unnecessary, even though I
found myself equally often thinking how much resemblance I also had to the two.
The only part that I was surprized to read when I reached it was about Najib's
second wife being the Granddaughter of the Grand Bahai, founder of the Bahai faith. I would have baited the reader with a hint about it very early in the book.
And a second artful tactic that Raja Shahadeh uses as if it were the most normal of practices is the mixing of the intimate with the public and the general: Personal and family affairs are brought casually into focus to be transcended at will to historical events and world affairs. Had I not been open to similar villification I would have accused the auther of slight of hand magic. But then again, the focus of the whole account is family centered while it is the entire world, particularly the West, that is Raja's target readership and potentially his accused perpetrators of neglect if not agression against the Palestinian people. Hence it is only natural that Raja zooms in and out of focusing at homes and family life in Ramallah, Haifa, Nazareth and Eyn-Anoub rendering their evident humanity accessible to his world audience.
Also for the non-Palestinian there is much more to savor: the reflective pauses about the human condition at large, about nature, about the geology, the fauna and
flora of Galilee, Palestine and the Rift Valley, and particularly about
understanding the basic nature of Israel's agressive pursuit of the Zionist
dream of a Jewish state west of the Jordan River. And, yes, indeed the
repetitive message in the enlightening discourse woven around the record of
Raja's and his Ottoman uncle's nature walks, one compelled by his Ottoman and
the other by his Israeli persuers, is worthy of repeating to the wider world
again and again. We will not be silenced by the world's inattentiveness.
Hatim Kanaaneh, MD, MPH
Author of 'A Doctor in Galilee: the Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in
Israel', Pluto Press, 2008
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