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The Bloom of Arid Hope
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18109 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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11 / 1990 |
1,448 Words |
| Author
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Bezalel Gordon
Bezalel Gordon is a Washington-based writer and Middle East
policy analyst who as lived in Jerusalem. |
NISANIT
Fadia Faqir
New York: Penguin, 1990
255 pp., $7.95
Fadia Faqir's bleak first novel is about love and torture in the Middle East. The protagonists are minor players in the Arab-Israeli conflict, so hate is never far form the surface. But enmity - and enemies - are blurred in this sincere yet flawed work, where politics and war are but a backdrop to the exploration of the raw, elemental forces of unconditional love and physical torture.
Faqir, a Jordanian living in England, creates a trio of political entities: one fanciful, two existing and overlapping-yet none quite real. The democratic state of Israel and occupied Palestine are well known, but for Faqir they are actually no less a state of mind than her fictional "democratic state of Ishmael" (read, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan). And her countries are all prisons: Ishmael, a repressive Arab Society; Israel, symbolized by a detention camp for Palestinians; and the occupied territories, chafing under Zionist occupation.
The book's three main characters are products of their separate, blighted locales. Shadeed Al-Falastini, a PLO fedayee, is from Nablus on the West Bank; Eman Saqi, daughter of a socialist revolutionary who is hanged as a traitor, grows up in a poor neighborhood of Rahmah (read, Amman); Polish-born David Dzentis lives in a middle-class development in Beersheba, in southern Israel. Shadeed, who surrenders rather than battle Israeli soldiers to the death, is a freedom fighter to his peers and his girlfriend, Eman.
... (1999 of 8910 Characters)
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