Ghada Karmi's Memoir

Telling the Palestinian Exile

Reviewed by David Shasha

In Search of Fatima, a Palestinian Story
Ghada Karmi
Verso (2002)

An American writer of Syrian Jewish heritage, Shasha offers a sensitive, unique perspective on this Palestinian memoir, on the "conflict" itself, and the under-appreciated shared cultural history of Arab Muslims, Christians and Jews.

Every time Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular are mentioned in the Jewish community they are called "those people," or "they" or "them," as if as human beings they have no individual identity.

Such a rhetorical strategy should be well familiar to us Jews as it is something — the creation of a monolithic, amorphous demonic entity — that we have been subjected to in our long history. It would indeed seem, as Ghada Karmi points out in her fascinating and inspiring memoir, that the Palestinians have now traded places with the Jews as the bearers of Western racial prejudice and vitriol.

Having to account for the increasingly psychotic, malevolent and desperate acts of a violent minority, the Islamic suicide bombers, Palestinians have unfairly been forced to match their own national tragedy against the greatest tragedy in the history of humanity: that of the Nazi slaughter of the Jews.

Ghada Karmi

The story that Karmi tells is one that is as tragic as it is elementary:

And indeed it had been a terrible time, so terrible that I have blotted many of its most painful moments out of my consciousness. The troubles in Palestine started before I was born, such that my childhood (and indeed that of my brother and sister, who were both older) overshadowed by the great political events which were happening around us in Palestine and in the world beyond. For a long time, we did not understand their significance, nor why we, an obscure Middle Eastern people, and our country, an undeveloped, backward place, should have been chosen to play such an important role in the affairs of the world.

The humble story of the Karmi family — one of "those people" — is a typical Palestinian tale that does not carry with it the demonic elements that have been invented by Zionist fantasists in order to account for their horrible treatment of what was essentially a peaceable nation.

Ghada’s father was a simple schoolteacher who had worked his whole life to move up the professional ladder, which he eventually did by becoming a part of the British school system authority as an administrator. He made the necessary compromises even when he knew that the British were responsible for the oppression of his people and even helping the Jews to displace them.

Regarding the Balfour Declaration, Ghada's uncle, a staunch nationalist, verbally chastises her father:

"What was a 'homeland' but an excuse to create a Jewish state here?" said my uncle bitterly. "The English are treacherous bastards. They never had me fooled!" My father was stung. He must have resented the implication that he was either stupid or worse, that those who worked with the authorities were tarred with the same brush.

Often In Search of Fatima reads like an internal dialogue taking place within the Palestinian Arab community, providing the reader with insights into the various levels of understanding and the subtlety of divergent Palestinian perspectives on unfolding events.

In this regard, we read the story of another of Ghada's uncles who ran afoul of the mafia-like brigades of the mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini:

Another of my uncles, Abdul-Ghani, also a journalist and also opposed to Hajj Amin, whom he openly accused of being a British agent, had barely escaped an assassination attempt a few months before. Another man had been killed by mistake for him and he had taken to living in Tel Aviv where the mufti’s men could not reach him. "Why don't they fight the Jews instead of each other?" cried my mother. "God forbid it should happen to you next," she said to my father. "I still haven't forgotten what happened last year."

The situation that Karmi reconstructs is that of a world in chaos and confusion. She recounts the daily difficulties of life in Palestine that were progressively made more impossible due to the volatile and ultimately toxic combination of Zionism, Palestinian nationalism and British imperialism.

Before our eyes we see the displacement and exile of a family amidst the anarchy of war in all its brutal malevolence.

This tale of exile and tragedy is one that serves as a very unsettling and distressing counterpoint to the thousands of Jewish stories of displacement in Europe at the very same historical moment.

And herein lies the most paradoxical and intractable issue in the whole Palestine question: The Jews and Arabs continue to use their own histories as a means to anathematize one another.

The Jews constantly raise the diabolical specter of the Holocaust as a means to justify the violent dispossession of the Palestinians, while the Palestinians counter with their own memoirs and histories — such as the one we are now discussing — to bear witness to their own dispersal and dispossession at Jewish hands.

This is a battle of narrative that has been waged as a battle to the death.

But I would like to try and discover another element in this tragedy that might illuminate a portion of the narrative in a manner that would re-establish the commonality of the Jewish and Arab exiles in order to bring them closer together rather than permit the two narratives to continue to serve as a contentious flashpoint.

When the state of Israel was declared in 1948, the Karmis, along with many other families, found themselves bereft of a home and a homeland. But because Ghada's father was a professional in the British sector, he was able to apply for work in England as an employee in the BBC’s World Service and, having secured this job, he brought the family over from Syria, where they had sought refuge during the 1948 war with Ghada's mother's family.

The bulk of the book —and its most telling and poignant moments — thus unfolds in England rather than Palestine.

In many ways Ghada Karmi's own story, the part of the tale in which she herself is the main protagonist, takes place in exile and so In Search of Fatima, rather than being a vulgarly nationalistic screed, is the deeply affecting notebook of a person who finds herself elsewhere and narrates the pain and difficulty of her family's adjustment — or lack of adjustment — to new and bewildering surroundings.

We read of her mother's intense rejection of the British surroundings and the stubborn fact that she refused to acclimate to her adopted country:

She made no secret of the fact that she resented being in London. She complained bitterly that there was no decent food to cook, none of the vegetables we were used to, and even garlic, the staple of all Arabic cooking, was a luxury. She hated the cold weather and the rain and she complained she could scarcely keep the house warm. She was lonely and longed for company. In the Arab world, you were never alone for a moment. Your neighbors or friends were always there to call on every day and, in any case, there was the family around you at all times.

This is a passage that reminded me of the many stories of our own Arab-American grandmothers who found themselves displaced from their cultural universe. The commonality of exile and displacement is one that ties together the Sephardic and Palestinian communities.

The ultimate causes of the displacement of the two communities are, at the surface, not at all similar. In many ways, the Sephardim were part of a migration that had more to do with the collapse of Ottoman society and the economic and social turmoil that happened in its wake while the Palestinian migration took place under adversely violent conditions.

But when one looks more closely, the migratory condition of the Arab Jews only began with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

In reality, the events unfolding in Palestine had a great deal of significance in the destruction of Jewish life in the Arab world. Karmi's parents meet a couple of Arab Jews in England who address this reality in an interesting fashion:

Which is not to say that my parents had no feelings at all towards Jews. One day, when my mother was out shopping, she stopped at the greengrocer who would shout at her from inside, "Don't touch me till I'm yours, love" — she found herself next to a foreign-looking black-haired couple. To her amazement, they were speaking to each other in Arabic. "Are you Arabs?"she asked eagerly, as she was always looking for someone to talk to. The woman looked uncomfortable. "Iraqis," she answered. My mother suddenly understood. "You're Iraqi Jews, aren't you?" The couple nodded. "And what about you?" they asked. . "I'm an Arab from Palestine," my mother answered. They looked even more uncomfortable.

"How could you do it to us?" my mother cried. "How could you throw us out of our homes and send us far away from our country?" When she said this, the couple seemed to get genuinely upset. "We would never have wanted that, believe me," said the man. "But we got there after the damage was done, and we haven't done well either. We should have never left Iraq. They cheated us with all sorts of promises, but we didn't fit in in Israel and we left." "Now we can't go back to Iraq," said the woman "and we're stranded here, like you."

In this short exchange, reconstructed from the fragile wisps of memory, we see in miniature the common elements in the Sephardi and Palestinian narratives: Arab Jews maintained their cultural and historical relationships as natives of the region. They continued the folkways and thought-patterns of the Arab East and felt themselves at home within its confines.

We do not see Arab Jews as innately hostile or resentful of the Arabs and within Arab Jewish culture there is little endemic racism regarding the Arabs. As Karmi points out throughout her memoir, the virulent forms of anti-Jewish behavior so endemic to the Western mindset were not an innate part of the traditional Arab cultural mentality.

In this snapshot of a group of disjointed exiles, people whose past was grounded in the Levant but whose present was being torn from its Levantine root, we see the forced acculturation of neighbors to the new paradigms of the Middle Eastern realities: Jews were now to be seen through the filter of Europe and Arabs were the eternal persecutors of the Jew.

But rather than continue to understand the trajectory of anti-Semitism as being European — and Christian — in origin, the new realities promote the idea that the West is the friend of the Jew — eliding the facts of history, facts that show that Arab Jews were not carted off into concentration camps, that Arab Jews were not massacred without mercy in the quest to restore the Holy Land to its rightful owners — the Christian princes of Europe.

The family's sojourn in London has Ghada acclimating to a non-Arab world where she cares more for the trends of the times, cigarettes, rock and roll music and tight skirts, than she does about the loss of her homeland and her cultural past:

Furthermore, events in the Middle East did not feature in my life at that time. I did not listen to the news or read the newspapers and I took less and less interest in what my father and his friends talked about. My chief concern in the meantime was not any of this but how to keep running with the pack at school, terrified I would be left behind. I was oblivious as to whether those who made up the pack were Jewish or not, and I had no reason to suppose they felt any differently towards me. I recall no specific prejudice directed against me at that time from any of them, but they merely preferred each other’s company over the rest of us. Ironically, the instances of prejudice, if I can call it that, to which I was subjected came only from non-Jews.

This is yet another telling passage that reflects the skewed imbalance that has masked our true understanding of the realities of the past. As Ammiel Alcalay has pointed out in his book After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture using the words of the great Levantine Sage Moise Ventura writing in the wake of the Second World War:

After the lamentable failure of Western civilization, the Orient is again called upon to play an important part in the cultural life of Nations. The Orient means Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Iraq; more specifically, the Semites — Jews and Arabs — are again called upon together to play a vital role within the scene of history. Everyone whose mental capacities are in free working order must recognize that today the enemies of the Jews are as well the enemies of the Arabs — that is, the enemies of civilization.

Further, there is this remarkable passage written decades earlier, prior to the rise of the Nazis, by the British Hebraist Solomon Schechter, describing the same thought in a slightly different context:

The terrible irony of this situation becomes apparent when we remember that while millions of Aryans lay eager claim to the name and heritage of Israel, Israel, ashamed of its Semitic origin, seeks to disavow itself and ape the Occident in all things except its admiration for Israel. It has become for it almost a sacred duty to Occidentalize its religion. It forgets all the while that, however, richly endowed the European genius may be, religion is not one of its gifts. Not a single European god has survived the awakening of mankind from savagery and barbarism. Nor has Europe produced a single great religious founder.

But the true lessons of history have not been properly assimilated.

For a region that has been so immersed in the battle over history, very little of the realia of life in the Middle East has permeated into the very literal texture of life as it is lived in the current Levant. The ability of different ethnic groups and communities to live together has been stifled by the vulgar nationalisms that now infect the region like a malignant cancer.

This idea of inter-ethnic co-existence has been asphyxiated in the seemingly intractable polemics that seek to intimidate anyone that would try and provide an alternative explanation of the history of the region; an alternative not dependent upon the xenophobia of the various mono-ethnic and mono-lingual nationalisms.

The new Jewish reality — not the reality of those Iraqi Jews mentioned earlier — is reflected in a passage that tells of Ghada's meeting with some Israeli partisans in the wake of the 1967 War:

Someone made room for me on a chair and asked me to sit down. Jeremy offered me a drink but I declined. One of the young men introduced himself as Dan and said they'd heard a lot about me from Jeremy. Then he asked me where I came from. I sensed this conversation was pre-arranged and that I was meant to fall into some trap. I thought again of leaving, but was held there, as if mesmerized.

"Palestine," I answered.

"You mean Israel," he said.

"No, I mean Palestine. That's what it was called when I was born there."

They started to laugh. "You don't like Israel, do you?" This was Tamar, who had always seemed mousy and timid, but was now clearly emboldened by the presence of her colleagues. "That's right, isn't it Jeremy?" He had the grace to flush and look embarrassed. He mumbled something unintelligible.

"Would you expect me to like Israel?" I asked..

"Why not?" she asked.

"Well," I answered, "what you call Israel was once called Palestine and is my homeland. However, people like you came over from all kinds of places, took it over and threw us out. How about that for a reason?"

One of the boys, who had been silent until then, now responded. "It's Jewish land, it's our land from thousands of years. We wanted the Arabs to stay, but you all ran away."

"Fine. Suppose you're right, why don't you let us come back then?"

They looked at each other and then changed track. "Do you think it's fun to hijack planes and kill people?" This from a girl sitting at the back by the door. They all stared hard at me. The atmosphere had slightly changed; in addition to the discomfort I was already suffering, I began to feel an obscure unease, as if they might actually attack me physically. I looked round at their hostile faces — some wore jeering expressions — and decided that I had to leave. I got up.

This exchange should be contrasted with the exchange between Ghada's mother and the Iraqi Jews. In the earlier exchange there was an understanding of the cruel and harsh realities that underlay the exiles of the natives. There was a shared lexicon of pain and frustration and bitterness that the interlocutors had shared; the pain of being thrown out of your home and winding up in a place that was not what you thought it might be.

In the later "conversation," if one could even call it by that name, the participants are talking in unconditional platitudes and bigoted sermons rather than in realities. All that is discussed is filtered through the haze of terrorism, violence and primal and irreversible ethnic hatreds.

Rather than permitting the terms of the discourse to remain as they are, filled with the hate and acrimony that comes when people talk beyond rather than with one another, we must look at the ways in which the dialogue has been corrupted and our historical understanding has been skewed.

We must come to terms with the fact that the painful ignorance of the Palestinians like Ghada Karmi, individuals who have been denied their own past and their culture and have had to make due with integrating into a world not their own, and Israelis like those represented at the meeting above, Jews who only see Arabs through the screen of "terrorism" and anti-Semitism, has polluted our current view of the situation.

In Search of Fatima is a book that portrays its protagonist without a firm identity anchoring her own life. Ghada Karmi is the perennial wanderer in search of her own Time. She assimilated herself into a Western world that cared little about her own sense of loss and her feelings of inadequacy. She found herself equally uncomfortable in an Arab world that had turned violently in on itself. We see her trying to find her rightful place in the world but getting no real comfort from the different scenarios that she spins out.

Beautifully written and poetically realized, In Search of Fatima is an ideal place to learn about the anarchy and incoherence of the Palestinian Diaspora. At the end of the book Karmi has no answers for the many questions she has raised. There is no justice for her people and there is no happy return to the "homeland."

And while the book ends on a resolutely downbeat note, what I personally take from it is the possibility of an ongoing collective reclamation of our Levantine past and the potential of a renewed dialogue that would act as a corrective to the many dead-end discussions in the book. At the very core of Levantine civilization is the ability to hear many discordant voices simultaneously, the ability of Levantines to adapt to polyphonic discourse.

As we now suffer through the seemingly endless strife and violence raised by the specter of the Palestinian question, we must read books such as In Search of Fatima in order to more carefully parse the multiple strands in the Levantine discourse — both in the Levant itself and in the now-massive and substantial Levantine Diaspora — and ferret out the points of salience and coherence within that discourse.

Ghada Karmi has written a brilliant book that re-opens for its reader the rich and disjointed world of the Levant and allows us to reconstruct its jarring tonality. The book is replete with the voices of our grandparents and with those whose lives have been shattered by the tragedies that occur in the region on a daily basis. By reconstructing the voices and following their trajectories, we can attack the violence and hatred that now animates the status quo and seek to transcend the venality of those who would steal our Time from us.

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