Novels that deal with the Nakba fall within the framework of colonial and post-colonial narratives, in an attempt to present the voice of the “victim” and allow her to speak (Getty)
The Palestinian Nakba of 1948 continues to attract the interest of the novel, and it is possible to distinguish a category of Palestinian and Arab novels under the name (Nakba novels) that are distinguished by dealing with realistic and quasi-historical material and exposing it to contemplation and review, because the “Nakba” really happened and resulted from the occupation of Palestine and the implantation of a colonial settler entity. In the heart of the Arab world, it represents a threat and poisons our existence even today, and therefore it is recognized that whoever deals with it may not offer anything new from a historical perspective.
However, literary writing, including novel writing, may not aspire to provide new historical information or details, but rather finds other justifications, foremost among which is the necessity of “reviving the Nakba” and ensuring that it remains present for generations with all the accompanying influence and what explains the dimensions of the conflict, as the effects of the Nakba continue to exist. The conditions of the Palestinians and the details of their lives until the defeat of the usurping occupier, the liberation of the homeland from its colonial effects, and the realization of the dream of return for millions of Palestinians who were forcibly displaced under the pressure of the brutal war machine.
We seek another justification for writing novels, which is what is included in the so-called “war of narratives” and its conflict, as appears in the novel (Yes) by the Palestinian/Jordanian novelist Ahmed Abu Salim, which recalls in a poignant way the Deir Yassin massacre, one of the most famous massacres committed by the Zionist gangs in the Nakba War. The war of narratives in this context is another war fought to impose the correct narrative and to confront the enemy’s false narratives.
The novel “Yess” by Ahmed Abu Salim (Al Jazeera)
The novel and the historical event
Narrative writing, then, contributes to establishing the historical event so that it continues in the consciousness of subsequent generations, or in the consciousness of the group, despite the changes, modifications, and employment that happen to this event. This is because it acquires its meaning and function through those narratives in their historical or imaginative form, which prompts us to alert that Recording and documentation - despite their importance - are the simplest forms of this type of narrative at the level of content and form, because the war of narratives requires objectifying the event, re-explosing it, coding it, and “ideologising” it so that it can be used and benefited from, and the living and the people of the new age do all of this.
As for the victims, their situation has ended and they cannot be treated fairly by changing or modifying the course of history. All that can be done to do justice to them is through the gains that their heirs will achieve. If the heirs succeed in any of this, it is the best victory for the victims. However, if the heirs continue to play the role of the victim to the point that it becomes defeat or... The massacre is a recurring event, psychologically and realistically. We are still prisoners of the event and have not overcome it.
An in-depth look at the Arab and Israeli narratives of the Nakba event can open our horizons to this vital aspect of the conflict, and this can be done at the level of reviewing the “historical narrative” using the tools of history and its philosophy, just as it can be done by creating the literary narrative and the narrative imagination that allows for the reprocessing of history. Interpreting it and directing its implications without disturbing its established and solid facts.
"Yes" novel
In this visionary circle, we place the novel (Yes) by Ahmed Abu Salim, published by the Palestinian Writers and Writers Union in 2021, and we praise it for its awareness of much of what we have indicated, and its keenness to contemplate, review, and sharply question the meaning of the Deir Yassin massacre, the meaning of the Nakba, and how to treat its effects? Psychology offers proposals for treating trauma, including war trauma and its impact on warriors, children, and ordinary people.
Some of the orphans of Deir Yassin experienced something of this when Mrs. Hoda Al-Husseini adopted about 55 children who had lost their parents and became orphans, and she cared for them by establishing the Al-Fata Al-Arabi House in Jerusalem, but the hero of the novel (Yassin) was not among them, due to his young age, as he was a baby a week old. When the massacre occurred according to the novel, the massacre preserved for him his mother, despite the loss of her leg, so she replaced it with a wooden leg that formed a sign reminding the character (Yassin) of the event that founded his crisis. It also preserved for him his maternal grandfather with Sufi tendencies, and it preserved for him an uncle who was disfigured by the massacre. As for the rest of his family, he lost them all on his father's side, including his twin brother (Amin).
Jordanian-Palestinian novelist and writer Ahmed Abu Salim (social networking sites)
The novel presents Deir Yassin from this (Yassin) perspective, starting with the choice of its name, to link it to the stricken village, by name and title, and to link it to the origin of its name, and its attribution according to the village’s heritage to a sheikh called Sheikh Yassin, in addition to the name of his uncle (Yassin) and the name of his grandfather as well. The naming, then, is intended to create a kind of focus on this name because it is the key to the event, the name of the village, and the name of the massacre, and here it is extended in the novel as the name of two main characters: Yassin the narrator, and Yassin al-Khal, whose tongue was cut off by the Jews but who preserved documents and pictures that will be a substitute for his words and narration as a direct witness. On traumatic events.
From a historical perspective, “the name Deir Yassin consists of two parts, each with a narrative that reflects the origin of the name. It is believed that the word “Deir” came in reference to a monastery built by a monk who lived in the village in the 12th century AD, so it was called in the past (Deir al-Nasr). As for the word Yassin It is named after a sheikh called (Sheikh Yassin) who came to the village. It is not known when, who he is, or where he came from, but there is a mosque in the village opposite the monastery, which is called the Sheikh Yassin Mosque. The villagers agree that their village was established between the monastery and the mosque and was called Deir Yassin Erdaa. "For both parties." (Kanaana and Zitawi, Deir Yassin - Destroyed Palestinian Villages, p. 9).
Name of the novel
It seems that the novel completed filling in the blanks when it made Sheikh Yassin a senior relative to whom the family (Yassin), the hero of the novel, belongs, while in the history of the village there is no lineage to Sheikh Yassin except for the mosque’s lineage to him.
The other observation is the connection of the name (Yasin) with the Holy Qur’an, as it goes back to the name of the Qur’anic surah, and to its beginning with two of the famous disjointed letters, and as a result of this connection and in interaction with it and with what it carries, the name was drawn on the cover of the novel with the Qur’anic drawing (Yasin), and not as it is written with the usual spelling. Outside the Qur’an. In the text of the novel, this is the usual spelling, with hints of linking the character’s name with the name of the Qur’anic surah, according to the linguistic link and its semantic extensions, and the claim that the mother’s character resorts to this surah and recites its verses to seek protection, as distressed people do.
The novel presents the fate of this family and follows their lives from April 1948 until 1982, and in its evocative glimpses it goes back to before that the time of the British Mandate, the Palestinian resistance to it, and the 1936 Revolution and its environs. Especially in Jerusalem and its villages, such as Al-Qastal, Deir Yassin, and Ein Karem, all the way to other cities like Kiaffa, Lod, and others.
It aspires - as it seems - to advance its documentary and influence side by depicting the bitter experience of the massacre with care and overwhelming emotional impact, but it does not want to be satisfied with this, but rather wants to place Deir Yassin in the context of the conflict history in Palestine until today.
With this awareness, we see that the novel strives to move from minor narratives that include individual literary works, to major narratives that include the archives of national memory and the basic lines for preserving and documenting them.
Historical content
The novel deals with semi-historical material related to a major known event of the Nakba, which is the Deir Yassin massacre, which was committed at dawn on Friday, April 9, 1948 AD. It is the largest event that the novel dealt with and seemed to influence its characters and its narrative path, in addition to passing on other historical events from The angle of interaction of the novel’s society and its characters with it, such as: the migration and asylum movement and the emergence of the camps as a new post-Nakba society, with a focus on the Zarqa camp mainly, the defeat of June 1967, the expansion of the resistance movements before and after the glorious Battle of Karama in 1968 AD, Black September and the departure of factions. The resistance from Jordan to Lebanon, the underground political work in Jordan and the political suppression of the leftist opposition parties and the resistance in particular, and finally the novel ends with echoes of the Sabra and Shatila massacre committed by extremist Lebanese forces (the Phalange) with the support of the Israeli Defense Forces in September 1982.
The novel tried to be distinguished by several things that preoccupied the writer, foremost of which is documenting the events of the massacre. In its first chapter, the novel endeavored to re-enact the massacre and present a plot for its events that were collected in detail by the threads of historical writing, as historical writings documented this massacre in detail and with the testimony of surviving witnesses, while making use of the archives. The Israeli novel and criticism of the Israeli novel as well, as in Dr. Walid Khalidi’s book, Deryassin, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1999. The novel benefited from the effective narrative method in expressing its ugliness and inhumanity, to emphasize the identity of the victim and the identity of the criminal, and to say that the entity was founded on a crime or crimes and not on Legitimacy of any kind, it is a kind of tyranny of crime and excess of power that was brutally exercised against a society that was not prepared for war or resistance in unprepared local and regional conditions.
It is a crime and a war of extermination, and another “Holocaust” in which the Palestinian was the victim, if we go along with the Jewish Holocaust and include it in the narratives that the other tried to benefit from in order to compensate for his extermination. The irony here is that the Jewish-Israeli, instead of learning the lesson and learning from the pain, purifies it by blaming innocent people who, like him, are victims of anti-Semitism and victims of European colonialism in the first half of the 20th century.
The novel depicts the stage of the British Mandate, which is the stage of colonialism that ended with the crime of occupying Palestine and the implementation of the “Balfour Declaration” by submitting Palestine to an occupation and colonial force that has continued for a long time until today. In this sense, this novel and other novels that deal with the Nakba fall within the framework of colonial and post-colonial narratives. To present the voice of the “victim” and allow her to speak, to present her specific and specific narrative, so as not to confirm the narrative of the occupier and the colonizer, who presents a narrative that serves him and includes only the least of the facts, because he is concerned with establishing his occupation and alleged ownership, and more dangerous than what happened to the earth is what happened to its human beings, whose catastrophe continues to this day.
Deir Yassin: an ongoing catastrophe
Writer Ahmed Abu Salim divided his novel into 5 chapters: the massacre, the camp, the prison, the uncle, and the picture. The first chapter devoted to the massacre is the longest, which makes it the center of the novel and the basis of its subsequent events, in addition to repeatedly referring to some of its details through whatever repetitions and expansions the narration allows. The last chapter (the image) is the shortest, so that it performs the function of a condensed apocalyptic conclusion more than it presents additional or new events. .
The three internal chapters of similar length illuminate the period after the massacre and after the Nakba (post-colonialism), which is related to the establishment of the camp and the upbringing of Yassin (the main character) in it, as he spent his childhood and youth in the camp until his early youth around the age of 20.
As for the prison chapter, it represents the subsequent stage in his life, which includes his attempts to join or get close in his youth to the resistance forces and political forces after the War of Dignity in 1968, that is, his attempt to participate in the response to defeat and occupation by joining the available resistance movements, and the novel follows his path until the incidents of his departure. Resistance factions at the beginning of the 1970s, then the void was filled in the 1970s with his acquaintance with his friend (Nehru), a medical student whose studies were interrupted due to his imprisonment for belonging to the Communist Party. This connection led to Yassin entering prison for 4 golden years of his life, and he almost continues the separation for a period of time. A decade of his life from 1968 until the end of the following decade, the 1970s, including almost a period of imprisonment.
As for the uncle’s chapter, it brings us back to Deir Yassin, because the uncle was one of the surviving victims. He had a captivating presence in the resistance and had a love story with a Jerusalemite girl or boy named (Yasmine) before the Nakba. He gave her a huge dowry by killing an English officer, who made her lose her father. The massacre took place about a year after their marriage, and it led to a revolution in their lives: Uncle Yassin lost his wife and his lover after a gang rape incident that happened to him before his eyes while he was tied to a tree, and he ended up as the remains of a destroyed human being, fractured on the psychological level, with his tongue cut out and literally rubble after the massacre. .
This character and the supporting narrative associated with it present an aspect of the events of the massacre, and more importantly its subsequent effects represented by these remaining wounds that cannot be cured. It also presents a legacy or legacy with a vital narrative function. Perhaps it is the most important thing in this chapter devoted to the character of the uncle. The legacy to Yassin after the uncle’s departure. He left him a group of closed boxes containing documents, letters, and pictures. The novel soon claimed to have benefited from them, turning them into a verbal narrative, as the pictures and documents once again illuminate aspects of the conflict and contribute to deepening this Palestinian narrative.
Part of these letters - according to the story - were exchanged with a Jewish woman named (Hanna Youssin), her sister, and her son. Hanna Youssin is a British Jewish journalist who witnessed the massacre and the abuse that the uncle himself suffered, as a journalist and photographer, accompanied by her friend and lover, an intelligence officer from the Haganah. After the incident, she broke up with him and became depressed or almost insane under the pressure she was exposed to. She and her uncle were placed in the mental hospital that was built on the ruins of Deir Yassin.
She gets to know him more during this period and remains in contact with him. They correspond, write, and exchange solace and contemplation of the harsh event or events that occurred. The massacre affected both of them, inflicting severe injuries on both of them, psychologically and physically. On the basis of exchanging sympathy, trying to console, and converging on what happened, Hanna Yussin unequivocally switches to a position of supporting the Palestinian victim, and separates herself from her previous affiliation or closeness to the Haganah and the Israeli gangs.
The novel allows for the establishment of this relationship and correspondence between the two through the mediation of her sister, and this relationship continues to extend until Hanna Youssain’s departure or death. It continues with the sister and with her son, who has become a young man and joined the military service in the Defense Army, but suffers from his unknown lineage on his father’s side. He doubts or fears that he The son of the Palestinian Yassin (the uncle), but the uncle categorically denies this and that he did not have a sexual relationship with his mother. He is a son of Deir Yassin whose father is unknown, his identity is fractured, as if by concealing his lineage his mother wanted to distance him from this colonial power and make him doubt it, its authenticity and its identity.
Deir Yassin Archive
This chapter depends on what Yassin infers from his uncle’s documents and letters, as if they were part of the Deir Yassin archive that can be scrutinized, re-read, and lessons learned from it. And beyond that, when Yassin is forced to learn Hebrew to decipher the hieroglyphs of this archive despite its inherent weakness in the educational aspect, Despite the fact that he suffers from a brain tumor that prevents him from being completely normal.
In this correspondence is a picture of a small group of Jews who discovered the falsehood and falsity of the Zionist claims, and whose consciences were moved and became supporters of the Palestinian human being. The Jewish woman sent him, among other things, important documentary photos that she had taken on the day of the massacre, and she was able to smuggle them and keep them despite the confiscation of her photos and her prevention from them. Post it.
These images will go to Yassin and the novel will use them in an interesting view of some of the documents of the massacre and the relationship of the image to the word and the narrative. Yassin will stop at the photo of his uncle with Abdel Qader Al-Husseini and Bahjat Abu Gharbiyya. He will also stop at the photo of (Yasmine), which the novel allocated to a vital section in the first chapter. As for the photos of the massacre It will help him represent the event and connect the details of the pictures with the recurring story that he was absorbed in as his mother had always told it. He will also participate in a university student event with these pictures on the anniversary of the massacre, and there he will meet Nisreen, who rushes to tear up the pictures, demanding that all of that be overcome, and it is a symbolic act that does not change There is nothing in reality, and it does not cancel out the occurrence of the massacre, but it carries the meaning of transcendence and the transition from the image to the act of resistance that could turn the page of the bloody Deir Yassin, and he finds her position a liking for himself and he falls in love with her, or almost, but he soon hears the news of her martyrdom in the Lebanese arena. Nothing is complete and no love triumphs in a life full of conflict and death.
Also branching out from the images is the issue of memory that Yassin questions and the images stored in it, and his thinking about it is mixed with the crisis of leaving the captivity of the massacre and its illness and its effects. Rather, his crisis reaches him getting rid of the old key, the key to the house of Deir Yassin, which hangs as an iconic image on the wall of the camp house. He gets rid of it within His quest for freedom from the past and the weight of memories and images.
But does reality allow this liberation? Is the problem in the weight of memories or in the occupation of the homeland and its further distance as time progresses? In my opinion, these photographs, iconic images, and images of real and imagined memory are not an obstacle, but rather may have constituted an incentive to search for a way. We may understand the character’s position on them because of the specificity and cruelty of his experience, but they are important components within the archive of memory, and it is dangerous for the Palestinian and for Palestinian literature to rebel against memory by erasing them. Or destroy them, thinking that the path to the future begins with this erasure and tearing up of images.
It is possible to place these pictures in the “narrative archive” because they are important documents.. They cannot be torn up in reality or imagination, and Yassin’s recovery is not related to tearing them up, but rather by moving beyond them to create new pictures, which include opposing responses within the principle of “responding in writing” and “responding with pictures.” “It is a branch of a long path of cultural resistance and resistance in its broader sense.
Deir Yassin Syndrome
The novel expressed part of the effects of the massacre with the term (Deir Yassin Syndrome), according to the name given by Nehru, the medical student and then the communist doctor, as a name for the medical condition that Yassin suffers from, which exposes him to a group of health and psychological problems. These symptoms began early with Yassin, and treatment was of no benefit. Sometimes this term expanded to include, in addition to Yassin’s troubles, everything that befell other characters, such as the uncle, Hanna Yussin, and others. Rather, it expanded to become a general syndrome related to the Palestinian people and those who follow their tragedy. It became an expression of the impact of massacres and suffering in the future. How do we move beyond the past? By forgetting him? Or by building a new reality that circumstances do not enable it to be built?
The continued suffering of the Palestinian people and the lack of a horizon for an end to the tragedy are some of what prolongs this syndrome. Outside of the novel, there is no known syndrome in psychiatric and non-psychiatric medicine with this name. Therefore, it is an “imagined” syndrome or an invention of the novel and its characters, but it is not far from believable or possible.
What the novel called “Deir Yassin Syndrome,” which Yassin, the narrator and the main character, suffered from, is nothing but a symbol of the effects that arise from major conflicts, which do not depend on the direct impact of the event, but rather extend to subsequent generations. What a strange or absurd scene at the end of The novel is only a symbolic expression of rebellion against the effects of the old massacre and against the new massacre (Sabra and Shatila), which was reported at the end of the novel and with his arrival at this choice, the choice of leaving refugee life and returning to the homeland, may seem an unreasonable event because it took place in the novel and did not take place in reality. And that he infected his refugee neighbors in the camp, so it became a collective act in which the collective memory gets rid of its pain and massacres.
The novel ends with an optimistic ending, despite its harsh events and details, as it concludes with the choice to return, “I started walking back to Palestine.” Despite the paradox in it between the world of the novel and the world of reality, the novel, as a narrative of struggle, has the right to say that as the only option available to respond to what He had previously experienced the pain of the Nakba, its massacres, and its violent effects.
The novel (Yasin), then, lies at the heart of the issue of the conflict of narratives. It presented an influential account of the events of the hideous massacre known as (Deir Yassin Massacre) and followed the destinies of the Palestinian generations and their aspiration to return and overcome the effects of the pain and crimes committed against them and the rights of previous generations. But history does not stop at one event. In fact, everything that passed through her memory and its painful images is nothing but one of the engines of the conflict that should only end with liberation and return.
Source: Al Jazeera