After the Last Sky, Again
By: Rayan Fakhoury
Tags: Literature, Syria, Middle East, Palestine, Revolution

The story of the Arab Middle East in the latter half of the 20th century is not an easy one to tell. It is at one and the same time a story of revolution, liberation, love, loss, defeat, and bitter struggle. Yet the work of Palestinian novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra manages to capture this labyrinthine historical moment in much of its beauty and tragedy. Through the lens of a small number of characters whose lives, dreams and defeats are closely, often tragically, intertwined with the social and political world around them, Jabra expresses the hopes, anxieties and unravellings of the region over the course of several decades.

Born in Bethlehem in 1920, Jabra was exiled to Baghdad as a result of the Nakba of 1948, where he was to spend most of the remainder of his life. The Nakba, which refers to the dispossession of over 700,000 Palestinians and the wholesale destruction of over 400 towns and villages in which they had lived, is central to both Jabra’s life and the historical trajectory of the region. As his translators Adnan Haydar and Roger Allen put it, the Nakba came to occupy a special place in the social imagination of the region: “Palestine is the microcosm of the Arabs’ defeat, of their failure to determine their destiny in their own lands. The fall of Palestine is not an incidental event; it is the tragic fall of the whole Arab world, a product and a result of Arab acquiescence in a reality before which they are helpless. Palestine is the land, the soul to be reclaimed…”

Jabra’s early work is concerned above all with this ‘reclamation of the soul’. He is committed to a project of emancipation and renewal, aimed at both political emancipation and, crucially, the liberation of the mind. His belief in the transformative power of art, literature and freedom of thought is reflected in his characters, most of whom are writers, artists, critics and intellectuals of some sort or other, alongside careers as architects, journalists, workers. All seek to be a part of something bigger than themselves, a collective endeavour to build a new world and assert control over their common destinies. For Jabra, love is an essential part of this endeavour: in the face of setbacks and defeats, love, romantic and platonic, is the redemptive force from which his characters derive their unwavering determination.

Bashir Abu-Manneh’s The Palestinian Novel beautifully captures the spirit of Jabra’s early writings, which he describes as “an aesthetic of exile, dispossession, and challenge”. These works, most notably Hunters in a Narrow Street, were written in the midst of a transformative moment in the region. The catastrophic defeat of 1948 had led to the rise of revolutionary social movements across the Arab world and a concerted effort to imagine and build something different. This project was embodied in the meteoric rise of Arab Nationalism, above all in Nasser’s Egypt, and its promise of a new social contract founded on international solidarity. The Algerian Revolution and its war of independence, in turn, captured the imagination of the world, and Algiers quickly became the ‘liberation capital’ of the Third World.

The promise of that revolutionary conjecture proved to be shortlived, however. Crumbling under the weight of foreign intervention and internal power-struggles, the revolutionary movements of the 1950s and 60s in time gave way to brutally repressive states which cultivated and weaponised a climate of fear. The cataclysmic defeat of the Arab armies in 1967 became the symbol of this collapse, while Nasser’s death in 1970 provided the final toll of the bell. Hope was not all lost, however, as the Palestinian revolution, born of the defeat of 1967, became the vehicle for the region’s aspirations and dreams of freedom. Jabra’s novels over this period, notably The Ship and In Search of Walid Masoud, reflect these turbulent times, and his characters are troubled by a lingering sense of uncertainty and anxiety. Nevertheless, self-sacrifice and collective renewal, personified by the Palestinian feda’i or revolutionary, represented for Jabra the spirit of the moment, and offered a path to the future which had failed to materialise under the Arab nationalist and revolutionary regimes of preceding decades. Challenges abounded, but one could make out a way forward. Visions of a free future retained some coherence.

Even this would not last. The Lebanese Civil War and the 1982 Israeli invasion appeared to spell the end of whatever semblance of coherence remained. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was expelled from Lebanon to a renewed exile in Tunis, while Palestinian civilians were left vulnerable to massacre in their camps, as would happen in Sabra and Shatila. Jabra’s vision of self-sacrifice and renewal disintegrated as Lebanon fell into vicious sectarian violence, and the promise of liberation appeared to fall with it.

It is in this moment of collective collapse that Jabra, together with legendary novelist Abdelrahman Munif, writes A World Without Maps in 1982. The central plot of the novel, which is set in the fictional Arab capital of Amouria, is the murder of Najwa al-Amery, long-time lover of the narrator and protagonist, Ala’. The narrative is deeply fragmented, as Ala’ confesses to the murder and then recants his confessions, casts doubt on his own memory, and jumps backwards and forwards in time to narrate the story of his family’s disintegration. Above all, then, this is a novel about things falling apart. As Abu-Manneh puts it, “Throughout this journey of anxiety, self-doubt, and self-questioning, stories are narrated and disbelieved, histories investigated and discarded, and theories put forward and withdrawn … An account of a possible murder thus becomes about the way the contemporary Arab world is constituted. Private act and public condition are deeply intertwined in a world that, as the title suggests, is ultimately one without maps, without firm objective grounding, and without real social or political anchor.” Even love, ever the redemptive theme of Jabra’s work, is clouded by death in Amouria.

Ala’s quest for the truth surrounding Najwa’s death in this way becomes a wider search for some semblance of meaning in a fragmented Arab world. Oil money and unrelenting political repression had created an atomised society devoid of the solidarity, energy, and optimism which had marked previous decades. Crucially, however, this experience of loss is not expressed in the form of a naïve yearning for some past greatness. Husam al-Ra’d, Ala’s uncle, offers perhaps the most poignant reflections on this theme in the novel. He is regarded by many of his contemporaries as a relic of a bygone era, obstinately clinging onto an imagined past, as in his dismissal of Ala’s modernist free-form poetry. But in an extended dialogue with Ala’, he makes clear that he is under no illusions about the loss which he, and by extension Amouria and the whole Arab world, has suffered:

“I am not talking about that actual era of Amouria’s life. I am talking about the dreams which we knew then, the raptures that made us hoarsen our voices in speeches, in the recitation of poetry, in cursing whoever stood in the way of our freedom, and in laughter. I am talking of the beautiful dream which we imagined would give birth to a better reality. We chanted and cried so as not to lose it, but it was lost after all. Will you reclaim it?”

Adham, Ala’s brother, offers perhaps the only source of redemption in this narrative. He joins the Palestinian feda’yeen in Lebanon, and is a lone symbol of revolt against a decaying social order in Amouria. Yet even his story ultimately fails to provide salvation. In Abu-Manneh’s words, “death also catches up with the revolution in Lebanon. Rather than freeing Adham and turning him into an agent of Arab freedom, the revolt is suffocated.” Upon his return, Adham paints an apocalyptic portrait of the war in Lebanon, sombrely telling Ala’: “Death is everywhere. Not only in Shyah and Sabra and Tal al-Za’atar and Fakehani … It is everywhere, and will reach all places.”

Where do you go when the world as you know it falls apart around you? What do you do in the face of fragmentation, collective collapse, and an unrelenting torrent of defeats? How do you find meaning or truth in a social world that has lost its moral bearings? If in previous decades it was possible to identify bases of hope and paths to a better future, there now appeared to be nowhere left to turn. In one of his most moving poems, Mahmoud Darwish asks “Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?” These are Jabra and Munif’s fundamental preoccupations in A World Without Maps. Also central to the narrative is the notion that the private is intimately, painfully intertwined with the public and political. National trauma is experienced ultimately as personal tragedy. It colours and disfigures every moment. Even love is not spared. But this offers, in a perverse way, a lone prospect of redemption. For there can be no inward retreat, no escape from society and the challenges of revival. In the end, there is no alternative to throwing oneself in the maelstrom, if only to rage against the dying of the light.

In many respects, this narrative arc of Jabra’s work, from revolutionary optimism to defeat and disorientation, maps closely onto the present condition of the Middle East. On 17 December 2010, Muhammed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, set himself alight in protest of the harassment and humiliation which he had suffered at the hands of municipal officials. The people soon reclaimed their streets, and the tyrants began to fall. For the first time in decades, a palpable optimism filled the air. Bread, dignity, and freedom — these were the demands of protesters across Tunis, Cairo, Dar’aa, Manama, Benghazi, Amman, Beirut, and San’aa. For a moment it appeared as though Jabra’s ‘reclamation of the soul’ was finally coming to fruition.

Counterrevolution would not be so kind, however. Eight years later, tyrants have consolidated their grip on power, civil wars have decimated communities, and many dream of nothing more than escape. Over 3,000 migrants seeking refuge from misery met their deaths in the vast expanse of the Mediterranean in 2017 alone. Libya has become the hub for a new slave trade, a large share of the responsibility for which lies with Fortress Europe. Much of Syria lies in ruin. In Yemen, the poorest country of the region, mass famine is wielded as a weapon of war. An entire generation whose social and political consciousness was moulded by the revolutionary moment of 2011 have watched on as their collective future seemingly disintegrated before their eyes. Vast numbers are today in prison. Many were not so lucky.

This too, then, is something like a world without maps. There is a moral haziness to the present moment, and seemingly nowhere to turn. We find ourselves once again facing the last sky, and peering over the edge. Jabra’s own former Baghdad home was destroyed by a car bomb in 2010. But perhaps his unwavering belief that there was, in the end, some truth to be found, some soul to be reclaimed, offers some salvation in these difficult times. The most resilient have carried on in the face of desperation. Feminist activists in Lebanon and Jordan achieved historic victories in 2017 when long-running campaigns to repeal colonial-era rape laws proved successful. Young activists in Syria, Egypt and beyond persist tirelessly in their struggle against authoritarianism, striving for a better future for their children, if not themselves. Over the past months, demonstrators have again taken to the streets in their thousands in Sudan and Algeria. As the massacre of 3 June in Sudan illustrates, these movements will face brutal resistance. In clutching onto dreams of popular sovereignty and freedom, however, they have reignited the embers of protest across the region.

The Tunisian poet Abu al-Qassem al-Shabi (1909–1934) witnessed a remarkable revival during the years of the Arab uprisings. His most famous poem, The Will to Life, has gained particular significance today. It begins as follows:

If, one day, the people will to live

Then fate must obey

Darkness must dissipate

And must the chain give way.