NOTHING TO ENJOY
By Avi Waksman
Ha’aretz
Dec 9 2008
Israel
West of the Jordan by Laila Halaby, Beacon Press, 200 pages, $15
(paperback).(Hebrew version translated from English by Daphna
Rosenblitt, Resling, 241 pages, NIS 84)
In a melancholy 1984 essay called "Reflections on Exile," Edward
Said told of a friend whose Armenian parents fled Turkey in 1915
after their families had been slaughtered. They traveled to Aleppo,
and from there to Cairo. In the 1960s, when "life in Egypt became
difficult for non-Egyptians," they and their four children were
sent to Beirut with the help of an international aid organization;
then to a stopover in Glasgow, Scotland; from there they continued
to Canada before ending up in New York.
It was in New York that the aid agency decided to put them on a bus
to Seattle. "Seattle?" Said asked his friend in puzzlement over the
destination that was chosen for his place of residence. The friend
did not reply, though he did smile with resignation, "as if to say,
better Seattle than Armenia – which he never knew, or Turkey."
People’s attitude toward their national origin – even if it is just
a "political" origin, a supposed homeland where one has actually
never set foot – is the theme of Laila Halaby’s first novel, "West
of the Jordan." In the first chapter, Hala, one of the four female
protagonist-narrators, departs on a plane from Los Angeles to visit her
family in Jordan. In the seat next to her, a Syrian woman with dyed
hair prattles away. The woman has been living in the United States
for 30 years, though she claims that she is unable to utter a single
word in English. "Why should I bother?" she asks. When Hala suggests
that knowing the language may make her life in exile more enjoyable,
the woman retorts: "Nothing to enjoy."
"West of the Jordan" is mournful of the Palestinian tragedy – but for
Halaby, that tragedy is not the Israeli occupation (even though it
is mentioned more than once), but rather the diasporic existence. The
book’s four narrators are girls on the cusp of maturity, cousins who
belong to a family that has been dispersed throughout the world –
Jordan, the West Bank, Arizona and California. As is to be expected
from girls their age, they have yet to find their place in that world,
but Halaby hints that detachment and confusion are not limited just
to them, nor are they exclusively characteristic of their families
or their fellow villagers.
This is the lot of many of their compatriots who find themselves in
exile, whether by force or voluntarily. Most of them ended up in the
United States, "which is like an army calling all able-bodied men
away and then never returning the bodies," as described by Mawal,
the only one of the narrators who stayed in her family’s home village
in the West Bank.
Those able-bodied men, who were blinded by the promises of a foreign
culture, later discovered that instead of the American dream, what
awaited them was hard, dull work. They "missed the smell of coffee
brewing, missed the clean air of their land, longed for the gentle
touch of their mothers"; but when they returned home for a visit,
or to get married and remain there, "they couldn’t stand it." They
were stuck between their lost homeland and the shattered dream.
Halaby often presents the less flattering aspects of life in
America. Take the story of Dahlia, Soraya’s aunt, whose husband was
"injured at his job in this country with so many rules and benefits
that he can stay home accumulating government assistance." Dahlia
discovers that her children have been kidnapped from under her
husband’s nose, but her boss does not allow her to leave work so that
she can look for them.
Mawal is the only one of the four cousins who has not left the
village. The other three protagonist-narrators, who are torn between
Arab culture and their lives in the U.S., represent possible outcomes
of the tense encounter between the West and the Arabs.
Hala moved to the U.S. to attend high school, and she returned to
Jordan to visit her dying grandmother. While contemplating whether
to get married in Jordan or to continue her studies in the U.S.,
she is saddened to realize that her father may have already decided
for her on the more traditional course for her life. Hala’s cousins
Khadija and Soraya have grown up in California. Khadija struggles to
acclimate to American openness and permissiveness, and she is forced
to deal with her oft-intoxicated and violent father, who tells her:
"This country has taken my dreams that used to float like those giant
balloons, and filled them with sand."
Soraya is a cause for concern to her family, because of her love of
dancing and provocative dress. Both girls try to navigate between
acceptance within the family and integration into American society. At
times, though, they are repelled by both options.
Nostalgic yearning
Laila Halaby, who was born to a Jordanian father and an American
mother, and who resides in Arizona, offers what could appear to be
a bleak picture of the clash of Arab and American cultures. Today,
though, that picture appears naive. The book was originally published
in English in 2003, but its plot is set in the late 1980s and early
1990s. In one chapter, Soraya is out on a date with an Arab boy at a
predominantly white neighborhood bar. The boy is assaulted by one of
the patrons, who mistakenly believes him to be Mexican and demands
that he speak English. Since September 11, 2001, the interaction
between Muslims and Americans has become much more volatile.
The rupture described in the book is liable to occur within families
from all traditional societies who lose their cultural bearings,
but in the U.S. this predicament has been compounded in recent years
by anti-Muslim hostility that has the backing of the authorities. If
life in exile, and the literature written about it, is a delicate
game between the urge to acclimate to a new setting and the nostalgic
yearning for the motherland, then the nostalgia is twofold in "West
of the Jordan": Read today, the book reflects a yearning not only
for the familial-village setting, but also for the lives that Arab
immigrants to the United States knew prior to 2001. (Halaby’s latest
book, "Once in a Promised Land," which was published in 2007, deals
with an Arab couple living in the paranoid climate that has gripped
the U.S. in recent years.)
Throughout the course of the novel, Halaby paints a clear picture
of the conflicts preoccupying the four storytellers. Their four
independent, distinct voices – critical voices through which rage and
reconciliation are weaved together – are powerfully heard and they
enable the reader to appreciate how ethnic origin and environment have
influenced each one’s perception of reality. Indeed, the characters
are the book’s strength. It is they – not the plot, that concludes
with a meek protest; the characters – not the way in which Halaby,
who occasionally veers into kitsch rhapsody, tells their story. Hala,
Khadija, Soraya and Mawal, four young women whose lives dealt them
a powerful slap to the face, remain in one’s memory even after their
story – one of maturing the hard way – is forgotten.