An Interview with Ibtisam Azem

Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance imagines what would happen if every Palestinian between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea were to disappear overnight without explanation, and how the Jews left behind would react to it. Published in 2014 in Arabic and released last year in an English translation by Sinan Antoon, the book depicts a hypothetical future that also acts as a reminder of actual events past. When Ariel, the book’s central Jewish-Israeli character, enters his disappeared Palestinian friend Alaa’s apartment to find leftovers of coffee and food, it is an echo of scenes described by families entering Palestinian houses in 1948 and finding meals still warm on tables. Azem’s book acts as a powerful affirmation that the Nakba is ongoing. Within this reality, how can Palestinians go about reclaiming space?

The question of reclaiming space may seem at odds with a story based on a thought experiment in which the people who have been dispossessed all disappear. In the book, the sudden Palestinian absence is felt first when people do not show up to work; the Israeli government’s initial response to the disappearance is to assume that Palestinians have gone on general strike. We sense that if Palestinians did not occupy a central place in the economy, it would take much longer to notice that they had all vanished. 

Two members of the GrayLit Volume 2 editorial team talked to Azem on a video call in late April 2020 with the apropos phrase “essential workers” prevalent in our minds. Azem told us that, although the book purposely never answers whether the disappearance is a result of choice or force or something else, one possible scenario is that it results from “the Palestinians saying, ‘You know what? We don’t care about you anymore. That’s it. We’re done!’” 

Does disappearing make the space you occupy visible precisely through absence? Is this one way of reclaiming place within ongoing displacement? In our interview, we discussed the roles that fiction, naming, and symbols play in such reclaiming, especially in a present where a dominant power maintains political and cultural control.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Cory Tamler: As I read your book, I thought about the role of the arts in the construction of landscape and vice versa. Maybe we could start by talking generally about place, space, landscape, as well as the ways place and memory are intertwined. What do these ideas mean to you as a writer? What is their role in fiction and what role does fiction play in shaping the real world?

Ibtisam Azem: The first thought that comes to mind when I’m thinking about space and place is my memories as a child; because I learned at a very young age that there are two different parallel, but unequal, landscapes and spaces around me. I grew up in what is today a town of around 50,000 inhabitants called Tayibe, north of Jaffa. My maternal grandmother was from Jaffa, but she was internally displaced to Tayibe in 1948. So that meant that, as a child, listening to her memories about Jaffa, you live in the space of a city that doesn’t exist in the way that this person is telling you, because the Jaffa they’re describing is the one before the Nakba. Some part of it does exist, but it’s not as it was. If I take it even more to basics, my town has only Palestinian citizens of Israel inhabiting it. Our neighboring towns and settlements were mostly Jewish, in contrast to the North where you have large Palestinian communities. In the center of Israel, not the West Bank, you have some Palestinian villages and towns, but the majority surrounding you are Jewish-Israeli towns.

When I was a teenager, I was on a basketball team. That meant the teams we played against were mostly Jewish-Israeli teams. You see the difference in equipment, in the field—ours was asphalt. And as a child I saw the landscape of my town where there was less green and streets full of potholes. I would go to Netanya, which is another city nearby, with my mother, as a child, for doctor’s appointments. We had doctors, of course, but for more complicated things you had to go outside. There were very few services, but you go to the neighboring Jewish-Israeli town, and you see that you are in a totally different world within 15 minutes. Experiencing these things as a child, even without knowing much about politics or your own history, if you open your eyes a little bit, you see all these differences. You see the ghettoization of Palestinian space and the structural marginalization of your community. You see how the places where Palestinians live are suffocating and the landscape shrinks. When you become older and more politically aware, you understand why things look the way they look. There is the space where the settler-colonizers live and the space where the colonized live.

CT: In terms of becoming aware of the political meaning of the landscape you’re describing, we see Alaa’s character remembering his grandmother’s stories. I’m fascinated by one episode that comes up a couple of times, in which it’s mentioned almost in passing that Alaa’s grandmother used to go out with her father and greet strangers as if they were friends in order to convince him that people have returned to Jaffa. Could you talk about that reconstruction of the city that she’s performing?

IA: When I think about what happened in ’47-’48 and afterwards, it’s really hard to capture the fact that 750,000 people were forced to leave within a very short period of time, and they couldn’t go back. But the Nakba is not something that happened in ’48 and was done. It is still ongoing, and people have reacted in different ways to the ongoing trauma of the Nakba. People react in different ways to catastrophes. I heard about people who lost the ability to talk, or people who stopped talking about their past. Alaa’s grandfather symbolizes this generation of people who cannot live anymore in this space. The scene is important because it symbolizes a linguistic dimension to the Nakba. A city becomes an almost foreign space to its inhabitants, because most of their neighbors and relatives, those with whom they speak their mother tongue, have been displaced. Language is also space and in Jaffa, most of those who made up the space of Arabic were kicked out. 

CT: That seemed to have to do with the role of fiction in bringing a place into being. Similarly, there is the recurring motif of Tel Aviv as the city that was a lie until it became true. There’s a linguistic dimension there too: the inherent lie in the meaning of the name Tel Aviv.

IA: I was trying to capture the shifting landscape. Of course, landscapes are constantly changing, but we are talking about a dramatic change, as if there’s been an earthquake. That moment meant [Alaa’s grandfather’s] death. Because his city died.

CT: Early on in the book, you talk about Jaffa as two cities that are impersonating each other. As a theatre artist, it gets me thinking about how mimicry is about imitating the other. These two cities are mimicking one another and internalizing what they’re mimicking. This feels more recursive than the idea of the historical layering of one landscape over another. It’s not so archaeological. It acknowledges that there’s a back and forth.

IA: The cities impersonating each other has to do with different memories about the place and the question of how you navigate your own space, your surroundings, when every movement tells you that, somehow, you don’t exist. Let’s look at language. When you read the Arabic names on some road signs leading to cities, they are transliterated in Arabic, but in the Hebrew pronunciation. For example, the city Be’er Sheva is بئر السبع‎ in Arabic, Bir Seb’a. They spell out the Hebrew pronunciation in Arabic letters بئير شيفع . It’s the same with Jerusalem. So it is a premeditated disfiguring of the language. A visual reminder of who controls public space, geography, and naming. If you go to any archaeological site, of course the history that is told will be from the Zionist perspective. Even these fights about falafel and hummus and about who gets to claim them. This is colonial appropriation par excellence. The characters in the novel are trying to live through this shifting landscape around them and trying to hold onto their beliefs about who they are and how they connect to the landscape. How do you relate to the trees, for example? Last summer, I was in an Israeli city, and they had all these olive trees planted in the middle of the road as ornaments, but they had trimmed them in a very “un-Mediterranean” way. Or when I would take the bus to Jerusalem, it was astonishing to see the settlements as you approach the city. They are so white. They all look the same, as if you took them out of nowhere and just put them there, which is what they did. So I’m trying to have readers go through what Palestinians go through when they navigate a place that they consider to be home but it’s still exile. It’s internal exile.

Shachaf Polakow: People come to Israel and don’t see the ruins from the Nakba, but if you go from Tel Aviv to Haifa, the road is full of ruins. They are built or planted over or still there. Your book is very much in this context. I think it’s interesting that the book takes place in Jaffa. It still exists, and the memory still exists, but there are ruined existing buildings, and it’s misshapen.

IA: It’s a symbol for the whole land. It’s Jaffa and Tel Aviv. Zionists think that Tel Aviv is their space because it has the illusion of not being built on destroyed Palestinian villages (which is not true actually because it was built before ’48, but that’s a different thing). So the interesting thing for me was: how do you, as a Palestinian, take Rothschild Boulevard and these important buildings and start re-claiming your space? Can you see, for example, the layers in this Bauhaus landscape: that it is an experimental architectural movement that was once suppressed in Europe, but at the same time it was brought to Palestine as part of a colonial power that’s about replacing the indigenous architecture? And a lot of these Israeli houses were built by Palestinian hands.

SP: As long as the Israeli state maintains control over the land, including narrative control, your book almost has to pass through a narrative checkpoint. How can stories of the land break the colonial narrative?

IA: The way things are going in Israel, the only road to change would be if Israelis would acknowledge a few things, including what happened in ’48, to try to understand the state’s foundation as a settler-colonial project. I’m a pessoptimist in the vein of Emile Habiby, the great Palestinian writer. I tend to be an optimist in general, but I have a pessimistic view of how things will develop. I hope we will get to a reality where instead of the apartheid state we have now, there will be one state for all its citizens with the right of return for refugees. But I’m afraid it’s not going to be as soon or as peaceful as I would like it to be. Looking at what’s happening on the ground, I have the feeling that things are getting worse.

CT: In the novel, I think we feel pretty viscerally the barriers to change through the growing sense that each character carries a landscape within them, and that there are frictions between their personal landscapes. In order to see his grandmother’s landscape, Alaa really has to try. The novel makes it clear that these landscapes exist alongside each other. The friction between these landscapes is part of the complexity of a relationship between a Palestinian and a Jewish Israeli, yes, but also of a relationship between a Palestinian of one generation and of another generation.

IA: It also shows the power dynamic. The relationship between Israelis and Palestinians is not a relationship between two equal parties. This goes beyond individuals. Yes, I could have a good Israeli friend, who could even be on the same page politically; but then we go back to our different and unequal realities. And that’s a fact. It’s a very complicated relationship between colonized and colonizer, and we move in these spaces whether we want it or not. Even within the same generation of Palestinians there are divisions and fragmentations that are caused by living in a colonial space with different levels and modes of intersecting suffering and marginalization that is inflected by gender and class.

CT: What materials do you consult during your research and how does your research show up in your writing?

IA: I try to know as much as possible about the period and the space I am writing about. So I augment my own knowledge and experience with oral history and interviews. I read history books and whatever is necessary to be on firm ground. For example, I had to do research on Bauhaus architecture in Tel Aviv and urban history as well as agriculture. Memoirs by Israeli politicians and Palestinian figures, and newspapers of the period of course. And documentary and feature films that are relevant. It’s also important to say that I don’t want to have nostalgia. I want to have a different perspective. One of the most important authors in Palestinian literature is Ghassan Kanafani, and he has an important short story about a family that was forced to leave Jaffa and about the women who, while they are on the road escaping, smell oranges that they took. It was important for me to take this symbol and change it. To make the grandmother a character who doesn’t happen to like oranges. But she starts eating them as revenge or something, out of anger. Do you see how you are in a trap as a writer if you are born in a land that has so much history and so many symbols with meaning for so many people, so many cultures? You need to take this into consideration but also find new meaning in it, redefine this relationship without being too nostalgic.

SP: The father of one of my parents’ friends always used to say that he remembered the people and places there before ’48. What the Zionists did in ’48 was to destroy coexistence and, with it, a future that would have been entirely different from our current reality. A lot of people focus on the West Bank and Gaza, but this goes from the river to the sea.

IA: The history of the whole region changed because of the Zionist movement. It has also radically and violently changed the lives and fates of Arab Jews. You probably know Ella Shohat’s article “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims.” She is an Iraqi Jew born in Palestine/Israel after ’48, but her parents were born in Baghdad. The Iraqi state colluded against them with the Israelis. Talking about landscape changing minds: in the book Alaa goes out to the beach and other places and watches people. He’s trying to get rid of the feeling of always being watched and observed as a Palestinian in a colonial space. When I call home and my father and I talk politics, my mother says, “Don’t talk politics on the phone! Someone is listening!” That’s what I grew up with: someone listening, the state listening. It’s true. They are watching and listening. But one of the ways Alaa changes over time is that he doesn’t care anymore. He redefines his relationship to colonial space, and he tries to see the nostalgia and the pain but also to have a “healthy” relationship that doesn’t let the colonizer’s memory take over his own. Once he is able to do that, he’s more free in his own space without leaving it. He’s in exile in his own home, but that exile has a new meaning. And the disappearance comes after this. On some level the disappearance could be read as an act of resistance.

CT: In another interview, you mention a woman in Ramallah who was inspired by your book to go to Jaffa and to see the places you write about. I was wondering about that, too, and the role that fiction plays in the continuous construction of a landscape. Let’s say I decided to map this book with my body. What would I find? What would I not find? What is the gap between the landscape in the book and the physical reality of Jaffa?

IA: That’s really interesting. Any landscape is in the context of social, economic, and political space. I haven’t seen that woman since then. Since she’s from Ramallah, she’s technically not allowed to go to Jaffa, but she called a friend and was able to figure out how to enter. The interesting thing for me, in this case, is the fact that she was from Ramallah. The majority of Palestinians, like her, cannot even visit historic Palestine. This means there would be a lot of conflict between the imagined Palestine and the reality as it exists now. That constantly shifting landscape is not a natural one. It has to do with political ideology. When I was at school, when we learned Hebrew literature, we learned a lot of Zionist stories about an empty land, about our own land as empty, or a land with very few, savage people. To go back to the last part of your question, it depends on how one navigates a place and what one sees or not. The ruins are still there. Some will just pass by them casually. But others will re-member or are compelled to see and realize that they are much more. The city itself, Jaffa/Tel Aviv, is a character in the novel. The city devoured by another city. 

CT: I’m thinking about the U.S. version of the Zionist narrative about empty land. In Firsting and Lasting, Jean M. O’Brien says that the US relies on a narrative, not of original emptiness, but of vanishing. The Indigenous peoples of the Americas have vanished. That’s the origin myth of the United States.

IA: There are a lot of parallels in the plight of indigenous peoples, but there are particularities as well. The colonization of the land and the displacement of the people is elided in the colonizer’s national myth. The Native Americans were slaughtered and driven out from their land, but they are still here. One of the Zionist lines one reads or hears is “if they loved their homeland, why did they leave in 1948?” Darwish wrote about how “invaders fear memories.” The continued presence of native people is considered a threat. The Israeli state describes Palestinians, who are its citizens, as a demographic threat, that they have too many children. And the recent law establishing the Jewish nation-state is the most recent example of the racism of the state.

CT: There are important differences in the meaning of indigeneity in the Middle East and the Americas for sure. But the reason I wanted to talk to you about “firsting and lasting,” actually, is that it refers to what’s essentially a literary trope. O’Brien looks at the language used in 19th century local histories in New England and finds a tendency to attribute “firsts” almost exclusively to Europeans (like the first settlement, the first town, the first religious building). Settlers have all the firsts, and Native people have the “lasts.” The Last of the Mohicans, the last village, the last chief. Through language, Indigenous Americans are lasted out of existence. The language is doing the work of constructing the imaginary space you just mentioned.

IA: Absolutely. Although I went to Palestinian Arab schools, they were part of the Israeli educational system, so that means that most of the literature I studied was from a colonial perspective, and it takes a lot of time to write against it and to be free of it. 

CT: To get to a place where you don’t have to be writing in response to it.

IA: But you are, whether you want to or not, responding to it, because you are fighting it and resisting it. It’s internalized. The challenge is to capture a space of Palestine in your own way and have a new relationship with places. There’s the homeland; this is your relationship to the land, to the place, and to its memories and meanings. And then there’s your relationship to the state and to its official narrative. I try to navigate these parallel spaces through writing.

~

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian short story writer, novelist, and journalist, based in New York. She studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and later at Freiburg University, Germany, and earned an MA in Islamic Studies, with minors in German and English Literature. In 2011 she moved to New York where she lives now and works as a senior correspondent covering the United Nations for the Arabic daily al-Araby al-Jadeed. She is also co-editor at Jadaliyya e-zine.

The Book of Disappearance is her second novel in Arabic. It was translated by Sinan Antoon and published by Syracuse University Press in July 2019. Some of her writings have been translated and published in French, German, English and Hebrew and have appeared in several anthologies and journals. She is working on her third novel and she just finished another MA in Social Work from NYU’s Silver School.