A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

There are poems like broken glass,

And I say: “Broken glass,

I have not found you a listener.”

My dream flees to your bedroom,

But your room is nothing but a trick.

Listen, I may have to call you by a different name.

Damn it! What name can I call you by?

I’ll make you a new prison,

But who will help me to escape?

11.

A Draft for an Introduction

It was in the early 1990s that I began work on this study of tendencies and conflicts in the national identity of Algeria between 1930 and 1960. It forms a natural sequel to my previous book, The Reconstruction of the New Algerian Identity through Municipalism, which dealt with the early formation of an Algerian sense of self via the institutions of local government. After I had begun the present study, a bloody civil war broke out in Algeria in the wake of the cancellation of the 1991 election results; it is still going on as I write these lines.

A historian of the recent past must choose between two approaches. The first is to write as if the present did not exist — or, rather, under the assumption that any serious and responsible examination of the present will have to wait for historians of the future, who will analyze it with the help of reliable documents and appropriate scholarly tools. In other words, any attempt to explain the flux of a hotly contested present with a methodologically responsible study of the past is doomed to hasty conclusions that will distort our understanding not only of the present but of the past as well.

Hence the warning of Professor Uriel Hed, a great Orientalist of the last generation:

“Especially in our field, in which we deal largely with recent events, we must resist all temptation to blur the boundary between scholarship and political journalism. The historian must do everything to resist the siren song of ‘contemporary relevance.’”

And yet there is also, it must be said, a second approach, one that the intellectually honest and morally sensitive historian cannot simply overlook. How, after all, can the serious student of the past, taken by surprise by extreme and unexpected developments (and the writer of these lines must admit that although he has been studying the history of North Africa for nearly three decades) — how can he simply shut his eyes and engage in his research as though nothing had happened? Inasmuch as all who believe in the continuity of historic process know that every turning point has had turning points before it, does he not have a scholarly obligation to search for the connection between the examined past and the experienced present?

But perhaps there is yet a third approach (a modest footpath, it may be, yet a real one) that can be taken by the scholar wishing to trace an arc from past to present — one that will, rainbowlike, connect these two poles of his interest.

I choose the image of the rainbow advisedly, for, as both a promise and a stimulus, evanescent yet spanning our field of vision, it represents the joining of the past to the dramatic events of the present.

What has happened to the identity of the Arabs, in which the Algerians share? This question, repeated interminably in cultural and political forums, has recently become a concern of academic research as well. What has kept the Arabs from a new ascendancy in which they might reclaim their proud place in history, a place held by them for hundreds of years? Why have they responded in such self-crippling ways to the challenges of technology and liberal democracy?

What is it that brought the well-known Syrian poet Nizar Kabani to publish his notorious 1995 poem, “When Will the Death of the Arabs Be Announced?” Despite the literary and political scandal caused by this work, and the subsequent attempts to ban the Syrian poet from Egypt, there were courageous Egyptian intellectuals who rallied to Kabani’s defense.

These fundamental questions, which the body of my book refrains from discussing, stand to be illuminated in this introduction by the many-hued and perhaps chimerical rainbow that I propose to sketch from the past, the proper subject of my research, to the contemporary events that hover on its horizon.

Is the covert source of Arab society’s inability to internalize the concept of personal freedom to be found in its attitude toward women? Does the early childhood identification of the Arab son with his docile, marginalized, and sometimes humiliated mother seriously damage his capacity to develop a sense of inner freedom as he matures? I believe that the identification with the passive female lies in the hidden depths of his construction of his masculinity, thus producing a binary passive-aggressive loop.

And why does the memory of colonialism continue to sear the Arab mind more than that of other Asian and African peoples with similar experiences? Is it the Arab world’s relative proximity to the West, or the memory of its former dominance in part of Europe, i.e., in the “lost Paradise” of Andalusia, that makes the pain and frustration of a remembered colonialism so great?

An ethereal, chromodynamic, vanishing and reappearing rainbow may suggest a number of hypotheses….

12.

ON SATURDAY MORNING, the Russian immigrant guard was waiting as agreed for Judge Rivlin and her husband to appear by the iron gate of a small wing of the District Court. Instead of giving them the key, he told them that he intended to keep it and lock the gate behind them until summoned to let them out. Rivlin did not like this arrangement at all. “Suppose you fall asleep?” he asked. “What if one of our telephones isn’t working or you have to go somewhere? Do you want us to spend the day locked up in the courthouse?” In the end, in violation of standard procedure, the guard reluctantly left the key with them, on the condition that they return it to him personally.

And even then, as they were climbing the worn white steps of the old building, once the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Division of the British Mandate in Palestine, the judge, perturbed by her husband’s eagerness to reorganize her drawers, had second thoughts. Perhaps, she suggested, they should put it off for another week.

Rivlin did not even break stride. “Are you crazy?” he said. “ Now you think of that?”

He hadn’t been in the courthouse in two years. Not much had changed in the halls of justice. Yet he was curious to have a look at the new electronic system, with its security buzzers and hidden alarm buttons, which had recently been installed outside the judges’ offices and beneath their desks. He took pleasure in using the code his wife had given him to unlock the door to her office. In fact, he announced with a flourish, the protection offered by such a system, if installed in his study, might give his hobbling book a push.

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Hagit said.

Her dark, cold chambers had a new feature: the desk and chair, formerly on floor level, were now set up on a low podium. Despite her husband’s populist protest, the judge seemed pleased by her new elevation. Raising the heavy blinds to let in some light, she pointed to some paintings on the walls, salvaged from their old apartment, whose absence Rivlin had not even noticed. At once he proposed hanging Granot’s watercolor alongside them. It might encourage her colleagues on the bench to invest in the paralyzed ex-Supreme Court justice’s work. But Hagit, her loyalty to her old patron notwithstanding, thought that neither the colors nor the subject of The Return of the Little Ones was appropriate for her office. Since it was her husband who liked it so much, she observed, he should hang it in his study, instead of letting it gather dust in their apartment.

She went to water the little flowerpots on the windowsill. Rivlin, eager to form a first impression of the chaos of paper awaiting his sound judgment and firm hand, mounted the podium and sat at her desk. As he had surmised, its drawers were bursting with documents and notices that should never have survived the day of their arrival.