The narrator of this
slim, haunting novel is, like its author, a Palestinian who has lived for
many years in London.Born in
Lebanon, he was raised there in a refugee camp.We readers may be tempted to call him Samir, but fiction is
fiction, and the author has left his narrator unnamed for his own good
reasons. Ambiguity serves him well, as this is a book about the blurry
contours of identity, memory, ideology, and knowledge.It is also a candid exploration of the Palestinian question and
opens many wounds.
As a student at
London’s School of Oriental and Asian Studies (SOAS, the narrator
planned to write a PhD thesis about Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.“I wanted to show how, due purely to changes in social
circumstances, Palestinians had managed to move from the state of an
underclass, to which they as refugees had been doomed, to a state in which
socially, if not legally or politically, they were considered middle
class.”This rather dry, academic synopsis implies a highly
subversive notion: That the Palestinian self-image as downtrodden victim
is increasingly obsolete.
Indeed, once word gets
out at SOAS that such is the narrator’s intent, he is confronted by
Palestinian student activists, serious Muslims, who accuse him of abetting
the “Zionist enemy.”At
which he bursts out laughing, and bluntly retorts: “We should be
realistic and forget about the idea of the right to return; the only
return we should think of is one of a more symbolic value.”A week later, they beat him up.He didn’t write the doctoral thesis, he tells us; this book –
nuanced, pained, deliberately provocative –
comes in its stead.Urgency
cannot often be expressed in a dissertation.
The Illusion of Return may offer relief to Jews who are frustrated or
frightened by the Palestinians’ unwavering insistence on returning to
their ancestral towns and villages, but the comfort is illusory. From
a Palestinian perspective, Samir El-Youssef is hardly a normative
character; he’s a fringe peacenik who writes essays about Amos Oz, and
has penned a book of stories, called Gaza Blues, in partnership
with the edgy young Israeli writer Etgar Keret.Is he comfortable in that role?Hard to know.His nameless narrator, the perennial outsider who has not
been back to Lebanon in fifteen years, is suddenly flung back into
Palestinian history when he gets a phone call from his old friend Ali in
Michigan.After seventeen
years in exile, Ali is heading back to Beirut, and asks the narrator to
meet him at Heathrow airport.Their
reunion, which sturdily frames the story, forces and enables the narrator
to confront his disquieting past.
Back in the mid-1980s,
four young men, Ali, Maher, George, and the narrator, would sit night
after night at the Ramadan Café in Beirut, arguing politics and
philosophy against a backdrop of incessant violence.George, a Christian, lives with his family in a Muslim
neighborhood, “and on a few occasions George’s father and brother were
kidnapped and beaten . . . There was also a time when someone tried to set
fire to their apartment in the night when they were asleep.”Such is the matter-of-fact, minimalist voice of an author writing
(or a character narrating) in acquired English, which fits the story well.
George at the café
launches into epistemological riffs about Descartes and Heidegger, which
Maher derides:“Tell me,
how does Heidegger help us fight the Israeli occupation?Huh?Tell me?”Maher is a Muslim whose parents came from Tarshiha in the Galilee.His family too has moved on from the refugee camp to the city, but
he is ashamed (as the narrator sees it) of his bourgeois status, and goes
around preaching working-class consciousness and revolution.His Marxist agitation among workers at a candy factory owned by a
Lebanese Christian leads inexorably to tragic consequences.Religious and ideological passions deform and bedevil the lives of
El-Youssef’s other characters, the narrator very much among them.No wonder he has removed himself to London.
At the start of the
story, we learn that when Ali fled Lebanon, he did so via Tel Aviv, as an
Israeli collaborator.Why
he was compelled to collaborate, we learn midway; and only at the end is
the purpose of his return trip revealed.El-Youssef is a good craftsman, who engages the reader’s
curiosity early on and dispenses information slowly, disclosing shameful
secrets, heightening both tragedy and empathy.So too we are told, in the opening pages, of the premature death of
the narrator’s rebellious sister Amina; only later do we hear about
their deeply religious brother Kamal, now estranged and living in Saudi
Arabia.Readers familiar with
Orhan Pamuk’s shattering novel Snow might guess the rest, which
the storyteller saves for last.After
Amina’s death, posters appeared on the walls of the refugee camp,
extolling her as a “heroine martyr who died while fighting the Zionist
enemy.”For the extremists
and the author alike, fiction mediates an agonized reality.
At Heathrow, the narrator
discovers that Ali too has become religious.“When I went to the counter to order some sandwiches I
asked him if he wanted a beer with his sandwich and he said no.”He has a sudden urge to tell Ali about his absurd first encounter
with the right-of-return students, when he goofed and bought them all
beers (and drank them all himself.)But he doubts Ali will get the joke.“Regretfully, I said to myself, when people become
religious they lose their sense of humor, especially if they are
Moslems.”El-Youssef’s
remark could apply to Jews as well.Come
to think of it, that might be his intent.
The author (I mean
narrator) gets pretty serious himself as the philosophical threads are
pulled together in the book’s final pages. Now
he understands that George was right: it all comes down to epistemology.Prior to his encounter with Ali, he had considered his past in
Lebanon to be “unreal,” apprehended through “the logic of
story-telling.”Ali helps
him see that violence exacerbates this misperception: “’Yes,
violence!’ he said.‘It
makes everybody and every event look as if it has only one dimension.Like in an action movie, people seem flat!’”
Ali goes on to explain
that he’d had “a similar conversation with someone but with regard to
a totally different experience.”That
someone is a Polish Holocaust survivor he met in America, who observed
that when life is reduced to mere survival, it loses its diversity, “and
without diversity there could be no proof of reality,” and real events
seem fictitious.(The
narrator isn’t quite sure what this means, but resolves to explore it
further.)
The old Polish Jew, Ali
continues, had pretended to be a Catholic anti-Semite to stay alive during
the war.He wasn’t a
Zionist, “didn’t believe in the right to return anywhere.”Instead, “the idea of return is actually an attempt to escape the
inhospitality of the present state of the world.”Thus, concludes the narrator, Palestinians who demand the
right of return are mainly those who live in inhospitable Arab countries.
Get over it, get on with
your lives, says the brave author to his fellow Palestinians, albeit
through a veil of fictional anonymity and a fog of literary theory.But to a Jewish reader, he also says this:Violence has hammered a simplistic narrative into your collective
mind as well.“Unless
different people, people of different tastes and different ways of
thinking, see the same thing from different perspectives, . . . there
could be no proof that such a thing existed.”That “thing”, in the end, may yield the reality, not the
illusion, of a return to sanity, to a normal life.
