Category: Review

On the evening of September 12th 2001, I sat in my living room watching, like the rest of the world, the footage that would come to define the geopolitics of my adulthood. I said something too casual and too careless, like, “What can they expect, when they stride around the world pretending to be masters of the universe?”

My mother, sitting in the chair by the door to the kitchen, where she always sits, responded instantly and with unusual insistence, “I cannot understand this viewpoint I keep hearing! What has happened in America is criminal and nothing else. It is savagery! Nothing can justify it. No one deserves it.”

Through my life, reprimands from my mother have been rare and so they weigh heavy. But on that evening, the broad humanism and refusal to trade in the logic of violence that she role-modelled had a lasting impact.

After helping my wife and I move to Scotland, my mom and dad headed off on a short excursion through the Highlands, a long way round back to the ferry home. My mom left a novel for me to read. She had gotten it because it was a book-club choice. Mornings in Jenin is not a book I would buy. Sure, no one judges a book by its cover but this cover needs to be judged, a photoshopped monstrosity of a vaguely Arab little girl peeking out behind a worn-wooden door.

But I practically read it in one sitting. It made me cry constantly. Like every book that makes me cry constantly, I suspect it of not being very good. I think that if I re-read it, I will see through its manipulation. That is of course, a helpful suspicion to harbour because it closes off the possibility of me re-reading it and it affecting me just as hard a second time.

It is written by a Palestinian American, Susan Abulhawa and it tells the purely fictional tale of a family of Palestinian olive farmers who are first dispossessed in 1948 by Jewish settlers, then devastated in the 1967 war and then slowly tortured by the destiny of being refugees without protection or hope over decades in Jenin. The fiction is realistic however. And it’s great success is in rooting out the stereotypes about “terrorists” by unfolding the commitments and losses and loves and longings that lead a person to raise up arms against his oppressor.

As the chapters passed, I did find myself falling into that dreadful bogeyman of the half-educated and wanting to hear “the other side” as well. It might just speak to prejudices unearthed in me, but I suspect this is more as a result of the pervasive and generations-long attempt in my native culture to cast Islam and Muslims as outside the pale of civilization. The Jews of Israel are practically Europeans. The Muslims of Palestine are not. The Christians of Palestine are forgotten, most especially by their brothers and sisters in Christ.

I call it a dreadful bogeyman because there is no “other side” to the story. There is no plot being unfolded with purpose and narrative when peoples harbour age-old resentments and injustices and express them in violence so ungodly that with each passing page I wanted to close the book and turn to prayer. Humans are story-telling animals but some of the stories we tell are misguided, ungrounded and dangerous. You will likely gladly agree that the story about the Promised Land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob taking the form of the secular state of Israel is one such story. You likely also agree, in the staunchest terms, that the story about Arabs needing to extinguish the Jewish race from the entire region also fits this bill. These are misguided, ungrounded and dangerous stories. But other people tell them, not us.

Yet the story that there are always two sides to any conflict and that reason and analysis can resolve such disputes is one of the misguided, ungrounded and dangerous stories we tell ourselves. It is one of the most long-lasting of our “Enlightenment” fables. We imagine that there is a logic to violence that we can make sense of. Al Quaeda tries to destroy Manhattan because America has bases all over the Middle East. America has bases all over the Middle East because the Soviet Union lay threateningly to the north. The Soviet Union needed to stand belligerently to the West because of how the White Armies invaded immediately after their glorious revolution. And on and and on and on back to Cain and Abel. The human biographies that create the contexts for ongoing violence are obscured by such abstract conceptions of history, the myth of Force A exerting itself on Force B who exerts and equal yet opposite force in return. There are not two sides to any conflict. There are as many sides as there are people involved and if you are old-fashioned like me and belive in human subjectivity and God’s sovereignty, then there is one more side too, the truth.

Mornings in Jenin might be propaganda, and it might be sentimental manipulation, and it might be guilty of a whole host of accusations critics can throw at it. But it weaves a human narrative around the inhuman violence of the Shabila massacre. That is a notable thing. It sets the history of a conflict not in objective terms but as a story about a family trying to do basic human things like raise babies, pass on wisdom and keep their word. It refuses to say the conflict is about “land” or “politics” or even “religion” since none of those things actually exist. The rose garden on the hill above Ein Hod exists. When we call that “land” we are telling a story as fictional as this novel, but more dangerous because we don’t notice the invention.

That September evening back in 2001, as we consumed unholy images that corrupted us by exhilarating us, my mom was on to something. If only Dubya had dropped in for a cup of tea. There is no logic to murder. It is the least logical thing in the world. The demonic (and I mean that most fully, literally, figuratively, all the meanings that the word holds) force of violence traps us by convincing us that our freedom is a prison. God knows the way to respond to murder and torture and military power is with empathy, prayer and a renewed hunger for peace. There is freedom in that response, that we forsake when we imagine that now They have done This to Us, the only option left is for Us to do This to Them.

Mornings in Jenin gave me a fresh insight into the prolonged injustices that the Palestinians endure. Mornings in Jenin made me fear for the future of Israel because it has stored up a hurricane of anger against it that if released, no nation could endure. Mornings in Jenin made me suspect that when the Torah speaks of sin casting a shadow over generations, it is a more realistic account of life in this world than the destructive stories of national self-interest and geopolitical ideology with which we choose to furnish our minds. I suppose when a book makes one think in so many directions and prompts one to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, the only thing you can say of it is that it is a good book.

Your Correspondent, Wonders why hedgehogs can’t just share the shrubbery.

First: the sheer scope of this book, in hardback, makes an eloquent appeal for that blasted Kindle-like technology. If someone could produce one with firmware, software and a licensing approach that actually allowed people to confidently develop their libraries, it would be wonderful. This is a big, bulky book with evidence of rushed copy-editing all over the place. It is a book for bedtime reading and its actual presence as a thing mitigates against reading in that context. An ebook I could trust would be a vast improvement.

Even if the book is uncomfortable as an artefact, it reads comfortably. It starts slow and climbs sluggishly over the sense that there is not a single sympathetic character on display. But once it gets over that hill, the story gains traction and it becomes compulsive.

Saying that a book is a great story is not a backhanded compliment. This is intricately worked out. For sure, the characters are sometimes pawns to move the plot around. Worse again, they are pawns shaped to reflect social issues but underneath all the layers of shared human meaning that makes a thing like a novel possible, fundamentally we want to hear stories. The woman who made wizards interesting again makes parish politics interesting. And as social issues go, at least she seems to be suggesting that people should be more careful and patient.

There are some lovely paragraphs that stand out. This one seemed to describe the stretched but rapid hours after death quite brilliantly:

Two mornings after her husband’s death, Mary Fairbrother woke at five o’clock. She had slept in the marital bed with her twelve-year-old, Declan, who had crawled in, sobbing, shortly after midnight. He was sound asleep now, so Mary crept out of the room and went down into the kitchen to cry more freely. Every hour that passed added to her grief, because it bore her further away from the living man, and because it was a tiny foretaste of the eternity she would have to spend without him. Again and again she found herself forgetting, for the space of a heartbeat, that he was gone for ever and that she could not turn to him for comfort.

J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy, p. 63

Your Correspondent, Democracy is fantastic but it is also dull.