Interview: Ibtisam Azem, Author, The Book Of Disappearance
“The reality that Palestinians live in goes beyond any dystopia”
The Book of Disappearance by Palestinian novelist and journalist Ibtisam Azem, translated from Arabic by Iraqi poet and scholar Sinan Antoon, explores the sudden disappearance of Palestinians from all historic Palestine and how the Israeli society deals with it. The speculative novel alternates between two narrators, Alaa, a Palestinian man who leaves behind a diary addressed to his grandmother recalling memories of pre-Nakba, and Ariel, his Israeli neighbor, a liberal Zionist journalist who happens to find Alaa’s diary after his sudden disappearance. The novel provides an “unforgettable glimpse into contemporary Palestine as it grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory.”
In an interview, Ibtisam Azem talks about the genesis of The Book of Disappearance (Simon & Schuster India), which was recently longlisted for this year’s The International Booker Prize, memory as a form of resistance against attempts to control collective memory and change history, the centrality of displacement to their lives, and how Palestinian literature, art, and cinema reflect the complexity of Palestinian lives in ways that mainstream media in the west and Arab world have failed to do.
Excerpts:
What was the genesis of the novel's central theme of the sudden disappearance of all Palestinians from historic Palestine and its impact on Israeli society? Was it inspired by some real life incidents or from your personal, family history while growing up in Jaffa?
The main theme is the disappearance of Palestinians from all of historic Palestine and the way Israeli society, like any settler colonial society, will deal with and react to the disappearance of this “enemy.” However, as a Palestinian writer, I did not want my novel to be consumed solely with how to deconstruct the founding myths of a colonial society. I also wanted to center the Palestinian narrative through Alaa's journal and his grandmother's stories. The novel is engaged with the choices that characters make and it tries to explore the psychology of colonialism. It also holds a mirror to historical events in which the majority of Palestinians, more than 750,000, were ethnically cleansed during the Nakba in 1948. And the destruction of more than 500 Palestinian villages and depopulating most of the coastal cities. The novel deals with the effects of all of this on the lives of people. The other side of the mirror was merely a warning over similar and possible future scenario. Anyone who looks deeply into Israeli policies since the Nakba, will see that it is ongoing. It is what I call “a silent Nakba” in the confiscation of land to successive wars and massacres and so on.
I also wanted to center the destruction of Palestinian cities, particularly coastal cities, because more than 11 of them were depopulated. Jaffa was the most important and its population had reached almost 100,000 Palestinians. But after the Nakba its population was reduced to 4000. Jaffa is also a character in the novel, as opposed to Tel Aviv, the colonial city. Before the Nakba, Jaffa was one of the most important Palestinian cities. It was the center of economy, culture and trade with a history that goes back thousands of years. The grandmother's character is inspired by stories I heard from my own maternal grandmother who was forced out of Jaffa during the Nakba, as well as other stories. But this is not an autobiographical novel. I did not grow up in Jaffa. I grew up in a small town 30 kilometers north of Jaffa called al-Taibe, to which my grandmother and mother when she was still one year old was displaced. So I did not grow up in Jaffa, but Jaffa grew inside me because of my grandmother's stories and our visits to the city and the centrality of displacement to our lives.
What was the idea behind contrasting narratives as depicted through friendship between the central characters of young Palestinian man Alaa and his Jewish neighbor and journalist Ariel? How does it reflect the tensions between collective identity and personal memory in the context of the Palestine-Israeli conflict?
There are many Palestinian and Israeli characters in the novel that have different intellectual and poetical leanings. With Ariel, I wanted a liberal character to highlight the double standards of that group that might be against the occupation of 1967 areas, but they don’t question the founding myth of Israel as an empty land. Ariel represents the silent majority that allows and accepts crimes to be committed in its name. Their friendship is lacking as a relationship as it is missing the most important part: equality. Alaa and Ariel exist in a historical and geographic context and their relationship both as individuals and members of collectives, is governed by colonial power. Colonizer and colonized.
Author Ibtisam Azem
Was it challenging to authentically inhabit the character and themes explored particularly through Ariel's character shown as a liberal Zionist who is critical of his country's military occupation and yet is loyal to the Israeli national project? What does this character 's behaviour speak about the larger themes of colonial entitlement and ideas of ownership and memory?
There are always challenges in creative writing. Writing about a character whose politics I don't agree with is a challenge and requires setting aside the writer's ego and personal opinions in order to make sure the character is multidimensional and is not made superficial. But I should say that writing about a character one loves is also challenging. There is the possible trap of mythologizing it. It is important in writing to reveal the complexity of inner worlds without necessarily passing judgment but letting the reader decide how they want to deal with the characters.
It is true that I live in New York, but I was raised all my life and studied over there and my family still lives there. It so happens that this interview was conducted while I am visiting my family. I have also known Israeli society very well. Before studying in Germany and the US, I studied at the Hebrew university in Jerusalem. Although our schools were Palestinian, but the curriculum was controlled by Israel and most of the Hebrew literature we studied was Zionists. What we studied was governed by the perspective of the Israeli government. So, my knowledge of the world and society in which Israeli characters live was based on both personal experience and my studies and not based on theory or detached knowledge. So, writing Ariel as a character was a challenge like any other.
Ariel's behavior reveals the inability or unwillingness of the colonizer to deal with his colonial past. If he were to do so, he would question many of the constants of Israeli society, including what it means to exist on stolen land. The colonizer claims that he wants to look at the future and accuses the colonized of being consumed with the past. But reality is quite the opposite. The colonized is engaged with the past because he wants to change the present and does not want the past to be repeated again. He wants to create a better world. I hope that a day will come when the Nakba is just “a memory,” but we are very far from that. The colonizer refuses to dismantle the founding myth and thus refuses to build the future that is different from the past he created
The memories of Alaa's grandmother are central to the novel. What is the significance of such intergenerational storytelling in preserving the identity of Palestinians and how does it push against attempts to displace and occupy Palestinian lives?
Memory, as Alaa says in the novel, is the last lifeline. It is also a form of resistance against the colonizers constant attempts to control collective memory and change history. The novel tries on various levels to center and revive oral history and zoom in on the stories of survivors and accentuate them. Oral memory and history have always been a resource for colonized societies to resist cultural erasure and extinction. The novel chronicles the survivor narratives so that they go on beyond individuals to be a counter and alternative history to official history.
The grandmother in the novel is a thread drinking the past that lives on despite visceral attempts to marginalize it and a present and a future for coming generations that resist amnesia. The dominant narrative in the West which adopts the official Israeli narrative, deals with the genocidal war as if it started on October 7th. But this is part of a long series of continuous wars against Palestine and Palestinians. Many forget that the majority of the people who live in Gaza are refugees or descendants of refugees from the first Nakba in 1948.
The novel was written and published way back in 2014. How do you see the relevance and reception of the novel post October 7, 2023 attacks and its aftermath as thousands of Palestinian civilians have since been killed in the relentless Israeli attacks on Gaza?
The reality that Palestinians live, particularly in Gaza, goes beyond any dystopia. Since the beginning of this genocidal war, I have lost the sense of time. I think we will need a very long time to read carefully what is written and what will be written. I'm focusing now on using any platform to talk about and shed light on the injustice that is befalling my people. I hope that literature and culture and art in general give more space to understand the lives of Palestinians from their perspective.
What are some other novels in the speculative fiction genre you would recommend for outside readers written by Palestinian origin writers, also translated into English, that deeply explore the social and political realities of Palestine and its inhabitants?
The landscape of Palestinian literature is quite extensive and rich and goes beyond what is written in Arabic. There's Palestinian literature written in other languages as well and it's difficult to keep up. What comes to mind is Emile Habiby’s The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist, and Palestine + 100, an anthology published by Comma press in the UK, Edited by Basma Ghalayini.
Tell us about your collaboration with the English translator of the novel Sinan Antoon and how did he go about preserving the cultural nuances, the novel's speculative aspects, and emotional depth of the original Arabic text in the English translation?
Literary translation is its own individual creative process. Sometimes there is author cooperation if need be in this case there wasn't. Sinan Antoon is a novelist, poet, and translator who has translated the works of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and the Iraqi poet Saadi Yusuf, in addition to his own works. He knew the text and its complexities intimately and he knew the target language and culture.
I read the drafts of the translation and loved it, but the translation was his work. Sinan happens to be my partner and my first reader, and he was aware of the various stages of writing the novel. I should say that unfortunately literary translation from the global South doesn't always get the attention it deserves from publishers and it always takes much longer to recognize. Small independent publishers and university presses carry the burden.
How has the novel resonated with the English-speaking audiences since the publication of its English translation and, more recently, when it was longlisted for the International Booker Prize? What does this recognition mean in terms of the larger discussions on the displacement of the Palestinians, identity and memory in the Israel Palestine context?
Being longlisted for the International Booker Prize impacted the novel’s reception and made sure it reached a wider readership even though it's not necessarily interested in Palestinian or Arab literature. Prizes play an important role in promoting literary works. It is good, but there are a lot of translated works that do not receive the attention they deserve because they are not on longlists. The question for the media and outlets is how to access those works and engage with them without the precondition of this or that price. Nevertheless, I am grateful. What I wish is for the reader to approach the novel as a literary work and judge it on its artistic merits.
How important is it to support Palestinian writers and translate their works for a wider readership to tell and publish their stories amid increasing attempts to silence them, dehumanize, distort and erase Palestinian stories as we have seen most of the mainstream media in the West attempt to do so?
Palestinian literature, art, and cinema have often reflected the complexity of Palestinian lives in ways that mainstream media in the west and even in the Arab world have failed to do so. The novelist stays with the characters and the world of Palestinians after the lights are out and the media and journalists have left. Creativity for me is a homeland and an entire world through which I can breathe and return to that rebellious child in me which life’s burdens make me forget sometimes.
(A shorter version of this interview was first published in HT books)