Chapter Four
Talking Democracy

For it is implicit that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other.
Frantz Fanon (1952)

Our political struggle, for us women, gives us a greater possibility of liberating ourselves from that given to other women in Arab countries at present; but we feel that the liberation of women will only come about within the framework of a socialist society, an authentically socialist one, since the fate of women is bound with that of society as a whole.
Mai Sayeh (1986)

For this rise in the political status of women's committees [during the Intifada] was accompanied by an even firmer shelving of the "feminist agenda" than before.
Rita Giacaman (1988a)

With or without duress, to be silent is to acquiesce to exclusion from the political process. Silence signifies capitulation and abdication of all rights to participate in the construction of a democratic society. The historian Barrington Moore defines democracy as "a long and certainly incomplete struggle to do three closely related things: 1) to check arbitrary rulers, 2) to replace arbitrary rulers with just and rational ones, and 3) to obtain a share for the underlying population in the making of rules" (Moore 1967, 414). How can individuals control their own destiny and then play a part in the ordering of their society? One answer is to construct a political-linguistic forum in which different constituencies with their different languages can communicate with respect . Beyond listening to and hearing one another, all constituencies by democratic practice must actively develop their own language and ensure its reception.^[1] Women

writers are key agents in this process, yet until recently they have not known how to impose and hold on to their voices. Literary history is full of women whose writings reached a small audience and no farther. How do I know they exist? Because of the fragments that somehow survived, even if hidden for centuries.

Contestation over access to discursive space is at the heart of democratic practice. Arab women have long participated in their societies' politico-literary debates. The first example of Arab women's literature to be uncovered so far is the poetry of the sixth-century Khansa' bint Tumadir. Although an entire anthology, or diwan , of poetry by al-Khansa' has been pieced together, it comprises elegies primarily. Does this mean that this woman who lived through the earliest, and some of the most exciting, moments of the rise of Islam wrote only of death? What of love and politics? The Tunisian critic Raja Ben Slama provides one possible answer to the question about love when he suggests that pre-Islamic women poets in the Arabian Peninsula, like al-Khansa' and Layla al-Akhyaliyya, waited for the death of the beloved to express their passion (Ben Slama 1991, 17–23). Political commentary is apparently absent. Does that mean that women did not participate in the political life of sixth- and seventh-century Arabian society? This is impossible. Contemporary sources document women's public activities that extend even to military encounters. So does their absence as political commentators mean that there was some kind of prohibition on their literary participation? Pace Stetkevych, this too seems unlikely in view of the fact that the Meccans chose al-Khansa' to be a judge of their poetry competitions, the most prestigious cultural events to be held in the city (Stetkevych 1992, 161–205). Clearly, something has been lost. The reasons for the disappearance of early Arab women's writings with the exception of elegies are yet to be revealed. I suspect that the elegies survive because they deal with a woman's relationships with her male relatives, particularly those who have been killed, and whose deaths probably need to be avenged. Such writings are safe: they support the system and reveal no internal rifts as women retain their shadow roles, urging their men to do what society expects them to do. Such writings can survive, they can even be celebrated. When women wrote about

themselves, however, their works were pronounced dull because autobiographical or out of bounds. Yet when men like the ninth-century Baghdadi Ibn Taifur and the nineteenth-century Cairene Qasim Amin pontificated endlessly about women, their opinions were carefully considered and then bound in Moroccan leather. This dichotomization of society between those who could and could not write changed in the modern period.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the Arab world was thrown into turmoil as nationalist movements began to challenge colonial powers in the region and to search for models of self-rule. The woman question took center stage as men and women debated what women's roles and status in their changing societies should be. Could a society develop and flourish if it drew on only half its human resources? Women like the Palestinian-Lebanese Mayy Ziyada who had found acceptance among male littérateurs wrote circumspectly about women's needs. She celebrated women's contributions to Arabic literature. Ziyada wrote biographies on Warda al-Yaziji, 'A'isha al-Taymuriya, and Zaynab Fawwaz and then, in their turn, Rose Ghurayyib and Widad Sakakini produced biographies of Ziyada. Together they were constructing a women's literary tradition that would draw attention to women and their rights as citizens. These writings were not threatening to status quo but merely supportive of women in a pro-feminist political climate and they were in general hailed as politically correct and quietly shelved.

The establishment of Israel in 1948 galvanized literary and political attention throughout the Arab world. Just as Arab countries were beginning to seize their independence from European colonizers, the Palestinians confronted a new period of colonization. The Palestinian community split between those who left and those who stayed within the green line (the 1949–67 borderline between Israel and Jordan, on international maps). Whereas women in exile, like Samira 'Azzam, wrote angrily of the need for resistance, those inside Israel, like Najwa Qa'war Farah, first tried to negotiate a livable future with the Israelis. Since women wrote about national and not women's issues, they were allowed to say what they wanted.

After the June 1967 War, Palestinian women in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of Jordan, the territories that Israel occupied, but not inside Israel proper, wrote about women. Quietly at first but then with growing insistence, these women pointed to the need to balance their activism and their writing about what they had done with what was labeled almost antagonistically as national interest and popular cohesion. More than most, Palestinian women in the Occupied Territories have been politically active, and they have written about their activism despite pressure from within and from without to remain silent. They have understood the importance of what the Moroccan Abdelkabir Khatibi calls a "double critique," or the simultaneous criticism of the colonizer as well as of one's own cultural patrimony. For women in a colonized society, such a critique is particularly hard for there are many waiting to condemn as cultural betrayal what they consider to be a demurral from a hardline, single-focused nationalist stance. External and internal pressures notwithstanding, women from the West Bank like the poet Fadwa Tuqan and the novelist Sahar Khalifa have simultaneously criticized Israel, America, and their own society, calling for what some term a women's agenda but all within the context of the nationalist movement . They argue that just as the liberationist struggles to free themselves from Israel will succeed only if they transform gender relations, so the social-feminist revolution must include a political victory for the Palestinian nation.

Palestinian women writers emphasize that equally indispensable elements of the nationalist revolution are women as actors and feminism as an ideology of radical social change. Mai Sayeh explains that women are not asking for liberation for themselves alone, but as part of "a revolutionary transformation of society. . . . We are living at a time of revolutionary struggle and we are determined to assert the need for the presence of women" (Sayeh 1986, 88). Khalifa calls for a real nationalism, not what she calls a "naive" version. Real nationalism "means to know and to love the nation with its rights and its wrongs, its sweet and its bitter, because without diagnosis there can be no prescription."^[2] The Syrian critic Bouthaina Shaaban interviewed a Palestinian woman whose articulation of the dilemma of the feminist activist in the

nationalist struggle reveals its paradoxical nature: "However deeply I empathise with the women's issue, I can't give it priority in a society which is rife with social and political problems and whose very identity and existence are in question. . . . I fight to break the fetters of femininity which cage my soul and mind; at the same time I fight ferociously for the restoration of my homeland to its own people. . . . My struggle for emancipation as a Palestinian is inseparable from my struggle for genuine liberation as a woman; neither of them is valid without the other" (Shaaban 1988, 160–64).

These women are demanding to be heard. They see little recognition of what women have done and said, despite the dozens of books and hundreds of articles in several languages that have been written about Palestinian women's participation in the resistance.^[3] These women are fighting to hold on to their words and the meanings they have assigned to these words, so that they will not be left out of the democratic process.

Contextualizing Erasure

Palestinian women were the first among the Arabs to organize themselves politically. The earliest institutions that they established were in general charity-oriented and helped foster a pro-feminist climate at the very beginning of this century. In 1903 Christian women in Acre set up an association to look after destitute children. Sixteen years later Muslim women in Jerusalem organized a parallel group called the Palestinian Arab Women's Congress. In 1921 the first Mulsim-Christian women's unions were formed in both Jerusalem and Haifa when the Christian Milia Sakakini and the Muslim Zulaikha Shihabi joined forces to found the Arab Women's Union. Momentum gathered and then, in 1929, the union convened the first pan-Arab women's conference—the Arab Women's Congress of Palestine—which demanded the establishment of a national parliament, rejection of the Balfour Declaration, and boycott of Zionist products. In 1933 a Christian woman delivered a political speech inside the Omar Mosque and a Muslim woman made a speech in front of Christ's tomb in the Holy Sepulcher (Antonius

1983, 63–64; Mogannam 1937, 55–70). By 1936, the date of the Arab Revolt against British rule, there were thirteen women's associations in Palestine, even including secret paramilitary cells like Uqhuwan. The war and the establishment of Israel slowed women's activities until the founding and formal recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the early sixties. In 1964 women participated in the PLO's first conference that included a resolution calling on women to struggle side by side with the men to liberate Palestine. The following year the General Union of Palestinian Women grew out of politicized charitable organizations. During the twenty years following 1967, women became more politically active than they have ever been. Suha Sabbagh, director of the Institute for Arab Women's Studies in Washington, D.C., says: "Before the intifada broke out in December 1987, there existed between 200 and 400 social service agencies on the West Bank, all run by women" (quoted in McMahon 1991, 32). Between 1988 and 1990, namely during the Intifada, five women's research centers were opened in Nablus, Gaza, and Jerusalem and in 1993 plans were developed for an institute of women's studies at Birzeit University on the West Bank. Nadia Hijab considers these centers to be important "in setting the agenda of the future Palestine. They are tackling hitherto undiscussed issues related to women's legal and economic status, such as violence in the family, inheritance, school dropout rates for girls' and women's economic activities in the informal sector." She goes on to talk about the Technical Committee for Women's Affairs, which is deliberating "a bill of rights for women, and it is reviewing the personal status laws issued by other Arab countries in order, as they put it, 'to avoid their mistakes.' The Committee is also working to prepare women to participate actively in elections" (Hijab 1994, 13–14).

Although there is relatively little research available on the women's associations and their participation in nationalist programs, it is clear that men were aware of them at the time and acknowledged their importance to the nationalist movement.^[4] In January 1955 the writer Emile Habibi (b. 1919), one of the founders of the Israeli Communist Party and longtime editor-in-chief of its paper, Al-Ittihad , responded to six articles about women's rights that had

appeared in Al-Mujtama '. He celebrated women's resistance during the war of 1948. He went on to demand that "they may fight side by side with the men to destroy the chains of oppression, suffering, and hunger that bind their people. . . . Withholding this freedom disempowers society. . . . To defend the right of the ordinary peasant to stay in his village and on his land, the women of Kafr Munda stood by their men, not inside the house but in front of the bullets of the police" (Habibi 1955, 6, 50).

In 1967, when Palestinians on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip came to share the fate of those who in 1948 had stayed inside the green line, the cultural logic of the Palestinian resistance changed. There was greater understanding of what the Palestinians who had stayed in 1948 had endured, and of the importance of collective action. Women mobilized. Their weapons were not guns but stones, weapons of the weak that often disarmed their soldierly opponents. But sometimes did not. Many on both sides were killed, especially in the 1970s.

By the end of the 1980s, when the informal skirmishes were organized and named Intifada, women's roles had entered the realm of legend. In 1993 the folklorist Sharif Kanaana published his study of the emergence of what he calls Intifada Legends. Within his collection of about two hundred fifty independent versions and several hundred variants, he finds that the male characters are generally young men "restricted essentially to one kind of role, that of direct confrontation with Israeli soldiers." Curiously, there are virtually no fathers—the legends have done away with that troubling vestige of patriarchy. The women are mainly older and they "are given a much wider range of roles . . . [and] they appear to be the strongest figures—the pillars of the Palestinian Arab family" (Kanaana 1993, 42, 43, 58). These legends strip away the complicated intergenerational relationships to concentrate on men's and women's ways of fighting. Explicit in this necessarily stark story is that the ones to devise effective forms of resistance were the women. Ghassan al-Masri in his introduction to Akram Abu Samra's book on Palestinian women's roles during the Intifada cites the thousands of women prisoners and dozens of women martyrs, including Fathiya 'Awad al-Hurani and Lina Nabulsi, who were

killed in what he calls the two intifadas of 1974 and 1976–77.^[5] He holds them out as proof that the Algerian heroine "Jamila Buhrayd has not died and that all Palestinian women are like Jamila the resistance fighter." He credits the women with daily acts of resistance that stopped Israeli attempts to cut off life lines; when necessary, they sewed new flags to replace those that had been confiscated. Echoing others, he praises mothers of martyrs and Patriotic Mothers who particularly in the recent period have been giving birth at abnormally high rates (Abu Samra 1989, 8, 87–90). He lauds women for informing the international media of what was happening during the uprising despite Israeli attempts to block news. He points out how international gatherings convened by women made the Palestinian cause an item on other countries' agendas.

So it would seem that this time at last women will not be forgotten in the aftermath. These legendary characters will surely be included in the democratic process of constituting a state out of the nation that they have worked so hard to maintain and for whose survival they can take a large share of the credit. Unfortunately, evidence from within the Occupied Territories indicates that this is not necessarily the case—maybe legends, like symbols, consume their subject when that subject is a woman. Moreover, there are some women, particularly those who are married, who are not learning from the Algerian Lesson because the multiple pressures are too great to focus on the women's agenda (see Mani and Ghazawneh 1993, 68–75). Yet a significant few are recognizing and already struggling against the impending erasure of their voices and, therefore, of their experience.^[6] They are articulating their concerns, formulating new strategies to memorialize their contributions, and engaging in what the sociologist Rita Giacaman calls "a process of self-criticism": "Rather than working through committees, where gender is used as a means to recruit for factional ends, we are convinced that women should enter politics as agents of change. . . . I believe we can only realize a truly independent agenda for Palestinian women if we set about forging alliances and coalitions with these other oppressed groups, around these issues of democracy and equality. . . . For us, feminism is an ideology that

calls for the social integration of women, and so is a part of a wider ideology calling for equality across all spheres and for all sectors of political and civil society" (interview in Usher 1992, 33, 35, 36).

In 1988 Giacaman with the writer Sahar Khalifa established a feminist association and sociopolitical training institution called Women's Affairs to safeguard women's political roles during the Intifada as men took over the leadership of the neighborhood committees. These committees, often formed by women, had served in place of the generally absent civil administration. The men described women's roles throughout the 1967–87 period as social rather than political.^[7] This attempt to minimize women's importance to the uprising can be seen in subtler strategies also. Giacaman points out how men's increasing focus on the importance of women as prisoners and martyrs obscures what women have done behind the screen of what has been done to them (Usher 1992, 42). Najah Manasra emphatically underscores Giacaman's concern: "To count the number of women martyrs, and speak about their important role in the fighting, without mentioning the negative developments is a dangerous policy" (Manasra 1993, 19). These "safe nationalist issues" drain the meaning out of women's oppositional practices. Is this perhaps how the non-elegiac poetry of al-Khansa' was lost?

The subtle and not so subtle erasure of women's centrality to the uprising and their omission in plans for reconstruction can be found in men's writings as well as in the ways women writers describe men's reactions to women activists. One of the best known male Palestinian writers living in Israel is Emile Habibi. During the 1950s he wrote little fiction, and what he did write might be described as accomodationist (see the discussion of "Mandelbaum Gate" below). After the war of 1967 his attitude changed. In 1974 he published his first novel that garnered him much fame, The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist . It goes back to the early days of the new Israeli state to tell the story of Saeed, a wise fool who returned to Israel illegally soon after being compelled to leave. His story is presented as a wild picaresque seeming to draw on traditional genres. I believe Saeed's predicament can be best understood in terms of the father figure in Deleuze and Guattari's

scheme of the Exaggerated Oedipus who has "to be enlarged to the point of absurdity, of comedy." This man lives with "head bent," trying to compel his son to do the same. Saeed, like other characters in a minor literature, is trying to find a way to survive in a culture that strives to exclude him, or at least to push him to its borders.

Saeed's reterritorialization entails complicities, betrayals, collaborations. His two sons, Walaa (loyalty) from his wife Baquiya (a verb-name meaning "he stayed" and indicating a relationship to the land) and Saeed from his lover Yuad ("it will be returned," namely another verb-name related to the land), must find a new path, one the father was not able to find: "The hypothesis of a common innocence, of a distress shared by father and son, is thus the worst of all hypotheses. In it, the father appears as the man who had to renounce his own desire and his own faith," and who demands the same of his son. In the intervention of 1967 the sons escape the impasse of the triangulation of the exaggerated Oedipus between father, son, and mother (Deleuze and Guattari 1986 [1975], 10). Saeed goes to prison, where he meets his unknown son Saeed, who has become a guerrilla fighter. When he learns that he has a son who has become part of an effective revolutionary force, Saeed can raise his head from the generations-old attitude of men who searched for treasure on the ground. But when he looks up, he sees that his other son named Loyalty has chosen to become Palestinian also; he rejects his father's becoming-Israeli desire. In each case, the sons are empowered by their mothers, women who are not afraid to say no and who consider loyalty to the Palestinian nation more important than citizenship in the Israeli state. The sons and their mothers—a foreshadowing of the Intifada trope—cannot, and do not wish to, reterritorialize themselves there where their father seems so invested. They deterritorialize absolutely by diving deep under the sea or by escaping the territory. Saeed cannot learn from them, and so at the end he finds himself the only possible space for survival: on top of a tall, blunt stake surrounded by a terrifying void. The epilogue announces that this story was told by a madman who is living in a fantasy world with extraterrestrials—the dream of reterritorialization but from outside—in fact from a psychiatric hospital, as well as a one-time prison, shrine, and museum. The women

instigate what Deleuze and Guattari call the proliferation of new series, each promising escape from an impasse, but Saeed cannot benefit from the openings they create. The women disappear with their sons after having put up a resistance, a resistance that cannot function effectively within such a context.

Widad Barghuthi intimates that such disappearing of women's political presence and importance is not new. She scans men's poetry of the twentieth century and finds that male poets do not incorporate women as sociopolitical actors into their discourse. In the 1930s, namely during the Arab Revolt in which women took a significant part, poets like Ibrahim Tuqan addressed women as muses (Barghuthi 1990, 155). She claims that the wars of 1948 and 1967 mark a change in men's representations of women. Mahmud Darwish, for instance, reduces women to symbols of the nation, or of struggle and loyalty, so that the one is indistinguishable from the other. They are also mothers (who lost their children, who give without taking, who are martyrs or prisoners or struggling peasants) and lovers awaiting the return of the beloved knight. For a short time, poets like Nayif Salim and Samih al-Qasim wrote of women as resistance fighters and Rashid Husayn invoked the Algerian Jamila. But this does not last. Barghuthi concludes with a quick overview of men's poetry about the Intifada that she says once again erases women's achievements. In fact, it indicates no change in women's social status, as men continue to write longingly for their lovers. At best, women are Spartan Mothers (Barghuthi 1990, 158). She ends with a call to women poets to correct the omission and offers as models unnamed women from Latin America and Cuba. Ironically, even she does not acknowledge that Palestinian women have written of their own political involvement in national liberation.

Mai Sayeh was marginally optimistic in the early 1980s, writing that "the younger writers and poets, like Khalid Abu Khalid, Yahia Badaw, and others, now depict two faces of woman: the strong woman, symbol of the home and the land, who encourages her son to fight, and the young woman, the beloved, who is herself a fighter and active in the struggle. These are new depictions of woman: to be loved she has to fight actively for her country" (quoted in

Antonius 1983, 67). This optimism is tempered by Ilham Abu Ghazaleh, who has analyzed men's poems composed between December 1987 and May 1989. She finds that poets stress women's physical appearance and not their actions, their roles as kin and not as activists. Although women are out in the streets, men write of them waiting at home to be told stories about what had happened as though it were utterly remote from them. She observes that "women are either totally negated by their absence, or they are depicted as incomplete beings. . . . All this passivity in depiction took place at a time when women in every neighborhood were more active than they have ever been" (paraphrased in Najjar 1992, 260–61). Kristin Brown's survey of popular Palestinian poetry and songs during the Intifada finds that if anyone is to be highlighted as having fought for the nation, it is going to be men who can be cast in mythic molds, especially of classic heroes such as 'Antar and Abu Zayd al-Hilali (Brown 1990, 3). Perhaps women cannot be sung because there are no mythic models for women warriors in Arab history? But then what of Zaynab, the Prophet's granddaughter famous for her exploits on the battlefield, who has become central to postrevolutionary Iranian women's construction of an acceptable woman fighting side by side with her men? By 1992 Hanan Mikhail Ashrawi, the former spokesperson for the PLO, points out that men's writings about women's resistance and the uprising have erased women's political and social agency; they have once again been reduced to "the embodiment of the unattained, the perfect goal: fertility, lush land, the womb of society, Palestine itself" (Najjar 1992, 260). Women are turned into symbols of national integrity and renewal and in the process they are denied oppositional agency (see page 214).

Many Palestinian women insist that they and their sisters must record what they have done outside the home and demand what they want. It is not enough to say that the women's, or the social, revolution and the national revolution are mutually dependent for their success, that the one fails with the failure of the other. As Giacaman asserts, echoing a growing chorus, women have to overcome their reticence at drawing attention to their specific needs and goals; they must publicly articulate and pursue a women's agenda.

In the preface to her volume of edited essays on women's roles during the Intifada, Ebba Augustin writes that "the gain of the uprising is an increased consciousness and practical understanding of gender issues on the part of the middle class leadership and the intellectuals. With a women's agenda being worked out and a leadership pushing for political representation while closely working with the grassroots, it is to be hoped that women will have their voices heard when there is a political settlement" (Augustin 1993, xi). In the same volume, Najah Manasra underscores the point when she says that "an increasing number of them are taking up the fight not just against the Israeli occupation but also against the restrictive norms of their own society. . . . During the Intifada the pressures on Palestinian society have increased. For many people, one method of coping is to 'go back to the roots'. . . . The victims of this trend are Palestinian women. . . . We need to see that many forces are at work attempting to curtail our existing rights, not to mention the rights we are fighting for" (Manasra 1993, 18–20, 20). This emphasis on the women's agenda should not be seen to conflict with the nationalist agenda. Rather it seems to be the only way to hold on to the necessary simultaneity of women's allegiances to gender, nation and culture. These allegiances are not contradictory but they will seem to be so if one is favored over the others. If, for instance, women prioritize "political and national considerations" they will not gain the confidence and strength that will allow them to become full citizens in the new society that they want to build with the men. Palestinian women are fighting for a democratic nation.

Radical and new? No, just a sharpening of rhetoric already out there. Sahar Khalifa, the best known woman novelist working in the Occupied Territories, has written four novels that compare men's and women's ways of resisting. Muhammad Batrawi quotes Khalifa as saying that Palestinian women writers "are progressive already, to pass the obstacles of 'to want to write' and 'to write', while men writers—even leftists—are still bound by the traditional role of women. . . . Real-life women are never represented [in their work]" (quoted in Augustin 1993, 118). She knows that women must constantly talk and write about what it is that they have done,

show how what they have done has shattered the myth of a menonly space; they must not allow the men to forget. Once they have made their voices heard, they must demand inclusion in the new body politic. She provides a model in her 1981 dramatized response to critics of her novel 'Abbad al-shams (Sunflower). One woman in the resistance complained: "But they do not hear us!" To which her companion replied: "How could they, when we do not open our mouths?" "But if we open them, they say it is silliness." "The important thing is that we open them while we are on stage " (Al-Katib , September–October 1981, 83). Yes, women must speak and write while they are still in the public eye, when their actions are still visible. Women like Rosie the Riveter in America and the Algerian Jamilas learned too late that actions do not carry their own rewards, but that they must be re-membered and repeated so as not to be erased. Khalifa heeds Cassandra's warning about what happens to women fighters when the "chorus of female speakers has vanished, swallowed up by the earth. The woman can now become the object of masculine narrative, in the role of heroine. . . . Do people suspect, do we suspect how difficult and in fact how dangerous it can be when life is restored to an 'object'? When it has to say 'I,' as a woman? We see a landscape generations wide where the writing woman still tends to get lost: lost in the man, the male institutions, federations, churches, parties, states" (quoted in Wolf 1988, 296–98).

Palestinian women like Sahar Khalifa are determined not to vanish, not to become the object of a masculine metanarrative because they already know that if they do why then it will be, as always, as heroines, martyrs, or some other idealized category that will erase what they have done by turning them into national symbols. She is saying "I" as a woman and refusing to get lost in male institutions, federations, churches, parties, and states.

1948

Let us now turn the clock back a half century and ask what role, if any, a woman's agenda played in the writings of women who experienced the war that was to lead to the foundation of the Israeli

state. Women's issues then, as always during national crisis, were relegated to secondary importance. The women like Najwa Qa'war Farah, Asma Tubi, and Thuraya Milhis who wrote in the late 1940s and 1950s rarely raised women's specific problems. Their writings resemble those of their male counterparts like Emile Habibi and Hana Ibrahim. Like the Algerian women under French colonial rule and then during their war of independence, Palestinian mothers, daughters, wives, and sisters did not demand radical changes. In fact, they advocated traditionalism, especially in the family. Education and professionalism were luxuries to be postponed indefinitely. Women like Najwa Qa'war Farah who wanted to be heard had to suppress feminist expression.

In general, Palestinians writing within the new state were cautious. In his analysis of the "Jewish neighbor" in early Palestinian fiction, the Israeli critic Sasson Somekh distinguishes two categories of writer: those who were close to the Communist Party, and those who threw in their lot with the Israeli regime. Although they all wrote about "Arab-Jewish brotherhood, peace, and co-operation," Somekh cautions that such writings were often coerced. The Communists wanted "their Arab comrades to write in the spirit of internationalism and to describe the common Jewish-Arab struggle against imperialism and chauvinism [in both nations]." The government demanded praise for its democratic achievements (Somekh 1989, 113, 114). Such pressures notwithstanding, the 1950s stories do reflect the harsh realities of life in Palestinian communities in Israel. Authors describe the struggle to survive with dignity and to establish a just, if patriarchal, society. Many seem as concerned about the persistence of injustice and oppression as they are about political violence. Somekh describes their writings as bitter but not accusatory: "At most there is an evil institution that is called Zionism or The State, but this is a meta-structure which is not identical with the simple human being. The Jew who appears in these stories is generally not ugly, and sometimes he is human and even likeable" (Somekh 1989, 119).

One of the very few Palestinian women writers of the earliest period who stayed in Israel was Najwa Qa'war Farah (b. Nazareth, 1923). She published her first collection 'Abiru al-sabil (Passersby)

in 1954, Durub wa masabih (Paths and lanterns) two years later, and Li man al-rabi'? (For whom is the spring?) in 1963. The dates of publication of the collections rarely indicate when the stories were actually written. Despite its 1954 publication date, Passersby contains only stories published before 1948; of the eight stories in Paths and Lanterns only two are post-1948; most of the stories in For Whom Is the Spring? are from the early and mid-1950s—the last two collections are relevant here because they contain stories written in the immediate aftermath of the war. After leaving Israel in 1967, Farah continued to write and in 1981 she published Rihlat al-huzn wa al-i'ta' (The journey of sadness and giving) and in 1991 Intifadat al-'asafir (The intifada of the birds). I focus on Farah's writings between late 1940s and early 1960s because they demonstrate the development in nationalist consciousness from accommodation with the Israelis to rejection.

Unlike most Palestinians who remained after the establishment of the Israeli state, Farah was educated. She graduated from Dar al-Mu'allimat, a women's teacher training college in Jerusalem, though she decided not to attend university because of parental pressure.^[8] In her midtwenties she became a member of the Arab Women's Union for which she lectured about women's issues. At the same time, she wrote plays and stories that were broadcast on radio in Israel, England, and Holland and then were published in journals like Al-Adib, Saut al-Mar'a, Al-Muntada, Al-Qafila , and Al-Ghad . Like the men who wrote just before and after 1948, she criticized social values and indicted the excesses of the rich and nouveaux riches, men and women alike. Society had to be reformed from within. But unlike the men who often criticized the national leadership, Farah did so only by indirection (Peled 1988, 202).

In her introduction to Paths and Lanterns , Farah spells out her vision of the role of the writer. It is threefold: "sometimes to portray life, sometimes to criticize and often to forge a better path. . . . Sometimes the writer must portray truthfully, sincerely, and precisely and then keep silence. Truthful portrayal is more eloquent than criticism because it is in itself revolutionary" (Farah 1956, i). Although many of her stories are socially motivated, dwelling on class and gender issues, Farah was among the first of

the Palestinians who stayed to write political stories.^[9] The critic Ibn Khaldun, who describes her Passersby collection as "cautiously revolutionary" (Ibn Khaldun 1956, 53–54), writes that in Paths and Lanterns the author has changed "from onlooker to participant in a struggle necessary for development" (Ibn Khaldun 1957, 22). Mattityahu Peled claims that her 1948 story "Inspiration from the Holy War" is probably "one of the first attempts to reflect the national struggle in prose literature." The story was published in Al-Adib , September 1948. Peled writes that men before 1948 did not deal with political topics (Peled 1988, 154, 182). Revolutionary is thus an adjective that not only she but also others use to characterize Farah's writings. But revolutionary here connotes political rather than social action.

When asked about her identity as a woman writer, Farah replies, as do many other Arab women writers, that it is not gender but personality and literary style that differentiate one writer from another. There is little of the feminist in her public persona. Her writings connect with men rather than with women. For example, she allowed a committee of three men, 'Isa al-Na'uri, Sami Habibi and Taufiq Qa'war, to select the stories for her first collection that al-Na'uri introduced.^[10] Whether this was a conscious strategy or not, it worked. He praises her works for their dramatic atmosphere, their psychological range, and their rhetoric against hypocrisy and arrogance: "Any religious person who reads her will feel her writing has more influence than 1,000 priests' sermons" (Farah 1954, 12). Unlike Algerian male critics of women's early writings on the revolution, he does not condemn a woman's critique of her society from within as subversive. In fact, her critique was not so different from that current among men. She was read with the men, her gender did not signal the need for another reading.

The frequent choice of male narrators is another tactic that allows Farah to expose corruption in society without risking trivialization as feminist carping. In her pre-1948 stories, male narrators criticize rich men and women, who unscrupulously exploit the poor and those who trample all over each other in the struggle to the top.^[11] They mock the older generation's cultural and political blindness. For example, in "Which of the Two Paths?" a young man

rejects his father's advice to accept the inevitability of corruption and withdraws into ninth-century literature and starts to write. His mother exclaims: "As though all those books with which he stuffed the house were not enough, he had to add his own. His poor father! While he is knocking himself out all day long, this one sits around and writes." The father adds: "And we have to pay. . . . People are flying to the stars and he goes backward to write about the Abbasids!" Neither parent can see the relevance of the past to the present, much less its potential as "fuel for the revolution" (23, 24).

As she wrote in her introduction to Paths and Lanterns , Farah does not merely attack miscreants; she also describes and thus penetrates the tragic world of the poor. "The Newspaper Vendor" is a boy who, in the face of tough competition, must earn enough to provide his sick mother with her medicine. One of his battles lands him in reform school where he learns not reform but crime (26–37).

The war does not put an immediate end to Farah's social criticism. In her 1950 story "Two Beggars" a boy, brought up to be a beggar, is suddenly struck by the reality of his misfortune. He overhears conversations as the people leave a cinema-house and he realizes that they were born into different expectations. Far from disabling him, this realization empowers him to change his fate and leave the city. The story ends with him getting his first paid job and exchanging his first flirtatious moment with a woman. Although Farah scarcely alludes to the radically different political reality, she does suggest that the time has come for people to take their destinies into their own hands (Farah 1963, 5–11).

Get active. Do something. But is it too late? Have the Palestinians lost their direction and their compass also? "The Story of a Generation" describes the angst of those who cannot fit into the new world and whose only solace may be found in the land. A farmer on his way to market in Haifa runs into a wheat agent who had once been in his debt. He had offered to defray the debt by giving his creditor four dunams (each about one-quarter acre) at the foot of Mount Carmel. The protagonist had refused because at that time the land on which Haifa was built was worth nothing. How times had changed! This once-destitute wheat merchant had flourished

under the new system: he lived in a splendid new home with his silk-clad wife and his children, each of whom had a French name, spoke French, and had western table manners.^[12] The farmer, embarrassed by his own lack of "sophistication," escapes. At the bus station, he realizes that he has arrived too late for the buses. Although Farah does not say so explicitly, the reader assumes that it is Friday: the Muslim protagonist had attended the noon communal prayer, there is no bus after sundown because of the Israeli prohibition on driving during the Sabbath. Even at this point, she does not mention the Jews and the specific nature of some of the changes they instituted. In consternation, the protagonist returns to find the house full of gamblers, bare-armed women, and blaring music.^[13] He escapes again and after many ordeals on the road returns to his village from which he feels that he has been parted for a lifetime. He picks up a piece of earth that "embraced a whole life, many generations even. Then he threw it away slowly, lovingly, reverently. It was sacred" (Farah 1954, 184). "The Story of a Generation" broaches a major issue of post-1948 Palestinian women's writings on their wars: the existential importance of staying on the land, of being true to oneself and above all of not profiting from a situation that brings misfortune to others.

Earlier than most writers, Farah warns of the dangers inherent in commingling with the European immigrants. Although like many of her contemporaries, she differentiates between the people and their military administration, she is less sanguine than most about the prospects of mixing with the Israelis. She urges caution as she extols traditional bonds, even if at the expense of women's freedom of action. Her pre-1948 "When Nairuz Returns" (Farah 1954, 185–225) is a prognostication of the pains and dangers to come. One day, villagers awake to find Polish and Russian women walking through the streets. Whereas the Palestinian women recoil from these libertine women, the men are attracted. Ibrahim is one such. He throws himself into a relationship with some of these new women, even on one occasion driving off to Tiberias with them. Samiha, his fiancée, tries to keep faith but has to acknowledge finally that he has become "mean, stubborn, selfish, and indifferent" (204). Ibrahim is not evil, merely weak. Just as Samiha is about

to be married off to a class mate, he comes to his senses. They are reconciled, but on the wedding night Samiha dies. Ibrahim loses his reason. This melodrama compels Samiha's family to recognize the depth of his devotion, and they forgive him. The story ends with a striking vignette of Ibrahim and his to-have-been brother-in-law walking toward the grave. So strong are the ties that bind these Palestinian villagers that nothing, not even the foreign femmes fatales, has power enough to undermine them. As Somekh points out, this description of Jewish women's freedom and Palestinian women's dependence on "the will of the man" is a topos of the literature of the 1950s (Somekh 1989, 116).

Six years later, Farah wrote what might be considered to be a sequel. Yet this story neither criticizes foreign women nor affirms Palestinian solidarity as critical to survival. Like many men's stories of the period, "Layla and the Fragrance of Oranges" (Farah 1956, 72–80) proffers the hope that Palestinians might be able to communicate with the Israelis.^[14] The protagonist is a Bulgarian gold merchant who came to Palestine after the failure of the suq shakhur (Hebrew for black market); note the use of Hebrew vocabulary which Farah must assume her readers will already understand. Yaqub Ibn Yusuf—whose name is oddly Arabic-sounding—is one of the very few explicitly Jewish protagonists in Farah's works. He is not an expropriator but a family man who bought the land he now loves. One day he notices an "eastern man" in his garden, and he asks him his name using the Arabic he has already bothered to learn. The man runs away. Yaqub remains wary and that night when the man returns he is ready to shoot him. His Iraqi son-in-law stops him; an Arab Jew intervenes to save a fellow Arab. The Palestinian is called Ahmad and it transpires that this was Ahmad's house and that his bride, killed by loose shrapnel on their wedding night that was also the first night of the 1948 war, is buried in the garden. After establishing a measure of rapport, he begs them to make sure that she is properly buried should he come to harm. They sit together and talk about his eight years in refugee camps, and of his longing for the land of his birth. Ahmad mirrors Yaqub's language when he describes his feelings for the plantation: "Yaqub could understand how Ahmad loved the plantation because he too

had experienced and fallen under the spell of its magic because this was his homeland just as Vaudeville had once been his home" (80). While they are talking they hear sounds and they try to hide Ahmad. When Ahmad hears them turn on the radio, which they had agreed would be the danger signal, he escapes. However, "a few seconds later a shot was heard. The next day's paper mentioned that soldiers had fired at an audacious infiltrator who had burst into a plantation at Rehovot and had killed him. It was an almost commonplace piece of news." The Israelis are not to be confused with their military administration. The reader assumes that the two Jews will honor their promise to give Ahmad's bride a proper burial. But what kind of a burial will it be? Will it be Jewish or Muslim? And once they have performed the ritual, how will they feel about the land whose former owner their government has killed? In this story the humanity of both sides becomes apparent to each. It leaves openended what the outcomes of such an interaction might be. This story joins others of its period in which Jews appears as fully rounded characters.^[15]

Despite her political and social involvement in women's issues prior to the war, Farah advocates that women should now control personal desires and ambitions. Women should not move out of their traditional, narrowly circumscribed roles. The following two stories are among the few that Farah seems to have written for the female reader. In "Baha" (1951), Farah criticizes mothers whose only interest in their daughters' education is their beautiful teachers who may serve as brides for their brothers. The lovely teacher Baha and the protagonist's brother marry according to the mother's plan. But then the couple throw the ambitious mother and the narrator out of the house in which both had been born. Farah is warning Palestinian women against exploiting the situation lest it lead to their expropriation by their own men who know no better than to obey their wives just as they had previously obeyed their mothers. Women are participating in their own exploitation; they should turn their energy to positive ends so as to create a different future for society as a whole.

"Stumbling Block" (1953) is another cautionary tale for foolish women. The story is ostensibly concerned with women's chastity

but in fact it is a warning against meddling with traditional values. An older woman urges Basima to elope with her lover and not to submit to her brother. The following day, with her lover in the hospital and her brother in prison, Basima is in terrified hiding. The well-meaning Salma al-Mubarak is horrified at the results of her words and somewhat abruptly and unexpectedly dies. She is a warning to all who would interfere in traditional codes of behavior. At such a time of cultural and political vulnerability, Palestinians should adhere to tradition even if at the expense of women's freedom and right to self-fulfillment. This warning against involvement with or emulation of Jewish women's freedom again echoes men's literary concerns (Peled 1988, 184–85).

By the mid-1950s and early 1960s, Farah's writing becomes more radical in content as in form, as she includes extended passages written in Palestinian Arabic. Recognizing the effects of expropriations, the humiliations of living as a stranger, a hireling on one's own land, she seems less and less committed to negotiating a future in Israel. In "The Call of the Ruins," she expresses doubts that coexistence is at all possible. All that remains of a prosperous Galilee village is a convent that seems to wish that it too had been destroyed so that it might now be spared its daily witness to the surrounding devastation. Yet it is not the Israelis alone who are blamed: "It is better to be wronged than to do wrong. . . . You may ask yourself and those close to you who is responsible for the refugees' plight. They'll say the English or the Arab or the Jewish leaders. Doubtless they are all responsible. But I must teach you something else. The one responsible in a deeper sense of the term is the human heart, the source of good and evil, the progenitor of crime and compassion, the nurturer of love and hate. The human heart is the workshop out of which even atomic and hydrogen bombs explode because when love and hate appear they need to express themselves. . . . I don't want to teach you revenge. How miserable is the life of the vengeful. I want to teach you forbearance because it precedes goodness and mercy. When I have done this I shall not fear death" (Farah 1963, 68–69).

This exhortation to recognize individual responsibility ends on a bitter note because, as some claimed, responsibility is not the

message of the story.^[16] The protagonist's daughter hallucinates her dead mother's voice and follows its sound into no-man's land. There, when she sees her "beloved earth," she squats. She does not resist the police who arrest her because she has no papers; "after a short trial the girl was fined 50 liras" (Farah 1963, 71). She was arrested for being on her own land. This end provides an immediate ironic commentary on assuming responsibility. For no matter how much the Palestinians accept responsibility and try to work with the Israelis, if they so much as step on no-man's land, which may in fact belong to them, they will be swiftly punished.

"A Hired Hand on His Own Land" (1958) tells the familiar story of wave upon wave of colonial rulers whom the Palestinians have endured. A poor farmer who had survived the Ottomans and the British finds himself deprived of the land he had worked so hard to buy. Yet, being an easy-going and unresentful fellow, he is happy to work the land for another. Anticipating calls to sumud ,^[17] or steadfastness, that mark post-1967 Palestinian commitment to resistance, she creates a character who is determined to remain on that land whatever the costs of such a remaining. The Jewish owner respects him and heeds his agricultural advice. Just as he is beginning to feel a measure of control, however indirect, he gets a mortal blow. The owner announces in broken Arabic that he has been compelled to sell the land to someone who was bringing his own workers (Farah 1963, 87). Within ten years of the establishment of Israel, the first generation of Jews with whom it had been possible to live and work was being replaced by another who rejected interchange.

By the late 1950s Farah's stories are about the need to leave. "The Bitterer Choice" (1957) tells of the difficult decisions that old people have to make. Abu Ibrahim dies in exile consumed by longing for the land he had left. As the family goes through his belongings they come across a note: "If some day you return, take my bones with you" (Farah 1963, 80). In 1957 he did not have the relative freedom of the Lebanese Radwan in Emily Nasrallah's Al-iqla' 'aks al-zaman (Flight against time), who in 1980 could leave his children living in exile to return to die in his own country. Abu Ibrahim did not die with Radwan's smile of satisfaction that

could only come to those who had followed their hearts to their land (Cooke 1988, 156–60).

"The Call of Damascus and the Pomegranates' Censure" (1959) is the first story to refer to the Israelis explicitly and negatively: workers can neither get permits without work nor work without permits; Histadrut inspectors catch those who try to outwit the system. The Palestinian men do not know how "they can remain steadfast and be proud of being Arab and survive." When the male protagonist despairs and decides to leave, his brother tries to bring him back, but "as he was crossing, he heard shots from the Israeli side. He tried to hide behind a stone. But he was caught and taken to prison" (Farah 1963, 96–97). One young man was probably killed and his brother captured. The decision to leave the land is disastrous but so is the staying.

The two stories Farah wrote in 1962 just before leaving Israel mix nostalgia with bitterness. "Granny's Things" describes how outcasts forge links that derive from love for a common past. The younger villager, trained as a lawyer, feels alienated in the city. It is only when he gives protection to the son of a blind man that he finds solace because the boy shared his love for his grandmother's things. This story is reminiscent of the pre-1948 "Café Wise Man" in which Farah narrates the alliances that the marginalized and the oppressed forge.

"Mandelbaum Gate" (1959) describes the excitement of Palestinians on both sides as they anticipate meeting in Jerusalem and then their pain at parting. Written eight years after Emile Habibi published his own story under that same title in the widely read Al-Jadid , these stories demand comparison. Both focus on a grandmother who is meeting with a son who has left. Habibi's protagonist is herself leaving to join her family, presumably in Jordan; Farah's grandmother is going to the gate to see her son Halim who has come from Kuwait. Halim bears gifts and stories of another life that make his mother's life with her ailing husband even more unbearable than it already is. Habibi's story ends with the grandmother crossing no-man's land, and her granddaughter, unaware of political frontiers, rushing to hug her. The Jordanian and the Israeli guards are equally moved as they "hang their heads and dig

their feet into the ground." Whereas Farah's 1959 story portrays life in Israel as unbearable, in 1951 Habibi is still concerned to show that Israelis, even the military administration, can be touched by a show of tenderness. Farah left Israel after writing this story; Habibi is still there.

How should we read Farah's writings? What are the connections between her activities as a member of the Arab Women's Union and her writings? Despite the conservatism of Palestinian society in the young Israeli state, feminism was on the rise.^[18] As in all societies in transition, for a feminist to be read and heard, she had to write in a way that made her criticism palatable. Was this what Farah was doing? Certainly in her interview with Mahmud Darwish, she complains that the "women's cause is a cause in which women are absent." Like Algerian women, she is aware of the difficulties of biculturalism for women: education opens the doors to new horizons whose attainment entails compromise between intellectual needs and cultural duties (Darwish 1962, 61). However, and this is crucial, Farah does not deal with these problems in her stories. Indeed, the men seem to feel freer than she does to write about the impossible conditions in which women found themselves in the aftermath of 1948.^[19] Her concerns in the later stage reflect what Khalifa calls "naive nationalism": criticism of the Israelis with less advocacy of internal reform in class and gender relations so as to strengthen society. Except when she wanted to urge women not to rock the boat, Farah wrote for men and as long as she remained in Israel she used their language.

1967

Whereas 1948 distracted Farah from internal criticism as she turned her attention to the political crisis through which she and her people were passing, 1967 inspired women intellectuals in the Occupied Territories to mobilize and to write about mobilizing for social change. Because coexistence was not a real prospect, writers did not have to imagine ways in which individuals might forge relationships with the Israelis. They wrote about the hardships of work in Israeli factories, women's struggle, prison life, and the problems connected with persisting social and gender stratification.

In the wake of the defeat of 1967, writers all over the Arab world questioned in fiction and poetry what had gone wrong. Many conducted a "double critique" that targeted Israel and America while looking in on their own societies. They asked themselves how might they have changed the outcome had they been more politically committed, perhaps even more religiously observant? Some women writers in the Occupied Territories suggested that a social revolution in gender relations might have strengthened the society and made the nation less vulnerable. They began to insist on internal reform and change, while calling attention to their particular experiences and oppositional practices. Unlike Farah, they were not isolated, individual voices but were forming a chorus made up of writers, readers and activists. They wrote to transform relationships so as to create conditions in which individuals might respect and therefore empower one another in a situation where everyone was needed for the resistance to be successful.

Post-1967 women's writings hark back to Farah's pre-1948 criticism of society and particularly of class. As Rosemary Sayigh writes: "The reality of being a minority has produced a mood of acute rebellion among young people against class and family structures that are seen to transmit Israeli oppression . . . rebellion against Israeli oppression and the patriarchal family are refused" (Sayigh 1992, 202). The tone is urgent: if men do not heed this socioeconomic and of course patriarchal critique they will not succeed. They are their own worst enemies by alienating half of their population and accusing of vulgarity women who try to function alone. These women affirm that if all accept responsibility and participate in the restructuring and strengthening of society, they will themselves be restructured and strengthened.

Nablus has been the center for women's literary activity in the post-1967 period. Three women stand out as having attracted international attention: Raymonda Tawil (b. 1940), Fadwa Tuqan (b. 1917), and Sahar Khalifa (b. 1941). Each of these women witnessed the events of 1967, the violence as well as the human displacement. Tawil recounts the story of her collaboration with Khalifa on a dangerous mission. They confronted Israeli soldiers who had taken over the social welfare department and demanded

food. They got what they wanted, but upon their return escorted by a soldier, some of the refugees became angry. Khalifa in her turn became angry with them, exclaiming: "We have suffered enough from slogans and ideologies! Baathism, Marxism, and all the rest. Now we have thousands of mouths to feed, hundreds of wounded to care for. We've talked enough! Now let's go to work and save what we can of the Palestinian people!" (Tawil 1983 [1980], 98).

Raymonda Tawil's work has been the most criticized, for it has been interpreted as a form of cultural betrayal. Her many acts of defiance, her attempts to inform the world of the Palestinians' situation in the Occupied Territories, have been largely overlooked in the outrage at her condemnation of her husband and other Arab men in My Home My Prison (1983 [1980], 253–55). In this work Tawil recounts her life from the moment an Israeli policeman knocked at the door of her childhood home in Acre to question her mother about her involvement in the resistance of 1948 through her own activism and its costs; it ends with her 1978 imprisonment and torture in an Israeli jail. Tawil is calling for a strengthened resistance movement, yet the tone of her criticism of Arab patriarchy is sometimes so shrill that it overpowers the overall nationalist message. Why, for instance, does she end her story comparing the Israelis' ill-treatment favorably with Palestinian men's oppressiveness (Tawil 1983 [1980], 257)? Finally, the fact that the book is written in Hebrew and was published first in Israel creates the problem of audience. It is one thing to write about pressing internal problems for the Palestinians in Arabic, quite another to write for the Israelis in a language accessible to few of her compatriots about issues that would seem to render her society even more weak and vulnerable than it already is.

Fadwa Tuqan, the poet born into a well known and highly respected literary family, also wrote of Palestinian women's double burden but her language is Arabic and its tone is more moderate. She is always balancing her allegiances to culture, nation, and gender, catching herself when a conflict threatens to emerge, when one loyalty seems about to overwhelm the other two. Her work A Mountainous Journey , serialized in Al-Jadid in the late 1970s and published as a whole in 1985, recounts her life in Nablus from

childhood in the 1920s through 1948 and ending with 1967. This is the first time that this premier Palestinian poet writes in prose. She tells of personal difficulties she encountered as a woman in conservative Nablus. She details the trials and restrictions that she endured as she brushed up against patriarchal authorities—many of them weak men whom she sarcastically refers to as "lords of the family." Tuqan asserts throughout that the Palestinian woman faces a double struggle: "to assert her liberation as a woman and the struggle to assert her and everybody else's national liberation. What I am sure about, however, is that once the inevitable national liberation is achieved, our feminist liberation will also prevail and there will be no relapse of the kind that can happen after national revolutions" (Tuqan 1990 [1985], 204–5). Su'ad Qaraman claims, though not quite correctly in view of what Tawil and Khalifa had already published, that Tuqan is the first woman "to express frankly and truthfully the problems of the Arab women. Arab women before had only referred to such problems symbolically and by means of allusion. Tuqan said everything openly and in an exquisitely sweet style" (Qaraman 1990, 8).

As a child, Tuqan had been deeply hurt by her family's indifference toward her: no one could even remember when she had been born. For the month, she decided to place herself "under the sign of Pisces" (14). For the year, she asked her mother to give her an approximate date. Her mother tells her cruelly that her birth inauspiciously coincided with the death of her mother's favorite cousin. Again and again she criticizes her mother as though trying to free herself of this debilitating biological bond. Her politicized mother, who had been a member of the Society for Women's Welfare, which in 1929 became affiliated with the General Union of Arab Women, should have provided her daughter with a powerful role model. Yet it is probably this very fact of her political activism that led her to want to abort what turned out to be her daughter Fadwa. She was rejecting fecundity as a raison d'être, and her daughter cannot condone this feminist gesture without bringing her own existence into question.

The only happiness and freedom Tuqan ever experiences is with other writers and when she is writing—a trope in Arab women's

writings: "My ability to separate myself from reality and to dive into daydreams began to grow. These dreams helped me to escape my prison bars and to venture forth into the streets alone. I travelled to lands unknown where I met strangers who loved me and whom I loved. I would always leave the family out of my imaginary trips because they were the prison out of whose locked gates I wanted to escape" (58–59). But the greatest freedom of all was when her father died in 1948. She no longer had to escape the family because the heavy patriarchal presence was gone. She gained a sense of herself "as a social being. It was during the Occupation only, when I gave poetry recitals and met the people, that I learned the value and true meaning of poetry that matures and ferments in the popular earthen wine jug" (109).

The style of the autobiography underscores its function. The circular narration gives Tuqan the freedom to arrange her life according to her own desires and needs. Again and again, she returns to events in the past to add layers upon layers of experiences that thus come to assume their full significance. She ends with twenty pages, divided into twenty-seven diary entries, that chronicle the year before the 1967 war from a political as well as from an apparently personal perspective. The last page is broken up into four sections in which she lives through the period after the occupation; feverishness, silence, and then finally five poems that are harbingers of many more. The autobiography awaits completion to cover the post-1967 period when Palestinian women in the territories became so active in the resistance. The fact that it does not go beyond 1967 is significant for this section of the autobiography. This is the period that precedes Tuqan's composing of committed poetry. She is reconstructing herself at a time before and during the formation of her identity as a poet, not as a woman poet.

The Intifada

Like many other Arab women poets, Tuqan wrote elegies. She describes her initiation into poetry and adult identity through the memorization of an elegy. She explains how hard it had been for her to write at first, particularly to write political poetry when her

experiences were so far removed from the realm of politics. After 1967, however, her poetry became politically engaged. She celebrated the ways in which children were resisting the occupation. Her "Song of Becoming," written after 1967, was—to quote her—prophetic, describing "the intifada before it started, which proves how absolutely inevitable it was" (Tuqan 1990 [1985], 204). Others point to the importance of this poem that foreshadows the shape of the resistance to come, for example Khalifa uses it in 1979 as an epigraph for Sunflower . After wandering through the streets, and watching the military settle in, Tuqan writes about the jumping, whistling, kite-flying boys who have suddenly "grown more than the years of a lifetime. . . . They're now the voice that rejects / they're the dialectics of destruction and building anew / the anger burning on the fringes of a blocked horizon / invading classrooms, streets, city quarters / centring on the squares / and facing sullen tanks with a stream of stones" (Tuqan 1990 [1984], 10). In an interview I conducted with her in Nablus in December 1982, she told me that she had started a salon in 1968 that the military soon banned. She explained that they feared that "each reading will give birth to ten fedayeen." In general, because of the moral authority of poetry in the Arab world and because of the wide appeal of Tuqan's work, it has drawn more censorship than works by other women, including Sahar Khalifa. The Israeli authorities have allowed Khalifa's subtly subversive literature to circulate, though they screen out from others' writings obvious symbols like "paradise," "olives," and "wild thyme growing on hills," "snake," "dark clouds," and "predatory foreigners."^[20]

Throughout her oeuvre, which is also set in Nablus, Sahar Khalifa traces women's growing politicization and effectiveness. By evoking the tensions underlying nationalist as opposed to feminist struggle, she shows how women can name, control, and extend their own actions. In a letter she wrote to me in August 1991, she explains her conception of the role of the writer. It is "to understand human behavior rather than prescribe it. What drove all those women to do what they did at the beginning of the Intifada was not the love of Palestine, but rather the pain of losing their sons,

husbands and brothers, or even the idea of losing them . . . from what I have witnessed, women are motivated (at least at this point) by their blood ties rather than by conceptual, abstract, nationalist thinking." Echoing the General Union of Palestinian Women's slogan that it was established not so much to liberate women as to liberate Palestine, she demands that women balance their multiple allegiances so that culture, nation, class, and gender remain in tension with one another. Like Tuqan, and more effectively than Tawil, she argues that the successes of the nationalist and social revolutions are interdependent.

Khalifa speaks out of loyalty to her nation and her culture, but because she focuses on gender roles and relations her works have been charged with being feminist only. Although I was at first surprised at such a misreading, I have come to believe that this judgment has a great deal to do with her location. Writing from within the Occupied Territories, she is expected to represent her nation uncritically. Self-criticism is out. What critics overlook is that writing from inside, Khalifa does not have the freedom of Palestinian women from elsewhere who can write with impunity about the Israelis and the hardships of separation from the homeland. Equally important, she does not have the distance to overlook the damaging effects of a persisting bourgeois patriarchy.^[21] In 1989 Khalifa told Sibylle and Shraga Elam that she "has been accused of being like the Israelis and of wanting to undermine the Intifada since I was raising to the forefront a secondary matter, women." She complains that people do not know how to read her works that talk "for the first time of women's ways of fighting that are not recognizable as fighting" (quoted in Bunzi and El-Masri 1989). Self-criticism is urgent for survival.

Khalifa often contrasts men's and women's ways of fighting the war against Israel. In her Intifada novel, Bab al-Saha (1990a), she criticizes the strategies and tactics of Palestinian men's resistance, as she did in Wild Thorns (1985a [1976]), the first volume of her second novel that she wrote between 1972 and 1974.^[22] In the earlier period the men saw themselves as having only two choices: to leave and plot revolution, or to stay and compromise. In the later

period they invited military retaliation by throwing themselves against the Israelis without thought of the consequences. Khalifa demonstrates the bankruptcy of both ways of fighting.

In Wild Thorns , those who remain suffer a kind of internal exile, as they work for the enemy. Zuhdi works "inside," as does 'Adil al-Karmi. He knows that he and his family cannot survive if he refuses to compromise. Unbeknownst to his father, he joins the workers "inside," while trying to survive with a modicum of decency. How bitter are the words of Abu Sabir, who loses his fingers in a factory accident in Israel: "Israeli cash is better than starvation. . . . I've tried hunger, but all it did for me was to wear me down to a skeleton, weak in body and mind" (Khalifa 1985a [1976], 52–53). Outsiders are quick to judge and condemn. When Usama arrives in the West Bank from Kuwait, he asks his taxi driver: "Where's the resistance then?" the latter jokes: "With those who are paid" (21).^[23] He has not lived under military occupation and so he can continue to be dogmatic: "They've stuffed you full and made you greedy. They've absorbed you. And I see no sign of shame in your eyes." To which 'Adil responds: "Ah, Usama, I said the same thing when I first arrived from Amman. . . . Do you measure man only by his deeds of glory? What about his weaknesses? The harshness of his life?" (27, 65). His cynicism foreshadows the futility of armed resistance from within.

Khalifa criticizes Usama, the revolutionary in exile, in even harsher terms. When Usama ironically accuses 'Adil of forgetting his country, the latter retorts: "The proof that I haven't forgotten my country is that I haven't left it," and he accuses Usama and his cronies of wanting "us to bear all the burdens of risk and sacrifice on our own" (98). Usama does not appreciate the complexity of the issues involved, believing "that there was no longer more than one dimension to the issue, not after the 1967 defeat and the occupation that followed" (88). His myopia misdirects his challenge to the occupation onto fellow Palestinians whose murder he claims is not a crime (94). His operation, the attacks on Israeli buses carrying Palestinians to work in Israeli factories, killed Palestinians only, among them a friend: "The individual was of no importance when the fate of the community was at stake" (86). Let them, like him,

"be martyrs to the land, to the cause" (181). In the end, the exiled revolutionary is killed, desperately trying to recuperate a measure of pride in his senseless behavior and declaiming: "And me, I'm a real lion, mother; tell everyone I died a martyr, a martyr to the cause. A martyr to the land" (185).

In Wild Thorns , men embody political positions and attitudes. They are fighters and martyrs, but also compromisers and inveterate conservatives whose bourgeois values seem the more heinous when compared with stark statements by workers like Abu Shahada, the old retainer of the al-Karmi farm, who scoffs at Usama's zeal for the land: "Why should we die for it? Don't give me that! Nobody ever came and asked about us when we were nearly dying of starvation" (42). On another occasion, Abu Sabir reminds 'Adil that "doors will always be open to you, the doors of the rich, the doors of the banks. And the gates of heaven, too" (51). His father comes in for particularly severe criticism. The patriarch is weak and dependent on a dialysis machine that is in turn dependent for its proper functioning on the family members. Yet, undaunted, the old man continues to curse "the workers right back to their ancestors" (55). He entertains foreign journalists and dignitaries, hoping that help can come from outside. 'adil bursts out in frustration: "He hangs on to life as . . . a virus to a living cell. And I'm that cell" (95). Like other protagonists of Palestinian literature, particularly that by men, 'Adil rejects his father and above all his complicity with the occupation. At the end when the Israelis blow up the al-Karmi mansion for having been the storehouse for guerrilla arms, 'Adil leaves behind the dialysis machine. He must liberate himself of the burden of this father if he is to move on. This death, like that of other tyrannical bourgeois fathers in stories written in the Occupied Territories between 1967 and the outbreak of the Intifada (al-'Alam 1991, 1), signals the hope that the reactionary values of a sick patriarchal bourgeoisie will also die.

The women are stronger if less prominent actors in this first volume. During the five years Usama had been away, things had changed for women: "The servant girls were servants no more, and the class ladder was less steep" (Khalifa 1985a [1976], 27). The situation was opening up what had previously been closed doors for

women; they were less anxious to marry. Some, like Lina, were joining the struggle, even being incarcerated. Although individual women are not portrayed as fighters, Palestinian women as a whole are. When the mothers are annoyed with their children, they send them into the streets, the new front, to "pester the Jews." The children laugh at the Israeli soldiers when they curse them. When an Israeli soldier beats a child, the mothers in unison "let loose a stream of curses on all who'd had a hand in the creation of the state. Their husbands blinked in surprise at the volley of oaths. . . . The children's chanting and clapping rang through the empty streets, a crescendo of rhyming slogans about God, Palestine, Arab unity, the Popular Front, the Democratic Front, freedom, dedication, selfsacrifice, and Yasser Arafat" (104–5). Whiel the mothers and children are defying the soldiers in this proto-Intifada confrontation, other Israelis are exploding condemned houses in the neighborhood. At the sound of the explosions, the women once again break into shouts: "Palestine! Palestine!" In 1976 during the second year of the Lebanese war when Palestinians in Beirut were coming under growing pressure to leave, it was not clear whither, Khalifa—like Tuqan—predicts a new way: the revolution had to be accomplished from within and by a new cadre—women and children.

These women know that there is no hope of resolution as long as action is male-driven and full of compromises. Unarmed, they confront the Israelis. Usama's mother remains cool while the soldiers search her house for her son. She reaches "out to the machinegun, push[es] it out of her way," and sits quietly playing with her prayer beads and silently repeating verses from the Qur'an (164–72). Umm Sabir sells her bracelets, her dowry, to sustain her family while her husband is out of work. The women are grounded and suspicious of rhetoric. The woman in the taxi bringing Usama to his home in the West Bank for his first visit in five years mocks his empty slogans. Later when Usama warns his mother of a Kissinger conspiracy, she mishears and asks: "Singer? You mean there are still imported sewing machines in the country?" (31).

Women have another way of seeing the conflict, they may have another way of addressing it. Wild Thorns highlights one aspect of women's ways of fighting that recalls the writings of Farah and

other early Palestinian authors in Israel: recognize and negotiate with the humanity of the enemy. In a powerful scene, Umm Sabir and her son witness the murder of an Israeli officer and the distress of his wife and daughter. She uses her veil to cover the little girl, who has fainted, and calls her "my daughter." She turns to the widow and calls her "sister." At the moment of their loss, this Palestinian woman draws the Israeli woman into her family in a profoundly human gesture that recalls Virginia Woolf's declaration: "As a woman I have no country, as a woman my country is the whole world."

Khalifa does not restrict this recognition of the human in the enemy to women. By learning from women's ways of knowing and acting, men may cease to fear and reject the feminine, the tender, in themselves. When 'Adil then enters the murder scene, he, too, is moved by the woman's tragedy. He holds her briefly, then raises the girl onto his shoulders (157–60). His compassion is immediate and unthinking. Later, after Usama is discovered to have been the murderer, he muses over the irony: "My cousin kills a man and I carry off his daughter" (171–72). Another man to acknowledge an Israeli's humanity is Zuhdi. Just before dying, he says that Shlomo, the Israeli worker he had tried to kill and because of whom he had been imprisoned, "wasn't all bad. Just an ordinary man, like you, too, Usama, you bastard!" (183). The novel ends with the women standing on the roofs of their houses, helpless as they watch the bus explode.

Because Wild Thorns focuses on the relations between Palestinian men who have stayed in Palestine and those who have gone to Kuwait, it bears comparison with Ghassan Kanafani's best known story Al-rijal fi al-shams (Men in the sun, 1963). His protagonists also have chosen between these two specific places. Kanafani condemns escape from Palestine; he does not confront and weigh the merits and risks of remaining, because in 1963 he does not yet have the hindsight to deal with the paradoxes Khalifa raises. The answer, Khalifa writes, lies neither with Usama nor with 'Adil who each consider the other responsible for action as well as for failures. Her pessimism questions the earlier male-authored text that posits one way as superior to the other.

The second volume, Sunflower (1985b [1979]), also anticipates the Intifada.^[24] The novel is written in a lyrical style with characters repeating themselves in insistent refrains that satirize and condemn the one who speaks. This novel chronicles the lives of three women. Each is without a male protector. Each is, therefore, socially suspect. Rafif, the journalist, struggles with her need for 'Adil. The peasant Sa'adiya, Zuhdi's widow, works inside. Khadra is a prostitute.

Sunflower reiterates a central concern of Wild Thorns: it is great "for people to dream of a better world, but it is greater for them not to lose contact with the facts of their present world so that they should not float like bubbles on the surface of stagnant water" (Khalifa 1985b [1979], 40). The men in this book are the bubbles: the journalists—'Adil, Badi, and Salim—are mouthpieces for ideologies that range from a pure Arabism through an idealized internationalism to a romanticized collaboration with the Israeli intellectual left. 'Adil, in particular, has become self-important, "contradictory and vacillating, making generalizations without applying specifics" (17). These leftist intellectuals have no program, just the need to identify and exclude all who are not "politically correct." Those who have kept "contact with the facts of their present world" are the women. From the first page they appear as strong and rebellious. Rafif, 'Adil's colleague and lover, calls for a women's revolution that "is not a people's revolution against another's exploitation, nor the revolution of the oppressed majority against the oppressing minority, nor a revolution against a ruling system. Rather, it is a revolution against a social, economic, religious and ethical system" (211).^[25] Rafif may be right, but her defiance remains abstractly theoretical: an entreaty to take women seriously and to include them in the political process. Khalifa criticizes feminists like Rafif who are as simplistically ideological and programmatic as the men. Rafif's claim to speak on behalf of what she considers to be voiceless women is exposed by Sa'adiya: when the journalist wants to interview her after she has lost her land, Sa'adiya refuses, asking her how she thinks she can understand when she has "no children, has not lost a husband, land, sewing machines, or needles" (268).

Rafif recognizes Sa'adiya's charges as identical to those she herself makes to male colleagues, and this realization renders her believable and vulnerable. She is not a transparent symbol, but rather an individual torn between political agendas, social realities, and personal weakness. Her mood depends on 'Adil's treatment: when he is cruel and indifferent, she is anguished but rebellious, when he is loving she is seduced. She knows that "all her decisions were made subject to him. . . . Where was her freedom as an independent woman?" (108, 112). Love presents her with a paradox: she has to balance the need to be free of her slavery while holding on to the power of her emotions because revolution, she says once, "is impossible without emotions" (256). Rafif never does manage to balance her love with her political goals, which include introducing a women's page into Al-Balad , their failing newspaper. Her feminist scheme is no better than those of her male colleagues.

Is Sa'adiya's untutored, instinctive feminist behavior more effective? 'Adil refers to Sa'adiya as a "strong woman who could challenge her circumstances and her environment and stand on her own two feet" (23). After Zuhdi is killed, she has to fend for herself, while guarding herself against suspicions directed at single, particularly beautiful, women. Widowhood for Sa'adiya means becoming the "land without a guardian" (30). Independence means freedom from male ownership and therefore openness to suspicion of immorality.^[26] Sa'adiya has to learn how to survive in what had until then been a man's world. To that end, she constructs herself outside the mold, and this exceptionality has to be seen as male: "She sees the women in the accursed windows looking at her with envy. She feels as though she had become a man, or half a man. So her step became firm . . . [she] was no longer merely a woman. She was the mother, the father, and the miserable woman moving between home and Tel Aviv" (35, 66). Since becoming a "man," Sa'adiya sees clearly for the first time with her own eyes. Reconstructing the past in light of her new awareness, as do the protagonists of other women's war fiction, she discovers that her late beloved husband had always tried to possess her. Society sanctioned his mastery because he was a man and for no other reason: "I'm a man, Woman." he had once said. "Women are for the home

and that's it" (25). The absence of a male to define her as his other shakes this rigid categorization. When Shahada—a peasant-made-good business colleague—propositions her, she immediately rejects the familiar urge to control (69, 73). When he calls her Sa'adiya, she retorts angrily: "First of all, I'm Umm Hamada and not Sa'adiya. Second, I'm not a woman. I'm like you. I have a business. Third, no one is responsible for me but God and I. Understand?" (73). She invokes a female and a male identity: as Umm Hamada she commands the respect due a mother, as a business person she demands equality. In this melding of her two gender identities she escapes the control of her society. Only God is responsible for her now.

Sa'adiya is no simple symbol of sumud . She dreams of a house on a plot of ground that she can call her own and where she can live, but it must be away from people. Her need to be alone on the land subverts accepted notions of "non-departure"—a form of behavior more fully elaborated by Palestinian women in southern Lebanon in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion. Staying on the land is not enough, as her son assures her, she must stay with her people. Sa'adiya's masculinity is not consciously constructed to create an alternative model for women's participation. It is a survival mechanism that does not affect her socialized attitude to other women without male guardianship. When she meets Khadra the prostitute, Sa'adiya ironically wishes her a mahram (a male guardian) to control her excesses (71–72), giving no thought to her own ambivalence in regard to male-female relations.

The political situation forces Sa'adiya to become involved. Her land that she had planned to be the site for her dream home is confiscated. She joins her people in their communal struggle. She can no longer remain alone on the margin. During the Nablus demonstrations, Sa'adiya fears for her son whom the Israelis have detained. She joins a group of women who have lost their sons and who are training their children to throw stones at the Israelis: "Stones, Pebbles. Clods of earth. Shrapnel. Glass. Women's screams. Beatings. Stones. Slings. Children climbing up and down the wall" (278). Together the women advance on the walls of the schoolyard where the young men are being held. When an officer

appears, Sa'adiya breaks away from the women and rushes toward him. He beats her but she does not give up, "clinging to his chest: 'My son!' A second blow. A third. She drew back a few paces and then . . . the attack. She kicked him between the legs with all the hate and bitterness and anger of a pained heart" (278). Inspired by her example, the other women start to throw stones and glass. The sons take advantage of the turmoil their mothers have caused and they climb over the walls. When the collaborationist mayor tries to stop the women, telling them to go home so that he can work, the women attack him also. Their ultimate insult was to call these men "women." Yet these revolutionary women were not in any way like the women these collaborators had become (279).^[27] The world may not have heard of the Intifada until 1987 but it is clear from this exposé by a twentieth-century Arab Cassandra that its roots had already sunk deep.

If there is a model revolutionary woman in this novel then it may be Khadra, the prostitute. She is afraid of nothing. Khadra has been so thoroughly beaten that she has nothing more to fear. She has her own set of moral rules that sanction dishonesty and theft (92, 99). She teaches Sa'adiya to kick all men between the legs even if she can see no immediate benefit. As we have already seen, Sa'adiya puts this lesson to good use. Khadra's daring is not empty bravado, it empowers women so that they do the undoable and attack the Israelis and collaborators and they can say the unsayable: "They say that we women are each worth five shillings. By God, each of us is worth ten men" (166).

The social outcast–revolutionary Khadra poses a dilemma: how can a Palestinian woman act independently, fight, survive within the community , and make sure that her actions will continue to count? In her next novel, Mudhakkirat imra'a ghayr waqi'iya (Memoirs of an unrealistic woman, 1986), Khalifa explores how individual transformation can take place and what the consequences might be.^[28] What happens to women who create themselves outside the norms of social expectations? How can they deal with their intense self-awareness and yet continue to function effectively? In this lyrical novel written as an internal monologue, Khalifa joins other postcolonial writers—Gloria Anzaldúa, an

American of Mexican descent, is another—who are trying to construct an oppositional consciousness and borderlands practice that may be safe from co-optation by the dominant discourse. As they do, Khalifa uses the female body as the site for an experiment that would melt the boundaries rigidly dividing what is said to be distinct but is in fact mixed and ambiguous. Memoris is what Anzaldúa would call "a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images that connect us to each other and to the planet" (Anzaldúa 1987, 81).

This new story is about connections: "There is no fixed boundary between people, animals, plants, and inanimate objects. All are things in my opinion. People are things? May God forgive me, but things are people. I mean things are worlds, people are worlds. The world of people, the world of cats, the world of apples, the world of stories and songs, all are worlds" (Khalifa 1986, 9). The old story had been about separation and clear categories: "I am the daughter of the supervisor and remained thus until I became a merchant's wife. Sometimes I'm both. When the husband mocks me, he calls me 'the supervisor's daughter,' and when the father gets angry, he calls me 'the merchant's woman.' The truth is that I was happy to be the supervisor's daughter because the supervisor is a symbol of knowledge, dignity, and authority over all teachers" (5). 'Afaf, whose name means chastity, is a commodity whose identity changes with its owner; the only difference that marriage makes is to prove that she is a "salable commodity" (40). But it is only in the preface that she unemotionally accepts such reification, for this is the frame structure that the rest of the narrative serves to subvert.

'Afaf rejects such notions of femininity that allow her no agency, because a thing cannot act. She tries to learn how not to be a girl, both physically and socially, and how to become an androgyne: "I am a girl but because of my anxiety at their anxieties I behaved like a boy and so became something between both. Because I wanted to gain respect, I refused my fundamental characteristic and became an 'androgyne' [khanata ]: neither male or female. That's what I heard the old women of the family say about me as they smiled and frowned, encouraged and warned. . . . My identity became more and more confused" (6).^[29] She has become what Anzaldúa calls

the "forerunner of a new race, / half and half—both woman and man, neither—/ a new gender." This new race, this new gender is ahead of its time whether its habitat be the West Bank or the American Southwest because both are borderlands where life is war, "where enemies are kin to each other;/ you are at home, a stranger / . . . you are wounded, lost in action / dead, fighting back" (Anzaldúa 1987, 194). How hard it is to fight back when at every instant the complex self that 'Afaf creates is flattened back into the woman-body equivalence that makes her a "criminal who has committed no crime" (Khalifa 1986, 49). To prevent such an eventuality, like Sa'adiya she acts like a man, pulling back her hair severely and adopting a military step (24). But however hard she tries, she cannot always prevent people from noticing her: her body has turned her into a prey, sometimes paralyzing her so that she "stays in bed sick without sickness" (15)—the allusion to Betty Friedan is unmistakable.

'Afaf tries to create a new self that will escape the prison of easy labels. This new self is not dyadic. In a world that recognizes black and white only, she is neither female nor male, revolutionary nor bourgeois,^[30] free nor bound, married nor unmarried, active nor passive. The self-authored 'Afaf inhabits the borderlands that link the oppositions defining her life. It is there that she can "dream different stories" (17), like the ones her grandmother had told, stories whose heroine she might become. Stories, paintings, and dreams are the escape valves from a harsh reality. 'Afaf tries to make sense of her new identity that is splintered between socialized construction, self-perception, and self-production. Recognizing her body to be the source of social censure, she changes it. At one point, it turns into "a human envelope" curled around a red apple—later referred to as religion (218)—her father insists she eat. She refuses because she cannot consume herself. No one can understand how she and the apple-religion had become inextricably intertwined, and their destruction of the apple necessarily destroys part of her: "They skinned the apple from me. I saw a huge knife slaughter it and cut it to pieces. I saw my mother strip off the apple's red skin and I pictured blood and was afraid and hated" (10–11). She finds renewal in another thing, this time in a cat she finds in a garbage

can. The cat is not merely a companion, it becomes part of her to the extent that she calls herself half-cat, half-woman: the androgyne becomes Egyptian goddess! Addressing her image in a mirror, she says: "They say you are deceitful and cunning. I say something else. I say that I know you because I know myself. I know myself in you. The self that is revealed in the night mirror. My imagination that lives in the unconscious. My freedom lost in the conscious and unconscious. I am you. So let me begin to draw. A woman with a cat's imagination" (43). 'Afaf uses this real/reflection cat to construct herself other than others expect. But this mythical construction does not affect reality. As long as the context remains unchanged, her own transformation will have no impact. It is not enough for her to change, she must learn how to apply art to life so as to transform reality.

The contradictions of living in the borderlands may become too much to bear unless a way is found to make them less raw. 'Afaf accommodates her new gender by ironically creating another binary between body and mind: "The body was exploited, but the mind was escaping. . . . I knew that in the darkest hours and in the smallest prison cells I could open the window in my head and escape through it into a world full of joy, dancing, singing, and smiling faces filled with emotions. Storybook people came alive and I interacted with them to the point that I became a complete part of their world. . . . Through art I loved people more" (131–32).

In this artist's biography we witness a woman choosing the route espoused by a number of women writers during the Lebanese civil war (Cooke 1988, chapter 8). 'Afaf discovers art as a political tool. Whereas the women in Lebanon used art as a raison d'être that supersedes that of wife and mother so as to find a way to prioritize self above selflessness, Khalifa shows 'Afaf turning to art in an attempt to change reality as she changes herself. While painting she disembodies herself and creates herself and those with whom she comes into contact as being interdependent: "I have my own world on whose colors, melodies, and perfume I fly. At night, when people sleep I draw dozens of drawings and create dozens of faces" (Khalifa 1986, 18). Real people offer less companionship than do her creations: "I exchanged the living for dead, empty canvases which my imagination filled with humans" (60).

'Afaf's relationship with art remains ambivalent. It gives her freedom from convention, while alienating her from those whose loves she craves. At school, a friend turns from her in jealousy because of it. At home, her parents and then her husband misunderstand and despise her creations. They condemn her talent as madness, exhorting her always to be realistic. But theirs is not a reality that she cares to share. Others may despise and even try to destroy what she produces, but she knows that she must continue to create, to fashion herself and by extension her universe too, however imperfectly, in terms of her fluctuating needs. It is this self-centered and self-conscious process that gives her the only possible control over her life.

Self-control entails rejection of social norms. She laughs at the women who ululate with joy when the new-born boy urinates his "cologne" onto all and sundry. She determines to "be a woman who gets her way exactly as men do. A woman who wants, desires, and feels. Who uses her husband the way husbands use their wives. Who treats him the way men treat prositutes" (30). Above all, she refuses to be quiet even though "speech was forbidden" (27). 'Afaf knows what she must do but not how. When she becomes pregnant she quickly arranges an abortion, hoping that ridding herself of her husband's child would also rid her of the man and her own complicity in the perpetuation of the cycle (33). For her motherhood, especially in war, is destructive.^[31] Her family subverts even this decision: so as to ensure her remaining within society, her deed had to be reconstructed as involuntary and above all passive. They announce that 'Afaf has had a miscarriage; she did not do anything to her body, her body did something to her. Like other women protagonists of Arab war fiction, 'Afaf's reaction to such pressure is silence.^[32] This silence is called madness: "I was always afraid of crying in front of people. Yet I did. . . . A thing I learned during those years in prison was to control my sobs until I reached the bathroom. I didn't learn shame but fear. Fear of the word 'mad'" (12), even when uttered by a despised husband's whiskey-laden tongue.

Madness is the label for behavior that cannot be categorized or, better, controlled. With time art becomes her madness: "I became drawing crazy and took refuge in my colors. It was said that

drawing was the secret of my madness so I increased my madness by drawing. . . . I was convinced of my madness because I constantly heard them apply that word to me" (58). Jane Marcus explains that this labeling of madness is often applied to women in war and she calls those spaces of silence and cleansing into which such women retreat the "asylums of Antaeus." The asylums are "the real and imagined places where the contradictions of her state-enforced roles drive woman mad (where she fights fetishization and fails). She speaks out of the confusion and fear derived from this condition in a doubled voice" (Marcus 1989, 135).

'Afaf had always been called mad. As a child, she changed the meanings of others' labels. When her father called her hawa'iy , meaning capricious and lacking in respect, she returned to the root of the word and, finding hawa' meaning "air," translated his criticism into praise: she was light as air. But with time she learned that subversive translations were not effective when they remained uninstitutionalized into dominant discourse. For the others, hawa'iya lies midway between two poles of unacceptable behavior for women. In a typical stringing of adjectives, Khalifa lays out the natural progression in society's condemnation of women's power: "strong, obstinate, capricious [hawa'iya ], freakish, mad" (Khalifa 1986, 58). 'Afaf's strength is dangerous and must be curbed with the label of hawa'iya , which is only two steps removed from madness. The act of naming empowers the namer. 'Afaf cannot ignore the power of the name and finds herself caught in her own act of defiance. As a "mad woman," she exists in a freedom that is ineffective because it is a freedom to act outside society. She has gained control of her body but cannot find a space beyond herself in which, thus transformed, she may act effectively. Finally, she has to face the fact that whether she constructs herself as masculine, feminine or androgynous, society treats her as a woman. Her urine will never become "cologne"; she must marry, even though marriage is a prison, and remain married; she must play the domestic game to the end: "Is there no place for a woman outside her house?" (22, 45, 47). There is a hint that she may not be willing to tolerate this domesticity indefinitely when she links "laundry, dishes, kitchen" with "knife" (60, 70). Stringing them together

reveals a deadly desire. How long will she remain within her society's prison and consider it home?

Why should she want to keep such ties? Why not put herself outside a society that she recognizes as harmful to her humanity? Because she loves her country with the love of a child for her mother (74, 80, 99–100). In an extended passage, she describes her mother and herself and the land as coextensive. Her mother retains the spirit of Palestine "before the Occupation, the arrests, and the prisons [when] things were better, or, perhaps, we thought they were better." By remaining thus frozen in time, steeped in tradition and the perfume of cardamom, her mother takes her to a time when dreaming was not escaping and therefore not abjuring responsibility. 'Afaf can remain a child of this mother, this land, or she can grow up and escape the cozy cocoon. She challenges women's implication in the preservation of a reality destructive to women. Reality for 'Afaf is the tension between perceiving her mother as symbol of the land—the highest good—but also of unchanging values destructive to women as well as her desire to remain such a woman's daughter. This reality drives her to madness. Yet she must not submit to this madness lest she lose political effectiveness. She realizes that exercising her freedom to be other than people expect and opting out of the gender prison seems to imply rejection of the political struggle. Hers is not a passive decision—in war no decisions are passive—but an active decision to do nothing. Everything she does has impact on her society and on its ability to act and react appropriately to outside threats. She must continue to search for a way to be who she wants to be and to achieve a fully integrated identity, while retaining the power to act in her society. 'Afaf's introspection provides a multifaceted model for a woman's self-construction during war. This model mirrors a new fragmented reality, a new vision of the future.

But it is only a vision. Instead of closure to the quest in the next novel, Bab al-Saha (1990a)—appearing fourteen years after the publication of Khalifa's first war novel, Wild Thorns —returns to the theme of men's unsuccessful ways of fighting.^[33] The intervening years have changed nothing. The men have not learned from the martial models offered by the women and the children. They must

recognize that the women had managed to keep the Israelis at bay for twenty years and that they may still hold the key to success. It is at their own peril that the men are not attending to women's ways of resisting. Yet they do not; they still leave for the Gulf and the United States with promises to return and restore Palestine. Their parents still condemn their staying as folly. They continue to score small victories that the Israelis quickly undo. Again, they are killed in ideological actions. Like 'Afaf's father in Memoirs , they care more about sharaf (honor connected with women's chastity) than they do about 'ird (honor pertaining to dignity).^[34] They consider loss of 'ird by working in Israel to be less heinous than loss of sharaf ; a brother is more concerned to kill his sister who has been forced into "prostitution" than he is to recognize her contribution to the struggle. Despite all that the women have achieved, the men cannot see them except as transgressing bodies. It is not that the women in Bab al-Saha are any less strong and assertive than Khalifa's other women protagonists, it is just that the transformation in the social context has not taken place.

The Intifada that in its 1967–87 phase epitomized the hyperspace of the postmodern battlefield was already in its waging being reformulated in the image of the conventional front. Khalifa demonstrates how the binaries that had been shown to be false were being reinscribed, and how some women were resisting this reinscription: "The women fought with their hands and with pots. They exchanged insults. They fought with the soldiers in their nightclothes, their hair unkempt" (Khalifa 1990a, 135). As in Sunflower , there are three women protagonists: another prostitute, Nuzha; another intellectual of sorts, Samar; but instead of the self-sufficient businesswoman Sa'adiya, who lives on the margins of society, the third woman, Zakiya, is a pious midwife who is described as the "alley cornerstone and everyone's mother" (26). This somber and ironic novel proclaims that the Intifada—despite widespread claims concerning women's involvement and empowerment—has changed nothing in women's lives except their level of anxiety: "Their previous worries remained unchanged and countless others have been added" (20; cf. 73, 126).

Nuzha, the so-called prostitute, is again the strongest character in the novel. After comrades kill her mother, who was suspected of

being a collaborator, and her brother apparently leaves, Nuzha has to sustain herself. Her options are limited: first, in a bakery; next, at Studio Zizi; finally, marriage at age fifteen to a loathsome man (94–107). She becomes politically active with her boyfriend, but after an assignment he escapes and she is incarcerated. In the Ramallah prison she finds herself "lost among Israeli women criminals and Arab women politicians. Yet she was neither a Jewish prostitute nor was she an Arab politician" (148–49). Upon her release everyone, including the pious Zakiya, rejects her. She is thus a double victim, first of the Israeli jailers and then of Palestinian men. As Samira Haj writes, Israelis have long known how to use the values attached to Palestinian women's sexuality to intimidate the society as a whole. Even before the Intifada, but especially since its outbreak, Israeli soldiers were reported to have sexually harassed and raped women in order to "pressure and neutralize Palestinian activists. As of last summer [1991], there had been an alarming number of reports of 'fallen women' who had turned collaborators; women who had been sexually assaulted were then threatened with exposure, forcing them to cooperate with and report to Israeli intelligence on political activists in their communities" (Haj 1992, 771). Sisters are particularly useful targets because of the code that demands of a brother that he avenge the family honor, even at the cost of his sister's life. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that Nuzha's brother Ahmad returns to the square of Bab al-Saha not to take his sister to America, as she had expected, but to discharge his duty.

Nuzha's character and behavior give the lie to people's accusations that she is a prostitute, daughter of a collaborator. Even had this been true, Nuzha's perspicacity shows that such labels serve only to divide the community against itself and to undermine its ability to resist. As long as women continue to be valued for the sexual purity of their bodies and not for their effective participation in the resistance, the nation will remain at the mercy of outsiders who know how to manipulate the culture against itself.

Nuzha saves Zakiya's nephew, Husam, when he is wounded and has no safe house (Khalifa 1990a, 109–10). One by one, the women come to her previously shunned house, and it seems that Khalifa is preparing a utopian scenario. Illusions of a women's community

dissipate when Zakiya's sister-in-law arrives. Umm 'Azzam's search for Zakiya forces her to enter the prostitute's house. She begs for help against her husband. This is the turning point. Zakiya remembers her own similar pleas to Umm 'Azzam years ago; she also remembers her sister-in-law's repudiation of her, and she returns to Umm 'Azzam the advice the other woman had given her years ago: go back to your husband, it was probably your fault (159–67). Attitudes have not changed, therefore social relations also cannot change.

The women in Bab al-Saha are not as independent as the women in Sunflower . They may live alone but everything they do is in terms of others, particularly men. Nuzha laments her brother's departure and longs for him to return so that they might leave (147). When he does return it is not to save her but to kill her (179–81). She escapes him and then he is shot. At that point, she openly embraces him and mourns his loss. She tends the wounded fighter Husam with care and affection. He has been the first man to acknowledge her humanity, even though only when he was weak and dependent. After initial gratification, especially at receiving a second poem dedicated to her as "symbol of the land," she bursts out: "Even in this house I'm a human being. I have a heart and a soul and I'll do a lot for those I love. . . . Yesterday I was Mother. Now, I'm the Land. Tomorrow, of course, I shall be Symbol. I'm a human being. . . . I'm not a symbol. I'm a woman" (176). Nuzha may be angry to be reduced to a symbol, but something has happened between her and Husam. Husam realizes that during his time with Nuzha he has grown up (171). This recognition of a possible change in himself through his relationship with a woman who has fought in her own way is the only glimmer of hope of a change in societal attitudes that Bab al-Saha holds out.^[35]

Samar is a tough fighter who has stood up to Israeli soldiers but she cannot stand up to her brother (136). Even when she is in a position of power she does not exploit her advantage. As Sadiq is dragging Samar back home after curfew forced her to spend nine nights at Nuzha's house, a patrol passes. Sadiq is afraid because he does not have his identity card on him and he turns to his sister, suddenly gentle in his hour of need. Samar is first gleeful, then sad,

and finally protective: she stands in front of him so that the Israelis should not see him. The man is saved by the woman's body, yet he will not remember because he did not understand. When Nuzha's brother Ahmad comes to take Husam to the mountains, Samar wants to accompany them, but Ahmad snaps at her that she will become like his sister. In other words, he cannot think of the woman fighter except as a camp follower (196).^[36]

But it is this despised sister who is the heroine, even if an unconventional one. When he is shot and the women see that Ahmad is dead, they emit ululations as though at a wedding. Nuzha remains silent, in shock. The women ask her: "Why are you quiet? Where are your ululations?" Nuzha stares at the women in confusion: "Get them away from me! Get them away!" A peasant woman shouted, "Congratulations, Palestine. Congratulations on your new groom!" (209). The women are furious when Nuzha angrily refuses to celebrate the marriage of the cadaver with the earth.^[37] At Ahmad's wake, Nuzha sits frozen next to the coffin, staring at the ceiling, and all pronounce her mad. Madness, as we have seen before, is a woman's reality in war. Madness is a state for which society has no name.^[38] In this case, however, it allows her to function effectively because she has an audience to witness what she is doing. They, like Husam, are compelled to learn that women's ways of fighting are also ways of surviving for everyone.

The novel ends with a riot. Some young men decide that they want to break into the square, Bab al-Saha, take over the Israeli command post, and burn the flag. One by one, they climb to the top of the wall, where they are predictably shot down. After twenty have climbed to their deaths, become "grooms" to Palestine, Nuzha quietly suggests a better way to enter the square. She leads them through her kitchen—a powerful domestic symbol—to an underground passage that leads into the heart of the square: "Within a few moments, crowds of women poured out of the earth" (222). The young girl who was in the lead with the flag in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other is shot. Nuzha, as though in a trance, goes to the girl's body. The novel ends with her lighting the cocktail, "not for the ghula [Palestine] but for Ahmad" (222). She will probably share the fate of her predecessor, but she will have

had the time to light and then cast the explosive. Why does Nuzha turn this heroic suicide into an act of revenge for a brother who wanted to kill her? Is it that family, however bad, matters more to women than politics? Or is there another explanation? Nuzha knows that women's activism is doomed to co-optation, and that her blowing up of the command post must eventually be called personal revenge. She keeps control of the naming process, and then, perhaps, others may see that the personal is also political, and that the political is doomed without the feminine personal.^[39] But maybe she is lighting the Molotov for Ahmed because, whatever his intentions, he was a Palestinian fighter and his death demands revenge. She, a woman, thus takes on the role quintessentially that of the Arab men, to avenge a kinsman's death. Another interpretation is that this novel bears out the growing belief that once the scattered intifadas coalesced into an organized movement led by men, it lost much of its momentum.

After Bab al-Saha , Khalifa published a short story entitled "Our Fate, Our House," which tells in a few words but in graphic detail what happens to a family that determines to stay in the downtown of Nablus. They refuse family and friends who urge them to leave for safer places. What matters is to remain in their house. Finally soldiers break in and demand that the sons be brought forward. Umm Samih tells her husband to go to the kitchen so that she may take care of the soldiers; meanwhile, her daughter is blocking access to her brother's room. Finally, the soldiers throw caution to the winds and they beat the women. While they are thus occupied, the son escapes. The story ends with Umm Samih bruised but triumphant.

Contrasting Resistances

Writing at two different times of national crisis, Najwa Qa'war Farah, Fadwa Tuqan, and Sahar Khalifa each imagine ways in which the society might become stronger. Each of these writers is concerned at the poor status and situation of women, yet each carefully chooses her moment to articulate that concern. Each recognizes that women's disadvantaged positions have a negative

impact on Palestinian society and its ability to resist. Although Farah criticized the class and gender hierarchy of pre-Israel Palestinian society, after the war of 1948 she writes to express solidarity in crisis. She tries instead to understand what is happening to her people. Such writing gained her literary acceptance—an important consideration at a time when cultural conservatism seemed to be the best, if only, form of political action. In contrast, Tuqan's autobiography and Khalifa's post-1967 novels are less concerned with solidarity than with change; how to change readers' expectations of how men should behave in society and at home.

These women of course write for women also. Whenever Farah does so her intention is to control change. Like the Algerian women during their revolution, Farah does not see the war as an opportunity for women. Indeed, she warns against its temptations. When Khalifa targets women her goal is changed. She wants to teach women how to transform themselves. Memoirs in particular subtly leads the reader through the minefields of oppositional agency and self-construction. Its clear, abiding message is not to accept a black and white world. Conflicts will never be resolved by a violence that pits opposites against each other. The solutions are in the hands of women who have invented a new kind of fighting. Now they must create a new kind of writing that might participate in the resistance.

Sahar Khalifa goes beyond the reflection of experience in war to script the female body as the site for the struggle to establish the possibility of women's literary agency in the time and space of war. As a woman, she appropriates a discursive space presumed to be closed to her. In that appropriation, she shows the hollowness but also the relentlessness of men's attempts to create for the war a structure, that of the War Story. Because she is not expected to write, she does not have to mold her experiences in terms of a necessary preexisting form. She is free to represent the war as lived and not as prescribed. She can even describe this chaotic space as productive. Like the women who wrote of the Lebanese civil war, the Beirut Decentrists, she reacts to the chaos by producing new discursive structures. The Beirut Decentrists challenged male writers' description of the war as a revolution, in other words, as one group's organized refusal of another group's imagined community.

They offered instead descriptions of the minutiae of normless survival. Because they understood that experience is meaningless until it is given expression, they were able to transform meaning. They labeled anomie war, postcolonial war. They described the waiting woman (the noncombatant) in a Beirut apartment (home front) as a combatant at the front. They demonstrated that survival in war was no longer a passive fact but a resisting act (Cooke 1988). The Beirut Decentrists' literary mapping of a postcolonial war is reflected in Palestinian women's writings on the Intifada. They pen the breakdown of binary structures in the individual and in society. They demand that the notions of private and public under military occupation be imagined anew to accommodate the new battlefield that is neither home nor front but both and neither at the same time.

Khalifa's work paints the canvas of postcolonial warfare in which men and even some women fight ideologically, fragmentedly, and schizophrenically. Some women, however, offer new cognitive maps. Khalifa is adamant that women should not be separatist or in any way ideological, for that would be a way of emulating the men. She advocates a politicized domesticity and motherhood that keep women in their traditional roles that they thus transform. Her writing exemplifies what Rita Giacaman and Penny Johnson describe in the political arena: "Women, and particularly those not already originally identified with a political movement or group, have enlarged or extended their traditional role rather than adopting a completely new role . . . particularly defense of family. . . . These aspects of women's roles have become a source of resistance because women have transformed their family responsibilities to encompass the entire community" (Giacaman and Johnson 1989, 161).^[40]

Khalifa resists the power of male war discourse that constantly strives to recuperate a threatened masculinity by co-opting women's agency. She warns that without a revolution in men's attitudes nothing will change. Women will have invested much in return for little. The women's revolution must work hand in hand with the nationalist revolution because neither can succeed without the success of the other . Khalifa takes note of what women in Algeria and Lebanon have and have not written. She is confronting both Algerian and Lebanese models: fear of the Algerian women's post-

conflict disempowerment; aspiration to the utopian inscription of feminist mobilization into Lebanese war discourse. Yet Khalifa shows that Lebanese women's discursive activism, fashioned to counteract the debilitating effects of Algerian women's voicelessness, was just that: discursive. Khalifa's novels ask what is appropriate, effective resistance. How may activism be connected to its interpretation so that discourse itself can become an agent of change? How can literature become a nonviolent way to participate in the nationalist movement as a feminist activist?

The challenge to hold on to the memory of what they have done and to retain the right to express this activism and to assign it meaning is an on-going struggle for Palestinian women. But does it really matter if women's writings on national resistance are suppressed? Of course it does. Writing is more than an affirmation of having done something. Writing is a self-constitutive practice. As much as the act of standing up to tanks, of throwing stones, of languishing in prison, writing contains and produces its subject, linking the resister with the resisting writer that she always already is. As Roland Barthes wrote in his pioneering essay Writing Degree Zero (1978 [1953]), writing is not merely a transitive verb that mediates the act and its expression; it is intransitive in that it describes the underlying possibility of its own and its author's coming into being. Writing "represents the writer's descent into the sticky opacity of the condition that he is describing" (Barthes 1978 [1953], 81).^[41] Writing is central to democratic practice. When it is neglected, worse when it is actively suppressed, not only the words are erased and the writer is denied, but the citizens as subject, object, and pretext of the writing act are disenfranchised.