An excerpt from the novel The Inheritance Translated by Aida Bamia

Part One
Without Inheritance

I went to the West Bank looking for him, looking for them, searching for my face in the land of exile. I wanted to know how it would look. I had received a letter from a man saying that my father was somewhere, in other words that he was alive. He said that he was my father’s brother from Wadi al-Rihan.

A huge gap separates Wadi al-Rihan from New York and Washington. I always visualized Wadi al-Rihan as being the opposite of New York, a small clean town, inhabited by simple people, good-hearted and nature loving. Whenever I heard my father talk about the place that evening, I would run down the stairs, shouting “We’re going back home, we are going back, we are going back”. But we never did because my father ran away, or to be accurate I ran away.

The story began in New York, when my father came from his village and married an American woman, my mother of course, and as a result he acquired a green card (he became a resident alien). Then came the divorce, predictably, then the grocery store and other wives and an army of children. Prior to the grocery store my father sold small items which he carried on his back, going from house to house. He sold all kinds of merchandise, regardless of its origin, as products of the Holy Land. He would fill small bottles with water and sand and call in the streets: “Holy water and holy sand from the holy river . . . do you know Jordan, Madam? Holy water and the baptism of Jesus Christ. Is there a baptism in the family?”

“Yes, we have many baptisms, we have baptisms every day,” replies the lady of the house.

“I am from Jerusalem and I brought water from the Jordan river,” says my father.

He had trouble speaking English but managed to communicate in a typical Middle Eastern smart manner. He would display his merchandise of shiny clothes, pins and threads and say to the American housewife: “Look, lady, how beautiful it is! This caftan is hand-embroidered in Arabia, far away, do you know Arabia? The land of sand and camels, dates and incense, gum and the Qur’an. Do you know Mecca?”

The American housewife, seduced by the exotic appearance of the man and his merchandise answers with great enthusiasm: “Oh! Mecca! Arabia! Of course, of course, let me see, let me see.”

“Easy on them, lady, see this, and this and this.”

Then, as if by pure coincidence, he stumbles on something of little importance, an old faded photo of al-Hussain the first. He asks her: “Do you see this, lady? It is my father’s photo, he was a great prince, but died. A Bedouin tribe seized his emirate while I was still a young boy. I ran away to Jerusalem, then to Cairo and then to Marrakesh. From there I took a boat to America. Do you see, lady, I am a poor beggar while my father was a great prince.”

The lady stares at the photo with eyes wide open and seeing a noble face, a white beard and a large turban on his head, she is deeply moved and repeats: “Oh dear! Oh dear!"

My father says again, broken-hearted: “Do you see, lady, I’m a poor beggar while my father was a great prince”.

“No, no, never!” objects the lady. Her eyes moving between him and the picture, she comments: “No, no, never, you are not a beggar.” Looking at him again, she stares at his black eyes and his glittering dark moustache and whispers to herself in amazement, “His father was certainly a prince, and he looks like a prince too”.

“I bet anything you are a prince!”

At that very moment he wraps a piece of silk round his head and, standing in front of her, asks her flirtatiously: “Like so?”

Visibly moved, the lady shouts: “Oh! Goodness me, I can’t believe it. I bet anything you are a true prince!”

He rushes toward her, saying: “You too are a princess, a Sultana, the goddess of beauty and charm, I swear by God Almighty!”

He then takes another piece of silk, ties it around her waist and swears by the Prophet Mohammad, master of all Prophets and Messengers, that she looks exactly like Sheharazad, with all her majesty and glory she is even the jewel of all Arabs and Muslims, amen. He swears three times to divorce his wife if he is wrong. He repeats it over and over again and every time he says: “Let’s try this one again, one more time, one more time.”

This is how he was able to sell Hong Kong merchandise as products of the Holy Land made by deposed princes such as himself. In a few years he was able to open a grocery store in Brooklyn containing everything one could imagine.

He was naturally successful, not because of his knowledge of English and his fluency in the language, but rather because of his eyes and his moustache and his ability to make up stories and invent dreams.

I was born to inherit all this and I became a renowned writer in the field of anthropology and civilization; in other words, I am an anthropologist. Yet, before becoming what I am now, I made use of my father’s tricks. The story began when I felt the pain of my budding breasts in my chest. My stepmother said that it was a hereditary chronic illness in the family. The illness progressed to a point that it made me peep through keyholes and windows that were ajar.

One day, while I was standing on the roof spying on two lovers kissing in the dark and learning from them, my father caught me red-handed. I had no choice but to invent a story about my fasting and waiting on the roof for the call to prayer. I asked him innocently what time the sun set for iftar in order to break my fast. I explained that I was waiting for Bilal's call to prayer.

Bilal was our senile and clumsy neighbour preparing to convert America to Islam by making the call to prayer every day, five times a day. My father looked at me, perplexed, but chose to believe me. I even believed myself and almost choked with tears of hunger. I said in a strangled voice: “I’m hungry, I’m very hungry!”

At night I heard my father reprimand his wife, saying “Show some mercy, the girl is killing herself with this fasting! See how small and thin she is! Is it acceptable that she prays five times a day, fasts the whole month of Ramadan and makes up for missed days?”

My stepmother turned in bed causing the springs to crack under her huge weight and said to my father: “Isn’t that what you want her to do?”

He replied anxiously: “Me! And also to make up for the missed days!”

She said angrily: “What? What missed days? Why? Pray, tell me, do you think that your daughter really fasts? She eats like locusts. She would swallow me without bicarbonate of soda. Before lunch she gobbled up seven heads of corn at one go. I tried to stop her but failed. My God, how stubborn she is and how unbearable. She’s headstrong, a liar, crazy; she never tells the truth. May God protect us from her. I am afraid she will do something like Hoda and embarrass us in the neighborhood.”

Hoda was the daughter of our neighbors living in the same complex. Like me she was half American. She became pregnant at fifteen and we all saw her father run after her in the street like a raging bull, carrying his longest knife. My father tried to stop him, but he could not. Finally, with the help of two neighbors they were able to prevent him from killing her. My father constantly said, whenever he had the chance: “He should have killed her . . . she sullied his name, stained his honor and humiliated him among his people. Had I been in his place I would have gone after her to Hell.”

Hoda was able to escape, however, and took refuge in her American grandmother’s house. We did not see her in Brooklyn again. From then on we began to hear rumors, some said she kept the baby, others said that she gave him up for adoption, yet others said that she had an abortion. Regardless of all the rumors, everyone agreed that Hoda’s father was no longer a man.

I heard my father mutter, while in his bedroom: “God forbid, God forbid. She said that she was waiting for the call to prayer, while I stood there like a Billy goat. All I needed was a turban!”

The following morning my father announced the news: “To hell with America and the Americans. That is it. I am going back home.”

He was sitting in front of the grocery store with two of his neighbors, smoking a water pipe. I stood in a corner, watching them in anticipation. As I heard the words “old country” I jumped for joy and almost flew as I ran up the stairs to the second floor. The words “old country” were music to my ears, as melodious as the long stretch of a mawwal1. It was like a miracle, a story similar to that of Aladdin and the magic lamp, Shubbake, Lubbake2, one of Father’s stories, enveloped in smoke, incense and butterfly wings.

I pushed the door and shouted: “We’re going back home, we’re going back home.”

My stepmother came towards me holding a big wooden spoon that she waved threateningly: “A liar goes to hell, you will go to hell and melt like a candle.”

I started crying but repeated stubbornly: “We are going back home, by God Almighty. I heard my father say it with my own ears, go and listen to him.”

She hesitated for a few seconds, then rushed towards the window, looked below and heard my father saying: “What are we waiting for, friends? Haven’t we had enough of America and the trash of America? We all have boys and girls. I mean, do you want your daughters to be loose like American girls? Do you want to protect your girls, keep them pure and bring them up strictly and marry them well?”

The two men nodded approvingly, and my father became very emotional. He shouted in a voice that could be heard at the end of the street: “There one really lives, brothers! There you speak Arabic, eat Arabic, drink Arabic coffee. Everything is Arabic! If you need help, you find a thousand hands stretched out to help you. If you need money, you can take it from a friend – no banks, no drafts and no headaches. At the end of the day you can sit in a café for hours on end, then go to the mosque or the diwan3. There, people are genuine Muslims, even the Christians are good-hearted and know God like us. We worship God in a mosque and they worship Him in church. There is not much difference. As for here, may God Almighty protect us from what is here! Is there anything here, please tell me?”

One of the two men growled “Hah!” and my father shouted: “Well, well, we all gorged ourselves. I ate and you ate and everyone of us ate to the point of saturation. But pray tell me, the Americans in Saudi Arabia, what are they doing there? Are they defending the Kaaba? Are they being baptized in the river Jordan? Or do they perform the tarawih prayers4? Do please tell me what they are doing there.”

The two men shook their heads without saying a word, provoking my father’s anger. He shouted at them: “Don’t shake your heads like Bilal! Just tell me what they are doing there.”

One of them exploded, saying: “They eat our food and take us for a ride. This is, in a nutshell, what they are doing there. We the Arabs, on the other hand, are as stupid as mules and donkeys and deserve even less than that. This is what they are doing: they are screwing us openly and shamelessly.”

“God forbid,” commented my father.

The other man retorted: “They’re screwing us? I am the one doing the screwing, I do not spare anyone, white or black, I screw them all.”

My father shouted: “This is the intention, you screw their daughters and they screw yours, isn’t this the plan?”

“God forbid!”

The first man shouted: “I won’t let anyone touch a hair of any of my girls.”

“Well, what about Hoda?” my father asked, “Where did she go?”

The three men bowed their heads for a few minutes until my father ended the discussion saying: “I want my daughters to be brought up as Arabs, clear and transparent as a candle. I want them to marry Arabs and Muslims, according to the Prophet’s teachings. I want them to be impregnated by Muslims. To hell with America, I am going back home.”

My father did not go back, however. He opened another grocery store in New Jersey, bought a new house and married a new woman. Then he ran after me in the street, holding the longest knife he had. I was fifteen years old.

Part Two
In Search of the Inheritance

My language was lost before I was lost, and so was my identity. My name and address followed suit. My original name was Zeinab Hamdan and with time it became Zeina. My father was called Muhammad Hamdan and with time I was left with neither Muhammad nor Hamdan. My father’s birthplace was Wadi al-Rihan and mine was Brooklyn. As Zeina I was caught between two languages and two cultures, my father’s Brooklyn and West Bank cultures on one side and my maternal grandmother’s American culture on the other. I was later left without any culture and lived in a vacuum. My father’s songs, the Qur’anic verses and the praises of the Prophet were meant to protect me from the negative influence of American culture. Obviously they did not. There was a simple explanation: I did not understand the meaning of the words and I did not respond to the melodies. There was also my new stepmother, a person who considered the ability to speak English a sign of education, good upbringing and a mark of civilization. Her English was poor however, and so was her upbringing. She pronounced ‘p’ as ‘b’ and ‘k’ as a strong guttural sound. She would say, “abble bie and panana sblit” and “bark your car in the barking lot.”5

As for us children, we were able, thank God, to distinguish a ‘p’ from a ‘b’. We failed however, to construct one full meaningful sentence. Our conversation consisted of a strange mix of the two languages, so strange that our American guests wondered whether we went to school to learn reasonably correct English or not. Our relatives, on the other hand, did not hide their dismay at our failure to join the Arab club and learn respectable Arabic. In order to refute all those accusations my father would ask me at the end of each gathering to prove to our honourable American friends my mastery of the English language. I would spend part of the evening standing on a chair surrounded by bottles of arak and plates of mezze, and the cheers and laughter of the visitors, reciting the verb “to be”, then the verb “to have”, followed by “Twinkle, twinkle little star” and “Row, row, row your boat”. I used to end the show with the American national anthem, accompanied by the loud singing of all the guests. The noise would be so loud that our new neighbors would call the police and the fire brigade. The scene was repeated with our Arab relatives. I would stand in their midst and stun them with the sisters of kana6 and inna and its sisters7, the laudations of the Prophet and tala’al Badru (The Full Moon Appeared), al-Hamd, al-Fatiha – the first sura of the Qur’an. I would end my performance with an Andalusian muwashshah8, accompanied by the enthusiastic participation of all those present. By this time dawn would have appeared and the police officers would return to the apartment to escort our relatives out of the building and possibly out of New York.

I can’t really say that my childhood was miserable; on the contrary, it was filled with excitement, fun and good food. With the exception of my father’s wives, my unfulfilled dream to return to the homeland, my hope to receive a phone call from my mother in Los Angeles – one which never came – and a single visit to my grandmother without one of my father’s wives spoiling it, everything went like a breeze. I enjoyed living with my father, who was as dear to me as my soul, and the light of my eyes. He was a good-hearted man, full of memories, anecdotes and funny stories. I still remember when he used to gather us around the large wood-burning stove on the cold New York nights and tell us old jokes while grilling chestnuts, drinking arak, and eating mezze. He used to say that he was a child of the world. He had toured the globe, seen everything, and heard it all. Nothing surprised him or shocked him anymore and yet, when the name of a relative or a friend in Beirut or Damascus was mentioned he would be overcome with emotion, and cry. He liked sad songs. He would listen to them and move with the rhythm, flapping his hands as if flying. Then he would get drunk, relax and shout after each rhyme “al-Lah, al-Lah!” [“Bravo, bravo!”]. I would observe him quietly from my place, my tears flowing down my face. The tears, the rhymes and the stories protected me from feeling totally ostracized.

Whenever I remember the knife and that look, I recall the tears of longing and my dream, and a wish that was never fulfilled. His words still ring in my ears: “It is true that I am a worldly man, but I never dishonoured anyone or betrayed the trust of any person. Every woman I was involved with I have known according to God’s law. I never took people’s opinion lightly. All my life I cared what they said and thought of me. Listen to me, Zeinab. The most important things in life are a good reputation, the fear of God, and the day of judgment. It is possible for a person to live without this and that, but if you forget God, He forgets you and if you ignore God’s words you won’t remember people’s words. That is how life is and this is the way the world goes. Life is but a lesson, an exhortation and a path. It is a message, a message of love and forgiveness. What is life, Zeina?”

I would answer him, with tears running down my cheeks: “Life is an exhortation, Daddy.”

“What else?”

“Life is a test, Daddy.”

“What else?”

“Life is a path.”

“A path to where? Toward whom?”

“A path to the afterlife, to the Prophet and his Companions and the believers, both men and women and the pure men and women.”

“Great, my daughter, great, great. May God protect you in this world, smooth your way and cover it with good intentions and good deeds. Come sit beside me and eat this. Be careful with the mezze and don’t spill the arak.

Translated from Al Mirath [The Inheritance]

Sahar Khalifeh’s international reputation was made with her novel Al-Subbar (Wild Thorns) which has been published in French and Hebrew (1978), Dutch (1980), English (1984), Malay (1992), Spanish (1994) German and Italian (1996). Other novels have been published in Hebrew, Russian, French, Swedish, Spanish and Italian. In Spring 2002, the German edition of Al-Mirath (Das Erbe, translated by Regina Karachouli), was published to great acclaim in the German press.

Notes:

mawwal – a song similar to ballad or blues, dealing with oppression, love and loss
lubbake, shubbake – magic words pronounced by a genie
diwan – council and assembly room
tarawih prayers are performed during Ramadan
These words were written in English in the original Arabic text
the sisters of kana – the name given in Arabic grammar to the rule governing case of subjects with certain incomplete verbs
inna and its sisters – the name given in Arabic grammar to the rule governing a group of particles that have the same grammatical impact on a sentence but carry different meanings
a muwashshahah is a form of post-classical Arab poetry, arranged in stanzas, composed to be sung. It flourished in Andalusian Spain.
Aida A. Bamia

Sahar Khalifeh: novelist and feminist

Sahar Khalifeh was born in 1941, in Nablus, Palestine. She is a novelist and a feminist, actively involved in promoting women's rights through her fiction and the Centre for Women and Family Affairs, which she directs in Amman, Jordan.

Her career was launched after she ended a thirteen-year arr-anged marriage in which she did not find much happiness. She pursued her higher education in the United States, where in 1988 she obtained a PhD in Women’s Studies and American Literature from the University of Iowa.

Khalifeh published her first novel, Lam Na’ad Jawari Lakum [We are No Longer Slave Girls for You] in 1974 and in it the author makes a statement against the oppression of women. Her three other novels, Al-Subbar (1976, English edition Wild Thorns, 1985), ’Abbad al-Shams [The Sunflower] (1980) and Bab al-Saha [The Gate to the Square] (1990) are written against the background of the Palestinian resistance during its various stages, and show a clear role for the women in the fight for independence.

Bab al-Saha focuses on the years of the first Intifada in the city of Nablus, with which the author is quite familiar. The novelist addresses the issue of class differences in a city known for its bourgeois tendencies as she gives the major role to a woman of ill-repute. Two of Khalifeh’s novels, Mudhakkirat Imra’ Ghayr Waqi’iyya [Memoirs of an Unrealistic Woman] (1986) and Al-Mirath [The Inheritance] (1997) branch into slightly different directions without losing sight of her feminist ideals or the national cause. The protagonists in both novels experience a sense of loss while living abroad but “find” themselves upon their return to their homeland.

Al-Mirath addresses the complex issue of the conflict between civilizations resulting from mixed marriages, especially among the children who are torn between two different and sometimes opposite cultures. Parents often fail to recognize and address their children’s dilemma and the loss of their sense of belonging. Khalifeh’s upcoming novel, Surah wa Ayqunah wa ’Ahdun Qadim [A Picture, a Medallion and an Old Testament], being published in 2002, features, for the first time, a male protagonist.

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Reprinted from Banipal magazine No 15/16, Autumn 2002/Spring 2003. www.banipal.co.uk
© Translation copyright Banipal and translator. All rights reserved.