Finding a Language for Memories of the Future

Finding a Language for Memories of tbe Future FINDING A lANGUAGE FOR MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE by Ammiel Alcalay Ammiel Alcalay teaches at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Most recently he edited Portraits of Sarajevo, by Zlatko Dizdarevic. His books include After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (University of Minnesota Press), tbe cairo notebooks (Singing Horse Press), and Keys to tbe Garden: New Israeli Writing (City Lights Books). -_.:....-_------------The question is not linear, but spherical. The problem concerns the explosive impulses of the individual. Violence shoots its thousand arrows and pierces all that it encounters. It is no longer a question of clarifying the distinction between the feminine and the masculine, but of redefining the human species.' Etel Adnan Of Cities and Womenl Beforehand 45 One summer on my way to the airport (New York!Paris(fel Aviv), the driver from New Jerusalem Car Service, a native of Nablus, told me that after getting his American visa he stopped over-en route-in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria (where his brother had finished electrical engineering at Damascus University). Now he was moving to Oregon. "For the girls," as he put it. His family ran a pastry shop in Nablus but he gave the address of another, Abu Seer, on Granada Street, that he said was even better. As I got off the connecting bus in Paris, an extended Palestinian 'Etel Adnan, Of Cities and Women (Sausalito: Post Apollo Press, 1993), p. 37. 46 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 family, each by their own generation, made their way to the departure gate: three young boys with a huge boom box discussed its various features in the King's English; their sister, covered in a pale green head scarf, wore a Boyz in the Hood T-shirt; an older sister, wearing jeans, occasionally looked at a copy of theJerusalem Post she was holding; the matriarch, a real villager, looked on, directing everyone to their respective duties. The relations between a family of Arab Jews, speaking French, Arabic, and Hebrew all at once, seemed just as precise and confused as both the language they were speaking and the Palestinian family working their way into the line before them. Once in the plane I notice a headline in The European, held by the larger half of a very large American couple: "The Terrible Price of a Joke Against Islam." I am reading Woman's Body, Woman's Word: Gender and Discourse in Ambo-Islamic Writing.2 As the food comes, the other half of the couple turns to me saying: "I couldn't resist, but you can't expect to sit next to a woman and not have her ask you about what you're reading." She proceeds to ask from "what point of view" the book is written and I explain that the author takes classical medieval texts and juxtaposes them to contemporaryArab feminist writers. With a conspiratorial smile, she says: "But isn't that an oxymoron?" We're somewhere over the Alps. I put down the food, feeling queasy. It's not until we're over Elba that I start to feel better. 1. Ghosts The inherent push and pull of a process that includes the struggle of redefinition and changing space-personal, cultural, geographic, social, political-often leaves language by the wayside, as if the work that needs to be done were that easy and you could simply rely on hand-me-downs. Yosef Ibn Chikitilla, a Jewish mystic born in Castille in 1248, wrote: "A person must understand and know that from the earth unto the firmament there is no free space, but it is all filled by a multitude of hosts; those that are pure, possessing kindness and mercy, and below them the impure beings, harmful and accusing, but all of them contingent, about to materialize. And there is no free space from the earth unto the firmament, 2Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Woman's Body, Woman's Word: Gender andDiscourse in AraboIslamic Writing (princeton UNiversity Press, 1991). Finding a Language for Memories of the Future 47 but it is all filled with multitudes, those for peace and those for war, those for...