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Last year, the British Palestinian novelist Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University.
Everything we thought we knew has been turned on its head, and yet it all makes sense.
But Hammad also has her doubts.
Palestinians are familiar with such scenes in real life: apparent blindness followed by staggering realization, she writes.
I was moved to see them moved, admits Hammad.
I wonder what reality you now live in.
We know the answer.
Texts are worldly, he wrote in 1983.
(Kirsch too is a literary critic who has taught at Columbia.)
This way, when something comes along that demands more than reading, we may be more prepared.
I will give you an example.
But her writing instructor felt it was too weighed down by Hammads own pessimism and grief to be successful.
I wanted to respond, But its an image I included randomly, something I saw in life!
Reflecting on this story today, Hammad has come to agree with her instructors critique, however harsh.
Literature is not life, she admits.
The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay, she concluded, is the dead.
All they have isweight; they are deposits of pure tragedy.
The writerTareq Baconi has observed that Gazapersonifies abjection in our time, even among its sympathizers.
The corollary is that the Palestinian is a personification first and a person second.
That she wrote this with the Jews in mind only sharpens the point.)
One remembers that Oedipus responds to the horror of the truth by gouging out his own eyes.
This is the most I think we can hope for from novels, Hammad writes.
Not revelation, not the dawning of knowledge, but the exposure of its limit.
When he writes This is you!
I dont want grand metaphors, the director says.
Im just so bored by it all.
Thesymbols.The keys, the kuffiyehs I mean, is this all we have?
The jaded protagonist jokes that they should make Ophelia a suicide bomber and call it a day.
Solemnly, the director replies, We cant.
Someone already did a version like that quite recently.
I do not know if this was true; I hope it was!
(Little of my own work would qualify.)
She skips right to Israels acknowledgments page.
She touches the art.
Gaza does not propel people to cool contemplation, wrote the poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Rather she propels them to erupt and collide with the truth.
During the interview, the woman saw another woman wailing on the television and exclaimed, Thats me!
Only after Hammad learned the interviewees name did she realize it was her own grandmother.
I suddenly laughed, Hammad admits, because my grandmother is very dramatic.
But the second, uncannier instance of recognition undercuts this reading.
The world of the story is revealed to be the same world where the story is being told.
But they are not simply reinterpreting Shakespeare.
Then, as if recognizing this too, a soldier opens fire.
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