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Representing Palestine: The Omar Yussef Mysteries (Part One of Three)
I'm on a listserv dedicated to research methods; so's one of my dissertation advisors. During a conversation about using novels for social science research and teaching, my advisor made a proposition: all social scientists are failed novelists. My immediate reaction, from the part of me that spent the years of 1998-2000 identifying primarily as a writer, was along the lines of "Who're you calling failed?" In general, I've been thinking about the relationship between writing fiction and writing ethnography as I pick my way through my fieldwork-oriented chapters. Apart from the fact that I'm constrained by adherence to actual data, many of the elements of writing I'm doing don't strike me as so different from the ones I practiced as a short story writer: conveying character, theme, tone, meaning through carefully chosen details and scenarios.
Writing the 'other,' writing about people not like you in some significant way, is hard. Those of us in fandom are just coming off a year of debate on the subject of when and how to do it right, but it's a constant concern for researchers too, at least those of us who feel a normative duty to our research subjects. I constantly worry about how I'm describing Arab American communities, and thinking about how others, including others with whom I have serious disagreements, might use what I say, and what possible interventions I might make to forestall this.
I'm thinking of this now because I just picked up Matt Beynon Rees's mystery novels set in Palestine. Rees is a journalist who has lived in Jerusalem for many years and covered Israeli and Palestinian politics for Time Magazine. His novels feature Omar Yussef, a refugee and teacher in an UNRWA school, and are murder mysteries with political intrigue thrown in for fun. There are four novels in the series: The Collaborator of Bethlehem, A Grave in Gaza, The Samaritan's Secret (set in Nablus), and The Fourth Assassin (set in Brooklyn). Sadly, my library only had the last three, but I ordered them and picked them up eagerly.
I've read through them now, and find that they're inspiring me to think much more than I would have expected. To be blunt, they're not very well written; Rees doesn't seem to be very good at characterization, and so most of his characters fall flat. I also find myself very dissatisfied with them as fictional representations of Palestinian life and politics. They aren't overtly or intentionally racist, and Rees is clearly familiar with and positive towards Palestinians. But being a nice guy doesn't make your work unimpeachable, sadly, as we all know.
Because I found them so interesting, I'm planning on doing three posts on them, because I have kind of a lot to say. In this first one, I talk about the ways that Rees uses language, particularly the distance between Arabic and English, and the ways I think that his decisions are othering, and representative of the broader trend towards othering in his work. In the second, I'm going to talk specifically about The Fourth Assassin's discussion of Arabs in New York City, which has particular issues that strike me as someone who is also writing a book set, largely, in Bay Ridge (and as someone who's worked at the UN, which is the other major setting of the book). In the third, I'm going to talk about the reception of Rees's fictional works, which I think help indicates precisely how the things he establishes are problematic.
There were a couple of places where I could have hung my initial critique of Rees's work, many of which I'll come back to in subsequent posts. There's the amount of his work that focuses on the corruption of the Palestinian governing institutions. No one's going to argue that they are corrupt, enormously so, but to harp on the fact simply seems like kicking a guy when he's down, not to mention confirm strong Western stereotypes of the Arab world as ungovernable. There's a strange absence of the occupation as a player in the lives of the characters; while it certainly is routinized for Palestinians, in these novels it's never really directly addressed. Characters might mention that they had to go through a checkpoint, or that their travel permit only goes for so long, or that someone spent time in Israeli prison, but the only characters who ever seem upset by the occupation are characters we aren't supposed to sympathize with. (The summary I've read of The Collaborator of Bethlehem suggests it deals more with the occupation, so I might feel differently if I'd read it.) There's the fact that none of the female characters seem well developed, which strikes me as particularly problematic given the poor representations of Arab and Muslim women in fiction. (Then again, many of the male characters are one-note; this fault really is one that comes back to the quality of the writing.)
But what I ended up fixating on, in part because I encountered it on almost every page, was the question of language. Rees's manner of writing would-be-in-Arabic dialogue in English ended up bugging me quite a bit. Some awkwardness is inevitable when trying to match up Arabic and English idiom, and, as someone who's done very small amounts of Arabic-to-English translation, I sympathize with the problem. But Rees tends towards literalism in ways that I think end up being othering.
Let's start with translating الله (allah) Allah, not God. While many Muslims do use the Arabic word in other languages to talk about God, there's no reason, when writing in English dialogue originally in Arabic, not to simply say God. I feel pretty strongly about this, though I understand and respect that others feel differently. But to me, having Muslims talk about worshipping Allah ends up suggesting that the deity they worship is fundamentally other than the Judeo-Christian deity, and that's a) theologically wrong and b) reinforces notions of Muslims as religiously other.
Then there are his translations of inshallah and hamdullah. He renders them as if Allah wills it and thanks be to Allah. But those are both awkward, foreign sounding phrases in English, as opposed to God willing and thank God, which are something that, like inshallah and hamdullah, mildly or non religious English speakers actually say. (Yes, hamdullah has a much broader semantic range than thank God, but Rees isn't really making use of that range.).
Then there's where it gets weird. Lots of Arabic, especially greetings and polite things to say, are highly formulaic. Rees translates them all literally. When someone says sahtain, he writes to your double health. Yes, technically, that's what it means; it's the dual form of the noun health, because Arabic uses the dual form to intensify in some cases. But it's also the equivalent of bon appetit; would you write good appetite if your French speaking character said bon appetit? I'm pretty sure that he translates ahlan wa sahlan as like the home of your family and your own home. While that's the figurative meaning, it's also just what you say to welcome someone. Most jarring for me was the translation of sabah al-kheir/sabah al-nur as morning of joy/morning of light, rather than good morning. Having characters greet each other over coffee with "morning of light" is just bizarre.
Rees isn't technically incorrect about any of his translations. But the way he deploys them ends up creating a foreignness, an irreducible oddness, to the way the characters in his books speak. His characters simply don't talk like us, don't talk in recognizable ways, pepper their speech with strange formulas at regular intervals. At best, it's fetishizing: look at how picturesque their language is! At worst, it's othering: how strange the Arab mind must be that it thinks so oddly; no wonder it's such a mess over there. And I don't think either of those responses do any good for American understanding of Arabs or of Palestine.
And that's part of why this bugs me: because when we write about something our audience is less educated in than we are, whether our own experience or someone else's, we're teaching something. People who don't know much about Palestine are going to read these books. What will they learn? Will their impressions of Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians be of people whose different social structure and value system is different but worth respecting and dialoguing about, or will it be of a group of people who are so odd, strange, exotic, but that some of them really seem like they're normal people? We have to remember our readers don't necessarily share our deep and complex knowledge and love for our subjects. We have to teach them it.
What would I do, were I writing a novel where there was dialogue between people who were speaking Arabic, but I were writing in English? I see two fully defensible options. The first is to translate, pure and simple. Sabah al-kheir becomes good morning; hamdullah becomes thank God; sahtain becomes to your health. This has the advantage of readability. The other is to use the Arabic words and footnote them the first time they're used, and figure your readers can follow along. (This is the convention in literary translations.) I'd pick this one, because it would have the advantage of teaching the reader some Arabic, but I realize footnotes are a turnoff to some people, for some reason. In my academic work, when transcribing conversations that are Arabic/English bilingual (as many are), I write out the Arabic in transliteration, and then bracket the English gloss. That probably wouldn't work well for literature, though.
In many ways, this problem with translation is the problem with Rees's books overall. None of the factual information he presents is wrong, and much of it is important to understanding the politics, culture, and life of Palestine. But by presenting them the way he does, and in the context he does, he ends up reproducing stereotypical assumptions about what Palestine and Palestinians "are," in ways that are counterproductive for improved cultural understanding and acceptance. I want to like Rees's books; I like the idea of popular fiction set in places that Americans should be interested in learning about. But I can't get behind this particular attempt.
Look for my post on The Fourth Assassin and on the reception of these books in the days to come!
Writing the 'other,' writing about people not like you in some significant way, is hard. Those of us in fandom are just coming off a year of debate on the subject of when and how to do it right, but it's a constant concern for researchers too, at least those of us who feel a normative duty to our research subjects. I constantly worry about how I'm describing Arab American communities, and thinking about how others, including others with whom I have serious disagreements, might use what I say, and what possible interventions I might make to forestall this.
I'm thinking of this now because I just picked up Matt Beynon Rees's mystery novels set in Palestine. Rees is a journalist who has lived in Jerusalem for many years and covered Israeli and Palestinian politics for Time Magazine. His novels feature Omar Yussef, a refugee and teacher in an UNRWA school, and are murder mysteries with political intrigue thrown in for fun. There are four novels in the series: The Collaborator of Bethlehem, A Grave in Gaza, The Samaritan's Secret (set in Nablus), and The Fourth Assassin (set in Brooklyn). Sadly, my library only had the last three, but I ordered them and picked them up eagerly.
I've read through them now, and find that they're inspiring me to think much more than I would have expected. To be blunt, they're not very well written; Rees doesn't seem to be very good at characterization, and so most of his characters fall flat. I also find myself very dissatisfied with them as fictional representations of Palestinian life and politics. They aren't overtly or intentionally racist, and Rees is clearly familiar with and positive towards Palestinians. But being a nice guy doesn't make your work unimpeachable, sadly, as we all know.
Because I found them so interesting, I'm planning on doing three posts on them, because I have kind of a lot to say. In this first one, I talk about the ways that Rees uses language, particularly the distance between Arabic and English, and the ways I think that his decisions are othering, and representative of the broader trend towards othering in his work. In the second, I'm going to talk specifically about The Fourth Assassin's discussion of Arabs in New York City, which has particular issues that strike me as someone who is also writing a book set, largely, in Bay Ridge (and as someone who's worked at the UN, which is the other major setting of the book). In the third, I'm going to talk about the reception of Rees's fictional works, which I think help indicates precisely how the things he establishes are problematic.
There were a couple of places where I could have hung my initial critique of Rees's work, many of which I'll come back to in subsequent posts. There's the amount of his work that focuses on the corruption of the Palestinian governing institutions. No one's going to argue that they are corrupt, enormously so, but to harp on the fact simply seems like kicking a guy when he's down, not to mention confirm strong Western stereotypes of the Arab world as ungovernable. There's a strange absence of the occupation as a player in the lives of the characters; while it certainly is routinized for Palestinians, in these novels it's never really directly addressed. Characters might mention that they had to go through a checkpoint, or that their travel permit only goes for so long, or that someone spent time in Israeli prison, but the only characters who ever seem upset by the occupation are characters we aren't supposed to sympathize with. (The summary I've read of The Collaborator of Bethlehem suggests it deals more with the occupation, so I might feel differently if I'd read it.) There's the fact that none of the female characters seem well developed, which strikes me as particularly problematic given the poor representations of Arab and Muslim women in fiction. (Then again, many of the male characters are one-note; this fault really is one that comes back to the quality of the writing.)
But what I ended up fixating on, in part because I encountered it on almost every page, was the question of language. Rees's manner of writing would-be-in-Arabic dialogue in English ended up bugging me quite a bit. Some awkwardness is inevitable when trying to match up Arabic and English idiom, and, as someone who's done very small amounts of Arabic-to-English translation, I sympathize with the problem. But Rees tends towards literalism in ways that I think end up being othering.
Let's start with translating الله (allah) Allah, not God. While many Muslims do use the Arabic word in other languages to talk about God, there's no reason, when writing in English dialogue originally in Arabic, not to simply say God. I feel pretty strongly about this, though I understand and respect that others feel differently. But to me, having Muslims talk about worshipping Allah ends up suggesting that the deity they worship is fundamentally other than the Judeo-Christian deity, and that's a) theologically wrong and b) reinforces notions of Muslims as religiously other.
Then there are his translations of inshallah and hamdullah. He renders them as if Allah wills it and thanks be to Allah. But those are both awkward, foreign sounding phrases in English, as opposed to God willing and thank God, which are something that, like inshallah and hamdullah, mildly or non religious English speakers actually say. (Yes, hamdullah has a much broader semantic range than thank God, but Rees isn't really making use of that range.).
Then there's where it gets weird. Lots of Arabic, especially greetings and polite things to say, are highly formulaic. Rees translates them all literally. When someone says sahtain, he writes to your double health. Yes, technically, that's what it means; it's the dual form of the noun health, because Arabic uses the dual form to intensify in some cases. But it's also the equivalent of bon appetit; would you write good appetite if your French speaking character said bon appetit? I'm pretty sure that he translates ahlan wa sahlan as like the home of your family and your own home. While that's the figurative meaning, it's also just what you say to welcome someone. Most jarring for me was the translation of sabah al-kheir/sabah al-nur as morning of joy/morning of light, rather than good morning. Having characters greet each other over coffee with "morning of light" is just bizarre.
Rees isn't technically incorrect about any of his translations. But the way he deploys them ends up creating a foreignness, an irreducible oddness, to the way the characters in his books speak. His characters simply don't talk like us, don't talk in recognizable ways, pepper their speech with strange formulas at regular intervals. At best, it's fetishizing: look at how picturesque their language is! At worst, it's othering: how strange the Arab mind must be that it thinks so oddly; no wonder it's such a mess over there. And I don't think either of those responses do any good for American understanding of Arabs or of Palestine.
And that's part of why this bugs me: because when we write about something our audience is less educated in than we are, whether our own experience or someone else's, we're teaching something. People who don't know much about Palestine are going to read these books. What will they learn? Will their impressions of Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians be of people whose different social structure and value system is different but worth respecting and dialoguing about, or will it be of a group of people who are so odd, strange, exotic, but that some of them really seem like they're normal people? We have to remember our readers don't necessarily share our deep and complex knowledge and love for our subjects. We have to teach them it.
What would I do, were I writing a novel where there was dialogue between people who were speaking Arabic, but I were writing in English? I see two fully defensible options. The first is to translate, pure and simple. Sabah al-kheir becomes good morning; hamdullah becomes thank God; sahtain becomes to your health. This has the advantage of readability. The other is to use the Arabic words and footnote them the first time they're used, and figure your readers can follow along. (This is the convention in literary translations.) I'd pick this one, because it would have the advantage of teaching the reader some Arabic, but I realize footnotes are a turnoff to some people, for some reason. In my academic work, when transcribing conversations that are Arabic/English bilingual (as many are), I write out the Arabic in transliteration, and then bracket the English gloss. That probably wouldn't work well for literature, though.
In many ways, this problem with translation is the problem with Rees's books overall. None of the factual information he presents is wrong, and much of it is important to understanding the politics, culture, and life of Palestine. But by presenting them the way he does, and in the context he does, he ends up reproducing stereotypical assumptions about what Palestine and Palestinians "are," in ways that are counterproductive for improved cultural understanding and acceptance. I want to like Rees's books; I like the idea of popular fiction set in places that Americans should be interested in learning about. But I can't get behind this particular attempt.
Look for my post on The Fourth Assassin and on the reception of these books in the days to come!
Here from the friending meme
It also glosses over the fact that many non-Muslim Arabic speakers use exactly the same phrases, since to most English speakers, Allah = Muslim word for God, not Arabic word for God, and besides, aren't all Arabs Muslims? So that kind of translation is perpetuating the stereotype that Muslim and Arab are completely equivalent.
Re: Here from the friending meme
Apparently, there are Christian characters in the one of these books I haven't read, but none in the three I've gone through, so I can't testify to how he handles religious differences. But this is definitely not a good sign, I'd wager.
I just read today that someone started a "Dear Allah" letter writing art project after doing a "Dear God" one previously, and I was all AAAAAAAAAH NOT ENOUGH HEADDESK IN WORLD.
Re: Here from the friending meme
I've heard stupid jokes about Jesús/Jesus, but not anyone who literally thinks they're different people.
People no one prove us wrong.