A Land of Stone and Thyme: Palestinian Short Stories

by Abdelwahab Elmessiri

The stories in this anthology are the work of a new generation of Palestinian writers who began to appear in the 1960s both inside Palestine and abroad. The writers of the diaspora developed many themes among them, life in the camps and the wandering Palestinian. Those living inside occupied Palestine had to contend with political repression and so generally resorted to symbolism and illusion while focussing on the inner worlds of their characters. Includes work from Liana Badr, Riyad Baidas, Emile Habibi, Farouk Wadi and their forerunners Samira Azzam and Ghassan Kanafani.

Genres: Short Stories

233 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1993

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection is like a series of short insights into the Palestinian mindset and experience. Themes of family, home and land run throughout. My favourite story was Liana Badr's ‘The Trellised Vine’, in which a Palestinian woman living in France remembers her homeland by making ‘vine leaves stuffed with rice and minced meat’ (p.110). Not all the stories are as memorable, but the collection is worth reading all the same.

[Reader in Tokyo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book, published in 1996, contained 38 works by 22 writers. It focused mainly on the generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, and three earlier writers, Emile Habiby, Samira Azzam and Ghassan Kanafani. Most of the stories weren't dated precisely, but the majority appeared to come from the 1970s and 1980s, and the rest from the 1960s and early 1990s.

An introduction briefly mentioned Palestinian short story writers going back to the 1920s, but dismissed works from the early years as overly didactic and lacking subtlety. Writers who were published in the 1940s or 1950s such as Aref al-Azouni, Najwa Qawar, Asma Touba, Abdulamid Yasin and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra were mentioned, but nothing from them was included.

The pieces in the book were grouped under the themes of paradise lost, exile, refugees living abroad in hostile cities, various kinds of miscommunication, life and death, and dreams of paradise redeemed. The themes were compelling, but for me a number of the works weren't especially striking illustrations of them or utterly memorable stories.

Those that were included a piece by Farouk Wadi ("Black Lines") about a protagonist who lacked identity papers, a job, a lover, a home, and eventually freedom -- except within the span of his imagination -- and two by Ahmed Omar Shaheen: "The Tree," which used the changes to a beloved tree, its tying, branding and withering, to symbolize history, and "Four Colors," which contained one of the anthology's few positive visions, that of an established homeland. Another was "Flying Carpet," by Riyad Baidas, involving a conversation between a Palestinian and an Israeli that aimed to show how they saw differently things like their surroundings, human contact and peace of mind.

A number of the other stories were too brief (1-2 pages) and/or dreamlike and diffuse for me to understand. Many recalled parables by Kafka. Lack of familiarity with cultural or social references and allusions probably made this kind of writing more difficult than usual to grasp.

An example of this type would be a story about a woman who stepped outside to pluck leaves from a vine, was stopped by a guard of the "ruling party's headquarters" and asked what she was doing. She gave him a recipe for the leaves and was asked to let him taste the dish. Returning home, she saw a sunken car looming out of torrents of water, thought drowning was a bad omen and a sign that she shouldn't return, and went home without looking behind her.

Opponents, whether "Zionist" or those in cities in the Arab world where some of the works took place, when they appeared, were usually at some distance in the background. Dislocation, dream visions and despair were at the fore. It was a surprise that so few stories focused on the loving relations between, say, a couple or parents and children or friends.

One that did, "The Man Who Lies a Lot," by Zaki Darwish, showed a father's love for his young daughter ending unintentionally in tragedy, in magic realist style. In another, the budding relationship between two teenagers was broken up when the girl was detained for throwing a Molotov cocktail. In another, the narrator's life had been wrecked by the shooting death of his pregnant wife. Many of the stories contained an isolated protagonist, nearly three-quarters were written in the first person.

In the end, I appreciated this anthology mainly for the pieces named above, several stories by Kanafani, and one by Azzam, whose work I read here for the first time. Readers interested in writing by Palestinian authors are naturally among those who'd find the collection worthwhile. I wondered whether additional writers and short stories in more direct, naturalistic styles were available for inclusion in it to represent the times. And whether earlier writers could've been added without detracting from the themes.

[Sidrah Ahmad · Rating 4 out of 5]

The experience I had with this book had less to do with the individual stories and more to do with the collective sequence and impact. The short stories are categorized into different time-phases ... before, during and after the war. Sequenced in this way, even though the characters and stories are all different, a broader storyline is created. It feels like we have gotten a glimpse into an entire community of people that went through similar circumstances, but because we see them in different time-phases ... it feels almost 3-dimensional ... like a round spherical world. The common thread in all the stories gives a strange memory-and-dream-like feel to the entire experience.

The individual stories thenselves were inconsistent in terms of quality - some were brilliant, others just average and a few quite torturous and arduous to read. There were times the awkwardness of the writing felt like something was being lost in translation.

[Ch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent collection, very moving.