Middle East/North African Lit discussion

My apologies for setting up this thread late. Some members have begun reading, so I wanted to get this set up immediately even though i want to include some background information. I will come back to do that, but in the meantime, please feel free to begin discussing. I read this several years ago and loved it. I'm interested to see how others react to it. Happy reading!

I am so happy that others r reading it, I just got my copy yesterday and started reading it this morning. Apparently it will be a very interesting book

Ghada wrote: "I am so happy that others r reading it, I just got my copy yesterday and started reading it this morning. Apparently it will be a very interesting book"


I'm hoping we can start the discussion with you giving us an English pronunciation lesson on how to accurately pronounce the name Ghada. In my head, I think I've been saying it wrong all this time and I want to say it right! Will you give us non-arabic speakers some tips please???

Hehe...

I wonder how our Ghada will explain it. The "gh" is a transliteration for a letter/sound that does not exist in English, but is quite similar to a French "r". You know, rolled slightly at the back of the throat. It's quite lovely, IMHO.

Yeah, that is how the author describes it in her book, so instead of thinking of it as sounding like "gahhhda" it sounds like I should be thinking of it as sounding more like "ahhhhhrrda"??? I look forward to Ghada's direction :-)

The r sound comes at the beginning of the name, so more like rrada. I wonder if there is a video or something with someone saying this name. I will look. And I look forward to our Ghada explaining, too!

ooo! i found some audio!

Marieke I really love u u got me out of the hook :) the audio is perfect otherwise it would have been really difficult for me to describe it in writing :).
Funny enough me first and last name begin with letters that do not exist in English so I am usually called by funny names by westerners like rada hada (which is a word used in the Palestinian dialect to say this one) someone even called me shada ;)
here is a link to show u how we pronounce me second name http://www.forvo.com/search/arafat/

Thank you both for the audio versions. Wow -- my Arabic is terrible! I was not even close!!!! I'm going to have to practice -- it is really hard to make that sound come out of my mouth. Kind of like when I try to say something in French and my accent is so atrocious that it sounds ugly. That is how I'm afraid my feeble attempt at Arabic probably sounds.

Don't worry, Wendy -- when Westerners first attempt Arabic, they always sound ridiculous. I certainly did! Like anything else, it takes a little bit of practice and familiarization to master a new skill. I highly recommend finding a boyfriend who speaks Arabic if possible. :) Qais was incredibly patient with me.

Better yet, visit the Middle East if you can. I, for one, am pretty bad at learning languages unless I learn them in a setting where they are meaningful and I can use my new vocabulary immediately and listen every day to how people really talk. (People rarely talk like textbooks!)

I finished In Search of Fatima a few days ago, and I look forward to the discussion here!

Marieke wrote: "Hehe...

I wonder how our Ghada will explain it. The "gh" is a transliteration for a letter/sound that does not exist in English, but is quite similar to a French "r". You know, rolled slightly at ..."

Thanks Marieke! I recognize that sound! It is very similar to the rolling r in French like you mentioned. It is also virtually the same r as I grew up with in southern Sweden so amazingly I can say 'Ghada' without turning it into mush. So is there no G sound (as in English) in Arabic? Is the letter G (or Gh) at the beginning of a word always pronounced as a rolling r? Just curious!

"Gh" is a transliteration of a single letter and sound in Arabic that doesn't exist in the Latin alphabet or the English language (similar to how "sh" is a representation of a single sound in English that doesn't have its own letter).

There is a "G" sound in Arabic, pronounced like an English G in Egypt and North Africa, and like an English J (and sometimes like "zh") in the Levant (Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan).

Sounds complicated, but it all starts to make sense once you get used to it!

There is a letter that is similar to G/J. It is called geem/jeem. I'll get a picture and sounds later. Most Arabs pronounce it with a soft j-like sound, but Egyptians say geem, which is how I learned it first. But then I switched...

I always had this idea of making a t-shirt with the letter geem and some script around it that says "it's a geem thing." but I think that is only funny to me.

Our your parents Swedish?

Ha! We simulposted, Pam!

Also there is no P sound in Arabic, as Pamela points out in her own book. The name for Palestine in Arabic starts with an "f" sound.

Hmmmmmm . . . ok, so how hard is it to pronounce "habibti"? Maybe I could just sort of stick w/ that? Or is it considered presumptious to call someone habibti on a casual basis?

And Marieke, I've been meaning to ask this question but keep forgetting -- in the Bible they mention the Philistines. Is that a reference to the Palestinians, just w/ a different spelling? Or were the Palestinians not a distinct/separate people until after Biblical times? Sorry, that's a bit off-topic, but your comment about no P in arabic made me remember I've been wondering about this.

Ummm...I would have to do some biblical history research to answer that or maybe someone else knows, but I can say that the word for Palestine in Arabic sounds pretty much like Philistine. But I don't know what the relationship is, if there is one...it's ancient history, afterall. :D

Habibti sounds like it looks so I don't think you'll have much trouble pronouncing it. But make sure you only say that to your daughters and girlfriends! You'll want to call your husband and son habibi...

I can't get the audio just yet but the geem/jeem looks like this:

ج but when you use it in a word, like jameela (beautiful) it will look like this:
جميلة

Arabic goes right to left so the ج is that first squiggle with the dot under it that is connecting to the circle, which is the letter meem (m).

:D

Omigosh so I've been typing on my phone so please forgive all the autocorrects that are not correct at all!

And Pam, I didn't see your first message previously...good advice to Wendy!! Haha...I was not lucky enough to have an Arab boyfriend but it was because of my boyfriend at the time (now my husband) that I started studying Arabic. I was lucky, though to have an awesome Egyptian teacher and class four nights a week and then several good friends from Arabic-speaking families, etc. And the past few years I've relied on my Jordanian tutor (who I haven't actually met with for a long time), a friend at work, and online friends (esp Nile daughter and Ingy!) who have the patience to read my writing. I think friends are definitely key!

So...about the book...is anyone finished besides Pam? Pam, I know you are already intimately familiar with Palestine and its history, but I'm curious to know your reactions. Without giving anything away, I remember really being struck by her recollections of growing up in England and how she was treated as a young person there because of how events in the middle east were being conveyed in the media.

Habibti is pronounced "ha-BEEB-tee," and it's the feminine version. As Marieke mentioned, Habibi ("ha-BEE-bee") is for when you are talking to a guy. If you're talking with girls, it's like saying Hon or Darlin'. It's pretty informal and widely used. I've even heard men call other men "habibi" when they were asking directions from total strangers. :)

My dad's side of the family is Swedish (if you were asking me...). Mom's side is mostly Irish with some Cherokee splashed in.

As for the book, I was also struck by her love/hate relationship with her culture. I can relate to some extent -- there are parts of my conservative Southern upbringing that drive me crazy, some that infuriate me, some that I think damaged me for years. It's strange how it's easier to appreciate the good things about a culture if you are not a part of it, not bound by it.

Speaking of infuriating, one of the most infuriating things I hear is that Palestinians somehow don't deserve freedom because their culture represses women. First of all, it's soooo much more complicated than that. Second, since when do human rights come with conditions? Third, if you ask any Palestinian womans, she'll say that whatever her situation is, it will be infinitely better without occupation, not only because her human rights won't be violated every day (curfews and checkpoints are incredibly dangerous for women and restrict their movement horribly) but also because it will take so much pressure off the men, allow them to work and make a dignified income, so that they can relax and not feel so insecure that some end up taking their frustrations out on their family.

Not to mention the fact that Palestinian society was much more liberal in many ways in the 60s and 70s and even up to the 90s. As the occupation got worse and worse, people became more and more conservative. Even in the US we see how one single attack (9/11) caused our culture to go backwards in many ways. Imagine attack after attack after attack after attack after attack...

I am really enjoying this conversation.
Let my start with the Arabic pronunciation to Palestine we say it like, Falasteen in regular language and Felasteen in traditional arabic but the T is pronounced in a much heavier way. the is no letter that matches it in English. Here is a link to how we say it http://www.forvo.com/word/%D9%81%D9%8...
As for the Philistines we got our name from them. Of course the ethnic nature of the inhabitants of the country changed with migrations, as said before it is ancient history, as different peoples and cultures inhabited the land since then.
As for the status of women in Palestine, I would agree with Pamela, especially that our society used to be one of the most liberal societies compared to others in the region before the occupation. One more mistake has been made for years is to talk about the status of women from a current and Western point of view. I still need to finish the book or at least co a little further with it before I can say anything about what exactly;y she said.

"My mother, who was distracted and worried, provided no comfort or reassurance" This sentence made me shrug. I always felt bad for my kids during the war on Gaza cause i believe I did the same thing to my kids during that time. They were only 3 and 4 year old and I hope they will not remember. What makes me feel worse is that my mother went through much worse times and yet some how she managed to provide us with her care and warmth.

This post may have some spoilers, but is in general terms, not specifics.

I have only about 20 pages left till I am done w/ the book (couldn't quite keep my eyes open to finish it before falling asleep last night). I found the author's depiction of her parents, but especially her mother, to be very interesting. I'm glad Ghada that you brought this up too. Her mother's adamant refusal to accept their stay in in Englande as anything other than temporary could in some ways be viewed as a refusal to accept the reality of the situation, but I think in her mind it was a coping mechanism and a way for her to not allow herself to be defeated. In terms of how this affected her children -- I'm not sure which would have been more emotionally beneficial for them. Would they have been better off if she turned her back on the situation she had left and acted like England was their future and never looked back? Maybe this would have been easier in the short term for her kids, but I think in the long term it would have caused more confusion as to who they were -- especially the author who was relatively young when they left Palestine. I feel for the mother. I think she was probably just so overwhelmed and depressed about how things had turned out that she didn't have the emotional energy to cope with running the house and taking care of the children in the same way she had done when they lived in Jerusalem. The author describes her as such a social and vivacious person in Jersualem and then as being so isolated and closed off once they arrived in London, but I'm wondering how accurate that was since she does talk about how her mother surrounded herself with many in the Palestinian ex-pat community. She may not have given her mother as much credit as she deserved.

Thank you Pamela for the info on how to prounounce (and when to use) habibti and habeebi :-) And thank you to "our Ghada" (sorry Ghada, but you have now been designated as "our Ghada" for purposes of this discussion so as not to confuse you w/ the author of the book under discussion -- I hope you don't mind) for answering my side question regarding Palestinian/Philistine history :-)

So glad to see this book discussed here. It's one of my absolute favorite memoirs and books about Palestine. I wrote a book review of it on my blog: http://arabiczeal.com/favorite-book-p...

I saw Ghada Karmi speak at the Emirates Festival of Literature here in Dubai last year or the year before. Naturally she was a sharp & articulate speaker. She was promoting her second book, Married to Another Man(an argument for a one-state solution).

I found In Search of Fatima to be both tragic & exquisite. It's so rare to find a Palestinian memoir that goes back to 1948 & is so beautifully written.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts here.

I really enjoyed reading your discussion so much :) and I am so sad I will not be able to read it with you .

Wendy ,
regarding your question about (Palestinian/Philistine history) , I want to add something to Ghada note (allow me dear) since I read some debates about this issue (Palestinians are not related to the land …..etc) , the original name of Palestine is "the Canaan land" , it was inhabited by the native Canaanite population الكنعانيون (they were Semitic peoples/ some say Arabs from Yemen) round 4000 BC or before , and they were the ones who built Jerusalem long before it was captured by King David and made into the Capital of the People of Israel .

Abraham immigrated from (Iraq) round 2000 BC .while Philistines were the people who inhabited the southern coast (Gaza strip), they are originally from Greece , came round (1150 BCE) and it was said they adopted local Canaanite culture and language by time . there were continuous immigrations (to and from the land) , at some point "the Canaan land" was part of the Egyptian empire . then Israel's rise in the tenth century BC and the kingdoms of Judah and Israel , all of the races who lived around that land co-existed yet still with struggles until the complete dominance of Babylonians in the sixth century BC , then Persian , then the Greek who called the eastern coast of the Mediterranean “the Philistine Syria” , then the Romans shortened to "Palaestina" , The name continued to be used during the Islamic rule and until the British mandate , So the Palestinians are the inhabitants of this area and produced by her long history as all ancient nations .

Sorry for the boring interruption!...continue and enjoy :)

Not boring at all ND -- thank you! It is great to have a more in-depth understanding of the history of the region and exactly "who" it was that populated the area. Thank you so much for the overview. It is interesting to learn all of this, and to try to overlay it against all the Bible stories I learned as a little girl telling me about Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt, King David, King Nebudchanezzer (sp???), etc. I only ever heard these stories from the perspective of the experiences of the Jewish people, so it is good to be able to understand a bit more as to how that story fits alongside what was happening in the region during that time.

ND thank u sooooo much for elaborating on the info. Time shortage makes me less and less useful but I am really happy u can fill in the gaps, better than me actually :)
Pamela as usual ur contributions makes me homesick thank u for the great presentation.
Wendy, "our Ghada" is fine with me actually I like it :)

Wendy,
You are welcome and I am glad I did not bore you to death :)

I understand your point , we too have stories from the Koran beside the bible and the Israelites , starting reading such stories as an abstarcted history was a strange experience for me and I only did it briefly .

Ghada,
Thank you dear :)

woooow i just finished the book can not wait for everyone to finish it and start the discussion

Started this yesterday and am already about 100 pages in. So good and very readable.

This is a superb memoir - informative and affecting.
I can't wait for other people to read it so we can get a good discussion going.

I think if you guys want to start discussing in earnest, we should go for it. And hopefully attract more people to join in. :D

So many things I loved about this book.
I appreciated Karmi's lifelong quest for cultural identity–first as an Arab schoolgirl in London trying to assimilate, later as the wife of an Englishman, and finally as a Arab-English woman who returns to the Arab World as a physician and activist.
I was riveted to the page during the ending when she finally finds her childhood home... Last paragraph was lovely & has stayed with me for a long time.

I thought the end was devastating. It reminded me of Palestinian Walks where the author talks about the land outlasting the inhabitants. Seems a big price to pay for all that loss.

I was most interested in Karmi's experience with her parents and how living in the west made her neither fully arab or fully english.

The irony is how much this memoir read like a similar stories of the Jewish immigrant experience.

I was also struck by her relationship with her mother.

I apologize...i meant to come back here way before now! Lauren, i agree about that particular irony...can you think of a Jewish memoir that would complement this one? i've been scratching my head to come up with a good pairing but lately i feel a bit brain dead. :(

What in particular did you think was remarkable about her relationship with her mother? i'm having trouble remembering that aspect of the book...the things that have stuck with me are her teenage years in England, trying to reconcile what she knows about Palestinian history with how Palestinians were being portrayed in the press and her work as a doctor in refugee camps.

Ghada...you had a strong reaction to the book it seems. tell us your thoughts! :D

Marieke wrote: "I apologize...i meant to come back here way before now! Lauren, i agree about that particular irony...can you think of a Jewish memoir that would complement this one? i've been scratching my head t..."
It's not a memoir, but while reading In search of Fatima , I couldn't help thinking about To The End of The Land from David Grossman. It's about a mother who's son is engaged in the israeli army and she doesn't want to hear the news of his death — which she has a deep felling will inevitably happen — so she leaves on a trip. While Grossman was writing his book, this is saddly what happened to his own son. You get into this story and feel the mother's pain as if it was yours. Very poignant...

I'm only halfway through Fatima , but her teenager years also made me think of another book about how muslim women try to reconcile two identities: I Speak for Myself. American Women on Being Muslim in which "Forty women under the age of 40, born and raised in the United States, dismantle stereotypes of what it means to be a Muslim woman in America".

To the End of the Land is a book i've wanted to read ever since it was published. I read a long article about Grossman and that book at the time it became available in the US; i can't believe i haven't read it yet.

Identity is such a complex and interesting dilemma. I haven't read
I Speak for Myself: American Women on Being Muslim but it's the type of book i'd love to read with non-Western Muslims, i mean, like some of our friends here who have never been to the U.S./Canada (or Europe...but i think the experiences of Muslims in North America are very, very different from those in Europe)

The childhood home was btw being squatted by Ethan Bronner, the NYT Jerusalem reporter.

Ok, so what does "Fatima" allude to - besides her maid?

I think it means to be in search of something that cannot be found or is so different from what it once was that it is virtually unfindable.

I have read To the End of the Land and lots of other Grossman as well.To the End of the Land is interesting from a number of perspectives - one of which is a critique of the militarism of Israeli culture. It would be interesting to compare it to Palestine Walks since both are about what the land itself represents to both Israelis and Palestinians.

I always wonder when I read a book like this esp by a woman that if the family had remained in their home country, if the woman would have had the same opportunities and chosen the same path.