An Excerpt from Sahar Khalifeh’s ‘A Novel for My Story’ – ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY

Sahar Khalifeh’s روايتي لروايتي  appeared in 2018, long after she was established as one of the great novelists of her generation, one who painted complex portraits of Palestinian society in novels that often focused on the lives of women. In a 2021 interview with ArabLit, Khalifeh said — of why she wanted to write this memoir — “Because I wanted to reveal secrets. I wanted to reveal my secrets as an oppressed Arab woman and the secret behind each novel. I wanted to teach and let others learn. I was nothing and became something. Others can learn from that, especially women. Is it worth trying? I think it is.”  Words Without Borders previously published an excerpt in Sawad Hussain’s translation. Here, Nada Hodali brings us some of the fast-paced, wild joy of Sahar finding her path.

From ‘A Novel for My Story’

By Sahar Khalifeh

Translated by Nada Hodali

Free

I came back from the sharia court at a run. Jumping over the stone steps, flying like a butterfly. I threw myself onto the weedy green grass that grew beneath the spectacular olive tree at our family home. I lifted my legs high into the air and practically screamed at the top of my lungs: I’m free, finally free!

I was thirty-two years old, yet I was still as young and naïve as any teenager who hadn’t yet reached the age of twenty. I had gotten married before I’d made it to eighteen. Become a mother before I’d turned twenty. After that, I was weighed down by nightmares and shortness of breath. Suffocated by life and the withering of art—the one thing that had safeguarded me and allowed me to live in a space away from reality and the borders of others. Now, as I threw myself onto the green grass and lifted my legs into the sky, this was my only thought: that I’m free, that I will always be free, from this moment on. Ever since, I have been free from that life of oppression.

I was still young, a teenager at thirty. My life at that point had been limited to fighting for my life with all of my being, in a marriage where I’d needed to maintain my self, my hopes and dreams, my artistic talents and abilities. All of that had been shelled down violently, like a flower stripped of its blooms and trapped in a sealed glass bottle only for it to slowly wither, die, and shrivel up, to the point that only a tiny insect remains: a black fly. Ideally, a brown bee would form, with neither color nor wings.

As if clothing would release me into a vast ocean full of waves that would lift me up, and on which I could stay brilliantly afloat, I changed out of my old dress and pulled on a pair of jeans. I wouldn’t drown. I would fight and overcome all waves; I would fight them until I reached the shore and walked on soft sand. There, I would leave permanent marks, unaffected by the incoming tide.

I entered the house, where my mother sat behind the sewing machine. In the tone of a TV news presenter, I quickly told her: That’s it, I’m done. She shook her head without looking up and said: Should’ve done it before this, idiot! It was said in a joking rather than a critical tone, but it did include the seed of a reprimand, reminding me that a long time had passed, and for nothing. That was what my mother meant. For all those years, she had nagged me, encouraging me to let go of this failure of a marriage, this failure of a husband. Every two or three days, she would impatiently mutter under her breath: “Don’t worry so much, just let him go, you’ll find someone better than him and his whole family.” I’d stand there, broken and humiliated, saying: “But my daughters! What will I do?” She’d simply repeat: “You’ll find someone better than him and his entire family.”

I think that’s what I feared most and was the reason for my hesitation and inability to make a decision: that I’d go back to the family house and wait on a second husband, who would screw me over just like the first one, wreck my life and the lives of my daughters, and snatch away what was left of my sanity and dreams. Hadn’t I been planning, deep inside, for all of these years, to be free, to restart my life, to become everything I’d dreamed about, discovering what I had of poetry and colors and music? Hadn’t I shifted to books after he destroyed my paintings? He’d punched through them, right through the center of the canvas, ripping them apart: cracked colors, broken frames. Sometimes, in the best of times, the canvas would pop out of the frame, crumpled up, only to be discarded.

I switched to reading because books were easier and cheaper. They were easier to carry, easier to hide, and they cost less. I would go to the Municipal Library, clutching piles and piles of books in my arms so that they nearly covered my face, and you could see only my eyes through the piles, my eyes helping me watch my step as well as the looks people gave me, especially the men. They saw a young lady, tall and slim, with soft straight long hair—and oh, how I’d always heard AbdulHalim’s words as he sang about it. Passersby would echo: a wave of perfume, silky hair, covering the cheeks, and flying away! I would mutter under my breath with grave malice: “May this wave swallow you and your pea-sized brain, you son of a bitch, can’t you see the books?” Of course, he didn’t see the books. He’d be looking only at the silk and what was beneath it. That’s what I was back then: half a being, half a human.

“What happened with the university, did they accept your application?” my mother asked. Filled with hope, I replied: “They said it’s possible.” She shook her head and kept silent, suspicious. Of course she would be—I was a 32-year-old woman with no high-school diploma who had barely passed the entrance exam with an average that barely reached 60%, since I had failed Mathematics, Algebra, Arabic Grammar, and Poetry. I’d gotten a zero in mathematics and a zero in algebra, and my scores in Arabic grammar and poetry were both under 50%, which did not save me from failing. Strangely, I received a 100% in architecture, and writing and English were both above 90%.

That’s how I was when I was younger, a moody student living in her own world. Dancing, singing, acting, playing piano without sheet music, imitating people. I would imitate this person and that, and my crowd—which was made up of the girls from boarding school—would laugh. So would the nuns, my sisters, and some of my cousins, too. They would say I was strong, devilish, and witty. In reality, when I was in prison, or my so-called marriage, I was neither strong, devilish, nor witty. My face turned pale, my mood sank, I walked slowly, doing housework was a chore, and my dreams were of death. Yet when I was courageous enough to make a decision, I became strong again, with a bit of wit, and I remain that way to this day.

Upon my return from Libya, where I spent the last years of my stinky marriage, my mother said:

– What do you want to do with your life?

Everything became as clear as the sky in my head, and without thinking, I blurted:

– I want to be a novelist.

She was in the kitchen, cooking, and she froze in place, the spatula held up, and said in surprise:

– What!

And she continued holding up the spatula until I reiterated:

– I want to be an author, to write novels like Yousef Al-Siba’i and Ihsan Abdel Quddous.

As she stared at my face, she went back to the same old lines she was so used to saying, lines of complaint I’d been hearing all my life, about my moods:

– For a second, I thought you’d grown up!

At that moment, I stole the spatula from her hand, voraciously licked its edges, and said: “Your cooking is delicious!”

Numbed by her impatience, she said:

– How are you going to make a living, smartass? You don’t have a certificate or a job, so who will take care of you and your girls?

She gestured toward my absent father, who at that point was doing well financially, or at least that’s what people said. He had left us the family house after abandoning my mother, sneaking away from my paralyzed, wheelchair-ridden brother and all of the family and relatives on my mother’s side. Amid a storm, he left us with nothing. I quickly said:

– I’ll study and earn a degree, followed by a job. And then I will write novels like Yousef Al-Siba’i and Ihsan Abdel Quddous.

When she turned around to check on the food, I gave her a synopsis of the novel I had written in secret and hidden from my husband: We Are No Longer Your Maids*. It had been accepted by the biggest publishing house in the Arab world at that time, Dar AlMa’aref AlMasriya, and by Hilmi Murad, a writer whose monthly column she followed passionately, in addition to the novels of Al-Siba’i and Abdel Quddous. Hilmi said that, in me, he’d discovered a writer with a bright future and great potential. To convince her that my project was feasible, I added some glamorous descriptions that had a good ring to them. She stayed silent, confused, her mind questioning everything, hoping something would open up a new vista. She had always been smart and alert, with a penchant for literature. With her generation’s circumstances, she couldn’t do more, but she had inherited some of these traits from me, or, more likely, I had inherited them from her. For that reason, she was strangely prescient and played a part in reinventing me.

The Mother of Daughters

My relationship with my mother was rocky and never easy. To this day, I still believe that she is the cause of everything that happened to me and my family, when it comes to the slings and arrows we experienced. Her decisions were hasty, stemming from the need to control and defend. Maybe she was doing this to make up for her failure to have a baby boy, since she was cursed to have only girls, such that she became known as “The Mother of Daughters.” That was what people called her. She considered the nickname an insult back then, and she still considers it an insult now. Even if it’s not the case everywhere, those are nothing but shallow sparse spots, very small, and don’t represent the general vibe amongst us. Having a daughter nowadays still brings in despair; girls are a project of shame, a heavy burden that results only in agony. That’s why a girl is welcomed with abuse and opposition, or sometimes with silence, light mockery, and a whole lot of regret.

That’s how it was for me and my sisters. We were welcomed with heavy silence, teary eyes, and a lot of mumbling and condolences. Friends and relatives would visit my mother with damp eyes and try to console her for her repeated grievance by saying: “Don’t worry, the one who births a girl is bound to birth a boy. You’ll decorate these girls with a boy, inshallah.” When it came to our close relatives, they would wail publicly, verbally attacking my mother so that she knew what a failure she was: failing in her second, third, fifth, and eighth exams, only producing eulogy-worthy offspring. It baffles me that my mother never got childbirth fever nor a stroke from birthing this many girls, especially after seeing that her sister-in-law aced the exam by having ten boys. Having eight daughters announced my mother’s defeat, while her sister-in-law won with ten boys.** We can only imagine what my mother felt like in a city like Nablus, where a woman’s prestige was based solely on her ability to reproduce, either killing her or bringing her back to life, or taking pity on her. Having girls only burdened women, both publicly and privately.

My mother’s internalized depression and ours would reach its peak and emerge each time one of us daughters affirmed her femininity and hit puberty against my mother’s will. Tears would trickle down her face, and my grandmother’s tears would follow, after which came a fake smile from my father. It made us feel as though we’d sinned. It had us, or mostly me, wondering: “Oh God, why did you make us women!”

In this setting, I learned the meaning behind my existence and my value in this world. I learned that I belonged to a deprecated, useless gender that deserved only to be lamented. I learned that I was under threat because of my gender, because it was taboo and a source of danger. Being a woman became a vow, which meant only that we would commit some crime like Shadia in the movie Henna Night, or do what Nahed Sharif did in the movie Father of Girls, where she slipped and besmirched the family’s honor, causing the fall of the house, the fall of the father Zaki Rustum, and a fallen reputation for the girls. Unfortunately, in my mother’s eyes, I was prone to such acts, perhaps because I was artistically inclined, or perhaps because of my emotional outbursts. Or perhaps it was because of my childhood rebellion and blabbering, and she expected me to go out and do something like Shadia, or Nahed Sharif, or the fighting army of girls who filled the Egyptian movies of the 1950s. These movies were the engine of my mother’s hidden and public fears, and she watched them diligently, embodying every saying and warning they presented.

I took to reading, writing, and then colors as my escape. I remember one painting in particular that represented me back then, summarizing how I viewed this world. The name of the painting was “Behind the Walls,” and it showed a teenager lying on her stomach on the ground inside a walled garden. A willow tree stretched its arm toward the center of the garden, behind the walls, and the girl looked at the branch with fear, misery, and clear vulnerability. Another painting, which I called “A Rebel,” depicted a girl with sharp features, red eyes, and fists held close to her chest, as if she had an incurable illness or was recovering from a punch.

When I stopped receiving compliments for my replicas, I had painted these two originals. The artist Ismael Shamout, our teacher, told me and a group of hobbyists that an artist must paint what they feel within, what they see and experience, without copying portions of pictures or paintings from random artists in the world. “We must paint from within: what we love and what we hate, what we think and what we wish for, crafting a mirror of our concerns and the concerns of others.” I hung these two paintings in the next art exhibition, which was put together in Ramallah by Shamout and a group of young artists. When I presented these paintings, Shamout applauded and encouraged me with words that filled me with pride, to the point that I went back home and told my mother: “You don’t know my value. I’m a talented artist and, one day, I’ll be a famous painter like Shamout and other people whose names you know.” She gave me a wary look, filled with confusion and suspicion, as if she knew our life’s limits, the limits that I was allowed to reach. The look showed the fears that had been instilled in her by the venomous movies she watched, and that she thought I would become like Shadia and Nahed Sharif, wreaking havoc for the Mother of Daughters, via the Father of Daughters, similar to what happened to Zaki Rustum in the movie Father of Girls.

Throughout the stage of “Mother of Daughters” and this concern over girls, I could not see myself as part of a society. Instead, I saw myself as a victim, a lost soul who was unable to find a home to protect it. Maybe at that stage, I reflected the effects of the existential literature that I so constantly devoured. I was intrigued by it because it truly encapsulated my feelings and my pain. The picture painted in Kafka’s The Trial reflected my individual nature, explaining what I expressed in my paintings and later in my writings. All in all, Kafka’s The Trial was, more or less, about the experience of a helpless person, Mr. K, who was confined within a useless state with no solution. Wherever Mr. K went, no matter what he did, he faced the same defeat, the same humiliation and pain. The ending represented the mentality of defeat and capitulation, accepting “fate” with no sense of resistance, no asking for help or slipping away.

As expected, the person who led the campaign against my teenaged rebellion was my mother, the Mother of Daughters. At that point, I read her oppressive and authoritative persona as an indicator of innate cruelty. Now, I see it as indicative of her bitterness and need to defend herself. In simple terms, she feared that we girls, most specifically me, would commit some disobedient or dishonorable act similar to those found in films from the 1950s. That was her reasoning, mixed in with feelings of guilt for having given birth to this herd of creatures that belonged to the less-valuable gender, and also, within the herd, there was the most annoying and troublesome girl in the family. For this, she suffered inhumane pressures. Her dignity forced her to hold her feelings captive in front of others. Thanks to her wit and her ability to control herself and the atmosphere around her, she was able to bury her fears and pretend to be as strong as steel, as firm as a rock. In reality, under all this grandiosity and pride, she was hiding a heart full of fear and heartbreak. She felt she deserved way better than she got: eight girls! She was the most beautiful, smartest, and strongest girl in her family and in our neighborhood. Everyone treated her like a queen, and she also embodied the role. But with the herd of girls she was stuck with, she always felt inadequate, filled with self-pity.

I captured this sense and drank from it. No matter what she pretended to be, or what feelings she buried or disguised, I always hit the nail on its head when it came to her true feelings. In a way, she hated how I could read her so easily, figuring out her secrets, challenging her over her sense of strict control. Meanwhile, I despised her for not accepting me for who I was. Not being content with me, not accepting me as a creature deserving of love and care. I accused her of hypocrisy and cruelty. I told her in plain terms everything I felt and suffered from. I screamed in such agony and venom, with a raging heart: “You are not my mother, you’re heartless!” Many times, I was the reason behind her tears, and she swore time and time again that she would rip my head off. With devotion, she tried. When she failed, she sent me to boarding school with the cruelest nuns in Jerusalem, then to the Rosary School in Amman, which also failed at teaching me a lesson. That was why I was shoved into a wedding which I survived with prominent wounds, covered in bruises.

After I married, my relationship with my mother shifted. After she discovered my husband’s disastrous side, she began to side with me, perhaps to compensate for all the prejudice, for all the hell I would encounter in a marriage that felt like an incurable disease. And I, for my part, sided with her, because back then she was my only refuge, and the distance between us lessened and then disappeared when my father remarried and yanked her from the throne on which she sat. She lost her prestige and became like me. I became her. We were in the same shoes. That is how, upon my return from Libya, I decided to break free from this marriage, escaping it and opening the doors to the family home once again, embracing my daughter with open arms, and, as much as was possible, rebuilding.

*The original title, Where Does Sadness Come From, might have been influenced by the existential literature that I would delve into for hours on end. However, my publisher, Hilmi Murad, saw that we should change the title of the novel to one that fit a poor poem I wrote about women. It begins as follows: “Because I am a woman, because I am female, Ali married four…” The novel was released with the poem placed at the beginning as an entry point to attract readers!

**Eight daughters, two of whom passed away when they were young.  Six of us remain, Alhamdulilah, Thank God.

Sahar Khalifeh is the author of eleven novels, translated into fifteen languages, and the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Naguib Mahfouz
Medal, the Simone de Beauvoir Prize and the Cervantes Prize.

Nada Hodali, a Palestinian literary translator based in Ramallah, holds a degree in English Language and Literature with a minor in Translation from Birzeit University in Palestine. She furthered her education with a Masters in Translation Studies from Durham University in the UK. She’s passionate about translating Arab literature with the aim of increasing its audience and highlighting it through the art of translation.