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Overview
A Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language, "Homelandic," is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A Jewish-Israeli author imagines a "language plague" that infects young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the narrator in search of his Arabic heritage. In Poetic Trespass, Lital Levy brings together such startling visions to offer the first in-depth study of the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the literature and culture of Israel/Palestine. More than that, she presents a captivating portrait of the literary imagination's power to transgress political boundaries and transform ideas about language and belonging.
Blending history and literature, Poetic Trespass traces the interwoven life of Arabic and Hebrew in Israel/Palestine from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, exposing the two languages' intimate entanglements in contemporary works of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by both Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. In a context where intense political and social pressures work to identify Jews with Hebrew and Palestinians with Arabic, Levy finds writers who have boldly crossed over this divide to create literature in the language of their "other," as well as writers who bring the two languages into dialogue to rewrite them from within.
Exploring such acts of poetic trespass, Levy introduces new readings of canonical and lesser-known authors, including Emile Habiby, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Anton Shammas, Saul Tchernichowsky, Samir Naqqash, Ronit Matalon, Salman Masalha, A. B. Yehoshua, and Almog Behar. By revealing uncommon visions of what it means to write in Arabic and Hebrew, Poetic Trespass will change the way we understand literature and culture in the shadow of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400852574 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/26/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Poetic Trespass
Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine
By Lital Levy
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-5257-4
CHAPTER 1
From the "Hebrew Bedouin" to "Israeli Arabic"
Arabic, Hebrew, and the Creation of Israeli Culture
When two languages meet, one of them is necessarily linked to animality. Speak like me or you are an animal.
—Abdelfattah Kilito
So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language.
—Gloria Anzaldúa
Much more than just a medium of communication, language is a symbol of identity that impels people to hold referendums, bring down governments, and even go to war. It is the idea of language, its meaning in this symbolic sense, that preoccupies the many works examined in this book. The encounter between Hebrew and Arabic did not begin with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the conflict has irrevocably transformed their relationship. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find a current discussion of the two languages that is not framed by their present circumstances as languages on opposite sides of an enemy divide. Their current relationship in Israel/ Palestine is the outgrowth of over a century of sociolinguistic, political, and cultural developments; though the two languages had shared a long and storied past, Zionism catalyzed their reunion in the context of modern nationalism. In this chapter I survey that historic landscape to offer a counternarrative of Israeli language and culture, arguing that Arabic has played a central, formative, yet paradoxical role in the self-definition of Modern Hebrew from the very outset. The repressed story of Arabic and Hebrew in Israel/Palestine is inseparable from the triangulated history of Ashkenazi Jews, Palestinian Arabs, and Mizrahi Jews, each group having faced distinct yet interrelated dilemmas of language. In excavating this multilayered site of memory, I trace pre-state linguistic practices, the institutionalization of Modern Hebrew, and the continuing evolution of Hebrew and Arabic in the political scene, concluding with the question of literary translation between the two languages.
LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY: 'AJAMI AND "ISRAELI ARABIC"
The relationship of Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine has always been a contest of power operating on an uneven playing field. Sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists who study language in Israel/Palestine concur that the conflict has "conditioned the linguistic attitudes toward Arabic and Hebrew on both sides of the Arab-Israeli divide" such that "both parties look at the language of the Other as the language of the 'enemy.'" If Jewish Israelis generally see Arabic as the language of their hostile neighbors and the "enemy within," then "[t]he Arabs, correspondingly, see Hebrew as the language of a foreign body that has been forcibly implanted in their midst, one that continues to occupy Arab lands." Similarly, both sides tend to view ethnic or national identity in categorical and totalizing terms: conflict leaves little room for nuance. In everyday parlance, for example, most Palestinians (as well as other Arabs) do not distinguish between "Israelis" and "Jews," using the Arabic term al-yahud, "the Jews," when referring to Israelis. Jewish Israelis, in turn, usually say 'aravim, Hebrew for "Arabs," rather than "Palestinians," typically without differentiating Palestinian citizens of Israel from residents of the West Bank and gaza. Palestinians in Israel, however, challenge binary notions of language and identity. They speak Hebrew as a second language, using it in everyday interactions with Jewish Israelis—and, in a different manner, with each other, through the Hebrew absorbed into Palestinian-Israeli Arabic.
The question of "Israeli Arabic"'s relationship to Hebrew came to the fore in the critically acclaimed 2009 film 'Ajami, whose unflinching realism garnered local and international accolades. The film itself and its reception among Jewish Israeli viewers and critics tell us much about the power dynamics of language and society in Israel/Palestine. Co-written and co-directed by a Palestinian Israeli and a Jewish Israeli, the film portrays the intertwined stories of Palestinians and Jews in a crime-ridden neighborhood of Jaffa, a historic Palestinian city on the outskirts of metropolitan Tel Aviv. 'Ajami surprised Jewish Israeli viewers not only with its gritty, graphic depictions of social and political tensions and police violence, but also with its unprecedented (and in fact unscripted) portrayal of a linguistic reality: the Hebrew-smattered Arabic of Palestinians in Israel. Jewish Israelis, most of whom have little real-life exposure to Palestinian Israelis speaking among themselves, were startled by hearing familiar Hebrew idioms seamlessly interpolated within strings of otherwise unintelligible, fast-flowing Arabic speech. Some Hebrew words in the characters' speech are Arabicized (through Arabic suffixes or grammatical declensions) to the point of being unrecognizable to most Jewish Israelis; such hybrid constructions signal a pidgin or creole strain within local Arabic. At times, when Palestinian characters converse with or in the presence of Jewish characters, they switch to Hebrew. This is known as "code-switching," a linguistic phenomenon that refers to the "use of more than one language in the course of a single communicative episode" and that takes place in a context of asymmetrical political or social power relations between speakers.
Encountering everyday Israeli Hebrew expressions within Arabic speech is not an ordinary experience for the Jewish Israeli viewer. The language of the film occasioned widespread commentary in the Hebrew press and on blogs. Seeing themselves in the mirror of the Other, numerous Jewish Israeli viewers reported feeling a gratifying sense of self-recognition mixed with an unnerving sense of defamiliarization. One viewer found the experience of watching the film simultaneously scintillating and alienating, imagining herself a "foreigner" in relation to the Arabic speakers on the screen and in the audience: "How sexy to sit in the Ayalon Mall [near Tel Aviv], with your popcorn and diet cola, and watch a movie in Arabic along with a large number of Israeli Arabs.... There are also parts in the movie where the Arabs [in the audience] laugh. We don't. There are nuances that a foreigner will never understand." Critics for Israel's major dailies celebrated the film and lavished praise on its language. As one wrote, the film's success in conveying an unmediated reality is due largely to "its very precise dialogues, in both Hebrew and Arabic, in which one feels no 'scriptorial' presence. That's life, and this is language [ele ha-hayim, ve-zot ha-safa]." The article's subheading jauntily proclaims, "The movie 'Ajami provides a peek at one of the most important linguistic phenomena in our language: Israeli Arabic."
Statements such as "That's life, and this is language" and "a peek at ... our language: Israeli Arabic" are anchored in underlying assumptions about community, identity, ownership, and power. Whose language, whose reality, are "we" speaking about? In context, the phrase "our language" (ha-safa shelanu) is intriguingly ambiguous. It subsumes the Arabic-Hebrew patois of 'Ajami's characters into an imagined national language that contains Hebrew and Arabic; at the same time, the lives of Arabic-speaking characters in Jaffa are recoded as a part of "Israeliness," potentially opening a new discursive space of representation. Yet here, as in many other postcolonial and minority contexts, such resignification, rather than reflecting an existing reality, is a form of symbolic appropriation: naming their hybridized language "Israeli Arabic" makes it safe for local consumption, while stripping it of Arab or Palestinian connotations.
Given Palestinian Israelis' quotidian immersion in Hebrew, not to mention the fact that they are citizens of the state, one might expect that Israeli Hebrew would also be viewed as "their" language, just as the film critic could claim "Israeli Arabic" as a part of "our language." Or, to put it bluntly, why should a few Palestinian Israelis speaking Hebrew, or speaking Arabic mixed with Hebrew, be such a big deal? In practice, however, Hebrew's symbolic status is disconnected from the reality of its everyday usage. No matter how many Palestinian Arabs speak Hebrew and no matter how well they speak it, Israeli Hebrew remains an exclusively "Jewish" language in the eyes of the state, its Jewish citizens, its Arab citizens, and the world. Ideas of linguistic ownership and possession stop short of opening the gates of Hebrew to the Palestinian.
Beyond all else, there is a stunning dissonance between the critics' celebratory embrace of "Israeli Arabic" and the disparaging attitudes toward Arabic (not to mention Arabs) that prevail in mainstream Israeli society. As members of the liberal elite, the critics see the creolized language of 'Ajami as a sign of Arab cultural integration into the Hebrew-speaking Jewish majority, a welcome harbinger of coexistence. The film itself, however, does not promote this interpretation. While it demonstrates how the lives and fates of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians are closely intertwined, it offers very little by way of hope or redemption. In fact, from a sociolinguistic perspective, linguistic interference often indicates asymmetrical power relations, as in the case of "Spanglish" in the United States. The Israeli film critics fail to recognize the interference of Hebrew in Palestinian Arabic as a sign of the ever-weakening status of Arabic in Israel—as evidence of what Anton Shammas, in writing about what he calls the "Arabebrew" of Haifa, has termed the "vanishing Arabic" of the mixed Arab-Jewish city. From his perspective as a bilingual Palestinian Israeli, "not only did the Hebrew language empty the land of its [Palestinian] inhabitants, but it also rendered their language captive." In short, the critical responses to 'Ajami are themselves expressions of majority-minority power relations. What springs to life in the language of the film is the conspicuous, unreciprocated influence of Hebrew on Arabic; what the criticism reveals is the majority's blindness to its own position of privilege. As members of the majority group, Jewish Israelis can enjoy the uniqueness and authenticity of "Israeli Arabic" on the movie screen voyeuristically—from a safe distance, without venturing out of their linguistic home.
MODERN HEBREW: FROM IDEA TO LANGUAGE TO STATE
A century before the making of 'Ajami, the picture of Arabic-Hebrew relations on location in Palestine was quite the opposite. An early twentieth-century ethnographer with a camera would have documented not the influence of Hebrew on Israeli Arabic, but the influence of Arabic on Palestinian Hebrew. The role of Arabic in the formation of Modern (Israeli) Hebrew, all but forgotten today, left its traces throughout the literary works discussed in this book. Although Israeli Hebrew is now a living, breathing national language, it began as an idea, and it has never quite stopped being one; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called Hebrew "a mythic language," one that "still possesses the quality of an active dream." The idea of Hebrew as the spiritual ether of the Jewish state goes back at least as far as 1879, when a Russian Jew named Eliezer Ben-Yehuda wrote an article called "A Burning Question" in which he fervently argued for the linkage between linguistic and national revival. Zionist settlement in Palestine had not yet commenced, and Ben-Yehuda's idea was so controversial that he struggled to find a publisher. Paradoxically, the choice of Hebrew was predicated on its history as the language of the Bible, even though Zionism itself was a primarily secular movement that embraced the idea of a secularized Jewish language.
Initially, Hebrew was not a universally popular or self-evident choice even among Zionists. Hebrew did not take hold as a spoken language in Palestine until the decade leading up to the First World War, with the wave of ideological Russian Jewish immigrants known as the Second 'Aliya; its progress was incremental, realized largely through Hebrew-language primary education. As one old-timer recalls, "No, no, they [the parents] didn't speak Hebrew at home—they spoke Yiddish—but they would smack us kids if we didn't speak Hebrew. Our Hebrew in those days was a jumble: a word in Turkish, a word in Hebrew, a word in Yiddish, a word in Arabic. But we called it Hebrew." In the end, Ben-Yehuda's revolutionary vision succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Less than half a century after the publication of his "burning question," the connection among land, language, and sovereignty became doctrinal, and a genuinely Hebrew-speaking society was formed. In present-day Israel, Hebrew is used in all aspects of public and private life. Poetry, street signs, café menus, textbooks, and military orders are all written in Hebrew; Hebrew is spoken at home, in the streets, in the army and the university, in board rooms and back rooms, and on television and radio. In short, Modern Hebrew seems nothing less than a miraculous success story, the tale of a language wrested from the jaws of historical oblivion and rejuvenated against all odds. Moreover, Hebrew is now spoken by nearly a million and a half Palestinian Israelis, in addition to thousands of foreign "guest" workers, making it impossible to define it as a strictly Jewish language.
Yet the blinding success of Modern Hebrew masks another, far less triumphant tale: the fate of all other languages in Israel. Hebrew hegemony was realized through the persistent stigmatization and suppression of "Diasporic" languages. In many respects, this scenario is not without historical precedent. In post-Enlightenment Europe, Romantic nationalist ideologues of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries championed the linkage between national identity and a single language, engendering policies of linguistic centralization. The top-down creation of "national" languages usually entailed the repression of other languages or dialects. Nonetheless, the story of Modern Hebrew is exceptional in the audacity of its vision and forcefulness of its realization. In the case of Hebrew, one could say that it was not even the state that created the language so much as the language that created the state. It entailed not only linguistic centralization or the privileging of one language or dialect over others, but the reinvention of a traditional, liturgical language as an all-encompassing, everyday spoken and written medium, carried out through the successful inculcation of nationalist monolingualism.
The demise of Diasporic Jewish languages and literatures is most often associated with Yiddish, a tragic casualty of the Nazi genocide, Stalinist repression, the cultural assimilation of North American Jewry, and Israel's language policies. Equally devastating, but hardly acknowledged, is the eradication of Arabic-based Jewish culture following the mass emigration of Jews from the Arab world. Although Arabic is nominally Israel's second official language, Israel was created not as a bilingual nation but as a monolingual Hebrew state. In 1952, David Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister and the father figure of the state, declared in the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) that "the State of Israel is a Jewish state and this is indicated by the Law of Return and by the Hebrew language." If anything, the second-class status of the Arabic language simply mirrored and marked that of Palestinian Arabs in Israel, who after 1948 were transformed into a national minority and second-class citizens. Israel's destruction of a large number of Palestinian villages during and after the 1948 war is a well-known historical fact. In the linguistic arena, this process of erasure continued well after 1948 with the gradual and ongoing removal of Arabic from the historic as well as the living map of the country. Concurrently, Israel's language policies systematically destroyed Arabic as a Jewish language, putting an abrupt and tragic end to the illustrious history of Jewish thought and creativity in Arabic—a history that reached back as far as pre-Islamic poetry.
This purposeful remapping of language and identity—Hebrew for Jews, Arabic for Arabs—continues to be enacted through social practices and the media as well as through separate residential patterns and educational systems for Jewish and Palestinian Israelis. It has been extraordinarily fateful, albeit in different ways, for both Palestinians and Mizrahim, reinforcing a separate and politically subordinate identity for Palestinians in Israel while stripping Mizrahi Jews of their identities and pasts. As Zvi Ben-Dor writes, "The founding fathers had two groups in mind: Hebrew-speaking Jews, and Arabic-speaking Arabs. Nothing was supposed to exist in the middle, between the two groups, and it was in this 'in-between' that Arabic speaking Jews found themselves." That in-between space is the no-man's-land, the space of cultural encounter whose history this book seeks to narrate.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Poetic Trespass by Lital Levy. Copyright © 2014 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Illustrations ixAcknowledgments xi
Note on Transliteration and Translation xv
Introduction: The No-Man's-Land of Language 1
PART I HISTORICAL VISIONS AND ELISIONS
1 From the "Hebrew Bedouin" to "Israeli Arabic": Arabic, Hebrew, and the Creation of Israeli Culture 21
2 Bialik and the Sephardim: The Ethnic Encoding of Modern Hebrew Literature 60
PART II BILINGUAL ENTANGLEMENTS
3 Exchanging Words: Arabic Writing in Israel and the Poetics of Misunderstanding 105
4 Palestinian Midrash: Toward a Postnational Poetics of Hebrew Verse 141
PART III AFTERLIVES OF LANGUAGE
5 "Along Came the Knife of Hebrew and Cut Us in Two": Language in Mizraḥi Fiction, 1964–2010 189
6 "So You Won't Understand a Word": Secret Languages, Pseudo-languages, and the Presence of Absence 238
Conclusion: Bloody Hope: The Intertextual Afterword of Salman Masalha and Saul Tchernichowsky 285
Bibliography 299
Index 329
What People are Saying About This
"This is a work of immense accomplishment dedicated to understanding what it means to write in two languages about a condition of life that is, at once, both shared and separate. Lital Levy's critical speculations are careful and courageous as her beautiful prose moves back and forth across the borderline of Israel/Palestine, forging a way of moving toward a solidarity built of sorrow and survival, failure and hope. Read Poetic Trespass and reflect anew on the ethical and poetic possibilities of a translational dialogue in a star-crossed region."—Homi Bhabha, Harvard University"Erudite and elegant, Lital Levy's Poetic Trespass is a groundbreaking exploration of the unexpected twists and turns in the complex interrelations of Hebrew and Arabic. By rethinking the Hebrew-Arabic nexus and positioning Modern Hebrew literature as an exceptionally rich turf for the study of the ways in which entangled languages affect one another, the book offers an important new perspective on literature's power to reimagine bilingualism. A remarkable consideration of the audacity of writers as different as Anton Shammas and Almog Behar to cross linguistic and political boundaries within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."—Ilana Pardes, author of Agnon's Moonstruck Lovers: The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture"Poetic Trespass opens new vistas on the 'no-man's land' between Hebrew and Arabic. Through deeply thoughtful readings of works in Hebrew, Arabic, and uncanny palimpsests of both languages, Lital Levy probes the ways in which literature can reimagine the world beyond the ordinary boundaries of political discourse. With its nuanced attention to questions of translation and mistranslation, of cultural memory and oblivion, Poetic Trespass should be read by anyone interested in pathbreaking work in comparative literary and cultural studies today."—David Damrosch, Harvard University"Poetic Trespass is one of the most important studies of contemporary Hebrew literature in recent years. Focusing on how a variety of writers in Israel/Palestine transgress the lines that separate Hebrew and Arabic, Lital Levy's compelling, provocative, and productive book enriches our understanding of more than a century of literature in both these languages. It is bound to appeal to scholars across fields who are interested in Jewish studies, the history of Israeli-Palestinian relations, and the history of the Middle East."—Amir Eshel, Stanford University