Muhammad Barrada says: “The desire for expression through an artistic or literary form is a desire to continue life despite the limits and objective barriers in front of man, that is, despite the ceiling of death, the inevitability of demise, and the limited human energy in absorbing the manifestations of reality and the complexities of it. The world... It also looks to the broad horizon that gives indication to the experiences of life, in addition to helping us to understand the self and its various relationships with what is around it... Hence writing becomes part of the adventure of living and being. (Al-Karmel/82/2005)
With this vision, expression comes through writing for the Palestinian, who always tries in his creative works to revive the collective self that others try to ignore. The place comes as a title for the collective self for the Palestinian, especially the refugee who lost the place and became homeless. For him, the place is not a flat, mountainous or rocky piece of land, but rather memory and history. It preserved it from the features of geography, and it expresses the lives of the residents who left and who are still on their land preserving what remains of their existence.
After more than seventy years of the Nakba, the Palestinian is still living the memories of the village that was taken from him by force of arms and terrorism in 1948, and he still dreams of returning to it. There are many accounts written about the Nakba and what preceded it, about the life of the inhabitants and their displacement. The Palestinian did not abandon his memory and his memories. At every time and occasion he seeks to draw the features of the village, its details, its houses, its streets, its gardens, its plants, its trees and its animals. Coming to deepen belonging, until the situation reached some generations that were born in the diaspora, and they were able to visit their village to walk on their land according to what their memory stored of the stories of grandparents and fathers about their village.
We have in our hands the tenth novel "Zar'in" by the writer Safi Safi, who has a long experience in writing the Palestinian novel, which he began in 1990 with the novel of Hajj Ismail, and after that the stolen dream, The Rising Again, Al-Yasira, Al-Kurba, Shihab, Sama Sama Samia, Al-Batin, and Tayeh. In 2021, the novel "Zar'in" was published by Dar Al-Shorouk, Ramallah. The novelist, Dr. Safi Ismail Safi, Professor of Physics at Birzeit University, was born in the village of Beit al-Lu in Ramallah, to a family displaced in 1948 from the village of Beit Nabala in the Ramla district. He is a member of the General Union of Palestinian Writers and Writers, and a member of its administrative board from 1992-2005. He participated in many publications. From cultural and scientific conferences and seminars, and whoever follows his page on the social networking site (Facebook) finds in front of him a traveler across the country immortalizing in the image and in the word every teacher from the villages of Palestine.
The novel "Zar'in" is a unique novel in its content, ambiguous in its semantics. It narrates the events of a journey that appears at first glance to be a trip to a Palestinian village, which it is. It examines its history and geography, and highlights its features that have disappeared or still exist, but when you explore its depths, you find Yourself in front of a narrative journey that embodies the place, but at the same time it carries intellectual, philosophical and political dimensions, and expresses deep connotations that the language carries and floats between the folds of the narration, formulated by the writer together without the reader feeling that there is a cut or separation between the contents of the narration, which made him continue reading enjoying the aesthetic The place he is told about, but the overall vision that includes all the indications that are absorbed between the folds of the narration, constitutes the writer's vision of what he formulated from the fictional text, to give us another path for the novel that is contrary to the path of the journey.
Title and Narrative Structure:
The title (Zareen) corresponds narratively and semantically with the events of the novel. Where the novel refers to the course of events and their location, "Oh, how sweet you are! How sweet is today's path to Zir'in and the Faqqu'a Mountains." And the village of Zar'in is one of the Palestinian villages that was occupied in 1948 and its people were displaced. naturally". It is one of the villages that belonged to the Jenin district before the Nakba, and its people became refugees in the Jenin camp.
After the village resisted and defended itself, a British officer came and asked the residents to evacuate the village and to go to their camp in Jenin, as it was empty and waiting for them. An indication of the British cooperation with the Zionist movement in displacing the villagers, and gives us a political and temporal dimension to what Britain did throughout the years of its occupation of Palestine, by paving the ground for the establishment of the Jewish entity.
Cultivate reality and imagination:
The village of Zar'in before 1948 was full of its inhabitants. It is a reality that still exists in the memory of the narrator. He says when he stands on its ruins: "I see the village with its inhabitants, who were about two thousand, with its alleys and alleys, as they overlook their farms from here, and they look out from these windows In the form of arches and quadrilaterals on the Jordan River, and on Ain Zar'in, which is still great, I see its people transporting the fruits of their crops, and emptying them into the threshing floor, I see shepherds of sheep, and I imagine their pens, I see the elderly sitting in front of their homes, ... I hear a voice Yusra Al-Barmakia, while she sings and beats the tambourine at weddings and birthdays. He draws the features of the place in all its details, plains and plateaus, valleys and rocks, plants and trees, springs and wells, and the names of families. She continues to grow to renew the memory of those who once embraced her.
He is the son of this place that he cannot relinquish, no matter how much the occupier changes the village's land, where he established the settlement of Jezreel on its land (the name is derived from the Canaanite heritage), and established the park over the school site. These changes are rejected by him and are not Recognized. Despite this, the belief in her return remains firm. "The important thing is that she returns, and she will return, not necessarily as it was, it can be more beautiful. It will definitely be different." Because life has changed and the vision of the new generations has also changed.
As for the narrative structure, the novel takes a circular form, where the opening of the novel is a continuation of the end. The beginning of the novel was from the departure of the bus. There is beauty in bringing the Israeli police to them in order to save them from the predicament, then he returns from the first page of the novel to complete the events. He says: "At the end of the path, and after we made sure that we had survived... I tried to be alone while I continued the path towards the bus", using the retrieval technique. (Flashback) In the narration of events.
The narrator who gives his characters the opportunity to tell is a democratic narrator, according to critic Yomna Al-Eid. However, our narrator completely dominated the narration, except for a little, as he is not satisfied with describing the characters and introducing them, but rather conveys through their tongues what the character himself could have spoken, for example: Abu Nihad talks about his village and its struggle through the eyes of the narrator, then he moves on to Abu Nihad Directly in the hadith, Abu Nihad said, talking about the migration of the village, .. Abu Nihad still remembers the village well. Despite this, he sometimes opened a self-dialogue with himself in an internal monologue, to ask some questions or comment on a situation. Or he conducts an individual dialogue with one of the personalities and discusses with her on a subject, such as the dialogue that he opened with Abu Maher about the house of Grandfather Hanan in Bisan, or he enters into a group dialogue such as the dialogue that took place between the members of the team when they commented on the hill, or the dialogue between Hajj Ibrahim and Sheikh Muhammad about Abu Maher's position on burning his father's body and moving it to his grandfather's grave, but it is all through the eyes of the narrator. The narrator, according to modern novel techniques, is the narrator who knows everything.
One of the modern novel techniques used by the writer is the technique of communicating through Facebook with Hanan, through which he reached her after many years, and it became a communication tool between them.
As well as the technique of manipulating time, as we find in this novel two times: a fixed time related to the time when the events took place. As for the narrative time for arranging the events, it is a time that is variable or distributed over the space of the novel, as we read about an event in a time, then we go back and read the completion of the event in another place.
Venue and build events:
The events are based on a description of a trip to explore the features of the place, which is the village of Zar'in, and other villages (Faqu'a and its mountains, Emwas, and the city of Bisan). Through the course of the trip, we learn about many of the names of the villages while the bus was moving from Jerusalem, "we covered the distance, between The villages of Lifta on the left, the villages of Beit Iksa and Beit Surik on the right, Beit Naquba, Abu Ghosh, Saris, Deir al-Latrun, Faamwas, Gimzu and Daniel, al-Haditha, Beit Nabala, Deir Tarif, al-Tira, and Majdal Sadiq. The writer succeeded in reviving our memory, deepening our belonging to these villages, and making us walk with him through the paths of the slopes, mountains, hills, plains, and wells, and to be part of the artistic painting he drew of the place with all its details and features, including trees, plants, animals, insects, roads, and houses that were inhabited by its people. As if the narrator was standing in front of the gate of paradise describing it with all sincerity and sincerity, for it was truly paradise. For Abu Nihad, the village of Emmaus is paradise, and Bisan for Hanan is paradise, so all of our land is paradise.
The painting established the depth of faith in the place, the narrator's pride in his homeland, and the strength of his belonging to this land. Although it is a journey in its simple content to explore the features of the villages and the changes that took place on them, and what remains of them after more than seventy years of immigration, it includes deep connotations in the course of the political reality after the Oslo agreement, which gave up many of these villages, so the narrator tries to recreate Building the place and commemorating it in response to those who sought to make the place disappear. This is what we read in the narrator’s dialogue with Hanan when she says: “We, like others, would like to return to our city and live among its parts. I thought of joining the organization’s movements, but they bring up the name Jericho, and when they say span by span, they refer to the cities of the West Bank. As for Bisan, you hear its name in The songs, and in the names of some girls, they want it to be a memory, and is Ramallah and Jerusalem more important than Bisan?
Here the narrator began to understand it, and he wants the reader to understand, and he determined his path is to keep the memory alive for future generations through pictures and words about those places abandoned by the Oslo Accords. "Every time I feel that this is the first path, I go to know them." Destroyed sites and villages... This is my mother's village, this is my father's village, this is the village of my friends, and this is the village of my relatives." All of these villages are still inhabited by refugees in Ramallah and its villages or camps, and he used to take pictures of these villages and give them to their owners. "I care about the place, even the presence of my colleagues makes it difficult for me to take pictures of the place. Sometimes I ask them to move away, or I go ahead of them, or I wait until they leave." . His concern was to document the place with the image so that it would become a reference for the memory and the aesthetics of the place, and a gift for the owners of the villages so that they would keep the pictures of their countries for the sake of their children. And she will inherit it to her grandchildren, as she said, so living with the shadows is better than without it.
The trip was the background for a political vision emanating from an unfair political agreement against the Palestinian refugees, and a firm and unwavering belief in the right of the Palestinians to the place, and denying the Jewish-Israeli biblical narrative about the place, that God gave them this land. This English-speaking historian reads history as he wants without any scientific basis. He talks about the Biblical battle of King Saul in the Faqqu'a mountains. On the land of Zir'in, they see a group of school children whose teacher falsifies the historical and geographical facts in front of them, but the midges did not allow them to elaborate on their lies, so they fled from the place. It is the irony of pain. And the narrator discusses with Abu Maher about their inability to bear the midge, and he assures him that the enemies do not have the ability to deal with the place like us, although they have lived for seventy years, but they do not live in the place, so we do not find among them shepherds of sheep or cows like us, and they do not sleep on roofs rather in high apartments. This is an indication that they do not belong to the place / nature. Also, all the places that they mentioned in the Torah existed before them, and they did not build a single city. The falsification of history stems from the logic of force, as Abu Maher says to the narrator: "It is about force, and it must formulate your history, in which you justify the killing of others, the confiscation of their land, and the expulsion of the rest outside the country."
The team of the trip determined that there is no cooperation or normalization with the occupation, as they are enemies, and they cannot be used, and during their trip they refuse to wander in their markets, or buy from their groceries, or enter their cafes, but they depend on themselves for their food and drink, Even coffee comes with them, and they refused to enter Ain Jalut Park when they were asked for the price of the entrance ticket.
The characters and plot of the novel:
The journey begins with a team of up to fifty people, but we get to know a number of them who represent the main characters in the narrative (narrator / Hanan, Jamal, Hajj Ibrahim, Abu Nihad, Abu Maher, Ghassan, Sheikh Muhammad). All of them come from different places, some of them carry an Israeli identity, the narrator carries a Dafawi identity, and Abu Maher comes from Jordan, but they are all brought together by emigration and asylum, and each of them has an abandoned village, and each of them has a purpose from God in the journey.
The plot of the novel emerges through two complexes: the first, the predicament that Gamal placed on the team members when he called the police to save them. The second complication is the narrator's attempts to reach Bisan and fulfill his friend Hanan's wish to photograph her grandfather's house. We try to clarify them by reading the characters themselves, as this journey brings together generations, the younger generation and the older generation.
= Jamal: An eccentric personality, representing a political thought that preys on the Arabs, and it is the Islamic political thought, which he expressed during his speech on the bus, and he is also the one who announces the call to prayer for the afternoon and performs the prayer, and presents the idea of the emirate to the team, but it is social in nature, with its face Smiling, extraordinarily cooperative, good-looking, showing residuals of a chronic illness, he works as an administrative assistant in a school affiliated with the Israeli Ministry of Education in Jerusalem. He was photographing landscapes, talking about the benefit that followers reap from his photos, and he was proud of the number of followers of his posts, and he made a great effort to master them, so he bought a flying camera for this purpose, and he hopes to get paid for continuous publication. But he used to choose what he photographed, as he would turn off the camera when the picture was not in the mood of the followers, such as singing and dancing parties, or the burial ceremonies of Abu Maher's father, and he would search for what would excite them, for example, about a large snake between the cracks of the mountains. He is not interested in documenting the place, but in what he earns from photographing the place.
This is the thinking of the new generation that Jamal represents about the significance and importance of the image, which is to gather the largest number of followers, and the price that he receives from publishing the image. Whereas if we met him with the position of the narrator regarding the image, we would find it in contrast.
He tries to impose himself as the leader of the team, by speaking on the bus microphone about the displaced villages and introducing them, and assuming supervision and organizing the team. Rather, he takes advantage of his closeness to Al-Hajj in order to impose his views. He "took his position through Hajj Ibrahim, who honored him one day with the shield of the man who persevered on the paths despite his illness."
He acted on his own by contacting the Israeli police to rescue the team. After the team fell into serious trouble on the hill where the great slope, and slipping meant falling about a hundred meters down. Jamal could not save the situation or listen to Hajj Ibrahim's advice to help the team to disembark. Rather, he insisted on his position that he was waiting for the police to get rid of them. When the police came, they did nothing. He is the leader of the team, so everyone denied that the team has a leadership, but rather they are all equal leaders and fans, and when they asked Jamal he said: "I was lost, I have not tried the track before", and this is an indication of his lack of experience in life and politics.
The significance of the situation expresses the new generation's feeling of helplessness and its inability to rely on itself in the face of dangers, "I could not help myself, so how can I help you, we were there, hope for survival was lost." Therefore, he uses others to save him, even if he is his enemy. This negative attitude did not please the other elderly people, and the narrators who refuse to help the enemies, and prefer to rely on themselves.
In order for Jamal to prove that he is not helpless after his involvement, he refuses to help Hajj Ibrahim in saving the team, and this is an indication of the conflict between two generations over the leadership of the team, and the attitude towards dealing with the occupier, while Hajj Ibrahim refuses to deal with the occupation police, we find Jamal has Willingness and ability to deal with it as a reality.
= Hajj Ibrahim: He is the leader of the team, fascinated by the beauty of nature, and never tire of flirting with nature, although he visited many Asian and European countries known for the beauty of their nature, but he did not find anything more beautiful than the nature of the homeland, so he would always repeat, "How beautiful you are." Oh my country”, “How beautiful is this nature”, “How beautiful is what God has given us in this universe”, and he always repeats the traditional and motivating songs of the team he describes as heroes.
Despite Jamal's attempt to hold him responsible for seeking the help of the police because he abandoned the team, which is an attempt by Jamal to justify his condemnation of the entire team, Hajj Ibrahim did not abandon the team in his predicament, as he sent them peace more than once to help them get off, but Jamal's insistence that they not go down, and that they are under police surveillance. And when the police came, the pilgrim wanted to prove to them that everything was fine, and that there was nothing that necessitated your presence, so he started singing and dancing, and everyone participated. And push Salamin to take down the team.
As for his stance towards Jamal, it was solid and firm.
= Abu Maher: No one from the team knew him before, but they got to know each other during the trip. His name is Mahmoud al-Shalabi. He does not hold a Palestinian or Israeli identity card. He is just a visitor who came from Jordan, and he has many relatives in the Jenin camp. After their emigration in 1948, they lived in the Jenin camp, and they remained there until the June War of 1967, when they immigrated to Jordan, and lived in the Irbid camp. His father joined the resistance and participated in the Battle of Karama, then his father traveled to Greece in the hope of obtaining its nationality. Years after the 1967 war, his father visited the village of Zareen and took his son Mahmoud (Abu Maher) with him. He looked at the village's landmarks, stood at his father's grave and wept, bequeathing: "Bury me here, in the grave, or next to it."
He was secretive, did not speak to anyone, and was almost isolated from the team, and sometimes he got involved in the heart of the team. From time to time he checks his bag, the remnants of tears in his eyes drying up and then flowing again.
The team took the right road towards the park, while he went towards the cemetery because he was carrying the remains of his father, who died in Greece. The team approached the eastern cemetery in Zareen, where he was sitting beside his grandfather's grave, and it was damp, as he had just buried his father's ashes. Sheikh Muhammad stood and asked the team to perform the funeral prayer for the soul of the late Maher Mahmoud Al-Shalabi. And when Hajj Ibrahim asks him about the issue of religion's position on cremation of a Muslim's body, Sheikh Muhammad says: Necessities allow for prohibitions.
Abu Maher's goal of the trip was to bury the ashes of his father's cremated body in order to facilitate its transportation through the crossings and checkpoints, and put it in a plastic container from Greece to Amman, to Ramallah to the Qalandia crossing, and all the way to Zareen. In order to fulfill his father's will, he should be buried in his father's grave in the village, and after his death, his son had no choice but to carry out his will, even if he crossed the limits of religion. This is an indication of the Palestinian's adherence to his homeland, which was stolen from him, and if he is unable to return, at least he finds a grave for him in his land in order to be resurrected from the soil of the homeland and not from the soil of diaspora and asylum.
Abu Maher was the most terrified member of the team when he saw the police, after the predicament that Jamal put them in, because he believed that they had revealed his order to transfer the remains of his father. On the bus radio, he teaches lessons about Zar'in and the Faqqu'a Mountains, assists the team leader, and records the events of the trip. He is just a newcomer to Palestine from Jordan, who has no experience with men and places.
Therefore, he did not want to confront or clash with the police for fear of what he had done. His attitude was negative. He tried to avoid the police, but he did not resist them so as not to be exposed. The policeman grabbed him and helped him. Ibrahim went down the slope, and when the policeman called that their cars were ready to take them, he got into the car with them, drank water, ate biscuits from them, and stayed with them until they brought him to the bus.
The position of this person coming from Jordan to Palestine, who did not live on Palestinian land, contradicted the position of those rooted in the land, who refuse to deal with the occupation police and army, which suppresses, kills and arrests the Palestinian, while his concern was to escape by himself, without any Take responsibility for others.
= Abu Nihad: An old man, seventy-five years old, walking slowly, and Jamal trying to help him at Hajj Ibrahim's request. He sits a lot to rest and smokes a cigarette. Tall, white-skinned, close to blond, clean-shaven, well-dressed, dressed in sportswear. He is from the displaced village of Emwas, he lived in Ras al-Amud in Jerusalem, he works as a merchant in Musrara, and he has been renting an apartment all these years, he did not build a house, and he kept longing to return to his village.
The village of Emwas was abandoned and destroyed in the June war of 1967, along with a number of villages in the Latrun area, namely Yalo and Beit Nuba. Its inhabitants were displaced to Ramallah and its camps. When he arrived with the team to the village, he said to them: “You now live in paradise.” But it is no longer my home, for they have destroyed it, and there is nothing left in it except the water spring and the trees around it, and the shrine of our master Abu Ubaidah al-Jarrah. It is still stuck in his mind despite the long years of emigration, he still "sees everything in it, he sees the fields and the wells, (listing the names of the wells), ... he sees the remains of the building, he remembers its youth, its men, its women and its girls." He still remembers the names of the dead in the graves of the village, the names of the owners of the houses, and his house among the trees, and he remembers the revolutionaries' defense of the village, and the emigration of its people and their return to it in June 67.
Abu Nihad felt in the land of Emmaus his youth, and that he still had the ability to climb the carob tree, so his foot slipped, and he fell on the ground, and when Ghassan wanted to pick a fruit from it, he was keen on his advice not to break its branches, because it is our tree. This is the Palestinian who still believes in his right to the place/land no matter how long the years pass, and fears for its trees and fruits, as if he lives in it and eats its oil, olives, figs and grapes.
He liked to get acquainted with some plants that he had not seen for decades, while he was walking around the land of Zir'in, and he said: "The country was more beautiful, because all the people of the country used to live among these plains, and they were used to grow grains as well. Don't you see that there are Wide roads separate the land from each other, don't you see that the train distorts it, it was more beautiful, the land is more beautiful with its people. These are just temporary tenants from the state, trying to exploit it to the fullest extent, they do not belong to it, and it does not belong to them."
When he felt nostalgic for Emmaus, he used to come to it to restore his soul and her spirit, and the young men would come to it and plant signs showing its features, including a sign on their house, and this prompted the military governor to summon him for investigation about the sign, and after a discussion with the governor, he confirms his right to the place, so he responds to him Al-Hakim: “I was from there, we are there, and we are here.” Abu Nihad says to him: “I am from there and from here, and you are from there.. there.” Al-Hakim says: “Our Lord gave us the land.” Abu Nuhad’s sarcasm comes: “Is your Lord Conqueror of the Tabu district.” The ruler replies: “If you defeat us, expel us, sit in our place, and name it whatever you like.”
This is the truth. The Israeli narrative is false, and it relies on the logic of power to impose its religious and political logic. They had power, so they abandoned the people of the place, and wrote a false history of the place, and it will not return unless we have the power.
When the team ran into Jamal's dilemma, and Abu Nihad was one of them, we find him giving up when he felt cold, and his body began to shiver, so he was afraid of death, "I don't want to die here, I want to die quietly. Let the helicopter come, let the devil come, and save me from death." . He tries to justify his position that he does not want to die in this place despite its beauty, and expresses his attachment to his village and death on its land, "If I were in my village, Emmaus, I would have told you: Leave me here to die. Each of us chooses his paradise, and mine is not here, despite its beauty. I want to go back." To my home in Jerusalem, and die there."
There remain among the personalities who had a role in narrating the events, but they were simple roles, the character of Ghassan and Sheikh Muhammad, two contradictory personalities on the intellectual and political level.
= Sheikh Muhammad: A traditional cleric who expresses religious opinions that he is sometimes not convinced of. He was the imam of those praying for the ashes of the late father of Abu Maher, and he justifies the burning of the body. He accuses the Arabs of losing Palestine when he sees the Faqqu’a mountain range, and he mentions that it is difficult to fall militarily, as it was delivered from the Arabs, including the Iraqi army, and that we are a victim of conspiracies, and Palestine will not be liberated by the imaginary leaders in the Arab world, but rather the liberated by non-Arabs, perhaps from Turkey or Other.
= Ghassan: Ghassan, the son of the National Movement, and a worker in one of the Jerusalem documentation institutions, addresses this position, and defends the Arab position, especially the Iraqi army, stressing that the tombstones of the enemies (on both sides of the road to the Faqqu'a Mountains, there are memorials bearing the names of the soldiers who were killed in Hebrew ) Evidence that great battles were fought, that they did not surrender easily, and that the graves of the Iraqi army in Jenin are still witness to their defense.
The idea of presenting these two visions in the narrative is an indication of the interactions within the Palestinian society in terms of visions that try to deny the Palestinians and Arabs their defense of Palestine, to establish new historical facts with a religious dimension derived from the time of Saladin, that the liberation of Palestine does not come from Through the Arabs, but rather from non-Arab Muslims, meaning that Islam or Muslims are the ones who will liberate Palestine.
= The narrator / Hanan: The narrator has no definition of himself, except that he embellishes a vague identity, and is considered the central figure in the narration, as he is not one of the characters, but rather the main driver of all the characters in the course of events. It represents the role of the intellectual who asks questions and discusses them with himself, and expresses his position on issues related to the trip.
In the case of the predicament that Gamal put them in on the hill. He falls into a contradiction between following Jamal's orders, who commanded himself, and Hajj Ibrahim's request for help in disembarking. He did not want to cause embarrassment to either of them. He says: I see myself incapable of making a simple decision after Jamal almost quarreled with the representative of the pilgrim, moments of waiting, waiting for a decision Al-Hajj, Jamal’s decision, the police’s decision, and our lackluster participation in the decision.” The significance of this situation expresses the narrator’s inability to express his opinion despite his rejection of Jamal’s behavior, yet he surrendered to his will, indicating his fear of splitting the team, and he does not want to be a party to the division. So he stood on the fence, but his position was firm in refusing to cooperate with the occupation police or to ride their cars, rather he was prejudiced against himself despite his injury and continued walking to the bus. He determined his position after the end of the impasse, by siding with the position of Hajj Ibrahim, when Jamal came to him To explain his position, he says: I looked towards him again, and I would like his speech to end as soon as possible, and I tried to approach Hajj Ibrahim.
The narrator, like the others, had a goal of the trip, and he revealed his goal, saying: "As for me, I will take this path with the approval of the team. I will reveal my origin in Bisan, the old Bisan, and I can photograph the house of Hajj Khalil al-Zarini, and send it to Hanan, because it is only seen in Palestine." Bisan, her grandfather's town, and I'm looking for the trace of the picture hanging at the entrance of the house."
This definition represents a summary of the narrator's story and his role in the journey, arriving in Bisan and filming the home of his friend Hanan's family. This tenderness is not a character in the course of the journey, but rather a character in the mind of the narrator, and through it our vision of it is formed in the narration of events. He is his classmate since university days, and they had multiple meetings, and he loved her passionately, but he did not dare to propose to her. Her answer shocked him when he asked her about the qualities of the man she would be associated with, as she said: “To bring me back to my grandfather’s riches.” Love is not important to him. For her, what is important is the decision of her family, as she is committed to the consensus of her family. She says that while she is not convinced. However, the significance and contradiction of its proposition stems from the conditions that the Palestinian lives in after immigration, as the Nakba has imposed on him things that he does not accept.
In the narrator's meeting with Hanan's friend, she explained to him Hanan's position on not being related to him, not because it is inappropriate, but rather because they drew their life picture on uniting the family, not breaking it up, as she is sick with her family's disease, so her father refuses to alienate his daughters, and does not want his grandchildren to be distributed, As the catastrophe did to them, and he does not want to live in the hope of collecting shadows, for you are a shadow for them, you may help them, but you are not part of the picture, and they live on the dreams and shadows of their city.
Hanan is a beautiful, intelligent, aware and self-confident person who loves her country, Bisan, to the point of worship. She memorizes the smallest details about her, even though she was not born and lived in its land, but rather lives in an Arab country, and feels alienated whenever she meets someone from Palestine. Its people still live in Bisan. The pictures hanging on the walls are pictures of the city, pictures of her grandfather and uncles, and the furniture of their house is green like the color of their city. With his identity "Not a moment goes by that I don't feel my identity."
The situation came to Hanan thinking of joining a commando group and taking a plane and threatening him to land in Bisan, because of her longing to see her city, and when she presented the idea to her father, he said: “If that was possible, I would have done that... Forget this idea, let us We carry our city with us, as we do, until God releases it.” This is the destiny of the Palestinian refugee to carry his city as if it were a suitcase to travel with him wherever he goes, without giving it up or wasting a single grain of its land. Therefore, the Oslo agreement was a betrayal of their dreams, and Hanan expressed this betrayal clearly, saying: "We, like others, would like to return to our city and live among its parts... Are Ramallah and Jerusalem more important than Bissan?"
Hanan was away from him for years after university, but he still sticks to his promise to her to search for her grandfather's house in Bisan and photograph it. He communicated with her via the Internet, to renew the memory, but time changed her appearance, but did not change her thinking. The first question I asked him on the Internet was, "Did you visit our house in Bisan?"
As if it became necessary for him to fulfill his promise, so he participated in the journey with the aim of arriving, and he began describing the features of the house to Hajj Ibrahim as he had told him from Hanan’s memory, so he began describing the house as if it were a painting embodied in its details before his eyes, including stones, arches, staircases, pictures, a gate and marble columns. And the family picture in the entrance of the house. Hanan's memory represents the memory of all the Palestinian generations living in exile. Grandparents and parents engraved in their memory the details of the place, the features of their homes and the streets of their villages, so they lived dreaming of returning, even if they could not at least get a picture of their home.
If a person is absent from a place, his shadows remain a witness to his existence, and the shadow is the extension of the person in the place no matter how many years pass, and every person has a shadow, that is, he has assets that he cannot give up, so the shadows are different according to the extension of the person. So Hanan asked him to take a picture of the big picture at the entrance of the house, if it was there, because the picture expresses the presence in the place, and confirms their previous presence in the house, no matter how the enemies try to claim that the house is theirs. She is looking for a copy of the original photo, so she did not ask for the original, but rather a photo so that its shadows remain in the imagination of her children, while the original remains in its place as a witness to the shadows of their existence and their entitlement to the place.
While the narrator is riding, the bus passes by Bisan, he tries to photograph through the windows, but the speed of the bus did not help him to take a good picture of the place, so the pictures were blurry and unclear, and he collected what he photographed and sent it to Hanan, and she replied that she did not find Bisan in The video, because for her, Bisan is the family home, not the modern buildings.
The narrator did not reach Bisan, nor did he enter its old town, because the time of the trip did not allow, and what happened to him in terms of spraining his leg, and the predicament that Gamal put them in, changed the course of time, so Hajj Ibrahim promised that the visit to Bisan would be for the next week.
The writer succeeded in making the end open, and not reaching Bisan, "Hajj Ibrahim held my hand, and asked: Do you still want to visit Bisan? Of course. When you are ready, we will go together." Arriving means the end of a journey, but it was not a journey, as it is the background for a political vision, so the Bisan path will remain open, and the insistence on reaching it remains the goal of every Palestinian, as Bisan is a symbol of the entire stolen homeland, which the Oslo agreement waived.
The overall view of the text:
The narrator says: We were one team, we rode the bus together, we started the path together, we sang, and we danced, but the length of the path separated us, making us distant blocks, unable to communicate and connect. The team extended for a kilometer, sometimes more or less, we were united by conversations and interests, conversations about work and busyness in life, ... we were united by conversations about politics and society, customs and traditions, and our interests in educating our children in institutes and universities, we were united by old friendships, or mutual friends, and interests in research projects And he worked, and there are those who unite him with the team spirit and the common path, so I find a colleague within the group, then he separates alone between two groups.
This is a piece of the Palestinian reality, not from the reality of a journey, as it expressed the changes in people's psyches in society after they were one team. Therefore, the overall vision of the narration stems from the deep connotations presented by the narrator, which constitute the writer's vision of the fictional text he formulated. The question that arises is, did the writer really want his novel to be a journey, or is there another vision that he wanted to convey to the reader through the journey? To save them from the impasse, but there is a vision that is still ambiguous between the folds of the narrative, which is the vision of the religious path represented by Jamal, and reinforced by Sheikh Muhammad, and the strong emergence of this trend after the Oslo agreement, and the support of the team leader for it and the strengthening of its presence.
The problematic questions posed by the narrator between the folds of the narration remain the most capable of expressing the overall vision of the novelist's narrative. To lighten the mind of the reader to answers to such questions, and his participation in the answer.
The ideas presented in the Palestinian society were the motive for the narrator to ask the question, about who liberates Palestine, Arabs or non-Arabs, and to raise the differentiation between men and women, through the question of whether the prayer for the male is different from the female?, And the issue of permissible and forbidden in cremation Muslim, and others. In his answer, the divergent visions in society emerge. The penetration of political Islamist thought into Palestinian society led to the emergence of differences and their attempts to present new ideas related to religion, even if they were not convinced of them. Rather, it is a kind of their attempts to control society, as Jamal did when he tried to lead the team. And the exclusion of the captain of the team, Hajj Ibrahim. Despite his inability, they are signs and indications of what happened in the Palestinian society later.
In conclusion, the novel expressed the transformations in the vision from talking about the Nakba and its repercussions to talking about the place and expressing its aesthetics after the Oslo agreement, so that the new novel came more expressive of the Palestinian right in the face of attempts to obscure and deny the right, and in response to the Zionist narrative in its falsification The Palestinian right is based on false biblical claims that do not stand up to the power of the right on the Palestinian land itself, which still bears witness to this right, and its cemeteries bear witness that there were those who died here and were buried here among the owners of the land, and the Jewish evidence and memorials are only an affirmation that there are those who resisted and fought in order to preserve The land, and that we will keep searching for the shadows of the image in every grain of sand from our land, and when we have the strength we can liberate the place and rewrite its history.
That is why the narrator raises his fear of the future when he asks himself several questions, and tries to answer them himself, but he does not reach his goal: I still cannot understand the preservation of the destroyed villages. Then he wonders about keeping cemeteries in some villages, as well as on some shrines. He tries to search for an answer, "perhaps they made it a witness, for every visitor, so that he knows his past and future fate, and stands on it to ruminate on the past and weep... Did they want to remind those who visit their villages of death?"
However, with all his answers, he did not reach a specific answer, an indication of the absence of a vision after the Oslo agreement, and the ambiguity of the position or the political path regarding the refugee issue. However, he was able to form a vision, which is important in these questions: “But I am afraid that we will be satisfied with these stops, so that we will continue to cry, And we regurgitate the memories that we did not live. Did they want us to continue to cry and grieve? Would our grief increase if they were swept away? Perhaps they wanted us to be like these remnants, because for them we are just remnants." This is what the occupier wanted, robbing the right, and making you a witness to this plunder without you doing anything but crying, and this is what the narrator does not want.