Victims of Violence Don’t Owe the Public Anything
6 min read
For Edward Said, to be Palestinian was to be an exile. In 1979 he wrote, “Behind every Palestinian there is a great general fact: that he once—and not so long ago—lived in a land of his own called Palestine, which is now no longer his homeland.” Yet Said is careful to maintain that despite this shared past, all Palestinians have unique histories and experiences. “What I have tried to insist on,” he writes, “is the richness of ‘the question of Palestine,’ a richness often obscured, ignored, or willfully misrepresented.”
Said’s desire for “richness,” for specificity and detail, resists the impulse to settle into a conclusive story about the past. This philosophy underlies Sand-Catcher, Omar Khalifah’s sharp, darkly funny debut novel, translated from Arabic by Barbara Romaine. The novel follows a group of four young Palestinian journalists who work at a Jordanian newspaper, characters identified only as archetypes: Two men, Qaa’id (meaning “leader”) and Khaa’in (“adulterer”), and two women, Mutarjima (“translator”) and Khaa’ina (“adulteress”). (No one in Sand-Catcher is referred to by their proper name.) Together the journalists—the only four of Palestinian descent at their newspaper—are assigned to interview an old man who is his family’s last living eyewitness of the 1948 Nakba, during which more than 750,000 Palestinians fled from their home or were expelled by the new state of Israel. Through the interview and its absurd aftermath, Khalifah satirizes the idea of telling your story as a noble or even politically effective pursuit. Instead, Sand-Catcher asks what is lost when the multiplicity of experience is reduced to a single, traumatic story.
That kind of flattened narrative—easily packaged and sold—is exactly what the journalists hope to extract from the old man. Sand-Catcher is set in the lead-up to the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, in 2018. The novel begins with the interview, the four journalists equipped with “digital recorders, papers, smart tablets, cameras, and nineteen questions.” Surrounded by his family members, the old man sits silently through each of the journalists’ carefully crafted questions, offering nothing in response. Flustered, Qaa’id eventually says, “You can’t imagine how valuable your testimony to the events of the Nakba will be. The world has declared war on the collective memory of the Palestinians, ‘ammi, and you’re a soldier on the right side of this war. All of us have a duty to tell the world our stories, so that—” He’s interrupted by the old man: “Get the hell out of here, you motherfuckers!”
The outburst might seem shocking, but we soon learn that the old man’s only wish is “to die without being forced to tell anyone about 1948.” He has spent his whole life refusing to excavate his past as a form of national duty. Even his eldest son does not know what happened to his father in 1948; he scheduled the interview in the hopes that he might finally have the chance to hear his father’s memories, despite the fact that they’ll be “mediated by strangers.” The old man’s grandson, too, is curious about his grandfather’s past, recalling a school assignment for which he had tried to interview him about the Nakba:
When I got home from school that day, I approached him and told him what the teacher had asked for. My grandfather said, “Write.” I opened a notebook and sat down by him.
“Palestine was lost.”
“Palestine was lost.”
“Full stop.”
This line becomes the old man’s only refrain when his family asks about the Nakba: Palestine was lost.
If the old man’s silence frustrates and hurts his family, it outrages the reporters. This is where Khalifah’s satire is at its sharpest: The journalists begin to cast themselves as victims, not aggressors, in the fight to unearth the old man’s memories. After all, they think, their careers are on the line. If they fail, their editor threatens, he will not just assign other writers to the interview, but he will make the resulting article entirely about their failure. The editor knows what sells: a dramatic story.
Freshly determined to get the old man to speak, the journalists hatch a ludicrous plot. They accost him after Friday prayers and kidnap his grandson, using him as leverage to coerce the old man into talking with them; they also try to get their hands on a diary that he has kept since 1948. In chronicling their increasing desperation to finish the job, Sand-Catcher grows darker and more absurd. The journalists overstep boundaries, ignore their conscience, and fight—sometimes physically—with one another.
What lies behind their rabid intensity? The journalists are not just motivated by their professional ambition: They all feel a personal stake in hearing the old man’s account. Because each of them lives in exile, their homeland is accessible only secondhand, through anecdotes and their family’s memories. For them, and for others of their generation who have never spent time in Palestine, these stories become almost cipherlike, obscuring the place itself. The grandson reflects that for him, Palestine “acquired the character of something like a legend: simultaneously real and unreal—something he saw every day without ever getting to know it fully, a mystifying text he didn’t know how to read, despite its powerful effect on him.”
The journalists have similarly complicated feelings about Palestine. Early on in the novel, Khaa’ina asks her colleagues to “name one specific thing, something distinctive, about your connection to Palestine.” The scene morphs from conversation into confession, revealing truths that each journalist continues to reflect on over the course of the novel. Qaa’id admits that he still mixes up the colors of the Palestinian flag. Mutarjima tells the group that the first time that she ever made maqlouba, a traditional Palestinian dish, she burned it “to a crisp.” Khaa’ina recalls that she set her wedding date for the anniversary of the Nakba, which she didn’t realize until the Palestinian band she’d hired refused to play. Khaa’in seeks out affairs with Palestinian women, searching for a kind of profound, mystical connection that he imagines he might find with a woman with whom he shares a land of origin. Through its polyvocal structure, Sand-Catcher refutes the demand for one Palestinian story to be told (and sold), instead offering many stories, about many kinds of people, with many different relationships to Palestine.
But perhaps the most powerful insight of Sand-Catcher is that the call to bear witness shouldn’t supersede the right to privacy. The old man calls the journalists “thieves,” condemning their almost-vampiric hunger to take something essential—his recollections—from him. His memory is “an intimate concern, something private, and he didn’t want anyone else getting near it. Why not respect the one unique thing left to him from his homeland?” The grandson says that everyone—his father, the journalists—sees his grandfather’s story “as a matter of public record,” belonging not to him but to all Palestinians. He considers the realities of life that people prefer to keep to themselves: intimate relationships, embarrassing moments from childhood, troubles at work. But witnesses to significant events, especially violent ones, are not given the option to stay silent. For them, speaking out becomes a moral duty, as Qaa’id tells the old man—a national, collective responsibility to counter the history being written by those in power.
In the end, the old man surrenders his diary in exchange for his grandson. But he gets the last word. When the journalists open the notebook, each entry is the same: a date, from May 15, 1948, until May 15, 2018, and underneath it, the phrase “Palestine was lost.” Reading Sand-Catcher in late 2024, as the terrible violence in Gaza and Lebanon continues, is a poignant reminder that each picture, each death recorded, represents an individual, a whole world of dreams, ideas, and idiosyncrasies. And some of these people might prefer, like the old man, to keep their experiences to themselves. When atrocities become commonplace, when dominant narratives circulate unchecked and unopposed, too often the burden of collective memory comes to rest on individual witnesses—people who, Sand-Catcher suggests, might have something to lose in the telling.
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