סמיר נקאש וספרותו הרב־לשונית בעידן החלוקה הלאומית
سمير نقاش وأدبه متعدد اللغات في عصر التقسيم القومي
Almog Behar · Yuval Evri
Journal of Levantine Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, Winter 2019, pp. 111–131
The issue of language comes up in every discussion about Samir Naqqash’s literary work.1 He is identified as a writer who insisted on writing in a language that had lost its speakers, its writers, and also, tragically, its readers. Naqqash is often portrayed as a remnant of a faded linguistic tradition, as the last representative of a ruined cultural world. He is viewed as one who dissented from the new cultural and literary world in which he operated, who was incompatible with his new linguistic and social reality after his emigration from Iraq, and as someone who chose to write in a language whose readership had dwindled and almost disappeared. Naqqash’s literary work has repeatedly been identified as the nostalgic creation of a writer who insisted on preserving the Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic dialect of his community, family, and childhood, despite the emigration and disintegration of the community in Iraq and Israel. He has also been identified as the last of the Mohicans—the last Arab-Jewish author—and the last Jewish writer in literary Arabic.2 Beneath these descriptions and images we can sense the footprints of the monolingual national narrative and its perception of language as a monolithic construct with distinct boundaries that are often associated with rigid geographical, national, and political boundaries. This narrative also shaped the way we perceive the nature and boundaries of modern literature in general, and national literature in
particular, as well as the way in which we formulate and interpret translation works as points of intersection between separate, distinct languages. These perceptions were dominant in the formation of modern Hebrew and Arabic literature and had a crucial influence on the development of Naqqash’s literary work. In many ways his literary work developed in response to these conceptions, and his work represents a complex intersected linguistic matrix that seeks to return to the moment before the linguistic and literary partitions were created by colonialism, nationalism, and secularization. His prose represents an alternative literary form that blurs national and linguistic boundaries. Naqqash’s work has for the most part been compared to the work of other Iraqi Jewish writers of his generation. His choice to write in Arabic was presented as a contrast to writers such as Shimon Ballas and Sami Michael, who shifted from writing in Arabic to writing in Hebrew.3 This transition was portrayed in the scholarly literature as a binary choice between two languages, between two conflicting cultures and identities: Hebrew versus Arabic, Jewish versus Arab, Iraqi versus Israeli. Moreover, even in relation to other Iraqi Jewish writers who continued to write in Arabic, Naqqash’s writing represented an exceptional literary strategy: in contrast to “modern” writers who clung to literary Arabic, and “traditional” writers who wrote mostly in Judeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew script), Naqqash combined the different linguistic and literary traditions. He integrated the spoken Jewish dialect with the other dialects of Baghdad as part of the literary language, interwove the oral and written Judeo-Arabic literary traditions with modern Arabic literature—which includes the Muslim Arabic oral and written literary traditions—and wove the religious and communal languages together with the formal and national language. In addition, he incorporated words and phrases from other languages—such as Persian, Turkish, Aramaic, Kurmanji, Hebrew, Hindi, and English—into Arabic, thus “infecting” the Arabic language and undermining its nationalistic imagination as a uniform and “pure” language. Naqqash’s linguistic literary style also raises the question of translation, not only translation between Arabic and Hebrew as two different languages, and not only translation between different literary and linguistic traditions, but translation as an integral part of writing (and speaking). The multitude of linguistic combinations in Naqqash’s writing complicates and challenges the common separations between original and translation, and between the spoken and the written. Multiple translation spaces are thus created—some within the text itself—between the different spoken languages and written words that mix within the text and within the language or consciousness of the different speakers. Sometimes the translation
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occurs at the intersection of a dialogue between two characters, and sometimes in the seam between the author and the text, and between the text and the reader, echoing the gap between speech and writing. In some stories the author Naqqash appears as translator—in footnotes to the text—mediating his polyglotic linguistic style to the monolingual reader via self-translation of the spoken languages into literary Arabic. The translation in this case becomes a writing strategy—embodied in different ways within the “original” text—that is not external to the text. Naqqash’s works contain many translation strategies, and alongside self-translation into the standard literary language, we find places of nontranslation, translation that is part of the narrative, and translation that is part of the plot and the relationships between the characters, as well as mistranslations and misunderstandings. Sometimes there is an unwillingness of the characters in the text to perform code switching in a dialogue between them and their environment, perhaps as a parable of the writer himself. Against the backdrop of the national and colonial era, the rise of the monolingual national literature, the intensifying national conflict between Jews and Arabs, and the separations between Arabic and Hebrew as enemy languages and cultures, this article explores the ways in which Naqqash’s work represents a subversive linguistic and poetic model that blends spoken and literary languages, transcending the religious and national divide while simultaneously intersecting different literary traditions from a wide geographical and cultural context, facing both East and West. This model challenges the monolingual Zionist national perspective on which modern hegemonic Hebrew literature was based; it also challenges the Arab national ethos of a pure and uniform monolingual culture on which modern hegemonic Arabic literature was based. It was precisely from his peripheral position that Samir Naqqash challenged fundamental conventions in the modern Arabic and Hebrew cultures and literatures. This article investigates Naqqash’s writing as a case study of multilingual writing in a monolingual literary reality, where there is a sharp gap between the language of the text and the expectations of the readership and its language. Through an exploration of Naqqash’s literary work, the article focuses on questions of multilingualism, translation, and literature along the borderlands of the modern Hebrew and Arabic languages and literatures. It explores the ways in which Naqqash’s work crosses geographical, national, and linguistic boundaries, defying and resisting the dominant nationalistic and monolingual trend in Arabic and Hebrew literature, with its division between the written and spoken languages, Islamic and Jewish traditions, and language and religious or national identity.
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The power of literature lies in the imagination, the possibility of reweaving languages, traditions, places, and memories that have been unknotted and separated, and melding them anew. Naqqash’s literary works stimulate silenced voices and repressed languages, and place renewed attention on dialects that were exiled from the official national tongue. In his writings Naqqash intentionally diverges from the official literary Arabic (MSA) in which he wrote his first two books and instead moves toward a multivocal and heteroglossic linguistic style that emphasizes the multiplicity comprised in the spoken, living colloquial languages. Naqqash’s literary language is always in a dialogue; it is dynamic, formed along movement in relation to social and human interaction. It exposes the polyphonies existing in language, in every language, particularly in Arabic, in the continuum from literary to colloquial Arabic.4 This movement is never binary but is part of the polyglottic texture in which multiple levels of language (related to social status, religion, and geographic region) appear, thus blending and crossing the borders that differentiate one language from another. Boundaries between languages, between the spoken and the written, and between language, community, and territory are blurred. For Naqqash language is an arena that permits dialogue between communities and social classes via the movement between these intermixed and translated languages—though sometimes they are not translatable—and via the different dialects and accents of the same language. Every language embodies a complex variety of linguistic types and idioms, and Naqqash acts within this lingual seam, when his literature embodies internal translation processes, moving across the communal linguistic divide. His polyglot linguistic style is representative of what the Russian linguist and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin labeled as the heteroglossia that contains one of the central foundations of the novel: The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized. The internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour . . . this internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of its historical existence is the indispensable prerequisite for the novel as a genre. The novel orchestrates all its themes . . . by means of the social diversity of speech types and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions.5
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Similarly, in Naqqash’s prose the lingual stratification is interwoven in the complex structure of the plots with multiple speakers, narrators, and voices, and movement through time and space. Naqqash seemingly preserves in his mind the Baghdad of the 1940s, with its plurality of tongues and types of languages: the dialects of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities; the various professional and social strata jargons; the dialects of immigrants from other places such as Kurdistan and Iran; and the dialect of his own emigration from Iraq to Israel, Turkey, Iran, India, Egypt, and Britain.6 His stories, along with his novellas and novels, are nourished by this rich diversity of language and the polyphony appearing repeatedly as a critical ingredient of the plot itself—the figures are all perfectly characterized by their language.7 Thus, linguistic intersection is an ideal in Samir Naqqash’s work, even when the polyphony represents misunderstandings between the various characters.8 Likewise, the polyphony is sometimes internal for a specific character, when different types of language can represent a specific character within the different contexts—such as Judeo-Arabic in the dialogue within the Baghdadi Jewish community in Bombay, Hindi in the street, and Hebrew and Aramaic in the synagogue prayers—while the narration is in literary Arabic.9 In the novella ʿAbūsi rab al-ʿalāmīn (عبوسي رب العالمين, ʿAbusi lord of the worlds), written in 1978, the Muslim protagonist ʿAbusi, a medical student who has abandoned his studies following the death of his girlfriend, sits in a cafe in Baghdad where he does not just drink coffee and smoke cigarettes—he begins to hear voices, or to be more exact, “The Voice.” He wanders the streets feeling that he is passing between heaven and earth and that he stands at the moment of judgement in the struggle between himself and God, in which he rebels against the evil deity and which he will win and be crowned as God. Surprisingly, in this novella ʿAbusi’s internal dialogue is presented in literary Arabic, whereas his dialogues with the heavenly voice are recorded in Muslim Baghdadi-Arabic. Is Naqqash attempting to strengthen the natural, familiar closeness in the conversation between ʿAbusi and God? Or is he trying to hint that this conversation is an imaginary delusional discussion that takes place in ʿAbusi’s mind alone? The reader might expect that classical literary Arabic, Qur’anic Arabic, would be used when speaking to God and about God. But theologically God is everywhere: he is closest to man—that is, within man—and he understands all languages and is beyond language, so certainly it is possible to speak with him in spoken Arabic.10 In the Sufi tradition, as well as in the Judeo-Arabic tradition, we do find folk stories featuring the righteous, who speak with God in colloquial Arabic.
Midway through the novella Shumel, the Jewish owner of a chicken coop, whose large rooster attempted to poke out his eye, approaches ʿAbusi, the neighborhood bully, requesting a judgment and a determination of the punishment for the rooster. ʿAbusi sees this as a sign from heaven: here is someone who recognizes his authority, and now he, ʿAbusi, is entitled to perform a miracle and defeat God. However, the interaction between ʿAbusi and Shumel is rife with misunderstandings because, in contrast to the expected standard majority-minority relationship, Shumel does not code switch and does not move from the Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic dialect to the Muslim-Arabic dialect, as would be expected when he is speaking with someone who is not Jewish. He continues to speak to ʿAbusi in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic dialect, and ʿAbusi, who is unable to understand the Hebrew words that are an integral part of Judeo-Arabic, tries unsuccessfully to interpret or translate them himself. For example, Shumel uses the Judeo-Arabic words that originate from Hebrew sources, such as evel (אבל, mourning), herem (חרם, boycott/ban), naval (נבל, fool), hakham (חכם, wise), and malakh mi-shamayim (מלאך משמים, angel from heaven). The word hakham entered Judeo-Arabic from Hebrew to refer to a rabbi, but in this manner it also found its way into literary Arabic, and ʿAbusi understands it. The word herem, albeit similar to the Arabic word from the same root hִ arām () َح َرام, one of whose meanings is religious prohibition, is used by Shumel in the Judeo-Arabic context in the form of an oath: “I shall be banished by God” (Walak, awqaʿ abhִ erem min ʿindo li-lah, ”)ولك اوقع ابحيرم من عندو لله.11 ʿAbusi, who does not understand the language, says this to himself in a literary Arabic monologue: كنت. مثلما هو استشاط على ديكه, استشطت عليه غضبا.. ما هذا؟. وهو يحدثني بااللغاز,انا المالك لقدره . وصرخت به. هذه مسئولية كبرى وال بد من االلمام بحذافيرها.اريد ان افهم القضية حرفا حرفا Anā al-Mālik li-qadrihi, wa-huwa yuhaddithunī bi-al-ghāz. Mā hadhā?.. istashatִ tu ‘alayhi ghadִ bān, mithlmā huwa istashātִ a ‘alā dīkihi. Kuntu uridu an afham al-qadִ īyya ַ hִ arfān hִ arfān. Hadhihi masʾuliyya Kubra wa-lā buda mīn al-ilmām bi-hִ adhāfīrihā. Wa-sִ arakhtu bihi. I am in control of his destiny and he speaks to me using hints—how can this be? I was furious with rage toward him, just as he was furious at the rooster. I wanted to understand the problem from beginning to end [literally: detail by detail, letter by letter]—this is a formidable responsibility, and the only option is to learn every nuanced detail. I reprimanded him.12
Then ʿAbusi turns to Shumel and says to him in Baghdadi Muslim-Arabic:
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“ الميرم؟.. الحيرم.. يعني شنو هذا شسمه. تكلم مثل لوادم..”لك لتحاكيني بلسان الجاج Lak [Walak] la-tuhִ āchīnī bi-lisān al-jāj.. takalam mithl l-wādam. Yaʿanī shno hadhā ַ shusmo… al-hִ erem… al-merem? Alas, don’t speak to me in chicken language. Speak like a human being. What does this mean banish smanish [“al-hִ erem . . . al-merem”]?13
In other words, the Judeo-Arabic used by Shumel is interpreted in ʿAbusi’s ears as non-human language, a chicken squawk, and ʿAbusi ridicules Shumel. However, since according to Jewish and Muslim traditions King Solomon could understand the tweeting of birds, it is possible to understand that this also indicates a sign of unique mystical wisdom. Further on in the story, ʿAbusi starts to use some of the Judeo-Arabic words, giving them new and not always accurate meanings.14 The polyglottic structure, the multitude of linguistic layers and dialects as typified in this story, complicated the translation of Naqqash’s works. This was expressed by his sister, Ruth Naqqash, who was the first translator of his work into Hebrew. In the translator’s epilogue to the book Yom she-tevel harta ve-hepila bo, she describes the complexity of the translation process: At first glance, the use of different layers of Hebrew is likely to be interpreted in the eyes of the reader as inconsistent and sometimes even slipping into incorrect language. This lack of unity stems, as stated, from the attempt to maintain loyalty to the original, in which the passage from the literary language or from a particular idiom to an alternative in these stories is sometimes done even within one sentence. The reader of the Arabic who is familiar with Iraqi dialects will learn from the wide use of them about the characters, their backgrounds, the social class to which they belong, their level of education and more, which cannot be translated accurately into Hebrew.15
Three decades after the first translation of a Naqqash book into Hebrew, a new Hebrew translation of his last novel, Shlūmū al-Kurdī wa-anā wa-al-zaman (شلومو الكردي وأنا والزمن, Shlomo the Kurd, me and the time) will soon be published (in 2020) by the Maktoob book series.16 In this book Naqqash reverts to literary Arabic but expands its geographical area and severs it from its familiar space and accepted nuances. The main character’s mother tongue and the language of his childhood are Kurmanji and Aramaic, not Arabic; most of the plot takes place in non-Arab settings or settings in which Arabic is not the language of the majority; and the main character only learns Arabic when he arrives in Baghdad as a refugee.17 This setting is the reason that this book, as opposed to most of Naqqash’s other books (those following his first two books), was written entirely in literary Arabic,
and there is no central presence of spoken Arabic with its various dialects—neither the Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic nor other dialects—because the protagonist, who is also one of the story’s narrators, does not speak Arabic. This is supposed to facilitate the reading of the book and make it accessible to a wider audience, which was not the case with his previous books.18 Despite this, within the literary Arabic in the book, words and expressions from other languages have a significant presence, and the movement in time and space in the novel is often connected to different languages. The story’s protagonist, Shlomo Katani (also known as Shlomo the Kurd), has command of many languages but is not identified with any particular one. He acquires languages and moves between them like a merchant who shifts between his commodities. He speaks Kurmanji, Aramaic, and Persian; Hebrew is the language of prayer and tradition and is significant in his life; and during his trade journeys he also learns Russian and attains a basic level of Hindi. He learns spoken Arabic only after he escapes to Baghdad as a Kurdish refugee at the end of the First World War, but Israeli Hebrew has no discernable presence in the book, although the story begins in Ramat Gan, Israel, in 1985. Throughout the novel, language has a symbolic role in the formation of the plot: it is variously the imperial language and that of the armed forces (the Ottoman Turks, the Germans, the Russians, and the British), the state language (Persian and Arabic), or the local language (Kurmanji, Aramaic, and Judeo-Arabic in Baghdad and among the Jewish Baghdadi diaspora in India). The status of language changes in relation to changes in time and place, and the location of the narrator. For example, when a Baghdadi Jewish refugee arrives at Shlomo’s synagogue in the city of Sablakh during the First World War, the linguistic setting changes: Nanji Parizat. That was his name. I found him dressed in the clothes of a bedouin woman, leaning against the door of the synagogue, fighting for his final breaths. His hair was red and his face freckled, a boy of 16. I spoke with him in every language that I know, and he spoke with the pronunciation of a Baghdadi Jew. At the time, I did not know a word of Arabic. I opened the door of the synagogue and looked around, and since I did not see a stranger, I let him in. He gestured to me that he was hungry and thirsty, so I fed him and gave him a drink from what I found in the synagogue closet as the worshippers began to gather. Yona Agassi, who lived for a period of time in Baghdad and knew how to speak the Jewish language well, translated the words of the Baghdadi youth. The words were saddening, but behind the words there was a scent of hope.19
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The translation itself—between Arabic and Kurmanji in this instance, and in other places between Hindi and Arabic, and Shlomo acting as the translator between the occupying Russians and the people of Sablakh—is also present as part of the plot throughout the last part of the novel, as a mediating tool between languages, people, and communities, even as a self-translation between a man and himself. When the Ottomans return to Sablakh during the First World War, this moment is described in the book as a linguistic moment, a blending of languages alongside the silence and muteness in the streets, in the Jewish community, and in the family: I will not hide from you the grip of fear that is suffocating my soul. I was not afraid for myself, but for this house. I was afraid for Asmar and Esther, and for ʿAzaria the silversmith and his daughter, and for the Hakham Nahum and his family, and for the Hakham’s brother Mikhael; I feared for my brothers and Esther’s family. I feared for all of the Jews of Sablakh and for her Christian inhabitants. I feared for its Muslims who joyously received the Ottomans. The ululations arrived from the distance together with the noise of gunfire and calls for help from unknown sources. The sound of the rattling metal ceased, but the thunderous gunfire continued, and outside the Eastern languages intermingled with the German, and inside there was a confusing fragile quiet, wordless, mute, and eyes silently exchanging expressions of fearful chatter.20
The novel is built from bits of memories, fragments of stories mixed with events of that time and place, and the blend of languages enveloping them. The stories are strengthened by the abundance of languages and by the three different narrators: Shlomo the Kurd, “I” (Shlomo’s friend in Teheran after the expulsion from Baghdad), and Time itself. The stories develop from within the multitude of voices and narrators, and fragments of the memories and traumas are revived, as described by one of the narrators, the same “I” who is not identified by name: At night in my room, previously your room, your memories come to life and “Scheherazade of Sablakh” returns and tells her story. Around the oil heater “Salah al-Din,” events of the past arise from their graves, the noise of the cannons awakens and the rifle sounds are thunderous; and the tumult grows with the influx of your garbled Arabic tongue: the Kurdish, the Aramaic, the Persian, the Russian, the Azeri, the Turkish, the German, and even the English. Love is intertwined with hate, the sweeping insanity of man with consideration for all of this, and it clogs my nose.21
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Similar to the protagonist in Shlūmū al-Kurdī wa-anā wa-al-zaman, Naqqash’s life was an intricate web of emigration, refuge, and trauma. He was born in Baghdad in 1938 and arrived at a transit camp in Petah Tikva, Israel, with his family in 1951, when he was twelve years old. While spending most of his adult life in Israel, Naqqash repeatedly set out to wander the world: at age fifteen, after his father died, he illegally crossed the border into Lebanon with his seventeen-year-old cousin after the foreign ministry of Israel refused to issue passports to his family. Naqqash and his cousin were caught by the Lebanese police, held in detention for several months, and then extradited to Israel where they were imprisoned for several more months before being released. Naqqash was forced to abandon his studies in order to work, to help support his family after his father died. He later left Israel as a young adult and lived for several years in Iran, Turkey, and India, residing in Bombay among the large Baghdadi Jewish community. During this period, he learned Persian and some Hindi. In 1971, several years after his return to Israel, he self-published his first collection of stories in Arabic, titled Al-khatִ aʾ (الخطأ, The mistake). The natural development for Naqqash as a writer would have been to adopt Hebrew as his literary language, as many of the older Iraqi Jewish writers did, but his dream to write in Arabic was an essential element in his life. At the age of twelve, he had translated Hamlet from English into Arabic, and he continued to cultivate Arabic and to read in Arabic throughout his lifetime in Israel.22 After the publication of his first book, Naqqash quickly discovered that other than a few researchers of Arabic literature, some of them Iraqi Jews, the audience for Arabic literature written by Jewish Israeli writers had disappeared—among Jews, Arabs, Palestinians, and Iraqis. Sasson Somekh labeled the literature in Arabic by Jewish writers in Israel (and named Naqqash’s works as the prototype) “literature without an audience”: Despite the richness and variety of the body of work being discussed here, it exists in a vacuum, essentially it is not directed toward a particular audience. It is possible to say in a somewhat exaggerated manner that this is the literature of writers without a reading audience . . . the numbers of readers of Jewish Arabic writers has shrunk and is disappearing. First, they lost the Palestinian audience, and afterward, the Jewish Arabic community itself, because the latter’s interest in Arabic and literature written in Arabic diminished. Thus, the Jewish Arabic writer in Israel remains glaringly isolated.23
The absence of an audience causes most writers to gradually refrain from writing, or at least from publishing. For Naqqash, who was acutely aware of his status as
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“a writer without readers,” this brought about a significant change in his writing. His first two collections of stories were written in standard literary Arabic and maintained the clear separation in Arabic literature between the use of literary Arabic for writing and spoken Arabic for speaking. With his discovery that, in any case he did not have readers and was not a part of Arabic literature and its polemics regarding the proper language for literature, he began to radically blend in more and more spoken language, especially the Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic. Initially, he limited his use of the spoken language to dialogues, but eventually he went beyond that. And he did not restrict himself to Judeo-Arabic: Naqqash used all Baghdadi dialects, Muslim and Christian, as well as Hindi in a novella that takes place in Bombay, and so forth. It is possible to situate Naqqash’s writing in this context thus: the first two generations of modern Iraqi Jewish writers of literature, such as Anwar Shāʾūl, Mīr Basִ rī, and Yaʿqūb Balbūl, who adopted literary Arabic as the language of their writings and who occupied a central position in the development of Iraqi literary circles in the first half of the twentieth century, embraced the demand of the literary system for neutrality. They wrote exclusively in literary Arabic, made certain that their characters’ names were ethnically neutral and unidentifiable as Jewish, Muslim, or Christian, and took pains to be sure that no Judeo-Arabic words penetrated their general work. They adopted the principle of Al-Nahdִ a, the Arab renaissance, according to which the Islamic sources are the cultural treasures of all Arabs—Muslims, Jews, and Christians.24 Indeed, Samir Naqqash supported the Al-Nahdִ a principle in relation to the Islamic sources, but his place on the periphery of the literary system enabled him to make significant use of the spoken languages in his writing. In doing so he created a new synthesis and style that blends the foundations of the Judeo-Arabic language and literature, from both folk stories and liturgy, together with the modern style of the new Arabic literature, while maintaining an attachment to the Arab Islamic tradition. Toward the end of the twentieth century, Naqqash resumed his wandering. In 1991 he moved to Cairo for several months, hoping to find literary recognition, but he was disappointed. In contrast, Iraqi Muslims who were in exile because of the Ba’ath regime—and who had created communities in England and Germany, founded newspapers, and established publishing houses such as Manshūrāt al-Jamal—heard of Samir Naqqash who, though he had been exiled twenty years earlier than they, had continued to be faithful to Iraqi culture. They invited him to publish his books in their publishing house and to write for their newspapers. At this stage his writing language and style were already extremely demanding for a monolingual Arabic reader or anyone who was not multilingual as he was—and Naqqash had no intention of changing his linguistic style or of limiting himself to
literary Arabic. Instead he added interpretations and explanations in long footnotes in which he translated the sections with different languages and dialects into literary Arabic. Naqqash migrated to Manchester, England, in 2001, living among the Iraqi Muslim exiles and writing for several Arabic newspapers. In 2003, with the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the book and newspaper publishers, including some of the Muslim exiles, considered returning to Iraq. Samir Naqqash thought about returning to Baghdad as well. Ultimately, he chose not to do so, but he was left without the Iraqi exiles and their cultural and literary community. He returned to Petah Tikva, where he died shortly after his return to Israel. He is buried not far from where the tent had been, where his family had lived when they first arrived in the country. After his death, a collection of his stories was published in Baghdad by Dār Mesopotamia, and articles about his works were written at the universities in Baghdad and Basra. His work received recognition as a part of twentieth-century Iraqi literature. In retrospect, it is possible to define him as the most important Jewish writer in Arabic in the second half of the twentieth century and as one of the most unique and interesting Arabic writers of this period, even though during most of those years he was in creative isolation, far from the centers of modern Arabic literature and its literary circles. The translation of Naqqash’s last book into Hebrew, in the framework of a series of books and translations produced by Maktoob, could be the beginning of a gradual change in Israel similar to the one that occurred in Iraq after his death—one that firmly positions Naqqash as a part of Jewish literature, Israeli literature, or part of a new bilingual Arabic-Hebrew literary space. Can this translation into Hebrew be a catalyst for a new readership of his works that would place him in new contexts, crossing the boundaries of nationalistic Arabic or Hebrew literatures? It is important to position this new Hebrew translation of a work by Naqqash within the history of Arabic-to-Hebrew translation in Israel, which experienced many changes throughout the twentieth century. Translations from classical Arabic literature, created primarily in academic frameworks, were produced and published. Translations from modern Arabic literature, especially from Egyptian, Palestinian, and Lebanese literature, were also published by commercial publishing houses such as Andalus, the Jusur/Gesharim series, or Mifras, and currently the Maktoob series. Translations from the Judeo-Arabic tradition have also continued—some were academic publications, but some were also printed by community and religious publishers.
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The fact that the Maktoob series includes works of a twentieth-century Arab Jewish writer is a symbolic manifestation of how Arabic literature can be imagined in Hebrew.
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Samir Naqqash’s literary and linguistic approaches resemble those of other borderland writers who resist the nationalistic separation of languages and literary traditions. Naqqash’s resistance to the monolingual order and his refusal to adjust his writing to the literary Arabic canon resemble Chicana American feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa’s resistance to being translated or to adapt her language to a monolingual reader or listener: Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself. Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate.25
Anzaldúa reclaims the borderland identity and language by resisting the nationalistic hegemonic effort to correct or adapt her language and identity to the logic of the dominant monolingual culture (Spanish/Mexican, English/American). By resisting this effort to eliminate her culture, she creates a new literary and cultural space for her hybrid polyglot linguistic identity. She insists on writing in her own language, the language of the borderland: Spanglish. Naqqash’s literary work was perceived as exceptional even among Iraqi Jewish writers of his generation, and even those of the previous generation. Writers such as Shimon Ballas and Sami Michael who immigrated to Israel at an older age, who were more involved intellectually and literarily in the Iraqi Arabic scene, who began writing in Arabic in Iraq, and who continued writing in Arabic during their first decade in Israel, later decided to switch to writing in Hebrew.26 Writers of the previous generation who continued to write in Arabic in Israel, such as Shalom Darwish and Yitzhak Bar Moshe, as well as those who continued to write in Arabic in Iraq, such as Anwar Saul and Mir Basri, wrote in a linguistic and literary style very different from that of Naqqash.27 Some of the Iraqi Jewish writers of Naqqash’s generation had a different approach to language and literature, mainly in regard to mixing spoken dialects with literary Arabic. These writers (as well as most Arabic writers) adopted the modernist
approach toward the split between the spoken and written Arabic.28 In one of his essays, Sami Michael describes his transition from writing in Arabic to writing in Hebrew, stressing the linguistic differentiation between the languages: I liked the simple word that clearly reflects the thought and does not enslave reality to magical formulas. And here, I found refuge in Modern Hebrew because today it is more like European languages than Arabic. However, the transition from Arabic to Hebrew was quite easy for a strange reason: no Arab poet and writer writes as he thinks or speaks. In the Arab countries, there is a huge gap between spoken and written language. From childhood, a person is destined to develop a kind of complex and intricate mechanism in his brain that deals with translation from spoken language to written language. The experienced reader develops a parallel mechanism that translates the written language into the spoken language in order to get the full enjoyment of the reading, and eventually communication between the writer and the reader is created. The victims of this form of communication are the characters who appear in the story. They ponder, struggle, rehearse, joke, and conduct dialogues in a strange, inflated, and usually ridiculous way.29
In Arabic there is a gap between the spoken and literary language that forces the reader to translate from the written form to the different spoken dialects of the characters. Coming from a modernist point of view of the diglossic split between written and spoken Arabic, Michael argues that this gap cannot be bridged by Arab authors in the literary text. This approach also determined his reservations about Naqqash’s linguistic mix of spoken and literary Arabic. In an interview with the researcher Nancy Berg, the Iraqi Jewish writer Yitzhak Bar Moshe stated that it is impossible to read or enjoy Naqqash’s works, owing to the effort it requires of its readers.30 Other Iraqi Jewish writers exp ressed similar views regarding the “unreadable” character of Naqqash’s literature.31 It is interesting to examine Bar Moshe’s statement, and those of others about Naqqash’s writing, through the distinctions made by the editor Roland Barthes between the “readable text” and the “writable text.” When the text is readable, it provides a familiar reality based on codes and norms common to both the creator and the reader. The writable text, however, unravels this connection and is oppositional to all automatic and agreed-upon meanings. This text does not have fixed indicators; rather it is built upon diffuse movement and multiple channels of cursors and understandings. Barthes emphasizes: This text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signified; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one.32
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That being the case, “the writable text” causes the reader to leave his familiar safe zone and creates a crisis of representation in relation to the way the world is presented to him in “the readable text.”33 Naqqash’s writing challenges the monolingual (Arabic or Hebrew) reader, forces him to leave his familiar linguistic and literary world, and confronts him with the unstable character of the world, life, language, and their literary representations, far from the world and literature to which the reader is accustomed. Indeed, in an interview with the researcher and translator Ammiel Alcalay, Naqqash admitted to the depicted complexity in his written heteroglossic language, with its multiple levels of language that make his work “virtually unreadable.” In some of his books, Naqqash utilizes the strategy of self-translation in order to make the text more accessible to the average Arabic reader by translating the many levels of the spoken languages into literary Arabic.34 In the same interview he explains his choice of continuing to use spoken language in his writings: Spoken dialogue is much more trustworthy and exact than dialogue written in literary language. And this is one of the difficulties that makes some of my work virtually unreadable. So that I find myself forced to add translations below the dialogues. I myself don’t even know how I got to this point of being able to use the language of each character, regardless of their social standing. Apparently, I absorbed every word that I heard. As I said, our house was a kind of meeting place for many different kinds of women and men. My mother and aunt in their respective professions knew many Muslim women of all classes and they were always our guests so I had the opportunity to hear and absorb all of these different dialects and styles and I would listen to them and it sunk in.35
It is not surprising, then, that when Naqqash was approached to translate Sami Michael’s novel Victoria from Hebrew into Arabic, he translated all of the dialogues in his own style, into spoken Arabic with all of its variations and levels, according to the community, religion, social standing, gender, and education of the characters.36 In the tension between spoken and written language that is depicted in modern literature, Naqqash restores the spoken stratum of the language, drawing attention to the multiplicity of the writing and reading processes and bringing the listener together with the reader and the speaker together with the writer. Bakhtin emphasizes the importance of the utterance, the sound of the language, the spoken layer that exposes the lingual multiplicity, and he simultaneously exposes the place of the listener within the text:
Therefore his orientation toward the listener is an orientation toward a specific conceptual horizon, toward the specific world of the listener; it introduces totally new elements into his discourse; it is in this way, after all, that various different points of view, conceptual horizons, systems for providing expressive accents, various social “languages” come to interact with one another.37
Barthes, who continues many aspects of Bakhtin’s approach to literary and textual analysis, speaks of the musicality of the text, of the traces of the sound and the expression in the written text: The sounds of the language, writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; . . . the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, . . . the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.38
The sounds of the spoken language are emphasized in Naqqash’s writing, highlighting the characters’ different accents and pronunciations, representing the diversity and richness of the language. Instead of the standard unified written language, Naqqash insists upon presenting the array of expressions of language as representations of its multiple speakers and its place in time and space. By means of language, Naqqash sketches his characters’ movement in space, and he also redraws the imaginary geography of Jewish Iraqis, before the division and reduction into the nationalistic binary between Iraq and Israel, between Arabic and Hebrew, and between East and West. This fluid geographic imaginary is not just about Baghdad in relation to Israel; it positions Baghdad as the epicenter or the connecting thread between Bombay, Teheran, Istanbul, Azerbaijan, Moscow, Kurdistan, and Ramat Gan. This is exemplified in the novel (Shlūmū al-Kurdī wa-anā wa-al-zaman) in which the movement from Baghdad to Bombay resembles the movement in that space: The thought of the day of judgement momentarily distracted me, and when I came back to my senses, I found us—Yehudah Bahִ r, the coachman, and myself—in the midst of the neighborhoods of Nakbara. There I heard the voices of Baghdad and smelled the scents of her cooked food. I saw myself pass from one Jewish Baghdadi neighborhood to another. Two wretched Baghdadi Jewish neighborhoods, with thousands of kilometers between them, but their body and soul are solidified into one concrete object.39
In Naqqash’s novel we wander with Shlomo the Kurd forward and backward in time and from east to west in space during the latter part of the First World War in the city
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of Sablakh in Iranian Kurdistan, via Teheran, Moscow, Baghdad, Basra, and Bombay to Ramat Gan. This journey in time and space is also a journey into the depths of language and linguistics, a voyage in which the boundaries between the languages collapse. In this capacity language and linguistics are the true main characters of the book, and like them, time is the center of attention and takes upon itself the task of the narrator. To conclude, the historic and linguistic fracture and the literary isolation and severance that Naqqash experienced embody the cultural tragedy of the Arab Jews after 1948—after the uprooting from their lands and immigration to a country in which their language was perceived as the language of the enemy, an inferior language ridiculed from the colonial point of view, and a foreign language of the Diaspora.40 This tragedy integrates within itself the Palestinian and Arab Jewish tragedies, within the colonial reality of the negation of Arabness and the East, and their being ridiculed. It is also the tragedy of Israeli Hebrew culture being built upon layers of denial and destruction of the local Arab Palestinian culture. Naqqash is mostly known for his resistance to shifting from writing in Arabic to writing in Hebrew and to explicitly and implicitly strengthening the borderline and the division between those languages and literatures, marking them as separate, and at times opposing, cultural entities. A critical reading of Naqqash’s work reveals a more complex story that problematizes the monolingual narrative of binary options between two separate languages. Such a reading reveals instead the ways in which his writing destabilizes the clear-cut separations between Hebrew and Arabic and challenges the perception of pure, unified national languages and literatures (whether Hebrew or Arabic), presenting a continuum of dialects and languages that stretch from multiple dialects of Arabic through Persian, Aramaic, and Hebrew, and undermining the ethos of the monolingual culture. Naqqash’s polyglotism challenges the sharp national lingual matrix, undermining the link between language and national territory or religious identity.41 Exploring Samir Naqqash’s literary work offers a unique angle on the history of Hebrew and Arabic linguistic and literary relations. Additionally, it provides an opportunity to examine these relations beyond the nationalistic linguistic imagined geography, transcending the disciplinary, cultural, and linguistic partitions that set the foundations for the distinctions between Hebrew and Arabic, between Judaism and Islam, between Jews and Muslims, and between spoken and written languages.42 Facing this historical context, Naqqash’s poetics provides alternative paths, not just because of his persistence in using Arabic but also because of the way in which it is phrased, designed, and placed within the historical context itself. It takes form in
the borderland, at the edge of languages and in the space between languages, across the different forms of Arabic. In relation to the contrasting process of reduction and the erasure of the language and history of Iraqi Jews—pushing them into narrow nationalistic categories (Iraq versus Israel, Arabic versus Hebrew, Arabs versus Jews, diaspora versus homeland)—Naqqash creates a polyglotic, multilingual world and moves beyond geographical and cultural borders. In his stories there is great emphasis on temporal and spatial dimensions. The plot flows forward and backward in time, as well as across distances and between locations, placing the historic story of the Iraqi Jews beyond the Iraq/Israel dichotomy, or beyond pre- or post-1948, spanning a wide geographical region with a broad array of languages. Furthermore, Naqqash’s prose expands the geographic and linguistic range of Arabic in a way that resists the reduction to the Hebrew-Arabic binary matrix. Rather, it includes linguistic contact zones across national and communal borders and often overlaps Arabic with other languages. In this manner his writings challenge the rigid nationalistic approach of Arabic language and literature as a unified linguisticcultural entity. In the context of Hebrew literature, this perspective rattles the binary perception of Hebrew and Arabic as two separate languages, belonging to different cultures and regions, and representing distinct religious, literary, and poetic traditions.
Notes
* Yuval Evri would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship grant that has made this research possible.
1 Samir Naqqash was born in Baghdad in 1938 and came with his family to Israel in 1951, when he was about twelve; initially, they lived in a transit camp in Petah Tikva. He continued to live in Petah Tikva but traveled around the world and lived for different periods in Iran, Turkey, India, Egypt, and Britain. In 1971 he published his first story collection, Al-khataʾ (The mistake). He published a total of five story collections, two novels, four novellas, and three plays. In many of his stories, he returns to Baghdad; other stories take place in India and Israel. His stories are soaked in layers of language, absurdity, and sometimes even madness. After his death in 2004, a collection of his stories was published in Baghdad for the first time, by Dār Mesopotamia, and articles about his work recognizing him as part of twentieth-century Iraqi literature were written in Iraq.
2 For selected works on Naqqash, see Nancy Berg, Exile from Exile (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996); Reuven Snir, Araviyut, Yahadut, Tsiyonut: Maavak zehuyot be-yetziratam shel Yehudei Irak (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi, 2005); Lital Levy, Poetic Trespass: Writing
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between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
3 Shimon Ballas (1930–2019) and Sami Michael (b. 1926) were born in Baghdad. They began writing in Arabic while still in Iraq, and they continued to do so until shifting to writing in Hebrew. For more on their transitions, see Berg, Exile from Exile; Snir, Araviyut, Yahadut, Tsiyonut.
4 On the spectrum of Arabic language, see Yasir Suleiman, The Arabic Language and National Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). On the differentiation between literary Arabic and Judeo-Arabic, and between the spoken language and the written language, particularly regarding the Baghdadi dialects, see Haim Blanc, Communal Dialects in Baghdad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964); Benjamin Hary, Multiglossia in Judeo-Arabic: With an Edition, Translation and Grammatical Study of the Cairene Purim Scroll (Leiden: Brill, 1992). For the different approach that Ella Shohat presents, see Ella Shohat, “The Question of Judeo- Arabic,” Arab Studies Journal 23, no.1 (2015); Ella Shohat, “The Invention of Judeo-Arabic: Nation, Partition and the Linguistic Imaginary,” Interventions 19, no. 2 (2017).
5 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 263.
6 For more on the historical context and the linguistic diversity of Baghdad in the first part of the twentieth century, see Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).
7 For discussion on the polyphony in his writing, see Berg, Exile from Exile; Levy, Poetic Trespass.
8 See Jacqueline Kahanoff ’s essay “Childhood in Egypt,” in which she attempts to present the Levantine concept: “When I was a small child, it seemed natural that people understood each other although they spoke different languages, and were called by different names—Greek, Moslim [sic], Syrian, Jewish, Christian, Arab, Italian, Tunisian, Armenian.” Jacqueline Kahanoff, Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, ed. Deborah Starr and Sasson Somekh (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 1. However, Kahanoff, who wrote in English, presents the Jew born in the Arab world in the first half of the twentieth century as one who adopted the colonial languages, that is French and English, and had partial fluency in spoken Arabic but did not learn any literary Arabic. In this sense Kahanoff was not part of the dialogue with traditional Judeo-Arabic writing, nor with literary Arabic, and therefore, her place as a writer was different than that of Samir Naqqash. Naqqash’s Arabic was his primary spoken language, with its different dialects, Jewish and non-Jewish, and literary Arabic was his primary written language, with the addition of written Judeo-Arabic.
9 See, for example, Samir Naqqash,“Yom she-tevel harta ve-hepila bo,” from the collection of stories with the same name. Samir Naqqash, Yom she-tevel harta ve-hepila bo, trans. Ruth Naqqash (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Poalim, 1985).
10 Reuven Snir expands on this subject, Araviyut, Yahadut, Tsiyonut, 221.
11 Samir Naqqash, Yawm ḥabalat wa-ajhaḍat al-dunyā: Qiṣaṣ ʿIrāqiyya, 1980), 127. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are our own.
12 Ibid., 128.
13 Ibid., 128.
14 The attempt of non-Jews in Baghdad to speak in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic can be seen in the memoir of the Iraqi-Jewish writer Naim Kattan. In Farewell, Babylon, which was written in French, Kattan describes a conversation that took place in a cafe in Baghdad before his emigration. A group of young people of all ethnoreligious persuasions discuss their common future in Iraq. Surprisingly, and much to Kattan’s embarrassment, a fellow Jew in the group speaks about that common future in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic. To Kattan’s astonishment, other members of the group who were not Jewish continued the conversation in the Jewish dialect, even if somewhat unsuccessfully. This afforded a level of legitimacy to the Jewish communal tongue, which was often ridiculed by general society because of its pronunciation, and acknowledged it as worthy for use in future intercommunity dialogues about the common political future of all Iraqis. See Naim Kattan, Farewell Babylon (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976).
15 Naqqash, Yom she-tevel harta.
16 The Maktoob Translators’ Circle and book series is a cultural and political initiative in which the presence and representation of the Arabic language in Hebrew is central and prominent.
17 See books by Salim Barakat, a Kurdish-Syrian writer who writes in literary Arabic, although his mother tongue is Kurmanji; he tends not to use colloquial Arabic in his novels.
18 See Reuven Snir, following his correspondence with Samir Naqqash in 2001, before his novel was published: “Naqqash wrote his last novel in response to allegations by academics that his works were unintelligible, and that he wrote only for himself; he was therefore willing to sacrifice literary quality in order to increase book distribution. The problem is that this novel is not any less clever than his previous works—it is more polished in language, structure, and character development.” Snir, Araviyut, Yahadut, Tsiyonut, 244.
19 Samir Naqqash, Shlūmū al-Kurdī wa-anā wa-al-zaman (Riwāya, 2003), 290.
20 Ibid., 223.
21 Ibid., 72.
22 For further biographical details about Samir Naqqash, see Snir, Araviyut, Yahadut, Tsiyonut; see also Binyamin Rish, Maagalei kiyum be-mivhan ha-metziyut be-sipureihem ha-ktzarim shel ha-sofrim ha-Yehudiyim yotzei Irak: Shalom Darwish ve-Samir Naqqash (Jerusalem: Agudat Akademaim Yotzei Irak be-Yisrael, 2009).
23 Sasson Somekh, “Sifrut lelo kahal: Sofrim Yehudiyim kotvei Aravit be-Yisrael,” Ha-kivun mizrah 7 (2004): 10.
24 On the Al-Nahḍa movement and its linguistic and literary principles, see Tarek El-Ariss, Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
25 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 78.
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26 For more on Ballas and Michael, see Hannan Hever, Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon: Nation Building and Minority Discourse (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Berg, Exile from Exile; Snir, Araviyut, Yahadut, Tsiyonut; Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
27 For more on the Iraqi Jewish writers in Arabic and Hebrew in the twentieth century, see Berg, Exile from Exile; Snir, Araviyut, Yahadut, Tsiyonut.
28 For a critical discussion on the split between spoken and literary Arabic, see Suleiman, The Arabic Language and National Identity.
29 Sami Michael, “Lihiyot sofer mi-motza Iraki,” Moznaim 3/4 (1983): 8–11, 10.
30 Berg, Exile from Exile, 55.
31 For more about the Iraqi literary circle’s perception and reception of Naqqash’s work, see Berg, Exile from Exile; Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, “Ha-lashon ha-ribonit ve-ribonut ha-lashon,” Theory and Criticism 50 (2018): 129-150.
32 Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 5.
33 Ibid., 6.
34 See Naqqash’s interview with Ammiel Alcalay: Ammiel Alcalay, ed., Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 100–111; also Levy, Poetic Trespass.
35 Naqqash interview with Ammiel Alcalay, Keys to the Garden, 109.
36 When Sami Michael saw this translation of his novel into Arabic, he asked the editor to change the dialogues back to literary Arabic in order to make it readable throughout the Arab world, and not just for those who are proficient in the Iraqi and Judeo-Arabic dialects; the translation was published in Cairo in 1995.
37 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 282.
38 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 66–67.
39 Naqqash, Shlūmū al-Kurdī, 26.
40 For more on this process, see Ella Shohat, “The Invention of the Mizrahim,” Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 1 (1999); Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Yonatan Mendel, The Creation of Israeli Arabic: Political and Security Considerations in the Making of Arabic Language Studies in Israel, Palgrave Studies in Languages at War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
41 On the link between language, territory, and nationalism in the Hebrew-Zionist context, see Hever, Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon.
42 Regarding this division, see Shohat, “The Invention of the Mizrahim”; Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Gil Hochberg, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).