[This first appeared as part of UCLA’s 2017 symposium, “The Naksa at 50”]
Abstract: Despite its small size, Emile Habiby’s 1968 work, Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (The Six-Day Sextet) is arguably the most compelling literary reflection on the moment of the 1967 Naksa and its immediate aftermath. Building on the topos of reunions, Habiby explores the ironies and ambiguities of defeat, and the imperfect new possibilities that came with Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, possibilities that have been eclipsed many times over by subsequent developments. This essay offers a short appreciation of Habiby’s work, arguing for conceptualizing the work not as a collection of short stories, but rather a form situated between the short story and the novel. This formal ambiguity it not only true to the theme of imperfect reunions explored in Habiby’s work, but more critically, to the experiences of previously separated Palestinian communities joined against their will by Israeli military force.
Reunions Amidst Shock
For Arab poets and writers, the June War was a shock, an occasion for weeping, self-critique and even self-flagellation.[1] To hear the urgency of the moment, we only have to recall the opening lines of Nizar Qabbani’s well-known poem “Margin Notes on the Dossier of the Setback”:
My friends—behold the death of the old language,
And the ancient books,
To you, I bring news of the passing
Of our words worn out like old shoes,
And the death of whorish vocabulary, sarcasm and curses
I announce for you, for you,
The end of the thinking that led to the defeat.[2]
While there may have been a consensus about the existential nature of the military defeat, Arab intellectuals differed on the nature of its causes. For some, it was due to betrayal and treason: a failure to properly modernize, or to fully commit to Marxist, Nasserist, or Baathist models of revolution. For others, the defeat was the direct consequence of a poverty of thought and language, or a blind adherence to authority and tradition. For the Syrian poet Adonis it was all of these things at once. Writing in al-Adab in 1968, he said:
Our masses are not up to the level of the revolution. When the revolution surrenders to them, it betrays itself, when it abandons them it dies.… We must realize that the societies that modernized did so only after they rebelled against their history, tradition and values… We must ask our religious heritage what it can do for us in our present and future… If it cannot do much for us we must abandon it.[3]
In light of this body of writing, it is remarkable how differently the event was absorbed by those Palestinian poets and intellectuals who lived inside Israel. While they appreciated the enormous impact of the war on the Arab regimes, they did not necessarily talk about it in terms of defeat (hazima) and setback (naksa). As Mahmoud Darwish put it in a 1969 interview:
As a writer, the war had no sudden effect on me. It didn’t turn my thoughts upside down. It didn’t crush my ideals as it so thankfully did to those of the Arab poets outside my country. I wasn’t sitting up in a pigeon tower, needing to be convinced of the necessity of going down to the street. But the war was a painful truth-teller [and forced some writers to discover core realities]. Fedwa Tuqan’s poetry [for instance] took a sharp turn immediately after Nablus was occupied. During our first meeting in Haifa, I said to her, “Not a month has passed since the occupation, your occupation. What do you think about all these long discussions about poetry?” Then couldn’t help but add, “I hope there’s some benefit from all that’s happened. Let Nizar Qabbani come visit us in Haifa!”[4]
Qabbani never did visit Haifa, but others did. Similarly, the poets and writers of Haifa and Nazareth used the occasion to tour the West Bank to meet with writers and poets they’d never met, and family and friends they hadn’t seen in decades. The exchanges and conversations that developed out of these meetings were as transformative as they were unexpected. Within weeks or months, it was clear to Palestinian intellectuals that one of the most paradoxical consequences of the June War was that it managed to put an end to the twenty-year siege on Palestinian life inside Israel.
As welcome as this outcome was, the fact that it came about through military defeat rather than victory only accentuated the abject state of Palestinian politics, whether living as third-class citizens in the Jewish state or living under the new military occupation. In this context, it is not surprising that Palestinian citizens of Israel spoke about the war and its aftermath in terms of meetings that were as sad as they were happy, and reunions that, on the one hand, reaffirmed Palestinian connections, and on the other, reminded Palestinians of the divisions that continued to separate them. The post-1967 literature is dominated by the motif of reunion.[5] Importantly, the motif is fraught, incomplete and even troubling, as evidenced in the ambiguity inherent within some of the post-1967 reunions cited in Maha Nassar’s recent study, Brothers Apart.
In one instance, Nassar recounts the story of the Haifa intellectual, Hanna Abu Hanna, who took a car trip through the West Bank in the months following the war. Abu Hanna and his wife visit her sister in Ramallah—it is the first time they have seen each other in twenty years. Then Abu Hanna drops in an old friend, who asked, “Shall we thank the occupation, in whose shadows this meeting occurs? Yet it is the reason for our separation in the first place.”[6]
In a second instance, a young intellectual, Salman Natur, writes of his first trip to East Jerusalem in 1967 as a journey of self-discovery:
Upon seeing a copy of the [Egyptian] newspapers al-Ahram and al-Jumhuriyya, or the [Lebanese] journals al-Adab or al-Adib, I felt at that time as if I was embracing the Arab world.… [Along Salah al-Din Street] you don’t hear anything around you except Arabic, and everything you see is written in Arabic, and the people are calling out in the [open air] market [selling] Arab goods… It was as if I stepped through a large portal and entered the Arab world.[7]
Israeli officials correctly understood that these meetings between West Bank and ’48 Palestinians were transformative and that they would undermine the fragile system of control which had, for almost twenty years, relied on a policy of isolating and separating Palestinian communities inside the Jewish state.[8] In a third example, Nassar recounts the story of how the poet Samih al-Qasim was detained by the Israeli police in early 1969. After questioning the poet about contacts al-Qasim had made while taking a tour of the occupied territories, they detain him for weeks on charges of conspiracy. There, in Damun prison, al-Qasim meets prisoners who had been brought in from all over the occupied territories—from the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. As Nassar puts it, “After years of writing about the need for Arab unity and lamenting the barriers that kept Palestinians in Israel from having contact with other Arabs, it was in prison… that they were finally carrying out a unique type of Arab unity.”[9]
Emile Habiby and the Six-Day Sextet
Arguably, the most important literary statement on these post-war reunions was Emile Habiby’s 1968 work, Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (The Six-Day Sextet). There is little doubt that motif of imperfect, incomplete and troubling meetings were on Habiby’s mind at the time he wrote it. As Habiby put it many years later:
I wrote the Six-Day Sextet during the first year of the occupation. If they’d called it the Seven Days War, I would have written it as a septet instead. I wanted to flip the word on its back to see the other face of this war’s tragedy. A prisoner, separated from his family for twenty years, wakes up one day to loud noises in the prison courtyard. Suddenly, he finds his entire family gathered there with him. After all the rupture and isolation, how is he supposed to feel about such a reunion? Can we even call that a ‘reunion’?”[10]
The Sextet first appeared in the pages of al-Jadid, the legendary Arabic-language monthly of politics and culture established in 1953 as an organ of the Israeli Communist Party (MAKI).[11] Like other literary publications in Beirut and Cairo, al-Jadid translated poetry and essays from a wide range of languages, and engaged actively in questions of modernism, literary commitment, and cultural critique. Unlike those other journals, the circulation of al-Jadid was confined to one city and a handful of towns and villages in the Galilee and Triangle. It is difficult to exaggerate the accomplishments of this little journal, which at various times employed Hana Abu Hana, Tawfiq Zayyad, Emile Touma, Samih al-Qasim and Darwish as editors, and which formed, despite the perennial, double-edged embargo[12] of Palestinian literature inside Israel, one of the most vibrant journals of the entire Arab world until its demise in 1991.
The Sextet appeared over the course of six issues of al-Jadid, between April and September of 1968.[13] Although the stories were published under the pen-name of Abu Salam, readers would have recognized the author immediately: over the years, Habiby had published many pieces in al-Jadid (and its sister newspaper, al-Ittihad), sometimes under his own name, sometimes anonymously, sometimes under various pen-names.[14] In any case, the light touch of his prose and its biting sense of humor were as good as any signature.
Each story in the work sketches a meeting that is troubled and incomplete. In most cases the reunions are between people—old friends, old loves, people who might have met earlier were it not for the Partition. But the encounters always also involve other things—places, things, stories, memories, songs, and poems.
In the first story, “Hayna sa‘ada Mas‘ud bi-bn ‘ammuh,” a young boy inside Israel—from the only family without relatives in the village—meets his uncle and cousin for the first time. As joyful as the encounter is, tensions break out between the West Bank cousin and the other kids in the neighborhood. By story’s end, the protagonist grasps the precarity of their attachment and wonders what will happen when Israel withdraws from the West Bank. A question mark hangs over this reunion.
In the second story, “Akhiran, nawwara al-luz,” a friend from his town approaches the narrator for the first time in twenty years and asks him about another childhood friend of theirs. Thus the story of this other friend is recounted and how, in 1947, he had loved a girl from the West Bank and had promised to marry her the following year. When the Nakba occurs, the two lovers are separated, never to meet again. The narrator tells us how this man had gone on a quest to find out what happened to the lovers after all these years, and how, while visiting the West Bank after the June War, he had actually found the same girl now married but who’d nonetheless held onto the same almond blossoms that were a token of her engagement to the other young man, their mutual friend. The narrator’s old friend is desperate to remember the name of the young man in this love story, but the narrator is unable to help him. The man goes away, still trying to remember the identity of the protagonist of the story. At the end, the narrator reveals that the young man of the love story was this same confused man from his village, and that the protagonist he was trying to remember was himself. The man had indeed met his old love, but his repression was so total that he never recognized her. In the shadow of this lost memory, their meeting both happened and did not.
In another story, “Umm al-Rubabika,” we meet an old rag and bone seller. In her junk shop, property looted from Haifa homes in 1948 mingles with property looted from the Golan Heights in 1967. Another, “al-‘Awda,” tells the love story of activists from opposite sides of the Green Line who meet in a series of joint protests both inside Israel and in the West Bank, only to be separated again in Israeli prisons. The details of the various stories begin to accumulate and get tangled up in one another. Motifs repeat. Situations, characters and phrases repeat so often that it sometimes becomes difficult to remember which story we are in.
This confusion, it seems, is precisely the point. While each story is self-contained, they are also in conversation with one another through an aesthetics of repetition and doubling. While critics have tended to discuss the work as a collection of stories, this is mistaken: from the moment it first appeared in April 1968, The Sextet was published and named as single work, not as a collection of separate stories. Thus, in terms of literary form, The Sextet exists somewhere between story and novel. And in this regard it is crucial to remember that this work itself marks a turning point in the author’s career: before The Sextet, Habiby wrote only short stories; after, mostly longer experiments within the novel form.
In this light, we might consider how the final story of the Sextet, “al-Hubb fi-qalbi,” folds back onto other narratives. To frame this, it needs to be pointed out that Habiby begins each of the six stories with an epigram taken from a song—such as “Raji‘una” or “Zahrat al-mida’in”—sung by the Lebanese singer Fairouz. While the meaning of these lines is never made clear, they tie the stories together in a ligamental, lyrical way. Not accidently, they suggest something like radio broadcasts drifting across otherwise closed borders.
However, “al-Hubb fi-qalbi” breaks the pattern of the first five stories by quoting lines from a pre-Islamic poem which, we are told, “was never sung by Fairouz.” This last story then begins by reflecting on the fact that while Fairouz sings with warmth and feeling, her songs were composed by others. In the same way, Habiby’s unnamed narrator explains that the story we are reading was not written by him but by others. The figure holds: as a fiction writer—who is really a journalist—the narrator recounts narratives composed by others, just as a chanteuse sings songs written by others. This sense of collective, disparate authorship resonates, as we shall see, with the very form of Habiby’s text, which gathers together many narratives into a single account characterized by multivocality and resonance.
The narrator then mentions that on a recent visit to Leningrad he was taken by his hosts to see the national monument to the 900-day Siege of Leningrad, one of the most horrific episodes of the 20th century. Overwhelmed, the narrator and the others wander through the grounds, silent and sullen. In a small building next to the monument, they see the possessions and relics of victims of the siege, including a small diary of Tanya Savicheva, a young Russian girl of eleven or twelve at the time of the Siege.[15] The narrator quotes directly from the diary on display there: “Today grandmother died. This morning, my little brother didn’t wake up… Today they took away my mother. She was sleeping the whole time. She hasn’t come back” (80).
The narrator’s Russian hosts tell him that the diary was found in the rubble of the city, and the girl Tanya died soon after the siege was lifted. The narrator, devastated by the story promises his hosts, “I will write about what I have seen.” But after leaving them, he wonders whether he is up to the task: he is just a journalist whose usual material is quotidian, even banal.
The narrator’s block comes to an end when he happens upon the letters of a young woman from Jerusalem, now in Ramleh prison. The narrator decides to change the name of the author of the letters—not to Tanya, but to Fairouz, because that is a name which “moves us” (82). Fairouz, the girl who wrote these letters to her mother was one of three girls accused of plotting against the Israeli state. The story then goes on to quote the letters at length: in the first, the girl presents a wish list of items (magazine, hairbrushes, toothpaste, a watermelon, chicken) she wants her mother to send to them in the jail; in the second letter, the girl tells her mother, who appears to be a 1948 refugee from Haifa, about her cellmate, the girl from Haifa—and how much they have in common: how they both listen to Fairouz, Abdel Wahhab, and so on. Throughout the letters, the girl tells her mother not to worry (la taqlaqi, la khafi) so often, that we begin to see the real desperation behind her words. The narrator never presents the third letter, whose contents, he tells us, we have already encountered in false newspaper accounts of the trial of the Israeli policewoman who helped smuggle the letters out. The story—and the Sextet—end with the narrator reminding us that the reality here is of a friendship between characters “from a single people who have reunited, after a long separation, under a single roof, the roof of a prison cell” (92).
Every element in the final story resonates with situations, themes and characters from the other stories: here, as elsewhere, the tension between separation and reunion (or in the Arabic: al-qati‘a wa-l-liqa’) is only resolved the most fleeting ways; the doubling of a far-away story—Tanya’s story—with a local one repeats many such instances of narrative mixing in the Sextet, where small everyday stories of Palestinian life get tangled up in the plots of The Tale of Two Cities, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the folktale of “Jubaineh and the Blue Necklace.” The same is true of the prison narrative, which resonates with another prison narrative in the fourth story. There are other instances of repetition worth mentioning, such as Habiby’s sly habit of misquoting, in this particular case, taking the words “weapon in hand” from Abdel Wahhab’s 1967 song, “Hayy ‘ala falah” and making them into “love in the heart.”[16]
With such an untrustworthy quoter of well-known poems and songs, what are we to make of the narrator? Indeed, this is one of the most fascinating elements of the work itself. The narrator in the final story seems to be the same narrator who appears in the others, even though we can never be sure: in some stories, the narrator is from Nazareth, in others, from Haifa or a village somewhere in the Galilee. He could be a Palestinian everyman—observing and recording, always in the same wry tone. But there is also evidence to think of him as even more ambivalent, reluctant than that. This hesitation comes through in the last lines of the third story, when the old rag and bones dealer, Umm Rubabika, hands him a stack of letters, which are perhaps the same prison letters that appear in the sixth story?
The gift of these letters reminds the narrator of how his own grandmother used to tell stories about Hassan the Clever—only she told the stories out of order, without beginning, without a proper ending. Or as he puts it, amputated stories (qisas butra’). After leading us on about the letters, the narrator decides not to tell us what they contained: “let’s leave this story amputated, let’s finish writing it together” (49).
This ambiguous gesture—between silence and authorship, between beginning and end, between separation and reunion—seems especially fitting for thinking about how the June War appeared to Habiby (and perhaps others) in the months that followed. Its meanings were unclear, even if its implications were not. But as Habiby’s stories make exceeding clear: while fiction could raise questions, the answers would be have to be found outside the text.
Notes
[1] On the literature of post-67 self-critique, see: Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 24-75.
[2] Nizar Qabbani, Hawamish ‘ala daftar al-naksa (Beirut: n.p, 1969).
[3] Adonis, as qtd. in Ajami, 29.
[4] “Ma‘ al-sha‘ir Mahmud Darwish,” al-Jadid (1969: 3), 24. Translation mine.
[5] On shifting responses with the Palestinian literary field inside Israel, see essays by the Palestinian literary critic from Haifa, Emile Touma: “Madha ba‘d Haziran 1967?,” al-Jadid (1972: 6), 7-12, 43; “Ta’thir harb 1967 ‘ala al-adab al-filastini fi-Isra’il,” al-Jadid (1976: 1), 51-65.
[6] Maha Nassar, Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017),156.
[7] Nassar, Brothers Apart, 156.
[8] See Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of the Liberal Settler State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).
[9] Nassar, Brothers Apart, 176.
[10] Emile Habiby, Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta wa-qisas ukhra (Haifa: Arabesque Publishing House, 2006), 8-9. All subsequent quotations from the text are from this edition. All translations mine.
[11] On the history of the journal, see: Mahmud Ghanayim, Al-Jadid fi-nisf qarn: musarrid bibiliyughrafi (Kafr Qar‘: Dar al-Huda, 2004); and Maha Nassar, “The Marginal as Central: Al-Jadid and the Development of a Palestinian Public Sphere 1953-1970),” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 3 (2010), 333-351. On literary culture in Palestinian society within Israel, see also: Khaled Furani, Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); and Adina Hoffman, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
[12] See: Seraje Assi, “Memory, Myth and the Military Government: Emile Habibi’s Collective Autobiography,” Jerusalem Quarterly 52(Winter 2013), 87-97.
[13] Emile Habiby (Abu Salam): Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (1): “Hayna sa‘ada Mas‘ud bi-bn ‘ammuh,” al-Jadid (1968: 4), 7-8, 35; Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (2): “Akhiran, nawwara al-luz,” al-Jadid (1968: 5), 5-7, 38; Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (3): “Umm al-Rubabika.” al-Jadid (1968: 6), 11-13; Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (4): “al-‘Awda,” al-Jadid (1968: 7), 8-10; Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (5): “al-Khurza li-zurqa’ aw ‘awda Jabina.” al-Jadid (1968: 8), 6-7; Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (6): “al-Hubb fi-qalbi.” al-Jadid (1968: 9), 11-15.
[14] Emile Habiby (Abu Salam), Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (1): “Hayna sa‘ada Mas‘ud bi-bn ‘ammuh,” al-Jadid (1968: 4), 7-8, 35. Subsequently, the Sextet was republished many more times: once, at the end of 1968, in the pages of the Lebanese journal, al-Tariq; in 1969 the Cairene publisher, Dar al-Hilal, brought out a mass market paperback. Other early editions include: Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta: riwaya min al-ard al-muhtalla (Beirut: Dar al-‘Awda, 1969); Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta wa-qisas ukhra (Haifa: Matba‘at al-Ittihad al-Ta‘awuniyya, 1970); Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta; al-Waqa’i‘ al-ghariba fi-khtifa’ Sa‘id Abi al-Nahs al-Mutasha’il wa-qisas ukhra (Beirut: Munazzamat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyya, Da’irat al-I‘lam wa-l-Thaqafa, 1980). Most recently, it was republished in 2006, as part of the definitive edition of Habiby’s collected works, edited by Siham Daoud and published by Dar Arabesque in Haifa. During the 1970s, parts of the work were produced in Cairo as a radio play, and Habiby himself adapted one of the most famous stories, Umm Rubabika, as a play by the same name.
[15] For information on Savicheva, see: Patricia Heberer, Children During the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2011), 52-54.
[16] “As long as I have my hope, my hope, and in my hands my weapon,” (Tul-i ma amali ma‘yya ma‘yya wa fi-idayya silah…). Credit to Fuad Saleh for this observation.
