Why the Past Matters: Personal Reflections on the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
By Zayhie Kundos
This text is based on the manuscript of Zahiye Kundos‘ presentation “Why the Past Matters: Personal Reflections on the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life”, that she contributed to the workshop “Shadows, Ghosts and Afterlives of Empire: Entanglements and Potentialities in the East of the Mediterranean”, convened by C. Ceyhun Arslan (Koç University / EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 2023/24) and Galili Shahar (Marcel Reich-Ranicki Chair in German Literature, Tel Aviv University) on 5 July 2024 at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin.

For the past hundred and fifty years or so (feel free to count differently), Arabs – whether Muslims, Christians, or Jews – have been dealing with relative loss of control over their lives in part due to living without self-sovereignty. Such collective experience is manifest in the feeling of being lost in history, exhausted from Sisyphean efforts to connect to that past and achieve radical changes in their present, moving in a circle between glances of hope and long periods of depression. The result is a stuttering tongue, a symptom of a bruise in their heart. Generation after generation, but this heart injury doesn’t get old; the bruise continues to be blue.
This blue bruise in the Arab heart occupies me. In my writing (both for academia and the public) I try to touch it to see how it came to be. I am carefully looking for the appropriate tools that could assist in the process of healing the Arab heart as a condition for rehabilitating the Arabic tongue. I do this because I want to get up in the morning and remember, without much effort and immediately, why I am.
I choose to do this by walking, slowly, in two tracks. In the old track, there are fathers (many fathers), in the recent track there are mothers (yet to be found). In both tracks, I search for genealogy, of figures in the family I inherited and historical figures that I actively acquire. I am obsessed with building family trees and clanging my missing belongings on their branches.
In fact, belonging (or intimāʾ in modern Arabic) is a fundamental concept in my life. I can imagine neither words nor silence without it. It serves as a compass for how I think, write, and relate to my surroundings.
It could be a natural given, not subject to conscious choice, something that was deposited with me from ancient times, through the feelings, modes of conduct, and life events of the family in which I grew up, thus shaping my personality.
My father’s determined refusal to hear any criticism of his mother, Zahiye Mughrabi, even though she had preferred his brother Ali. Uncle Ali, was a light-skinned, strong-bodied and elegant man, born two years prior to the great transformation in his mother’s life.
Ali reminded my grandmother, Um Said, of her brothers, affluent businessmen, as the story goes, with their rich humor, charm and charisma. The brothers whom my grandfather, Abu ʿIssa, the well-builder, forced her to leave behind in Gaza. They had headed there following the Nakba and had to return to Yafa where her husband stayed with the few who remained. Two years later she became sick in her heart and gave birth to her last son. Hassan was a brown-skinned, slender and thoughtful child. His very body resembled no one familiar or admired; his very existence spoke of imposed separation.
About funerals in Gaza, grandmother Um Said, would learn too late from neighbors or the newspapers. No one in the family was brave enough to tell her in real time. Among the families that stayed on in Yafa, she took charge of weddings and divorces, quarrels and reconciliations. The one who ended up being most like her and continued following her tradition was, in fact, her youngest son whom she had deemed weak and too sensitive to survive.
My inheritance also came from my mother’s side of the family. Her obsessive care of a small aquarium in our home to remind herself of the big pool in the orchard of the home in the Old City where she grew up; her father, Abu Mussa, carefully removing the fish so that she could enjoy some pleasurable moments in the water under the pomegranate tree.
My own longing, when having a hard time, for some fresh air taken between the lemon and jasmine trees, from which my grandmother, Um Hussein, picked some shoots just before they were forced to leave the orchard behind, so that she could re-plant them in the yard of her home in Ajami.
My aunts and uncles who never tired of comparing life before and life after, the foods coming out of the ancient furnace and those prepared on the gas stove; keeping grandmother company in her small kitchen, watching her farmer’s hands clean the huge steel pots, emptied to the bottom during Friday afternoon meals.
الشتا بحب ينزل على ارض نضيفة“Rain likes to fall on clean soil” she would say, towards the end of fall as she swept the fallen leaves of her only two trees. As my hands massaged my grandmother’s feet when she rested in the evenings, everything blended.
I hold on to the term – belonging – because of my extended family, too. When I was a child, no one would dare to interfere with me, and that was because of my family name. Everybody feared my cousins’ reaction (those who were not killed in gang wars grew old and turned to religion). Perhaps my trust that nothing bad could happen to me was not due to having these blood relatives watching over me; maybe it derived, rather, from knowing that as long as I lived among Yafa’s working class no harm could ever happen to me.
Every look into the distance on Ajami’s beach makes up a moment of mercy and sin: it is a privilege owing to Abu ʿIssa who managed to stay and thereby allowed me to be born and raised in Yafa; a sin due to Um Said’s long-drawn songs; Abu Mussa’s death two years after he was deprived of his land; Um Hussein’s long silence and her stubborn insistence that life must go on despite everything.
I am bint al-balad (“the daughter of the town”), where you see a lot of brown young girls and boys who rightly have a reputation for not giving a fuck about anyone. Only God knows for how long they will be able to continue living there.
Because of all of this, because Yafa, each time I visit, has become a little more diminished, I am obsessed with belonging. Writing – one way or another – from what remains, or what has been lost, from a dried-up well or the remaining shallow water, I write because I worry about the lives of the people who are mine. The people who feel I am theirs.
I have been practicing my father’s tongue. He is the reader I imagine when I sit at my desk. I write for him and about him or issues of his concern. Being a Papi-girl had a direct impact on my attraction to certain personalities in research.
I have spent a good porch of my career with the dinosaurs of modern Arabic thought, all of which are men who enjoy an undisputed status in the canon of modern Arabic thought. I strive to save each one of them from themselves by spending time with their texts and rewriting their experiences in a way that captures their tendencies and the dramas behind their intentions. Moreover, I paid attention to how they related to each other and the intergenerational bonds between them on the emotional and visionist levels.
Pointing to their differences and blind spots while drawing a thread of continuity has given me comfort as if they were members of my own family. It satisfies my need to tell them that I see them and show indebtedness for all that they did for my generation. I feel the relief of not needing to start from zero. I know that much has been done and much more to do.
During that process of resurrection of fathers, I came to realize my own dark areas. Where are the mothers in that intellectual tree I built? Where is my mother? Where has she been hiding from me, and more importantly: where have I been hiding from her?
I feel the pain of her absence in my belly.
My mother is the one I should be writing for and writing about, but so far (I am 43 years old) that state of soaking in her waters has not been my business. Women write in “white ink,” wrote Helen Cexue. But my mother does not write. She was taken out of school at the age of ten. She says it was her decision. She also remembers that she had flowing milk when I was born which made other women envy her. She says that she decided not to clang me to her breasts.
Our stories together, she and I, have not been written on any paper, not hidden in any drawer. My mother lives in the margins of my fragmented being.
My beginning is not registered anywhere in me.
I know I shall begin. But to write about my mother I need a proper mother tongue. I do not even know what that means, having a proper mother tongue. It is unclear to me whether I need to learn it or remember it, or whether it is going to be difficult or for some reason the slightest of efforts. All I know is that I need to be brave to look for her, inside me.
Specialists say that the female body knows how to give birth to children but they do not have an idea of how to go backwards, namely children giving birth to their mothers. I am pretty sure that it will be caesarean surgery since I already consumed the drug limit that my body could consume.
This time I will keep my eyes wide open. I will not pray to navigate my pain. I will not cry. I will be watching the blood that covers us both.
Only after I can make other women walk through me, including the women in me. Searching for the mothers in me and history softens my skin; my pregnant body makes me reconsider everything. I have no idea who am I to be tomorrow.
I cannot undo my trajectory. Egypt (the country my father clanged to culturally and politically) continues to be a central site for my current project on trying to explore the experiences of motherhood in contemporary Egyptian literature. But since I have developed a serious breathing allergy to nationalism and nation-states, I position myself on either side of the Sinai Desert. Along with reading Arabic works of prose composed by writers born and raised in Egypt, I am reading Hebrew works of prose by Mizrachi Jewish writers, specifically daughters of Jewish Egyptian descendants. They, too, have been obsessed with the theme of motherhood. They, too, have their tongue stuttering in Arabic.
I confess that as a Palestinian who grew up on the Israeli side of the land, I long refused to see the Mizrachim as real Arabs. They look like Arabs and many of them behave like Arabs but I did not consider them as such. They have brown skin just like me, some of them share my family’s social-economic class and even have an accent in Hebrew. Still, they looked white to me. My color blindness did not bother me. I chose to be blind.
Being Arabs in Israel has been a third option offered by left Mizrachim and mostly dealt with suspicion by Palestinians. After all, when Jews reappropriate their Arabhood in the sense of cultural heritage they often continue to speak ‘as Jews’ and enjoy the privileges of being part of the majority of Israeli society. This free movement between the categories is not so easy for Palestinians. The conversion to Israelisim has proved to be an impossible mission for those who tried. It is not a matter of cultural heritage or equal citizenship that Palestinians have been struggling to achieve but to end their fragmentation, for being Palestinians as a whole. Being an Arab is an option that Palestinians are happy to perform once they exit the Israeli borders.
Interestingly, reading Hebrew prose by Mizrachi women about motherhood involves an effort to rescue what is left of the Arabic their ancestors had practiced for centuries. Is this literature apologetic, or is there a hand stretching toward Arabic and another toward mothers that tries to grasp something that only this pair of hands can firmly hold?
Literature, indeed, takes part in constructing borders between peoples, therefore it has the power to uncover their illusions. It has taken too long for female Mizrachi writers to enter the Hebrew Ashkenazi canon. It will take much more time to welcome them within the Arabic canon and to reconsider Hebrew as one of the languages of the Arabs. Clearly, there are political conditions to consider in this matter. Inviting Hebrew back to the arms of Arabic is an action that has political relevance for Arabic itself. Just like mothers should not be left alone, Arabic should not be left alone. Because cultures better speak in many languages or they do not speak at all.
About the Author
Zahiye Kundos is a literary scholar and essayist. Her scholarship ranges between modern Arabic and Hebrew literatures, Islamic reform movements, Arab intellectual history, and the critique of European modernity. She received her undergraduate degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Comparative Literature and General History departments. She completed her MA and PhD in Literature at the School of Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University. Since 2020, she has been a post-doctoral fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Europe in the Middle East, the Middle East in Europe (EUME), and a visiting scholar affiliated with the Seminar für Semitistik und Arabistik at Freie Universität, Berlin. She currently holds the position of Research Associate at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture, Simon Dubnow, in Leipzig. Among her recent publications, Amīna and the Breaking of the Secular Silence: Revisiting The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz (Political Theology, 2024) and Beginnings, Belongings and Political Anxieties (Political Theology, 2023). Zahiya continues to be an associated EUME Fellow through the academic years 2021-2025, with the support of the Minerva Foundation.
Citation: Zahiye Kundos, Why the Past Matters: Personal Reflections on the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 24.10.2024, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/53441
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Forum Transregionale Studien (24. Oktober 2024). Why the Past Matters: Personal Reflections on the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Abgerufen am 12. Februar 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/12kbr