[...] Because of the perpetual — and all-too-real — fear of being hurt, or
of death, or of unbearable loss, or even of “mere” humiliation, each
and every one of us, the conflict’s citizens, its prisoners, trim down
our own vivacity, our internal mental and cognitive diapason, ever
enveloping ourselves with protective layers, which end up suffocating
us.
Kafka’s mouse is right: when the predator is closing in on
you, the world does indeed become increasingly narrow. So does the
language that describes it. From my experience I can say that the
language with which the citizens of a sustained conflict describe their
predicament becomes progressively shallower the longer the conflict
endures. Language gradually becomes a sequence of clichés and slogans.
This begins with the language created by the institutions that manage
the conflict directly — the army, the police, the different government
ministries; it quickly filters down to the mass media that are
reporting about the conflict, germinating an even more cunning language
that aims to tell its target audience the story easiest for digestion;
and this process ultimately seeps into the private, intimate language
of the conflict’s citizens, even if they deny it.
Actually, this process is all too understandable: after all, the
natural riches of human language, and their ability to touch on the
finest and most delicate nuances and strings of existence, can hurt
deeply in such circumstances, because they remind us of the bountiful
reality of which we are being robbed, of its true complexity, of its
subtleties. And the more this state of affairs goes on, and as the
language used to describe this state of affairs grows shallower, public
discourse dwindles further. What remain are the fixed and banal mutual
accusations among enemies, or among political adversaries within the
same country. What remain are the clichés we use for describing our
enemy and ourselves; the clichés that are, ultimately, a collection of
superstitions and crude generalizations, in which we capture ourselves
and entrap our enemies. The world is, indeed, growing increasingly
narrow.
My thoughts relate not only to the conflict in the Middle East.
Across the world today, billions of people face a “predicament” of one
type or other, in which personal existence and values, liberty and
identity are under threat, to some extent. Almost all of us have a
“predicament” of our own, a curse of our own. We all feel — or can
intuit — how our special “predicament” can rapidly turn into a trap
that would take away our freedom, the sense of home our country
provides, our private language, our free will.
In this reality
we authors and poets write. In Israel and Palestine, Chechnya and
Sudan, in New York and in Congo. Sometimes, during my workday, after
several hours’ writing, I lift my head up and think — right now, at
this very moment, another writer whom I don’t even know sits, in
Damascus or Tehran, in Kigali or in Belfast, just like me, practicing
this peculiar, Don-Quixote-like craft of creation, within a reality
that contains so much violence and estrangement, indifference and
diminution. Here, I have a distant ally who doesn’t even know me, but
together we weave this intangible cobweb, which nevertheless has
tremendous power, a world-changing and world-creating power, the power
of making the dumb speak and the power of tikkun, or correction, in the
deep sense it has in kabbalah.
As for me, in recent years, in the fiction that I wrote, I almost intentionally
turned my back on the immediate, fiery reality of my country, the reality of
the latest news bulletin. I had written books about this reality before, and
in articles and essays and interviews, I never stopped writing about it, and
never stopped trying to understand it. I participated in dozens of protests,
in international peace initiatives. I met my neighbors — some of whom were my
enemies — at every opportunity that I deemed to offer a chance for dialogue.
And yet, out of a conscious decision, and almost out of protest, I did not write
about these disaster zones in my literature.
Why?
Because I wanted to write about other things, equally important, which
do not enjoy people’s complete attentiveness as the nearly eternal war
thunders.
I wrote about the furious jealousy of a man for his
wife, about homeless children on the streets of Jerusalem, about a man
and a woman who establish a private, hermetic language of their own
within a delusional bubble of love. I wrote about the solitude of
Samson, the biblical hero, and about the intricate relations between
women and their mothers, and, in general, between parents and their
children.
About four years ago, when my second-oldest son, Uri,
was to join the army, I could no longer follow my recent ways. A sense
of urgency and alarm washed over me, leaving me restless. I then began
writing a novel that treats directly the bleak reality in which I live.
A novel that depicts how external violence and the cruelty of the
general political and military reality penetrate the tender and
vulnerable tissue of a single family, ultimately tearing it asunder.
“As
soon as one writes,” Natalia Ginzburg says, “one miraculously ignores
the current circumstances of one’s life, yet our happiness or misery
leads us to write in a certain way. When we are happy, our imagination
is more dominant. When miserable, the power of our memory takes over.”
It is hard to talk about yourself. I will only say what I can at this point, and from the location where I sit.
I write. In wake of the death of my son Uri last summer in the war
between Israel and Lebanon, the awareness of what happened has sunk
into every cell of mine. The power of memory is indeed enormous and
heavy, and at times has a paralyzing quality to it. Nevertheless, the
act of writing itself at this time creates for me a type of “space,” a
mental territory that I’ve never experienced before, where death is not
only the absolute and one-dimensional negation of life. [read full article]
