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THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF LANGUAGE USE IN
"THE PARISIAN OR AL-BARISI" OF ISABELLA HAMMAD
——o—
HELGE DANIELS
INTRODUCTION AND BRIEF OUTLINE OF THE PLOT
“The Parisian or Al-Barisi”' by Isabella Hammad is a novel that defies easy
categorization in many ways. In the first place, it is a semi-biographical Bil¬
dungsroman based on the many stories that were told within the Hammad
family about Midhat, who was the author’s great-grandfather.” The reader
follows the coming of age of Midhat Kamal, a young Palestinian from Nablus,
who goes to study medicine in Montpellier during W WI in order to avoid Ot¬
toman conscription and returns afterwards to his native city. The novel is also
a love story: central to the plot is a love gone wrong between Midhat and Jean¬
nette, the daughter of Frédéric Molineu, his host in Montpellier. Midhat leaves
for Paris when he discovers that Molineu, who is a professor of anthropology,
is treating him as a study object and Jeannette, with whom he has a beginning
romance, does not support him when he confronts her father. There he enjoys
many romantic adventures and discusses politics with his Arab friends. After
the war he returns, without his doctor’s degree, to Nablus, a city that boils with
unrest and revolt against the British Mandate and the upcoming Zionist project.
With its ample and well-researched descriptions of the political situation,
the novel reads also as a historical account. It provides a nuanced portrayal of
the turbulent years of WW/1 and the interbellum, when the Sykes-Picot agree¬
ment (1916) and the Balfour Declaration (1917) caused upheaval and eventu¬
ally led to the drastic redrawing of the map of the Middle East. Midhat tries to
break free from the strict social traditions prevailing in Nablus and the patri¬
archal yoke of his absent and standoffish father. Midhat’s struggle and play
with his identity and alterity, the ‘oriental’ in France and ‘al-Barisi’ in Nablus,
together with his quest for independence, are intertwined with Palestine’s
political struggle for independence and the redefinition of its national identity.
Even if the novel does not deal directly with the establishment of the Israeli
state in 1948—the nakba (catastrophe), from a Palestinian perspective—and
its consequences (the novel ends in 1939), both the author and the readers are
aware that this was the eventual outcome of the colonial deals that were struck
! Isabella Hammad: “The Parisian or Al-Barisi”, Vintage Press, London, 2020.
2 Afikra: Interview with Novelist Isabella Hammad, afikra conversations, https://www.afikra.
com/talks/conversations/isabellahammad, accessed 28 October 2022.
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