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LITERARY CODE-SWITCHING like Teta’s song, and heard a moan seep from his grimacing mouth. He grabbed a piece of paper, observed without reading a title about licencing. All of it was business correspondence. With exaggeration he ripped it down the centre, severing the cushion of a letter Saad from its tail. Ripping the paper was like drawing blood and in the shock of the sound he was calm. Knocking down his father’s desk and ripping the paper is again a kind of trespass by which Midhat can finally, albeit posthumously, give vent to his anger. However, despite these rare moments when trespassing is liberating, it indicates mostly alienation. The mixed feelings of awe, trespassing, liberation and alienation are clear when Midhat, after receiving a telegram of his father saying that he is proud, enters his father’s office to write a reply but is not able to and ends up writing a letter to his friend: He walked into his father’s darkened bedroom and with a deep breath continued into his father’s office. He sat down at the desk. [...] Midhat opened a desk drawer and a pen rattled; he took it out and pulled a sheet from the stack of paper beside it, knocking the drawer closed with his foot. [...] [H]e wrote the words “My dear father.” [...] He reached for a fresh sheet. “Cher Hani, [...]”* This is also obvious when Midhat, who is still a boy at the time, enters his father’s and his stepmother’s bedroom in Nablus because he is looking for something and is violently chased from it by her. This event underscores the psychological impact of his father’s remarriage on Midhat. Recalling this as an adult, Midhat acknowledges that “Layla’s actions may indeed have done him some harm as a child,” but he also indulgently understands that she was very young at the time and “needed to claim her territory and expel the foreign boy when he trespassed into her bedroom. Marriage was her life’s great venture, and happily, she had prevailed.” The importance of marriage in the plot and as a theme in this novel cannot be overestimated and is highlighted by the next relexified expression in our analysis. MARRIAGE: “SIGNING THE BOOK” The relexified phrase “the signing of the book” occurs more than once in the novel.‘ Insider readers will immediately recognize it as an unidiomatic 60 Ibid., 340-341. 6 Ibid., 327-328. Emphasis is mine. © Ibid., 182. Emphasis is mine. 6 Ibid., 19, 239, 326, 377. + 36 +»
