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LITERARY CODE-SWITCHING
when the Arab revolt against the British presence in Palestine and the Zionist
project breaks out in 1936. Ihe British army deems his field notes invaluable
and he is lured, despite his doubts and his sympathy for the Nabulsis, into
espionage for the British. Ihe French sisters who run the local hospital, how¬
ever, adopt a totally different position. Ihey secretly support the Nabulsi
rebels by, among other things, hiding weapons for them.
In the text, the author’s detailed “ethnographic” descriptions, including
descriptions of architecture and urban space, are indirectly in dialogue with
the “ethnographic work” of both Molineu and Pére Antoine and can be read
as an implicit critique on orientalism. We could say that Hammad reverses
these characters’ orientalist gaze by using her authorial power to describe
them. This is one way in which the extradiegetic comment, albeit referring to
a specific element in a subplot, “To invent one’s self was to resist the inventions
of others: to forge was to author.”®’ can be understood.
The reversal of the gaze is not limited to the authorial control over these
two characters, though. It also consists of the descriptions of French society
and the Provencal landscapes. As discussed above, these observations, often
alluding to similarities between French and Palestinian societies, can be read
as implicit comments and frequently take an “ethnographic” twist, which is
also the case for the following remark on the rather closed community of
vignerons: “In distinction to the northern Gauls, they clung to the archaic
identity of Occitania [...]”** and for the descriptions of French dialects. The
implicit comments on orientalist ethnography are sometimes voiced explicitly
by the extradiegetic narrative voice, here on popular and academic orientalist
imagery:
the inhabitants of those apostasized [sic] subaltern continents who had so defected
from civilization as they occurred in picture books and nursery rhymes and the
imaginations of French children. [...] Docteur Molineu lurked at the edges with
his notebook and his analysis, his charts of cranial development, observing him
[Midhat] at the dinner table.*
Many other examples of (implicit) comments on orientalism and the orien¬
talist gaze could be given, but it is clear that this relexification creates yet
another rich point that underscores the “ethnographic pact” between the
author and the reader, a pact that is at the same time questioned and reversed.
#7 Ibid., 402.
88 Ibid., 41.
8° Tbid., 158-159.
42 ¢