Oldal 44 [44]
OCR
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, however, 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 orientalist 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 ¢
