Three female characters dominate Passage to the Plaza, the third of Sahar Khalifeh’s novels. It is 1987, the first Intifada has begun. The first woman to appear is Sitt Zakia, a compassionate, pious, and discreet midwife regarded as a venerable matriarch in Bab Al-Saha, a quarter in the Palestinian city of Nablus. Next, there is Samar, a sociology student and feminist at Birzeit University who is interviewing women to gather data about how the Intifada is affecting their lives. Finally, there is Nuzha, an embittered woman in her late 20’s who has been ostracized by her community for working in “a den of scandal and calamity” — her mother Sakina’s bordello. The mother has been murdered by Palestinian men who accused her of being a traitor and consorting with Jews; Nuzha also was betrayed and was jailed in the Israeli maximum security prison in Ramla. Sakina’s house, now Nuzha’s refuge, becomes the novel’s center point.
Passage to the Plaza (also published as The Door to the Courtyard) appeared in 1990, emerging from Khalifeh’s immediate reactions to the Intifada. Drawn with rapid strokes, the novel’s broader action is clear enough – The Israelis sweep into the quarter, erecting blockages and walls which the inhabitants knock down. The walls go higher and thicker, the resistance to them intensifies. Palestinians and Israelis die and are injured. Although Khalifeh isn’t invested in either extended action scenes or visual depth, there is plenty of tension. The young Palestinian men, some striking back, some hiding in the mountains, are regarded as heroes. But in Khalifeh’s work, the striving for women’s emancipation from patriarchal domination runs in parallel with the desire for Palestinian freedom. Beyond the novels, she has also founded the Women’s Affairs Center in Nablus and its satellite offices in Gaza and Amman.
Born in Nablus, Palestine in 1941, Sahar Khalifeh published her first novel, Wild Thorns, in 1976 having succeeded to become a novelist over the objections of her family and the hurdles set by her community against any woman striving for certain professions. “As for my family, being an artist was the greatest sin ever,” she told an interviewer in 1980, “mischievous and destructive for the family’s reputation … This is the expression, ‘Death is easier for you or for us rather than to let one of our family become an artist, especially a woman.’”
Wild Thorns (also titled Cactus in another translation) was born from experiencing the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967 and its immediate impact on daily life in her community. In particular, the novel considers the lives of Palestinian workers – drivers, porters, skilled laborers, and those doing unskilled labor in Israel. She said, “I collected information and read and tried to compare our situation with that of other laborers who were forced to work with other occupiers like the French proletariat in the Nazis’ factories of weapons … After all that, I became a Marxist.”
Samar, stifled by her family’s oppressive values, almost certainly echoes – even in her name — a part of Sahar the novelist:
“She ran away from all this to university, then to the association, then scientific research. How heavy her burden was! The more she understood things, the more they weighed on her and the more she feared. Today, she knew that change wouldn’t come with the establishment of the state. Political matters were a different animal altogether from morals, religion and aesthetics. Political matters could be settled, whereas customers, women … ‘The road is long, my sisters,’ she had explained at an association meeting …”
The dialectic in Passage to the Plaza is worked out between the three women – Sitt Zakia draws everyone back towards mutual care and the sacredness of life, Samar inquires into the core impulses and unfulfilled needs of women, and Nuzha curses the hypocrisies of the self-proclaimed righteous. The narrative proceeds through conversation like a stage play with Nuzha’s place as the set. A knock at the door – and here is Hussam, Sitt Zakia’s nephew, severely wounded during a street confrontation, a man desired both by Samar and Nuzha. And also found wanting in his humanity. Hussam was known for his unrequited love of a woman named Sahab who had informed his unlistening ears, “I’m not the mother, not the land, not a symbol, but a human being. I eat, drink, dream, make mistakes, I lose things, I get agitated, I am tormented, I confide in the wind. I’m not a symbol, I am a woman.” In Khalifeh’s view, men are trapped within both their inherited social history and the demeaning conditions of the occupation. The flipside of Hussam’s fascination with Sahab is his – and every other man’s – cruel exploitation of woman. Sakina’s bordello, it turns out, was hardly unfamiliar to some of the Palestinian leadership.
The severe mistreatment of Nuzha triggers her disparagement of the “cause” – and Samar, now perceiving the emotional truth in her testimony, begins to wilt. But then, the Intifada absorbs everyone’s attention. Will the women contribute to the communal fight? And if they do, will their brave commitment change the attitudes of men? This is where the “passage to the plaza” comes in – the way forward.
In a 1980 interview in The Iowa Review, Khalifeh said about characterization, “You cannot let the characters behave according to your own ideology or your own way of dealing with things. You have to present them in the state in which they live. Then gradually you present them with many experiences and through these experiences their awareness is raised … I don’t shift from complete unawareness to complete awareness – this would be false. No reader can be convinced by this.” Even so, the polemical armature of Passage to the Plaza pokes out from the prose here and there. Just as a single stellar performance can save a movie, Nuzha’s complex and intensely felt animosities bring everything else into assessment. “When we talk about social structure, to focus on nationalism is really a mistake,” Khalifeh has said. Nuzha refers to her ex-husband as “the nationalist piece of crap who didn’t care about anyone or have any sense of compassion.” In the fight for freedom, Khalifeh has insisted in all six of her novels that liberation must comprise more than just wresting free of the Israelis.
[Published by Seagull Books on March 15, 2020, 2254 pages, $24.50 hardcover]