Palestinian Writer Shehadeh Straddles "A Rift in Time"

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Palestinian Writer Shehadeh Straddles "A Rift in Time"

05.11.10 - 11:17

Jerusalem - PNN/Exclusive - Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh’s new book “A Rift in Time” is aptly titled to straddle past and present. Yet it also spans genres, crosses rivers, and connects two men from two very different eras—Shehadeh himself and his great uncle Najib Nassar, a proud subject of the Ottoman Empire, conscientious objector, and exile.
Shehadeh read selections from the book at the Swedish Christian Study Center, near Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate, on Thursday night. The book is his fourth; his third, “Palestinian Walks,” won Britain’s prestigious Orwell Prize for political writing. A writer, lawyer, and founder of the human rights organization Al-Haq, Shehadeh has spent most of his life in Ramallah.

“A Rift in Time” is part biography, part travelogue, memoir, ecology book, and novel. In it, Shehadeh traces the buried tracks of Najib Nassar, the “odd one out” in his family tree: a self-proclaimed novelist, pioneer of Palestinian journalism, wanderer and casual prophet who was sentenced to death in 1915 by the Ottomans after he objected to participation in the First World War. He fled his family home in Haifa and embarked on a series of travels across the then-undivided Levant, into present-day Lebanon, down through Palestine, and across the Jordan River to live with Bedouin shepherds. Nassar died in March 1948, just a few months before the Nakba.

In Nassar’s travels, Shehadeh found occasion to express his deep longing for an undivided land in which to wander, wonder, and examine flowers by the roadside—the subject of his critically acclaimed “Palestinian Walks,” and a pastime he still enjoyed as he researched and wrote “A Rift in Time.” But he said he has never considered the practice mere escapism.

“Everything has been designed by Israel to make Palestinians feel like strangers in their own land,” he said, referring to the thousands of villages renamed or wiped off the map after 1948. “This will be my way of resisting.”

Romantic resistance is Shehadeh’s project, not public demonstration. “A Rift in Time” offers readers a time of relative peace and unity—though Palestine was occupied by the Ottoman Empire, whose crimes Shehadeh will not excuse, the Palestine of his great uncle Nassar was nonetheless eminently accessible, unblocked by the settlements, settler roads, barbed wire fences and concrete walls of the current, Israeli, occupation.

Najib Nassar, Shehadeh explains, was the first to warn against selling land to Zionists, an advocate of sustainable agriculture, and a supporter of Ottoman participation in World War I only if it joined the Allies. As for his descendant, he predicts only that peace in Palestine is “unlikely in my lifetime.” But where Nassar prophesized, Shehadeh dreams.

“Mainly [the book] is about an act of imagination, to try to make readers overcome the malaise and the depression,” he said. “Borders become real when we internalize them. The trick is to see beyond them.”