The Brooklyn Rail

Sand-Catcher is a novel of the Palestinian diaspora, yet it dwells remarkably little⎯ fascinatingly little⎯on the grief and loss. On rare occasions, someone mentions a refugee camp, and just once, over a couple of pages, the oldest character tosses off brief and contradictory recollections of the Nakba, the violence of 1948 that left thousands of Palestinians dead or in exile. Omar Khalifah’s imagination is far more engaged, rather, with how those ghosts come groaning back generations later, in the era of texting and Facebook. His principal players are young professionals in Amman, Jordan, seeming paragons of assimilation, out of touch with their tormented homeland. Nonetheless, the sands of the old country still catch under their fashionable clothes, chafing, prickling, and drawing them into “a personal nakba.”

Khalifah, a Palestinian raised in Jordan and now a professor at Georgetown University, knows perfectly well he’s disrupting the norms of creative work about his people. Sand-Catcher mentions the poet Mahmoud Darwish and the great 1998 novel Gate of the Sun, by the late Elias Khoury. That fiction’s set in a makeshift field hospital and winds through desperate tales of resistance. But in Khoury’s posthumous trilogy Children of the Ghetto (two of them now in English), his vision is more cosmopolitan, his protagonists touring Europe. Inevitably, these days, most dramas of refugees and migrants develop with similar complexity⎯though, of course, we haven’t yet seen much imaginative work addressing the latest Gazan horrors. The current disaster was still four years off, when Sand-Catcher first saw print. Thus, like Khoury’s trilogy, Khalifa contends with ghosts, agonies his protagonists never experienced for themselves.

Nevertheless, the sand continues to chafe. Towards novel’s end, one of the most urbane transplants erupts:

All my life I’ve hated myself for being a Palestinian, because it aligned me with a beaten people, unable to avenge themselves on the sons of bitches who robbed us and destroyed our lives. All my life I’ve striven for individual successes to compensate for the national defeat…

It's almost a cry for holy war, yet it takes place in a comfortable apartment in the Jordanian capital, among a foursome of comfortably salaried journalists. “The only ones of Palestinian descent at the paper,” part of their bond is how they’ve neglected their heritage. One admits “I still mix up the colors of the… flag,” and two others, a man and a woman, regard their marriages not as a way to propagate the race, but rather a convenient platform for sleeping around. The four flirt with each other a bit as well⎯another element that eventually grows toxic⎯but the book opens with the discovery of a story that seems a natural: a local grandfather, now eighty-five, was witness to the Nakba but has never told spoken of it. An interview is swiftly approved, and just as swiftly sets off the first of a series of explosions. The old man shuts things down with a thundering obscenity.

Translator Barbara Romaine renders this as “motherfuckers” (in italics, with an exclamation, closing the chapter), and while I can make an educated guess at the Arabic, Romaine’s choice helps illuminate what distinguishes her work throughout, the way she maintains conversational flow while never skimping on impact. The narrative tensions heighten, in most cases, while three or four people are talking at once. Following the disastrous interview, the grandfather’s final word has the reporters seething (“An insult like a punch in the gut” ), yet when they go to their editor, the punchline sets him laughing and applauding. With that, he heaps on more pressure. These four must either get the old man’s story or become themselves the story, publishing an article about their failure and setting “a new precedent for journalism” about the displaced⎯a piece that suggests a spiritual watershed, a coming to terms.

Indeed, that’s how the obstreperous grandfather prefers it. His own family come to offer a counterpoint to the reporters, as Khalifah’s point of view roves amid several major players, and while the old man’s son and grandson have learned to allow him peace and quiet, both younger men suffer a deep desire “to know, to know.” From time to time, in their way, they’ve pressed the paterfamilias, but he’s remained gnomic: “Palestine was lost, and so were you, and so were we.” Nothing further, and does it signify acceptance, if of a grim variety? Is such a limbo the best a homeless people can hope for? The grandfather, following his unhappy non-disclosures, seems to think so, concluding: “What else do you want?”

Sand-Catcher underscores the question with a clever omission: no one has a full name. The grandfather is “the grandfather,” like his “eldest son” and “grandson,” and the reporters are known by nicknames. Yet if everyone’s somehow incomplete, these dramatis personae don’t lack for drama. Naturally, Khalifah has breaks from conversation, a flashback or someone grappling with conscience, and these glimmer with unexpected humor. Still, whenever the intensity jumps up a level, the dialogue crackles accordingly⎯“I’ve hated myself!”

Over the closing chapters, the most incisive revelations concern the two women journalists. One is the casual adulterer and the other so pious as to wear a hajib, but they draw close, sharing so fully that together they cook up the nerve-wracking final maneuvers, yoking their male colleagues into a conspiracy. This starts with seduction and ends in violence, a climax like a wind-up toy built to fly to pieces, a breakup that tears through both family and friends. It’s the same widening crack as ever⎯all that’s been lost⎯lurking under all the clever structure and gab. And since last October, here in the real, hasn’t the same abyss opened once more?