The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist

"Yes, it’s a hoot. It’s also another one whose position in the canon is pretty much guaranteed now. It frequently appears in lists of the ’10 best Arabic novels.’ It’s also the first Palestinian novel I have picked, and I have been reading quite a lot of Palestinian literature recently for obvious reasons. The plot centers around a guy called Saeed, a hapless, naïve, Forest Gump-esque character who lives through several momentous events in Palestinian history. He is the kind of person that things always seem to happen to , but who never appears to be in control. It starts, more or less, with the events of 1948, which is the creation of the state of Israel and the expulsion of a large number of Palestinians. Saeed himself is expelled from his home, but through a series of connections (and quite a lot of luck), he manages to find his way back into the country. It’s divided into 44 little segments, all of which are comic vignettes about Saeed and his life. It is very picaresque. The book is, in part, inspired by the pre-modern Arabic prose genre called the maqama , which is a collection of short, very loosely connected tales usually centered around a trickster protagonist and his companions. Maqamas didn’t have plots, they were just these episodes. This is very similar to that, which is why the plot is a little bit hard to summarize—it does have a plot, but it isn’t the most important thing. The book ends with Saeed flying into outer space in an alien spaceship, gazing down at Palestine below him. Despite the zany plot and the comic delivery, this book covers serious themes – the central one being how to live as a Palestinian citizen of Israel. Saeed comes to represent that whole experience where, whatever you do, you are constantly forced into choosing between, broadly speaking, ‘collaboration’ or ‘resistance.’ Everything that you do as a Palestinian is refracted through that lens. Even going for a cup of coffee somehow becomes either an act of resistance or collaboration. Habibi turns this reality into a comic set piece. He doesn’t make it heavy, although the lessons are serious. So Saeed becomes an exaggeratedly committed collaborator, to the point of absurdity. There’s one episode that I always remember, which happens in 1967, as Israel occupies the West Bank. There’s a very funny vignette where they broadcast a message on the radio saying that any Arabs who surrender should raise a white flag. And Saeed, in his comic excess, raises a white flag from his house in Haifa because he thinks, ‘Well, they need to know I’m surrendering so they don’t come to get me!’ Then he’s arrested because the Israelis think he’s taking the piss. For me, it’s this juxtaposition of the comic and the tragic, which it does so well. It’s constantly either describing a very tragic scene and then undercutting it with some comedy or describing a very comic scene, which you gradually come to realize is actually a tragic scene. It does both. Annoyingly, the translation of this book is the one I like the least. I feel slightly bad saying that because it’s translated by one of the greats of Palestinian literature and literary criticism, Salma Khadra Jayyusi (in collaboration with Trevor LeGassick). But this novel depends so much on lightness of touch and the English prose sometimes feels a little bit too heavy or unwieldy. Maybe translating this book is an impossible task. Translating comedy is very difficult. But if there was any Arabic novel I would like to see re-translated, it would probably be this one. In a sense, yes. One thing that it’s about—which he was obsessed with—is what it’s like to be a Palestinian who stayed in Israel. The Communist Party was basically the only party in which Israelis and Palestinians worked together on something like an equal footing. Being a member of the Communist Party is a political statement in that you’re a communist, but it’s also a political statement about working with Israelis towards some other future—though it’s certainly not an acceptance of the system as it is. Habibi received both the Israel state prize for literature and the Palestinian state prize for this book, which was pretty controversial at the time."