Book: Let it be morning
Jun. 26th, 2013 11:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Sayed Kashua
Details: (c) Sayed Kashua 2004; Translated Miriam Shlesinger 2006; Pub Atlantic Books 2007; ISBN 978-1-84354-543-9
Verdict: Let it be morning raises some disturbing political issues in an engaging way.
Reasons for reading it: My parents read it at their book club and passed it on to me.
How it came into my hands: Borrowed from parents.
Let it be morning describes an alternate reality where Israel declares actual war on the Israeli Arab minority (that is, Israeli citizens who are ethnically Arab and come from Muslim cultures). It's about what you might expect: a grim account of people suddenly finding that the army of their own country is laying siege to their town. The packaging of the book underlines the fact that the author is, like the protag, an Israeli Arab journalist who writes for Ha'aretz (the main left-leaning broadsheet), who has moved back to his Arab village of origin with his wife and young family because he can't afford Tel Aviv rents. It's typical of a (good) novel by a journalist, easy to read, emotionally engaging, unashamedly political.
I don't really know enough about Israeli politics to be able to comment on whether the book is realistic. I've not been following things closely since the early 2000s, and even if I had I would still have a very filtered, outsider's perspective. The state and military turning on a minority group, that feels like it probably could happen, simply because we've seen it happening enough times in other countries (I've just returned from a visit to Bosnia after all), not because Israel is uniquely awful in the relationships between the majority population and others. I expect the parts about the weirdness of living as a Muslim Arab citizen of the Jewish state, which are told as reminiscences of how it was before the war, are reasonably true to life, and I also expect that a different Israeli Arab writer would have a different perspective. It happens that this particular book was originally written in Hebrew and translated into English, meaning that it's available for me to read; I'm not likely to have access to the views of Israeli Arabs writing in Arabic. I'm thinking that if you know nothing about ethnic relations in Israel this novel probably isn't the place to start; if like me you know a tiny bit it gives some additional perspective but of course doesn't tell the whole story.
Of course, even though the particular events described in LIBM are fictional, there are obvious more general messages. The book draws parallels between the shocking treatment of its fictional Israeli Arabs and the real treatment of Palestinians under occupation. It's very clear about how little it takes for minor day-to-day racism and xenophobia to coalesce into actual state-backed lethal violence. It's not a wild-eyed Israel-is-evil propaganda piece either; Arab anti-semitism and Muslim religious / nationalist fanaticism are portrayed as very distasteful. I wasn't surprised to learn that the author is a Ha'aretz guy, he's very much taking the standard editorial line of the Israeli centre left.
There are a couple of things I found odd. Some of the reminiscences and flashback scenes give a rather strange impression of the narrator's character and I didn't quite get the point of them. There's a long scene about his childhood resentment of his mother which occurs right before the climax and doesn't seem to drive the story at all. And another about how he was sexually bullied by another teen boy, which seems to have a bit more relevance as the bully later shows up as an armed thug and seems to represent a negative portrayal of the potential alternatives to Israeli-backed law and order. This kind of thing seems to happen quite a lot in Israeli novels though, so it's probably a literary trope I'm not quite getting. And the translation has some little quirks, such as saying "the leftwing party" or "a prestigious university" rather than using proper names. There are snippets of Arabic dialogue which go untranslated; I imagine this made sense in the original version of the book, but Hebrew-speaking Israelis are much more likely to have both comprehension and emotional responses to Arabic phrases than English-speaking international readers.
Details: (c) Sayed Kashua 2004; Translated Miriam Shlesinger 2006; Pub Atlantic Books 2007; ISBN 978-1-84354-543-9
Verdict: Let it be morning raises some disturbing political issues in an engaging way.
Reasons for reading it: My parents read it at their book club and passed it on to me.
How it came into my hands: Borrowed from parents.
Let it be morning describes an alternate reality where Israel declares actual war on the Israeli Arab minority (that is, Israeli citizens who are ethnically Arab and come from Muslim cultures). It's about what you might expect: a grim account of people suddenly finding that the army of their own country is laying siege to their town. The packaging of the book underlines the fact that the author is, like the protag, an Israeli Arab journalist who writes for Ha'aretz (the main left-leaning broadsheet), who has moved back to his Arab village of origin with his wife and young family because he can't afford Tel Aviv rents. It's typical of a (good) novel by a journalist, easy to read, emotionally engaging, unashamedly political.
I don't really know enough about Israeli politics to be able to comment on whether the book is realistic. I've not been following things closely since the early 2000s, and even if I had I would still have a very filtered, outsider's perspective. The state and military turning on a minority group, that feels like it probably could happen, simply because we've seen it happening enough times in other countries (I've just returned from a visit to Bosnia after all), not because Israel is uniquely awful in the relationships between the majority population and others. I expect the parts about the weirdness of living as a Muslim Arab citizen of the Jewish state, which are told as reminiscences of how it was before the war, are reasonably true to life, and I also expect that a different Israeli Arab writer would have a different perspective. It happens that this particular book was originally written in Hebrew and translated into English, meaning that it's available for me to read; I'm not likely to have access to the views of Israeli Arabs writing in Arabic. I'm thinking that if you know nothing about ethnic relations in Israel this novel probably isn't the place to start; if like me you know a tiny bit it gives some additional perspective but of course doesn't tell the whole story.
Of course, even though the particular events described in LIBM are fictional, there are obvious more general messages. The book draws parallels between the shocking treatment of its fictional Israeli Arabs and the real treatment of Palestinians under occupation. It's very clear about how little it takes for minor day-to-day racism and xenophobia to coalesce into actual state-backed lethal violence. It's not a wild-eyed Israel-is-evil propaganda piece either; Arab anti-semitism and Muslim religious / nationalist fanaticism are portrayed as very distasteful. I wasn't surprised to learn that the author is a Ha'aretz guy, he's very much taking the standard editorial line of the Israeli centre left.
There are a couple of things I found odd. Some of the reminiscences and flashback scenes give a rather strange impression of the narrator's character and I didn't quite get the point of them. There's a long scene about his childhood resentment of his mother which occurs right before the climax and doesn't seem to drive the story at all. And another about how he was sexually bullied by another teen boy, which seems to have a bit more relevance as the bully later shows up as an armed thug and seems to represent a negative portrayal of the potential alternatives to Israeli-backed law and order. This kind of thing seems to happen quite a lot in Israeli novels though, so it's probably a literary trope I'm not quite getting. And the translation has some little quirks, such as saying "the leftwing party" or "a prestigious university" rather than using proper names. There are snippets of Arabic dialogue which go untranslated; I imagine this made sense in the original version of the book, but Hebrew-speaking Israelis are much more likely to have both comprehension and emotional responses to Arabic phrases than English-speaking international readers.
