Sunday Reading: The Attack by Yasmina Khadra

Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of the Algerian writer Mohammed Moulessehoul, and he is the author of the remarkable novel The Swallows of Kabul, discussed on these pages last year. His most recent novel, The Attack, released in paperback in May in the U. S., was published in French in 2005 under the title L'attentat.

The Attack is a novel about terrorism and the Isreali-Palestinian conflict. The narrator, Amin, straddles the border between Palestine and Israel, an Arab doctor who has received Isreali citizenship and lives luxuriously in Tel Aviv. One day as he finishes his work day at the hospital where he is a surgeon, a bomb rocks the city, sending the hospital into crisis mode and Amin back into surgery, where he remains for the next several hours.

Finally, he arrives home where he anticipates the return of his beloved wife, Sihem, who has been visiting her grandmother in Nazareth.

Except she hasn't.

Amin's friend Navid, a commander in police forces, calls him at home, and asks him to come back to the hospital. He reluctantly agrees, with assurances from Navid that he won't face the same treatment from police at various checkpoints between home and the hospital that he received earlier, when soldiers reluctantly let an Arab with proper paperwork documenting his Isreali citizenship pass through on the day a bomb has shaken the city. When Amin arrives at the hospital, his friend Navid explains that they need him to identify the body of his wife. Incredulous, he is confronted with the mangled corpse of his wife, her face miraculously undamaged, but her body blown apart from the explosives she carried around her waist and which she detonated in front of a restaurant where eleven children celebrated a birthday party. They and eight others lose their lives, while many others are in critical condition at Amin's hospital.

Amin refuses to believe that his wife was the bomber. Although the forensics experts insist that her body is consistent with that of a suicide bomber, Amin argues vehemently that the act was not in her character. He spends 24 hours in interrogation repeating the same thing, and insisting that she had been visiting her grandmother, until the police are satisfied that Amin knew nothing about the plot. They send him to his home, which he finds vandalized by his outraged neighbors, and he eventually is beaten by more vandals who come to his home in the night. When his freind Kim from the hospital finds him in his deplorable state, she takes him home and nurses him back to physical, if not mental health. In another day or two, he receives a letter postmarked from Bethlehem. It is Sihem's farewell, and in a moment of crushing grief, Amin learns that the wife he mourns for is also a murderer, and has been lying to him about her whereabouts for some time. Her letter talks about freedom, claiming that in spite of the life she and Amin lead together, they cannot have freedom while their people are subjegated.

From there Amin is determined to find out the truth about his wife, and if this were a Hollywood movie and Amin were played by Bruce Willis or Nicholas Cage, he would strut into Bethlehem or Jenin with a sidearm or two and bring the terrorists to justice. And although Amin's rage is palpable in the novel, and his moral certitude never waivers, Khadra is too sensitive a writer to follow the revenge path vary far. What emerges from the rest of the novel is a dialectic on terrorism and freedom, subtly played out as Amin gradually crawls deeper into the depths of the Intifada, of which, it turns out, Sihem has been a major player.

At every turn in the streets of Jenin and Bethlehem, where Amin's journey takes him, he is told that no one pressured Sihem to do what she did, and that many in fact tried to talk her out of it. Still, the argument that emerges from the Arab side is desperate and violent, a presupposition that violence is justified in the face of ongoing oppression and the countless injustices the Palestinians endure. Of course, in summarizing the argument, I am reducing it and removing its power--the language of the Palestinians as Khadra presents it is powerful and moving.

We're in a world where people tear one another to pieces every day that God sends. We spend our evenings gathering our dead and our mornings burying them. Our homeland is violated right and left, our children can't remember what the world school means, and our daughters have no dreams because their Prince Charmings choose to court the Intifada instead. Our cities are being buried by machines on caterpillar tracks, our patron saints dont' know which way to turn and you, simply because you're nice and warm in your golden cage, refuse to see the inferno consumeing us. It's your right after all. Everyone steers his ship as he thinks fit. But please don't come here asking questions about those who are sickened by your apathy and your selfishness and do not hesitate to vgive their lives to wake you up. Your wife died for your redemption, Mr. Jaarari.

Nevertheless, Khadra's novel never descends into a justification or apologia for terrorism in the face of oppression. Amin maintains his moral certitude until the novel's final moments (the end, incidentally, is written at the beginning of the novel, and the novel winds its way back to that point). Repeatedly, Amin insists that as a surgeon his interest is in preserving life above all else. It is a lesson which also reverberates in his memories of his father:

Thanks to him, even though I was growing up in a land that had been tormented ssince the dawn of time, I refused to consider the world as a battlefield. I could see that wars beget wars, that reprisals follow reprisals, but I forbade myself to give them any support of any kind. I didn't believe in prophecies of discord and I couldn't bring myself to accept the notion that God could incite his subjects to take up arms against one another and reduce the exercise of faith to an absurd and frightening question of power relationships. And ever since then, I've trusted anyone who required a little of my blood to purify my soul about as much as I would trust a scorpion. I have no desire to believe in vales of tears or valleys of shadows--there are other more charming and less irrational features of the landscape all around me. My father said, "Anyone who tells you that a greater symphony exists than the breath in your own body is lying. He wants to undermine your most precious possession: the chance to profit from every moment of your life. If you start from the principle that your worst enemy is the very person who tries to sow hatred in your heart, you're halfway to happiness. All you have to do is reach out your hand and take the rest. And remember this: There's nothing, absolutely nothing, more important than your life. And your life isn't more important than other people's lives."

The novel stares into the eyes of terrorism without flinching, without making excuses, and without backing down from the premise that violence is never justified. Although Kahdra presents the Intifada's arguments in a serious way, without caricaturing them or making them deliberately hateful or open to attack, he likewise never backs down from his essential condemnation of those arguments. As Amin tracks down his wife's secret life and the back alleys of her clandestine existence, he finds himself more and more distant from her, and he mourns the loss of her innocence as much as he mourns the loss of her life. "The Attack" is not just the bomb exploded in a restaurant in Tel Aviv, but also the attack on peace, the attack on reason that leads to a vicious cycle of violence in Israel and Palestine, but also around the world.

Kahdra's poetic style, his crisp storytelling, and evocative dialogue make The Attack a pleasure to read. If the novel were more morally simplistic and predictable, the bad guys more one-dimensional and the antagonist more vengeful, it would make a great Hollywood thriller. To Khadra's credit, that movie will never be made.

Another excerpt:

I believe I've arrived at my destination. The route I took has been terrible, and I don't have the impression that I've reached anything or learned anything redemptive. At the same time I feel liberated; I tell myself that my suffering is over, and from now on nothing can cathc me off my guard. This painful search for the truth has been my personal voyage of initiation, my very own. Am I going to reconsider the order of things now? Am I going to call it into question, reposition myself in relation to it? Of course, but I won't feel as though I'm contributing to anything major. For me, the only trugh that counts is the one that will help me one day to pull myself together and go back to my patients. Because the only battle I believe in, the only one that really deserves bleeding for, is the battle the surgeon fights, which consists in re-dreating life in the place where death has chosen to conduct its maneuvers.

Links:

Janet Maslin of the Times accuses Khadra of a "final manipulative plot trick." I disagree. There is a symmetry in the novel told by an Arab Isreali: a symmetry which prevents us and prevents Amin from choosing sides. The final attack in the novel parallels the first. It demonstrates the destructiveness and randomness of violence, and seeks to put the Isreali attacks on innocents in Palestine on a par with Palestinian attacks on innocents in Tel Aviv. Both are stupid, indefensible, vicious, and escalating. Here, in a review of Khadra's most recent novel (I'm one behind) Maslin calls The Attack "didactic." Where do they get these people?

"Detectives Beyond Borders": Blog review

National Book Critics Circle: an evening with Yasmina Khadra

Khadra profiled in the Guardian