The allure of memoirs lies in their ability to create an intimate space between the writer and the reader where the ‘I’ of the writer becomes the ‘I’ of the reader too. Thus the space becomes a shared one and the personal becomes the universal.
Recently, I discovered another charming quality of memoirs: their ability to be compelling narrators of history. Sayed Kashua’s Native: Dispatches From an Israeli-Palestinian Life (translated by Ralph Mandel) and Hisham Matar’s The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between are two memoirs that offer refreshingly personal and insightful accounts of two conflict-ridden regions of the world.
Kashua, a Palestinian who was born and raised in Israel, compiles the essays he wrote for a weekly column in Haaretz , a popular Israeli newspaper. The memoir captures the time when he lived with his family in Beit Safafa, a Palestinian neighbourhood in Israel.
Matar was 19 when his father Jaballa Matar was abducted by Muammar Qadhafi’s men in Libya. The Return recounts his endless search for his father 20 years after the kidnapping, after the fall of Qadhafi.
Kashua with his ironic sense of humour and Matar with his stinging, yet sensitive, narration draw you into their worlds with an enviable ease.
However, it is what they do after they draw you in that struck me as poignant. Once you are in Kashua’s living room, for instance, living his life with him, he opens all the windows and doors of his home to introduce you to his outside world. He asks you to walk with him and his Palestinian daughter on the streets of Israel to her mixed school. And you listen, choking with tears, as he tells his daughter that it is okay to speak Arabic as long as it is not at the entrance to a mall where an Israeli guard stands.
Similarly, inscribed across Matar’s search for his father is the story of Libya itself. His everyday conversations with his family and his personal predicament and apprehensions speak on multiple levels to Libya’s own future post-Qadhafi.
For me, both Kashua and Matar’s memoirs are examples of how individual lives can be embodiments of the conflict in a region, making for fantastic history-telling. As I finished the books, I couldn’t help but realise that despite the entire world constantly surveying these regions, one cannot know what Kashua and Matar tell you about life in these countries — except through their own accounts.
archana.n@thehindu.co.in
