Time of White Horses

Ibrahim Nasrallah, Nancy Roberts

Description

Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction

Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction

Spanning the collapse of Ottoman rule and the British Mandate in Palestine, this is the story of three generations of a defiant family from the Palestinian village of Hadiya before 1948.

Through the lives of Mahmud, elder of Hadiya, his son Khaled, and Khaled’s grandson Naji, we enter the life of a tribe whose fate is decided by one colonizer after another. Khaled’s remarkable white mare, Hamama, and her descendants feel and share the family’s struggles and as a siege grips Hadiya, it falls to Khaled to save his people from a descending tyranny.

Sujets

• Historical Fiction
• Literary
• Historical
• Literature
• Palestinian literature
• Middle East
• Palestine
• Ibrahim Nasrallah
• Sagas
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781617971754
• Langue: English

Extrait

Ibrahim Nasrallah is considered one of the most influential voices of his generation. Raised in a refugee camp to Palestinian parents, he became a journalist before turning to creative writing. His work includes fourteen novels. He lives in Amman, Jordan.
An award-winning translator of Naguib Mahfouz, Ghada Samman, and Mohamed El-Bisatie, Nancy Roberts lives in Amman, Jordan.
*
Nasrallah paints a vivid portrait. . . . Roberts s translation is excellent.
-Peter Clark, Times Literary Supplement
You soon realize the power of Nasrallah s novel. . . . Nasrallah s intensely eloquent voice gives Western audiences an insight into the lives of the marginalized without rattling off numbers.
-Tam Hussein, New Statesman
[Nasrallah] conveys a powerful sense of the textures of place, time and custom . . . With the publication of Time of White Horses , lovingly translated by Nancy Roberts, our understanding of the history of modern Arabic literature has taken a giant leap forward.
-Raymond Deane, The Electronic Intifada
The measure of the greatness of this book is its humility in approaching a people s vast experiences and rituals across this long stretch of time between Ottoman and British then Israeli occupation, as Nasrallah deftly narrates this community s character within a specific locale and around the acts of the novel s hero. . . . That Nasrallah s writing evokes this epic grandeur in discrete, alluring, lyric chapters, one story seamlessly weaving into another, is even more compelling: the long novel enlightens us in flash fictions which illuminate each other and sustain our attention.
-Benjamin Hollander, Warscapes
Men are murdered or executed, demolitions and collective punishment meted out, ancestral lands taken at a stroke. One learns the lesson that the behavior of any oppressor is the same, regardless of time or circumstance.
-Norbert Hirschhorn, Banipal Magazine
I turned these pages with trepidation for nearly a month, sometimes holding my breath and swallowing hard. I was reading the unfolding of my own life, and the lives of all Palestinians. I knew what was going to happen and in the strange ways of a heart touched by literature, I wanted to warn the characters.
-Susan Abulhawa, novelist
I have been constantly asked by Western critics and readers: When will the Palestinian epic appear? Time of White Horses has now answered their question. It is truly the novel that the Palestinian catastrophe has awaited for a long time, an insightful depiction of Palestinian life and struggle since the last century of Ottoman hegemony over the Arab world and the 1948 unforgettable divide when the final catastrophe hit the Palestinian people in their ancestral home. . . . The novel uncovers the causes of the catastrophe, its overwhelming circumstances and the tragic conspiracy against which the courage and resistance of an innocent, defenseless people could not prevail. . . . Written in a shimmering and sensitive style, it has a captivating grip on the reader, a lasting effect on his/her sensibility and memory. This is the greatest creative portrayal which explains, through fine art, the tragedy of the Palestinian people and the causes of their disaster.
-Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Founder and Director of PROTA
Time of White Horses charts the history of three generations of a Palestinian family in a small village, Ibrahim Nasrallah s saga is a descendant of a genre introduced into Arabic fiction by Naguib Mahfouz s famous Cairo Trilogy . Through the lives of the members of this family, Nasrallah depicts the tragedy of a whole nation under changing historical circumstances: the Ottoman rule, the British Mandate and the Nakba (the catastrophe of the Jewish occupation of Palestinian land in 1948) to the expulsion of the Palestinians and finally the post-Nakba era.
-Judges Committee, International Prize for Arabic Fiction
Time of White Horses
Ibrahim Nasrallah
Translated by
Nancy Roberts
This electronic edition published in 2016 by
Hoopoe
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
www.hoopoefiction.com
Hoopoe is an imprint of the American University in Cairo Press
www.aucpress.com
Copyright 2007 by Ibrahim Nasrallah
By agreement with Pontas Literary & Film Agency
First published in Arabic in 2007 by al-Mu assasa al- Arabiya li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Nashr as Zaman al-khuyul al-bayda
Protected under the Berne Convention
English translation copyright 2012, 2016 by Nancy Roberts
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978 977 416 757 7
eISBN 978 1 61797 175 4
Version 1
God made horses from wind, and people from dust (Arabic proverb)
... and (one might add!) houses from people
Preface
Book One: Wind
Book Two: Earth
Book Three: Humankind
Preface
W HEN I BEGAN THIS NOVEL in 1985, I thought it would be the Palestinian tragicomedy. Consequently, I set to work preparing for the writing of it by recording testimonies and compiling a library devoted to the relevant topics. However, it sometimes happens that the best events in life are those that don t go according to plan. In this case, the long time I spent working on this novel turned out to be the door through which five other novels would enter the scene, and thus it transpired that the present novel, which was supposed to be the first in the series, ended up being the last.
I accomplished the task of collecting the lengthy oral testimonies that contributed in particular to Time of White Horses during the years 1985 and 1986. A number of witnesses who had been uprooted from their homeland and had gone to live in exile presented me with detailed accounts of the lives they had lived in Palestine. Sadly, every one of these witnesses passed out of our world before the grand hope of returning home could become a reality.
Witnesses from four Palestinian villages-my uncle Jum a Khalil, Jum a Salah, Martha Khadir, and Kawkab Yasin Tawtah-dreamed the same dream, and died the same death: as foreigners. This novel is dedicated to their memory. As such, it is a salute to them, as well as to the scores of other witnesses who shared so generously of their memories, or whose stories I happened to hear by chance over the course of the twenty years during which this novel was coming into being. It is also a salute to the Palestinian and other Arab writers whose studies and books have helped light my path, the titles of whose works appear at the end of this book.
There is amazing diversity among the customs proper to the various Palestinian villages and areas. Hence, some of the customs to which reference is made in the novel may strike this or that Palestinian reader as unfamiliar.
The story of the monastery in the village of Hadiya is true from beginning to end. It is the story of my village.
The names of all individuals and families that appear in this work are fictitious, and any resemblance between them and those of real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Book One
Wind
Hamama s Arrival
A PERFECT MIRACLE HAD TAKEN on flesh. . . .
Under the mulberry tree in front of the guesthouse, Hajj Mahmud was sitting with his son Khaled and a number of men from the village, when suddenly they saw a cloud of dust approaching in the distance. A strange feeling came over him. With the passing of the moments the dust began to disperse, and in its place there appeared a whiteness the likes of which they had never seen before. It continued to glow more and more brightly, until it appeared in all its fullness.
There was nothing on the face of the earth that could captivate them more than the beauty of a mare or a stallion.
In a half-stupor, Hajj Mahmud said, Do you see what I see?
Hearing no answer, he turned toward the other men, only to find them tongue-tied with amazement.
There was a long silence, broken only by the frenzied galloping of this creature that seemed to have emerged from the world of dreams.
Oblivious to the terrible pain the bridle was causing her, pain that ascended in heart-rending moans with the heat of her panting, the rider was trying his utmost to control the mass of light that bucked wildly beneath him, the mass of light that was offering him such stubborn resistance. Her head upturned, the mass of light began emitting a pained whinny, at which point Hajj Mahmud shouted, Men! There s a free spirit calling for help! Take her under your protection!
The mare came to a halt in front of them, still as a stone. It was as though she had decided it would be better to die than to take a single step farther.
When he saw the men rushing toward him, the rider struck the mare with his stick to get her to move. But she didn t budge. So he dismounted and took off running, tripping and stumbling as he went, in the direction from which he had come.
By the time the men reached the mare, Khaled had flown past her with his own mare, blocking the man s escape.
He circled around him again and again until he saw him fall.
Who did you steal the horse from? he asked.
The man made no reply.
Khaled came closer. Neighing heatedly, his mare raised her front legs menacingly in the direction of the thief s panic-stricken body.
From some Arabs on the move! he shouted.
Khaled turned his mare until her front legs were only an arm s length away from the man s chest.
Where?
West of the river.
The thoroughbred has exposed you