A long-standing student of Western attitudes toward the Arab world, the British writer Ghada Karmi is curious to know why the United States and its allies discuss Iraq in such crudely personalized terms. Obsessively vilifying Saddam Hussein, they seem barely aware of the existence of Iraq’s 22 million inhabitants.
In a Guardian article published at the close of last year, Karmi raised the question whether it was mere accident that the 1991 military campaign against Iraq was christened “Operation Desert Storm”, a name calculated to call up images of an essentially empty land.
Karmi’s conviction is that a “deep and unconscious” racism informs every aspect of Western conduct toward Iraq, and that Saddam Hussein has become the perfect Western surrogate for anti-Arab abuse. Consider the way Tony Blair used to speak of “putting Saddam back in his cage.” Such demonization of the Iraqi leader by Blair and Bush has, in Karmi’s view, obscured the fact that, for all his brutality and ruthlessness, he is not much more than “a petty local chieftain,” a “Third World dictator in the mold of many others before him.”
Karmi’s acute sensitivity to neo-colonialist Western perceptions of the Arab world springs from traumatic personal experience. At an early age she became caught up in the Palestinian diaspora precipitated by the creation of Israel in 1948. Born in Jerusalem in 1939, she was a child of nine when her family fled the Middle East for Britain, forced into exile by the turmoil and blood-letting that accompanied the creation of the Jewish state.
Published in Britain last year, Karmi’s remarkable memoir, “In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story,” is at once a graphic evocation of her family’s ordeal and a soul-searching account of her personal journey toward political awareness in 1950s Britain.
Having secured employment in the Arabic section of the BBC’s World Service, Karmi’s father found a house for his displaced family in — by an extraordinary irony — the north London suburb of Golders Green, which is heavily populated by Orthodox Jews. As it happened, Karmi’s parents did not blame the Jews for their plight. They believed that the Palestinian people had been sold out by Palestine’s former administrators, the British.
A bookish intellectual who devoted his spare time to Arab lexicography, Karmi’s father absorbed himself in his work. Her mother, by contrast, was simply incapable of coming to terms with her existence as an exile.
Stubbornly denying the reality of her circumstances, she declined to learn English, listened endlessly to Arab radio stations and continued to prepare nothing but Arab food. But there was one old habit of her life in Palestine that she signally failed to keep up: Dressing with care. The truth, her daughter now realizes, was that her mother was suffering from depression.
Karmi remembers how, in the immediate aftermath of the family’s arrival in Britain, her parents used to say that there was “still no word from the Jews;” loath to refer explicitly to Israel or the Israelis, they clung to the belief that sooner or later they would be invited to return home.
She remembers, too, how they often spoke of the “nakba,” the disaster of the Palestinians’ eviction from their ancestral land. If Karmi asked her parents what they were talking about, they would tell her to mind her own business. The power of “In Search of Fatima” to a great extent resides in its vivid recreation of the author’s dawning adolescent understanding of the fate not just of her family but of the Palestinian people as a whole.
In the course of the 1950s, it became apparent to her that the very term “Palestine” was dropping out of popular usage. All too plainly, the impression was forming in Britain and elsewhere that the part of the world from which her family and thousands of other Palestinians had been expelled was previously occupied by a mere handful of Arab squatters. Karmi recalls the epoch-making, propagandist impact in the late 1950s of the film Exodus, with its emotive depiction of Israel as a plucky little nation making heroic efforts to establish itself in the teeth of practically impossible odds. Based on a best-selling novel of the same name, this Hollywood blockbuster did more than a little, she suggests, to excise historic Palestine from the collective consciousness, and to entrench the common perception of Palestinians as un-persons.
Much of Karmi’s passionate book concerns her struggle to make sense of her riven identity — to reconcile the part of herself formed by British influences and the part that was shaped by her family and Palestinian heritage. Obedient to her father’s wishes, she studied medicine at Bristol University (later specializing in the health of migrants and refugees). But in Bristol, she met and married an Englishman — something with which her mother and father found wholly unacceptable. For a long time, her mother refused to speak to her. Karmi’s description of all this makes painful reading.
Given its unhappy beginnings, it was perhaps inevitable that her marriage would founder, and it did. Later, Karmi was to pour her energies into championing the Palestinian cause.
Politicized by the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the subsequent emergence of the PLO, she set up Palestine Action in London and became a regular visitor to the Middle East, meeting Yasser Arafat. Gradually, though, she began to sense that, as a well-educated, Westernized woman, she was in many ways as much an alien in the Arab world as in Britain; seen by Arabs as British, and by the British as Arab, she found herself caught between two worlds.
Karmi’s biggest challenge was to conquer the impulse which her parents had implanted in her to think of Israel as the “forbidden place.” In recent years, she finally went back to Jerusalem to search for the house where she and her family had lived until the day in 1948 when their lives changed forever. The “Fatima” of the book’s title was a fondly remembered village woman who used to help her mother with domestic chores and who became symbolic of Karmi’s quest to rediscover her roots.
Nowadays, Karmi ranks among the British Arab community’s most challenging voices. She is rightly appalled by the “callous disregard for its human consequences” with which the war against Iraq is being planned. Yet, in one respect, her response to the current crisis has perhaps been unduly pessimistic.
In the Guardian article last December, Karmi wrote that Britain was witnessing a reprise, albeit in less blatant form, of the anti-Arab prejudice that marked the Suez crisis of 1956 and the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Except in xenophobic, right-wing newspapers, there has actually been little indication of this.
It is opposition to war — not hostility to Arabs — that is now rampant among the British public.
