Odd Jobs (104 page)

There is a powerful negative impulse pulling at José Saramago’s airy, wry poetry. His strangest literary habit is to disown thoughts and words that have flown out of his characters: “Who knows why such thoughts should occur to these rustics, for they are all illiterate except João Anes, who has had some education”; “This couple can neither write nor read, yet they can say things that seem most unlikely at such a time and in such a place”; “These are similes invented by someone who is writing on behalf of a soldier who fought in the war. Baltasar did not invent them.” And, most confessionally: “Blimunda was clearly incapable of such subtle thoughts; therefore, we are perhaps not inside these people and cannot tell what they are thinking.” For all its lovely color and imposing panoply of historical detail,
Baltasar and Blimunda
does somehow lack an inside; King and Queen and priest and lovers and even Domenico Scarlatti are paraded past us without our quite knowing what we are supposed to make of their embellished opacity. In this the novel sharply contrasts with
Chronicle in Stone
, whose exotica are rendered, through a child’s eyes, intimate and familiar. At one point, Blimunda looks clairvoyantly at the Sacred Host and sees not Christ but “a dark cloud.” A dark cloud lurks at the center of this superficially buoyant and festive narrative: “Human existence is so miserable,” the narrator reflects toward the end. Queen Maria is shown counselling her daughter the Infanta: “The longer you live the more you will realize that the world is like a great shadow pervading our hearts. That is why the world seems so empty and eventually becomes unbearable.” This emptiness translates into a novelistic inertness, a frozen tableau vivant.

C
ITIES OF
S
ALT
, by Abdelrahman Munif, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux. 627 pp. Random House, 1988.

A
RABESQUES
, by Anton Shammas, translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden. 263 pp. Harper & Row, 1988.

The most fabulous geological event since the explosion of Krakatoa surely was the discovery of oceans of petroleum beneath the stark and backward Muslim realms of the Persian Gulf. Sheiks whose wealth was previously measured in horses and camels soon ranked with the world’s richest men; dusty remotenesses like Kuwait and Bahrain and Saudi Arabia became able, with scarcely a dent in their national revenues, to shower all the blessings of an advanced welfare state upon their sparse populations. According to
The World Almanac
, the highest per-capita income on the planet belongs not to the United States or Sweden or Japan but to Qatar. The Western view of this global caprice is expressed by resentful caricatures of dollar-glutted sheiks and by our nervous protective naval presence in the Persian Gulf. The Arab view receives less publicity;
Cities of Salt
performs a needed service in dramatizing the impact of American oil discovery and development upon an unnamed Gulf emirate in the 1930s. It is unfortunate, given the epic potential of his topic, that Abdelrahman Munif, a Saudi born in Jordan, appears to be—though he lives in France and received a Ph.D. in oil economics from the University of Belgrade—insufficiently Westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel. His voice is that of a campfire explainer; his characters are rarely fixed in our minds with a face or a manner or a developed motivation; no central figure acquires enough reality to attract our sympathetic interest; and, this being the first third of a trilogy, what intelligible conflicts and possibilities do emerge remain serenely unresolved. There is almost none of that sense of individual moral adventure—of the evolving individual in varied and roughly equal battle with a world of circumstance—which, since
Don Quixote
and
Robinson Crusoe
, has distinguished the novel from the fable and the chronicle;
Cities of Salt
is concerned, instead, with men in the aggregate. Its focus might be described as sociological, and its sociological
point as the single insistent one that Arabs are discomfited, distressed, and deranged by the presence of Americans in their midst. In over six hundred pages, repeated illustration of this point wears thin.

The book begins by evoking the oasis of Wadi al-Uyoun, “an outpouring of green amid the harsh, obdurate desert.” It is, for most of its residents, a kind home: “Wadi al-Uyoun was an ordinary place to its inhabitants, and excited no strong emotions, for they were used to seeing the palm trees filling the wadi and the gushing brooks surging forth in the winter and early spring, and felt protected by some blessed power that made their lives easy.” Births and deaths, the arrival and departure of caravans, the seasons of rain and drought make a rhythm of events that is timeless; when three white foreigners, escorted by two marsh Arabs, camp on the edge of the village, curiosity runs rampant and the strong emotion of dread enters the breast of Miteb al-Hathal, a patriarch of the Atoum tribe:

He confides to his son Fawaz, “They said, ‘Wait, just be patient, and all of you will be rich!’ But what do they want from us, and what does it concern them if we get rich or stay just as we are?… They’re devils, no one can trust them. They’re more accursed than the Jews.” His unease drives him to address the emir: “By God, Your Excellency, we were as happy as we could be before those devils came along. But from the first day they came to our village life has been camel piss. Every day it gets worse.” Miteb is foremost but far from alone in his agitation: “Fear gripped the wadi. The men grew more rash and nervous, and Miteb was considered indispensable—if he absented himself from the wadi a single day to sleep in Zahra the people missed him acutely; only he was capable
of saying everything, of expressing their innermost thoughts.” Increasingly, the oasis-dwellers feel blighted by this lawless visitation from the outside world. The American oil-prospectors sunbathe in their shorts in view of the women fetching water; the affront is hardly greater when, a little later, the entire village is bulldozed into rubble. Miteb al-Hathal takes to the desert to wreak some ill-defined vengeance, and Fawaz, who has been itching to leave the oasis anyway, goes to work for the oil company as it builds its port in the seaside town of Harran.

In Harran, there is more of the same: on the American side, construction and revelry; on the Arab, puzzlement, depression, and hard labor. The cruellest cut seems to be not that the American houses have fences and swimming pools, or that the emir becomes obsessed by such devil’s toys as a telescope and a radio, or even that the American bosses drive the Arab workers right through the heat of summer, but that, occasionally, like a voluptuous mirage, a white boat appears offshore, laden with nearly naked white women. “The women were perfumed, shining and laughing, like horses after a long race. Each was strong and clean, as if fresh from a hot bath, and each body was uncovered except for a small piece of colored cloth. Their legs were proud and bare, and stronger than rocks. Their faces, hands, breasts, bellies—everything, yes, everything glistened, danced, flew.”
^†
The women come ashore and dance and entwine with the Americans, while the Arabs of Harran look on in an astonishment beyond words: “The men were mostly quiet now and slightly dizzy, feeling sharp pains throbbing in certain parts of their bodies. Some cried out, and most of them wished that they had never come to see what was transpiring before them.” During this long and shameful night, one of the Arab men announces out of the darkness, “Say what you want, but I’m afraid we’ve lost our world and our faith.”

The book continues for four hundred more pages, but the moral has been stated: the invasion of the oil exploiters has cost the native population its world and its faith. The money that petroleum brings the populace is no consolation: “True, the company was paying them now, but the next day workers paid out again what they had received. Prices went up every day, and their savings declined.” Ibn Naffeh, one of Harran’s
spokesmen for Islamic righteousness, announces, “Foreign lands are corrupt, and foreign people bring corruption, and money corrupts worst of all.” Another such seer, a healer called Mufaddi, refuses to work for money, and proclaims, “Money enslaves, it subjugates, but it never brings happiness.” The Americans themselves, their wild women and useless money aside, have infuriating personalities. Invited to a feast, they “looked and behaved like small children”—asking endless questions, taking many photographs, speaking Arabic with funny accents, and showing a pathetic inability to eat with their hands correctly. They are not invited to a wedding because they would have turned it into “an orgy of interviews and picture taking.” On the job, they are “cruel” and “tough and bigoted.” “At first the Americans had laughed and slapped them on the shoulders. Now they did not look at them or if they did, spat out words that could only be curses.” They awaken self-hatred, resentment, and fear in the workers. As Ibn Naffeh says, “The Americans came and the demons came with them. Anyone who drinks their water or eats of their provisions will have a demon enter him.”

The maledictory rhetoric of the Ayatollah Khomeini is nothing new. In
Cities of Salt
, the boat full of shining and laughing women is “Satan’s ship,” and the American projects are “Satan’s work,” culminating in “Satan’s pipe project.” The novel’s language strains in trying to capture the peculiarly intense mental states induced by the advent of modern Western enterprise and mores. “The people were overwhelmed with pity and fear; these were obscure but powerful emotions.” After the staunchly religious Mufaddi dies, “babies cried all night, as though afraid or in pain.” A man with a grievance against the oil company feels “an urge to weep or scream. He had to do something to keep from falling down dead.” He is “burning with anger, no, not only anger; it was mingled with something as black as pitch and oozy thick as old blood that had not dried yet.”

The undrying wound is the loss of tribal and village unity, of effortless interaction and mutual consideration. “In spite of the crowds and the endless influx of new people”—as Harran grows—“each man became a world unto himself. Dealings between people from different and perhaps mutually hostile places were wary and full of apprehensions.” Urbanization detaches and renders deaf. “Harran was no one’s property, no one’s city. So chaotic and crowded had it become that everyone asked and everyone answered, but no one heard or understood.” As sociology, this has its interest, but it doesn’t animate the characters. A few of the
Americans receive names (Henderson, Middleton, Blackie, Fatso), but they remain indistinguishable. Miteb al-Hathal stays out in the desert, a mere rumor of redemption from the demons. The Arabs in the foreground are rarely seen from within but live mainly in the gossip of others and the author’s gossipy, regretful voice; they are not so much persons as reputations. In a village, no one needs to be described, since everyone is known. Only slowly, as the novel settles into Harran and the town becomes more corrupt and crowded, does Abdelrahman Munif begin to give us what we can recognize as characterizations, with physical descriptions:

But such visualizations, and portraits of such outsiders as the truck-driver Akoub the Armenian, begin to clarify the picture too late: the novel’s people and events are seen as if through a sandstorm, blurred by a hopeless communal grief and sense of affront. Some authorities, too, were evidently affronted: the jacket flap tells us that
Cities of Salt
has been banned in Saudi Arabia. The thought of novels being banned in Saudi Arabia has a charming strangeness, like the thought of hookahs being banned in Minneapolis.

Anton Shammas, the author of
Arabesques
, shows no lack of sophistication in the ways of the literary West: his novel about Palestinians is intricately conceived and beautifully written, with epigraphs from Clive James, Bernard Shaw, and John Barth. A crisp, luminous, and nervy mixture of fantasy and autobiography, it has not one but two heroes called Anton Shammas and a number of scenes set in Iowa City, during a session of the International Writing Program. Yet this elegant example of postmodern baroque, like Abdelrahman Munif’s long and muffled quasi-oral tale, repels our attempts to enter it whole-heartedly; we feel we are not getting out of the book nearly as much emotionalized information as the author put into it. Something gets stuck. Is the stickiness to be blamed on our lack of familiarity with the Arab world? Munif’s Muslims seemed, until the demonic modern world scrambled their souls, familiar: they were the noble caftaned savages admired by T. E. Lawrence, Wilfred Thesiger, and other doughty British travellers. Shammas’s people
are of a type we rarely hear about: Palestinian Christians. Shammas himself is a walking paradox: a non-Jew who considers himself an Israeli, a poet in both Arabic and Hebrew, and a columnist in two Hebrew-language newspapers. He has told
The New York Times
that he feels he has more in common with the average Israeli than with the average Palestinian or Arab living in Jordan. One wonders how long he can maintain his balancing act in a land where, as of now, Palestinian Arabs are assassinating officials and doctors who are perceived as collaborating with the Israeli authorities. Already, for having presumed to chide the beloved mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, in a newspaper column, he has received death threats, and graffiti spelling “Arab vermin” have appeared on his apartment building. At present, Shammas—in his book-jacket photograph, a studious-looking young man pensively scratching his ear—resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he has a Rockefeller Fellowship in Middle Eastern literature; a note on the translation tells us that he helped Vivian Eden produce this smooth English version of his “very allusive and layered kind of Hebrew with equally complex Arabic resonances, especially in the rhythm section.”