Representations of Jerusalem in the modern Palestinian novel.

THIS ESSAY STUDIES THE TEXTUAL representations of the City of Jerusalem in the modern Palestinian novel. It is generally guided by Blanche Houseman Gelfant's deductive framework of the city novel. Gelfant has suggested that "through literary practice, if not through literary theory," three patterns of the city novel have emerged: the "portrait" novel, which reveals the city through the struggles of a single character; the "synoptic" novel, which reveals the total city immediately as a personality in itself; and the "ecological" novel, "which focuses upon one small spatial unit such as a neighborhood or a city block and explores in detail the manner of life identified with this place." (1)

The City of Jerusalem, like any other, can be represented by any combination of attributes historically, culturally, geographically, and spatially associated with its setting, and how this setting as a "physical place", as an "atmosphere", and as a total "way of life", as Gelfant's theory implies, makes distinctive impressions upon the mind and the senses and sets the values and manners which may "mold character and destiny". (2) For this purpose, I have chosen five representative modern Palestinian novels to exemplify, on the one hand, the three deductive types of the "city novel" in terms of the formation and domination of the setting, and to represent, on the other hand, in terms of their narrative and chronological time, the three major political periods of the Palestinian national history in the second half of the twentieth century; the 1948 upheaval, the 1967 war, and the 1987 uprising, intifadah. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra's novels Hunters in a Narrow Street (published 1960), and The Ship (1970) fall into the "portrait" type and historically cover Jerusalem during the first period. Mahmoud Shugair's novel Another Shadow for the City (1998) falls into the "synoptic" type and covers Jerusalem, retrospectively, during the second period. Ahmad Harb's novel The Other Side of the Promised Land (1990) falls into the "ecological" type and represents Jerusalem during the third period. In addition, 1 will include Izzat Ghazzawi's novel, Nebo Mountain (1996), as an example of "allegory" which has its own metaphorical poetics of representation that hardly fits any of these types.

I should clarify, however, that in my application of Gelfant's types of the "city novel" to Jerusalem-related Palestinian novels, I have used the term "city" to assess the various levels of Jerusalem's dominant presence as a setting, with all its composite elements, without particularly suggesting that the "city" in association with the Palestinian literary representation of Jerusalem is an urban, industrialized, "socially heterogeneous", and impersonal "settlement", (3) as the term may essentially mean. This clarification is of paramount importance in order to have a proper grasp of the Palestinian spatial poetics of representation. It is worth noting that the City of Jerusalem, in most of the Palestinian literature I have researched for this study, including the selected novels, figures out as a "countryside" continual with the Palestinian expansive landscape or a "village" with distinctive topographical, religious, and historical sites. One way to explain the non-urban representation of Jerusalem in Palestinian literature is perhaps to examine the Palestinian historical and national experience of confrontation with Zionism as colonial settler movement. Urbanism has been so linked in the Palestinians' imagination with the Zionist colonization of the land and hence their loss and eviction; it is the death "machine in the[ir] garden", to borrow Marx Leo's metaphor. (4) While country life, in opposition, has been linked with freedom and sublimity of Palestine and the deep identification of its people with the land. (5)

Furthermore, in the Palestinian national consciousness, Jerusalem is inseparable from its geographical landscape, that is the whole country of Palestine. Most often, the Palestinian vision of Jerusalem alternates with their vision of the homeland. Thus, to the Palestinian writer, the rural image of Jerusalem performs the pertinent function of signifying the continuity of the city with its surroundings and simultaneously expressing the Palestinian attachment to the "country" in both sense of a "nation" and a "land". (6) I may add that representing Jerusalem in a rural setting is commensurate with the Qur'anic representation of the City. Although Jerusalem is not mentioned by name in the Qur'an, it is described as an inseparable part of the reverential expansive landscape from which prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven; "the farther [mosque] whose surroundings We have blessed" (Sura 17:1). In another situation, Allah refers to Jerusalem as a "village". In the context of reprimanding the Israelites for their "hypocrisy" and "wrongdoing", He says, "Enter this village and eat where you will to your hearts' content"(Sura 2:57). (7) It is interesting to notice in this connection that the Palestinian Christian writers, such as Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, draw heavily on the Christian pastoral traditions in their representation of Jerusalem's country setting where the "good Palestinian shepherd", born in Bethlehem and grows in Jerusalem, like Jabra's protagonists, constitutes a permanently parallel "Christ-figure" or "martyr" who is set to redeem Jerusalem and hence his country.

In the preface to his autobiography, The First Well: Bethlehem Boyhood, Jabra I. Jabra states that throughout his literary career, he has kept William Wordsworth's saying "The Child is father of the Man" in mind. "I have done so out of deep desire to stress the beauty of that specific period of a person's life. It is beautiful probably because of its nearness to the source of being, especially if we believe, like Wordsworth again, that this source is rooted in Heaven with God". (8)

This passage provides a key to Jabra's aesthetics of Jerusalem representation in his two novels Hunters in a Narrow Street, (9) and The Ship. (10) One of the central drives in these novels is the nearly reflexive desire of the author to present an idealized non-urban setting of Jerusalem of his childhood which looms in his extended retrospect as Jerusalem of Jesus. Jabra was born in Bethlehem in 1920 in a place adjacent to the Church of Nativity commonly known as "al-Khan". He grew up in Jerusalem where his family built a house in the al-Katamon, one of the suburban neighborhoods in West Jerusalem. As a boy, he would roam the landscape between Ein Karem and Ein Salwan (Gihon Spring), bathing in its "holy water" and enjoying the company of the shepherds pasturing their flocks along the hillsides of Wadi er-Rababeh (the Hinnon Valley). He would visit the Holy Sepulcher, the Road of the Cross, the Dome of the Rock and the Castle of David. He would play with his schoolmates in the narrow streets of the Old City. "The beautiful Jerusalem was there for me to discover, neighborhood by neighborhood, stone by stone, the old part and the new, its past and its present," he later writes in his autobiography. (11) It is this "beautiful Jerusalem" which has fired Jabra's imagination and become the center of his life and art. It has provided him with a compelling symbol of identity, beauty, patriotism, and infinite love. In a "poetic trance" similar to what the romantic poet John Keats calls "negative capability"--that gift which allows the greatest artists to become a medium in synthesis with Beauty and Truth--Jabra blends in his novels all the reality-basis components of Jerusalem's representation, the landscape, the stones, the human actor, and the childhood memories, into one great image of the magnificent "Jerusalem of Jesus". (12)

Indeed, the "great image" of Jerusalem of Jesus" is appropriately the governing image in Jabra's Hunters in a Narrow Street and The Ship. The image combines "beauty", "sadness", and "hope". Jerusalem of Jesus was beautiful and much of its beauty could be attributed to its landscape; majestic hills, colorful stones, and picturesque valleys. It was sad because Jesus wept over its terrible fate as he foretold its destruction by the Romans: "They will wipe you out ... and leave not a stone on a stone within you" (Luke 19:44). Judging the resplendent history of the City's resurrection, there would be hope embodied by the "new Jerusalem, coining down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband" (Revelation 21:2). Jabra, through a complex process of displacement and appropriation "reharnesses" this great image, as Gaston Bachelard would say, (13) in a modern Palestinian national context of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In Hunters in a Narrow Street, this great image is revealed through the fate and the struggles of the protagonists Jameel Farran and his fiancee Leila Shahin. The novel takes place against the background of the 1948 war that culminated in the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) and establishment of Israel. In January of 1948, a Jewish terrorist organization attacked the Arab suburb of Katamon in West Jerusalem where Jameel's and Leila's families were living. The attack took place, as the narrator Jameel Farran describes it, during a "mad howling storm. It thundered and rumbled and rain fell ferociously for hours. The power suddenly failed and the whole quarter was in foul darkness"(p.9). After the storm subsided, Jameel, in horror, could faintly perceive Leila's house in ruins. Terrified, he skipped about the rubble and the great stones and the iron girders in vain hope of finding Leila alive. Then he felt something soft. He dug it up. "It was a hand torn off the wrist. It was Leila's hand, with the engagement ring buckled round the third finger. I sat down and cried"(p. 10).

This opening tragic scene constitutes the controlling image upon which the whole novel is constructed. It establishes, on the one hand, the objective correlation between Leila, the "torn-apart" fiancee, and Jerusalem, the "wartorn" city, and, on the other hand, between "Jerusalem of Jesus" in the imaginary and Jameel Farran's Jerusalem in reality. The correlation is so powerful in the mind of Jameel Farran that the "beloved Leila" and the "beloved Jerusalem" have become interchangeable images of the same "dream" which he tries to realize throughout the rest of his life as a refugee following that horrifying experience. With the consciousness of all artist, directly after his family has fled Jerusalem to Bethlehem, and still unable to rationally believe that what happened to his Leila and Jerusalem could have happened while the "Christian West" is watching or perhaps conspiring, Jameel invokes the image of "Jerusalem of Christ" to reflect upon Father Isa's, the parish priest's, queries on the same subject.

Jameel's reflections represent a Palestinian patriotic concept of "Jerusalem of Christ" against that of Western Christianity, a concept which Jabra enthusiastically embraces and instills in his novel. "Christ for the West has become an idea, an abstract idea with a setting", Jameel Farran tells Father Isa, "but the setting has lost all geographical significance". "For them," he continues, "the Holy Land is a fairy land. They have invented a fanciful Jerusalem of their own and made it the city of their dreams. But for us the geography is real and inescapable. When they sing of Jerusalem in their hymns they do not mean our city.... Nor is their Jerusalem the city of Christ any more. It is the city of David. What does it matter to them if our houses are destroyed, if a thousand Leilas are blown to bits and our city gates are turned into shambles?"(p. 17).

In other words, Jabra means to say that his City of Jerusalem is deeply rooted in the Palestinian national geography, history, and culture, and his "Christ", beautifully made in her image from the same soil to tell her story of destruction and eventually redeem her, is the Palestinian protagonist Jameel Farran. Like Christ, Jameel (whose name signifies beauty and art) was born in Bethlehem and roamed the landscape of Jerusalem and walked barefooted in her streets "with a haggard face and beautiful hands" calling for love and peace (p.16).

This interpretation lends additional meaning to the Leila-Jerusalem correlation. It enforces the image of Jerusalem as an ideal of beauty and love that has deep roots, as well, in the Arab collective psyche and art. Leila, in Arabic literature and folklore, is a prototype of female beauty and ascetically sought love based on the Arab romance of Qays wa Leila which Ahmad Shawqi, the Arab poet-laureate, transformed into a play in verse, the famous Mahnoun Leila (Leila's Mad Lover). In his autobiography, The First Well, Jabra tells us that in his childhood he was fond of Shawqi's play and that one day at his Jerusalem school he was captivated by the national poet Ibrahim Tuqan's performance reading from the deer-hunting scene in Act I. Later on that day, at home, he repeated with his sister Susan and brother Yusuf, the same verses over and over again:

   We dug a grave for the deer and we buried it.
   We prayed over the dead body and shed tears on it.
   Join me, and Leila too, and say, "God's mercy be on it." (14)

This scene from Jabra's childhood seems to properly germinate and dramatically anticipate the scene of Leila's tragic death under the rubble of her house in the novel, where her Qays, Jameel Farran, like "a madman" wept over her battered body.

It is necessary to notice that Wordsworth's verses, "The Child is father of the Man/ And I could wish my days to be/ Bound each to each by natural piety", do not only describe the germination of experience in one's childhood and its closeness "to the source of being", but also provide "a covenant of continuity with the poet's earlier self". (15) This aptly characterizes Jameel Farran's experience in Baghdad which the novel reveals as "bound" to Jerusalem experience "by natural piety", which can mean here love and devotion to his ideal city of childhood. The continuity, or rather the "mystical fusion" of the experience is achieved in the novel through a series of perceptive identifications and alternations between the locus and the protagonists of the "bound" experience. The bound experience here comprises the City of Jerusalem in association with Leila Shahin, Jameel's "lost" fiancee, alternating and interpenetrably identified with the City of Baghdad in association with Sulafa Nafawi, Jameel's would-be fiancee and eventually his future "bride". Alter the fall of Jerusalem to the israeli forces, Farran is forced into exile in Baghdad. Having a master of arts from Cambridge University, and being a poet himself, he qualifies to teach English literature at the College of Arts of Baghdad University, the position which gives him respect and social prestige and enforces his moral influence among Baghdad's wealthy community. In the University, he teaches Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and more importantly Shakespeare. He also gives special classes to Sulafa, the beautiful and intelligent daughter of the rich but hypocritically "traditional" Nafawis who do not allow her to go to college for fear of mixing with men and hence undermining her father's principle of "carefully designated marriages".

Again the major alternation in Jameel's experience of Jerusalem is between the vision sweeping outwards into the nightmarish reality of the "battered" Jerusalem, and a wholly inward or mystical vision of Jerusalem of his childhood. Outwardly, Baghdad is a projected continuation of Jerusalem's reality. It is socially and politically battered just like the embattled Jerusalem. Its "Narrow Street" where Jameel takes his dwelling is infested with prostitutes and fortune hunters as the narrow streets of Jerusalem are overrun by the "Jewish terrorists"; the former bury Sulafa in the rubble of their outlandish, barbaric "social tradition"(men there hunt for prostitutes and paradoxically hunt down their sisters in the name of family honor), and the latter have buried Leila in the rubble of her beleaguered family house.

Inwardly, Jameel's vision is sweeping towards the ideal Jerusalem of Christ of his own childhood as his imagination has once conceived in Leila. As such Jameel's vision is totally mystical, reminiscent of Jerusalem in Jerusalem-bound Sufi lore:

   If I travel East you are the east of the east,
   If I travel West you are directly before my eyes,
   If I go up you are the tower of my ascendance,
   If I go down you are all my place. (16)

Baghdad, geographically, is east of Jerusalem and Sulafa's home is east of Bagdad and when Jameel visits Sulafa's home he usually comes across a sign signaling the road to Babylon, the ancient city of the Jewish exile. Despite the bitter irony which this setting arouses in Jameel, his soul remains prefixed on Sulafa as an embodiment of his inwardly Jerusalem. The tutoring scenes, in conjunction with the very final scene of the novel, reveal that Sulafa is a projected image of Leila in a Jerusalem setting transposed from the Shakespeare's land-related tragedy of King Lear. During an unusually profound discussion of the storm scene(Act III) between Jameel and Sulafa, the spirit of Leila of Jerusalem occupies the scene, with Jameel saying, "Sulafa's eyes, like Leila's dead hand pursued me"(p. 106). The Shakespearean setting invokes two seminal images in Jameel's mind; the image of the ferocious storm which hit Jerusalem the night of the Jewish terrorist attack in which Leila was killed and her house destroyed, and the associated reflective image of the battered land. After all, the tragedy in King Lear is the tragedy of the "battered" land and the "battered" woman. The intelligent Sulafa is very quick to see through this analogy and tells Jameel, "Why shouldn't I wear mourning for a girl you loved, a girl in whose death I see the death of myself; the death of a good part of my country and yours? But she had received your love, you had kissed her, you had walked with her all over the hills of Jerusalem" (p. 142).

By extension, the final scene in the novel, seems to be a prophetic fulfillment of Sulafa's expressed desire of identification with Leila's place and destiny, and Jameel's overwhelming longing for unification, through her, with Leila, and hence his Jerusalem that she represents:

      I kissed her [Sulafa's] mouth. I kissed her hard and
   long, her flesh supple and resilient
      and wicked against my arms. Though inside me the
   terrible laughter still rose shrill and
      mad, Leila's hand, seemed suddenly to tall over my
   eyes, large, twisted, dead. But I kissed
      Sulafa again and again before we had to go out to the
   garden to talk to her waiting friends ....
      While we waited ... the crows and kites in squawking
   formations flew over the palm groves of slowly refurbished
      land (pp. 231-2).

It is interesting to remember in this context that the romantic poet John Keats, in his letters which the author Jabra had translated into Arabic, considered Shakespeare's King Lear as a model for the artistic "intensity" in which his "negative capability" is exemplified throughout, (17) and where the necessary fusion with "beauty and truth" is accomplished. This may explain further the importance of King Lear to Jameel's experience. He too seeks fusion with "beauty and truth" as exemplified in Leila and Jerusalem of his imagination, and it seems metaphorically he has accomplished it.

The image of Jerusalem as a city of the "Palestinian-naturalized" Christ or virtually the perfectible land where the Palestinians have their history, geography and identity, continues to dominate Jabra's second novel, The Ship. But whereas Hunters in a Narrow Street emphasizes the alternation between the inwardly and the outwardly Jerusalem and the struggle of its Jesus-like protagonist Jameel Farran to recapture the city of his dream, The Ship, more directly and affirmatively, emphasizes the theme of Palestinian patriotism with Jerusalem as its source of being. It is clear that the nature of the writer's experience has determined his choice of protagonists, the tone of his work, and more importantly in the case of Jabra's two novels under consideration, the mental framework of the representational images of Jerusalem.

The action in The Ship takes place, as the title indicates, on a ship cruising the Mediterranean from Beirut, Lebanon, to Naples, Italy, where apparently unrelated travelers, like Chaucer's pilgrims in Canterbury Tales, tell their stories and reasons for being there. The characters belong to different nationalities among them the Palestinian, the Lebanese, the Iraqi, the Spaniard, the French, the Italian, and the American. Although Jabra's narrative technique in this novel is based on the assumption that each character will tell his or her story, the narrative is mainly told by the Palestinian Wadi Assaf and the Iraqi Isam Salman. These two characters dominate the narrative from the very beginning to the end except for a short interval where the Italian woman Emelia Farnesi confesses her affair with Dr. Falih Haseeb, Luma's husband, to shed light on his seemingly incomprehensible suicide.

In effect, the Palestinian protagonist-narrator Wadi Assaf, also a poet and an artist, is obsessed with his Jerusalem experience, especially the killing of his friend Fayez Attallah and the loss of the land during the 1948 war with the Israelis. The Iraqi protagonist-narrator Isam Salman, who is, like Wadi, a British university graduate of distinct artistic sensibility and judgement, is also obsessed with the land which his father lost in a tribal feud in Iraq. In fact, his love obsession with Luma, Dr. Haseeb's seductive beauty-paragon wife, turns out to be obsession with the land. The narrative alternates between Wadi and Isam while simultaneously their voices coalesce, their experiences converge, and their personalities mysteriously identity with each other. One may confidently assume, through a willful psychological leap, that Isam Salman is Wadi Assaf's alter ego.

Thus, by comparing Jabra's representations of Jerusalem in the two novels, we see the dominant female imagery of Jerusalem in Hunters in a Narrow Street is being replaced by masculine imagery in The Ship; Leila and Sulafa in Jameel Farran's experience are replaced by Fayez Atallah and Isam Salman in Wadi Assaf's, respectively. Like Jameel Farran in Hunters, Wadi Assaf in The Ship is presented as a "Palestinian manifestation" of Christ. But whereas Jameel represents the more contemplative, passive, graceful and hence the more inwardly "Palestinian Christ", Wadi represents the more active, the more operatively calculative "Palestinian Christ", the Martyr who suffers but fights and dies for his country. It is important to recall for this comparison that Leila, Jameel's fiancee, is killed when the Jewish terrorists blow up her house and that horrifying scene establishes the course of Jameel's transcendental experience, while Fayez Atallah, Wadi's close friend, is killed on the hills of Jerusalem while defending the city in active fighting and this "martyrdom scene" provokes Wadi to actually fight back and revenge the killing of his friend. He does ambush enemy forces and kill some of their soldiers at the same battlefield where his friend has just been killed.

One may surmise that the affirmative masculine tone that characterizes Jabra's Jerusalem representation in The Ship is related to the Palestinian national experience after 1967 Arab-Israeli war. As a result of that war, the rest of Jerusalem and Palestine which was hitherto under Arab control was occupied by Israel. The resounding Arab defeat was paradoxically an intelligible, immense inducement for Palestinian patriotism in the aftermath of the war, especially the 1967-1970 period. This is the period which the Palestinians refer to as the golden period of the "armed struggle" which basically promoted the idea of the Palestinian innate identification with the land of Palestine in conjunction with the concept of the Palestinian fida' or martyrdom. As The Ship was first published in 1970, it is then reasonable to assume that Jabra was influenced by the sweeping Palestinian patriotism of the time. He later expressed his patriotic sentiment as follows:

      My Palestinian sense of belonging is that like of the
   peasant to his soil, of the farmer to his tree, of the inhabitant to
   his home.
      This is how I loved Jerusalem. This how I loved
      Palestine and my land in which I roamed, dozed oft   loved, and dreamed. I remember
      the soil of Jerusalem, the rocks of Jerusalem as if I
   remember the jewels of the world.
      My attachment to Jerusalem is of deep love and
   spiritual integration. (18)

In The Ship, this intense patriotism is forcefully expressed by the protagonist Wadi Assaf. Still Jerusalem is seen as a pastoral landscape distinguished by its springs, pools, valleys, picturesque hills, and colorful solid rocks, and he, Wadi Assaf bearing a face similar to that of Christ, has his mind, body, and soul nurtured in the landscape. "Landscapes of place reflect upon landscapes of the mind," writes James Houston in his seminal essay "The Concepts of Place and Land in the Judaeo-Christian Tradition". He maintains that "the world's landscapes are but the screen on which the past, present, and anticipated cosmic vanity of mankind is written." (19)

Wadi Assaf, likewise, is highly conscious of the formative power of Jerusalem landscape that he sees in the City of Jerusalem an image of himself and Christ. As child, the novel tells us, he descends the slippery steps of the cave of Salwan [Gihon Spring] to drink from the "very spring the builders of Jerusalem had drunk at the dawn of history" (p. 54). He takes off his clothes and immerses himself completely in the water in "the very womb ... where he could touch the secret of the city's birth with his own hands" (p. 55). Wadi's "rite of initiation" recalls the birth of Christ in the Cave of Nativity within the same proximity of the Cave of Salwan and the "birth" of Jerusalem (her founding historically is attributed to Ein Salwan) and suggests, by extension, that Wadi, Christ, and Jerusalem form integral unity with the same history and geography and share the same values.

As Wadi Assaf grows up "between the rocks" of Jerusalem landscape, he takes their shape and color "as if he is hewn from rock"(p. 91) just like the City of Jerusalem itself:

Jerusalem itself was shaped like rocks. Its contours were those of rocks, and rocks were to be found on the edge of every road in the city. Wherever we went, we saw people breaking up rocks to pave roads or to build houses. Rock quarries were all round the city. Palestine was a rock on which civilizations had been built because it was so solid and had such deep roots connected to the center of the earth. The people, who were as solid as rock, were the ones to build Jerusalem and all of Palestine. And whom did Christ choose as his successor? Simon Peter, "The Rock." What did the Arabs build so that it would be one of the most beautiful buildings made by man? The Dome of the Rock. And what about those people dotted around on the slope? On moonlit nights you could see their heads and shoulders showing about the pits. They were of rocks too! And Sultan's Pool, what was it we like about it? The rocks, which were surrounded by water every time there was any. So let us now praise the virtues of rock! (p. 53).

This passage reinforces the pastoral image of Jerusalem while emphasizing the profound identification between Wadi, Christ, and the City. The three of them are made of the same "rocks" of the same landscape. It is the Palestinian "naturalized Trinity", as Jabra would like to call it, which symbolizes the unity of the Palestinian with his land and god: "It is easy for anyone who had spent his younger days in Jerusalem to identify God with the land," Isam Salman says of Wadi Assaf. "Or, as Wadi himself would say, to unite Christ with the rocks. Wadi also united himself with Christ and the rocks and he saw the need to preserve this trinity as one whenever it seemed to fall apart"(p. 92).

Jabra's patriotic image of the "trinity" can also be seen in terms of the "geopiety", a term borrowed from John K. Wright "to stand for a special complex of relations between man and nature [the place]." (20) One of the aspects of this relation, as Yi-Fu Tuan thinks, is perceived in the Chinese popular belief that "aspects of the earth are different manifestations of the cosmic being", as mountains serve as its body, rocks its bones, water its blood that runs through its veins. (21) The cumulative effect of this image signifies that "man is made in the place ... as the virtues of the land pass[ed] into the limbs of her sons," (22) which is the highest expression of patriotism. Thus, Jabra perhaps wants to confirm that his Palestinian protagonist Wadi Assaf, like Christ, and, by extension, the Palestinian people, was made in Jerusalem on her own image embodying her virtues. However, Jabra's vision of an idealized non-urban Jerusalem, in spite of its emphasis on Palestinian freedom, identity, patriotism, and rootedness, ironically share some of the deterministic implications of "naturalism" insofar as it portrays the Palestinian protagonist as a product of environment. Whether through romanticism or naturalism, Jabra's idealized vision makes his Palestinian characters lack sober analysis of their actual realities and consequently lack the individual power and self-responsibility to look within and thereby to transform their world without.

Mahmoud Shugair's Another Shadow for the City (23) represents what I may call the "synoptic" Jerusalem novel in Gelfant's classification of the city novel. In this novel, Jerusalem is presented immediately and in totality as a protagonist participating in the action, and as an "atmosphere which affects the emotions, and as a total way of life--a set of values and manners and a frame of mind--which molds charactrer and destiny." (24) Shugair takes us from Jabra's colorful, expansive landscape of Jerusalem to the narrow alleys and roofed souks of the "old city" inside the walls. Like Jabra, Shugair was born in the environs of Jerusalem and grew up in the city itself where he has his childhood and boyhood memories. But whereas Jabra grew up in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Shugair grew up in the center of the city. This biographical fact is perhaps largely responsible for the differences in their representations of Jerusalem although they share their ultimate themes of patriotism and identity. Jabra, as we have seen, represents Jerusalem mainly through landscape imagery with emphasis on the Palestinian protagonists being "made" of the same solid beautiful rocks of the landscape where the city itself is made. In comparison, Shugair, as we will see, represents Jerusalem through "center-related" imagery such as the "heart", the "womb", or the "flower" images which are exchangeable images of birth or life-giving, beauty, and centrality. The governing image of Jerusalem in Shugair's novel which combines all these aspects is that of the mother who gives birth to "the son", the narrator, and molds his identity, and when he is "exiled" or forcibly separated from her, she offers him new possibilities of rebirth, reclamation of identity, and self-realization. "Jerusalem in the Another Shadow for the City," Mahmoud Shugair says of his novel, "is not a mere spatial setting, but the essential protagonist." (25)

Another Shadow for the City is an autobiographical novel, based on the author's personal experience of exile and return to Jerusalem. Shugair was exiled by the Israeli occupation authorities in 1975 and had his Jerusalem identification papers confiscated for his support of the Palestinian national cause. He was allowed to return to Jerusalem under the terms of the Oslo Declaration of Principles between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993. Upon his return, he was summoned by the Israeli Interior Office to reclaim his papers. While waiting in the office, which is just across Damascus Gate opposite the Old City behind the walls, he has undergone a Proust-like experience in In Search Of Lost Time; he "is tranced" by the "celestial" beauty of the setting, the dwelling of his memories which his mind tries to recapture as he tries to retrieve his identification papers.

The narrative is set on these two alternating lines; the protagist's actual visit to the office of "Interior" to reclaim his identity through the identification papers, and the metaphorical visit of his memory to the "heart" or the "center" of the city to reconstruct the identity of "the soul". Of all the places which most hold his memory are the narrow alleys, the stairways, the cafes, and the buildings down the Damascus Gate square which opens to four directions: Jabsha Road on the right, el-Seikh Rihan to the left, Souk Bab Khan ez-Zeit in between, and the el-Wadi Road. Bab Khan ez-Zeit opens on its southern end to the historical covered Souks of al-Attarin (Spices Market), el-Qassabin (Butchers Market), el-Haddadine (Godldsmiths Market). These sites constitute the center of the "Muslim Quarter" which extends from the northern city wall to the northern part of the southern walls of the el-Haram es-Sharif (al-Aqsa Mosque, Dome of the Rock and the Esplanade). This area includes several Muslim and Christian religious institutions and the Via Dolorosa. There are also heavily populated residential sections. In normal mornings, the narrow streets of Old Jerusalem overflow with people forming a peculiar kind of mass movement.

Seen from a "street level" spatial viewpoint, these sites constitute a typical labyrinth image. (26) Shugair's narrator is lost several times in the narrow alleys and the zigzags where the sight-lines are limited by poorly-lit corners, crowd, animals, porters' carts, and peasant vegetables vendors. He tells us that, as a child, he used to walk while holding his father's hand for fear of being lost. One morning his hand was separated from his father's by the pedestrians' commanding flow and and he was "scared to death" before he could find his way back to rejoin his father. "After this frightening experience", he says, "I became constantly watchful while holding tight to my father's"(p. 33).

However, there is "mystification" in the labyrinth if the labyrinth itself, as Kevin Lynch believes, has "some form that can be explored and in time be apprehended." (27) Thus, seeing these sites in retrospect by the "tranced" narrator in the Interior Office allows for the quintessential image of Jerusalem as the heart of the Palestinian life, or the "mother womb out of which the Palestinian people are pouring forth." (28) The protagonist narrator is contained in these sites as they contain the formation forces within him. He has not only experienced his poignant memories of fear, danger, mystery, and watchfulness in its labyrinthine streets, but he received his education in its schools along those streets, and as a young man he nourished his political and national consciousness at its cafes. The outstanding emotion that Jerusalem now elicits in his memory is that of being the "nest of his soul", and he of being her son, her "Another Shadow".

The visual presentation of these sites in the particular geographical location in the physical center of the city enhances the metaphorical image of Jerusalem as the symbolic heart of the Palestinian life. The Damascus Gate Square "throbs" and the streets leading to it from the four directions "become the arteries through which flow the life-giving element: the people." (29) I think this image is also linked with the image of Jerusalem as the "flower of cities" which became prevalent in Palestinian modern poetry and art under the widespread influence of Fayruz' Jerusalem famous song "The Flower of Cities" after the fall of Jerusalem under the Israeli occupation in 1967. The "flower" is a woman image which shows the City as a source of life and beauty. The flower can also be an image of the "heart" representing Jerusalem as the center of the world as the three continents open from it as petals open from the center of flower. (30) However, the flower image is an apt representation of the particular location of the narrator's memories which is frequently referred to as the "Basin". In relation to the center of Jerusalem, this basin is known as "heart of the heart"--the flower petals symbolize the domes and towers opening from the basin (the stamin and the pistil).

The narrator's name, after long hours of waiting in the Interior Office, is called by the Israeli official to attend to his identification papers. The call awakens him to the hard political reality of the City under the military occupation. He retrieves his papers and then "I walked, I went looking for a shaded place in the City which called me at one dawn and I remained attached to her as my mother who gave birth to me" (p. 203).

Shugair's Another Shadow for the City was published in 1998, but historically it gives a portrait of East Jerusalem in the sixties and the seventies. It provides vivid descriptions of the city before the war as it represents the Palestinian country life. The village atmosphere is prevalent; Palestinian peasants selling their products and sheep before Damascus and Herod Gates; donkeys and camels crossing the streets laden with goods and people; and the opulent smells of the mountain thyme and sage, the two plants which characterize the Palestinian countryside and become national symbols. The novel also provides vivid descriptions of the 1967 war as the fighting was raging across the divide lines between East and West Jerusalem. The narrator is gripped by fears as he witnesses in disbelief the fall of East Jerusalem, the setting of his childhood memories, under the Israeli occupation. Immediately after the war, Israel annexed the newly captured Arab Jerusalem and the surrounding environs and declared the "unified Jerusalem the permanent capital of Israel". In spite of the annexation and the subsequent Israeli measures to curtail the Arab existence, East Jerusalem in the early seventies began to emerge as a political and cultural core for the Palestinians, in addition to being their spiritual center.

By the eighties, especially with the eruption of the first Palestinian uprising in 1987, East Jerusalem was acquiring most of the characteristic qualities of an urban setting; publishing enterprises, functioning theaters, newspapers, think-tanks for the "newly organized Palestinian intelligentsia", research centers and societies along the lines of the Palestinian political spectrum. Although most of these activities have proven short-lived because of the Israeli stringent counter measures, East Jerusalem was emerging as the de facto capital of the "Independent State of Palestine" to live side by side with the State of Israel with West Jerusalem as its capital.

This background furnishes in part the spatial and the socio-political setting of Ahmad Harb's novel The Other Side, of the Promised Land, (31) first published in 1990. The novel may fit Gelfant's description of the "ecological" city novel in two areas; the emphasis on specific spatial unit in the city, and the locus on the urban (social and political) relationships and manners of the group identified with that unit. (32) Here, there is important deviation from the prevailing mechanization of the setting in the Palestinian Jerusalem representative novels where the setting is either Jerusalem landscape or Jerusalem, the village within the Walls. The spatial unit, which is represented in Harb's novel, extends from Suleiman Street outside the City walls along Salah ed-Din Street up to the American Colony and the adjacent areas on both sides of the street between Nablus Road and Wadi el-Joz neighborhood. This is the area where most of the Palestinian commercial, cultural, communications and business centers are located and which socio-economically represents the Palestinian Jerusalem's family-oriented bourgeois.

At the center of The Other Side o/ the Promised Land, as far as the themetization of Jerusalem is concerned, is Hadi's and his Jewish wife's spatial and social relationship with the City. In the novel, Hadi is a Palestinian peace activist associated with the Palestinian national movement, which has its self-proclaimed leadership in the "urban" East Jerusalem, and with one of the peace groups in Israel. This double relationship has taught him the hard and the heartless pragmatic methods of Israel's and PLO's polities. In one of his meetings with the Israeli peace group, he is introduced to Arnuna, an Israeli woman peace activist. They soon become attracted to each other and eventually decide to marry despite the strong objections, both on religious and national grounds, of their respective families. Contrary to their declared intentions and expectations that their marriage would bring about rapproachment between Israelis and Palestinians, they end up in forlorn condition denied by their own immediate families and communities. They seek refuge in Jerusalem, envisioning that it will be their sanctuary under the Israeli "unfication law" which ordained the annexation of Arab Jerusalem. Making use of that law and by the help of intrnational sympathizers, they establish the "Bridge Office" in Wadi el-Joz to work for peace between Israel and Palestine.

Their vision of Jerusalem as a sanctuary soon dissipates with the first contact with the reality of the City. Despite the "unification law", Jerusalem is actually in schism. To Hadi, the reality of the schism is not only reflected in the barriers on the ground between the hostile Arab and Jewish populations, and the Israeli government discriminatory policy against the Palestinian inhabitants, but also by the social and "national" structure of Jerusalem's Palestinians which, as he discovers, is "inward-looking, and clan-oriented". (33) Although Hadi has all the makings of the Palestinian politician of the eighties (handsome appearance, fluent English, high education, experience in women and party politics, and an Israeli Jerusalem identity card), he remains a "stranger", spatially and socially. He cannot penetrate the Jerusalem Palestinian oligarchies because of his peasant origin from the village of el-A'in, south of Hebron. But being a shrewd politician, he attempts to climb the "social ladder" by arranging for his sister to marry a member of a Jerusalemite family. To his great disappointment, his sister dies suddenly of heart attack, diminishing his hopes for profitable social acceptance. Driven by a passion of revenge from the Jerusalem family-oriented society, which has rejected him, he establishes an illicit relationship with one of their influential women in the City. They "share beds", but when he proposes marriage to her (in sardonic repetition of his experience with Arnuna), she angrily discards him. Their relations ultimately further estrange him from his Jewish wife. Rejected by her family and religion for her marriage to Hadi, Arnuna finds herself now in Jerusalem in a limbo. She feels immeasurably lost, a feeling which compels her to think of self-annihilation. While entertaining suicide, she complains to Waheed, her and Hadi's friend: "We have come to Jerusalem seeking a refuge to bridge the unbridgeable gap between the Israeli and the Palestinian peoples and I find myself, as you see, in limbo suspended between my Jewishness and my Islam, between Israel and Palestine, beween Hadi and his shrewish mistress. O cruel Jerusalem! You have killed your peace prophets!" (34) Waheed stops her from committing suicide and advises her instead to run away from Jerusalem to el-Khudaira, where her Jewish parents live, and seek their forgiveness for social reintegration.

There is so much symbolism, so much history, so much religion, so much blood of sacrifice attached to Jerusalem that the City is lived more in the Palestinian imagination as a metaphor than being a human space in reality. Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet, warns against this kind of overt romanticization or assailment of mythology that sacrifices reality. On entering Jerusalem stealthily (as he always does because of the restrictions of the Israeli occupation), a foreign journalist stops the poet and insists that he must have a conversation with him on the beauty and holiness of the place. Darwish concurs:

   The olive trees were the visual rhythm of the landscape,
   myths ascending, descending, soaking our Canaanite autumn,
   sweeping us into an old conversation,
   hadn't been for a white donkey,
   that wisely and neutrally stood in between us.
   I said, "this is the wiseman of the place,
   the one able to dodge the mythology,
   to define the wall between myth and reality.
   For every myth, there must be a civilized donkey,
   to confer to its time a present moment."
   "How?" he asked.
   "By stripping it of its classical grandeur,
   of its infinite story line,
   it eases our burden of tragic ends
   that might be subject to change." (35)

Harb's novel echoes Mahmoud Darwish's call to demythologize Jerusalem by deconstructing the ever-increasing tendency in the Palestinian political and cultural socialization to adore the "signifier" and overlook the "signified". This mode of Jerusalem's representation in the Palestinian mainstream political and literary discourse has been extremely harmful to the Palestinian national cause in the sense that it has, in the matter-of-fact politics, led to the fossilization of the "symbolic family-oriented" leadership of Jerusalem which historically has dominated the Palestinian national movement entirely throughout the twentieth century, thus blocking all possibilities of social and political mobilization conducive to genuine self-interrogation and accountability in the Palestinian body politic. There is always symbiotic collaboration between this Palestinian leadership and mythology implied in the constant metaphorization of Jerusalem. Even the Moslem popular belief, "He who lives in Jerusalem is considered a warrior in the Holy War", is narrowly interpreted to legitimize the monopoly of the Jerusalemite "families" of the leadership of the Palestinian national struggle. As one of the narrators in The Other Side of the Promised Land says, while commenting on Hadi's emulated attempts to "be like them", "these peoples are not born to "live", but to lead the "living"(p. 94).

Nonetheless, in Izzat Ghazzawi's novel Nebo Mountain, the whole image of Jerusalem is one of metaphorization. (36) Burton Pike, the American critic, has noticed that writers seem to pay careful attention to the difference between reality and image. They typically create in their fictions the city of a time considerably before the actual time of writing. "Through [mythification] and the use of the conventions governing verb tenses in narration, they give the impression of describing a present scene when they are actually inventing the picture of a past one, as if by displacing the city backward in time in this fashion, they wished to insure its metaphorization, to place as firmly as possible in the realm of the imaginary while at the same time presenting it as a "reality". (37)

Ghazzawi's Nebo Mountain provides a good example of this temporal displacement. The novel is based on the displacement of the Biblical story that relates the vision of Moses at the peak of the mountain of Abarim in Moab, where the "Children of Israel camped and from which Moses beheld the land of Canaan before his death at Mount Nebo". (38) In the novel, the Palestinian refugees (and not the children of Israel), camp at Busra' beside Mount Nebo, and Haj Ibrahim, the son of Haj Imran, and the aging lather of Yusuf (and not Moses) ascend Mount Nebo every morning to behold "es-Sadeer", their original village west of the River Jordan.

Jerusalem is not specifically mentioned by name but it is geographically, historically, religiously, as well as metaphorically, identifiable with the imaginary village of es-Sadeer. It is situated in the west side of the River, at the hills of the West Bank, recognized from afar by its mosque with the "minaret soaring up high in its light ... evolving around itself in a crystal acclamation" (p. 37). Haj Imran, the father of Ibrahim, who wishes to have Ismael born to him in old age, is buried there. Imran in the Qur'an is the great grandfather of prophet Ibrahim and the pillar of the "House of the Prophets", a reference to the Muslim belief that Jerusalem is the home of the prophets. More importantly, perhaps, is the name of es-Sadeer itself. It embodies all the Qur'anic images of Jerusalem. "Sadeer" in Arabic has double interrelated meanings, which corroborate the images of holiness, centrality, and the ultimate search or yearning for the divine. On the one hand, "Sadeer" means the "farther place", unmistakable reference to al-Aqsa mosque as it describes Prophet Mohammed's ascension in the "Night Journey": "Glory be to Him who made His servant go by night from the Sacred Temple to the Farther Temple whose surroundings We have blessed, that We might show him some of Our signs". (39) On the other hand, "Sadeer" from "sidra" (lotus tree) refers in the Qur'an to sidrat al-muntaha, the farther lotus tree in Muslim "paradise" which is in Islamic lore identified with Jerusalem, and describes one's attainment of "the highest or ultimate goal". (40) The narrative description and tone throughout the novel reinforces these images: "Even at such moments," the narrator says, "Sadeer haunts us. Nothing could be its equal as if it were the center of the universe; the place that God created before any other place and sat there for a rest ... and there, too, we left Afaf [purity] and Amena [faith] and ages of absence" (p. 53).

This passage describes Jerusalem as "the center of the universe" or the "navel of the earth", as it is commonly believed. Its strategic centrality is a manifestation of its spiritual or religious centrality to the protagonists. That is why every morning Haj Ibrahim ascends Mount Nebo to behold Jerusalem (es-Sadeer), enacting the popular Muslim saying that Allah (God) every morning thinks about mercy for Jerusalem, and only then about mercy for the rest of the world.

The overall effect of Ghazzawi's metaphorization is that Jerusalem represents the vision (Busra) for the Palestinian future city of return. It is the center of their spiritual life, the cradle of their history, and the home of the prophets and their individual highest attainment. As the novel suggests, Jerusalem is even holier and has more imperishable significance to the Palestinians than Mecca, the first holy city in Islam. It is interesting to notice that Haj Ibrahim prays every dawn at Mount Nebo towards Jerusalem and not Mecca, reminding perhaps that Jerusalem is "the first direction of prayer" in Islam and insisting it should have remained so. With his face towards Jerusalem, he asks his God to grant him a son, to be called Ismael, from his aging wife Maryam (Mary) not to be the old "builder of al-Kaaba", as in the Qur'anic story of Ismael and his Father Ibrahim, but the new "redeemer" of Jerusalem.

There are still further implications in Ghazzawi's metaphorical displacement of Mount Nebo-related myth. Jerusalem is seen as a village, an image which is commonly in commensuration with the non-urban representation of Jerusalem in Palestinian literature. However, Ghazzawi's novel Mount Nebo takes one step further. By displacing the primordial myth of Mount Nebo, the author significantly displaces the Qur'anic version of the story of "Abraham's sacrifice of his son". In the Qur'an, Abraham had supposedly begun to sacrifice his son Ismael in Mecca, which is described as the "Mother of Villages" upon whom Abraham asks God "to bestow peace and tranquility"(14:34). The novel, while maintaining that Ismael is the "sacrificed son" (and not Isaac as the Children of Israel believe) changes the site from Mecca to Jerusalem (es-Sadeer), thus suggesting that Jerusalem, to the Palestinians, replaces Mecca in being their "Mother of Villages" (City of cities) and their direction of worship.

In conclusion, the five novels chosen for this study of literary representation of Jerusalem, exemplify, in terms of the predominance of the spatial setting, the three patterns of the city novel; the portrait, the synoptic, and the ecological. They also represent three different historical and political phases of the Palestinian national experience to which Jerusalem has served as a catalyst. Judging from the modes of representation, Jabra's novels Hunters in a Narrow Street and The Ship represent Jerusalem in the pastoral images of its picturesque landscape with emphasis on the symbiotic interrelationship between Jerusalem and its Palestinian population. This interrelationship is expressed by the image of the "trinity" which comprises Christ, the Palestinian protagonist, and the City. The three "are made" of the same "rocks" of the same hilly landscape. Shugair's novel Another Shadow for the City is based on the correlation between the labyrinth of the narrator's memory and the Old City in which he has grown to manhood. The relationship between the narrator and the city is aptly represented by the core image of the "heart" or "mother womb" which essentially signifies the centrality of Jerusalem to the Palestinian livelihood both spiritually and existentially. In Harb's The Other Side o/ the Promised Land. the spatial and the sociological aspects of the represented sector of Jerusalem express the disappointment, frusration, and anxiety of the protagonists Hadi and Arnuna in the mythologically-naked reality of the city. Based on the assumption of myth-temporal displacement, Ghazzawi's allegory Nebo Mountain attetmpts to recuperate the past of Jerusalem by reordering its history with the effect that Jerusalem should maintain its status as the first home of the Palestinians and the first direction of worship in Islam and hence the first city.

Aside from Harb's The Other Side of the Promised Land, the novels discussed are suffused with the affection for the "village within Jerusalem", which provides an unwavering sense of national identity and a rich source of life-sustaining values. This theme is recurrently overstated in these novels, reaching sometimes the dangerous level of self-exoneration, and glorification of Palestinian assumed innocence.

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ENDNOTES

(1.) Blanche H. Gelfant, The American City Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), p. 11.

(2.) Ibid: p. 4.

(3.) Cf. Louis Wirth, "Urbanism as a Way of Life," American Journal of Sociology, 44 (July, 1938): 1-24. Quoted by Hana Wirth-Nesher, "The Modern Jewish Novel and the City: Franz Kafka, Henry Roth, and Amos Oz," Modern Fiction Studies, 24 (Spring, 1978): 91-111.

(4.) Marx Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idealism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

(5.) Cf. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: New York Time Books Co., Inc., 1979). Said maintains that Palestine has always played a special role in the imagination and in the political will of the West, which is where by common agreement modern Zionism also originated and which eventually has led to the Zionist adoption of the doctrine "a land without people, for people without land". From the beginning of the twentieth century, "Palestine was the site of a contest between a native presence and an incoming, basically European/Western form of advanced culture" (p. 19).

(6.) Cf. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Williams argues that the "country" is both a nation and a part of a land; it can be the whole society or its rural area. The rural setting is usually more representative of patriotic values in a national literature or art.

(7.) In the original Arabic the verse reads: "udkhulu hathihi el-qariah" which must be translated, "Enter this village". I think some English translations of the Qur'an err, may be on purpose, when they translate "qariah" into "city" instead of "village" as they err, in similar context, in translating "al-Masjid al-Aqsa" into "the farther Temple" instead of "the farther Mosque". Cf. The Koran. Trans. N. J. Dawood (Penguin Classics, 1990).

(8.) Jabra I. Jabra, The First Well: Bethlehem Boyhood, Trans. Issa J. Boullata (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1995), p. xvii.

(9.) Jabra I. Jabra, Hunters in a Narrow Street (A Three Continents Book, 1997). All references to this novel are to this edition. Originally, Hunters ... was written and published in English in 1955, and was first published in the United States by the Three Continents Press, Inc., in 1990.

(10.) Jabra I. Jabra, The Ship, Trans. Adnan Heider and Roger Allen (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1985). It was first published in Arabic in 1970.

(11.) The First Well, Ibid., p. 184.

(12.) Jabra translated John Keats' foreground letters of the seminal essay of the "Negative Capability". Cf. Jabra I. Jabra, Freedom and Chaos (Beirut: The Arab Establishment for Studies and Publication, 1979). See also Faisal Darraj, "Jabra Ibrahim Jabra: The Unvanquished Palestinian in the Promised Culture", 54 al-Carmel (Winter 1998): 6-26. Jabra was very much under the influence of the romantic theory of art through his study of the British Romantics at Cambridge.

(13.) Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. xiii-xix. Bachelard argues that a writer "harnesses" the image rather than he "creates" it.... "great images have both a history and a prehistory; they are always a blend of memory and legend.... Every great image has an unfathomable oneiric depth to which the personal past adds a special color."

(14.) Jabra, The First Well, Ibid., p.184.

(15.) These are the last three lines of Wordsworth's poem "My Heart Leaps Up" which he reused as preface to his poem "Intimation of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". Cf. The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, vol. II, Ed. Frank Kermode, et al (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

(16.) The reference is to darawish Beit al-Maqdis (ascetics of Jerusalem) known for their zawaya (cults) in the Old City. Inspired by Prophet Mohammed's Journey of Ascension to Heaven, they give spiritual predominance to Jerusalem as the "Road to Heaven". The lines are translated by the author.

(17.) Cf. Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963).

(18.) Jabra I. Jabra, Springs o/the Vision(Yanabee' ar-Ru'ia) (Beirut: The Arab Establishment for Studies and Publication, 1979), p.125, as quoted by Faisal Darraj, Ibid., p. 24.

(19.) James M. Houston, "The Concepts of Place and Land in the Judaeo-Christian Tradition," Humanistic Geography, Eds. David Ley and Marwyn Samuels (Chicago: Maaroufa Press, Inc., 1976):224-237.

(20.) Cf. Yi-Fu Tuan, "Geopiety: A Theme in Man's Attachment to Nature and to Place", Geographies of the Mind (Lowenthal and Bowden), 1976: 11-41.

(21.) Tuan, Ibid., passim.

(22.) Ibid: p. 27.

(23.) Mahmoud Shugair, Another Shadow for the City (Jerusalem, 1998).

(24.) Gelfant, Ibid., p. 4.

(25.) From a special interview with the author for the purpose of this study, 15 November 2001. He adds, "In my writing, I depend on my personal experience as a child and a young man which I had inside the city. Jerusalem is everywhere in the fabric of my writing and my soul."

(26.) Cf. Burton Pike, The Image of the City in Modern Literature (Princeton University Press, 1981. Pike maintains that the "kind of spatial mimesis" dictates to large extent the technical means an author could use in constructing his image of the city. The most important of these is his choice of spatial viewpoint where there are three major possibilities. The narrator or narrative could present the city from "above", from "street level", or from "below"; the above is a contemplating position, the street level is an active position where the city is experienced as a labyrinth, and the subterranean view where the city appears "closer to the realms of myth and instinct." pp.34-36.

(27.) Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), p.5.

(28.) The image of Jerusalem as a "mother womb" is a familiar image in the Palestinian painting. Palestine is symbolized as a woman giving birth to Jerusalem and exchangeably Jerusalem is symbolized as a woman giving birth to Palestinian people. See for example Suleiman Mansour's works Untilled (1988). Cf. Sarah Rogers, "Painting Territorial Claims on the Canvas: Images of Jerusalem by Contemporary Palestinian and Israeli Artists" (Unpublished Dissertation, Tufts University, 1999), p. 12.

(29.) Marily Sibley Fries, "The City as Metaphor for the Human Condition: Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz", 24 Modern Fiction Studies (Spring 1978), p.44.

(30.) Jerusalem is believed to be strategically located in the center of the world. Ancient literary sources speak of Jerusalem as the "navel of the earth." Cf. Richard M. Mackowski, Jerusalem City of Jesus: An Exploration of the Traditions, Writings, and Remains of the Holy City from the Time of Christ (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1980).

(31.) Abroad Harb, The Other Side of the Promised Land, 2nd Ed. (Ramallah:Birzeit University Press, 1994).

(32.) Cf. Gelfant, Ibid: pp. 4-12.

(33.) Cf. Abraham Ashkenasi, Palestinian Identities and References (New York: Praeger, 1992), p. 77.

(34.) Ahmad Harb, Baqaya (Remains), The Other Side o/the Promised Land'sequence novel, Ibid: p. 78.

(35.) Mahmoud Darwish, "The Light of Darkness and the Stone", Al-Carmel (Winter, 1998): 198-200. The translation from Arabic is by the author.

(36.) Izzat Ghazzawi, Nebo Mountain, trans, by the author (Birzeit University Press, 1996).

(37.) Burton Pike, Ibid: p. 13.

(38.) Cf. The Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land, Ed. Avraham Negev (New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1986).

(39.) Holy Koran, 17:l. Trans. N. J. Dawood (Penguin Books).

(40.) Cf. The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Writing Arabic, Ed. J. M. Cowan (New York: Spoken Language Services, Inc., 1976).

Ahmad Harb is Dean of Arts, Birzeit University, as well as a writer and novelist.