It is seldom a good sign when a publisher tries to market  a novel as an exotic spin on a more famous article. A recent translation of Omar Khalifah’s Sand-Catcher advertises itself as a “sardonic Palestinian Citizen Kane”. Aside  from the “sardonic”, whose meaning evidently escapes the copywriter, Sand-Catcher has no epic flourish of the latter. It is a minor work, as fleeting and insubstantial as its title implies; its significance lies wholly in the single intriguing dilemma which underlies it.

Sand-Catcher opens with four journalists arriving at the home of an 85-year-old man  to interview him about events from 70  years prior. The events in question are the Nakba, the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. The four journalists are Jordanians of Palestinian heritage, whose relation to the lost country is both  removed and painfully intimate. For their generation’s sake, they hope to record the old man’s experiences, as a witness and survivor of this national catastrophe. To their astonishment, the old boy keeps mum, then instructs them profanely to clear out. For our reporters, the matter becomes personal, and the remainder of the novel will appeal to those who vociferate about mediatic intrusions and relish accounts of gutter press malpractice. To call their conspiracy a plot is to bestow a false coherence on clownish (but far from benevolent) stratagems, interlarded with droll sides about the sex life of Middle Eastern women.

Yet, the true tension of the story lies outside of these journalistic maneuvers , encapsulated in a confidence made by the old man to his grandson: “It’s my Nakba, not yours.” This is not a statement about trauma in the commonplace sense. Traumatic experiences are effectively disowned or unclaimed (see Cathy Caruth’s collection of essays). If there is trauma, it is experienced by the collective, the second- and third-generation Palestinians. For the old man, it is a question of ownership: where his self-declared interrogators see a piece of (unredeemed) history, he sees, rightly, his own lived experience. These two perspectives are irreconcilable, hence the old man’s insistent warnings—which from another view sounds like classic paranoia—against the “memory thieves”. Freudians might call him a melancholic, one who, confronted with an irreparable loss, internalizes it as part of their ego. If this withdrawal is pathological, it is no less so than the obsessive disclosing of the later chroniclers, for whom this selfishness must seem like a threat.  His son, for example,  insists that unless he tells his story, “Palestine will vanish from the map of the world”. On a personal level , this is gross hyperbole; on a collective scale, it has the force of a categorical imperative.  But this anxiety is also entangled with family resentment which is, of course, the heart of the conflict.

Khalifah’s conceit makes for a compelling short story; as a novel it goes nowhere, for no conclusions can be given. Speaking of conclusions, the novel’s finale is downright silly, even against the farce that precedes it. Upon closing the book, one is left with the impression of a diminutive sphinx collapsing back into sand. The riddle, however, remains.
Edited By: Alice Weldon