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The Road Taken
What is lacking in the debate about the novella is the consideration of its
horizon. Memoirs was written at a very peculiar time: a time of change, of
264 · Hanita Brand
an abrupt move away from one era, and one style of writing, to another
era, with its own new style. The move away was from a religious Roman-
tic style of writing that was influenced by the theosophical teachings that
suffused Arab Romanticism, particularly its poetry. The greatest repre-
sentatives of this kind of writing were the poets and philosophers Jubrān
Khalīl Jubrān and Mikhā᾿īl Nu῾ayma. As is the case with all Romantic
literature, theirs too had great respect for nature in its two meanings, both
the nature we see outside around us, and our inner makeup—our innate
character. But what was particular to their special brand of Romanticism
was its unique religious Weltanschauung, which gave it its theosophical
nature. Within it all monotheistic religions were welcome, and ideals of
communality and equality were married to a universal religious belief in
which there prevailed a message of tolerance and forgiveness. If George
Kanazi were to include and apply in his otherwise thorough analysis of
the work its particular religious theosophical worldview, the ideal char-
acter proposed by the hen, which he summarized in his research, would
faithfully represent this Arab theosophical Romanticism. Quite a few
Arab writers, including Palestinians, wrote in that vein up to the 1940s.
But around that time, due to the escalating conflict in Palestine among
other reasons, there was an abrupt move away from it into a message of
vengeance and violence, particularly in Palestinian writings.
I have written elsewhere about another Palestinian writer, a Chris-
tian poetess whose work underwent just such a change: Najwā Qa῾wār
Farah.
27
Up to the 1940s she wrote mostly Romantic poetry of the kind de-
scribed above. Then she turned to writing Palestinian nationalist stories.
In one of her stories, “Nidā᾿ al-aṭlāl” (The Call of the Ruins), published in
a collection in 1956, a Palestinian father, who becomes a refugee after the
creation of the state of Israel in 1948, bequeaths to his son a handwritten
message of tolerance, punctuated by such phrases as “it is better for us
to suffer wrong than to cause wrong, for the evil deed is foul,” and lay-
ing the blame for the Palestinian Nakba (calamity) on the human heart,
rather than on “the British, the Arab leaders, or the Jewish leaders.”
28
As
was noted by Avrhahm Yinon, who translated this story into Hebrew,
after the book was printed, the publisher decided to change some of the
original lines of the father’s speech in which he spoke of mutual tolerance
based on righteousness and mercy. A revision was pasted into each copy,
on which were written new lines calling for vengeance, including such
The Road Not Taken: Isḥāq Mūsā al-Ḥusseini and His Chickens · 265
phrases as “there is no peace without justice, and there is no mercy and
no pity before justice is rendered.”
29
Around the time of the change in the cultural horizons one could find
both attitudes—old and new—expressed by the same people. Thus in
1942 a close friend and colleague of al-Ḥusseini, the Jerusalemite Chris-
tian Palestinian writer and intellectual Khalīl al-Sakākīnī (1878–1953), a
fierce anti-Zionist Arab leader, was asked by an American journalist who
visited Jerusalem, “What is the solution to the conflict?” He replied, “It
will be solved in one of two ways: either our land will remain ours, or
it will be taken away from us by force,”
30
echoing almost precisely the
words of the young hotheaded chicken in the Memoirs. But al-Sakākīnī
was also against wars, and he advocated even in 1948, “Return your
swords to your shields and do not fight anyone; there is enough room on
earth for everyone,” even as he knew that no one would listen to him.
31
A move toward nationalism happened also in Hebrew literature of the
same era, though on a smaller scale. Thus at the beginning of the twenti-
eth century one could still find stories like Ḥemda Ben-Yehuda’s “Ḥavat
bney Rekhav” (Bney Rekhav’s Estate), published in 1903, in which a Bed-
ouin tribe is seen as a lost Jewish tribe and is eventually turned into the
ideal Zionists—a Hebrew-speaking avant-garde tribe of shepherds and
cultivators of the land.
32
But the stories of the 1950s already conformed
to the more familiar definition of nationalism.
That clash between the two types of ethos clearly marked the history
of the debate over Memoirs. While the novella was written in the old
style, expressing a message of tolerance and communality, the debate
took place already inside the new era, where a message of struggle had
the priority. In fact, one can see, when viewing the responses to the Mem-
oirs by Arab critics, an escalation in the phrasing of the criticism leveled at
the story as time passed. While the earlier criticism usually only politely
hinted at the problem, the more recent critiques were harsher in tone.
Thus al-Sayyid al-Dālī writes in 1943: “The reader might be surprised
to learn that Arab unity was discussed in these Memoirs by that hen in a
way as never before. Indeed, the reader’s level of surprise might increase
when he learns that the Palestine problem was also raised in these Mem-
oirs. Rather than overtly stating this—suffice it to just mention it here.”
33
But in 1981, Fārūq Wādī writes that “consciously or not, [al-Ḥusseini] cre-
ated a Palestinian hen that betrays Palestine.”
34
In this climate, the author
266 · Hanita Brand
had to defend his loyalty to his nation more frequently. Al-Ḥusseini’s
subsequent writings also manifested an increased influence of the new
ethos. While, as I indicated above, he always wrote about Jerusalem and
Palestine before and after the change, in his later writings he tied this
topic to the national struggle. Thus he wrote in 1966 Literature and Arab
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