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May 12th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
This month we’re excited to share Mahmoud Shukair’s “Praise for the Women of the Family,” a delightful novel set in the tumultuous time after the Nakba (the Palestinian exodus from what is now Israel), portraying the rapid advance of modernity and the growing conflict in 1950s Palestine. Shukair is one of the most celebrated and prolific writers of short stories in modern Arab literature. He has authored 45 books, six television series, and four plays.
“Praise for the Women of the Family” follows the al-’Abd al-Lat clan as they exit the desert and prepare to leave its Bedouin customs behind. Some of the women of the family are drawn to the allure of urban glitz, while others scorn it and fear the loss of their traditional lifestyle and values.
Mahmoud Shukair’s works effuse a sprightly tone, presenting characters from everyday life who grapple with customs uprooted by challenges, be it from within family dynamics or rapid political changes. His short stories often embody dark humor at its finest, meticulously structured in riveting tales told in the canon of post-colonial short fiction that dominated the literary landscape of his youth.
The author was born in Jabal al-Mukabbar, Jerusalem, in 1941. His stories have been translated into several languages, including English, French, German, Chinese, Mongolian, and Czech. He was jailed twice by the Israeli authorities for political speech and was deported to Lebanon in 1975. He returned to Jerusalem in 1993 and continues to live there today. In 2011, he was awarded the Mahmoud Darwish Prize for Freedom of Expression.
“Praise for the Women in the Family” was originally published in Arabic in 2015 and was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2016. Interlink Books has released an English translation of the novel, available for Mondoweiss readers at a 10% discount with the promo code BookClub.
PRAISE FOR THE WOMEN OF THE FAMILY
by Mahmoud Shukair; translated by Paul Starkey
224 pp. Interlink Books. $15
Copyright © Hachette Antoine, 2015 and 2019; Translation copyright © Paul Starkey, 2019; Originally published in Arabic in 2015 by Naufal Books, an imprint of Hachette Antoine, Beirut, Lebanon.
We had to cancel our trip.
Sanaa grumbled and fell silent, as she usually did when something took her by surprise. Then she busied herself inspecting her clothes that she’d arranged in her suitcase, taking them out and putting them back into the wardrobe. With a mixture of regret and sense of loss, she looked at the bathing suit I’d bought her a few days earlier.
Sanaa had been keen to travel and visit Beirut again, a city famous for its warm climate, and its sea. I had visited it once before our wedding. Then after our wedding we spent ten days there. I continued to be impressed by it and wanted to go back again and again. I wanted us to be able to celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary there, to renew our acquaintance with a city we loved and be reminded of the first days of our marriage. “How I long to visit the places where we were at that time!” Sanaa said.
We regarded the trips that some people here made as escapes from the reality that we lived in, or as acceptance of, and submission to, that reality, retreats to a private world in order to forget the world around us. When it became clear that things would remain as they were for no one knew how long, we realized it made no sense to just be unhappy, continuing to deny ourselves the simplest pleasures that could help us bear our burdens. We started to go out here and there, to enjoy ourselves a bit.
When we went to the Dead Sea together, I put on my swimsuit and swam in the water. Sanaa contented herself with her own personal ritual: she took off her shoes and lifted her dress above her knees, so that the water washed her legs and wetted the edge of her dress. When she met the women of the family one evening, she told them what she had done, to demonstrate that she did not respect the usual conventions of modesty. I sympathized with her, and she sympathized with me, because I carry the weight of the family on my shoulders, a weight that my father made me carry. Sanaa and I wanted to be free of the family and its cares, at least for a while.
~
My father named me Muhammad ibn Mannan al-‘Abd al-Lat, known as al-Asghar (the Youngest), to distinguish me from two other brothers to whom my father gave the same name in honor of his own father, Sheikh Muhammad, who had an important position in the clan when our people lived in the desert. He called one of my brothers al-Kabir (the Elder) and the other one al-Saghir (the Younger). They went in totally opposite directions, and my father grumbled about them both. On several occasions, he announced before the sons of the family that he had put his trust in me. That he pinned his hopes on me to keep the various parts of the family together, to protect the women from any evil—especially after what had happened to my sister Falha and caused my father such grief—and do laudable deeds that would lift up the reputation of the al-‘Abd al-Lat clan, which had spread its various branches, and scattered its sons, everywhere.
When I told him that I wanted to marry a divorcee three years older than myself, he just looked at me.
“You must be joking,” he said.
“Not at all,” I replied. “I’m not joking.”
He took this decision of mine hard and almost withdrew his trust in me, lumping me in with my two brothers Muhammad al-Kabir and Muhammad al-Saghir, and with my brother Falihan, who’d committed several crimes. The year was 1962, and our general situation was not promising, political repression being at its height. He continued to give me one piece of advice after the other, stressing that I would be able to get a pretty virgin from Ra’s al-Naba‘ or some other village around Jerusalem. But I would not be persuaded.
My mother was sympathetic towards me, in light of his opposition to my wishes.
~
Mother was obsessed with her shadow, sometimes following it and sometimes walking in front of it, in broad daylight. But this obsession didn’t stop her from closely following the affairs of the family and interfering in its various trajectories. Despite her strong emotions, which sometimes made her angry, she had a good heart—unlike my father, who could be a little harsh. He continued to adopt a carrot-and-stick approach with me, but without success.
When Sanaa came to our house, she behaved with poise and tact, and spoke without any haughtiness. I had told my father that her former husband was her cousin, who was fifteen years older than her. They didn’t have children because they had decided to wait for five years before having one. They lived together for three years but she couldn’t tolerate his preoccupation with his business. She fled from him, and they agreed on a divorce. They went to court and stood before the judge. I was recording the case proceedings. Sanaa captured my heart from the start.
She came to our house, and my mother said she was a woman worthy of praise. Sanaa and her mother and father spent the whole day in Ra’s al-Naba‘. After she had left, my father said to me, “With God’s blessing!”
That was twenty years ago.
~
Now, I could find no alternative but to cancel the trip, and I didn’t know if we would be able to rearrange it in a few days’ time. When we were getting ready to travel, my mother said that she had seen the family horse in a dream. The horse, which hadn’t appeared in her dreams for some time, had shown up again. She said that it had neighed a lot, as if to warn us about the consequences of this trip.
Still, we were eager to go, despite the bullets that had been flying around there—sometimes more seriously—for seven years. We went to bed hoping that in the morning we would be able to cross the bridge to Amman, and from there board a plane for Beirut. But because air raids and chaos had engulfed the south of Lebanon, and were advancing towards Beirut like a flood, we couldn’t travel.
~
I’m forty-two now. I’ve lived a life full of worries—family concerns, as well as concerns for Sanaa. This trip that we were hoping to make was in keeping with a ritual that we followed to relieve the family pressures on Sanaa. These pressures weren’t in her hands, but she suffered from them, and as soon as they calmed down they’d flared up again. From time to time she would suggest to me that we separate. I wouldn’t agree to a separation, though, because I loved her, and because my work in the sharia court had given me an aversion to divorce, the burden of which usually fell on the wives. I told her, “I won’t separate from you, no matter how many burdens there are.”
I worked in the sharia court in Jerusalem. I started there in 1958. My job wasn’t of much significance, but for some time my relatives thought I was an important official when they saw me in my dark suit, blue tie over a white shirt, holding a black briefcase in which I kept papers and files. And I believed them. I believed I was an official of some importance, despite the fact that I was only a rather junior official in the hierarchy. My self-confidence grew, and I thought I would be able to please my father by fulfilling his wish to reunite the family.
I got the job at a time when posts weren’t easy to come by. The credit for that goes to my father, who was able to take advantage of his relations with people who had come to prominence after the East Bank and West Bank were united, and who held posts in various government departments and institutions. He asked one of them to intervene to get me a post, and he found me a position as a clerk in the sharia court in Jerusalem, recording marriage contracts in a large register, as well as inheritance certificates and divorce papers. A lot of young women came to the court to register their marriages to young men, and divorcees also came to register second or third marriages to men who were older than they were, because they were in need of a man’s protection. I saw so many examples of divorce for one reason or another, all sorts of reasons, in fact! As I look back over my time in the job, I can confidently say that these years definitely made an impression on me as they went by.
~
My brother Muhammad al-Saghir was always competing with my other brother, Muhammad al-Kabir, for influence over me, to define the direction I was taking with my life. Both of them tried to recruit me to their own views. I was wary, unenthusiastic about linking my life to convictions that might give me responsibilities I was incapable of fulfilling. Before I got my job, Muhammad al-Saghir told my father that he knew the director of the Religious Institute in Jerusalem, who was ready to accept me into the Institute, from which I would graduate as a sheikh, to lead people in prayers in the Haram al-Sharif. Although I was naturally religious, I hadn’t thought of becoming a sheikh wearing a turban, so I wasn’t excited about my brother’s suggestion, and my father wasn’t, either.
My father wanted to arrange a position for me that would provide me with a reasonable amount of money, of which he would take a share. He was no longer confident that he could rely on livestock, after investing his wealth in land he had bought here and there, and he was unwilling to accept any money from my brother Falihan because it was laundered. So I worked in the court. I wouldn’t deny that my work there was out of tune with my dreams, but getting a regular salary at the end of each month makes you turn a blind eye. I consoled myself with the fact that I might be able to change careers and choose a job I liked better.
After completing a training course, in addition to my work in the court, I was given the job of writing marriage contracts outside the court. I became a religious registrar, a ma’dhun. I would go to engagement and wedding parties, and sit between the families of the bride and bridegroom. I wrote the marriage contract and asked the bridegroom to put his hand on the hand of the bride’s father, who had decided to give him his daughter in marriage. When the bridegroom had confirmed his acceptance, I would ask permission to go to the bride to hear her view. Preceded by her father, I would go into an adjoining room. One of her brothers would escort her from a crowd of women, and she would stand in front of me and give her agreement to the marriage, then return to the women.
I heard many girls give their assent to their marriages, only to discover later that their agreement had been the result of pressure from their father, or one of their brothers. Then the truth would emerge that the girl did not really want this husband, especially if it was a cousin or other relative, because she wanted to marry someone else. This would result in a wretched family life for her, which might well end in divorce.
But I would finish writing the contract, with the signatures of the parties and witnesses on it, and continue to sit with the guests. I could display no special knowledge on matters of religion. I would talk politics a bit and discuss the repressive atmosphere in which we lived. When we came under occupation, I would talk with others about the suffering of our people, but cautiously, for fear of agents who might report my conversation to their masters, in exchange for petty sums thrown in their direction, like a bone to a stray dog. I’d talk about the necessity of guarding the new generation from the decay of corruption.
Then the food would arrive—a mansif, made of rice, flat bread, meat and gravy. I’d ask for a spoon, which some tribespeople, accustomed to eating mansif with their hands, would find strange. They would roll a lump of rice and bread between their fingers and put it right into their mouths. I previously used to do the same, thinking it was a sign of good breeding, until a few days after our wedding Sanaa was appalled to see me stuffing rice in my mouth the same way, and asked me to eat with a spoon.
~
Whenever I was on my own, I remembered the hopes that my father had pinned on me: that I would be able to achieve something beneficial for the family and the clan.
I would feel the weight of this hope, which meant closely following the personal secrets, dreams and fates of both the men and the women…
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