commit df01b20acddd32b467512296f0b262e13e027ed5
parent 72605f9eb1282e84d09ad74fdab66bc23e10fbeb
Author: FIGBERT <figbert@figbert.com>
Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2024 14:03:09 -0800
Add Waking Lions review
Diffstat:
2 files changed, 296 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
diff --git a/content/reading/illusion-of-return.md b/content/reading/illusion-of-return.md
@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
+++
title = "The Novel of Palestinian Disillusionment"
date = 2024-11-01T17:25:51-07:00
+updated = 2024-12-14
[extra]
book = "The Illusion of Return"
author = "Samir El-Youssef"
@@ -10,10 +11,10 @@ rating = "★★★☆☆"
**Author's Note:** I write everything in a conversational tone, so I
doubt anybody reading this will notice much difference, but this review
-was originally a presentation. It is one of two I will give in Russell
-Berman's wonderful [Zionism and the Novel]. It was first written in [iA
-Presenter]. The title I have given the review here on the website was
-taken from our syllabus.
+was originally a presentation. It is one of two I gave in Russell
+Berman's wonderful [Zionism and the Novel], the second of which [you can
+read here]. It was first written in [iA Presenter]. The title I have
+given the review here on the website was taken from our syllabus.
## Let's begin
~~Alright close your laptops and let's do this for real.~~ To get you up
@@ -218,6 +219,7 @@ reconcile this position with the reality of Israel—a return that worked?
What, if anything, makes the case of the Jews different?
[Zionism and the Novel]: https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?q=COMPLIT37Q
+[you can read here]: @/reading/waking-lions.md
[iA Presenter]: https://ia.net/presenter
[HISTORY81B]: https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?q=HISTORY81B
[*The War of Return*]: @/reading/war-of-return/index.md
diff --git a/content/reading/waking-lions.md b/content/reading/waking-lions.md
@@ -0,0 +1,290 @@
++++
+title = "The Detective Novel: Interior Life and Refugees"
+date = 2024-12-14T13:53:42-08:00
+[extra]
+book = "Waking Lions"
+author = "Ayelet Gundar-Goshen"
+finished = 2024-11-28
+rating = "★★★★☆"
++++
+
+**Author's Note:** I write everything in a conversational tone, so I
+doubt anybody reading this will notice much difference, but this review
+was originally a presentation. It is the second of two I gave in Russell
+Berman's wonderful [Zionism and the Novel]. It was first written in [iA
+Presenter]. The title I have given the review here on the website was
+adapted from our syllabus. You can read a similar transcript of the first
+presentation I gave in my review of [The Illusion of Return].
+
+## A Brief Something to Note Before We Begin
+Ayelet Gundar-Goshen is at Stanford! She's a lecturer and
+artist-in-residence at the Taube Center for Jewish Studies. I met her on
+Tuesday. And, her most recent novel is set in Palo Alto and deals with
+similar themes to the book we're discussing today.
+
+Which are what?
+
+## What is this book about?
+Nominally, it's something of a murder mystery. But unlike a typical
+murder mystery, we the reader know "whodunnit" the whole time.
+
+So perhaps it's closer to a different genre that I'm quite excited about
+because I just really solidified its existence in my mind recently: a
+thriller. We know the great secret, and we're watching its consequences
+unravel and spread out.
+
+There are aspects of a drama here. We have family dynamics on display,
+with subelements of romantic, paternal, and maternal relationships.
+There are career struggles: the rising star banished to the desert, and
+now with his secret double-life (though this doesn't get too much focus)
+he's even on the edge of getting fired from this provincial post. And in
+a true return to form for this class there's the possibility of an
+affair.
+
+But dive beneath this upper crust of the text, and you can see that the
+novel has profound political implications. Because this is a book that
+is, at its core, about gray areas.
+
+> That one battered Eritrean had called her an angel and one
+> grief-stricken Bedouin had called her a devil, and that both of them
+> were wrong, had to be wrong. Because neither angels nor devils
+> existed. Of that Eitan was convinced. People existed.
+
+Here, Ayelet discusses impurity of character, that no person can fit
+neatly into the fantastical archetypes of angel and devil. Sirkit is no
+angel—she is, among other injustices, forcing the doctor into this
+illegal practice against his will—but is no devil either—that same
+illegal hospital has saved real human lives.
+
+> People generally assumed that someone like him had made a choice
+> somewhere in the past... One road turned right. The other left. If he
+> turned right, he’d choose evil. If left – good. The directions
+> themselves weren’t important. What was important was the crossroads;
+> that is, the existence of the moment when a person stands before two
+> clear, opposing paths and chooses one over the other.
+
+This passage comes in a deeply fascinating portion of the book: a
+section dedicated to exploring the history of a very bad man. The
+Eritreans Eitan encounters all work at a restaurant, and the owner of
+that restaurant is a drug-pusher, abuser of their cheap labor, and a
+rapist. Not a good man. The author has this to say about him.
+
+She then says that this is false. That good and evil are not like a
+crossroads. That they're like "goat paths," winding and overlapping
+trails that snake through the desert, taking a patient and trained eye
+to separate them from the windings of rocks and sands the wind naturally
+forms. There's no one choice: we are just meandering on goat paths that
+at one point or another may align with our paradigms of good and evil,
+black and white.
+
+This is expressed in the text through the issue of
+
+## Intercommunal Relations
+And specifically, the Eritrean refugee issue in Israel and the
+overlapping layers that exposes within society.
+
+We witness a few different communities in the text, and I think it's
+super fascinating to break them down.
+
+### The Communities
+1. Jews
+ 1. Ashkenazim
+ 2. Mizrahim
+ 3. Ethiopians
+2. Eritreans
+3. Bedouins
+4. Egyptians
+
+What makes it super fascinating is that **all of these groups** are
+perpetuating complex and interleaving harms on **all of the groups**.
+Ayelet leaves none out, it's fantastic.
+
+Bottom-up:
+
+1. The Egyptians enforce the border with Israel on their side. They
+ shoot at Eritreans trying to cross over illegally by foot, as all
+ Eritreans in Israel do, which is the genesis of the popular joke
+ referenced in the novel that the Eritreans are the "world champions
+ of the 500-meter race," so named after the range of Egyptian rifles.
+ These are Arabs, who speak Arabic, shooting at Africans trying to
+ enter Israel to achieve the Afro-Asiatic equivalent of the American
+ Dream.
+2. The Bedouins are a different and distinct Arab people. They live in
+ Israel, one of three major Arab communities also including the
+ Arab-Palestinian-Israelis and the Druze. Due to their migratory
+ way of life, they live in corrugated metal semi-temporary structures
+ largely outside both the protection and supervision of the State. In
+ this book, they aggravate the Egyptians by acting as smugglers of
+ Eritreans across the border, the Eritreans by perpetuating abuses
+ against them both on the journey from Africa to Asia and after in
+ Israel—exploiting their more established status in Israeli society to
+ beat down on them—as well as the Jews by running a significant,
+ often-violent criminal element in the desert.
+
+ > They don’t help us and we don’t help them.
+
+ This is Sirkit commenting on the relationship of the Eritrean and
+ Bedouin communities. The Jewish-Bedouin frustration can be seen in
+ the commentary of the police, which is consistently negative, and
+ specifically the easy dismissal from the get-go that Asum's
+ death—which sparks the conflict of the novel—was probably done by
+ some random Bedouin and thus unsolvable. A nameless victim and a
+ nameless murderer, both members of transitory and peripheral
+ communities.
+3. The Eritreans—and this is important—are African, so really the only
+ people from a context removed from the Middle East, but they are
+ Arabic-speaking Muslims. They have a distinct culture, and another
+ language (Tigrinya), but they are also culturally compatible and
+ mutually intelligible with the Bedouins and the Egyptians. Their
+ transgression toward the Jews and the Egyptians is the same:
+ territorial violation, though to the latter it is significantly more
+ temporary. The Eritreans are imposing themselves on unwilling hosts.
+ Against the Bedouins, they have a different sort of territorial
+ transgression, and that's of class territory: they have taken up
+ residence in the bottom rung of society, alongside the Bedouin,
+ forcing them to share a conceptual (and occasionally physical) space
+ that once they had full control over.
+4. And of course the Jews. I've highlighted three important subdivisions
+ of the Jewish community in Israel here to acknowledge that there is,
+ in addition to the inter-communal harm we're discussing, also
+ intra-communal harm as well, but actually primarily to emphasize the
+ following: in Israeli society, Mizrahim are considered Jews, not
+ Arabs, and Ethiopian Jews are considered Jews, not
+ Africans/Eritreans. There is visual similarity frankly between all of
+ these groups, but it's important to note that group dynamics don't
+ play out according to the Western conception of similarity.
+
+ > Both were Arabs, so they were identical. Both aroused a combination
+ > of wariness and shame in her. First wariness, then shame. Their
+ > dark faces, which actually resembled the faces of the people she’d
+ > grown up with, and yet looked different.... She didn’t like feeling
+ > that way, but it was how she felt. That they had less intelligence
+ > and more hatred. That they were pathetic because they’d lost, but
+ > more dangerous because of it, and even though that seemed
+ > contradictory, it actually wasn’t. Like a dog you’ve beaten that
+ > you now both ridicule and fear. An Arab dog.
+
+ This is Liat, a Mizrahi Jew, talking about Arabs.
+
+ The Jews perpetuate harm on the Egyptians in the obvious way, and vice
+ versa. Against the Bedouins by their inadequate accommodation of their
+ lifestyle in the workings of the State. And against the Eritreans
+ through deportation and their status as illegal aliens.
+
+Everyone is harming each other. It's not simple. None of these groups
+are good guys, and none are bad guys. That Ayelet is able to capture
+this so thoroughly is a testament to her ability. It is a message we
+desperately need.
+
+## Side Explorations
+There are, in addition to this core track, also some very cool tangents
+in Waking Lions.
+
+### Relationships
+Ayelet contrasts in the text two models of marital relationship: that of
+Sirkit and Asum with that of Liat and Eitan.
+
+Sirkit and Asum's relationship takes place entirely before we, the
+reader, arrive but we get a pretty good understanding of it by the end.
+They had three kids back in Eritrea, two of whom died in childbirth and
+one of whom was killed by a soldier, perhaps while they were fleeing or
+in an act that instigated their emigration. Asum has, since the
+inception of the relationship, been physically abusive. He both hit
+Sirkit consistently and would burn her with cigarette butts. When Asum
+was hit by Eitan in his car, he had taken Sirkit out to beat her in the
+desert. Sirkit resented him, and is somewhat happy that he died, while
+also resenting Eitan in some capacities for having the gall to remove
+her agency from her liberation.
+
+I haven't finished my own thinking and thesis-generation on Liat and
+Eitan, because I think it's bigger than just this text: I think Liat and
+Eitan have an explicitly paradigmatic Zionist relationship. Israel is a
+deeply family-oriented country. The statistic that's often cited here is
+that it's the only highly-developed country with a birth rate well above
+the replacement rate, but I think it goes far beyond numbers. (Though
+while we're talking numbers Israel also does by far the most IVF of
+anywhere in the world, by a factor of I think 2-3 times.) Marriage and
+children are a huge aspect of Israeli society, mile-markers on the
+Israeli path through life, and I want to do more research on this to
+find its instigation. It's here that I actually disagree with the
+previous presenter's analysis of Liat and Eitan's relationship, and
+define the exact dynamic that I think defines the Zionist relationship:
+the previous presenter alleged that Liat dominated the relationship,
+perhaps due to her detective's tendencies to know everything about
+everyone, and that Eitan's feelings toward Sirkit were his searching for
+freedom from this domination. I would counter that's it's the
+opposite—their relationship is one of mutual, total dedication.
+
+> Liat’s eyes changed constantly.... And for almost fifteen years he had
+> been judging himself by the scales of justice in those eyes. A measure
+> of right and wrong unmatched in its precision.
+
+> She could say in total honesty that she still loved her man. And he
+> loved her.... Embarrassing incidents might happen to other couples,
+> but not to her and Eitan.
+
+The reason why Eitan is so devastated by the total upheaval of his life
+is not because of the legal consequences of revealing what was
+transpiring, but because he was terrified to his core that Liat would
+look at him differently. It happens later in the book when she flees to
+her mother's house, but is then repaired. The reason with Liat is so
+devastated by the estrangement of her husband is because of the huge
+role he plays in her own narrative of her life.
+
+There is also perhaps a lens one could apply to these two relationships
+that involves national development and increasing rights/modernity,
+paralleling Eitan's perception of the Eritreans as less-than, but given
+that the differences in their relationship are written as true and not
+just perceived, I think that's a dead end.
+
+### Lions
+I had a moment while reading the book like when a character in a movie
+turns to the screen and says "What are we, some kind of Suicide Squad?"
+and so I went back through the book and picked out what I figured to be
+important references to this figure that appears in the title.
+
+> She knew that any other woman would have started checking up on him
+> long ago. And she knew that she, who checked up on and investigated
+> others on a daily basis, she, of all people, would never do that. She
+> wasn’t willing to look at him with those eyes of doubt. To look for
+> signs, traces. She wasn’t willing because if she began doing that now,
+> she wasn’t sure she would be able to stop later. On safari in Kenya,
+> after their wedding, the guide had told them that once a lion tastes
+> human flesh, it won’t ever want to hunt anything else. Perhaps it
+> wasn’t true, just a story for tourists, but her lioness’s instincts
+> knew there was no greater temptation, no hunt more tantalizing, than
+> the ambush of your loved ones.
+
+> Lions roared inside him all night. He turned onto his side. Tried to
+> think about Itamar, about Yaheli.... When she finally lifted the
+> blanket and lay down beside him in the long chaos of the night, he
+> drowned in the blue-black of her hair and kissed her silent lips, and
+> he didn’t think about angels or devils. Or about people either.
+
+In the first quote, the lion is Liat's investigatory instincts, which
+she refuses to turn inwards on her own family. In the second, the lion
+is Eitan's adulterous desire for Sirkit.
+
+## A Question
+
+> Because that which hath been is that which shall be, and today, like
+> yesterday, the earth would carry on...
+
+Here, Eitan observes after hitting Asum in his SUV how the world hasn't
+left its axis. The rest of the book ensues, and then ends with the quote
+below:
+
+> How beautiful the earth is when it moves properly. How pleasant to
+> move with it. To forget that any other movement ever existed. That a
+> different movement is even possible.
+
+Ultimately, our protagonist Eitan escapes from his crimes unpunished.
+Asum's murder goes unsolved, as does that of the restaurant owner. Eitan
+is made famous in the media as a doctor who volunteered to help the
+refugee community, perhaps illegally but certainly nobly.
+
+How do you interpret Eitan's ultimate judgement, or lack thereof?
+
+[Zionism and the Novel]: https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?q=COMPLIT37Q
+[iA Presenter]: https://ia.net/presenter
+[The Illusion of Return]: @/reading/illusion-of-return.md
