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waking-lions.md (14801B)

---

 +++
 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