For this old man, the only thing that matters — whether it’s ‘48 or ‘49 or ‘56 or ‘91 — is that Palestine is lost. Palestine is no longer so. Why do you even want to hear more details, when this is the bottom line?
Omar Khalifah is a Palestinian novelist and short story writer in Arabic. His collection Ka’annani Ana (As If I Were Myself) was published in Amman, Jordan in 2010, and his novel Qabid al-Raml (Sand-Catcher) was published in Amman in 2020. The English translation of Sand-Catcher, by Barbara Romaine, was published in December 2024 with Coffee House Press.
Khalifah is also an Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and Culture at Georgetown University in Qatar. His first academic study Nasser in the Egyptian Imaginary was published in 2016. He is currently working on a book-project on remembering the Palestinian Nakba.
In January, I spoke with Khalifah via Zoom. In Sand-Catcher, Khalifah’s most recent novel, a Palestinian who was driven out of Palestine in 1948 is hounded by a younger generation of Palestinian journalists to recount his experience for a news story. Even decades later, he refuses to tell anyone about it, including his own family. This refusal sparks a host of conflicted feelings among the journalists and the family, leading to an absurd series of reactions.
We had planned to begin our discussion with Sand-Catcher and how its dark humor engages with the ongoing condition of the Nakba. However, the news of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire was announced a day before our conversation, and so we started by addressing this recent political development before exploring Khalifah’s literary and academic work.
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Omid Bagherli: You’re a Professor in Doha, Qatar, and I’m talking to you a day after the agreement of a permanent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which was brokered in Doha. Could you offer some thoughts and reflections on the agreement? Could you share what the atmosphere is like in Doha, either on campus or in the city?
Omar Khalifah: Of course, the atmosphere is one of big relief. Anything that could put an end to this horrible war would be welcomed by Palestinians, by many people in the Palestinian camp, and by many people around the world. This is something that we have been really looking forward to. That’s obvious. Now, maybe the novelist in me always wants to complicate things, and I don’t want to sound cynical, but two things come to mind which are really unfortunate.
The first is that this agreement could have happened way back on day three or four of the war. So here we are, after more than a year of the war, with none of Israel’s most pronounced objectives realized. Israel’s less pronounced objective in this war has been realized — which I believe was actually Israel’s main mission — which is the obliteration of Gaza. But the most pronounced objectives are not realized. Hamas is still powerful in Gaza. The hostages are not released by force. So, we’re back to square one. Negotiations are the only way to end this. The tragic thing is that the main change that occurred over the past months is Donald Trump, like it or not. You know, a Republican. Call him whatever you want, a fascist, a misogynist, a racist white man etc., he was the reason for the materialization of this agreement. The genocide occurred under the umbrella of the Democrats. Biden could have exerted some force over Israeli policymakers to reach this on day three or four. This is something that I think people in the Global South will never forget. It will have huge repercussions in the time to come.
The second point is to ask: how many people will be killed from now until Sunday, which is the formal day of the ceasefire? And why? There is no “why,” even for the previous victims, but especially for the people in the last three days. The previous casualties died in the midst of the war. They were killed by Israel without knowing that the war was about to end. But in these last three days, Israel is still bombing Gaza — as we speak right now — even though it knows that a ceasefire is coming. It’s so gratuitous. You’re lost for words. It’s just unbelievably painful.
OB: I’m thinking about the November ceasefire agreement with Lebanon, too. Even after the ceasefire started, Israel didn’t cease firing.
OK: Exactly. Or, it’s announced — it’s coming in three days — and so, they think let’s bomb as much as we can until you know… I don’t know how to describe this.
OB: No, you’re right. It’s gratuitous. Let’s talk about your novel Sand-Catcher (2020) in relation to this. The novel is set in present-day Jordan. It follows a group of young journalists, all of whom are Palestinian, as they try to interview an old Palestinian man who witnessed the Nakba for their newspaper. Essentially, the group wants to publish his memories to further their careers as journalists. In addition, they feel they have a right to the old man’s story because they’re Palestinians. When the man refuses without giving a reason, all hell breaks loose.
Now, this puts me in a slightly awkward position as an interviewer asking you these questions, so we’ll acknowledge that! But hopefully, we can also discuss your interests and explore the dangers of thinking of a single, representative Palestinian view.
The first question I wanted to ask about Sand-Catcher is why you found the old man’s refusal formally interesting? Your academic work also focuses on the crises of memory in Palestinian culture. Could you share your interest in this refusal, this resistance to documentation?
OK: Sure. When I started writing the novel I wanted to write against the trauma plot. I have a problem with the trauma plot for various reasons. I’m not the only one. Many scholars are deconstructing the whole fetish of trauma and whether trauma can capture the magnitude of the events occurring in various parts of the world. In the Palestinian case, my problem with trauma is that it doesn’t do justice to the Nakba, because trauma for me connotes an event that happened in the past. It connotes a finite event in the past that’s still affecting people in the present. But the Nakba is an ongoing condition. There is no “normal time” and “trauma time” for Palestinians. There is Nakba time. So, both times are combined in the Palestinian case, whereas for many people — whether it’s the Holocaust, or the Armenian genocides, or many other horrible events — they imagine trauma in relation to a single extraordinary event happening at one point in time in the past. It’s finished, but its repercussions are still felt.
The Nakba undermines this paradigm, in my view. So, I was thinking about how to fictionalize this. What’s the best way? I’m not sure which one came first, the fiction-writer or the scholar in me, but I knew I wanted to undermine this common assumption. Similarly, I have been seeing a turn in Palestinian literature that registers the memories of 1948, which is understandable. But I have some issues with this trend, because it may give the impression that the Nakba is what occurred in 48. So, when you turn to the Nakba you turn to 1948. Yet what we are witnessing right now is the Nakba as well, right? So that’s two things against the trauma plot— the definition of trauma is not applicable to the Nakba, and the false impression that ‘48 is exclusively understood as the Nakba.
Also, there’s this idea of having “a right to know” what happened, which deprives victims of their ability to retain their stories to themselves. I wanted to mock and make fun of this idea of fetishizing painful stories and selling them for mass consumption, but also make it more… In hindsight I intended to show this issue as a Palestinian thing. One of Palestinians versus Palestinians. The memories of ‘48 is something that we talk about in various Palestinian communities, and we take for granted that people wanted to share. But what if people didn’t want to share?
OB: Even though the Nakba is ongoing, in Sand-Catcher, the younger generation of Palestinians living in Jordan don’t understand it that way. They describe themselves as “liberal” or as “ordinary” Palestinians and think of the catastrophe as a distinct event in the past.
But it comes out in other ways. Alongside this fetishization of 1948 in the novel, there’s also the sexual fetishization of Palestinians, especially Palestinian women. There are a few interactions in the novel along this line—one character has the clichéd obsession of unveiling the hijab, for example. Why did you want to foreground this sexual dynamic and place it in relation to the national trauma plot?
OK: First of all, I wanted to introduce a hijabi woman in this novel. I don’t think this had anything to do with Palestine. I wasn’t thinking of those famous tropes of “feminizing the nation,” or what have you. I didn’t have any kind of national approach to women or feminist approaches to the nation, etc. But I feel that hijabi women are way underrepresented in Arabic fiction. They do not really appear in a way that reflects how they exist in society, and I personally come from a family where most of my female relatives wear the hijab. So, I’m not an orientalist in that sense, or like a self-orientalist. These are my female relatives.
I wanted to introduce this aspect in the novel, but I felt that adding the sexual tension in the novel helped me with the satirical tone that I was trying to introduce. For example, this idea of sleeping with a Palestinian woman. Maybe it’s not expected to be heard from a Palestinian—maybe it’s something that other people may fetishize about. Now that I’m thinking about it, I think it was for me a window, if you will, through which I could provide more sarcastic or satirical approaches to the novel.
OB: I think one of the funny aspects of the novel is its repetitiveness. Characters get caught in clichés, and they realize that their behavior is ridiculous, but they continue to do it anyway. But in addition to this satirical kind of repetition, which is seen in these cycles of cliché and obsession, there’s also the repeated statement by the old man “Palestine was lost,” which is more serious and concludes Sand-Catcher. That’s a very different kind of repetition.
OK: That’s good. That last repetition is something I had in mind while approaching the end of the novel. I wanted a powerful ending. Some people who read the novel thought that that repetition was powerful, and some of them objected to it. I knew I wanted to do something different. I wanted to use the typography of the page itself. The page itself can carry the vastness of the disaster.
Also, through that repetition I wanted to mock the idea that remembering the past can help people remedy the present or their health. There is this romanticized idea about memory— the whole notion of global memory culture is that memory spreads human rights, that it prevents violence, that it helps people. But for this old man, the only thing that matters—whether it’s ‘48 or ‘49 or ‘56 or ‘91—is that Palestine is lost. Palestine is no longer so. Why do you even want to hear more details, when this is the bottom line? This repetition is like the repetition of the bottom line, the repetition of the most important fact for him. I think it was the old man’s unintentional or unwitting attempt to mock the obsession with the details of the past.
OB: Finally, I wanted to turn to your current academic research on Palestine, the Holocaust, the Nakba, and the issue of memory. Could you outline the general argument of the academic book you’re currently working on?
OK: It’s related to my fictional work. That’s why I can’t tell exactly which one came first. I’m always fascinated with questions of memory, and how the Nakba is remembered among the world’s most devastating catastrophes. My basic argument is that there are some particularities of the Nakba that make it very challenging to remember. So, I don’t take remembering for granted— I don’t think that the Nakba can be easily thought about through the remembering paradigm for various reasons, and in the book I highlight two main particularities of the Nakba.
We have already spoken about the first one, which is the fact that the Nakba is ongoing. What does it mean to remember an ongoing catastrophe? Can you even use the word “remember” here? If one of the basic meanings of remembering is to have a temporal distance between yourself and that which you remember, then that is absent in the case of the Nakba.
Second, the other interesting aspect about the Nakba is the perpetrators of the Nakba. After the Holocaust, Jews were monolithically and universally conceived of as permanent victims, and this paradigm has really influenced memory studies and trauma studies. Elevating Jews to the status of ideal victims creates huge obstacles for remembering the Nakba because the permanent victim, or a group of people who identify as the permanent victim, perpetrated the Nakba. How can Palestinians navigate this? In the book I engage with some really prominent patterns in Palestinian writing, such as Palestinians referring to themselves as “the victims of victims.” This is something that in Arabic we say as ضحية الضحية or “Dahiyyat al-Dahiyya.” Even big Palestinian writers like Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said spoke about this. I trace this framing’s emergence in various Palestinian writing and problematize it, in a sense.
Omar Khalifah is Associate Professor of Arabic literature at Georgetown University in Qatar. His publications include the scholarly monograph Nasser in the Egyptian Imaginary and the story collection Ka’annani Ana (As If I Were Myself). His novel Qabid al-Raml was translated into English and appeared as Sand-Catcher from Coffee House Press.
Omid Bagherli is a graduate student at Tufts University. He studies the representation of absence and exclusion in contemporary texts that draw from “the archive.”
Thumbnail photo: Cutting room of an olive oil soap factory, Palestine. c. 1903. Source: Library of Congress