Emile Habibi: I stayed in Haifa
SBS, Wednesday, May 20, 8pm (7.30pm in SA)
Preview by Jennifer Thompson
Ironically, the life and work of Arab Israeli and Palestinian writer Emile Habibi is not well known in the English-speaking world precisely because of a distinguishing feature of his life: Habibi stayed in his city of Haifa, even after it became part of Israel on May 14 50 years ago.
This moving and insightful documentary — largely a series of deeply personal interviews with Habibi as he moves around Haifa remembering parts of his life, in connection with his novels — was made in the last months of his life in 1996.
Habibi is famous in the Arabic-speaking world for his novels. The best known of these is The secret life of Sa'eed, the Pessoptimist, an account, over 20 years and two wars, of the life of the Palestinians remaining in Israel after each war, despite the mass expulsions and flights. Habibi's contribution was acknowledged in 1990 when PLO chairperson Yasser Arafat awarded him a political and literary prize, a reward for staying in the homeland.
The issue of staying or leaving Israel was, since 1948, a difficult one for the 100,000 Palestinians who remained behind the Green Line, subject to curfews, pass laws and lesser citizen rights than Jewish Israelis. Those who stayed had been isolated from the rest of the Arab world until fellow Israeli Arab, Mahmoud Darweesh, dubbed the poet of the national resistance, shot to prominence at the time of the 1967 war when he and a group of similar poets published a collection of poetry that was to galvanise the Palestinian resistance and the Arab literary world.
Darweesh eventually fled the Israeli repression in 1971, and gave a moving eulogy on the troubled subject at Habibi's funeral on May 3, 1996. Like Habibi, Darweesh was a member of the Israeli Communist Party, the successor of a party that had declared its support for the partition of Palestine in 1947.
Habibi recalls announcing to the central committee of the National Liberation League, the CP's front organisation, the party's support for partition. He said, it would have seemed to Arabs, especially from outside, that the CP was collaborating, "but collaborating was the only way for us to survive in our homeland".
The decision was significantly influenced by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but also by the need to return life to normal in Palestine, which was rent by violence and British colonial repression. Indeed, the woman Habibi loved was killed when a Jewish underground group bombed the secretariat of the British Mandate government in 1946.
The ramifications of this position on partition were to remain with Habibi. He recalls his first return to his beloved Haifa, after the 1947-48 war, when there seemed to be few people and certainly no Arabs left. "Is this the peace we were expecting?", he asked.
The lives of the whole Arab population were filled with contradictions. These had to erupt like a volcano, and mine was in writing The Pessoptimist, Habibi said. He could only write when he was deeply moved, he said; his way of crying was to drip ink from his pen into his novels.
Some of the most beautiful moments of the film are when Habibi reads his novellas about Haifa. When he visits the place where his fictional hero used to meet his lover, Saraya, Habibi's quotes from the novel intermingle with his own feelings: "I'm afraid that the stones and trees will speak to me and ask me, 'Where have you been all this time'. I haven't visited; I've been involved in politics."
In the office of Ikhtiyad, the communist newspaper, he talks about his regrets about the difficulties of combining his literary life and his political life. Habibi represented the Communist Party in the Israeli Knesset for 19 years, before he left the party in 1988 over his support for Glasnost. He said, "Writers can't carry the burden of holding two melons in one hand" — the melons of politics and creating literature.
It is not often that we have the chance to know a little of a person like Habibi. The uninterrupted sequence of his recollections gives a rare insight into a man deeply involved in one of the unresolved tragedies of our century.