S H I M O N   B A L L A S
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from OUTCAST

 

A note from Ammiel Alcalay :

 

Outcast is narrated by Haroun Soussan, a Jewish convert to Islam. Soussan's character is based on a historical figure, Ahmad (Nissim) Soussa, who converted to Islam in the 1930s and whose work ended up used as a certain kind of propaganda during Saddam Hussein's regime. The narrator is a civil engineer and historian who has completed his life's work, The Jews and History. The book opens with him getting an award from the President (Saddam Hussein), during the period of the war between Iran and Iraq. The text we are reading, the novel, is his autobiography written at the age of 70, the book he writes after having completed The Jews and History , and the book where he feels he can explore his own personal and political history more openly, particularly his relationship to his daughter, Butheina, and two friends, Qassem Abd al-Baki, a militant communist in political exile in Eastern Europe, and Nissim Assad, somewhat based on the Iraqi Jewish writer Anwar Shaul. Soussan's narrative moves in and out of the present, the recent and more distant past, providing a unique and intimate chronicle of Iraq's contemporary political history. His friends and comrades Abd al-Baki and Assad provide pathways into different aspects of Iraqi history, political resistance, repression and allegience. The communist Abd al-Baki is persecuted by the British, the nationalists, the Iranians, the Baath secret police, and even his own comrades. Emissary of every revolution, Abd al-Baki is a perennial victim of changing alliances: while in exile in Eastern Europe, his adopted son is forced to pay for his father's politics, as he is accused of collaboration with pro-Iranian Shi'ites. Nissim Assad, on the other hand, finds his own biography and memory distorted by the Arab-Israeli conflict as he is transformed into a Jewish alibi, a servile figure who finds it almost impossible to maintain the dignity of the narrator, Soussan, despite the fact of his conversion.

The novel contains many narrative issues that might appear self-evident but which, under closer scrutiny, pile one complexity upon another. To begin with, there are a number of entryways into the book itself, “fictional” suppositions that structure our relationship to the text and the world it depicts. The original text is in Hebrew, but the fictional narrator tells his story in Arabic. The fact that this fictional narrator is a Jew who has converted to Islam and the author, Shimon Ballas, is an Arab Jew from Baghdad who emigrated to Israel in 1951 and only began writing in Hebrew in the mid 1960s, makes this entryway more like a hall of mirrors. So the text itself is already a translation, in several senses: to begin with, it is a “fictional” construct, but it is also an intralinguistic text that has an Arabic basis even though it is written in Hebrew. Ballas has spoken about this in an interview I conducted with him in the mid 1990s:

I think that for me the transition to another language is crucial, the use of language as a means. Yet language is not only a tool, language is also part of the personality. That's what makes this transition so difficult: you have to literally reconstruct yourself, you recreate yourself through a borrowed language. But I'm a Jew by chance — the realm of ideology, ideology as a world view, of Judaism, of Israel, of Hebrew, and the total identity between Hebrew and the Jews — none of that plays that much of a role with me. Zionist ideology is essentially an Ashkenazi ideology that developed in a different culture, in different surroundings, in a different world and which came to claim its stake here in the Middle East through alienation and hostility towards the surroundings, with a rejection of the surroundings, with no acceptance of the environment. I don't accept any of this, this is all very different from what I am. I am not in conflict with the environment, I came from the Arab environment and I remain in constant colloquy with the Arab environment. I also didn't change my environment. I just moved from one place to another within it. The whole project of a nationalist conception, of Zionist ideology, of the Jewish point of view, the bonds between Jews in the diaspora and Israel, all of this is quite marginal for me and doesn't play a major role, it's not part of my cultural world. I am not in dialogue with the nationalistic or Zionist point of view, nor am I in dialogue with Hebrew literature. I am not conducting a dialogue with them. If anything, I am in dialogue with language itself. On the one hand, I am trying to fend off, avoid or neutralize ideological connections or associations within the language. On the other hand, I think that I am probably trying to bring my Hebrew closer and closer to Arabic. This isn't done through syntax, but maybe through some sense of structure or way of approaching things. It is very abstract and I don't do it in a way that is completely conscious either. That's the problem, and it is extremely difficult to describe or quantify.

As in all of Ballas's other works, the apparently conventional narrative masks extremely radical approaches to ideological and historical assumptions, particularly regarding the context of Zionism, the mystified relationship of Jews to language and the diaspora, but also to the history of Jews in the Arab world and their participation in the production of modern political life there. Throughout the novel, Ballas, the Iraqi exile, manages to provide an intimate history of the major events of a country he hasn't lived in since 1951, a narrative that also delineates his own sense of exile and attempts to translate and reconfigure his life in a language that might both embrace his former self and allow new selves to emerge. While our horizons in this country are very much geared towards literary texts that appear formally complex or technically innovative, Outcast never surrenders itself to any facile or fashionable rendering of the experience of exile. On the contrary, Shimon Ballas's insistence on historical specificity in a novel that is itself a clearly fictionalized construct, opens a very new and different space for politics, one that requires a reader to recalibrate their own assumptions about what radical writing might look like.  

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