“A Mask the Color of the Sky” by Bassem Khandaqji

Palestinian poet, novelist and commentator Bassem Khandaqji wrote his latest novel, A Mask the Color of the Sky while in an Israeli prison. Any prisoner, anywhere, who manages to write a novel while incarcerated must be commended for persistence, dedication and focus; this one won the 2024 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. His novel is now available in English, translated by Addie Leak.

Nur Mahdi al-Shahdi is a Palestinian refugee who has, from his mother, inherited: “her paleness and the blue of her eyes, as well as long, curly hair that shifted in color from brown to sandy blonde. From his father, he’d gotten a thick beard shot through with red and a tall, slender frame.” In other words, he can pass for an Ashkenazi Jew.Nur  speaks both Arabic, “the language of his heart”, and Hebrew, “the language of his shadow side and his Ashkenazi features.” He buys a second-hand leather jacket and finds within a pocket an Israeli identity card; he assumes the identity of the original card-holder, an Ashkenazi Jew called Or Shapira: “Shapira … Or Shapira. Like Bond … James Bond.” Khandaqji thus sets up an investigation of Palestinian and Israeli identity, of identity as performance, and of the blurring of lines between oneself and the enemy other:

Here I am, sitting in front of the walls of Jerusalem on an April afternoon in Ramadan … I don’t know if Jerusalem will reflect back my shadow or Or’s …  Or, who, as soon as I assumed his character and put on his mask, burst from within me and began walking by my side … He, like me, has no shadow—at least not yet.

Nur uses Or’s blue and white identity card—his mask the color of the sky—to gain access to an archaeological dig, an obvious metaphor for the stratification of memory, and the processes of uncovering buried layers of history, identity and truth. Nur wants to join this dig because he’s writing a novel with the aim of uncovering the “true” story of Mary Magdalene as a correction to her portrait by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code: “why would a foreign writer uproot Mary Magdalene from her historical Palestinian context to throw her into the abyss of the West? Why?”To answer one question with another one: if Mary Magdalene is not the European/Christian heroine of art and legend, then who is she? To express confusion here perhaps reveals nothing more than that I, a white, Western woman, don’t really understand what Mary Magdalene means to Palestinians. In any case, Nur regards her as a symbol of reclaimed history, and he says, surely uncontroversially, that she represents: “the contradictions in life: the dual presence of good and evil, repentance and sin, angels and demons.”The dig is at a contested site, which has been important since the time of the Bar Kokhba Revolt, a setting which raises pertinent questions about how we project the past onto the present, or vice versa.On the dig, Nur/Or meets two girls, one, Ayala, is a pretty Sephardic Jew, the other Sama’ whose name means sky, is a Palestinian from Haifa. That is, she’s not a refugee, but a citizen of Israel —which she refuses to name, saying only that she’s “from here.” Ayala has a chip on her shoulder because, as a Sephardic Jew, she thinks the Ashkenazi look down on her. Her role appears to be either to point out that Jews discriminate even against each other, or to fancy Or (who is really Nur), or to be the object of Or’s lust, or perhaps just to be particularly nasty to Sama’. (Incidentally, we are told that Nur (Arabic) and Or (Hebrew) both mean light, but, in English, the resonations of or, in either / or are either a happy accident, or a clever bit of inter-language wordplay. I presume the latter.)Sama’ is presented as an exemplar of all that’s beautiful, noble and fine. She disdains Nur when she thinks he’s Or, and initially disbelieves him when he reveals his Palestinian identity. But she comes around, and the novel finishes with Nur telling her: “You are my identity; you’re my destination.”If Ayala and Sama’ are presented as somewhat one-dimensional characters, Or, too, can come across as little more than a mouthpiece for unnuanced views. Not that one-dimensionality is necessarily a flaw: Khandaqji gives some indication of being at least as interested in allegory, as in character development. Perhaps his hint that when one thinks of Or, one should think of James Bond—who has been an allegory for so many things, from waning British power, to the changing role of masculinity—is a clue that some of his characters represent political ideas and moral qualities rather than individuals.Is translation an unmasking, or its own a form of masking? Either way it’s hard to comment on an author’s use of language in a translated text. Although Addie Leak’s translation flows smoothly and is always clear, what perhaps is lyrical in Arabic, sometimes comes across in English as a little over the top:

It was a quiet afternoon threaded through with gentle breezes, draped over the sprawling space between the deep exhale of a plain and the sigh of a mountain, whose forested edge twitched slightly as a band of hikers climbed its rocky, pine-covered shoulder.

A Mask the Colour of the Sky is an absorbing and challenging read, which will leave the reader with much to think about, although Western readers may suspect they’ve missed, or misunderstood, some of Khandaqji’s cultural references.