Rashad Abu Shawar, the great Palestinian writer, left in the Jordanian capital, Amman, far from his first village, “Zikrin” in the Hebron District/Palestine, where he was born in 1942), and he lived his life estranged from it, searching for a way to it, and since he found his way to writing, he had no choice but to write. The doctrine of “commitment” and “resistance literature,” his writings of stories and novels, and his overall cultural and political life, are a broad example of the sincere adoption of the concept of “commitment” with its dimensions adapted to the Palestinian experience. Abu Shawar has been driven to write prolifically and strongly since the end of the sixties of the twentieth century, and he has not stopped giving. Over the following decades, until his final passing on September 28, 2024, his writings varied between short stories, novels, articles, and plays. He also wrote for adults and children, and he wrote about thought, politics, and culture, close to Palestine and believing in its freedom and liberation despite all the disappointments.
As for his short story collections, the most famous are the following: A Memory of Past Days/1970, A Green House with a Tiled Roof/1974, Trees Don’t Grow on Notebooks/1975, The Prairie Pony/1977, Pizza for Mary’s Memory/1981, The Story of People and Stones/1989, Laughter in Late Night/1990, Death Singing/2003. In addition to his well-known novels, such as: Days of War and Death/1973, Crying on the Beloved’s Chest/1974, Lovers/1978, and God Did Not Rest on the Seventh Day/1986, and he has a book: Oh Beirut/1983, which is his diary during the siege of Beirut in 1982. Among his books are: The last book: This is how I faced Corona (Diaries and Stories)/2022.
Most of his stories focus on the axis of “resistance” and Palestinian concerns. If we wanted an artistic or narrative picture of the formation of guerrilla work and the guerrilla camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, we would find it in the first stories of Rashad Abu Shawar, and in the stories of a number of his contemporaries. In his stories, he painted an accurate picture of the training camps and the relations of the guerrillas. The fighters and their dreams, their guerrilla operations, the atmosphere of bombing they were subjected to, and the circumstances surrounding the guerrilla action. When you read his first collection: Memory of Past Days, you find him recalling the echoes of June and reviewing what happened, but he does not exaggerate in describing frustration and does not call for despair. Rather, his stories generally escape from the despair of defeat to the hope of resistance, and therefore we find in his stories characters who represent the resistant youth who represent the future of liberation. And redemption, as they rush endlessly to join the guerrilla corps and training camps. They leave their schools, their jobs, and their temporary homes, to move from the refuge tent to the guerrilla tent and the bases of the revolution. They are not stopped by the lack of weapons or their unfitness to fight an honorable war. They only think about liberating Palestine and redeeming it with their lives. They are led by… This includes their resistant conscience and their impulsive, optimistic spirit.
Poetry and a mobilization story
The short story, in such a case, is closer to the “mobilization” story that calls for resistance, and depicts explicit images of the guerrillas’ clashes with the enemy as they cross the river in the valleys and resist with their lives, often martyring themselves with complete satisfaction and joy, as if death were a normal and desired matter. The story here relies explicitly on resistive reality material, and uses names, places, and events in a way that sometimes comes close to a documentary or “documentary” narration.
In the second group (A Green House with a Tiled Roof), Abu Shawar continues the atmosphere of the first group, and from an artistic standpoint, we find more than one story that tends to experimentation through cutting techniques and cinematic shots, and benefiting from the language of the scenario and integrating it into the narrative work, as in the story (Before the Rain Falls). In which there are many cinematic observations that help create narrative transitions, as well as the story (Blessed are the Dead), which combines the frustration of September and cinematic techniques in one story. We also find the beginnings of employing folklore, popular songs, yargul singing, and similar new phenomena, which soften the tone of political discourse in favor of multiple levels of aesthetic discourse.
As for the group (Trees Do Not Grow on Notebooks), although it was published at a close time to the previous group and despite sharing some of the atmosphere of the Palestinian issue with it, it was distinguished by expansion and diversity in characters and climates, and was no longer limited to the guerrillas and resistance fighters who formed most of the personalities of the first and second groups.
We also find an experimental attempt to employ the Arab and Islamic heritage by evoking significant heritage figures. This employment often occurs in attempts to understand the present in light of past experiences, and sometimes as a symbolic choice that addresses the present that the storyteller cannot examine frankly or clearly. We find this approach in the story (He Who Died at the Top of the Mountain), which recalls the Mongols’ occupation of the Islamic world and its focus on the country of Khwarezm and its leader or prince, Jalal al-Din Shah, and his resistance to the Mongols, the story (The Assassination of Abu al-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi), and the story (Acre and the Emperor), which he dedicated to Ghassan Kanafani and in which he painted a scene. A condensed story of Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat in Acre and his retreat at its walls. There is another story, which is the story of “Sticks and Chopsticks,” in which he expressed the idea of Arab unity, relying on the traditional story in which the old father presented the bundle of sticks to his children, so that each of them tried individually to break it, but they were unable to do so until they cooperated and broke it together, all of this to understand the principle of: unity. Strength and dispersal are weakness. This traditional spirit is employed here to expand and deepen Palestinian expression within the committed revolutionary goal of Rashad Abu Shawar.
As for the collection (Mahr Al-Barari), it contains various threads within Palestinian expression, including the resistance line in the explicit sense, that is, stories related to fighters and fedayeen and their atmosphere in Jordan and Lebanon, to the emergence of short stories that reflect the world of intellectuals and their atmosphere, such as the stories: (Nudity in the Rain), and (Is… You like Rachmonov.) There is a social story (an honor killing) that reflects the social issue in the camp through the killing of the girl Maryam, who was deceived by the teacher and left to her bloody fate at the hands of her brothers. There is the story after which the collection is named (Mahr Al-Barari), which reuses the symbol of horses that Ghassan Kanafani and others used in various images and variations. The dowry here is purebred Arab, and as for the man who bought it, he wants to convert it to plowing and working, but he refuses to change to the new job, and in the end he is able to escape. To his freedom, because he was created for wilderness, freedom, and freedom. It is as if he is equivalent to the fighter and the guerrilla who was not created for any work other than freedom and battle, and he is not proficient in anything else, so there is no way to tame him and modify his behavior to suit the new conditions.
Literature and experimentation
The tone of pain and somewhat sad review does not appear except with the group (Pizza for Mary’s Memory), where the painful look to the past, and if “Palestine” has not yet been liberated, but has become farther than it was, then what will those who tried to do so and gave everything for it do? The characters here review themselves, gradually move away from the optimistic spirit that was common previously, and move from the story of “answers” to the story of “questions.”
We notice a tendency toward experimentation in the story: (Horror) through the writer’s integration as a character into the text of the story with his explicit name. The story is also characterized by the spirit of black sarcasm that attempts to criticize the disordered reality, and realizes that it contains disordered aspects that cannot be dismissed under the banner: resistance. This critical and resentful spirit was not in Rashad Abu Shawar’s first stories, but rather expanded with the collapse and withdrawal of the experience of struggle and resistance as the years of the 1980s progressed, accompanying and following the resistance’s departure from Beirut in 1982.
The writer ends the (horror) story by addressing the narrator in a way that reveals the voice of the narrator/writer, bringing the narrator to them clearly in a new experience of narrative expression that is not devoid of recourse to the patterns of oral narration: “And now, good night, the sounds of bullets are ringing out, I am extinguishing I hide my papers, cover my head and body, and sink into heavy darkness.”
He also tries again by using the folk tale in the story: (The hyena, the sheikh, and the man who..etc.) The text of the story contains more than one level: The first level contains the voice of the writer/narrator addressing the readers, announcing that he will tell us about a story from his grandmother Fatima’s stories, and that he will first present it in the language of Fatima without Changing or modifying it again in its own words. This explanatory introduction is a part of the story that the storyteller did not distinguish and did not make it an explanation or clarification. After that, he presents the first formulation as a recorder of the story of Fatima, the narrator of the story. Here we are with a popular story or tale known in the Palestinian heritage, and the existing text is as if it is a close-to-accurate recording of the oral utterance in the spoken dialect. And with all the requirements of a folk tale.
After he finishes the novel “Fatima,” the narrator’s voice returns to connect and clarify. Then we move to the second formulation, which represents a narration in the eloquent language of the story itself. Here it has been formulated again through the intervention of the writer and his “cultured” language, and he stops before the end of the story, as if in an enjoyable narrative exercise. Then, he returns to discuss the readers/narratee at the proposed ending. This overwhelming presence of the writer in his writing is a clear experimental phenomenon that contributes to renewing storytelling methods and suggests new ways of narrative pleasure. The story ends by borrowing the conclusion of folk tales or its usual closing: “And the bird flew… May God bless you with good evening.”