“The Parisian” by Isabella Hammad

Hammad’s novel tells the life story of a Palestinian man, Midhat Kamal, who lives through the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the First World War, and the British Mandate. After his mother died and his father remarried, he was sent away to school in Constantinople and then on to France to study medicine. After the war, he eventually, reluctantly, returns to Nablus to continue the life his father has charted out for him. “He was indebted to his father, and for that alone he must marry. This debt was arranged before he was born. His father’s care was always based on this future sense, that Midhat would mature like a bond and yield to him. So although one might be convinced momentarily that family ties were petty, in the end, as Jamil said, they were everything.” Back in Nablus, Midhat dresses as a dandy, speaks Arabic with flourishes of French, reads foreign newspapers, and drinks whiskey on nights out in Jerusalem. He eventually settles into the family business, selling garments to the fellahin at the tailor shop in the khan. “Midhat was learning to dissemble and pass between spheres and to accommodate, morally, that dissemblance through an understanding of his own impermanence in each.”

This is a sprawling epic about cultural determinacy, family obligations, the nature of self, the power of memory, the fight for freedom, and one’s place in the world. Hammad’s novel uses the lens of Midhat’s life to detail the larger Palestinian battle for independence against British rule. “There lay Sahar, pregnant and exhausted, wrapped in the veil she had been fighting against. This forced rebel lore, the songs the shoeshine boys sang about the whores who wore Western clothes, all of it has some quality of revenge, disguised as ardour. Was that such a heavy price to pay, though, for their freedom?” But, at its heart, this novel is about a single man’s struggles within himself, as he grapples with his own identity. “Perhaps men had an ability to forget the strictures of past law. The past appeared eternal: what had happened was inviolable; one did not keep forever the contingencies; what did not happen was forgotten. But in the present moment, one was made more aware of what would be possible if only.” Midhat is forced to come to grips with how he will define himself in the world and what it means to have a family. “He had obeyed—and he had defied. He was one of them, and he was his own.”