Ibtisam Azem has been peering into the lives of displaced Palestinians in Tel Aviv for a few years now, and she’s heartbroken by what she finds: in an interview with The Booker Prize, she elaborates on the anger she felt upon hearing an Israeli politician make false claims about the equality Palestinians enjoyed in Jerusalem and all the privileges they were offered. This anger finds place within the plot of The Book of Disappearance, written by Azem and translated by Sinan Antoon, wherein all Palestinians in Israel go missing one day. The uncomfortable effect of this disappearance – or rather a fulfilment of the Zionist project – guides the novel through a stunning narrative that seeks to understand the memory of loss and the loss of memory.
The Palestinian experience
“I wish you were here. Missing you is like a rose of thorns.” The book opens with a journal entry by Alaa, the narrator of the story, chronicling his grandmother’s lived experiences in Palestine pre-1948. Alaa’s neighbour and friend, Ariel, is a liberal Zionist, who condemns the military’s destruction of the West Bank and Gaza yet remains loyal to the foundations of Israel. It becomes his mission to investigate the disappearance of all Palestinians, and we are witness to his journey as he begins searching for clues to the secret of their collective disappearance.
The journal entries are scattered throughout the entire book in order to centralise the Palestinian experience rather than prioritising the Israeli reaction. The intentional usage of a first-person account is what carries the book forward: In this paradigm, Azem demonstrates a striking representation of how deeply intertwined the intimacy of everyday life is with the political and the systemic to the global. After a few pages, we learn of Alaa’s grandmother’s death. Following Alaa’s disappearance, Ariel discovers his journal, and from then on, Alaa’s voice is mediated through Ariel’s perspective – we only access his memories of his grandmother’s stories when Ariel chooses to engage with them.
The function of Ariel’s narrative seems to be a critique of liberal Zionists who do not understand the harm they perpetuate by offering a tempered response to colonialism, rather than opposing it vehemently and outwardly. Our first view of this ambivalent stance is his frustration with a young German woman and her legacy of guilt. Ariel accuses her of displaying a sense of performative care to Alaa, who doesn’t really want to talk about the matter.
Ariel’s family background is important to consider here, since he is the descendant of an original Israeli settler. Azem endows him with unnerving faith in his own actions. Even when he is conflicted by the idea of enlisting in the army, we learn that he did enrol, since the repercussions of refusing military service is jail time. Ultimately, he opts to serve, claiming it allows him to create more meaningful change from within the system. This instance is layered with thick irony for many reasons: although Ariel acknowledges the intentional cruelty and institutional apathy that Palestinians are subjected to, his critical assessment of the German girl is missing in terms of his own behaviour.
Azem employs Alaa’s house as an interesting metaphor for the encroachment of Palestinian land and spaces. One of the things that Ariel does when the information of the disappearance reaches him is to instinctively enter Alaa’s house in order to look for information on what seems like an impossible mystery to solve. At first, he second-guesses himself for fear of overstepping his friend’s personal abode, but soon after says, “He’ll understand why I’m doing this,” upon entering Alaa’s house without his presence.
During his search for details and proof, he finds himself standing in front of a guttural, blood-red painting of a body covered in a velvet cloth, wearing a traditional Palestinian keffiyeh. Although he wonders about the symbolism of it all, he stops himself from going closer to it so as to read its title. He begins to feel at ease in the apartment as if it were his own and finds himself leafing through Alaa’s diary. This is a particularly still scene; the only thing moving in the entire house are Ariel’s pupils expanding, contracting, darting around the diary’s pages. Through this incredibly intimate and invasive act, wherein Ariel violates Alaa’s personal space, a parallel is drawn to Israeli settlers encroaching upon Palestinian territory – mirroring a global pattern of settlers laying claim to what doesn’t belong to them.
Colonial complicity
When it comes to style and tone, Azem expertly blends a meditative literary style with haunting speculative elements that serve as an emotional punch to the gut. Alaa’s prose brims with longing – a tender unraveling of the many heartbreaks he gathers along the way. He refers to his recollection of Gaza as “flashes of black and white” when Ariel says his memory is grey. He says time and again that there is a fissure in his memory. That the memories of his family, which lived within his mind, carry a crack. But that crack didn’t mean obscurity – it meant pain.
Between Alaa’s and Ariel’s chapters are the everyday people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv – television hosts, flower vendors and cafe owners – whose routine lives become the backdrop for these deeper fractures and questions to unfold. The novel progresses in a fragmented and non-linear manner, mirroring the conflicted nature of the Arab identity. When Palestinians are taken out of the picture, it is interesting how new enemies are constructed and villainised based on whoever upholds the state. The Israeli government and media sprout into paranoia, afraid that the missing Palestinians will return with armour and a vengeance like never before, which is to say that power structures shift in order to challenge the fragility of the Zionist fantasy.
Towards the end of the novel, Ariel once again intrudes on Alaa’s space without a second thought. As his mother tells him over the phone that she is going to take a look at empty Arab homes to buy, he brews coffee for himself in Alaa’s kitchen. This unforgettable moment is crucial in that it captures the dangerous ease with which dispossession can become routine. At its core, The Book of Disappearance is not only a story about who is lost, but about those who get to remember, and those who are remembered. It is a searing lens into colonial complicity, the politics of absence and leaves us wondering what it means to disappear in a world that never truly saw you to begin with.
The Book Of Disappearance, Ibtisam Azem, translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon, Simon and Schuster.
