Poetic Trespass by Levy Lital

Author:Levy, Lital
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Part 3

Afterlives of Language

CHAPTER 5

“Along Came the Knife of Hebrew and Cut Us in Two”

Language in Mizraḥi Fiction, 1964–2010

What is it to be authentic, to run through the middle of Tel Aviv’s streets and shout in Moroccan Jewish Arabic: “Ana min-el maghreb, ana min el-maghreb” (I’m from the Atlas Mountains, I’m from the Atlas Mountains).

—EREZ BITTON1

Sometimes I wonder whether this unknown language is not my favorite language. The first of my favorite languages.

—JACQUES DERRIDA2

Why write in a language you don’t know? Or use the one you know to imagine another, “lost” language? Or reinvent your language, perhaps as a secret language no one else understands? In his Monolingualism of the Other, Jacques Derrida provocatively declares, “I only have one language; it is not mine.” That language, his only language, is “the language of the other,” one he sets out to define and redefine in conflicting terms of inhabitation and alienation.3 Derrida traces his paradoxical experience of language and resulting disorder of identity to the anomalous historical situation of Algerian Jews, to whom French citizenship was granted, revoked, and restored. In his telling, Algerian Jews were “interdicted” from Arabic and Berber, from French, and finally (“or to begin with,” he says) from Hebrew. This also cut them off from “Jewish memory,” from the “history and language that one must presume to be their own, but which, at a certain point, no longer was.”4 As an ethnic minority within a colonized nation, Algerian Jews were doubly removed from the homology of language and identity at the core of modern nationalisms. In principle, their experience of language should be diametrically opposed to that of Hebrew-speaking Jews in Israel, who are the ethnic and linguistic majority in their own sovereign nation. How then could Israeli Hebrew be construed by any of its contemporary Jewish speakers as a language “not their own”?

For Mizraḥi Jews in Israel, many of them descendants of Arabic-speaking Jews, Modern (Israeli) Hebrew is no more the language of “Jewish memory” than is French for Derrida. Derrida’s proclamation thus finds an ironic inversion in recent literature by young Mizraḥi writers, for whom his phrase “the history and language that one must presume to be their own, but which, at a certain point, no longer was” encapsulates their feelings about Arabic. Arabic, the language of the recent and almost-tangible Arab Jewish past, is a minefield of contradictions. It is at once intimate and forbidden, known and unknown, remembered and forgotten. It is consciously rejected, even disparaged, by some; nostalgically romanticized and at times “Orientalized” by others. Apart from the dwindling remnant who reached maturity in Arab countries, Jews no longer have access to Arabic in an unmediated, unselfconscious way. To speak it, or to speak of it, is to have a position on it.

As we shall see, however, the Mizraḥi relationship to language is not only a dyadic question of Hebrew versus Arabic, any more than mizraḥiyut (Mizraḥiness) is a simple question of Ashkenazim versus “Sephardim.”5 Mizraḥiyut encompasses highbrow and lowbrow culture, radical and reactionary politics, Arabic and Hebrew (and other languages).

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