The Question of Space by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 5043209
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International

THE CITY AND THE NAKBA

Palestinian scholar Walid Khalidi describes in great detail the geography of Haifa in his article ‘The Fall of Haifa’ (1959), emphasizing early on Haifa’s place on the northern slopes of the Carmel ridge, which faces the Bay of Acre. Positioned farthest northeast along the mountain were two Jewish quarters: Hadar Ha Carmel and the Commercial Centre. ‘The Arab quarters’, Khalidi writes, ‘(starting from the East) [moving progressively West]: Halisa, Wadi Rushmiya, Burj, The Old Town and Wadi Nasnas, all of which lay below Hadar Ha Carmel and between this Jewish quarter and the Harbour’ (1959: 26–27). Because the Nakba represents ‘a fixed and commanding historical and psychological landmark in Kanafani’s fictional landscape’ (Siddiq 1984: xiv), we must understand how the geography of the city during the violent battle helped to intensify the traumatic impact of the event on two of its survivors, Said and Safiyya. How do Kanafani’s characters’ experiences of the fighting that took place in their streets distinguish their traumatic neuroses? In other words, why did this violent disruption of their everyday urban experience later lead to a complicated relationship with those very spaces that cause their acting out?

Marxist urban theorist Henri Lefebvre offers us unique insights into the various ways spaces are lived. Unlike Bachelard, Lefebvre risks understanding how our experiences of spaces can be hostile and disorienting. In his posthumously published Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (2004),7 Lefebvre mediates on the concept of rhythm. Through dressage8 individuals ‘break themselves in like animals’ to societies and develop from their rituals personal rhythms of their everyday spaces (Lefebvre 2004: 39). An individual’s personal rhythm, Lefebvre writes, is ‘repetition pushed to the point of automatism and the memorization of gestures’ (2004: 40). Important for our purposes regarding Returning to Haifa is Lefebvre’s distinction between eurhythmia and arrhythmia as varied experiences of moving through space. According to Lefebvre, eurhythmia has a certain harmony or metastable equilibrium; it occurs when ‘rhythms unite with one another in the state of health, in normal … everydayness’. When eurhythmia is disrupted is where we find arrthythmia. Arrhythmia occurs ‘when [rhythms] are discordant, there is suffering, a pathological state… . The discordance of rhythms brings previously eurhythmic organizations towards fatal disorder’ (Lefebvre 2004: 16). Lefebvre later describes how a crisis may provoke arrhythmia:

[Arrhythmia] throws out of order and disrupts; it is symptomatic of a disruption that is generally profound, lesional and no longer functional. It can also produce a lacuna, a hole in time, to be filled in by an invention, a creation. That only happens, individually or socially, by passing through a crisis. Disruptions and crises always have origins in and effects on rhythms. (Lefebvre 2004: 44, emphasis in original)

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