‘So dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane!’: writing Palestinian history in a magical realist key

ABSTRACT

This article reflects on writing a history book in the style of a magical realist novel. The book, The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub, employs classic techniques from magical realist fiction to narrate the transformation of the Palestinian town of Bethlehem in the 19^th century. In this article, I describe the process of writing the book, using this as an entry-point into a wider discussion on how historians can productively engage with literary form and genre. Drawing on fictional writing in Spanish, Arabic and English, the article argues magical realist prose is particularly well suited to capturing a sense of the fantastical, the uncanny and the absurd – areas of historical experience usually neglected in academic writing. I discuss how I experimented with specific techniques to tap into Bethlehem’s arresting, often bizarre encounters with global capitalism in the 19^th century, as well as explore my own relationship to this history as a British historian writing about Palestine.

KEYWORDS:

• Historiography
• magical realism
• Palestine
• literary genre
• reflexivity
• Creative non-fiction

Introduction

A woman who was washing clothes in the river during the hottest time of the day ran screaming down the main street in an alarming state of commotion.

‘It’s coming’, she finally explained. ‘Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it’. (García Márquez 2014, 227)

So goes Gabriel García Márquez’s description of the first train arriving in the village of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude. I remember reading the passage and being struck by how viscerally it conjures an atmosphere of confusion and panic. I was aware that railway building had been greeted with apprehension among rural communities in northern Colombia (where the novel is set) and had read scholarly articles describing the incursion of the world economy into those areas in the late 19^th century. But none of this academic writing had allowed me to grasp the sheer bizarreness of the experience – a sense of two worlds colliding and an entirely new one emerging. As García Márquez goes on: ‘It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise, keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alteration between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay’ (García Márquez 2014, 230).

In this paper, I reflect on the process of writing a history book in the form of a magical realist novel – a literary style for which One Hundred Years of Solitude has become one of the best-known examples. The book I wrote deliberately blurs the boundaries between history and fiction in chronicling the transformation of the Palestinian town of Bethlehem in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries – a time when the town was gripped by emigration fever. Beginning in earnest in the 1870s, hundreds of young men set off in search of opportunities as itinerant merchants and peddlers. They started out selling Holy Land devotional objects carved in Bethlehem, targeting mainly Catholic countries in Europe, Latin America and Asia (the Philippines). Quickly, they diversified their businesses, selling all manner of small consumer goods with a particular focus on South and Central America. In the early stages, the merchants’ movements were circular: they moved in and out of their hometown with great regularity, feeding a patriarchal business structure that maintained its family base in Bethlehem. The effect on Bethlehem was transformational as all manner of new influences and capital flowed into this small rural town. In just a few short decades, Bethlehem metamorphosised from impoverished rural backwater into Palestine’s wealthiest and most globally connected town.

It was this astonishingly rapid transformation that most interested me in writing the book: how a seemingly insular and socially conservative society was suddenly lurched into a new age of travel, encounter and unprecedented prosperity. How did the merchants feel as they stepped off the boat in Rio de Janeiro for the first time, or as they crossed the Andes on muleback? How did families process the absence of these young travellers? And what was the response of townsfolk when the merchants returned with strange inventions and tales of faraway lands?

The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub (Or How the Bethlehemites Discovered Amerka) was my attempt to explore those questions. Before beginning the book, I had published articles on the socio-economic conditions that gave rise to the town’s emigration boom and its role in precipitating larger movements of people out of Ottoman Syria and Palestine. The book project, however, took me into different historiographical terrain. Sources I had long been working with – oral traditions, family stories, letters, memoirs, images – spoke of the excitement, confusion and wonder gripping both travellers and townsfolk back home. Increasingly frustrated by the limitations of academic prose, I began to experiment with techniques borrowed from fictional writing. Eventually, I settled on an approach that mimicked the classical tropes of magical realist fiction in an attempt to capture a sense of the fantastical, the bizarre and the miraculous in Bethlehem’s 19^th-century transformation.

One individual named Jubrail Dabdoub (1860–1931) stood out as a vehicle for telling this story. Not only did he appear in numerous countries during the early stages of Bethlehem’s emigrations, he was also the subject of a miracle performed by local nun Marie-Alphonsine in 1909 when he was brought back to life having been declared dead from typhoid fever. This curious combination of trade, travel, piety and saintly presences provided a framework for relating Bethlehem’s transformation. Jubrail had not left behind sufficient material to construct a detailed historical biography. Rather, episodes from his life became a narrative hook for capturing a certain historical ‘mood’ (Highmore 2017). The silences offered a creative space for a more imaginative form of writing as I set about constructing a series of vignettes using techniques derived from magical realism. At first daunting and painstaking, I gradually let go of my academic training, trusting in Bourdieu’s assertion that literary texts hold an advantage over academic ones as they can condense an entire social structure into a singular narrative without the need to ‘laboriously unfold and deploy’ (Bourdieu 1992, 24).

At the heart of this approach is a conviction that the styles of writing we employ as historians can serve as powerful commentaries on the history itself. Walter Benjamin was an early exponent of the idea in his unfinished Arcades Project (begun in 1927), testing out a style he called ‘montage’ as a reflection on the age of mechanical reproduction. By juxtaposing long citations with passages of commentary devoid of the historian’s explanatory narrative, he was able to convey the fragmentary nature of life under modern capitalism while simultaneously asserting a philosophy of history that saw the historian as reconstructing ‘flashes’ of images from a film roll that has already been played. The point, for Benjamin, was that writing style should reflect subject matter and that this was the most effective way to produce historical meaning: ‘Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show’ (Benjamin 1999, 460).

Since Benjamin, various types of scholars have experimented with narrative style as a way of accessing the past. The fields of literature, historical anthropology and literary anthropology have all developed bodies of work that explore the relationship between form and historical meaning. Such approaches, however, are still relatively rare in the discipline of History where a general interest in subjectivity and positionality has not, on the whole, translated into experimentation with form. There are, of course, significant exceptions, many of whom have published their work in the pages of Rethinking History. The likes of Bryant Simon, Jonathan Walker, Natalie Zemon Davis and Marjorie Becker were inspirational in the writing of my book, but they remain outliers in a field otherwise marked by a style of prose that is authoritative, detached and analytical (Becker 1997; Davis 1995; Fulda 2009; Simon 1997; Walker 2001).

My hope in writing this article is to push forward a conversation around how historians can engage more closely with literary form in ways that generate different types of historical meaning. Whether historians or otherwise, very few of those who deviate from standard academic prose have turned to a specific literary genre as their guiding principle. The advantage of doing so lies in genre’s very genericness – a type of metacode geared towards generating particular meaning. Placing individual writers within pre-fixed categories can be problematic, often obscuring more than it reveals. But the emergence of such categories in the first place presupposes a commonly understood project that strives to articulate a world view through a shared set of motifs and structures (Frow 2013, 1–3). For historians untrained in creative writing, these literary metacodes offer toolkits for writing about elements of past experience unreached by academic writing. As literary genres are usually recognisably different from the academic historical genre, adherence to their classical style and form offers the historian a potential clarity and transparency of purpose. In this sense, the more generic the better: by reproducing standard tropes from a literary genre, historians can convey meaning through a recognisable set of symbols. We might imagine historians imitating the classic styles of science fiction, fantasy, horror or detective novels, depending on the type of past experience they wish to convey. As Jonathan Walker put it when discussing his narration of a 17^th-century Venetian history in the form of a tarot reading: ‘I wanted to make my artifice obvious in writing about the artifice of stories told by people in the past’ (Walker 2001, 325).

My own writing makes no claim to literary merit, but rather employs some of the techniques associated with magical realist fiction as a commentary on Bethlehem’s 19^th-century transformation. Once committed to this approach, I decided the experiment would be best served by sustaining the style of writing throughout the entirety of the book, as if the whole thing were a magical realist novel, or at least a series of vignettes in the life of one man. It therefore seemed appropriate to reserve any explication of methodology for a separate discussion – the article presented here – leaving the book free to pursue its own narrative course.

Below I describe the process by which I applied a magical realist approach in the hope of capturing something of the fantastical, the uncanny and the absurd about Bethlehem’s transformation. I begin with a discussion of magical realism’s inherent historicism through a discussion of classic works in Spanish, Arabic and English, highlighting the unique types of historical insight they afford. I then delve into specific passages from my own book, describing the process by which I adapted (to varying degrees of success) particular fictional techniques to the case of Bethlehem in the 19^th century. In the final section, I explore the significance of my own positionality – a UK historian writing about Palestine – in this process, arguing that magical realism’s embrace of narrativity offers one route towards a more open assessment of historians’ distance from the societies we study.

Magical realism as historical commentary

Magical (or magic) realism is one of those genres that offers a clearly defined metacode for making sense of the world. Since its earliest incarnations in 1920s German painting, magical realism has been marked by an interest in the fantastical, mysterious nature of reality. Unlike genres such as fantasy, the supernatural elements of magical realism appear within mundane, realistic settings, producing a series of surreal, unexpected juxtapositions. As the first person to coin the term, art critic Franz Roh, wrote in 1925: ‘With the word “magic”, as opposed to “mystic”, I wish to indicate that the mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it’ (Roh 1995, 16).

From these early beginnings, magical realism came to be most associated with the writers of the ‘Latin American boom’ of the 1960s and 70s. Thanks to the global attention they garnered, a recognisable literary genre emerged with its own set of motifs, structures and world view. Where the earlier expressions were born from a set of European artistic concerns, this new group of writers – the likes of Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes – were concerned with depicting a distinctly Latin American reality. In Carpentier’s genre-defining prologue to El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World), it is the very landscape, peoples and traditions that provide ‘lo real maravilloso’, rather than the ‘contrived distortions’ of European fantastical writing (Carpentier 1986, 6). García Márquez, meanwhile, was famously amused that his work was praised for its imagination, insisting all his work was based in reality. ‘The problem’, he explained, ‘is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination’ (García Márquez 1981, 69).

This assertion of a more capricious reality, vastly different from European forms of the novel, was quickly picked up and adapted by writers elsewhere in the world interested in the historical suppression of indigenous knowledge and the absurdities of colonial rule. Although there exists a danger in grouping together vastly different traditions of non-European writing, magical realism’s inversion of the ‘rational’ and the ‘irrational’ has proved a popular blueprint for writers of this kind. Toni Morrison initially took objection to the label, describing it as ‘another one of those words that covered up what was going on’. But she later came to acknowledge the synergies with her writing: ‘My own use of enchantment simply comes because that’s the way the world was for me and for the black people I knew. … there was this other knowledge or perception, always discredited but nevertheless there, which informed their sensibilities and clarified their activities’ (Morrison 1994, 225–226). Morrison may not have set out to write ‘magical realist’ texts, but her seamless integration of supernatural forces into detailed historical settings inevitably puts her work into conversation with a pre-established genre sharing a similar set of concerns.

In Arabic fiction, numerous writers have self-consciously experimented with magical realist forms of writing, often serving to critique persistent forms of colonialism (Jarrar 2008, 297–316). One of the best-known examples is Salim Barakat, and in particular his 1985 novel Fuqaha’ al-Zalam (‘The Sages of Darkness’). Here, the character Bikas (and later his son), goes from birth to old-age in a single day, serving as commentary on a Kurdish tribe’s attempt to survive the traumatic transition from Ottoman rule to the newly emerging borders of Syrian and Turkish nationalism. ‘How can I explain something I have no control over?’, Bikas mutters to his brothers when he reaches the age of 30 by early afternoon. ‘I’m just as dumbfounded as you. I see you other people every hour, growing with me year after year, in an acceleration that mixes up my fixed understanding of things I knew before I came’ (Barakat 1985, 16). Using Bikas’ accelerated development as a metaphor for his community’s violent absorption into modern state-building projects, Barakat transmits a historical mood – one of confusion and alienation – that would be diluted by more analytical prose. Bikas’ ‘supernatural’ experience of time is accepted as a given in the text, integrated without explanation into a detailed portrayal of his social milieu – that of a Kurdish tribe in northern Syria. Meanwhile, the changing world outside appears as unnatural, threatening and unfathomable.

It is this enactment of seemingly fantastical events within richly detailed, realistic social settings, that makes magical realism so ripe for use as historical commentary. Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (1949) was a seminal work of Latin American magical realism, but it was also a deliberate attempt to transgress fictional-historical borders, employing the concept of ‘lo real maravilloso’ as a means to explore the role of myth, voodoo and hybridisation in the Haitian Revolution. As Carpentier explains in the prologue, his goal was to establish a more ‘historically organic’ approach that ‘allows the marvellous to flow freely from a reality strictly set down in all its details … for what is the history of all America if not a chronicle of the marvellous-real?’ (Carpentier 1986, 11–12).

Since Carpentier, magical realism has developed as an intrinsically historical literary genre. From Isabel Allende’s narration of the Chilean coup d’état of 1973 in La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits), to Salman Rushdie’s chronicle of the birth of the Indian nation-state in Midnight’s Children, many of the most famous works of magical realism have provided piercing historical commentaries. As literary scholar, P. Gabrielle Foreman writes: ‘Magic realism, unlike the fantastic or the surreal, presumes that the individual requires a bond with the traditions and the faith of the community, that s/he is historically constructed and connected’ (Foreman 1995, 286). A far cry from the empirical analyses of academic historiography, this is ‘felt history’ as John Burt Foster Jr calls it – an attempt to access areas of the past off limits to rational analysis, a preference for the Jungian over the Freudian and, above all, a search for the wondrous in the everyday (Foster 1995, 273; Menton 1983, 13–14).

In 19^th-century Bethlehem, it was the dynamic of a small rural town saturated in ‘agrarian religion’ (Grehan 2016, 16), thrusting itself so abruptly into the world of global trade and travel, that seemed to invite a magical realist telling of the story. Unlike much magical realist fiction, there was not an obvious anti-colonial moral to this tale. On the whole, Bethlehemites were beneficiaries of European colonial networks, tapping into steam travel, world’s fairs, and the ‘liberalisation’ of Latin American markets to forge their own mini empires of trade. But they were intruders in this world, looking in from the outside in a state of bemusement, trepidation and wonder. It was magical realism’s ability to destabilise the rational certainties of global capitalism, and portray them instead as absurd distortions of the natural order of things, that made it such an attractive vehicle for narrating the Bethlehemites’ encounters. As the book’s main character, Jubrail Dabdoub, tells a crowd of listeners upon returning to Bethlehem from the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893:

Let me tell you the strangest thing about that place. Everything in that white city—the domes, the towers, the palaces, the ornate facades, even the gondolas—everything was erected purely for the exhibition. The buildings were not made of stone but of cement and jute fiber that seemed like they might crumble when touched. Now the show has finished, they’re already tearing the whole place down. It was all an illusion, a trick of the eye! (Norris 2023, 123)

There was something particularly appealing about writing in magical realist prose given that the majority of the Bethlehemites’ early travels were directed towards the Caribbean and Latin America. Stepping off the boat in Havana, Barranquilla, Port-au-Prince or Veracruz, the Bethlehemites actively sought out remote areas not yet reached by importers of foreign consumer goods. As I read sources describing how they would open their trunks full of trinkets – crosses, rosaries, mirrors, perfumes, toiletries – to bemused local villagers, I could not help picturing them as the Arab traders of One Hundred Years of Solitude who traded ‘wondrous clocks for macaws’ (García Márquez 2014, 40), or the merchants Raduan and Jamil in Jorge Amado’s Brazilian novella, The Discovery of America by the Turks (Amado 2012), both of which were based on the authors’ own experience of Syrian-Palestinian communities in their hometowns.

For Carpentier, an important part of Latin America’s ‘marvellous reality’ was the natural environment itself – ‘the virginity of the landscape’, as he described it, that provides a ‘raucous setting’ for ‘a history impossible to situate in Europe’ (Carpentier 1986, 11–12). This was something I tried to tap into in my own writing, albeit inverted through an outsider’s perspective. To the Bethlehemite travellers, the tropical landscapes of Central and South America would have appeared so different to the much drier, more sombre scenery of the Palestinian hill country. How would the likes of Hanna Morcos, who arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1851, have looked upon the natural environment as he set off into the surrounding tropical forests to sell his wares? In the absence of any descriptions left by Hanna himself, I turned to Arabic and Ottoman travel writing from the same period to conjure a sense of the magical realist from these encounters. ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Baghdadi’s 1866 account of his arrival in Rio de Janeiro was one such example, describing in colourful prose the ‘wondrous fruits’ (cashew, jackfruit, pitomba) and ‘curious animals’ (parrots, whales and cobras) he came across (Al-Baghdadi 2007, 68). By employing this kind of language, al-Baghdadi deliberately situated his work within older Arabic traditions of travel writing, serving as a counter-pose to the ‘scientific’ Ottoman travel writing that emerged in the 19^th century (Kulez 2021, 200–2001). But his prose is also a reflection of the sheer vitality and exuberance of the flora and fauna he encountered, something that must have seemed otherworldly to a traveller from the Ottoman Empire. I tried to convey this sense of a world lying outside the normal realm of possibilities when imagining Hanna Morcos telling tales of his Brazilian adventures to a young Jubrail Dabdoub back in Bethlehem. ‘Plants and animals sprout gleefully from every crevice’, he declares, adding that ‘all manner of strange beasts … lie ready to devour the traveller’ (Norris 2023, 21).

Further south, meanwhile, the Bethlehemites’ journeys across the high Andes provided further scope to explore the fantastical elements of Latin America’s natural landscapes. Before the opening of the Transandine Railway in 1910, numerous young Bethlehemites attempted to cross the Andes on muleback in their quest to reach Chile – the country that eventually received the highest number of Bethlehemite migrants. Drawing on oral legends told by Bethlehemite families in Chile, alongside magical realist fiction such as Mario Vargas Llosa’s Lituma en los Andes (Vargas Llosa 1993), I tried to conjure the surrealness of the landscape for these early voyagers and the mysterious stories that circulated back in Bethlehem. The travellers are described as ‘disappearing into the clouds’, some of them never to be seen again, others saved by saintly interventions, French priests and strong doses of cognac (Norris 2023, 86–87). In the high plains of Bolivia’s Altiplano, meanwhile, the travellers come across ‘peculiar mountain people’ who keep ‘bizarre hybrid beasts’ – a reference to the llamas and alpacas that look to the Bethlehemites ‘as if a camel had been crossed with a sheep’ (Norris 2023, 88).

From these initial synergies with some of the natural landscapes and peoples of Latin American fiction, I dug deeper into the toolkit of magical realism in an attempt to access areas of Jubrail Dabdoub’s story that seemed ill-suited to academic prose. Mimicking many of the classic works of the genre, I incorporated ghostly presences into the narrative as a way of breaking the linear flow of time, serving as reminders of the past’s stubborn presence in the unfolding of current events. Thinking in particular of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (Rulfo 1955) in which a whole town of spectral characters haunts the novel’s protagonist, I wove the ghost of Jubrail’s brother Murqus (died aged 17) into a number of chapters, often in the form of dream sequences that served to blur the boundaries of the real and unreal. In a similar way, I mined fictional texts for techniques that convey the existence of circular timeframes alongside linear ones. Inspired by Carlos Fuentes’ Aura (Fuentes 1962) in which two sets of parallel characters co-exist as embodiments of the same people at different stages of their lives, I wrote passages in which Jubrail Dabdoub encountered his younger self as well as other characters from his past.

Among the various techniques I tried, perhaps the most productive was the deliberate inversion of the ‘rational’ and the ‘irrational’, so common to magical realist texts. To achieve this, I focused on two particular features of Bethlehem’s transformation: encounters with new technologies and the presence of saints/spirits. To begin with the first of these, it was noticeable how the few surviving written sources from 19^th-century Bethlehem, as well as oral traditions, conveyed a sense of the bizarre and the fantastical when describing early encounters with industrial technologies. The memoir of a cousin of Jubrail Dabdoub describes the ‘wondrous inventions’ reaching the town at the end of the 19^th century (Dabdoub 1923, 19), while stories passed down through the Mansour family tell of the great panic caused by the arrival of the first motor car in Bethlehem – a white Berliet driven into the town square at high speed by Hanna Mansour, one of the most successful of the 19^th-century merchants. Beyond Bethlehem, a variety of other sources were suggestive for conveying such encounters in terms of the bizarre and the fantastical. Pauline Lewis’ work on the ‘telegraphic imagination’ in the Ottoman Empire explores how various communities interpreted the telegraph’s ability to compress space and time according to their own cosmologies. These include illustrations in Syriac Gospel Books from the 1870s depicting the Istanbul-Baghdad telegraph line as a wondrous entity, worthy of inclusion alongside the lives of local saints and scriptural events (Lewis 2018, 143–146).

In the case of a small, inland town like Bethlehem, knowledge of such technologies arrived predominantly via tales from the outside, heightening the sense of mystery. Several decades before the railway arrived anywhere near Bethlehem (the Jaffa-Jerusalem line of 1892), the town’s young merchants were returning with stories of the trains they boarded trains in Marseille, Paris, New York or Rio de Janeiro. When the land ran out, vast steamships became their vehicle of trans-oceanic travel as they headed mainly west across the Atlantic but also eastwards through the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, the extravaganza of the world’s fairs – firstly in European capitals but later across the American continent too – provided first glimpses of electricity, the phonograph and megaphone (all witnessed by Jubrail Dabdoub at the Paris fair of 1878), as well as a submarine (seen by Jubrail’s brothers in Paris, 1867) and the giant Ferris Wheel of Chicago, 1893.

In the book, I attempted to narrate these experiences as beguiling encounters, emphasising the confusion and mystery they elicited among Bethlehemites. Trains are described as ‘fearsome creatures’ that emit a ‘curious panting sound’, ‘puffing out great clouds of smoke’. Steamships are ‘well-mannered giants’ that make their way along the Suez Canal as if ‘gliding across the desert itself, in full defiance of the laws of nature’. The demonstration of electricity is seen as a ‘dazzling stunt’ where ‘the mere flick of a switch magically lights a candle’, while phonographs ‘mysteriously emit the sounds of singing and musical instruments’. The net effect is to leave the Bethlehemites ‘in a state of permanent dizziness’ (Norris 2023, 91).

The second element in the inversion of the rational/irrational paradigm was the presence of saints and spirit-like figures. Here, the goal was to downplay the sense of surprise and wonder, creating a contrast to the magical properties ascribed to modern technologies. The more I researched Jubrail and his peers, the more I realised how piety and trade were seamlessly blended in their lives. ‘Oh Reader, regard how he of little faith runs his affairs’, writes Jubrail’s cousin Ibrahim when describing a family feud in his memoir (Dabdoub 1923, 19). These kinds of sources are peppered with Arabic phrases indicating that the protection of saints – particularly al-Khadr (a local Bethlehem variant of Saint George) and the Virgin Mary – was seen as vital to the success of the merchants’ voyages. Meanwhile, jinn and ghouls make regular visits from the underworld via ‘openings’ in the natural landscape such as springs, wells, caves and trees, threatening to throw well-laid plans into disarray (Canaan 1922). In the notebooks of Marie-Alphonsine, the nun who brought Jubrail back from the dead, I was struck by the lack of hyperbole when describing the miracles she performed. The Virgin Mary appears as an earthly character, intervening of her own volition as part of Palestine’s social landscape, alongside a host of other spirit-beings that range from a pantheon of local saints to deranged hyenas and devilish snakes. The Virgin’s intervention in Jubrail’s own resurrection is described as simply happening, devoid of embellishment or surprise. Indeed, Marie Alphonsine never uses the word ‘miracle’ (mu‘jiza) to describe such events (Alphonsine 2004).

To emphasise these otherworldly presences as an integral part of the merchants’ social landscape, I tried to replicate magical realist authors’ use of matter-of-fact, mundane tones in scenes that might otherwise be considered implausible. Famously, García Márquez described the character Remedios Buendía ascending to heaven as she hung out the washing, leaving her sister-in-law, Fernanda, ‘praying to God to send her back her sheets’ (García Márquez 2014, 243). Following the Colombian writer’s lead, I attempted to narrate Jubrail’s salvation without raised eyebrows: ‘From his vantage point on the ceiling, Jubrail could see his family gathered around his lifeless body’ (Norris 2023, 166). Elsewhere, I employed well-worn magical realist turns of phrase such as ‘everybody knew’ or ‘it came as no surprise’, to convey a sense of the expectedness of saintly interventions. Meanwhile, the real ‘miracle’ was the return of merchants from distant shores and their construction of fabulous pink-stone palaces in the town with money earned abroad.

The overall aim, to paraphrase Michael Wood’s analysis of magical realism, was to create an atmosphere in which the history appears drunk, but the historian sober (Wood 2002, 9–14). This notion of ‘inebriated history’ was a useful way of thinking about the tumult gripping Bethlehem in the late 19^th century – a time when supernatural events routinely intermingled with mesmeric inventions and fantastical landscapes. Maintaining the sobriety of the historian, on the other hand, was a way of grounding the text in a particular world view that saw saintly interventions as ‘normal’ and capitalist interventions as ‘bizarre’, thus inverting dominant colonial binaries. The text presupposes the reader shares this world view: the appearance of a ghost requires no explanation while the boarding of a steamship is fully explicated as a wondrous, beguiling event (Carpentier 1967).

Narrativity and the historian

The tone that I eventually used in One Hundred Years of Solitude was based on the way my grandmother used to tell her stories (García Márquez 1981, 68).

From García Márquez to Allende and from Murakami to Okri, magical realist authors lay bare the narrator’s role as weaver of stories. While their novels play out in realistically constructed settings, there is often a clearly definable external voice recounting events to the reader. As the opening passage of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children exclaims: ‘There are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined life events miracles places rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane!’ (Rushdie 2006, 1–2).

This explicit embrace of storytelling became a useful means for exploring my own relationship to Bethlehem’s history. All history is appropriation in one form or another, but projects like this one carry a particular type of baggage. As a British historian writing about Palestine, I relate to Bethlehem with an uncomfortable mixture of geographical distance and colonial proximity. Writing in an obviously imposed narrative voice offered one way of acknowledging and thinking through this relationship.

Despite the global mobility of Jubrail Dabdoub and his peers, the book’s story is anchored in a specific historical locale, rendering ridiculous any claim to authenticity of representation on my part. No matter how long I spent living and researching in Bethlehem, I would always approach the town as an outsider. No matter how much I immersed myself in Arabic and its local Bethlehemite dialect, I would never know the language as a native speaker. My intense affection for the town and its people will always be shaped by a position of privilege – the mobile western researcher able to intersperse visits with archival trips to Europe, Latin America and Asia, while Bethlehemites themselves are confined to ever smaller spaces, thanks in part to the legacies of my own country’s colonial policies. The irony of this dynamic in a town once marked by the intense mobility of its residents hung heavy over the writing of the book.

The resulting text was therefore designed to underline the historian’s role as crafter of stories rather than presenter of concrete reality. Many were the times I was tempted to intersperse more analytical passages of writing into the story, but each time I came back to the conclusion that an unbroken narrative was the best way to test out the value of this experiment and make explicit my own role in the process. An extensive notes section, tucked away at the end of the book, allows the reader to follow the research trail if they so wish, explaining where and why certain passages stray into the realm of imagination. The main text, meanwhile, is free to pursue its narrative course, written in a singular, consistent voice – that of a magical realist-style narrator.

Such an approach allowed me to experiment with various devices designed to make explicit the historian’s role as a mediator between subject and reader. The regular use of phrases such as ‘In the stories that made their way back to Bethlehem … ’, ‘It was said that … ’, or ‘Back in those days … ’ served to highlight the inherent distance and ambiguities contained within this mediation, allowing me to embrace the role of ‘happy failure’ assigned to historians by Keith Jenkins (2010). I also made regular use of Arabic exclamations in dialogue between characters, not only to emphasise the embeddedness of these Christian actors within their Arabo-Islamic social milieu, but to emphasise the gap between the past and the text. ‘Mashaʾ Allah! You’re back! Wayn ha al-ghaybah? I thought you were dead!’, explains Jubrail’s father upon his return from the Philippines (Norris 2023, 111). Rather than represent a claim to authenticity, these sudden outbursts in Arabic were designed as reminders that the majority of the text is constructed in a language (English) entirely foreign to the historical subjects – something akin to Walker’s notion of ‘textual realism’ (Walker 2010) in which deliberately anachronist forms of representation self-consciously distance us the past, opening up creative spaces of self-reflection.

Being explicit about the imposition of an external, authorial voice served the double purpose of providing commentary on the role of storytelling within the history. Not only was I, the historian, crafting stories about the past; I was also seeking to capture scenes of travellers telling tales about their journeys to distant lands. These stories-within-the-story were a device for conveying the sense of uncertainty surrounding the merchants’ journeys. I imagined returning emigres holding court in Bab al-Dayr (the town’s central square) telling yarns to impress their listeners – ‘By the truth of al-Khadr, I went and came back’, Jubrail declares in chapter 13, using a common invocation to the local version of Saint George. Or in chapter 14 he exclaims ‘ba‘id ‘an is-sami‘in!’, echoing a common exclamation used in Palestinian oral folk tales to warn the listener that something abhorrent is coming (in this case a description of belly dancing at the Chicago World’s Fair).

In their seminal work on Palestinian folk tales, Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana emphasise how the khurāfiyya format of oral storytelling combines the magical and the realistic, grounding tales of the supernatural (jinn, ghouls etc.) in real-life settings that are entirely believable to the listener (Muhawi and Kanaana 1989, 5–6, 18–20 and 46). The result, they argue, is an inherent ambiguity in this uniquely Palestinian genre (Are they real? Have they been deliberately embellished?) that mirrors the ambiguity I wished to portray in the tales of travellers returning to Bethlehem. As the celebrated Bethlehemite writer Jabra Ibrahim al-Jabra wrote when describing his childhood memories of a returning emigre in the 1920s: ‘Did Miquel come from the far side of the world, from Chile, to carry out the will of the demon living in our fig tree?’ (Jabra 2001, 109).

At several points in the book, I imagined travellers’ tales being told within recognised plot structures of the khurāfiyya - for example, a young man leaves his home village in search of faraway riches and has to overcome demons and monsters to find a hidden treasure before returning home (chapter 13). At other times, I sought to integrate these local vernaculars of storytelling into the audience’s responses. Chapter 14, for example, is told from the perspective of inquisitive townsfolk in Bethlehem’s central square after Jubrail returns from the Chicago exhibition of 1893. Their retorts include accusations that Jubrail is a khurāfa (teller of fairytales) at points where he is in fact giving accurate descriptions of the exhibition that nevertheless appear to have transgressed the limits of the listener’s credulity – thus returning to magical realism’s playful inversion of the normal and the fantastical.

This type of storytelling is hardly confined to the oral sphere in Palestine. Examples abound of Palestinian, and more broadly Arabic, writers invoking the magical as an allegory for history itself. One of Palestine’s best-known novelists, Emile Habibi, self-consciously employed the figure of the khurāfa in his book Khurāfiyyat Sarāyā Bint al-Ghūl (translated as Saraya the Ogre’s Daughter), presenting a series of fairy tales whose plot structures serve as commentaries on the modern Palestinian predicament. As Habibi discusses in the introduction:

I have removed Saraya, Bint al-Ghul from the class of the long novel from the beginning. What is it, then? I have called it a khurāfiyya. I have found that we Palestinian Arabs, whether specialists or not, use the term khurāfiyya for every action that catches us by surprise. (Habibi 2006, 7–8)

He goes on to provide an etymological discussion of the term, relating it to the gathering of over-ripe fruit, before linking this to the figure of the khurāfa:

A khurafa is a man who offers up - by way of excuse - the claim that he has acted under a genie’s spell … but isn’t believed by people, who say he’s just ‘telling fairy tales’ - that is, fine story but something essentially untrue. Or perhaps senility, kharaf, has distorted his reason. (Habibi 2006, 9)

Conclusion

Making use of fictional techniques in no way undermines the historian’s craft. These modes of writing broaden our expressive repertoire and, in doing so, expand our historical range. In the case of my book on 19^th century Bethlehem, it was the abrupt exposure of a small agrarian hill town to the capricious flows of global capital that rendered magical realism an appealing narrative style. The Bethlehemite merchants were no passive victims of globalisation; they proved highly astute at tapping into new circuits of trade and travel in the 1860s and 70s. But what interested me most in writing the book was a certain atmosphere that seemed to prevail in the town as these young men set out on, and later returned from, their journeys to the other side of the world. Tales of strange and exotic spectacles – from the colonial gaze of the world’s fairs to the great steamships plying the Atlantic Ocean – were processed within a world view steeped in Palestine’s socio-religious landscape of saints, miracles, mystics and local folklore.

It was this sense of the outsider looking in on the ‘spectacle’ of modern capitalism (to put it in Situationist terms) that opened the text to a magical realist narration – a world in which commodity fetishism ‘attains its ultimate fulfilment in the spectacle, where the real world is replaced by a selection of images which … at the same time succeed in making themselves regarded as the epitome of reality’ (Debord 1970, thesis 36). Unlike a traditional philosophical or historiographical text, however, magical realist fiction allows the reader to grasp the absurdities of this reconstituted reality on a more intuitive level. Avoiding the need to ‘laboriously unfold and deploy’ (Bourdieu 1992, 24), magical realism restores our sense of the ‘rational’ and the ‘irrational’ by adopting the perspective of a curious observer, viewing the spectacle of modern capital as an unfathomable, bizarre experience.

My aim in writing this article has not been to claim that magical realism holds some kind of universal historical value. To reformulate Benjamin’s axiom: writing style should reflect subject matter, meaning any number of different literary genres might serve as metacodes for conveying distinct forms of historical experience. In this spirit, my intention has been to explore the possibilities magical realism offers to historians writing about communities’ exposure to forms of colonial modernity – not as a singular route to historical truth, but as a reflection on certain features of the sources we encounter. In the literary sphere, magical realism has proved enduringly popular among writers across the Global South who identify in some way with the sense of alienation experienced under colonial modernity. Why should historians not borrow and adapt some of their techniques in an attempt to enter into previously unchartered historiographical territory? Emile Habibi’s playful use of the khurāfiyya – discussed above – provides an illustrative example in this regard. Palestinian historians have understandably focused on gathering, recording and disseminating empirical evidence to document their dispossession since 1948. But for Habibi, the injustices of the Palestinian Nakba go beyond rational explanation. Just like the magical realist writers of Latin America who deconstructed the absurdity of the modern state by telling fantastical stories as if they were normal, Habibi allows us to grasp the bizarreness of Palestinian existence by maintaining a dead pan tone in the face of farcical scenarios.

In his most famous novel, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, Habibi employs a mixture of satire and comic absurdity to convey the harshness of Palestinian reality. The book’s anti-hero, Saeed, goes to great lengths to please his Israeli masters – working as a police informant, renouncing his Palestinian identity, even raising a white flag on his rooftop – and yet is repeatedly abused, beaten and thrown in jail. Habibi’s masterful use of sardonic humour provokes a qualitative shift in the reader’s response, enabling a type of intuitive understanding and historical empathy that would not be achievable in a traditional academic text. Historians trained in academic forms of writing will rarely be able to conjure the literary flair or dexterity of writers like Habibi, but we might at least try to imitate their methods as we attempt to make sense of the strangeness of history. As the opening lines of Saeed the Pessoptimist pronounce: ‘Please tell my story. It is surely as weird as the story of Moses’s staff, the resurrection of Jesus, and the election of the husband of a ladybird to the presidency of the United States’ (Habibi 2010, 3).

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Gerardo Serra for his inspirational support and input in writing this paper. I would also like to thank Jonathan Walker and the anonymous reviewers at Rethinking History for their valuable comments on the paper.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Jacob Norris

Jacob Norris is Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the University of Sussex and Co-Director of the Middle East and North Africa Centre at Sussex (MENACS). His work has mostly focused on Palestine and its connections to other areas of global south history.