Soraya Antonius’s Arab awakening: Palestinian identity, activism, and Anglophone literature

ABSTRACT

While scholarship on Anglophone Palestinian literature has burgeoned in recent years, there has been no attempt to retrieve and assess the work of Soraya Antonius (1932–2017), author of two remarkable English-language novels depicting British-ruled Palestine from the 1910s to 1948, The Lord (1986) and Where the Jinn Consult (1987). Exploring and contextualising Antonius’s contribution to this literary corpus, this article examines the cultural, political and linguistic forces shaping her writings. It begins by tracing the fusion of Anglophile mimicry and anti-colonial resistance typical of her parents – George Antonius, author of The Arab Awakening (1938) and Katy Antonius, Mandatory Jerusalem’s leading socialite. While her parents funnelled their Levantine-cosmopolitan options into a distinctive Palestinian identity, the Nakba compelled their daughter to take the opposite trajectory, leaving Palestine to pursue cosmopolitan possibilities elsewhere. The article’s second section thus considers her work in 1960s and 1970s Beirut, first as a journalist and editor, committed to developing a critical discourse on Western Orientalism, and subsequently as an activist and spokesperson, advocating the Palestinian cause. Probing how these biographical and professional strands shaped her fiction, the final section demonstrates how the first novel’s Anglophile fascination with the coloniser’s mindset is replaced, in the second novel, with a decided focus on Palestinians’ perspectives. Echoing Albert Hourani’s critique of the ‘Politics of Notables’, Where the Jinn Consult thus offers a loving yet bitter account of her parents’ generation, complacent and ineffectual in the face of looming catastrophe.

KEYWORDS:

• Soraya Antonius
• Anglophone Palestinian literature
• Palestinians
• Mandatory Palestine
• George Antonius
• Zionism

Soraya Antonius’s first novel was called The Day Will Come. Its subject was ‘Palestine triumphant’ but the book ‘petered out on page 17’ because she could not quite envision how this victory would come about. It was 1941, and the nine-year-old Antonius wrote the book as a birthday present to her mother, Katy Antonius, Mandatory Jerusalem’s leading Arab socialite and wife of the eminent Palestinian historian, George Antonius. ‘She said she liked it’, recalled Soraya in an insightful essay written six decades later and published in Alif, ‘but could I perhaps persist to the happy end?’ (2000, p. 257).

Looking back, trying to explicate the politics of language that shaped her life and career, Soraya Antonius realised a ‘shocking truth’: neither she nor her mother questioned the unfinished novel’s language of composition – English. Educated in Cairo in English and French, Katy Antonius ‘did not read Arabic’. Soraya herself spoke it imperfectly, having been schooled in Jerusalem and Alexandria in private institutions that ‘used English for all but the Arabic class itself’ (2000, pp. 257, 258). No wonder, then, that her two ground-breaking yet largely forgotten novels, The Lord (1986) and Where the Jinn Consult (1987), were also written in English. This time, however, the subject was Palestine defeated, and the author persisted, unflinchingly, to the bitter end.

Scholars of Anglophone Palestinian literature agree that the corpus emerged with Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s Hunters in a Narrow Street (1960), only to slumber again until the mid-1990s, when a new cohort of writers appeared (Ebileeni 2019). Soraya Antonius’s name sometimes surfaces in inventories of Arab Anglophone literature (Gana 2005, Sarnou 2014). Nevertheless, apart from one early study (Sabbagh 1989), there has been no scholarly appraisal of her work. The omission is glaring, and not only because of the novels’ literary merit. As this article argues, it is the intricate role played by English in Antonius’s specific biographical trajectory that has shaped the novels’ unique literary intervention – a significant link between Anglophone Palestinian novels of the 1960s and 1990s.

In many ways, Soraya Antonius’s literary project continued the political work of her father, best remembered today for his pioneering study, The Arab Awakening (1938). Both George Antonius and Soraya Antonius sought to convince a western audience in the colonial (and later postcolonial/neo-colonial) metropole of the moral rightness of Arab political claims in general – and of the Palestinian cause specifically. No wonder, then, that both father and daughter wrote their books in English. However, while George Antonius did so by preference, Soraya Antonius could not have written her novels in Arabic. ‘I have found it impossible to break the mindset of writing and reading in English or French’, she confessed, ‘although I do sometimes dream in Arabic’ (2000, p. 260). Katy and George Antonius, it should be noted, became Palestinian by choice; born to affluent Christian Lebanese families and raised in Egypt, they had other options when settling down in the Levant. In becoming Palestinian, however, they defined and affixed their daughter’s national identity, although she herself would live most of her life in exile.

Consequently, Soraya Antonius’s literary endeavour was both early and belated: early, because it appeared a decade before the Anglophone Palestinian literary boom of the late 1990s; and belated, because its Anglophone nature was rooted in a linguistic schism, typical of a certain class and generation of Palestinians. As Edward Said (three years younger than Soraya Antonius) observed in his autobiography, Out of Place, ‘The basic split in my life was the one between Arabic, my native language, and English, the language of my education and subsequent expression as a scholar and teacher’ (1999, p. xiii). Born and raised in the motherland, these Palestinian intellectuals were nevertheless educated in a system that left English the default language for scholarship and composition, even if one yearned to write in Arabic: ‘because of schools and family background, I ended up as I started, writing in English and have to make the best of it’, Soraya Antonius wrote (2000, p. 262). Making ‘the best of it’ reflected, as we shall see, Antonius’s growing recognition ‘that even if I couldn’t write in Arabic I could still write as an Arab’ (2000, p. 266).

We begin this article by tracing Antonius’s family background, demonstrating that the same political forces and social circumstances that allotted her parents such a central role in the consolidation of Palestinian nationalism also shaped their ambivalent relationship with English, Englishness, and the English. Fusing mimicry and resistance, loyalty and humiliation, this relationship would go on to colour Soraya’s own upbringing, education and career. Examining her multifaceted work in Beirut, from the 1950s to the 1980s, the second section depicts Antonius’s gradual transition from journalism to activism and highlights her pioneering contribution to the critique of Western Orientalism, anticipating Edward Said’s insights. Examining how these biographical and journalistic elements have seeped into her fiction, the final section traces the novels’ crisscross pattern, shifting from British to Palestinian perspectives, from a focus on rural Palestine to urbane Jerusalem, and from magical realism to harsh naturalism.

Family

Soraya Antonius was born in 1932 ‘in Jerusalem when it was the capital of Palestine’ (her own formulation, in a biographical blurb [Moors et al. 1995, p. 253]). Apart from several months spent in a French kindergarten in Beirut, and a sojourn in a Jerusalem ‘nationalist school at which all classes, except of course the English one, were taught in Arabic’, her education was conducted solely in English, focusing exclusively on metropolitan topics and authors: ‘nothing that I read – and I read voraciously – had anything at all to do with my environment’ (2000, pp. 258, 260).¹ Attending the Gezira Preparatory school in Cairo, the young Edward Said experienced a similar displacement: ‘Our lessons and books were mystifyingly English: we read about meadows, castles, and Kings John, Alfred, and Canute’ (1999, p. 39).

Taking this kind of education for granted, Antonius and Said’s parents belonged to Palestine’s ‘cosmopolitan Anglo-Arab elite’ (Cleveland 2001), emerging in the late nineteenth century and flourishing in the interwar period. The Antonius family history, in particular, demonstrates how this elite emerged from the Levantine Christian legacies of Egypt’s Syrian-Lebanese (Shawam) community. As this section demonstrates, it is impossible to understand Soraya Antonius’s literary achievement without perusing this complex family history.

George Antonius (1891–1942) was born to an affluent Greek-Orthodox trading family from the Lebanese mountains of Greater Syria.² In 1902, aged eleven, his family moved to Alexandria, a city celebrated for its cosmopolitan, polyglot, multicultural fluidity. Although Antonius read, wrote and spoke four languages – Arabic, English, French and German – it was English which was the language of his education: first at Victoria College in Alexandria; then at King’s College, Cambridge, graduating with a B.A. in Engineering. Returning to Egypt in 1914, Antonius joined the public works department of the British-administered Egyptian government. During WWI he was based in Alexandria. Working as Deputy Chief Press Censor in Egypt, he also participated in a cosmopolitan literary circle that included E.M. Forster and Constantine Cavafy.

Antonius’s background and education allowed him to move effortlessly between the Oxbridge-trained British elite and the Arab upper classes. It was in this capacity as a cultural-linguistic mediator that Antonius served the British Empire in the decade after the war. This was not an obvious path: the post-war quasi-colonial Mandate system dealt a massive blow to the vision of a unified Arab nation; and the Balfour Declaration was incompatible with British promises made to the Arabs. Nevertheless, Antonius remained a loyal civil servant. Accepting an appointment as Assistant Director of Education in the fledgling British government of Palestine (a senior position, testifying to his Anglophone credentials), Antonius moved to Jerusalem in 1921, procuring Palestinian citizenship in 1925. He was also involved in a series of delicate diplomatic missions to settle border disputes in the Arabian Peninsula, awarded a CBE for his services in 1927.

That same year, Antonius married Katy Nimr (1891? – 1984), who came from a similar, though even more affluent, Syrian-Egyptian cosmopolitan background. Her father, newspaper mogul Faris Nimr (1856–1951), was an Orthodox Christian from Southern Lebanon and a central figure in the Arab Nahda movement. Deeply committed to the popularisation and dissemination of scientific knowledge in Arabic (a mission taken up by the al-Muqtataf monthly magazine, which he co-founded in 1876), Nimr left Beirut in 1884 and settled in Cairo, where he co-founded the successful pro-British evening newspaper, al-Moqattam.³ A staunch Anglophile (and convert to Protestantism), he married Helen Eynaud, from a family of mixed British, French and Austrian ancestry based in Alexandria since the 1860s (Obituary 1952). Recalling childhood visits to her grandparents’ villa in Cairo’s Maadi suburb, Soraya Antonius noted that ‘all books, magazines, newspapers in our house were in English or French’ (2000, p. 258). The education of the five Nimr children was decidedly Anglophone. Katy and her younger sister Amy were sent to an English boarding school, Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Amy, a modernist painter associated with the Egyptian surrealist ‘Art and Liberty’ group (Bardaouil 2016), was married to Walter Smart, the British Oriental Secretary in Cairo (1926–1945).

At home in Cairo, London and Paris, Katy Nimr settled with her husband in Jerusalem. At first, the newlyweds lived in the Old City’s Austrian Hospice, but in 1930 they moved to an impressive mansion in Karm al-Mufti (the Mufti’s vineyard), a small neighbourhood which later merged into Sheikh Jarrah. The house’s owner was Haj Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem, who first rented and subsequently sold the house to his confidant, Antonius (Rose 2010, p. 32). Teeming with ‘colourful Bokhara carpets and paintings’, music and books (Boyle 2001, p.146), Katy Antonius’s salon soon became the leading social arena in which politicians, government officials and intellectuals could mingle. ‘It was a magnificent party – evening dress, Syrian food and drink, and dancing on the marble floor’, recalled British MP Richard Crossman, who attended a typical Antonius gathering in 1946: ‘As far as I could see the party was fifty-fifty Arabs and British’ (1946, p. 132). Indeed, although Jews were sometimes invited, Zionists were wary of the salon’s cosmopolitan ambience and suspicious of Anglo-Arab conviviality – captured, as we shall see, in Soraya’s future literary work.

Whitehall officials valued George Antonius’s unique abilities as a go-between ‘who could protect British interests while not offending Arab aspirations’ (Cleveland 2001, p. 132). In Palestine, however, Antonius was continuously snubbed, despite – or rather because of – his exceptional talents and social position. In 1927 he was transferred from the Department of Education, where he had been trying to promote pro-Arab reforms, to a less contentious position as assistant secretary for Arab affairs. When he was finally restored to his old department, it was to a lower position. Disillusioned, Antonius resigned in 1930, ‘aware that the administrative and personal problems which he faced essentially represented on a micro level the fundamental problems of British pro-Zionist colonial rule in mandatory Palestine’ (Silsby 1986, p. 85). ‘Because he lived so well within that Victorian Englishness’, observed his daughter, ‘his feelings of disappointment and betrayal were so great’ (Lazar 2015, p. 191).

These feelings fed into The Arab Awakening which Antonius wrote throughout the 1930s (as he was working for the Institute for Current World Affairs, a private think-tank established by American tycoon Charles Richard Crane). A bitter denunciation of Britain’s betrayal of the Arabs, the book was nevertheless written ‘not with inflamed language but with a sad lament for the loss of the traditional British values of fair play and justice’ (Cleveland 2001, p. 134). Describing the violent British repression of the Arab Revolt, George Antonius notes that even after ‘their policy has turned Palestine into a shambles, they show no indication of a return to sanity, that is to say to the principles of ordinary common sense and justice which are held in such high honour in England’. The book’s final sentence declares ominously that ‘no room can be made in Palestine for a second nation except by dislodging or exterminating the nation in possession’ ([1938] 1939, pp. 398, 412).

Bemoaning the state of Palestinian propaganda – ‘the Arabs have little of the skill, polyglottic ubiquity or financial resources which make Jewish propaganda so effective’ (Antonius [1938] 1939, p. 387) – The Arab Awakening cemented George Antonius’s reputation as an ardent advocate for the Palestinian cause in the global arena, complementing his role as secretary and advisor to several Arab delegations negotiating the future of Palestine, most importantly the St James’s Palace conference of February 1939. Significantly, Katy Antonius also attended that conference, aiding the delegation (and her husband) by presenting testimonies from Palestinian women who bore witness to Britain’s iron-hand policy toward the Arabs (Segev 2001). In Jerusalem, too, her social activities extended well beyond her salon. In 1940 she initiated the establishment of Dar al-Awlad, a home for displaced boys. By this stage, however, her own home suffered a major crisis. Having separated from her husband in 1939, Katy stayed in Jerusalem with Soraya while George, who was travelling throughout much of the 1930s, moved to Beirut. His professional frustrations and deteriorating health brought him back to Jerusalem, where he died in May 1942, a week after the marriage was annulled. Soraya, long nicknamed ‘Tutu’ (von Maltzahn 2023), was ten.

More calamities followed, events that would also, subsequently, enter her novels. In January 1943, Soraya joined her family in Cairo – Katy’s sister Amy, uncle Walter and their eight-year-old son Micky – on a desert excursion to Saqqara. The cousins began playing with ‘a silver-black object half-buried in the sand’. Interviewed in 2015, Soraya recalled how ‘it suddenly exploded in Micky’s hands, blasting away half his face, and inflicting fatal injuries that saw him pass away a few days later’ (Bardaouil 2016). In Jerusalem, where hostilities were intensifying, Soraya experienced other horrors. In July 1946, Katy Antonius was on her way to a luncheon at the King David Hotel when a small bomb exploded nearby. She found Soraya ‘sobbing in front of the hotel’ (Clarke 1981, p. 239). Luckily, the two got away before the Irgun’s main explosion destroyed the hotel’s south wing, killing 91 people. This must have hastened Katy’s decision to send Soraya to study at the English Girls’ College in Alexandria; it seems that she was there in Spring-Summer 1948, as the Nakba devastated the Palestinian community.⁴ Soraya then moved to Britain, attending Cheltenham Ladies’ College (1949–1950). ‘It was my first experience of racism’, she recalled: ‘I didn’t know how to tackle it’ (Lycett 1988, p. 31). Like her Aunt Amy, she then studied at the Slade School of Art.

Even as violence was sweeping Jerusalem, a widowed Katy Antonius continued to hold her famous soirees. One of her guests in the summer of 1946 was General Evelyn Barker, the newly-arrived commander of the British forces in Palestine. The two became lovers, an affair that persisted until Barker left Palestine in February 1947 (Segev 2001). A year later, in February 1948, as war was escalating and her villa was scarred with bullet holes, Katy Antonius left for Cairo. The house became a guard-post of the Highland Light Infantry, then confiscated by the Haganah. Katy Antonius returned only once to the house, during a brief lull in the fighting. The roof was broken, the doors and windows gone, and the parquet floor charred with cooking fires and covered with bloodstains and human excrement. Years later she remembered how she sat on a crate and wept (Collins and Lapierre 1982).⁵

In 1949, Katy Antonius returned to East Jerusalem, now under Jordanian rule. Inhabiting a new house, she reopened Dar al-Awlad, taking in young Palestinian refugees (Jansen 1984). To help with its finances, she started a restaurant, 'the Katakeet’, a follow-up to her aristocratic Mandatory salon. Soraya visited Jerusalem during the UK school breaks. In the summer of 1951, following her mother’s suggestion, she went to meet Palestinian author Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1919–1994) who was visiting his family in Bethlehem, three years after he fled from Jerusalem to Baghdad. Soraya ‘was very intelligent and quite articulate. It was very clear that she would soon become a writer one day – in English, though’, Jabra recalled: ‘Perhaps the two Palestinian novels she published in London toward the end of the 1980s were, as she recently told me, mysteriously related to that beautiful afternoon visit’ (Jabra 2005, pp. 114–115). With Brahms playing in the background, the stone floor ‘covered only by a Bedouin rug of white-and-black goat hair’, and the ‘ground-to-ceiling bookshelves stuffed with Arabic and English books in no order’, Jabra’s Bethlehem sitting-room fused East and West – an ideal setting for the two expatriate Palestinians who would become major figures in the Anglophone Palestinian literary project.

Accounts of Mandatory Jerusalem often invest depictions of the Antonius family with a melancholic (and not un-Orientalist) nostalgia for a lost cosmopolitan-Levantine Palestine, which disappeared with the British retreat and the Palestinian tragedy (Lazar 2015). That this cosmopolitanism was in many ways a product of the colonial system, considered illegitimate by indigenous societies, highlights the tensions and paradoxes typical of the multiple, tangent circuits in which the Antonius-Nimr family operated. Yet it also emphasises the fact that, despite the array of cultural, social and national options open to them, Katy and George Antonius made a conscious choice to identify as Palestinians.⁶

Born in 1932 ‘in Jerusalem when it was the capital of Palestine’, their daughter Soraya Antonius had no need to acquire a Palestinian citizenship – or identity: it was an innate part of her life and work. Nevertheless, whereas her parents funnelled their Levantine-cosmopolitan options into a more distinctive Palestinian identity (marked by her mother’s decision to return to East Jerusalem in 1949), the new political reality after the Nakba compelled Soraya to take the opposite trajectory, leaving Palestine to pursue various cosmopolitan possibilities outside it. In doing so, she reworked her parents’ social and cultural mediating endeavours, adapting them to the anti-colonial and feminist discourses which emerged in the 1950s.

Facts

Having graduated from the Slade in the early-1950s, Soraya Antonius did not return to live in Jerusalem. She would go on to spend substantial periods of her life in Cairo, Nicosia, and especially Gadencourt, a small village in Normandy, where the Smarts kept a holiday home. It was in Beirut, however, that Soraya Antonius made a name for herself, working for three decades as a journalist, editor, curator, activist, propagandist and author; and it was there, in Achrafieh’s Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation, that she was buried in January 2017, aged 85.

Beirut of the 1950s and 1960s was the cultural and intellectual capital of the Arab world, supplanting Cairo, which had played a similar role in the first half of the twentieth century. While the decolonised Arab states were swept by military revolutions that deepened state intervention, Lebanon’s relative liberalism made it the leading hub for avant-garde cultural and political groups, attracting young intellectuals and dissidents from various Arab countries (Traboulsi 2007). Antonius was among them.

Of course, Palestinians played a central role in Lebanon’s modern political history. Around 120,000 Palestinians fled from the Galilee to Lebanon in 1948. Settling in camps, they remained stateless refugees, barred from naturalisation. Developments throughout the 1960s – the establishment of the PLO in 1964, the Arab defeat and Israeli occupation of the territories in 1967, Black September 1970 – deepened Palestinians’ footing in Lebanon. Militarily, the country became the base for the Palestinian militias’ guerilla warfare against Israel. Culturally, Beirut accommodated two of the most influential Palestinian think-tanks, the Institute for Palestine Studies (est. 1963) and the PLO Research Centre (1965). Both fostered intense discussions about the future of Palestine, colonialism and Zionism (Gribetz 2016). This vibrant activity persisted even after civil war engulfed Lebanon in 1975, but it could not survive the invasion of the Israeli army in 1982 and the devastation that followed. All these events were crucial in shaping Antonius’s career.

She began her journalistic work in mid-1950s Beirut, writing a column for the French-language daily L’Orient. ‘Occasionally Soraya lapses into French to find the right word’, noted a British interviewer: ‘But then she is totally fluent in three languages’ (Lycett 1988, p. 31). She sometimes published in Arabic (although it is unclear whether this was also the language of composition). One such essay – published in 1964 in the short-lived (and covertly CIA-funded) Lebanese magazine Hiwar – depicted her visit to newly-liberated Algeria. Describing Algerians’ attempts to re-Arabise their culture after more than a century of French colonial rule, Antonius typically focused on the nexus of language and gender. Since most Algerian women living under French colonialism were deemed too lowly to receive French education, they used Arabic ‘as their main language and sometimes their only language’, she explained (1964, p. 125). Following independence, however, it was this monolingual existence that made Algerian women the bearers of an indigenous Arabic culture for the entire nation. Writing about Algeria, Antonius was perhaps contemplating her own linguistic position in the context of Palestinian nation-building. Her contribution to the national cause would clearly hinge on English: ‘in the circumstances I was born to, my duty was to use a given formation to the best of my ability’, she recalled: ‘At the time it did seem important – we all registered the effect Abba Eban’s Oxford accent had at the UN’ (2000, p. 263). That her own ‘given formation’ was intimately related to her father’s Cambridge accent (never to be heard in the UN, instituted three years after his death) must have reinforced her sense of duty.

In the late 1950s Soraya Antonius began her professional association with the Middle East Forum, culminating with her tenure as editor (1961–1963). Established by the Alumni Association of the American University of Beirut back in the mid-1920s, the Forum aimed to offer Anglophone audiences a candid coverage of the Arab world. In an early piece, published in 1960, Antonius (introduced in the sub-title as ‘the daughter of Mr. George Antonius’) responded to controversial claims made by the Guardian’s Michael Adams regarding Arabs’ persistent critique of Britain’s imperial policies. ‘Brooding over past betrayals, I quite agree, can only make one bitter’, begins Antonius in terms that echo her late father’s indignation. Recounting Palestinians’ grievances, which she illustrates both historically and statistically, Antonius concludes with a poignant appeal to western liberalism (not unmixed, perhaps, with a whiff of sarcasm):

I hope that Mr Adams will not think that I have been actuated by bitterness or narrowness in attempting to reply to his points, but I believe so strongly that what he calls the emotion and lack of realism bound up in the Palestine question spring, not from a sense of guilt, but from the despair of a people who for years have seen facts distorted and omitted with the aim of minimizing or even obliterating a great injustice, and who naturally turn to the liberal press with its tradition of integrity for a redressment of the balance. (1960, p. 29)

Antonius’s publications covered a broad range of Levantine topics, from book reviews exploring works by her father’s old friends, Cavafy (1959) or Forster (1962), to a study of Lebanese architecture (1965). Following the establishment of the PLO in 1964, and especially the Arab defeat in 1967, her work became increasingly devoted to the Palestinian cause. The west’s enthusiastic response to Israel’s military victory and ‘total indifference to the suffering of a new flood of Palestinians struggling across the destroyed bridge over the Jordan, many of them refugees for the second time in 19 years’, triggered Palestinian intellectuals into action. ‘At least people were trying to think for themselves’, she recalled, ‘to shake off the colonial or the foreign mindset, or to use it quite deliberately to change the foreigner’s own mindsets. I fell into the last trap, still victim of the Abba Eban syndrome’ (2000, pp. 263, 264).

Antonius was thus a founding member and director of the Fifth of June Society. Producing and disseminating documentary films, organising public lectures, developing information kits for journalists and inviting them to visit refugee or training camps, the society sought to educate western audiences about the Palestinians’ struggle for recognition and justice. Explaining to a UPI journalist that she personally ‘was against killing’, Antonius went on to note that ‘when I talk to these boys they tell me: “Until we picked up our guns, no one even listened to us.” And who can deny they are right’ (Sims 1973).

During these years Antonius was involved in various cultural and media initiatives. She organised an exhibition on ‘Palestine in Art’ in London (1969) and another, in Beirut, showcasing Palestinian posters (1972); wrote and produced the documentary film Resistance, Why? (1971), directed by Christian Ghazi; and made numerous interventions in the western press. In one such case, following the murder on Israeli orders of Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani and his niece in Beirut in 1972, Antonius complained to Lord Hill, Chairman of the BBC’s Board of Governors, about the corporation’s inaccurate and biased reporting, as well as the reporter’s subsequent rudeness to her. These protests were seconded by Lady Diana Richmond, an old friend of her mother Katy, demonstrating Antonius’s ability to nurture and harness pro-Palestinian western networks of support (Down 2023).⁷

That the political, financial and cultural drawbacks hampering Palestinian propaganda in the 1970s were not so different from the difficulties commented upon by George Antonius back in the 1930s allows us to see the daughter’s publicity efforts as a clear continuation of her father’s Anglophone project of mediation (virtually all western interviews with Soraya Antonius mention The Arab Awakening).⁸ Still, her networking skills and broad cultural interests also reflected her mother’s legacy. ‘Take Soraya Antonius, a brilliant, educated woman in her thirties who lives in an artfully decorated apartment high on a Beirut hill and yearns to return to Jerusalem where she grew up’, wrote an American journalist (Toll 1972), echoing Mandatory depictions of Katy Antonius’s convivial Karm al-Mufti. ‘Infinitely more practical and intelligent than the male Palestinian intellectuals, Miss Antonius has a dispassionate dedication to Palestinianism that should worry both the Israelis and the Arab leaders’, wrote John Laffin, calling her a ‘prominent intellectual woman feda’i’ (1973, p. 140).

Antonius’s feminism was certainly a central component of her work. Active in the PLO’s General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW), she authored two major works (part of a larger book that was never completed), both published in the Journal of Palestine Studies. The first was a series of conversations with Palestinian women activists, claiming that their struggle for women’s rights was ‘an accidental consequence of their determination to carry out some political action, such as a demonstration, which entailed a flouting of conventional mores’ (1979, p. 26). Presenting, a year later, the effects of this movement, Antonius published ‘Prisoners for Palestine’ (1980), a painstakingly-researched list of 1,229 Palestinian women arrested and detained by Israel since 1967.

Antonius also produced sharp cultural criticism highlighting the representational mechanisms of western literature about Arabs, and particularly Palestinians. ‘Novelists writing in English have a tendency, not so much to misunderstand Arab cultural patterns as to completely ignore their existence, imposing a grid of Western value judgements on a world invisible or undecipherable to the writer’, noted Antonius in a sardonic review of Eric Ambler’s thriller, The Levanter (1972). Writing five years before the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Antonius wittingly acknowledges Ambler’s research (‘a refreshing novelty after the recent run of instant thrillers relying on the Intercontinental Hotel for local colour’), only to pose profound questions about the political and moral implications of these representations: ‘It is as though, the Jew and the Black having become forbidden subjects of contempt, all the pent-up energy of Anglo-Saxon Protestant racism has surged into the single remaining channel of “the Arab”’ (Antonius 1973, pp. 123-124).

Committed to the study of lowbrow forms, Antonius worked on a book-length study ‘of Western tabloid literature’s depiction of Arabs and Israelis’ (Moors et al. 1995, p. 253). Although this, too, remained unfinished, one section was published in 1995. Entitled ‘White Trash: Aspects of the Palestinian in Western Thrillers’, it surveyed 32 Anglophone popular novels published from the late-1960s onwards, suggesting that ‘trashy hostility to Palestinians may well be correlated to the PLO’s increased visibility on the political stage’ (Antonius 1995, p. 80). Sharp and relentless, her survey offers a taxonomy of the novels’ Orientalist tropes, presenting the Palestinians as backward, ugly and murderous. With millions of copies sold, these images disseminated widely. ‘To hazard an unsupported generalization’, she writes in the conclusion: ‘their effect may have smoothed the way to massacre – from Deir Yassin through Doeima, Kfar Qasim, Tel az-Zaatar, Sabra, Shatila, to mention only those reported in the West’ (Antonius 1995, p. 87).

These two activist-scholarly realms, Palestinian feminism and cultural critiques of Orientalism, would go on to inform Antonius’s fiction – just like the anger and wit exhibited in these publications, as well as the mediating skills inherited from her parents. Equally important, however, was Antonius’s sojourn in a small refugee camp near Tyre during a truce in the civil war. Speaking to the older, often illiterate women, Antonius was struck by their Arabic: ‘Unimportance, a certain isolation, helped preserve the rural society and language they had been driven from over a generation earlier’. This, in turn, led to an epiphany: ‘For the first time I realised that even if I couldn’t write in Arabic I could still write as an Arab – and without droning away in sub-sub-Abba Eban mode’ (2000, p. 266). Following the Israeli invasion, ‘holed up in her Beirut flat with her ailing mother’ (Lycett 1988, p. 32), she began her literary awakening by writing The Lord:

[…] for the first time since ‘The Day Will Come’ I wrote a novel, again about Palestine (but less optimistic) which I tried to write in the thought- and speech-rhythms of Arabic and to use Arab forms of tale-telling to depict the Arab characters. All were questioned by friendly publishers and rejected by certain critics as ‘bad English’ while both approved of the passages about British characters, which I had tried to write in English-speak. Not one accepted that I wrote, in English, as an Arab would speak in Arabic, although many accepted that Tutuola, Soyinka, Rushdie, Naipaul, or others use the thought- and speech-rhythms of their own backgrounds. I put this down to political rather than literary resentments. Africa, the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean, are not perceived by Britain and the US in the way that the Arab world is.

[…] Painters are allowed to repeat the same subject as much as they please, taking it from slightly different angles or by a different light of day: as soon as the book was finished I too longed to write it again in a different version. And I think now that this sense of liberation stemmed from ‘translating’, from being at last able, thanks to the sad epics of the camps, to reconcile my deep lost language with the superficial taught one, and that this is probably the only way out of an internal exile. (2000, p. 267)

Concluding Antonius’s Alif essay, this powerful description positions her Palestinian fiction firmly within the Anglophone postcolonial literary tradition associated with African, Indian and Caribbean (male) writers. It also, however, offers an interpretive key to the development of her literary project: while Where the Jinn Consult (1987) could be read as a chronological and thematic sequel to The Lord (1986), it also marks, as we shall now see, a major shift in both ‘angles’ and ‘light’, allowing Antonius to re-write the Palestinian story ‘again in a different version’.

Fictions

Taken together, the two novels offer a panoramic account of Mandatory Palestine, starting around 1910, a few years before the British conquest, and ending in 1948, just after the British withdrawal, with a bleak description of the Nakba. Presenting an extraordinarily rich array of characters and locales, dotted with numerous Arabic terms (explicated in appended glossaries), the novels strive to recreate the life and culture that Palestinians had lost, longing for a temporary resurrection – if not literal, then at least literary. Although the novels identify the Zionist project as perpetrator of the Palestinian catastrophe, Jewish characters are absent from the first novel and marginal in the second. Instead, the novels stage a typical Antoniusian love-hate relationship with the British, revering the colonial rulers for their civilisation and denouncing their betrayal.

Narrated by an unnamed woman journalist living in wartime Beirut, The Lord opens with a visit to a precipitous Crusader castle on the Lebanese coast, where the narrator and her partner locate ‘a stony mound, as long as a tall man’s height’ (p. 11). At this point, however, the narrative cuts back to early-twentieth-century Jaffa, as seen through the eyes of seventeen-year-old Alice Rhodes, who arrives in Palestine with her Anglican missionary father to educate and convert Palestine’s heathens. Decades later, Alice is being interviewed in Beirut by the narrator, who is writing a series of articles ‘on life a generation earlier’ (p. 175). The novel thus moves back and forth between 1980s Beirut and the reconstruction of Palestine life from the 1910s to the 1930s, peppered with references to historical episodes: the Balfour Declaration, the British conquest, the advent of a Jewish High Commissioner, Zionist immigration, and the Arab strike of 1936, developing into an armed rebellion which is violently quashed by the British.

The novel’s Palestine plot, as pieced together by the narrator, focuses on the enigmatic story of Tareq, one of Miss Alice’s students – and the man whose body, we ultimately learn, is buried in that Crusader castle. The handsome son of a poor Jaffa family, a mediocre student throughout his years in the missionary school, Tareq stuns his teachers with his stellar performance in the final examinations. Suspected of cheating (though no-one can suggest how), the disgraced youth is sent away, losing his prospects of employment ‘in the British administration, soon to become civilian’ (p. 29). The mystery deepens when, visiting Miss Alice, Tareq explains that the answers were given to him by ‘those behind the stars’ (p. 32). He then confounds her by performing a telekinetic trick. sinking a fisherman’s boat viewed from the window.

In time, Tareq makes a name for himself as a travelling magician. Some of his tricks are mundane, others less so. Witnesses claim that he ‘walked through walls of houses’ or put out a fire by ordering it to stop (p. 41) with the same ease that he passes from Galilee to Lebanon, unhindered by colonial boundaries. As the Arab Revolt intensifies, Tareq’s acts becomes increasingly defiant. Producing a silver Homburg hat, just like the one sported by the High Commissioner, he ‘waves it around and then turns it into a keffiya’ (p. 104). These tricks are complemented by ominous speeches. ‘You will all lose your homes’, he warns the nervous villagers, ‘and you will never be able to rebuild them. You will be driven out. Unless you stand up now and defend yourselves the names of your homes will vanish from the face of the earth’ (p. 160).

Tareq’s most spectacular and subversive trick is performed slightly earlier, in 1935. When rumours of the Galilee conjurer reach Jerusalem, he is invited to perform at the High Commissioner’s Christmas party. Following some commonplace tricks, a huge comet suddenly lights the sky. By its light, His Excellency, walking down the stairs, appears for a few seconds stripped naked, ‘without his boiled shirt and medals and black patent-leather pumps, a plumpish man with tufts of gingery hair sprouting out of his armpits’ (p. 94). Later investigations reveal that many of the British spectators missed the view but all the Arabs witnessed the soft, ridiculous vulnerability hiding beneath the Empire’s old-new clothes.

All this attracts the attention of Challis. A cruel, greasy-skinned, pig-eyed Briton who heads the CID office in Jaffa, he is the ‘archetypal villain’ of ‘that particular episode of empire’ (p. 67). Challis, whose professional obsession with the charismatic conjurer is fused with personal hatred and jealousy, exploits the relationship between Tareq and Buthaina, the novel’s leading female Palestinian protagonist. Originally from Anabta, near Tulkarm, twelve-year-old Buthaina was forced to marry an elderly widower, Abu-Ramzi. Losing child after child, she turns to the magician for help, an appeal that leads to the birth of a healthy boy, Saqr. Although the novel never suggests that Tareq’s help went beyond advice about hygiene and family planning, the full nature of their relationship remains vague. Yet the liaison is intimate enough, apparently, for Challis to force Tareq to work for the government, replacing the keffiyeh trick with a ‘flabby sleight of hand [that] produced a Union Jack’ (p. 170). The acquiescence is short-lived, however, and a defiant Tareq soon begins to support ‘the rebel gangs openly, saying that without them the ingliz would have stolen the land from its owners and given it to the Jews’ (p. 190). Challis has had enough. Tareq is captured, beaten and executed during Eid al-Fitr, just after Ramadan. It falls to Buthaina to steal the body and carry it to Lebanon, where Tareq had performed some of his feats.

Contesting the Orientalist tropes which Antonius had traced in western literature about Palestine, The Lord introduces a remarkable series of vignettes exhibiting the rich vivacity of Palestinian culture, not only in Jaffa but in the upper Galilee village of Tarshiha, in Abu-Ramzi’s village near Jenin, or in Nebi Rubin, a sacred site south of Jaffa, where an annual summer festival attracted thousands. Far from glorifying Palestinian society, however, Antonius is particularly attuned to the double colonisation of women, forced to endure child marriage, polygamy and drudgery. The description of Buthaina’s daily chores is a literary tour de force, exposing the enormous yet utterly unacknowledged labour required to sustain the rural ‘homes’ that featured in Tareq’s prophecies. This careful attention to lower-class domesticity (so different and distant, to be sure, from Antonius’s own social background) is captured in one of the novel’s most agonising scenes, describing the British Army’s house-demolition methods. Due to a bureaucratic blunder, Buthaina’s house is searched and ravaged, ‘the cotton stuffing of the slashed bedding […] soaked with the contents of the smashed olive jar’, the grain spilt from the silos ‘disintegrated into a mash that lay soaking, sodden, on the carpets and clothing’, and the ‘disintegrating Qoran […] reeking of kerosene’ (pp. 154–155). Registering the carnage – all that was spilt, shattered, scattered – the novel both conjures up the vernacular beauty and laments its annihilation.

Still, it should be noted that much of the novel’s plot and narrational energy are devoted to the British. A fossilised remnant/witness of the 1930s, it is Miss Alice, Tareq’s teacher, who stands at the heart of the novel: the readers’ first encounter with Palestine and many subsequent events are depicted from the young British missionary’s perspective, either focalised through her in free indirect speech or spoken by her (and quoted, verbatim, by the narrator). Other episodes are evoked in detail through Frank Egerton, a British journalist; and, occasionally, Kit Farren, the High Commissioner’s young and attractive ADC who courts Miss Alice but then marries a wealthy aristocrat. Indeed, while the novel certainly depicts Palestinians’ social life and etiquette, it pays much more attention to the class distinctions, schisms and intrigues that characterise Palestine’s British rulers. The colloquial yet stylised exchanges between the British protagonists indicate that Antonius relishes the playful opportunity ‘to write in English-speak’. Yet they suggest that this literary mimicry builds on a real interest, perhaps even investment, in the colonial mentality, which is represented as anything but monolithic. Antonius is fascinated by scoundrels like Challis but also by the benevolent Miss Alice, who fails to recognise that she, too, is ‘laying the foundations of another hundred years’ war’ (p. 87). Indeed, as the narrator acknowledges, ‘It wasn’t – still isn’t – easy to belong to a conquering people’ (p. 161).

Those who sympathise with the British, however, are often betrayed. When Tareq explains to Miss Alice that his special, preternatural gifts damaged his career, ‘and now I cannot find work in an office with the English and am worse off than if I had only come out in my true place’ (pp. 33–34), one is reminded of George Antonius’s professional disillusionment. Similarly, when the young student Tareq surprises Miss Alice by insisting that Tudor history or London’s geography are irrelevant to Palestinians’ lives – but later amazes Egerton who hears the magician tell the children of Tarshiha of ‘a city of fog and soot, where the sun rose for only a few hours of unequal struggle before it set again’ (p. 60) – it is difficult not to think of Soraya Antonius’s ambivalence towards her English education. Interestingly, various episodes in the novel express resentment towards parents who let their children down: Alice’s father is utterly oblivious to his daughter’s sacrifices while Tareq’s mother (Antonius’s most repellent invention, alongside Challis) betrays the national cause by secretly purchasing land for the Zionists.

Tareq is Anglicised not only by Miss Alice’s missionary school but also by the novel, which positions a Muslim Palestinian (sacrificed during Eid al-Fitr) at the centre of a plot reproducing the story of ‘The Lord’ Jesus Christ. The novel’s fantastic dimensions reverberate the postcolonial magical realism of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), but they chiefly serve the novel’s Sunday-school atmosphere. ‘Miracles are happening again on those green hills far away’ is Egerton‘s Fleet-Street response when he first hears that a ‘man had appeared in villages, a magician’ (p. 41). Indeed, Tareq’s first miracle with the fisherman’s boat is followed by other playful allusions to Jesus. In Galilee, not far from Cana, Tareq transforms ‘the forbidden liquor’ in Egerton’s brandy-flask to mulberry juice (p. 61); he later miraculously heals Egerton’s broken ribs. Challis sardonically advises the High Commissioner, ‘governor of Palestine’, to ‘wash our hands’ of the entire Tareq affair (p. 186). Buthaina, Tareq’s Mary Magdalene, snatches the body, raising rumours about its disappearance; while Um Tareq is ‘Judas, selling the land for coin being worse than selling one’s god, who by his nature could not be bartered if he were truly divine’ (pp. 178–179).

The novel’s focus on the Christian Holy Land may suggest a conscious appeal to Anglo-American readers, those former colonial (or present-day neo-colonial) ‘Lords’ of the earth, reflecting the Anglophone Palestinian author’s need to allure uninterested, ill-informed or hostile readers (Irving 2017). On another level, the figure of a Muslim who comes to carry a pseudo-Christian burden could be read as a political statement on pre-1948 Palestinian society. On the one hand, Tareq’s final resting place, in a Crusader castle north of the Palestine border, suggests a trajectory of growing isolation. On the other hand, prophesying among the people, his hybridised Muslim–Christian presence seems to capture a bygone ecumenical politics of pluralism (Makdisi 2019). In any case, if Tareq’s story is an allegory of the Palestinian national struggle it is also an allegory, more specifically, of the Antonius family. Charming entertainer, prophetic visionary, Anglicised, misunderstood and betrayed – Tareq seems to embody an amalgamation of George and Soraya Antonius.

*  *  *

Picking up where The Lord had left, Where the Jinn Consult marks a clear change in perspective. Tareq’s story still surfaces, mainly in early chapters: infuriated by his execution, an angry Jaffa mob attacks ‘the closest inglizi establishment’ (p. 18) – namely, the Rhodes’ missionary school. A shocked Miss Alice makes a brief appearance, but this is, tellingly, her final mention in the novel. The Lord’s fascination with the colonial rulers’ mentality and the spectrum of colonial attitudes is replaced in Where the Jinn Consult with a decided focus on Palestinian responses to the escalation of Zionist violence. Although Britons still feature in the novel’s rich mosaic – a British officer, Raymond Drewson, becomes the leading British protagonist – what matters most is Palestinians’ inability to acknowledge the looming catastrophe.

This denial is captured by the book’s intriguing title, explicated in a long epigraph describing how the Ottoman sultan imprisoned rival princes in a confined section of his palace. Enjoying every luxury, the princes nevertheless live with the knowledge that assassins might congregate in a nearby inner court – called ‘the place where the jinn consult’ – and murder them in their sleep. Yet they manage to ignore this, ‘either by exercising stoicism, or by imputing qualities of humanity and a sense of justice to the monarch, in the teeth of all past evidence, or by believing themselves to be no possible threat’ (p. 7). While the title draws attention to the (Zionist) assassins serving the (British) ruler, the novel itself is concerned with the (Palestinian) princes’ blindness and complacency.

This frame of mind is exemplified in an iconic scene, in which the mayor of Nablus tries to demonstrate to Egerton what might happen if Zionist immigration is allowed to persist. Instructing a young man to pour water into an already full glass, stopping only when his desk is soaked, the mayor explains that one of two things can happen: ‘The new addition is spilled. Or the container bursts’. Egerton proposes a third possibility: ‘If the new water were poured in fast enough […] [t]he original contents would probably be displaced’. Yet the mayor ignores this option, just as he fails to notice the silent woman who enters the room, her ‘eyes bent to the ground not to disturb the rulers of the world’, and begins ‘to sponge up the water’ (pp. 145, 146). This, incidentally, is one of various episodes in the book highlighting the subjugation of women and domestics, an important theme, as we have seen, in The Lord. Still, Buthaina’s fate here demonstrates the change in Antonius’s outlook. Having left Abu-Ramzi (who had married again, following rumours about her relationship with the magician), Buthaina becomes a servant in Jerusalem. Still, her Palestinian employers treat her almost as a family member, inviting her son Saqr to attend the Anglophone home-schooling arranged for his master’s children and their upper-class friends.

It is this small community of Jerusalem bourgeoisie, in which Antonius grew up, on which the novel focuses. These are the ‘princes’ who manage to ignore the impending assassins. The shift from the British perspective in the first novel to the Palestinian one here signals a loss of patience and empathy for the Miss Alices who are implicated in the colonial project; but this insularisation is also reflected in the novel’s turning away from the depiction of Jaffa’s poor, Galilean life or rural culture – all social and geographical spheres that must have been less intimately familiar to Antonius – towards the ‘comfort zone’ of her privileged Jerusalem childhood (with its undeniable Anglophone hold). If Tareq, as we have seen, embodies the Antonius family allegorically, Where the Jinn Consult moves on to explore the originals, or at least a very faithful reproduction.

The novel follows the fortunes of two upper-class Jerusalemite circles, from the late 1930s to 1948. The more dominant circle includes three affluent families, whose matriarchs represent different dimensions of Katy Antonius’s persona and biography. Violet Dhaishi is a fashionable and frivolous hostess of exquisite parties, bringing together Arabs and Britons. Neglecting her businessman husband and three children, Violet indulges her Anglophile desires by embarking on an affair with the British officer, Raymond Drewson. Violet’s best friend, Maliha al-Ghal, is married to a senior political activist, a member of the Arab Higher Committee, who is exiled by the British after the Jaffa riots. Having to fend for herself and her two children, Maliha is assisted by her new servant Buthaina, who supports her mistress when the war breaks out and the British confiscate their spacious home in Sheikh Jarrah. A third, more marginal, figure is Mimi Manfaluti, chair of the Ladies’ Union committee, who compensates for her childlessness by founding a home for young boys.

Disliking parties and insisting (unsuccessfully) on Arab education for his children, Rurik Dhaishi is hardly a George Antonius complementing his hostess wife. This role is reserved, to a certain extent, for the politician al-Ghal, whose long sojourn from home – first during his exile, then when he travels to America ‘to prevent the water from being spilt’ (p. 184) – captures Antonius’s long absences from home in the 1930s and his untimely death. In a poignant scene, the novel imagines a frustrated al-Ghal in Flushing Meadows during the November 1947 UN vote on the Palestine partition plan. George Antonius died five years earlier, but such is the Palestinian predicament, his daughter suggests, that even his rare diplomatic skills would not have changed the historical vote.

Soraya Antonius herself seems to be split between several characters. She is partly Veronique Dhaishi, the apple of her father’s eye, who is sent by her mother, the hostess, to a girls’ school in Alexandria. Yet Antonius is also the daughter of the politician al-Ghal, a somewhat bitter child who always feels less loved than her younger brother Amr and is hostile towards the servant’s son, Saqr. Significantly, although the novel begins with a third-person omniscient narrator, an unexpected comment on p. 50 (‘I must have seen Saqr around the house’) marks a change; henceforth the narrative is dotted with occasional first-person recollections, narrated by the unnamed al-Ghal daughter in the present tense of mid-1980s Beirut. It is impossible to determine whether the narrator of Where the Jinn Consult is also narrator of The Lord (who never mentions any direct biographical connection to British-ruled Palestine or even claims to be Palestinian).⁹ What is clear, however, is that the ruptured timeframe of the first novel (reflecting the split between the narrator and Miss Alice) is replaced here by a more cohesive account, narrated retrospectively by one of the historical players herself. In doing so, the narrative suggests how the narrator’s life in 1980s Beirut is rooted in her experiences in 1940s Jerusalem.

Yet Soraya Antonius’s presence is also visible in the second, adjacent group of upper-class Palestinians, part of a cosmopolitan intellectual set that includes several Arabs (both Muslim and Christian), a British officer and a Jew. United by their common love of literature and the arts, professed in regular poetry-reading parties, they establish an English-language literary journal called The Camel’s Hump. To facilitate the work, they hire an editor, an aspiring young writer called Vilia Haddad. Daughter of a ‘run-of-the-mill businessman’ and a mother who ‘had yearned for Europe and artistic life of operettas’, educated ‘at the Jaffa nuns’ and then at Beirut University (p. 105), Vilia is in many ways a Soraya Antonius, projected back from 1960s Beirut to an imagined early-1940s’ intellectual setting in Jerusalem – one which Antonius would have been much too young to inhabit herself, but which reflects the cosmopolitan facets of her mother’s salon.

What sustains this heterotopian bubble is the mixed romance between the Palestinian Umaima and the Austrian Jew Behr, as well as the genial generosity of Valentine, the Englishman. Indeed, it is English, the language of colonial oppression, that functions as the cultural and social glue bonding these individuals. Even Samarai, the group’s staunchest nationalistic Palestinian, believes ‘that more relevant matter was now written in English, more relevant to his and other people’s lives’ (pp. 82–83). But to what extent is English literature really applicable to the vernacular setting? As Behr comments, in terms anticipating Antonius’s and Said’s recollections of their English education, ‘What’s the point of reading all these misty fogs? We ought to be doing something about here’ (p. 80). Nevertheless, when Behr begins to recite Oden’s ‘Refugee Blues’ (1939), the clash that follows convinces the group that it must shy away from the political reality outside the bubble. Esoteric and short-lived, The Camel’s Hump suggests that such a project is perhaps admirable but unfeasible. ‘There isn’t enough raw material’, Samarai had warned beforehand: ‘We can’t just feed on our own humps month after month’ (p. 83). The episode invites a self-referential, meta-textual comparison to Where the Jinn Consult, a novel which positions the political critique at the heart of its Palestinian Anglophone project.

The cosmopolitan bubble bursts when, following the escalation of violence in 1946, Valentine is transferred to Cairo and Behr to London. This symbolic withdrawal of benign ‘colonial’ forces leaves the Arabs at the mercy of Palestine’s Jews. Significantly, while The Lord focused solely on the Arab and British vertices of the Mandatory triangle, Where the Jinn Consult introduces, alongside Behr, a Jewish protagonist who gradually replaces Challis as the plot’s chief antagonist. This is Lupa Reni, an East-European Jewess who works as a typist in the Treasury. First introduced as a comic character, thick-accented and oddly-dressed, Lupa emerges as a cold-blooded demonic presence, active in a Zionist underground cell – perhaps run by that ‘Mad little Pole’, Menachem Begin (p. 93) – and demanding terrorist acts that ‘make maximum impact’ (p. 131). Seducing Raymond away from Violet, she works her power on the British officer, convincing him to assist the Zionist cause.

Sketched in unabashedly grotesque lines, Lupa is the Jewish equivalent of those murderous Palestinian caricatures so prevalent in western culture. Having explored them in her critique of Orientalist fiction (Antonius 1973 , 1995), this is Antonius’s very conscious literary retaliation. Less conscious, perhaps, is the fate she assigns to Raymond Drewson, who is clearly a version of General Evelyn Barker, Katy Antonius’s lover (though in her case, after her husband’s death). While the allegedly anti-Semitic Barker left Palestine safely, the pro-Zionist Drewson is killed in the King David Hotel bombing, carried out by Lupa and her friends.

The horrific description of the hotel bombing (deferred, in the novel’s chronology, from July 1946 to April 1948) is one of numerous scenes in the novel reconstructing well-known episodes of Zionist violence. Major examples include the Irgun’s blowing up of the Palestinian-owned Rex cinema in May 1939; the Deir Yassin massacre in April 1948; and the mass expulsion of Lydda’s Palestinians in July. Two lesser events, however, are particularly poignant, immersed as they are in Antonius’s biography. The first occurs when the al-Ghal children are about to attend a costume party raising money for the boys’ home. When they reach the Damascus Gate, a Zionist terrorist attack involving barrels full of explosives kills Amr, the narrator’s nine-year old brother. The narrator’s proximity (‘the blast knocked me off my feet’ [p. 201]), followed by the graphic description of the wound and the corpse, call to mind the death of Antonius’s cousin, Micky Smart, the closest she had to a sibling (and probably the MS to whose memory the novel is dedicated [p. 5]). Relying on her own ‘hump’ of memories, Antonius projects her most intimate trauma onto the tragedy of her people.

Although it features no actual death, the novel’s conclusion captures the essence of the Palestinian catastrophe by bringing it home, literally. Violet, who had been staying with the al-Ghals for several weeks following the British withdrawal, walks to her lavish home. Entering the house, ‘facing reality – the future – for the first time’ (p. 274), Violet gradually realises the extent of devastation and filth that Katy Antonius found when she re-entered her home in 1948. Seeing, in the smashed mirror, ‘a thousand tiny deformed and split-angled Violets’, the shattered Palestinian hostess surrenders, as the novel ends: ‘There she left the house, […] lost the wish to see, the courage to return’ (p. 275).

That the destruction of Violet’s mansion in Where the Jinn Consult echoes the wreckage of Buthaina’s home in The Lord exhibits, yet again, Antonius’s shift in focus from farmers and villagers to the urban upper middle-class. Yet it also highlights the relationship between the two historical phases of Palestinian resistance, in the 1930s and 1940s. Anticipating later historiographical trends (Khalidi 2001), Antonius suggests that Britain’s violent quelling of the Arab Rebellion – epitomised in The Lord by Ramzi, Buthaina’s stepson, who joins the rebels’ struggle – left the Palestinians crushed, unable to face the formidable diplomatic, political and military challenges of 1947–1948.

This historiographical insight shapes the novels’ different depiction of Britain’s guilt. If the first novel condemns the colonial rulers for their excessive violence, the second mocks their inability to understand Zionism’s real aims. The Jews, Valentine assures his cosmopolitan friends, ‘they’re not a martial race, not gifted for war’ (pp. 84–85). ‘Weizmann himself has promised that there’s no intention of driving them [the Arabs] out, of replacing them’, explains Raymond: ‘As though it could be done!’ (p. 182). Only the journalist Egerton, nicknamed ‘Cassandra’ by Kit (p. 93), is able to assess the situation correctly.

Yet it is the Palestinians’ recklessness and denial that the second novel focuses on. Antonius devotes some attention to the villagers’ viewpoint. Reprimanding his son’s decision to desert his agricultural duties and join the fighting, Abu-Ramzi explains that the British will leave, just like the Turks had: ‘They all go, there’s no difference. But the land remains. If you look after it. If you let the land go then you will die’ (p. 92). While Antonius shares Abu-Ramzi’s devotion to the land (Um Tareq, as we have seen, who buys Arabs’ land for the Zionists, is among the novel’s chief villains), she stresses his naïve failure to recognise the Zionist enemy (a blindness ‘validated’, paradoxically, by The Lord’s minimal mention of the Jews).

Nevertheless, the critique of Where the Jinn Consult is aimed first and foremost at those leaders, like the mayor of Nablus mentioned above, who failed to understand the threats and respond accordingly. Although al-Ghal is stamped with Soraya’s loving memory of her father, he is in fact more reminiscent of Palestinian leaders such as Jamal al-Husayni and Musa Alami. While the Lebanese/Egyptian Antonius ‘became’ a Palestinian, these men emanated from Palestine’s long-settled dynasties of ‘urban notables’ (Hourani 1981). As the novel explains, ‘the Nashashibis and the Tamimis and the Khalidis’ (p. 48) represent a patrician tradition of caution, moderation and negotiation which ultimately proved totally inapt. ‘They can’t partition a country against the will of its inhabitants’, protests the reasonable, gentlemanly al-Ghal to the Indian delegate in Flushing Meadows, who responds, ‘You can do anything if you have a gun in your hand and the other man does not’ (p. 215).

The political failure of the ‘fathers’ goes hand in hand with the fecklessness of the mother. When a child of the Dajanis, who live close by, is shot by a Jewish sniper, Violet decides to send Veronique to Egypt, where her older brother is already studying. Articulating an upper-class equivalent of Abu-Ramzi’s warning, her husband insists that ‘roaming round the world like the Jews and the British, makes people unfit. […] The colt should graze where the horse will gallop’ (p. 167). As with his earlier insistence that the children study in Arabic and not in English, Rurik Dhaishi’s dogged Palestinian patriotism is repeatedly overridden by the cosmopolitan rootlessness of his (unfaithful) wife. ‘Perhaps they were both right?’, the narrator nevertheless wonders: ‘Those who lived grew up to ask the same question again and again, at weddings, at births, above all at funerals: why? how? what should one have done? […] Today a hundred – four thousand – Dajani boys are slaughtered out of the blue sky, on an afternoon blazing under the sun of death and no one moves’ (p. 169).

This is one of several moments in which, pausing the historical plot, the narrative moves in fast-forward from the 1940s to the present-day suffering of Palestinians in Lebanon’s refugee camps. These orations sometimes become self-reflexive musings about the power of language and memory to recreate the lost Palestinian world. Enough to pronounce the old Arabic name, and the speaker, ‘sitting in the dusty disheartening alley of the camp’, smiles with pleasure as his immediate surroundings vanish and he can almost see the beauty of that golden countryside ‘now lost, sprayed with poison, cemented over, surrounded with barbed-wire and watchtowers and police dogs’ (p. 157).

In other cases, writing with frantic fury, the narrator denounces the west’s amnesia and hypocrisy, often highlighting the ‘juncture between the legacy of British colonialism and the ascendance of American imperialism’ which has been so central to the rise of Arab Anglophone literature (Gana 2005, p. 12). In one example, an allusion to the Irgun’s notorious hanging of two British sergeants in July 1947 (and then booby-trapping the bodies) ignites a bitter three-page jeremiad depicting the rise to power of Menachem Begin and lamenting Americans’ utter inability to recognise the connection between their own support of the Irgun in the 1940s and the Marine Headquarters disaster in Beirut in October 1983: ‘I don’t suggest the Marines themselves, at the moment they were blown out of the whole repetitive story, had the knowledge or the time to realise that they were paying for other explosions and their consequences. But none of their parents […]? Not one of the leaders […]? No one said to himself, “we started this and now it has returned home”? It seems not’ (pp. 178–179).

Even sympathetic critics were baffled by these intensive diatribes. ‘Where the Jinn Consult belongs to an unusual genre, the novel as malediction’, wrote Robert Irwin in the TLS: ‘This is Caliban’s novel and the guilty protagonists in it are eloquently cursed’ (1987). ‘Indeed by the end’, observed William Dalrymple in the Literary Review, ‘it has become above all a scream for justice, so that the storyline sinks into the background and only the scream remains’ (1988). Consequently, although Simon Sebag Montefiore claimed that Where the Jinn Consult was ‘probably the best novel’ written about Mandatory Jerusalem (2011, p. 463), it was only published in Britain and not issued (like The Lord) by an American press.

Conclusion

Demonstrating her maturity as a novelist, Where the Jinn Consult marked Soraya Antonius’s very own Arab awakening. By moving closer to her own personal history, she replaced the external British perspective that dominated her first novel (and went hand-in-hand with a pseudo-ethnographic representation of rural Palestine) with a powerful insider’s testimony depicting the Palestinians’ predicament as viewed – or rather tragically unheeded – from the upper echelons of urbane society.

If, as this article has sought to demonstrate, Antonius’s career as journalist, cultural mediator and political activist emanated from and built on the work of her better-known parents, Where the Jinn Consult seems to have signalled a break from that legacy, in both tone and perspective. As we have seen, when George Antonius, in the late 1930s, denounced Britain’s betrayal of the Palestinians, he did so ‘not with inflamed language but with a sad lament for the loss of the traditional British values of fair play and justice’ (Cleveland 2001, p. 134). Writing fifty years later, his daughter made no effort to withhold her inflammatory rage and frustration, aimed not only at western colonialism and neo-colonialism but also at her parents’ milieu, which is otherwise depicted so lovingly and nostalgically. Indeed, perhaps it was her mother’s death, in 1984, that finally liberated Soraya Antonius from the familial burden, allowing her to cast off the diplomatic affability associated with George and Katy Antonius and to look back – and forwards – in unadulterated anger. To be sure, this inter-generational family drama reflected much broader historical developments. It is telling that while her father’s magnum opus is imprinted with the violent events of the Arab Rebellion, Soraya’s masterpiece could be said to have anticipated the first Intifada. Indeed, with its fusion of wrath, exasperation, dignity and nostalgia, Where the Jinn Consult could be read as the literary equivalent of the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation that broke out in December 1987, shortly after the novel’s publication.

Of course, the scale and repercussions of this new Palestinian uprising were far from clear in January 1988, when The Middle East magazine published an interview with Antonius, discussing her new book. Asked about her future plans, Antonius promised a third novel, a ‘Passion Flower Hotel of the Orient’ that would describe her years in the English Girls’ College in Alexandria. Indeed, ‘her publishers talk of a trilogy, but she says there could be more’. Intriguingly, Antonius noted that she was thinking of writing a future novel in French: ‘It would give an interesting slant on events’, she explained (Lycett 1988, p. 31). A shift from English to French would have presented a powerful linguistic emblem of Antonius’s need to move beyond her parents’ Anglophone allegiance (reflected so forcefully in the narration of The Lord). The fact that Soraya Antonius could not have turned to Arabic as her language of composition – as she herself explained so candidly in her Alif piece (2000) – is typical of the biographical and educational trajectory that shaped her unique contribution to Anglophone Palestinian literature, an overlooked but momentous link between Jabra’s earlier work in the 1960s and the remarkable growth of the corpus in the 1990s and 2000s.

If Antonius did write additional novels, in either English or French, they remained unpublished. The Alif piece suggests that her subsequent silence was rooted in the critics’ frustrating inability to do justice to the postcolonial dimensions of her work. But perhaps it was simply the result of the deep pessimism engulfing the future of the Palestinian national cause. ‘Everyone has been warped for three or four generations’, were her final words in that interview in 1988: ‘I’m afraid things are going to be bad in the Arab world for at least a century’ (Lycett 1988, p. 32). The Day Will Come, the novel that Soraya Antonius wrote in 1941 for her mother’s birthday, ‘petered out on page 17’ because the nine-year-old child could not quite see how its subject, ‘Palestine triumphant’, could ever be achieved. A similar petering out may have marked Antonius’s oeuvre in the wake of the first Intifada, Oslo, the second Intifada and beyond. Triggered by the ‘sad epics of the camps’, she explained at the very end of the Alif article, her Anglophone Palestinian novels offered a way of reconciling her ‘deep lost language with the superficial taught one’. This, she concluded, ‘is probably the only way out of an internal exile’ (2000, p. 267). Yet it was the exile, both internal and external, that finally prevailed.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to James Downs, archivist of the Middle East Collections at the University of Exeter, for his archival assistance; and to Ayelet Ben-Yishai for her useful comments.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation Grant 933/17.

Notes on contributors

Eitan Bar-Yosef

Eitan Bar-Yosef is Associate Professor at the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Specialising in Postcolonial Studies in both British and Israeli contexts, he is the author of The Holy Land in English Culture, 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (2005) and A Villa in the Jungle: Africa in Israeli Culture (in Hebrew, 2013). His current research project explores representations of Mandatory Palestine in British literature and culture after 1948.

Eli Osheroff

Eli Osheroff is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His first monograph, which he is currently completing, explores the Arab political imagination before 1948 regarding the future of Jews in Palestine. Focusing on Palestinian and Arab intellectual history within the context of the Arab-Zionist encounter, his essays have appeared in the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, and other venues.

Notes

1 The ‘nationalist’ school was probably Madrasat al-Umma, founded by Shukri Harami.

2 The most comprehensive biography is Boyle 2001 (abridged in Silsby 1986). See also Cleveland 2001; Thornhill 2004; Lazar 2015.

3 A student and later ‘native instructor’ at the Syrian Protestant College (renamed the American University of Beirut in 1920), Nimr left the College (and Beirut) following a bitter controversy concerning the study of Darwin’s theory. The attack on Darwin was incited not by Arab students but rather by the overly-anxious, ‘pious’ Protestant-American faculty. See Elshakry 2013.

4 Antonius is identified in two photographs of EGC senior boarders taken in May and Summer 1948. See https://www.flickr.com/photos/cam37/2410646850/in/photolist-75GTDY-75D27D-4F2cjJ

5 Occupying the house, Haganah members confiscated discreet family letters, now held at the Israel State Archives. On the house’s highly symbolic history after 1948 see Hasson 2009, Dabbagh 2021.

6 Interestingly, neither was Jabra born in Palestine (rather in Adana, then part of the French Mandate of Cilicia). Nevertheless, he was an infant when his Syriac Orthodox family settled in Palestine in the early 1920s (Tamplin 2021).

7 See correspondence in the papers of Sir John and Lady Diana Richmond, Special Collections, University of Exeter, EUL MS 115/4/4. Sir John’s father, architect Ernest Tatham Richmond, was a colonial administrator in Mandatory Palestine. On the history of the Richmonds’ pro-Palestinian sympathies and activities see Downs 2023.

8 Antonius funded two important initiatives honouring her father: an annual memorial lecture at St Anthony’s College, Oxford (est. 1976); and a post-doctoral fellowship at Birzeit University, sponsoring scholars’ research trips to Oxford.

9 The narrator’s childhood acquaintance with Buthaina and Saqr in Jerusalem could explain, retrospectively, her journalistic attempt (in the earlier novel) to piece together Tareq’s history.