By Tania Khadder
WHAT is the role of Arab women in today’s world? Can Palestinians and Jews really be friends? How does it feel not to belong anywhere?
In her recently published collection of short stories, You Don’t Live the Moment Twice, Cyprus-based Reem Hijjawi asks these and other questions, looking not only at issues specific to Arabs, but also at those universal to the human experience.
Each of the 16 stories explores a different idea, some written from such a personal angle you would think they were pages taken straight from the author’s diary. And as a Palestinian refugee who has lived in six countries throughout her 41 years, hers is a voice worth listening to.
“I have always felt like a bird who flies from one country to the other and I dream of belonging to a place and feeling settled,” Hijjawi, a mother of two, told the Sunday Mail. “I feel that any place I will live in, deep inside I will not feel strong bonds with it because I have no history there.”
In The Foreigner, she paints a picture of the harsh realities of life as an immigrant. A Jordanian family is living in a cold Western country, both literally and figuratively. The father waits for the bus in the snow with his children, but misses it while dreaming of life back in Jordan, and wondering why he had ever had big ideas about leaving in the first place.
When they finally make it onto the bus, they are greeted with suspicious eyes and snide remarks about “foreigners”. At the end of the story, he goes home to his wife and tells her they should go home, a decision in which they both rejoice. Hijjawi has chosen an ideal ending to her story – one that is not possible in her own reality.
She does not even remember her place of birth, Nablus on the West Bank in Palestine, but the struggle of her people remains close to her heart — in 1996 she founded the Reem Hijjawi Health Centre for Children in Palestine.
And with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict still very much alive, it is a running theme in her stories.
My Friend asks whether or not Palestinians and Jews can have a meaningful friendship, as the author describes her own relationship with an American Jew named Lana whom she met at a Nicosia gym. The two had a good time together and avoided talking about politics until one day, Hijjawi’s curiosity got the best of her and she had to know where Lana stood on the Palestinian problem.
When she learned that she and Lana had very different political views, she was confused about what that meant for their friendship. And when Lana left Cyprus to take up a governmental position in Israel, Hijjawi began to see her as both a friend and an enemy. This complex relationship raised many unanswerable questions for the author, and does so for the reader as well.
“We couldn’t get so close because there so many unresolved issues between us,” she said, reflecting on the situation. “But we could ignore them and focus on other things.”
But being a Palestinian refugee is just one of Hijjawi’s identities. She is also an Arab woman, which can carry with it a whole new set of obstacles. Some of these obstacles, she says, exist within Arab society, while others come merely from being misunderstood by the rest of the world.
“I wanted Western readers to have a better view of the Arab woman, because she is not as weak as she has always been portrayed,” she said. Ancient Traditions tells the story of an Arab woman, starting from the lessons she learned as a child about being pure and staying away from boys. She is kept a prisoner in her own home while she watches her brother come and go as he pleases, and she begins to question the double standards of her household. She rebels and studies law in order to better know her rights.
When her father dies and she is expected to forfeit her share of the family land, which she would normally keep for her future husband, she does not allow herself to be pushed around because of her thorough knowledge of what the Sharia law really states.
With this story, Hijjawi wanted to show the strength of Arab women, often overlooked by the outside world. She said that in her own family, it was her father and brother who urged her to educate herself and to strive for success. It was with their support that she went from Kuwait to the United States to earn a degree in Industrial Engineering.
You Don’t Live the Moment Twice gets its title from one of the stories with the same name, which illustrates a surreal encounter between lovers where one moment is all they’ve got. This is one story that does not touch on any Arab or woman’s issue, but instead looks at the basic human struggle to appreciate life as it happens, without always looking forward or back.
Though this is her first full-length book, she has had a number of her short stories published in newspapers and magazines over the years. And for a newly emerging Arab author, having the legendary Nawal El-Saadawi write the foreword to her book was an honour.
“I grew up reading her books, many of which talk about women in the Arab world,” Hijjawi said. “She was definitely one of my inspirations.”
The picture adorning the cover of You Don’t Live the Moment Twice is one of Hijjawi’s own paintings. In the centre of the book, there are two glossy pages showing some of her other paintings, which are all exploding with colour and emotion. One depicts a man sitting in front of what was once his home, brought to the ground by Israeli occupation.
“I started painting three years ago and before that I never held a brush. I wasn’t even interested in art,” she said. “But I had a friend who took me to an art class and I really liked it.” Since then, she has been taking art classes regularly and her paintings now decorate the walls of her Nicosia home.
So for someone who has always felt like an outsider, how does Hijjawi feel since she left Jordan to come to Cyprus for her husband’s offshore company?
“I’m very grateful to this country, because they don’t discriminate against Palestinians — they support the cause,” she said. “This really makes life easier for me as a Palestinian living in a foreign country.”
You Don’t Live the Moment Twice is published in the UK by The Book Guild at £10.95
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
