Describing the Past

The Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan moved with his family to Karameh refugee camp east of the River Jordan as a seven-year-old boy. His first prose work to appear in English translation takes place in that valley, around its marshes and reeds and flash currents. The camp became a center of Palestinian resistance after the Six Day War, and in 1968 in the Battle of Karameh, Israel invaded Jordan and razed the entire camp. The Zaqtan family home was not spared. The setting of Ghassan's childhood became a ghost.

Ghassan Zaqtan's novella, however, is not that immediately concerned with history. If history is alive and well in the narrative, it mostly serves as spandrel and not arc to the story. What remains, or what emerges as most present in Describing the Past is childhood--a childhood whose domain is between the living and the dead. It's a coming of age story that ends as soon as it begins in desire. Two teenage boys and a young woman interweave their shared existence in a refugee camp that holds within it a people's humanity.

Describing the Past is more than an elegy for the death of a childhood friend. And more than lament for the captive sexuality of a young woman and the kindness of an old pious man. Ghassan Zaqtan transports memory as dream narrative or, more precisely, as a state of being with altered consciousness. As if in a s#65533;ance, voices appear and speak from a truncated time, resected and preserved in a jar. The tension is between reflection and a recollection free of it--a reportage that roams in the enduring world of the dead.