On Nostalgic Longing and Monumentalism in Ghada Samman’s The Impossible Novel

Ghada Samman’s collection of prose poems, Letters of Longing for Jasmine (1996), opens with the following passage:

Everyone who masterfully conceals their emotions explodes like a deluge if they are exposed. Here I am revealing and writing about the projection of my heart.

Whenever I write about Damascus, my paper is transformed into white sails, the pen in my hand becomes a spike of wheat, and my fingers a rainbow.

Whenever I write about Damascus, decaying language glitters with fertility and light.

The spirit pervades it, and the words are converted into a tribe of children with curious eyes, rushing through the playground of paper, jumping over the lines that whisper together about me in the corner of the paper like children of a nursery school of ghosts who have discovered that their teacher is a lover.

 Whenever I write about Damascus, I weep on the breast of the paper with tears of ink.

Writing from exile, Samman evokes a tripartite relationship between the city of her birth, nostalgia, and the creation of narrative. The attempt to inscribe her memories of Damascus marks her entry into a magical world; the city and her recollections of it are responsible for reviving language with a child-like spirit. Yet, this spirit is not embodied on paper without its own aura of the sadness of separation, of distance in time and space.

Samman is neither alone in her bittersweet and occasionally overwrought evocations of the Syrian capital, nor is Letters of Longing for Jasmine her only work dedicated to the city. Numerous literary texts by Syrian authors have depicted a similar notion of nostalgic longing for Dimashq al-fayha, ash-Sham, the city of jasmine. These works range from those of Nadia Khust, who has written both historical and literary texts to argue for the preservation of Old Damascus, to Nizar Qabbani who wrote a number of poems dedicated to recollecting the city of his youth. Notwithstanding their more satirical counterparts, such as Zakariya Tamir, various Syrian authors have attempted to preserve Damascus through a form of textualized monumentalism. These nostalgic restorations of Damascus are nearly always located in the earlier decades of the twentieth century rather than in the stark reality of the present.

This scripted restoration and monumentalization of a city merges with an official declaration of the value of the “universal” heritage contained within the ancient walls of Damascus. The Old City of Damascus (the area within the ancient city walls) was designated as a World Heritage site in 1979. According to the UNESCO website, the justifications for adding Damascus to the World Heritage list include the need to preserve selective areas of the city from decay, destruction, or change as well as the idea that “over the centuries”, the “authenticity” of Damascus has persisted” and it is “one of the oldest cities that has preserved its state” while being continually inhabited. Thus, Damascus is seen as “the cradle of historical civilizations constituting a beacon of science and art over the ages” and “a historical encyclopedia that tell us a large part of the story of humanity”.

The official language of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee relies on a specific lexicon. Words like heritage, monument, authenticity, and preservation reveal a reengagement with what was in the 19th century both an obsessive “search for origins” on the part of imperial powers and emerging nation-states as well as an idealistic notion of universal, progressive human history whose traces must be selectively unearthed and/or preserved. It is not only UNESCO that embraces these defining terms; the Syrian state does as well. The state has been responsible for nominating this and other sites within its borders for UNESCO’s consideration, and it has drawn on the “authenticity” of the “old city” in its discourse of nationalist identity and its promotion of tourism. But just as the terms heritage, monument, authenticity, and preservation relate to notions of history and heritage–whether nationalist or universalist– they can simultaneously be connected to the ideas of personal memory and memorialization, and in turn, to a critical awareness that paradoxically underpins the idealism of nostalgic longing.

One year after the appearance of Letters of Longing for Jasmine, Ghada Samman published a lengthy, semi-autobiographical novel with a title that reinvoked the image of Damascus: The Impossible Novel: A Damascene Mosaic (Al-Riwaya al-Mustahila: Fusayfisa Dimashqiya, 1997). Ranging in styles from stream of consciousness narrative, realistic description, and elegiac poetry, the novel recounts the stories of the “nationalist” character Amjad al-Khayyal, the death of his wife Hind, the coming-of-age of their daughter Zayn, and the fates of the rest of his extended family from the politically pivotal years 1946 to 1956 immediately after Syrian independence. In what follows, I trace the ways in which Samman’s depictions of Damascus in The Impossible Novel echo, revise, and at times, deconstruct a kind of nostalgic and monumentalizing restoration of the city that surfaces in UNESCO’s conception of it as a World Heritage site.

In Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003), Andreas Huyssen examines monumentalism as both an unstable process and an aesthetic category. He reminds us not only that the search for the monumental in modernity is always a quest and desire for origins, but also that the monument and the monumental are always suspect because of their links to mass movements, nationalisms, and totalitarianisms and their “delusions of grandeur and imaginary wholeness”(39). The origin of the concept of monumentalism retains the idea of a monument as an ancient or antique structure that is preserved and venerated for its historical and archeological significance. In contrast, contemporary “memory practices” also deal with the monument as an aesthetic structure that is created and erected in the present as a memorial in order to commemorate a person or event.

The notion of the monumental UNESCO uses in defining its World Heritage sites is tied more to the former conception than the latter; the value of the heritage of the Old City of Damascus is defined by the millennia of history still visible in its various ancient monuments and residential architecture. Yet, if constructions of Damascus such as those of Ghada Samman are examined closely, they demonstrate a fusion of these two different conceptions of the monumental that is disturbed by the actions of the characters, their individual memories, and the events of history. The veneration and commemoration of Damascus through the personal and the everyday in these literary texts also expand the boundaries of the monumental (both in the text and in definitions of the boundaries of Old Damascus at large) while simultaneously suggesting the contradictory, transient, and historically contingent nature of monumentalism’s own foundations.

In The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Svetlana Boym regards nostalgia as both seductive and manipulative; in doing so she delineates two forms of nostalgia– restorative and the reflective. Restorative nostalgia emphasizes the concept of “nostos;” it attempts to reconstruct the lost home, regards itself as “truth and tradition,” and is a central element of the notion of return to origin and of a seemingly coherent and unifying national and religious revival. Reflective nostalgia stresses the component of “algia,” the idea of painful longing in and of itself. This form of nostalgia reveals a delay in the notion of return and expresses doubt and contradiction rather than absolute truth; out of defamiliarization and distance, it necessarily produces a narrative that is “ironic, inconclusive, and fragmentary”. “Reflective nostalgia” destabilizes the imagined innocence of longing and of recollection; it also reveals a fundamental sense of distance, differentiation, and alienation from the past. It is a fraught interplay between monumentalism and reflective and restorative nostalgia that appears in the representations of Damascus in The Impossible Novel.

Samman’s narrative initially provides detailed descriptions of the Old City and the family’s house there while remaining silent on the newer, more “modern” neighborhood of Abu Rummana to which Amjad, his mother, and Zayn eventually move. Yet even this initial depiction of the idyllic Old City is continuously interrupted and deferred by the portrayal of the turmoil of both political and personal events in the lives of members of the al-Khayyal family. The references to the major historical events of its time frame include the withdrawal of French Mandate forces from Syria in 1946, the war for Palestine in 1948, and the three post-independence coups in 1949. These events appear in the text not only as a type of chronological time-line for a narrative that is not linear, but also as critical turning points directly affecting the lives of the characters of the novel. The novel’s conclusion remains incomplete but alludes to Zayn’s impending exile from Damascus and from Syria: the last chapter is merely a title page with a footnote stating that it has not been written yet. Samman, thus, provides no conclusion for Zayn’s story and no closing eulogy for the city of Damascus.

The first chapter of the novel is entitled “First Attempt: Delusional Memories”, and the introductory scene is one of mourning. It depicts Amjad’s overwhelming feelings of guilt over the death of wife Hind after she endured a highly risky second pregnancy in order to give him the son for whom he longed. After a memorial service for his wife at the National University, Amjad roams the streets, alleys, and various neighborhoods of Damascus. In these passages, sections of the city are mapped out and landmarks described through Amjad’s flâneur-like meanderings. Hind’s memorial service, the commemoration of her life, and the grief over her loss parallel the monumentalization of the landscape of the city. But it is not just physical structures that are incorporated into the description, nor is the city’s depiction limited to those monuments and landmarks found within intermural Damascus: those everyday objects, practices, and people of Damascus who surround Amjad and the major historical events that have touched his life are all assimilated into the monumentalism of the city constructed through the narrative.

As Amjad leaves the university he walks towards the Barada River in order to “be by himself” (21). In tracing his path, the reader is provided with a selective picture of the city in 1946; Hind’s death, as noted during her memorial service, came just months after the final withdrawal of French troops from Syria. To quote at length:

To him, the minarets of the Takiya Sulaymaniya appeared like giant arms extending to the sky with a vivid, stone gracefulness, possessing a secret movement that pulsed in supplication and proclamation just like him (Heaven Help me. I’m in agony. I killed her…No I didn’t kill her). He contemplated the Barada as it was transformed from a river into an illuminated mirror while time stood still for a while at sunset. With his eyes, he embraced both the bows of the domes made gold by the dusk and the honey of the clouds that flowed over them in sweetness, over Mt. Qasiun and the idlers, dervishes, and resident beggars of the Takiya, over the streets full of life, buildings, and people. He felt a degree of solace as he contented himself with the scene of a profusion of vendors who as soon as the storm had passed and the rain had stopped, would come back to spread out their wares and pop up anew…As usual, the people of his city were in a state of waiting—while the storm passed—but they continued despite everything. He recalled how the cry “Cloak!” used to mean disappearing quickly whenever the French soldiers passed by to come to arrest one of them after one of those with “sweet hand-writing” had denounced them…The people around him filled him with comfort, and even his wounds had affection for the courage of the simple men who continued despite everything, for the stubbornness of the vendors in the face of the rain, and for the power of life in them. The sight of the Barada flowing like an open artery into his own veins revived him, the sight of Qasiun looking down from above like a guardian angel…(21-22 Bold in original).

Amjad’s reflections on the city and people he sees around him are interrupted by his realization of his own culpability in his wife’s death. Although these thoughts break up the flow of the narrative description, the sites of the city (Takiya Sulayman, the Barada river, Mt. Qasiun) are inscribed poetically and tersely as idealized visions. In such a passage, Boym’s concept of “restorative nostalgia” in which “national belonging” is strongly identified with a sense of place and with a collective community comes into play. His recollection of all of those who participated in resisting the French occupation forces adds to his sense of community with his fellow residents of Damascus. It is the image of endurance of the city’s inhabitants that provides him with a sense of “solace”, and this human forbearance is extended to those landmarks of the city that have existed not only since his childhood, but seemingly since time immemorial. At the same time, the text alludes briefly to a rupture in national unity through the mention of informers, and thus it suggests a potential break in the vision of coherence offered of both the city and its people.

Having recalled his longing for the city while he was abroad as a student in France, Amjad continues his walk from Victoria Bridge to Hijaz station while passing the Oriental Palace Hotel. Eventually, he makes his way towards Suq al-Hamidiya which marks his entry into the walled, Old City of Damascus. The minute details presented in the narrative are juxtaposed to Amjad’s oscillating awareness of his surroundings:

Drops of rain continued to come down on his tarbush and his face from the holes in the old roof. The suq appeared half empty of people. The smell of the bundles of auzi wafted up from al-Umira’ restaurant, and the ice cream at Bakdash shrunk from the rainy cold…

He continued coming and going, leaving the suq and returning to it. He circled around the Hamidiya barracks for a while, and then he went deeper into the suq. He wasn’t listening to the fall of his footsteps on the wet stones laden with fabric, rugs, cloaks, and dust. Nor was he listening to the fall of the rain on the tin of the roof from the holes of light and shadows and silence and clamor…

He came and went and turned until he found himself in the narrow alley where the clog-makers were. He glanced at the hand-span high clogs inlayed with pearl, the cashmere, the embroidered clothing, the foreign trousers, the gold belts, the handbags, and the wooden benches. He continued on his path for a long time, even after he had passed the tomb of Salah al-Din and the Shahm minaret penetrating deeper into the alleys of musk, snuff, amber, cinnamon, decayed benches, Indian spices, dried coriander, cumin, ginger, nutmeg and atayaf like the white, silk sails of wandering ships with crystal droplets on it like desiccated magical material. And the mummified rust of the wind and the dusty canvas wrapped around it. (25-27).

Here, the Old City becomes a landscape of minutia only briefly punctuated by the mention of historical monuments. The “living history” of the markets rests in the explication of unending details, that serve as a reminder that the monumental is not necessarily only the architecturally significant. The monumental and the object of nostalgic longing become the everyday sights and sounds around him.

Amjad traverses a number of different neighborhoods in an attempt to avoid returning home. The map of the city produced through these passages vacillates between expansion and circumscription. Eventually, Amjad “awakens” and becomes slightly more aware of the significance of his environment:

He felt overcome by exhaustion as he began to wake up in Suq Saruja, Harat al-Ward, al-Shala, al-Sammana, al-‘Aqayba, and Mazz al-Qasb; it was as if he were deriving strength from the soul of his ancestors who had successively sought out these places in the passing of epochs as he remembered that under these streets lay a Roman city, and under that an Aramaic city while he was wondering across the ages of Damascus….

He felt as though he was on the verge of collapse. The coachman passed by him, issuing a frightful sound from the black, rubber horn. He waved at him with his hand to pick him up, but the man snapped at his two horses with the whip and continued off into the distance as if he were the driver of a delusion or one of the enigmas of Damascus that time had left behind at the entrances of the city like the behavior of its people or the obscure, archaeological symbols of its gates that dispersed into the soul, the delight of living… He walked and walked as if he were separated from time in order to remain dedicated to the surge of dripping sorrow, and soar like a plane that would land a distant star without memories (30-31).

In this section, Amjad returns to a conception of Damascus that dwells on the ancient, palimpsest-like nature of the city. Here, Damascus is envisioned as a construction that was built layer by layer in different epochs, and thus, as UNESCO declares, it tells “a large part of the story of humanity”. The origins of the city are multiple, but rather than contemplating this “enigma”, Amjad wishes to be in a place “without memories”. It is not the history of Damascus that concerns him, but the loss of his wife.

As Amjad eventually returns to his house, the reader is presented with his memories of his wife’s initial lack of enthusiasm for his family’s home in the Old City. While Amjad’s reflections on Damascus focus on “pre-Mandate” neighborhoods both inside and outside of intermural Old Damascus, Hind is portrayed as having favored the newer sections of the city that were built and developed in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Yet Amjad’s attachment to his family home begins to wane, as if the loss of his wife has begun to cause his own displacement from his “origins”. Amjad recalls:

Hind wanted to reside in an independent home. She didn’t dislike the residents or the neighborhood as became clear to everyone later. She didn’t loathe the arches of the iwans, its columns, the illuminated horizontal and vertical lines around its courtyard, its mud, stones, tiles, pond, trees, and the arches above the doors like symbolic domes bowing to god. But she needed some of the individual freedom and privacy that she had been accustomed to in her father’s palace…She wanted to be alone with herself and that was something impossible in the big house, neither in the room decorated with marble where she would try to write only to be assailed by the neighbors, nor in the reception room with its walls inlayed with marble and stone and glazed tiles with plant stems, flowers, and a greenish-blue covered with a layer of transparent glass…

Everything has remained touched by her and her passing through this house: the raised marble fountain, inlayed with mosaics and the murmur of its water in the guest hall, the water that flowed on the walls of the fountain, the roof of the great hall and the sparrows of the iwan. Everything was touched by her–every human and every stone that saw and knew her.

I have grown weary of the big house that I love and have loved perhaps because everything in it is common. I’ve grown weary of the mud and stone structure with its unburnt bricks, its engraved iron banisters, its wooden latticework, its spread-out laundry, the rust of its iron bars, the wooden portion made for observation, and its roofs disclosing quarrels, concerns, joys, children, debts, insomnia, and even the sighs of the women in the bedrooms with closed doors and shuttered windows (32-33).

In the same section of the narrative, other passages provide great detail of the al-Khayyal house. Like the detailed descriptions of the markets, those of the house stand as a form of textual monumentalism. Amjad’s personal sense of “heritage” is based not just upon his ties to the city of Damascus as a whole, but also upon his sense of identification with his family home and his personal memories of it. It is here that Samman inscribes the domestic space of the home as the personal monument. However, not only does the absent female figure of Hind fail to appreciate this “traditional” domestic space of the classical Damascene house, but Amjad has also become “weary” of it.

Amjad’s feelings of estrangement become more apparent just as his nostalgia becomes more “reflective”. His longing for Hind and the reality of her death provokes a sense of defamiliarization with and emotional distance from the old house. Despite the fact that it appears to be the essence of stability and of timelessness and is invested with Amjad’s idyllic childhood memories, the house can no longer stand as an uncontested source of identification with the past: “even the familiarity between him and the old house has been broken” (41).

Eventually, the family is forced to move to a “modern” neighborhood due to lack of space. As a result of the war in Palestine, Amjad’s relatives Umm Amir and her family arrive in Damascus as refugees from Acre and with no place else to go, move into the house. Their presence in the old house causes him to finally make the move to Hind’s house in Sahat al-Madf’a in Abu Rummana. Amjad’s does not make this decision without moments of regret, and it is through these scenes of hesitation and sadness that the narrative once again returns to depictions of the old house:

He had forgotten everything as he was saying goodbye to the big house with sorrow and bitterness like someone saying goodbye to his hand before it was cut off. He would miss Hind’s ghost, the noise of the children, the alleys, the cries of the vendors, the clatter of wooden clogs in the courtyard of the house, the arches, the doors carved with Quranic verses on the top…and the treasure buried somewhere in the house with all of its mythical jewels and gold as his mother had told him in his childhood when she advised him not to leave the house at any cost…

Since Hind’s death, he had made up his mind to live in the house on Abu Rummana Street, but then he would waver. He would say goodbye to the big house again and again, and then stay in it like an infatuated lover who says goodbye to his beloved only to cling to her more…He said to himself, there is no escape from leaving the big house …(176-177).

Eventually, however, Amjad, his mother the Hajja, and Zayn move to the new house. Yet this passage, which occurs in the midst of the family’s preparation for the celebration of a circumcision, briefly reverts to the style of description found in the first chapter. Once again, the old house is described as a source of beauty, myth, and familiarity for Amjad. This same depiction is destabilized by the knowledge that the house cannot provide enough space for the entire family, and that it is no longer a place where Amjad wants to raise his daughter.

In the final chapters of the novel, the plot primarily revolves around Zayn’s adolescence, her search for and discovery of her mother’s writings, and her own desire to become a writer. It is in the newer, “modern” neighborhoods of the city that Zayn’s coming of age and her growing feminist and political awareness is portrayed, and depictions of these areas are rare and brief in the text. The descriptions of the city are subsumed by and subordinated to other narrative events, and they do not rely on the heavy, physical detailing that was found in the first chapter.

Yet, in a particularly poignant section of the third chapter, the differences between the old family home, and Amjad’s new home and neighborhood are the subject of the reflections not of Zayn, but of his mother, the Hajja. Returning from the pilgrimage, she is on her way back to Damascus on an airplane when she begins to feel sorrow over the fact that she will be returning to the house in Abu Rummana rather than her old home:

How I miss the old house in my exile in Sahat al-Madf’a on Abu Rummana Street. And I am afraid for it—afraid of the appraisal, the division, the demolition, the deterioration, and the widening of the road, just like what happened to my sister Umm Muwaffaq in al-Qanawat ….

The Hajja, Umm Amjad felt anguish in her heart because she wasn’t going back to the Alley of Jasmine where she would be received as a pilgrim with trills of joy, prophetic praises, decorations, greetings of welcome, and the neighbors who would try to touch her clothes and gain blessings from her because she had been in there in the land of the chosen Prophet…(301-302 Bold in the original).

The Hajja’s desire to return to her old home in the Alley of Jasmine reflects not merely her attachment to the physical attributes and memories of the house, but also her relationships with those in the old neighborhood (and underscores the absence of those links in the newer district of the city in which she now lives). The Hajja’s sense of alienation is intensified by her embarrassment over her “clothes”, “speech”, and ways of “thinking” in front of her unfamiliar, new neighbors (302). At the same time, she expresses her concerns over the possible loss of her old home as new construction takes place in the Old City.

Although the old house will be saved from demolition because Amjad’s brother refuses to sell it, the threat of its destruction has appeared in the narrative, and its potential disappearance from the characters’ lives is a continual reminder that even the monumental can become transitory, and that its historical “groundings” can easily be erased. The Hajja’s longing for her old home cannot be appeased by the “modern” convenience that her new house offers. Instead, she sometimes imagines that “if she stayed in the old house, she would have remained young” because she longs not for “the walls” of the house but for its “soul” which stands as a reflection of her youth (303). These mournful musings reflect her concern over her loss of social relationships and her fear of losing the old house. Surprisingly, however, the Hajja’s alienation from her neighbors promises to be alleviated. When she arrives at the airport, she is greeted by her family, and then taken to the home in Abu Rummana where her new and old neighbors have joined together to celebrate her return from pilgrimage (308). Thus, even this character’s sense of mournful nostalgic longing for her old home in the Old City is alleviated by her realization that she can establish affectionate relationships with the “human mosaic” around her in Abu Rummana (309).

The Hajja’s reflections on the “human mosaic” that she discovers at her pilgrimage celebration returns us to the subtitle of The Impossible Novel. The mosaic is an image that Samman occasionally evokes in the novel in various contexts. In one such scene, Zayn and her father are at the National Museum viewing the mosaic portraits on display there. She thinks:

How did the picture appear as one from far away but when brought her face up close to it, she found it composed of thousands of small pieces. Zayn began to try to count the pieces as she furtively touched them with her finger one by one. …Her father asked her, “What’s the story now?” And she said with excited surprise: “Look…How many there are! From far away, they are one. And from up close, there are thousands. Her father said to her: this is the nation, Zayn (268).

Here, Samman offers up the ideal of national unity through the image of an antique object located in the national museum; despite its division into thousands of small, distinct segments, the portrait appears to offer up a singular, unified portrait of the “nation.” Yet, only upon closer examination do the differentiations between the pieces become clear. And it is also only upon the reader’s realization that the mosaic is an archaeological object preserved in a museum as an object of heritage and deprived of its original historical context that the meaning of its authenticity comes into question.

The Damascene mosaic that Samman presents in her novel consist of various portraits and scenes some of which are merely fragmentary and some of which offer up the illusion of a constructed wholeness. The mapping of the city and the monumentalism of the everyday through Amjad’s wanderings, the idealization of the family home invested with personal memory, and the potential loss of that constructed ideal form pieces of this mosaic that exhibits an inherent link between nostalgia and monumentalism. Samman’s various representations of Damascus both merge with and depart from the ways in which UNESCO constructs Damascus as a world heritage site. Samman’s Damascene mosaic at times alludes to the Old City as an ideal example of a variegated, “historical encyclopedia” that stands as a testimony to human history. It also projects a site of individual memory whose borders move beyond those marked by the often-arbitrary delineations of official understandings of heritage. The various aspects of the monumental and the objects of nostalgic longing found in the text are both commemorated and contested. Thus, the mosaic of Damascus provided in the various narratives trajectories of The Impossible Novel can be interpreted through an integrated vision or through a view that acknowledges its potentially fractured segmentation.

References:

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia.

New York: Basic Books, 2001

Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Al-Samman, Ghada. Rasa’l al-Hanin ‘ila al-Yasmin.

Bayrut: Munshurat Ghada As-Samman, 1996.

——al-Riwaya al-Mustahila: Fusayfisa’ Dimashqiya

Bayrut: Munshurat Ghada Al-Samman, 1997.

Bio:

Shareah Taleghani is a translator and PhD candidate specializing in contemporary Arabic literature in the Department of Middle East and Islamic Studies at New York University. She is currently completing her dissertation on contemporary Syrian prison literature.