Vivre et témoigner en Palestine

Living and bearing witness in Palestine

Interview with Stéphanie Dujols

The hills and their bursts of green, the men and their precarious existences. The cities and villages, no plot of land escapes the ravages. The army and the settlers multiply the lynchings, the crimes of the era of wild colonies. In Les espaces sont fragiles, Carnet de Cisjordanie, Palestine 1998-2019, Stéphanie Dujols, translator of many masterpieces of Arabic literature at Sindbad/Actes Sud, delivers a testimony on a colonial situation that is both denied and hidden in Palestine.
With a language of rare literary beauty, the humanity and goodness of the systematically dehumanized Palestinians are revealed in broad daylight.

Faris Lounis: Can you tell us about the genesis of your book?
Stéphanie Dujols: It all started with the text of the fox. It was a scene that inhabited me, that came back to me all the time. It lasted three years. One day, suddenly, without having planned anything, I wrote it, as if to free myself from an obsession. The text wrote itself, in one go, and I hardly touched it afterward.
That was in 2004. Several months later, I started writing other texts and little by little, I told myself that it could end up being a book. I had no idea how it would turn out, but I always knew that, if there was a book, the fox scene would open it. Quite quickly, I also knew that the gazelle scene would be the epilogue.

Spaces are fragile is composed of short chapters and fragments. Why did you choose such a form?
I have always loved literature of fragments. In any case, I think that here, it imposed itself on me. I tried to describe broken and fragmented spaces, with a particularly fleeting and fragmentary memory. I don’t think I could have done otherwise.

The descriptions of nature and human beings in your West Bank Notebook are of rare literary beauty. Why did you choose such a style, such a way to tell your Palestinian experience?
I first had the text of the fox, as I have just explained. I admit that I liked it, and that it also pleased those to whom I had read it around me at that time. From there, I had the intuition that it should serve as a reference for me. It is on it that I placed the cursor. I wanted the other texts to be a bit of the same ilk, even if, formally, each took different paths. Something in the dosage between proximity and distance with the subject.
Using the I as a guiding thread, but without ever letting it encroach on the text. Writing as a drawing. Often a “simple” sketch, then, towards the end of the book, something that would be closer to painting. I say this now, but in fact, while writing, I was not really conscious of what I was doing. I just had in mind the idea that I had to “live up” to what I was given to see.

The hospital, the prison and the dams occupy an important place in your book. Would it be fair to say that they are your writing places?
The hospital and the prison occupied an important place in my life in Palestine. In Nablus, during the invasion and curfew periods, the hospital was like an intimate theatre. A closed room. Most of the time, families could not access it because of the siege, we were almost alone there with the wounded and the carers. In this void, the words of the wounded emerged very spontaneously. It was in an equally spontaneous way that, every evening of the invasion, the psychiatrist with whom I worked at the time wrote her chronicles. It was she who, at the beginning, had taken on the duty of writing. It so happens that, when she had forgotten certain factual details, she asked me to fill in the blanks in her texts. So it was with her, basically, that I began to write, like a little hand. I understood years later that this book would also exist to avenge her misadventures with this big newspaper that no longer wanted her texts. In a way, I took over.
Prison is a crueler theatre. I don’t talk about it directly, I circle around it in the section that opens with the scene of the two young people arrested in the street by screaming female soldiers. In Palestine, as a man at the roadblock says, the prison motif is omnipresent, you don’t have to go far to see it emerge.

Your interest in Palestinian folk tales, and also in their different ways of naming and registering the land, reflects a certain taste for
anthropology. Can you tell us more about it?
I have no particular attraction to traditional tales. They are often too schematic for my taste. I have never tried to collect any in Palestine. But I was told two that astonished me. The first was a story of an ogress totally improvised by the old mother of a prisoner, a long time ago, in a hut on the side of a hill where we had climbed on foot in the winter mist. It was only when I translated her story for my colleague that I understood that it was in fact a parable to express the ferocity of what was happening to her son. The second was that of the fox who loved figs, which Abou B. told me of himself near the fig tree in question. Obviously, I immediately saw in this correspondence with the fox on the road (and those of my old dream) a very strong sign for the unfolding of the book. But what I also liked about this tale was its fantasy and freedom. These furry animals who insist on wearing fur coats. And then the ending devoid of any moral, just a mischievous pirouette. It’s like an embryo of a fictional narrative.
As for the names of the plots, it was rather their poetry and, once again, their fantasy, that fascinated me, and what they say about the organic and ancestral relationship of the Palestinians with their land.

In the hinterland of Ramallah there is a plateau on top of a hill where two children often come to “see the gazelles”, “towards the end of the afternoon, when the ochre of their fur mingled with that of the light”. You say about this plateau: “For a long time, a fantasy inhabited me: that someone would bring me here the day I would leave”. Where does this attachment, this fascination for this place come from?
All the details of this walk to the gazelle plateau were enchanting. Above all, there was this tiny cemetery right in the middle of the dirt road. As if, on their way to their fields or some escapade in the hills, the people of the village wanted to greet their dead, or to connect with their presence. Like a rite of passage. In the book, these places discovered by mistake (I had taken the wrong road) are for me like the culmination of an initiatory journey.
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