Omar Khalifah’s rapid-fire romantic satire Sand-Catcher is over so quickly that the reader is left clutching at the final sentences, wanting the story to go on for just a few more pages.
The novel, Khalifah’s first, appeared in Arabic in 2020 and is out this month in Barbara Romaine’s English translation.
The short, bantering book starts on ordinary ground, introducing us to four bumbling Palestinian journalists in Jordan. But the action soon veers into comic absurdity as the team tries to force an elderly man to share his Nakba story.
Throughout this wild, polyvocal journey, we return to a few central questions: Whose Nakba story is it? What happens to trauma when it is repeated, repackaged, and sold — when memory is mass-produced?
What happened to The Old Man in ’48?
From the journalists’ perspective, Sand-Catcher is a detective story, as the four of them must uncover the mystery of what happened to one old man in 1948, during the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians.
Yet while these journalists are central to the novel, we never learn their names. Only the minor characters get names, and the journalists are called instead by descriptive monikers: al-Qaid is the leader, while the second man is Kha’in, since he’s unfaithful to his wife. One woman is Kha’ina, as she’s unfaithful to her husband, while the other is Mutarjima, or “translator,” because she knows several languages.
The relationship between Palestine and the narrative is immediately thrown into question, as each of the four journalists is haunted by the “deficiencies” of their Palestinian-ness.
Al-Qaid couldn’t remember the colours of the Palestinian flag during a romantic encounter; Kha’in married a non-Palestinian, so now must cheat on his wife with Palestinian women; Kha’ina accidentally scheduled her wedding for the anniversary of the Nakba; and Mutarjima publicly failed at making a signature Palestinian dish: maqlouba.
Naturally, the namelessness of all the central characters has a comic effect. Yet it also troubles the reading experience by turning them into real, sympathetic characters and, at the same time, into absurd archetypes. They thus echo the novel’s portrait of Palestinian memory, which is both deeply individual and also archetypal, private and shared by all.
The action kicks off when Kha’in’s lover Abir tells him that her great-uncle is one of the last living witnesses to the Nakba. Kha’in, sensing opportunity, pitches the old man’s story to his newspaper. The editor agrees, and the other three are assigned to cover it with him.
From the start, the reader is fairly certain that this will not go well. On the one hand, the journalists’ questions are dull and formulaic.
On the other, we have been given a glimpse of the old man’s grandson, who already asked him for his Nakba story. In response, the old man told exactly 48 Nakba stories, one after the other, serving both to overwhelm the listener with details and to allow the old man to keep his own story for himself.
The family doesn’t tell the old man why the journalists want to meet him. They ambush him, in part, because they too want to know his story. Thus, they’re all assembled when the journalists arrive, and Interview #1 goes about as we might have expected. But when the journalists traipse back to their editor’s office and tell him about their failure, the boss refuses to let it go. Either they come back with a new Nakba story, he says, or he’ll have someone else write a story about their failure.
This moment provides one of the novel’s many comic inversions. When the journalists realise they might become the subject of the story, they’re outraged. Yet naturally, they don’t connect this to the ethics of pursuing the old man.
Al-Qaid asks his boss, credulously: “Sir, you don’t want to damage us, surely?” To which the editor responds, “I’m just doing my job. Your story belongs to me now — you can’t get around that.”
At this point, the journalists are given two weeks to either capture the story or become it. This ticking clock intensifies their group dysfunctions. Kha’in relentlessly flirts with Mutarjima and obsesses over her hijab, while Mutarjima and Khai’na spar about gender politics.
To make the situation even more wonderfully bonkers, the old man’s grandson develops a crush on Kha’ina. And while she doesn’t return the grandson’s feelings, she is seduced by his over-the-top adoration. All these forces come together in the explosive Interview #2, which takes place in a mosque, followed by an even wilder finale.
So, then, whose Nakba story is it?
The reader has every reason to side with the old man. After all, what right does anyone have to his story?
And yet, the more determined he is to keep the story to himself, the more the reader — like the journalists — becomes curious. However, while the novel feeds this curiosity, it also waves red flags about giving in to it.
Throughout the book, the dialogue shimmers. The romantic flirtations and political arguments crackle, for which we must also credit Barbara Romaine’s high-energy translation.
It sets a brisk pace and has excellent comic timing.
But even more than the dialogue, it’s the novel’s contradictions that propel us to tear through the story.
Nearly everything is both a ridiculous stereotype and also, improbably, genuine.
In the end, the novel doesn’t tell us where to put the line between a commodified archetype and the real. Instead, it leaves us to take this tension forward into our lives.
M Lynx Qualey is a writer whose primary focus is Arabic literature and its translation. She publishes in The Guardian, Qantara, The Chicago Tribune and on the daily blog she edits, www.arablit.org
Follow her on X: @mlynxqualey
