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Ashraf Sahbeni

Karmi in no mans land.. To the world , the Jews have been pictured all the time as victims who struggle to establish a HOME in the Middle East .on the other hand, the Palestinians were barbarians ,savages or/and terrorists . The latters fate was blur as they were forced to leave their country. the injustice done to Palestinians is tremendous and this book tells the reality which the west doesnt want to hear, that they are civilized people who lived there for thousands of years, that wrong was done to them, that the victims of Jews turned into savage killers and no one wants to stand with the victims any more. Ghada Karmi and her family, where among them, they had to leave Jerusalem and eventually live in England. In Search of Fatima is a memoire of Karmi seeking an identity, trying to balance a life between two worlds and all the sadness and confusion that entails. The directional image of Karmis autobiography reflects her cultural reality. She seems to constantly be pulled between two realities. As a young child, she is torn between peasant and town person. As a young immigrant, she is faced with Catholicism versus Islam. As an adolescent and young adult she fights between English and Arab identity. Each of these dichotomies plays an important role in shaping Karmi and many of the battles span more than one period of her life. Her life then, serves as a battleground where her identity is constantly challenged. Karmi was born in Jerusalem in 1939, and left with her family soon after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. In search of Fatima recounts her familys expulsion from Jerusalem when she was young girl, her year living with her family and her grandparents in Syria, her adolescence and adulthood in England, her visits to the Middle East as a political activist and physician, and her attempt to return HOME. Karmis experience of exile and the accompanying feelings of estrangement and loss , as well as dislocation and nostalgia , cause her to feel alienated from both her identified homeland Palestine and her other various places of residence . These feelings are not wholly negative, however. Karmi engages with them and they propel her to attempt to belong to both England and Palestine, to challenge Israeli power structure, and to defend the Palestinian nation. Karmi is a member of a wealthy, educated family, and a class to which most Palestinians do not belong to .For her Palestine in the place of her childhood, her dog Rex and her beloved nanny Fatima. She, indeed, relished life in pre1948 Palestine .Palestine for her is a country like no other place on earth .it is not just a country or a name , it is an idea, an aspiration, and a symbol for everyone who has lost and longed for restitution and recompense.
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Ashraf Sahbeni

Unluckily for her, Palestine was not a permanent residence as she and her family was forced to leave. They thought their departure would long for while and they will get back inasmuch as they have taken worn blackest and few clothes as if they were in a short vacation in Syria. As Karmi becomes an adult, she navigates through her identity as a Palestinian English woman living in exile, and struggles with her understandings of home. Upon attempting to return to home and realizing that this is not possible, Karmi comes to view her exile as permanent, one from which there is no return yet another taxi was to transport me from one world into another .but though I did not know it then ,this time would be the strangest and the last(p170) . This realization leaves her in confusion, unable to identify as either English or Palestinian, and only as an exile. She came across the painful realization that she can never go homethe home, I would suggest that exists most strongly in her imagination, rather than exclusively as a piece of soil, a house with a backyard and a veranda, a nation of others who share the same ethno-cultural origins, or a state with recognized boundaries. Now Karmi is a woman without a country; indeed, after May 10, 1949, Palestine ceased to exist not only on maps but also in the minds of those around her. Her situation is further complicated by her familys choice of housing in London; her father finds them a home within the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green. It is no more the environment that Karmi was used to. So she starts to fit in. that is right that she has been English in every aspect of her life. She enrolls in a Convent school La Sagesse the nuns are kind to her, which leaves her with a lifelong affection for Catholicism. She befriends a Jewish girl, Leslie Benenson, in the convent school, which foreshadows the number of Jewish friends she eventually will make in her life. Karmi herself tries to assimilate in the British society .She is spoon-fed Englands special culture, its liberalism, its intellectual values and sophistication (321). Karmi embraces the host culture. Each moment she spends in England is solidification of her English identity. She is a person of an Eastern belief system trying to find her way in the Western world. She starts to do what her fellow British citizen would do and like what they like. She was trying to convince herself that she is a British girl. Many examples that foster this standing point; among which the goon show a TV program on the BBC. Karmi says that no Arab could have understood the English innuendos and allusions in the program (p205) but for her it was zany, crazy and to *me+ extremely funny (p205). Ghada turned her back on what was once used to be Middle Eastern beliefs, lifestyle and traditions. I had by then already closed off the Palestine of my childhood into a private memory place where it would always remain magically frozen in time (p174) .She dares
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Ashraf Sahbeni

even to challenge the Islamic commandments. She eats pork, drinks beer and/or fornicates. She tries to convince herself that Palestine is a mere phase in her life and that she is now in a position of going ahead with a purpose of building her future there. Britain is her home land or she wanted it to be so. This feeling is concealed in her; She did not share what she feels with anybody even her family (except Ghada and zied), who tried to keep their memories of Palestine alive not only in memory but also their life style. As soon as they open the door they find themselves in the Middle East again; as they had decided to recreate Palestine in London (p171) .this does not affect how Karmi opts for being a member of the host country a people she thinks from the very beginning , they were the epitome of kindness.To the point of indulgence. (p192). When it comes to building relations, Karmi was seduced by the idea of having a boyfriend .she, indeed, has one, john. In order to complete her disguise she has to go through this phase in order to prove to herself that she is 100% a British girl. Notwithstanding the family opposition, her relation ends up in getting married, a part of her scheme to get her an identity. In marring john I had sought to belong to England to fit seamlessly into English society (p377). The 1967 war was a turning point in Karmis life. Despite the fact that she does not want to reveal her true feelings concerning the true identity she belongs to , Karmi was not totally detached from her past or her past revived her .I may have become English in culture and affinity, but in all the ways in which I mattered I was not (p377). She beheld the atrocities that the Arabs incurred. To her horror everybody was on the side of Israel. She was confused she wants to know who exactly *she+ was (p376). it is a world that she does not belong to they all let her down even her husband whom she told what she has been through when she was only 9 years old ; what it must feel like to be expelled what it must feel to be displaced what it must feel to lose ones home... When Karmi insists to know what john thinks of the events that took place in the Middle East, he just says that he cant help admiring Israel (p376). He ought to respect her feelings, to console her at least instead he does not support her when she needs that from him .if he is not on her side, why would she keep living with him? It is normal that couples have different political views but he should have been aware of her personal feelings. Instead of being tactful he acted as cold as an ordinary English person would act. Alone again, for years she adopted to two opposing personalities: Arab and English .She settled to be predominantly English but not anymore. This forced on her the question if she is not English who is she???
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Ashraf Sahbeni

Her brain is like a Chinese puzzle. She starts to think carefully about her situation. Many questions that could not find answers to how can Israel get away with it? How these people not only sympathize with them but also support them logistically? How she accepts to marry someone who thinks exactly like them? She tried to justify the British attitude that in several ways ; that the Palestinians were misunderstood or poorly understood , or because of the British ignorance and misunderstanding as the Palestinians till then never represented themselves they were in the British public opinions not as Palestinians but Arab refugees , terrorists, bombers . She sees no use of resistance she is really an Arab .she divorces john and through him she divorces what used to be her fake identity. She longs to revisit her past HOME the place where she used to play with her dog Rex, wandering the streets with her nanny Fatima . Karmi eventually returned to the forbidden place, or what is now called Israel, in 1991. Much to the shock of her liberal Israeli friends, when asked her impressions of the country, Karmi writes, Only one word came to mind: apartheid. Not recognizing it to be the country of her youth, Karmi did not find a rush of memory when standing in front of the taxi stand at the Old City of Jerusalems Damascus gate where she parted with Fatima so many years ago. Similar was the lack of fulfillment when she visited her familys old home, now rented by Orthodox Jews who were visibly discomforted by Karmis presence. Her Israeli friend Akiva told her a very symbolic story which is as follows Im going to tell you a story my father told me years ago. He said there was once a young frog and an old frog who fell into a jug of milk. They struggled to get out, but they couldnt, and the old frog said to the young frog give up, my boy. Its no use struggling. were going to drown, might as well accept it and with that, the old frog sank back into the milk and sure enough, he drowned but the young frog could not accept it despite himself, he went on scrabbling and pushing against the sides of the jug, so hard and so long that he churned the milk , which curdled and turned into butter and when that happened he climbed out and survived (p446) . At this moment Karmi starts to be the young frog.

Karmi writes about her lifelong quest for cultural identity, first as an Arab schoolgirl in London trying to assimilate, later as the wife of an Englishman, and finally as an Arab-English woman who returns to the Arab World as a physician and activist.
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Ashraf Sahbeni

Karmi's great achievement is to humanize the Palestinian predicament. Violent uprooting and exile have permanent psychological effects, which, as the Jewish people discovered, are not necessarily assuaged by the passage of time. We need counter-narratives like this, because we have recently learnt that it is not only parochial but also dangerous to ignore the pain and rights of others.

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