BADIL

Towards the end of Emile Habiby’s novel The Secret Life of Sa’eed, the pessoptimistic protagonist looks out the window of the police vehicle disappearing him to prison. Sa’eed notices that they are driving through the plain of Ibn Amir, which he tells the Israeli police.

“’No, it’s the Yizrael plain!’” corrects the policeman. This is just one of many scenes in Habiby’s absurdist novel that illustrates the disappearance of people and places in 1948 Palestine. Elia Suleiman’s 1996 film Chronicles of a Disappearance, in a style similar to Habiby’s also makes use of this theme of Palestinian disappearance. It makes sense that one of Palestine’s leading novelists and one of its leading filmmakers would illustrate the absurdity of disappearance as an existential crisis for Palestinians since the Nakba given the reality disappearance plays in daily life.