‘Cry in a Long Night’, an allegory of Jerusalem, says scholar

AMMAN — A main motif of the classical novel “Cry in a Long Night” by Palestinian-Iraqi writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1919-1994) is redemption, both individual and collective, according to an American scholar.

“It’s an appropriate theme for a novel set in the Holy Land during a national crisis. How would Amin, the protagonist, be saved? How would his compatriots be saved? Those are the questions at the heart of the book,” noted William Templin, who received his PhD from Harvard.

He said that the book’s ending hints at an answer. “I find the answer given by the Syrian critic Faysal Darraj to be the most convincing: Jabra thought Arabs needed to save themselves individually before the Arab nation could be saved collectively. Jabra thought every Arab would have to adopt the responsibility of redemption on his or her own; no political party or movement would save them,” Tamplin said.

For How would the Arabs redeem themselves,  according to Templin, Jabra believed they would have to overcome the suffocating customs and traditions that had hindered them from entering modernity, adding that it would require individual actions on a mass scale. 

Jabra was a politically cautious man, he said.  “Although Jabra was a Palestinian patriot, I don’t think he was affiliated with any particular political factions, as Palestinian Culture Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo points out in a recent Al Jazeera documentary,” he said.

Jabra was wary of the fickleness of crowds — his novels abound with scenes of crowds run rampant, crowds bent on destruction for its own sake, Tamplin said. “Murderous crowds lynched his mother’s first husband, and mass political violence was a fixture of life in Palestine beginning in 1929, when Jabra was a boy. Jabra was suspicious of the mob. Yet, he believed in the individual and in his or her capacity to be transformed, to be redeemed,” Tamplin said.

Furthermore, the city portrayed in “Cry in a Long Night” is an allegorical city, the scholar said.

“It’s never given a name, just ‘The City’.Yet, the city resembles Jerusalem in the mid-1940s,” he said.

Jabra signs the last page of the novel “Jerusalem, summer 1946” as if to assign his allegorical city a place and a time. 

“If you read the history of Jerusalem in 1946, many events that occurred there echo in ‘Cry in a Long Night’,” he said.

 In July 1946 the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in a double explosion; a double explosion also graces the final chapters of Jabra’s novel, Tamling noted, adding that in the novel, policemen guard different sectors of the city, and in 1946, Jerusalem was divided into three sectors, each one separated by checkpoints. 

“Finally, there’s the juxtaposition of extreme poverty and extreme wealth in the novel as in 1940s Palestine,”Tamplin said.

Jabra wrote six or seven novels, a collection of short stories, several diwans (collection) of poetry, a study of modern art in Iraq in the 1950s, and much literary and cultural criticism. He painted. And from French and English, languages he knew extremely well, he translated into Arabic everything from modern American short stories to “Waiting for Godot” to Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” to scholarship on ancient Mesopotamian philosophy to a biography of William Faulkner. 

Muhammad Asfour, from the University of Jordan, claims that Jabra produced 64  books in his 75 years. “That’s a testament to how prolific Jabra was. Jabra was a dedicated mentor to a generation of Arab writers and thinkers, who encouraged his students’ creativity, convened artistic and literary salons, and penned introductions to his friends’ work,” highlighted Tamplin.