Translator's Introduction to Spring — Web Exclusive
By S. V. Atalla
"Spring" recounts the author's experience of the assassination of Khalil al-Wasir in Tunis on April 15, 1988. Al-Wasir, better known as Abu Jihad, is thought to have been assassinated by Israeli agents, although Israel has never claimed responsibility for the act. Al-Wasir was believed to be coordinating the intifada in the West Bank and Gaza strip.
The most obvious connection to the theme of "fire" in this story is the overwhelming violence of the assassination scene. The savage shooting, in addition to the omnipresent spots of blood which recall Macbeth, offer a forceful example of fire as destruction—the devastation of wildfire, for example, or the ruthlessness of a firing squad. Yet in a sly, almost teasing counterpoint, the author frames the shooting with meditations on springtime. This creates an interesting interplay, if we consider spring as another aspect of fire—a firing of the imagination, perhaps, or a fiercely tenacious sense of life, as in Denise Levertov's poem "Living":
The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.
Indeed, the story repeatedly suggests a connection between spring and violence. Every year in Beirut, springtime seems to trigger another outbreak of civil war. In Gaza, children emerge for a springtime game of soccer, only to discover a mass grave. The narrator, in Badr's story, runs to the site of the assassination along a road bordered with orange and lemon trees in blossom. It is as though spring, the image of life, cannot be allowed to exist unless accompanied by the shadow of death.
This duality seems evident in the description of the victim's widow: "The smell of his blood on her body. His sap, their prey. Coursing through his living veins, spattering her body." Here blood is the image of both life and death: it is the sap coursing through the veins of every living thing, but it is also the smell of prey, splattered and spilt. That blood, "black, reddish brown, clouded, earthen, spattered," is fire—green sap, red flame, and black ash; the fire of life, and the fire that kills.
Liana Badr is a Palestinian writer who was born in Jerusalem and left Jericho as a teenager during the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict. Since then she has lived in Amman, Beirut, Damascus, and Tunis. One of her primary concerns has been to define and emphasize women's roles in the Palestinian resistance. To this end, she has spearheaded efforts to promote literacy among women in Palestinian refugee camps. She has also spent months interviewing these women and recording their accounts of Palestinian life, which she incorporates into her fiction. After the signing of the Gaza-Jericho Accord, she was appointed to the new Palestinian Ministry of Culture as Director of the Audio-Visual Division, returning her to Jericho.
Ms. Badr is a prolific writer of novels, short stories, and children's literature. Several of her works have been translated into English, including the novel A Compass for the Sunflower (The Women's Press, London, 1989) and A Balcony Over the Fakihani: Three Novellas (Interlink, New York. 1993). Other recent works include a short story collection, Jahim Dhahabi (A Golden Hell, 1991), currently being translated by S. V. Atalla, and a novel, Eye of the Mirror (1992), which is being translated for Garnet Press of Oxford University as part of a series on contemporary Arab women writers. Her works have been reviewed favorably in several British publications, and she is included in the 1992 Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature. Her collection of novellas, A Balcony Over the Fakihani, has been placed on the Methodist Reading List for 1995.
S.V. Atalla was born in New York, completed high school in Amman, Jordan, and now lives in Southern California where she teaches at Mt. San Antonio College. In 1992 she obtained an MA in Comparative Literature from UCLA. She is an accomplished poet and translator. Her translations have appeared in the journals Mediterraneans, Passport, Prairie Schooner, Painted Bride Quarterly, Banipal, and others.