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A Palestinian woman from Jerusalem, 1938, via Wikimedia Commons. Photograph by John David, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Lord, Soraya Antonius’s vivid chronicle of Palestinian life before the Nakba of 1948, is a novel that moves fast, driven by fury and passion. Tales are told within tales; there are jump cuts and flashbacks. Antonius’s eye is as keen as her wit. The narrator of the book, which was first published in 1986, is an unnamed woman journalist in the Lebanon of the early eighties. She is covering current events—the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres are obliquely referred to at one point—but she also takes an interest in the region’s past, and is particularly curious to find out about a young man named Tareq, who grew up under the British Mandate and played a significant role in the 1936–1939 Palestinian uprising against colonial rule. Her curiosity leads her to the elderly Miss Alice, an Englishwoman who was Tareq’s teacher in a mission school founded by her father at the start of the twentieth century. Tareq, Miss Alice tells the narrator, was a boy of humble background and an undistinguished student, who, however, possessed uncanny powers that Miss Alice can’t really account for. How he put those powers to use will be the novel’s story.

A rallying call of the Palestinian uprising was “No taxation without representation,” but that was only one of many grounds for discontent with colonial rule. “They come to our country uninvited,” states one disgruntled shop owner in The Lord, “they impose their mad laws, and then they make us pay them for their presence.” Increasing Jewish immigration to Palestine was also a source of growing tension. In 1917, at the time of the Balfour Declaration, less than 10 percent of the population of the region was Jewish, but the numbers were rapidly growing, and the British colonial authorities, having enshrined the terms of the Balfour Declaration in the mandate from the League of Nations, were biased in favor of the new Jewish immigrants and against the indigenous (multireligious) Arab population. A deep source of grievance was the deployment of what is now known as lawfare: the British, to quote the historian Matthew Hughes, “pacified the country through quotidian application of a crafted, all-encompassing legal system that restrained, detained and impoverished Palestinians, hanged and killed them, and demolished their homes.” The revolt initially took the nonviolent form of mass strikes, boycotts, petitions, and demonstrations, to small effect. More violent confrontations followed: There were assassinations and other targeted attacks; roads were mined, trains derailed. The fellahin (villagers or peasantry) were at the center of the rebellion, while the urban elites, encouraged to put their trust in the British, were inclined to be more ambivalent.

Tareq, on leaving school, sets up as a traveling entertainer, performing magic tricks for villagers. His tricks, however, have a satirical, subversive edge. In his hands, a “silver Homburg with a black ribbon round it … like the one HE always wears”—and “HE” here refers to His Excellency, the High Commissioner—is transformed into a Palestinian keffiyeh. It becomes clear that Tareq, as he moves from village to village, is functioning as a messenger and organizer and perhaps even as the leader of the growing rebellion. He has come to be called the lord (sayid). At the same time, however, he appears to be a reluctant revolutionary, eager to settle down, and whether he is doing anything more than giving vent to the simmering anger about the mandate is never entirely certain. If he puzzles the colonial authorities, they are for the most part disinclined to take him seriously. The exception is the head of military intelligence, Challis, who does see him as a threat, and this vengeful, bitter man proves unrelenting in pursuit. Challis, an extraordinary character, may be inspired by Orde Wingate, the founder of the Special Night Squads in Palestine that militarized Jewish settlers and encouraged them to attack Palestinian villages. Another possible model is Douglas Valder Duff, notorious for his harsh treatment of prisoners in Palestine. (The British expression to duff someone up is said to derive from his name.) Whatever the case, Antonius’s Challis is an entirely believable monster, but she is by no means out to tar all her British characters. Those like Miss Alice and the journalist Egerton—perhaps a portrait of the Marxist historian Thomas Lionel Hodgkin, who was close to George Antonius—are presented with a great deal of nuance, respect, and affection.

As Challis pursues Tareq, the British crackdown on Palestine intensifies, while the population grows more restive and divided. The rebellion had begun in the old city of Jaffa, and The Lord records how, in the purported interests of “urban beautification,” the mandate directed that this Arab quarter that had long evaded British control be dynamited and rebuilt. Leaflets were thoughtfully distributed to the local population in advance, the better to let them know what was to come. Then, as today, the efforts to cajole the subjugated population into compliance are underwritten by torture and bloodshed. And yet despite Antonius’s palpable sympathy for the Palestinians, she does not depict them as without fault. Tareq’s mother, for example, Um Tareq, is a deeply suspect, unapologetically mercenary figure, all too ready to betray her people and her son.

Which points to another dimension of the novel: The Lord tells of thwarted resistance but also of thwarted lives and loves, especially women’s. It includes the story of Buthaina, who as a girl is taken by a much older man as his second wife and struggles to hold her own. Buthaina captures Tareq’s imagination and his heart, but it is impossible that anything should come of that, or at least anything good. Miss Alice’s beau is too socially ambitious to be true to her, and of the contemporary narrator’s partner, it is said, “There was only one domestic animal that Nicholas wanted at home: a well-buttocked admirer/slave who cooked well and abased herself. On none of these counts, except possibly one, could I qualify.”

The voice of Antonius in The Lord is unique. It ranges from the highly literary to the urgently informative to wry asides imbued with feminist critique. At times the voice is sarcastically knowing; at others forthright and furious; it is frequently funny. Antonius will skip ahead to expose the horrors to come, or break the fourth wall, addressing the reader directly, and when it comes to architecture, to agriculture, or to the assiduous working of and love for the land, the tone softens and grows tender, imbued with awe for a people and a place. She describes the Palestine that was lost, its villages, fields, customs, agricultural practices, and social hierarchies. She tells of dinner parties and mimics urban gossip, dilates on village chores and drainage problems, reveals the fractures in Palestinian leadership and the pressures faced by Palestinian resistance fighters. Combining the magic of Tareq with the realism of Alice, she writes in a way that is unchecked by given political and social boundaries. What could be more apposite to Antonius’s persona and politics than the style of this novel that breaks away from standard forms, subverting expectations and creating a new living form?

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Soraya Antonius was born in 1932 into the intellectual elite of Jerusalem, then the capital of Palestine. Her father, George, came from a trading family in the Lebanese mountains and grew up in Alexandria. He was a Cambridge graduate, and in the course of his life worked for the British Mandate government in Palestine, for a private American think tank, and as a secretary to Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem. He is best known as the author of the seminal work on Arab nationalism, The Arab Awakening (1939). Soraya’s mother was the socialite, hostess, and philanthropist Katy Nimr, the daughter of a Syrian Lebanese press  magnate and a British French Austrian mother. The Antonius family was well connected, multilingual, cosmopolitan, and well-to-do. Soraya was their only child.

In Jerusalem, the Antonius family lived in the great house of Karm al-Mufti (“the Mufti’s vineyard”) in Sheikh Jarrah. Their home was a busy social hub, but the couple spent a good deal of time apart. After George died in 1942, Soraya and her mother continued to live in Jerusalem, though attacks by Jewish militants on British and Palestinian targets made the city increasingly violent. In 1943, when she was ten years old, Soraya witnessed the death of her nine-year-old cousin Michael Farès Smart, after a small shiny object he picked up by the Saqqara pyramids exploded in his hands. In 1946, she and Katy narrowly escaped the bombing by Irgun that destroyed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Soon after, Soraya was sent away to school in Alexandria. In the summer of 1948, the British mandate ended, the State of Israel was declared, and at least seven hundred thousand Palestinians—around three-quarters of the Palestinian Arab population—were violently driven from their villages and homes, most of which were razed to the ground. Katy was in Egypt by then. After the ceasefire of July 1948, Katy returned to Jerusalem, now in Jordanian hands, and to Dar El Awlad, the orphanage for boys that she had been running, which she expanded to take in new refugee boys who had lost their parents. She also opened a popular restaurant, Al Kat-a-Keet. She cleaned up Karm al-Mufti, which had been used as a guard post and trashed. Even the parties and soirees began again.

Soraya was largely educated in English and French, and in 1949 she was sent to London to board at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. In an essay published in the college magazine in 1950, she described how the living conditions in Jerusalem “have only just recommenced to be tolerable. Thousands of homeless Arabs are living just outside the town and their condition is as appalling as the world’s apparent indifference is incredible.” It was on a visit home to Jerusalem in 1951 that Katy introduced Soraya, now studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, to the novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, who encouraged her to write. From her twenties onward, she worked as a columnist, editor, and publisher in Beirut, with L’Orient, Middle East Forum, and Al Khayat publishing. Her interests were broad; she reviewed the writings of the Greek Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy and the novelist E. M. Forster (both of whom were friends of her father) and produced a volume of photographs of modern and vernacular Lebanese architecture in 1965. She also organized an exhibition of Palestinian posters. Visitors to her apartment in Beirut described it as decorated with artworks, fine carpets, books, and tapestries.

With the foundation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964, Soraya became active in the PLO-affiliated General Union of Palestinian Women, and after the Six-Day War of 1967, which began on June 5, led to second massive expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and to a further expansion of Israel’s undeclared border, she helped to set up and served as the director of the Fifth of June Society, which sought to advance the Palestinian cause. (Other members included Mariam Said, the wife of Edward Said, and the scholar Rosemary Sayigh.) As part of her work with the society, Soraya put together “information kits about Palestine for the hordes of news people who came to Beirut to cover the revolution,” according to her colleague and friend the artist Vladimir Tamari. She also produced and wrote the film Resistance, Why? (directed by Christian Ghazi), interviewing Palestinian political figures in Lebanon, where the PLO had moved its operations after being expelled from Jordan in 1971.

The Lebanese Civil War that broke out in 1975 lasted for fifteen years, dividing and destroying much of the country. From September 16 through 18, the right-wing Lebanese Phalange militia, in coordination with the Israeli army, killed between two thousand to three thousand and five hundred Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in less than forty-eight hours.

For some years, Soraya had been researching a book on the lives of Palestinian women. The war, however, as she later wrote, “made it impossible [to] continue … or to do any research (the Israelis had stolen the entire library archives and even the furniture of the Palestinian Research Center) or eventually leave the house for long.” It was at that moment, living under Israeli siege and bombardment with her dying mother, that Soraya turned to writing The Lord, her first novel. “Personal circumstances were grim,” she later wrote, “Beirut was in the throes of a really bad round … one had to write by candlelight or those horrible little butane gas lamps which tended to explode in sympathy with the field-mortars,” and yet The Lord “virtually wrote itself,” she said, even though “until the last three pages,” she had “no idea how it would end.”

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Antonius’s many years spent researching the lives of Palestinian women, of listening to them closely, are particularly important to the book. It has been said that nowhere in the world has ever been documented as much as Palestine/Israel, and yet the culture of rural Palestine, after the repeated expulsions of the population, after the destruction of so many villages, threatens to be lost to history. There is also the distortion of memory around trauma, a sense of shame felt by refugees for not having done more to resist their fate. Recreating the lives of women under the mandate is even more difficult, since culture was oral, with low literacy rates. Little writing exists, particularly by women from the villages. Listening to Palestinian women in the refugee camps of southern Lebanon “was a linguistic revelation” for Antonius, who found herself fascinated by “the similes, the poetic repetitiveness, the use of parables or proverbs uncannily biblical.” Their stories, she said, could be “frequently confusing, impenetrable,” and yet “the little individual pasts rose up in every trivial detail, singing the beauty of the land, laughing at the absurdity of war.” Her own writing not only preserves these ways of telling but is shaped by  them. In writing fiction, she realized that “even if I couldn’t write in Arabic, I could still write as an Arab.”

Telling a story about the destruction of Palestine and the dispossession of its people, a story that is ongoing to this day, increasing in force and brutality with the years, The Lord is also an act of the literary resurrection of an entire nation. With her pen, Antonius rebuilds villages and cities, replants crops, observes the weather, curates national festivals, and depicts both Palestinian and British high society. Her characters travel the land from Jaffa and along the coast, up to the Galilee and inland, observing its nature and customs. The vision is not romanticized. Antonius is inclined to say it as it is, freely juxtaposing the torture of Palestinians in British police cells with scenes of the perpetrators swanning around at parties. And she calls out injustice, no matter who is behind it, whether Palestinian informants, British torturers, or chauvinist boyfriends. She shows us the corrosive nature of colonial rule and military oppression on the intricate civilization of Palestine and she demands change.

Soraya Antonius belonged to no one land nor to any one language, yet her birth, life, outlook, career, politics, and passions were quintessentially Palestinian: rooted yet diasporic, moderate (sometimes muzzled) yet radical in essence. It is a vision that is in line with the spirit of Palestinian revolution, that is “armed,” in the words of Fawaz Turki, “with the anti-determinist vision of the open-endedness of the future.”

From the introduction to Soraya Antonius’s The Lord, to be published by NYRB Classics this December.