The Markaz Review:

Rebecca Ruth Gould

In his introduction to the English translation of his novel The Trinity of Fundamentals, Wisam Rafeedie quotes Ghassan Kanafani’s famous statement in his 1969 novella Returning to Haifa: “[I]n the final analysis, man is a cause.” With this citation, Rafeedie inserts himself into a long tradition of revolutionary fiction. Arguably born in 19th century Russian novels such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to be Done? (1863) and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (1871-1872), the tradition received a new life in Arabic literature, such as Syrian writer Hanna Mina’s The Snow Comes from the Window (1969). Revolutionary fiction is defined by its aims and preoccupations: how to overturn the existing order of contemporary society. Not all revolutionary fiction actively advocates revolution — Dostoevsky’s brutal critique of revolutionary hypocrisy is a case in point — but Palestinian revolutionary fiction certainly does.

The Trinity of Fundamentals is published by 1804 Books.
The existence of The Trinity of Fundamentals is a miracle in itself. The novel was composed between 1993 and 1995, during Rafeedie’s incarceration in the Negev desert’s Ktzi’ot Prison (known to many Palestinians as Naqab-Ansar 3), while he was dreaming of being released. In order to conceal the manuscript-in-progress from prison guards, Rafeedie’s fellow prisoners copied sections from the novel in miniature handwriting and stuffed these extracts into pill capsules which they then smuggled to other prisons. The novel was finally published in Arabic in Damascus in 1998. It now reaches the English-speaking world courtesy of 1804 Books and the Palestinian Youth Movement, with Muhammad Tutunji having produced an initial draft. The translation reads well even though it departs in places from the original Arabic.

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