Nostalgia in Ghada Karmi's In Search of Fatima and Lucette Lagnado's The Man in The White Sharkskin Suit  

Nostalgia in Ghada Karmi’s In Search of Fatima and Lucette Lagnado’s The Man in The White Sharkskin Suit.

I.Introduction The aim of this study is to trace the features of nostalgia in Ghada Karmi’s In Search of Fatima and Lucette Lagnado’s The Man in The White Sharkskin Suit. In this study, I argue that while the nostalgic immigrants might have some common reasons for their nostalgia and some common symptoms of it , they have different reactions to their nostalgia. These different reactions are determined by their ability to handle their nostalgia, showing the victorious nostalgist and the defeated one. The victorious nostalgists can handle their nostalgia by preserving the integrity between the ethnic identity of the lost past and the national identity of the new homeland while the defeated nostalgists fail to bridge the gap between the two identities. I compare Ghada Karmi’s memoir In Search of Fatima and Lucette Lagnado’s The Man in The White Sharkskin Suit , showing that both writings reflect three phases: the phase of pre-nostalgia, the phase of during-nostalgia, and the phase of post- nostalgiato face their nostalgia and defeat it, otherwise they may be defeated by it..

Ghada Karmi was born in 1939, in Jerusalem. Karmi is a leading Palestinian activist, academic and writer. As a result of the violent incidents in Jerusalem in 1948, she had to leave with her family first to Damascus then to London. She wrote In Search of Fatima to narrate her memoir about the homeland and exile. She lives in London. Lucette Lagnado was born in 1956 in Cairo. In 1965, she had to move with her family to Paris then to New York to settle down there. Lagnado is an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal. She won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for her work, The Man in The White Sharkskin Suit , in which she reveals her experience as well as her family’s in Egypt and New York. Her major area of writing is about Jews and the hardships they had to face. She lives in New York..

The theoretical framework of my study counts on Svetlana Boym’s statement that the “ Immigrants’ stories are the best narratives of nostalgia—not only because they suffer through nostalgia, but also because they challenge it” ( Boym 16 ) and Elena Pourtova’s psychological approach of nostalgia by emphasizing its defensive and connecting function, which enables the nostalgist to adapt to the new circumstances: “nostalgia is looked at as an integrative emotion, connecting up the lost past with the new identity of the acquired culture” (p.43)..

II. The phase of pre-nostalgia includes the causes of emigration of both writers’ families, the parallelism between the incidents narrated by the two writers and some historical events narrated by some historians, and both writers’ points about these incidents. For example Karmi’s In Search of Fatima describes the gradual arrival and settlement of the foreign Jews in Jerusalem when she informs readers about their new Jewish neighbour , Kramer, who was a soldier in the Haganah and his children who became friends with her sister Siham . One evening in the end of 1947, Kramer visited Karmi’s father at their house advising him to take his family “and leave Jerusalem as soon as possible” ( Karmi 43). One night in January of 1948, Karmi awoke from a deep sleep to the “tremendous noise of shattering glass, shooting and explosions” ( Karmi , 86). Finally, Karmi’s father declares that they all should leave as soon as possible because Jerusalem “is not safe anymore, not after Deir Yassin ” ( Karmi 118)..

Moreover, Lagnado in her memoir, The Man in The White Sharkskin Suit , describes the gradual emigration of the Jews from Egypt. Lagnado expresses how the Jews were worried when the King had to leave Egypt after 1952 Revolution, wondering about their future without him as he was their most powerful friend. she tackles the impact of the Suez War of 1956 on the Jewish community as it “led to convulsive changes inside Egypt,” explaining how the Egyptian authorities asked those who were holding British and French passports to leave the country within seventy two hours at most. The authorities nationalized the entire industries, “insisting that most employees be Egyptian nationals” ( Lagnado 92). Lagnado’s father, Leon lost much of his money in the stock market that was nationalized by the Egyptian government, many of his relatives who emigrated to different countries, and his reputation when his daughter Suzette was arrested and thrown in jail. Finally, Leon made his decision to leave Cairo with his family..

III. The phase of During-Nostalgia reveals the symptoms of nostalgia that have been reflected by the nostlagists ’ yearning for the old places and communities, comparing them with the new merciless ones, then mourning them, and re-visiting them to conclude that they will never ever be regained. According to Howard Scott, “nostalgia involves an evaluation that the past was preferable to the present” (642). In Jerusalem, Karmi’s family belonged to the middle class, her father had a position in the government education department, and her mother, Damascus’ daughter, was keen “on the latest fashions coming from Europe as portrayed in Egyptian films” ( Karmi 22). In Damascus, Karmi had to attend a school that “was full of impoverished looking girls,” and wear old clothes with holes. In 1949, in Damascus, Karmi’s father had to face the fact of being penniless and homeless, so he decided to leave to England. In London, when Karmi met her father in the airport she noticed he became thinner and smaller and his hair was all white. Karmi was fifteen when she recognized the concept of racism and was deprived from the first prize in a reading competition because she is not British. The adjudicator affirmed, “In point of fact, the little dark girl [ Ghada Karmi ] read best, but I cannot in all conscience give the first prize for an English recitation to someone non-English” ( Karmi 246)..

Moreover, Leon, Lagnado’s father and the protagonist of her memoir, is introduced in the beginning of the memoir as a “broker and middleman between two worlds- cosmopolitan colonial Cairo and mystical, sensuous Islamic Cairo” ( Lagnado 24). In the cosmopolitan Cairo, Leon who was able to communicate with the foreigners and natives, could make a reasonable fortune. In Paris, as a refugee, Leon has had to live as a destitute and dependent on charity. Finally, in New York, in his faded raincoat, Leon has worked as a tie salesman after his appeals to get a loan of $2,000 to open a candy store had been rejected. The collapse of the patriarchal society that Leon enjoyed in Cairo and vanished in New York has been a reason of nostalgia. The strong authoritarian father, Leon, who slapped his wayward daughter, Suzette, when she had been arrested in Cairo for “his moral code was as strict and unbending as that of his Muslim neighbors,” failed to control her in New York when she decided to leave the family home to live by herself rebelling against his Levantine moral code. He finally surrendered shouting “ mogrema –criminal” when she left ( Lagnado 147)..

Comparing their previous cozy happy homes with the new bitter ones leads both nostalgic writers to mourn the past. “When the links with the past have become broken and fragmented, there may be a need to return to a time before the loss in order to recover what can be saved and mourn what cannot be” ( Pourtova 42). Mourning the loss of social status, influence and family relations is a significant indication of nostalgia which surfaces when the nostalgist senses that s/he is very inferior and unable to face or cope with the new environment. That mourning imposes itself when Lagnado and her family were insulted in their exile of New York by Mrs. Cagno , the landlady who declared that the Lagnados “would be better off in a tent in the desert,” Lagnado remembers that scene and says: We had owned a lovely apartment on a broad tree-lined boulevard named after a queen, with a maid, a balcony and a cat with a coat of many colors. I should have said I had attended a private girl’s Lycee that taught me more by the age of six than I’d learned in all my years at American elementary school, I should have informed her that only an unfortunate twist of fate had placed us at the mercy of fellahin like the Cagnos of Sixty-fifth Street. (276).

Karmi and Lagnado both decide to re-visit the old places trying to re-connect with the past or to search for what they miss in present. In 1991Karmi went back to the motherland, Palestine, to search for her family’s house in Qatamon . Karmi narrates how she has stayed for many days in Jerusalem exerting efforts to find the family house: Now that I had decided to confront the past, I could not bear to leave without seeing, knowing, breaking open the magical seal set in childhood and left undisturbed for forty-three years. I must find the house. (443) For Karmi , searching for the family’s house represents searching for identity to prove that she has roots somewhere which might support her to continue and resist the oppressive circumstances she faces. In 2005, Lagnado decided to visit Cairo, the family apartment at 281 Malaka Nazli (Ramses now), the Gates of Heaven temple, and Groppi the “legendary patisserie” that she used to go to with her father. At her former home at Malaka Nazli , Lagnado affirms, “ Malaka Nazli hadn’t simply been a place, I realized, but a state of mind. It was where you could find an extraordinary, breathtaking level of humanity”(332). That state of mind, which has been explained by Lagnado as a longing for the humane qualifications of the oriental Egyptian society, is her sense of nostalgia..

During her visit to her former house in Jerusalem, Karmi has been searching for her earlier self which has been buried for a long time for many political, social, and personal circumstances. Yet, she finally realizes that there is no place for her because the house is not hers: “but of course it wasn’t ours anymore and had not been for fifty years. Our house was dead, like Fatima, like poor Rex, like us” ( Karmi 450). Karmi has considered that they are all dead because the house as well as the Palestinian homeland is still lost. In downtown Cairo of 2005, Lagnado was wondering, “where was the elegance [her] parents had pined after?” (320). She could not find the abundant department stores or the famed buttery desserts of Groppi that distinguished Cairo during the 1940s and her family had known, so they disdained the offerings of Paris and New York. In other words, the return visits to the old places and long-forgotten homes do not solve the problem of nostalgia. Such visits lead both of Karmi and Lagnado to face the bitter fact and determine if they can defeat their nostalgia and adapt to the new homeland or not..

IV. The phase of Post- Nostalgia Moreover, the memoirs reveal that the crucial and climactic point comes when the émigrés reach the new home of the exile and face the great question of adaptation. They start to wonder about the possibility of finding an alternative community, being absorbed by the new culture, or isolated from the new environment. The immigrants’ possible identities could be classified as follows: An individual who retains a strong ethnic identity while also identifying with the new society is considered to have an integrated (or bicultural) identity. One who has a strong ethnic identity but does not identify with the new culture has a separated identity, whereas one who gives up an ethnic identity and identifies only with the new culture has an assimilated identity. The individual who identifies with neither has a marginalized identity. ( Phinney et al 495).

On one hand, Karmi , the narrator and protagonist of In search of Fatima , is considered a defeated nostalgist . Throughout her narration, we realize that Karmi has tried to be assimilated into the British community but she finally concludes that she cannot belong to that community or the Palestinian one. Karmi represents that marginalized identity, living on the periphery of two identities: the ethnic Palestinian and the national British. Affirming her British identity and ignoring her Arab background, Karmi “comforted [herself] with the knowledge that [she] was part of a higher order of being, liberal, free, English” (237). Yet after her divorce from her English husband whom she married to belong to the British community, she asks herself “If I am not one of them, then who am I?” (377). Trying to find belonging, Karmi decides to take her medical skills to the refugee camps of the Arab world to serve her people. Later on, throughout her visits to the Arab World, Karmi has realized that she failed to accept or be accepted by the Arab world. She concludes: “But to my dismay it soon became clear that I was as alien to them as they to me. I looked and sounded Arab, but in myself I was not, and they sensed it” ( Karmi 414). Karmi’s inability to balance the Arab and British identity made her more prone to marginalization..

Lagnado’s father, Leon, is the defeated nostalgist who has failed to be assimilated or integrated by the culture of the new homeland, America, having a separated identity. He also “preferred being an old Egyptian to a new American” ( Lagnado 207). That attitude has become clear from the beginning when he declared to Mrs. Kirschner , the American social worker who has been in charge of the Lagnados ’ Americanization, “we are Arab, madame ” ( Lagnado 207). Mrs. Kirschner reports that Leon “regards the immigration as a calamity rather than as an opportunity” ( Lagnado 208). He has always kept his suitcase which he had bought for the day he was going back to Cairo. Underlining the fact that he is an Arab waiting to go back to Cairo, Leon unintentionally reveals his resistance to cope with the requirements of the western values, to get rid of the colonization of the Arab identity, or to keep a balance between the Arab and American identity. Finally, he died in America..

On the other hand, Lagnado represents the victorious nostalgist as she could retain her Jewish identity and respond to the American culture. Attending Hebrew school at night and receiving Hebrew lessons from her father have strengthened Lagnado’s sense of belonging to a specific community that is identified with her inherited cultural identity. Lagnado says, “I realized that I had a natural affinity for Hebrew- a facility that I didn’t enjoy with Arabic or English” (234). Finally, on the contrary with the Jewish Orthodox traditions, Lagnado could share the Jewish males reading psalms for her father when there was no minyan , affirming both her Jewish identity and the American independent identity that enables women to participate in all activities away from the shackles of gender roles which may hamper their counterparts in the Middle East. The integrity that Lagnado could create between the Jewish identity and the American one shows her as a model of the victorious nostalgist ..

References. Boym , Svetlana. “Nostalgia and its discontents.” The Hedgehog Review 7 .2 (2007): 7-18. Howard, Scott A. “Nostalgia.” Analysis 72 .4(2012): 641-650. Karmi , Ghada . In Search of Fatima . London: Verso. 2002. Lagnado , Lucette . The man in the white sharkskin suit . New York: Ecco . 2007. Phinney , Jean S., Gabriel Horenczyk , Karmela Liebkind , and Paul Vedder . “Ethnic identity, immigration, and well-being: An interactional perspective.” Journal of Social Issues , 57.3 (2001): 493-510. Poore , Benjamin, Yana Meerzon , and Daniel Meyer- Dinkgräfe . “Nostalgia: chapter one.” Consciousness, Literature & the Arts (1573-2193 ) 36 (2013): 15-60. Pourtova , Elena “Nostalgia and lost identity.” The Journal of Analytical Psychology 58.1 (2013): 34-51..