In Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, Isabella Hammad explains the contradictory value of an anagnorisis (a moment of literary recognition) “when it is not redemptive: when it instead stages a troubling encounter with limitation or wrongness.” These moments of recognition reveal to us the limits of our knowledge, she argues, which can be equally or even more useful than revelations that reaffirm. In Bassem Khandaqji’s novel, A Mask the Color of the Sky, the author deals its protagonist—and potentially his readers—several such “tragic reversals,” telling the story of Nur Mahdi al-Shahdi as he takes on a double identity and, indeed, an intensified double consciousness.
Aiming to write a novel that reclaims the historical Palestinian origins of Mary Magdalene in a post-Da Vinci Code world, Nur steals the identity of an Ashkenazi Israeli, Or Shapira, whose expired ID he finds in the pocket of a thrifted leather jacket. He then dons Or’s mask to join an archaeological mission near the settlement of Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek, built upon the displaced Arab village of Al-Lajjun. This double identity requires him to inhabit the perspective of the “Zionist other,” embodying the rupture of occupation within his own psyche and resulting in both internal and external conflicts, the latter against his colleagues on the dig, which includes Ayala, a Sephardic Jewish Zionist, and Sama’, a Palestinian Israeli national living in post-Nakba Haifa. It also leads to heated defenses in the imagined conversations Nur has with his imprisoned friend, with whom he grew up in the alienating alleyways of a refugee camp in Ramallah.
Nur/Or’s mission uncovers, both through his archaeological preoccupations and his adoption of a false identity, the concrete traces of colonial violence, occupation, and displacement. Treated by the settlers as a vestige of a turbulent past and victorious origin, the Zionist narrative is troubled by the evidence of the Arab village and news of tensions in Jerusalem, which spring into the present through layers of narrative silt. But within Nur bubble other tensions: What does he really expect to gain by entering the other side, and what does he risk losing by doing so? Is he a traitor by embodying Or so readily?
Through the mirror which hosts the encounter between occupier and occupied, the Holocaust and the Nakba, Nur humanizes the longing of his own fragments, “excavating the earth and extracting its pottery and its secrets, heedless of his own shattered pieces, which he hoped to one day see someone gather and return to their point of origin.” What Nur is able to excavate may not constitute answers, but rather a clarification, brought into relief through the disclosure of his true identity to Sama’. Taking on Or’s identity has not liberated him, nor has it led to any achievement; instead, he senses the fractured state of his homeland more acutely, within his own body, and his anagnorisis comes when he throws Or Shapira’s ID into the distance and drives away from the settlement as Nur. Though what the novel offers is but a tentative hope of return, A Mask the Color of the Sky is certain in its resolve that the protective mask of normalization is ultimately a trap; without truth and justice, reconciliation is impossible.
