A Life Disappointed
Outcast
By Shimon Ballas
Translation by Ammiel Alcalay and Oz Shelach
City Lights, 2007
308 pages, $13.95
“Relations with Iran are getting complicated.” Just one of many resonant lines in Shimon Ballas’ latest novel that brings to mind contemporary events. Written in Hebrew and recently translated into English, Outcast is the fictional autobiography of Dr. Ahmed Haroun Soussan, an amalgamation of actual figures in Iraqi history, including Ahmad Soussa, an Iraqi Jew who in the 1930s converted to Islam. Ballas’ Soussan has also made a conversion from Judaism to Islam and this, along with his deep sense of love lost in a broken marriage to an American named Jane, provides the dominant framework for the narrative.
As one might expect from a novel by an author who identifies as both Jewish and Arab, Outcast draws our mind out in numerous, albeit related directions, operating in three distinct yet connected spheres of thought: that of a man wrestling with his own cultural and religious identity, of Iraq struggling to free itself from the chains of imperialism, and finally of the fear and ultimate realization that Zionism is both tragic for Palestinans and spiritually and socially problematic for Judaism and for Arab Jews.
The narrative style of Outcast drifts in time, touching on every major political event in Iraqi history, from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the rumblings of the Iran-Iraq war, taking ample time to dwell in the 1930s when, as Soussan remarks, “We were young, brimming with high ambition, and Iraq was at the beginning of its road to independence, in dire need of construction, of raising his beacon high among nations.” Of course the beacon is not raised high, and it is with this disappointment fully embodied that Soussan tells his story.
Among the many disappointments that shape his life is the zealotry he sees around him. It is a zealotry he relates directly to injustice and one he senses early in his childhood, when his father forbids him to play with his Muslim friends: “How great was my joy to have my new clothes, tailored for the holidays… but even then my joy was mixed with unease at the sight of the peasant children in worn-out weekday clothes… I wasn’t allowed to visit them in my new suit.” The exclusivity he senses in the Judaism of his youth ultimately leads him to his profoundly personal conversion, and the writing of his first book, My Path to Islam. However, this too brings on many disappointments. Years later, when his words are twisted into an argument against the Jews, he remarks: “I chose Islam out of the will to extract myself from the chains of separation and couldn’t bear to see myself escaping Jewish xenophobia and zealousness only to fall into the hands of Muslim zealots and xenophobes.”
Throughout the book Ballas’ tone is subtle and nuanced, but ultimately brutal in that there is little salvation offered or obtained. In the end we are left with the portrait of a man who has “exhausted his paths in life.” As a piece of Israeli literature, Outcast is rare as it challenges, if indirectly, many deeply assumed beliefs within the realms of Jewish identity and Zionist thought.
Shimon Ballas was born in Baghdad in 1930 and emigrated to Israel in 1951 (out of “necessity, not ideology”). He has been a professor in the Arabic department at University of Haifa, and now divides his time between Tel Aviv and Paris. For more on his life and work, see Samir’s film Forget Baghdad and Ammiel Alcalay’s book After Jews and Arabs.
