A review of
THEY FELL LIKE STARS FROM THE SKY
& Other Stories
by Sheikha Helawy
– a review by author and poet, Julia Spry-Leverton
It’s likely, isn’t it? that most of us have learnt more in the last ten months about Palestine than in our whole lives before 7 October 2023. Perhaps from a source like The Guardian[i] article which describes the Israeli Government’s recent demolition of 350 homes in Wadi-al-Khali village: olive trees uprooted, livelihoods destroyed, hundreds of children left shelterless against the burning heat, the community’s animals wandering loose from their pens.
Wadi-al-Khali is in the harsh Negev desert where a mere 1100 nomadic Bedouin Palestinians remained when the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 ended, people who’ve been struggling ever since against the marginalization of displacement from their ancestral lands, their villages ‘unrecognized’ by the new state of Israel due to their Bedouin status – villages rendered anyway uninhabitable, deprived of water, electricity and refuse services.
This political repression and its concomitant domestic devastation was lived firsthand by Sheikha Helawy, Palestinian author of ‘They Fell Like Stars from the Sky’. It is over thirty years since the village of Dhail El E’rj where Helawy spent her childhood was erased to make way for an Israeli railway, every family forcibly displaced, many going into exile. Today Helawy is a Professor of Arab Feminism at Ben Gurion University, just a few kilometres from where Wadi-al-Khali is currently being bulldozed.
Helawy’s book contains 18 place-based stories, translated from the Arabic by Nancy Roberts, narrating the lives of Dhail El E’rj’s Palestinian Bedouin inhabitants, predominantly those of women and girls. Some are first person accounts, at least partially autobiographical. The title story however is about Jahawir, and establishes the book’s overarching theme in which Helawy depicts her characters, confronted by the other repression constricting their lives, that of the formidably restrictive conditions imposed by their community’s age-old patriarchal cultural norms, using transgressions of different kinds to snatch at some kind of autonomy. The women do this sometimes grimly, sometimes with joy, the dilemmas imposed by sexuality and gender discrimination always simmering beneath their choices.
The story describes what happens to young Jawahir when she seizes one of the freedoms enjoyed by boys but forbidden to girls: to take a ride and go high on the swing that hangs from the old oak tree. Where defiant Jawahir leads, the other girls follow, crowding to sit on to the tyre, flaunting how it ‘moved gracefully between the two ends of the sky, the .. breeze billowing their skirts.’ Until the rope snaps, that is, and the girls are scattered. Jawahir falls on to boulders, her wound causing a spot of viscous blood, ‘big and round’ to be visible ‘low on her abdomen.’
Jawahir feels no pain but describes the gasp she hears released by the nearby women as going ‘straight through her, like a knife slaughtering her childhood… She was gone, buried in humiliation.’ Once home, the wound is revealed as being on Jawahir’s thigh, relief unanimous that the unspeakably shaming public exposure of puberty’s onset has not occurred. After the shock and the horror, a taboo has been broken and when the swing’s mended, this time it’s the emboldened women who crowd, laughing and joking, to take their turn on it.
‘Here’s your little braid,’ says the village barber to the narrator in Haifa Assassinated: My Braid, another story focused on rebellion against the rituals associated with young women’s approach to maturity. We learn how the narrator’s succeeded in her agitation to have her long hair cut off, enabling her, a village girl, to blend in with fellow students at the city high school. But alas, she then comprehends the barber has ‘sensed the grievousness of her calamity’ yet he, ‘steeped as he was in the Bedouin mentality that equates braids with virginity’, is nevertheless rejoicing in the snip of his scissors, ‘taking pride in another masculine victory.’ (He would display the braid in his shop for long years thereafter.)
Referring to the despised braid as ‘a Bedouin legacy .. breaking my back’ the narrator yet describes how, fumbling for it, her hand ‘fiddled nervously with the short hair .. against my neck, only to draw back as if it had been stung.’ Conflicted, she wants to relish that in appearance she’s become like the Haifa girls, ‘Or nearly so’. But hearing that gasp again from her watching mother she fears she’ll never be able to justify the sin of being lured from her Bedouin ways.
Some of Helawy’s stories are very short and often tinged with melancholy, some are brief anecdotes such as A Funny Red Rose, some merely extended epigrams. Some like Queens of Darkness are touched by magical realism’s wand, meaning that definitive interpretation can present a challenge.
The book’s longest, Umm Kulthum’s Intercessor, offers the reader a poignant soundtrack. In a first-person account by a sixteen-year-old, the revered contralto voice of Umm, Egyptian megastar idolized across the East from 1920-70, takes centre stage. The narrator’s grandmother spent hours listening to radio broadcasts of Umm’s songs of love, longing and loss, Granny always referring to the artist as ‘The Beloved’. Although the singer dead more than a decade at the time of the story, it transpired Umm’s reputation could be the cause of a tiff between grandmother and granddaughter. Helawy’s description of this and its resolution delicately combines inter-generational affection with technological innovation, spiced with a touch of schadenfreude.
They Fell is no political diatribe, the words ‘Al Nakba’ (‘The Catastrophe’ in Arabic) referring to the origin of the Bedouin’s 76 years’ history of displacement appear only once. The stories focus on personal perceptions. Deftly told, they use straightforward vocabulary, building for us a largely unsentimental picture of lives striving for normality in circumstances of tragic dispossession. Aside from the girls’ and adult female voices, such as the woman’s who washes the bodies in the morgue, we hear from the construction workers who labour building luxury Jewish villas, a jilted husband, an obsessively violent brother.
The book’s takeaway, though, must be of the vitally meaningful nature of women’s shared experience, however the world scene may change. In her last story Helawy draws back from the intimate to the more universal via a fantastical description of the viewpoint of her ‘Queens of Darkness’. She claims the queens discuss what they know: ‘life itself – life unadorned.’ Affirming the power and value of this knowledge ‘of where secrets are kept,’ for example, and ‘how old stories are divided up’, Helawy’s conclusion emphasizes the timeless significance of these conversations that are never closed, ‘conversations .. in the darkness – on the edge of bitterness and hatred, the edge of fear, the edge of pleasure…’
They Fell Like Stars from The Sky & Other Stories by Sheikha Helawy
Published by Neem Tree Press in 2023.
[1] Tondo Lorenzo “We will not go away’: Israeli demolitions leave Bedouin homeless’ The Guardian (London 6 June 2024)