Hatim Kanaaneh’s Chief Complaint: A Country Doctor’s Tales of Life in Galilee, is among the best books I have read in the last ten years. Hatim is a wonderful storyteller with a unique voice. His prose is engaging. His immersion in Galilee and its people brings depth and gravitas to the slightest details of his accounts. While at times he idealizes those about whom he writes, it is the kind of idealization that stems from love, not from hyperbole, all the more credible because of his unflinching if often indirectly expressed objectivity when he addresses the shortcomings of his subjects.
I found Hatim’s first story, the tale of Adheem, a powerful and unstoppable giant of a man, brave, aggressive, at times heroic, but rather dim, whose unthinking impulsiveness ultimately blows his genitals to smithereens, a perfect metaphor for the self-destructive stupidity that so often dominates the policies and efforts of all sides in the conflicts that embroil the Middle East. His second tale is a poignant exploration of lifelong love that moved me deeply. Hatim’s politics, once stated in the preface, blend seamlessly into his tales and the dialogs he reports. While politics are high on his agenda, Hatim is at his best eloquently describing love and family in the Palestinian world, every word deeply rooted in the earth and traditions of his ancestors. His voice begins firmly grounded in the particular and soars to the universal.
The result is a celebration of a fast-vanishing lifestyle and a wistful account of the complexity and centrality of family life in the Palestinian community, and an participant-observer’s account of his ancient culture’s changing, crumbling, and trying to reaffirm itself and its directions as it struggles against engulfment by the twin riptides of modernity and occupation. For readers who have worked alongside their grandfathers in agriculture or gardening, Hatim’s reflections on his family’s tending orchards and crops and his preservation of those traditions just might bring tears to their eyes. It certainly brought tears to mine. I guarantee the reader that after reading this book, eating a pomegranate will never be the same.
Hatim’s home village of Arrabeh comes alive in these pages. Comparisons to Sholem Aleichem’s portrayal of the fictional village of Anatevka spring readily to mind. Both authors are gifted with tremendous wit, demonstrate a deep unapologetic love for what they bring to life in their writing, and share a bittersweet sense of both the precious and the precarious in the times and places they depict. To this reader, Hatim’s fusion of humor, politics, rapid social change, and love, in the context of a closeness to nature, agriculture, and animal husbandry also evokes vague echoes of Virgil’s first and rarely studied masterwork, the Eclogues or Bucolics.
It is hard to imagine a more moving advocacy for the Palestinian cause. I would like to believe that at times the pen is mightier than the sword, and that a wider reading of this book would be far more effective than terrorism and agitation in promoting the cause of the Palestinian people.
Chief Complaint... is an important book with powerful human, political, cultural, and anthropological insights. It deserves a wide readership. It belongs on the reading lists of high schools and universities, and on the bookshelves of those eager to better understand the Middle East today. It should be regarded as required reading for those with interest and involvement in international affairs.
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