'I wished I could leave the tiny corner I had been crammed into'
Haji Jabir’s novel ‘Black Foam’ is a profoundly sad portrait of the modern world, showing the lengths people, in this case an Eritrean man, will go to escape their homeland
(This review first appeared in Haaretz English Edition on July 23, 2023, and can also be read there.)
“Black Foam” by Haji Jabir, translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain and Marcia Lynx Qualey. Amazon Crossing, 224 pages
“Black Foam” is quite a surprise.
Haji Jabir’s novel tells the story of an Eritrean who deserts his country’s army, flees south to Ethiopia and finds his way to a compound run by the Jewish Agency, where he claims membership in the Falashmura and requests to make aliyah to Israel.
The Falashmura were the people left behind after Israel and world Jewry succeeded in bringing nearly all of Ethiopia’s Jews – Beta Israel – to Israel. That mission was largely completed by the turn of the century. After that, Israel took on the far more contentious task of bringing over those who weren’t recognized as Jews by religious law but had strong connections to the Jewish community.
Many of the Falashmura are the descendants of Jews who were pressed to convert to Christianity in the 19th and 20th centuries. Government policy on the immigration of the Falashmura has zigzagged as political winds have changed, and there are always more clamoring to be let into Israel. In “Black Foam,” it is suggested that with enough money, one could bribe one’s way into the emigration center in Gondar and onto the list for aliyah. That’s what the book’s protagonist, Dawit – a man with no family and no home, and no links to the Jewish people – hopes will be his salvation. Naturally, he has no idea what he’s getting into.
Novelist Jabir is a 47-year-old Eritrean whose family fled that country during its decades-long civil war (which ended in 1991, when the country became independent of Ethiopia). He grew up in Saudi Arabia and today lives in Doha, Qatar, where he works for Al Jazeera. He has published a total of five novels in Arabic.
The fourth of these, “Black Foam” (2018), was nominated for the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and it’s thanks to that recognition that it was translated into English earlier this year by Sawad Hussain and Marcia Lynx Qualey. (I learned about “Black Foam” from a recent episode of the podcast “Bulaq,” in which Qualey and co-host Ursula Lindsey showcase new English translations of contemporary Arabic prose and poetry. Both women are knowledgeable and always passionate about their subject, and their show is a gift to nonreaders of Arabic whose curiosity about the Arab world goes beyond the headlines.)
What made Jabir write a book about Israel? He has said it was the death of Habtom Zarhum, an Eritrean asylum seeker who was shot in October 2015 when a security guard in the Be’er Sheva Central Bus Station mistook him for a Palestinian terrorist who had just stabbed to death an Israeli soldier and begun shooting up bystanders. After the unarmed Zarhum was shot in error and he lay wounded on the floor, he was then attacked brutally by enraged members of the public. He died a short time later.
Jabir heard Zarhum’s tragic story, which was widely covered both in Israel and internationally, and, he told Qualey recently in an interview in the online magazine Hadara, it “deeply affected” him.
Even writing a long nonfiction piece about his Eritrean compatriot, he continued, wasn’t sufficient to “exhaust my emotions,” so he decided to write a novel and dedicate it to Zarhum’s memory. Not wanting it to read like an “angry screed,” he gave himself a crash course on the subject of Ethiopian immigration to Israel and eventually paid a visit to Jerusalem – although he doesn’t seem to have ventured further into Israel.
Disjointed and disorienting
“Black Foam,” though, is not a fictionalized version of Zarhum’s story. Summarizing what it is requires piecing together a narrative that is by design disjointed and disorienting. Perhaps this nonlinear structure, in which the chapters, and even parts of them, jump around in time and place without warning, is meant to approximate the uncertain existence of its protagonist, who is constantly revising his own life story, to accommodate his audience of that moment.
Dawit, who also switches names in relation to his circumstances, was born on the Eritrean battlefield to a soldier mother, whose identity – like that of the male soldier who impregnated her – is unknown to him. Instead, Adal, as he was called as a child, was raised collectively within the army, moving “from one babysitter to another, and they were all my mother.” Children born out of a battlefield hookup are called “Free Gadli,” meaning “fruits of the struggle” in Eritrean. They were glorified by some, because their lives were dedicated to serving the socialist revolution, and scorned by others, being the result of a union forbidden by Islamic law.
Dawit has been educated in military schools and raised “without tribal or religious ties, so the revolution was our only goal.” He is drafted at age 17.
We learn much of this biography when he is interviewed by an official of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Endabaguna, Ethiopia. Because his goal is to convince the official, identified only as “the European,” that he merits resettlement in a safe, third country, we are on warning that his story may not necessarily be reliable. In fact, the European as much as encourages him to fabricate his story, telling him that he’s tired of hearing the same sad refugee tale and wants to be entertained. Dawit, who indeed began his interview by launching into a canned biography meant to elicit sympathy, now decides he will risk telling his interlocutor “the truth” – but since Dawit has already told us, in effect, that “Everything I say is a lie,” we have no way of knowing what to believe.
Dawit relates how, on leave from the army in Asmara, he met and fell for Aisha. The love is mutual, instantaneous and grand, yet he doesn’t feel confident about it to tell her the truth about himself. “I wished I could tell her that I was one of the Free Gadli,” Dawit relates to the UN official. “I wished I could leave the tiny corner that I had been crammed into, which always made me the bad guy, the liar. I didn’t even want to think about what would happen if Aisha knew I was cut off from family and ancestors, and that everything I knew about mothers and fathers had come from the revolution.”
When he misses a curfew by spending a night with Aisha, he is sentenced to 10 days of solitary confinement. After his release, he again goes AWOL. When he’s caught, he is sent to the Blue Valley, which, despite its bucolic name, is a prison camp so notorious that Dawit has never heard of anyone returning from it. Dawit, however, escapes (we never learn how), this time fleeing the country, without an opportunity to part properly from Aisha. This is how he ends up at the UNHCR office in Endabaguna asking for recognition as a political refugee.
The European loves the story, but nonetheless denies Dawit asylum status. At that point, Yohannes, another Eritrean at the camp, shares with him his own plan to push on to Gondar, where’s he heard it’s possible to buy oneself onto the list of Falashmura waiting for airlift to Israel. Dawit convinces himself that it would be okay to attack Yohannes and steal both his money and his plan, and he does just that. Subsequently and fittingly, Dawit himself is attacked by bandits on the way to Gondar, who relieve him of the money he stole from Yohannes.
Eventually, though, Dawit makes it to Gondar and, through more lies and subterfuge, finds the sum needed to bribe officials at the Jewish Agency camp there, thus gaining the coveted Falashmura status. He begins learning Hebrew and taking lessons in Judaism in preparation for immigration to Israel.
For the Israeli who reads “Black Foam” to see how the Jewish state comes off once Dawit lands at Ben-Gurion Airport, there’s no clear-cut answer. The Israelis he encounters aren’t any more or less cruel or racist than any other group in “Black Foam.” “Man is wolf to man” seems to apply most everywhere.
What can’t be denied about Israel, though (and Jabir does not attempt to do so), is that it goes to great lengths to rescue Jews distress to the country, and expends significant efforts in helping them settle in once they are here. These benefits include language instruction, housing, psychological counseling if needed, and tours to historical and religious sites. Similarly, Israel’s nearly 100,000 Ethiopian immigrants, whether Beta Israel or Falashmura, whatever their complaints, have made a stubborn effort both to integrate into Israeli society and hold onto their community’s distinct culture and traditions.
‘Bottom of the food chain’
Had he desired to, Haji Jabir could have written a far more satirical book – one that mocked the programming (or indoctrination) that the Zionist movement serves up to new immigrants. Not to mention the bizarre logic that characterizes the Zionist search for “lost tribes,” which some time ago became a factor in the demographic battle being fought to maintain a Jewish majority in the Holy Land. He also could have been more critical of the growth of a mentality that makes many Israelis increasingly unable to feel empathy for the suffering of non-Jews, especially considering that his project had its origin in the chilling, lonely demise of an Eritrean refugee here.
“Black Foam,” however, seems more interested in the relations between Africans of different nationalities and religions than in attacking Israel. Certainly, this is where he seems on firmer ground.
In one interview, Jabir described several encounters he had with Ethiopian Jews during his own brief visit to Israel. The one that made the strongest impression was with “someone I didn’t talk to at all. Instead, we kept looking at each other without speaking. He was an Israeli conscript from the [Ethiopian] community who I met in the alleys of Jerusalem that lead to Al-Aqsa Mosque. He was talking to a white conscript. But, as soon as he saw me, he stopped talking and kept looking at me, as if he were going to say or ask something.”
In the book, Jabir interprets that ambiguous exchange of glances in a scene whose meaning is far more explicit. Dawit is taken by an Israeli woman to witness a demonstration outside the Knesset being mounted by non-Jewish, African refugees, who are protesting a government decision to deport them. What grabs his attention is the way a Black member of the security forces guarding the site responds to the protest:
“In front of [Dawit] stood a soldier from Beta Israel, holding his machine gun. He passed the time cursing the Eritrean motherfuckers who had followed him to Israel, wishing that the government would send them back to their miserable fucking country.”
The concept of the narcissism of small differences tells us we shouldn’t be surprised that people from the same country or region look down on, or feel threatened by, others who are similar to them. So it is for Dawit, who is convinced that people are looking at him with suspicion and disdain wherever he sets foot: In the camp in Gondar, the real Falashmura seem to see right through him, and some spit and throw stones at him. When he ventures into town, the local Ethiopians appear to envy him for the privileges he has a Jew. What’s certain is that if people knew he was really an Eritrean, they would all be united in loathing him. “He was at the bottom of the food chain.”
The only time Dawit finds himself fully accepted by anyone is toward the book’s end, when he is taken in by a Black shopkeeper in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter. Muhammad Ali, who is also known as Mariel, has an uncanny ability to identify what part of Eritrea Dawit hails from just by the shape of his face. He says he and others in his community are the descendants of immigrants who came to Jerusalem at different times during the preceding century from Sudan, Chad, Nigeria and Senegal. “Some of us came to the neighborhood near Al-Aqsa Mosque, and we’re called al-Mujawirun, or ‘the Near Ones.’ Some came only to battle Israel as soon as the state was declared in 1948.” And there those who came earlier, when the British imported them to lay the tracks of Mandatory Palestine’s railway.
“In any case,” Mariel continues, “we are now Palestinians down to the marrow of our bones, and we will defend it heart and soul.” He invites Dawit into his home, introduces him to his wife as “my son,” and offers to help him find work. All he asks of Dawit is that he not like the Israelis.
Talking with Mariel and his communist twin brother Yassin, however, Dawit learns that the Jerusalem Africans are not fully accepted by their Palestinian brethren. “Some of our own people,” admits Mariel, “still can’t accept the color of our skin.”
Again, Dawit recalls the image that for him symbolizes his lack of either belonging or agency: “From Asmara to Endabaguna to Tel Aviv, and now to Jerusalem. All of these places had tossed him to the surface, like foam, without allowing him into their depths.”
Now, he realizes that he has encountered this same phenomenon in “the paradox of the African Palestinians. … It was the black foam all over again, floating to the surface despite all their attempts to become part of the heart of the place.”
While Dawit’s wanderings in Jerusalem’s Old City are convincing, when Jabir moves further out from the city’s heart, he is less persuasive – as in his description of the absorption center Dawit is assigned to in Pisgat Ze’ev.
Pisgat Ze’ev is one of five new Jerusalem neighborhoods that were built in the wake of the Six-Day War to anchor the city’s new borders, which had tripled the area under municipal control. Today it is the capital’s largest neighborhood, with more than 50,000 residents. Jabir refers to it as a “settlement,” which is correct technically – it is built on land that the international community sees as occupied, even if Israel has officially annexed it to the state – but you wouldn’t know that if you visited it.
Pisgat Ze’ev is not in fact surrounded by a fence, and is connected to the rest of the city by the light rail and numerous bus lines. It also has attracted many Arab residents who didn’t want to be left on the other side of the security barrier when it was built two decades ago.
Pisgat Ze’ev is also not the location of a Jewish Agency center for new immigrants – and even if it were, it would hardly look like the sprawling campus to which Dawit is sent, where he is assigned to “Apartment 18, on the fifth floor of Building 7, in Group 22 of the Pisgat Ze’ev settlement.”
The novel’s limited success in its depiction of Israel detract from it, but “Black Foam” is not meant to be a travel guide. I have a feeling that different readers would give widely different answers if asked what they think it is meant to be. For me, the book is a profoundly sad portrait of the lives of an increasing portion of humanity: vast numbers of people on the move, seeking little more than conditions that may allow them to survive. Every man for himself, and every state for itself, are impulses that are hard to resist, but they don’t bode well for the future of any of us.
Israel’s largely successful attempt to save the Jewish community of Ethiopia from the same sorts of threats now faced by hundreds of millions has been undeniably heroic, and Haji Jabir doesn’t suggest otherwise. But seen as a harbinger of growing insularity and xenophobia, they remind us of the care we must take in deciding which lessons we want to draw from the experience.