Alain Corbin’s Village Bells is a classic work of “campanarian history” that presents bells as a technology of regulation and an auditory aspect of collective identity. Samira Azzam’s very short story about a bell-ringer is a condensed evocation of this technological truth. Instead of being located in revolutionary rural France, though, this bell is being rung in at an unknown time in an unnamed location, but it doesn’t seem too far from Lebanon or Palestine.
Abu Masoud is the old bellringer being replaced by a young upstart after a long career. “Abu Masoud and the bell were one and the same thing,” we are told. The sound of the bell is the sound of the old man. But “he was coming apart”. Growing deaf, trembling, weak. The youngster’s not going to get the proper tone – he doesn’t know the right way to strike the bell. But the old man’s losing his touch.
Azzam’s stories in this collection proceed at a measured pace, with much allegorical resonance. I recently saw Adania Shibli explain the not-overtly-political resonance of Azzam’s fiction as a strategic move. When censors read her work in the 1960s, they found no obviously negative depictions of Zionism, and so allowed it to be published. What they didn’t realise is that Azzam’s fictions dared to imagine a world without Israeli apartheid.
Collected in Out of Time, ArabLit Books, 2022
A Personal Anthology 