Emile Habiby's The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist
Half a century after it was published, Emile Habiby's darkly comic novel remains one of the sharpest portraits of life as a Palestinian inside Israel.
There is no easy word in English for what Emile Habiby's most famous character is. Saeed is neither optimist nor pessimist but both at once: a pessoptimist, a man who, when things go badly, thanks God they did not go worse. Through his misadventures, Habiby wrote one of the funniest and bleakest books in modern Arabic literature.
The author
Emile Habiby (1922–1996) was born in Haifa to a Christian family and stayed there after 1948, becoming a citizen of Israel. He was a leading figure in the Israeli Communist Party, served in the Knesset and edited the Arabic-language newspaper al-Ittihad for many years. He was a public intellectual on both sides of a divided identity: a Palestinian writer and an Israeli citizen.
That double position was reflected in the recognition he received. In the early 1990s he was awarded both the PLO's Jerusalem Prize and Israel's national Israel Prize for literature. Accepting the latter was controversial in parts of the Arab world. He asked that his gravestone carry a simple line: remained in Haifa.
The novel
*The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist*, published in Arabic in 1974, is written as a series of letters from Saeed. He is a Palestinian who stayed in Israel after 1948 and who works, clumsily, as an informer for the Israeli authorities. He recounts his life from what appears to be outer space, where he claims to have been rescued by aliens.
The book mixes slapstick, satire, folklore and tragedy. Saeed's loyalty to his handlers is absurd and his compromises are humiliating. Behind the jokes lies a devastating account of the first decades of Palestinian life in Israel: military rule, lost villages, divided families and the constant pressure to prove loyalty.
Why it lasts
Habiby's achievement was to find a form for an experience that did not fit the standard narratives of heroism or victimhood. Saeed is neither a resistance fighter nor a passive victim. He is an ordinary person trying to survive, and that is exactly why the book continues to find readers.
It has been translated into many languages and adapted for the stage. It remains a starting point for anyone trying to understand the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the community that, like Habiby, remained.