Provocation | Introduction to Otherness

When he was twelve years old, Shadrach went on a summer vacation to his uncles’ house in “New Sderot”. While he was there, a disaster occurred. Nano-gas was spread on the inhabitants by the Zen-Americans, the powers that ruled the world at the time. The inhabitants become predators and prey, zombie-like. “In Exile-Tel Aviv (“Ha-Gola Tel Aviv”), in the city of Yavus, in Ma’aganei Tzedek, in Nahariya, in the Sanhedria, the same images. Peaceful-faced Zionists, but with a gleam of madness in their eyes, attacking one another, tearing with their teeth, their nails, slaughtering, and their blood, other’s blood, does not stop. Flowing veins” (Shadrach, p. 28). All victims, except those living in New Sderot and Gaza, are protected under protective domes designed to protect them from Qassam missiles. Those who are not resistant to the gas and are not protected under the dome die in their madness, including Shadrach’s family – his father, mother and sister.

Shadrach (Editor: Naama Tsal, published by Resling, 2017, link for purchase) is a short, futuristic novel by Shimon Adaf, in which he creates a technological post-apocalyptic future, terrifying and convincing, but also full of beauty – foreign, removed, different. The novella moves between two points in time, and between two parallel plots, which are told alternately and slowly intertwine with each other. Both take place in Sderot – once in the future, in “The New Sderot”, and once in the past, in the Sderot of the year 1987. Shadrach, whose story begins in “The New Sderot”, also takes part in the story of the past, but in this work I will deal only with the futuristic narrative of “The New Sderot”.

Shimon Adaf (Photo: Ronen Lalena)

Adaf’s books are full of moments of confronting foreignness, or moments when the world becomes foreign or the world in all its foreignness invades you and disrupts perception and consciousness.

According to the philosopher and cultural critic Mark Fisher, foreignness or otherness can be examined through two sets of concepts: the first is the one based on Freud’s, The Uncanny (literally translated from German: unhomely) (see Dana Thor’s article on this issue). This theory, as Fisher presents it, is about “the strange that is within the familiar, the strangely familiar, or the familiar as a stranger. The outside is seen as a projection of the inside and vice versa.” So the familiar can be a stranger, but the stranger is always also familiar. Through this theory, foreignness is always understood, processed and interpreted through the concepts of the “I”. On the other hand, Fisher offers two other categories, the strange and the eerie, as fundamentally different categories from Freud’s Uncanny. These, Fisher claims, do the opposite: “They allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside. […] The strange is that which does not belong. The strange brings to the familiar something that is a little way beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with ‘The Homely’ (even as opposites)” (from Fisher’s book, On The Weird and the Eerie).

Adaf’s works provide many such moments of foreignness and otherness, which are not reduced to the definition of the “Uncanny” (Unhomely). Fantasy and speculation allow Adaf to create situations and figures of inherent otherness, which grant us a new look at the inside, from the outside, and an examination of foreignness not through the concepts of the “I”, as can be seen in Shadrach.

Foreignness or otherness are an attack on the “I”, challenging its boundaries. In the “New Sderot” two strange events occur that undermine the entire existence for the residents of the town. The first event is the nano-gas attack I began with, which fundamentally changes the lives and perception of the residents; The second event is a significant and fateful meeting of Shadrach with a character with foreign, almost alien qualities, when he was fifteen years old. Both events force a confrontation with otherness, a confrontation of society as a whole, and of Shadrach alone.

For the residents of “New Sderot” – the closed dome that covers the city and was used as protection also led to closure and seclusion of thought and conception. Until the disaster, the residents of “New Sderot” lived without the memory of the past, without the old customs, without the need for them. But the disaster arouses in some of them a desire to return to the past, to the origins they forgot, which they no longer live by. “And what about the history that we don’t remember [said Zamir], the past that returns to us in fragments of visions and dreams? Our grief is deeper than that, sending roots to ancient times, but we don’t know what the past compares to its depth, we mourn it even today” (Shadrach, p. 63). The disaster arouses in the residents of “New Sderot” a need for tradition, a past and a history. They are looking for a more solid ground than that of the present (or the future) to hold on to.

On the other hand, Shadrach, who was orphaned from his family, finds other avenues for grief and sorrow. He does not understand what the members of the “Shomatz” (“Keepers of the Zion Tradition”) find in the old rituals, they seem artificial to him. Instead of the bubble that surrounds life and closes it in, he creates ecological bubbles, similar to the ones he encountered in “New Sderot”: “Independent, disposable ecological bubbles, tiny universes of insects and humidity, winged creatures and fungi, complex symbioses, buzzing and rapid life cycles” (Shadrach, p. 27). These are living, complex and dynamic works of art, in which Shadrach buries his childhood memories.” [Shadrach] began to design some bubbles of his own, brand new. […] He tried to incorporate details into them that would reflect, in some way, moments that had intensified in his memory since the attack” (Shadrach, p. 41). There they are assembled with other elements, undergo metamorphosis and develop into something new. In the face of disaster, Shadrach finds solace in art, and the ability to transform his memories into beauty, and not in history or renewed faith in religion.

Shadrach (published by Resling, 2017). Link for purchase

But the novel offers another possibility that grows out of an encounter with otherness and foreignness, through Shadrach’s encounter with Naharda֘::ֻ.

After a few years of Shadrach’s residence in the “New Sderot” he meets Naharda֘::ֻ, she/he is one of the moon settlers whose ancestors did indeed come from Earth, but they developed and changed over time into undefined creatures, or with fluid gender. In this sense, they are radically different from the inhabitants of the earth, who are often defined absolutely, even when a certain flexibility in their sexual orientation is described in the book. Even before he meets Naharda֘::ֻ, face to face, Shadrach sees her/him from afar. He wants to ask for her/his name, but he decides not to. He writes in his diary: “But you can ask for her/his name and maybe also for her/his gender. “No! the name and sex need to be revealed in some other way, to be given, not in a way that will give them a grip and actuality in the inside world, without them having existence on the outside. Wait!!!” (Shadrach, p. 87).

Shadrach tries not to define Naharda֘::ֻ in advance, through his own concepts. He realizes that he is meeting a different and completely foreign being here, this is not just a meeting with someone new, but this is “an introduction to otherness” (Shadrach, p. 121). He refuses to reduce Naharda֘::ֻ’s foreignness to his own concepts, but seeks to see and accept her/him in her/his foreignness, in the asymmetry of the experience. The name and gender are given to him as a gift, not he gives them to him/her. The other is experienced through its otherness, and not through its conformity or nonconformity with the concepts of the “I”.

The unique meeting between Shadrach and Naharda֘::ֻ, which leads to an intimate relationship between the two, takes place first of all in language. After they meet, Shadrach asks Naharda֘::ֻ to teach him to talk to her properly, in a way that befits his/her gender. He urges Naharda֘::ֻ to give him the rules that will allow him to talk to her/him in the most accurate way, from Shadrach.

The undefined Hebrew that Adaf creates for the characters is the result of the unique meeting between these two characters, a real meeting between foreignness and responsibility. The language that developed according to the degrees of the relationship between them allows the creation of contact, dialogue and conversation, without erasing the differences or foreignness between them, and without needing a third, foreign language as well. Apparently, another language could have been used, more convenient for gender fluidity, but here, the foreigners and the others force the language to accommodate them, to find solutions for themselves within the existing language, even though it seems closed and limiting, as Hebrew often seems to us. Hebrew is known and mentioned many times for being a “sex maniac” language, as Yona Wallach wrote about it in one of her poems: Every object is male or female, and it is necessary to determine. But it doesn’t have to stay that way, as Adaf shows in this piece. Getting to know others expands the possibilities of the existing language and gives it a continuous and future existence. In this context, it is also possible to mention Michal Shomer’s multi-gender Hebrew project (1), which created a system of Hebrew letters, enabling multi-gender reading and writing. And so the language can develop and open up to the foreign, the new, the other, the threatening, not just retreat to its origins as a result of an external threat.

Michal Shomer’s Multi-Gender Hebrew Project. Image from the Alef Alef Alef website.

The meeting between Shadrach and Naharda֘::ֻ is a meeting in which there is a deep foundation of Eros and attraction despite and perhaps because of the foreignness, an unusual meeting in our world where like attracts like. In his 2012 book The Agony of Eros, philosopher and cultural critic Byung-Chul Han argues that “in recent years, the end of love has been declared many times. Love, it is said, has failed because of infinite freedom of choice, abundance and an excess of possibilities, and the pursuit of perfection. In a world of unlimited possibilities, love itself symbolizes impossibility. [… But] the crisis of love does not arise from the fact that there are too many others, but from the erasure of the other. The disappearance of the other is a dramatic process – although, for the most part, it escapes consciousness. […] In the inferno of the similar, into which contemporary society is becoming, an erotic experience [stemming from desire, Eros] is not possible. Such an experience presupposes asymmetry and foreignness, an outsiderness of the other.” (The Agony of Eros, p. 1). In this sense, the meeting between Shadrach and Naharda֘::ֻ is unusual. Their meeting is similar to what Hahn describes as “A moment of truth”, “It presents a new and completely different way of life compared to the habit, the existing state of being. He interferes with the similar for the sake of the other.” (The Agony of Eros, p. 45)

The falling in love between Shadrach and Neharda֘::ֻ is described as a response to a real, deep encounter, which requires learning a new language, and a perceptual change that seeks to let go of definitions based on externalities, such as male and female. But it is possible that the meeting with others is also necessarily temporary, or impossible in the end. “It will never be mine, it will always stand there, outside the fringes of hunger, even with the enveloping and merging of the presence,” understands Shadrach (Shadrach, p. 134).

Even if the relationship between two individuals who are fundamentally alien to each other does not last forever, evidence that the distance cannot be bridged and the alienation remains, yet still – it happened, it was possible. This is the meaning of the introduction to otherness and the true encounter with it, even if it hides heartbreak within it. The language that formed the foundation of the encounter remains and you can continue without them.