Abstract
“Reception” is a strange idea in relation to the story of Hagar and Ishmael. To receive is to welcome, but the story of Hagar and Ishmael is about expulsion, not welcome. This essay examines both the biblical story and the “afterlives” of Hagar and Ishmael as they have been “received” in various contexts, including African-American literature and art, war-torn Europe, and Iraq.
Introduction
The editors of Interpretation kindly invited me to contribute an article on the reception or afterlives of Hagar and Ishmael in art and literature. Thinking about the task raised some problems, or caveats, that I thought it would be important to confront. Such an approach would, I think, be strangely faithful to the spirit of the book of Genesis. This is a book that foregrounds its difficulties in detail, rather than burying them and making life easier for itself. The stories of Hagar and Ishmael are deeply problematic for Israel’s identity and composure—and yet they are preserved. In reading their stories, we are not allowed to escape some hard questions: not so much conceptually difficult as unnerving. Their story leads us into the discomforting adventure of what I like to think of as “Bible Study for Grown Ups.” 1
My first caveat or observation is that when Hagar and Ishmael leave the biblical canon and journey into their afterlives, the term “art and literature” does not really describe the places to which they go. There is a tendency in academic biblical studies to channel reception studies into “art and literature” or “art, literature, and music” rather than, say, land claims or “politics.” The suggestion, or hope, is that the domains of reception will be non-controversial and non-essential—an entertaining diversion for a discipline where historical criticism is still seen as the main work. We maybe hope for little more than nice PowerPoint illustrations to accompany a sermon or lecture, or the opportunity to name-drop and show that we are the kind of people who know about Rembrandt or Bach. We can enjoy a little excursion into Rembrandt or Bach’s Bible in the same spirit that we might listen to classical music or visit a museum on the weekend. The domains of “art” and “literature” suggest both leisure and a universal realm of culture or humanity above all divisions and arguments. We can all enjoy a good book, a fine work of art.
But the afterlives of Hagar and Ishmael lead us to dark and alien spaces. Though there are some Rembrandt Hagars, for the most part she takes us not to the A-list of widely acknowledged cultural heroes, but to relatively minor or buried names like Josephine Butler, Pauline Hopkins, Itzik Manger, or Amal Al-Jubouri. If you look for Hagar, she leads you (for example) to Iraq and the recent wars in Iraq; to the Jewish shtetl or folk villages that were once such an integral part of Europe and the Jews who were not allowed full citizenship in Europe; to the hidden spaces underneath the public societies that we know, but that (at least at the time when writers first took up the story of Hagar) remained unacknowledged and unseen. Hagar was taken up by those who were ostracized from the universal “human” and full citizenship, and those whose works did not, for a very long time, get elevated to public spaces like the art museum. She found her home in the brothel or plantation slave quarters, with campaigners on behalf of prostitutes and African American slaves. Far from taking us to the serene realm of universal culture, stories told about Hagar and Ishmael foreground difficulty and division. This is, at the very least, political literature: literature that confronts enmity and questions of borders, distinction, and discrimination. The legacies of Hagar and Ishmael lead us into the tensions between Europe and America and their different others: Judaism and Islam. What else could we expect from the figures who are named in Genesis as the biblical progenitors of the Arabs, and who come to embody the inferiority of Judaism as the religion of the flesh, not the spirit, in interpretations of Galatians 4?
“Reception” is a strange idea to think about in relation to the story of Hagar and Ishmael. To receive is to welcome. And the general truism of reception history is that later interpretations of the Bible propagate biblical tradition. By retelling the Bible, they keep the Bible alive. But the story of Hagar and Ishmael is about expulsion, not welcome. And, in one reading at least, the perpetuation and protection of the true line depends on their expulsion. Future generations of the true line and the biblical story of Israel rely on the fact that this other family has been sent into the desert. Are those who retell and reuse the story of Hagar and Ishmael serving biblical tradition, then, or working against it? And how have interpreters received a story in which the characters are expelled?
Another term for reception history is the study of “afterlives.” This implies a simple story of time. First come the origin and the original text, and then the afterlives. But again, this is not a very good fit for the stories of Hagar and Ishmael. The stories of Hagar and Ishmael are told as the fore-lives of the true family of Abraham. Their place is the time and place before the proper origin. They come first; the true family comes second. But why?
The stories of Hagar and Ishmael alert us to how much is in the Bible, especially at the beginning. Genesis is rich in complexity, and sometimes this complexity seems counterproductive. We might expect simplicity at, of all places, the beginning. It would be perfectly reasonable to expect a simple, clean origin story about our father, our family—and no one else. Whatever he/she is writing (a documentary report, an academic essay or a work of cultural memory), a writer chooses. Writing is choosing. We choose what to leave in and what to keep out. If I asked you to describe the surroundings in which you are reading this article, or what you did today before you read it, is unlikely that you would tell me how you brushed your teeth, or what you had for breakfast, or in which pocket you put your handkerchief, or how exactly the cushion was lying on the chair. It is also likely that you would put your best foot forward, and create the kind of public persona or environment that put you in a good light. You might switch your surroundings (who would know?) to a book-laden office; you might not mention your outburst of irritation with your spouse or child. For an extreme and hilarious example of a story that tries to tell everything, with no relevance-filter whatsoever, try the mock-biography Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. 2
Those who have explored the literary style of the Old Testament/Tanakh, from Erich Auerbach to Robert Alter, teach us that the style is sparse, full of gaps. The tendency is not to keep in, but leave out. So-called “ideological criticism” of the Bible tends to assume, quite reasonably, that writers tell stories in ways that serve their own interests. But on reflection, this assumption seems far too straightforward. No one who has read very far into the Prophets can assume that the biblical texts are written by people who want to feel good about themselves. It does, however, seem reasonable to assume that writers faced with the task of recording the story of their own people’s origins would be free—and would be tempted—to make the story as neat as possible. We might expect them to validate their group’s own identity claims and keep all awkwardness out.
Why not, for the sake of simplicity, have a founding father who was born there, first and alone in the land? One could go further. One could have him not just born there, but born from there. This would be an autochthonous origin story (from autochthōn: born from the earth [Chthōn] itself [autos]). Here is an example of how to do this, modelled by the Athenian rhetorician Isocrates (436–338 We did not become dwellers in this land by expelling others, nor by finding it uninhabited, nor by coming together as a motley horde of many races. We are a lineage so noble and pure that we have for all time continued in possession of the very land which gave us birth, since we are autochthonous, and can address our polis by the very names which apply to our nearest kin; for we alone of the Greeks have the right to call it at once fatherland, nurse and mother.
3
We can see how such a myth serves the people’s own interests (fully conforming to the expectations of ideological criticism). It provides a unity to the polis. It describes how the boundaries of the polis were set by nature, not by human agreements. It naturalizes the Greek claim on the land. As geographer Stuart Elden puts it:
The land is seen to belong to the people by right, by birth. There was no need for conquest and forced movement of previous inhabitants. Playing a role similar to that social contract theory would many years later, the origins of a polis could be assumed to be peaceful. The consequence of this is the existing regime is the original and only one.
4
When it is compared to this origin story of legitimacy and security, we can see how set the biblical narrative is on illegitimacy and insecurity. Abraham is not made from the earth of Canaan, as Adam was made from the soil. The Abrahamic family is emphatically not autochthonous, or aborigine or indigenous. Their claim on the land is not validated by nature or by human agreement. Abraham comes from Babylon/Iraq and is called to Canaan by God. Land and descendants are given by divine gift. But both promises are fraught with incredible difficulty from the start. Abraham cannot become Father Abraham until he has a son. But the story of descendants is complicated (to say the least) by a barren wife and the surrogate family of Hagar and Ishmael. When the true son is finally born, he is already second, and before he can become the father of myriad descendants, he is exposed to (and saved from) the sacrificial knife. The gift of the land of Canaan is followed almost immediately by the caveat that the land is anything but an empty or even modestly populated land. It is already full of “Canaanites” (Gen 12:6), who three chapters later split down into a myriad swarm of “Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, Jebusites,” not to mention the “Rephaim” or giants (Gen 15:19–21). The editor of the Antwerp Polyglot, Benito Arias Montano, presented the clutter perfectly in his pedantically literalist map Tabula terrae Canaan Abrahae tempore (fig.1).
“Tabula terrae Canaan Abrahae tempore” (1572), Benito Arias Montano (1527–1598). Vol. 8, Antwerp Polyglot. Rare Books Division. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Photo credit: Princeton University Library.
Far from being empty, like a desert, the biblical beginning looks more like a map of London or Manhattan. Faithful to the biblical record, Montano crams the land with no less than 31 kingdoms and tribes. Abraham helps to make the land more crowded. He becomes the father of the Israelites, the Ishmaelites, the Hagarites/Hagarenes and the Edomites—not to mention Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak and Shuah (Abraham’s sons with Keturah), and also those other unnamed sons of his concubines (Gen 25:6). The relation to the land is never naturalized. It depends on human agreement as well as divine promise. After the death of Sarah in Genesis 23, we watch Abraham barter for a grave-sized piece of land.
It is not just that when Abraham arrived there were others there already. Even the story of the birth of new descendants, after Abraham’s arrival, cannot be told without the others getting there first. The birth of Ishmael is the first story of the firstborn that will be repeated in the story of Esau and Jacob. Why present “them” as the firstborn, leaving only the belated time of the second-born for ourselves? Why is the eponymous ancestor of Israel always haunted by a shadow side, a twin, an other brother who was there before him, or a surrogate family lurking just outside the tent? Why this strange kamikaze desire to present “our” ancestor as the one who had to wrest the blessing from the firstborn or expel the other family into the desert to make enough room for us? Why keep this act of dispossession on record? If you want to write a people out, you can choose not to include them. Why complicate one’s own story by keeping myriad “thems” (and the laborious narrative of their expulsion) in? Why not expel Hagar and Ishmael altogether? Why not push them off the page?
This is what is so intriguing about the story of Hagar and Ishmael, laid out in such detail in Genesis 16 and 21:1–20. There is an effort to record, at length, a story of something that should not have happened in both a moral and chronological sense. The story implies moral wrong and a wrong turn from the neat path of narrative progression—and yet here it is, on record, and told not once but twice. Counterintuitively, the Bible preserves the name of Hagar—and, strangely, the Hagarites and the Hagarenes (1 Chron 5:10, 19, 20; Ps 83/82:7; 1 Chr 27:31)—not the Qur’an. Hagar is never mentioned by name in the Qur’an. Ishmael is mentioned twenty-seven times. In Islamic tradition, Hagar finds a home in the Hadith and the Islamic exegesis of biblical and Jewish tradition and in the association between her story and the Ka’bah in Mecca and the rites of the Hajj. 5 In Islam, Hagar survives primarily not in words, but in memory through action, rite.
It is the Bible that preserves Hagar’s memory in words. Stranger yet, her story is told in a self-sabotaging way. The expulsion of Hagar the Egyptian is told as an inverted exodus. Like the Israelites at the beginning of Exodus, she is fertile and conceives easily. Oppressed in the Israelite house of bondage, the slave both flees and is forced out (just like the Israelites in the exodus: cf. Exod 12:33). She leaves the house of Abraham and ends up at Shur, on the borders of Egypt (Gen 16:7). She departs carrying bread on her shoulders (Gen 21:14; Exod 12:34) and enters the “wilderness” (Gen 16:7; 21:14). She finds water in the desert and is found by a messenger/angel of God. Far from being left alone, she receives the sympathy and intervention of God and an angel—which surely calls forth sympathy from the reader. Who can read against her when God comes to her support and aid? Though the blame is arguably placed more on Sarah than Abraham, the way in which the story is told incriminates the Israelites and suggests that this primal dispossession was unfair. The sympathy for the expelled one is repeated in the second narrative of the first and second-born, involving Esau and Jacob (with Isaac now in the role of father). Esau is eloquent in ways that attack Israel/Jacob, suggesting that the sympathies of God and the author (and so the reader) are not simply to be with the trickster yăʿqōb, “He tricks/he deceives.” Howling “Bless me also, my father,” Esau poignantly protests his usurpation, as firstborn. He protests against a system in which one gets everything, and the other gets the rest (which is of course nothing, or blessing’s opposite, the curse). But the sympathies of God, the author, and the reader seem more fairly distributed than the inheritance. When it comes to sympathy, Jacob-Israel does not get everything. Nor do Sarah and Abraham in the story of Hagar.
Jacob and Esau are twins. Born at the same time, they wrestle in the womb and fight to be first down the birth canal. Ishmael and Isaac are half-brothers with different mothers. They are separated in time not by a split second but a gap of years. But the stories of Hagar and Ishmael and of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac are told as doubles, twins. In English translations, it is hard to understand why Sarah is so provoked by seeing Ishmael laughing or playing. Some translations try to make the offense clearer by having Ishmael mock. But in Hebrew, the offense and puare clear. Ishmael is měṣaḥēq in Gen 21:9 (NRSV: “playing”). The sense has a double meaning, since this form so closely resembles Isaac’s name (yiṣḥāq). The Hebrew means “to play, to joke, to laugh.” But it also carries the sense of being Isaac, mimicking Isaac, threatening the status of Isaac by being so like him.
Like mother, like son. As Ishmael mimics Isaac, the story of Hagar mimics and in some cases precedes key elements in Abraham’s story. Abraham is a gēr, a “resident alien” in Egypt, then the land of the Philistines (Gen 12:10; 20:1). Hagar is also named as a resident alien in Canaan. (A “resident alien” implies a different word and status to the “foreigner”/nokrȋ.) Exceptionally for a woman, and especially an Egyptian woman, Hagar does things in Genesis that only men and patriarchs get to do. She encounters God and an angel, just like the Abraham of Genesis 18 and 22. She gives a name to God (Gen 16:3), and she names crucial landmarks (Gen 16:14; cf. 22:14). The patriarchs often label landmarks that bridge the gap between the “then” of the story and the “now” of the ancient reader, and creating a word-map that pinpoints where exactly this story took place. Repeating this essential patriarchal function, Hagar names the well Beer Lahai Roi between Kadesh and Bered and, we are told, the well bears the same name “to this day.” She receives a promise that is a double of the Abrahamic promise: descendants too numerous to count (16:10). (This promise of being the only biblical female ancestor of a nation is hinted at in the Hagarites and Hagarenes, and taken up in the recent novel by Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, where the central character Hattie, a modern Hagar, becomes the mother of twelve tribes. 6 ) Undertaking a task performed by patriarchs and their servants—never matriarchs—Hagar finds an (Egyptian) wife for her son. The famous story of the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22) is preceded by a far less famous, even relatively forgotten, story, one chapter earlier. This doggedly follows (or rather precedes) it in myriad points of detail, from “getting up early,” to the intervening angel and the son snatched from death. The fact that Genesis 21 comes just before Genesis 22 and tells a story of the other son saved at the last moment makes it additionally puzzling that, in his command to sacrifice Isaac, God refers to Isaac as Abraham’s “only son” (Gen 22:2).
The story of Hagar and Ishmael is a surrogate story, in several senses. According to the Babylonian Law Code of Hammurabi, a barren wife should offer her servant, or concubine, as surrogate. Genesis reflects the same principle. Standing in for Rachel’s body—almost becoming, or merging with, Rachel’s body—the slave Bilhah is described as giving birth on Rachel’s knees (Gen 30:3). Hagar’s surrogacy is biological and also social. In her important reading of the Hagar story in light of African American experience, Delores Williams talks of social as well as physical surrogacy. Slaves stand in for the other family. They build their houses and plantations, look after their children: their bodies stand in for theirs and exhaust themselves in their tasks. 7 Hagar is also a textual surrogate. Her stories stand in for, and duplicate, the stories of Abraham. Surrogacy explains why Hagar and Ishmael are felt to threaten Sarah. For a surrogate is someone who can “take the place of another, especially as a successor” and “replace.” 8
There is something uncanny, and scary, about a body and a story so close to us that impinges on our place, and is like us, but not quite. In a famous essay on the uncanny (in German, the unheimlich, “the unhomely”) written in 1919, Sigmund Freud tried to get to the bottom of what disturbs us and sends shivers down our spine. He argued that the aliens we find most frightening are those that are closest to us. He pointed out that in German, strangely, the word heimlich (or homely) means familiar and agreeable but also strange, concealed, kept out of sight. The heimlich shades into its opposite, the unheimlich. We are most disturbed by that which is uncannily close. We tend to have an allergic reaction (horror) to the double that is like us, but not quite. Perhaps something like this is implied in the saying “familiarity breeds contempt.” These ideas fit uncannily well with the story of Hagar and Ishmael. Hagar and Ishmael are very familiar in the literal sense—part of the Abrahamic family—but they also represent something threatening, then concealed or pushed away.
Hagar and Ishmael are part of the Abrahamic family, but they also become the origin of a foreign group, the Arabs. Perhaps this point helps us to think about why so many Christians are worried about Islam (more than, say, Hinduism or Buddhism). Maybe the problem is that the Islamic/Arabic is uncanny: part of the Abrahamic family but also too close to us for comfort; a familiar kind of “strange.” It seems that these are the kinds of things that the biblical narrative is pushing us to think about, as it leads us into “Bible Study for Grown Ups.” Why do Hagar and Ishmael get positioned at both extremes of the spectrum of the familiar and the foreign? Why are they so extremely familiar, and so extremely foreign? Hagar is not the foreigner but the resident alien, the alien living with us, in our house. Her intimacy with the Abrahamic is as close as could possibly be conceived. It is hard to imagine a closer relation. Hagar stands in for the body of Sarah, and Hagar and Abraham have sex. According to the laws of kinship and tribes in the book of Genesis, she and her offspring become part of the family of Abraham. (In lieu of sons, Abraham assumes that his servant Eliezer is part of his family, and will inherit. According to Exod 12:48–49, the circumcised resident alien becomes part of the family and shares the same law.) But even as she is as close as could possibly be imagined, Hagar is also expelled, sent to another place. At the other extreme, she is also labeled as Hagar the Egyptian, and her son becomes the father of the Arabs—and the two are sent far, far away. Ishmael is to be the father of a great nation, a parallel and doubled multitude. His name (“God hears/God understands”) is more pious and more closely related to God than Isaac’s, which means “He laughs.” But in the very same verse in which Ishmael is given the name Ishmael, the messenger of God announces “His hand will be against everyone and he will be a wild ass of a man” (Gen 16:12).
This verse and God’s attitude towards Ishmael seem deeply divided. On the one hand, we have absolute empathy, salvation, and support, remembered forever in Ishmael’s name. On the other hand, the man is to be beast. Ishmael is described as the absolute enemy. His hand will be against everyone. But at the same time, he is the friend so close that he is actually part of the same family, the brother. There is something profoundly revealing—and uncanny—about this enemy-brother-friend. Esau is flung between the same extremes. He is the red hairy man, the fool, the dupe. But he is also the usurped and eloquent brother to be pitied; the one who convicts us of our guilt.
In many respects, Hagar and Ishmael did not become important figures until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I do not think it is accidental that this was the time when European and North American thinkers were haunted by the question of the uncanny double, and were so exercised about newly-invented ideas of nationhood and race.
The most famous literary Ishmael, Herman Melville’s, is a wanderer on the seas and survives against the odds, like his namesake. But right at the beginning of Moby Dick, Ishmael is also involved in a game of doubling as he and Melville think about how to relate to those of other religions and races. Early in the novel, Ishmael encounters the native of a fictional island in the South Pacific Ocean, called Queequeg. Queequeg is a reverse explorer: a pagan who has gone to great effort to come to find out about the Christian world. He is black; he has been a cannibal; and he is also more devout than many Christians in New Bedford, Massachusetts. With Ishmael, we watch him practicing animistic rites and worshiping a small idol named Yojo, and participating in acts of fasting and silence that Ishmael calls his “Ramadan.” We also get glimpses of Queequeg watching Ishmael/us. He goes to hear Father Mapple’s sermon, but slips out at the end. The Ishmael-Queequeg relationship functions like the Ishamel-Isaac and Esau-Jacob relationships in the Bible. In the Bible, the wild, hairy men and the “smooth” (white?) men are polar opposites—but also brothers or even twins. Similarly, Ishmael feels absolute repulsion from Queequeg’s black skin and tattooed body—but his repulsion is also uncanny, related to familiarity. And his relationship with Queequeg leads to some radical conclusions, for 1851. “The man’s a human being just as I am; he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him.”
9
Ultimately his identification with Queequeg, his attempt to see through Queequeg’s eyes, leads to an absurd conclusion:
And what is the will of God? – to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me – that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator.
10
If his desire is to convert Queequeg then, applying the Christian principle of doing unto others as one would have them do unto you, he should allow Queequeg to convert him. The Bible shows Ishmael “playing”: becoming Isaac, perhaps threatening Isaac. Now we see the Christian Isaac figure in Moby Dick in effect “hearing” and “understanding.”
The doubleness of the brothers is also a theme in the American poet Eleanor Wilner’s poem “Sarah’s Choice.” Sarah repents and goes to call Hagar and Ishmael from the desert, leaving Isaac anxious about the encounter, like Jacob meeting Esau. When Isaac asks how he is to greet his brother, Sarah tells him to greet his brother as he would himself, the reflection he sees in the well, “not knowing” his own “image” thus “reversed.” 11 She urges him to learn to recognize this mirror self, or he will “see [his] own face” when he and his brother are “at each other’s throats.” 12 The wording of the stanza creates confusion. Who are we seeing? Which face is which? But Isaac has further questions about identity. Are we the “chosen people”? If we are not the chosen people, what/who are we? “I am afraid of being nothing,” 13 he confesses. And it is at this point that Sarah laughs. The lesson from this famous poet and civil rights campaigner is that we cannot rely on sending the other ones—the potential doubles—out into the desert, so that we can feel more securely and uniquely chosen, more securely and uniquely ourselves.
The afterlives of Hagar and Ishmael are double, just like the biblical narratives from which they come, divided between sympathy and division, the enemy and brother/friend. On the one hand, their stories have a dark legacy. They have been used to claim that enmity and segregation are divinely ordained. The separation of the two branches of the family has been used to justify apartheid and the slave trade, like the story of the sons of Ham. But compared to the story of Ham and Canaan in Genesis 9, Genesis 16 and 21 are more complex—and so their afterlives are more complex. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the stories of Hagar and Ishmael were taken up by those who were, or who defended, those deemed to be outside mainstream Christian-civil societies of Europe and America: immigrants, refugees, Jews, prostitutes, African-American slaves. Retellings of the story of Hagar have also highlighted the difficulties and divisions between the three brothers, the Jew, the Muslim, and the Christian: pointing to the polite discrimination and the violent expulsions in American and European history of which we are now only too aware. Sometimes now we like to talk of the “Abrahamic” as if the three religions have always got on famously. But Hagar’s story, like other stories in Genesis, frankly confronts the question of division and enmity. And reception histories of Hagar and Ishmael’s expulsion cannot but confront the historical difficulty of living together.
Hagar’s afterlives only recently became public. This unheimlich figure found her home in those invisible places that were not seen, but were essential for the functioning of public, official society: the alleys, the brothels, and the ramshackle quarters for plantation slaves. Official public society knew of these spaces and feared them—and feared those who might rise up from them and hurt/contaminate us, or retaliate. They feared them precisely because they were very close to (just underneath), supporting and building our homes. The social activist and British Victorian feminist Josephine Butler (1828–1906) used the biblical story of Hagar to address the plight of prostitutes and victims of poverty and sexual exploitation. 14 As a passionate Christian activist who famously asserted that “God and one woman make a majority,” Butler campaigned against the Contagious Diseases Act of the 1860s, which allowed any woman accused by a policeman of being a prostitute to be subjected to a forced genital examination. A campaign against the Contagious Diseases Act is a good example of the sometimes unsavory places to which Hagar went. Not for her the serene composure of “literature” and “art” exhibited for our enjoyment in public museums. Butler’s reading of Hagar’s story was an early example of “contextual Bible Study” or liberation theology. Rather than starting with the text, Butler started down below, with her social context and her understanding of justice, and this led her to a radical and unique re-reading of the biblical texts. While contemporaries like Harriet Beecher Stowe still defended Abraham and Sarah, Butler saw Sarah as a figure of the respectable wife, upholding class distinctions and therefore complicit in the dehumanisation of prostitutes. She read the story of Hagar as a story of self-accusation for civil society. Arguably, since Genesis 16 and 21 tell the story of Hagar as a reverse exodus, this self-critical reading was faithful to the original texts.
Sarah’s servant and the surrogate of Abraham found a natural home among the un-homed people who, like her, were trapped into nurturing and building the homes and plantations of others. According to Delores Williams, Hagar has been alive in African-American culture for well over a hundred years. 15 The stories of Hagar and Ishmael resonated deeply with people who endured separation from families, the loss of children (through death and violent separation), and felt themselves rejected from the main narrative of white American Christianity, while still feeling a fundamental connection to the Bible. Making their own distinct spirituality, parallel to white mainstream Christianity but in a different place and style entirely, African Americans identified instinctively with the story of Hagar and Ishmael, the firstborn sent to the desert who has an intimate encounter with God.
When she tells Abraham to sleep with Hagar, Sarah says explicitly “it may be that I shall obtain children by her” (Gen 16:2). Hagar’s role is to provide boy bricks for Sarah and Abraham’s house. Those slaves who provided sexual services and manual labour, and were considered as property (often also sexual property), identified with her. Nor was the identification broken by emancipation. As Delores Williams points out, profound social pressures on African Americans after emancipation meant that they often only moved from “enforced surrogacy” to “voluntary surrogacy”—still working, now by “choice,” in the homes of others, performing the nurturing tasks for white children and building and cleaning the houses of others. 16 (One thinks of the figure of actress Hattie McDaniel, the “mammy” in Gone with the Wind, cooking, cleaning, and dressing the pampered white girls, putting on their corsets, and plumping up their skirts.)
The doubleness of Hagar’s story was not first discovered by scholars. African Americans were best- (or worst-) placed to hear the double, positive and negative aspects of the story of the loved-rejected other first family of Abraham, portrayed as absolute enemy and double/friend. In a kind of social typology, Hagar became an emblem for those who, in the words of one spiritual, “[s]ometimes . . . [felt] like a motherless child/ A long ways from home.” 17
Hagar lived not in high art but in folk culture. She lived in children’s names, and she lived as general idea or type, rich in meaning and history. Muslims, white Christians, and Jews have never called their children Hagar. Only African Americans have named their daughters Hagar or compound names like Hagar-Ann. In African American culture, the name Hagar became loaded with deep meaning and emotion, like other traditional type-scenes and figures: for example, Jesus on the cross. In Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and Maya Angelou’s “The Mothering Blackness,” Hagar is invoked as a name replete with cultural meaning—well beyond the biblical story—and it is taken for granted that Hagar is, by definition, black. 18
At around the same time that Josephine Butler was relating Hagar to the plight of British prostitutes, Edmonia Lewis was working on her sculpture Hagar in the Wilderness (1875, fig. 2).
Hagar in the Wilderness (1875). Carved marble, 52 5/8 x 15 1/4 x 17 in. Frontal view. Edmonia Lewis (1843/5–c.1911). Location: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Photo credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C./Art Resource, NY.
Like many who took up the figure or cause of Hagar, Lewis had “mixed” or complex origins and moved far more than most. Her father was Haitian, of African descent, while her mother came from Missauga Ojibwe and African families. She was born in New York State in what had been one of the earliest Dutch settlements, but after traveling around North America she finally achieved her ambition of working in Rome. Her Hagar embodies a protest against slavery and suffering and Lewis’ support for the abolitionist cause. But there is something strange (or maybe uncanny) about the white marble and white facial features of this neoclassical Hagar, following the fashions of Rome. The sculpture is “black”—and also not. The sculpture has now become public, on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. As in the Bible, Hagar strangely survives, even though many of Lewis’ works were lost.
Edmonia Lewis’ Hagar is not the only Hagar who looks to all intents and purposes white, except for her (black) name. Reading the little known but brilliant novel Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice by the novelist and journalist Pauline Hopkins (a novel originally published in 1901 in the Colored American Magazine, but recently repopularized as part of the rediscovery of Black American fiction 19 ), I was perplexed to discover that the Hagar of the title was white, rich and beautiful, just back from a “young ladies seminary,” and due to inherit a large estate. My confusion grew when I saw that the name Isaac was given to a black slave. Gradually I realized that the novel operated like the book of Genesis and the double/twin family stories in particular. Identities are mixed and mimic one another. True identities are hidden. The difficulty in following the true line seems to be precisely the point.
On one level, Hopkins’ characters are stereotyped and polarized. Judgment and identity are absolutely clear. The good are never ugly. The beautiful women are either eminently marriageable and rich, pure angels, or promiscuous and dangerous parasites, with sensuality but without funds. The white men divide neatly into slave trader-gambler-womanizer-deceivers and virtuous citizen-landowners and defenders of the law. The plot is fueled by the feud between the good white brother and the bad white brother, “two men, sons of the same father, but with a bridgeless gulf between them,” like Jacob and Esau or Isaac and Ishamel. 20 When it comes to the black characters, it is as if Hopkins wants to preserve the vicious vulgarity of prejudiced caricatures and record how indelible they seemed at the turn of the century. Stuck in the rut of caricature, it is as if the black characters do not know how to act apart from the roles of “mammy,” “buck,” and the “wench.” 21
But on another level, the novel does everything possible to confuse us about moral judgment and family relationships. The whole novel is a conundrum of relation. Presented with seemingly separate stories and buried identities, the reader is caught up in the game of trying to work out how the plot lines and characters can possibly relate. Like the characters who must find out who they are, the reader must try to figure out how the characters are connected through blood and time. The plot is as convoluted as a soap opera. The families are strangely complicated, self-sabotaging and mixed, just like the families of Genesis who seem to make life so difficult for themselves.
In a plot line that seems more characteristic of the twenty-first century than the early 1900s, children are conceived outside marriage; they disappear, reappear again, and are adopted into families unawares. Morality is also mixed. The seemingly facile distribution of virtue and vice collapses around the revelation of race. When the white woman, Hagar, is revealed, true to her name, to carry black blood, she is rejected absolutely by her “good” husband as well as her “good” self. Related now to “common … trash,” 22 she smashes the mirror in horror, refusing to see a trace of the “despised” Negro race. In her eyes, it is as if Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara was forced to look in the mirror and see Hattie McDaniel staring back. Abandoned by her good husband, she flees with her newly born and besmirched child and hurls herself and her baby into the Potomac in despair. We find them again when they wash up in another story under different names. But we can only find them once all the adoptions and deceptions are exposed by black servants and a plot carried out by “veiled women” 23 in disguise. Genesis-fashion, the same story and pattern is repeated in the next generation. Jewel, Hagar’s daughter adopted into a white family, has to deal with the same dark denouement and confront the “horrible living nightmare that she, the petted darling of society, should be banned because of her origin.” Once again the “perfect picture of sweet womanhood” and “Eve’s perfect daughter” has to deal with ostracism from universal humanity and womanhood, into the particular outcast line of Hagar. 24 Like Jewel’s father before him, Hagar’s upright fiancé is repelled by this apparition of the alien, here in the hearth of the family and in his bed.
Hopkins is scathing about the fiancé’s limited and self-interested virtue: “beyond a certain point his New England philanthropy could not reach.” 25 She damns the nice-sounding but ultimately self-serving vocabulary of “rights” and the “human” and “freedom.” When the erstwhile hero of the novel announces, “I am willing to allow the Negroes education, to see them acquire business, money, and social status within a certain environment” but also maintains his right to preserve the “racial stream” of the Anglo-Saxons against “the ignorance, poverty and recent degradation” of “this people,” we see the dark core of civilization and moral heroism, even the heroism of “rights” and freedom. 26 We get to enjoy the unmasking of the bad characters (the unscrupulous slave-owner and the womanizer). But we have to face the more unheimlich and discomfiting unmasking of (limited) virtue, and the characters with whom the novelist has tempted us to identify throughout. At the end, Hopkins makes the lesson polemically clear. The dark and ongoing legacies of slavery “bastardise” and debase the lives of slaves and master, slave-owner and righteous gentleman, alike. When public society, organized around “the holy institution of marriage,” ignored the life of the slave which supported it, this “bred indifference to the enormity of illicit connections.” And if we are now all Ishmaels and Hagars—all “bastards” far from our pure origins—then who can judge? The only path of redemption is to bring choice and liberty, “holy freedom,” to the heart and hearth of the nation and the family and to break free from the “Puritan New England philanthropy,” which smugly grants the African American “every privilege but the vital one of deciding a question of the commonest personal liberty which is the fundamental principle of the holy family tie.” 27 Society will only be saved when that most intimate alien, the black woman/man who has always been in the white man’s home in one sense, is allowed to enter that home in another. But we fear most of all the idea of closeness and mixing with the one so like us, the one that we once so used and needed. This fear and threat is explored in the biblical story of Hagar, the resident alien, and Hopkins’ novel alike.
I want to end by looking at two interpretations of Hagar by Itzik Manger and Amal Al-Jubouri that are profoundly moving in both senses of the word. Both writers were/are “resident aliens,” with poignant experience of national boundaries and war. Manger was born in Czernowitz: a place that “moved” in national terms from Austria-Hungary to Romania and then the Ukraine. Czernowitz was a university town famous for its multicultural population, its cafés, and book shops. By 1919, almost half the population was Jewish; in 1940, there were 78 synagogues. Moving between Romania, Poland, France, England, and finally lsrael, Manger was even more mobile than the town of his birth. Forced to leave Paris when the Nazis invaded in 1940, he fled via Marseilles hoping to get to Palestine, but lacking the relevant papers, ended up in England (which he hated). Amal Al-Jabouri was born in Iraq, but moved to Germany in 1997, during the embargo. She returned to Iraq after the Ba’ath Party’s fall in 2003 and lived there during the war.
Having deliberately taken up Yiddish (his father, a tailor, spoke German), and adopted the folksy sounding name Itzik, Manger wrote a series of poems that airlifted the biblical stories of Genesis to the landscapes of Galicia. Though his own family were among the integrated and relatively wealthy Jews who lived in the city, he identified with the poorer Jews who lived north of the city of Czernowitz, and deliberately wrote in low-level Yiddish vernacular, as a challenge to the highfalutin’ literary fashions of Europe in which he trained. He moved the stories of Genesis—in which the patriarchs or their families are always on the move—into the disappearing world of Jewish village folk life in the early twentieth century. The poems are gritty and realistic; not idealized or romanticized. Like the Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, Manger wanted to shake the Bible out of pious cliché, and upset the habit of locating the Bible in a fairytale world or never-never-land apart from ordinary life. He wanted to make the Bible heymish (Yiddish for “homely,” familiar), populated by people like us, like our neighbours and families. But the home he evokes is unheimlich, disturbing, un-homed. The characters are often journeying, exiled from their homes, like Roma or the “wandering Jew.” They are often presented on journeys: in wagons, carts, on horseback, and on trains.
Manger wrote no less than three poems or ballads on Hagar: “Hagar’s Last Night in Abraham’s House,” “Hagar Leaves Abraham’s House,” and “Hagar on Her Journey.” He homed in on the un-homed one. Perhaps part of his attraction to Hagar lay in his own “mixed-up pedigree.” 28 He understood the Hagar story through his experience of the mixed, extended families that were part of early twentieth-century Jewish life. “Every vivacious aunt doubled as a surrogate mother”; at home, the “master, the master’s wife, the journeymen tailors, and one or two apprentices were as one family,” his editors write. 29 In “Hagar’s Last Night in Abraham’s House,” Hagar describes man’s love (which is to say Abraham’s love) as “like the smoke of a chimney/. . . like the smoke of a train.” 30 She and “this bastard child” (this Hagar is no idealized mother) have nowhere to hide, nowhere to run to, except, perhaps, some “alien kitchen” 31 (an appropriate hiding place for Ha-ger, resident alien and domestic worker).
In “Hagar Leaves Abraham’s House,” a teamster haggles with Abraham over the fare to carry mother and son away. And Hagar “foresees herself abandoned” in railway stations in other countries, and “sobs [i]nto her Turkish shawl.” 32 This Hagar is a prophet (only Spinoza, in chapter two of his Theologico-Political Treatise, numbers Hagar among the prophets 33 ). She is also “Turkish”: foreign already. She has vitriolic condemnation for the hypocrisy of Sarah, that “proper deaconess,” 34 and for the “Fathers with their long and reverend beards.” 35 We are reminded of Pauline Hopkins’ sardonic comments on the limits of New England philanthropy or Josephine Butler’s condemnation of respectable middle-class Sarahs. Maybe there is something about the story of Hagar that leads us to question or satirize authority in its public, dominant forms.
In the last of Manger’s three poems, “Hagar on Her Journey,” Hagar, disowned by the Bible, finds her way into Islam. (This movement from the biblical into the “foreign” is already foreshadowed in her “Turkish shawl.”) We see her worn with weeping, sitting on a stone, and in desperation asking the wind and the birds which way she should go. They confuse her by seemingly leading her in all directions. She is incredulous that, after years of serving Abraham faithfully, she is now in a ludicrous position where she can be made a fool of by any random wind or bird. Lifting her head she sees a caravan, led by a Turkish sultan. He asks if she is Hagar, servant of Ibrahim, and whether her son is Ishmael. 36 In one translation of the Yiddish, the sultan talks of Ishmael as her “little baby boy”; in another, as “the little fat brat.” Though I have not consulted the Yiddish, my hunch is that the first translation is trying to soften the original. I suspect that Manger wanted to provoke the question of hostility and foreground the hostility in Genesis. Is this a “Jewish” joke against the Arab (the sultan insulting his own ancestor)? Or is this a secular joke against religion? Not one to spare us, Manger translates the hates and enmities in Genesis, and does not simply allow us to make a nice, serene travesty of the biblical text. Racial tension is also highlighted. In the second (ruder and I suspect more faithful translation), the Turkish sultan says “we are of his [Ishmael’s] race.” 37 Declaring that he has found his “lineage,” his chosen ones, his origin, he falls on his knees before Hagar and Ishmael saying, “Allah be praised.” 38 But Hagar is no more or less confused listening to the voice of the sultan than she was listening to the voice of Abraham, the wind, or the birds. Because the “truth” is still unclear, “she can only stare.” 39 (Hagar here reminds me of Wilner’s Isaac, not knowing if he sees his own or Ishmael’s face.) Perhaps as the subtlest of pointers to the truth, the playful moonlight forms a “silver crescent” 40 that glistens in Hagar’s hair. The crescent moon famously features on several flags of Islamic countries, many newly created, like Turkey, in the twentieth century. Hagar seems to belong to Manger’s times where countries as well as immigrants and exiles find, or are forced into, new volatile identities. Religions also move and mix. In Manger’s poem, biblical-Jewish Hagar gets kicked out onto the road—in Galicia—and finds her way to Turkey and Islam. Hagar’s story is arguably a point in the Bible where we cannot resist the traffic or connection between Judaism and Christianity and Islam. Hagar already becomes Arab in the Bible, before Islam takes up her story. In Manger’s poem, Hagar travels between one religion and another, one group and another, as she has always done.
So it seems appropriate to end with the path between the Bible and the Qur’an. In our final journey—at least for now—Hagar takes us further east, to Iraq, or the long journey between Germany-Europe and Iraq. In 2011, Amal Al-Jubouri published a collection of poems with the title Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation. 41 The title might lead us to expect a simple contrast between before and after, bad versus good. But instead, we are drawn into a far more complex, ambiguous relation, as in Pauline Hopkins’ Hagar’s Daughter and the book of Genesis itself. (Was it better when Hagar and Ishmael lived with Abraham, Sarah and later Isaac; or was it better when they were sent away?) The poems take the form of short epigrammatic statements, presented as riddles. “Befores” and “afters” are differently at war, and feud amongst themselves. The Hagar of the title stands for restless movement, pacing between differently unliveable alternatives. The formerly exiled poet feels orphaned from her homeland, but Iraq is a site of love and hate.
Once again, the reception of Hagar seems to lead us into extremely difficult territory: expulsion, exile, borders, the bastard, the limits of freedom, and the life-destroying forces of sectarianism and hate. The terse poem “My Country Before the Occupation” is a single-line statement:
Passport—travel not permitted
42
“Religion Before the Occupation” is feminized: a weak resident alien, like Hagar,
stood lost, scared on the doorstep of the Regime
43
Exile turns aggressor.
“Religion After the Occupation” dressed the country in black the constitution of al-Sayed
44
shroud of Persian words.
45
“My Soul Before the Occupation” likens exile to being buried alive, but carries quasi-messianic hope, like a “saviour in a barren womb.” 46 Expressing exile in Germany, Al-Jubouri speaks in Christian language of the messiah and the second coming.
Ironically, foreign idioms haunt and shape even her hope of returning home; “the Green Zone,” the center of international occupation, sickens.
“My Soul After the Occupation” escapes behind the walls of the Green Zone that canopy sky, that stockade for regret. I hide my exhaustion, my yellowing blood from my children’s cries my husband’s caress
47
In the sardonic poem “My Grave After the Occupation,” the burial place “started asking” if she is “Sunni or Shi’ite.” 48 Even the dirt is fanatical about identity, about who belongs to him, who he will accept to enter. This is a traumatized homeland. She needs a passport even to go down to the grave. And at the center of all this trauma stands Hagar.
“Hagar After the Occupation” There is no one but Hagar Before her, the Occupation Behind her, the Occupation And freedom? A bastard child An orphan Without a name
49
Postscript
The story of Hagar and the reception of the expulsion provide rich resources for preaching and reflection. There is, of course, the story of personal blessing: God finding the lost individual in the desert, salvation at the point of despair. But this is a story that refuses to be read simply as a story of personal blessing. It pushes us into the social, the political, and the tangled complexities of families and nations. The focus is on relation, on how the individual relates. Hagar and Ishmael’s story is a forum for reflecting on the complexity of families, blended families, extended families, surrogacy, and adoption. What and who counts as family? By extension, what and who counts as nation? The narrative gives us rich material for reflecting on resident aliens, guest-workers, with and without papers and claims to rights and land. What does it mean that Hagar and Ishmael mimic Abraham and Isaac, and that the story so clearly needs them, before it expels them, or that they get God and the author’s sympathies, but are still sent elsewhere? What does it mean that all the retellings of the story further confuse the mixed identities and surrogacies (physical, textual, and social) and the mixed origins in the original text?
The story of Hagar and Ishmael reminds us that the Bible is not simply a book of answers, but also a book of questions. And one thing Genesis is very actively thinking about is who counts as family, and, relatedly, who inherits? The idea of kinship is never separate from property and territory. Once you know who is who then you know who gets what. In Genesis, these questions are far from settled, which is perhaps why people are on the move so much of the time. The book is busy working out what is going to count as proper and best relationships within families and where to draw the line. Are your servant and your servant’s children part of the family (whether they have the same father as the rest of the family)? Is Sarah Abraham’s sister or wife? Can one marry or have sex with one’s sister, or daughter-in-law? To what extent should you keep family in the family? Where is the right line between exogamy, endogamy, and incest? How foreign is the Ishmaelite, the half-brother of Isaac and son of Abraham? How foreign is the Moabite, son of Lot, nephew of Abraham? How different are the Arab and the Jew, if both are Abraham’s sons? The book is clearly trying out different answers. It may well be a blessing that Genesis does not take the form of doctrine, but narrative—and that sometimes the narratives “are so messy and contradictory” or undecided, that “the categories . . .‘foreigner’ and ‘Israelite’ dissolve.” 50