256 · Hanita Brand
By the time he published Memoirs of a Hen, Dr. al-Ḥusseini was back
in Palestine, working as a lecturer at the Dār al-Mu ̔allimīn teachers’ col-
lege and as the British government’s chief inspector for the teaching of
Arabic in Palestine. After the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948,
al-Ḥusseini left the country, moving first to Lebanon and then to Egypt,
where he lectured, among other places, at the American University. He
was elected a member in various Arab scholarly academies in Egypt
and Iraq, including al-Azhar’s Academy for Islamic Studies. In 1952 al-
Ḥusseini moved to Canada and accepted a post at McGill University in
Montreal. Under the Israeli Law of Family Unification, he returned in
1973 to Jerusalem with his wife and lived there until his death in 1990 at
the age of 87.
As for Memoirs of a Hen, its history was no less complex than the life of
its author. For Arab critics, it looked defeatist, since the hen sends away
the young generation to preach to the world the sermon of peace and har-
mony she has taught them and stays alone with the new arrivals in the
chicken coop. Against these accusations, George Kanazi (=Jūrj Qanāzi ̔),
professor in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Haifa
University, wrote an essay in which he emphasized the utopian nature
of the work and its educational purposes. As early as 1943, al-Ḥusseini
advised his readers to “think well of this humble creature, and soar with
her for a while in an ideal universe, free from any hatreds and feuds.”^5
Kanazi justly reiterates this classification of the book in 1981 and further
elaborates: “Memoirs of a Hen is indeed a book containing a humanis-
tic philosophical idea whose aim is reforming human society in general,
through personal reformation. Thus it constitutes an unmistakable call
for changing the [prevailing] educational and cultural systems, so that
the next generations are raised on the love of truth, virtue, and righteous-
ness.”^6 Kanazi finds these characteristics to be proof of the readers’ and
critics’ mistakes in their interpretations of the novella as pertaining to the
Middle East conflict: “Unfortunately,” he writes in the critical introduc-
tion to his translation of the work, published in 1999, “the book was mis-
interpreted and misunderstood from the very beginning, and as a result,
its evaluation was basically negative.”^7 I do not think this last conclusion
is validated by the text.
Over half a century later, I would like to take this story and do some
justice to it, not only in terms of its political message and as an interesting