The Palestinian Nakba produced, alongside death and displacement, a generation of writers who came of age in its aftermath. The moment seemed to demand a funereal tone from artists who had witnessed the tragedy. For them, a version of Theodor Adorno’s maxim, that to “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” rung true. Few broke the taboo.

Born in Haifa 102 years ago, Emile Habibi was an exception. His 1974 masterpiece, The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist, dared to approach the Nakba with irreverence; the Palestinian catastrophe was for him a tragicomic saga, which he depicted with a firm sense of irony. “Had it not been for your Shoah . . . then the calamity that remains the lot of my people would not have been possible,” he wrote in a 1986 article.

Habibi grew up under the system of military rule imposed on Palestinians within the newly established state of Israel between 1948 and 1966 and brought to an end in 1967, when Israel launched the Six-Day War against its Arab neighbors. This regime was, for Palestinians, a segregationist one: land appropriation and restrictions on movement as well as political and intellectual expression were its defining features. For nearly two decades after the Nakba, these Palestinians were completely cut off from the Arab world, the rest of the Palestinian people, and each other. Stranded in the iron cage fashioned by military rule, the first generation of Palestinians in Israel lived in a state of national limbo and cultural alienation. Overnight they became strangers in their homeland.

The period was marked by a McCarthyite persecution of “communists” — a rather broad designation which the military government readily threw onto Palestinians still holding on to their national identity. Divide and rule — that age-old tactic of colonial government — was the modus operandi of military rule. Palestinian were either good or bad Arabs, collaborators or communists. The former were rewarded with military permits and other privileges, the latter punished with imprisonment. It was a racial regime of internal apartheid that bears a striking resemblance to the Jim Crow South. “Infiltrators” was the name the regime gave to Nakba refugees attempting to return to their homes inside Israel.

The Nakba took place when Habibi was twenty-six and in the process of making his first stabs at fiction. Three decades later, and seven years after the abolition of the military regime, he produced The Pessoptimist. Distance from events lent his writing a cool detachment: his was the eye of a redeemed artist who had taken hold of the trauma rather than allowing it to paralyze him.

Spanning over twenty years and two wars, The Pessoptimist was Habibi’s first serious attempt at depicting the predicament of the Palestinian population that remained within the borders of the new state of Israel. Palestinians are for Habibi neither heroes nor victims but fallible characters pulled toward collaboration and resistance, defeatism and rebellion, death and regeneration. Habibi’s was among first novels to portray Palestinians as aliens in their own land, a nation of living dead who look down on their lost homeland from a helpless space to mourn, marvel, and laugh. “When I asked my extraterrestrial friend why he took me in, he merely replied, “What alternative did you have?” Habibi’s protagonist remarks.

In contrast to the dark and somber tone of his contemporaries, Habibi approached the Palestinian tragedy with a rare sense of mockery and paradox, irony and sarcasm. Laughter, he thought, was not just an expression of joy but a means of redemption, a way of coping and healing: “Laughter is a very sharp weapon with only one edge. If all the prisoners laugh together at the same moment and continue to laugh, will the jailer then be able to laugh?”

Saeed, the eponymous “pessoptimist,” is both a comic- and antihero: a tragic fool who recounts the secrets of his life in the form of a letter to an unnamed friend. Convinced that he’s been abducted by aliens, he writes his story while confined to an insane asylum located in a former British prison, a metaphor for Palestine after the Nakba. There Saeed, courted by his communist cellmates, rediscovers his Palestinian identity. He recounts the story of his survival, which he owes partly to a donkey, with absurdist flair:

After my father fell a martyr on the open road and I was redeemed by the ass, my family took the boat to Acre. When we found that we were in no danger, and that everyone was busy saving their skins, we fled to Lebanon to save ours. And there we sold them to live.

Skinless and soulless, our hero returns to Israel a collaborator with the military government. A combination of cowardice and foolishness drives Saeed to make this move, which Habibi describes with enough sympathy that we do not lose sight of the fact that our protagonists is a victim rather than a villain. In temperament, his closest literary equivalent is perhaps Voltaire’s Candide, and this naivety endears him to his oppressors. But Saeed is not entirely powerless.

The Pessoptimist marked a shift from the realistic literature of the Nakba, its tragic and romanticized narratives, and disenchanted preoccupation with exile and return. Set in a transformed postwar Palestine, the novel diverges from the nostalgic tales of exiled Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, notably Men in the Sun and Returning to Haifa. While Kanafani’s hapless men die in fear and despair in a godforsaken desert, Habibi’s protagonist dies a fantastical death in his native homeland. And while Kanafani’s hero leaves Haifa utterly disenchanted and estranged, Habibi’s hero remains untamed: not out of place in this new Palestine but the unsung master of his times and spaces. Habibi was as defiant in life as he was in fiction; he had “Remained in Haifa” inscribed on his gravestone.

The somewhat quixotic Saeed is not entirely a product of Habibi’s imagination. In an interview dated June 1996, shortly before his death, Habibi confessed to the autobiographical origins of his ill-fated protagonist: “In The Pessoptimist, to be sure, I was writing to a great extent about myself. His rationality is my own rationality to a considerable extent.” The military government’s almost comic obsession throughout the novel with infiltrating the Arab communists was a dead giveaway.

For Habibi, a founding member of the Communist Party in Israel who served three terms in the Knesset, Saeed embodies the inherent guilt many Palestinians in Israel harbor as a result of their assimilation into settler-colonial society. Saeed, whose name means “happy” in Arabic, was at once lucky and miserable: he was lucky to survive but miserable to survive that way.

But perhaps more telling, the pessoptimist represents millions of Palestinians who, having lost their homeland virtually overnight, have never quite lost their faith in the future. The figure humanizes Palestinians as a people who, in the midst of their collective agony, are capable of laughing at themselves. For Habibi, pessoptimism is a quintessential Palestinian condition.