Post-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistance 1800348274, 9781800348271

Citation preview

Post-Millennial Palestine Literature, Memory, Resistance

Edited by Rachel Gregory Fox and Ahmad Qabaha

LIV ERPOOL U NIV ERSIT Y PRESS

First published 2021 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2021 Liverpool University Press The right of Rachel Gregory Fox and Ahmad Qabaha to be identified as the editors of this book has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-80034-827-1 cased ISBN 978-1-80034-744-1 epdf Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

To Lindsey If not for you, we would never have come together to create this book

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgements ix Notes on Contributors

xi

Foreword: Under ‘Suffering’s Glow’: Palestinian Writing after Oslo 1 By Bashir Abu-Manneh Introduction 9 By Rachel Gregory Fox and Ahmad Qabaha Part I: Palestinian Archives: Catastrophe, Exile, and Life Writing 1 Late Style as Resistance in the Works of Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti By Tahrir Hamdi 2 A ‘Rich Fabric of Some Sort, Which No One Can Fully Comprehend [or] Fully Own’: Levantine Remains in Memoirs by Edward Said, Jean Said Makdisi, and Wadad Makdisi Cortas By Lindsey Moore 3 The Exile’s Memory and the Chronotope in Ghada Karmi’s Return: A Palestinian Memoir By Ahmad Qabaha

31

47

67

viii

Post-Millennial Palestine

4 Snapshots of Solidarity: Anthologizing Palestinian Life Writing By Sophia Brown

83

Part II: Palestinian Aesthetics: Icons, Haptics, and Palimpsests 5 Confronting the Mythic? Najwan Darwish and Post-Millennium Palestinian Poetry By Sarah Irving

103

6 Enduring Palestine: Haptics, Violence, and Affect in Adania Shibli’s Touch 119 By Michael Pritchard 7 ‘I Can Only Get There Now on the Rafts of Memories’: Palimpsestic and Genealogical Memories in Susan Abulhawa’s Novels By Rachel Gregory Fox

135

Part III: Palestinian Horizons: Endings and Beginnings, or Taking Flight 8 Killing God to Find Palestine ‘after the End of the World’ in Adania Shibli, Mahmoud Amer, and Maya Abu al-Hayyat By Nora Parr 9 Unfinished Work: Anticolonial Pedagogy in Selma Dabbagh’s Out of It By Tom Sperlinger 10 Wingwomen: Towards a Feminocentric Poetics of Flight in Twenty-First Century Palestinian Creative Consciousness By Anna Ball

155

173

191

Works Cited

209

Index

225

Acknowledgements Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the team at Liverpool University Press, especially Chloe Johnson, for all their support, which has made this collection possible. We are also grateful to the reviewers who have read this work across its many stages for seeing its potential, and for their generous and constructive feedback. This collection would not be anything without our amazing contributors. We cannot thank them enough for all the hard work they have put into developing this book. They have produced what, we think, amounts to a necessary and critically perceptive interrogation of contemporary Palestinian literature. We particularly want to acknowledge the number of contributors to this collection who are early career researchers (like ourselves)—their commitment to helping produce this book, in spite of the precarity that comes from often last-minute, fixed-term, and/or part-time academic job contracts is highly appreciated by us and, we hope, our readers. Thank you to Bashir Abu-Manneh for agreeing to write the Foreword for this collection. We are grateful to him for his time, generosity, and enthusiasm towards the project. Special thanks are also due to Lindsey Moore, to whom this collection is dedicated. She supervised both of us through the course of our PhD research, and continues to provide guidance and support as we take on the next stages of our academic and professional careers. We are indebted to her for the advice and feedback she has offered on the production of this collection, from its earliest stage. Thank you to Zawyeh Gallery for giving us permission to use Nabil Anani’s Mother’s Embrace as part of the cover of this book. We feel it ix

x

Post-Millennial Palestine

speaks to the themes of the book, invoking Palestinian heritage, cultural memory, and resilience. We would also like to thank the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) for contributing funding towards the purchase of this image. Rachel Gregory Fox would like to thank her colleagues at Lancaster University, UK, who have provided her with a supportive work environment in which to develop this collection as both PhD student and, later, post-doctoral teaching staff. She is also thankful to her colleagues at QMUL for their warm welcome to the department in September 2019, and their kindness and encouragement. Rachel would also like to thank Ahmad for joining her in this venture—it would have been impossible to attempt it alone. Rachel is forever grateful to her mother and brother for their continued love and support. Lastly, Rachel is thankful to her husband, Alan, who she had the privilege of marrying while in the process of working on this book. Ahmad Qabaha would like to thank his colleagues at An-Najah National University, Palestine, for their encouragement and motivation. They showed a huge interest in this collaborative work and their courtesy inspired him to go through this mountainous journey. Ahmad would also like to reciprocate Rachel with his gratitude; undoubtedly, Rachel’s commitment and dedication is the cornerstone of the completion of this project. Lastly, Ahmad feels indebted to his parents, siblings, wife, and naughty baby for their emotional support and love, which stimulate his interest in conducting research.

Notes on Contributors Notes on Contributors

Bashir Abu-Manneh is Reader in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent, and author of The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present (2016) and Fiction of the New Statesman, 1913–1939 (2011). He is also editor of a collection of essays on Edward Said entitled After Said: Postcolonial Literary Studies in the Twenty-First Century (2018). Anna Ball is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Feminisms, Literatures, and Cultures at Nottingham Trent University. She specializes in women’s writing, film, and art from the contemporary Middle East, and also works on questions of gender, agency, and representation in relation to cultures of forced migration. Her monograph, Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective, was published with Routledge in 2012. With Karim Mattar, she co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and, following a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2019, she is shortly to publish her next monograph, Forced Migration in the Feminist Imagination: Transcultural Movements (Routledge, forthcoming). Sophia Brown is an Associate Research Fellow in the Department of English, Theatre, and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. In 2018, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Kenyon Institute, East Jerusalem. Her PhD, a study of exilic Palestinian life writing in English, was awarded in 2017 by the University of Kent. She has published journal articles on Egyptian women’s blogs, the narration xi

xii

Post-Millennial Palestine

of life under occupation in East Jerusalem, and the life writing of Ahdaf Soueif, and is currently working on her first monograph, based on her doctoral research. Rachel Gregory Fox is Lecturer in World Literature at Queen Mary University of London. She moved to QMUL in September 2019, following the completion of her PhD at Lancaster University, where she graduated in 2018. Her research interests include Middle Eastern and West Asian literature, postcolonial feminism, visual culture, and pedagogy. She has published an article on Iraq War cinematography in Interventions and written book chapters on the Iranian graphic novel and on Malala Yousafzai. Her forthcoming monograph, based on her doctoral research, is under contract with Routledge and is provisionally entitled Remediated Witnessing in Literary, Visual, and Digital Media: Post-Millennial (Re)Framings of Women in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan. Tahrir Hamdi is Professor of Postcolonial Literature at Arab Open University/Jordan Branch. Her research revolves around resistance literature, postcolonial/anticolonial theory, and the importance of geography in literature. She has published articles on Edward Said, William Butler Yeats, Mahmoud Darwish, Saadi Yousef, Ghassan Kanafani, Naji Al Ali, Palestine, and Iraq. Her research articles have been published in leading postcolonial journals, such as Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Race & Class, Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Hamdi is an assistant editor of Arab Studies Quarterly, a journal founded by Edward Said. She is currently working on a book entitled Imagining Palestine: Cultures of Exile and National Identity. Sarah Irving is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of English, History, and Creative Writing at Edge Hill University, and has also held academic appointments at King’s College London and Leiden and Linnaeus universities. She is primarily a social historian of Late Ottoman and Mandate-era Palestine and has published widely on the involvement of Arab Palestinians in the intellectual history, ethnography, and archaeology of the region. Her current research examines the impacts of the 1927 Jericho earthquake on the society and culture of the Levant.

Notes on Contributors

xiii

Lindsey Moore has published widely on Arab and wider Middle Eastern literature and visual media that circulates in English and French. She is the author of Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations: Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine (Routledge, 2018) and Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film (Routledge, 2008; paperback, 2014), and co-editor, with Abir Hamdar, of Islamism and Cultural Expression in the Arab World (Routledge, 2015; paperback, 2017). She is currently writing Global Literature and the Arab World with Nadia Atia, again for Routledge, and working on Palestinian speculative fiction and film in relation to heritage. Nora Parr is a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she is working on ‘What is the Arabic for “Trauma”?’, a project offering alternative definitions of ‘trauma’ based on contemporary Palestinian fiction. She works with the GCRF Network+ project Rights for Time/Time for Rights, is the Middle East subject editor at the Literary Encyclopedia, and has a forthcoming monograph, Nation Constellation, on models of national imaginary in Palestinian novels. A short article on the material was published in the Journal of Palestine Studies in spring 2019, titled ‘Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Palestine Comedies: Liberating the Nation Form.’ Michael Pritchard is a PhD student at Lancaster University. He is currently writing on Palestinian fiction and memoir. He has published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Electronic Intifada, and the Contemporary Levant. Ahmad Qabaha is Assistant Professor in Postcolonial, Comparative and American Studies at An-Najah National University in Palestine. He currently teaches a wide range of courses at An-Najah that are relevant to his field of specialization, including the Contemporary American Novel, Modern American Literature, Orientalism and Oriental Studies, Postcolonial Literature, and Comparative Literature. He is highly interested in literature and art, investigating links between the humanities, politics, and culture, and his research examines the various modes and paradigms of literary, historical, socio-political, and cultural displacements in the twenty-first century. He is the author of Exile and Expatriation in Modern American and Palestinian Writing

xiv

Post-Millennial Palestine

(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and he has published several articles in highly reputable journals, including Interventions. Tom Sperlinger is Professor of Literature and Engaged Pedagogy at the University of Bristol. He is author of a memoir, Romeo and Juliet in Palestine (2015), about a semester he spent teaching at Al-Quds University in Abu Dis; an Arabic translation, by students at An-Najah University, was published by the Khalil Sakakini Center in 2020. He is co-author of Who are Universities For? (2018) and co-editor of Doris Lessing and the Forming of History (2016).

Foreword Under ‘Suffering’s Glow’: Palestinian Writing after Oslo By Bashir Abu-Manneh Foreword

Colonial violence ruptures Palestinian writing. The post-Oslo moment will be recounted not the way the Palestinian elite see it: as peace negotiations and diplomatic recognitions. The last quarter of a century in Palestinian history will be remembered in a manner closer to how it is articulated by contemporary Palestinian writers and poets: as an attack on Palestinian life and limb; a negation by force of ordinary existence. This is what a closer look at a new generation of writers, which has taken the mantle of representing Palestinian reality in all its socio-political and moral complexity, clearly shows. Consider Najwan Darwish’s magnificent poetry collection Nothing More to Lose (2014)—written under the intense mark of ‘suffering’s glow,’ that wonderfully evocative phrase for a post-millennial Palestine (2014, 15). Darwish’s poetry captures many post-Oslo feelings: anger, disillusionment, betrayal, and despair. Death and destruction bang loudly in his verse. ‘Let me lie down / and rest my head on pillows of despair’ (2014, 90). Or: ‘and all mankind is against me / and reality too is against me’ (2014, 49). Or: ‘My Lord: Is this life that limps toward me / or a supermarket of deformities?’ (2014, 61). With destruction comes wilful distortion by enemies who cynically package colonial injury as fabrication. Mass suffering is compounded by Palestinian betrayal: the elite honours itself with awards called ‘the Order of the Patient Donkey’ and is seen ‘rejoicing in defeat’ and ‘welcoming disgrace’ (2014, 92; 55). So, the poet responds to a Palestine where ‘everything is lacking / but injustice’ (2014, 42) by accounting for injury and by suffusing his work with his Jerusalemite biblical imagery of redemption. Faced 1

2

Post-Millennial Palestine

with the dead of Gaza, Lebanon, and Sabra and Shatila, Darwish holds up challenge, struggle, and anticipation: Despite all this it is still my duty to say a few words poisoned with hope, here in this assembly of despair. (2014, 78) It is hard to live without showing those who have internalized defeat that resources of resistance will never be depleted—so long as injustice exists. ‘Tell this to those / who say we’ve been defeated’ (2014, 40). Darwish’s distinct and powerful poetic language thus bears the weight of Palestinian suffering today. At exactly this moment, it does something else as well. It embodies all human oppression, denial, and resistance. So, with Palestine’s increasing reach as a global moral cause, Darwish embraces universalism: There is no place that resisted its invaders except that I was of one its people; there is no free man to whom I am not bound in kinship; and there is no single tree or cloud to which I am not indebted. And my scorn for Zionists will not prevent me from saying that I was a Jew expelled from Andalusia, and that I still weave meaning from the light of that setting sun. (2014, 9) Rather than responding to Israel’s colonial exclusion in its language of particularism, he does what many Palestinian writers have done before him: sees his local as universal. It is that tone that allows him to construe his own identity not as national or particular, but as human. Not in solidarity with other oppressed, but as them. One can hear the same emphasis on destruction in contemporary writers from Gaza. Under siege, under rubble, and with nowhere to escape, Gazans have been subjected to a decade of concentrated Israeli cruelty. Far too many Israeli wars, mini-wars, military incursions, in addition to economic strangulation and collective punishment, have left the most populated place on Earth in mass despair. Here too, literature is strongly marked by the effects of colonial violence, as The Book of Gaza (Abu Saif, 2014) shows (see also: Abu-Manneh, 2017). At the forefront is a generation of women writers like Samah al-Shaykh and Asmaa al-Ghoul who chart their varied forms of un-freedom and voice their

Foreword

3

determined will to live without any form of injury or domination. As Najlaa Attallah says in her short piece ‘In Gaza We Are Not OK’: My tragedy is that I don’t just want to live. Nor do I want life to simply go back to the way it was. Nor do I want to go on waiting for a new war where we say at the beginning, ‘tomorrow, the war ends,’ and say at the end, ‘we just want to live.’ I don’t want that war to begin in the first place. (2018, n.p.) Such appeals mean absolutely nothing for the 96 per cent of Israelis who supported Israel’s war on Gaza in 2014: a horrific statistic that registers Israel’s settler-colonial barbarism, and conveys how the dehumanization of the Palestinians lies at the root of the conflict. With more than 70 per cent youth unemployment in a place where two-thirds of the population is under the age of 24, a high percentage of besieged Gazans want to leave—but cannot. Hope is, here, hard to come by—as Gaza’s most talented young writer Muhannad Younis (1994–2017) knew all too well. His posthumous collection of short stories, Ruins Leave Footprints Behind, was published in Arabic, two years after his suicide. One sentence in particular condenses a whole milieu of collective and individual pain and suffering: Sleeping improved and became more regular a few days ago. I began to regain my sense of happiness as if I had forgotten that I was Palestinian, as if nothing has been happening in Syria, Iraq and Gaza for the last 10 years. But now here I am, awake just after 3 in the morning. (2018, 55) As another short story affirms, hope has become false and nauseating. For Gaza’s besieged, another war is always lurking around the corner and their cruel isolation might never end. Politically, Israel’s colonial strategy of divide and rule compounds this systemic violence. Hamas now rules Gaza and the Palestinian Authority dominates the West Bank, and it acts, through security coordination, as Israel’s colonial enforcer. Both regimes are authoritarian and internally repressive, disabling free collective association and mobilization. If separation describes the reality between Israelis and Palestinians after Oslo (permanent closure, segregation, and de facto annexations), it also speaks to the divide between colonized

4

Post-Millennial Palestine

Palestinians themselves. Occupied Palestinians live in increasingly fragmented and isolated enclaves, separated by checkpoints, road blocks, walls, and fences. As Israeli settlements continue to increase and expand, Palestinian territory shrinks. Different forms of confinement and restriction have come to define what it means to be Palestinian today: Gaza is an open-air prison and the West Bank is a collection of Bantustans. Even if the realities of this violent period have their distinct features, the specific nature of a settler-colonial injury is not new to Palestinians. How can it be for a rightless, dislocated, dispersed people, defined by the mass expulsion and ongoing effects of the Nakba of 1948, and living under wildly different conditions across the world—endlessly dispossessed from (what turn out to be temporary) abodes like Kuwait, Iraq, and Syria? In the long story of Palestinian dispossession, what can be new or radically different about today’s moment? There are striking developments in the global scope and dimension of Palestinian culture: its multiple sites and languages of production. Palestinians now write in English and in all the other European languages, in the many different countries where they find refuge, including France, Germany, and Chile (which has the largest Palestinian community outside the Arab world). With several generations being born in exile after the Nakba, the sources of Palestinian writing have simply proliferated and multiplied. The Palestinian shatat (exiled diaspora) is articulating the varied forms of Palestinian experience across the globe. Even if most Palestinians live in Palestine or the Arab world, significant changes in the substance and geography of cultural representation can be clearly discerned. And this has affected both the range and forms of Palestinian narrative. There is, for example, a whole new Anglophone genre of writing dedicated to charting the realities and travails of Palestinian life—by Palestinians and non-Palestinians alike. Raja Shehadeh’s oeuvre is an ongoing rumination in English on restriction, spatial imprisonment, and national loss in the occupied West Bank, most famously in Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007). Shehadeh’s work has been extremely well received in the Anglophone world and has become a permanent feature on academic syllabuses in English and Postcolonial Studies. There is also Suad Amiry’s Sharon and My Mother-in-Law (2005), widely reviewed, and seen as a protest against the absurdities and agonies of life under occupation and curfew; and Atef Abu Saif’s The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary (2015) from a violently besieged Gaza. Also from Gaza is Asmaa al-Ghoul’s

Foreword

5

powerful testimony (written with Franco-Lebanese Selim Nassib) A Rebel in Gaza: Behind the Lines of the Arab Spring, One Woman’s Story (2018)—challenging Israeli occupation as well as Palestinian forms of authoritarianism, social oppression, and corruption. Through Ahdaf Soueif’s subtle translation, Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah (1997; trans. 2000) is a good example of a recent non-fiction text that has received extensive literary critical attention. It details how a return to the Palestinian homeland is distorted by conquest and a flawed peace deal. Followed by another successful account entitled I Was Born There, I Was Born Here (2009; trans. 2011), Barghouti has come to be indelibly associated with the new reality of troubled exilic returns. Similar themes of remembrance and flawed reconnections mark Ghada Karmi’s In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story (2002) and Return: A Palestinian Memoir (2015)—where a growing estrangement is registered alongside an unwavering commitment to justice. Palestinian ‘suffering’s glow’ has also seen the proliferation of a solidarity literature in English that is gaining widespread circulation. More and more writers and activists feel compelled to come to Palestine, account for its colonial realities, and connect to its traditions of resistance. A few examples will suffice. Rachel Corrie’s Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of Rachel Corrie (2008) chronicles her encounter with occupied Palestine before she was murdered trying to courageously block the demolition of a Palestinian family’s home in Gaza. Ben Ehrenreich examines Palestinian life in the West Bank in The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine (2017), and Andrew Ross accounts for the neglected Palestinian construction workers in Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel (2019). Another example is Arthur Neslen’s collective portrait of Palestinian identity mapped through different interviews in his In Your Eyes a Sandstorm: Ways of Being Palestinian (2011). For the last decade, a new mode of literary solidarity and encounter has been organized by Ahdaf Soueif through the unique activities of the Palestine Festival of Literature. As a travelling festival, PalFest took more than 200 writers and literary professionals from around the world to Palestine to read from their work and meet with Palestinians. The aims of the festival were: ‘showcasing and supporting cultural life in Palestine, breaking the cultural siege imposed on Palestinians by the Israeli military occupation, and strengthening cultural links between Palestine and the rest of the world’ (‘About Palfest,’ n.d., n.p.). This Is Not A Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature (2017) is a selection of writing that shows how deeply consequential and productive this journeying to Palestine has been. Especially, for Soueif,

6

Post-Millennial Palestine

in order to witness what in Jerusalem she calls the iḥlal or substitution of one people by another—employing the violent logic of ‘we instead of you.’ As a journey through culture and political geography, Marcello Di Cintio’s Pay No Heed to the Rockets (2018) belongs to this solidarity genre as well. Under ‘suffering’s glow’ and in the context of the criminalization and demonization of Palestinian resistance in the West (including the non-violent resistance of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement), more Palestinians are resorting to writing about their life and history in English. The emergence and proliferation of the Palestinian novel in English as a new genre is noteworthy here. Brewing for the last decade, it has been increasingly coming into its own as an effort to reach across borders, times, and ruptured family histories. Historical chronicle mixes with present-day setting in order to account for the breadth of Palestinian dispersal and modes of reconnection. There is: Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home (2008); Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2006) and The Blue between Sky and Water (2015); Selma Dabbagh’s Out of It (2011); Ahmed Masoud’s Vanished: The Mysterious Disappearance of Mustafa Ouda (2015); and, most recently, Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses (2017) and Isabella Hammad’s staggeringly praised historical novel The Parisian (2019). What is striking about these new novels is that most of them are written by women. Indeed, women have been contributing in increasing numbers across many different cultural forms. More women writers are gaining prominence in the Palestinian Arabic novel. For example, Husama Habayeb’s recent work has been compared to the founding generation of Palestinian novelists. Her third and latest novel Velvet won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2017. Before the Queen Falls Asleep (2011) is widely regarded as the most important novelistic representation of Palestinian refugees since Ghassan Kanafani. Other notable contributions are Maya Abu al-Hayyat’s No One Knows their Bloodtype, published in Arabic in 2013, and Adania Shibli’s Touch (2002; trans. 2010) and We are All Equally Far from Love (2004; trans. 2012). There are also many notable recent novels by men worth highlighting, with significant thematic innovation and generic development. Like: Raba’i al-Madhoun’s troubled return to his homeland in The Lady from Tel-Aviv (2009; trans. 2013), which won both the International Prize for Arabic Literature and the English Pen Award; Ala Hlehel’s historical novel Au Revior Akka [Acre] (2014); and Abbad Yahya’s Crime in Ramallah (2017) that charts millennial life under occupation and

Foreword

7

was banned for its explicit sexuality and gay representation in the city. Add to that prominent Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury’s ongoing examination of Palestine from Gate of the Sun (1998; trans. 2006) to My Name is Adam: Children of the Ghetto (2016; trans. 2018), and Ibrahim Nasrallah’s recent novels, such as Time of White Horses (2007; trans. 2016). Most visibly, it has been cinema that has seen not only an exponential rise in significance and cultural reach (with new films by founding director Michel Khleifi and by post-Oslo directors like Elia Suleiman and Hany Abu-Assad) but also a growing crop of internationally recognized women directors as well. There is: May Masri’s post-Beirut work, including her films on refugee life in Lebanon, like Children of Shatila (1998); Annemarie Jacir’s three features, including her brilliantly realist Wajib (2017); Cherien Dabis’ Amreeka (2009); Suha Arraf’s Villa Touma (2014); Maha Haj’s intimate stylized Personal Affairs (2016); and Maysaloun Hamoud’s feminist and feisty In Between (2016). In the absence of any Palestinian national funds for the development or support of a Palestinian film industry, what these productions convey is an individual determination to excel in new forms of self-expression. Aesthetically and politically varied and diverse, these new films respond to harsh socio-political realities and mediate new modes of Palestinian being and belonging. Post-millennial Palestine, then, has seen a proliferation of independent Palestinian voice ranging across all major forms of cultural production. Palestinian culture is no longer located in Palestine, although it continues to be pulled by the destructive realities of present-day suffering there. And Palestinian voice can no longer be monopolized by one political party, official representative, or court sanctioned writer. If this multiplicity can be read as fragmentation, it can also be seen as a form of sharedness: that Palestine is a project in common. For a refugee people, such cultural multivocality has its political virtues. It clearly affirms that the only form of politics that can accommodate dispersal and varied condition is democracy. Political substitution is not a basis for collective representation. In the formulation of a common destiny, no one entity or locale can have more weight or speak on behalf of another: neither the occupied on behalf of the shatat, nor the reverse. To mirror diversifying self-representation in culture is to uphold the right of Palestinian self-determination in politics. That is the main lesson I take from a post-millennial Palestine. That deep-rooted self-organization of Palestinians across the world has to be part of a future strategy for Palestinian emancipation. ‘Suffering’s

8

Post-Millennial Palestine

glow’ will end: by acts of imagination quite as much as by new forms of organization and mobilization—to borrow Raymond Williams’ phrasing. References ‘About PalFest.’ Palestine Festival of Literature, n.d. Available at: . Accessed 28 May 2019. Abu-Manneh, Bashir (2017) ‘Gaza Fractures.’ Social Text Online, 24 October. Available at: . Accessed 28 May 2019. Abu Saif, Atef, ed. (2014) The Book of Gaza. Manchester: Comma Press. Attallah, Najlaa (2018) ‘In Gaza We Are Not OK.’ AGNI, 30 January. Available at: . Accessed 28 May 2019. Darwish, Najwan (2014) Nothing More to Lose. Trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid. New York: New York Review Books. Younis, Muhannad (2018) Al-Athar Tarsem Khalfuha Aqdam [Ruins Leave Footprints Behind]. Ramallah: A. M. Qattan Foundation.

Introduction By Rachel Gregory Fox and Ahmad Qabaha Introduction

Inspired by the growth of recent scholarship on Palestine, this collection seeks to contribute to the ongoing critical debate on the tropes of memory and resistance, which are so familiar to work on the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. Post-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistance confronts how Palestinians have recently felt obliged to re-think memory and resistance in response to dynamic political and regional changes in the twenty-first century; prolonged spatial and temporal dispossession; and the continued deterioration of the peace process. The collection offers a distinctive contribution to the field of existing scholarship on Palestine, charting new ways of thinking about the critical paradigms of memory and resistance as they are produced and represented in literary works published within the post-millennial period. While the Nakba (1948) and its aftermath remains a prominent historical context, the present is persistently exposed to new catastrophes. We contend that more recent generations of Palestinian writers therefore also have to attend to the current socio-political landscape, and the crises that continue to have a significant impact upon their lives. Insofar as the articulation of memory in (post)colonial contexts can be viewed as an integral component of a continuing anti-colonial struggle for self-determination, in tracing the dynamics of conveying the memory of ongoing, chronic trauma, this collection negotiates the urgency for Palestinians to reclaim and retain their heritage in a continually unstable and fretful present. The articulation of memory within post-millennial Palestinian literature—an act of archaeology and/or archiving—works as a means of resistance against official versions of history imposed by 9

10

Post-Millennial Palestine

Israeli settler-colonialism. Further modes of resistance in contemporary Palestinian literature are presented throughout this collection: refusing to surrender; acting in solidarity; working as an advocate; evoking icons; engendering affect; investing in anti-colonial pedagogy; and aspiring towards potential futures. Broadly considering the conceptual paradigms of archives, aesthetics, and horizons, the critical essays in this collection serve to advance scholarship on Palestine by providing an effective account of the dynamics of Palestinian memory and resistance as represented in literature in a post-millennial context. The collection offers readers fresh analysis on critical and creative responses to current affairs in Palestine and provides insight into the interrelationship between historical and ongoing socio-political contexts, still affecting Palestinians today. Reflecting on the potential for the Palestinian narrative to recreate reality in ways that both document it and resist its brutality, this collection shows how Palestinian writers in the twenty-first century critically and creatively consider the possible future(s) of their nation. Post-Millennial Palestine: Temporalities, Continuities, Ruptures In the twenty-first century, Palestine has witnessed new upheavals that have maintained a sense of uncertainty about its people’s future and have further widened the perceptual gap between Palestine’s past and present. Historically, Palestinians have experienced various points of ‘rupture,’ dispossessed of control over their land. In 1917, the Balfour Declaration, a letter from the British Foreign Minister to Zionist pioneer Walter Rothschild, saw Britain pledge to establish ‘a national home for the Jewish people,’ which was later incorporated into the terms of the British Mandate for Palestine (Tahhan, 2018, n.p.). The British Mandate facilitated the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and precipitated the 1948 Nakba and, later, the 1967 Naksa. While these are fundamental temporal points of reference in Palestinian history, in the present Palestinians continue to be exposed to new catastrophes that have significantly impacted their lives. Among these upheavals in post-millennial Palestine: the Second Intifada (2000–05); the construction of the Separation Wall (al-Jidār al-Fāṣil) in 2002; the construction of new roads that can only be taken by Israeli citizens; the formation of buffer zones in Gaza; and the repeated attacks, including drone strikes, in Gaza by Israel. While their traumatic past has been seen as a burden that does not allow Palestinians to live peacefully in

Introduction

11

the present, these new upsets contribute to a site of perpetual trauma, wherein ‘trauma [has become] an ever-present reality of Palestinian life’ and a defining feature of their existence (Moore and Qabaha, 2015, 19). The Nakba has been extensively featured in literary and scholarly output and remains an omnipresent event in the chronicling of Palestine. However, newer generations of Palestinians, who did not physically experience the Nakba, find themselves caught in the tumultuous events of today—borne of seeds sown in 1917 and, later, 1948, but, for them, more immediate, and more urgent. In the opening chapter to this collection, Tahrir Hamdi argues: This repetition of catastrophe enables Palestinian youth who have experienced numerous horrors, such as the Israeli bombardment of Gaza in 2008–09 and 2014, to re-live and re-imagine the Nakba, a memory that is more than a memory as it is lived and re-lived in the daily nakbas of the Palestinian people. As catastrophe is ‘lived and re-lived’ across generations in Gaza, the West Bank, and in the diaspora, literature produced during the post-millennial period finds itself traversing ‘political-historical temporalit[ies]’ (Abu-Manneh, 2016, 5). In his seminal monograph The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present (2016), Bashir Abu-Manneh ‘traces the development of the novel from the nakba to Oslo,’ examining how ‘distinct circumstances and uneven temporalities of existence and struggle are crucial for interpreting the Palestinian novel’ (3–4). Drawing from György Lukács’ notion of ‘periodization,’ he observes that ‘[b]oth society and literary genre are affected by historical uneven development’ (Abu-Manneh, 2016, 6). Our collection begins where Abu-Manneh left off in his monograph: at the precipice of the post-millennial period in Palestine, with the deterioration of the Oslo Accords and the beginning of the Second Intifada. A point of rupture. Agreeing with Lukács, Abu-Manneh writes that ‘the artistic autonomy and social meaning of art are distinct yet relationally mediated notions, and that historicism attuned to conjecture and rupture can bear significant literary-critical interpretative fruits’ (2016, 7). Of significance here is Abu-Manneh’s notion that literary output is ‘relationally mediated’ by both the intentions of the artist and the socio-political contexts within which literature is produced. Thinking about the production of post-millennial Palestinian literature in these relational terms does not conflate the literary and the political, but does

12

Post-Millennial Palestine

allow for a consideration of how Palestinian literature produced in the twenty-first century can be influenced by, and speaks to, the current socio-political climate. What is the literature considered within the pages of this collection attempting to do, if, indeed, it can do anything? Is it working to chronicle history? To retrieve memories? Or, perhaps, trying to come to terms with them? Is it bearing witness to recent upheavals? Articulating injustice and trauma? Reflecting strategies used to resist Israeli settler-colonialism? To answer these questions about the articulation of memory and resistance in post-millennial Palestinian literature, we must carefully position it within its particular national, political, and social contexts. Nationalism does not exclusively commandeer narrativity, Abu-Manneh argues, instead, we should ‘insist on situating both the nation and the novel within determinate social and historical formations and contradictions’ (2016, 12). Thus, in reading post-millennial Palestinian literature, this collection must attend to the specific social and historical temporalities that inform the political and personal perspectives of Palestinian writers and artists. Within the specific context of post-millennial Palestinian literature, the ‘rupture’ (Abu-Manneh, 2016, 7) that we must be most attuned to in our critical readings is the failure of the Oslo Accords. Palestinians have continually struggled against the injustices that have befallen them following the Nakba in 1948 and, earlier, under British Mandate. However, their attempts to reclaim their national rights have repeatedly been thwarted by misleading, ambiguous ‘peace’ interventions. The First Intifada, an uprising by the Palestinians against Israeli occupation that began in 1987, was concluded in 1993 with the signing of the Oslo Accords. The Oslo Accords, among other things, created the Palestinian Authority (PA), and granted them the limited responsibility of self-governing some areas of Gaza and the West Bank. Issues such as sovereignty, the rights of refugees, and the status of Jerusalem were, however, postponed. Joseph Massad argues that the signing of the Oslo Accords served to make the different interests of the Palestinians living, variously, in what is now Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and the diaspora, incompatible, if not contradictory: ‘Although the Palestinian people remain one spiritually, their material interests are different’ (2006, 114; 127–28). In the lead up to the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian leadership began preparations to establish an independent state, promised as part of the peace process, while marginalizing their main national and collective rights, including the rights of refugees to return to their homeland. By only agreeing to negotiate with the

Introduction

13

Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza in Madrid in 1991, Israel effectively ‘succeeded in destroying the political unity of the Palestinian people,’ leaving Palestinian refugees, living in the diaspora, ‘bereft of leadership and with no identifiable goals’ (Massad, 2006, 114; 127). The supposed ‘peace process’ instigated by the Oslo Accords proved to be a false promise for an unrealized future; it completely failed to achieve the national aspirations of Palestinian people, and it widened the disunity between their various communities. The failure of the apparent ‘peace process’ served as one of the underlying roots for the Second Intifada that began in September 2000. The breakdown of the Oslo Accords marks a point of temporal transition—as ‘rupture,’ to borrow Abu-Manneh’s phrasing (2016, 7)—through which we can contemplate the ways Palestinian literature is writing about themes of memory and resistance in potentially new ways. However, even if we read the failure of the Oslo Accords as a point of ‘rupture,’ the socio-political contexts that arose as a result of the so-called ‘peace process’ have not been formed ex-nihilo. It may be appropriate to call these historical events rhizomatic insofar as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue that ‘[t]here is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome’ (2003 [1987], 9). The point of ‘rupture’ is relational to its historical foundations—separate from, and yet mediated by, these historical underpinnings. So too, it would be incongruous to assume that post-millennial Palestinian literature is entirely new: it is produced relative to current socio-political contexts, but is also shaped by—or re-shapes, consciously or not—the legacies of Palestine’s historical formations. The concessions made by the Palestinian leadership during the Oslo Accords have resulted in a postponed ending to the Israeli occupation, and thus a prolonged occupation. As Sara Roy argues: The Oslo process, therefore, did not represent the end of Israeli occupation but its continuation, albeit in a less direct form. The structural relationship between occupier and occupied, and the gross asymmetries in power that attend it, were not dismantled by the accords but reinforced and strengthened. The Oslo agreements formalized and institutionalized the occupation in a manner that was altogether new. (2002, 9)

14

Post-Millennial Palestine

In dividing Palestinians into new categories and zones, the Accords reinforced the division and displacement of Palestinians in the catastrophes of 1948 and 1967. Instead of putting an end to the suffering of the Palestinian people, the Oslo agreement formalized the occupation of their land. The PA is powerless and ineffective against the enforcement of increasingly encroaching borders and checkpoints by Israel; it has instructed Palestinians, especially in the West Bank, that they have no power to resist the atrocities of the Israeli army, and that it would be less harmful if they submit to its military power. The current political discourse of the PA leadership subscribes to passive resistance, or even defeatism. In the face of this defeatism—and this structural elision of Palestinians—this collection asks, as Nora Parr puts it in her essay: ‘What happens to narrative when existing structures of community, of belonging, stop making sense?’ The newer generation of Palestinian writers must contend not just with the erasure of their past, but also with how these historical foundations—or elisions—shape an uncertain and ambiguous future. Underpinned by the historical socio-political paradigms of settlercolonialism—which are institutionalized through the Oslo Accords—the post-millennial period has given rise to continuing, increasingly visible violence by the Israeli occupation. The annexation of Palestine is seen in both Gaza and the West Bank. Architectural modes of control in Gaza have become more concrete in the new millennium with the formation of buffer zones where ‘entire agricultural areas and residential neighborhoods were systematically destroyed, the most egregious example being Rafah where the IDF [Israeli Defence Force] demolished over 1,600 homes alone, displacing over 10 per cent of the local population’ (Roy, 2007, 226). Meanwhile, the construction of the Separation Wall in the West Bank in 2002 stands as an iconic symbol of Israeli territorial hegemony over Palestinians. This wall has become a concrete realization of what Caroline Mall Dibiasi calls the ‘architecture of the occupation’ and its visibility has prompted international controversy (2015, 677). The West Bank Separation Wall was supposedly designed for the purpose of security for Israeli citizens, in response to the number of Palestinian suicide bombers that were passing into Israeli territory. However, the Wall proves to be an amalgamation of how Israeli ‘[c]ontrol has been both structural and bureaucratic’ and it ‘operates as an attempt by Israel to consolidate control over Palestinian space and extend Israel’s territorial reach’ (Pallister-Wilkins, 2011, 1858). The Separation Wall is perhaps the most visible example of how ‘the mundane elements of planning and

Introduction

15

architecture have become tactical tools and the means of dispossession’ (Weizman, 2007, 5). As the experience of one of us shows, the Separation Wall has disconnected Palestinian territories and people from one another: it has restricted the mobility of Palestinians and deprived them of living in a specific place in the West Bank with any sense of permanence. The sense of certainty of ‘home’ in the West Bank is suspended and is subject to Israeli territorial plans and the political situation, while visiting friends and family members in cities such as Haifa or Jaffa (now under Israeli control), or Gaza is almost impossible for many people. Encountering checkpoints and restrictions is a part of everyday life. From the demarcation of the Green Line to the construction of the Separation Wall, the map of Palestine has been continually re-drawn and the country does not resemble what it was at the eve of the Nakba in 1948. Such (re-)construction of space and architecture in Palestine constitutes what Derek Gregory calls a ‘landscape of colonial modernity’ (2004, 101). While contemporary Palestinian literature is shaped out of cultural memory, historical socio-political (and geographical) paradigms are continually being reformulated by the ongoing conflict. The past remains integral to the production of post-millennial literature, but, as this collection exposes, literature arising in the new millennium is orientated towards future possibilities and depicts in a more immediate fashion the violence and trauma of today. Palestinian literature in the new millennium is, in many ways, pragmatic: it transcends the repeated argument that piecing together a coherent space for the past is fundamental to the Palestinian sense of identity, and stresses the necessity of reconfiguring a relationship with the material world by forging new modes of resistance. Ilan Pappé argues that the dramatic changes on the ground in post-millennial Palestine prompt ‘the need to look for a new conversation about Palestine’ and that the long-term crisis in Palestine impels ‘the search for new ideas, and maybe even for a new language’ through which to debate resistance and solidarity movements in Palestine (Chomsky and Pappé, 2015, 10). The new millennium has given rise to increased global awareness and solidarity for the Palestinian experience, particularly as the nature of the Israel–Palestine conflict develops from that of occupation to what many characterize as apartheid. This development in the annexation of Palestine, and global awareness of this, is captured in the BDS Movement (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions), which launched in 2005 and is led by a large coalition of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian organizations both in Palestine and

16

Post-Millennial Palestine

abroad (O. Barghouti, 2011, 4–5). Omar Barghouti outlines how ‘BDS strives to delegitimize Israel’s settler-colonial oppression, apartheid, and ongoing ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian people, just as the South Africa boycott was aimed at delegitimizing apartheid there’ (2011, 15–16). BDS engenders a form of non-violent protest and activism that has gained traction internationally, and, by drawing direct lines of comparison to models of anti-colonial resistance practiced by other countries that have since gained ‘independence,’ makes visible potential solutions to the Israel–Palestine conflict. Such debates on modes of activism demonstrate a growing international awareness of what is occurring in this particular region in the Middle East, invoking various proposals for support and intervention made both locally and globally. However, this is not to suggest that a ‘solution’ is readily available, nor that what works for one country will automatically work for another. While Ali Abunimah suggests that the formation of post-apartheid South Africa ‘offer[s a] hopeful, real-life [model]’ of a single state solution (2009, n.p.), both Noam Chomsky and Pappé, in conversation with each other in On Palestine (2015), argue that a single state solution, as achieved in South Africa, is simply not feasible. Chomsky points out that Israel is a separationist state whereas South Africa was not, and Pappé expands on this, stating: It is very clear that the South African post-apartheid model cannot work in Israel, in other words, you cannot buy the Israelis by persuading them to give up their racist ideology in return for maintaining their economic privileges. This is not going to work. In a very bizarre way, Israeli apartheid, if we can call it that, or racist ideology, is far more religious and dogmatic than the white supremacist one in South Africa. (2015, 117–18) The socio-political landscape of Palestine/Israel vastly diverges from that of South African apartheid. Its discriminatory ideology, as Pappé discusses, is not merely political conviction, but impinged by a deep-rooted, religious dogma. As David Lloyd argues, the confluence between ‘secular Zionism and religious messianism culminates in what is at first sight an irresolvable contradiction between Israel’s normalisation and its exceptionalism’ (2012, 65). He continues: As a state, Israel seeks on the one hand to be accepted as one among the community of advanced democracies; on the

Introduction

17

other, it demands to be excepted from the norms of international law and human rights conventions on the basis of its peculiar destiny as a state in which ethnic nationalism and religious prophecy are enshrined and which is called on to defend. (2012, 65) While activists and advocates for Palestinian rights are aware of the injustices experienced by Palestinians, and while there is a wider public comprehension of the Israel–Palestine conflict, this has not yet minimized Palestinian suffering. Israel continues to discriminate against Palestinians, and does so, partly, by positioning itself as exceptional/ exempt from international legal infrastructure, in the name of both dogmatic self-determination and radical securitization (see: Lentin, 2016, 33). The state of Israel thus continues to confiscate Palestinian land; violates international law; and rejects conformity to human, moral, and legal codes. In the West Bank, Palestinians are exposed to daily humiliation at checkpoints and have no sense of security even inside their homes due to endless Israeli raids; they are arrested arbitrarily, and their movement is restricted. Meanwhile, Palestinians living in Gaza, described as the biggest open human jail on Earth, are subjected to siege and invasions, and Palestinian refugees, living in the diaspora, have no prospect of when they may be able to return. These current conditions on the ground, and the frustrating paradox of an increase in international support that is not practically realized, make it essential to chart the various representations of these circumstances in Palestinian literature as responses to the positions and proposals advanced by official and non-official Palestinians, Israeli exceptionalism, and international diplomats and activists. Articulating Memory and/as Resistance: From Archives to Horizons The essays in this collection partly focus on how literature produced by Palestinians in the twenty-first century often works to remember, preserve, and archive their heritage. Edward Said identifies the Palestinian fight for the ‘right to a remembered presence and, with that presence, the right to possess and reclaim a collective historical reality’ (2000, 184). Palestinian writers seek to provide testimony of their memories not simply to remember their past, but to combat

18

Post-Millennial Palestine

the violent physical and intellectual erasure of Palestinian homes, land, and culture under Israeli settler-colonialism. The assertion of individual and collective memory in Palestinian literature, therefore, represents a form of nationalist resistance: a way of reclaiming a stolen heritage and an urgent act of preservation. Thus, the articulation of memory in Palestinian literature can be encoded as a political act, one that promotes modes of creative and cultural resistance fighting for prospective stability and visibility. Citing Paul Ricœur in her contribution to this collection, Lindsey Moore argues that ‘“re-memory” (rémemoration) activates a claim and is oriented towards the future […] memory should not be instrumentalized in the service of a fixed notion of identity or a rivalrous conception of trauma: “working through” competing versions of the past is ideally collaborative work ([Ricœur,] 2004 [2000], 57; 71).’ This proposition that the act of remembering and the articulation of memory—as something that is ‘worked on’ or ‘worked through’—is ideally collaborative is important within the context of Palestinian writing following the Oslo Accords. As we observed earlier, by only including Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza in the Oslo Accords, Palestinian refugees and those living in the diaspora were completely marginalized. By contrast, as several essays in this collection find, contemporary Palestinian writers often attend to the divergent experiences of Palestinians: opposing divisional and defeatist agendas (Hamdi); inspiring a communal, yet relational, ethos of resistance (Brown); allying ‘concepts of personal liberation and social critique […] alongside national allegiances’ (Irving); attending to the inevitability of past events and the urgent crises of the present (Gregory Fox); and, thus, ‘working’ to recognize the past while offering a ‘renewed connection’ to the present (Parr). Therefore, we argue that the role of memory in post-millennial Palestine shifts, especially when the authors of these contemporary texts are second- or third-generation survivors of the Nakba. Following Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘postmemory’ (initially conceived of within the context of Holocaust survivors), newer generations of Palestinians connect ‘to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before’ wherein past experiences are ‘transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right’ (2012, 5; emphasis in the original). Insofar as newer generations of Palestinian writers do attend—either directly or indirectly—to their national socio-political history, postmemory serves to demonstrate how the history of the Nakba remains a pervasive

Introduction

19

presence. However, the narrative voice of the individual not only exists within and responds to a collective, national discourse of resistance, but also continues to build upon its foundations. As previously discussed, contemporary Palestinian writers must contend not just with their history, but also the continued experience of catastrophes across Gaza, the West Bank, and in the diaspora today. Ihab Saloul problematizes the ‘post’ in postmemory, arguing that ‘second and third generation of post-Nakba Palestinians, although they have not experienced this originating moment in 1948, are still “inside” the event itself living the catastrophe every day’ (2012, 107). In the event of continuing crisis, following the Nakba, the precarity of the present socio-political landscape in Palestine takes precedence. If, as Abu-Manneh argues, ‘[b]oth society and literary genre are affected by historical uneven development’ (2016, 6), then contemporary Palestinian writers will not only write to their inter-generationally remembered past, but also to their present moment. How, therefore, can the articulation of memory be used to critically engage with the ongoing crises experienced by Palestinians today? Contemporary Palestinian literature, whether it is fiction or non-fiction, can be described as (semi-)autobiographical resistant literature. Palestinian writers conceive (life-)writing as a means through which memories and historical realities of their indigenous land are preserved and foregrounded. As Moore argues, ‘Palestinian existential and political challenges impel processes of narrative archiving’ (2018, 165). Narrative archiving would enliven the presence of Palestinian history that Israeli settler-colonialism negates to justify its existence in Palestine. Pappé describes this as ‘a metaphorical palimpsest,’ which is ‘the erasure of the history of one people in order to write that of another people’s over it’ (2006, 225; 231). This Zionist tendency has escalated and accelerated in the new millennium, aiming to erase and re-inscribe the history of Palestinian land anew, in order to justify the expulsion of Palestinians from their home in the Nakba and Naksa. The new millennium has witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number of Israeli settlements built over Palestinian territories. In chronicling the continued, drastic transformation of their land, contemporary Palestinian writers work to resist negation and anonymity. As the Palestinian memoirist and lawyer Raja Shehadeh describes in Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2008 [2007]), irreversible damage has blighted the Palestinian land at the hands of Israeli colonial modernity, which is supported by ‘Western’ powers. He describes

20

Post-Millennial Palestine

how Israeli settlements have dominated Palestinian land and replaced certain Palestinian communities. ‘To achieve this,’ Shehadeh argues, ‘the intervening centuries and generations of land’s inhabitants have to be obliterated and denied. In the process of history, mine and that of my people, is distorted and twisted’ (2008 [2007], xv). Shehadeh writes against statelessness and nonentity, against exile and its destitution. The (auto)biographical memories embedded in contemporary Palestinian literature provide counter-memories, and thus counterhistories, to official totalizing versions of history, and these counter-histories can resist the limitations imposed over the indigenous Palestinian national narrative by Israeli settler-colonialism and the US administration. The Palestinian narrative of injustice is constantly occluded by the more powerful Zionists and their US supporters. Power, as Haim Bresheeth observes, ‘is not only exercised over the [Palestinian] land and its people, it also controls the story, its point of view, and the meta-narrative of truth and memory’ (2007, 165). The elision of the Palestinian story has therefore turned memory into an antagonistic process between competing versions of history. The Palestinian narrative documents, disrupts, inverts, challenges, and writes back against the colonialist intellectual and material subjection of Palestine, and it aspires to decolonize the memory and history of the Palestinian people. Post-millennial Palestinian literature resists the accommodation of failures, especially those attributed to Oslo. It seeks to understand the reasons for this political deterioration and to channel the national concerns of the collective. Contemporary Palestinian writers speak about their national despair, triggered by the persistence of colonial control and the weakness of their political leadership. They reformulate the traditional Palestinian narrative, safeguarding their history, and address the potentiality of a precarious and uncertain future. The continuing production of Palestinian literature today represents an example of steadfastness (ṣ umud), which Jeff Halper calls a ‘default strategy that takes the form of daily coping, an insistence on carrying on one’s life and a refusal to be cowed, as well as active and intentional forms of struggle’ (2006, 45). This kind of resistance gives Palestinians the means to realize an existence that has been suspended by colonialist and imperialist interventions. Its practice is a sign that Palestinians have not succumbed to defeatism, and that they continue their struggle to find a way to tell their story. They seek to resist despair and nurture hope that the Palestinian dream will eventually be realized in the form of a Palestinian nation-state that evolves from the collective

Introduction

21

commitment of survival and steadfastness, and the growing support of international audiences. In her interview with Moore, author Selma Dabbagh, whose novel Out of It (2011) is the subject of Tom Sperlinger’s essay in this collection, suggests: I do think the role of artists to engender criticism and to visualize a better future goes some way to challenging the current status quo. I do not believe that art alone can bring about a third Intifada or should be viewed as replacing political activism, but it can complement it. It needs to be a multipronged attack. (cited in Moore, 2015, 336) Dabbagh argues that while literary output does not replace other practical modes of resistance, it can support and facilitate it. Creative cultural production can disseminate and make visible the ongoing socio-political circumstances experienced by Palestinians today on an international scale, re-narrating, enacting, and encouraging acts of advocacy, solidarity, and resistance. However, the resistant potentiality of literature entails a reader. While the escalation in violence between Israel and Palestine in the early 2000s ‘increased the international visibility of the conflict, which in turn has strengthened the international Palestinian solidarity movement and expanded the metropolitan market for Palestinian cultural production’ (Bernard, 2013, 4), there is no guarantee that readers perusing the market for Palestinian literature will do so with anything more than a touristic gaze. In response to this potentially touristic desire to read about Palestine, Bernard argues that contemporary Palestinian writers ‘actively expect and exploit the reception of their work as a document of the conflict, using their status as “world” writers to authorize […] their accounts of the region’s history and their visions of its political future’ (2013, 4). This critical awareness on the part of the writer recalls Sarah Brouillette’s notion of strategic exoticism, as a means of negotiating ‘postcoloniality’s touristic guilt’ (2011 [2007], 7). Within this model, the resistant potential of Palestinian literature finds itself partly dependant on a reader who shares with the author ‘assumptions about the way culture operates, and concur[s] in their desire to exempt themselves from certain undesirable practices’ (Brouillette, 2011 [2007], 43). The requirement for a critical, conscientious, politically aware reader for the resistant

22

Post-Millennial Palestine

potential of Palestinian literature to be realized is a limitation that cannot be ignored. However, there are such readers, and the contributors of this collection make up some of that number as they critically attend to a range of Palestinian literary texts. Drawing on Elleke Boehmer’s formulation of reading as ‘less about assessing representations, than it is about attending, intensively, and in an internalized way, to the semantic processes through which meaning unfurls’ (2018, 8), Michael Pritchard’s chapter reminds us of the political potential of reading pedagogically (see also: Sperlinger) and aesthetically, wherein ‘such a mode of reading/writing can subvert the kind of cultural hegemony dominant powers can hold.’ Thus, resistance in literature is not only formulated through the articulation of memory (archives), but also through close attention to the personal and the particular (aesthetics), and by resisting despair and nurturing hope (horizons). As Anna Ball argues within this collection that ‘flight becomes a motif not simply of return, but also of regeneration,’ so too does contemporary Palestinian literature attend to both its past and its present. In recalling Deleuze and Guattari’s consideration of the rhizomatic, the present moment—following the ‘rupture’ marked by the failure of the Oslo Accords—is relational to its historical foundations: separate from, and yet mediated by, these historical underpinnings. Shaped—and re-shaped—by the legacies of Palestine’s historical formations, and, yet, also produced relative to current socio-political contexts, post-millennial Palestinian literature engages in a process of remediation; of renewal; of regeneration. This collection does not merely seek to attest to the increasingly visible traumatic past experiences of Palestinians, but to facilitate critical discussion on post-millennial Palestinian literature that does not simply look back into the past, but also looks ahead. It seems apt to conclude, here, with Mourid Barghouti’s provocation: ‘Our song is not for some sacred thing of the past but for our current self-respect that is violated anew every day by the Occupation’ (2003 [1997], 7). Structure of this Collection This edited collection is divided into three sections. The first section, entitled ‘Palestinian Archives: Catastrophe, Exile, and Life Writing,’ begins with Tahrir Hamdi’s chapter, which focuses on Late Style in the post-millennial works of prominent Palestinian intellectuals Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti. By exploring

Introduction

23

the literary and critical works of these authors, whose writing is inextricably entrenched within Palestine’s continual exposure to repeated crises, Hamdi gestures to how young Palestinians can evoke Late Style resistance—an act of ‘beginning’ in the face of catastrophe— as they experience repeated ‘daily nakbas.’ Hamdi argues that, by living the continually catastrophic, the experiences by young Palestinians of loss—of lateness—engenders beginnings, a fearless defiance, and a refusal to surrender. In Chapter Two, Lindsey Moore traces the familial and national trajectories of the autobiographies written by Edward Said, his sister, Jean Said Makdisi, and his mother-in-law, Wadad Makdisi Cortas. Moore contextualizes these writings as a specifically Levantine or ‘Shāmi’ critical inflection of modern Palestinian cultural identity, arguing that through their ‘archiving’ of regional and familial histories, the Said–Makdisi–Cortas triumvirate ‘resuscitate embedded, expansive models of being Palestinian.’ Moore, therefore, interrogates how this extended family narrative can be seen as a creative and critical attempt to re-root and reformulate contemporary Palestinian cultural memory. Moore’s consideration of archival and archaeological writing is similarly visited in Chapter Three, where Ahmad Qabaha focuses on the role of the Palestinian life writer Ghada Karmi, as ‘a custodian of the Palestinian national history’ (Karmi, 2015, 144). Through a close reading of Karmi’s 2015 memoir, Return: A Palestinian Memoir, Qabaha studies the relationship between memory and resistance, arguing that Karmi’s writing in exile represents an act of preservation, wherein the articulation of collective Palestinian memory functions as a means of resistance to official versions of history imposed by Israeli settler-colonialism. This notion of Palestinian life writing as an anti-colonial, resistant act, continues to be explored in Chapter Four. Here, Sophia Brown examines the post-millennial Palestinian intellectual trend towards anthologizing Palestinian life writing, marking the fact that individual Palestinian stories mirror wider shared and collective experiences. Brown introduces a range of anthologies and analyses, in-depth, two ‘snapshots’ from these collections: stories by Mischa Hiller and Randa Jarrar. She critically discusses how many of the anthologies of ‘contemporary Palestinian writing in English [go] beyond narrating the specifics of the conflict in order to reflect on central questions of dignity, justice, and kinship.’ This first section of the collection features chapters that contemplate the role of literature—and, in particular, life writing—in representing, archiving, and critically

24

Post-Millennial Palestine

dissecting Palestinian history and the effects of the ongoing crises in the twenty-first century. How can Palestinians comprehend—and apprehend—their history during continual, sustained catastrophic loss and dispossession? How can Palestinian writing evoke and/or engender a refusal to surrender? The second section of the collection, ‘Palestinian Aesthetics: Icons, Haptics, and Palimpsests,’ features chapters that offer in-depth analysis of Palestinian poetry and fiction, contemplating the ways in which literary narratives can be used to convey the relationship between the personal and the political. In Chapter Five, Sarah Irving offers a reading of the work of Najwan Darwish, whose poetry uses the language and gravitas of epic-scale myth to comprehend the experiences of ‘the most ordinary individual or events.’ Irving argues that while N. Darwish’s use of the mythic continues a motif familiar to earlier schools of Palestinian poetry, his work reshapes and reforms the mythic, which ‘evoke[s] a sense of dislocation and despair, a feeling that former truths and dependable narratives have lost their meaning, it also represents an opening to new politics and discourses within the Palestinian setting.’ As the earlier chapters in this collection discuss, archiving Palestinian history, myth, and literature is important, but, in a socio-political climate that continues to be dealt crisis-after-crisis, the immediacy of the present cannot—and should not—be ignored in favour of historical remembrances. What about ‘now’? Whereas Irving focuses on macroscopic myths, in Chapter Six, Michael Pritchard focuses on the small, intimate moments captured in Adania Shibli’s novella Touch (2002; trans. 2010). Pritchard investigates the significance of attending to different modes of violence—colonial or gendered, systematic or symbolic—for understanding the complexities of Palestinian identity and society. He argues that Shibli’s novella ‘offers a haptic understanding of the Palestinian experience of violence,’ making a case for the attentive reading of this palimpsestic text. In Chapter Seven, Rachel Gregory Fox examines the ways in which palimpsestic memories and discourses are unfolded and foregrounded in Susan Abulhawa’s novels, which are structured through both familial and national genealogies. Gregory Fox analyses how the act of return in Abulhawa’s novels compels the retrieval of both pre- and post-millennial memories of trauma, bridging individual memory with genealogical memory. Throughout the chapters of this middle section, it becomes clear that the act of acknowledging and attending to the—small, ordinary, felt—present is as crucial as curating the—epic, grave, remembered—past. Apprehending the individual feelings and

Introduction

25

experiences of Palestinians can therefore resonate and amplify a wider political discourse of self-determinism. From past, to present, to future: the concluding section of this collection, ‘Palestinian Horizons: Endings and Beginnings, or Taking Flight,’ features chapters that address potential modes of resistance explored in Palestinian literature and video art. The critical analysis of Palestinian literature in Chapter Eight by Nora Parr evokes earlier discussions by Hamdi, whereby the experiences of catastrophe, crisis, and dispossession prompt new ‘beginnings’ engendered by defiance, resistance, and a refusal to surrender. Parr’s reading of Palestinian literature in translation attends to how the sense of an ending (often the result of catastrophe) necessitates an act of refiguring—of renewal. Parr seeks new horizons through her literary analysis, ‘find[ing] a path out of the quagmire of “post-”’ where new ‘beginnings’ have the potential to encompass the past but also, most significantly, open up a renewed connection to the present, and beyond. While Parr attends to language and symbolism as potential ambassadors of resistance in Palestinian literature, in Chapter Nine, Tom Sperlinger scrutinizes themes of education in Selma Dabbagh’s 2011 novel Out of It, reading it as a critique of colonial modes of teaching. Sperlinger argues that Out of It engenders an anti-colonial pedagogy through the experiences of its millennial characters. The younger generation of Palestinians partake in acts of revolt and resistance that remain unfinished at the conclusion of the book, leaving future possibilities and potentialities as yet unexplored. What exists beyond these future horizons waiting to be explored, in among the continuing crises of the present? In the concluding chapter of the collection, Anna Ball analyses Palestinian feminocentric, diasporic poetry and video art. Ball argues that the evocation of the symbol of flight in Palestinian literature, an act of movement towards horizons, is both poetic and political: ‘a mobile source of solidarity that circulates expansively around Palestine.’ As Ball tells us to ‘set your sights high,’ this collection asks its reader to consider: What does the future of Palestinian literature have in store? Exploring the dynamics of Palestinian memory and resistance, the essays in this collection contemplate how post-millennial Palestinian literature must attend to its past traumas, its present uncertainties, and its, as yet, undetermined future.

26

Post-Millennial Palestine

References Abu-Manneh, Bashir (2016) The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Abunimah, Ali (2009) ‘Israeli Jews and the One-state Solution.’ The Electronic Intifada, 10 November. Available at: . Accessed 6 September 2017. Barghouti, Mourid (2003 [1997]) I Saw Ramallah. Trans. Ahdaf Soueif. New York: First Anchor Books. Barghouti, Omar (2011) BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Bernard, Anna (2013) Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel/ Palestine. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Boehmer, Elleke (2018) Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Bresheeth, Haim (2007) ‘The Continuity of Trauma and Struggle: Recent Cinematic Representations of the Nakba.’ Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, eds. Ahmad Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod. New York: Columbia University Press. 161–88. Brouillette, Sarah (2011 [2007]) Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chomsky, Noam, and Ilan Pappé (2015) On Palestine. Ed. Frank Barat. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari (2003 [1987]) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum. Dibiasi, Caroline Mall (2015) ‘Changing Trends in Palestinian Political Activism: The Second Intifada, the Wall Protests, and the Human Rights Turn.’ Geopolitics 20.3: 669–95. Gregory, Derek (2004) The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Halper, Jeff (2006) ‘A Strategy within a Non-Strategy: Sumud, Resistance, Attrition, and Advocacy.’ Journal of Palestine Studies 35.3: 45–51. Hirsch, Marianne (2012) The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Karmi, Ghada (2015) Return: A Palestinian Memoir. London: Verso. Lentin, Ronit (2016) ‘Palestine/Israel and State Criminality: Exception, Settler Colonialism and Racialization.’ State Crime Journal 5:1: 32–50. Lloyd, David (2012) ‘Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel.’ Settler Colonial Studies 2:1: 59–80. Massad, Joseph A. (2006) The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians. London: Routledge.

Introduction

27

Moore, Lindsey (2015) ‘A Conversation with Selma Dabbagh.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 51.3: 324–39. Moore, Lindsey (2018) Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations: Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine. New York: Routledge. Moore, Lindsey, and Ahmad Qabaha (2015) ‘Chronic Trauma, (Post) Colonial Chronotopes and Palestinian Lives: Omar Robert Hamilton’s Though I Know the River is Dry/Ma‘a Anni A‘rif Anna al-Nahr Qad Jaf.’ Postcolonial Traumas: Memory, Narratives, Resistance, ed. Abigail Ward. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 14–29. Pallister-Wilkins, Polly (2011) ‘The Separation Wall: A Symbol of Power and a Site of Resistance?’ Antipode 43.5: 1851–82. Pappé, Ilan (2006) The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: One World. Ricœur, Paul (2004 [2000]) Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roy, Sara (2002) ‘Why Peace Failed: An Oslo Autopsy.’ Current History 101.651: 8–16. Roy, Sara (2007) Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press. Said, Edward W. (2000) ‘Invention, Memory, and Place.’ Critical Inquiry 26.2: 175–92. Saloul, Ihab (2012) Catastrophe and Exile in the Modern Palestinian Imagination: Telling Memories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shehadeh, Raja (2008 [2007]) Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape. London: Profile Books. Tahhan, Zena (2018) ‘More than a Century on: The Balfour Declaration Explained.’ Aljazeera, 2 November. Available at: . Accessed 12 May 2020. Weizman, Eyal (2007) Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso.

part i Palestinian Archives: Catastrophe, Exile, and Life Writing

chapter one Late Style as Resistance in the Works of Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti By Tahrir Hamdi Late Style as Resistance

What comes after disaster, catastrophe, and death? What comes after the Nakba, Naksa, repeated dispossessions, and massacres; after Deir Yassin, Tantura, Qibya, Sabra and Shatila, and the ethnic cleansing in Khan al-Ahmar? What comes after the many divisions, sectarian wars, and the devastation of state infrastructures? Following the continued occurrence of catastrophic events in Palestine, the status of the Palestinian cause has deteriorated. Is it too late? Edward Said’s last/latest theoretical contribution to his powerful oeuvre is what has come to be known as ‘Late Style,’ which was still being formulated at the time of his premature death in 2003. This chapter argues that Said’s Late Style engenders what I am calling ‘lateness of beginnings,’ representing the Palestinian intellectual’s deepest resistance against catastrophe, impending death, dispossession, and colonization. In the face of continued catastrophe, resistance in post-millennial Palestine is currently being reinvigorated by the creativity of new Palestinian generations, who have attained a metaphorical lateness by the very means of the repetition of the catastrophic. This chapter explores the reconfiguration of Late Style resistance in the works of Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti, arguing that these intellectuals’ works are important in foregrounding an oppositional criticism in the face of divisionist agendas at this most critical moment in the continuation of the Palestinian struggle. Said’s concept of beginnings is anchored in human intention and agency, thus allowing for resistance. The possibility to imagine, to produce, or make history anew is embedded in the idea of beginnings (Said, 1975, 349–50). Beginnings, of course, are not a one-time event 31

32

Post-Millennial Palestine

with a single point of origin, but are rather inevitably linked to the idea of repetition, meaning that it is not only about beginning, but also about beginning again (Said, 1975, 357). Said began his intellectual and theoretical endeavour with Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), and concluded it with On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (2007), which was published posthumously. Both books, and their eponymous concepts, have much in common. Said’s idea of beginnings is a response to catastrophe. These beginnings are not only about human intention and agency, but represent ‘a point of departure, a beginning principle’ (Said, 1995 [1978], 15). In turn, experiences of catastrophe can prompt an act of resistance—to start again—which marks the very essence of Said’s lateness of beginnings. Said’s notion of lateness was deeply personal, as he faced his impending death from leukaemia, but he arguably also characterized it in terms of national discourse, in relation to the Palestinian objective, which he refused to see as a lost cause. Said, Darwish, and Barghouti display Late Style in their mature work, published in the post-millennial period, pondering the meaning of existence, identity, and the dialectic between life and death. Late Style is more than aesthetic style; it is an attitude, which is described most succinctly by Said in his commentary on playwright Henrik Ibsen’s late work, When We Dead Awaken (1899): ‘But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce the serenity of “ripeness is all”? […] Far from resolution, then, Ibsen’s last plays suggest an angry and disturbed artist’ (Said, 2007, 7). This artistic lateness, which is marked by anger, intransigence, and a refusal to surrender, adequately describes the late work of the three intellectuals discussed in this chapter. In continuing his commentary on Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken, Said suggests that the ‘angry and disturbed artist’ means to ‘stir up more anxiety, tamper irrevocably with the possibility of closure, and leave his audience more perplexed and unsettled than before’ (2007, 7). It is for this reason that, for Said, ‘late works constitute a form of exile’ (2007, 8). In fact, Said’s description of Late Style corresponds with his earlier definition of intellectual exile, presented in Representations of the Intellectual: ‘Exile for the intellectual in this metaphysical sense is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others. You cannot go back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at home; and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one with your new home or situation’ (1994, 39). This feeling

Late Style as Resistance

33

of restlessness, of ‘feeling unsettled,’ is the very definition of the intellectual who lives in either physical or metaphorical exile. Further still, the intellectual’s involuntary physical exile adds to the restlessness and unresolved contradiction of his experiences, which in turn deepens the anger, defiance, and intransigence of his later work and attitudes. This exilic restlessness, this living in contradiction, is what gives life to a Late Style that engenders creative resistance. In this sense, as Said explains in On Late Style, ‘[l]ateness therefore is a kind of self-imposed exile from what is generally acceptable, coming after it, and surviving beyond it’ (2007, 16). To exile oneself from what is generally acceptable requires a conscious attitude that rejects the hegemon and stands at the margins of society with the downtrodden and oppressed. Lateness is not only linked to intellectuality—via both physical and metaphorical exile—it is also related to impending death due to either illness or old age, where ‘lateness retains in it the late phase of a human life’ (Said, 2007, 13). Both Said’s leukaemia diagnosis and Darwish’s heart condition directly inspired Out of Place: A Memoir (1999) and ‘Mural’ (2003a), respectively. Both works represent a defiance and refusal to surrender in the face of death, which are essential features of Late Style. However, while experience, advanced age, and illness are important conditions of Late Style in these intellectuals’ works, this chapter argues that Late Style can also be practiced by younger Palestinians. It is possible to reconfigure Said’s concept of Late Style to include not only experience gained by age, illness, and knowledge of the past, but also experience gained by what Mourid Barghouti describes as repetition in his second memoir, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here (2009; trans. 2011). Barghouti’s concept of repetition enables Palestinian youth to experience a metaphorical lateness, which matches the intellectual lateness of these three great Palestinian thinkers. The post-millennial generation in Palestine has reached a stage of defiance and anger borne of a lateness not of old age or ill health but of the repetition of the daily hardship, suffering, and death perpetrated against them by the Zionist state. This repetition of catastrophe enables Palestinian youth who have experienced numerous horrors, such as the Israeli bombardment of Gaza in 2008–09 and 2014, to re-live and re-imagine the Nakba, a memory that is more than a memory as it is lived and re-lived in the daily nakbas of the Palestinian people. The younger generations of Palestine possess a deep understanding of the present, which is another essential feature of Late Style: ‘Lateness is being at the end, fully conscious, full of memory, and also very […] aware of the present’ (Said, 2007, 14). These young people are not

34

Post-Millennial Palestine

facing impending death due to illness, but continue to face the same external threats to their existence and their national identity as was experienced by Said, Darwish, and Barghouti. In this first quarter of the twenty-first century, the Palestinian cause has reached a critical juncture, following the proposed ‘Deal of the Century,’ designed by the American and Israeli governments with the support of some Arab states. The ‘Deal of the Century’ represents the effective continuation of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and is the most recent version of the so-called ‘peace’ treaties (of capitulation), which started with the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978, followed by the Oslo Accords between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel in 1993, and the Wadi Araba Agreement between Jordan and Israel in 1994. Said, Darwish, and Barghouti vehemently opposed the Oslo Accords, as is poignantly expressed by Said in ‘On Lost Causes’: ‘To me and every Palestinian I know these agreements signify defeat, not only militarily and territorially but, more important, morally’ (2001, 550). This Arab defeatism continues in the post-millennial era with several Arab countries (especially in the Gulf region) having already normalized their relations with Israel while attacking Palestinian and Lebanese resistance (see: Abu Hannieh, 2018; Salem and Alsharif, 2016). In the face of such political manoeuvring, Late Style, as a mode of creative resistance, is now more important than ever. The intellectual is called upon to nurture a critical consciousness that, according to Said in The World, the Text and the Critic (1983), works against all domineering forces (local, regional, or international) that aim at making the Arab masses compliant to hegemonic power structures (1991, 24). This oppositional thinking that sincere Arab intellectuals aim to nurture is, at its core, what Said calls ‘secular criticism,’ which places criticism before solidarity (1991, 28). This critical consciousness of which Said speaks is of the utmost importance in the post-millennial era, especially as the Palestinian cause is at a crucial crossroads. Thus, Late Style is not only about anger, defiance, and a refusal to surrender, but also entails a deep understanding of historical and political events, an understanding that cannot be tamed or fixed by distinct descriptors. As Said puts it: ‘criticism modified in advance by labels like “Marxism” or “liberalism” is, in my view, an oxymoron’ (1991, 28). A critical consciousness is also an exilic one, characterized by dispossession and, thus, Late Style. In his introduction to After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986), Said describes the unity between aesthetic form and experience: ‘Since the main features of our present existence are dispossession, dispersion,

Late Style as Resistance

35

and yet also a kind of power incommensurate with our stateless exile, I believe that essentially unconventional, hybrid, and fragmentary forms of expression should be used to represent us’ (1993 [1986], 6). The style that Said describes here is equally recognized in On Late Style (2007). For Said, the mixing of genres and modes of expression reflects the Palestinians’ difficult experience of dispossession and dispersion. Although the Palestinian people’s misery began with the 1948 Nakba, catastrophe is a repeated reality. This is aptly described by Darwish in his poem ‘Earth Presses Against Us’ (originally published in Arabic in 1986). In this poem, Darwish describes the impending death (and defiance) of not one individual facing death, but of a whole people that have been dispossessed, which prompts the poet to ask: ‘Where do birds fly after the last sky?’ (Darwish, 2003b, 9). This iconic line was later borrowed by Said for his book After the Last Sky. The Palestinian people have experienced repeated moments of dispossession: from their homeland in 1948 and 1967, from Jordan in the early 1970s during ‘Black September,’ and in Lebanon in 1982, the latter of which is the subject of ‘Earth Presses Against Us.’ Does the uprooting of Palestinians and their resistance at what Darwish refers to as the last border, which is the very definition of lateness, signal a surrendering to death? In the bleak opening of his poem, Darwish writes: ‘Earth is pressing against us, trapping us in the final passage’ (2003b, 9). The diminishing of the space—the earth, the land—takes on a dangerous quality for the Palestinians who keep on losing their place—who are continually forced to pass onto their next destination. Dispossession continues to be a repeated Palestinian catastrophe that is not relegated to memory, but is very much a living part of the present. The final passage in Lebanon, referred to in this poem, was used by the PLO, and was invaded by Israeli forces in 1982 in order to root out any form of Palestinian resistance. After the Palestinians lose the final passage, Darwish evokes the symbolic image of the olive tree and defiantly answers this loss with a refusal to surrender: ‘Here we will die. Here, in the final passage. / Here or there, our blood will plant olive trees’ (2003b, 9). Darwish leaves room for hope, in the form of a growing olive tree. Darwish sees this refusal to surrender as being best exemplified in his fellow intellectual, Said, who does not deny his own mortality and impending death, but remains a tireless fighter for the oppressed as he fights his own terminal illness (Williams, 2012, 34). In the closing lines of ‘Counterpoint,’ Darwish’s tribute to Said after his death, the poet writes about when he visited Said in 2002 in New York:

36

Post-Millennial Palestine

When I visited him in New Sodom, in the year two thousand and two, he was resisting the war of Sodom against Babylon, and cancer at the same time. He was the last hero in that epic, defending the rights of Troy. (2009, 94) Said’s very life is Late Style in motion: aware of his impending death, Said does not surrender, but fights both his cancer and the imperialist colonizer/invader, symbolized in the poem as Sodom and Babylon (Iraq). Here, it is easy to see that the writer and art cannot be separated from reality. As Darwish writes in his 2002 poem ‘State of Siege’: ‘The martyr teaches me: no aesthetic[s] outside my freedom’ (2007, 163). For Darwish, there is no poetry that can be separated from the freedom of the oppressed; in the same way, Said’s fight against cancer is also a fight against oppression. The theme of aesthetics and freedom is once again pondered in ‘Counterpoint’: He says: The poem may host loss, as a thread of light flashing in the heart of a guitar or a Messiah on a horse, pierced by beautiful, figurative   language. The aesthetic is only The incarnation of Truth in form. (2009, 93) In other words, beauty cannot exist in isolation, for aesthetic is the incarnation of Truth. Art and beauty also mean to make beautiful, to end catastrophe and oppression. Darwish has a near death experience in 1999–2000, which he documents in his epic poem, ‘Mural’ (2003a). The poet states: ‘When I wrote Mural, which relates to my own death, I aimed to explore the theme of death, but rereading it when I had finished, I realized it was a hymn to life’ (cited in Williams, 2012, 34). ‘Mural’ documents the poet’s and, allegorically, his nation’s near death, which then becomes a hymn of return and reclamation of life and land. Darwish does not refuse his own mortality, rather, his refusal to surrender is epitomized in the very title of this poem. This poetic ‘mural’ serves to document history, recalling the stories that survive through the ancient murals of past civilizations, while, at the same time, evoking the writings

Late Style as Resistance

37

and drawings on the walls of refugee camps in Occupied Palestine. These ‘murals’ (or graffiti) represent and fuel the resistance of the Palestinian people, especially the younger generations brought up in the post-millennial period. Thus, Darwish’s poetic mural represents both survival (keeping the narrative alive) and resistance (as in protest art or the art of defiance), and return and reclamation. Darwish documents his (and his people’s) imaginative return to Palestine, reclaiming his lost space, repossessing every particle of sand of his lost homeland: What was mine: my yesterday. What will be mine: the distant tomorrow, and the return of the wandering soul as if nothing had   happened. (2003a, 161) Darwish reclaims his life, his land, his yesterday and tomorrow, and most importantly, announces his return. He does not surrender to illness, death, or dispossession. Darwish’s voice resounds loud and clear in the poem’s final line: ‘This sea is mine. The fresh air is mine’ (2003a, 161). The repeated, possessive use of ‘mine’ here is a conscious act of the reclamation of the land, which, for Said, is an important feature of the culture of resistance: ‘One of the first tasks of the culture of resistance was to reclaim, rename, and re-inhabit the land. And with that came a whole set of further assertions, recoveries, and identifications, all of them quite literally grounded on this poetically projected base’ (1993 [1986], 226). ‘Mural,’ which was inspired by Darwish’s near death experience, turns into a defiant call of reclamation, resistance, and return. Refusing treacherous surrender, Darwish writes in his poem ‘On a Canaanite Stone at the Dead Sea’: Father, I am myself despite my defeat. I’ve seen my days spread before me and a moon among my papers overlooking the palm trees. I’ve seen an abyss. I’ve seen war after war. One tribe became extinct. One told the new Hulagu, ‘We’re yours.’ I say: We’re not a slave nation, with all due respects to Ibn Khaldoun. (2000, 80; emphasis in the original)

38

Post-Millennial Palestine

In spite of defeat and repeated catastrophes (‘war after war’), Darwish remains steadfast, insisting, ‘We’re not a slave nation.’ Darwish’s speaker will never surrender to the new Hulagu. The surrender of Ibn Khaldun and Arab tribes to Hulagu in the thirteenth century represent certain Arab regimes that currently believe they can be protected by the US (the new Hulagu) and its allies today. For Darwish, Arab regimes that ally themselves to the new Hulagu also support sectarian and divisionist agendas, which are spread by the media and religious apparatuses of these Arab states. For example, the poet laments the current (sectarian) state of Iraq, and, in a sense, the rest of the Arab world in a poem entitled ‘Iraq’s Night is Long’ (2013). Here, Darwish realizes that the occupation and destruction of Iraq makes the road to Palestine longer still, and the same is true of the recent conflict in other Arab countries, such as Syria, Libya, and Yemen. In ‘Iraq’s Night is Long,’ which he dedicates to the Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef, Darwish writes: ‘Iraq, Iraq is cemeteries that are open, like schools, / to everyone: / Armenian, Turkmen, and Arab. We are all equal in eschatology’ (Darwish, 2013, n.p.). At its conclusion, the poem laments: “God has abandoned the perplexed, so who are we? / Who are we? We are nothing but a predicate in the poem: / Iraq’s night is long / Long!” (Darwish, 2013, n.p.). Darwish condemns the Western-revived sectarian and ethnic divide that is part of the ‘creative chaos’ officially introduced in the Arab world with the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US and its allies (Baker et al., 2010, 39). According to Baker et al. the invasion was aimed to be ‘state ending,’ an intentional policy whereby certain nations not contained within the American sphere of influence are destroyed ‘in the interest of an imagined [American] remaking’ (2010, 39). In his poem, Darwish reminds Iraqis that the cemeteries of Iraq are open for all religions, sects, and ethnicities and (invoking grammatical language) wonders why the perplexed Iraqis have literally become a ‘predicate’ as opposed to an active agent. Iraqis fell prey to imperialist designs when sect turned against sect, tribe against tribe, brother against brother, which makes the poet ask, ‘Who is killing whom in Iraq now?’ (Darwish, 2013, n.p.). Across his works, Darwish criticizes defeatist Arab regimes who, instead of standing their ground, have chosen to take an active part in the American and Zionist remaking of the Arab region by signing capitulation treaties, such as Camp David, the Oslo Accords, and Wadi Araba. Like Darwish, Mourid Barghouti’s late works are equally angry, intransigent, and refuse surrender and defeatism. In his memoir, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here (2009; trans. 2011), Barghouti fiercely

Late Style as Resistance

39

criticizes the defeatist mentality of Arab regimes, which he calls a ‘fear of victory’ (2011 [2009], 212). He writes: ‘I think this over and say to myself that it is our “moderate” leaders, who fear victory and make no preparations for it, who give Israel the impression that it will never know anything but victory while we will never know anything but defeat’ (2011 [2009], 34). The defeatism of Arab regimes is shared by the Palestinian Authority (PA), against which Barghouti reserves his severest criticism. Barghouti derides the PA: ‘Yes! From a liberation movement of stubborn persistence it has [turned] into a fat, flabby NGO [non-governmental organization] at which they [imperialists] brandish the stick and the carrot’ (2011 [2009], 154). Here, Barghouti expresses frustration that the PA has chosen to surrender by disavowing armed resistance in favour of meaningless negotiations while at the same time coordinating ‘security’ issues with the Zionist state. Said’s attack on the Oslo Accords is just as harsh as Barghouti’s, as is evident in ‘On Lost Causes’: But does the consciousness and even the actuality of a lost cause entail that sense of defeat and resignation that we associate with the abjections of capitulation and the dishonor of grinning and bowing survivors who opportunistically fawn on their conquerors and seek to ingratiate themselves with the new dispensation? Must it always result in the broken will and demoralized pessimism of the defeated? (2001, 552) Said, like Darwish and Barghouti, blames the Oslo Agreement between the PLO and Israel for the humiliating capitulation of the PA. Much of what Said says in this political essay is similar to his description of the aesthetically based Late Style in his posthumously published book of the same name. In place of the abhorrent defeatism of the PA, Said offers the hope, defiance, and intransigence of the individual thinker ‘whose power of expression is a power […] that enacts a movement of vitality, a gesture of defiance, a statement of hope whose “unhappiness” and meager survival are better than silence or joining in the chorus of defeated activists’ (2001, 552–53). For Said, Darwish, and Barghouti, there is hope in the ‘possibility of resistance’ that can inspire the need to ‘begin again,’ an intentional act on the part of the oppressed that makes Said wonder ‘if any lost cause can ever really be lost’ (2001, 553). In place of the ‘broken will and demoralized pessimism of the defeated’ PA and moderate Arabs (Said, 2001, 552), Barghouti offers the ingenuity,

40

Post-Millennial Palestine

resourcefulness, and creativity of the Palestinian people, who cannot be broken and cannot be defeated. Barghouti narrates a certain incident that he experiences with six other popular writers: Mahmoud Darwish, the Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, the Spanish poet Juan Goytisolo, the South African writer Breyten Breytenbach, the Italian writer Vincenzo Consolo, and the American poet Bei Dao. Barghouti explains that the Occupation keeps coming up with ways to make the everyday life of Palestinians unbearable, such as imposing street closures, setting up military checkpoints, and cutting off roads by ‘using dynamite and bulldozers to create chasms, trenches, and dikes [so] that cars can’t cross’ (2011 [2009], 22). The car taking the group of seven writers to Jericho comes upon a 500-metre-long trench created when the Israeli army intentionally destroyed a mountain road; the driver, Mahmoud Darwish, has the car taken to the other side with the help of a huge crane, which carries the car and its seven passengers to their momentary exile in the air: The suspended bubble of air in which we seven are swinging is now our place of exile from this earth […] This bubble of air is the unyielding Occupation itself. It is the rootless roaming of the Palestinians through the air of others’ countries. In the world’s air we seek refuge from our earth. We sink into the upper spaces. We sink upward […] This absurd bubble of air is Mahmoud’s way of letting no obstacle defeat him and force him to take us back in failure. (Barghouti, 2011 [2009], 19) This incident, which is a somewhat ordinary event in Occupied Palestine, becomes symbolic of the creativity of the resistance of Palestinians living under occupation, a people who, unlike the PA, refuse to surrender under the most difficult of circumstances. They invent new ways to survive, as Barghouti writes: ‘What matters is that for every obstacle the Occupation sets, Palestinian desperation finds a solution’ (2011 [2009], 22). In this particular event, the writers’ suspension in the bubble of air represents the exiled existence of the Palestinian intellectual. The two Palestinian writers, Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti, in being suspended in the air by the crane, are physically and metaphorically in a ‘place of exile from this earth.’ It is this exiled existence, this out of placeness, to rephrase Said, which enables these intellectuals to critically and imaginatively recover Palestine in their work in exile. In fact, it is this suspension, difficulty, tension, and restlessness that becomes enabling

Late Style as Resistance

41

and empowering. Similarly, the Occupation is continuously creating difficulty and obstacles for Palestinians, but instead of breaking their will, it only empowers them to create new ways to resist. This creativity of Palestinian resistance is what offers hopeful beginnings, which are engendered by the extreme difficulty of Palestinian existence or the daily catastrophe of Palestinian life. Barghouti ends his memoir I Was Born There, I Was Born Here with a chapter entitled ‘An Ending Leading to the Beginning?’ emphasizing the idea of the lateness of beginnings. Barghouti’s beginning is signalled by a spray of bullets directed against corrupt PA men by ‘armed fighters belonging to Fatah’ (2011 [2009], 211). This symbolic incident represents a ‘final scream of protest’ (2011 [2009], 212), an ending signalling a beginning. Barghouti insists that the PA’s official position is not the Palestinian people’s ‘last word’ (2011 [2009], 212–13). As he puts it at the conclusion of his book: The Palestinian cause is starting over again from the beginning. Wasn’t the beginning that a land was occupied and has to be reclaimed? And that a people was expelled from its land and has to return? Is the end that we have come to today anything other than that beginning? (2011 [2009], 214) The Palestinian cause is not owned and cannot be monopolized by the defeated PA that does not believe in revolutionary struggle and has now spent twenty-five years involved in futile negotiations with the Zionist state while hundreds of new Israeli settlements have been built on the ‘West Bank’ that Barghouti refuses to name as such, preferring to call it ‘eastern Palestine’ (2011 [2009], 139). The cause can, and has, been taken up by a brave new post-millennial generation of Palestinians who understand that a ‘people was expelled from its land and has to return.’ Newer generations do not dwell upon the sentimentality and nostalgia of older generations. However, this does not mean that they do not possess a deep understanding of history, a functional understanding that is put to effective use. Although the new generations did not experience the 1948 Nakba, or even the 1967 Naksa, the daily, monthly, and yearly repetition of death, massacres, and blood as described by Barghouti, is what links the past to the present and future: In long conflicts, the weaker party experiences what might be called ‘historical pain.’ In such conflicts, the incident, the word, and the teardrop repeat themselves. Everything is

42

Post-Millennial Palestine

repeated. Despair is repeated and hope is repeated. Heroism and treachery are repeated. Blood recurs and elegies recur. (2011 [2009], 144) The repetition of despairing events is what equips new generations of Palestinians with a purposeful anger, which they can employ in all forms of resistance (both armed and creative) against the Occupation inside and outside Palestine. All of the repeated incidents, words, teardrops, blood, elegies, heroism, and treachery are part of an ingrained memory that has become an essential feature of Palestinian collective memory. This ‘historical pain’ has been absorbed by the new generations not because the older generations taught them about the past, but because they live daily nakbas (Hamdi, 2016, 663–64). Darwish states: ‘The Israelis want to continue the Nakba. They want it to renew and repeat itself, as if the War of 1948—and that is what they say—had never ended’ (cited in Williams, 2012, 30). Thus, for new generations of Palestinians, the catastrophic is a daily event. However, instead of having the effect the Zionist state hoped for—that of defeat—newer generations of Palestinians have nurtured hope. This hopeful defiance is also very clearly seen in Barghouti’s poem entitled ‘Midnight’ (2008) which in its title combines the very definition of the lateness of beginnings. The poem conveys a kind of lateness, one that signifies death. ‘Midnight’ features many harrowing images of death as a result of the barbaric occupation of the Zionist state, with one such example hauntingly presented here: The way to the maternity hospital is blocked. The baby girl born first on the asphalt died first; her twin, born second, died second (there is no time to give them names). The age of the first baby: zero. Her sister’s age: one day. The two new-borns managed to die at a military checkpoint. (Barghouti, 2008, 136–38) The image of the innocent death of the two new-borns, who die on the asphalt of one of the many Zionist state’s military checkpoints,

Late Style as Resistance

43

emphasizes the barbarity of the Occupation. The new-borns are not allowed to be born by the Occupation, dying at age zero and one day. Meanwhile, the description of the barbaric slaughter of a young Palestinian boy, described as ‘the size of a bouquet,’ killed by an Israeli tank, ‘the size of history’ (Barghouti, 2008, 162) makes one wonder what exactly about the boy does the Zionist state, armed to the teeth, fear? In a strange reversal, the Zionist state’s aim of breaking the will of the Palestinian people fails miserably; the Palestinians grow in courage as their enemies grow in fear: ‘What, at the climax of your victory, is it / that makes you so scared?’ (Barghouti, 2008, 166). Barghouti goes on to ponder the fear of the enemy: In your intimate madness, you’ll keep listening to the rustle of leaves through the window: March, February, August, January, June. (2008, 167) The enemy fears the new Palestinian generations that have not forgotten. How could they forget? The Zionist state has kept the Nakba alive with its daily atrocities, its daily occupation. The Zionist state fears the children of Palestine: it fears the 20-year-old Gaza paramedic and martyr, Razan Al Najjar, who worked near the Gaza border helping injured protesters and fearlessly putting her own young life at risk before an Israeli sniper fatally pierced her heart (see: Fletcher, 2018); it fears the defiant fighter, Ahmed Jarrar of Jenin (see: Alsaafin, 2018); it fears the double amputee activist, Ibrahim Abu Thurayah of Gaza (see: Roberts, 2017); and it fears the piercing screams of Ahed Al Tamimi of Al Nabi Saleh, Ramallah (see: Holmes and Taha, 2018). Such brave young people are the leaders of the ‘Great March of Return,’ which represents, among other things, the Palestinian people’s rejection of the so-called ‘Deal of the Century.’ The Palestinian people have refused to surrender in the face of death. On its first day, on 30 March 2018, the ‘Great March of Return’ saw at least eighteen young Palestinians martyred and about 1,500 others injured, with the death toll continuing to rise thereafter. Refusing treacherous surrender, the defiant creativity of young Gazans was observed in what has come to be known as Gaza’s ‘fire kites,’ which young Gazans direct against the Zionist state, turning a simple and harmless toy into a potent weapon, causing vast fires on the enemy side.

44

Post-Millennial Palestine

These young Palestinians are not in need of the experience that comes with old age, illness, or a particular catastrophic memory from the past in order to reach a state of Late Style resistance precisely because they experience repeated daily nakbas. They feel the historical pain; they live the catastrophic, the lost totality, and lateness, and this lateness can only engender beginnings—a fearless defiance and a refusal to surrender. As for those for whom it may seem so utterly late—a metaphoric middle of the night—Barghouti declares: I, who have lost my battles, have nothing left but to work in construction, and to build, with my two desperate hands, four walls for hope. (2008, 164) While midnight is indeed late, it simultaneously heralds the coming of a new day: On the same nail, from the same wall, hang the new calendar. (2008, 168) References Abu Hannieh, Hassan (2018) ‘Why Does Saudi Arabia Describe Hamas as a Terrorist Organization?’ Middle East Monitor, 9 March. Available at: . Accessed 10 April 2019. Alsaafin, Lindah (2018) ‘Israel Kills Palestinian after Month-long Manhunt’ Aljazeera, 6 February. Available at: . Accessed 11 April 2019. Baker, Raymond, Shereen Ismael, and Tareq Ismael (2010) ‘Ending the Iraqi State.’ Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered, ed. Raymond Baker, Shereen Ismael, and Tareq Ismael. London and New York: Pluto Press. 3–48. Barghouti, Mourid (2008) Midnight And Other Poems. Trans. Radwa Ashour. Todmorden: Arc Publications.

Late Style as Resistance

45

Barghouti, Mourid (2011 [2009]) I Was Born There, I Was Born Here. Trans. Humphrey Davies. New York: Walker Publishing. Darwish, Mahmoud (2000) The Adam of Two Edens. Trans. and eds. Munir Akash and Daniel Moore. Syracuse: Jusoor and Syracuse University Press. Darwish, Mahmoud (2003a) ‘Mural.’ Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. Trans. and eds. Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche. Berkeley: University of California Press. 119–62. Darwish, Mahmoud (2003b) Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. Trans. and eds. Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche. Berkeley: University of California Press. Darwish, Mahmoud (2007) ‘State of Siege.’ The Butterfly’s Burden. Trans. Fady Joudah. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press. 119–73. Darwish, Mahmoud (2009) ‘Counterpoint.’ Almond Blossoms and Beyond. Trans. Mohammad Shaheen. Northampton, MA: Interlink Publishing Group. 87–95. Darwish, Mahmoud (2013) ‘Iraq’s Night is Long.’ Trans. Sinan Antoon. Jadaliyya. Available at: . Accessed 5 March 2019. Fletcher, Lily (2018) ‘Razan al-Najjar: 21-year-old Palestinian Medic Who Became a Symbol in Gaza.’ The Independent, 17 June. Available at: . Accessed 11 April 2019. Hamdi, Tahrir (2016) ‘The Power of Poetry to Travel: An Interview with Mourid Barghouti.’ Arab Studies Quarterly 38.4: 656–75. Holmes, Oliver, and Sufian Taha. ‘Ahed Tamimi: “I am a Freedom Fighter. I Will Not be the Victim.”’ The Guardian, 30 July. Available at: . Accessed 11 April 2019. Roberts, Rachel (2017) ‘Ibrahim Abu Thuraya: Disabled Palestinian Activist Shot Dead by Israeli Troops in Jerusalem Protest.’ The Independent, 16 December. Available at: . Accessed 11 April 2019. Said, Edward (1975) Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books, Inc. Said, Edward (1991) The World, the Text and the Critic. London: Vintage Books. Said, Edward (1993 [1986]) After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. London: Vintage Books.

46

Post-Millennial Palestine

Said, Edward (1994) Representations of the Intellectual. London: Vintage Books. Said, Edward (1995 [1978]) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin Books. Said, Edward (1999) Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Vintage Books. Said, Edward (2001) ‘On Lost Causes.’ Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 527–53. Said, Edward (2007) On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain. New York: Pantheon. Salem, Mostafa, and Asma Alsharif (2016) ‘Arab League Labels Hezbollah Terrorist Organization.’ Reuters, 11 March. Available at: . Accessed 10 April 2019. Williams, Patrick (2012) ‘“No Aesthetics Outside My Freedom”: Mahmoud Darwish and Late Style.’ Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 14.1: 24–36.

chapter two A ‘Rich Fabric of Some Sort, Which No One Can Fully Comprehend [or] Fully Own’ Levantine Remains in Memoirs by Edward Said, Jean Said Makdisi, and Wadad Makdisi Cortas By Lindsey Moore Levantine Remains in Memoirs ‘Memory is political in Israel and Palestine,’ Raja Shehadeh reminds us in Where the Line is Drawn: Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine (2017, 223). His latest book, on difficult friendship, emphasizes bordercrossing in space and time. It strenuously resists the ongoing effects of ‘lines drawn in the sand,’ a phrase redolent of the Sykes–Picot or Asia Minor Agreement, ratified in May 1916, that inaugurated the division of formerly Ottoman territory (see: Shohat, 1992, 99; Barr, 2011). While Shehadeh’s work repeatedly archives the regional reality that preceded modern nation-states in the Levant (see, in particular: 2010), he is not the only writer to mine a Levantine paradigm prospectively, as well as retrospectively. This chapter considers what ‘Levantine remains’ yield for post-millennial Palestine, particularly in the context of a seemingly moribund ‘two-state solution.’ It takes up the regional optic of a multigenerational extended-family narrative in Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir (1999), his sister Jean Said Makdisi’s Teta, Mother and Me: An Arab Woman’s Memoir (2005), and his mother-in-law Wadad Makdisi Cortas’ A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman (2009).1 The Said– Makdisi–Cortas family collectively summon, through memoirs and paratexts, a ‘lost’ or otherwise ‘forgotten’ Levantine world (E. Said, 1

See also: Najla Said (2013). Mariam Said oversaw the English edition of her mother’s memoir after Edward’s failed efforts to publish it; she provides an introduction and their daughter, Najla, the ‘Afterword.’ Two shorter Arabic editions were published, in the early 1960s (under Wadad Khuri-Makdisi) and posthumously in 1982. 47

48

Post-Millennial Palestine

2000 [1999], xiii; Makdisi, 2005, 23; M. Said, 2009, xxvii; Cortas, 2009, 1; N. Said, 2009, 194). The ‘Shāmi’2—rather than national—inflection of these memoirs illuminates ways in which colonial fragmentation of a formerly integrated region underpins transgenerational (im)mobilities.3 In archiving ways in which historically produced ‘facts on the ground’ have etiolated Levantine identities, these authors also resuscitate embedded, expansive models of being Palestinian. Reading these three memoirs together reinforces an important point made by Bart Moore-Gilbert: that E. Said ‘enlarges the possibility of solidarity by affirming hybridity and multiplicity as the “essence” of the category “Palestinian”’ (Moore-Gilbert, 2009, 120). Robert Young, in an article that ‘effectively shifts the centre of gravity of postcolonialism […] back to Middle East Studies’ (Hassan, 2019, 46), asserts the value of remembering instances of ‘diversity that preceded nation formation’ (Young, 2012, 33). Young emphasizes tenthcentury al-Andalus and the Ottoman Empire, the latter ‘a long-lasting system of comparative tolerance of diversity and cultural syncretism that was only destroyed by European imperial greed and the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century’ (2012, 34). Such histories, he suggests, might linger productively as ‘postcolonial remains’ (2012, 32). My chapter presses upon the means and ends to which the extendedfamily memoirs of E. Said, Makdisi, and Cortas—published in English from 1999 to 2009—leverage Levantine remains. Critical Levantinism is interpreted in the context of Palestine’s ongoing ‘colonial present’ (see: Gregory, 2004), in which the right to self-representation has been preeminently (although not exclusively) articulated, and repeatedly forestalled, through the logic of the nation-state.

2

3

These authors denote that which is from Bilād al-Shām. The Levant (the east, where the sun rises, a medieval European designation) is broadly synonymous (al-shām, the north, is an orientation from the Hijaz). As an Ottoman super-province, Bilād al-Shām’s glue was Islam, as majority religion, and its logic economic. Identities were polycentric and multi-layered, particularly in ancient cities such as Jerusalem (Macmillan, 2016, 80–82). The historic area corresponds to modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine/Israel. I reconsider, here, my prior framing of E. Said’s and Makdisi’s texts as Nakba memoirs (Moore, 2018, 168–87).

Levantine Remains in Memoirs

49

From the Horizon to the Hollow Land Contemporary ‘technologies of control’ in Palestine/Israel are, as Eyal Weizman argues in Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, the terminus of ‘an evolutionary chain of techniques of colonization, occupation and governance’ (2012 [2007], 9). In the post-millennial period, the cartographic imaginary of the (Israeli) nation-state elastically encompasses ‘a multitude of temporary, transportable, deployable and removable border-synonyms—“separation walls”, “barriers”, “blockades”, “closures”, “road blocks”, “checkpoints”, “sterile areas”, “special security zones”, “closed military areas” and “killing zones”— that shrink and expand the territory at will’ (Weizman, 2012 [2007], 6). This is a context defined by spatial and linguistic violence, including obfuscation of what has, in fact, ‘been a relatively straightforward process of colonization [and] dispossession’ (Weizman, 2012 [2007], 9). Palestinian agency, nevertheless, ‘makes itself manifest […] holding steadfastly to its ground’ (Weizman, 2012 [2007], 7). Palestinian writers often perceive their creativity as a form of ṣ umud (for example, see: Shehadeh, 2008 [2007], 189). The writers discussed in this chapter, in revivifying history, refuse the ongoing eradication of ‘spaces of belonging’ for Palestinians enclosed in—or exiled from—‘ever diminishing territorial spaces’ (Fields, 2017, 6). In Teta, Mother and Me (2005), Jean Said Makdisi imaginatively recreates her newly married great-grandmother Leila’s migration in 1872, by mule and horse, from the village of Schweir in Mount Lebanon,4 over Mount Sannine, to the town of Zahleh in the Bekaa Valley, and then by carriage to Damascus and eventually Homs. Leila and her husband journey across an integrated region. In Makdisi’s reconstruction of the journey, the horizon is vast: terraced orchards, pine trees, and wild flowers yield expansively to ‘the bleak beauty of the anti-Lebanon range, and then the Syrian desert, majestic and awe-inspiring in its bleak emptiness […] Overhead, waves of migrating birds would soar—herons and storks, eagles and swallows’ (2005, 154). If the distance by direct flight is about 130 kilometres, Leila’s journey is circuitous and more arduous. However, there were, at that time, no political barriers to traversing Greater Syria (Bilād al-Shām). In the prologue to her memoir, Makdisi speaks of the ‘archaeological’ work of reconstructing her heritage by travelling around the Levant, reading, looking at photographs, studying the natural environment, 4

I replicate the authors’ spellings.

50

Post-Millennial Palestine

and discussing material culture such as costume and cuisine with older people (2005, 23). The process generates ‘a sense of continuity’ and recognition of ‘the way one civilization interacts with another’ historically (Makdisi, 2005, 23). Through her research and writing, ‘[t]he history of the region came to life, and with it an era long past, and forgotten by many—when historical Syria was one open space, and the whole region was connected with itself and with its past’ (2005, 23). The multi-generational structure of Teta, Mother and Me gives historical depth to the colonial reconfiguration of Bilād al-Shām that enabled, among other things, the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Great-grandmother Leila’s journey precedes but anticipates colonial intervention proper. The challenge to Ottoman integrity was first ascertainable in the different Christian missions that ‘penetrated [its] densely woven and richly diverse cultural tapestry’ from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards (Makdisi, 2005, 145). Leila’s husband, Youssef Badr (b. 1840), went to an American Presbyterian mission school and converted from Greek Catholicism to Protestantism in 1867; he relocated to Homs to become a pastor. His and Leila’s daughter, Munira—the author’s ‘Teta’ (grandmother)—is born there in 1880. She, in turn, marries a Baptist minister born in Safad, in the Galilee, and they move to Nazareth, where their children are born. One of them, Hilda, marries Wadie Said, from Jerusalem, ‘as were his parents, grandparents, and all his family back in time to a distant vanishing point’ (E. Said, 1986, 14). Wadie’s ancestors, his son Edward Said surmises, converted from Greek Orthodoxy in the 1870s to become ‘stolidly Anglican’ (1987, 24; cited in Marrouchi, 2004, 245). If this synopsis of a family’s geographical and ideological mobility bewilders, one can sympathize with E. Said’s claim, in Out of Place, that, as a child, he had no idea who his mother Hilda was, ‘in the national sense of the phrase’ (2000 [1999], 5). Growing up in Cairo— to which the family relocated in 1947—he could hear through her Egyptian Arabic to one that was differently accented: ‘if not outright Shami, then perceptibly inflected by it’ (2000 [1999], 5). The frame of perception is split by (im)maturity, imperfect memory, and historically variant ways of defining identity. Hilda was, in fact, both ‘from Greater Syria’ and ‘Palestinian, even though her mother, Munira was Lebanese,’ the latter a retrospective ascription for someone born in Homs (E. Said, 2000 [1999], 5). This grounding of ‘Palestinian’ within expansive space accentuates the tragedy that Hilda, born so rich in ‘national’ identity,

Levantine Remains in Memoirs

51

dies in exile (E. Said, 2000 [1999], 132–33).5 Hers is a story of multiple amputated roots: she loses Palestine in the 1940s, leaves Egypt in the 1950s, and is forced out of Lebanon during the 1975–90 war. Hilda’s life epitomizes what E. Said calls his ‘deeply disorganized’ family (and by implication Palestinian) history, something ‘gleaned […] in bits’ and resistant to full reconstruction: ‘the total picture was never quite right’ (E. Said, 2000 [1999], 6). Genealogical uncertainty, partly due to shifting configurations of identity in the Levant, is one thing that leads to Said’s enduring sense of being ‘out of place,’ destabilizing the ostensibly conventional, developmental structure of his memoir. Introducing her mother Wadad Makdisi Cortas’ A World I Loved, Mariam Said (née Cortas) echoes her late husband Edward when she says that for Wadad and Hilda’s generation, the post-Ottoman ‘Middle East’ seemed composed of ‘precarious’ entities (M. Said, 2009, xxvi). Growing up in Beirut, Cortas recalls resentment at the French mandatory division of Greater Syria, ‘hampering the flow of people and trade in an area that had never been boundary-conscious’ (2009, 34). By 1927, a family trip to Jerusalem—whose ‘Arab face […] was evident in the behaviour, carriage, attire, and language of the city’s dwellers’ and had been so ‘for nearly 2,000 years’ (Cortas, 2009, 39)—necessitated the crossing of political frontiers that did not exist under Roman, Arab, or Ottoman rule. The European division of the Levant (and wider Mashriq) did not lead exclusively to new forms of enclosure, however. In the waxing and waning of French and British Mandates, ‘throngs of people were [put] in motion’ (Cortas, 2009, 53), a situation that reached its apotheosis in the Palestinian catastrophe (the Nakba). Cortas speaks of a study trip to Michigan in 1931, where ‘our nation’s future’ was the subject of impassioned debate among a diverse Arab group and the status of Palestine recognized as ‘the most acute problem’ (2009, 63). Indeed, for Arab students everywhere, ‘the problem of Palestine was our common denominator, the core of our thoughts and aspirations’ (Cortas, 2009, 67). The creation of three-quarters of a million refugees in 1948 would only confirm that ‘[t]he problem of Palestine was not contained within frontiers’ (Cortas, 2009, 147). Cortas visited Palestine again in the late 1950s, although the ‘coastal route to Jerusalem, used through the centuries by the Phoenicians and 5

Having left Palestine before 1948, Hilda was never able to return. She was eventually granted Lebanese citizenship. A compassionate judge overruled her deportation from the US during her final illness (E. Said, 2000 [1999], 132–33).

52

Post-Millennial Palestine

the Romans, Byzantines and Arabs, was now cut off. Our children would never travel the historic pilgrim road of their great-grandfathers’ (2009, 141). The recounting of this period in A World I Loved, in a section entitled ‘Fragments from a Shattered Place,’ sketches a region in turmoil: the bloody Algerian War of Independence from France begins (1954); King Faisal II is toppled in Iraq (1958); new alliances are also forged, notably between Egypt and Syria against Israel. The memoir ends in a similar structure of fragments, with the Lebanese war decried as the logical outcome of the region’s dissolution since 1916 (see also: Makdisi, 1990). Cortas’ ‘world,’ in her memoir, deteriorates into a zone of ‘endless war’ (2009, 189). Makdisi, similarly, cites ‘the historic wrong done decades ago in Palestine’ as catalyst for the ongoing violence in the region (2005, 109).6 While the ‘lost world’ Shāmi trope that these memoirs share initially evokes nostalgia, their structure of feeling is more akin to ‘critical melancholia’ (see: Khanna, 2006). In a wider analysis of Mashriqi memoirs of the first ‘postcolonial’ generation, Norbert Bugeja identifies dialectical interchange between the ‘often violent introduction of forms of Western modernity’ and the contingent identities thereby produced (2012, 9). Territorial disintegration produces a melancholic undertow or ‘elusive remainder’ (Bugeja, 2012, 29) that stymies autobiographical development. E. Said has said of post-1948 Palestinian culture, specifically, that memorializing practices ‘highlight’ and ‘preserve […] the rift or break fundamental to our lives’ (1986, 58). These memoirs show that this ‘rift’ is not experienced exclusively by those who identify as Palestinian. Across the three extended family memoirs, Palestine is decryptable as ‘common denominator’: the absent ‘core’ or defining hollow of a superseded Levantine orientation (Cortas, 2009, 67). Territorial fragmentation is most viscerally experienced by Palestinians who remain in what is now Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. But Palestinians more broadly represent a community of suffering. According to E. Said, his father Wadie acknowledged once—before succumbing to depression—that exile from Palestine, and Jerusalem specifically, represented the loss of ‘everything’; the subject was thereafter ‘repress[ed]’ within the family (2000 [1999], 115, 117). 6

The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire ‘created internal borders in a world that had no experience of them. In doing so, the Sykes-Picot Agreement wove intercommunal tension into the fabric of the states they created and stored up problems for the future’ (Macmillan, 2016, 82–83).

Levantine Remains in Memoirs

53

E. Said would only return ‘back to where it all started, the struggle over Palestine’ (2000 [1999], 293) during the 1967 Arab–Israeli War. Similarly, Ghada Karmi, in her first memoir In Search of Fatima, says that by the time she arrived in Britain, following her family’s 1948 flight from Jerusalem, she had ‘closed off the Palestine of my childhood into a private memory place’ (2002, 174). According to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (1994), loss can be defensively encrypted, but a melancholic attachment persists and may break through repression if compounded by further loss. Karmi’s denial of her origins cannot withstand the 1967 war and nor can E. Said’s. Karmi speaks to a shared project of critical archiving when she turns, as do E. Said, Makdisi, and Cortas, to memoir as a way of ‘unseal[ing] memory’ and ‘draw[ing] it back into communal space’ (Karmi, 2015, 212). In all of the cases discussed here, attachment to Palestine generates critical historiographical writing in the interests of solidarity. Makdisi, for example, pursues women’s roles in ‘the inner workings’ of a regional history whose ‘outer forms’ have tended to erase them (2005, 13). A key compositional technique is the collation of oral histories: the author also asks her mother Hilda to write down her memories. The resulting journal, which Jean only reads after Hilda’s death, provides a portal to ‘Teta’ Munira’s mental ‘database’ of ‘who left Palestine when, during, and after the war of 1948 that displaced her and her children’ (Makdisi, 2005, 16). Makdisi, via Hilda, is thus able to reposition and, in a more public way, emulate ‘Teta’ as ‘the unofficial chronicler of […] a time and place inordinately susceptible to change, to movement, to the destruction of more permanent forms of records’ (2005, 16). All three memoirs disinter an extended family narrative and contextualize its ellipses. In this manner, exile from historic Palestine, and more broadly from ways of belonging to an integrated region, emerges as a shared condition that E. Said, Makdisi, and Cortas insist upon and creatively resist. Rememoration, or Uses of Heritage Let us look more closely at some of the visual, textual, material, and sensory mnemonics in the E. Said, Makdisi, and Cortas memoirs, which have a declarative function—they bear witness to places in which Levantine lives were lived (see: Ricœur, 2004 [2000], 41–42). Anamnesis, as Paul Ricœur argues, is intentional: ‘re-memory’ (rémemoration) activates a claim and is oriented towards the future. As such,

54

Post-Millennial Palestine

memory should not be instrumentalized in the service of a fixed notion of identity or a rivalrous conception of trauma: ‘working through’ competing versions of the past is ideally collaborative work (2004 [2000], 57; 71). The memoirs under discussion represent an extended family’s connected historical experiences. They are linked by authorial signatures in themselves indicative of Levantine identities transformed by colonial modernity and its elisions. E. Said wryly evokes the discomfort induced not only by ‘“Edward”, a foolishly English name yoked forcibly to the unmistakably Arabic family name Said,’ but by the fact that he ‘discovered no grandparents called Said’ (2000 [1999], 3). If we map family names across the three memoirs, we do see that both Edward and Jean, who marry Lebanese, attach themselves to Makdisi lineage. This common regional family name (‫ )مقدسي‬originally means someone from, or who makes (Christian) pilgrimage to, al-Quds (bayt al-maqdis), or Jerusalem. While more commonly a Christian name, it is not exclusively so. In any case, Jerusalem has been an orientation point for Jews, Christians, and Muslims (ahl al-kitāb) in the Levant for millennia and, for Palestinians of all faiths, epitomizes what has been lost.7 In both Said’s and Makdisi’s memoirs, a Jerusalem past is evoked through a few surviving family photographs and scattered memories of the sensations and smells of dwelling and playing spaces. For all three writers (recall Cortas’ assertion of the Arab lineaments of the city), Jerusalem is ‘a haunting place’ (Marrouchi, 2004, 21). That these three memoirs also emphasize a constellated Levantine, or regional, identity is due to the class identity of these authors, all public figures in their lifetimes, whose families were on the move before 1948.8 E. Said’s and Makdisi’s ‘Teta’ and her parents, as we have seen, seized opportunities for upward mobility in a transitional period of Ottoman decline and European encroachment. Makdisi positions their ancestors on the ‘frontiers’ of a ‘new cultural map’: they are mediators of ‘modernity’ whose lifestyle blends rural and urban, Turkish and Arab, mountain and coastal, and ‘native’ and European ‘customs, clothes, food, furniture and manners’ (2005, 152, 160). Historically, as I discuss later, there has been an (often pejorative) 7

8

For illuminating guidance on the Makdisi name, I am grateful to Mariam Aboelezz, Madonna Kalousian, Ahmad Qabaha, and George Sadaka. Compare the intensely local memory work of Palestinians displaced from villages during the Nabka, for example by naming children after lost villages (Masalha, 2012, 206–08).

Levantine Remains in Memoirs

55

association of Levantinism with cultural hybridity or inauthenticity. Here let us emphasize that our three memoirists see their ancestors as agents actively participating in a ‘refashioning of cultural norms and practices’ (Elsadda, 2011, 212). Makdisi identifies with these figures who elected their own paths, even though this created ‘an enormous gulf’ between themselves and what she calls ‘the old society’ (2005, 152). For example, and in keeping with her feminist project, she emphasizes what her mother Hilda gains, as well as loses, in marrying the purposefully self-made Wadie.9 E. Said is less finely attuned, although not oblivious, to the specificities of social mobility. Out of Place includes one photograph, not addressed in the text, of Said aged six: ‘With my sister Rosy, in traditional Palestinian dress, Jerusalem, 1941’ (2000 [1999], n.p.). Moore-Gilbert reads the image as a professionally staged ‘performance of affiliation’ (2009, 120). However, while it serves such a purpose through captioned inclusion in the memoir, there would have been little need in 1941 to legitimize the family as Palestinian. Considered alongside other early photographs in Out of Place, in which furnishings, clothing, accessories, and hairstyles are consistently ‘Western,’ the portrait distances ‘tradition’ as playful anomaly in a performative family repertoire. Said himself observes of photographs taken in Cairo that they highlight the artificial quality of what we were, a family determined to make itself into a mock little European group despite the Egyptian and Arab surroundings that are only hinted at as an occasional camel, gardener, servant, palm tree, pyramid, or tarbushed chauffeur is briefly caught by the camera’s otherwise single-minded focus on the children and assorted relatives. (2000 [1999], 75) While an analogy between Levantinism and inauthenticity is alluded to, the family’s ‘ethnic[ized] classism’ is more explicitly predicated 9

For her son E. Said, by contrast, Hilda was ‘plucked from what was—or was retrospectively embellished as—a wonderful life and the [social and academic] successes of Beirut and returned to dour old Nazareth, where she was deposited into an arranged marriage’ (2000 [1999], 13–14). This interpretative difference may be due to Makdisi’s access to her mother’s letters. It may also be that Hilda herself understood her choices differently in hindsight.

56

Post-Millennial Palestine

on the ‘ghostly labour’ of compatriots (see: Kamal, 2017). The Said family’s privilege is also contrasted, discomfortingly, with ‘the dour Palestinian grimness that otherwise existed around us’ after 1948 (E. Said, 2000 [1999], 194). E. Said makes clear that his parents’ ‘precarious’ self-fashioning as minority subjects—Christian, modern, wealthy—in colonial Cairo necessitated the ‘repression’ of the subject of Palestine (2000 [1999], 117). Maternal Aunt Nabiha’s work aiding immiserated refugees nevertheless generated ‘fault lines, little inconsistencies and lapses’ in family discourse (E. Said, 2000 [1999], 114–15), which both E. Said and Makdisi track in their memoirs. In a separate piece, revealingly entitled ‘Becoming Palestinian,’ Makdisi considers her paternal grandfather in another Jerusalem studio photograph, sporting a ‘heroic moustache’ and ‘wearing a hatta and igal, a heavy abaya slung carelessly over his back’ (2013, 162). She muses that he may have ‘deliberately posed to fulfil the fantasies of that Orientalism that Edward was destined to write about’ (2013, 162) and—as we see in the Said family photograph discussed above—at times visually replicate, if not of his own volition. Indeed, E. Said’s Out of Place, from its title onwards, thematizes and counterpoints his father Wadie’s construction of a visual archive that is ‘contrived and rigid,’ ‘exclud[ing] so much [of] the effort and uncertainty of our lives’ (2000 [1999], 75). E. Said admires, as an exception, film footage from a Maadi swimming pool in which his evanescent child avatar manages to breach the ‘unforgiving optical grid’ (2000 [1999], 78). Still reflecting on the arduous ‘ritual of doing the same thing over and over in front of my father’s camera,’ E. Said recalls a childhood fantasy of wanting to be a book, which conceals internal expressiveness within its covers (2000 [1999], 76). If he were a book, he could ‘remain my own true self’ despite being ‘[p]assed from hand to hand, place to place, time to time’ (E. Said, 2000 [1999], 76). However, in the fullness of historical time, this ‘true self’ loses stable and sovereign valence. Out of Place ends with a meditation on the autobiographical subject ‘as a cluster of flowing currents’ rather than ‘a solid self’ (2000 [1999], 295). The passage synthesizes E. Said’s critical keynotes—exile, contrapuntalism, dissonance—as products of a particular life: These currents, like the themes of one’s life, flow along during the waking hours, and at their best, they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They are ‘off’ and may be out of place, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of all kinds of strange combinations

Levantine Remains in Memoirs

57

moving about, not necessarily forward, sometimes against each other, contrapuntally yet without one central theme. A form of freedom, I’d like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is […] With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place. (2000 [1999], 295) Palestine functions as textual unconscious in Out of Place—its repression is part of the family legacy worked through, retrospectively, in the writing of the memoir. Moreover, readers are likely aware of Said’s critical work on Palestinian dislocation, which provides ballast to such abstractions as the ‘essentially constructed and provisional nature’ of the self in/as a book—but also precludes resolution (Moore-Gilbert, 2009, xxii). Experiential specificity and ongoing existential crisis are corroborated by Makdisi and Cortas: the absent ‘core’ of Palestine, in what was a Levantine reality, emerges as the object of representational praxis for all three authors from this extended family. Cortas rewrote and expanded early versions of A World I Loved, in English, in order ‘to explain to the West the politics around the Palestinian tragedy that had unfolded in the region’ (M. Said, 2009, xxvi–xxix, xxviii). Echoing her brother’s well-known meditations, Makdisi defines being Palestinian as constitutionally exilic and so as a commitment to justice in all contexts (2013, 161). However, each of these memoirs also works—through its emphasis on incomplete archives, imperfectly worked-through trauma, and/or fragmenting narrative structure—against a conservationist agenda that would assume either a fully retrievable past or an ‘essential’ Palestinian identity. The ways in which the three memoirs supplement one another provides further evidence that history is a contestable, interminably imperfect construction. For example, E. Said observes that ‘[m]y grandmother (“Teta”) never appears at all’ in the family’s visual archive, ‘rigidly in keeping with her strenuous wish that she should never be photographed’ (2000 [1999], 77). His sister Makdisi, however, finds ways of accessing their grandmother’s engagement in historical processes, highlighting the ironies of ‘modernity’ for women and foregrounding the ‘home’ as ‘an integral, active part of the world’ (2005, 401). In related fashion, Makdisi suggests that on the ‘apparently unimportant question’ of what her ancestors wore ‘hangs the interpretation of a culture, a history, a civilisation’ (2005, 171). She describes great-grandmother Leila, in a photograph not included in the book,

58

Post-Millennial Palestine

wearing a ‘severe high neck emphasized by a thin white collar’ with ‘elements of local Syrian costume in the embroidery’ and a mandeel around her head (2005, 168–69). Leila combines local custom with ‘the Victorian model of the mission ladies’ (Makdisi, 2005, 169). Makdisi speculates that she must have worn a charchaf or izar (cloak) and face-covering outdoors but, at some point, abandoned them (2005, 169). Leila’s daughter Munira (‘Teta’) did not cover herself with the hasbara (the Galileen version of the izar), ‘nor did she veil herself as was still customary among Christian women in Nazareth’; her appearance was interpretable ‘as a clear sign of her modernity’ (Makdisi, 2005, 172), despite her refusal (according to E. Said) to be photographed. Munira’s daughter (Edward’s and Jean’s aunt) Nabiha, ‘like Mother [Hilda], always wore a hat to church, thus definitively sealing with her appearance her status as a good Protestant’ (Makdisi, 2005, 171). Makdisi maps a changing interface between Arab, Turkish, and Western culture through the Levantine routes of her forebears.10 Lest we lose sight of the ‘ghostly labour’ (see: Kamal, 2017) of Levantine subjects less privileged than this extended family, syncretic aspects of Palestinian heritage are not only ascertainable in the embodied and writerly practices of elites. Makdisi’s emphasis on the rich ‘cultural tapestry’ of Palestine, embedded in Bilād al-Shām (2005, 145), has a corollary in the history of embroidery (tatreez). When US congresswoman Rachida Tlaib took her 2018 Congressional oath in a thobe embroidered by her mother, from a village near Ramallah, social media—via #TweetMyThobe—corroborated ‘the continued existence of the complex fabric of Palestine’ (Dedman, 2016, 73). A recent Palestinian Museum exhibition similarly demonstrated, as its curator Rachel Dedman argues, that ‘Palestine’s material culture represents a connective thread between Palestinians of the past and present’ and ‘beyond the contested geography of Palestine itself’ (2016, 73).11 As Makdisi’s memoir in particular emphasizes, inhabitants of the Levant were negotiating modernity through the clothes they made,

10

11

In so doing, Makdisi combats ‘the lost place of Christianity in the working out of Palestinian symbolism’ (2015, 172). The combined work of these three memoirs in tracking Levantine Christianity complements work on the ‘relational indigeneity’ of the Arab-Jew (Shohat, 2019, 147). The exhibitions at Dar el-Nimer in Beirut (2016) and onsite in Birzeit (2018–19) were curated by Dedman as At the Seams: A Political History of Palestinian Embroidery (May–July 2016) and Labour of Love: New Approaches to Palestinian Embroidery (March 2018–January 2019) respectively.

Levantine Remains in Memoirs

59

bought, and wore from the late nineteenth century onwards. Dedman concurs that dress culture can be read as historical ‘mirror and manifestation of changes to the economic, social and political landscape’ in historic Palestine and beyond (2016, 38). Pre-1948 embroidered Palestinian dresses were distinguished in detail by specific local and social groupings but were ‘a constantly changing phenomenon’ (Weir, 2009, 17). They were also syncretic, partly produced through trade and other forms of mobility across and beyond the Levant. By the mid-nineteenth century, most textiles woven in Palestine were made from cotton, linen, and silk yarns imported from Egypt, Syria, and England, and, after World War I, synthetic dyes from Europe supplanted natural dyes made locally. By the early twentieth century, urban Palestinians had adopted Western dress in contradistinction to ‘peasant costume’ (Weir, 2009, 24; 26): recall the Said Jerusalem photograph. In the present, the production, display, and purchasing of embroidered items has become an act of solidarity with Palestinians. This is not reducible to heritage nostalgia; rather, creative practitioners, at both demotic and ‘elite’ levels, ‘iterate[s] the Palestinian heritage canon whilst opening this up to new creativity and transformation’ (Butler and al-Nammari, 2018, 37). Taṭ reez has, since 1948, functioned as an ‘activated material form’ exemplifying Palestinian heritage (turath) and inheritance (mirath) (Butler and al-Nammari, 2018, 31–32), but also ways in which that heritage is mutable and worldly. As Frantz Fanon (1959) argued during the Algerian War of Independence, cultural phenomena signify according to historical need. Dress, like memoir, is a ‘historically situated and socially inflected “utterance” that exists in relation to a speaker and an addressee, both immersed in history, located in a specific place and period’ (Shohat, 2006, 252). As the literary and the material examples (cited in and beyond the three memoirs) discussed here illustrate, contemporary Palestinian heritage practice dynamically sustains a regionally embedded culture in the face of ongoing loss, fragmentation, and enclosure. The Common Ground, in Retrospect and as Prospect Historian Avi Shlaim describes, as ‘chronic condition,’ a ‘post-Ottoman syndrome’ of national, political, and territorial illegitimacy, due to the failure of Arab states—‘cracked cauldrons,’ as poet, academic, and activist Tamim al-Barghouti calls them—to provide for, defend, or

60

Post-Millennial Palestine

represent their own peoples, let alone secure Palestinian rights (Schlaim, 2015, 17; al-Barghouti, 2015, 82). Moreover, the fact that nationalism in the region often propagates ethnic or cultural homogeneity provokes creative and critical excavations of heterogeneity ‘hidden beneath the surface of modern national states, but living on, the past persisting in the present’ (Young, 2012, 33; see also: Moore, 2018). This critique is reflected in a strain of resurgent Levantinism, advocates of which include Jewish and/or Israeli writers dissenting from hegemonic definitions of Israeli national identity epitomized by the Nation-State Law passed in 2018. For example, David Shasha, director of the Centre for Sephardic Heritage in Brooklyn, condemns what he sees as a ‘calamitous ethno-cultural situation’ for Sephardic Jews as well as Palestinians and puts forward, as alternative to the status quo, a ‘Levantine option’: ‘a radically new perspective based on a very old way of seeing things’ (2012, n.p.). As does Young and others, such as the late Egyptian author (and mother of Tamim al-Barghouti) Radwa Ashour (2003), Shasha invokes al-Andalus (Sepharad), in which Arab Jews helped to articulate a creative, humanist multiculturalism that then shaped Ottoman civilization. The potential remains, Shasha argues, for Levantinism as ‘a cultural model that would be more appropriate […] than the spurious binarism promoted by the concept of Israel as an outpost of Western civilization’ (2012, n.p.). Originating in the sixteenth century to describe those who lived on the Mediterranean coast and served as intermediaries between European merchants and Ottoman locals, Levantines became associated, in colonial discourse, with racial impurity; in Israel, the term continues to adhere to racist constructions of Arabs as well as ‘Oriental’ (Sephardic) Jews (Hochberg, 2007, 46). A divergent tradition, however, deploys Levantinism as synonym for cosmopolitanism; to describe, in the words of Egyptian-born writer Jacqueline Kahanoff (1917–79), something ‘not exclusively eastern or western, Christian, Jewish, or Moslem [but] more like a prism whose various facets are joined by a sharp edge of differences’ (1951, 247; see also Kahanoff, 2011).12 In Out of Place, E. Said reflects on his family’s worldly, polyglot social milieu: ‘We were all Shawam, amphibious Levantine creatures whose essential lostness was momentarily stayed by a kind of forgetfulness, a kind of daydream’ (2000 [1999], 195). Shāmi/Levantine 12

Kahanoff, whose parents were Iraqi and Tunisian Jews, also grew up in Cairo; she later emigrated to Israel.

Levantine Remains in Memoirs

61

culture here encapsulates ‘an extroverted, non-Arab, non-Muslim life that was not quite European, because tied to Oriental luxury, service, and sensuality’ (E. Said, 2000 [1999], 199) and was, in Cairo, on the verge of extinction. The 1952 Egyptian revolution would create new social hierarchies and recast families such as E. Said’s as khawagat (foreigners). E. Said’s description echoes both the pejorative historical meaning of ‘Levantine’ and what Amr Kamal (2017) sees as an elitist European orientation in Kahanoff’s cosmopolitanism. E. Said flags up, however, that lives ‘of an inordinate and untoward luxury and peculiarity’ were held together by drivers, gardeners, and domestic employees (2000 [1999], 197). He also records a ‘growing sense of Palestinian identity—thanks to Aunt Nabiha—that asserted ‘something altogether more complex and authentic than a colonial mimic’ (2000 [1999], 195). E. Said’s affiliation with Palestine is narrated in Out of Place as a trajectory that passes from a youthful desire for stable identity—that ‘we could have been all-Arab, or all-European and American, or all-Orthodox Christian, or all-Muslim, or all-Egyptian’ (2000 [1999], 5)—towards mature recognition that ‘being Palestinian need exclude none of these categories’ (Moore-Gilbert, 2009, 117). This also acknowledges the irreducibility of ‘Palestinian’ experience: ‘no single Palestinian can be said to feel what most other Palestinians feel. Ours has been too scattered and various a fate’ (E. Said, 1986, 5). The integrity of the Levant has, for sure, been claimed by reactionary groups, including recently and most infamously the so-called ‘Islamic State’ (al-Dawlah al-Islamiyyah fil-Iraq wal-Sham). Ottomanism can also be unduly romanticized, whereas early Palestinian struggle against dispossession, as expressed through the 1936–39 Revolt, was oriented against the ‘Palestinian feudal-clerical elite’ as well as anti-colonial (Abu-Manneh, 2016, 16). One can, however, learn in an informed and strategic way from history. Shehadeh, discussing the Revolt with an elderly survivor, suggests that the final years of Ottoman rule, marred by forced conscription, famine, and disease, left a skewed perception among the populace. The author himself is sympathetic to the views of his great-uncle, Najib Nassar, a reformist who championed Ottoman transnationalism as bulwark against nationalism, colonialism, and Zionism (Shehadeh, 2010, 86–98). The value of critical Levantinism persists in the way that it stresses multi-ethnic, multi-faith, shared historical space and cultural achievement. It is recuperated, most saliently, as an alternative to an ‘ethno-nationalist separatist politics of memory’ that underpins Israel’s flagrant ‘logic of partition’ (Hochberg, 2007, 3; 141). Ali Abunimah,

62

Post-Millennial Palestine

co-founder of Electronic Intifada, advocates a single ‘democratic and decolonized state that offers citizenship and equal rights to all who live between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean’ (2014, 46). A key driver for such a vision is a contemporary ‘demographic, territorial, and economic reality’ in which Palestinians and Israelis—Arabs, Muslims, Jews, and Christians—already share ‘an inextricably linked’ yet radically discriminate life (Hochberg, 2007, 5). Hochberg’s title, In Spite of Partition, taken from E. Said,13 conjures a ‘territory that bridges social constellations or identities that no longer exist’—the ‘lost world’ of the memoirs discussed here—‘and others that do not yet exist’ (2007, 140; emphasis in the original). E. Said’s millennial calls for a binational arrangement in Palestine/Israel—‘a rich fabric of some sort, which no one can fully comprehend, and no-one can fully own’—was a radical projection of a different kind of ‘nation’ in which ‘political, ethnic, and religious boundaries are suspended by exiles who “cross borders [and] break binaries of thought and experience”’ (Shavit, 2000, n.p.; Iskandar and Rustom, 2010, 6). E. Said is not the only intellectual to sustain such a vision (see also: Butler, 2012). It would certainly be a fitting conclusion to the routes taken by his extended family. A new generation of Palestinian writers, emphasizes Nora Parr, seeks ‘to craft words for a lived reality that is no longer best described by lingering systems,’ ‘new words and symbols that recognise history but give different space to its expression in the present’ (2019, 21). However, a post-nationalist structure of feeling continues also to drive capacious affiliations. khulud khamis’ Haifa Fragments (2015), to give one contemporary fictional example, emphasizes both Palestinian contiguity in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the possibility of creative Palestinian–Israeli alliances. To give another, Raba’i al-Madhoun’s Fractured Destinies intersects plural historical exiles in its protagonists’ yearning for a future ‘homeland for everyone’ (2018, 234). Literature produces ‘alternative actualities, which might find expression only at the level of cultural imagination, but which, as such, are nevertheless part of our times’ (Hochberg, 2007, 3). Creative, critical Levantinism persists as such a form of post-millennial praxis.

13

‘We must now begin to think in terms of coexistence, after separation, in spite of partition’ (E. Said, 1999, n.p.).

Levantine Remains in Memoirs

63

References Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok (1994) The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Vol. One. Trans. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Abu-Manneh, Bashir (2016) The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Abunimah, Ali (2014) The Battle for Justice in Palestine. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Al-Barghouti, Tamim (2015) ‘Cracked Cauldrons: The Failure of States and the Rise of New Narratives in the Middle East.’ Shifting Sands: The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East, eds. Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson. London: Profile. 82–97. Al-Madhoun, Raba’i (2018) Fractured Destinies: A Novel. Trans. Paul Starkey. Cairo: Hoopoe. Ashour, Radwa (2003) Granada: A Novel. Trans. William Granara. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Barr, James (2011) A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East. London: Simon & Schuster. Bugeja, Norbert (2012) Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East: Rethinking the Liminal in Mashriqi Writing. Abingdon: Routledge. Butler, Beverley, and Fatima al-Nammari (2018) ‘“We Palestinian Refugees”— Heritage Rites and/as the Clothing of Bare Life: Reconfiguring Paradox, Obligation, and Imperative in Palestinian Refugee Camps in Jordan.’ The New Nomadic Age: Archaeologies of Forced and Undocumented Migration, ed. Yannis Hamilakis. London: Equinox. 29–41. Butler, Judith (2012) Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. New York: Columbia University Press. Cortas, Wadad Makdisi (2009) A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman. New York: Nation Books. Dedman, Rachel (2016) ‘At the Seams: A Political History of Palestinian Embroidery.’ At the Seams: A Political History of Palestinian Embroidery, eds. Akram Musalam and Malak Afouneh. Birzeit: The Palestinian Museum. 17–73. Elsadda, Hoda (2011) ‘A “Phantom Freedom in a Phantom Modernity”? Protestant Missionaries, Domestic Ideology and Narratives of Modernity in an Arab Context.’ Rethinking History 15.2: 209–28. Fanon, Frantz (1959) L’An V de la révolution algérienne [Year Five of the Algerian Revolution]. Paris: Maspéro. Fields, Gary (2017) Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Gregory, Derek (2004) The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

64

Post-Millennial Palestine

Hassan, Waïl S. (2019) ‘Postcolonialism and Modern Arabic Literature: Twenty-first Century Horizons.’ The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East, eds. Anna Ball and Karim Mattar. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 43–56. Hochberg, Gil (2007) In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of the Separatist Imagination. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Iskandar, Adel, and Hakem Rustom (2010) ‘Introduction: Emancipation and Representation.’ Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, eds. Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1–22. Kahanoff, Jacqueline Shohet (1951) Jacob’s Ladder. London: Harvill Press. Kahanoff, Jacqueline Shohet (2011) Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff. Eds. Deborah A. Starr and Sasson Somekh. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kamal, Amr (2017) ‘Ghostly Labor: Ethnic Classism in the Levantine Prism of Jacqueline Kahanoff’s Jacob’s Ladder.’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 49.2: 255–75. Karmi, Ghada (2002) In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story. London: Verso. Karmi, Ghada (2015) Return: A Palestinian Memoir. London: Verso. khamis, khulud (2015) Haifa Fragments. Oxford: New Internationalist. Khanna, Ranjana (2006) ‘Post-palliative: Coloniality’s Affective Dissonance.’ Postcolonial Text 2:1. Macmillan, E. A. (2016) From the First World War to the Arab Spring: What’s Really Going on in the Middle East? New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Makdisi, Jean Said (1990) Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir. New York: Norton. Makdisi, Jean Said (2005) Teta, Mother and Me: An Arab Woman’s Memoir. London: Saqi. Makdisi, Jean Said (2013) ‘Becoming Palestinian.’ Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, eds. Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. 160–77. Marrouchi, Mustapha (2004) Edward Said at the Limits. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Masalha, Nur (2012) The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory. London: Zed. Moore, Lindsey (2018) Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations: Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine. New York: Routledge. Moore-Gilbert, Bart (2009) Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation. Abingdon: Routledge. Parr, Nora (2019) ‘Stop Waiting: The “Next” Palestinian Writers Are Already Here.’ The Middle East in London, April/May. 20–21. Ricœur, Paul (2004 [2000]) Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Levantine Remains in Memoirs

65

Said, Edward (1987) ‘Cairo Recalled: Growing up in the Cultural Cross-Currents of 1940s Egypt.’ House and Garden, April. 32–45. Said, Edward (1999) ‘What Can Separation Mean?’ Al-Ahram Weekly, 455, 11–17 November. Said, Edward (2000 [1999]) Out of Place: A Memoir. London: Granta. Said, Edward, with Jean Mohr (1986) After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. London: Faber and Faber. Said, Mariam C. (2009) ‘Introduction.’ A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman, by Wadad Makdisi Cortas. New York: Nation Books. xi–xxxi. Said, Najla (2009) ‘Afterword.’ A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman, by Wadad Makdisi Cortas. New York: Nation Books. 193–96. Said, Najla (2013) Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family. New York: Penguin. Schlaim, Avi (2015) ‘The Post-Ottoman Syndrome.’ Shifting Sands: The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East, eds. Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson. London: Profile. 17–32. Shasha, David (2012) ‘A Jewish Voice Left Silent: Trying to Articulate “The Levantine Option.”’ Mondoweiss, 10 January. Available at: Accessed 1 February 2019. Shavit, Ari (2000) ‘My Right of Return: An Interview with Edward Said.’ Haaretz, 18 August. Shehadeh, Raja (2008 [2007]) Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape. London: Profile. Shehadeh, Raja (2010) A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle. London: Profile. Shehadeh, Raja (2017) Where the Line is Drawn: Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine. London: Profile. Shohat, Ella (1992) ‘Notes on the “Post-Colonial.”’ Social Text 31/32: 99–113. Shohat, Ella (2006) Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shohat, Ella (2019) ‘On Orientalist Genealogies: The Split Arab/Jew Figure Revisited.’ The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East, eds. Anna Ball and Karim Mattar. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 118–60. Weir, Shelagh (2009) Palestinian Costume. London: Arris Books. Weizman, Eyal (2012 [2007]) Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. Young, Robert J. C. (2012) ‘Postcolonial Remains.’ New Literary History 43.1: 19–42.

chapter three The Exile’s Memory and the Chronotope in Ghada Karmi’s Return: A Palestinian Memoir By Ahmad Qabaha The Exile’s Memory

This chapter explores the role of memory in recreating the place that contemporary Palestinian memoirist Ghada Karmi was expelled from by providing a close analysis of her work Return: A Palestinian Memoir (2015). I build on theorizations of exile and memory, alongside Mikhail Bakhtin’s theoretical concept of the chronotope, wherein space is always located in time (1981, 84–85), to assess how memories conceive of a particular place. The chapter suggests that Karmi’s memories of Palestine function as the main component of her incoherent and transient national experience, and it explores the potential for resistant acts contained within her narrative of personal memory. In her memoir, Karmi discusses various issues, including the vulnerability of the Palestinian Authority, restrictions on the movement of Palestinians, the expansion of Israeli settlements, and many other socio-political and economic issues and hardships. However, underlying her work is an attempt to keep the memory of her childhood alive as this serves her own understanding of her own self and the Palestinian reality. Visiting Palestine for the first time since her childhood, Karmi ponders the power of memory, and explores how its articulation across time and space provides opportunities to resist Palestine’s political and historical negation. Because memoirs can be seen, in Suzanne Nalbantian’s terms, as ‘a laboratory for the workings of the mind’ (2003, 1), this chapter demonstrates that Karmi’s memories allow her to open herself to the deeply disorganized state of her past and origins, glean them, and then try to construct them in order, to reconstruct a historical experience. As such, Karmi illustrates how (exilic) Palestinian writing can serve as ‘a custodian of the Palestinian national history’ in 67

68

Post-Millennial Palestine

which the Palestinian authors or protagonists are ‘the vital witnesses to the dispossession and loss of the homeland which lay at the root of the bitter conflict that had blighted all our lives’ from that time until the present moment (Karmi, 2015, 144). Born in Jerusalem but forced to leave after the 1948 Nakba and live in exile, Karmi feels doubly dispossessed, both physically and psychically, and she lives with a sense of inadequacy in the present. The history of her people is denied, and the resulting plight is unacknowledged. The consequences of this denial manifest themselves in the new millennium where Palestinians continue to experience further atrocities and repeated dispossessions. Their right to return remains unfulfilled. In her memoir, reflecting on her visit to Palestine in 2005, Karmi describes how the stunning power of Israel’s hold on international law, the terminal decline of the Arab states, and the unethical complicity of the international community, endanger the national aspirations of Palestinians. In Return, Karmi reflects on the precariousness of the Palestinian present and the uncertainty of its future. She attributes this fraught present and unstable future of Palestinians to the Nakba of 1948. For Karmi, the Nakba is the worst event in the history of Palestine, and its tormenting effects exist in the present moment. Karmi’s Return reflects on the loss of Palestine and the attempt to recreate it, in the present, through memory. The things Karmi yearns for are located in a remembered and inaccessible past and she carries through an image of this place. What she remembers are just elements or impressions of it—and what she looks for is the exact thing she cannot find. Karmi tries in the present to restore her childhood homeland by recalling certain acts or occasions still alive in her memory. These acts of remembering make her feel ‘at home’ once more and in a way that she cannot conjure physically, inhabiting a space where she feels a lack of belonging. Karmi resides in exile, displaced and hence misplaced, yet she can remember the particularity of this place and time of her past. Thus, she is confronted with the dilemma of being dislocated, and yet able to discern what imaginatively re-locates her. Karmi’s great yearning can only be fulfilled with memory. For exiles, this physicality of place is absent, and their lives are defined by this sense of ephemerality and a lack of stability. Because memories are intangible, what the exile depends on are the feelings recalled and associated with these memories. Karmi reflects on the moments when she feels the need to belong, and her unwillingness to remake her roots anew in an environment that

The Exile’s Memory

69

is different from the place where she once felt at home. The memory of the past is retrieved, which prevents her from establishing roots in the present; the past is an archive of traumatic memories that impinge on her consciousness. Karmi contends that ‘for us [Palestinians in exile] the past is still the present’ (2015, 269). Through acts of remembrance she re-establishes her connection with her place of origin, which David Harvey defines as the ‘locus of collective memory’—a site where identity is created through the construction of memories linking a group of people with the past (1996, 306). Consequently, Karmi struggles in the present to establish a new place outside the limits of what she has experienced in the past. She seeks to immortalize the place to which she can no longer return through the act of remembrance and by making a record of these memories in writing. Karmi attempts to recreate the deeply felt personal sensations and feelings of a particular time (before the Nakba) and place (Palestine) that, for her, appears to be significant in determining the pattern of her life in the new millennium. Karmi refers to the Nakba of 1948 through the following portrayal of her loss of physical contact with Fatima (her family’s maid) before she was expelled from Palestine: I clung to her by the taxi, unwilling to let go or accept that she would come no further with us. To leave her was to leave all that I knew as home, its comfort and security, and for what? A journey to an unfamiliar place and unfamiliar people I did not want to see. When I was eventually persuaded to let her go and made to settle back into the taxi, a silent emptiness descended on me, as if my whole life had ended on that terrible day. (2015, 265) Karmi establishes a powerful dichotomy between home and exile; familiarity and strangeness; here and there; the past and the present; memory and reality; roots (place) and routes (departure). Karmi does not only want to say that her physical return to Palestine in 2005 invokes the tension between the elements of these binaries; she also intends to emphasize that inherent in her departure from her home are memories of loss and distress (Qabaha, 2018, 190). Karmi’s obsession with this particular time before the Nakba can be seen as a sign of her commitment to retrieving the memory of a land lost by the events of the Nakba of 1948. Karmi reflects on those memories by closely associating her departure with her loss of contact with Fatima. As

70

Post-Millennial Palestine

Rachel Gregory Fox argues within this collection, the unfolding of memories represents an ‘act of return as remembrance and retelling.’ Throughout her memoir, Karmi implies that Fatima embodies the version of Palestine that existed before the establishment of the state of Israel, the place to which she really belonged and that she needs to discover to be able ‘to find my roots and a credible identity’ (2015, 13). This is not because Karmi in the present deals with imagined constructions, but rather because she deals with childhood as she remembers it. Karmi seems to tell us that we cannot recollect our lives in a linear manner from birth to the present, but instead our memories are of singular events, which often spring to the foreground of our minds without any conscious effort and for reasons we cannot easily recognize. These memories situated in time and place need to be recovered to make sense of our identities. ‘The gap in time of over fifty years in our collective history since then,’ Karmi asserts, ‘had made us different people, with new lives and new identities’ (2015, 314). The memories Karmi recalls are time-bound, yet they also connect to a specific place—they are located in the particular. This linkage of time and space has been enunciated by Bakhtin in the form of a chronotope. He defines this concept, which literally means ‘time-space,’ as ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (1981, 84). The Russian literary critic merges time and space into one component: ‘time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history’ (1981, 84). For Bakhtin, we can only comprehend the self if we relate it to a specific location. Our sense of ourselves, our sense of our past and present—or our sense of our history—is also our sense of place. In the present, Karmi seeks to piece the fragments of her identity together by recalling a specific time and place. In her memoir, she links the peaceful moments of her life to a particular time and place and she demonstrates that the contours of her experience are almost always shaped by sensations derived from the remnants of her place in history. ‘My memories of that time,’ Karmi narrates, ‘were hazy, but I could still recall those peaceful, quiet siesta afternoons spent playing with Randa Issa, my friend from across the road, while our parents were asleep’ (2015, 116). Karmi’s description of this time before the Nakba is embedded within the spatial comfort and physical certainty she once felt. As Deborah Haynes suggests, there is no experience outside space and time, and both of these always change. In fact,

The Exile’s Memory

71

change is essential. Therefore, subjectivity and created objects are always constituted differently. In short, all conditions of experience are determined by space and time, which are themselves variable (Haynes, 1995, 166). The physical distance between the self and its ‘true’ home does not allow Karmi in the present to feel any sense of being ‘at home’ outside Palestine. She writes, ‘I would have to go there myself and re-establish my connection with the people who lived there, my people, whose lives I would share, even if only for a while’ (2015, 17). Karmi seems to be looking for self-definition and the recognition of others, therefore her motivations to return to Palestine are premised on the need to be re-located to a specific place and time since she believes that she cannot be fully comprehended until she re-establishes her link with that particular place and time. Karmi emphasizes the feeling of a persistent sense of displacement and lack of belonging that torments but also animates her.1 She describes that the Nakba was ‘a seminal event in every Palestinian’s life, the root of all the sufferings that followed, and I hungered to reach back for its elusive memory through first-hand accounts of that time’ (2015, 212). Karmi tries ‘to unseal the memory of the Nakba, so dim and unattainable, and draws it back into a communal space that could be shared, examined and compared’ (2015, 212). This is to suggest that a particular time and place informs the memories of Karmi and influences her progress in the world. Karmi tends to describe her physical loss of her original place as something that reflects her state of mind. Places can, as it were, act as a mirror to our feelings; they can set the mood by indicating feelings such as insecurity, lack of belonging, and loss. Karmi begins her memoir by describing Palestine as a ‘torn-up, unhappy land,’ and she states that her journey to it ‘had filled me with bitterness and grief’ (2015, 7). We can connect this again to Bakhtin, wherein space does not merely contain the here and now, but resonates with our past, shapes our present, and anticipates our future. According to Bakhtin, the way we perceive things is massively influenced by the way we perceive time. He states: The ability to see time, to read time, in the spatial whole of the world and […] to perceive the filling of space not as an immobile background […] but as an emerging whole, an 1

Karmi fully discusses this sense of dispossession and animation in her 2003 article ‘Edward Said and the Politics of Dispossession.’

72

Post-Millennial Palestine

event—this is the ability to read in everything signs that show time in its course. (1986, 25; emphasis in the original) Karmi’s feelings are linked to a particular setting. Finding that Fatima, who was her family’s maid in the 1940s, is dead is an indication of the impossibility for Karmi to feel at home or reconnected with her roots: a symbolic death of historical Palestine. The death of Fatima indicates Karmi’s persistent inability to ‘feel connected to a past’ and find ‘a context in which I belonged and could claim as truly mine,’ and restore the coherence and wholeness of ‘that I knew as home’ (Karmi, 2015, 52). For Karmi, Fatima manifests pre-colonial Palestine and, thus, stability and connection. Karmi captures this sense of the wholeness, or fullness, of time in Return, where she uses recollection and memory—and dreams and visions—alongside accounts of contemporary events. As Karmi describes in her memoir, post-millennial Palestine has witnessed the construction of the Separation Wall in 2002, repeated attacks on Gaza, and the annexation of more Palestinian territories to build an increasing number of Israeli settlements. By engaging with a ‘full’ time span—from past to present—Karmi’s writing has space to explore the many potentialities of the colonial transformation of Palestinian land, and to maximize the emotional and political symbolism of the occupation for the reader. She describes that ‘although I had visited the city [Jerusalem] before, each time I went there it seemed more built-up and more unrecognisable as the Arab place of my childhood’ (2015, 44). This feeling of dissociation further recalls the sense of despair that her parents nurtured a long time ago: ‘Our parents rarely spoke of it [Palestine]; it was as if the door had been firmly shut on Palestine, and only what was happening to us in England mattered’ (Karmi, 2015, 266). Israel, Karmi contends, ‘succeeded in fragmenting us beyond recall’ with the 1948 Nakba and we ‘were scattered all over the world, never to return’ (2015, 314). ‘The temporal displacement or dispossession’ of Palestinian refugees, their exclusion ‘from past and future time,’ as Karim Mattar calls it (2014, 109), has irrevocably obstructed Palestinians from returning to their roots. They might have the chance to temporarily return to Palestine, but as Karmi’s experience suggests, the feeling of dispossession remains. Karmi returns to Palestine in 2005 only to feel even more disconnected than before. Karmi deals with this problem by returning—or attempting to return—to where she had lived before the Nakba. Because she finds no means of actual return, she must rely on memory:

The Exile’s Memory

73

I had travelled to the land of my birth with a sense of return, but it was a return to the past, to the Palestine of distant memory, not to the place that it is now. The people who lived in this Palestine were nothing to do with the past I was seeking, nor were they a part of some historical tableau frozen in time that I could reconnect with. This Palestinian world I had briefly joined was different: a new-old place, whose people had moved on from where I had them fixed in my memory, had made of their lives what they could, and found ways to deal with the enemy who ruled them. (Karmi, 2015, 313) There may be no cure for the exile or the returnee, and it may not really ease the longing, but it is all we now have of the place—‘a place,’ Karmi writes, ‘which I knew more in theory than in practice, more as an abstract cause than a living reality’ (2015, 9). This feeling suggests the loss of connection with the past; in Edward Said’s terms ‘no return to the past is without irony, or without a sense that a full return, or repatriation, is impossible’ (2001 [2000], xxxv). Karmi’s return invokes her initial rupture with her place of origin and reinforces it. The exile’s journey home then triggers other kinds of estrangement and exile, instead of turning rupture into connection. In her memoir, Karmi focuses on the idea of temporal and physical separation and the (im)possibility of return. She remembers looking down on a night-time Tel Aviv from the windows of a plane taking her back to London and thinking hopelessly, ‘Flotsam and jetsam, that’s what we’ve become, scattered and divided. There’s no room for us or our memories here. And it won’t ever be reversed’ (2015, 1). Karmi’s memoir is concerned with this notion of returning: of the need to return, of the possibility of regaining (emotionally) what has been lost, but also of the impossibility of any physical return. Her memoir tells us of the fecundity of memory and how it is associated with specific times and places, which are detailed and depicted in their particularity, and yet are poignant and evocative: ‘the gap in time of over fifty years in our collective history since then had made us different people, with new lives and new identities’ (Karmi, 2015, 314). Because of her involuntary extended disconnection from her community and place of origin, upon her return, she feels a transition from being a familiar and fully incorporated part of Palestine to being stranger and distanced from it. She cannot restore that sense of the past without giving up part of her identity. When Karmi visited Palestine in 2005, she found that

74

Post-Millennial Palestine

Palestine ‘was usually taken to mean the Israeli West Bank and Gaza’ (Karmi, 2015, 17). The involuntary absence of Palestinian refugees from their past home for more than half a century is a substantial force that could obscure the link between Palestinian refugees and their indigenous place. Richard van Leeuwen asserts that ‘conceptions of space are a unifying, structuring force that is fundamental to our sense of identity and our relationship with the material world. Consequently, a disruption of the ties with the environment inevitably leads to various forms of fragmentation’ (2004, 199). Physical and psychic fragmentations are the defining features of the lives of Palestinians expelled from their land in the 1948 Nakba (and 1967 Naksa) and prevented from returning. Karmi is concerned with the consequences of return, of what could and would occur if she was able to go back to what she had lost. She wonders: ‘had Israel kept us out of our homeland for so long that we were forced to make alternative lives and thus suspend indefinitely our right of return?, and in such circumstances, would any of us ever go back?’ (2015, 316). Karmi’s reflection resonates with Said’s following comment in After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives: All of us speak of awdah, ‘return’, but do we mean that literally, or do we mean ‘we must return ourselves to ourselves?’ The latter is the real point, I think, although I know many Palestinians who want their houses and their way of life back, exactly. But is there any place that fits us, together with our accumulated memories and experiences? (1986, 33) The practical circumstances of the temporary return of exiled Palestinian writers thwart their repatriation and instead convert them into ever displaced people. Unlike the expatriate, the Palestinian exile has to grapple with the fact that return is out of the question and their life outside Palestine is subjected to discontinuity. The fact that they are an exile unsettles their routes and subjects them to involuntary relocations. Karmi feels displaced even when she is inside today’s Palestine. She, for example, narrates that she did not fool herself into believing that she would find a sense of ‘home’ in the modern-day Ramallah, ‘anomalous and artificial as it was, distorted by four decades of Israeli military occupation; nor that it could re-create the lost childhood of long ago’ (2015, 19). The act of return, alone, was not ‘enough to restore my sense of self and heal the other rifts in my life’ (Karmi, 2015, 19; 85).

The Exile’s Memory

75

Return, then, is a memoir about exile, about the effects of the rift between imagination and reality; instead of reintegration this memoir re-enacts displacement. It is concerned with what she had lost after she left her childhood homeland behind and the complexities of life in exile that she has to bear. Karmi describes how people from old established families complained about the social mix that occurred in exile after 1948. No one knew who anyone was any more, they said. All sorts of upstarts and people of low origins and insignificant families could pop up in positions they would never have attained in Palestine. (2015, 52) This might be interpreted as demonstrating some ability to adjust: when we are alienated from our immediate environment, we can draw on our memories, and use these for our dreams and visions. This also might mean our desire for maintaining the present as a source of comfort. Karmi refers to her parents by saying ‘my parents, despite their unwillingness to dwell on the past, had not forgotten, but I suspect they could not encompass the pain of remembering’ (2015, 267). Traumatized people in exile either dwell on the painful memories of the past or think of moving on into the future. In the Palestinian context, the Palestinian writer often tries to turn exile into a beneficial state, yet without undermining its catastrophic power. To understand this complex attitude of Palestinian writers towards exile, we should consider Said’s theory on this, especially as Karmi has compared herself to Said in more than one article (see: Karmi, 2003; 2010). Said has always stressed the catastrophic force of exile. In Reflections on Exile: and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, Said defines it as ‘the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted’ (2001 [2000], 173). However, Said argues that the exile should not submit to this catastrophic force, nor should they be undermined by it. Said’s view of ‘exile’ as a condition of transcendence and an enabling act stems from his belief that the exile should not spend their life in exile mourning their fate or ‘falling victim to the concrete dangers of exile’ (1983, 6). Said opines that ‘provided that the exile refuses to sit on the sidelines nursing a wound, there are things to be learned: he or she must cultivate a scrupulous (not indulgent or sulky) subjectivity’ (2001 [2000], 184). Exile in this sense, Said argues, becomes ‘converted from a challenge or a risk, or even from

76

Post-Millennial Palestine

an active impingement […] selfhood into a positive mission, whose success would be a cultural act of great importance’ (1983, 7). However, Said concedes that even though there are ‘pleasures of exile, those different arrangements of living and eccentric angles of vision that it can sometimes afford, which enliven the intellectual’s vocation,’ these pleasures far from ‘alleviat[e] every last anxiety or feeling of bitter solitude’ (1993b, 122). Return can therefore be seen as a study of how we can use our resource of memory to sustain and justify our existence in the present moment. ‘For me,’ Karmi narrates, ‘discovering someone [Ayman] who had known my family was immensely pleasurable and comforting; it made me feel connected to a past and gave me a context in which I belonged and could claim as truly mine’ (2015, 52). Thus, memory functions as a form of compensation, where we substitute a loss in the present with the stores we have built up over our life. This sense of compensation allows us to feel again the sense of home as it is located in the inaccessible past that includes our longings, dreams, and memories. There are some ready links here with the manner in which we use and relate to our homeland when we are displaced. Karmi identifies with a particular people and a particular place, full of intimately kept memories and hopes, where space and time are intrinsically linked. This storing of memory represents a refuge for her hopes and dreams, and a place to find the self. This analysis lends itself to what Bakhtin called ‘historical inversion’ in which Karmi resists the fragmentation of the present by recalling the memory of the shared and collective past. According to Bakhtin, the past in this sense becomes ‘weightier, more authentic and persuasive’ (1981, 147). The present, and even the future, turns out to be ‘somehow empty and fragmented,’ and, therefore, the past functions as an alternative. This place is Palestine, which has drastically changed because of colonial transformations. Since the Nakba of 1948, the Palestinian landscape and history are increasingly shrinking due to a ruthless Israeli settler-colonialist machine (see: Qabaha, 2019). Karmi writes, in a critical essay, that ‘the Israelis have attempted to annihilate an entire people, including their history, memory, language and culture. All Palestinians feel this insult of a double dispossession, aimed at their bodies and souls: their existence as a separate people with a history denied, and their resulting sufferings unacknowledged’ (2003, n.p.). Karmi expresses multifarious notions of Palestine as her original homeland. Within the memory of an imagined homeland, Palestine takes on a mythical quality. The Palestine she found upon her return

The Exile’s Memory

77

is considerably different from the Palestine she has composed in her memory—anomalous and artificial. Karmi’s quest is to retrieve and document the memory of the Palestine of the past, that she herself lived in. The special power of these autobiographical memories is that they testify to her national history and resist forgetfulness and negation. She ‘bear[s] witness to the suffering engendered by racial and colonial oppression’ (Craps, 2012, 5). As memory theorist Alan Baddeley asserts, ‘autobiographical memory is concerned with the capacity of people to recollect their lives’ (cited in Assink and Schroots, 2009, 4). These autobiographical memories provide counter-memories, and thus counter-histories, to official totalizing versions of history, and these counter-histories can resist and break limitations imposed upon the indigenous national narrative. Karmi stresses that ‘for me, Jerusalem was an undivided city where our old house still stood as testimony to Jerusalem’s Arab past—no matter what artifice Israel had later imposed on it’ (2015, 115). Memory, here, functions as the antithesis of nonentity and forgetfulness, or even compromise. My particular focus in this chapter is on the ways in which memories and existing narratives of memory and history shape people’s notions of the self, their group identity, and, by extension, their place within the world. I argue that memories of the past have the power to affect both the present and future, and that the present and future can and do affect our memories of the past. As Said argues, ‘[s]ince almost by definition exile and memory go together, it is what one remembers of the past and how one remembers it that determine how one sees the future’ (2001, xxxv). Memory itself is performed, for when an exile attempts to ‘remember,’ he or she combines the past with the present to foresee the future. The memory retrieved is not necessarily an exact replica of the past; instead, it is a created version of the past based on how it is remembered in the present, what the present looks like, and how the future should be. As Daniel Schacter explains, ‘memory is constructed from influences operating in the present as well as from information [that has been] stored about the past’ (1996, 8). While acknowledging that memory is sometimes contradictory, ambiguous, and not altogether stable, Karmi presents herself as a truthful and accurate rememberer. She attempts to retrieve an image of the past that Israeli settler-colonialism tried to distort in order to disconnect Palestinian exiles from their place of origin and make it unrecognizable: ‘with each change of this kind East Jerusalem lost more of its distinctive character, and I could see that in time and perhaps

78

Post-Millennial Palestine

before too long the pluralistic, mosaic city of my birth would become something unrecognizable,’ and ‘strange and unfamiliar’ (Karmi, 2015, 110). Karmi’s task is to fend off this strangeness by engaging with her memory, by recording how the familiar has changed into the unfamiliar. While in Palestine, at the beginning of the new millennium, she takes the opportunity to record how the past has been skewed by both historical and ongoing colonial violence, and she tries to give a fairly representative image of Palestine as it existed before the Nakba. Colonial violence has changed ‘the Palestine’ that Karmi knew in the past into a new place with ‘new landscape, new alien language, new inhabitants’ (Karmi, 2015, 7). It is the basic fact of memory’s mutability that allows it to become a means of resistance and a space for the construction and reconstruction of the self, and of the national collective. Karmi alternates between what she sees in the present and her memories of Palestine in the past. Karmi’s perception of Palestine in the present is deeply influenced by her memories of the time she spent in Palestine before the Nakba. Her memories of the past resist and falsify the settler-colonial state that replaced it. Karmi’s memoir stresses the significance of the link between memory and our sense of ourselves. Karmi demonstrates that it is only through memory that the exile recounts his or her personal and collective identity. As Nicola King argues, ‘the function of memory and the ways in which it is constructed’ is implicated in the notion of personal identity that ‘is rehearsed again and again in a narrative which attempts to recover the self who existed before’ (2000, 1). James Olney expresses a similar view when he argues that ‘memory enables and vitalizes narrative; in return, narrative provides form for memory, supplements it, and sometimes displaces it’ (1998, 417). The conventions of narrative help structure our personal memories and piece together the fragments of our collective history. These autobiographical narratives attempt to chronicle historical events in cohesive ways and fill in the gaps caused by systematic, politicized erasure. Return documents the politics of this collective identity and re-tells the story of Palestine and the Nakba to keep it alive, to fight oblivion. Priscilla Wald notes that the ‘dynamic interaction’ between the lost nation and the seeker for it produces an imagined and re-constructed national/positional identity (1995, 4). The output of the dynamic interaction between national and personal narratives, according to Wald, is that ‘national narratives actually shape personal narratives’ (1995, 50). One can extend Wald’s position to argue that in Karmi’s case, and for Palestinians more generally, personal narratives contribute

The Exile’s Memory

79

to a (re)construction of a national narrative. Bakhtin explains the possibility of using the chronotope to explore the permeability of national space by human intervention. He argues that we should not read historical and national spaces as ‘completed once and for all,’ but to read in them signs of change with the course of time (1986, 25). One of the distinctive features of post-millennial Palestinian writing, including Karmi’s, is that the narrative of the (exiled) Palestinian, to quote Said, ‘contribute[s] to the construction of a Palestinian national identity’ (2000 [1999], 114). The Palestinian memoirist attempts to reconstruct remote and significant time and experience and cohere together all the narrative fragments to understand what occurred in Palestine in 1948, the point in history that signals the temporal and spatial fragmentation of Palestinians. The Palestinian writer acts as the custodian of his or her community’s past and memory, and he or she encapsulates their people’s suffering and the struggle for self-recognition and determination. Karmi seems to say that the collective Palestinian memory functions as a means of resistance to official versions of history imposed by Israeli settler-colonialism. Zionists, Karmi explains, ‘had pinned their dreams and delusions on its land [Palestine], seen it as their salvation, and tried to make it exclusively their own’ (2015, 250). Palestinians are aware that their narrative of injustice is constantly occluded by that of the more powerful Israeli settlers. Power, as Haim Bresheeth observes, ‘is not only exercised over the land and its people, it also controls the story, its point of view, and the meta-narrative of truth and memory’ (2007, 165). The destruction of the Palestinian landscape has turned memory into an antagonistic process between competing versions of history. Palestinians recall their memories of their time and indigenous places in Palestine before the Nakba and piece together the fragments of their shared narrative in the form of the chronotope; ‘the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied,’ to which ‘belongs the meaning that shapes narrative’ (Bakhtin, 1981, 250). Karmi believes that unless the survivors of the Nakba narrate their story, the Palestinian existence and their struggle in the present will be incomprehensible. As Bill Ashcroft, et al. suggest: ‘What it means to have a history is the same as what it means to have a legitimate existence: history and legitimation go hand in hand; history legitimates us and not others’ (1995, 335). Thus, documenting historical recollections of memory—and the proclivity to capture the replica of the past—function as a means of resistance, allowing one constructed version of history/reality to compete with the colonial and imperial

80

Post-Millennial Palestine

conceptions of the past and indigenous culture. It is apt to conclude with Said’s words, in Culture and Imperialism, that while ‘the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism,’ narratives have also emerged as ‘the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history’ (1993a, xiii). References Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (1995) The Post-colonial Studies Reader. Hove: Psychology Press. Assink, Marian, and Johannes Schroots (2009) The Dynamics of Autobiographical Memory. Boston: Hogrefe. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981) The Dialogic of Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bresheeth, Haim (2007) ‘The Continuity of Trauma and Struggle: Recent Cinematic Representations of the Nakba.’ Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, eds. Ahmad Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod. New York: Columbia University Press. 161–88. Craps, Stef (2012) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Harvey, David (1996) Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Blackwell. Haynes, J. D. (1995) Bakhtin and the Visual Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karmi, Ghada (2003) ‘Edward Said and the Politics of Dispossession.’ Al Ahram. Available at: . Accessed 14 May 2019. Karmi, Ghada (2010) ‘Said and the Palestinian Diaspora: A Personal Reflection.’ Edward Said: The Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, eds. Adel Iskandar and Hakem Ruston. Berkeley: University of California Press. 304–13. Karmi, Ghada (2015) Return: A Palestinian Memoir. London: Verso. King, Nicola (2000) Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mattar, Karim (2014) ‘Mourid Barghouti’s “Multiple Displacements”: Exile and the National Checkpoint in Palestinian Literature.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50.1: 103–15.

The Exile’s Memory

81

Nalbantian, Suzanne (2003) Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience. London: Palgrave. Olney, James (1998) Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Qabaha, Ahmad (2018) Exile and Expatriation in Modern American and Palestinian Writing. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Qabaha, Ahmad (2019) ‘Decolonizing History and Depoliticizing Territory: Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape.’ Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21.7: 1030–44. Said, Edward W. (1983) The World, The Text and The Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Said, Edward W. (1986) After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. London: Faber and Faber. Said, Edward W. (1993a) Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Said, Edward W. (1993b) ‘Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals.’ Grand Street 47: 112–24. Said, Edward W. (2000 [1999]) Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Vintage Books. Said, Edward W. (2001 [2000]) Reflections on Exile: and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. London: Granta. Schacter, Daniel (1996) Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind and the Past. New York: Basic Books. Van Leeuwen, Richard (2004) ‘A Journey to Reality: Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah.’ Crisis and Memory: The Representation of Space in Modern Levantine Narrative, eds. Ken Seigneurie and Samira Aghacy. Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert. 177–98. Wald, Priscilla (1995) Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Durham: Duke University Press.

chapter four Snapshots of Solidarity Anthologizing Palestinian Life Writing By Sophia Brown Anthologizing Palestinian Life Writing

Recent crises, in particular the wars on Gaza (2008–09, 2012, 2014); the intensification of Israeli state violence; and the moribund status of the ‘peace process’ have been accompanied by a marked increase in Palestinian life writing. This builds on the earlier growth in autobiographical responses to displacement and the failure of Palestinians to achieve self-determination. As Bart Moore-Gilbert observes: ‘Since 1948—and more particularly since 1967—the sub-genre [of life writing] has flourished in direct proportion to Israel’s ever-tightening stranglehold on Palestinian lives and resources’ (2009, 115). Similarly, Juliane Hammer notes that ‘[m]emoirs and autobiographies of Palestinians have over the last five decades contributed to the development of a Palestinian collective memory’ (2003, 178). In the introduction to her Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, Salma Khadra Jayyusi refers to Palestinian life writing as ‘perhaps the greatest witness to the age of catastrophe’ (1992, 66). She also emphasizes the impact of displacement, asserting that there are two distinct branches of Palestinian literature—one produced within Palestine/Israel, one without—and her inclusion of numerous exiled writers (many of whom write in English) is indicative of their importance (1992, 4). Likewise, Hammer notes that post-Oslo, once it became apparent that diaspora Palestinians had been excluded from the terms of the negotiations, memoirs and oral history projects proliferated (2003, 189–90). It is, therefore, impossible to ignore the role that crisis plays in generating Palestinian life writing, as well as the fact that diaspora Palestinians have significantly contributed towards its growth, evidenced by the numerous works now available, including those by notable authors such as Mourid Barghouti, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Ghada Karmi, and Edward Said. 83

84

Post-Millennial Palestine

Unsurprisingly, given Palestine’s turbulent history, the subgenre is also marked by its emphasis on the collective. As Jayyusi insists, ‘in a period of communal upheaval […] no good personal account literature can ever be strictly “personal”’ (1992, 66). While her own remarks refer to single-author, book-length works (which her anthology includes extracts from), her reference to the communal speaks to the ethos of the contemporary English-language anthologies that this chapter explores, which gather together connected yet distinct voices through short-form life writing.1 This sense of communality, alongside a desire to respond to contemporary crises, is central to anthologies such as Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home (Johnson and Shehadeh, 2013b), Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation (Prashad, 2015b), Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine (Freeman, 2015a), and This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature (Soueif and Hamilton, 2017), which have followed the proliferation of single-author works during the previous quarter-century or so. Often to a greater extent than single-author texts, anthologies actively draw attention to the fact that while the predicaments faced by Palestinians are individually experienced, they are also widespread and shared. The very form of an anthology underscores this: by drawing together stand-alone pieces, explicitly connected at the outset through an editor’s introduction, personal stories coalesce into a broader collective. It is important to first locate these anthologies within the broader context of the growth of life writing in English in the twentyfirst century. Following what has come to be called the ‘memoir boom,’ which saw works by well-known figures and unknown authors become part of mass culture and its conversations about personal and collective identities, the genre of life writing has grown exponentially since 2000 (see: Rak, 2013; Smith and Watson, 2010; Whitlock, 2007). In her examination of the memoir boom, Julie Rak argues that memoirs establish connections, meaning that notions of community

1

I concur with Jeffrey R. Di Leo’s assertion that while there is sometimes a distinction made between ‘collections’ and ‘anthologies,’ the former a reference to new writing and the latter a work of previously published material, the term ‘anthology’ is often conflated with other types of collected and edited works (2004, 4). Therefore, I similarly use the term expansively. I am also drawn to its literary connotations: the original Greek word, anthologia, literally translated as a gathering of flowers, came to mean a collection of poems or poetic epigrams.

Anthologizing Palestinian Life Writing

85

and citizenship should be integral to our understanding of them. While the rapid popularity of life writing raises clear issues, such as the commodification and commercialization of personal narratives, as well as the fact that most published texts do not reflect on difference or look to challenge the status quo, there are still works that, as Rak asserts, ‘can be read for what they say about citizenship as a lived experience rather than as a formal system of obligations and rights’ (2013, 155). Such narratives, she argues, are often concerned with statelessness or precarious citizenship, as well as the ensuing complexities of belonging and bearing witness, thus sharing experiences that can forge meaningful alliances. This analysis has strong relevance to anthologized Palestinian life writing in English, which although a modest category in comparison to the more mainstream works of life writing that have enjoyed mass appeal following the memoir boom, nonetheless establishes important networks—starting with those between authors themselves—and intervenes in ongoing debates about citizenship and injustice. Assessing developments in life writing following the memoir boom, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the growing attention paid to diversity, global politics, and formal innovation. Post-millennial life writing, they argue, ‘reflects the powerful transformations taking place in nations around the world and the realignment of national interests across regions of the globe’ (2010, 130). Their focus on ‘emergent forms that have recently gained prominence’ includes narratives concerned with complex questions of citizenship—echoing Rak—and narratives of witness and testimonial life writing, which they consider within a broader context of work that attests to human rights violations (2010, 128; 130–38). They also draw attention to collaborative and collective life-writing projects, particularly in terms of autoethnographic and postcolonial texts, noting that such works write against repression and seek to bring about social change (2010, 157–60). This has clear parallels with the rise in anthologized Palestinian life writing, which I would locate within these growing concerns with issues of citizenship, belonging, and human rights. Also pertinent is Jeffrey R. Di Leo’s observation that in the twenty-first century, ‘there is a greater receptivity and interest in non- or uncanonical bodies of writing,’ with ‘[a]nthologies play[ing] a great role in mapping out these spaces’ (2004, 15) because of the concerns they often address and their commitment to emergent forms of writing. As such, ‘progressive cultural contributions are always within the grasp of the anthologist’ (2004, 17). These broader assessments all gesture towards what anthologies of Palestinian life

86

Post-Millennial Palestine

writing make explicit: advocating for greater awareness and political action through the use of the short form. Integral to the collective ethos that underpins these anthologies is an explicit sense of solidarity, giving the works their forward-looking momentum, as past and present injustices are voiced alongside a vision of a more equitable future. This desire for change and the articulation of solidarity are inseparable from considerations of international advocacy and language. In her survey of diasporic Palestinian life writing, Hammer notes the international audience the authors address, as they ‘make visible the hidden Palestinian dimensions of a largely pro-Israeli international historiography’ (2003, 193). Anna Bernard observes that Palestinian life writing in English builds on the increased international visibility of the conflict, thereby circulating as a form of Palestinian testimony (2013, 4). Norbert Bugeja asserts that the growth in life writing has arguably given the Palestinian predicament ‘its most effective form of speech on the international stage’ (2012, 38). Similarly, Moore-Gilbert claims that Palestinian life writing aims to rectify the invisibility and misrepresentation of Palestinians, before suggesting that ‘it has become the major branch of contemporary Palestinian literature, at least in the eyes of those in the West’ (2009, 115). He also asserts that the choice to write in English signals a desire to influence international public opinion and advocate for Palestinian rights, an observation that Lindsey Moore also makes (Moore-Gilbert, 2009, 115; Moore, 2018, 164). This is undoubtedly true, but it is also the case that some Palestinians must write in English because it—and not Arabic—is their first language. Therefore, writing in English, especially in the case of diaspora writers, should also be recognized as one of the outcomes of ongoing displacement. Anthologies of Palestinian life writing in English have an explicit international orientation, which their form encourages: they consist of a range of different writers based in different places, both in Palestine and the diaspora, united in a common cause and a desire to speak out. This sense of international advocacy that undergirds anthologies is also illustrated by the frequent inclusion of non-Palestinian authors, whose own participation presupposes a solidarity with Palestine often made clear in their contributions. When surveying these anthologies, it is apparent that they have provided opportunities for a broad range of authors. Not all writers, especially those less-established, are able to publish a book-length work. Short-form life writing allows them to explore a particular topic that reflects their individual perspective, while also contributing towards the wider shared narrative to which each anthology is equally committed. In this sense, there is a democratization

Anthologizing Palestinian Life Writing

87

to anthologies that again speaks to the issue of solidarity. Also important are the material acts of solidarity that connect various anthologies, which indicate a sense of community centred on cultural production. For example, the proceeds of Seeking Palestine were donated to the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest), thus also contributing towards the festival’s anthology, This is Not a Border (Soueif and Hamilton, 2017, v).2 Also donated to PalFest were the author fees paid to the contributors to Extraordinary Rendition.3 In her introduction to Extraordinary Rendition, which includes life writing, short stories, and poetry, editor Ru Freeman traces a lineage from her anthology to those responding to the Vietnam War and Franco’s fascism, thus positioning it as the latest instalment of writers opposing injustice (2015b, 16). In keeping with other anthologies, Freeman expresses this solidarity as a response to crisis, in particular the Israeli military attack on Gaza, ‘Operation Cast Lead’ (2008–09). In her introduction to This is Not a Border, an anthology predominantly made up of life writing that includes work by Palestinians and non-Palestinians who have participated in PalFest—itself an act of solidarity—Ahdaf Soueif similarly pinpoints a moment of crisis. Witnessing the impact of the occupation in 2003, specifically an Israeli military incursion in Ramallah and the military closure of Nablus, impels her to act, leading to the establishment of PalFest and the ensuing anthology (Soueif, 2017, 1–2). Soueif also positions the work as future-oriented, intended to contribute to ‘a change in the moral climate’ (2017, 5). Letters to Palestine, which contains examples of life writing alongside poetry and essays, by authors such as Remi Kanazi, Najla Said, and 2

3

PalFest is an annual literature festival that started in 2008, founded by the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif. The festival gathers a new group of international writers each summer, who stage events at various locations in the Occupied Territories. It both facilitates a cross-cultural exchange between these writers and Palestinians, and shows these writers—some of whom know little about Palestine—the realities of life under occupation. It is also worth mentioning the rise in online crowdfunding, which in the post-millennial period has become a way of achieving publication for certain projects. For example, the editors of the anthology Palestine Speaks acknowledge the success of their Kickstarter campaign (Malek and Hoke, 2015, 340–41). This arguably points towards a new model of publishing particularly suited to anthologies—with their networks of writers—especially ones that intervene in contemporary political debates. For example, recent successful anthologies, The Good Immigrant (Shukla, 2017) and Nasty Women (McDaid and Jones, 2017) were also crowdfunded.

88

Post-Millennial Palestine

Fady Joudah, also characterizes itself as a response to crisis. The editor, Vijay Prashad, begins his introduction with a reflection on the more recent bombardment of Gaza, ‘Operation Protective Edge’ (2014), before referring to ‘the everyday war that eclipses the smiles of ordinary people who have to make bare lives in extraordinary times’ (2015a, 5). His allusion to Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life,’ which denotes those denied political agency and exposed to violence through the governing state’s belief that such lives are expendable (see: Agamben, 1998), connects with both Freeman’s and Soueif’s desire to combat the international community’s failure to recognize Palestinian suffering through building a communal response. This communality is also prevalent in Seeking Palestine, an anthology almost exclusively made up of life writing that includes many well-known Palestinian writers, such as Susan Abulhawa, Mourid Barghouti, and Raja Shehadeh (who is also its co-editor). Threaded through the collection is the conviction that wherever Palestinians find themselves, whatever generation they are, the ongoing nature of dispossession generates profound commonalities between them. This is evident in co-editor Penny Johnson’s observation in her introduction that when reviewing the material for Seeking Palestine, ‘it seemed very much like our writers were conversing with each other—and with Palestinian writers before them’ (2013a, ix). She rightly celebrates the contributions for not relying on iconic images, nostalgia, or fixed memories of the past, with each author instead reflecting incisively on what Johnson aptly articulates as ‘the complicated present tense of a truncated and transitory Palestine’ (2013a, ix). It is in this sense that the title and the ensuing life writing are future-orientated: Palestine is still a place that is sought. The imperative to seek this place at this transitional juncture is evident in one of the questions that Johnson poses: ‘What happens when the “idea of Palestine” that animated so many around the globe becomes an “Authority” and Palestine a patchwork of divided territory?’ (2013a, ix). I therefore argue that two major factors drive this recent growth in anthologies. Most crucially, the contemporary crises and violent entrenchment of the occupation, which continues to devastate Palestinian civil society in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, represent the central motivation to produce these narratives. In addition, their publication is enabled and encouraged by the prevalence of multifarious, politically aware English-language life writing in the post-millennial period, which has created a general appetite for such narratives. Connecting these factors is the increased visibility of the

Anthologizing Palestinian Life Writing

89

conflict, emblematized by the proliferation of images of the West Bank Separation Wall and the military assaults on Gaza, which creates space for the writing to be received. The contemporary texture of anthologies can therefore hardly be understated. More profoundly, the strongest examples of anthologized life writing use the short form to reflect on Palestine today in ways that illustrate both the nearness and distance of the Nakba of 1948, which remains the defining moment in Palestinian history. Often, this is achieved by focusing on one issue or facet of Palestinian experience, which the short form actively encourages, meaning that those writers who are most attentive to the form and its innate strengths are the most successful. As well as in many others, this is apparent in the contributions by Mischa Hiller in Seeking Palestine (2013) and Randa Jarrar in Letters to Palestine (2015), which both trace continuities with past injustices but also firmly place their experiences and articulations of identity within a post-millennial context, actively updating older themes. It is to these two writers that this chapter now briefly turns. ‘We Can Only Move Forwards, Not Backwards’: Mischa Hiller’s ‘Onions and Diamonds’ in Seeking Palestine Exile is not, after all, a matter of choice: you are born into it, or it happens to you. But, provided that the exile refuses to sit on the sidelines nursing a wound, there are things to be learned: he or she must cultivate a scrupulous (not indulgent or sulky) subjectivity. –— Edward Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’ (2012 [2001], 184) Following the Nakba, exile has become a defining feature of Palestinian lives and a principal theme of their literature. In his seminal essay ‘Reflections on Exile,’ first published in 1984, Edward Said oscillates between the genuine suffering of exile and its more constructive qualities, particularly as an impetus for creativity. While he describes exile as a predicament ‘as close as we come in the modern era to tragedy,’ one that may seem ‘a prescription for an unrelieved grimness of outlook,’ this does not always hold true (2012 [2001], 183; 186). One of its benefits, he asserts, is the ‘originality of vision’ it can produce (2012 [2001], 186), a consequence of the exile’s enforced access to a wide range of perspectives and experiences. And yet, melancholy is the overriding sensation; as Said expresses in the final words of his essay, ‘no sooner

90

Post-Millennial Palestine

does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew’ (2012 [2001], 186). In his personal essay, ‘Onions and Diamonds,’ the novelist Mischa Hiller (2013) offers his own vision of exile, borrowing heavily from Said, while also departing from his perspective in ways that, I would argue, are distinctly post-millennial. Hiller begins by recounting the story of Hassan, a Syrian citizen whose parents were expelled from Palestine following the Nakba. During a demonstration in 2011 to mark Nakba Day, Hassan crosses the Syrian–Israeli border and travels to his father’s hometown of Jaffa. Here, he asserts, is where he wants to stay. In response, Hiller writes: I envy Hassan his certitude. He is, in one sense, better qualified than I to write about exile. To him it is straightforward, a matter that can be undone by physically returning to where you belong. Unlike him, I would not be so confident of wanting to settle somewhere I had never been, simply because one of my parents had been born there. (2013, 178) Hiller’s suggestion that there are both ‘straightforward’ and more complicated ways of approaching exile introduces his central message, one that is fitting in the context of an anthology: the plurality of responses to displacement. Like Said, Hiller knows that exile is not ‘a matter that can be undone,’ but, instead, a permanent experience that will challenge and enrich. Hiller describes embracing a model of selfhood that does not privilege belonging or fixed identity markers, which he connects to Said’s exilic outlook: ‘Being “Out of Place”—as Edward Said aptly named his memoir—is not a bad spot to inhabit’ (2013, 180). In fact, such a position ‘is invaluable for a writer’ because of the ‘displaced’ and therefore less narrow perspective it encourages (Hiller, 2013, 180). By also reiterating observations found in Said’s ‘Reflections on Exile’ about writers shaped by exile, Hiller underscores its creative possibilities. Interestingly, both Said and Hiller recognize the overlap in perspective between those who are forcibly exiled and those who choose exile, often for creative purposes—thus acknowledging the enduring literary fascination with the term and the fact that it has come to represent a diverse range of experiences. By distinguishing between ‘actual’ and ‘metaphorical’ conditions of exile in Representations of the Intellectual (1994), Said takes this further by contending that even someone with no connection to physical dislocation can, through an

Anthologizing Palestinian Life Writing

91

intellectual commitment to dissent and scepticism, experience a form of exile within their own society (1996, 52; emphasis in the original). That one can choose exile in a metaphorical sense resonates with Said’s observations in ‘Reflections on Exile’ on the importance of agency— ‘refus[ing] to sit on the sidelines nursing a wound’ (2012 [2001], 184). Exiles and intellectuals face important choices over how they position themselves, with their respective roles as outsiders generating both pleasures and insecurities. For Hiller too, the positive jostles alongside the negative: ‘There is no doubt that it is liberating—being able to think against the grain—even if it is a struggle’ (2013, 180). Hiller’s discussion of being an exiled writer oscillates, sometimes paradoxically, between being compelled to write about Palestine, benefiting from the rich subject matter it offers, and a belief that a writer should never privilege politics over aesthetics. That these two areas—politics and art—are sometimes rendered distinct and yet inevitably merge in ways that are not straightforward, suggests that Hiller continues to grapple with the push and pull of exile and its multiple meanings, in a manner reminiscent of Said’s enduring preoccupation with the relationship between exile and intellectual life (driven, inevitably, by his vision of himself as an exilic intellectual). Yet Hiller’s description contains possibilities and freedoms that are not as pronounced in Said’s work. He notes that ‘in the past,’ he had ‘fluctuated between desperately trying to belong […] and distancing myself,’ whereas now, he likes ‘to move between’ his English and Palestinian identities, or even sometimes ‘ignore them both’ (Hiller, 2013, 180). The sense of control this implies—the shift from fluctuations to consciously moving between different identities—marks a distinction between the two writers. In an oft-quoted passage from the very end of Out of Place, Said describes the unreconciled and multiple nature of his identity as ‘[a] form of freedom’ (2000 [1999], 295), which is echoed in Hiller’s embrace of the plurality of identity. Yet it is ‘skepticism’ that effectively has the last word in Said’s memoir, as he admits that he is ‘far from being totally convinced’ that the disharmonious and unreconciled model of selfhood he espouses is in fact a form of freedom (Said, 2000 [1999], 295). This is markedly different from the ease and stability that Hiller expresses when letting go of previous antagonisms and choosing which aspect of his identity to emphasize, ‘depending on which layer or facet of myself I am showing’ (2013, 180). The obvious explanation for this is that Said, by virtue of being born in 1935 in Jerusalem, was inevitably more affected by what

92

Post-Millennial Palestine

happened to Palestine. Reflecting on Palestine’s history, Hiller remarks that if one were ‘literal-minded’ about exile, he ‘and millions of others born in diaspora’ could not be considered exiles, an implicit acknowledgement of the differences in generation and circumstance between himself and someone like Said (2013, 181). What is at stake, though, is a shared reality for all Palestinians, including himself: ‘the gradual dismantling of their abandoned homeland’ (2013, 182). It is the continual deconstruction of this homeland into a different, ‘quickly dissolving place’ that exiles all Palestinians, regardless of where they were born and where they currently reside (2013, 182). In this respect, exile is a constantly renewed phenomenon, not exclusively linked to the seminal moment of the Nakba but an ongoing, contemporary act of violence against a homeland to which Hiller has never had access. Hiller changes tack here slightly, asserting that this effectively means dispossession: ‘We have been dispossessed, not exiled. Something has been stolen and disguised so that it is no longer recognizable. We have become rootless, citizens of the world’ (2013, 182). For Hiller, this means ‘the struggle is taking place everywhere,’ albeit in different ways—the reality of occupation is very different to Hiller’s life in Britain, as he readily acknowledges (2013, 183). Hiller concludes with a hope for a future Palestine that allows those who wish to return to do so, but that does not become a place ‘trapped in history’ (2013, 185). In imagining this future, he nonetheless reaffirms his preference for being an outsider, stating that when Hassan does make it back to Jaffa permanently, ‘I reserve the right to graduate from being dispossessed to becoming an exile’ (2013, 185). In its final articulation, exile is an aspiration—a desired state that would signal the end of Palestinian dispossession. In a similar vein to Said’s strategies for managing exile, Hiller privileges it, celebrating it as a constructive model of selfhood. By distinguishing it from dispossession, he reaffirms exile as predominantly an intellectual and creative inheritance—inflected with Palestine but no longer weighed down by the political situation. It is here that he most significantly diverges from Said, for whom exile and dispossession are two sides of the same coin, hence the overlap across his work between actual and metaphorical conceptions of exile. For Hiller, they are separate experiences, even as they continue to inform each other in a context of entrenched conflict. The final message seems to be: let (actual) dispossession end so that (metaphorical) exile can truly begin. This suggests a new— perhaps provocative—way of articulating Palestinian identity in the diaspora that is broadly positive: the conflict is by no means ignored,

Anthologizing Palestinian Life Writing

93

but compartmentalized in order to safeguard what can be gained from inheriting an exilic identity—an inheritance that, in a post-millennial context, with the conflict far from being resolved, arguably needs to be creatively rethought in order to cope with it. Echoing other scholars who have similarly critiqued Said, Karim Mattar argues that Said’s tendency to render exile abstract or idealized means that key specificities of Palestinian displacement and lived experience are overlooked. Mattar therefore emphasizes ‘the critical value of post-Saidian exile,’ which consistently privileges these specificities (2014, 104). I would argue that Hiller’s vision of exile is partly post-Saidian, although perhaps not in the way that Mattar would characterize it. While he still borrows much from Said, Hiller moves away from the interiority of Said’s definition of exile, which although attentive to ‘exile as a contemporary political punishment,’ is undeniably underpinned by intellectual concerns and highly personalized to Said’s own temperament and preferences (Said, 2012 [2001], 175). Hiller also seems better able to shed some of the weight of exile by predominantly defining it as a creative experience that is also future-oriented—a state of mind he will finally, fully attain when the gross injustice of Palestinian dispossession ends. If this also sounds somewhat idealized (one might assume that Mattar would have some of the same problems with Hiller that he does with Said), it should be noted that Hiller’s essay is guided by a sense of solidarity with those more directly impacted by the conflict. In fact, by keeping exile and dispossession separate, symbolized by the differing approaches of himself and Hassan, Hiller acknowledges those aspects of Palestinian displacement and suffering that do not apply to him in his position of relative privilege and ability to thrive as an outsider, thus creating a space for him to articulate exile as a creative endeavour without eliding the multiple realities of displacement in the Palestinian context. At the end of his essay, he states: ‘We can only move forwards, not backwards. We are already re-imagining a Palestine that reflects who we are now and who we hope to become’ (2013, 185). This encapsulates Hiller’s attitude towards Palestine and exile in the twenty-first century. He invokes a sense of solidarity and belonging through the use of the collective pronoun, yet there is also a clear-sighted—perhaps even dispassionate—vision that is able to let go of the past and reimagine Palestine unburdened by the upheavals of the twentieth century. A new Palestine to which he is bound, but where he will not return.

94

Post-Millennial Palestine

‘ENTRY DENIED’: Randa Jarrar’s ‘Imagining Myself in Palestine’ in Letters to Palestine Some of them hid in the ruins, others amongst the trees, and did not cross over into Jordan. They moved while it was dark and slept by day, returning whence they had come, only to be expelled again, to return, to be expelled, and then to return once more, right up to the present time. –— Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist (2010 [1974], 63) Saeed, the eponymous anti-hero of Habiby’s 1974 novel, observes unsuccessful early attempts by exiled Palestinians—labelled ‘infiltrators’ by the Israeli state—to return to their lost homes and land following the Nakba. Contemporary iterations of this expulsion are to be found in the now well-known phenomenon of being denied entry by Israeli border control. Such border zones and barriers to freedom of movement have become an unavoidable fact of life for Palestinians, as well as spaces that dramatize the profound challenges of being Palestinian. As Rashid Khalidi observes: ‘The quintessential Palestinian experience […] takes place at a border, an airport, a checkpoint: in short, at any of those many modern barriers where identities are checked and verified’ (1997, 1). Being refused entry to Palestine/Israel is a particularly forceful reminder for returning Palestinians of their identity as exiles, denied the agency to even attempt the process of reversing this sense of displacement. In ‘Imagining Myself in Palestine’ (2015), Randa Jarrar narrates experiencing this denial, establishing continuities with the long history of Palestinians being turned away at borders and barriers, but also articulating concerns and experiences that are reflective of the twenty-first century. Jarrar focuses on the minutiae of being denied entry when travelling from Philadelphia to visit her sister, based in the West Bank. She foregrounds her sense of anxiety about the trip and begins by recounting her ‘anxious and neurotic’ preparations for her arrival at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport and the encounter with immigration officers she rightly anticipates having to endure (2015, 55). In doing so, she begins to reveal that the primary function of denying Palestinians entry, beyond the unrestrained show of power, is to undermine and undo the links between Palestinians and Palestine, not just through denying them physical access to the land, but by criminalizing their connections to it. Jarrar’s indication that her intense fear overrides

Anthologizing Palestinian Life Writing

95

any other thoughts—meaning that when she tries to ‘picture’ herself in Palestine, she ‘draw[s] a blank’—is symptomatic of this distancing (2015, 56). While we primarily follow an intense experience as it unfolds, what adds depth to Jarrar’s text is the way she narrates the interrogations she is subjected to. These confrontations bring back memories, even as she is shown that such memories are deemed criminal. This structure, moving back and forth between the urgency of the present and memories of the past, allows us to empathize more fully with Jarrar and comprehend the dual violence at work: denying not just her entry into Palestine, but her heritage and identity. Her precise focus on the experience, as well as it being a skilful use of short-form life writing, allows Jarrar to adopt a darkly humorous tone as she describes those aspects of the encounter that seem particularly absurd and painful, such as the flagrant racial profiling and being ordered to stand in a hallway as punishment for talking back. This is reminiscent of Suad Amiry’s life writing, which possesses a similarly agitative black humour, especially when narrating encounters with Israeli military or security personnel.4 When describing her preparations for the trip, Jarrar brings into focus the extreme policing of Palestinian identity in a post-millennial context of digital and technological surveillance and the hegemony of securitization: I had deleted anything on my website critical of Israel, which amounted to about 160 posts. I had deleted the section on my Wikipedia entry that said I was a Palestinian writer. It had been unsettling, deleting my Palestinian-ness in order to go back to Palestine. I had been told that the Israeli officers might confiscate my phone and read my Facebook posts and Twitter feed, so I temporarily deactivated my Facebook account and locked my tweets. The entire endeavor left me feeling erased. (2015, 58) The narration of self-censorship underlines the potency of Israeli control, which in this contemporary context is symbolized by its 4

Amiry describes her experiences of travelling as a Palestinian (and the inevitable interrogations) in ‘An Obsession’ (2013, 83–85), her contribution to Seeking Palestine, as well as in her memoir, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law (2007, 3–12).

96

Post-Millennial Palestine

online surveillance of Palestinians and their supporters. Jarrar’s sense of erasure demonstrates the emotional impact of these preparations as well as their force. While such deletions are temporary and reversible, nonetheless they come across as genuinely suppressive, especially considering the increasing importance of online lives in creating and maintaining models of selfhood. Her list of preparations signals the familiar and the mundane—Facebook posts and Twitter feeds—as well as the realities and repercussions of an eroded privacy in the twenty-first century, where citizens have to live with the consequences of choosing to build communities and articulate their identities and beliefs online. Israel’s technological capabilities are well documented, as is the fact that in an era of global surveillance, it profits economically from the exportation—to sites such as airports and schools—of technologies developed as a means of policing Palestinians. This is what Rema Hammami describes as ‘the global normalization of Israel’s particular security expertise in surveillance and border policing’ (2010, 34). Jarrar’s personal fears about what her online presence might betray must be placed squarely within this context. When Jarrar is taken for questioning, her family connections are scrutinized, especially once it is discovered that her father was born in the West Bank. This questioning is intersected with Jarrar’s account of her estrangement from her father, who is angered by the sexual content of her first novel. Jarrar’s assertion that she is an American citizen and no longer in contact with her father is of little interest to the officials, who instead present her with names of her Palestinian ancestors. Overlapping the intimacies of family life with the humiliations of Israeli security interrogation is deliberately jarring, making it obvious that Jarrar’s personal circumstances are being exploited against her. The entrenched and unwarranted criminalization of Palestinians—‘the turning of outcasts into outlaws’ as Caroline Rooney puts it—is central to Jarrar’s anthologized essay (2014, 134). What makes her narrative so powerful is that her complicated family relations do not detract from her central message of fundamental injustice. Jarrar is able to express a certain ambivalence about her family ties while simultaneously exposing the cruelty of having these ties rendered criminal. In doing so, she establishes that the process of interrogation still violates something sacred, even if the memories provoked by it are not straightforwardly positive. The complications of her private life should not be part of this process and the fact that they are speaks to the inherent brutality of the experience, during which the Israeli officials demonstrate no sensitivity and deem nothing beyond

Anthologizing Palestinian Life Writing

97

bounds in their pursuit of incriminating evidence of Palestinian-ness. This evidence turns out to be a Palestinian ID attached to her name, which contains data of her entrance to the West Bank many years ago. Despite her vehement objections, this ID overrides Jarrar’s American citizenship. Paradoxically, by proving her connection to the land, the Israeli officials are able to distance her from it, demonstrating the unacceptability of this link between person and place. Her sister, previously described as ‘only an hour away,’ is now unreachable and Jarrar is forced to leave, her passport stamped ‘ENTRY DENIED’ (2015, 57; 65). Her sharp account of this denial makes it clear how the apparatus of security and surveillance is utilized in the contemporary period to prevent Palestinians from reaching Palestine. By focusing on the fundamentally discriminatory process of denial—in place for decades and today a finessed system driven by lucrative technologies and techniques of surveillance—she succinctly illustrates the ongoing demonization of Palestinian identity. Conclusion In reading anthologized Palestinian life writing, connections rise to the surface quickly: moving from one short text to another, resemblances— and differences—are often obvious to the reader. We recognize that writers are in conversation with one another, each attempting to represent their own personal experience but also responding to wider issues, as articulated by the respective editors of the anthologies. Unlike book-length works, anthologized texts often provide a concentrated focus on a single issue (as Hiller does) or pivotal moment (as Jarrar does). Despite differing enormously in tone and outlook, both Hiller and Jarrar effectively use the short form and their personal stories to comment on—and indeed protest—the broader context of ongoing Palestinian dispossession, making this integral to the snapshot of experience they want to narrate. Such texts, individually meaningful but also conversant with wider concerns and messages of solidarity, are ideal components of anthologies that position themselves as future-orientated and express a desire for change at the outset. The reiteration of this desire by individual authors is especially evident in the testimonial texture of much anthologized Palestinian life writing. As Gillian Whitlock argues, such testimonies are a direct appeal to the reader in the hope

98

Post-Millennial Palestine

that the suffering expressed is recognized (2015, 8). Whitlock is right to draw attention to the affective nature of this appeal, through which the writer seeks acknowledgement of the injustice of their situation, and that of others, particularly evident in Hiller’s sympathy for Hassan, desperate to return to Palestine. Whitlock also asserts that ‘testimonial transactions connect directly to the most fundamental questions of who counts as human,’ reiterating observations made by Rak and Smith and Watson about post-millennial life writing and its concern for issues of citizenship and belonging (Whitlock 2015, 169). This also echoes the message relayed by many of the anthologies that contemporary Palestinian writing in English goes beyond narrating the specifics of the conflict in order to reflect on central questions of dignity, justice, and kinship. In this sense, it aims to reach its reader on a fundamental level, at which they understand that in today’s era of rising Islamophobia, the political obsession with national borders, and the scapegoating of migrants and other vulnerable peoples, as well as the ongoing Israeli occupation, radical change is needed. Acknowledgements The work for this chapter was supported by a Research Fellowship from the Council for British Research in the Levant. References Agamben, Giorgio (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Amiry, Suad (2007) Sharon and My Mother-in-Law. London: Granta. Amiry, Suad (2013) ‘An Obsession.’ Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, eds. Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. 74–85. Bernard, Anna (2013) Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel/ Palestine. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Bugeja, Norbert (2012) Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East. Abingdon: Routledge. Di Leo, Jeffrey R. (2004) ‘Analyzing Anthologies.’ On Anthologies: Politics and Pedagogy, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. 1–27. Freeman, Ru, ed. (2015a) Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine. London: OR Books.

Anthologizing Palestinian Life Writing

99

Freeman, Ru (2015b) ‘Making Sense.’ Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine, by Ru Freeman. London: OR Books. 15–24. Habiby, Emile (2010 [1974]) The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist. Trans. Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Trevor LeGassick. London: Arabia Books. Hammami, Rema (2010) ‘Qalandiya: Jerusalem’s Tora Bora and the Frontiers of Global Inequality.’ Jerusalem Quarterly 41: 29–51. Hammer, Juliane (2003) ‘A Crisis of Memory: Homeland and Exile in Contemporary Palestinian Memoirs.’ Crisis and Memory: The Representation of Space in the Modern Levantine Narrative, ed. Ken Seigneurie. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag. 177–98. Hiller, Mischa (2013) ‘Onions and Diamonds.’ Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, eds. Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. 178–86. Jarrar, Randa (2015) ‘Imagining Myself in Palestine.’ Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation, ed. Vijay Prashad. London: Verso. 55–66. Jayyusi, Salma Khadra (1992) ‘Introduction.’ Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi. New York: Columbia University Press. 1–72. Johnson, Penny (2013a) ‘Introduction: Neither Homeland not Exile are Words.’ Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, eds. Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. ix–xvi. Johnson, Penny, and Raja Shehadeh, eds. (2013b) Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. Khalidi, Rashid (1997) Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press. Malek, Cate, and Mateo Hoke, eds. (2015) Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation. London: Verso. Mattar, Karim (2014) ‘Mourid Barghouti’s “Multiple Displacements”: Exile and the National Checkpoint in Palestinian Literature.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50.1: 103–15. McDaid, Heather, and Laura Jones, eds. (2017) Nasty Women. Edinburgh: 404 Ink. Moore, Lindsey (2018) Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations: Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine. Abingdon: Routledge. Moore-Gilbert, Bart (2009) Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation. Abingdon: Routledge. Prashad, Vijay (2015a) ‘Introduction: A Country in Darkness.’ Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation, ed. Vijay Prashad. London: Verso. 3–14. Prashad, Vijay, ed. (2015b) Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation. London: Verso.

100

Post-Millennial Palestine

Rak, Julie (2013) Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Rooney, Caroline (2014) ‘Prison Israel-Palestine: Literalities of Criminalization and Imaginative Resistance.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50.2: 134–47. Said, Edward (1996) Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage Books. Said, Edward (2000 [1999]) Out of Place. London: Granta. Said, Edward (2012 [2001]) ‘Reflections on Exile.’ Reflections on Exile: and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. 2nd ed. London: Granta. 173–86. Shukla, Nikesh, ed. (2017) The Good Immigrant. London: Unbound. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson (2010) Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Soueif, Ahdaf (2017) ‘Introduction.’ This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature, eds. Ahdaf Soueif and Omar Robert Hamilton. London: Bloomsbury. 1–5. Soueif, Ahdaf, and Omar Robert Hamilton, eds. (2017) This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature. London: Bloomsbury. Whitlock, Gillian (2007) Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whitlock, Gillian (2015) Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

part ii Palestinian Aesthetics: Icons, Haptics, and Palimpsests

chapter five Confronting the Mythic? Najwan Darwish and Post-Millennium Palestinian Poetry By Sarah Irving Post-Millennium Palestinian Poetry

Mahmoud Darwish, one of the twentieth century’s greatest Arabic poets, often hailed as the national poet of Palestine, once wrote that ‘it is imposed on the Palestinian to pass through the mythic in order to reach the familiar […] [to be] confined to a mythic writing of everyday reality, of the Palestinian present’ (1997, 27–28).1 He emphasized, among the myths that constrained his poetic voice, the book of Genesis, a particular narrative that confronted his desire to ‘live all the cultures’ of the land, including Canaanite, Hebraic, Greek, Roman, Persian, Egyptian, Arabic, Ottoman, English, and French. At the same time, this eminent writer spent his last few decades writing work often seen as ‘difficult,’ still strongly identified with the Palestinian collectivity, but more personal and perhaps detached from and critical of the nationalist political entities and narratives with which, for many, he had become synonymous (M. Darwish, 1997, 27; Khankan, 2009, 13–14; Salti, 2010, 47–48). Rendered almost mythic in scale by his own literary stature, his use of the word imposed stresses the extent to which he, as a Palestinian poet, felt a duty to operate on the levels of legends and heroes—be they those of Biblical and other grand narratives, or those of the Palestinian Revolution and its fedayeen (see also: Khankan, 2009, 12). The spirit of the Resistance and its literature, epitomized in the works of the martyred writer and militant Ghassan Kanafani, demanded that the personal be set aside in favour of the greater purpose of national liberation. The literary use of the mythic (as I understand and use the 1

‘Cela impose au Palestinien de traverser le mythe pour atteindre le familier […] m’a contraint à une écriture mythique du réel quotidien, du présent Palestinien.’ 103

104

Post-Millennial Palestine

term in this chapter) fit this agenda in various ways: it rendered the individual and personal larger, permitting specific oppressions to be understood on grander scales. Its conveyance through images of mythic and larger-than-life figures, whether religious or secular, allowed appeals to broad cultural resonances and ethical messages that provided a kind of shorthand and/or a means of generalizing the Palestinian struggle to the level of great moral questions of oppression, innocence, and valour. Appeals to figures—again, sometimes religious, at others, historical or legendary—with specific virtues or qualities implied possession of, or connection to, their courage or victimhood, while by the same token enemies and opponents implicitly took on the characteristics of their others, such as cowardice, duplicity, or savagery. The mythic can be seen as offering a grammar of symbolism and resonance that renders the subject of a poem both more comprehensible within a certain moral framework and rich on a cultural and aesthetic level. Since the 1990s, though, the messy failure of the Oslo Peace Process and the fracturing of the Palestinian resistance has also shattered narratives of Palestinian literature that have tended to portray and analyse it solely in terms of the political environment. Although Bashir Abu-Manneh, in his analysis of Palestinian novels, termed Oslo ‘the root cause of the disintegration and liquidation of Palestinian agency’ (2016, 159), as this chapter shows, for some (both writers and critics), the post-Oslo period has opened up a less ambiguously negative space, in which concepts of personal liberation and social critique can co-exist alongside national allegiances. Whether or not Palestinian writers before Oslo felt compelled to write first and foremost as Palestinian nationalists, or whether they were simply read that way regardless of their own intentions, the poetry of the years approaching the millennium and certainly after it has been read in more diverse ways. As Muhsin al-Musawi discusses, the literary mask, in which writers transcend the romantic ‘I’ by adopting the persona of the mythic or heroic figure and thus proffer a more collective or objective voice, is a device widely used by poets of the resistance generation (2006, 31–33). But the personalized concepts and understandings of the political in a post-Cold War world offer less clear-cut notions of what constitutes ‘poetry of the resistance,’ and one product of this is, perhaps, a challenge to the extent to which the mythic ‘masks’ of Mahmoud Darwish, Adonis, and others must be applied by newer cohorts of poets. In order to interrogate this shift, this chapter offers a reading of works by Najwan Darwish (1978 –; no relation to Mahmoud Darwish). In his poem ‘Jerusalem,’ the younger Darwish writes of ‘Medusa […]

Post-Millennium Palestinian Poetry

105

Sodom and Gomorrah […] Rome […] [and] the Qur’an’ (2014, 6) in a way not dissimilar to the older poet’s listing of the cultural heritages of Palestine. But in his often cynical, sarcastic poetry and rejection of the idealization and heroic scale of his predecessors, has N. Darwish circumvented, and indeed at times appropriated, the mythic to create a poetry that demands the right to be personal, while also asserting its own politics? Kareem James Abu-Zeid writes in the afterword to his translation of N. Darwish’s poetry collection Nothing More to Lose that ‘no Palestinian has ever written poetry quite like this before’ (2014, 113). In this chapter, however, I argue that despite his apparent iconoclasm, N. Darwish remains obliged to confront a constellation of the mythic that closely resembles the themes made famous in the work of an earlier generation of Palestinian poets. The Mythic in Palestinian Poetry Arabic writers have incorporated themes and references from the mythic, and used its genres, tropes and themes, across time and space (al-Musawi, 2006, 30). But in the context of the Middle East in the second half of the twentieth century the deliberate and foregrounded use of the mythic is most associated with the Tammuzi school, a group of mainly Syrian and Lebanese poets linked to the Beirut-based journal Shi’r in the late 1950s and first half of the 1960s. Influenced by T. S. Eliot and the folklorist J. G. Frazer and his monumental compendium of myth and legend, The Golden Bough, they are often located in a sociopolitical setting of anti-colonialism and Arab nationalism, a ‘general societal feeling of renewal, liberation and political independence’ (De Moor, 2001, 193). They not only use images and symbols drawn from ancient legends and religions, but also adopt epic forms and utopian settings, even employing the former to talk about contemporary ‘heroes’ such as Ataturk and Nasser (al-Musawi, 2006, 31; Halman, 1974, 29). Their use of the mythic to express contemporary political ideas was an influence on later Arabic poets of the 1960s and 1970s, including Mahmoud Darwish and other Palestinian writers (De Moor, 2001). This was achieved particularly through the use of the mask or the archetype, a means of expressing (often political) ideas and opinions through the voice of another (al-Musawi, 2006, 32–33). In Palestinian writing, these motifs have several specific characteristics. These include a particular focus on the land, often conceived of as a female figure, depicted using mythical emblems such as

106

Post-Millennial Palestine

goddesses, and overlapping with themes of fertility and renewal (Mir, 2013, 116–17). These have obvious resonances, especially for those Palestinians living in exile and/or as refugees after 1948. Such motifs, as deployed in works by Rashid Hussain, Taha Muhammad Ali, and others, often incorporate problematic gendered imagery, with women figuring as passive, victimized, and raped; or as promiscuous and faithless; and rarely possessed of their own voices (Ghanim, 2009, 23; 33–35;2 Khankan, 2009, 50). A second aspect that is particularly strong among Palestinian writers using mythic tropes is the creation of contemporary mythologies, with the heroic and epic often clearly referring to the feda’i, or fighter with the Palestinian resistance, or the martyr killed by Israeli forces (Salti, 2010, 43). The mask is especially important here, permitting the poet to utilize the language and imagery of myths and legends to glorify and immortalize those embroiled in the national struggle. In addition to the links traceable between the Tammuzi school and poetic use of mythic elements by Palestinian poets, the latter can also be seen as drawing on a second range of sources. This is the body of scholarly literature beginning with the Palestinian nativist anthropologists of the Mandate period, who saw rural Palestinian identity and culture (in contrast to the exclusive claims of Zionism to a narrow Hebrew history) as the rich, inclusive product of the many peoples who had lived in the region over the millennia, regardless of religion or ethnicity. Ethnographers such as Tawfiq Canaan, Stephan Hanna Stephan, and Omar Salih al-Barghuti, publishing principally in the Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society from the early 1920s to 1948, argued that (for instance) Palestinian folk-songs had thematic and stylistic commonalities with the Biblical Song of Songs, but also with the traditional literatures of other Middle Eastern cultures (Tamari, 2009, 97–112; Stephan, 1922). This ‘Canaanist’ strand in Mandate-period nationalism had a resurgence in the 1970s, when some Palestinian intellectuals rediscovered the works of Tawfiq Canaan and his comrades, although this trend remained marginal and somewhat controversial (Tamari, 2009, 99). Nevertheless, similar ways of reading Palestinian rural culture remain alive in the work of anthropologist 2

Honaida Ghanim associates this with the rural background of many of the 1960s and 1970s generation of Palestinian poets, and sees it as indicative of an unchallenged peasant conservatism. However, such gendered and sexualized imagery is common among nationalisms from around the world, and likely reflects a more general patriarchal thread to many cultures.

Post-Millennium Palestinian Poetry

107

Ali Qleibo (2013) and historian Basem Ra’ad (2010). Differentiating his own work—and that of Canaan and Stephan, et al.—from the Euro-American ethnographers who saw continuities from antiquity to nineteenth-century Palestinian culture as a sign of stagnation, or that the Palestinian peasantry was the degraded remnant of once-great peoples, Ra’ad calls such links ‘not fossilized remnants but subaltern, functional folk traditions’ (2011, 3). This suggests that they embody a potential form of resistance or references that, unlike the Eliot-inspired references of the Tammuzi movement, would have meaning for a less literary audience. Drawing on the insights of Anna Bernard (2013) in her use of relational history to think about Palestinian and Israeli literature, it is also worth bearing in mind the significance of the mythic and religious in Israeli writing. Those Palestinian writers who have engaged with and been influenced by Israeli Jewish literature are not confined to those living and working within the State of Israel; indeed, Edward Said wrote of Mahmoud Darwish that he ‘was one of the very few Arabs to know and appreciate such great Israeli poets as Bialik’ (Said, 1994, 112). On the aesthetic level, it seems more than likely that there were influences back and forth, and in both cases the mythic has been, at least until the 1970s, utilized by largely secular writers seeking to focus attention on the national rather than the religious as a site of quasispiritual meaning and loyalty (El-Azma, 1968, 671; Aschkenasy, 2004, 138–49; Shapira, 1997, 647; Abramson, 2004, 67–68). On the political, too, Palestinian and Israeli literatures from 1948 until the 1970s might well be seen as trying to achieve similar ends through their use of the mythic, laying claim to land and history by deploying religious and secular myths, be they Biblical, Quranic, Classical, Canaanite, or Mesopotamian. In a conflict in which modern political and national legitimacy is often framed in terms of longevity of connection with geographical space, using myths and legends whose origins are lost in the mists of time seems almost inevitable. Jil Oslo and After: The Breakdown of Nationalist Narratives? The literary trends and groupings described above are, however, generally associated with modernism and with the monolithic certainties of nationalism and other grand narratives such as socialism and secularism. These, we are often assured, met their end with postmodernism, post-structuralism, and the fall of the USSR, while

108

Post-Millennial Palestine

in the Palestinian setting the sense of a heroic, unified resistance was tarnished with the political failures of the 1990s Oslo process. With the shift from an armed resistance to the processes of statebuilding, Rasha Salti suggests, ‘the fida’i disappeared politically, and consequently lapsed from the universe of poetic, fiction, visual and cinematic expression’ (2010, 48). The idea that this profound political change would, by definition, cause a deep-seated change in Palestinian poetic production is, of course, highly problematic. Although there is a tendency to describe Palestinian literature as if it is inevitably bound to the political situation (see: Mir, 2013), to do so denies creative agency on the part of the writer, as well as marginalizing those voices who do not allow the political to dominate their work (Khankan, 2009, 12–16). On the other hand, particularly for those Palestinians living a daily experience of Israeli occupation, dividing both daily oppressions, and the politics engendered by resistance to them, from the personal is nigh impossible. Anthropologist Lori Allen notes that the ever-present signs and discourses of nationalism in the environment of the Occupied Territories ‘structur[es] the texture of social life, its ideologies guiding the formation of subjectivity and political identity’ (2006, 110). This sense of the all-pervading presence of a nationalist politics offers us a way of understanding its role in influencing poetry and our reading of it; to see a West Bank or Jerusalemite Palestinian poet as affected by the messages—both aesthetic and political—of nationalism is not to assume that they accept Kanafani’s demand to subjugate the self to the national collective interest. Rather, it acknowledges that even if their reaction is ‘distraction, boredom and ennui’ (Allen, 2006, 110) in relation to nationalism, these are still emotions and states of mind that feed into the creative process, and omnipresent symbols and images that feed into a grammar of representation. Have mythic modes of talking about the national situation remained meaningful in this context? Salti (2010, 49–50) discusses Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s combination of the feda’i figure with both that of the ninja and of the crucified Jesus Christ, in his 2002 film Divine Intervention, in a manner that evokes a sense of glorious resistance alongside humour and an appeal to popular imagery from outwith the Palestinian context. In his surreal portrayal of the relationship between lovers divided by Israeli checkpoints, Suleiman presents the character of the ‘ninja Christ’: with her crown of spinning bullets, she defies and destroys Israeli occupation, but Suleiman’s depiction is tongue-in-cheek, with a sense of mockery, or self-mockery, which could amuse or offend (Scott, 2002, n.p.). Critical comment focused on the

Post-Millennium Palestinian Poetry

109

violence of the ninja killing an Israeli soldier, but more pertinent here is Suleiman’s use of the idea of Christ as a saviour for the Palestinians, amalgamated with a warlike female figure. Although the action is clearly magical, with the ninja-figure hovering in the air to shoot her crown of bullets, the mythic-heroic is complicated and destabilized on multiple levels. Both Christ and the feda’i are made female, the pacific figure of Christ rendered aggressive, blended with the Japanese warrior image regularly appropriated by Hollywood to portray extreme violence. As discussed below, in deploying the image of Jesus, Suleiman’s film works intertextually and disruptively with an image repeatedly used by Palestinian writers from Ibrahim Tuqan, to Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, and M. Darwish to denote the suffering of their country (Salti, 2010, 40; de Moor, 2001, 196–97; al-Musawi, 2006, 125). Nathalie Khankan’s research into poetry produced by a group coalescing around Ramallah in the late 1990s suggests similar trends. Glimpses of the mythic-heroic poetry of what might be termed the ‘resistance period’ still appear, but with their meanings transformed, often with any clear message of political identity or ideology stripped out or radically reshaped (Khankan, 2009, 4–5). As Khankan highlights, though, these poets fiercely resisted the charge from Arab critics that their work was no longer political (2009, 49). Instead, they located it within a renegotiation of what constitutes ‘politics’ in the changed institutional and ideological environment of the late 1990s (and beyond), in which Palestinians detached from the conventional resistance factions and their modes of expression laid claim to pleasure, existence, and personal liberation as necessary components of the political landscape (Khankan, 2009, 27; Karkabi, 2013, 309–10). Najwan Darwish: Constrained by or Transcending the Mythic? That Najwan Darwish’s poetry makes abundant use of the mythic references employed by his predecessors among the Palestinian ‘poets of the resistance’ is indisputable. Glancing through the selection in Nothing More to Lose, an anthology spanning N. Darwish’s work from 2000 to 2014, one finds mentions of the famed Islamic warrior and ruler Saladin (2014, 3; 54; 55), Biblical references to the Sea of Galilee, Mount Moriah, Sodom, and Gomorrah, (3; 5; 6; 31), angels (3; 8), the Medusa, ancient Rome, the Qur’an (6), the second Caliph Umar and the bishop Sophronius with whom he negotiated the legendary Pact that guaranteed the rights of Christians under Islam if they

110

Post-Millennial Palestine

surrendered Jerusalem (8), the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (14), Quss bin Saida, who was a Companion of the Prophet (25), Shulamite and other echoes of the Song of Solomon (26), Jesus and/or crucifixion (12; 29; 36; 38; 42; 79; 88), and the pre-Islamic poet Urwa ibn al-Ward (99). These images of heroic, religious, and legendary pasts are, like the poetry of the Palestinian Resistance epitomized by M. Darwish and in Kanafani’s writings, blended with more recent references to, for example, the Palestinian Intifadas, or uprisings, of 1987-93 and 2000-05 (N. Darwish, 2014, 34; 36; 40) or the figure of Suleiman al-Halabi, the Egyptian who assassinated the occupying French general Kléber in 1800 (65). Like the earlier generation’s work, therefore, N. Darwish’s poems seem to follow the nationalist practice of placing Palestinian and broader Arab existence and resistance on the mythic and heroic scale, imbuing them with the attributes associated with great military leaders such as Saladin, with the transcendent beauty of the women of the Song of Songs, or the religious significance of the various sacred books of the Abrahamic faiths. However, as this section of the chapter will argue, closer reading of N. Darwish’s work shows a different trajectory, more in accordance with Khankan and Nadim Karkabi’s analysis of contemporary Palestinian creative forms as laying claim to a more personal form of the political, sometimes even overtly challenging hegemonic narratives of Palestinian nationalism. In order to show how this works in the context of N. Darwish’s work, I will examine his use of two key images that appear both in his poetry and that of previous Palestinian writers. These are the figure of Christ—particularly the crucifixion—and the Ayyubid leader Saladin, who was instrumental in driving the Crusaders from Palestine in the late twelfth century. Mitri Raheb’s 2014 study of M. Darwish’s use of Biblical themes, and particularly of images of Christ, in his poems, points out that the latter are common in M. Darwish’s early work (before 1967) and after 1982, with a complete absence in between, despite the commonness of Christ as a mythic figure in Palestinian poetry. In the earlier period, Palestine or the Palestinian narrator are clearly identified with the crucified Jesus, whose faith inspires strength. In the later stage, after the massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut and the expulsion of the Palestinian resistance from Lebanon, the Palestinian identification with Christ becomes one abandoned on the cross and pleading for aid (Raheb, 2014, 95–98). But in these pre-Oslo poems, M. Darwish’s ‘I’ is very often a ‘we,’ a statement of the

Post-Millennium Palestinian Poetry

111

Palestinian collective and a representation of a people’s plight rather than of individual courage or suffering. N. Darwish follows his namesake on a number of occasions by invoking Jesus as a precursor to Palestinian pain. In ‘Sleeping in Gaza’ images of the crucifixion serve to emphasize the agonies of the people of Gaza, Iraq, and Lebanon under the impacts of their respective colonial wars, and to pointedly accuse those who benefit from these conflicts: […] those who collect the people’s suffering and sins mold them into crosses, and parade them through the streets of Babylon and Gaza and Beirut. (N. Darwish, 2014, 12–13) The mythic tone is reinforced by the use of the ancient city of Babylon as a location rather than (now) more populous and quotidian Iraqi cities such as Basra or Baghdad. Later, the poet writes: The earth is three nails and mercy a hammer: Strike, Lord Strike with the planes. (2014, 12–13) The note reading ‘December 2008’ that follows the poem tells us that its immediate inspiration is ‘Operation Cast Lead,’ the Israeli military campaign against Gaza that killed about 1400 people during December 2008 and January 2009. But N. Darwish’s words complicate the standard pairing of the underdog as Christ and the malevolent force in the poem as His crucifiers. Here, the earth, usually an object of desire and longing in Palestinian poetry, becomes the nails that hold the victim to the cross. Mercy is the hammer that drives the nails into their hands; the rest of the poem suggests that we might justifiably understand this ‘mercy’ as the ineffective platitudes of a humanitarian agenda that ultimately fails to deliver. Jesus, as ‘Lord,’ is implored to inflict greater pain by striking, and is identified with the Israeli warplanes that bombed Gaza. As such, the victims of this bombardment are distanced not only from their earth and from the hope of mercy, but even from Christ, who rather than being identified with them as a martyr becomes the inflictor of death and destruction. The sense of Jesus as a source of suffering rather than an alleviator of it recurs in ‘Mary’ albeit in a much more personal, wry version.

112

Post-Millennial Palestine

Here, Jesus represents the desire of the poet’s mother for a son who meets her demands both as the idealized martyred Palestinian youth and as the pure and martyred figure of an old-fashioned Christianity. Again, the narrator speaks of supplying the ‘books and nails’ themselves (N. Darwish, 2014, 36), implying, as in ‘Sleeping in Gaza,’ an uncomfortable collusion between victim and perpetrator that complicates any clear distinctions between patriot/traitor, hero/ villain, or martyr/coward. Two further poems bring us closer to the identification of the Palestinian with Jesus as the virtuous martyr, with a clearer sense of this figure as one who is morally good, or at least blameless, in contrast and confrontation with destructive powers. The implication throughout, however, is one of helplessness, unlike the poems of M. Darwish’s earlier phase in which Christ is a source of strength and inspiration. In ‘To Cristo,’ the narrative voice converses with the enormous statue of Jesus in Rio de Janeiro, invoking common origins—‘We’re your family, after all’—to tempt Christ back to Palestine (2014, 42–43). According to N. Darwish, little has changed in Palestine since the events of the New Testament in which Jesus overturned the tables of the money-changers and was betrayed by Jerusalem’s ruling class: And I know that the thieves are still working as judges and the false witnesses are still clothed as priests. (2014, 42–43) As with the earlier, even darker, poems, however, Christ remains distant, this time vanishing behind a cloud; despite the poet’s urging to return to the Holy Land, the statue to which he speaks remains a ‘torment’ and the subject of his ‘one fear.’ Neither an inspiration nor a fellow-sufferer in the moment, N. Darwish’s Christ continues to offer little but a scant identification based on shared origins. In ‘Coming Down,’ meanwhile, Jesus’ distance is that of a cross ‘far too high / for us to reach,’ on which He remains hanging in Jerusalem but also ‘at the edge of a camp in Gaza [and] on the nightly news’ (N. Darwish, 2014, 88–89). The image evokes a sense of universal suffering, in which Palestinian agony is distilled into the one person of Christ but also spread out across the vague, changing victims of repeated news stories. The closing line, ‘I never said I wanted to come down’ (2014, 88–89)

Post-Millennium Palestinian Poetry

113

is ambiguous; there is no clear marker to tell us that the voice has shifted from N. Darwish/the narrator, but the ‘I’ appears now to be Christ, abdicating his responsibility to end this universal suffering and denying that He should be expected to bring an end to the narrator’s ‘misery’ and ‘stumbling’ through ‘abandoned hills.’ As these various examples show, N. Darwish makes prominent and regular use of a mythic figure, one with strong links to Palestine and usually associated with clear ethical significance in the way in which it is used in most literary work. N. Darwish, however, adopts a darker and much more ambiguous position, in which he deploys mentions of the mythic entity in order to draw on its emotional and ideological weight, but takes it in different directions in which the contrasts between the usual heroic or martyr imageries lends depth and power to the portrayals of disillusionment and despair. Utilizing the mythic also provides a solid core to N. Darwish’s often complex and fluid ideas, in that the surety of references such as Christ—of whose figure most readers could be assumed to have a set of understandings that, if not shared, at least occupied an identifiable range on a spectrum—permits a known quantity around which less familiar or cohesive ideas and identities might revolve. Moving on from Christ, a figure of divinity, moral purity, and martyrdom, the next case examines the ways in which N. Darwish works with the character of Salah ad-Din, or Saladin, the famous and symbolically rich commander of the Islamic forces that retook Palestine from the Crusaders in the late twelfth century. M. Darwish’s depiction of Saladin is very much in accord with a long tradition of mythologizing this figure as a heroic warrior but also as a courteous and compassionate opponent and a just and wise ruler (Hillenbrand, 2005). In the autobiographical prose of Memory for Forgetfulness, he evokes the image of a noble Saladin sending food and ice to the Crusader army he is besieging, only to have them redouble their attacks once they have grown stronger on his beneficence (M. Darwish, 1995b, 33; 46; 115). The Crusaders are explicitly linked with (modern-day) colonialism and with duplicity (1995b: 34; 46). In the poem ‘Death of the Phoenix,’ meanwhile, a reference to the Crusaders is used to epitomize defeat and retreat, which M. Darwish/ the Palestinian people will not countenance (1995a, 359). In both cases, Saladin and the Crusaders are clearly articulated moral opposites, with the righteous Saladin/Arab Palestinians confronting the unethical behaviour of Westerners, be they medieval Christian knights or contemporary Israelis.

114

Post-Millennial Palestine

N. Darwish’s three uses of the image of Saladin within Nothing More to Lose do very different, and more diverse, work. In the opening lines of the first poem, also titled ‘Nothing More to Lose,’ N. Darwish writes: Lay your head on my chest and listen to the layers of ruins behind the madrasah of Saladin. (2014, 3) On one level, this reference reinforces the heroic version of Saladin, in this case evoking the wise and learned aspect of his character with a mention of the school founded by him soon after his conquest of Jerusalem. On the other hand, in these lines and in the rest of the poem Saladin and his madrasa are just one of many items characteristic of Palestine consigned to the past and to silence: behind the school are ruins, while in other imagery singers grow old, houses are sliced open, and a mill wrecked. With an ambiguity typical of N. Darwish, the sense of decay and death is blended with the idea of immortality and agelessness, but this might be as much a ‘torment’ as a blessing; the poet’s Palestinian heritage is both a subject of celebration and a burden to be forgotten. The figure of Saladin’s second appearance, in ‘I will rise one day’ (N. Darwish, 2014, 54), performs two symbolic tasks. On one hand, Saladin’s mixed heritage is evoked. The historical Salah ad-Din was of mixed Kurdish and Turkish ancestry: born in Tikrit in modern-day Iraq, his family were originally from the disappeared city of Dvin in modern-day Armenia. The poem’s narratorial voice similarly identifies with multiple roots—Kurdish, Amazigh and Arab—in a motif used in a number of N. Darwish’s other poems to indicate a sense of shared oppression among different peoples and to reject any sense of national or ethnic purity (2014, 8–9; 16; 41; 72). Linked to this, and also to a more conventional meaning of Saladin’s presence, is his second purpose here, which is that of a kind of anti-colonial hero to the oppressed peoples whose voices make up the poem, all of whom will ‘one day’ have the opportunity to rise up and declare: ‘They’ve gone now, Saladin’ (2014, 54). Saladin does similar work in a third poem, ‘The last soldier’s words to Saladin’ in which the soldier-Sultan again represents a distant but possible taste of freedom, at the height of which the narrating last soldier looks at ‘nothing but the sun, which shines / like your helm at victory’s zenith’ (N. Darwish, 2014, 55). Such an image of shining power

Post-Millennium Palestinian Poetry

115

and glorious victory is, however, subsumed beneath the content of the rest of the poem, in which the centuries since the Ayyubids drove the Crusaders from Palestine have been spent in sleep, ‘the invaders’ (the Crusaders of Saladin’s time or the Zionists of the present day, echoing M. Darwish’s parallel) are back, and the narrator’s society is filled with ‘lies’ and ‘shame.’ It is difficult, especially given N. Darwish’s views as stated in numerous interviews and opinion pieces, not to understand this as a critique of post-Oslo Palestinian politics (see: N. Darwish, 2010; 2014, 113). N. Darwish utilizes the figure of Saladin in an instance of postcolonial nostalgia, in which an idealized pre-colonial past is evoked as a potential beacon for the future (Walder, 2011; N. Darwish, 2014, 12; 72; 78; 112; 167). While, therefore, M. Darwish tended to adopt the figure of Saladin as opposite to a colonizing Other from an unspecified West, the younger N. Darwish adopts the imagery to do double duty, critiquing both the colonizer and the colonized society for its own failures and decadence. The latter narrative is typical of the more complex politics of the post-Oslo generation (and of later iterations of M. Darwish’s own work). Conclusion Mahmoud Darwish, doyen of Palestinian and, indeed, Arabic-language poets of the second half of the twentieth century, saw himself, as a Palestinian, as having to ‘pass through the mythic in order to reach the familiar’ and as ‘confined’ to writing his everyday self in a language and scale of the heroic myth (1997, 27–28). M. Darwish’s choice of words, of imposition and confinement, suggest his dissatisfaction with this state of affairs, as if he resented rather than appreciated the grand scale that the mythic conferred on his poetry. This is an understandable sentiment, perhaps, for a person whose personal and national struggles seem inextricably linked with great narratives of multiple faiths and legends, and whose displacement can at least to some extent be blamed on the relentless appeal that these national and religious epics have to some people’s political urges. But his use of the mythic references and language, as well as conferring on the Palestinian cause a sense of scale and import that provided succour to individuals and to the wider cause on an emotional and rhetorical level, also linked him to the poetic trends of the Tammuzi school and of other literatures in the region, and to a branch of Palestinian nationalism that drew on indigenous lore and a deep-rooted and tolerant sense of identity.

116

Post-Millennial Palestine

Najwan Darwish might also be understood as confined and imposed upon in the same way as his illustrious predecessor. He, too, seems compelled to talk of his personal predicament and the wider vicissitudes of the Palestinian people in the language of the mythic, with its myriad resonances and the epic scale that it seems to confer upon even the most ordinary individual or events. But in his complex and challenging reshaping of mythic references and the impacts of his juxtaposition of mythic scale with despair, squalor, and a refusal to conform to hegemonic nationalist narratives, the younger Darwish seems not to have transcended the imposed use of the mythic. Instead he appears to have confronted it and forced it into new shapes that, while drawing on the emotional, political, and aesthetic impact of the mythic in ways that signal continuity and intertextuality with previous Palestinian schools of poetry and their work, achieve very different ends. While the immediate effect of this in N. Darwish’s poetry is to evoke a sense of dislocation and despair, a feeling that former truths and dependable narratives have lost their meaning, it also represents an opening to new politics and discourses within the Palestinian setting, as charted by Karkabi, Khankan, and Salti. As such, it offers the possibility of a more diverse and complex Palestinian politics, but, in common with intersectional trends throughout resistant and critical movements worldwide, this faces the challenge of finding ways for diverse voices to achieve unity among their political goals and strategies. References Abramson, Glenda (2004) ‘Israeli Drama and the Bible: Kings on the Stage.’ Association for Jewish Studies Review 28.1: 63–82. Abu-Manneh, Bashir (2016) The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Allen, Lori (2006) ‘The Polyvalent Politics of Martyr Commemorations in the Palestinian Intifada.’ History & Memory 18.2: 107–38. Al-Musawi, Muhsin (2006) Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition. Abingdon: Routledge. Aschkenasy, Nehama (2004) ‘“And A Small Boy Leading Them”: The Child and the Biblical Landscape in Agnon, Oz, and Appelfeld.’ Association for Jewish Studies Review 28.1: 137–56. Bernard, Anna (2013) Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel/ Palestine. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Post-Millennium Palestinian Poetry

117

Darwish, Mahmoud (1995a) Limatha Tarakt Al Hassan Wahidan [Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?]. Beirut: Dar al-Rayyis. Darwish, Mahmoud (1995b) Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982. Trans. I. Muhawi. Berkeley: University of California Press. Darwish, Mahmoud (1997) La Palestine comme métaphore. Entretiens Traduit de l’arabe par Elias Sanbar et de l’hébreu par Simone Bitton [Palestine as a Metaphor. Interviews Translated from Arabic by Elias Sanbar and Hebrew by Simone Bitton]. Paris: Sindbad/Actes Sud. Darwish, Najwan (2010) ‘Al-thaqafa “fi hadrat al-ghiab”’ [Culture in the ‘Presence of Absence’]. Majallat al-dirasat al-Filistiniyya [Institute for Palestine Studies] 83: 143–47. Darwish, Najwan (2014) Nothing More to Lose. Trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid. New York: New York Review Books. De Moor, Ed (2001) ‘The Humanized God in the Poetry of a Tammuzian: Badr Shakir al-Sayyab.’ Representations of the Divine in Arabic Poetry, eds. G. Borg and Ed De Moor. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 193–210. El-Azma, N. (1968) ‘The Tammūzī Movement and the Influence of T. S. Eliot on Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb.’ Journal of the American Oriental Society 88.4: 671–78. Ghanim, Honaida (2009) ‘Poetics of Disaster: Nationalism, Gender, and Social Change Among Palestinian Poets in Israel After Nakba.’ International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 22: 23–39. Halman, Talat (1974) ‘Death and Rebirth of Myths in Near Eastern Literatures.’ Books Abroad 48.1: 25–33. Hillenbrand, Carole (2005) ‘The Evolution of the Saladin Legend in the West.’ Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph 58: 497–512. Karkabi, Nadim (2013) ‘Staging Particular Difference: Politics of Space in the Palestinian Alternative Music Scene.’ Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 6: 308–28. Khankan, Nathalie (2009) Breathing Sun-Drenched Horizons: The Possibility of Poetry in Post-Oslo Palestine. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of California, Berkeley. Mir, Salam (2013) ‘Palestinian Literature: Occupation and Exile.’ Arab Studies Quarterly 35.2: 110–29. Qleibo, Ali (2013) ‘Continuity and Discontinuity in Palestinian Cultural Expressions: Baal, El Khader and the Apotheosis of St. George.’ Archaeologies 9.2: 344–55. Ra’ad, Basem (2010) Hidden Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean. London: Pluto. Ra’ad, Basem (2011) ‘Who are the “Canaanites”? Why Ask?’ The Link 44.5: 2–13. Raheb, Mitri (2014) ‘Biblical Narrative and Palestinian Identity in Mahmoud Darwish’s Writings.’ Palestinian Identity in Relation to Time and Space, ed. M. Raheb. Bethlehem: Diyar. 89–105.

118

Post-Millennial Palestine

Said, Edward (1994) ‘On Mahmoud Darwish.’ Grand Street 48: 112–15. Salti, Rasha (2010) ‘From Resistance and Bearing Witness to the Power of the Fantastical: Icons and Symbols in Palestinian Poetry and Cinema.’ Third Text 24.1: 39–52. Scott, A. O. (2002) ‘Film Festival Review: A Tangle of Middle Eastern Hate and Love.’ The New York Times, 7 October. Available at: . Accessed 15 May 2019. Shapira, Anita (1997) ‘Ben-Gurion and the Bible: The Forging of an Historical Narrative?’ Middle Eastern Studies 33.4: 645–74. Stephan, Hanna (1922) ‘Modern Palestinian Parallels to the Song of Songs.’ Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 2: 199–279. Suleiman, Elia, dir. (2002) Divine Intervention. Artificial Eye. Tamari, Salim (2009) Mountain Against the Sea: Essay on Palestinian Society and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Walder, Dennis (2011) Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory. London: Routledge.

chapter six Enduring Palestine Haptics, Violence, and Affect in Adania Shibli’s Touch By Michael Pritchard Enduring Palestine

At the beginning of the new millennium, after a decade of so-called peace talks, ‘normal life’ for Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip remained unrealizable. Edward Said compared Palestinian existence to being ‘under siege’ (2001, 28), as the Palestinian territories lacked political and economic autonomy. The failed Oslo peace talks gave way to the Second Intifada in 2000, an escalation of violence that prompted a series of Israeli military strikes in 2002, called Operation Defensive Shield, which resulted in the reoccupation of the Palestinian territories, and the undermining of its leadership. Capturing and delineating this febrile set of circumstances posed a formidable challenge to writers of fiction about Palestine/Israel at this time. Novels like Out Of It (2011) by Selma Dabbagh—analysed in this collection by Tom Sperlinger—and The Attack (2006) by Yasmina Khadra were noticeable for their contextually direct approach, setting their stories amid concurrent events, and fearlessly depicting the violence that characterized the period. One contemporaneous book, however, broached Palestinian subjectivity in an unorthodox fashion, breaking new ground in the Palestinian literary canon. The way in which Adania Shibli’s Touch (2002; trans. 2010, by Paula Haydar), an imagistic novella, offers a haptic understanding of the Palestinian experience of violence is the concern of this chapter. Described as a ‘rare, challenging talent,’ Shibli has established herself as a writer whose ‘sharp observation of small physical details gives startling, at times repugnant, reality to her characters’ world’ (Irving, n.d., n.p.). Touch, her debut, is a forerunner to her later experimental short stories, as well as her later novels, We are All Equally Far from Love 119

120

Post-Millennial Palestine

(2004, trans. 2012), and, more recently, Minor Detail (2016, trans. 2020). Her modernist style can be read as an extension of a trajectory tracked by Bashir Abu-Manneh, when he says that Palestinian fiction, from the late 1970s onwards, registers a ‘liquidation of individual and collective agency,’ marked in a ‘shift from an emancipatory realism to the self-enclosed and privatized aesthetic of modernism’ (2016, 32; 24). Shibli, in Touch, revisits the nascently promising, but ultimately ill-fated, period just prior to the First Intifada (1987–93). Written as a palimpsest, wherein each episode describes a different set of experiences from the same period, Touch follows the (traumatic) development of a little girl. Rather than foregrounding the bloody violence endemic to the First Intifada milieu, it gives an intimate portrayal of childhood and adolescence as discreetly violent. This focus on the private allows the reader to discover how the violence of living under occupation is present in seemingly innocuous, yet irreparably damaging ways; delineating Palestinian life in the recent past provides a critique of the ongoing crisis in the early twenty-first century. My aim in this chapter is twofold, exploring both the sorts of trauma extant in Touch and the novella’s unique sensorial logic, with a view to better understanding the significance of this novella in a post-millennial Palestinian context. Slavoj Žižek usefully identifies a ‘triumvirate’ of violence. One component of this triumvirate is ‘subjective violence’—the exercise of physical force against a person— which is the most visible form of violence. The remaining components of Žižek’s triumvirate fall under the umbrella of ‘objective violence,’ outlined here: First, there is a ‘symbolic’ violence embodied in language and its forms, what Heidegger would call ‘our house of being’. [This] violence is not only at work in the obvious […] cases of incitement and the relations of social domination reproduced in our habitual speech forms: there is a more fundamental form of violence still that pertains to language […], to its imposition of a certain universe of meaning. Second, there is what I call ‘systemic’ violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems (2009, 1) Žižek’s triumvirate provides a rich typology for a myriad violence and, as I demonstrate in this chapter, a lens through which to observe the

Enduring Palestine

121

sorts of violence that impinge upon the life of Shibli’s little girl as a colonized subject. In terms of the novella’s unique sensorial logic one reviewer has argued that Touch creates a ‘visual logic [which] plays itself out through form and memory, dissecting the ways in which objects in a field are compiled in our minds as we apprehend their arrangements’ (Nance, 2011, n.p.). Touch, however, does more than this to encourage what affect theorists call a ‘state of relation’—a readerly response characterized by a profound sense of another subject, whereby form and memory become embodied (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010, 1–2). Shibli’s writing, as this chapter will show, counterpoints prevailing styles of Palestinian literature that tend to privilege optical, distant, and highly contextualized narratives. Instead, Shibli adheres to what Laura U. Marks would describe as the haptic and near, mitigating the ‘alterity or ultimate unknowability of other things, people, and times’ (2002, xii). Marks suggests that a ‘haptic visuality returns to acknowledge the material presence of the other,’ and although not exactly touching, such an experience ‘acknowledges both the physicality and the unknowability of the other’ (2002, xvii). This is a kind of what Marks describes as ‘ethical look[ing]’ (2002, xviii), which is especially significant given the international context in which Shibli’s novel circulates, particularly in translation. The first part of this chapter examines how Shibli creates a haptic experience, or puts the reader in the skin of her character. I then show how the traumas of the text appeal to universal ethics wherein the reader cannot help but be affected. Finally, I consider the book’s structure as a whole, explaining how the peeling back of its palimpsestic form is tantamount to unravelling the bandage on a wound. Recalling Frederic Jameson, Anna Bernard draws attention to the fact that ‘we want to read Palestinian […] texts as national allegories’ (2013, 2). Although Bernard aspires to complicate this ‘reader-response understanding of national narration,’ she stays within the frame of how writers ‘wrestle with the problem of needing to envision a future territorial and demographic nation-state’ (2013, 2). The following reading emphasizes a different kind of material relation to Palestine. It follows Elleke Boehmer’s formulation of reading as ‘less about assessing representations, than it is about attending, intensively, and in an internalized way, to the semantic processes through which meaning unfurls’ (2018, 8). Boehmer’s emphasis on a reader working ‘mentally, emotionally, and sometimes physically with [a text]’ (2018, 9), will guide this chapter in its attempt to reveal elements of Palestine that can be felt and embodied.

122

Post-Millennial Palestine

‘One Hand Had the Glove and the Other was Rough and Hurting’: A Haptic Modality In order to understand how Touch manifests nationhood, it is necessary to grasp its traversal of the distance between optic and haptic modes of relation to what is being represented. A reading of the opening two pages demonstrates this novel’s distinctive method and starts to elucidate its meaning. The opening sentence of Touch is radically decontextualized: ‘The big brown water tank stood on four legs, appearing from a distance to be an ant standing perfectly still’ (Shibli, 2010 [2002], 2). The reader is presented with a long-range view of a zoomorphized metal structure. Shibli unsettles the reader from afar, and then zooms in: ‘Once it had been another colour, which lasted until a tiny spot of rust came, and grew and grew until it took over the whole tank and turned it brown’ (2010 [2002], 2). The introduction of time—‘once’—brings motion into play; the rust has expanded until a new surface transplants the old. A reader primed for allegory might think of the increasing Israeli settlement in historic Palestine from 1948 to the present. Moreover, the tank’s stillness, exaggerated by the conflicting allusion to a hyperindustrious insect, possibly alludes to its non-functionality, signalling the subtending systemic violence of Israel’s control of the region’s water infrastructure (see: Corradin, 2016). It is worth noting, however, that the word ‘Palestine’ does not appear until page 57 (of 72 pages). What prevails in this opening scene is a sense of negation: stasis, rust, an unrealized telos. Although the scene defers a sense of relation to the scene—there is no human in this picture, yet—the reader is positioned in an optically and contextually unsettling manner. The next image is a beguiling piece of illusion: ‘Behind one of the legs of the tank stood a little girl’ (Shibli, 2010 [2002], 2). The reader simultaneously sees the girl and does not: she is both visible and obscured, appearing to materialize from the leg of the tank. Moreover, Shibli never gives this girl a name, referring to her throughout the novella as a ‘little girl,’ or ‘girl.’ In effect this makes her an ‘every-girl,’ a figure for the vulnerability of childhood, and potentially that of the subaltern, also. Conversely, however, this little girl’s materialization suggests she is indigenous to this landscape. Shibli, by embedding her in a dysfunctional (static, rusty) space, energizes the reader’s burgeoning sense of the uncanny, an impingement whereby affect begins to form. The following configuration of the scene begins to merge the symbolic with the haptic. The little girl, we are told, is covered in

Enduring Palestine

123

brown, but this ‘was not,’ in fact, ‘caused by that spot of rust, but by the tailor who, making a dress for the mother, did not use up all of the heavy, brown wool laced every so often with golden thread’ (Shibli, 2010 [2002], 2). Diverting the reader’s attention from the materiality of the rust, Shibli begins to colour the little girl’s history with allusions to a thrifty use of cloth and an absent mother, casting this girl as, potentially, an orphan. The motif of gold is also introduced, to which we will return presently. First, Shibli has the little girl turn towards the tank. Her ‘eyes were fixed on the leg in front of her’ (2010 [2002], 2). Having the little girl fix her stare on the water tank encourages the reader to do the same, letting the latter share the eyeline of the former. This shared perspective inaugurates a haptic experience: ‘Rust was dangling […] in tiny squares and pieces, making it look rough. She stretched out her hand and pressed it on the leg. She let go of the leg, and some of the rust splinters fell to the ground, while others stuck to her hand’ (Shibli, 2010 [2002], 2). At this point, the personal pronoun could potentially be exchanged for the collective. Impressing the reader into the scene, in this way, means the little girl’s actions rebound on the reader in a tantalizing closeness; her skin becomes ours, ours hers. Such haptic writing bears the potential for unique forms of relatedness, wherein a synaesthetic reliving occurs as the reader’s internal affective experience meets an imagined external sensory. Shibli, with her exacting ability to stay focused on a single point, keeps forcing this proximity of rust and skin on the reader. The rough splinters on the little girl’s hand are cold, ‘so she carried them out from the shade of the tank to warm them up a little’ (2010 [2002], 2). The introduction of heat, at this moment, introduces another layer to the reader’s sensory perception: there is roughness, then heat. Next comes light: ‘Out of the shade, there appeared, in addition to the little brown splinters of rust, little dots all over her hand, sparkling’ (2010 [2002], 2). Four paragraphs into the novella, readers are immersed in this minutely detailed, haptic world, meaning that overarching claims of symbolic relevance seem tenuous. Suddenly, Shibli brands the page, on a separate line, with the word: ‘Gold’ (2010 [2002], 2). Light, together with heat, enact an alchemical reaction on the skin of the page, and the skin of the reader, a layering of sensation that is then focused on the precious, value-signifying metal. The reader is invited to match sensation with thought, as the discomfort of the rough rust on skin becomes analogous to that which signifies wealth. Here, the little girl’s parodic experience of value-equals-pain undercuts traditional associations with gold.

124

Post-Millennial Palestine

The confusion that the reader might experience in response to this passage’s defamiliarization of the relation between symbol and meaning then bleeds back into the portrayal of the little girl’s experience. On one hand she wears a ‘transparent glove that matched the small dress,’ but ‘[the] other hand did not hold anything […] it was wet with sweat. When she put it in the sun, it too sparkled with dots and threads of gold’ (Shibli, 2010 [2002], 2–3). The girl’s skin begins to mirror the appearance of the water tank, linking what Žižek would call systemic violence to the subjective. The little girl persists in her exploration of the sensations offered by the rust: ‘She rubbed her hand onto one of the tank legs again to add a little more brown and sparkle to it, but instead of gold the roughness of the rust stuck to her hand; a roughness similar to the roughness of her woollen dress’ (Shibli, 2010 [2002], 3). Gold’s treacherous qualities are realized as it disappears, and we return to the implied penury of the make-do dress. Moreover, the little girl is losing mastery over her surroundings. With both hands incapacitated—‘one hand had the glove and the other was rough and hurting’—her state is synonymous with a lack of autonomy. She ‘stood behind the water tank on her way to have a pee’ (2010 [2002], 3), thus the mystery of her appearance is explained: she was seeking privacy. However, disempowered and unable to hold up her dress, ‘the urine began its double-streamed path down her legs’ (2010 [2002], 3). The haptic quality of this opening narrative puts readers in an uncomfortable position; with so much careful attention paid to sensation, we are now encouraged to experience the awkwardness of self-soiling, the fear of being caught, and the vulnerability of the girl’s exposed location. Shibli enforces a self-reckoning wherein the symbolic gold, systemic rust, and subjective urine compound on the reader’s skin in a devastating, and violent, summation: the embodied subaltern is one lacking in value, sustenance, and autonomy, respectively. ‘[B]lue Spots and Lines on her Arms and Chest and Lots on her Legs’: The Trauma of the Text It transpires that the girl is not orphaned and, as the novella unfolds, her numerous relationships with family and beyond are explored. This section looks at how violence can cumulatively contaminate a community, together with how the violent text affects the reading experience.

Enduring Palestine

125

The girl’s brother dies and, through several variant sequences that relate to his death, the relationship between the girl and her mother is elucidated. It is a dynamic characterized by violence and trauma. Before discovering who exactly has died, Shibli thrusts the reader into the mayhem of the funeral. Abandoned by her preoccupied family, the girl is left to dress herself. Struggling, she picks ‘[a] pair of dark blue velvet pants and a wool sweater […] After she put them on, she [finds] a hole in the pants near the left knee’ (Shibli, 2010 [2002], 6). In relating her impoverishment, the girl is once again represented in terms of limited control: ‘On the way to the mosque, she bought a bottle of cola […] She continued on her way, holding the bottle in her right hand and hiding the hole in her pants with her left’ (2010 [2002], 6). Hands occupied, autonomy diminished, she learns ‘that the mother had fainted and had been taken to an ambulance parked out back’ (2010 [2002], 6); instead of attending the ceremony, the girl must attend to her mother. The narrative once again privileges haptic proximity. Arriving at the scene, the girl finds she cannot reach her mother, ‘because a huge crowd of women in black created an immense wall between her and the […] ambulance’ (2010 [2002], 6–7). Although the wall is symbolic in its privileging of adult female grief, its meaning is affectively exacerbated for the girl—and hence reader—as it increases in size and she gets ‘pushed further and further back, unable to resist’ (2010 [2002], 7). A sense of claustrophobia becomes palpable, and once again the girl’s hands are portrayed as the locus of affecting impingement: She could not remove her hand, or everyone would see the hole. The pushing became harder and harsher, and each time it would force her hand away from the hole, so she would press on it harder and harder, using all her strength. [Her other] hand now had weakened its hold on the bottle, and a little black liquid leaked out with each step she was pushed backward. (2010 [2002], 7) Here, the reader is urged to recognize the little girl’s predicament through the (simulated) shared experience of having one’s hands overpowered. The scene, of enforced separation from the mother, is interpretable as a metaphor for maturation. However, while the maturation process should only be symbolically violent, here that violence is literalized through physical constraints, obstacles, and, once again, the soiling of the skin.

126

Post-Millennial Palestine

The hand motif reappears in scenes that portray the relationship between the girl and her neighbour. The neighbour is an older man who is silent throughout the text and engages with the girl in a game of ‘evol’ (Shibli, 2010 [2002], 21; emphasis in the original), a corrupt version of love. In one instance we see him at the door of the car in which the girl is hiding from the rain, ‘carrying her coat.’ Shibli paints him as paternal yet ominous, neither overtly friend nor foe. The girl appears willing—or resigned—to acquiesce to his desire: ‘The rain stopped. She opened the car door [and] walked across the courtyard […] until she reached the tree behind the neighbour’s house and waited there for him’ (2010 [2002], 21). Her apparent obedience suggests that the ‘game’ is potentially the result of grooming. The narrative once again emphasizes hands: A hand reached for the other’s body […] She put her hand on his. She put her hand on his face. He put his hand on her leg. She put her hand on his hair. He put his hand on her back. She put her hands inside his shirt above his chest. Her hand heard the noise of his heart, which again disappeared when she moved her hand away. (2010 [2002], 21) This stop-motion, frame-by-frame, representation of their game is unsettlingly clinical. It shocks the reader into a state of ethical displacement; they must re-live, in a haptic retrieval, these potentially devastating and unconscionable events. In this scene, which is affecting in sensation, Shibli also drives home a symbolic hit: where the quickness of heartbeats is an age-old metaphor for love, ‘the little girl never put her hand back on the neighbour’s heart again, so that silence could keep their [abusive] game of evol a secret’ (2010 [2002], 21). The violence inherent in these scenes accentuates the capacity of the skin—of both books and people—to transmit experience. Shibli appears to be concerned with how such transmission can be realized between her characters, and, by extension, between her characters and the reader. As its title hints, Touch emphasizes ways in which the skin can remember, reform, and re-live sensation, potentially making it an archive for resistance. In one illusory description—indicative of the trauma therein—the neighbour is depicted getting ‘closer until he was on top of her,’ before ‘put[ting] his hand on her neck,’ where his fingers ‘pressed hard’ (Shibli, 2010 [2002], 8). If, as Ashley Montagu describes, the language of sex is ‘primarily nonverbal [thus] the highest

Enduring Palestine

127

form of touch’ (1986, 204), then these moments of contact speak of alarming detachment. A resurgence of overt violence on the following page substantiates this reading. The little girl dreams that the same neighbour is assaulting her mother: ‘[He] stood at her feet […] In his hand he had a knife he used to stab the mother’s leg all over [until it] was covered with blue spots and lines’ (Shibli, 2010 [2002], 9). The dream scene is then uncannily replicated in a fight between the little girl and her sister, in which the girl is hit and left with ‘blue spots and lines on her arms and chest and lots on her legs’ (2010 [2002], 10). With devastating rapidity—from the neighbour’s fingers on the girl’s neck, through phallic knife stabs, to familial abuse—the skin’s capacity to bear trauma has been realized. It should be understood as a vector for violence, between characters in the novel, and potentially between the novel and its reader. ‘[H]er Throat Filled with the Loss […] of Being’: The Palimpsestic Uncovering of the National Subject Because Touch has no clear linear narrative, decoding the ‘story,’ as it were, is not the right way to approach it. The chapters are unnumbered and consist of five sensory episodes containing sequential subsections. The episodes run as follows: ‘Colours,’ ‘Silence,’ ‘Movement,’ ‘Language,’ and ‘The Wall.’ There is a palimpsestic quality to them. For instance, the protagonist is usually described at the beginning of each episode as a ‘little girl’ and at the end as simply ‘girl.’ The reader witnesses, and accompanies, this girl as she grows up in a manner that repeats over and again, from infancy to marriage, each time through a different mode of sensation. Keeping in mind Boehmer’s invitation that the reader attends ‘intensively […] to the semantic processes through which meaning unfurls’ (2018, 8), this last section looks at how these episodes function cumulatively to increase the likelihood of affect in a reader. I began my analysis with the opening scene of the first episode, ‘Colours,’ in which we encounter gold and blue wounds, but there are other uses of colour that give vital meaning to the unnamed girl’s maturation. This episode encapsulates both her sense of hope and fear for the future. Shibli places the little girl ‘on top of the hay bales of hay stacked in the back of the pickup’ (2010 [2002], 4) and, as her father drives up a mountain, this vantage point gives her a perspective of distance. The view combines beauty with the ideal of freedom:

128

Post-Millennial Palestine

‘From the peak of the mountain a rainbow emerged, stretching across the sky all the way to the plains, and disappearing’ (2010 [2002], 4). This sense of the infinite, burnished with the subsequent rainbow colourations—‘yellow,’ ‘blue,’ ‘green,’ ‘red,’ ‘pink,’ and ‘violet’ (2010 [2002], 4)—paints a bucolic scene, Edenic and peaceful, which can be ratified by the reader’s memory of a child’s view of nature. The fragility of this romantic subjectivity is intensified when Shibli has the girl ‘[follow] the path of the sun’s movement, chasing after it so that it would not get dark and all the colours disappear’ (2010 [2002], 5)—an impossible task, but one indicative of an inherent agitation at the sense of an ending. Shortly after this we see how ‘the departure of the sun allowed the darkness to stretch its black over everything the girl looked at. Black swallowed all the colours. […] blackness stood, on the windowsill, carelessly filing in the spaces’ (2010 [2002], 13). Here, stuck between two antagonistic worlds—the order of light and the chaos of darkness—the girl is situated quasi-religiously between realms. This imposing metaphor speaks to the nature of universal experience and calls forth an affective relatedness: ‘Black was there before creation. […] and after she would die, blackness would return to its place, her empty place’ (2010 [2002], 13). Giving the girl an existential epistemology such as this, despite the fact she has the Quran ‘under her mattress,’ allows any reader to relate to her. She faces a ubiquitous mortality. As Kamal Abdel-Malek writes, it is what makes the study of the literature of the Israel–Palestine conflict preferable to a limited socio-political perspective: ‘only literature can show us the internal struggles—of conscience, hatred, hope, love—that the everyday individuals of the region experience; from literature we can gain profound insights into the human aspect of the story’ (2005, 151). Whereas ‘Colours’ engages with a visual representation of a Palestinian world, ‘Silence’ delves into the aural experience. Uninvited sounds—that is, most of the sounds normally heard—impinge, on the girl, violently: ‘Waves of sound moved toward the little girl, each trying to be the first to reach her ears and fall on them like a hammer pounding’ (Shibli, 2010 [2002], 16). Shibli personifies sound as a tool—or, more appropriately, a weapon—which strikes blows on the girl’s body. Aural violence abounds throughout this episode: ‘sounds that stormed her ears,’ ‘noise and illness,’ ‘sound came and pushed her’ (2010 [2002], 16; 18; 19). To call this girl a sensitive child would at first seem appropriate, but Shibli wants readers to see the tautology in such a statement: children are necessarily sensitive. The subjective violence colouring these audiograms appropriately describes

Enduring Palestine

129

the experience of childhood and beyond, even. That is not to dilute the symbolic power of invasive sounds as potentially synonymous to colonial force (the allegorical is always within grasp), but Shibli’s use of sensory modalities, as a way of achieving epistemic solidarity between reader and character, solicits, once again, an embodied response that avoids reductive othering. When the girl ‘[searches] for some silence to find comfort in,’ she is searching for a prelapsarian mode of being: ‘[only] God had no sound’ in ‘the paradise of silence,’ before Original Sin when ‘voices and sounds became removed from Him and forgot Him’ (2010 [2002], 16; 30; 18; 30). In other words, Shibli casts the little girl’s subjection to aural violence as that which characterizes existence itself. Consequently, through manipulating the realm of the sensory, Shibli generates an aspect of universality in the figure of this ‘every girl,’ emphasizing the human aspect of the Israel–Palestine conflict, and foregrounding the psychological and physical damage caused. In ‘Movement,’ Shibli continues her investigation into how the little girl deals with the chaos of that which lies outside the body, and how she attempts to enact order through her behaviour. This episode pays special attention to kinetics. First, there is chaos: ‘watching some tadpoles in the water. […] Their movement was constant; she could not stop it’; ‘[she] chased the cigarette in the father’s hand, trying to cut off the rising smoke with her fingers […] but she could not stop the smoke, which […] continued to rise and disperse’; ‘[the] old neighbour had a knife in his hand, and between him and the knife was a chicken. Laughter kept the knife shaking’ (Shibli, 2010 [2002], 36; 37; 42). Surrounded by elemental movement, the little girl yearns for some semblance of stability. She finds this in the meditative quality of prayer exhibited by her mother: [After] ‘Glory be to my exalted Lord’, […] the mother straightened her back, her hands withdrawing without any resistance along the entire length of the prayer rug, then raised all the way up onto her knees […] Their traces were left on the velvet where all ten fingers had passed. (2010 [2002], 35) This establishing of order is then re-lived—performed—by the girl: ‘[the] little girl followed the flow of lines down the length of the prayer rug all the way to the end of the field of green velvet, following the movement of the mother, as if it were the wind’ (2010 [2002], 35). The power of prayer, this scene suggests, has little to do with religious

130

Post-Millennial Palestine

dogma; rather it is the ritual that fortifies selfhood against that which threatens to take it away. Following the mother’s movements is, for the little girl, an act that provides stability amid the tumult of subalternity. Until this episode, Touch deals primarily with the body, soliciting nuanced haptic responses. In the penultimate episode, the author seems to relent slightly, turning the reader’s attention to the rather more familiar symbolic order: ‘Language.’ This episode also marks a shift towards contextualization—notable because of the novel’s lack of specified place up to that point. In ‘Language,’ Shibli gives some hint of the systemic order that surrounds the girl. With the contemporaneous mention of ‘Sabra and Shatila’ (2010 [2002], 56), she discloses roughly when the novella is set: 1982–83 during the Lebanese Civil War. A signifier of genocidal violence, this reference momentarily reveals a history of dispossession, colouring the novella with the themes of ‘[s]tatelessness, permanent exile, and occupation,’ which Abu-Manneh (2016, 2) describes as significant tropes in the Palestinian narrative. Using the refugee camps as a contextual anchor, Shibli, here, provides a corollary to non-place-specific haptic affect. Moreover, having a child attempt to interpret this information, and locate meaning in the signs ‘Sabra and Shatila,’ ironically reinforces the systemic violence implicit here. The girl misinterprets. She corrupts those alien words and decides ‘Sabr was a cactus [and] shatla: a seedling form’ (Shibli, 2010 [2002], 56). Her innocent confusion leads her to a new-found interest in the cactus that can be seen in her schoolyard. Playfully abstracting it, she sees the ‘plant the size of a donkey, which was blocked from view by a donkey standing in front of her. She stood there waiting for the donkey to go so she could store the missing part of the plant in her memory’ (2010 [2002], 57). The girl wants to learn and fill in the missing spaces with meaning, but because of prevailing censorship—the teacher forbids the word ‘Palestine’—she finds herself compromised and open to ridicule. Unable to ‘understand the meaning of the words’ (Shibli, 2010 [2002], 58), she conflates her own abstractions with the signifiers she is given, internalizing them, thus abstracting herself. ‘“I am a donkey,”’ she writes on the chalkboard, before her classmates curse her, ‘[deciding] to cut her off forever’ (2010 [2002], 58). Even though this event is grounded in the specific context of 1980s Lebanon and Palestine, the shame caused by error at this age offers much scope for empathic, or affective, response. Even writing about the realm of the symbolic can, when the reader is primed, effect a closeness to the character. When ‘[the] little girl [sits], her throat filled with the loss of

Enduring Palestine

131

language mixed with the loss of being’ (2010 [2002], 63). The reader is encouraged to conjoin perturbation (loss of being) with strangulation (loss of language) in a moment where symbolic and subjective violence become one and the same. Until ‘Language,’ every episode concludes with the girl’s wedding. These occasions, however, are not portrayed as celebratory. On each occasion, there is a sense of departure and exclusion. In ‘Colours,’ ‘[the] borders of her wedding dress blended into the wall behind her’; in ‘Silence,’ waves attempted to climb over ‘high seawalls’; and in ‘Movement,’ ‘[her] eyes embraced the white wall’ (Shibli, 2010 [2002], 14; 32; 50). As it has already been repeated three times, it is natural for the reader to expect the wall and the wedding to be aligned at the end of ‘Language.’ But this does not happen. Instead, familial dramas are foregrounded—their ‘absence of love’ (2010 [2002], 69)— leaving a portent of failure. This is Shibli’s final layering of affect, and it comes in a structural manoeuvre designed to undercut what are already anti-climactic conclusions to each prior episode. ‘Wall,’ the short final episode, entails the sublimation of these complex rites of passage. Both wedding and family separation, the girl ‘sits on the bridal seat all alone,’ once again ‘embracing the wall with her eyes’ (2010 [2002], 72). ‘Everyone is looking at her’—her family—‘and she looks back,’ but, rather than seeing them, she can only look ‘[at] the wall’ (2010 [2002], 71). Alone where she should be accompanied, she can no longer distinguish between a structure that separates (the wall) and a structure that should connect (family). By manifesting the girl’s separation physically—that is, as an episodic detachment from the rest of the novella—Shibli constructs the book in order to echo the action. Whatever the reader makes of this segregation—whether or not it is to be read as allegory, or whether or not there is any hope in the marriage to an unknown groom—is in some ways insignificant. By deceiving the reader’s expectation of narrative closure, while simultaneously allowing states of relatedness to define structure, Shibli densely materializes the traumatic. The final clause of Touch, in which the girl, and we, ‘watch […] the house move away’ (2010 [2002], 72), entails both a moving and pushing away. It is a surprising technique that leaves the reader wanting to dispel the feeling of alienation and to rebuild a bridge to whatever is the truth of this Palestinian subject.

132

Post-Millennial Palestine

Conclusion In this chapter, a psychokinetic model of interpretation, enabled by theories of affect and perspective, has allowed a comprehension of the ‘other’ that would otherwise be foreclosed. Tracing the causality of violence through the Žižekian triumvirate has exposed how different kinds of violence interact to constrain and impinge upon the subject. That which Philip Dickinson calls the ‘pedagogical vocation of literature’ (2013, 3) can be potentiated by stories committed to an aesthetic of nearness, and such a mode of reading/writing can subvert the kind of cultural hegemony dominant powers can hold. Shibli’s novel, departing from the established norm of Palestinian writing, represents its own kind of truth, doing so through the transmission of pain. Gary B. Rollman tells of how ‘[there are] two components of pain: the sensory and the emotional. [It] is not necessarily linked to tissue damage [but] can arise in the absence of any evident physical injury and, in other instances, can persist long after the healing of a wound’ (1991, 91). This relationship between the sensory and the emotional, echoing the external sensory, the internal affective, and the persistence of pain beyond the healing of a wound, complements Megan Watkins’ reading of Spinoza’s understanding of ‘affect.’ She notes how he differentiates ‘between affectus and affectio, the force of an affecting body and the impact it leaves on the one affected. Affectio may be fleeting but it may also leave a residue, a lasting impression that produces particular kinds of bodily capacities’ (Watkins, 2010, 269). The two could be reconnected: affectio is like that pain that can persist after the healing of the wound. Though the ‘state of relation’ ostensibly only exists during our time within the texts, once we close the book—or wound—the pain we have shared arguably remains. Anna Gibbs calls this ‘mimetic communication’ (2010, 186)— something inherent to the literary experience—which can enact a kind of contagion unto the recipients of the text. Shibli’s novella suggests, internally, the potential for contagion by lasting painful affect. Trauma is then sustained through the intimate relationship that the reader necessarily assumes with the text. Ultimately, the reader is able to touch a Palestinian life, culminating in some degree of embodied understanding of that life, encouraged towards the ‘ethical look’ Marks espoused, and better able, in a subtle way, to contextualize the political and cultural situation of the opening decade of the new millennium.

Enduring Palestine

133

References Abdel-Malek, Kamal (2005) The Rhetoric of Violence: Arab-Jewish Encounters in Contemporary Palestinian Literature and Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Abu-Manneh, Bashir (2016) The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bernard, Anna (2013) Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel/ Palestine. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Boehmer, Elleke (2018) Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Corradin, Camilla (2016) ‘Israel: Water as a Tool to Dominate Palestinians.’ Al Jazeera, 23 June. Available at: . Accessed 1 February 2019. Dickinson, Philip (2013) ‘Feeling, Affect, Exposure: Ethical (In)capacity, the Sympathetic Imagination, and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 46.4: 1–19. Gibbs, Anna (2010) ‘After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication.’ The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 186–205. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth (2010) ‘An Inventory of Shimmers.’ The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1–26. Irving, Sarah (n.d.) ‘Dark, Beautiful Exploration of the Human Psyche.’ The Arab Review. Available at: . Accessed 1 January 2019. Marks, Laura U. (2002) Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Montagu, Ashley (1986) Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin. New York: Perennial Library. Nance, Andrew (2011) ‘Touch by Adania Shibli.’ The Quarterly Conversation, 7 March. Available at: . Accessed 3 July 2018. Rollman, Gary B. (1991) ‘Pain Responsiveness.’ The Psychology of Touch, eds. Morton A. Heller and William Schiff. New Jersey: LEA. 91–114. Said, Edward W. (2001) ‘Palestinians Under Siege.’ The New Intifada: Resisting Israel’s Apartheid, ed. Roane Carey. London: Verso. 27–44. Shibli, Adania (2010 [2002]) Touch. Trans. Paula Haydar. Massachusetts: Clockroot Books. Shibli, Adania (2012 [2004]) We are All Equally Far from Love. Trans. Paul Starkey. Northampton, MA: Clockroot Books.

134

Post-Millennial Palestine

Shibli, Adania (2020 [2016]) Minor Detail. Trans. Elisabeth Jaquette. New York: New Directions Books. Watkins, Megan (2010) ‘Desiring Recognition, Accumulating Affect.’ The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 269–88. Žižek, Slavoj (2009) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books Ltd.

chapter seven ‘I Can Only Get There Now on the Rafts of Memories’ Palimpsestic and Genealogical Memories in Susan Abulhawa’s Novels By Rachel Gregory Fox Palimpsestic and Genealogical Memories Susan Abulhawa’s first two novels, Mornings in Jenin (2006) and The Blue Between Sky and Water (2015), sprawl across time, from before the Nakba to the twenty-first century.1 Each novel follows the lives of a particular family, spanning across generations. Expelled from their homes after the Nakba, they are divided and relocated in the West Bank, in Gaza, in Israel, in neighbouring Arab countries, and in America. Although each novel features a large ensemble cast, this chapter will focus predominantly on the characters of Amal and Ismael (Mornings in Jenin) and Nur (Sky and Water), who were all born either after the Nakba, or who are too young to remember it themselves. Amal and Nur, in their respective narratives, grow from infancy to womanhood, immigrating to and/or living in America for most of their lives before eventually returning home—to Palestine—while Amal’s older brother, Ismael Abulheja, grows up in Israel as David Avaram, ignorant of his Palestinian heritage until late adulthood. In this chapter I examine the ways in which the early events of Israeli settler-colonialism continue to haunt the Palestinian characters in an ever-treacherous present. The continuing series of crises experienced in the new millennium are often as disruptive to the lives of the central families in the two novels as their earlier experiences of the Nakba. I argue that Abulhawa’s novels offer narratives that are constructed as palimpsests: negotiating between past and present across generations, across borders, and among acts of departure and return. Identity—individual, familial, and national—is similarly palimpsestic, formed out of memories that are continually enfolded and unfolded across generations. 1

Her third novel, Against the Loveless World was published in August 2020. 135

136

Post-Millennial Palestine

Postmemory and En/unfolding Memories: Negotiating Past, Present, and Inevitability Marianne Hirsch’s notion of ‘postmemory’ proves invaluable to the exploration of how inter-generational memory is significant to the formation of both collective and individual identities in Abulhawa’s fiction: ‘Postmemory’ describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviours among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. (2012, 5; emphasis in the original) Hirsch mainly discusses postmemory in the context of the Holocaust, but acknowledges at multiple points in her works on postmemory that the concept is applicable to other traumatic world events, including the Israel–Palestine conflict. For instance, in The Generation of Postmemory (2012, 203–25), she analyses Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Returning to Haifa (1969). The novella, in turn, anticipates part of the plot to Mornings in Jenin, serving as a prominent intertext, wherein the parents in Returning to Haifa lose their son during the Nakba, and later discover that he has been raised as Israeli. Postmemory represents a useful tool for exploring genealogical memory in Abulhawa’s fiction. In this opening section I pose two possible routes through which postmemory can be understood in the context of Palestine. The first serves to point out a potential flaw in applying postmemory to a Palestinian context. Hirsch argues that, with postmemory, ‘[t]hese events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present’ (2012, 5). In Palestine, these ‘effects’ of the past are not embodied by just haunting memories, but also by the continued physical threat from occupying forces. Ihab Saloul problematizes the ‘post’ in postmemory, arguing that ‘second and third generation of post-Nakba Palestinians, although they have not experienced this originating moment in 1948, are still “inside” the event itself living the catastrophe every day’ (2012, 107).

Palimpsestic and Genealogical Memories

137

Representations of continual catastrophe, post-Nakba, are recognizable in both Mornings in Jenin and Sky and Water, which reference real events that have occurred in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, respectively, in the post-millennial period.2 In her chapter, earlier in the collection, Tahrir Hamdi argues that this ‘repetition of catastrophe enables Palestinian youth […] to re-live and re-imagine the Nakba, a memory that is more than a memory as it is lived and re-lived in the daily nakbas of the Palestinian people.’ The persistence of trauma as an ever-present experience is compounded with pre-existing genealogical memories, forming identities out of both past and present traumas, as palimpsest. This leads to the second possible intervention into the concept of postmemory as it operates within the Palestinian context. Hirsch’s discussion on postmemory mostly revolves around visual culture. The use of visual rhetoric in conjunction with a discussion on memory is similarly found in Laura U. Marks’ Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (2015), which outlines what she labels as a model of enfoldment. The crucial component of this model is the proposition that ‘the past is not forgotten but enfolded’ and then selectively unfolded (Marks, 2015, 70). Marks describes the enfoldment model as follows: The past reaches us or becomes actual to us through selective unfolding, in a relationship between experience, information, and image. Each of these three levels is a plane of immanence—a membrane in which an infinity of stuff lies virtual, or enfolded. Now and then certain aspects of these virtual events are unfolded, pulling up into the next level. (2015, 70) Marks establishes that, as part of the enfoldment model, the image (or, in this case, the written narrative) ‘triangulates between information and experience’ (2015, 72). Experience, when re-visited, is mediated: it is represented by the image/text, and informed by 2

Mornings in Jenin concludes with the Battle of Jenin in April 2002, where Israeli military forces invaded the camp in response to increased Palestinian militancy during the Second Intifada. Set in Gaza, Sky and Water cites events such as the death of Rachel Corrie in 2003, the airstrikes during the War on Gaza (2008-09), and the exchange of 1,027 mainly Palestinian and Arab-Israeli prisoners for the Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit in 2011.

138

Post-Millennial Palestine

contextual information, be that historical or emotional, accurate or false. Memories are re-discovered—unfolded—but the process of en/ unfoldment colours the experience that is being rearticulated. Marks’ model of enfoldment can be viewed as a process that, although not the same as postmemory, can facilitate it. Postmemory represents a form of inter-generational memory that is inherited but which is acquired so subtly, so intimately, that it becomes one’s own. Adapting Hirsch’s concept within the Palestinian context of continued catastrophe, Saloul introduces the notion of ‘ongoing memory’ which represents ‘a memory that harks back to a traumatic originary event (al-Nakba) and, at the same time, is constantly reworked, reactivated by new events and rearticulated in new acts of memory’ (2012, 211). In this reworking of postmemory, the acquiring of memory across generations is supplemented by ongoing experiences that colour the inherited memory. This, in the model of enfoldment, sees the inherited past memory unfolded, and triangulated by current information and experience. This process captures the negotiation between past and present, and the potential for formulating palimpsestic memories across generations. The stakes of remembrance in Mornings in Jenin and Sky and Water, and the palimpsestic formulation of collective (national and genealogical) and individual relations and experiences, are caught in the negotiation between equally fraught pasts and presents as memories are enfolded and unfolded. This is exemplified in the prelude to Mornings in Jenin which begins with Amal staring down the barrel of an Israeli gun in Jenin in 2002 as ‘[t]he petitions of memory pulled her back, and still back, to a home she had never known’ (Abulhawa, 2011 [2006], xiii). As intergenerational memories drag the narrative back to 1941, to a time before Amal was even born, this moment in 2002 resonates throughout the novel: history is set in place, but the future is also inevitable. This sense of inevitability is compounded in both Mornings in Jenin and Sky and Water, which frequently uses the term ‘history,’ not to speak of a certain past, but, rather, of a future event. For instance, in Sky and Water, Khaled narrates that ‘Although the villagers’ visits eventually dwindled, they continued until history [the Nakba] arrived and Beit Daras was carried off by the wind’ (2016 [2015], 22; emphasis in the original). In both this example and in the prologue to Mornings in Jenin, past and present are collapsed unto one another, as palimpsest. Abulhawa’s fiction is driven by this sense of inevitability, a forward trajectory which predicates continual instability, and which levees against memories of a devastating but immovable past.

Palimpsestic and Genealogical Memories

139

Abulhawa’s second novel continually oscillates between past and present and uses magic realism to convey the tensions between these two temporal states. Sky and Water consists of a chronological third person narrative of the events that happen to the central family, while Khaled’s first-person narrative begins each chapter. Khaled belongs to the most recent generation in the family, born in 1996. He develops ‘Locked-In Syndrome’ in his teenage years, but remains a conscious, narrative presence, passing ‘into the blue,’ guided by the djinn, Sulayman (Abulhawa, 2016 [2015], 27; emphasis in the original).3 In the blue, Khaled visits and belongs to both past and present, wherein ‘[t]ime does not exist […] Everything is now’ (2016 [2015], 157; emphasis in the original). Sky and Water uses magic realism to form a Palestine that is palimpsest, where past and present simultaneously exist in the blue: there is the Beit Daras that was ‘carried off by the wind’ during the Nakba, but, for Khaled, ‘there is a Beit Daras in a Palestine without soldiers’ (2016 [2015], 22; 178; emphasis in the original). Samar H. AlJahdali suggests that ‘multiple and perhaps opposed historical, culturals [sic] and ideological forces overlap, and leave their imprints on a given locality. (Post)colonial space, then, becomes a palimpsest with layers of pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial inscriptions’ (2014, 219). Such palimpsestic inscriptions are realized through the use magic realism in Sky and Water, and manifests in both Abulhawa’s novels through the process of enfolding and unfolding memories; in the act of return as remembrance and retelling. Memories—captured through returning and retelling—are palimpsestic in that they pull together not just the individual memory, but also collective memory: the genealogical and the national. In the blue, Khaled visits his great-aunt Mariam during her childhood, where he is believed by her family at the time to be her imaginary friend. A genealogical palimpsest is captured in the body of a photograph taken by a visiting journalist: Mamdouh was standing on the riverbank with his arm around Nazmiyeh, who stood sassily, hand on hip. Their mother was there in a fine embroidered thobe she had sewn herself, but she was somehow absent. And Mariam, perhaps eight years old, was captured in an expression of casual

3

‘Locked-In Syndrome’ is a medical condition in which the body is paralyzed but the individual’s consciousness remains intact.

140

Post-Millennial Palestine

conversation with her friend Khaled, a boy of perhaps ten years, with a white streak of hair. (2016 [2015], 32). In this photograph, three generations of the same family are visually captured: Um Mamdouh, her children, and her great-grandchild, who is not yet born. Khaled’s presence in the image—a spectre that is at once not in 1940s Beit Daras and yet is—formulates a palimpsest, with the photograph representing people from two separate times. Insofar as a palimpsest operates as ‘a process of layering—of erasure and superimposition’ (Dillon, 2007, 12), the image embodies the space of Beit Daras before the Nakba while Khaled’s spectral presence implicates the desolation yet to come. A different version of Beit Daras exists in another time. Isabella van Elferen points out that ‘[s]pectraility […] radically conflates pasts, presents and futures and thus dislodges linear time’ (2012, 10). Khaled’s spectral presence, visiting 1940s Beit Daras from the 2000s, collapses the linear, and formulates a cyclical, remediated narrative that yearns back to a past before Israeli settler-colonialism. Within the palimpsestic twist in time, in the blue, a poem emerges: O find me I’ll be in the blue Between sky and water Where all time is now And we are the forever Flowing like a river (2016 [2015], 29; emphasis in the original) Abulhawa, who proves herself a proficient poet in her collection My Voice Sought the Wind (2013b), and whose natural lyricism blends itself into her prose, repeats this poem several times throughout the course of the novel: a reiteration that replicates the looping non-linear narrative. This non-linearity, the conflation of past, present, and future is further emphasized as Khaled states that ‘[w]e [Mariam and I] wrote a song together. Or maybe we remembered it. Inherited it somehow’ (2016 [2015], 177; emphasis in the original). The looping of the song, through a paradoxical process of both construction and remembrance/ inheritance, speaks to the sense of inevitability that overshadows the Palestinian narrative in Abulhawa’s two novels. The non-linear structures of both novels (which is most explicit in Sky and Water) suggests an inevitability of catastrophe. This same

Palimpsestic and Genealogical Memories

141

structure, which conflates past with present, provides opportunities for inherited and unfolded memories to negotiate between the two temporal states, and to overlap inter-generational memories, as palimpsest, introducing the potential to rearticulate past experiences in new ways. Crucial to the act of unfolding memories in both of Abulhawa’s novels is the act of return. The tension—and conflation—between past and present is played out in the act of physical return, and in the act of remembrance as a mode of return. Amal, Ismael, and Nur unfold memories upon ‘returning’ to a home they have never known, but which forms a foundational part of their collective (genealogical and national) and individual identity. Enfolding Memories and Identity in Exile Beginning with the Nakba, both Mornings in Jenin and Sky and Water feature the theme of exile. The characters end up in various locations, some remaining in Palestine, living in refugee camps; others moving to surrounding Arab or Gulf states; and some travelling to America. In both texts, the uprooting to America sees the largest separation of Palestinian characters from their heritage. Abulhawa mirrors both Amal’s and Mhammad’s (Mamdouh’s son and Nur’s father) experiences in America as they suppress their Palestinian identities, renaming themselves Amy and Mike respectively. In Sky and Water, Mhammad finds no opportunity for reconciliation with his Palestinian heritage, as his father laments, ‘Exile took his son, first by extricating the homeland from his heart and trashing the Arabic on his tongue, then by taking his life in a car accident’ (Abulhawa, 2016 [2015], 71; emphasis in the original). The car accident ends his life before he can reconcile his Palestinian identity, but the description of the accident is passive in comparison to the destructive language assigned to the condition of exile. The ‘extrication’ of his homeland from his heart sounds akin to a macabre surgical procedure. Meanwhile, the ‘trashing’ of his indigenous language implies an act of deprecation to this hallmark to his homeland. While Mhammad’s exile is only given cursory consideration, Amal’s experiences of exile in America in Mornings in Jenin are expansively discussed. When she first leaves for America on a university scholarship, Amal narrates that ‘the Palestinian girl of pitiable beginnings was trampled in my rush to belong and find relevance in the West. I dampened my senses to the world, tucking myself into an American niche with no past’

142

Post-Millennial Palestine

(Abulhawa, 2011 [2006], 173). Amal intentionally enfolds memories— trampled, dampened, and tucked away—in an attempt to re-mould her identity, so as to fit in. Amal enfolds her past completely, and in doing so, she is left with a sense of being ‘unrooted’: her memories, which tie her to her past, to her nation, and to her relationship with her family, are integral to the formation of her identity (Abulhawa, 2011 [2006], 173). However, her attempt to forget, or to enfold, the past is unsuccessful as she recounts: ‘Palestine would just rise up from my bones into the center of my new life, unannounced’ and that these memories worked as ‘a persistent pull, living in the cells of my body, calling me to myself’ (2011 [2006], 175). Although the enfolding of her memories uproots her, her memories of Palestine are ingrained, residing in her very bones and cells, resisting the conscious attempt to forget. Amal’s identity is an embodied identity. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it: ‘Insofar as I live the body, it is a phenomenon experienced by me and thus provides the very horizon and perspectival point which places me in the world and makes relations between me, other objects, and other shapes possible’ (1994, 84). Amal’s identity is formed out of relations—national and familial—that she has bodily felt and experienced. Alongside her own memories, her inherited memories (postmemories) are ‘transmitted […] so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right’ (Hirsch, 2012, 5; emphasis in the original). Her failure to completely enfold her memories can be linked to the emotions that are affiliated with them, which have helped form her identity during her childhood years living in Palestine. This, in turn, represents an affective response, where Sara Ahmed describes ‘a model of affect as contact: we are affected by “what” we come into contact with’ (2006, 2). The connection between identity and the phenomenological relation to the surrounding world is emphasized when Amal later returns to Arab soil, staying with her brother Yousef. As she unfolds her memories, reconciling herself with her family (both living and dead), she observes: ‘How it hurt, ever so sweetly, satisfyingly, to be Amal again—not anonymous Amy’ (Abulhawa, 2011 [2006], 195). When she returns to her exilic Palestinian life in Lebanon, she allows her memories to unfold, and feels it as a visceral, painful experience, but one that is positively inflected: to feel is to be. Being with her family— connecting with home—prompts her to unfold her memories that allows her to feel, wherein ‘[o]rientations shape not only how we inhabit the space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance,’ through relations and connections with others (Ahmed, 2006, 3). Her

Palimpsestic and Genealogical Memories

143

identity is composed out of palimpsestic layers, tied to both her own, and her family’s, memories. To reject some of those layers, in denying the relations pivotal to the growth of both her individual and collective (genealogical and national) identity, is to blunt it. This is vividly demonstrated when Amal later returns to America when the fighting in Lebanon increases, and her husband is killed before he can join her. Again, in this second exilic experience in America, she actively attempts to enfold memories of her past, adopting the name Amy once again, in what she describes as ‘[a] name drained of meaning,’ and adopting a cold persona, even towards her daughter, Sara (Abulhawa, 2011 [2006], 245). She adopts a façade, one that, as with the name Amy, lacks meaning or purpose, other than to suppress her memories, and therefore her identity as Amal. Although her memories, again, occasionally push through, they do not fully re-surface until she meets her brother Ismael in 2001. During the uprooting of their family, when Ismael was a baby and Amal had not yet been born, Ismael was taken from his mother’s arms and adopted by an Israeli family who desired a child but were barren. It is through connecting with Ismael, now called David Avaram—through the reconciliation with someone that is not a direct part of her memories, but does reside in her family’s memories, intricately tied to the history of the Israel–Palestine conflict—that Amal returns, once again, back to herself. En/Unfolding Ismael in Mornings in Jenin Crucially, experiences of return and exile are not only featured within the Palestinian experience, but also on the other side of the Israel– Palestine conflict. As Anna Ball puts it: ‘From the Zionist perspective, the act of colonising Palestine could be viewed as a return to a homeland and as an ending of the Jewish people’s diasporic experience, rather than as an act that created around 750,000 Palestinian refugees in 1948 alone’ (2012, 5–6; emphasis in the original). Movements of exile and return operate at an inverse to each other, especially when looking at both sides of the Israel–Palestine conflict. Although both of Abulhawa’s novels argue the case for Palestine, and feature many negative representations of Israelis, the focus on Ismael’s adoptive Israeli family are portrayed in a more nuanced fashion. The pivotal moment in which Ismael is taken from his mother’s arms is not an excusable act: it is a violent, forced separation between mother and child. However, when Moshe, the Israeli soldier who took

144

Post-Millennial Palestine

Ismael, brings him home, it is his wife Jolanta, who lost her entire family to the Nazi death camps, was left barren from the sexual abuses she suffered, and came to Palestine ‘following only the lure of Zionism’ and the chance for refuge that it offered, that receives the child into her arms (Abulhawa, 2011 [2006], 36). Abulhawa describes this moment: ‘Jolanta’s face opened like a spring blossom. Her nurturing instincts overtook her depression, her ghosts, her misery […] She enfolded him with her deepest yearnings’ (2011 [2006], 38). Abulhawa’s terminology (‘enfolding’) matches that of Marks’ in reference to the model of enfoldment. Significantly, in following with Marks’ argument that ‘the past is not forgotten but enfolded’ (2015, 70; emphasis in the original) Ismael’s past is not forgotten, but enfolded and hidden away, with the potential for these memories to later be unfolded. Abulhawa shows Ismael’s adoptive Israeli parents to be caring and nurturing. However, while she depicts the human side of these particular Israelis, there is a deliberate irony being perpetrated: the solution to Jolanta’s suffering, to find refuge and to have a child, works at the expense of another—a not too subtle allegory for the Israel– Palestine conflict at large. This allegory is further compounded in the first of two meetings between Ismael and his older brother Yousef. Ismael/David, who is wearing an Israeli uniform, vehemently denies any relation between himself and Yousef, despite recognizing that they look similar. At this point, his Palestinian heritage is unknown to him, enfolded far beneath his Israeli uniform. But even then, their lives are connected: their reunion is narrated as ‘[l]ess than six inches separated their bodies, and in that space fit nearly twenty years, a war, two religions, a holocaust, the Nakbe, two mothers, two fathers, a scar, and a secret with wings flapping in the slow butterfly way’ (Abulhawa, 2011 [2006], 99). Between the two brothers, the memories of two nations sharing the same land and conjoined in history are enfolded and unfolded over time. These dual histories—these two mothers and two fathers—all belong to Ismael/David, forming a palimpsestic identity that is constructed out of opposing and overlapping layers of genealogical and national relations, stretching back almost twenty years, spanning back to both the Nakba and the Holocaust. There is an additional reading to be made regarding this scene, which turns to Hirsch’s reading of Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa. Like Ismael/David, when the lost child of the Palestinian parents appears in Returning to Haifa, he too is dressed in an Israeli uniform, and Hirsch asks: ‘What could figure the enormity of their dispossession as powerfully as the loss of a child, or a child’s refusal to recognize his

Palimpsestic and Genealogical Memories

145

parents?’ (2012, 209). Although this scene is shared between brothers, not parents and child, Ismael/David’s complete disassociation from Yousef emphasizes the dispossession of the Abulheja family. The Israeli uniform is representative of Ismael’s enfolded genealogical memories. This emphasizes the unjust tragedy of the Abulheja family, but also points to how Ismael, too, is dispossessed of his memories, his name, and thus his true heritage. Amal, going by Amy, ‘[a] name drained of meaning,’ is similarly dispossessed of her Palestinian roots (Abulhawa, 2011 [2006], 245). As such, when Ismael learns of his Palestinian identity and, in 2001, tracks Amal down in Pennsylvania, it is the reconciliation of these two diasporic Palestinians, who have no direct memories of the Nakba and who have spent so long rejecting or not knowing that part of themselves, who finally unfold their shared Palestinian heritage. The dispossessed David and Amy (not Ismael and Amal) unfold their genealogical memories by forming a relationship with each other—as two children from the same family who have never previously met. Speaking to each other Amal finds: My question riled up ghosts of a nation, their torment unmitigated by justice or remembrance, coming to my side in flickering black and white movie reels. Images of my father holding me and reading from Khalil Gibran’s poetry in his deep voice, soldier’s boots, the wheelbarrow, and the ethereal face of little Aisha; Sister Marianne and all the orphans; the explosions and the cries, the restless woe and howls of finished people. I submitted to the memories of a dense past and it filled me with a sadness that I wish was anger instead. (Abulhawa, 2011 [2006], 265) This moment in the narrative strongly resembles the model of enfoldment, in which the past is unfolded. Reminiscent of Marks’ arguments, Amal conjures images of her past, which she narrates using distinctively visual rhetoric. Her memories are formed out of ‘flickering black and white movie reels’ that are triangulated through her experiences and the presence of Ismael/David. In order to communicate with her brother, she must allow herself to remember the past that she has enfolded, to submit to, and thus inhabit and embody, them: once more, to be is to feel. As Marks argues, ‘unfolding gives rise to affect’ that manifests in two ways (2015, 212). The first of these manifestations occurs when the subject/object ‘unfolds and becomes

146

Post-Millennial Palestine

actualized[;] you may very well feel a physical release in your body that corresponds to the release of the unfolded element’ (Marks, 2015, 212). This is recognizable in Amal’s affective response to the unfolded memories, filling her with an unexpected feeling of sadness, which is, perhaps, the emotion she needs to feel, rather than the emotion that is easier to deal with. The second way in which affect manifests through the process of unfolding memories is described by Marks as something that ‘occurs when you participate in a new connection that brings things into contact, makes a new fold’ (2015, 212). The contact between Amal and Ismael prompts a new fold, a rearticulating of the Abulheja family from different and now conjoined perspectives. This moment of remembrance, an unfolding that is facilitated by reconnecting with family, opens up the opportunity for reconciliation between the present and the past. Genealogical Inheritance and Rearticulating Identity The tone of Abulhawa’s fiction is undeniably depressing and melancholic as the central families are hit with tragedy after tragedy. The ‘ghosts of a nation’ that haunt Amal’s memories in Mornings in Jenin (2011 [2006], 265) are omnipresent throughout both texts as the past haunts the present. The immediacy of the despair that is felt is emphasized in the account in Sky and Water, following the Six-Day War (1967), that ‘[t]he humiliation of that war soaked into their skins. Everyone staggered around drenched in another loss, new rage, and revived fear’ (2016 [2015], 58). The response to threat and violence is a phenomenological, embodied response wherein ‘[t]he “here” of bodily dwelling is thus what takes the body outside of itself, as it is affected and shaped by its surroundings: the skin that seems to contain the body is also where the atmosphere creates an impression’ (Ahmed, 2006, 8–9). The war ‘soak[ing] into’ the skin of the Palestinians affected, intimately connecting the body to the surrounding world, in an embodied, felt experience. In this final section I explore how the act of return in Abulhawa’s fiction articulates a sense of what Saloul calls ‘ongoing memory’ (2012, 211), which sees the memory of the Nakba reworked through new memories in the continued occupation of post-millennial Palestine. In particular, I argue that this rearticulating of memory across past and present, as with the formulating of new folds in memories that are shared through connections and relationships, can find, if not an

Palimpsestic and Genealogical Memories

147

entirely positive resolution, then a hopeful one, in Abulhawa’s fiction. Despite the depressive tone of her fiction, the enduring generations of the two central families in her novels represent the practice of ṣ umud (steadfastness); an act of ‘resistance that takes the form of daily coping, an insistence on carrying on one’s life and a refusal to be cowed, as well as active and intentional forms of struggle’ (Halper, 2006, 47). Ṣumud serves as a kind of work: to keep on living; to keep on remembering. Despite the traumas of the past that continue to oppressively and persistently overhang the ‘now,’ opportunities for hope can be located in the act of return and remembrance in the post-millennial period. AlJahdali argues that ‘[f]or exiled Palestinians this return journey becomes a site of production whereby […] they connect to traditions and genealogies to produce themselves anew’ (2014, 225). Returning, remembering, and unfolding memories provides opportunities to rearticulate both individual and collective (national) narratives. In Mornings in Jenin, this ability to reconnect and to be produced anew is offered to Amal’s daughter Sara, who is born and raised in America. She travels to Palestine for the first time in 2002 and inherits the memories of her mother and uncle; she inherits her genealogical memories. Towards the end of the novel she tells her mother: ‘I wish I’d known him,’ to which Amal responds: ‘I will tell you everything I remember’ (Abulhawa, 2011 [2006], 316). Reconnecting with Palestine— with ‘home’—is tied to the passing on of memories: it is tied to connecting with a family she does not know herself, but who live in the memories she inherits. Likewise, in Sky and Water, Nur ‘returns’ home to a nation she has never set foot in and reconciles with her Palestinian identity by connecting with her family, whom she has never previously met. In both instances, the ‘site of production’ that AlJahdali cites (2014, 225) re-forms the returnee’s identity. Such sites of production are facilitated by acts of reconnecting, remembering, and thus rearticulating narratives passed down through the family. Marks argues that the enfoldment model ‘shows that […] much art is concerned with the nature of en/unfolding rather than with producing images; these artworks (and other things) thus are not so much representational as performative’ (2015, 73). Considering Marks’ remuneration on the use of the enfoldment model, I posit that the production of the returnee’s Palestinian identity can be revitalized anew, as AlJahdali claims, and is built out of a process of selected and remediated remembrance. Further to this, Palestinian identity is not merely represented, but is lived and performed. Likewise, memory is not passive, but actively narrated, mediated, and re-orientated in new contexts. Following

148

Post-Millennial Palestine

a tenet of postmemory, the connection of such memories ‘to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation’ (Hirsch, 1997, 22). Genealogical memories can be traced from past to present, and memories belonging to earlier generations (such as those of the Nakba) are unfolded by later generations, rearticulated in contemporary contexts of the occupation in Palestine. In Sky and Water, Nur is identified as ‘the American’ upon her initial arrival in Gaza (Abulhawa, 2016 [2015], 174). She has inherited her great-aunt Mariam’s mismatched eyes and wears contact lenses to disguise this, so it is only later that the family realizes who one another are. Nur and her great-aunt Nazmiyeh, who receives her into her home, undergo a genealogical return. Upon the discovery of Nur’s inherited genetics, ‘Nur lowered herself to the floor, her mismatched eyes staring at Hajje Nazmiyeh from another time’ (Abulhawa, 2016 [2015], 196). Nur’s genealogical inheritance, symbolized by her mismatched eyes, forms a palimpsest where past and present meet: ‘When Teta [Nazmiyeh] looked into those mismatched eyes, she felt as if time had folded on itself’ (Abulhawa, 2016 [2015], 97; emphasis in the original). Memory—and the past—is unfolded, as Mariam’s eyes, previously dead and enfolded, re-emerge in the present. As with the reconciliation between Amal and Ismael in Mornings in Jenin, this meeting between Nazmiyeh and Nur, magnified by the eyes that belong to both past and present, sees an act of unfolding that ‘gives rise to affect’ (Marks, 2015, 212). Once more, the affective response is two-fold: the ‘reveal’—or unfolding—of Mariam’s eyes in the present prompts a revelation that offers an emotional release to both Nur and Nazmiyeh; and a new connection—a new fold—is produced out of this bridge between generations. Nur’s inherited eyes open up a space through which she may discover her heritage, wherein the spectre of Mariam’s eyes prompts the unfolding of her great-aunt’s memories. Through storytelling and narration, through the bonding of female and familial kinship, Nur inherits the genealogical memories of her Palestinian family. She begins to develop her ‘Palestinian’ identity, forming a new fold out of the joint experience of her ‘American’ upbringing and her Palestinian heritage. Nur inherits the eyes and memories from her great-aunt who experienced the trauma of the Nakba first-hand. However, as has been evident in both of Abulhawa’s novels, while there is a persistent tug to look to the past, there simultaneously remains the pull of forward momentum, of inevitability, not just of ‘history,’ but also for the exiled characters’ eventual return. As Khaled narrates in Sky and Water: ‘Nur

Palimpsestic and Genealogical Memories

149

was always on the way […] She had no real anchors in the world, and so she was always on her way. On her way to herself. On her way to redemption. On her way to language. To something heavy enough to weight her against the wind’ (2016 [2015], 277; emphasis in the original). Nur is ‘always on her way’: her ‘return’ home is inevitable. In her exile she is, as with Amal, unrooted: she is on her way to a place, a language, a heritage, a past, to which she can anchor herself. It is by reconnecting to this past—by reconciling her present self with her genealogical history—that brings her to ‘herself,’ to a rooted Palestinian identity. Her return is ‘a site of production’ (AlJahdali, 2014, 225). She unfolds, and therefore produces and reproduces simultaneously old and new memories: ‘On the edges of memory, Nur found a moment when her grandfather had told her that her mismatched eyes were just like his sister’s eyes’ (Abulhawa, 2016 [2015], 170). She connects her own memories to the meeting of her family in the present and with the inheritance of their memories that follows, thus ‘connect[ing] to traditions and genealogies to produce themselves anew’ (AlJahdali, 2014, 225). Through the reconciliation of past with present, the inter-generational meeting, and the unfolding of memories of the past alongside an inevitable forward motion, Nur produces herself anew. Memory versus Inevitability In both Mornings in Jenin and Sky and Water, Abulhawa offers multiple points of view, which sometimes overlap or are remediated. She discloses events that are yet to happen, as she oscillates between a definitive past—an inevitable ‘history’—and an equally fraught present that frantically attempts to keep a hold on its inheritance. Her novels trace the time preceding the Nakba, and the violence and trauma that has followed. The non-linearity of the novels and the interplay of analepsis and prolepsis form the basis for palimpsestic memories that bind together collective (national, familial) and individual identities. Just as it is inevitable that Nur will find her way to Palestine in Sky and Water, likewise it is inevitable that Amal will ultimately find herself in Jenin in 2002, with a gun held to her head. The forward momentum of time in Abulhawa’s novels is driven out of nostalgic memory that Saloul argues ‘functions as a cultural response to the loss of the home in exile’ wherein nostalgic memory is ‘a present-orientated memorization that links the past to the present and future’ (2012, 10). Palestinian memories of the past strive to preserve their heritage and produce a cultural

150

Post-Millennial Palestine

memory that, although reshaped, persists in spite of their continued displacement in the new millennium. Memory is a phenomenological, genealogical force, and memory is also, fundamentally, work. It is an act of curation: ‘a chore of memory, a task to keep them near’ (Abulhawa, 2016 [2015], 53; emphasis in the original). Curating the past, and rearticulating the past in the present, requires work: it requires an embodied response to conjure images and narratives. The importance of memory in forming a collective (familial, national) and individual Palestinian identity is also captured in Abulhawa’s poetry. In the poem ‘My House,’ in her collection My Voice Sought the Wind, the speaker says: ‘I can only get there now on the rafts of memories / Colored snapshots and old movie reels’ (2013a, 107). Visual rhetoric is pivotal to both Hirsch’s and Marks’ arguments pertaining to postmemory and enfoldment respectively, and Abulhawa’s own use of visual rhetoric in connection to memory at significant points of her novels and in the poem cited above lends itself to their readings. The reference to ‘old movie reels’ in ‘My House’ recalls the similar rhetoric used in recounting Amal’s experience of remembering her past in ‘flickering black and white movie reels’ (Abulhawa, 2011 [2006], 265). Both the visual imagery used here and the object of the photograph in Sky and Water that was discussed at the beginning of this chapter, offers particular ways of reading memory. In particular, as Hirsch argues: ‘Photographs, ghostly revenants are very particular instruments of remembrance, since they are perched at the edge between memory and postmemory, and also, though differently, between memory and forgetting’ (1997, 22). In the curation of the past, as a curation of memory—represented by physical photographs and/or visual rhetoric in Abulhawa’s works—the individual chooses which memories to unfold and to enfold, which to remember and which to forget. The tension between the acts of forgetting and leaving, and the acts of remembering, remaining (steadfast), and returning, runs through Abulhawa’s novels. Mornings in Jenin and Sky and Water oscillate between enfolding/forgetting and unfolding/returning. The two novel’s narratives are inter-generational, and the negotiation of memories of the past and the inevitability of the present curates the past, while overlaying it—as palimpsest—with ‘now.’

Palimpsestic and Genealogical Memories

151

References Abulhawa, Susan (2011 [2006]) Mornings in Jenin. London: Bloomsbury. Abulhawa, Susan (2013a) ‘My House.’ My Voice Sought the Wind. Charlottesville, VA: Just World Books. 105–08. Abulhawa, Susan (2013b) My Voice Sought the Wind. Charlottesville, VA: Just World Books. Abulhawa, Susan (2016 [2015]) The Blue Between Sky and Water. London: Bloomsbury Circus. Abulhawa, Susan (2020) Against a Loveless World. London: Bloomsbury. Ahmed, Sara (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. AlJahdali, Samar H. (2014) “Venturing into a Vanishing Space: The Chronotope in Representing Palestinian Postcoloniality.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50.2: 216–29. Ball, Anna (2012) Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective. London: Routledge. Dillon, Sarah (2007) The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory. London: Continuum. Grosz, Elizabeth (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Halper, Jeff (2006) ‘A Strategy within a Non-Strategy: Sumud, Resistance, Attrition, and Advocacy.’ Journal of Palestine Studies 35.3: 45–51. Hirsch, Marianne (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hirsch, Marianne (2012) The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Marks, Laura U. (2015) Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Saloul, Ihab (2012) Catastrophe and Exile in the Modern Palestinian Imagination: Telling Memories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. van Elferen, Isabella (2012) Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

part iii Palestinian Horizons: Endings and Beginnings, or Taking Flight

chapter eight Killing God to Find Palestine ‘after the End of the World’ in Adania Shibli, Mahmoud Amer, and Maya Abu al-Hayyat By Nora Parr Killing God to Find Palestine

Post-millennial, post-Oslo, post-politics; since the late 1990s Palestine has been defined by a discourse attuned more to its past than its present. A generation of authors who grew up—or came of age—in an era of Peace Processes, Intifadas, and wars on Gaza, have witnessed immense change. Despite such transformations, the words used to understand and describe this Palestinian generation have remained the same. Take the word ‘Intifada.’ During the First (1987–93) and the Second (2000–05), the word was a powerful emblem of a people united. The ‘third,’ on the other hand, was declared at least once in 2008, 2012, and 2015, with more after.1 The ‘third intifada’ has been heralded more times than one can reasonably count, each new declaration referring to clusters of resistance acts across a continued landscape of occupation. The language of the Peace Process is no different. Early on, each attempt at a political solution to the ‘conflict’ inherited the name of 1

The idea of a third intifada has been mobilized as a category or name for events at least since the early 2000s, usually as politics become tense. Most recently this happened in October 2015(–16) after a series of stabbings (it is also termed the ‘knife intifada’) mostly in Jerusalem. The uncoordinated series of stabbings that targeted Israeli military personnel were said by some to be in ‘response’ to US declarations that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel, although others claimed motivations were economic. Earlier, a third intifada was declared by analysis in 2012 following protests against oppressive government policies (protests were against both the Palestinian Authority (PA) and a continued Israeli military occupation) said to be inspired by the Arab Spring. In 2008 a string of ‘bulldozer attacks’ were also declared by some commentators as the start of a third uprising. 155

156

Post-Millennial Palestine

the city that the negotiations took place in: Madrid (1991), Oslo (1993), Camp David (2000), Taba (2001), Beirut (2002)—but the dozens of talks (or attempted talks) that followed went nameless, simply amalgamated into a ‘peace process.’ In the case of both phenomena, ‘intifadah’ and ‘peace process,’ a paradigm—of resistance, of negotiations—was set in the 1980s and 1990s, but everything ‘after’ became a re-creation of what went before. Despite changes, language did not transform, so these changes went unmarked. Most recently, the language quagmire has spread to an awful series of aerial assaults on the Gaza Strip. Israel’s 2008 attack was termed the ‘War on Gaza.’ The ‘Second War on Gaza’ soon followed in 2012, the third in 2014. In 2015, 2016, and 2017, however, no headlines marked the fourth, fifth, or sixth attacks; these also slid into a political continuum as if what the first war meant, the rest could be defined by—the same political dynamic was presumed to be at play. No matter what actually happens in a given place or time of Palestine, the ‘next’ round—of resistance, negotiations, or military assault—remains fixed. For the new generation of Palestinian writers, however, this has become unconscionable. So, while imagery and ideas from the past remain significant across much of Palestinian cultural production, there is an increasing push against a quagmire of language, where meaning is stuck in a past paradigm. This chapter looks at contemporary writers who use their art to forge new words—a new language, a new framework for language—that better responds to life as they live it. In the process, existing structures of representation are forcefully discarded, although not entirely left behind. Looking at the work of three writers who have lived three distinct sorts of Palestinian lives, a trend emerges. In Adania Shibli’s ‘Maths, under which is love, under which is language,’ (‘Adanīya Shiblī, b. 1974, Palestine, lives Berlin/Ramallah; ‘Al-rīaḍīāt wa taḥtha al-ḥub wa taḥthu al-lugha,’ 2000) Maya Abu al-Hayyat’s No One Knows their Bloodtype (Māyā Abū al-Ḥayyāt, b. 1982, Lebanon, lived in Amman, Tunis, now in Ramallah; Lā aḥad yaʻrif zumrat damihu riwāyah, 2013), and Mahmoud Amer’s Cinema Gaza (Maḥmūd ʻAmar, b. 1991, Tunis, lives in Gaza City; Sīnimā Ghazza: riwāya, 2015),2 protagonists quite literally kill off existing systems of representation. In their explicit 2

Translations from Maya Abu al-Hayyat’s work draw from Hazem Jamjoum’s excellent and as-yet unpublished translation Bloodtype. Translations from Jamjoum’s manuscript are denoted with a (Txx). All other translations, including from Shibli’s and Amer’s texts, are my own.

Killing God to Find Palestine

157

renderings of the death of gods, fathers, and fighters, the texts record what Jacques Rancière calls a ‘blow to the existing regime of relations between the symbolic and the real’ (2015, 97). The stories demand repudiation—a reckoning with the fact that somewhere between the Oslo Accords and the new millennium Palestine’s symbolic order and its lived world ceased to cohere. Paralleling the Arab intellectual response to the military ‘defeat’ of 1967,3 ‘post-millennial’ Palestinian writers are also declaring symbolic language ‘rotten and inadequate’ (Kassab, 2010, 50). This shift has gone largely unacknowledged in the critical literature—perhaps because the defeat of Palestine’s political language has been more of a slow disintegration than an unexpected disaster. However, the shift has had no less of an impact. The works of Shibli, Abu al-Hayyat, and Amer share the same disgust that Syrian playwright and critic Sadallah Wannous’ character in Soiree for the 5th of June did when he wondered how it was possible the day after the 1967 war that ‘things continued to look the same […] words continued to be used in the same way […] people wrote, read, and behaved as if nothing had happened’ (Kassab, 2010, 50). By refusing to engage with existing ‘regimes of relations’—not extending, building on, or re-imagining familiar narratives of resistance, return, exile, or even universalism—the new generation of Palestinian writers declare these systems dead and search for alternatives. The process by which Shibli, Amer, and Abu al-Hayyat’s texts overcome symbolic limitations is strikingly similar: each begins with a visceral and pointed termination. Set in a Jerusalem hospital, the protagonist of Bloodtype, Jumana, finds her logical systems crumble in the first chapter of the text. The local midwife dies. Her father dies (her Lebanese mother had been left in Beirut with the exit of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Then, it turns out, Jumana’s father may not actually have been her father at all. In rapid succession, structures of community, links to the past, and a sense of belonging come undone—as if the gravity that kept the parts together ceased to apply. With no mechanism of ordering herself within the world, she toys with the idea: ‘This means I’m not even Palestinian originally (ʾaṣlān)’ (Abu al-Hayyat, 2013, 100). Similar anxieties drive the lead character, Alaa, of Cinema Gaza. The legacy of the young man’s father, who died in Tunis before the family ‘returns’ to Gaza, only has its absolute 3

The ‘setback,’ or Naksa, of 1967 is also known as the Six-Day War. It saw Israel’s military defeat a combined effort from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon.

158

Post-Millennial Palestine

death some 13 years later. The father’s eldest son—Qussay—is killed in a 2006 shootout between his political faction Fatah, and Hamas forces. Qussay, carrying the political standard of his PLO father, is killed for a political ethos that, as narrator Alaa puts it, Gaza ‘sheds’ with the Hamas takeover, ‘as though it hadn’t been its skin for years’ (Amer, 2015, 85). Where Bloodtype and Cinema Gaza look specifically at national language, Shibli’s short story takes a broader view at the links between language, writing, and creation. ‘Maths, under which is love, under which is language’ explores, through a series of vignettes, how physics, language, and human interaction might differently bind the self to space, to social meaning, and to others—in a way that differs from the rhetorical status quo. Each vignette is an intervention— disassembling the logic of coherence that each set of relationships are built on. It begins with the idea of god (a different sort of ‘father’), and the relationship between the word and the world. Although it does not touch on national themes, instead ‘Maths […]’ thinks through some of the invisible assumptions that drive national writing as it is encountered in Cinema Gaza and Bloodtype. Rather than killing the father/fighter, the story kills god. Each text targets what it sees as the linchpin of existing discourse. These new-generation texts do not place themselves within existing rhetorical structures. They demand not to be ‘post-.’ Rather, they show how ‘existing modes of symbolization are incapable of apprehending’ their reality (Rancière, 2015, 97). Palestine’s new generation broadly asks: What happens to narrative when existing structures of community, of belonging, stop making sense? Their answer is to write the end of Palestine as it had been written. Using a phrase from AfricanAmerican Jazz musician, cultural icon, and original Afro-Futurist, Sun Ra (1914–93): they are writing the ‘end of the world’ (Ra, Smith, et al., 2014 [1974]). The three symbolic deaths do not—as political discourse would have it—initiate a new cycle, but signal that cycle’s utter destruction. ‘After the end’—a term that points to the need for a new rhythm for African-American populations as a way to get out from under oppression—allows language to be disarticulated from existing structures. The work of these writers is to first bravely declare an end, and then struggle onward to create something different.

Killing God to Find Palestine

159

Writing the ‘End of the World’ A new generation of Palestinian authors are writing the ‘end of the world.’ The necessarily drastic phrasing comes from Sun Ra’s 1974 film Space is the Place, which sees character Ra travel to earth from another planet to proclaim: ‘It’s after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?’ On an alternative planet, Ra had seen an end to systems of slavery and oppression. Without these structuring systems his community of travellers were able to forge a new set of relationships—to each other, to the word—achieved through music. Earth’s problem, Ra says with certainty as he returns, is that ‘the people have no music that is in coordination with their spirits, because of this they are out of tune with the universe’ (2014 [1974]). The existing music—the rhythm, order, meter, pattern, and system—represents a white elite. So long as this rhythm prevails, Ra says, so does oppression. To live a free life, the rhythm of the system must be ‘in tune’ with the people in it. To find a different rhythm is to be ‘after the end of the world,’ because the ‘rhythm’ is the world or at least the ‘conditions of possibility of all knowledge’ in that world (Foucault, 1991 [1966], 168). The ‘symbolic’ that Rancière describes in narrative terms, is what Ra suggests with ‘rhythm.’ It is the rhythm, or symbolic order, of Palestine that is being ended by the foundational deaths in each work: Alaa’s father, Jumana’s father, and Shibli’s god. With the death of these structuring figures, the relationship to the world that they encoded also comes to an end. There is no continuation in the cyclical sense, but rather an ‘after’ that sees a break with the symbolic order at the same time as its remnants continue to populate the lives of the characters. This is signalled in the narrative ramifications of the symbolic mortalities. The death of Jumana’s father is portrayed in such visceral terms that the man becomes divorced of all symbol and ceremony. The man ‘wanted to be remembered as a fighter,’ as ‘a first lieutenant, commanding an infantry company despite being only twenty years old’ (Abu al-Hayyat, T66; T25). When he entered the administrative wing of the PLO he simply shifted from commanding an infantry to commanding his daughters, replicating the same paradigm. In hospital, he is no longer commanding: drool runs down his chin, and the only thing ‘familiar’ about the man to Jumana were the ‘snores I know well, but long and uneven’ (T6). Interrupting her thoughts, Jumana’s father then moves totally out of the realm of the familiar:

160

Post-Millennial Palestine

All of a sudden, my father’s body begins to convulse, like one that had swallowed a metallic object it was trying to disgorge. I do not see him as my father at this moment. He is a thing that resembles him and I am afraid to draw near […] his body falls to the floor with a tremor that wakes up the entire ward and rips the oxygen tubes out of his nostrils. For a moment he opens his eyes and releases a soulful snore […] They try to resuscitate him with CPR [cardiopulmonary resuscitation] and shocks from the defibrillator, but he has snored his last snore. (T6) The transitions are rapid. From known to unknown, from alive to dead. The man who had maintained total control over her life, who had ‘made sure [his daughters] felt as if they were under constant surveillance’ (T22), flails helplessly out of bed and dies—out of one world and into another. The surprises do not stop there. Overwhelmed at the death, Jumana faints and is admitted for tests. Glancing over her results, the nephew of the midwife (who would later be her husband) casually remarks, ‘[Y]our father’s blood type is O positive, and yours is AB positive. That’s not right!’ (T7). The same night her father dies Jumana learns that she is likely not his biological daughter. At a stroke, the past dies and Jumana’s relationship with it is upended. His ‘order’ or ‘rhythm’ is dead, and it no longer has a hold over Jumana. It is ‘after the end of the world’ and Jumana has a new distance from everything that Palestine had been for her. She must take stock. The subsequent chapters of Bloodtype put present-day Jumana and the reader into the jury box—charged with reviewing the past to re-determine its relationship with the present. Chapters proceed almost as flashbacks, recounting when her father came to Beirut as a PLO fighter; when her mother—forced to marry him—demanded a divorce in the midst of the PLO exodus; the final months of the PLO’s Tunis phase and her sister’s anger at the announcement they were going to ‘return’ to a Palestine they had never seen. Each chapter is narrated by a different character; even Jumana has a chapter, although it is not told in the same voice as the introductory section—her chapter has the voice of Jumana-before-the-end-of-the-world and narrates the difficulties of establishing a new family life in Jerusalem where she already struggles to fit in. The device gives reflective distance for Jumana to determine what sort of Palestinian she is, if she is not an ‘original’ one (and the underlying question of what ‘Palestinian’ means with the demise

Killing God to Find Palestine

161

of the fighter figure). After-the-end-of-the-world for Bloodtype does not mean an absolute departure from the past, but the reorganization of meaning through the selection of new symbols. In Cinema Gaza the ideology of the father only dies with the assassination of his eldest son, Alaa’s brother Qussay. It is a death that makes urgent and un-ignorable the necessity of finding a new language politics. Like Jumana, Alaa and Qussay are raised in the shadow of a PLO father in Tunis, but Qussay carries on the father’s legacy, as the Fatah-led PLO morphs into the Palestinian Authority (PA), a body created to govern the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the Oslo Accords. Qussay was a member of the PA’s armed guards, and he imagined that he was still a freedom fighter. As Alaa explains, ‘Qussay loved war’ and equates a new Fatah militarism with loyalty to his father and the cause he stood for: ‘He loved talking about it and about guns. He would clean the picture of my father hung in the salon whenever he got the chance’ (Amer, 2015, 21). The 2006 Hamas election win, and the party’s subsequent forceful takeover of Gaza forced a reckoning with Qussay’s logic; both parties claimed to be the inheritors of revolution (Khalili, 2007, 114).4 Hamas disrupted Fatah’s Oslo teleology: the claim that return and sovereignty promised by the accords would repair the losses of 1948 and the Nakba. As Hamas forces take charge of the Gaza Strip, forcefully ousting Qussay and his faction, the elder brother calls Alaa to tell him he will flee for safety to Egypt. Leaving Palestine for Egypt means, Alaa reflects, that ‘Qussay would not remain one of the returnees’ (Amer, 2015, 79). The implication is that political control over Gaza, for Qussay and his party, is more important than maintaining what they have called a return. For Alaa, this casts the whole Oslo project into question, so that not only Qussay’s return, but his own, ‘was not, from the beginning, a real return’ (2015, 79). With this breakdown of politics and indeed rhetoric, Alaa remarks, Qussay ‘would return to his Palestinian state outside of Palestine; his state would be the same as millions of refugees’ (2015, 80). If the goal was return, the symbolism (the Oslo teleology) fails when that return disappears. The brother does not have the chance to un-return, however, and is killed en-route to the Rafah crossing, leaving political rhetoric in limbo. 4

Following a Hamas election win in 2006, the party was ostracized by an international community that preferred to work with the previous party, Fatah. The party remained in government and, in the Gaza Strip, Hamas forces ousted Fatah following weeks of infighting.

162

Post-Millennial Palestine

The emblematic death of Qussay and its implicit critique of a failed symbolic order is only the first political position that comes under scrutiny in Cinema Gaza. Alaa may not have aligned with a political party, but his choice of ‘neutrality’ is also critiqued. He works as an Associated Press photojournalist—a position he hopes will stand him outside the fray, and provide a critical vantage from which to create an alternative. This myth also crumbles when Alaa realizes that the gun battle he has photographed—with such a perfect angle that he also imagined receiving awards for the work—is the same shootout that killed his brother. Alaa had ‘stood ten floors above taking pictures of his death and thinking about journalist prizes’ (Amer, 2015, 90) while Qussay was killed. Now, ‘Qussay is in the freezer’ and Alaa has ‘lost the ability to breathe’ (2015, 86; 87). He throws the camera out the window (2015, 89), along with the idea of detachment, and must try again to navigate life in Gaza with no political or narrative compass. Not only were political positions unable to provide answers, but simply remaining outside of the fray is also insufficient. What ‘Maths, under which is love, under which is language’ shows from its first vignette, is that new politics needs a new language. In its first lines, Shibli’s short story kills god and severs the ties binding existing narrative to the physical world. ‘Maths […]’ overturns a different foundational myth and demands a re-calibration. The first of the story’s nine vignettes re-writes and inverts the Biblical creation myth; it is titled ‘The End.’ In a few paragraphs, the vignette excavates the foundations of a presumed relationship between god and world, as well as the assumption that the word-of-god (language) is capable of explaining that world. By re-writing and up-ending the creation myth, ‘Maths […]’ demands the reader stop taking for granted the established order of things. The vignette is worth quoting in full: The End In the end, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and empty; and on its deep face was darkness. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light, and he was pleased. And God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And the light stole the darkness of the night from the paper. And the Author saw the whiteness of the page and that it was empty. And the emptiness of the page filled

Killing God to Find Palestine

163

the Author with emptiness. And the author called the emptiness of the page Death of the Author. And the Author was sad. (Shibli, 2000, 93; emphasis added) The bulk of the vignette gives the Biblical creation myth as it is presented in the Van Dyck-version Arabic Bible. With the exception of its opening phrase (fī al-nihāya), the first half of the vignette quotes the Bible verbatim. The simple swap of ‘in the beginning’ for ‘in the end,’ however, turns meaning on its head. Instead of a ‘beginning’ from nothingness, creation happens at the end of something else. It is, again, the ‘end of the world,’ and again, for Shibli, ‘world’ stands for ‘explanatory system,’ or ‘rhythm.’ Just like Jumana and Alaa, the narrator of ‘Maths […]’ begins by ending the world and its discursive order, and then goes on to try and re-make it. In fact, the re-ordering has already begun. Although the word order of what follows ‘fī al-nihāya’ remains intact (earth created, light created, night and day, etc.), a different logic now holds them together—a logic of endings. What does it mean if the earth was created ‘in the end’? The intervention of sacred language signals two fundamental changes to its meaning. First, creation did not come from nothing. Second, sacred language is no longer sacred, because it has been altered. The implications become clearer as the passage continues. Rather than the expected continuation of the creation story where god ‘brings forth’ water and plants and animals, the vignette shifts after the splitting of night and day to symbols reminiscent of the other ‘beginning’ of the Van Dyck Bible, John 1:1, which starts: ‘[I]n the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God.’ If genesis is about what existed ‘in the beginning,’ John tells us who existed, and the relationship of that who to how it/ he is known through language. According to the Bible, word had the authority of god, so language was capable of holding god’s meaning and had explanatory power over the world god made. ‘Maths […]’ re-writes this relationship. If ‘the Word was God’ in John, and if both had existed even before the beginning, this new ‘end’ signals a shift to both word and world. In ‘Maths […]’ word no longer automatically constitutes, conjures, or even describes world. In ‘the end,’ light brings forth, not time, a division between day and night, or chronology, but the realization that there is an author of the word, and that the page of the world is blank. The final lines of the story’s opening vignette hint at an alternative relationship between world and word—one that re-aligns the role of the

164

Post-Millennial Palestine

author within it. This comes in the final lines where the author declares ‘mawt al-kātib’—the death of the author. This is an explicit reference to Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay of the same name—an essay that essentially ‘liberated’ the critic from authorial intention (Barthes, 1977, 145). For Barthes, the death of the author means that the written ‘voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins’ (1977, 142); it is a critical disassociation of the text from the intention of the writer. God’s intention for the world is no longer relevant; it can no longer determine what the world means. In ‘Maths […]’ it is only after the death of the author that writing can begin. For ‘Maths […]’ the end of the world goes beyond the termination of systems that had constituted the nation. The short story dismantles the presumed relationship between word and meaning. Together, the three texts collectively disassemble the ‘world’ as it was formed in the era of Peace Processes, Intifadas, and wars on Gaza. Following the deaths of god, the father, the fighter, and the worldview their ordering presence held together, there proceeds the space of ‘after’ (the end of the world) within which characters aim to build a freshly representative language able to create symbols that connect word to world once again. Language, Space, Meaning For his end of the world, Sun Ra had the imaginary alternative of outer space to teach him a new ordering logic away from the noise of earth. In Bloodtype, Cinema Gaza, and ‘Maths […]’ narratives and protagonists stay firmly rooted on Earth in communities where ‘things continued to look the same’ (Kassab, 2010, 50) as they had before the world ended. Although each text seeks ‘another kind of language’ (Ra, Smith, et al., 2014 [1974]), all attempts to ‘re-figur[e] space’ (Rancière, 2015, 35) are thwarted by existing names and structures. In trying to re-script relationships between place, language, and community, the works show how very marked all aspects of life are; how linked language, relationships, and place can be; and how difficult a new language is to produce in a location that manifests the dead symbolic order. The characters find ‘no music that is in coordination with their spirits,’ and as a result feel constantly ‘out of tune with the universe’ (Ra, Smith, et al., 2014 [1974]). With the existing symbolic order finished, however, an alternative must be sought. While none of the works definitively produces its own new frame, each foregrounds the process of writing— of finding words that fit—as a medium within which new rhythms can emerge. It is thus that the journeys of each protagonist become

Killing God to Find Palestine

165

significant: how they go about proceeding with life ‘after the end of the world’ becomes the path to a way of writing capable of representing contemporary Palestinian experience and its connection with the past. Alaa of Cinema Gaza quite literally goes looking for a location—a physical space that is unmarked—within which he can feel free to think differently. He seeks out spaces unclaimed by family, government, or resistance, and finds few. ‘There’s the Gaza shore,’ he thinks out loud, a Gaza sea, there are Gaza fish ‘but not a Gaza Sky’ (Amer, 2015, 53). The sky offers the first unmarked possibility, which he probes further: ‘Does the sky have a language?’ (2015, 53). But the sky becomes linked with a description of heaven recalled from a primary school class; it is not unclaimed, without a language—it is already marked. The sky is heaven, ‘an unknown place that would stay that way’ (Amer, 2015, 22) according to tradition. To belong, Alaa wants a place that is knowable, to which he can feel connected. Language and location alone do not offer answers. So, as a photographer, Alaa predictably looks to the image for a different pattern of relationship. ‘Earth is not paradise,’ he muses. ‘We can take pictures of it and return with them captured’ (2015, 22). Photographs are proof, for Alaa, of the knowability of a place—proof of a relationship between photographer and photographed. However, the photograph fails to provide an alternative because it can only offer a ‘fixed place’ (2015, 91), which does not correspond to his reality in Gaza. Looking at one image he ‘wished it would move, that it would emit the sound of music […] I turned the image on my laptop, I printed a few, but it remained fixed’ (2015, 61). Even the moving image, he decides, is problematic. Not only is film merely a series of fixed photographs, but both photograph and film can portray only one vision, one rhythm. He determines: ‘Gaza doesn’t fear all of the special “action” that happens in it, but it does fear the one-way voice of a director shouting: “Action”’ (2015, 61). His fear continues to be of representation through a single vision. Alaa finds that without a logic for the new world, even his memories become problematic. As he searches for a solution, he creates imaginary filing cabinets to temporarily store all of the information that a new logic must make sense of. But his ‘[mind-]cabinets varied in their capacity and quality of locks on their doors,’ so all too often, ‘any number of times in a day,’ the lock breaks ‘on its own accord and all sorts of things spill out’ (Amer, 2015, 22). And then there is just chaos: The sound of bullets and explosions, masks with holes only for the eyes, empty cups of coffee, the sound of breaking news, yellow taxis, celebrations, colored banners, funerals,

166

Post-Millennial Palestine

marches, the sound of the sea and airplanes, a line of blood running parallel to the sidewalk, rubble. A lot of rubble. (2015, 22) The memories flood and overwhelm. To use the words of Jumana, without a rhythm that connects them, the memories ‘suddenly melted into air’ (Abu al-Hayyat, T75). For Alaa it is rubble, and for Jumana ‘that shoe factory in the heart of the industrial zone of Tunis that had been turned into our school,’ which evaporated as soon as the Oslo Accords were signed, like it ‘was never there to begin with’ (Abu al-Hayyat, T75). Undeterred by these failures, however, Alaa (and Jumana) continue(s) to search for a way to make sense of all they have encountered. What both decide is that the new system must be flexible—must account for things made invisible by earlier ordering logics. Developing a flexible language of relationship is the crux of the issue. Language defines not only a space, and an individual’s relationship to it, but also a position vis-à-vis others. This is a question that takes up a central position in Shibli’s short fiction. Even the title— ‘Maths, under which is love, under which is language’—suggests that language forms the foundation of the quest for relationships. Two sequential vignettes, titled ‘Love and Writing’ and then ‘Writing and Love,’ explore the possibilities and limits of language when it comes to defining the relationship between individuals; this sets a precedent for a new ordering logic between language and belonging. In the first vignette, ‘Writing and Love,’ character ‘A’ finds language impossible. She is in a romantic relationship trying to articulate her thoughts and feelings, to express and negotiate her own position—trying to describe her place—vis-à-vis her lover ‘B.’ The standard forms fail. When partner ‘B’ asks, ‘why are you sad?’ ‘A’ ‘cannot find a way to say in a form of language that expresses it’ (Shibli, 2000, 98). So, she stays silent, hoping communication will happen outside language. The next vignette builds on the problem. ‘Love and Writing’ sees another set of lovers struggle. It follows a man who has promised his beloved he ‘would write to her every Thursday’ (2000, 99). His love for her is not ‘conventional.’ He dreams erotic dreams of men, but loves this woman. Existing love-language does not let him say what he feels, and while ‘[h]e wasn’t able to love anything else more [than this woman] […] he couldn’t, also, write love’ (2000, 99), and so he never wrote the letters. The problem gets worked through somewhat as ‘A’ declares an incompatibility between ‘the field of language’ and the field of love.

Killing God to Find Palestine

167

The narrator announces that ‘love of language and love of “B” cannot live together for “A”’ (Shibli, 2000, 97). Language and love, the text declares, express different things. Language, the second vignette tells us, can only express one kind of love—a kind of love that does not have the words to explain how they feel. This inadequacy of language leads to the following scene of frustration: ‘B’ leaves ‘A’ in bed with love of language to write, [and] she becomes she who writes. In the evening ‘B’ comes home and takes ‘A’ from the bed of language into his arms, so she stops writing to become she who does not write. (Shibli, 2000, 97) But where ‘A’ abandons language, ‘B’ never had it in the first place, and ‘speaks without any relationship between the words’ (2000, 97). He speaks without connection between words, ‘opens double quotes and puts a few words between them then opens another set of double quotes and so on until the end’ (2000, 97), which is not language, but that is compatible (or at least not incompatible) with love. Communication between lovers, for different reasons, requires abandoning language, which neither has the undergirding sentiment nor grammar nor vocabulary that allows the lovers to relate. So non-language is used as a stopgap to communicate, but it is not a solution that can last. Science and numbers are then suggested as an alternative to language, but even these, it transpires, are too marked by existing symbolism. In Bloodtype, Jumana turns to deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) to determine her place in the world. At a clinic in west Jerusalem—the only one that will carry out a DNA test without the permission of the second party—she sits filling out a form. Going through the questions (about her father, her place of birth, her blood type) she wonders, ‘Is there a questionnaire that can definitively prove or disprove such a thing?’ (Abu al-Hayyat, T58). Such a thing as identity and belonging; such a thing as the relationship to one’s past, to a nation; such a thing as a relationship to her sister, the only living relative who still links her to a biological family, to her past, and to a Palestinian identity. The DNA test is abandoned (in part because she cannot afford it) and Jumana leaves the clinic, having determined that the ‘five page questionnaire of incomprehensible ruins’ (T58) will tell her nothing and abandons the ordered lines of the form. Science is not the right language. In Shibli’s next vignette, ‘Language after Engineering,’ Jumana’s conclusion is taken even further. The section debunks the possibility

168

Post-Millennial Palestine

of using the ‘rationality’ of science to describe life so long as science (and its idea of rationality) is tied up in language. Instead, links between world and word is work that must always forged by those living with language. The vignette opens with a reference to the French philosopher Michel Serres: Michel Serres searches for the birth of language in the same way as [thinkers identified] the birth of engineering in the Greek Miracle when Thales understood the height of the great pyramid by the length of its shadow at that instant that the shadow was the same length as the shadow of a small body. The Birth of language remains a mystery. (Shibli, 2000, 100) It is a densely coded set of remarks. The shadow and the pyramid references come from an anecdote whereby Thales (whose maths theory is often misattributed to Pythagoras) determined the height of a pyramid by comparing the length of its shadow to the length of the shadow of a young boy (of known height) standing a (known) distance away. In this way he determined the hypotenuse, the known value of a right-angle triangle, allowing the size to be determined. Thus, for Serres (as explained in Shibli’s story) the math of engineering (handasa) is directly related to the body—to the physical world. A measure of relationship between body, conceivable world, and theory is therefore established […] at least for math. In the alleged failure of Serres to find a similar origin for the ‘birth of language,’ the text highlights the absence of a found relationship between language and the body. Language is shown to have no fundamental relationship with the physical world. The idea is pushed in the next vignette, ‘Maths,’ which explores the work of Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege, a German thinker and mathematician said to have invented analytic philosophy. The vignette, ‘Maths,’ uses Frege to further question the relation of grammar to numbers (or to engineering, which we saw earlier was related to the body), with the example: Frege said that numbers were things. When we say there are three apples. The number three is the thing, and the apples follow in language. Numbers and the work between them is the only thing that can be called things. (Shibli, 2000, 101)

Killing God to Find Palestine

169

In other words, when numbers are turned into language and are used to describe physical ‘things’ a relation is created. However, for the text, what becomes important is that a foible of language—of communication—prevents any real relationship between the body and language. The vignette, after establishing a fundamental connection between math, grammar, and the physical world, relates correspondence between Frege and Bertrand Russell where the latter argues that Frege’s theory is wrong. As the vignette explains, Frege ‘never managed to reply to the letter. He never wrote again and died alone with frustrated certainty,’ even though Russell later discovered his assumption was false ‘but it was after Frege’s death’ (2000, 101). The impossibility of language to foster relationships to the lived and physical (like the lovers of the earlier vignette) is what ultimately prevents a philosophy that would see math and grammar linked to the world. Theories of grammar and math must be tested and agreed upon through language—the language that can fail to communicate because it is not necessarily a priori, connected to lived realities. As Sun Ran puts it to National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientists enquiring about an intergalactic teleportation programme, ‘Physicists are fed upon the food of discipline, precision, and research,’ and Ra needs those ‘fed upon the food of freedom, peace, and liberty’ (Ra, Smith, et al., 2014 [1974]). There is no science behind connection, the story concludes, only life and language. Living Alternatives Sun Ra has trouble recruiting engineers who would help transport Black Americans to a new world. Those he interviews are stuck in an old rhythm, have lived on a stifling earth, much like the protagonists of the three stories considered here. Although the lives of the protagonists were not in tune with the universe, they were, like Sun Ra’s ideal engineers, ‘fed upon the food of freedom, peace, and liberty’ (Ra, Smith, et al., 2014 [1974]). This imagination of freedom gives the engineers and the protagonists the ability to dream of a different language, even if it does not yet exist. In Bloodtype, Cinema Gaza, and ‘Maths […]’ vague outlines of an alternative language appear not in dreams, but in real and lived spaces otherwise rendered meaningless by the previous structures. These physical spaces become the unmarked locations—connected to the body—from which a new language can emerge. Jumana discovers the discursive potential, for example, of a pillow she shared with her sister. Having given up on the DNA test

170

Post-Millennial Palestine

and walked out of the West Jerusalem clinic, Jumana finds herself thinking not of the questionnaire paper, but of the bedsheet—one covering ‘that pillow in Tunis soaked with both of our tears when my father left us at the neighbours’ house when he went to Amman for a heart procedure’ (Abu al-Hayyat, T80). Tears and companionship are the language of connection that binds Jumana to her sister, to a Palestinian experience. It is from the pillow that Jumana’s meaning takes shape. This closely parallels the solution of the couple in ‘Love and Writing,’ in Shibli’s fiction, who awkwardly and bodily work out what begins as a miscommunication (or an inability to communicate through words) and transforms into a fight. Although the couple find no words by which to resolve the matter, the fight ends at bedtime when both heads share a single pillow—a blank and unmarked location that creates a space of connection that language had foreclosed. Shared pillows, shared life—scribbled in pen on pictures, in footsteps across a flat mid-argument, in teardrops across pillowcases—provide the unconventional spaces where the dead language temporarily ceases to operate. This is where the works find an alternative. For Alaa, Gaza comes alive in the image of a stack of photographs: ‘We can scribble over […] what we know, and we know and accumulate information and memories’ (Amer, 2015, 22). For him this is the only way to capture a Gaza City where ‘all things are in colour and changing and multiplying and overcrowded with people and weapons’ (2015, 61). This idea finds its home, a space that can realize the vision, inside a derelict cinema built in the 1980s that had closed down years earlier—the titular Cinema Gaza. Alaa had learned about the cinema while on assignment. The foreign journalist he takes pictures for had been interested in the closed building as a way to tell the story of Gaza’s strangled cultural life, but in the cinema Alaa finds a certain safety. He returns late at night, taking out the hidden key and opening a space of imagination. Although originally named Nasser Cinema when it was opened, the name is discarded, as Alaa remarks that this is, ‘The Nasser I wouldn’t know if he kissed me on both cheeks’ (2015, 26). He un-marks the space, and because it is out of use there is no one to contest the move. He calls it ‘Cinema Gaza’ and it is the only place he feels safe—the only place he can live the patterns of imagining he fails to find elsewhere. Exploring the cinema, Alaa finds old Bollywood and Egyptian films still run on the dusty equipment. They are not images of Gaza, but their movement, diversity, and colour in a space he has re-marked create a simulacrum for the world he seeks on the outside. He explains: ‘When I would sit in the center of the hall to begin the countdown

Killing God to Find Palestine

171

to the start of a film I feel like a fetus in his mother’s belly […] I am absorbed into the belly of the cinema like a grain of sugar is absorbed into a cup of tea’ (2015, 60–61). The space of the cinema is the only one that reconciles multiplicity with cohesion; it is both a productive (womb) and nourishing (tea) place. There is safety, some sort of unity, but also multiplicity and movement. Although Alaa knows ‘Cinema Gaza’ is not a literal space that can house his lived reality, it does provide a space to dream, and in that dream a language emerges: I wish I could bring Qussay with me to the cinema, and my mom and Miriam and Leila and all my friends. Here there was enough space for all of us together. I wish I could cram in all of Gaza; with all its history ancient and contemporary, with every alley, the smell of every spice, every wave of its shore, every different surface, all the faces of its children in to the womb of the cinema to see Gaza. Gaza in its completeness, as a film with a happy ending—if only just once. (Amer, 2015, 61) In the dream made possible by the cinema, are all of the elements of the past that Alaa wants to keep for the future. He wants everything. Not an ending, or a new phase, not a teleology that puts parts of Palestine in the past, but a space like a womb where every past particle and system is absorbed and accounted for. The idea of the womb of the cinema suggests that, if all these parts are brought together, an intuitive process may take over, may birth a new beginning. Critically, not a beginning or a new life that builds on what came before, but one that absorbs it within its very fabric so that Gaza comes out in a body that makes sense to itself. Appropriately titled ‘The Beginning,’ the final vignette of Shibli’s ‘Maths […]’ puts this all into perspective. Three lines of text simply declare the death of the presumed relationship between existing symbolic language and the world: ‘Since the beginning God has not told us that he created language to say, or love to create masculine and feminine, or maths to relax on the seventh day’ (Shibli, 2000, 102). The link between the word and the world, then, is forged by the author, who is charged with not only refusing the links made by myth, nation, and politics, but of tailoring language to suit the world as they see it. This is the charge that ‘Maths […]’ takes up, and indeed characterizes each of the works considered here. All three works

172

Post-Millennial Palestine

take seriously the role of language and writing in critiquing existing problematic systems of signification, and are brave in their endeavour to declare these systems dead before a new answer presents itself. It is here that these ‘post-millennial’ authors show that indeed, ‘wisdom will be when you say I do not know’ (Ra, Smith, et al., 2014 [1974]). The writing privileges lived spaces as a political act. In writing about what they see, feel, and understand as Palestine, Abu al-Hayyat, Amer, and Shibli create ‘a weapon against stagnation in language and literature’ (Athamneh, 2017, 95). None of these Palestinian works find or declare a new symbolic order, but they are keeping language alive by demanding that it take shape around the real. So long as the language for describing Palestinian life is renewed, a different set of symbols can emerge. The writing that these authors produce within their works creates symbolic meaning, and in creating new symbols they find a path out of the quagmire of ‘post-,’ so that the new ‘beginning’ is one that encompasses all pasts and gives them renewed connection to their present. References Abū al-Ḥayyāt, Māyā [Maya Abu al-Hayyat] (2013) Lā aḥad yaʻrif zumrat damihu riwāyah [No One Knows their Bloodtype]. Bayrūt: Dār al-Ādāb. ʻAmar, Maḥmūd [Mahmoud (alt: Mahmud) Amer] (2015) Sīnimā Ghazza: riwāya [Cinema Gaza]. Ḥayfa: Dār Rāyah lil-Nashr. Athamneh, Waed (2017) Modern Arabic Poetry: Revolution and Conflict. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Barthes, Roland (1977) Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana. Foucault, Michel (1991 [1966]) The Order of Things. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge. Kassab, Elizabeth S. (2010) Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective. New York: Columbia University Press. Khalili, Laleh (2007) Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ra, Sun, Joshua Smith, et al. (2014 [1974]) Space is the Place. San Francisco: Harte Recordings. Rancière, Jacques (2015) Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Trans. Steve Corcoran. London: Continuum. Shiblī, ʻAdanīya [Adania Shibli] (2000) ‘Al-rīaḍīāt wa taḥtha al-ḥub wa taḥthu al-lugha’ [‘Maths, Under Which is Love, Under Which is Language’]. London: Muʼassasaẗ ʻAbd al-Muḥsin al-Qaṭṭān.

chapter nine Unfinished Work Anticolonial Pedagogy in Selma Dabbagh’s Out of It By Tom Sperlinger Anticolonial Pedagogy

‘Palestine was turned inside out in 1948,’ Saree Makdisi writes (2008, 261). Makdisi uses the phrase to describe how a large number of Palestinians were expelled from their homes in that year and why, as a result, millions still live ‘outside’ in exile, whether as refugees or citizens of another country. Makdisi’s Palestine Inside Out shows how being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the 1948 state continues to define much of the Palestinian experience, including for those who remain within what became Israel and those who live in Gaza or the West Bank, which were occupied in 1967 and where access is now tightly controlled. The restrictions that are placed on those in the Occupied Palestinian Territories include limits in access to education, which Makdisi suggests are tightening: Of all the confines and limitations facing any human society, education has always provided a way out […] Thought allows us to move even when we cannot move ourselves (a point made so powerfully in Wordsworth’s poem ‘Old Man Travelling,’ where we see an old vagrant, standing quite still, who ‘does not move with pain, but moves / With thought’). An education provides Palestinians virtually the only way to transcend all the limits imposed on their inside and outside lives by Israeli rule. (2008, 206–07) Makdisi, writing in 2008, sees education as a ‘last avenue of escape’ for Palestinians and one that is itself ‘gradually being blockaded, narrowed 173

174

Post-Millennial Palestine

and closed’ (2008, 207). His analysis highlights the particular and developing restrictions placed on Palestinian millennials, compared to the generations that preceded them. However, Makdisi’s account does not imply a stable educational space in Palestine at an unspecified time before the early 2000s. The education system in Palestine has been narrowed or, at least, determined by others for a much longer period. Najwa Silwadi and Peter Mayo note, for example: Under the post-World War I British Mandate, Britain set up separate education systems for the Jewish and Palestinian populations, granting autonomy to the Jewish schools but not to Palestinian schools where they sought to control content in order to suppress Palestinian national aspirations. (2014, 72) The British Mandate system prefigured that of the Israeli state. But the history of colonial control of education in this context arguably goes back even further. Silwadi and Mayo suggest that ‘education in Palestine is unique because it is one of the very few places in the world that has been forced to develop under continuous challenges from external forces’: the Ottoman Government, the British Mandate, the Jordanian state (for those in the West Bank), and the Israeli state (2014, 72). The process of narrowing and closing educational opportunities is thus a persistent context in Palestinian education, rather than a point of departure. Selma Dabbagh’s novel Out of It (2011), which is the focus of this chapter, dramatizes some experiences of being both inside and outside the Occupied Territories and of limited movement between those states. The novel is set partly in Gaza but also in London and in an unspecified Gulf state. One means of getting ‘out’ in the novel, for those who have some degree of privilege, is by accessing a European education. Indeed, modes of informal and formal education are a recurrent theme in the book and one that illuminates the wider hopes and experiences of the central characters, as they respond to the colonial character of their situation. Dabbagh’s emphasis on multiple characters is a reminder that subjective experiences of learning are also determined by larger systems. Makdisi, in the discussion cited above, makes education itself sound almost apolitical, perhaps inadvertently, as if it is only access to education that is utilized as a means of control. But there are forms of

Anticolonial Pedagogy

175

education itself that can be restrictive, even (or especially) once one is ‘inside’ the system. In the Wordsworth example that Makdisi cites, the vagrant ‘does not move’ because of physical pain, but is liberated by thought. Yet political control may determine or limit an individual’s ability to look, think, and feel (as a wider reading of Makdisi’s Palestine Inside Out reveals), as well as their capacity to move physically as they wish. This is evident in debates between Major Tadman and Colonel Tyler, the education director and deputy for Palestine during the British Mandate, and the Palestinian educator Khalil al-Sakakini. al-Sakakini urges that a committee to direct Arab state education should be ‘independent as regards curricula, hiring and firing teachers, professional grades and salaries, textbook selection, and supervision of teachers and schools’; ought to have no ‘foreign members’; and that ‘committee members would be chosen by Arab society and by teachers and principals in Arab schools’ (Moed, 2014, 76). Al-Sakakini was appointed to the committee himself in 1919 but resigned, Kamal Moed relates, ‘when he found out that the British set up the national education committee to serve British policy, not Arab national interests’ (2014, 77). al-Sakakini’s struggles reveal a direct relationship between financial and bureaucratic control of education and the curricula, textbooks, and teachers that result. Silwadi and Mayo show that similar restrictions underpinned Palestinian education both before and after the British Mandate period. This has had consequences for the (literal and metaphorical) languages available for Palestinians to think in, and for which knowledge, Palestinian or otherwise, is valued—al-Sakakini’s own efforts, and those of his fellow teachers, notwithstanding. The analysis of colonial education in Dabbagh’s novel has some overlap with the critique offered by al-Sakakini and by Silwadi and Mayo, as this chapter will show. These writers also suggest alternative forms of decolonized pedagogy that might be applied in Palestine. For example, Silwadi and Mayo emphasize the relevance of the work of Paulo Freire to ‘the Palestinian case,’ since his work poses a choice between utilizing education to ‘domesticate’ or ‘liberate’ (Silwadi and Mayo, 2014, 73). Freire emphasizes the false notion of being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ society as a key aspect of colonization. He argues in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that to describe some people as existing outside a given society is often itself an act of oppression: The truth is […] that the oppressed are not ‘marginals,’ are not people living ‘outside’ society. They have always been ‘inside’—inside the structure which made them ‘beings for

176

Post-Millennial Palestine

others.’ The solution is not to ‘integrate’ them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become ‘beings for themselves.’ (1996, 55) In Freire’s analysis, both the oppressed and the oppressor are defined by the system that determines them as such; neither of them is able to escape that reality through a closer or more distant relationship to it, or to one another. This analysis is a response to colonialism, as a process that makes groups of people into ‘beings for others.’ Indeed, Henry A. Giroux has argued that Freire’s work can only be understood through an emphasis on ‘the profound and radical nature of its theory and practice as anticolonial and postcolonial discourse’ (2009, 79). Freire’s insistence on seeing the oppressed as insiders has particular resonance in a Palestinian context, in which those apparently ‘outside’ Israel—in the Occupied Territories or as refugees elsewhere— continue to be defined, at least in part, by that state, which denies them citizenship or formal recognition as refugees. Silwadi and Mayo expand on their case for the relevance of Freire’s work by noting that it lends itself ‘to situations of education under siege not only in a metaphorical sense but in the literal sense encountered by […] the Palestinians’ (2014, 73). The physical and practical reality of the Palestinian ‘siege’ is attested to in detail in Makdisi’s Palestine Inside Out and in Dabbagh’s Out of It. The literal occupation that many Palestinians experience is also reinforced, in a literary context, by the fact that a writer’s metaphors may also be under siege. In State of Siege, Mahmoud Darwish probes the aesthetic as a symbol of elusive transformation: This siege will endure till we can teach our enemies odes of our Canaanite poetry. (2010, 9) This reads like a colonial reversal, with the language of the oppressed heard by the oppressor, and Palestinian identity asserted as involving its own rich cultural traditions. Yet Darwish also sees that, for some, poetry is contingent on more urgent political considerations: ‘The martyr teaches me: no aesthetics outside my freedom’ (2010, 147). This viewpoint places a limitation on the aesthetic realm, as if it must either be delayed until freedom is won or realized only ‘inside’ that

Anticolonial Pedagogy

177

struggle. Elsewhere, Darwish expresses frustration at how his work is read: ‘When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She is not a symbol’ (cited in Peretz, 2008, n.p.). The political situation in Palestine conditions Darwish’s art and how it is received, even when it does not determine it. It is difficult for him to be outside the situation in Palestine, either in imagination or in how his work is interpreted. Much of the action in Dabbagh’s Out of It centres on the (formal and informal) education of Rashid and his sister, Iman, who is a teacher. Their stories overlap with those of their older brother, Sabri, who is writing a history of Palestine informed by the family’s experiences. The novel opens with Rashid and Iman, as mirror images of each other’s desire to be out of, and in, Gaza, respectively. Rashid wakes up the morning after an Israeli bombardment to an email confirming he has a scholarship to study in England and can get ‘out of here […] at least for a year’ (Dabbagh, 2011, 5). Iman, meanwhile, spends the night at a Women’s Committee meeting at a university, trapped by the bombs and feeling rejected by the other participants: ‘They were talking about her schooling [in Switzerland],’ she realizes and she finds her voice and opinions about the situation are largely dismissed (2011, 6). Attending the meeting is part of an ongoing struggle for Iman to ‘find a meaningful role’ for herself in Gaza (2011, 18). Following the confirmation of Rashid’s scholarship, the novel shows how education can operate (metaphorically and literally) as a means of ‘escape’ from the Occupied Territories. At the same time, it shows that it may not allow an individual to be ‘outside’ the structure of oppression, if the student engages with a colonial education system that alienates them from their own environment on their return, as it does for Iman. Sabri, who is a generation older, often acts as an internal/external voice prompting his millennial siblings to remember their duties as Palestinians. For example, while on an underground train in London, Rashid reads an email from his brother: ‘And here was Sabri’s message to remind him he could never relax, never be part of anything or anywhere unless it was part of a push for change, for resolution’ (Dabbagh, 2011, 120). Later Rashid wonders ‘what he would have done if Palestine had played no part in his life. Film, he thought, or music’ (2011, 126). Rashid laments that the piano lessons he had taken in Beirut were interrupted by another family move and other ‘urgent’ concerns: ‘the only time he had heard the word ‘talent’ being used in connection with him’ (2011, 126). This is a yearning for an alternative

178

Post-Millennial Palestine

mode of education, and perhaps (as sometimes in Darwish’s work) for an aesthetic experience that is not yoked inextricably to Palestinian politics. Rashid wishes to find a place ‘outside’ the realities of Palestine that are imposed on him. But his family and his English friends—and perhaps especially his English girlfriend, Lisa—read him indelibly through his identity as a Palestinian. Rashid’s experiences are echoed in those of his father, Jibril, who lives in exile in an unspecified Gulf state. Jibril finds that he cannot really leave Palestine’s resistance movement behind: ‘you can leave the [Palestine Liberation] Organisation but the Organisation will never leave you,’ he is told (Dabbagh, 2011, 160; emphasis in the original). He remains ‘inside’ Palestine and its internal debates in other ways, too. For example, while in exile, Jibril is upbraided by other Palestinians for educating his children abroad: ‘So, your children went to school in Switzerland, did they? And us? […] Left to rot; the education of our children disrupted’ (2011, 161). This exchange is a reminder that Jibril and his family endure the restrictions of the occupation from a relatively privileged position, including through their limited ability to move abroad. While Rashid is waiting for his opportunity to leave for London, he experiences another form of disconnection from Gaza: On nights like the previous one when the ground shook […] he would go to this collection [of videos] after coming down from the roof. He would lock himself into his darkened room with a screen of poltergeists, exorcists, zombies and vampires. He would listen to them scream out with the heightened sensual terror that only Gloria could engineer and would let them walk around his room taking over him and his reality to the exclusion of all else. (Dabbagh, 2011, 28) Gloria is ‘the Finest Marijuana Plant in Gaza,’ as Rashid describes her (2011, 27). Rashid seeks ‘heightened sensual terror’ by watching films, while stoned, that come to seem more frightening than the reality around him. The ‘screen’ acts like the marijuana, as a way of heightening his affective responses. Rashid ‘excludes’ reality—excludes ‘all else’—placing himself ‘out of’ his mind through sensory overload, because what is happening in Gaza is impossible to bear. The extent to which Rashid is able to get ‘out’ of Gaza itself is left unresolved. Dabbagh’s description of his experience has traces both of the euphoric

Anticolonial Pedagogy

179

or sublime, and of something more like a trap, a mode of becoming disconnected from all of reality. The novel includes vignettes of other people’s experiences in Gaza, which also foreground feelings of alienation. In an early scene in the novel, Rashid visits his friend Khalil’s house. Khalil’s father is deeply involved in international politics, while Khalil centres his efforts on running a resource centre in a refugee camp. Khalil normally tries to put both ‘physical distance’ and ‘political distance’ between his family and his own life. On this occasion, Khalil’s mother is at home: There was something so brittle about her. It was as though she had snapped and was jangling around inside. Here was a woman who had been brought up according to the best of French educational systems, who had been groomed assiduously to find a husband from the best of families, to cook, entertain and to pack suitcases in ways that emulated the preferences of the European aristocracy. All this she had done to perfection […] But no one had taught her how to deal with her husband’s infidelities, to cope with the humiliation of their multiplicity, their diversity, and the publicity that surrounded them […] She had never got used to them; each one had had floored her, each one had struck her down afresh. (Dabbagh, 2011, 75–76) Khalil’s mother is ‘out of it’ in multiple senses. She has been educated abroad, and is among the first to congratulate Rashid on the scholarship that will take him away to England: ‘You’re getting out […] This is wonderful!’ (2011, 76; emphasis in the original). She also positions herself outside of the political struggle that consumes her son, making her sound isolated from the violence that has just erupted around them: ‘This politics, it will make you like your father’ (2011, 78; emphasis in the original). Additionally, Rashid discovers at the close of the chapter that she may be ‘out of it’ in another sense. As he lingers in the bathroom, embarrassed by the family tensions he has witnessed, Rashid finds ‘sedatives, tranquilisers and mood stabilisers lined up inside the bathroom cabinet’ (2011, 78). Whereas Rashid uses cannabis to heighten his senses, the drugs in Khalil’s family bathroom are designed to dampen awareness. Khalil’s mother is, as a consequence, both present and absent. She has ‘snapped,’ as if herself has given way and is ‘jangling around inside’ her body.

180

Post-Millennial Palestine

This particular experience of being ‘in’ Gaza is framed explicitly in relation to this character’s education in Europe. There is a contrast between the ‘perfection’ that Khalil’s mother reproduces from ‘the best of French educational systems’ and what ‘no one has taught her’: how ‘to deal,’ ‘to cope’ with the imperfect reality of her husband’s affairs. Khalil’s mother is not named, other than in her maternal role or by her gender—‘Here was a woman’ (Dabbagh, 2011, 75)—as if her existence is only signified in the roles she plays according to patriarchal norms. The fact that she is unnamed mirrors her inability to name the world that she sees around her. Freire writes: ‘To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the names as a problem and requires of them a new naming’ (1996, 69; emphasis in the original). Khalil’s father’s affairs are repeated and yet ‘each one’ strikes Khalil’s mother down ‘afresh’; she is unable to learn from or change the situation and remains inside the unreal frame that her education has provided for her. This illustrates the limits of a form of education that emphasizes ‘perfection.’ In Pedagogy of Freedom, Freire writes: If I take as a starting point that the condition of misery in which the oppressed live is first and foremost a condition of violence and not an expression of the will of a punitive God, nor the fruit of laziness or miscegenation, then as an educator my task is to become ever more capable and skilled. (1998, 75) Khalil’s mother either does not recognize or cannot name her husband’s behaviour as ‘a condition of violence.’ There is a parallel between her domestic experiences and her wider life in Gaza; she experiences violence both in her private and public life. Khalil’s mother, as we have seen, is ‘out of’ the politics of Gaza. She struggles also to ‘deal,’ to ‘cope’ with political realities (‘their multiplicity, their diversity’) and has not been taught how to learn from her experiences: ‘each one’ of those too ‘had struck her down afresh’ (Dabbagh, 2011, 76). This may suggest that this character has become a ‘perfect’ colonial subject, who has internalized what is deemed worth knowing in an external educational environment and who is unable to engage with the lived realities of her own situation. As the options to resist are limited, she chooses (like Rashid) to be ‘out of it’ instead and to experience reality in a muted form.

Anticolonial Pedagogy

181

The state of mind of Khalil’s mother has its echo in the physical structure of her family home, which is remote from the worst realities of Gaza: The pale Sea View buildings hovered on the shore as though they were contemplating slipping away into the sea and dissolving pallidly into its watery mass. They were calm, clean buildings with elevators that worked and doormats that were guarded by plant pots that shone with the spit and polish of imported labour. (Dabbagh, 2011, 74–75) This description of the family home precedes Khalil witnessing the destruction of the Centre where he works in Gaza: ‘graffiti, bullet holes and gutted buildings’ (2011, 95). It also echoes an earlier glimpse of an organization for the disabled that Iman has visited, which is stranded on the third floor of a building that has no lift (2011, 19). In this context of ‘disaster’ (2011, 19), it is the apparently solid and unscarred Sea View buildings that look as if they do not belong in Gaza, ‘as though they were contemplating slipping away into the sea.’ The buildings do not fit because their amenities are functioning (‘elevators that worked’) and because they seem in no danger, illustrated in the ironic comment that the doormats are ‘guarded by potted plants.’ They are also out of place aesthetically. These buildings are ‘calm, clean’ and they ‘shine.’ Their apparently polished state thus marks them as almost outside their surroundings, much as the education Khalil’s mother has left her unprepared for the life that awaited her. The family home has such unreal comforts because Khalil’s father is complicit in the corrupt politics of the occupation, which runs as a vital thread through the story. Khalil is nervous about bringing Rashid to the family home partly because ‘[he] knew a lot about the financing structure for the construction of Sea View and he had once, when stoned, divulged what he knew to Rashid […] most of [which] had implicated his father’ (2011, 74–75). The subjective experiences within a home are partly determined by the political structure that finances and creates it, just as al-Sakakini shows that an education is shaped by the forces that design it. One of the questions that is posed by the vignette of Khalil’s mother and, implicitly, by Dabbagh’s novel as a whole, is what alternative forms of education (and representation) might be appropriate in Gaza. Khalil’s mother, Rashid, and Iman experience a Western European education, often viewed as ‘the best’ available (Dabbagh, 2011, 75) and yet that is

182

Post-Millennial Palestine

inadequate when it meets the reality in which they live. Khalil’s mother is educated in a French system, with explicitly colonial overtones. Such education literally takes each of these people ‘out of it,’ away from Gaza physically and mentally, in ways that also lead to alienation from their own society on their return, especially for Iman. These characters are in a recognizable dilemma, as articulated by Walter Mignolo: Racism consists in devaluing the humanity of certain people by dismissing it or playing it down (even when not intentional) at the same time as highlighting and playing up European philosophy, assuming it to be universal. It may be global, because it piggybacks on imperial expansion, but it certainly cannot be universal. Racism is a classification, and classification is an epistemic manuever rather than an ontological entity that carries with it the essence of the classification. (2015, xi) In a similar way, in Dabbagh’s novel, objective or ‘universal’ standards, which would class one form of education as ‘the best,’ turn out to be provisional and subjective. These standards are impervious or inappropriate to the realities of Gaza itself. Mignolo suggests that ‘decolonial horizons aim at epistemic pluriversality’ (2015, xlii), a shift away from the universal as aim or standard. What kinds of ‘epistemic disobedience,’ in Mignolo’s words (2015, xii), are available in Gaza? Freire emphasizes an anti-universal starting point. He sees it as critical, in creating anticolonial pedagogies, to acknowledge the imperfection of the educator: It is in our incompleteness, of which we are aware, that education as a permanent process is grounded. Women and men are capable of being educated only to the extent that they are capable of recognizing themselves as unfinished. Education does not make us educable. (1998, 58) Khalil’s mother seems precisely to be ‘educated’ rather than ‘educable’: she has acquired an education that has not provided her with the skills she needs to keep learning. There is a contrast between her experience and those of Iman, who is able to characterize her experiences and resist some of the categories imposed on her. This may be a difference

Anticolonial Pedagogy

183

of temperament or situation, but it also places the experiences of Palestinian millennials in counterpoint to older generations. After her stepmother, Suzi, takes Iman shopping, the younger woman queries: ‘You want me to dress up and smile at men?’ Suzi replies: ‘If you take my advice you will start to work on developing yourself as a woman rather than […] whatever it is that you are trying to do. You want to be a politician of some kind? Or an activist?’ (Dabbagh, 2011, 178; emphasis in the original). Iman is stung by this advice, which feeds into her later sexual experiments in London. But she is also defiant in her belief that the categories of woman/politician/activist are more porous than she (or Khalil’s mother) have been prompted to believe. She thus resists some of the classifications that Mignolo shows are central to colonial education. Iman’s wider resistance to such classifications leads later to a dispute with her English housemate, Eva, over the ‘supposedly objective’ terms she applies to the situation in Palestine/Israel: ‘she kept using their terms: “terrorism”, “democracy,”’ Iman asserts in frustration (2011, 193). Eva sees these classifications as stable and thinks it is possible to apply them in an objective way, but Iman disagrees. It is a considered act of epistemic disobedience. Alternative forms of education also emerge in Sabri’s efforts to educate his siblings. Sabri’s relationship to Rashid revolves around what Freire has called ‘problem-posing’ education (1996, 64): he keeps asking his younger brother questions, hoping to prompt him (for example) to understand for himself why a ‘Hajjar girl’ was chosen for the suicide bombing in Israel that precedes the novel (Dabbagh, 2011, 25–26). Rashid struggles to respond: ‘[He] cupped his chin with his fingers as though his greatest point was yet to be delivered. It was a mockery of himself in an intellectual pose’ (2011, 26). Sabri’s mode of education is needed in a context in which some truths cannot be stated, especially in writing, because of potential surveillance. One means of uncovering the truth thus becomes to imply it or to pose it as a problem to one’s interlocutor, in the hope that in the act of dialogue they will be able to work it out themselves. Sabri sends a letter to Rashid, when the latter is in London, which contains a number of underlined sections, the hidden meaning of which Rashid is unable to decode (2011, 120–24). Sabri’s writing also provides an alternative model for knowing and narrating Palestine. At first, he finds his ‘proximity to the subject matter […] unsettling,’ especially when he writes about the First Intifada, which he lived through (Dabbagh, 2011, 40). But his attitude changes as he writes:

184

Post-Millennial Palestine

Sabri concluded the paragraph he had written about the merchants’ strike in Ramallah and read through it with his editing pencil poised above it […] He could not decide whether it was objective enough. It should not read like propaganda. He read it again. To hell with it if it did. That was what had happened. He had been there. He had seen it. Damn it. All interpretations of history are propaganda for one idea or another. Sabri downed the pencil that hovered over the paragraph. He would leave it as it was. (2011, 45; emphasis in the original) One way of interpreting the choice that Sabri makes would be to see his writing as ‘propaganda,’ as he implies. However, another possibility is that in refusing an ‘objective’ perspective, Sabri is finding a more truthful way of viewing Palestinian history, in which he is an imperfect participant. Freire writes: ‘I am not impartial or objective; not a fixed observer of facts and happenings […] This did not prevent me, however, from holding always a rigorously ethical position’ (1998, 3). Sabri is rejecting a ‘supposedly objective’ perspective, perhaps of a kind that Iman critiques in her flatmate Eva and in the coverage of the conflict by the BBC: ‘I hate these people who try to stay neutral in times of crisis,’ Iman says to Rashid (Dabbagh, 2011, 193).1 Freire sees as ‘insidious’ the idea that ‘it is possible for education to be neutral,’ precisely because it denies the fact that the educator also ‘exist[s] as a human being in the world,’ with their own imperfections and capacity to influence events (1998, 90). Sabri is reaching similar conclusions as a witness-historian. This shift from an objective to a subjective perspective leads Sabri to a quite different focus in what he is writing: Afterwards, the lump of papers sat in the centre of his desk, pathetic. There was no point in it. No point at all. Now he could see that the thesis was flawed. The focus was wrong. 1

Dabbagh notes that this line is ‘a paraphrasing from Dante’s Inferno. It’s my father’s favourite quote’ (2019, n.p.). See the treatment of ‘a noisome choir of angels’ who were ‘not rebels, yet not true / to God’ in Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy I: Inferno, iii, 37–39 (Dante, 2006, e-version). A version of Dante’s sentiment is often attributed as John F. Kennedy’s favourite quotation: ‘The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality’ (Ions, 2010 [1967], 88).

Anticolonial Pedagogy

185

All wrong. What he really needed to write about was us, not them. Not how they screwed us, but how we let ourselves be screwed by them. About how we were now about to screw ourselves. It was all contemptible and disgusting. No one had the guts, the balls, to admit it, to confess to it, except him. (Dabbagh, 2011, 103; emphasis in the original) This moment of self-criticism appears excessive, as does Sabri’s sense that ‘no one […] except him’ sees Palestinian history in this way. But the shift—from them to us—is revealing. It is an attempt to see the Palestinians as themselves, with their own agency and flaws, rather than simply as ‘beings for others,’ who are defined by their relationships to Israel and the occupation. Freire writes that he likes ‘being human, being a person, precisely because it is not already given as certain, unequivocal, or irrevocable that I am or will be “correct”’ (1998, 54). He relates this sense of imperfection specifically to how history is made: I like being human because I am involved with others in making history out of possibility, not simply resigned to fatalistic stagnation. Consequently, the future is something to be constructed through trial and error rather than an inexorable vice that determines all our actions. (1998, 54) Sabri abandons his attempt to find a ‘correct’ perspective and his unease at bearing witness to the events that he has participated in, and instead writes a history he has been involved in making, through a form of ‘trial and error.’ As a consequence, he is able to chronicle Palestinian history in a spirit of self-criticism that, in the moment quoted above, tips into disgust. It is a less comfortable experience, but one that gives the Palestinians (a limited) responsibility for, and agency in, their situation. Writing becomes a form of epistemic disobedience— a means to resist being placed outside his own history. These issues are, in part, about colonial forms of education or history and their alternatives. But Sabri’s turn towards a subjective, and imperfect, mode of narration is also an aesthetic choice. In an essay written in 1968–69 on ‘The Palestinian Experience,’ Edward Said notes: ‘Political silence, in the case of the Palestinian, has meant now knowing to whom or for what to talk, and therefore talking with different voices, none of them his own’ (2000, 32). Sabri’s work, and

186

Post-Millennial Palestine

the thesis Rashid works on during his studies, are the major acts of writing in the novel; they are both unfinished at the end of the story, so far as we know. Yet each of these two writers is finding his own voice. Their subjective and unfinished work may be a more effective aesthetic response to the situation in Gaza, if the alternative is writing that is aesthetically ‘perfect,’ but that mimics a colonial voice with its apparent objectivity. Such an alternative would be as out of place as Khalil’s home, if it too was ‘calm’ or ‘shined.’ Sabri and Rashid are not only finding their voices, they are also looking for a way out of political silence. Dabbagh’s novel itself participates in this process. In an interview, the author comments: I knew I could not write a graphic, socio-realistic depiction of Gaza, as it is not where I am from […] I believe I fell a little into the trap described so well by Kavita Bhanot, of viewing my characters through the ‘liberal gaze’, in the very early drafts of the novel. I found myself writing in a lyrical style about rather sweet victims. The voice was not mine and the characters were phony. (cited in Moore, 2015, 327–30) Dabbagh resists the temptation to write ‘in a lyrical style’ and to make her characters into ‘sweet victims.’ This means finding an alternative aesthetic, which is still nonetheless not that of an insider: ‘it is not where I am from,’ she notes. In ‘The Palestinian Experience,’ Said writes: ‘This essay of mine, I feel, because it is in English partakes both of the peripherality and of the paradoxical silence that I have been trying to describe’ (2000, 33). Dabbagh is self-conscious that her novel too is ‘out of it,’ at least in part: it is written in English, published in the United Kingdom, and chronicles characters within but also outside of Gaza. Yet, by writing that peripherality into the story, Dabbagh asserts that to be ‘out of it’ is to be inside the Palestinian story, and that ‘leaving’ Palestine is (almost) impossible. The experiences of Jibril, Rashid, and Iman’s father echo this in the novel itself. The choices that Iman and Rashid are left with at the end of the novel are imperfect ones, and the book dramatizes the particular tensions for a generation of millennial Palestinians between commitment and action. Jibril reflects on what he calls a ‘problematic generation,’ while waiting at the airport for Iman: ‘They might be at best capable of revolt, but that in itself did not make them capable of revolution; they lacked the sophistication of ideology for that’ (Dabbagh, 2011,

Anticolonial Pedagogy

187

162). Jibril thinks this between reflecting on ‘Islamic movements,’ which he sees as ‘all action […] but not so great when it came to ideas or the bigger picture,’ and staring transfixed at the ‘red dots’ of a screen announcing a discount sale of DVDs (2011, 162). This might hint at a wider reading of millennials, caught between technology and tradition—a generation of ‘action’ and ‘revolt.’ Yet this view of millennials from the outside is unusual. Indeed, Iman’s own ambivalent pull towards Islamist movements in Gaza is rendered sympathetically. Dabbagh notes: ‘Iman neither fully embraces the Islamist group—I see her, rather, as desperately lunging towards it—nor does she fully reject violence’ (cited in Moore, 2015, 333). For the most part, Out of It reads Rashid, Iman, Khalil, and their contemporaries on their own terms. Dabbagh’s novel is careful, in its ending, to offer a conditional sense of future possibilities. Rashid survives his brief desire to martyr himself in place of Iman’s lover, Ziyyad, whom he resembles, but does so by killing someone else. He becomes a participant in the violence to which he has previously been subject: ‘Although the course of his family’s life had largely been determined by them […] Rashid had never actually used a gun’ (Dabbagh, 2011, 298; emphasis in the original). Earlier, Rashid reflects on a conversation in a café: Rashid recognised it as soon as the men had gone. That was what he had felt. Hope. That was the feeling that the leader had evoked in him when he first saw him. Rashid felt ashamed for having experienced it; so often it felt like the thing that could devastate them all. (2011, 68) Rashid recognizes hope; it is not something he has to strive towards or create. But he resists it. Freire writes: ‘Hope is not just a question of grit or courage. It’s an ontological dimension of our human condition’ (1998, 58). If so, it is a part of the human condition that has been denied to Palestinians and, thus, to ‘feel’ it is to risk too much for Rashid (although Khalil, among others, disagrees)—to yearn for a future that is not possible, the loss of which could be ‘devastating.’ This leaves limited possibilities, and Dabbagh’s novel is frank about the desperation and aggression that push both Iman and Rashid, at different moments, towards committing acts of violence. Freire notes: [The] assumption of responsibility does not mean that we are not conditioned genetically, culturally, and socially. It means

188

Post-Millennial Palestine

that we know ourselves to be conditioned but not determined. It means recognizing that History is time filled with possibility and not inexorably determined—that the future is problematic and not already decided, fatalistically. (1998, 26; emphasis in the original) All three main characters find a way to take some form of action by the end of the novel. Iman looks set to leave for exile with Ziyyad. Sabri goes on with his writing with a new young assistant. Meanwhile, Rashid feels ‘wired with purpose’ for the first time when he plots to die in Ziyyad’s place (Dabbagh, 2011, 290). Each of these transformations is unfinished, especially (and ironically) when compared with the experiences of the young British woman, Eva, in Gaza: ‘nothing I ever did before compares with [it],’ she claims breathlessly (2011, 284). The vignette of her trying to ‘get it straight in my head’ and noting ‘how good it felt’ to have such solidarity with others captures how being ‘in it’ in the Occupied Territories can be a peculiarly exhilarating experience for outsiders. Dabbagh’s novel offers several such perspectives on Westerners who feel committed to the Palestinian cause. The novel itself refuses to decide the future for its characters. The final chapter shows Rashid running towards the sea, although ‘he’ is not named, almost as though he is in the process of renaming himself, in Freirian terms. He feels ‘his heart [is] propelling him forwards with a love of chance, of risk, of the opportunities for tomorrow’ (Dabbagh, 2011, 308). The future for these characters remains problematic but, for a moment at least, it is not inexorably determined: ‘the gunboats [at sea had] turned away for the night, for it was his night and their presence was not required’ (2011, 308). The unfinished nature of the situation seems briefly to contain possibilities. Rashid has never seemed so present in Gaza, nor so happily ‘out of it all,’ as he does at this moment. References Alighieri, Dante (2006) The Divine Comedy I: Inferno. Trans. Robin Kirkpatrick. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Dabbagh, Selma (2011) Out of It. London: Bloomsbury. Dabbagh, Selma (2019) ‘Email to Tom Sperlinger.’ 14 January. Darwish, Mahmoud (2010) State of Siege. Trans. Munir Akash and Daniel Abdal-hayy Moore. New York: Syracuse University Press.

Anticolonial Pedagogy

189

Freire, Paulo (1996) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. London: Penguin. Freire, Paulo (1998) Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy and Civic Courage. Trans. Patrick Clarke. London: Rowan & Littlefield. Giroux, Henry A. (2009) ‘Paulo Freire and the Politics of Postcolonialism.’ Breaching the Colonial Contract: Anti-Colonialism in the U.S. and Canada, ed. Arlo Kempf. New York: Springer. 79–89. Ions, Edmund (2010 [1967]) The Politics of John F. Kennedy. Oxon: Routledge. Makdisi, Saree (2008) Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc. Mignolo, Walter (2015) ‘Yes, We Can.’ Can Non-Europeans Think? by Hamid Dabashi. London: Zed Books. viii–xlii. Moed, Kamal (2014) ‘Educator in the Service of the Homeland: Khalil al-Sakakini’s Conflicted Identities.’ Jerusalem Quarterly 59: 68–85. Moore, Lindsey (2015) ‘A conversation with Selma Dabbagh.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 51.3: 324–39. Peretz, Martin (2008) ‘The Poet and The People.’ New Republic, 12 August. Available at: . Accessed 11 January 2019. Said, Edward (2000) ‘The Palestinian Experience.’ The Edward Said Reader, eds. Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin. London: Granta. 14–37. Silwadi, Najwa, and Peter Mayo (2014) ‘Pedagogy under Siege in Palestine: Insights from Paulo Freire.’ Holy Land Studies 13.1: 71–87.

chapter ten Wingwomen Towards a Feminocentric Poetics of Flight in Twenty-First Century Palestinian Creative Consciousness By Anna Ball Towards a Feminocentric Poetics of Flight

In his iconic poem ‘The Earth is Closing on Us,’ the celebrated poet Mahmoud Darwish poses a question that has since become seared into Palestinian creative consciousness: ‘Where should we go to after the last frontiers? / Where should the birds fly after the last sky?’ (1984, 13). In the act of turning his sights away from the ground of a Palestine ravaged by the Nakba of 1948 and towards the skies overhead, Darwish affiliates himself to a space much occupied by Palestinian creative practitioners over the course of the twentieth century: that of the air, as a realm in which the motif of flight has circulated with particular symbolic force. From Muin Bseiso’s ‘roch bird […] / flown […] / without tossing me even a feather’ to Fadwa Tuqan’s ‘rainbowed kites’ once flown by boys now ‘merged with the stuff of our earth’ (Jayyusi, 1992, 133; 316), the motif of flight has come to encapsulate the dualistic drama at the heart of Palestinian history—of both the radical injustice of a population forced to flee its homeland, and the subsequent denial of the Palestinian people’s ability to return to a free, united, and independent nation. In post-millennial Palestinian creative work, flight continues to surface as a prominent motif—evident, for instance, in the focal imagery of Ibtisam Barakat’s Tasting the Sky (2007) and the recent poetry anthology, A Bird is Not a Stone (Bell and Irving, 2014). Yet in its contemporary connotations, it assumes increasingly multiple dimensions as it migrates creatively across generational, gendered, spatial, and formal contexts, manifesting in forms as complex and varied as the galactic journeys of spacewomen (Sansour, 2009); the omnipresence of drones overhead (Saif, 2015); and the aerial acrobatics of a fantastical female resistance fighter suspended in mid-air (Suleiman, 2002). In the work of artist 191

192

Post-Millennial Palestine

Sama Alshaibi and poet Lisa Suheir Majaj, aerial and avian images reappear. At their imaginative direction, the motif of flight animates each woman’s ability to explore her complex relationship not simply to the homeland and Palestinian history, but also to her own embodied positionality as a twenty-first century diasporic female subject. Highly distinct as Alshaibi’s video art and Majaj’s poetry may be, this chapter sets a selection of their poetic engagements with flight loose among each other in order to see where their paths may collide and diverge. In doing so, it gestures towards flight not simply as motif but also as socio-cultural movement (simultaneously spatial, gestural, and political) within the post-millennial Palestinian creative imagination. This is a movement defined by a distinctively feminocentric poetics, through which it becomes possible to envisage new forms of spatial, psychological, and creative relationships to Palestine fitting for this new century. The Regenerative Body in Sama Alshaibi’s Flight (2012) Flight permeates the work of the artist Sama Alshaibi. A multi-media artist and Professor of Photography now based at the University of Arizona, Alshaibi was born in Basra, Iraq to an Iraqi father and Palestinian mother whose own parents had fled from Jaffa to Nablus, then on to Baghdad following the Nakba. Shortly after her birth, Alshaibi’s parents made the radical move to Iowa in the United States, where her father earned his PhD. The family, though, subsequently returned to the Arab world, where Alshaibi recalls a life of perpetual displacement: ‘in each country where we lived, some aspect of our mixed Iraqi-Palestinian, Shiite-Sunni or American identity was problematic’ (Alshaibi, 2006, 37). She eventually moved back to the United States, but without her father. As such, her personal history has been defined by transit, and it is perhaps unsurprising that many of her works engage with modes of flight that are at once liberating and symbolically grounding. In her first work, produced during graduate school, for instance, Alshaibi returned to Palestine to document ‘how I tried to find my grandmother’s home in Jaffa (couldn’t) and accidentally wound up finding my grandfather’s home in Budrus on the next trip’ (Alshaibi, 2019a, n.p.) The piece was called ‘Where the Birds Fly,’ after Darwish’s aforementioned poem. In subsequent works such as Silsila (2017), Thowra (2011), and Negative’s Capable Hands (2010), flight is evoked more subtly through the use of

Towards a Feminocentric Poetics of Flight

193

feathers: ‘a metaphor for flight, migration and displaced communities’ (Alshaibi, 2019b, n.p.). This is also a motif infused with distinctively personal memories of her ‘father’s inability to be around caged birds’: a projection, perhaps, of trauma at ‘being caged in a constant cycle of displacement and movement’ (Alshaibi, 2019b, n.p.). For Alshaibi, then, flight is associated with the centrality of the Nakba of 1948 to both her nation’s and her own family’s history—mediated as this may be for twenty-first century exilic Palestinians by time and space. Within Alshaibi’s work, however, flight assumes complex connotations as it enables her to explore her present-day condition of interstitiality as an Arab-American, and the alternative forms of spatial relationship to Palestine that this facilitates. This understanding of flight can be read as a form of what Carol Fadda-Conrey terms ‘rearrival’: a return to the homeland enacted by second- and thirdgeneration Arab-Americans that enables them to at once witness and testify to their familial losses, while also facilitating their own unique sense of attachment to Palestine (2014, 67). Yet in her video work, Alshaibi’s ‘return flight’ to Palestine does not lead to a straightforward concretization of a lost home through a physical memorial. Instead, she witnesses and testifies to the Nakba through an altogether more mobile medium: her own body, which engenders freshly creative capacities for harnessing flight. The body surfaces as a powerful medium for witnessing, remembering, recuperating, and healing in Alshaibi’s 2012 video work, Flight. Created during a residency at the A. M. Qattan Foundation in Ramallah in the winter of 2012, the three-minute video was filmed in the valley of Wadi El Qelt: an area provided by natural springs, and located in the West Bank, Area C (Alshaibi, 2019b, n.p.). Indeed, the area is also, as radical architect and artist Yara Sharif observes, ‘one of the major pathways during migration’ for the abundance of birds that pass through and benefit from Palestine’s tremendous biodiversity, which renders it ‘one of the busiest corridors for bird migration in the whole world’ (2017, 170; 161). It is therefore wholly appropriate that in this film Alshaibi herself seems to control the ‘flight paths’ that circulate around her return to the homeland. Flight consciously calls attention to the partial and mediated visibility of Palestinian history through its very framing. Presented as two circles of moving image on an otherwise black screen, the piece is framed as though we are gazing through a pair of binoculars—scouting out glimpses of a territory just beyond reach, perhaps. The images within each circle do not correlate to a unified vision, however. Instead, each

194

Post-Millennial Palestine

circle presents a different content and focus, implying there are split perspectives, timescales, and movements at stake in Alshaibi’s visualization of Palestinian territory. The right-hand frame presents us with a constant vision: the crystal-clear water of a spring or stream flowing gently, light refracting on its surface. This, we sense, is the nurturing essence of the land: a pure and constant presence for those who would live in it (and, indeed, a recurring motif of the idealized ‘pastoral’ that surfaces in pre-colonial Palestinian imaginary; Sherwell, 2003, 133). The movement within the left-hand circle, however, plays disruptively against this steady visual narrative. Here, a series of jump-cut images offer a more abstract and symbolically resonant narrative. We witness black sand in a pair of hands, pouring into the earth at an angle opposing the flow of the water, and then sinking down a slope. As the sand slips, a scattering of white feathers tumble with it. Images shift into one another in this frame in a way that implies a discontinuous passage of time. They thus conjure a sense of endless precarity and awkward transit in sharp contrast to the deliberate constancy of the flowing water on the other side of the screen. In its disrupted visual trajectory, this narrative evokes something of the distinctive Palestinian temporality that Ahmad H. Sa’di traces back to the Nakba as ‘a specific point in time that has become […] an “eternal present”’ (2002, 177)—a temporal mode characterized by relentless slippage and endless loss. Yet it is also in this frame that Alshaibi’s body appears: curled, at first, like a seed, or a rock; hands clasped tight together and head tucked downwards, face out of sight—an image of self-protection, as though sheltering from a hostile environment. And onto this figure, we see feathers falling; a soft white down denoting either a blessing, or carnage—for these feathers must, we think, have been pulled from some creature’s wings. Falling feathers and sinking sand, curled back and clenched hands: markers of a history of invisible loss, now rendered present through Alshaibi’s own embodied witnessing of it. In this opening sequence, we therefore witness Alshaibi’s body transform into the locus of a deeply elemental symbolism. In her embodiment of the landscape, she both projects ‘the […] hope for the “right of return” […] not just the story of my family, but of Palestinians everywhere’ (Alshaibi, 2006, 37), and reclaims the longstanding heritage in feminized representations of the Palestinian homeland, in which women become collective guardians of the nation’s honour (Sherwell, 2003, 133)—represented here as an act of self-determination. If this opening sequence visualizes the traumatic histories of displacement that are so often obscured from the Palestinian narrative,

Towards a Feminocentric Poetics of Flight

195

Figure 1. Feathers glide into Alshaibi’s arms, enacting a powerful ‘return flight’ to her body, and to the homeland. Still from Sama Alshaibi, Flight, three-minute video work, 2012. Copyright Sama Alshaibi. Alshaibi ultimately reveals these as a point of creative inception that can be renarrativized through her own embodied imagination. For in the blink of an eye, we now see Alshaibi’s body standing and facing away from us, towards the valley, hands outstretched, as though summoning someone or something to her—and into her hands fly feathers, which she gathers calmly to her body. They fly to her one by one at first—and then, as she turns to the camera, they suddenly amass in her hands, until they seem a reconstituted body, soft and lithe, being cradled in her arms: a delicate bird, perhaps, longing for its wings to be mended. We probably understand, as viewers, that we are witnessing an ingenious reversal of video footage here, the film effectively played backwards to conjure the effect of feathers flying into rather than away from her hands. Yet the implications of this reversal are in themselves highly poignant. Redirected through her own creative vision, Alshaibi reframes the motif of flight as an act of gathering together rather than of dispersal: a ‘righting’ of return for her ancestors, and, as Alshaibi herself puts it, ‘an active body that sustains and supplies [it]self’ (2019b, n.p.), rather than the passive victim of loss. As mediator of the Palestinian landscape, Alshaibi therefore assumes the creative capacity to control Palestine’s airspace within

196

Post-Millennial Palestine

this film. By redirecting the flight paths of the Palestinian narrative through her own body, flight comes to represent the completion of a migratory cycle through her own return home. The poetic agency possessed by Alshaibi’s body as instigator of flight in this film presents us with an important opportunity to reassess the significance of flight as a motif of the twenty-first century Palestinian imagination. As collective guardian of a history of loss, Alshaibi’s return to the motherland connects her to the deeply rooted history of the Nakba and affirms the formative place it occupies in Palestinian personal and political narratives—of nation, and of self. As Rosemary Sayigh observes in her engagement with the oral histories of Palestinian refugee women, the narratives of Palestinian women’s lives tend to be defined temporally by the Nakba as centralized referent, all other life events experienced in relation to it (2007, 144–45), and Alshaibi’s work also represents the centrality that the event has held to her own life, transmitted as it has been across generations and spaces. Yet in her own embodied return, Alshaibi also formulates an important act of resistance to the narrativization of flight as a motif simply denoting loss. Instead, she engages in a freshly strategic appropriation of her own intersectional ‘situatedness,’ as twenty-first century subject of an international landscape. As Alshaibi herself writes, ‘My body, pictured in my American passport, had the ability to travel and move freely in this world and could […] speak for those whom I met in Occupied Palestine’ (2006, 39). Even while her dual nationalities as Iraqi-American situate her in a difficult biopolitical position upon her arrival in Israel, where she is ‘detained […] for nearly five hours’ and searched repeatedly, she finds herself able to negotiate these circumstances through her own creative control of her narrative: ‘I’m just an artist,’ she replies to those who accuse her of hostile motives in her return to her homeland (Alshaibi, 2006, 30). As such, Alshaibi proves herself capable of engaging with the legacies of loss inscribed upon her body in ways that take ownership of them, to the point that flight becomes a motif not simply of return, but also of regeneration: of a living, breathing discourse controlled at Alshaibi’s own welcoming hands. While potently evocative of Palestinian history, the regenerative body-in-flight we witness within this work also bears divertingly feminist potentials. Read creatively and indeed transculturally, Alshaibi’s embodied and playfully poetic direction of flight calls to mind the words of French feminist theorist Hélène Cixous, who, in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ claims:

Towards a Feminocentric Poetics of Flight

197

Flying is woman’s gesture—flying in language and making it fly […] Women take after birds and robbers just as robbers take after women and birds. They go by, fly the coup, take pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it […] dislocating things and values, breaking them all up […] turning propriety upside down. (1976, 887) Read in this light, we might view Alshaibi’s own startlingly creative engagement with flight—at once magical and mechanically ingenious in its visual construction—as similarly ‘improper’ and ‘disorienting’: a mode of beautifully visualized feminocentric retort to the dominance of the Israeli narrative denial of the Palestinian body politic. Yet if women present resistant potential within Alshaibi’s film, then so, too, do birds. This potential emerges within the right-hand panel of the film, where we witness the steady flow of water from the land’s nourishing springs—which in fact gestures towards a natural source of resistance embedded in Palestine’s biodiversity. As Sharif writes, ‘the West Bank itself is blessed with many water sources originating from its underground springs,’ and this, combined with Palestine’s unique position at the junction of Africa, Europe, and Asia, renders it ‘one of the busiest corridors for bird migration in the world,’ ‘attract[ing] a great number of bird species, especially the small songbirds who gather there to eat, breed and rest’ (2017, 164; 168). Palestine’s natural resources therefore prove attractive to a substantial bird population that, as Sharif also demonstrates, bear a subversive potential in their own right. Uncontrollable by an Israeli government keen to militarize every facet of Palestinian ground, water, and airspace, Sharif explains that birds in fact pose the greatest threat to the Israeli air force, due to the potential for ‘bird strikes’ in what have become identified as ‘bird plague zones’ above Palestine/Israel (2017, 166). So, too, does their own disregard for militarized boundaries render them spatially subversive, even utopian, with powerful political possibilities: Both birds and refugees refuse to accept the logic of boundaries […] Therefore, any geography, which emerges from oppression, should be made possible [sic] for these birds to occupy, breed, grow, nest and multiply. Eventually, they will accumulate the necessary power to break solid lines on

198

Post-Millennial Palestine

the surface of the land, and mark new ones yet to come as a collective ideology born from the sky. (Sharif, 2017, 175) In Flight, the feathers that Alshaibi draws magnetically into her hands from the rich land around her and then cradles to her body gesture imaginatively towards the reconstitution and return of the migrated bird to a nurturing landscape. In her hands, though, the defiant possibilities of this bird also seem to come alive—for the feathers she holds are hers, to do with as she wishes—to hold, or set free, to wear, even. They are the riches of the land, with all of its propensity for life and regeneration—and just as the valley’s hidden springs can nurture its abundant birdlife, so too, Alshaibi’s film seems to suggest, will they be there to sustain her, wherever she might fly. Reclaiming Airspace in Lisa Suheir Majaj’s Geographies of Light While the light that dances quietly on the hidden springs of Wadi El Qelt in Alshaibi’s Flight draws our eye to hidden sources of nourishment in Palestinian land, the lights that glimmer throughout Lisa Suheir Majaj’s 2009 poetry collection Geographies of Light instead tilt our gaze upwards—towards an unbounded airspace lit variously with stars, and with the glint of planes’ wings in the sun. Whether in the United States or Cyprus, Palestine or Iraq, Majaj mobilizes the motif of flight in her poetry in order to identify shared sources of human experience that incite empathy and solidarity across cultures and timeframes. Flight therefore operates as a motif that is at once achingly poetic and astutely political in Majaj’s work—gesturing towards a transnational landscape pock-marked with the power imbalances of contemporary imperialist ambition and militarized violence that, as Caren Kaplan (2018) argues, can be discharged from the air with a new efficiency in the twenty-first century. In Majaj’s work, however, this deeply hostile geopolitical landscape is counterbalanced by the transgressive potential of the everyday: the acts of love and care to be found, so often, in domestic relationships between mothers and daughters that set the heart altogether more gently in flight. By traversing just a few of the many locations in which motifs of flight are found in this poetry collection, Majaj’s subtly feminized poetics becomes visible. Through this poetics she reclaims airspace as a site of collective responsibility spanning international contexts, while also exposing it as a site of

Towards a Feminocentric Poetics of Flight

199

individual burden borne particularly by the parents of those children who will ultimately inherit the skies. Like Alshaibi, Majaj occupies an interstitial position as a secondgeneration daughter of the Palestinian diaspora. Born in Jordan, educated in Lebanon, and then resident of the United States for two decades before moving to Cyprus, her writing—both academic and poetic—displays a conscious critical engagement with her ‘hybrid’ internationalism, and with the negotiations of distance, difference, and temporality that this necessarily entails. As Majaj herself writes, ‘Arab-American literature takes its place on a global canvas, as one component of a worldwide Arab diaspora in which cultural ties can be reinvigorated’ (2008, n.p.). An implicit sense of gender-consciousness also informs much of her academic work, which has sought to create greater recognition of Arab-American women’s writing, and to forge networks of scholarly solidarity around its careful intersectional study (see: Majaj, et al., 2002; Amireh and Majaj, 2014). Her work is set simultaneously against the backdrop of a post-9/11 Anglophone scholarly environment concerned more usually with the flattening or indeed demonization of cultural difference (Fadda-Conrey, 2007, 61), and of a Palestinian nationalist movement that sometimes also conceals its own disparities of gendered agency in the service of an idealized, traditionally patriarchal model of national unity (Massad, 1995). As such, Majaj’s work can be read as a deeply valuable enterprise forged out of her own status as a female ‘border intellectual’ (JanMohamed, 1992). Indeed, this intersectional ability to work within, between, and across cultural and political boundaries also characterizes her poetic engagement with the trope of flight in Geographies of Light, a poetry collection that traverses varied historical, spatial, and personal terrains, although often through deftly unexpected routes. Like Alshaibi, Majaj displays a deeply engrained consciousness of the Nakba as a point of traumatic origin within her personal and political history. In her poem ‘Fifty Years On / Stones in An Unfinished Wall,’ she even seems to engage in conversation with Darwish’s question in ‘The Earth is Closing On Us’—‘Where should the birds fly after the last sky?’ (1984, 13)—replying that ‘fifty years on / soul still seeks a sky’ (Majaj, 2009, 95–96). She closes the poem with an image of unrequited desire for the return of the homeland’s children, figured once again as birds: ‘someone remembers […] / how stone / waits for the thirsty birds’ (Majaj, 2009, 95–96). In ‘Jerusalem Song,’ meanwhile, the city’s walls are portrayed as ‘a wingspan / embracing the dreaming city,’ while the Palestinian people are evoked as ‘fledglings

200

Post-Millennial Palestine

/ crying for a nest’ (Majaj, 2009, 97). Here, flight-as-displacement, a site of loss and longing, connects her work to the emphasis that many diasporic Palestinian poets writing in the wake of 1948 have also placed on ‘nostalgia by which a sense of attachment to the lost homeland emerges in the presence of exile’ (Saloul, 2012, 18). Majaj thus demonstrates an intergenerational connectedness to Palestinian collective consciousness and, indeed, poetic sensibility. Coexistent with this quintessentially Palestinian nostalgia for homeland, however, is an astute gender-consciousness that, in line with the work of many Palestinian women writers, sometimes cuts against the national narrative (see: Ball, 2012). In her poem ‘Homemaking,’ for instance, she displays a sense of implicitly gendered resistance to what she has defined in her own criticism as the ‘nostalgia for patriarchal structures’ (Majaj, 2008, n.p.) that sometimes appears in Arab-American literature. This poem offers a poignant portrait of a mother—implicitly hers, if she is indeed the speaker within the poem (‘I was the child in the doorway, watching’; Majaj, 2009, 5)—forced into exile from her homeland. This exile, though, proves painful to her not only for ‘the chipped stone of loneliness’ that has become ‘the measure of her life’ as a Palestinian of the Nakba generation, but for the disappointments she has borne as a woman who has ‘crossed an ocean and found a world / different and yet the same’ (Majaj, 2009, 5; 6). In ‘Homemaking,’ the thwarted flight of a butchered bird becomes an image of not simply national but also gendered wing-clipping, and of viscerally brutal domesticity, projecting her mother’s frustration at the patriarchal limitations also inherited by her daughters: Once, slitting a pigeon for cooking, underskin bloody beneath her knife,     she found a gleaming of eggs,     shells stark and tender as infant moons. She grieved, then, for her girls, born to a world of men. (Majaj, 2009, 6) Here, the avian imagery is imbued with a sharply feminist critique. The bird becomes a projection of the mother’s own grief at the banal inscription of unrealized potential she perceives within female

Towards a Feminocentric Poetics of Flight

201

existence, limited as it proves to the acceptance of ‘feminine’ roles and indeed to the gendered structures that perpetuate a life of brutal yet domesticated tragedy. The feminization of the bird also, more subtly, serves to subvert the uncritically masculinist narrative of flight through which the Nakba has tended to be read. As Isabella Humphries and Laleh Khalili’s research demonstrates, the desire to defend women’s honour by protecting them from rape is frequently cited as a subtext to the flight of many Palestinian communities, and is described by some Palestinian women as a source of ‘guilt and shame at leaving the nation behind’ (2007, 223). The burdens borne by exilic women, this image therefore suggests, extend beyond the socio-political sphere into the most painful realms of the female unconscious. The implicit passivity of this portrayal of female flightlessness is, however, stridently countered in many of Majaj’s other poems, particularly in those that cast a defiant gaze upwards, towards a militarized twenty-first century airspace. In works such as ‘Groundspace,’ Majaj conveys an astute awareness of what Eyal Weizman (2017) has described as a multi-layered occupation of Palestine operating not simply at ground level, but also at subterranean and aerial levels. She writes: Amman to Jerusalem is miles, and not just of earth. Even air space is enemy Territory—no telephone wire, no power or wisdom can bridge this gap. (2009, 55) As Weizman notes, Israel has appropriated its control of upper-level airspace obtained during the Oslo negotiations in the service of providing a ‘bird’s eye view’ of Palestine that makes it ‘the most intensively observed and photographed terrain in the world’ (2002, n.p.). This ‘bird’s eye view’ renders those on Palestinian ground supremely vulnerable to an Israeli military whose aerial weaponry includes ‘unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), miniaturized missiles and detection devices’ that aid ‘remote surveillance and targeting technologies’ designed to facilitate what the Israeli government describes as ‘preemptive targeted killing,’ often exercised as airstrikes on perceived targets on the ground (Hajjar, 2017, 65). In stark contrast to this dehumanizing discourse, Majaj presents

202

Post-Millennial Palestine

us with the quiet domesticity of life at ground level, particularly as it is experienced by women and their children. In her poem ‘What She Said,’ Majaj offers a potent evocation of the mundane yet heavy responsibilities that military occupation imposes upon mothers, who bear the implicit understanding of their children’s reduction to targets of biopower: ‘She said […] / When a jeep goes past, keep your eyes on the ground. / And don’t pick up stones, not even for hopscotch’ (2009, 10). Yet within the poem, transgressive possibilities also emerge. We see this specifically through the mother’s capacity for storytelling, or fable (ḥikaya), ‘traditionally the speciality of women’ (Sayigh, 2007, 137): a mode in stark contradistinction to official, masculinized modes of militarized knowledge. Within the final lines of ‘What She Said,’ the woman’s creative voice provides a source of reassurance for her children: Listen, I’ll tell you a story so you won’t be scared. Kan ya ma kan—there was or there was not— A land called Falastine Where children played in the orchards And picked apricots and almonds […] And when planes flew overhead They shouted happily and waved. Kan ya ma kan. Keep your head down. (Majaj, 2009, 11) In this ambivalent fantasy of nationhood (Palestine—Falastine—is evoked as a space that ‘was or was not’), the capacity to look to the skies in aspiration represents the condition of freedom. The final line of the poem, though, exposes the sky as one more realistically defined by a militarized, masculinist authority that lowers the heads of women and their children—if not in submission, then certainly in self-preservation. Feminocentric in its focalization, Majaj’s work presents a subtle counterpoint to the depersonalized, implicitly masculinized order of aerial violence that fails to recognize the importance of what Samina Najmi (2010) would term the ‘aesthetic of smallness’: a world of children, of play, and of the ordinarily mundane—all of which have exceptional value to Majaj within her poetry. If intimate experiences of maternity present a powerful counterrepresentation of life ‘on the ground,’ then the politics of motherhood also proves connective in a more expansive transnational sense, too.

Towards a Feminocentric Poetics of Flight

203

We sense this powerfully in her poem ‘Night Sky.’ Written, an endnote tells us, in Nicosia, Cyprus, the poem presents itself as a form of vigil in which flight is suspended in a ‘night sky’ punctuated by candles and stars: points of light that draw Majaj to contemplate questions of distance and proximity. Beneath this sky, division permeates her vision of the world as she sits in this divided capital on a divided island in our divided world. (Majaj, 2009, 120) Gazing upwards, however, she reflects on two things that unite human experience: the first, ‘the infinite variety / of bombs,’ each with their own destructive character; the second, ‘constellations’ that ‘shine unchanged’ from ‘childhood nights,’ when ‘my mother’s patient voice / direct[ed] my gaze’ (Majaj, 2009, 120). The voice of another imagined mother also draws her eyes skyward in this poem, as she recalls news of families in Baghdad, Iraq: so desperate to get a child out they stop any foreigner in the street. She pleads, ‘Just imagine our lives.’ (Majaj, 2009, 120–21) Looking at the sky, Majaj finds herself struck not by the vast and unbridgeable distance between places and life experiences, but instead, by the way in which imaginative empathy renders the world ‘small,’ ‘wherever we are, / Baghdad […] not so far’ (Majaj, 2009, 121). Majaj therefore invokes a longstanding Palestinian tradition of authority validated through women’s status as mothers (Humphries and Khalili, 2007, 219). Yet in transnational terms, she also locates herself within a politicized model of feminocentric pacifist alliance founded in maternity: a form of solidarity that has surfaced in many international and historical settings (Lawler, 1996, 160; see also: Ruddick, 1995). Here, then, the blissfully flightless night sky shines with subtly maternal potentials for international solidarity that emerge when sites of power imbalance, gendered and national, are rendered visible. Majaj’s deep-rooted perception of injustice demonstrably stems from her heritage as Palestinian in many of these poems. Yet it is through the transnational constellation of her own identity—as resident of

204

Post-Millennial Palestine

America, Cyprus, traveller of the world, and as a woman within and across all of these locations—that a more expansive model of collective global responsibility also emerges: what Judith Butler terms ‘sensate democracy,’ founded in careful acts of ‘cultural translation and dissent’ (2004, 151). In her poetry, then, Majaj ultimately invites all of us located within this ‘small world’ to cast our sights beyond what divides us, towards the troubling aerial connectivity of a twenty-first century defined by militarization and technological surveillance. In doing so, she dares us to cast a defiant gaze upwards, towards aerial eyes that may one day meet with our own. Wingwomen: A Movement for the Twenty-First Century If twentieth-century incarnations of poetic flight are fundamentally founded on the traumatic displacement incited by the Nakba, its twenty-first century mobilizations prove altogether more malleable when placed in the hands of second-generation diasporic female creative practitioners. Through their interstitial positionalities ‘on the brink’ (see: Safi, 2017) of countries, languages, histories, creative disciplines, and social identities as Palestinians, and as women, Alshaibi and Majaj are able to explore the mutability of flight as a poetic vehicle that transports them across multiple sites of connectivity and division, within and beyond Palestine. The hybrid, multi-layered poetics of flight in these works therefore emerges as characteristic of twenty-first century Palestinian existence itself, simultaneously marked with the traces of irrecuperable loss, and of future potential—operating as a vehicle for return, and facilitating transcendence. Above all, however, it emerges no longer simply as a trope, but as a movement: a gesture performed by active, living bodies marked distinctively, in Alshaibi and Majaj’s cases, by a generative and connective feminocentricity. Whether in the act of reversing history and reclaiming flight as a ‘grounding’ gesture, as in Alshaibi’s video work; or in the confrontationally maternal gaze turned towards militarized airspace, as in Majaj’s poems, both of these creative practitioners invite newly gender-conscious understandings of solidarity that extend beyond the Palestinian community itself. In this, their feminocentric poetics of flight cast them in a position of guidance and responsibility to which we might assign the name ‘wingwomen.’ What does it mean to be a ‘wingwoman’? Despite the mythical connotations of the term, to be a ‘wingwoman’ does not mean to be

Towards a Feminocentric Poetics of Flight

205

a figure of fantasy. Instead, it can be read as a playfully subversive engagement with discourses at once biopolitical and gendered: a simultaneous appropriation of the terminology of co-piloting (it is the ‘wingman’ who directs the pilot), and of the implicit potential for gender violence and sexual predation implicit in colloquial uses of the term ‘wingman’ (‘Wingman,’ 2005, n.p.). In her reclamation of flight as a twenty-first century gesture, however, the ‘wingwoman’ presents a form of movement founded in partnership and solidarity that traverses sites of power imbalance, abuse, and violence perpetuated both within airspace, and on the ground—in territories at once geographical and gendered. Hers is a transformational political agenda borne from the perception of injustice and desire for freedom generated by both her Palestinian-ness, and her femaleness. As such, she moves at the cusp of international movements that circulate within the twenty-first century landscape. She may move strategically with the gathering support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, for instance, that is creating fresh groundswell for Palestinian rights within the international arena (see: Sharoni, et al., 2015). She may, too, respond to Sara Ahmed’s reminder that ‘[f]eminism is a movement in many senses. We are moved to become feminists’ (2017, 3). ‘We might,’ then, Ahmed argues, ‘say a movement is strong when we witness a momentum: more people gathering on the streets, more people signing their names to protest against something, more people using a name to identify themselves’ (2017, 3). Bearing the ability to traverse territories at once transnational, political and poetic, wingwomen therefore reveal themselves to be capable of at once traversing and transcending biopolitically enforced boundaries in ways that incite new forms of intersectional perception and indeed coalition. While flight is not labelled as specifically feminist in Alshaibi’s and Majaj’s work, its feminocentric embodiment nevertheless operates in a way that is moving, and it incites political momentum through the creatively resistive potentials of their work. In the hands of ‘wingwomen,’ then, twenty-first century flight emerges as a movement that is at once poetic and political; grounding and liberating; creative and material: a mobile source of solidarity that circulates expansively around Palestine. Set your sights high, Alshaibi and Majaj’s work seems to suggest to us. Do you too sense freedom in the air?

206

Post-Millennial Palestine

Acknowledgements Sincere thanks to Sama Alshaibi, for her generous gifting of time and insight through email correspondence with me. This chapter was produced as part of a wider project exploring women’s representational responses to forced migration in the twenty-first century entitled ‘Moving Women, Moving Stories: Rethinking Narratives of Forced Migration,’ which has been generously supported by the Leverhulme Trust through a Research Fellowship in 2018–19. References Abu Saif, Atef (2015) The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary. Manchester: Comma Press. Ahmed, Sara (2017) Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Alshaibi, Sama (2006) ‘Memory Work in the Palestinian Diaspora.’ Frontiers 27.2: 30–53. Alshaibi, Sama (2010) Negative’s Capable Hands. Sama Alshaibi. Available at: . Accessed 29 May 2019. Alshaibi, Sama (2011) Thowra. Sama Alshaibi. Available at: . Accessed 29 May 2019. Alshaibi, Sama (2012) Flight. Three-minute video work. Alshaibi, Sama (2017) Silsila. Sama Alshaibi. Available at: . Accessed 29 May 2019. Alshaibi, Sama (2019a) ‘Email to Anna Ball.’ 3 January. Alshaibi, Sama (2019b) ‘Email to Anna Ball.’ 5 January. Amireh, Amal, and Lisa Suheir Majaj, eds. (2014) Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers. New York: Routledge. Ball, Anna (2012) Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective. London: Routledge. Barakat, Ibtisam (2007) Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Bell, Henry, and Sarah Irving, eds. (2014) A Bird is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry. Glasgow: Freight. Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Cixous, Hélène (1976) ‘The Laugh of the Medusa.’ Signs 1.4: 875–93.

Towards a Feminocentric Poetics of Flight

207

Darwish, Mahmoud (1984) ‘The Earth Is Closing on Us.’ Victims of a Map: A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry, by Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, and Samih al-Qasim. London: Saqi. 13. Fadda-Conrey, Carol (2007) ‘Writing Arab American Identity Post 9/11.’ Al Raida 118/119: 59–64. Fadda-Conrey, Carol (2014) Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging. New York: New York University Press. Hajjar, Lisa (2017) ‘A Comparative Analysis of Israeli and U.S. Targeted Killing Policies and Legal Challenges Against Them.’ Life in the Age of Drone Warfare, eds. Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 59–88. Humphries, Isabelle, and Laleh Khalili (2007) ‘Gender of Nakba Memory.’ Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, eds. Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod. New York: Columbia University Press. 207–28. JanMohamed, Abdul (1992) ‘Worldliness-without-World, Homelessnessas-Home: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual.’ Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker. Oxford: Blackwell. 96–120. Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, ed. (1992) Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Kaplan, Caren (2018) Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lawler, Steph (1996) ‘Motherhood and Identity.’ Women, Power and Resistance: An Introduction to Women’s Studies, eds. Tess Cosslett, Alison Easton, and Penny Summerfield. Buckingham: Open University Press. 153–64. Majaj, Lisa Suheir (2008) ‘Arab-American Literature: Origins and Developments.’ American Studies Journal 52: 2. Majaj, Lisa Suheir (2009) Geographies of Light. Washington, D.C.: Del Sol Press. Majaj, Lisa Suheir, Paula W. Sunderman, and Therese Saliba, eds. (2002) Intersections: Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women’s Novels. New York: Syracuse University Press. Massad, Joseph (1995) ‘Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism.’ Middle East Journal 49.3: 467–83. Najmi, Samina (2010) ‘Naomi Shihab Nye’s Aesthetic of Smallness and the Military Sublime.’ MELUS 35.2: 151–71. Ruddick, Sara (1995) Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon Press. Sa’di, Ahmad H. (2002) ‘Catastrophe, Memory and Identity: Al-Nakbah as a Component of Palestinian Identity.’ Israel Studies 7.2: 175–98. Safi, Lubna (2017) ‘On the Brink: Identity and Language in the Poetry of Arab-American Women.’ The Comparatist 41: 309–24.

208

Post-Millennial Palestine

Saloul, Ihab (2012) Catastrophe and Exile in the Modern Palestinian Imagination: Telling Memories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sansour, Larissa, dir. (2009) A Space Exodus. Available at: . Accessed 29 May 2019. Sayigh, Rosemary (2007) ‘Women’s Nakba Stories: Between Being and Knowing.’ Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, eds. Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod. New York: Columbia University Press. 135–60. Sharif, Yara (2017) Architecture of Resistance: Cultivating Moments of Possibility Within the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict. Abingdon: Routledge. Sharoni, Simona, Rahab Abdulhadi, Nadje Al-Ali, Felicia Eaves, Ronit Lentin, and Dina Siddiqi (2015) ‘Transnational Feminist Solidarity in Times of Crisis.’ International Feminist Journal of Politics 17.4: 654–70. Sherwell, Tina (2003) ‘Imaging the Homeland: Gender and Palestinian National Discourses.’ After Orientalism: Critical Entanglements, Productive Looks, ed. Inge E. Boer. New York: Rodopi. 123–45. Suleiman, Elia, dir. (2002) Divine Intervention. Artificial Eye. Weizman, Eyal (2002) ‘Control in the Air.’ Open Democracy, 1 May. Available at: . Accessed 15 May 2019. Weizman, Eyal (2017) Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, New Edition. London: Verso. ‘Wingman’ (2005) Urban Dictionary. Available at: . Accessed 15 May 2019.

Works Cited

Works Cited

Abdel-Malek, Kamal (2005) The Rhetoric of Violence: Arab-Jewish Encounters in Contemporary Palestinian Literature and Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ‘About PalFest’ (n.d.) Palestine Festival of Literature. Available at: . Accessed 28 May 2019. Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok (1994) The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Vol. One. Trans. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Abramson, Glenda (2004) ‘Israeli Drama and the Bible: Kings on the Stage.’ Association for Jewish Studies Review 28.1: 63–82. Abū al-Ḥayyāt, Māyā [Maya Abu al-Hayyat] (2013) Lā aḥad yaʻrif zumrat damihu riwāyah [No One Knows their Bloodtype]. Bayrūt: Dār al-Ādāb. Abu Hannieh, Hassan (2018) ‘Why Does Saudi Arabia Describe Hamas as a Terrorist Organization?’ Middle East Monitor, 9 March. Available at: . Accessed 10 April 2019. Abu-Manneh, Bashir (2011) Fiction of the New Statesman, 1913–1939. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. Abu-Manneh, Bashir (2016) The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Abu-Manneh, Bashir (2017) ‘Gaza Fractures.’ Social Text Online, 24 October. Available at: . Accessed 28 May 2019. Abu-Manneh, Bashir, ed. (2018) After Said: Postcolonial Literary Studies in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Abulhawa, Susan (2011 [2006]) Mornings in Jenin. London: Bloomsbury. Abulhawa, Susan (2013) ‘My House.’ My Voice Sought the Wind. Charlottesville, VA: Just World Books. 105–08. 209

210

Post-Millennial Palestine

Abulhawa, Susan (2013) My Voice Sought the Wind. Charlottesville, VA: Just World Books. Abulhawa, Susan (2016 [2015]) The Blue Between Sky and Water. London: Bloomsbury Circus. Abulhawa, Susan (2020) Against a Loveless World. London: Bloomsbury. Abunimah, Ali (2009) ‘Israeli Jews and the One-state Solution.’ The Electronic Intifada, 10 November. Available at: . Accessed 6 September 2017. Abunimah, Ali (2014) The Battle for Justice in Palestine. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Abu Saif, Atef, ed. (2014) The Book of Gaza. Manchester: Comma Press. Abu Saif, Atef (2015) The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary. Manchester: Comma Press. Agamben, Giorgio (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ahmed, Sara (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ahmed, Sara (2017) Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Al-Barghouti, Tamim (2015) ‘Cracked Cauldrons: The Failure of States and the Rise of New Narratives in the Middle East.’ Shifting Sands: The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East, eds. Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson. London: Profile. 82–97. Alighieri, Dante (2006) The Divine Comedy I: Inferno. Trans. Robin Kirkpatrick. Harmondsworth: Penguin. AlJahdali, Samar H. (2014) ‘Venturing into a Vanishing Space: The Chronotope in Representing Palestinian Postcoloniality.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50.2: 216–29. Allen, Lori (2006) ‘The Polyvalent Politics of Martyr Commemorations in the Palestinian Intifada.’ History & Memory 18.2: 107–38. Al-Madhoun, Raba’i (2018) Fractured Destinies: A Novel. Trans. Paul Starkey. Cairo: Hoopoe. Al-Musawi, Muhsin (2006) Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition. Abingdon: Routledge. Alsaafin, Lindah (2018) ‘Israel Kills Palestinian after Month-long Manhunt.’ Aljazeera, 6 February. Available at: . Accessed 11 April 2019. Alshaibi, Sama (2006) ‘Memory Work in the Palestinian Diaspora.’ Frontiers 27.2: 30–53. Alshaibi, Sama (2010) Negative’s Capable Hands. Sama Alshaibi. Available at: . Accessed 29 May 2019.

Works Cited

211

Alshaibi, Sama (2011) Thowra. Sama Alshaibi. Available at: . Accessed 29 May 2019. Alshaibi, Sama (2012) Flight. Three-minute video work. Alshaibi, Sama (2017) Silsila. Sama Alshaibi. Available at: . Accessed 29 May 2019. Alshaibi, Sama (2019) ‘Email to Anna Ball.’ 3 January. Alshaibi, Sama (2019) ‘Email to Anna Ball.’ 5 January. ʻAmar, Maḥmūd [Mahmoud (alt: Mahmud) Amer] (2015) Sīnimā Ghazza: riwāya [Cinema Gaza]. Ḥayfa: Dār Rāyah lil-Nashr. Amireh, Amal, and Lisa Suheir Majaj, eds. (2014) Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers. New York: Routledge. Amiry, Suad (2007) Sharon and My Mother-in-Law. London: Granta. Amiry, Suad (2013) ‘An Obsession.’ Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, eds. Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. 74–85. Aschkenasy, Nehama (2004) ‘“And A Small Boy Leading Them”: The Child and the Biblical Landscape in Agnon, Oz, and Appelfeld.’ Association for Jewish Studies Review 28.1: 137–56. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (1995) The Post-colonial Studies Reader. Hove: Psychology Press. Ashour, Radwa (2003) Granada: A Novel. Trans. William Granara. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Assink, Marian, and Johannes Schroots (2009) The Dynamics of Autobiographical Memory. Boston: Hogrefe. Athamneh, Waed (2017) Modern Arabic Poetry: Revolution and Conflict. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Attallah, Najlaa (2018) ‘In Gaza We Are Not OK.’ AGNI, 30 January. Available at: . Accessed 28 May 2019. Baker, Raymond, Shereen Ismael, and Tareq Ismael (2010) ‘Ending the Iraqi State.’ Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered, eds. Raymond Baker, Shereen Ismael, and Tareq Ismael. London and New York: Pluto Press. 3–48. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981) The Dialogic of Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ball, Anna (2012) Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective. London: Routledge. Ball, Anna (forthcoming) Forced Migration in the Feminist Imagination: Transcultural Movements. London: Routledge.

212

Post-Millennial Palestine

Ball, Anna, and Karim Mattar, eds (2018) The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Barakat, Ibtisam (2007) Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Barghouti, Mourid (2003 [1997]) I Saw Ramallah. Trans. Ahdaf Soueif. New York: First Anchor Books. Barghouti, Mourid (2008) Midnight and Other Poems. Trans. Radwa Ashour. Todmorden: Arc Publications. Barghouti, Mourid (2011 [2009]) I Was Born There, I Was Born Here. Trans. Humphrey Davies. New York: Walker Publishing. Barghouti, Omar (2011) BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Barr, James (2011) A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East. London: Simon & Schuster. Barthes, Roland (1977) Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana. Bell, Henry, and Sarah Irving, eds. (2014) A Bird Is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry. Glasgow: Freight. Bernard, Anna (2013) Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel/ Palestine. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Boehmer, Elleke (2018) Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Bresheeth, Haim (2007) ‘The Continuity of Trauma and Struggle: Recent Cinematic Representations of the Nakba.’ Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, eds. Ahmad Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod. New York: Columbia University Press. 161–88. Brouillette, Sarah (2011 [2007]) Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bugeja, Norbert (2012) Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East: Rethinking the Liminal in Mashriqi Writing. Abingdon: Routledge. Butler, Beverley, and Fatima al-Nammari (2018) ‘“We Palestinian Refugees”— Heritage Rites and/as the Clothing of Bare Life: Reconfiguring Paradox, Obligation, and Imperative in Palestinian Refugee Camps in Jordan.’ The New Nomadic Age: Archaeologies of Forced and Undocumented Migration, ed. Yannis Hamilakis. London: Equinox. 29–41. Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Butler, Judith (2012) Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. New York: Columbia University Press. Chomsky, Noam, and Ilan Pappé (2015) On Palestine. Ed. Frank Barat. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Cixous, Hélène (1976) ‘The Laugh of the Medusa.’ Signs 1.4: 875–93.

Works Cited

213

Corradin, Camilla (2016) ‘Israel: Water as a Tool to Dominate Palestinians.’ Al Jazeera, 23 June. Available at: . Accessed 1 February 2019. Cortas, Wadad Makdisi (2009) A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman. New York: Nation Books. Craps, Stef (2012) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dabbagh, Selma (2011) Out of It. London: Bloomsbury. Dabbagh, Selma (2019) ‘Email to Tom Sperlinger.’ 14 January. Darwish, Mahmoud (1984) ‘The Earth Is Closing on Us.’ Victims of a Map: A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry, by Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, and Samih al-Qasim. London: Saqi. 13. Darwish, Mahmoud (1995) Limatha Tarakt Al Hassan Wahidan [Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?]. Beirut: Dar al-Rayyis. Darwish, Mahmoud (1995) Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982. Trans. I. Muhawi. Berkeley: University of California Press. Darwish, Mahmoud (1997) La Palestine comme métaphore. Entretiens Traduit de l’arabe par Elias Sanbar et de l’hébreu par Simone Bitton [Palestine as a Metaphor. Interviews Translated from Arabic by Elias Sanbar and Hebrew by Simone Bitton]. Paris: Sindbad/Actes Sud. Darwish, Mahmoud (2000) The Adam of Two Edens. Trans. and eds. Munir Akash and Daniel Moore. Syracuse: Jusoor and Syracuse University Press. Darwish, Mahmoud (2003) ‘Mural.’ Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. Trans. and eds. Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche. Berkeley: University of California Press. 119–62. Darwish, Mahmoud (2003) Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. Trans. and eds. Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche. Berkeley: University of California Press. Darwish, Mahmoud (2007) ‘State of Siege.’ The Butterfly’s Burden. Trans. Fady Joudah. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press. 119–73. Darwish, Mahmoud (2009) ‘Counterpoint.’ Almond Blossoms and Beyond. Trans. Mohammad Shaheen. Northampton, MA: Interlink Publishing Group. 87–95. Darwish, Mahmoud (2010) State of Siege. Trans. Munir Akash and Daniel Abdal-hayy Moore. New York: Syracuse University Press. Darwish, Mahmoud (2013) ‘Iraq’s Night is Long.’ Trans. Sinan Antoon. Jadaliyya. Available at: . Accessed 5 March 2019. Darwish, Najwan (2010) ‘Al-thaqafa “fi hadrat al-ghiab”’ [Culture in the ‘Presence of Absence’]. Majallat al-dirasat al-Filistiniyya [Institute for Palestine Studies] 83: 143–47.

214

Post-Millennial Palestine

Darwish, Najwan (2014) Nothing More to Lose. Trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid. New York: New York Review Books. Dedman, Rachel (2016) ‘At the Seams: A Political History of Palestinian Embroidery.’ At the Seams: A Political History of Palestinian Embroidery, eds. Akram Musalam and Malak Afouneh. Birzeit: The Palestinian Museum. 17–73. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari (2003 [1987]) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum. De Moor, Ed (2001) ‘The Humanized God in the Poetry of a Tammuzian: Badr Shakir al-Sayyab.’ Representations of the Divine in Arabic Poetry, eds. G. Borg and Ed De Moor. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 193–210. Dibiasi, Caroline Mall (2015) ‘Changing Trends in Palestinian Political Activism: The Second Intifada, the Wall Protests, and the Human Rights Turn.’ Geopolitics 20.3: 669–95. Dickinson, Philip (2013) ‘Feeling, Affect, Exposure: Ethical (In)capacity, the Sympathetic Imagination, and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 46.4: 1–19. Di Leo, Jeffrey R. (2004) ‘Analyzing Anthologies.’ On Anthologies: Politics and Pedagogy, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. 1–27. Dillon, Sarah (2007) The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory. London: Continuum. El-Azma, N. (1968) ‘The Tammūzī Movement and the Influence of T. S. Eliot on Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb.’ Journal of the American Oriental Society 88.4: 671–78. Elsadda, Hoda (2011) ‘A “Phantom Freedom in a Phantom Modernity”? Protestant Missionaries, Domestic Ideology and Narratives of Modernity in an Arab Context.’ Rethinking History 15.2: 209–28. Fadda-Conrey, Carol (2007) ‘Writing Arab American Identity Post 9/11.’ Al Raida 118/119: 59–64. Fadda-Conrey, Carol (2014) Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging. New York: New York University Press. Fanon, Frantz (1959) L’An V de la révolution algérienne [Year Five of the Algerian Revolution]. Paris: Maspéro. Fields, Gary (2017) Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Fletcher, Lily (2018) ‘Razan al-Najjar: 21-year-old Palestinian Medic Who Became a Symbol in Gaza.’ The Independent, 17 June. Available at: . Accessed 11 April 2019. Foucault, Michel (1991 [1966]) The Order of Things. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge.

Works Cited

215

Freeman, Ru, ed. (2015) Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine. London: OR Books. Freeman, Ru (2015) ‘Making Sense.’ Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine, by Ru Freeman. London: OR Books. 15–24. Freire, Paulo (1996) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. London: Penguin. Freire, Paulo (1998) Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy and Civic Courage. Trans. Patrick Clarke. London: Rowan & Littlefield. Ghanim, Honaida (2009) ‘Poetics of Disaster: Nationalism, Gender, and Social Change Among Palestinian Poets in Israel After Nakba.’ International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 22: 23–39. Gibbs, Anna (2010) ‘After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication.’ The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 186–205. Giroux, Henry A. (2009) ‘Paulo Freire and the Politics of Postcolonialism.’ Breaching the Colonial Contract: Anti-Colonialism in the U.S. and Canada, ed. Arlo Kempf. New York: Springer. 79–89. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth (2010) ‘An Inventory of Shimmers.’ The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1–26. Gregory, Derek (2004) The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Grosz, Elizabeth (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Habiby, Emile (2010 [1974]) The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist. Trans. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, and Trevor LeGassick. London: Arabia Books. Hajjar, Lisa (2017) ‘A Comparative Analysis of Israeli and U.S. Targeted Killing Policies and Legal Challenges Against Them.’ Life in the Age of Drone Warfare, eds. Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 59–88. Halman, Talat (1974) ‘Death and Rebirth of Myths in Near Eastern Literatures.’ Books Abroad 48.1: 25–33. Halper, Jeff (2006) ‘A Strategy within a Non-Strategy: Sumud, Resistance, Attrition, and Advocacy.’ Journal of Palestine Studies 35.3: 45–51. Hamdi, Tahrir (2016) ‘The Power of Poetry to Travel: An Interview with Mourid Barghouti.’ Arab Studies Quarterly 38.4: 656–75. Hamdi, Tahrir (forthcoming) Imagining Palestine: Cultures of Exile and National Identity. London: Bloomsbury. Hammami, Rema (2010) ‘Qalandiya: Jerusalem’s Tora Bora and the Frontiers of Global Inequality.’ Jerusalem Quarterly 41: 29–51. Hammer, Juliane (2003) ‘A Crisis of Memory: Homeland and Exile in Contemporary Palestinian Memoirs.’ Crisis and Memory: The Representation of Space in the Modern Levantine Narrative, ed. Ken Seigneurie. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag. 177–98.

216

Post-Millennial Palestine

Harvey, David (1996) Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Blackwell. Hassan, Waïl S. (2019) ‘Postcolonialism and Modern Arabic Literature: Twenty-first Century Horizons.’ The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East, eds. Anna Ball and Karim Mattar. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 43–56. Haynes, J. D. (1995) Bakhtin and the Visual Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hillenbrand, Carole (2005) ‘The Evolution of the Saladin Legend in the West.’ Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph 58: 497–512. Hiller, Mischa (2013) ‘Onions and Diamonds.’ Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, eds. Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. 178–86. Hirsch, Marianne (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hirsch, Marianne (2012) The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Hochberg, Gil (2007) In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of the Separatist Imagination. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Holmes, Oliver, and Sufian Taha. ‘Ahed Tamimi: “I am a Freedom Fighter. I Will Not be the Victim.”’ The Guardian, 30 July. Available at: . Accessed 11 April 2019. Humphries, Isabelle, and Laleh Khalili (2007) ‘Gender of Nakba Memory.’ Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, eds. Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod. New York: Columbia University Press. 207–28. Ions, Edmund (2010 [1967]) The Politics of John F. Kennedy. Oxon: Routledge. Irving, Sarah (n.d.) ‘Dark, Beautiful Exploration of the Human Psyche.’ The Arab Review. Available at: . Accessed 1 January 2019. Iskandar, Adel, and Hakem Rustom (2010) ‘Introduction: Emancipation and Representation.’ Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, eds. Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1–22. JanMohamed, Abdul (1992) ‘Worldliness-without-World, Homelessnessas-Home: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual.’ Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker. Oxford: Blackwell. 96–120. Jarrar, Randa (2015) ‘Imagining Myself in Palestine.’ Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation, ed. Vijay Prashad. London: Verso. 55–66. Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, ed. (1992) Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Jayyusi, Salma Khadra (1992) ‘Introduction.’ Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi. New York: Columbia University Press. 1–72.

Works Cited

217

Johnson, Penny (2013) ‘Introduction: Neither Homeland not Exile are Words.’ Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, eds. Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. ix–xvi. Johnson, Penny, and Raja Shehadeh, eds. (2013) Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. Kahanoff, Jacqueline Shohet (1951) Jacob’s Ladder. London: Harvill Press. Kahanoff, Jacqueline Shohet (2011) Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff. Eds. Deborah A. Starr and Sasson Somekh. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kamal, Amr (2017) ‘Ghostly Labor: Ethnic Classism in the Levantine Prism of Jacqueline Kahanoff’s Jacob’s Ladder.’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 49.2: 255–75. Kaplan, Caren (2018) Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Karkabi, Nadim (2013) ‘Staging Particular Difference: Politics of Space in the Palestinian Alternative Music Scene.’ Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 6: 308–28. Karmi, Ghada (2002) In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story. London: Verso. Karmi, Ghada (2003) ‘Edward Said and the Politics of Dispossession.’ Al Ahram. Available at: . Accessed 14 May 2019. Karmi, Ghada (2010) ‘Said and the Palestinian Diaspora: A Personal Reflection.’ Edward Said: The Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, eds. Adel Iskandar and Hakem Ruston. Berkeley: University of California Press. 304–13. Karmi, Ghada (2015) Return: A Palestinian Memoir. London: Verso. Kassab, Elizabeth S. (2010) Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective. New York: Columbia University Press. Khalidi, Rashid (1997) Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press. Khalili, Laleh (2007) Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. khamis, khulud (2015) Haifa Fragments. Oxford: New Internationalist. Khankan, Nathalie (2009) Breathing Sun-Drenched Horizons: The Possibility of Poetry in Post-Oslo Palestine. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of California, Berkeley. Khanna, Ranjana (2006) ‘Post-palliative: Coloniality’s Affective Dissonance.’ Postcolonial Text 2.1. King, Nicola (2000) Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

218

Post-Millennial Palestine

Lawler, Steph (1996) ‘Motherhood and Identity.’ Women, Power and Resistance: An Introduction to Women’s Studies, eds. Tess Cosslett, Alison Easton, and Penny Summerfield. Buckingham: Open University Press. 153–64. Lentin, Ronit (2016) ‘Palestine/Israel and State Criminality: Exception, Settler Colonialism and Racialization.’ State Crime Journal 5.1: 32–50. Lloyd, David (2012) ‘Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel.’ Settler Colonial Studies 2.1: 59–80. Macmillan, E. A. (2016) From the First World War to the Arab Spring: What’s Really Going on in the Middle East? New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Majaj, Lisa Suheir (2008) ‘Arab-American Literature: Origins and Developments.’ American Studies Journal 52: 2. Majaj, Lisa Suheir (2009) Geographies of Light. Washington, D.C.: Del Sol Press. Majaj, Lisa Suheir, Paula W. Sunderman, and Therese Saliba, eds. (2002) Intersections: Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women’s Novels. New York: Syracuse University Press. Makdisi, Jean Said (1990) Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir. New York: Norton. Makdisi, Jean Said (2005) Teta, Mother and Me: An Arab Woman’s Memoir. London: Saqi. Makdisi, Jean Said (2013) ‘Becoming Palestinian.’ Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, eds. Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. 160–77. Makdisi, Saree (2008) Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc. Malek, Cate, and Mateo Hoke, eds. (2015) Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation. London: Verso. Marks, Laura U. (2002) Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Marks, Laura U. (2015) Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Marrouchi, Mustapha (2004) Edward Said at the Limits. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Masalha, Nur (2012) The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory. London: Zed. Massad, Joseph A. (1995) ‘Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism.’ Middle East Journal 49.3: 467–83. Massad, Joseph A. (2006) The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians. London: Routledge. Mattar, Karim (2014) ‘Mourid Barghouti’s “Multiple Displacements”: Exile and the National Checkpoint in Palestinian Literature.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50.1: 103–15. McDaid, Heather, and Laura Jones, eds. (2017) Nasty Women. Edinburgh: 404 Ink.

Works Cited

219

Mignolo, Walter (2015) ‘Yes, We Can.’ Can Non-Europeans Think? by Hamid Dabashi. London: Zed Books. viii–xlii. Mir, Salam (2013) ‘Palestinian Literature: Occupation and Exile.’ Arab Studies Quarterly 35.2: 110–29. Moed, Kamal (2014) ‘Educator in the Service of the Homeland: Khalil al-Sakakini’s Conflicted Identities.’ Jerusalem Quarterly 59: 68–85. Montagu, Ashley (1986) Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin. New York: Perennial Library. Moore, Lindsey (2008) Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film. London: Routledge. Moore, Lindsey (2015) ‘A conversation with Selma Dabbagh.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 51.3: 324–39. Moore, Lindsey (2018) Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations: Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine. New York: Routledge. Moore, Lindsey, and Abir Hamdar, eds (2015) Islamism and Cultural Expression in the Arab World. London: Routledge. Moore, Lindsey, and Ahmad Qabaha (2015) ‘Chronic Trauma, (Post) Colonial Chronotopes and Palestinian Lives: Omar Robert Hamilton’s Though I Know the River is Dry/Ma‘a Anni A‘rif Anna al-Nahr Qad Jaf.’ Postcolonial Traumas: Memory, Narratives, Resistance, ed. Abigail Ward. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 14–29. Moore-Gilbert, Bart (2009) Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation. Abingdon: Routledge. Najmi, Samina (2010) ‘Naomi Shihab Nye’s Aesthetic of Smallness and the Military Sublime.’ MELUS 35.2: 151–71. Nalbantian, Suzanne (2003) Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience. London: Palgrave. Nance, Andrew (2011) ‘Touch by Adania Shibli.’ The Quarterly Conversation, 7 March. Available at: . Accessed 3 July 2018. Olney, James (1998) Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Pallister-Wilkins, Polly (2011) ‘The Separation Wall: A Symbol of Power and a Site of Resistance?’ Antipode 43.5: 1851–82 Pappé, Ilan (2006) The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: One World. Parr, Nora (2019) ‘Stop Waiting: The “Next” Palestinian Writers Are Already Here.’ The Middle East in London, April/May. 20–21. Peretz, Martin (2008) ‘The Poet and The People.’ New Republic, 12 August. Available at: . Accessed 11 January 2019. Prashad, Vijay (2015) ‘Introduction: A Country in Darkness.’ Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation, ed. Vijay Prashad. London: Verso. 3–14. Prashad, Vijay, ed. (2015) Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation. London: Verso.

220

Post-Millennial Palestine

Qabaha, Ahmad (2018) Exile and Expatriation in Modern American and Palestinian Writing. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Qabaha, Ahmad (2019) ‘Decolonizing History and Depoliticizing Territory: Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape.’ Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21.7: 1030–44. Qleibo, Ali (2013) ‘Continuity and Discontinuity in Palestinian Cultural Expressions: Baal, El Khader and the Apotheosis of St. George.’ Archaeologies 9.2: 344–55. Ra, Sun, Joshua Smith, et al. (2014 [1974]) Space is the Place. San Francisco: Harte Recordings. Ra’ad, Basem (2010) Hidden Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean. London: Pluto. Ra’ad, Basem (2011) ‘Who are the “Canaanites”? Why Ask?’ The Link 44.5: 2–13. Raheb, Mitri (2014) ‘Biblical Narrative and Palestinian Identity in Mahmoud Darwish’s Writings.’ Palestinian Identity in Relation to Time and Space, ed. M. Raheb. Bethlehem: Diyar. 89–105. Rak, Julie (2013) Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Rancière, Jacques (2015) Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Trans. Steve Corcoran. London: Continuum. Ricœur, Paul (2004 [2000]) Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roberts, Rachel (2017) ‘Ibrahim Abu Thuraya: Disabled Palestinian Activist Shot Dead by Israeli Troops in Jerusalem Protest.’ The Independent, 16 December. Available at: . Accessed 11 April 2019. Rollman, Gary B. (1991) ‘Pain Responsiveness.’ The Psychology of Touch, eds. Morton A. Heller and William Schiff. New Jersey: LEA. 91–114. Rooney, Caroline (2014) ‘Prison Israel-Palestine: Literalities of Criminalization and Imaginative Resistance.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50.2: 134–47. Roy, Sara (2002) ‘Why Peace Failed: An Oslo Autopsy.’ Current History 101.651: 8–16. Roy, Sara (2007) Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press. Ruddick, Sara (1995) Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon Press. Sa’di, Ahmad H. (2002) ‘Catastrophe, Memory and Identity: Al-Nakbah as a Component of Palestinian Identity.’ Israel Studies 7.2: 175–98. Safi, Lubna (2017) ‘On the Brink: Identity and Language in the Poetry of Arab-American Women.’ The Comparatist 41: 309–24.

Works Cited

221

Said, Edward (1975) Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books, Inc. Said, Edward (1983) The World, The Text and The Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Said, Edward W. (1986) After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. London: Faber and Faber. Said, Edward (1987) ‘Cairo Recalled: Growing up in the Cultural Cross-Currents of 1940s Egypt.’ House and Garden, April. 32–45. Said, Edward (1991) The World, the Text and the Critic. London: Vintage Books. Said, Edward (1993 [1986]) After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. London: Vintage Books. Said, Edward (1993) Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Said, Edward (1993) ‘Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals.’ Grand Street 47: 112–24. Said, Edward (1994) ‘On Mahmoud Darwish.’ Grand Street 48: 112–15. Said, Edward (1994) Representations of the Intellectual. London: Vintage Books. Said, Edward (1995 [1978]) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin Books. Said, Edward (1996) Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage Books. Said, Edward (1999) ‘What Can Separation Mean?’ Al-Ahram Weekly, 455, 11–17 November. Said, Edward (2000 [1999]) Out of Place: A Memoir. London: Granta. Said, Edward (2000 [1999]) Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Vintage Books. Said, Edward (2000) ‘Invention, Memory, and Place.’ Critical Inquiry 26.2: 175–92. Said, Edward (2000) ‘The Palestinian Experience.’ The Edward Said Reader, eds. Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin. London: Granta. 14–37. Said, Edward (2001 [2000]) Reflections on Exile: and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. London: Granta. Said, Edward (2001) ‘On Lost Causes.’ Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 527–53. Said, Edward (2001) ‘Palestinians Under Siege.’ The New Intifada: Resisting Israel’s Apartheid, ed. Roane Carey. London: Verso. 27–44. Said, Edward (2007) On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain. New York: Pantheon. Said, Edward (2012 ([2001]) ‘Reflections on Exile.’ Reflections on Exile: and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. 2nd ed. London: Granta. 173–86. Said, Edward, with Jean Mohr (1986) After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. London: Faber and Faber.

222

Post-Millennial Palestine

Said, Mariam C. (2009) ‘Introduction.’ A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman, by Wadad Makdisi Cortas. New York: Nation Books. xi–xxxi. Said, Najla (2009) ‘Afterword.’ A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman, by Wadad Makdisi Cortas. New York: Nation Books. 193–96. Said, Najla (2013) Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family. New York: Penguin. Salem, Mostafa, and Asma Alsharif (2016) ‘Arab League Labels Hezbollah Terrorist Organization.’ Reuters, 11 March. Available at: . Accessed 10 April 2019. Saloul, Ihab (2012) Catastrophe and Exile in the Modern Palestinian Imagination: Telling Memories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Salti, Rasha (2010) ‘From Resistance and Bearing Witness to the Power of the Fantastical: Icons and Symbols in Palestinian Poetry and Cinema.’ Third Text 24.1: 39–52. Sansour, Larissa, dir. (2009) A Space Exodus. Available at: < https://vimeo. com/21372138>. Accessed 29 May 2019. Sayigh, Rosemary (2007) ‘Women’s Nakba Stories: Between Being and Knowing.’ Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, eds. Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod. New York: Columbia University Press. 135–60. Schacter, Daniel (1996) Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind and the Past. New York: Basic Books. Schlaim, Avi (2015) ‘The Post-Ottoman Syndrome.’ Shifting Sands: The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East, eds. Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson. London: Profile. 17–32. Scott, A. O. (2002) ‘Film Festival Review: A Tangle of Middle Eastern Hate and Love.’ The New York Times, 7 October. Available at: . Accessed 15 May 2019. Shapira, Anita (1997) ‘Ben-Gurion and the Bible: The Forging of an Historical Narrative?’ Middle Eastern Studies 33.4: 645–74. Sharif, Yara (2017) Architecture of Resistance: Cultivating Moments of Possibility Within the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict. Abingdon: Routledge. Sharoni, Simona, Rahab Abdulhadi, Nadje Al-Ali, Felicia Eaves, Ronit Lentin, and Dina Siddiqi (2015) ‘Transnational Feminist Solidarity in Times of Crisis.’ International Feminist Journal of Politics 17.4: 654–70. Shasha, David (2012) ‘A Jewish Voice Left Silent: Trying to Articulate “The Levantine Option.”’ Mondoweiss, 10 January. Available at: Accessed 1 February 2019. Shavit, Ari (2000) ‘My Right of Return: An Interview with Edward Said.’ Haaretz, 18 August. Shehadeh, Raja (2008 [2007]) Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape. London: Profile Books.

Works Cited

223

Shehadeh, Raja (2010) A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle. London: Profile. Shehadeh, Raja (2017) Where the Line is Drawn: Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine. London: Profile. Sherwell, Tina (2003) ‘Imaging the Homeland: Gender and Palestinian National Discourses.’ After Orientalism: Critical Entanglements, Productive Looks, ed. Inge E. Boer. New York: Rodopi. 123–45. Shiblī, ʻAdanīya [Adania Shibli] (2000) ‘Al-rīaḍīāt wa taḥtha al-ḥub wa taḥthu al-lugha’’ [‘Maths, Under Which is Love, Under Which is Language’]. London: Muʼassasaẗ ʻAbd al-Muḥsin al-Qaṭṭān. Shibli, Adania (2010 [2002]) Touch. Trans. Paula Haydar. Massachusetts: Clockroot Books. Shibli, Adania (2012 [2004]) We are All Equally Far from Love. Trans. Paul Starkey. Northampton, MA: Clockroot Books. Shibli, Adania (2020 [2016]) Minor Detail. Trans. Elisabeth Jaquette. New York: New Directions Books. Shohat, Ella (1992) ‘Notes on the “Post-Colonial.”’ Social Text 31/32: 99–113. Shohat, Ella (2006) Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shohat, Ella (2019) ‘On Orientalist Genealogies: The Split Arab/Jew Figure Revisited.’ The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East, eds. Anna Ball and Karim Mattar. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 118–60. Shukla, Nikesh, ed. (2017) The Good Immigrant. London: Unbound. Silwadi, Najwa, and Peter Mayo (2014) ‘Pedagogy under Siege in Palestine: Insights from Paulo Freire.’ Holy Land Studies 13.1: 71–87. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson (2010) Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Soueif, Ahdaf (2017) ‘Introduction.’ This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature, eds. Ahdaf Soueif and Omar Robert Hamilton. London: Bloomsbury. 1–5. Soueif, Ahdaf, and Omar Robert Hamilton, eds. (2017) This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature. London: Bloomsbury. Sperlinger, Tom (2015) Romeo and Juliet in Palestine: Teaching under Occupation. UK: Zero Books. Sperlinger, Tom, Kevin Brazil, and David Sergeant, eds. (2016) Doris Lessing and the Forming of History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sperlinger, Tom, Josie McLellan, and Richard Pettigrew (2018) Who are Universities For? Re-making Higher Education. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Stephan, Hanna (1922) ‘Modern Palestinian Parallels to the Song of Songs.’ Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 2: 199–279.

224

Post-Millennial Palestine

Suleiman, Elia, dir. (2002) Divine Intervention. Artificial Eye. Tahhan, Zena (2018) ‘More than a Century on: The Balfour Declaration Explained.’ Aljazeera, 2 November. Available at: . Accessed 12 May 2020. Tamari, Salim (2009) Mountain Against the Sea: Essay on Palestinian Society and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. van Elferen, Isabella (2012) Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Van Leeuwen, Richard (2004) ‘A Journey to Reality: Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah.’ Crisis and Memory: The Representation of Space in Modern Levantine Narrative, eds. Ken Seigneurie and Samira Aghacy. Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert. 177–98. Wald, Priscilla (1995) Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Walder, Dennis (2011) Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory. London: Routledge. Watkins, Megan (2010) ‘Desiring Recognition, Accumulating Affect.’ The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 269–88. Weir, Shelagh (2009) Palestinian Costume. London: Arris Books. Weizman, Eyal (2002) ‘Control in the Air.’ Open Democracy, 1 May. Available at: . Accessed 15 May 2019. Weizman, Eyal (2007) Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. Weizman, Eyal (2012 [2007]) Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. Weizman, Eyal (2017) Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, New Edition. London: Verso. Whitlock, Gillian (2007) Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whitlock, Gillian (2015) Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Patrick (2012) ‘“No Aesthetics Outside My Freedom”: Mahmoud Darwish and Late Style.’ Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 14.1: 24–36. ‘Wingman’ (2005) Urban Dictionary. Available at: . Accessed 15 May 2019. Young, Robert J. C. (2012) ‘Postcolonial Remains.’ New Literary History 43.1: 19–42. Younis, Muhannad (2018) Al-Athar Tarsem Khalfuha Aqdam [Ruins Leave Footprints Behind]. Ramallah: A. M. Qattan Foundation. Žižek, Slavoj (2009) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books Ltd.

Index

Abdel-Malek, Kamal 128 Abraham, Nicolas 53 Abu al-Hayyat, Maya, 6, 156 No One Knows their Bloodtype 157–58, 159–61, 164, 166, 167, 169–70, 172 Abu-Assad, Hany 7 Abulhawa, Susan 6, 24, 88 The Blue between Sky and Water 135, 137, 139–41, 148–50 Mornings in Jenin 135, 136, 137, 138, 140–47, 148, 149 My Voice Sought the Wind 140, 150 Abu-Manneh, Bashir 2, 11–12, 13, 19, 61, 104, 120, 130 Abunimah, Ali 16, 61–62 Abu Saif, Atef 2, 4, 191 Agamben, Giorgio 88 Ahmed, Sara 142, 146, 205 Al-Barghouti, Tamim 59–60 Al-Barghuti, Omar Salih 106 Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) 59 Al-Ghoul, Asmaa 2, 4–5 Alighieri, Dante 184n AlJahdali, Samar H. 139, 147, 149 Allen, Lori 108 Al-Madhoun, Raba’i 6, 62 Al-Musawi, Muhsin 104, 105, 109 Al-Nammari, Fatima 59

Index

Al-Sakakini, Khalil 175, 181 Alshaibi, Sama 192, 204–05 Flight 192–98 Al-Shaykh, Samah 2 Alyan, Hala 6 Amer, Mahmoud 156 Cinema Gaza 157–58, 159, 161–62, 164–66, 169, 170–71, 172 America see United States Amireh, Amal 199 Amiry, Suad 4, 95 anglophone see English language, writing in the anthologies 23, 89, 90, 96 and communality 84, 88 and solidarity 85–87, 97–98 anti-colonial 9, 16, 20, 23, 61, 80, 105, 114, 175–76, 182, 183 see also decolonial; decolonized; and under pedagogy apartheid 15–16 Arab Spring 155n Arraf, Suha 7 Ashcroft, Bill 79 Ashour, Radwa 60 Athamneh, Waed 172 Attallah, Najlaa 3 autobiographical 19, 52, 56, 77–78, 83, 113 see also life writing; memoir 225

226

Post-Millennial Palestine

Babylon 36, 111 Baddeley, Alan 77 Baghdad (Iraq) 111, 192, 203 Baker, Raymond 38 Bakhtin, Mikhail 67, 70–72, 76, 79 Ball, Anna 143, 200 Barakat, Ibtisam 191 Barghouti, Mourid 22, 31–32, 34, 83, 88 I Saw Ramallah 5 I Was Born There, I Was Born Here 5, 33, 38–42 ‘Midnight’ 42–44 Barghouti, Omar 15–16 Barthes, Roland 164 Basra (Iraq) 111, 192 Battle of Jenin (2002) 137n, 138, 149 beginnings 23, 25, 31–34, 35–37, 41–42, 44, 92–93, 157–58, 162–64, 165, 171–72 see also endings Beirut (Lebanon) 51, 56n, 105, 110, 111, 157, 160, 177 Beit Daras (Gaza) 138–40 Bell, Henry 191 Bernard, Anna 21, 86, 107, 121 biblical narratives 103, 106, 107, 109–10, 162–63 Christ 108–09, 110–13 Song of Songs 106, 110 Boehmer, Elleke 22, 121, 127 Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) 6, 15–16, 205 Bresheeth, Haim 20, 79 Britain see United Kingdom British Mandate 10, 51, 106, 174–75 Balfour Declaration (1917) 10 Sykes–Picot Agreement (1916) 47, 52n Brouillette, Sarah 21 Bugeja, Norbert 52, 86 Butler, Beverley 59 Butler, Judith 62, 204 Cairo (Egypt) 50, 55–56, 60n12, 61 Canaan, Tawfiq 106–07

catastrophe 32, 36, 136–37, 140 repetition of 9, 10–11, 19, 31, 33, 35, 38, 41, 44, 136–37 see also Nakba (1948) Chomsky, Noam 16 chronotope 67, 70, 79 citizenship 62 American 96–97, 196 Lebanese 51n precarious 85, 90–92, 96–97, 98, 173, 176 see also dispossession Cixous, Hélène 196–97 colonialism 36, 48, 49, 50, 111, 113, 129, 143 pre-colonial Palestine 72, 115, 139, 194 see also anti-colonial; decolonial; decolonized; education: and colonialism; Israeli: settlercolonialism; modernity: colonial; postcolonial; violence: colonial Corrie, Rachel 5, 137n Cortas, Wadad Makdisi 23, 47–48, 51 A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman 47–48, 51–52, 53, 54, 57 Craps, Stef 77 critical Levantinism 48, 60–62 Cyprus 198, 199, 203, 204 Dabbagh, Selma 6, 21, 25, 119, 186 Out of It 173–88 Dabis, Cherien 7 Darwish, Mahmoud 31–32, 42, 107, 109, 177, 178 comparison with Najwan Darwish 110–11, 112, 113, 115 critique of Oslo Accords 34, 39 use of myth 103–04, 105 with Mourid Barghouti 40 works ‘Counterpoint’ 35–36 ‘Death of the Phoenix’ 113

Index ‘Earth Presses Against Us’ or ‘The Earth is Closing on Us’ 35, 191, 192, 199 ‘Iraq’s Night is Long’ 38 ‘Mural’ 33, 36–37 ‘On a Canaanite Stone at the Dead Sea’ 37–38 ‘State of Siege’ 36, 176 Darwish, Najwan 24, 116 Nothing More to Lose 1–2, 104–05, 109–10, 114 ‘Coming Down’ 112–13 ‘I will rise one day’ 114 ‘Jerusalem’ 104–05 ‘The last soldier’s words to Saladin’ 114–15 ‘Mary’ 111–12 ‘Nothing More to Lose’ 114 ‘Sleeping in Gaza’ 111–12 ‘To Christo’ 112 Deal of the Century 34, 43 decolonial 182 decolonized 62, 175 Dedman, Rachel 58–59 Deleuze, Gilles 13, 22 De Moor, Ed 105, 109 diaspora 4, 17, 86, 92–93, 143, 199 exclusion of diasporic Palestinians from Oslo Accords 12–13, 18, 83 see also displacement; dispossession; exile Dibiasi, Caroline Mall 14 Di Cintio, Marcello 6 Dickinson, Philip 132 Di Leo, Jeffrey R. 84n, 85 displacement 68, 71, 74, 75, 76, 83, 90, 192–93, 194, 200, 204 see also diaspora; dispossession; exile dispossession 4, 10, 14–15, 34–35, 49, 68, 72, 76, 92–93, 97, 142, 143–44, 200 see also diaspora; displacement; exile

227

dress, modes of 55–56, 57–59, 123, 183 embroidery 58–59, 139 uniform 144–45 education and colonialism 25,173–76, 177, 179–83, 185 and freedom 173, 176, 177–78 see also pedagogy Egypt 34, 51, 52, 59, 61, 157n, 161 Ehrenreich, Ben 5 Eliot, T. S. 105, 107 Elsadda, Hoda 55 endings 25, 31–34, 35–37, 41–42, 44, 157–58, 159, 160–61, 162–64, 165, 171–72 unfinished 25, 186, 188 see also beginnings England 59, 72, 177, 179 see also United Kingdom English language, writing in the 4–5, 6, 57, 83–86, 88, 98, 186, 199 exceptionalism 16–17 exile 32–33, 40, 52–53, 89–93, 178 and memory 67–69, 72–73, 75–78 and return 74, 92, 94, 143, 149, 161, 193–194, 195–96 see also diaspora; displacement; dispossession; Said, Edward Fadda-Conrey, Carol 193, 199 Fanon, Franz 59 feminism 191–92, 196–97, 200–01, 204–05 Fields, Gary 49 Foucault, Michel 159 Frazer, J. G. 105 Freeman, Ru 84, 87–88 Freire, Paulo 175–76, 180, 182–84, 185, 187–88 Gaza 5, 12–15, 18–19, 43, 72, 74, 111–12, 137, 148, 156, 173 annexation 10, 14–15, 17

228

Post-Millennial Palestine

in Mahmoud Amer’s Cinema Gaza 157–58, 161–62, 165, 170–71 in Selma Dabbagh’s Out of It 174, 177–82, 186–88 under siege 2–4, 17, 72, 88–89, 111, 164 Gaza War (2008–09) 11, 33, 83, 87, 111, 137n, 156 Gaza War (2012) 83, 156 Gaza War (2014) 3, 11, 33, 83, 88, 156 gender feminine imagery of Palestinian land 105–06, 194 maternity 177, 180, 202–03, 204 resistance to patriarchal, national structures 199, 200–01, 202 women and society 53, 57, 183 see also feminism; and under nation generation differences between generations 41–42, 92, 174, 177, 183 inter-generational 135, 138, 140–41, 148–49, 150, 196, 200 multi-generational 47–48, 50–51, 147 new generation of Palestinians 11, 25, 31, 33, 37, 43, 186–87 new generation of Palestinian writers 1, 9, 14, 18, 62, 115, 156–58, 159 older generations of Palestinians 6, 104, 105, 110 second- and third-generation, post-Nakba 4, 18–19, 136, 148, 193, 199, 204 Ghanim, Honaida 106 Gibbs, Anna 132 Giroux, Henry A. 176 Great March of Return 44 Green Line 15 Gregg, Melissa 121 Gregory, Derek 15, 48 Griffiths, Gareth 79 Grosz, Elizabeth 142 Guattari, Félix 13, 22

Habayeb, Husama 6 Habiby, Emile 94 Haifa (Israel) 15 Haj, Maha Hajjar, Lisa 201 Halman, Talat 105 Halper, Jeff 20, 147 Hamdi, Tahrir 42 Hamilton, Omar Robert 84, 87 Hammad, Isabella 6 Hammami, Rema 96 Hammer, Juliane 83, 86 Hamoud, Maysaloun 7 Harvey, David 69 Hassan, Waïl S. 48 heritage archiving 17 reclaiming 9, 18 reconstructing 49 see also under Palestinian Hiller, Mischa ‘Onions and Diamonds’ 89–93 Hirsch, Marianne 18, 136–38, 142, 144–45, 148, 150 historical pain 41–42, 44 histories familial 6, 23, 51, 54, 149 regional 23, 48 historiography 53 history documenting 36, 57, 177, 185 erasure of Palestinian history 19–20, 76, 193–94 and exile 92, 130, 193, 194 and inevitability 138, 148, 149 and memory 19–20, 23, 47, 52, 61–62, 68, 70–73, 76–79, 137–38, 144 of the Levant region 50, 54–55, 61 preservation of Palestinian history 9–10, 17–18, 19–20, 23–24, 49, 67, 78, 79–80, 86, 196, 204 relational 107 relationship with myth and legend 104, 107, 114

Index social and political temporalities 10–14, 15, 19, 22, 24, 52, 62, 79, 139 Hlehel, Ala 6 Hochberg, Gil 60, 61–62 Hoke, Mateo 87n3 Humphries, Isabelle 201, 203 intifada 155, 156 First Intifada (1987–93) 12, 110, 120, 155, 183 Second Intifada (2000–05) 10, 11, 13, 110, 119, 137n, 155 third intifada 21, 155 Iraq 38, 52, 111, 114, 157n, 192, 193, 198, 203 Iraq War (2003–11) 38 Irving, Sarah 119, 191 Iskandar, Adel 62 Ismael, Shereen 38 Ismael, Tareq 38 Israel 16–17, 34, 47, 52, 60, 61–62, 135, 176, 183 founding of the State of Israel 10, 50 Israeli airspace 197, 201 annexation of Palestinian land 4, 14–15, 19–20, 41, 49, 52, 72 border control 94–97, 196 checkpoints 14, 15, 40, 42 control of water infrastructure 122, 197 identity 60, 136, 143–45 literature 107 nationalism 16–17, 62 occupation 5, 13–15, 19–20, 42, 76, 79, 83, 87, 98, 108, 185 settler-colonialism 3–4, 10, 12, 18–20, 23, 77, 79, 135, 140 Israeli Defence Force (IDF) 14 Israel-Palestine conflict 15–17, 128–29, 143–44 Jabra, Jabra Ibrahim 83 Jacir, Annemarie 7

229

Jaffa (Israel) 15, 90, 92, 192 JanMohamed, Abdul 199 Jarrar, Randa 6 ‘Imagining Myself in Palestine’ 89, 94–97 Jayyusi, Salma Khadra 83–84 Jenin (West Bank) 43, 137n, 138, 149 Jerusalem (Israel) 6, 12, 48n2, 88, 110, 112, 114, 155n, 201 and Ghada Karmi 53, 68, 72, 77–78 in Maya Abu Hayyat’s No One Knows their Bloodtype 157, 160, 161, 167, 170 and the Said–Makdisi–Cortas family 50, 51–52, 54, 55, 56, 59, 91 Johnson, Penny 84, 88 Jones, Laura 87n3 Jordan 34, 35, 48n2, 62, 94, 157n, 174, 199 Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 106 Kahanoff, Jacqueline Shohet 60–61 Kamal, Amr 55–56, 58, 61 Kanafani, Ghassan 6, 103, 108, 110 Returning to Haifa 136, 144–45 Kaplan, Caren 198 Karkabi, Nadim 109, 110, 116 Karmi, Ghada 5, 23, 53, 83 In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story 53 Return: A Palestinian Memoir 63–80 Kassab, Elizabeth 157, 164 Khadra, Yasmina 119 Khalidi, Rashid 94 Khalili, Laleh 161, 201, 203 khamis, khulud 62 Khankan, Nathalie 103, 106, 108, 109, 110, 116 Khanna, Rahanna 52 Khleifi, Michel 7 Khoury, Elias 7 King, Nicola 78

230

Post-Millennial Palestine

Late Style 23, 31–35, 36, 39, 44 Lawler, Steph 203 Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) 51, 52 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (1982–84) 35, 130 Lebanon 2, 7, 35, 48n, 49, 51, 110, 111, 130, 142–43, 157n, 199 Lentin, Ronit 17 Levant, the 47, 48n2, 49, 51, 54, 58–59, 61 and Palestine 52, 57, 58 Levantine culture 58–59, 60–61 identities 23, 48, 50–51, 53–54, 55–56 remains 47–48, 60 see also critical Levantinism; Shāmi life writing 19, 83–89, 95, 97–98 see also autobiographical; memoir literary aspirations of the future 63, 87–88, 156–58, 159, 164–65, 172 marketplace 21–22, 83–88, 97–98, 199 literature relationship to socio-political contexts 11–13, 15, 19–20 and resistance 9–10, 18, 21–22, 79, 103–04, 116, 121, 128, 132, 185–86 see also English language, writing in the; solidarity: via literature Lloyd, David 16–17 London (UK) 73, 174, 177–78 Lukács, György 11 Macmillan, E. A. 48n2, 52n Majaj, Lisa Suheir 192, 204–05 on Arab-American women’s writing 199 Geographies of Light 198, 204 ‘Fifty Years On / Stones in An Unfinished Wall’ 199 ‘Groundspace’ 201 ‘Homemaking’ 200

‘Jerusalem Song’ 199–200 ‘Night Sky’ 203 ‘What She Said’ 202 Makdisi, Jean Said 23, 47–48, 52 Teta, Mother and Me: An Arab Woman’s Memoir 47–48, 49–50, 52, 53–58 Makdisi, Saree 173–74 Malek, Cate 87n3 Marks, Laura U. 121, 132 model of enfoldment 137–38, 144, 145–46, 147–48, 150 Marrouchi, Mustapha 54 Masalha, Nur 54n8 Masoud, Ahmed 6 Masri, May 7 Massad, Joseph 12–13, 199 Mattar, Karim 72, 93 Mayo, Peter 174–76 McDaid, Heather 87n3 memoir Ghada Karmi 67, 75, 79 memoir boom 84–85 Said–Makdisi–Cortas family 47–48, 51, 52–57, 59, 62 see also autobiographical; life writing memory 9–10, 22, 25, 121, 165–66, 193 collective 18, 42, 69, 83, 150 counter-memories, counterhistories 17–18, 20, 23, 77–80 cultural15, 23, 67, 139, 143, 149–50 en/unfolded 70, 135, 137–38, 139, 141, 142–43, 144–46, 147–49, 150 and exile 67–69, 72–73, 75–78 genealogical 24, 136–37, 139, 143, 145, 147–49, 150 and identity 18, 53–54, 69–70, 77–80, 135, 136–37 individual 18, 139, 143, 150 inter-generational 136, 138, 141 and life writing 52–53, 54, 69, 83 ongoing 33, 35, 137–38, 146 and place 70, 73

Index postmemory 18–19, 136–38, 142, 148, 150 re-memory 18, 53–54 and return 69, 70, 72–73, 76–77, 139, 141, 142–43, 146–49 see also under history Middle East 16, 51, 105, 106 Mignolo, Walter 182–83 Mir, Salam 105–06, 108 modernity 54, 57–58 colonial 15, 19–20, 52, 54 Moed, Kamal 175 Montagu, Ashley 126–27 Moore, Lindsey 11, 19, 48n3, 60, 86 Moore-Gilbert, Bart 48, 55, 57, 61, 83, 86 Nablus (West Bank) 87, 192 Najmi, Samina 202 nakba see catastrophe Nakba (1948) 9, 10–11, 15, 33, 41–43, 48n3, 76, 89, 90, 149, 161, 173, 191, 192–94, 196, 199–201 and displacement 4, 51, 53, 135, 143, 204 and exile 94, 141 and memory 18–19, 68–75, 78–79, 136–37, 138, 146, 148 Naksa (1967) 10, 41, 53, 157n, 146, 173 Nalbantian, Suzanne 67 Nance, Andrew 121 Nasrallah, Ibrahim 7 Nassib, Selim 5 nation and gender 105–06, 199, 200–01, 202 and memory 67–68, 77–79, 142, 146, 193 see also Shāmi; transnational national allegory 36, 121, 122, 144 nationalism 60, 105–07 see also under Israeli; Palestinian Nelson, Arthur 5 olive tree 35 Olney, James 78

231

one-state solution 16 Operation Cast Lead see Gaza War (2008–09) Operation Defensive Shield 119 Operation Protective Edge see Gaza War (2014) orientalism 56, 60–61 Oslo see peace process: Olso Accords (1993); post-Oslo Ottoman Empire 47–48, 50, 51, 60–61, 174 decline of Ottoman Empire 52n, 54, 61 post-Ottoman 51, 59 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) 34, 35, 39, 157, 158, 159–60, 161 178 Palestinian heritage 58–59, 95, 105, 114, 135, 141, 144–45, 148–49, 203 identity 15, 34, 48, 50–51, 52, 57, 61–62, 73–74, 78–80, 95–97, 106, 141–43, 144, 145, 147–49, 150, 167, 178 literature 9–10, 11–12, 13, 18, 19–22, 25 nationalism 12, 103, 108, 110, 115, 116, 199 refugees 12–13, 17, 18, 51, 72, 74, 106, 143, 176, 196 rights 12, 17, 59–60, 62, 85, 86, 205 symbolism 36, 58n10 Palestinian Authority (PA) 3, 12, 161, 155n, 161 defeatism 14, 39–41 Palestinian Festival of Literature 5–6, 87 see also Soueif, Ahdaf Palestinian Museum 58 palimpsest 19, 120, 121, 135, 137, 138 139–41, 143, 144, 148, 149, 150 Pallister-Wilkins, Polly 14 Pappé, Ilan 15–16, 19 Parr, Nora 62

232

Post-Millennial Palestine

peace process 1, 9, 83, 155 Beirut Summit (2002) 156 Camp David Accords (1978) 34, 38 Camp David Summit (2000) 156 Madrid Conference (1991) 13, 156 Oslo Accords (1993) 3, 18, 38–39, 156, 157, 161, 166, 201 failure of 11–14, 20, 22, 34, 104, 108, 119 Taba Summit (2001) 156 Wadi Araba Agreement (1994) 34, 38 pedagogy anti-colonial 10, 25, 175–76, 182, 183 reading pedagogically 22, 132 see also education; Freire, Paulo photograph 55–56, 57–58, 139–40, 150, 162, 165, 170, 201 postcolonial 21, 48, 52, 85, 115, 139 post-Oslo 1, 83, 115, 155 see also peace process: Oslo Accords (1993) Prashad, Vijay 84, 88 Qabaha, Ahmad 11, 69, 76 Qleibo, Ali 106–07 Ra, Sun 158, 159, 164, 169, 172 Ra’ad, Basem 106–07 Raheb, Mitri 110 Rak, Julie 84–85, 98 Ramallah (West Bank) 43, 58, 74, 87, 109, 156, 193 Rancière, Jacques 157, 158, 159, 164 resistance refusal to surrender 23, 32, 33, 34, 35–37, 38, 40, 43–44 self-determinism 7–8, 24–25, 79, 194 ṣumud 20–21, 49, 147 see also anti-colonial; pedagogy: anti-colonial; solidarity; and under literature rhizome 13, 22

Ricœur, Paul 18, 53–54 Rollman, Gary B. 132 Rooney, Caroline 96 Ross, Andrew 5 Rothschild, Walter 10 Roy, Sara 13–14 Ruddick, Sara 203 Rustom, Hakem 62 Sabra and Shatila 2, 110, 130 Sa’di, Ahmad H. 194 Safi, Lubna 204 Said, Edward 17, 22–23, 36, 37, 40, 47–48, 50–51, 58, 62, 83, 107, 119 contrapuntal 56–57 critique of Oslo Accords 34, 39 on exile 32–34, 73, 74, 75–76, 77, 79, 89–93 on Late Style 31–35 works After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives 34–35, 61, 74 Beginnings: Intention and Method 31–32 Culture and Imperialism 80 On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain 32–33, 35 ‘On Lost Causes’ 34, 39 Out of Place: A Memoir 33, 47–48, 50–51, 52–53, 54–57, 59, 60–61, 79, 90, 91 ‘The Palestinian Experience’ 185–86 Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays 73, 75, 77, 89–91 Representations of the Intellectual 32, 90–91 Said, Mariam 47–48, 51, 57 Said, Najla 47–48, 87 Saladin 109, 110, 113–15 Saloul, Ihab 19, 136, 138, 146, 149, 200 Salti, Rasha 103, 106, 108–09, 116 Sansour, Larissa 191

Index Sayigh, Rosemary 196, 202 Schacter, Daniel 77 Schlaim, Avi 59–60 Seigworth, Gregory J. 121 Separation Wall 11, 14–15, 72, 89 Shāmi 23, 48, 50, 52, 60–61 see also Levantine Shapira, Anita 107 Sharif, Yara 193, 197–98 Shasha, David 60 Shavit, Ari 62 Shehadeh, Raja 4, 19–20, 47, 49, 61, 84, 88 Sherwell, Tina 194 Shibli, Adania 6, 156 ‘Maths, under which is love, under which is language’ 157–58, 162–64, 166–69, 171, 172 Touch 24, 119–32 Shi’r 105 Shohat, Ella 47, 58n10, 59 Shukla, Nikesh 87n3 Silwadi, Najwa 174–76 Six-Day War see Naksa (1967) Smith, Sidonie 84–85, 98 solidarity 15–16, 34, 48, 59, 93, 129, 188, 198, 199, 203–05 via literature 5–6, 21, 53, 85–87, 97–98, 199 Soueif, Ahdaf 5–6, 84, 87, 88 South Africa 16 Stephan, Stephan Hanna 106–07 Suleiman, Elia 7 Divine Intervention 108–09, 191 symbolic histories 36, 113–15 order 62, 157–59, 160, 161–62, 164, 166, 171–72 symbolism and myth 104, 105, 108 see also Rancière, Jacques Syria 48n2, 49–51, 52, 59, 90, 157n Tamari, Salim 106 Tammuzi school 105–07, 115 Tel Aviv (Israel) 73, 94

233

temporality 11–13, 139, 141, 194, 196 temporal and spatial relationship 70, 72, 73, 79, 139 see also chronotope Tiffin, Helen 79 Torok, Maria 53 transnational 198, 202–04 trauma 57, 120, 121, 125–27, 131, 132, 137, 199 chronic 10–11, 137 collective 18, 54, 136 and displacement 193, 194, 204 and memory 69, 75, 138 Tunis (Tunisia) 156, 157, 160, 161, 166, 170 two-state solution 47, 62 United Kingdom (UK) 10, 53, 92, 174 see also England United States (US) 20, 34, 38, 58, 135, 142–43, 147, 155n, 203–04 Van Dyck Bible 163 Van Leeuwen, Richard 74 violence 24, 88, 119, 120–21, 132, 146, 180, 187 aural 128–29 colonial 1, 2, 3, 14, 21, 52, 78, 92, 198, 205 gendered 105–06, 126–27, 202, 205 subjective 120, 127, 128–29, 131 symbolic 49, 95, 120, 124–26, 131 systemic 49, 95, 120, 122, 124, 130 Wald, Priscilla 78–79 Wannous, Sadallah 157 Watkins, Megan 132 Watson, Julia 84–85, 98 Weir, Shelagh 59 Weizman, Eyal 14–15, 49, 201 West Bank 3–4, 12–15, 18–19, 74, 94, 96–97, 137, 161, 173–74, 193, 197 annexation 14–15, 17, 41, 88–89

234

Post-Millennial Palestine

Whitlock, Gillian 84, 97–98 witness, bearing 12, 53, 68, 77, 83, 85, 185, 193–94 ethical looking 121, 132 witness-historian 184–85

Yahya, Abbad 6 Young, Robert J. C. 48, 60 Younis, Muhannad 3 Zionism 16, 79, 106, 143–44 Žižek, Slavoj 120, 124, 132