Tragedy and exile

witness, memory, identity, alienation, displacement, subjectivity, subjugation

Minor Detail stock sentence

Adania Shibli’s 2020 novel ‘Minor Detail’ begins with Israeli soldiers kidnapping, gang-raping and murdering a Palestinian girl in the desert in 1949–one year after the Nakba (Catastrophe) that dispelled and expelled more than 700,000 Palestinians and saw the birth of the Israeli state. Years later, a woman from Ramallah attempts to piece together a narrative of forgotten brutality in a landscape erased by ongoing Israeli occupation

what is exile linked to?

time/memory

Place

Land

trojan women adaptations

Tragedy of female refugees as leftover, spoils, residual witnesses across history

Jean Paul Satre 1965: Algerian Civil War

Omar Abu-Saada 2013: Syria: Trojan Women

argument: exile’s connection to home

it is exile itself that fortifies the knowledge, the connection to home which lives in that knowledge alone

Mourid Barghoutis ‘I Saw Ramallah’

Translated in 2000

1960s: emigrated to Cairo

1967: returned during the war

1977: expelled from Egypt to Budapest exile bc criticised Anwar Sadat

1996: returned to Palestine after 30 yrs and noticing changes

Anger, exile, movement, language, tragedy as a form disputed in practice

Tragedy, Exile, Form

Memoir as a form of self-performance

Tragedy doesn’t teach but finds the words and forms for the experience of displacement

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, ‘Prison in Windsor Castle’ early 16th c.

where he grew up:

“Where each sweet place returns full sour”

^^ use in relation to Rome and Ramallah

The Troy before you

is no longer Troy

Troy is

No longer Troy

Afrodit Angelepoulou

the city itself becomes one of the principal actors

Died/defending

their homeland

Betraying homeland

and country

Paul Eberwine

challenges the aristotelian model

“Laments have no peripeteia. They are one moment”

^ this is the play’s tragedy—unlike ‘I Saw Ramallah’: exile and movement means critical consciousness, where return works as peripeteia

Queens of Troy 2016

“Troy does not exist anymore”

“No! Syria will always exist…inside of us”

Tragedy and community

Tragedy problematises the community

The community carry memory and identity because its immaterial

But tragedy and land are inseperable

Land is a representation of identity

What does it mean to be a Palestinian without Palestine—> leaves tragedy in statis —> Barghouti turns to comedy= the farce of betrayal

Palestinian landscape

subject to Israeli toponicimide entrenched by Oslo Agreement

“Area A”, “Area B”, “Area C”

“Even think of going to a place so far…almost Area D”

Movement and subjectivity

Freedom of movemtn constitutes ways of beingg

Power and voice —> power and movement

Bureaucratic and violent structures

Little

village

Blank yellow space occupying the area

Where I imagine it…to be

Shibli: the landscape

you are constantly reevaluating the landscape emotionally—you don’t trust it

Coriolanus and Exile

Brutus and Sicinius leads the Plebians to banish Martius

Denigrates their capability to choose

Multitudinous tongue; let them not lick/

the sweet which is their poison

A foe to

the public weal

Would depopulate the city/

and be everyman himself

Banished/as an enemy to

the people and to his country

I banish you

there is a world elsewhere

Unshout the noise

that banished Martius

• link to “each sweet place returns full sour”

Christina Wald: Coriolanus

Rome/home and a place of exile

Barghouti: tragicomedy and Palestine

Post-Oslo Palestine—> the farce of Palestinian lives, and the Palestinian Authority’s role in controlling voice and resistance, using their own defeatist rhetoric

Feelings of disillusionment, anger and betrayal—> attempting to catch the Palestinian consciousness, through the ridiculousness of their situation

Politics as a theatre stage, a comedy

Barghouti returns and feels alien, goes through the world acting the fool—> Palestinians acting both merry and melancholy in continual loss and resistance

Faber: Comedy

laughter allows an audience to be more open emotionally to tragic experience

The situation is tragic but the tragedy is always tinged with comedy because it is without majesty.

we fall silently, without that resounding noise that accompanies the fall of the hero in Greek or Shakespearean tragedy

Hamamra, Qabara, Qinnab: power of exile

appropriates exile as a subjective space of creativity and critical consciousness that allows for fighting against corruption” in respective homelands (connections to Hamlet)

^^this is the difference from TW/MD: different registers of exile, movement and resistance

Palestinian Authority’s defeatist rhetoric

Words, words, words O Prince of Denmark

Hammara, Qinnab, Qabaha: Anger

troubled exilic returns and a state of anger at those who have internalised defeat

E.g Hecuba, Corionalus’ anger and betrayal

Hamamra, Qinnab, Qabaha: Barghouti on Hamlet

A conflict between two mighty opposites without any action

Impacts of the Oslo Accords

Palestinian Authority: limited self-governing in Gaza and West Bank

Formalised Israeli occupation

Sacrificed main national and collective rights—> divided Palestinians between multiple interests and parties

Hamamra, Qabaha and Qinnab: alienation

the post-Oslo disillusionment “makes Barghouti feel like a stranger in his native palce”

Hamlet: “but break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue”

Barghouti: Greek and Shakespearean

“Something is rotten in the State of Denmark, and that was the end of it”

“Oedipus cannot transport the catastrophe into a carnival or a festival”

We arabs have become used to reading the tragedy and the comedy on the same page in the

Same event and in the same treaty

O our beautiful martyr

Started to colour the tragedy with a hint of routine familiarity

The comedy of death, of funerals

mockery becomes one of the psychological tools that enable us to continue

He reached he

stood he paused

Hygiene obsession

jerry can, gauze, antiseptic, ointment

Infected bite

violent tremors, shaking, began vomiting

Right hand curled into a fist

and flung into her face

Left hand on

her stomach

Whole body

on top of hers

Still moaning

black mass

Have their

way with her

Poured onto the sand

which steadily sucked it down

The effacement is tragic—> destabilisation of history, decentring of narrative. Dispossession not only in exile from land but from history

Fatima Bhutto

Shibli documents the real story of a gang rape carried out by Israeli soldiers in the Negrev desert in 1949

When asked why they didn’t return her to her village, the captain said “it would have been a waste of fuel”

Twenty-five years to the

day for I was born

Find no

details

Collections of photographs and photographs

Israeli War Museum + Nirim Settlement

Maybe this

hut

Cummins

The only view we have comes from…the perpetrator

Cries beyond language

AIAI OIMOI

“Grief unfit for language”

Why be silent now?/

and yet why not be silent

In exile, the lump

in the throat never ends

(Words, words words/ we fall silently)

Andromache: you cry

my cry

Syria: Trojan Women (2016)

actresses spoke in native Syrian before an Anglophone audience—paradox between articulation and understanding

Trojan Women: end

before the actual departure of the ships

Limits action in liminal suspension

There is little hope of catharsis in the standstill

Minor detail: utilitarian prose

gaps which cannot be filled by explanation—minor resonances and details show limits of knowledge and the novels own limits of articulation—ends with death

Babbling in

Incomprehensible fragments

Intertwined with the

dog’s ceaseless barking

The minor chorus

dogs barking

Sounds of the wind

This type of investigation is

completely beyond my ability

Glimpse of a silhouette

maybe a girls

Shibli: minor details

unimportant minor details that emerge within a language

We sing for it only

so we may remember

Aeschylus, ‘Suppliant Women’

Argive king Pelasgos aware that “the wrath of Zeus, lord of the suppliants, endures”

^^ whereas TW: the argive army are not safe shores but a conquering force, promising a life of brutal slavery

Poseidon: “the women are soon to be

divvied up to masters

Talthybius: we’re capable of doing

whatever we will to you

Andromache: the house of the killers

of my kin

Dumped in

some ravine

Naked for

wild feasts to feed on

By marrying/I’ll kill

the very ones i hate most

Weiburg: witnessing trauma

trauma is suppressed not just through the violent content of tragedies…but the responses of the witnesses