MJ: making and unmaking history

exile, homeland, childhood, memory, duality, repetition, form

Palestinian Literature and History: Argument

palestinian literature’s project in battling dominant histories created by Israeli narratives, appropriating land and culture

Sustained tool against this hegemonic denial, staging resistance by reasserting personal and collective memories to forma. Atapestry of national identity

Susan Abulhawa, ‘Mornings in Jenin’ (2010)

Traces 4 generations of the Abulheja family from 1948 Nakba to the 2002 Battle of Jenin

Framed by temporal markers of collective tragedy: stages origins, internal displacement, violence and exile that create Palestinian consciousness

Empowering personal trauma with political and historiographical agency

Ahmad Qabaha: novel and decolonisation

“the novel is a powerful means of decolonisation”

Affirming Palestinian indigeneity against dominant narratives of A Land without a People for a People without a Land

History is narrativised as Abulhawa deliberately records this, usign fiction to combat hegemonic narratives

Working with colonisation not as historical moment but alive process in which the human pierces a hole in history at a singular point

In a distant time, before history marched over the hills and shattered present and future…

a small village east of Haifa lived quietly on figs and olives, open frontiers and sunshine

Fischer and Mitchell: Palestinian past

as a past “always already lost”

The sound of

reaping that noble fruit

Women who “sang the ballads

of centuries past”

Ein Hod

Ayn Hawd

Forty generations of

living, now stolen

All carried away by the notion

of entitlement

As the heritage of

Jewish foreigners

By presenting the parallel, Abulhawa shows the inequality of the superior claim—there is no basis of Israeli heritage compared to Palestinian comparison to land

UN Mediator Bernadotte

it would be an offence…if these innocent victims…were denied the right to return to their homes

Right to Return —> was assassinated

they were slowly being erased from the world,

from its history…its future

Second Section

1967 El Naksa (the Disaster)

Forced to represent through dates: introduction to Palestine and how much postcolonial literature bears the burden of an explaining position

The Refugee camp + childhood

fractured site of permanent termporariness, ongoing history

Amal’s childhood setting is constantly ruptured by the violent realities of war

The 1967 attack: time after that ran in a continuous stream,

unmarked by day or night

Aisha’s “abdomen…a gaping hole cradling

a small piece of shrapnel

Ronit Lentin: the racist state

“the life of the occupied subject is akin to bare life that may be killed at the state’s whim”

Edward Said: Palestinian narrative forms

fragmentary compositions…in which narrative voice keeps stumbling over its limitations

The novel and trauma

Does not fit comfortably within trauma theory framework

The novel’s fractures accommodate multiple perspectives

Trauma is politically mobilised, enacting Palestinian resistance

Yousef, “the son” “the man”

the Prisoner

They have scripted lives for us that

are but extended death sentences

I won’t live

in their script

The narrative pastiche

Shifting protagonist places the novel as a continually empathetic force

The first/third person: what can the first person bear

Both an individualising and the collective—> the affect of closeness and continual death

Continual death and desensitisation—> the trope of starting with death

Poetry and education: the future cannot breathe

in a refugee camp

Abulhawa as a humanist story

possibility between and beyond two opposing stories

Amal’s exilic consciousness

Focalisation of Othered figures: namely her stolen brother Ismael/David

Abulhawa’s liminal diasporic positionality

Amal’s move to the US: section

El Ghurba (the stranger) not only removed from the homeladn but from herself

I dampened by senses…tucking myself

into an American niche with no past

The present keeps

the past hidden away

Palestine would just rise up from

My bones into the centre of my new life

A persistent pull…

calling me back to myself

Rumi, Enough Words

how does a part of the world leave the world

Edward Said: Palestinian diaspora

we must return ourselves to ourselves

Israel/David: argument

Amal’s own connection with homeland via memory recuperates Ismael’s/David’s Palestinian selfhood

The novels power to allow conversations between histories to exist without yielding the Palestinian fundamental right to resistance, arguing “its a human story” (Qabaha)

That this Arab peasant should have the gift of children,

while his poor Jolanta who had suffered the horrors of genocide, could not bear a child

Ibni!

Ibni!

Ayman Abu-Shomar: diasporic liminality

“Enables them to transcend the…essentialised dichotomy between self and the OTher…that often entrap them

Showing photographs: “the proof of what Israelis already know, that their history

is contrived from the bones and traditions of Palestinians

Gaping chasm between

truth and lies

Endings and reconciliations

the Amal/David reconciliation is not cathartic

The protagonist rarely dies at the end—> you cannot write a palestinian novel without tragedy—there are politics to consuming tragedy

The present day—> ongoing colonisation