Palestinian Literature

Elias Khoury’s novel Bab el Shams (Gate of the Sun), which came out in 1998 symbolically marking fifty years to the Palestinian Nakba, is perhaps the most comprehensive narrative of this ongoing event. This fascinating novel has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves. My suggested reading of the novel is inspired by and juxtaposed with Holocaust literature
and what might be called ‘Holocaust related critical theory’. This reading, I contend, is invited by the novel itself and is pursued from the perspective of a Jewish Israeli Holocaust and trauma scholar. The main argument of this essay is that the novel deals with the unsettling conjuncture of the extremely destabilizing, traumatized and decentred testimony of the Palestinian victim–
witness and the essential, collective Palestinian national epos  that frames these individual traumatized narratives. The former inevitably undermines the latter while, at the same time, the latter collectively frames the former. These tensions, integrations and disintegrations form the core theme of Gate
of the Sun. To put it differently, I contend that this novel is about the unsettling paradoxes of writing a polyphonic non-monolithic decentralized collective epos. This narrative of collective and individual traumas manages to unsettle old national structures and ultimately invites binational thinking.

The news of Indian migrant laborers traveling in a cement mixer because of the nation-wide lockdown is eerily reminiscent of Ghassan Kanafani's short story Men in the Sun where three Palestinian refugees suffocate to death while traveling in a water tanker in order to evade surveillance at a checkpoint. This is a short, comparative article where the condition of dehumanisation and superfluity experienced by migrant labourers and refugees, and its impact on the apathetic viewer are theorised

This study examines three Palestinian works, Hanna Ibrahim’s short story “Infiltrators,” (1954), Mahmoud Shukair’s short story “Mordechai’s Moustache and His Wife’s Cat” (2004) and Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance (2014). Remarkably, each features a Jewish Israeli as a central character in the story; more intriguing, in each, the story  is
mediated through the perspective of that character– focalized by
him or her. I address the significances generated by using focalization as a rhetorical strategy, particularly fraught because the perspective is that of a character from the other side of a national conflict. My analyses address whether the narrator reinforces the focalizer’s perceptions or undermines them, and how the technique of focalization unsettles established perceptions and offers critique of the system.  I work through how conveying a story through the perception of a character on the opposite side of the conflict foregrounds and complicates structures of representation and power dynamics.

The Nakba not only resulted in the loss of the homeland, but also caused the dispersal and ruin of entire Palestinian communities. Even though the term Nakba refers to a singular historic event, the consequence of 1948 has symptomatically become part of Palestinian identity, and the element that demarcates who the Palestinian is. Palestinian exile and loss have evolved into cultural symbols that at once help define the person and allow the person to remember the loss. Although accounts of the Palestinians’ experience of the expulsion from the land are similar, the emblems that provoke these particular memories differ. Certain mementos, memories or objects help in commemorating the homeland.
This book looks at the icons, narratives and symbols that have become synonymous with Palestinian identity and culture and which have, in the absence of a homeland, become a source of memory. It discusses how these icons have come into being and how they have evolved into sites of power which help to keep the story and identity of the Palestinians alive. The book looks at examples from Palestinian caricature, film, literature, poetry and painting, to see how these works ignite memories of the homeland and help reinforce the diasporic identity. It also argues that the creators of these narratives or emblems have themselves become cultural icons within the collective Palestinian recollection.
By introducing the Nakba as a lived experience, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Middle East Studies, Cultural Studies, Literature and Media Studies.

عرض كتاب (العلاقات البحرينية الفلسطينية) لمؤلفه المؤرخ البحريني راشد الجاسم. "باللغة العربية" (كتب هذا العرض: د. علي فيصل الصديقي)

The book (Bahraini-Palestinian Relations) was presented to its author, Bahraini historian Rashid Al-Jassem. (wrote this presentation: Dr. Ali Faisal Al-Siddiqi)-  "In Arabic"

In the hands of Palestinian artists, the concept of bearing witness not only serves as a means of recording a past tragedy but also involves a complex repertoire of strategies, including interrogating the past, recreating it and, most importantly, forging resistance against the assassination of liberation itself. This article examines how artists of resistance, such as Naji Al Ali, Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani, use the concept of bearing witness to tragedy as a tool of resistance and to guard against the idea of liberation itself dying. It is argued that the state of Israel has used assassination as a means of extinguishing the will of the Palestinian people to resist, targeting both political leaders of resistance movements as well as cultural and literary figures.
Keywords: assassination policy, ethnic cleansing, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, Naji Al Ali, Nakba, Palestine
‘One nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.’
Arthur Koestler1
‘The dual injustice of exile and occupation could not break the will of a people bent on achieving freedom, dignity and redemption of history.’
Mahmoud

In the 1920s, the Palestinian ethnographer Tawfiq Kan'an examined the physical and narrative construction of Palestinian space by cataloguing the living archive of Palestinian sanctuaries. His collection of narratives, imbued in the sacred space of the "shrine, tomb, tree, shrub, cave, spring, well, rock [or] stone" is suggestive of cultural anthropologist Keith Basso's elaboration of "place-making" as learned from the Western Apache. Articulating two modes of disruption, place-making narratives preserve indigenous culture in the face of colonial conquest and unsettle colonial paradigms of spatial belonging and exclusion. Despite the efforts of settler colonial erasure, this interpolative practice has been carried through Palestinian narrative traditions into the present. Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007) illustrates an indigenous mode of seeing, creating, and contesting spatial narratives, disclosing the role of place-making in contemporary Palestinian literature.

Creative Writing
Writing the Senses / Writing the [Other] Body

This course introduces principles and strategies of creative writing in the genres of poetry, drama, prose (fiction and non-fiction), and translation. Students should expect to read and write extensively, participate actively in discussions and workshop, and proactively revise their work. The theme of this class is the writing of the body and writing with the senses, as well as exploring what it might mean to have a body and to be embodied in a society that marks bodies according to categories including race, gender, and nationality.
What does it mean to interact with the world through the body and through the senses – taste, touch, smell, sound, sight? How can we expand and deepen our writing by using our senses, particularly taste, touch, and smell? How do we write as people who are embodied and live in bodies marked for race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and socioeconomic class? What does it mean to write when we have been marked as “other” in terms of one or more of these categories?
We will use course readings as a guide for ways to write ourselves and our own experience, including experience of our senses, and to enrich our writing of characters and the viewpoints of other people in our writing. Each class will begin with two part exercises to generate material and will include discussions of elements including themes, voice, vocabulary, and style in assigned literature and workshopping of student writing. We will examine these readings for words and phrases that jump out at us, for techniques we can borrow, imitate, or steal, and we will use them as entry points into the conversation, practice, and discourse of creative writing.

Mourning is German-Jewish novelist Grete Weil’s aesthetic, moral, and intellectual project. My intent in this paper is to explicate and defend that claim. Weil’s two major autobiographical novels, Meine Schwester Antigone (My Sister Antigone) and Der Brautpreis (The Bride Price) deal with complex issues of guilt, Jewish identity, and irreparable loss; Weil is concerned to mourn these losses through texts that explore and ask questions of them. I will also examine Weil’s collection of short stories, Spätfolgen (Aftershocks), published in 1992, to show that mourning remained a consistent preoccupation as Weil continued her late-life writing. Meine Schwester Antigone and Der Brautpreis appeared in German in 1984 and 1988, respectively, and looked backward. The Aftershocks stories are set in the contemporary now of the early 1990s and work through ways that the Holocaust pervades the lives of survivors and second-generation Jews without regard to proximity to the event.
Weil mourns Europe, the Jewish graveyard. She mourns her husband, Edgar (Waiki), a playwright murdered at Mauthausen, her fraught relationship with Jewish identity, the children thrown violently into the backs of Nazi death trucks in Amsterdam, the German language, her dog, her hijacked country, the Kulturnation and its classical, humanist traditions of intellect and art. She grieves that she was forced to confront her Jewishness by the Third Reich when her life as a fully secular and assimilated Berliner had been lovely. She grieves her old age and incapacitation, ugly streets, and the pain of no longer being able to look forward to a new Gide or Mann that she must read the moment it comes out. She mourns her unstructured days that are shot through with brutal memories that are not just recollections, but the stuff of her life, the ground of her consciousness and identity. “Weil implicitly and explicitly poses questions that explore the difficulties of her own case history. What does it mean for a person to insist on national identity after fleeing that country and being pursued in exile? What do the terms ‘Jew’ and ‘Jewish’ signify to a woman with no belief in the God of the Old Testament and no stake in the success of a post-Holocaust Jewish nation, yet whose husband was murdered because he was Jewish?”

In this article, I argue that Mīrāl al-Ṭaḥāwī's Brooklyn Heights (Brūklīn Hāyts, 2010) and Salmān Nāṭūr's She, the Autumn and Me (Hiya, Anā, wa-l-Kharīf, 2011) call into question the very fixedness of the concepts of "homeland" and "diaspora/abroad," and obscure the distinction between the indigene and the relocated diasporic subject. She, the Autumn and Me (Hiya, Anā, wa-l-Kharīf, 2011) is the most recent novel by Palestinian Israeli writer Salmān Nāṭūr (b. 1949), a seasoned writer of short stories, novels and critical writings. Brooklyn Heights is the fourth and most recent novel of the Egyptian Bedouin Mīrāl al-Ṭaḥāwī (b. 1969), who stands out as the first Egyptian Bedouin woman to publish modern Arabic prose. Through their portrayal of characters who are outcasts or loners, these contemporary novels complicate and deconstruct axioms which imply a reciprocal association between homeland and belonging, on the one hand, and exile/diaspora and foreignness or estrangement, on the other. In this study, I interrogate portrayals of the homeland in both texts, as it is conceived through shades of belonging and foreignness; and how "abroad" is portrayed vis-à-vis an originary homeland, in layered diasporic terms, and yet also conflated with home and homeland.

World-Ecology, World-Culture, World-Economy: Crisis, Slump, Revolution?, University of Durham, July 2016.

'Making the desert bloom' was notoriously an ambition of the early Israeli state, strongly associated with Israel's first president and Zionist figurehead David Ben-Gurion. Reshaping Israel's environment through drastically altering the country's hydrological landscape served to symbolically inscribe Israeli ownership into the land, while increasing the country's economic potential (notably agriculture, but also supplying coastal cities). This practice demonstrated the new state's technological prowess on a global stage, aligning Israel with the Euro-American world through showing its shared adherence to dominant ideologies of mastering nature. American and European experts participated in 'modernising' Israel's hydroscape as part of a wider global circulation of American-led discourses of development in the mid-twentieth century (Linton 2010). Today it may seem as if water management expertise flows in the opposite direction, as Israeli politicians proclaim that the country's desalination technologies will end persistent droughts in California and South Africa. 'Bluetech' is an increasing Israeli export, with the country seeking to fashion itself as - in the oft-repeated phrase - 'the Silicon Valley of water technology'. Ben-Gurion's nation-building rhetoric is repurposed in Israeli government promotional material to serve Israel's neoliberalising economy, as the country bids for membership of the world system's core. Israel's key export until now has been military expertise and technology (Graham 2010). While water tech may seem a much less problematic export, apparently aiding global responses to looming scarcity, these domains are, as I discuss, not as far apart as they may at first appear. Drawing on disciplines including political ecology, science and technology studies and anthropology, this paper examines the ways in which contemporary local and global discourses about water and economics are registered in Israeli and Palestinian literatures, specifically what I call 'hydrofictions'. It explores the role of Israeli and Palestinian literature in reproducing or resisting unequal power relations brought about through Israeli control and militarisation of water supply. Crucially, it argues for the central role of Israel/Palestine in understanding the power dynamics, politics and cultural impact of global water crisis.

Yusuf al-‘Isa was an early pioneer of modern
journalism in Palestine which began to flourish
during the second Ottoman constitutional
period. During the years 1911–14 he worked
as the editor-in-chief of the Arabic newspaper
Filastin (Palestine). The texts written by him
reflect his broad cultural horizon, progressive
modernist thinking, open-mindedness, and
aversion to dogmatism. These writings also
manifest his commitment to secularism,
Ottoman and Palestinian patriotism, and
religious tolerance, as well as a respect for
and inclusive approach to other religious
and ethnic communities within the Ottoman
Empire.

Filmler, yalnızca görsellikten veyahut kurgulardan ibaret değildir. Filmler içerisinde toplumsal
gerçekliği, sosyolojik unsurları barındırır. Platon’un Devlet kitabında yer alan Mağara Alegorisine
benzetebileceğimiz filmlerin gerçekliğin birer yansıması olduğunu söyleyebiliriz. Filmlerin ardında var olan
gerçekliğe ise sosyolojik bir analiz neticesinde ulaşabiliriz.
Sınır, kısaca “komşu devletlerin topraklarını birbirinden ayıran varsayımsal çizgi” manasına
gelmektedir. Ancak tanımını aşan bir gerçeklik olarak “sınır” içerisinde birçok hayat, hikâye, kültür ve
sosyoloji barındırmaktadır. Devlet sınırlarını sosyolojik açıdan inceleyen sosyoloji biliminin bir alt dalı olarak
“Sınır Sosyolojisi” henüz yeni bir alandır. Sınır Sosyolojisi, sınırın ardında yatan sosyolojik gerçekliğin
peşindedir. Toprak üzerine çizilen sınırların günümüz de insan zihninde yaratmış olduğu etki ve toplumsal
ilişkilere verdiği biçim sosyolojik olarak ele alınması gereken önemli bir husustur. Bu çalışmada
yönetmenliğini Eran Riklis’in üstlendiği, olayların İsrail ile Filistin sınırında geçtiği 2008 yapımı “Limon Ağacı”
filmi sınır olgusu perspektifinden ele alınmıştır. Çalışmamızda sırasıyla Sınır sosyolojisi, İsrail-Filistin Sorunu
ele alınmış ve Limon Ağacı filmi sosyolojik açıdan incelemeye tabi tutulmuştur.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Sınır, Sınır Sosyolojisi, Sınır Algısı, Filistin Sorunu, Limon Ağacı.

كتاب مرجعي علمي للدخول في دراسة المسجد الأقصى المبارك، يحتوي على معلومات أساسية حول المسجد الأقصى المبارك ومدينة القدس في محور المفاهيم، ومحور التاريخ، ومحور الأقصى عند غير المسلمين، ويعتبر مرجعاً أساسياً لمن يرغب بالبدء بالدخول في دراسة المسجد الأقصى المبارك.

Discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are rarely far from the topic of the Holocaust, often taking the form of competitive victimhood, as supporters of both sides politicize the memory of the genocide for their political gain. In her 2010 novel Mornings in Jenin, Palestinian-American Susan Abulhawa interweaves a Palestinian narrative of history-including the Nakba, that is, the destruction of historical Palestine in 1948, the ongoing conflict and the Israeli occupation-with Holocaust memory. By acknowledging rather than minimizing or denying the Israelis' cultural trauma, she takes a stance of empathy, which researchers consider a prerequisite for peaceful conflict transformation. I contend that Mornings in Jenin exemplifies how cultural texts not only provide a space to explore how new mnemonic links are being drawn up against contested and reified national narratives in Israel/Palestine but also play a political role by performing a narrative that acknowledges the cultural trauma of the other side.

This article provides an overview of the reception of Palestinian Arabic literature in French translation from the first publications in 1970 until the present day. It follows this history and offers insights at its main actors, whether translators or publishers, and thus describes it as a variation on the conditions that govern the reception of Arabic literature in translation in the French literary market: it follows its general patterns (e.g., an over-politicized reception that stresses the testimonial and the documentary dimensions over the literary ones), but also presents original characteristics (notably, the strong presence of Mahmud Darwich’s towering figure).

My Paper presented at Diyar's Seventh International Conference on " Palestinian Identity in Relation to Time and Space" held in Bethlehem in August 2013. It looks at Mahmoud Darwish's Writings in chronological order and how Bibilcal texts and themes were used in what context and why.
http://www.amazon.com/Palestinian-Identity-Relation-Time-Space/dp/1502713462/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1424009505&sr=8-1&keywords=palestinian+identity+in+relation+to+time+and+space

Contemporary Palestinian adaptations of Red Riding Hood tale focus on figures representing the future generation (Little Red Riding Hood) and the immediate threat to it (the wolf) but completely ignore the figure of the grandmother, who often represents the past. This choice seems particularly surprising given that Palestinian society is deals a lot the past and memory questions besides the collective and political history — because of its history and the political reality in which it lives.

העיבודים הפלסטיניים העכשוויים למעשייה "כיפה אדומה" מתמקדים בדמויות המייצגות את דור העתיד (כיפה אדומה) ואת האיום המיידי עליו (הזאב), אך מתעלמים לחלוטין מדמות הסבתא, שמייצגת לעתים קרובות את העבר. בחירה זו נראית מפתיעה במיוחד לאור זאת שהחברה הפלסטינית היא חברה העוסקת בשאלות על העבר ועל הזיכרון וההיסטוריה הקולקטיבית והפוליטית — בשל ההיסטוריה שלה והמציאות הפוליטית־מדינית שבה היא חיה. נוכח זאת ההתעלמות מהסבתא בעיבודים של המעשייה "כיפה אדומה" ניכרים ואף צורמים, ודורשים התייחסות.

Open-air prison, Terror, Resistance, Occupation, Siege, Trauma, Bare humanity: irrespective of when, where, and to whom the word is uttered, Gaza immediately evokes an abundance of metaphors. Similarly, a plethora of metaphors also invoke Gaza: Crisis, Exception, Refugees, Destitution, Tunnels, Persistence. With essays written by journalists, writers, doctors, academics and others, this volume uses metaphor to record and historicize Gaza, to contextualize its everyday realities, interrogate its representations and provide an understanding on Gaza's real and symbolic significance. The essays within, written both from within Gaza and outside, touch on life and survival, the making of the Gaza Strip and its increasing isolation, the discursive and visual tools that have often shackled Gaza behind misunderstandings, and what Gaza contributes to our understanding of exception; inequality; dispossession; bio-politics; necro-power and other terms which we rely on to make sense of our world. The volume reveals how Gaza is an outcome of specific historical and spatial practices, and not simply a metaphor of a far-away humanitarian disaster or place of incomprehensible violence. Gaza As Metaphor demonstrates that Gaza is a real place, an inseparable part of the past, present, and future condition of Palestinians, in particular, and of dispossession, more generally.

On a village in Palestine called Ein Houd: By the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, its Palestinian Arab inhabitants were dispersed, exiled or moved up the Carmel establishing a new Arab Ayn Hawd that was deemed "illegal" by the State of Israel for decades. Their stone homes were not destroyed. In 1953, Marcel Janco,  a luminary of the Dada movement  established an artists' cooperative community in the houses of the village renamed Ein Hod.

This essay provides an analysis of “Tibaq,” an elegy written in Edward W. Said’s honor by the acclaimed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Noting that the poem exhibits aspects of a number of genres and demonstrates Darwish’s generally innovative approach to traditional literary forms, I consider how he has transformed the marthiya, the elegiac genre that has been part of the Arabic literary tradition since the pre-Islamic era. I argue that Darwish used the elegy-writing occasion to comment on Said’s politics and to make respectful use of his critical methods, particularly his interdisciplinary borrowing of counterpoint, a concept typically used in music analysis. By reworking the conventional marthiya to represent Said’s life in exile and his diverse body of work and by putting his contrapuntal method into practice in the conversation depicted in the poem, Darwish elegizes a long-lasting friendship and shores up a shared political cause. http://www.mlajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1632/pmla.2007.122.5.1447

For the past twenty-five years, and particularly during the last decade, the idea of the Arab Jew has been debated in multiple forums in different parts of the world. The Arab Jew is represented in literature and film, discussed in blogs and social media, and featured in live performances. It has informed scholarship in literary and cultural studies, sociology, and history, in Israel, the Arab world, Europe, and North America. Yet the term “Arab Jew” remains controversial, especially in Israel, where it is widely viewed as a left-wing political concept. This article surveys the Arab Jew’s full range of expression to date, emphasizing the reciprocal movement of ideas across different geographies and between discursive spheres. It argues that the Arab Jew idea has developed as both a project of political intervention into the present-day separation of Arabness from Jewishness and a project of reconstruction focusing on the Jewish past in the MENA region. Examining recent episodes in the Israeli public sphere, the article investigates how contemporary discussions about Arab Jewish identity and culture utilize competing views of history. It concludes by reconsidering the relevance of the “Arab Jew” to the burgeoning historical scholarship on Jews in the MENA region during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In "Arab Critical Culture and Its (Palestinian) Discontents after the Second World War," Adey Almohsen historicizes the consolidation of a particular understanding of iltizam (literary commitment). By exploring specific Palestinian literary and cultural critics, Almohsen brings to the fore those writers that did not subscribe to that understanding or who otherwise wrote from a different set of concerns they viewed as central to the Palestinian reality. In doing so, Almohsen forces us to rethink the chronologies and categories that have emerged in the historiography to narrate Arab literary and critical output since the Second World War and the 1947-9 Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe).