"접촉 공간과 몸에 새겨진 기억: 팔레스타인 작가 가싼 카나파니와 모나 하툼의 경우"

Abstract

This paper discusses the ways in which a Palestine novelist Ghassan Kanafani and a Palestine artist Mona Hatoum represent the traumatic experiences of diaspora and (absence of) the Palestine nation in their works. Being displaced from their own ancestral native territory, Kanafani and Hatoum recapture the traumatic memory inscribed in diasporic bodies and skin in different ways. This paper first looks at Kanafani’s novels, Returning to Haifa (1969) and Men in the Sun (1963), including Tawfiq Salih’s filmed production of The Dupes (1972) based on Men in the Sun, in order to examine how the novels embody the trauma of Nakba in the year 1948 and how they use the theme of masculinity to narrate diasporic bodies and their experiences of loss and shame. Exploring the theme of bodies, entrails, and skin in Kanafani’s novels and corporeality of memory in his narratives, this paper then analyzes Hatoum’s early videos and performance including Measures of Distance (1988) and The Negotiating Table (1983) in order to sketch out how the artist inscribes the public/political geography of contact zone unto her private body signified as the place overlaid with intimate traumatic memory and histories of the Palestine nation. Finally, this paper finishes with some brief comments on the relationship between epistolary styles and the theme of exile in Kanafani’s early works and Hatoum’s Measures of Distance.