“A History Buried Alive”: Resisting Amnesia and Reclaiming Native Palestinian Ecology in the Works of Susan Abulhawa

Abstract

“A land without people for a people without land” was the Zionist slogan used to justify the Jewish settlement in historical Palestine. To prove that historical Palestine was unoccupied, Zionists have attempted to erase its native population from their land and from historical records, through the propagation of the myth that the Jews made “the desert bloom,” obliterating the agricultural practices of Palestinian Arabs. This article studies the deliberate attempts to use ecology as a means of cultural amnesia and its resistance by Palestinian writers. By examining the novels of Susan Abulhawa for remembrances that combat the strategy of forced amnesia of Palestinian ecology, this article finds that literature becomes lieux de mémoire that helps to resist erasure.