Arab and Latin American Literature: Mourid Barghouti, Najla Said, and Lina Meruane in Palestine

Abstract

Over the past quarter-century, the production of memoirs on Palestine in Arabic, English, and, more recently, Spanish animated the genre. This article compares diasporic memoirs of return to Palestine: Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s Ra’aytu Ramallah (1996), Arab-American author Najla Said’s Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (2013), and Chilean writer Lina Meruane’s Volverse Palestina (2013). Examining the narrative of return genre across three languages illuminates how Arab, Arab-American, and Latin American writers of Arab ancestry contribute to the rise of new memoirs in Arabic, English, and Spanish within a global cultural production on Palestine.