Contemporary Palestinian Prison Literature: Ḥikāyat Ṣābir (Ṣābir's Story) by Maḥmūd Isā as a Case Study

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which dates back to the first half of the nineteenth century, brought occupation to the Palestinian people and caused oppression and suffering. This study examines the novel Ḥikāyat Ṣābir [Ṣābir’s Story] by Maḥmūd Isā (born in 1967) as a sample of contemporary Palestinian prison literature. The novel’s social and political resonances pushed Al-Jazeera television to turn it into a documentary film. Because the novel has received no prior scholarly attention, this article relies on the techniques and narrative structure of the novel. This paper examines the documentary values of the novel, its literary contributions, and its narrative manner, styles, and techniques. We use literary narrative analysis methodology, which draws upon Mieke Bal’s approach to narratology, as the theoretical basis for this. This article confirms that Ḥikāyat Ṣābir has a unique narrative-structural-fictional overlap; the novel includes a short story within the novel that is narrated by the protagonist, and the narrator is all-knowing, dominant, and omniscient. Furthermore, the novel features multiple narrative techniques and styles that occupy a great deal of space in the novel, rendering it a deeply polyphonic text.