Nostalgic Memory and Palestinian Identification

Abstract

Like those of many exiled Palestinians either inside or outside historic Palestine, the words of prominent poet Mahmoud Darwish express a nostalgia for a past that Palestinians experience when they identify themselves as “Palestinians” in a present in which there is no independent Palestinian state. In the wake of the events of 1948, al-Nakba emerged in Palestinian culture as a concept that signifies an unbridgeable break between the past and the present, and that romanticizes the Palestinians’ loss of the homeland as a loss of paradise. In her vast research on Palestinian exiles in Lebanon, Rosemary Sayigh describes their feelings of being expelled from paradise as a sentiment that is not exclusive to this specific segment of Palestinians.2 This articulation of a lost paradise signifies a nostalgia for a relatively distant past. Nostalgia, as Barbara McKean Parmenter notes in her book Giving Voice to Stones: Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature, became “the most characteristic element of Palestinian literature in the decades following al-Nakba” (1994: 43). In this chapter, I argue that this nostalgia informs the Palestinians’ cultural memory of loss of place in exile, through which both their sense of themselvesas Palestinian subjects and their identification with Palestine as their homeland are shaped and, crucially, reshaped.KeywordsSymbolic OrderCultural MemoryTraumatic PastArab SocietyLove StoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.