“Only Palestine Is Real”: Virtual Counterpoints in Yasmine Zahran’s A Beggar at Damascus Gate

Abstract

Al-Nakib first reads Palestinian writer Yasmine Zahran’s novel, A Beggar at Damascus Gate , written in English, as a national allegory in Fredric Jameson’s terms. She then argues that the novel’s too obvious performance as national allegory is perhaps intentionally misleading, and that it is more effective to read it, as she does, from the perspective of a “literary machine,” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s sense. In her third section, “A Contrapuntal Performance,” Al-Nakib re-examines some of the novel’s formal techniques— its use of multiple voices, its temporal and spatial jumps, and its proliferation of fragments—in order to demonstrate how it functions more contrapuntally than allegorically. In the final section, she examines the “virtual” effects (again, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense) of Zahran’s contrapuntal literary machine in relation to a Palestine-to-come.