Out of time: colonial history in Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses

Abstract

In its broadest contours, this article seeks to foreground the importance of colonial history in postcolonial approaches to Palestine. After demonstrating that the hegemonic reading of the Nakba by the Israeli “New Historians” has largely obscured the teleology of Zionist settler-colonialism, it argues that postcolonial studies must follow Palestinian historiography in drawing on oral history to counter such narrative erasure. It then turns to Palestinian historical fiction and explores the functioning of orality in literary counter-narratives of the Nakba. It focuses on Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses (2007; trans. 2012), a historical novel which seeks to resolve the “symbolic problem” of the invisibility of the Nakba in global culture. By directly transcribing oral testimonies in its narrative of the destruction of Palestinian society under colonialism, this novel becomes riven between mythic and historical registers. Nasrallah’s attempt to produce Palestinian historical fiction as form thus reproduces the crisis of Palestinian representation in the form of historical fiction. It concludes that aesthetic resolution in the Palestinian case is impossible without national resolution in the form of return.