The Burden of the Past: Memories, Resistance and Existence in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin and Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses

Abstract

The act of remembering a traumatic past has become one of the strategies for Palestinians to counter-assert settler colonial efforts denying Palestinians the right of return and obstructing their reclamation of memory. I examine the poetics of memories and the politics of representations in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010) and Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses (2017). These novels present memory, whether individual or collective, as a non-violent resistance against the oppressor and an affirmation of the Palestinian national identity. Although Palestinian memories are characterized by compulsion to repeat, I argue this compulsive return goes beyond the psychodynamics of remembering purported by trauma theory, and includes moral, political and ethical responsibilities. Reading Palestinian literature in line with trauma theory decolonizes the theory and extends its analysis to events happening in the global South.