The Thirdspace of Resistance Literature in Naomi Shihab Nye’s “1935” and Hala Alyan’s “Hijra”

Abstract

This paper examines the poetry of the two Palestinian American poets, Naomi Shihab Nye and Hala Alyan within the concept of the “thirdspace” of resistance literature. With this premise in mind, the study uses Edward Soja’s concept of “thirdspace” (1998) to examine the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye and Hala Alyan as an articulation of “resistance poetry” exemplified in Ghassan Kanafani’s book entitled Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine 1948-1966 (1966). The poem itself, as a form, is an imagined geography constructed by the poet’s personal and collective memories that build up his/her spaces of resistance poetry. In these artistic cartographies, memories traverse from contested lands and geographies to a “thirdspace” that recreates a timeline of stories and narratives that unfold the poems’ resistance manifesto. To foreshadow these imagined memories, the poem functions as: first, a documented tool of resistance to forgetfulness; second, an artistic device for articulating memory; third, a “thirdspace” where contested geographies of resistance and resilience dissolve to re-visioning history that curates hybridized literary spaces of prose poetry and cartographies of memory.