Unfinished Work

Abstract

Where education opportunities in Palestine continue to narrow, this chapter considers Selma Dabbagh’s Out Of It as a work of fiction that is particularly attentive to scenes of education and as offering a critique of colonial modes of teaching. Modes of informal and formal education are a recurrent theme in the book and one that illuminates the wider hopes and experiences of the central characters, as they respond to the colonial character of their situation. The chapter reads the novel in light of Paulo Freire’s theories in Pedagogy of Freedom (1996), which emphasises the unfinished nature of the individual as a necessary condition for learning, and offers a model for anticolonial learning. Following this, the chapter contends that the subjective and unfinished work of some of the characters in Out Of It represents an alternative aesthetic response to the situation in Gaza, compared to that which is aesthetically ‘perfect,’ but that mimics a colonial voice with its apparent objectivity.