Palestinian Writer Research Articles

Палестина ұлттық бірегейлігінің анықталуы (таңдаулы әдеби туындылардың негізінде)

This article examines the phenomenon of the division of Palestinian national identity in relation to Israel based on the literary works of Palestinian writers. To conduct the study, there were used a specific historical method of analysis and interpretation of original literary works to work with the sources. There were selected such works of fiction for the study as Sahar Khalifa’s Wild Thorns (1974), Gharib Haifaoui’s Snatcher of Sleep (2012) and Ibtisam Azim’s The Book of Disappearance (2014) and Said Kashua’s Dancing Arabs (2002). Based on these materials, it is concluded that the Palestinian nation is divided against Israel, from attempted assimilation to armed confrontation. It also concludes that there is short-term pragmatism and a willingness of mostPalestinians to maintain economic relations with Israel,with a consequent increase in thenumber ofArabs who speak Hebrew and are familiar with Jewish culture.

Palestine in Geography and Fiction: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Using critical cartography studies as theoretical basis and argumentative entry, this paper examines the role played by mapmaking in essentializing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, expanding the gap between the two peoples and maintaining the current dilemma in the Middle East. The paper also draws on political/historical data and fictional narratives written by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani particularly his seminal novel Returning to Haifa to demonstrate that mapping and cartography are manipulated to achieve dubious political and military purposes. The argument in the paper emphasizes that imperial cartography leads to the mapping production of Palestine as a territorial space of ownership and control by non-Palestinian invaders. In his response to the colonial mapping of Palestine, which aimed to eliminate the country’s Arabi identity, Kanafani provides in his fiction alternative cartographies of Palestine to subvert the colonial mapping of his homeland. In other words, Kanafani attempted to reclaim his indigenous territory or part of it through literary maps drawn in his novel discussed in the paper1.

A Corpus Stylistic Analysis of Abulhawa's the Blue between Sky and Water

Palestinian literature received significance after Nakba (1948 Palestine-Israel war) and Naksa (1967 Arab-Israel war) and it laid an impact on Palestinian writers and there emerged a new form of literature called Palestinian American literature which got recognition in the 1990s internationally. After Nakba and Naksa many Palestinian families migrated to America. These Palestinians wrote literature in English that is called Palestinian-American literature. The aim of the stylistic analysis of Abulhawa's work to trace out how the writer constructs reality through lexical categories. This thesis also analyzes the work of Palestinian-American writer Abulhawa's novel, The Blue between Sky and Water, and focuses specifically on how the writer achieves her aims. At the same time, this stylistic analysis of The Blue between Sky and Water shed light on the use of Arabic words in English fiction which represent the culture and identity of the Palestinian nation. It explores the dilemma of Palestine that they become a foreigner in their native land. The researcher employed a mixed-method approach to conduct the present study. The researcher used Corpus stylistics tools to analyze the novel. The researcher traced around 6288 concrete nouns and 1634 abstract nouns from the sample respectively. The extensive use of concrete nouns showed that the main purpose of the writer was to get homeland and this piece of writing was not only art for art sake rather art for life's sake. The researcher traced out around 1400 adjectives from the sample of study.

“I’ll Dance for You, I’ll Dance for Me, I’ll Dance for the Sake of Dancingˮ

Abstract This article examines ʿAtaba thaqīlat al-rūḥ (“Threshold of heavy spirit,” 2011), a novel by the new generation West Bank writer Māyā Abū l-Ḥayāt, who is considered one of the prominent new generation Palestinian West Bank writers, in which diverse and unique use of a dance motif is found. The article reviews the history of dance in Arab society and the meanings that it had in the past and currently has in Arab society and culture. It illustrates how Abū l-Ḥayāt uses each of these meanings throughout her novel in order to reveal the female soul and the status of women in Arab society. The article shows how Abū l-Ḥayāt incorporates this motif into her novel in a unique and original way, thus exposing woman’s yearning for freedom, creating a new feminine language and undermining accepted norms.

A Comparative Study on the Chauvinism of Nationalist Discourse in Selected Poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Maya Angelou and Rudyard Kipling

Poststructuralists, such as Foucault, conceived discourse as "a form of power that circulates in the social field and can attach to strategies of domination as well as those of resistance" (Diamond & Quinby, 1988, p. 185). Discourse denotes a system of thought through which knowledge is produced, truth is constructed and maintained, and power relations are redefined. The current article examines the nationalist discourse disseminated and adopted in selected poems by the Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish, African American writer Maya Angelou and British writer Rudyard Kipling. Nationalist discourse, the article argues, usually revives the sense of resistance, self-esteem and pride in the subaltern groups of the colonized and the oppressed but breeds a quest for expansion and domination in the colonizer. It holds overt and covert chauvinistic implications that necessarily deepen interracial conflicts. The chauvinistic aspects associated with the poems include an emphasis on the hierarchy of races, race-based division of the world's continents, and homogeneity of races and cultures. The comparisons the article makes proceed from the essential representation of self and other and the subsequent feelings of disrespect, distrust and fear that characterize the attitudes and perspectives of people identifying with different cultures and homelands. The article questions the dominant narratives underlying national identity in colonial and anti-colonial contexts. It further questions the monolithic concept of home, which nationalists advance to fuel colonial expansion or anti-colonial resistance. The article finds that racial and cultural chauvinism lies at the core of the nationalist discourse the selected poems reproduce.

Ghassan Kanafani as a Revolutionary Intellectual, Humanist and Pioneer of the Literature of Resistance

This paper is an attempt to explore Ghassan Kanafani’s character as a revolutionary intellectual, humanist and pioneer of the Literature of Resistance. He is the exiled Palestinian writer who insists on voicing his distinctive identity when his writings emerge as diverse, imaginative and revolutionary in both content and style. He is the voice of the voiceless. His novels and stories have been rendered into several languages worldwide, including English, German and French. Obviously, he was influenced by his country’s history and culture and that’s why he has sought to reconstruct that history, set the record straight and reclaim the lost homeland. An understanding and appreciation of his literary works must be dealt with from within the political and literary contexts of the twentieth century that overtook the Arab world in general and the land of Palestine in particular. His creative writings reflect the dignity, defiance, steadfastness and human resilience of its Palestinian people who have been living under harsh circumstances of displacement and dispossession since 1917 with still nowhere to flee to, even in the sun.

THE PROHIBITED SPEECH ON THE SACRED PROFANE IN THE LITERATURE OF THE ARAB WOMAN: AREEJ 'ASSAF DAMOUNI'S NOVEL: “ANA ISTITHNA … FAHDAR / I AM AN EXCEPTION…BEWARE!" AS A SAMPLE

Each woman has her own creative moment and her special tendency for creativity. The woman has taken responsibility to express herself in a literary writing that interrogates feelings and experiences that differ from those that the man expresses in his writing. Through her writing, the woman can crystallize characteristics and features that light areas and spaces that have been considered shameful throughout the period during which the man has monopolized writing creative texts. In writing, the woman can give up the 'moral' requirements that surround her as an objectified woman, who submits to the 'will' of society, in order to be able to come closer to those intimate spots that make her entity appear in its particularity, its distinction, and its opposition to the prevailing values of masculinity. The woman has proved that she can produce literature of high quality from the perspective of her human suffering that rages through emotional feelings that are unique literarily, physically and intellectually. Because the Arab woman has read and written for decades according to the conditions of the man and under a curtain of several ideological wrappings, her voice has remained excluded and she has remained forbidden to make her voice heard, to show her concerns and to express her opinion. As a result of unjust social measures, we see that many Arab women writers have broken their silence and started crying loudly. Among these writers is the Palestinian writer Areej 'Assaf Damouny, who wrote the novel Ana Istithna'… Fahdar/ I am an Exception…Beware. Like other women writers, Areej 'Assaf Damouni seems to say in her discourse: We are in need of women who reveal a genius that exceeds and challenges the man's genius, which implies a call for the woman to enter worlds that have been a monopoly for the man. Article visualizations:

Display of national identity in modern Palestinian literature

In the first half of the twentieth century, Palestine was shocked by serious political, social, and literary changes. The writers felt the need for a new type of literary work that could capture and express current historical events and circumstances, as well as in order to move towards change. Literature has become a kind of barometer of the mood of the nation. With the beginning of the new century and the change in the political situation in the country, the Palestinian national identity undergoes changes, losing its sharp political color, which was also reflected in literature. The writers’ thoughts are not only ideas about national independence, political freedom, they give way to topics such as economic life: wealth and poverty, the labor market, consumer protection, as well as women’s freedom, political and ideological contradictions. The article discusses the main meanings of the concepts of “identity”, “national identity”, and their reflection in the works of young Palestinian writers such as Ziyad Khaddash, Jamal al-Qawasmi, Ibtisam Azem, as well as in the work « في حضرة الغياب » (“In the Presence of Absence”) of the classic of Palestinian literature, Mahmoud Darwish, in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The main aspects of national identity are highlighted in the discourse of prose works of these writers. Key words: national identity, Palestine, Israel, new generation, new subjects, alienation, homeland.

Affiliation and Alienation in the Works by the Palestinian Writer Ghassan Kanafani

Affiliation and Alienation in the Works by the Palestinian Writer Ghassan Kanafani

Time and Space in the Novels of Palestinian Writer Sahar Khalifa

This article seeks to examine the connections between time and space in the novels of the prominent Palestinian writer, Saḥar Khalīfa. In her writing, Khalīfa emphasizes the status of women in society. She describes Palestinian society, and links each of her works to the collective Palestinian struggle and the parallel female struggle. She draws inspiration from her personal identity, and contributes to the development of a cultural discussion and creation of a collective identity. Khalīfa’s works constitute a broad literary corpus, describing through time and space the events of Palestinian society in general and the status of Palestinian women in particular. These events constitute a chronological timeline that reflects processes of forming a Palestinian collective identity, and in a narrower circle it describes the changes that have taken place in Palestinian women’s lives, and the processes that contributed to shaping their identity in light of political-national changes. Thus, the connection created in Khalīfa’s novels between historical time and physical place is an inseparable part of the entire range of literary means that drive the plot and emphasize the role and status of Palestinian women in society.

MEMPERTAHANKAN TANAH AIR PALESTINA PADA PUISI “QAṢĪDATU AL-ARḌI” DALAM ANTOLOGI AL-AʻMĀLU AL-KĀMILATU KARYA MAḤMŪD DARWĪSY ANALISIS SEMIOTIK

<p>The condition of Palestine which has been occupied by Israel for a long time and has yet to be resolved, encourages poets to give birth to literary works in which echoed the suffering experienced by the Palestinian people. One of them is the poem of Maḥmūd Darwīsy entitled "Qaṣīdatu Al-Arḍi" in anthology Al-Aʻmālu Al-Kāmilatu. The poem reflects the message of revealing encouragement for the community in fighting for the Palestinian homeland and bringing up Palestinian nationalism. Therefore, the aim of this study is to uncover the meaning of this poem in relation to defending the Palestinian territories and uniting the nationalism of the people. The theory used in this research is the semiotic theory, which is a discipline that views the poem "Qaṣīdatu Al-Arḍi" in anthology Al-Aʻmālu Al-Kāmilatu as a semiotic marker where the meaning (signified) requires deeper analysis. Methodologically, this study uses the Michael Riffaterre semiotic model, a method that reveals the meaning of poetry technically using indirect expressions, heuristic readings, and hermeneutic readings. The results of this study found that this poem implies the struggle of the Palestinian people in defending their homeland where the action was manifested in large-scale demonstrations but unfortunately it did not even have any impact. Therefore, the only effective way to do it is by telling it through literary works such as in the title "Qaṣīdatu Al-Arḍi" in the anthology of AlAʻmālu Al-Kāmilatu. The work is a reflection of the suffering of the Palestinian people represented by the author, Maḥmūd Darwīsy, a Palestinian writer.</p>

The Wandering Palestinian as Reflected in the Novel Imra’at Al-Risāla by The Palestinian Writer Rajā’ Bakriyya

Abstract The article examines the writing of Rajā’ Bakriyya, who is considered a prominent new generation Palestinian woman writer in Israel, focusing on her latest novel, Imra’at al-risāla (The Letter Woman, 2007). It points to the way Bakriyya feminizes the novel from every possible aspect, even the national-political dimension which is integrated into the novel, creating a narrative which is truly her own. The article focuses on the integration of the national-political reality into the text, especially the female protagonist’s journey of wandering between homeland and exile, which is presented as a metaphor for the wandering Palestinian. Bakriyya articulates this journey in a unique way, as a journey between the beloved and a lover. Leaving the homeland is described as leaving the beloved while returning to the homeland is described as a returning to the eternal beloved one. The uniqueness of the novel lies in the innovative and unconventional way in which it describes this journey.

The Multiple Resistance Strategies for Survival under Israeli Occupation in the Novels of Sahar Khalifeh

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict that started after 1948 war persists to play a dominant role in shaping Palestinian resistance movement. Sahar Khalifeh is a renowned Palestinian writer of the West Bank which is one of the Israeli occupied territories of Palestine. The core theme of Khalifeh’s writings is the Palestinian resistance to Israeli Occupation. This article examines specifically the multiple resistance strategies adopted by both Palestinian men and women on a land which is under prolonged Israeli occupation. Indeed, the Palestinian resistance movement constitutes both violent and non-violent forms of resistance throughout their struggle for independence. Unfortunately, the media has sidelined the issue of civil or non-violent forms of resistance movements pursued by the Palestinians and represented the Palestinian resistance grossly as an act of terrorism or insurgency. This paper analyzes the different ways of resistance carried out by the Palestinians and the limitations thereof, as depicted in the two novels of Khalifeh–The End of Spring and the Inheritance.

The Translation of Mourid Barghthouti’s Autobiography as a Cultural Encounter

I saw Ramallah, is an autobiography of Mourid Barghouti, a Palestinian writer and poet. It is an honest and accurate account of a Palestinian who could not adapt to the changes that have taken place during his absenteeism. It can also be considered a precise manifestation of the national and political identity of the author. It is about the abandonment and loss that Palestinians feel both in Palestine and in the Diaspora. I saw Ramallah is the type of literary genre that won the admiration of Edward Said, who considered it as, “one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement that we now have.” The aim of this study is to explore translational problems and challenges of this autobiography into English by Ahdaf Soueif, the celebrated Egyptian novelist and critic. This study examines some of the translation strategies adopted by Ahdaf Soueif in handling the complexity posed by cultural-bound expressions since such expressions are bound to pose a real challenge for the translator. This study underlies the role of language in reflecting the realities of an entire community; all encompassed as facts, memories, imagination, and fiction.

Ghassan Kanafani: The Palestinian Voice of Resistance

Ghassan Kanafani is a Palestinian writer who is has raised his voice against injustice and tyranny of Zionist regime in his writings. He is the voice of subaltern or voice of voiceless and through his writings one can easily trace out the struggle which he has undergone throughout his life but has been firm in his resolution to speak against any kind of injustice done against his countrymen. Kanafani have tried to highlight issues related to humanity through his writings. So in depiction about issues related with humanity his perspective is to raise his voice against all kinds of racism, imperialism and atrocities. In his works he has depicted characters who are trying to uplift themselves from all kinds of colonial encounters. Characters who are trying to assert their autonomy in adverse situations, who are trying to liberate themselves from various kinds of exploitation, oppression, persecution and inhuman activities, are part of their writings.

Mahmoud Darwish: Literature and the Politics of Palestinian Identity

Mahmoud Darwish: Literature and the Politics of Palestinian Identity

Double Exposure: A Jewish–Palestinian Anthology That Bridges Cultural Divides

Double Exposure is an anthology about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict penned by diaspora playwrights of Jewish and Palestinian descent. It is the first English-language anthology worldwide in any genre by Jewish and Palestinian writers. In this interview, co-editors Stephen Orlov and Samah Sabawi discuss the value of the diasporic perspective, the impacts of cultural memory and postmemory, and the purpose of bridging cultural divides.

Between Revision and Return: Emile Habiby’s Pessoptimistic Response to Postcolonial Theory

This essay explores how literary postcoloniality, postmodern aesthetics and local narrative traditions are historicized in modern Arabic literature, in particular in the novel of Palestinian writer Emile Habiby (1922–1996), الوقائع الغريبة في اختفاء سعيد ابي النحس المتشائل : قصة (The Mysterious Facts of the Disappearance of Saeed abi Nahs al-Mutashail: A Story) (1974). As an implicit critique both of postcolonial reading categories and postmodern writing, the novel recycles classical Arabic prose (most notably the maqama and the One Thousand and One Nights), French literature (Voltaire’s Candide) and Arabic poetry to offer a different historiographical approach to the postcolonial moment in which colonial and anticolonial cultures coexist. I argue Habiby’s recycling of classical prose opens up possibilities for rewriting the history of the Arabic novel and responds to postcolonial criticism’s problematic privileging of discourse over form. In mocking the expectation of realistic representation, the novel suspends the tension between retaining history and liberating the contemporary Arabic text from the past, specifically by foregrounding traditional narrative forms within the long form of the novel. As such, it invites us to reassess the resurgence of classical narrative forms in the period known as النهضة (al-nahda) or Arab Renaissance (1798–1939) as an integral moment of negotiation between the تراث (turath) or heritage and the modern (imported) novel form. In revisiting this significant historical moment, the novel historicizes both accounts of literary modernity and postcolonial representation and demands a revisionary literary history that could remind postcolonial theory of the need for an open and engaged commitment to singular “postcolonial” conditions.

Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine by Lital Levy

Reviewed by: Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine by Lital Levy Riki Traum Lital Levy, Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. 360 pp. "Who will tell our story? We, who walk upon this night, driven out of place and myth. The myth that could not find a single one among us to testify that the crime had not taken place. If we are not we, then they are not they. But particulars are particulars—the thief's pretext." —Mahmoud Darwish1 Edward Said introduced the idea that postcolonial writers bear their past within them as "re-interpretable and re-deployable experiences in which the formerly silent native speaks and acts on territory taken back from the colonialist."2 His words resonate decades later, in the works of Israeli and Palestinian writers and poets. In many ways, Lital Levy's Poetic Trespass, which studies the inseparable paths of Hebrew and Arabic, starts exactly where the silent native Palestinian or Jewish writer locates the appropriate linguistic "territory" and speaks. Poetic Trespass profoundly identifies linguistic liminality within Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli literature and its interrelation with Mizraḥi literature. It brings together historical moments in which the past is abruptly taken and consequently dies, and the future is yet to be born and is hence questionable. In this context, the nakba, for the Palestinians, and the immigration to Israel, for Jews, are two focal and vivid examples. For Levy, however, this liminal stage creates poetic possibilities that deserve special scholarly attention. Moreover, these experiences have become points of encounter where a literary text meets its other, and historical circumstances generate circles of linguistic identity, by their own merits and crucial impact. The attention that Levy draws to this hyperawareness of language to its Other and to itself, as well as the different representations of this hyperawareness, unveils a crucial aspect in the contemporary Israeli politics of identity. In this context, the book presents Mizraḥi writers and poets who resist the politics of identity by rendering their linguistic identity as an open and heterogenic space.3 Levy then examines different linguistic strategies and practices emerge amid displacement of ethnocentric domain and recreate poetic visions and possibilities. No-man's-land, [End Page 331] a saturated term that becomes a theme in the book, becomes a palpable metaphor of the book's zone of study and exploration; "The cultural space of in-betweenness, encompassing contact zone and no-man's-land" (12). Although Levy anchors the term in its scholarly context, she clearly uses it as a zone and form of resistance and subversion. Poetic Trespass studies the complex multi-layered dialogue between Hebrew and Arabic and the cultural functions and meanings of Arabic in Modern Hebrew literature. This no-man's-land can be seen as the "forsaken zone" between Hebrew and Arabic, where writers and poets wander between the two languages, but also create alternative standpoints and political stances. At the foundation of the book lies the presumption that the migration between Hebrew and Arabic opens new cultural-cum-political "redemptive" possibilities, beyond the narrowly national ones, "where writers transgress the boundaries of language and identity inscribed in sociopolitical codes of the state" (3). This poetic insight is refreshing in itself and requires the clarification of the book's two conceptual axes. The first axis is the "hyperlanguage" that Levy coins and describes as "excessively performative, self-aware literary language" (12). Hyperlanguage is the exact dialogized state between Hebrew and Arabic which anchors the literary works discussed in Poetic Trespass in a wider socio-political concept. It is employed at different levels of visibility, but it illuminates the creative state of mind of its writer, who links "the political and the metaphysical." The second axis is the literature of no-man's-land, the subject of the book, and a literature that emerges in the bilingual interaction between the two languages. No-man's-land, in Hebrew, in Arabic, and in their relationship, evokes simultaneously political and mental intersections while translating the unclaimed and abstract political zone into a palpable and visible literary space, now inhabited by the...

A. B. Yehoshua and David Grossman: towards postnational(ist) allegories?

This essay reads a selection of the fiction of Israeli writers A. B. Yehoshua and David Grossman against these authors’ non-fictional pronouncements in favour of a “Two-State” solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Moore-Gilbert argues that Yehoshua’s The Liberated Bride (2001) and Grossman’s See Under: Love (1989) and To the End of the Land (2010) in fact gesture towards the “One-State” aesthetic that was similarly identified as a strain in the work of Palestinian writer Anton Shammas (see the previous essay). At the centre of this essay is the claim that Yehoshua and Grossman, like Shammas, trace the blueprint of this “common culture” through a shared interest in Arabian Nights. The first part of this essay explores the Israeli writers’ engagements with this key intertext, and the second part draws out the cultural and political implications. While cognizant of the risks involved in this Israeli appropriation of Arab culture, the essay argues that Arabian Nights becomes in Yehoshua and Grossman’s texts a vehicle for imagining a post-nationalist culture.