Palestinian Writer Research Articles

A study of National Consciousness found in the Heroic Children's Stories of Palestinian Writer Rawḍah al-Hudhud

A study of National Consciousness found in the Heroic Children's Stories of Palestinian Writer Rawḍah al-Hudhud

One Sky: The Palestinian Writer Liyāna Badr between Two Periods

Abstract The present article illustrates how the change in the geographic location of Liyāna Badr, one of the prominent Palestinian women writers, influenced her writing in thematic and stylistic terms. It shows how Badr’s writing shifts from descriptions of isolation and loneliness, alienation and yearning for the past, to describing feelings of rage and frustration with the reality of Israeli occupation, and how from an innovative and vague writing style she shifts to a realistic, simple, and direct style that reflects the themes of her stories and the messages she wishes to convey. In this way Badr reinforces the connection of her work with Palestinian existence and the reality of occupation, and does not let the contemporary writing directions adopted by the young women authors influence the degree of Palestinian-ness of her texts.

Literature of the Global Working Class: Guest Editor's Introduction

November–December 2013 • 35 W hen I began my PhD studies and told my advisor I would write my dissertation on contemporary American working-class women’s poetry, her response was, “Is there such a thing?” I do not tell this story to criticize my advisor—I heard the same question from almost everyone I discussed it with: writers , professors, readers. However, I knew that my own poetry was firmly grounded in the working class—before I started college as a thirty-sevenyear -old single mother (and the first woman in my direct line to complete high school), I had held many common women’s working-class jobs of the period: waitress, bartender, nurse’s aide, telephone solicitor. I wrote poems in my head while changing beds at nursing homes and mixing drinks, then sketched them down later when I had time. My mother, too, working class all her life, wrote poems; after she died, I found boxes of her poetry in a closet. And I knew I had read published poetry and fiction and creative nonfiction that spoke to me as a working-class person, of the structures of feeling found among the working classes, of work itself, of working-class humor, and, often, of the despair and danger that attends working-class life. The point is, working-class writing is out there, everywhere—the difficulty is that it’s not often recognized. I hope that this working-class writing issue of World Literature Today serves you, our readers , as an introduction to the enormous range of contemporary, worldwide, working-class writing . From Ireland, Michael Pierse brings us the writings of Paula Meehan, Martin Lynch, and Dermot Bolger, arguing that they are successors to the rich tradition of Irish working-class writing . Australian Sarah Attfield shares her own poetry, poetry by an indigenous Australian, and a working-class rap. Karen Kovacik interviews Ewa Parma, from Poland; we also include poems by Parma. Wendell Ricketts has translated two excerpts from contemporary Italian working-class novels; one, Michela Murgia’s “The World Must Be Told” is included in the print edition, and the other, Peppe Fiore’s “Anyone Can Be Replaced” can be found in our web exclusives. Englishman Alan Morrison contributed the poem “Twigworth Yews,” and Chinese worker-poet Zheng Xiaoqiong is represented by her poem “Blue.” American Kat Meads shares an excerpt from her new collection of essays, 2:12 a.m. Qalandar Bux Memon and Zeeshan Yousaf report on working-class poets of the Punjab region in an article that includes a translated poem by Arif Shah Parohna. In addition to the excellent writing in the print issue, you’ll find more working-class writing in this issue’s web exclusives: a YouTube video of Punjabi poet Arif Shah Parohna performing one of his poems; a sheaf of contemporary American working-class poetry; a second poem by Alan Morrison; a poem by Palestinian writer Ibtisam Barakat; Eun-Gwi Chung’s article introducing us to working-class poets of Korea; and links to more poems by Zheng Xiaoqiong. Finally, I hope you’ll check out “Publishing and Presenting American Working-class Literatures,” an article with live links to journals and presses that feature workingclass writing. I hope that you enjoy your excursion into working-class writing and that you will share your copy of WLT with those who ask, “But is there such a thing as working-class writing?” Jeanetta Calhoun Mish (www.tonguetiedwoman.com) is a scholar, poet, and prose writer who completed her PhD in American working-class literature at the University of Oklahoma in 2009. Mish’s 2009 poetry collection, Work Is Love Made Visible, won the Western Heritage Award, the WILLA Award from Women Writing the West, and the Oklahoma Book Award. She is director of and a faculty mentor for the Red Earth Creative Writing MFA at Oklahoma City University. Literature of the Global Working Class Guest Editor’s Introduction Jeanetta Calhoun Mish ...

Interview with Raja Shehadeh

For this thematic edition on occupation, the International Review of the Red Cross considered it crucial to complement the academic and military perspectives reflected in this issue with a viewpoint of someone who has lived and practised law in an occupied territory. The Review chose to interview Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian lawyer, writer, and human rights activist who lives in Ramallah. In 1979 he co-founded Al-Haq, an independent Palestinian non-governmental human rights organization based in Ramallah, which is an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva. He worked with Al-Haq as co-director until 1991, when he left the organization to pursue a literary career.Raja Shehadeh is the author of several books on international law, humanitarian law, and the Middle East, such as The West Bank and the Rule of Law (1980), Occupier's Law: Israel and the West Bank (1985 and 1988), and From Occupation to Interim Accords: Israel and the Palestinian Territories (1997). He was awarded the Orwell Prize in 2008 for his book Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape. His most recent book is Occupation Diaries.In this interview, Raja Shehadeh gives his views on the relevance of occupation law today, as well as his personal reflections on Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and the work of international organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Son‘allah Ibrahim’s al-Talassus: The politics of modernity in Egypt through the child-narrator’s lens

Son‘allah Ibrahim’s al-Talassus (translated as Stealth by Hosam Aboul-Ela, 2009) is a novel about the coming of age of a child through his deeply troubled relationship with his ageing father during the year 1948 when Egypt was still under British colonialism and monarchical rule. It is also the year of the Palestinian Nakba, when the Arabs and the Zionists were fighting in Palestine on the eve of the declaration of the state of Israel. This article focuses on the significance of recounting the events of the novel and this specific period in Egyptian and Arab history through the lens of the child-narrator. In the Arab world, Ibrahim is celebrated for his modernist stylistics and innovative writing devices and techniques. He has developed his novelistic project over more than 40 years through a variety of narrative structures whilst stirring massive debate and extended discussions in relation to his novelistic forms and content. In this context, al-Talassus is read here as an exploration into the complex and undefined emotions of a child who is bearing witness to his father’s demise through poverty and ill-health during a period in Egypt’s history which is perceived as “modern” through the child’s lens. It is the child who maps out for the reader the politics of modernity by chronicling the details of everyday events, routines, conversations, and encounters. The article draws on Henri Lefebvre’s perception of the “quotidian” as a “philosophical concept” in his work Everyday Life in the Modern World, in order to shed some light on the role which this concept plays in the life of Ibrahim’s young protagonist. It also reflects on the Palestinian writer Faisal Darraj’s analysis of Ibrahim’s treatment of historical time as deriving from everyday time, “as if everyday time becomes the master of all Time”.

Living between memory, war, and daily life

This paragraph written by the widely acclaimed Palestinian writer, Salman Natour, in one of his significant play about memory, as he tried to show the trauma of the Nakba for Palestinian society. His writing reflects many of the deep seated emotions embedded in Palestinian memory. I remember watching the play in Haifa in July 2004. Natour performed the role with his wonderful acts and movements. His play raised a lot of thoughts in my mind, especially when he started mentioning his granddaughter, Salma, and the stories that he told her and will tell. These Nakba (Palestinian Catastrophe) memories and stories, especially for the first and second generations, are often underpinned with feelings of fear, loss, humiliation, and insecurity. They relate to the year 1948 as a demarcating event in their lives. Simply, their lives were turned upside down in that year. Therefore, the Nakba is a key to Palestinian collective ...

The Miracle of Emile Habiby's Pessoptimist

This article argues that the ideological blockade in the U.S. academy against any assertion of pan-Arab nationalism is most transparent when it comes to Palestinian writers. A consequence of more than forty years of pro-Israel propaganda aimed at discrediting and silencing the Palestinian right of self-determination, the Pale stinian abyss in American academic cultural studies and also its twentieth-century world literature curricula is best illustrated by the invisibility of Emile Habiby's internationaly celebrated novel The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist . Written in Arabic and originaly published in Haifa in 1974, Habiby's self-ironic and wickedly sarcastic postmodernist pastiche quickly became a classic in the modern Arabic literature tradition and, after translation into English, named by critics a Palestinian masterpiece. For the Palestinian people themselves, from the Diaspora and those living inside Israel to the milions still under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, Habiby's Pessoptimist signifies the beginnings of a distinctive Palestinian national literary form. The purpose of this critique is to appreciate Habiby's logic on its own terms, but it is also to liberate his masterpiece from the Zionist corral—to project it outward into the world of other nations, peoples, and intellectual styles. In this task, a special emphasis is placed on the Arabic trickster figure, Juha , who, while completely singular in origin and meaning in Arabic folklore, has several compelling counterparts in world literature, in particular the African American Signifyin' Monkey. From this double-critique—establishing at once the singularity of Habiby's trickster figure and opening it up to other worldly comparisons—a new concept is offered, what the author terms "the blues people of Palestine." The concept is used to illuminate Habiby's iconoclastic narrative style, and to understand the extremely complex multi-voicedness of the text itself.

A Compass for the Sunflower

AbstractThis paper examines the distinctiveness in content and style of narrative texts written by prominent Palestinian women writers from Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, and the Diaspora, from 1948 to the present day. The paper diachronically examines the changes and developments that have taken place from period to period. It also synchronically examines the characteristics common to works from the same period and the differences between one writing locus and another. It shows that over the years, the writing of Palestinian women writers has become more refined in thematic and stylistic terms, while combining personal with national issues. Although the female self in the works of Palestinian women writers has become increasingly accentuated, the political dimension does not disappear from their work, and seems to be laying in wait to burst forth at any opportunity.

The Marginal as Central: Al-Jadid and the Development of a Palestinian Public Sphere, 1953–1970

AbstractThis article argues that throughout the 1950s and 1960s the communist-sponsored Arabic literary journal al-Jadid played a central role in creating a Palestinian-Arab counterpublic within Israel by challenging Zionist discourses and championing Arab and Palestinian causes. As a result, when Palestinian writers, activists and intellectuals in Israel were reconnected with Palestinians outside Israel after the 1967 War, they played a vital role in the development of a broader Palestinian public sphere that emphasized perseverance, ties to the land, and resistance to Zionist hegemony. rough content analysis of over 140 issues of al-Jadid published between 1953 and 1967, this article demonstrates al-Jadid's signifi cant role in communicating politically subversive discourses to an increasingly literate public living under military rule, as well as its part in the social circulation of these discourses in the region following the 1967 War. In doing so, it sheds new light on the nexus of media, literature and nationalism in the Palestinian context.

“Acoustic Walls”: On Feminine Voices in Stories by Sāmiyah ‘At‘ūt

AbstractThis article examines the new line of writing introduced by young Palestinian women writers, focusing on the works of the Palestinian-Jordanian writer Sāmiyah ‘At‘ūt and her use of a relatively new literary genre, that of the Very Short Story. This article argues that ‘At‘ūt exploits the conciseness characteristic of this genre to underscore women’s issues and the feminine perspective, and to subvert male literary writing conventions. It shows how the stories reflect a reality of social rupture along gendered lines on the one hand, and on the other, attempt to establish an alternative by revealing the thoughts of the female protagonists and the way in which they analyze and perceive their social situation.

La ocupación de Jerusalén Oriental y de Palestina en "El Barrio de los Cristianos", de Nabil Juri

This paper analyses the history of the occupation of East Jerusalem and the whole of Palestinian land through the remembrance of the widow of an resistance’s hero, as related by the palestinian writer Nabil Juri in his novel The Christian Quarter.

Literature and war: conversations with Israeli and Palestinian writers

Literature and war: conversations with Israeli and Palestinian writers

In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (review)

In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination, by Gil Z. Hochberg. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. 192 pp. $35.00. Ostensibly, Gil Z. Hochberg's richly comparative study of Hebrew and Arabic writers bears a certain resemblance to previous works such Ammiel Alcalay's oft-cited After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (1993) and more recently, Rachel Brenner's important Inextricably Bonded: Israeli and Writers Re-Visioning Culture (2003). But Hochberg's over-arching perspective leads her toward strikingly different conclusions than any previous work. Rather than stress the values of coexistence or evenhybridity, she attempts to demonstrate the need to free both Arab' and from their current status markers of fully separable . . . identities. . . . I am interested in the passage between the Jew and the (p. 16). Brenner and Hochberg examine some of the same figures (Israelis and other writers of North African descent) well Arab-Israeli writers such Emile Habiby (The Pessoptimist), Atallah Mansour (In a New Light), and Anton Shammas (Arabesques), each of whom has written in Hebrew or published their works for Israeli readers in translation. But In Spite of Partition is distinguished by its insistence that, rather than polarities, Arab and Jewish must be reevaluated inseparable identities. This book's greatest strength resides in its compelling close readings of literary narratives. Hochberg begins by noting the expressed antipathy toward the East in the discourse of early Zionist statesmen and ideologues, in the following: Ben Gurions statement: 'Israelis will not become Arab-like' . . . not only expresses Israeli antagonism toward anything Arab; it also attests to a terror at the very heart of the Israeli nation's enterprise, haunting it from within. . . . It is only by establishing a connection between these threats that we can fully uncover the internal phobia operating within the Israeli society still today (p. 14). In pursuit of this dynamic's complex reverberations, Hochberg finds ingenious ways to structure her chapters around dialogues, real or imagined, between North African, Israeli (Jews, Christians, and Muslims), and Palestinian writers. These include works by authors that will likely be unknown to most English readers, such Jacqueline Kahanoff and Albert Swissa, well more familiar figures such Albert Memmi, Ronit MataIon, and Anton Shammas. At the heart of In Spite of Partition's idealistic yet rational approach is the sober reality of two peoples whose lives and destinies are utterly inextricable due to the complex territorial, economic, and demographic circumstances in which they are rooted. In this respect, Hochberg's favorite trope seems to be that of traces-in Derrida's sense that one's subjectivity or identity always already bears traces of the other. Thus she maps out ways in which 'Jew' and Arab,' rather than representing two independent identities, are in fact inevitably attached (p. 2). She finds a tremendous range of illustrative examples that demonstrate the profound impact this essential paradigm has on the writer's imagination. For example, both the Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifah and the Israeli writer Orly Castel-Bloom experiment with the ways that bilingual narrative can stimulate the reader's understanding of the illusion of homogeneous national identity: calling attention to the 'familial' (Semitic) relationship of [Hebrew and Arabic], and further implying . . . that the two Semitic people might in fact be closer to each other than they realize, or wish to realize (p. 6). Besides offering a particularly astute reading of Anton Shammas' widely-translated and acclaimed novel, Arabesques (1989), Hochberg argues that the subsequent controversial cultural debate between A. B. Yehoshua and Shammas (over the latter's presumption in claiming the Hebrew language the natural provenance of Israel's writers) should be seen as an opportunity for rethinking the limits of national separatism and ethno-cultural segregation (p. …

“Only Palestine Is Real”: Virtual Counterpoints in Yasmine Zahran’s A Beggar at Damascus Gate

The epigraph to Palestinian writer Yasmine Zahran’s first novel in English, A Beggar at Damascus Gate (1995), reads, “All characters in this book are ficticious [sic], only Palestine is real” (vii). As Zahran’s novel unfolds, we begin to realize that this apparently straightforward epigraph is more ambiguous than it seems. The epigraph suggests that Palestine will be a character among others in the novel, the only one singled out as “real.” If this is so, however, is it not inevitable that parts of Palestine will be imagined, conjured up in words, like the other characters? The epigraph implicitly asserts this even as it attempts to claim an exception for Palestine. Zahran’s epigraph might have read: “This is a work of fiction; only Palestine is real.” That it does not do so suggests that the opposition between fiction and reality may be precisely what Zahran’s text will attempt to unravel.

“Only Palestine Is Real”: Virtual Counterpoints in Yasmine Zahran’s A Beggar at Damascus Gate

Al-Nakib first reads Palestinian writer Yasmine Zahran’s novel, A Beggar at Damascus Gate , written in English, as a national allegory in Fredric Jameson’s terms. She then argues that the novel’s too obvious performance as national allegory is perhaps intentionally misleading, and that it is more effective to read it, as she does, from the perspective of a “literary machine,” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s sense. In her third section, “A Contrapuntal Performance,” Al-Nakib re-examines some of the novel’s formal techniques— its use of multiple voices, its temporal and spatial jumps, and its proliferation of fragments—in order to demonstrate how it functions more contrapuntally than allegorically. In the final section, she examines the “virtual” effects (again, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense) of Zahran’s contrapuntal literary machine in relation to a Palestine-to-come.

Representation and its discontents: Orientalism, Islam and the Palestinian crisis

Orientalism has become the pivotal account of the relationship between Europe and its others. But its very focused and selective account of Orientalism has provoked controversy from all sides. Said's work must be seen as an argument rather than as the presentation of some transcendental historical truth because we may then see that it fulfils a much broader task set for the ‘Oriental’: to take back the power of representation from the dominant culture. Orientalism remains even more critical now than twenty-five years ago because the task of taking hold of self-representation has become, for Palestinians, a matter of life and death. Resistance (muqãwamah) was first applied to literature by the Palestinian writer and critic Ghassan Kanafani, and the example of post-colonial literature remains the crucial model for the Palestinian people. This article proposes that the post-colonial strategy of transformation turns resistance from a simple opposition to a control of the means of representation. Success for the Palestinian people will never come from armed struggle but from the control of representation and the communication of the Palestinian situation to a dominant audience. In this way the achievement of Orientalism can be extended to the level of contemporary politics.

‘No Common Ground’: Joseph Massad and Benny Morris Discuss the Middle East

If there has been little purposeful dialogue in recent years between Israeli and Palestinian political leaders, the extent of intellectual exchange across one of the world's most pronounced diplomatic fault lines has also been conspicuously modest. The two traditions are not on talking terms. 'The most demoralising aspect of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict', according to the Palestinian academic and writer, Edward Said, 'is the almost total opposition between mainstream Israeli and Palestinian points of view.... There is simply no common ground, no common narrative, no possible area for genuine reconciliation'. In that same article in the London Review of Books (14 December 2000), Edward Said suggested that respected Palestinian and Israeli historians and intellectuals should hold a series of meetings 'to try to agree a modicum of truth about this conflict ... which in turn might reveal a way out of the present impasse'. Not a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, at least not yet, but perhaps something along the lines of a 'Historical Truth and Political Justice Committee'. The obvious way of examining the potential of Edward Said's proposal is to engage prominent Palestinian and Israeli academics in discussion. That's what History Workshop Journal has done. Joseph Massad is a colleague of Edward Said at Columbia University in New York, where he is Assistant Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History. His most recent publication is Colonial Effects: the Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York, 2001). He was in Amman at the time this discussion was recorded in July 2001. Benny Morris is, with Avi Shlaim, perhaps the most prominent practitioner of what has been called the 'new' or 'revisionist' school of Israeli history, and is the author of Righteous Victims: a History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 (London, 2000). He is Professor of History at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. He took part in the discussion from Dartmouth College in New England, where he was a visiting professor. Professor Massad and Professor Morris had never met prior to this conversation. Both participants have had the opportunity to revise and correct their contributions. I moderated the discussion from London on a conference phone call. Andrew Whitehead

Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream

Metropolitan Detroit is home to one of the largest, most diverse Arab communities outside the Middle East, yet the complex world Arabic-speaking immigrants have created there is barely visible on the landscape of ethnic America. In this volume, Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock bring together the work of twenty-five contributors to create a richly detailed portrait of Arab Detroit. The book goes behind the bulletproof glass in Iraqi Chaldean liquor stores. It explores the role of women in a Sunni mosque and the place of nationalist politics in a Coptic church. It follows the careers of wedding singers, Arabic calligraphers, restaurant owners, and pastry chefs. It examines the agendas of Shia Muslim activists and Washington-based lobbyists and looks at the intimate politics of marriage, family honor, and adolescent rebellion. Memoirs and poems by Lebanese, Chaldean, Yemeni, and Palestinian writers anchor the book in personal experience, while over fifty photographs provide a backdrop of vivid, often unexpected, images. In their efforts to represent an ethnic/immigrant community that is flourishing on the margins of pluralist discourse, the contributors to this book break new ground in the study of identity politics, transnationalism, and diaspora cultures.

Chicana/o Fiction from Resistance to Contestation: The Role of Creation in Ana Castillo's So Far From God

past two decades have given us a wealth of Chicana and Chicano both because of the exemplary work of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project in discovering and recovering older texts and because of the sheer boom in Chicana/o publications over the last fifteen years. Even the nonspecialist now recognizes the names of Chicana/o authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Benjamin Alire Saenz, Ana Castillo, Rolando Hinojosa, and Denise Chavez, to name only a few. Their work, as as that of their contemporaries, complements the publications of the heralded Chicana/o movement, which included Corky Gonzalez's epic poem Yo Soy Joaquin (1967), Tomas Rivera's Y no se lo trago la tierra ... / And the Earth did not Devour Him ... (1971), Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Oscar Zeta Acosta's Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973), and Estela Portillo Trambley's Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings (1975). corpus of Chicana/o writing, in short, has grown exponentially. While many of the contemporary writers share the social and political concerns of the Movement writers, what I find particularly interesting is the strategic shift these writers have made from a to what I identify as a contestatory literature. This essay examines the theoretical framework and historical conditions surrounding that shift and illustrates by example how a contestatory engages in social critique. After charting the historical and theoretical ground for the shift from to contestation, I examine the role of the creation narrative in Ana Castillo's romance So Far from God (1993).(1) In establishing a framework for my definition of contestatory I would like first to consider literature. Taking her lead from the Palestinian writer and critic Ghassan Kanafani, Barbara Harlow has written the definitive text on a text which carefully examines the relationship between this and third world national liberation movements. Resistance literature, states Harlow, calls attention to itself, and to in general, as a political and politicized activity. of sees itself furthermore as immediately and directly involved in a struggle against ascendant or dominant forms of ideological and cultural production (28-29). writers from the various sites (e.g., Palestine, Lebanon, and South Africa) that she discusses, though not necessarily bearing arms, are so intimately tied into the armed struggle, that she is able to demonstrate powerfully the mutually reinforcing relationship between the cultural and paramilitary programs. Indeed, Harlow asserts, The writer, like the guerrilla of the armed liberation struggle, is actively engaged in an urgent historical confrontation. questions raised by the leaders are the questions faced by the writers as well (100). Consequently, the alliance between the national liberation movements and the that Harlow discusses demarcates a sharp boundary for me between and contestatory literature. For the term resistance literature is used most appropriately when discussing armed liberation movements that have direct links to territorial claims, where there is literally a battle for terrain and governance at stake. In addition while Harlow takes the necessary measures to define the terms of her argument, the term resistance literature has become nearly ubiquitous since the publication of her book eleven years ago. Critical omnipresence of a term, though not necessarily bad, typically drains it of its specificity. In short, I believe the term resistance literature has been bandied about so much that it has lost its critical impact and function. Before moving further ahead, I would like to reflect for a moment on the role of in the United States, which Harlow has absented from her study,(2) though many scholars, Ramon Saldivar among them, have subsequently adopted her model to talk about Chicana and Chicano literature. …

Out of Pentonville

On 17 January, Abbas Shiblak, Palestinian writer and researcher at the Arab League, was arrested along with six other Palestinians and several dozen Iraqi nationals and served with a deportation order on the grounds of ‘national security’. He was released on 6 February. This is his own account