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Palestinian Literature: Occupation and Exile
Abstract
This article explores the origins of Palestinian literature vis-à-vis the historical, political and literary backgrounds of Palestine. It argues that understanding the forces that informed Palestinian writers is necessary to appreciate this literature. From the British Mandate to 1948 and its aftermath to the 1967 War and the continued Occupation, the article looks at major themes as writers search for imaginative forms to reconstruct their history and voice their identity. Going beyond the imposed legacy of history, Palestinian writers reclaim their loss and dispossession in miraculous words. The emergence of “Poetry of Resistance” in the 1950s and thereafter is a witness to the resilience of Palestinians inside Israel. Moreover, as Palestinian writing continues to flourish, it builds on early writing, rejecting the “nightmare of history.” Palestinian literature is at the heart of the Palestinian struggle.
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Notes
Ghassan Kanafani has been credited for coining the label “Resistance Literature” in 1968. See “Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine,” Afro-Asian Writings 1:2–3 (1968), 65–79.
For a tracing of the importance of Jerusalem throughout history, see City of the Great King: Jerusalem from David to the Present , ed. Nitza Rosovsky (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), especially the article “Palestinian Images of Jerusalem,” by Muhammad Muslih, 178–201.
Naser el Din al-Asad, Al-Ittijahat al-adabiyyah al-Hadithah fi Filastin wa al-Urdun (Modern Literary Trends in Palestine and Jordan) (Arab League: Institute of Arab Studies, 1957).
Ibid., 128.
Quoted in ibid., 129. My translation.
Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed. “Introduction,” in Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 19.
Jayyusi, Anthology , 7–8.
Ibid., 318–319, trans. Salwa Jabsheh and Naomi Shihab Nye.
Ibid., 11.
Ahmad Abu-Matar, Al-Riwayafi al-Adab al-Filastini, 1950–1975 (The Novel in Palestinian Literature, 1950–1975) (Beirut: Arabic Institution for Research and Publishing, 1980), 22.
Ibid., 28.
Khalil Ibrahim Baydas, Al-Warith: Riwayah Ijtimaiyah Gharamiyah (The Heir) (Jerusalem: The Syrian Dar al-Aytam Printing Press, 1920).
Jayyusi, Anthology , 14.
Ibid., 14–15.
Ibid., 15.
Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 50.
The rise of the Egyptian writer Najib Mahfouz must be acknowledged here for having had lasting influences on the art of Arabic fiction.
For Ghassan Kanafani, see, for example, Men in the Sun and Other Stories , trans. Hilary Kilpatrick (1978; Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1998) and All That's Left to You , trans. May Jayyusi and Jeremy Reed (1966; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). For Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, see The Ship , trans. Roger Allen and Adnan Haydar (1970; Washington DC: Three Continents Press, 1987); In Search for Walid Masoud , trans. Roger Allen and Adnan Haydar (1978; Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000); and The Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood , trans. Issa J. Boullata (Fayetsville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995).
See Little Things (1954); The Long Shadow (1956); And Other Stories (1960); The Clock and Man (1963); and The Feast from the Western Window (1971).
Samira Azzam, Al-Zill al-Kabeir (The Long Shadow) (1956; Beirut: Dar al-‘Awda, 1982).
Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist , trans. Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Trevor LeGassick (New York: Vantage Press, 1982).
See Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, “Modern Arabic Literature and the West,” Critical Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature , ed. Issa J. Boullata (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1980), 7–22.
Ibid., 7–10.
Ibid., 12–15.
“Why Write?” From “What is Literature?” (1949) by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Bernard Frechtmen in The Critical Tradition, Classical Texts and Contemporary Trends , ed. David H. Richter (New York: Bedford Books, 1989), 1177–1184.
Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry , vol. II (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977), 532–533.
Jabra, “Modern Arabic Literature and the West,” 18.
Jayyusi, Trends and Movements , 533.
Samih al-Qasim, quoted in A. M. Elmessiri, collector and trans., The Palestinian Wedding: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Resistance Poetry (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1982).
Emile Nakhleh, “Wells of Bitterness: A Survey of Israeli-Arab Political Poetry,” in Critical Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature , ed. Issa J. Boullata (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1980), 244–262.
Quoted in ibid., 255; originally from the collection A Lover from Palestine, ‘Ashiq min Falastin (Nazareth: Al-Hakim Press, 1966).
Elia Zureik, The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 166; and Fowzi El-Asmar, To Be an Arab in Israel (1975; Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1978), 149, originally written in Hebrew and published in Israel by Frances Pinter, 1975, and later translated by the author into Arabic.
See El-Asmar, To Be an Arab in Israel , 149.
Hanan Mikhail Ashrawi, “The Contemporary Palestinian Poetry of Occupation,” Journal of Palestine Studies , 7 (1978), 77–101, at 78–79.
Zureik, Palestinians in Israel , 167.
Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 38–40, trans. from the Arabic by Inea Bushnaq; see also John Cooley, Green March, Black September (London: Frank Cass, 1973), 51–52.
Zureik, Palestinians in Israel , 171–172.
Quoted in Zureik, Palestinians in Israel , 172; originally from Ian Lustick, “Institutionalized segmentation: One factor in the control of Israeli Arabs,” unpublished paper delivered at the Middle East Studies Association Meeting, Louisville, Kentucky (1975), 25.
Ashrawi, “Contemporary Palestinian Poetry of Occupation,” 78.
Jabra, “Modern Arabic Literature and the West,” 19.
The Norton Anthology of World Literature , vol. 2 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 1607–1609.
Ibid.
Fawaz Turki, The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 8–9.
Ibid., and Soul in Exile: Lives of a Palestinian Revolutionary (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1988).
Turki, The Disinherited , 15.
Quoted in Jayyusi, Anthology , 363–364.
David Robert Gilmore, Dispossessed: The Ordeal of the Palestinians (London: Sphere Books, 1982), 80.
Quoted in Gilmore, Dispossessed , 80, originally from Elmer Berger, Who Knows Better Must Say So: Letters of an American Jew , 2nd ed. (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1970), 43.
Gilmore, Dispossessed , 80.
Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987).
Ibid., 79–82.
Ibid., 79.
Ibid., 80.
Ibid., 86.
Fadwa Tuqan, A Mountainous Journey: An Autobiography , trans. Olive Kenny, Foreword Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Intro. Fedwa Malti-Douglass (1985; St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1990).
The term is Albert Hourani's, quoted in Rashid Khalidi, “The Palestinians and 1948: The Underlying Causes of Failure,” in The War for Palestine, Rewriting the History of 1948 , ed. Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 22.
Fawaz Turki, “Meaning in Palestinian History: Text and Context,” Arab Studies Quarterly 3 (1981), 371–383, at 373.
Ibrahim Nasrallah, Prairies of Fever , trans. May Jayyusi and Jeremy Reed (Northampton, MA: Interlink, 1993).
Tuqan, A Mountainous Journey , 113.
Trans. May Jayyusi and Jeremy Reed (Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 1993).
Sahar Khalifeh, Mudakarat Imra'Gair Waqiiyah , 2nd ed. (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1992).
Ibid., 17.
Ibid., 17.
A number of Palestinian writers in Israel such as Michel Haddad, Jamal Qa'war, Anton Shammas, and Fahd Abu Khadra also write in Hebrew; but since they are Israeli-affiliated and have not participated in a resistance literature, they are beyond the consideration of this article. See Ashrawi, Literature of Palestine: Poetry and Fiction,” PhD dissertation. University of Virginia, 1982.
Edward Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives . Photographs by Jean Mohr (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 7.
Ibid., 7.