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Abstract
This article examines the process of identity formation as it pertains to two Palestinian American women in the United States, specifically in New York City. It considers the answer to a characteristically conversational question in the West: “What is this Palestine, anyway?” through a reading of Najla Said’s and Suheir Hammad’s memoirs, Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013) and Drops of This Story (New York: Writers & Readers, 1996), respectively. While the memoirs are set in socioeconomically different parts of New York City, both narrators chronicle their complicated negotiations around issues of belonging, integration, self-worth, and body shame as second-generation Palestinian women in the United States. The paper argues for the necessity to narrate such experiences, or else risk being outwritten by various Others. Given the reality of “Palestine” geographically and politically, the literary space can be powerful in locating and registering an imagined postcolonial Palestinian experience today. It can coherently articulate a broken Self, rehabilitate body politics, retrace violently digressive journeys, find meaning in a confounding kind of nationalism, and resist dominant and hostile ideologies. Indeed, the act of narration could not only heal the fraught relations between the Palestinian Self and various Others, but can allow for the envisioning of a postcolonial space from within.
Notes
1 Patrick Williams and Anna Ball, “Where is Palestine?” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50, no. 2 (2014): 127–33, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2014.883164.
2 Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 20.
3 Ola Awad, “Brief Report on the Population of Palestine at the End of 2021,” Arab Center Washington DC, January 3, 2022, https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/brief-report-on-the-population-of-palestine-at-the-end-of-2021/.
4 Said, After the Last Sky, 133.
5 Said, After the Last Sky, 130.
6 Lama Abu-Odeh, “Disrupting the Peace of Others,” in Being Palestinian: Personal Reflections on Palestinian Identity in the Diaspora, ed. Suleiman Yasir (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 34–36.
7 Esmat Zaidan, “Palestinian Diaspora in Transnational Worlds: Intergenerational Differences in Negotiating Identity, Belonging and Home” (working paper, Birzeit University, 2012), https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2009267.
8 Tom Brocket, “From ‘In-Betweenness’ to ‘Positioned Belongings’: Second-Generation Palestinian-Americans Negotiate the Tensions of Assimilation and Transnationalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 43, no. 16 (2020): 135–54, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2018.1544651.
9 Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber, eds., Race and Arab Americans before and after 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008).
10 Helga Tawil-Souri, “The Necessary Politics of Palestinian Cultural Studies,” in Arab Cultural Studies: Mapping the Field, ed. Tarik Sabry (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 137–61.
11 Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate,” JPS 13, no. 3 (1984): 27–48, https://doi.org/10.2307/2536688.
12 Said, After the Last Sky, 48.
13 Suzette A. Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life Writing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), xix, as quoted in Rachel N. Spear, “‘Let Me Tell You a Story’: On Teaching Trauma Narratives, Writing, and Healing,” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 14, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 53–79, https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2348911 (emphasis added by Spear).
14 Said, After the Last Sky, 2.
15 Brocket, “From ‘In-Betweenness’ to ‘Positioned Belongings.’”
16 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 396.
17 Helena Lindholm Schulz and Juliane Hammer, The Palestinian Diaspora: Formation of Identities and Politics of Homeland (London: Routledge, 2003), 183.
18 Najla Said, Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013), 1.
19 Said, Looking for Palestine, 51.
20 Said, Looking for Palestine, 52.
21 Said, Looking for Palestine, 87.
22 Said, Looking for Palestine, 53.
23 “Jewish Population by State,” World Population Review, last modified March 2023, https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/jewish-population-by-state.
24 Said, Looking for Palestine, 127.
25 Said, Looking for Palestine, 29.
26 Said, Looking for Palestine, 43.
27 Said, Looking for Palestine, 47.
28 Said, Looking for Palestine, 46.
29 Said, Looking for Palestine, 132.
30 Said, Looking for Palestine, 52.
31 Spear, “‘Let Me Tell You a Story.’”
32 Said, Looking for Palestine, 2.
33 Said, Looking for Palestine, 29.
34 Said, Looking for Palestine, 214.
35 Said, Looking for Palestine, 103.
36 Said, Looking for Palestine, 168.
37 Said, Looking for Palestine, 160.
38 Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jews Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).
39 Said, Looking for Palestine, 174.
40 Said, Looking for Palestine, 187.
41 Said, Looking for Palestine, 134.
42 Eytan Gilboa, “Americans’ Shifting Views on the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict,” Middle East Quarterly 28, no. 4 (Fall 2021): 3, https://www.meforum.org/62604/americans-views-on-the-palestinian-israeli-conflict.
43 Robert Marquand, “Conversations with Outstanding Americans: Edward Said,” Christian Science Monitor, May 27, 1997, https://www.csmonitor.com/1997/0527/052797.feat.feat.1.html.
44 Said, Looking for Palestine, 254.
45 Said, Looking for Palestine, 256.
46 Suheir Hammad, Drops of This Story (New York: Writers & Readers, 1996), 6.
47 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 6.
48 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 17.
49 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 69.
50 Said, After the Last Sky, 26.
51 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 5.
52 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 5.
53 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 36.
54 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 83.
55 Said, Looking for Palestine, 3.
56 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 87.
57 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 49.
58 Hammad, Drops of This Story, Author’s Note, no page number.
59 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 86.
60 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 73.
61 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 50.
62 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 50.
63 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 51.
64 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 79.
65 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 14.
66 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 53.
67 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 18.
68 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 11.
69 Hammad, Drops of This Story, Forward, no page number.
70 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 49.
71 Hammad, Drops of This Story, Forward, no page number.
72 Dashiell Moore, “‘Breaking Language’: Performance and Community in Suheir Hammad’s Poetry,” Journal for Postcolonial Writing 56 no.1 (2020): 111, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2019.1702083.
73 Moore, “‘Breaking Language,’” 117. The microphone is a key tool for creating a third space, seeing that it allows her to speak up over everyone in the audience and articulate her own experience.
74 Susan B. A. Somers-Willett, “From Slam to Def Poetry Jam: Spoken Word Poetry and Its Counterpublics,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 10, nos. 3–4 (2014): 1–2, http://liminalities.net/10-3/spoken.pdf.
75 Moore, “‘Breaking Language,’” 110.
76 Moore, “‘Breaking Language,’” 110.
77 Salt of This Sea, directed by Annemarie Jacir (Paris: Pyramide Distribution, 2008), https://www.netflix.com/watch/70117041?source=35.
78 Jacir, Salt of This Sea.
79 Nina Fischer, “Remembering/Imagining Palestine from Afar: The (Lost) Homeland in Contemporary Palestinian Diaspora Literature,” in Spiritual Homelands: The Cultural Experience of Exile, Place and Displacement among Jews and Others, ed. Asher D. Biemann, Richard I. Cohen, and Sarah E. Wobick-Segev (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 53.
80 Said, After the Last Sky, 34.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Mai Serhan
Mai Serhan is a writer, editor, and translator. Her forthcoming memoir, Return Is a Thing of Amber, won the Narratively Spring Memoir Prize 2022. She has a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Oxford. For more about her work, visit www.maiserhan.com.