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ABSTRACT
Looking at the context of Palestine in the years before, and after the Nakba (Catastrophe) in the aftermath of the 1948 War, this article reflects on the manifold relationships between humans, words and books in the context of colonisation and efforts to manage the colonised. Here, this article looks specifically at the effects of holding and sharing knowledge versus withholding it, as reflected in the process of publishing books, versus stealing them. Subsequently the article proceeds to examine the experience of Palestinians’ linguistic alienation as an effect of their experience of settler colonialism in Palestine, weaving between personal experiences, Edward Said’s thoughts on this question of linguistic alienation, and of Aimé Césaire on silence, amongst others.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Adania Shibli
Adania Shibli (Palestine, 1974) has been teaching part time at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, Birzeit University, Palestine, since 2013. She earned her PhD from the University of East London, in 2009, for her research ‘Visual Terror’, which explored visual compositions of major acts of violence. In the fall of 2021, she was invited as a Friedrich Dürrenmatt Guest Professor for World Literature, University of Bern, Switzerland. In addition to her academic work, Shibli has written novels, plays, short stories and narrative essays.