Ruins, rifts and the remainder: Palestinian memoirs by Edward Said and Raja Shehadeh

Abstract

This article examines memoirs by two high-profile Palestinian authors. The aim is to highlight the exemplarity, in the context of postcolonial studies, of memory work relating to the ongoing colonial context of Palestine. Part I of the article explores the implications of the Palestinian crucible for Edward Said's (partial) life story in Out of Place (1999), highlighting ways in which its treatment underlines the deterritorialised ontology and contrapuntal ethos that constitute keynotes of his seminal contribution to postcolonial studies. Part II discusses the movement in Shehadeh's West Bank writings toward a conception of rémemoration - a term used by Paul Ricoeur to evoke an active exercise of memory oriented towards justice - as a future-oriented, ideally collaborative project. I suggest in Part III that Said and Shehadeh provide models of ways in which ‘what remains’ can be conceptualised as a remainder that disrupts, at least at a textual level, the seemingly intractable Israel/Palestine situation.

Notes

1. Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, London: Profile, 2008, p 118.

2. David Eng and David Kazanjian, ‘Introduction: Mourning Remains’, in David Eng and David Kazanjian (eds), Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, p 13.

3. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing, Abingdon: Routledge, 2009, p 113.

4. For assessments of Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks (subtitled, in one imprint, Forays into a Vanishing Landscape) as travel and eco-writing respectively, see Charlotte Salmi, ‘Reflections on a National Cartography: The Freedom to Roam and the Right to Imagine in Raja Shehadeh's Travel Writing’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48(4), 2012, pp 431–441; and Robert Spencer, ‘Ecocriticism in the Colonial Present: The Politics of Dwelling in Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape’, Postcolonial Studies 13(1), 2010, pp 33–54.

5. Mourid Barghouti's memoirs I Saw Ramallah, Ahdaf Soueif (trans), London: Bloomsbury, 2005, andI Was Born There, I Was Born Here, Humphrey Davies (trans), London: Bloomsbury, 2012, also reveal a preoccupation with intersections of time, memory, place and space and are critically positioned against official (particularly Israeli state and Oslo Accord) discourses in the Palestinian context.

6. The term is Paul Ricoeur's, from Memory, History, Forgetting, Kathleen Blamey and David Pillauer (trans), Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2004, used in the sense of an active mobilization of memory towards justice (p 56). I leave the term in the original (rather than using ‘remembering’), because it more effectively evokes the ongoing, future orientation that Ricoeur posits as an alternative to commemoration (see p 91).

7. Martin McQuillan, ‘“The Last Jewish Intellectual”: Edward W. Said 1935–2003’, The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 13, 2005, pp 1–26, p 12.

8. Edward Said, Out of Place, London: Granta, 2000, p 293.

9. Michael Wood, ‘Beginnings Again’, in Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom (eds), Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010, p 64.

10. Said, Out of Place, pp xiii, 293.

11. Wood, ‘Beginnings Again’, p 65.

12. Said, Out of Place, pp 20–21. It also refutes efforts by others to deny Said a Palestinian identity: see Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing, p 119.

13. Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing, p 118; Said, Out of Place, p 195.

14. See Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, Masques blancs, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952, for a seminal illustration.

15. Said, Out of Place, pp 42, 34, 3.

16. The obvious point should be made that Said's sometimes critical portrayal of his family is a subjective one.

17. Said, Out of Place, pp 115, 117.

18. Said appropriates Antonio Gramsci's phrase in his introduction to Orientalism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, p 25.

19. Said, Out of Place, pp xv, 104, 281, 280.

20. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Eric Prenowitz (trans), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p 4 n 1, my emphasis.

21. Derrida, Archive Fever, pp 2–3, 2. Derrida coins ‘patriarchic’ to emphasize the archiving (archic) authority of those with political power.

22. Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing, p 116.

23. Said, Out of Place, pp 19, 13, 18. He notes that his father may have sent him away to the States knowing that ‘the other Edward’ could only emerge at a distance from his family, particularly his mother (p 294).

24. Said, Out of Place, pp 19, 27.

25. Raja Shehadeh, Strangers in the House, London: Profile Books, 2009, pp 9, 97–98, 23. Aziz Shehadeh advocated a two-state solution in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war. His son explains that this did not fit the agenda of the Israeli occupying authorities, the surrounding Arab states, or the PLO (formed shortly afterwards), all of whom claimed Israel/Palestine in its entirety (see chapters 6 and 8). Aziz later withdrew from politics and disapproved of his son's voluntary land reclamation work.

26. Shehadeh, Strangers, pp 200–201.

27. Aziz was murdered by a Palestinian over a contested land claim. Because the Israeli authorities provided no genuine help in the investigation, Shehadeh concludes that the murderer was a collaborator (see chapters 21–23).

28. Shehadeh, Strangers, p 229.

29. See James Olney, ‘Autos*Bios*Graphein: The Study of Autobiographical Literature’, South Atlantic Quarterly 77, 1978, pp 113–123.

30. Said, Out of Place, pp 3, xvi.

31. Edward Said, ‘Between Worlds’, The London Review of Books 20(9), 2007, unpag.

32. Abdelkébir Khatibi, ‘Incipits’, in Du Bilinguisme, Paris: Denoël, 1985, cited in Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, Patrick Mensah (trans), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, p 63.

33. Said, Out of Place, p 4.

34. Derrida, Monolingualism, p 28. Moving well beyond (though some of his readers would say always also within) autobiography, Derrida's work asks the more fundamental question of ‘whether we can ever call a language our “own”, and what is at stake in the claim to ground identity either in a geo-political “home” (… “onto-topology” …) or in a “mother tongue”’. Michael Syrotinski, Deconstruction and the Postcolonial: At the Limits of Theory, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007, p 17.

35. Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing, p 117.

36. Said, Out of Place, p 293.

37. Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing, p 116.

38. Said, Out of Place, pp 184–186.

39. Anshuman A Mondal, Nationalism and Post-Colonial Identity: Culture and Ideology in India and Egypt, London: Routledge, 2003, p 8, citing Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983, p 11, and Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, 1990, pp 30–34.

40. Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p 29.

41. Giddens, Consequences, p 97, relates national trust to the fort/da of Freudian theory.

42. Hilda was eventually granted Lebanese citizenship but, during the Lebanese civil war, problems with immigration recommenced. She was only saved from deportation from the US during her final illness because a compassionate judge threw the case out of court (see Said, Out of Place, pp 132–133).

43. Said, Out of Place, p 294.

44. Said, Out of Place, p 105.

45. Derrida, Monolingualism, p 58; Derrida, Archive Fever, p 19.

46. Beverley Butler, ‘“Othering” the Archive—from Exile to Inclusion and Heritage Dignity: The Case of Palestinian Archival Memory’, Archival Science 9(1–2), 2009, pp 57–69, pp 67, 69.

47. Uriel Orlow's Unmade Film (2013) seems to epitomize this kind of ‘counter-memorial’ work. See Hanan Toukan, ‘Continuity from Rupture: Deir Yassin's Absent Presence in an Unmade Film’, Jadaliyya, 18 April 2013, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/11273/ (accessed 23 April 2013).

48. Edward Said, ‘The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile’, Harpers, September 1994, p 55, cited in Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, ‘Introduction’, in Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin (eds), The Edward Said Reader, London: Granta, 2001, p xiv.

49. Ranjana Khanna, ‘Post-Palliative: Coloniality's Affective Dissonance’, Postcolonial Text 2(1), 2006, unpag.

50. Edward Said, ‘Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals’, in Bayoumi and Rubin, The Edward Said Reader, p 370.

51. Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing, pp 118, 117.

52. Edward Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, London: Faber and Faber, 1986, pp 5, 17, 20–23. This situation materializes in many ways, including the difficulty of moving between the West Bank and Gaza.

53. Said, After, pp 20, 38. Elia Suleiman's film The Time that Remains (2009), for example, plays out as farce structured by ironic repetition.

54. Said, ‘Between Worlds’.

55. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, Alan Bass (trans), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p 65.

56. Said, After, pp 58, 81, 70, 38.

57. A'rsh means both throne and tribe and qaṣr also means castle or palace. We could interpret the ruin as a relic of collective ancestral dignity and security. I have used Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, 4th edn, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1979.

58. Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks, pp 15, 17, 32, 37.

59. Palestinian Walks refutes the stereotype that, as a young Israeli settler says, ‘Arabs don't walk’ (p 193). However, Shehadeh uncritically claims a mobility that is particularly difficult for Palestinian women. Compare, for example, Liana Badr's short story ‘Other Cities’, in which a woman's mobility is constrained both by the Israeli authorities and by Palestinian men. In Jo Glanville (ed), Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women, London: Telegram, 2006.

60. Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks, p 2. The book is written in English (as are all of Shehadeh's books), so hails readers beyond Palestine. According to Spencer, the Palestinian Authority has promised to organize a translation into Arabic (‘Ecocriticism’, p 40).

61. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Steven Rendall (trans), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, p ix.

62. Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks, p xvi.

63. De Certeau, Practice, pp 103, 96, xix, 105, 107.

64. Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks, pp 46, 47, 61–62.

65. Spencer, ‘Ecocriticism’, p 40.

66. Najib, the editor of Al Karmil newspaper, opposed Ottoman allegiance to the Allies in the First World War.

67. Raja Shehadeh, A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle, London: Profile, 2010, p 4.

68. See Spencer, ‘Ecocriticism’, pp 43ff, on the kind of ecocriticism that Shehadeh's work supports: one which assumes nature's cultivation, so a populated landscape.

69. Shehadeh, Rift, p 83.

70. Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks, pp 24, 9. In the earlier Strangers, the a'rsh is not claimed as a family site.

71. Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks, p 123.

72. In Strangers, Shehadeh says he sometimes took the pen name ‘Samed—the steadfast, the persevering’ (p 146). The verb form means to defy, brave, withstand, resist, oppose or hold out; to repair; and to apply oneself.

73. Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks, pp 152–154, 154, 189.

74. B Butler, ‘Othering’, pp 57–69.

75. Raja Shehadeh, The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank, London: Quartet, 1982, p 87.

76. Ricoeur, Memory, pp 42, 41. Traumatic memory, as a structure of disavowal, posits that something did (not) take place. More evocatively in French, quelque chose n'a pas eu lieu literally translates as ‘something did not have a place’.

77. Ricoeur, Memory, p 54.

78. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, vol 1, Nicholas T Rand (trans), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp 142, 136.

79. Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks, pp 153, 124, 129, 123.

80. Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks, pp 124, 118. This contrasts with Selma, an idealist who believes the Oslo Accords hold a promise for the future (p 104).

81. Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks, p 183. The Israeli invasion of Ramallah in 2002 is the backdrop to Raja Shehadeh, When the Bulbul Stopped Singing: A Diary of Ramallah under Siege, London: Profile, 2003.

82. Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks, pp 192–200.

83. Ricoeur, Memory, pp 57, 80, 81, 86, 79, 82.

84. Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks, pp 201, 202, 203.

85. Said, After, p 58; see Part II of this article.

86. Ricoeur, Memory, pp 79, 68, 71, 39.

87. Work which favours mourning over melancholia (or acedia) includes Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Joan Rivière (trans), in Ernest Jones (ed), Collected Papers, vol 4, 6th edn, London: Hogarth Press 1949–1950; Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, Harry Zorn (trans), London: Pimlico, 1999; Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, New York: Verso, 2004.

88. Eng and Kazanjian, ‘Introduction’, p 4, and ‘Preface’, p lx, in Eng and Kazanjian, Loss. See also Khanna's notion of ‘critical melancholia’ in ‘Post-Palliative’.

89. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, p 143; Ricoeur, Memory, p 78.

90. Said, Humanism, pp 144, 64, 63, 58–62.

91. Shehadeh, Rift, pp 48–49.

92. I am grateful to Shuruq Naguib and George Sadaka for their assistance with this term.

93. The Rift Valley is an earthquake zone and ‘disaster for the region is looming, though whether brought about by human forces or by natural causes is yet to be seen’ (Shehadeh, Rift, p 66).

94. Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks, pp 210, 215.

95. Edward Said, ‘Truth and Reconciliation’, Al Ahram Weekly Online 412, 14–20 January 1999, unpag. In political terms, Said and Shehadeh call for an alternative to the (by now probably impracticable) two-state solution.

96. J Butler, Precarious Life, p 114.

97. Grant Farred, ‘The Act of Politics Is to Divide’, Works & Days 51/52, 53/54, 2008–2009, pp 347–358, p 350; Derrida, Monolingualism, p 64. Said's and Derrida's compatibility is not obvious and Derrida's relation to Israel/Palestine is complex and contested. I have been guided here by McQuillan, ‘Last Jewish’: ‘Ultimately, Said's own final position on a bi-national state was … a deconstruction, and when Derrida writes of the [sic] logocentrism, western thought, Europe, the remainder [cindres], the enlightenment, nationalism, the religious, the messianic, the Abrahamic, Marxism, friendship, hospitality and so on, he will have been [sic] writing, according to a certain index, about nothing other than Palestine. If Said [a Christian] was the last Jewish intellectual, Derrida was the last after the last’ (p 25).

98. Said, Humanism, p 102.