Venturing into a vanishing space: the chronotope in representing Palestinian postcoloniality

Abstract

This article responds to the relative neglect of Palestinian literature in postcolonial studies by exploring the possibility of Bakhtin’s chronotope as a useful tool in representing Palestinian postcoloniality. The chronotopes of walking and retuning in Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks (2008) and Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2011) respectively sketch ways of challenging settler colonialism and reconstructing Palestinian history and geography.

Keywords:

• Palestinian literature
• Raja Shehadeh
• Susan Abulhawa
• chronotope
• walking
• return

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Professor Gerald MacLean (University of Exeter) and Dr Hind Jamal Al-Leil (King Abdul Aziz University) for their invaluable comments on draft versions of this article.

Notes

1. Bhabha criticized “the high Saidian style” sometimes employed when speaking for the Palestinian cause (2000, 15). Joseph Massad points out that “Bhabha, who as a postcolonial critic is presumably also anti-colonial, never describes the Zionist enterprise or Israeli occupation as having anything to do with colonialism, which leads him to call not for an end to Israel’s colonization and occupation, but for a negotiated ‘just and lasting peace’” (2004, 15).

2. Abulhawa’s novel was first published in 2006 under the title The Scar of David (Summerland: Journey), then republished in 2010 by Bloomsbury as Mornings in Jenin. The paperback edition, from which I cite, appeared in 2011.

3. I use the term “metropole colonialism” following Gabriel Piterberg’s classification of “the two master types of colonialism, namely, metropole colonialism and settler colonialism” (2008, 53).

4. Susan Abulhawa states in the author’s note to the novel that the “seed for this book came from Ghassan Kanafani’s short story about a Palestinian boy who was raised by the Jewish family that found him in the home they took over in 1948” (2011, 327). By focusing on Abulhawa’s re-narration of the return of the exile in Kanafani’s, this article reveals how the rhetorical strategy of intertextuality has been utilized by diasporic Palestinian writers as a form of discursive return to Palestinian literary heritage.

5. The plural form of ha-tiyul: a Hebrew word that means walks or hikes.

6. Pappé used the term “memorycide” in reference to the systematic and scholarly work of the Israeli official Naming Committee and Jewish National Fund to de-Arabize Palestine.

7. This phrase, which refers to Palestine, is the English translation of the title of one of Ghassan Kanafani’s early stories, Ard al-Burtugal al-Hazin (1963), republished in 2001 in Ghassan Kanafani’s al-Atha’r al-Ka’milah [The Complete Works]. Baghdad: al-Dar al-Wataniyah, republished in Kanafani (2001).