On rights, ruins and returns: Rachel Tzvia Back’s Israeli anglophone lyric palimpsest

ABSTRACT

Written at the height of the Second Intifada, Israeli anglophone poet Rachel Tzvia Back’s On Ruins & Return uncovers the politics of Palestinian indigeneity and the material realities of occupation. Back evokes the near-extinct buffalo and crafts a “lyric palimpsest” to draw a line between settler colonialism in North America and Israel–Palestine. This article offers an overview of the understudied field of Israeli anglophone literature and its affinity to postcolonial and global anglophone discourses through an examination of Back’s transnational mobility, the role of English as a colonial-turned-global language in Israel–Palestine, the architectural legacy of British colonialism in Jerusalem, and anti-colonial resistance. The article analyses Back’s postcolonial lyric palimpsest in terms of its form, theme, authorial voice and audience, and argues that English-language writing challenges Israeli nationalism, while simultaneously underscoring the ongoing repercussions of colonialism.

KEYWORDS:

• Israeli anglophone
• Israel–Palestine
• palimpsest
• settler colonialism
• Rachel Tzvia Back
• 1948

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express her deepest gratitude to Jim Holstun for his formidable critical eye; Guy Weiss for his unabating feedback and support; the anonymous readers, whose significant input crystalized this article; and the editorial board for their collaboration. A special thank you to Rachel Tzvia Back for her contributions during our correspondences and for permission to cite her poetry.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See e.g. Young (2012) and subsequent responses in New Literary History 43 (2).

2. Back wrote her dissertation on Howe, later published as Led by Language (Back 2002).

3. Examples include studies on Salman Rushdie’s Shame (Hart 2008), Assia Djebar’s novels (Donadey 2000) and Sophiatown’s “urban palimpsest” (Samuelson 2008).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Morani Kornberg

Morani Kornberg’s current book project investigates the intersection between Israeli anglophone and Hebrew lyric poetry, postcolonialism, and cultural memory in the context of Israeli–Palestinian history. Her scholarship appears or is forthcoming in Research in African Literatures, Poetics Today and Emerging Possibilities. She also authored a poetry collection, Dear Darwish, a series of letters and poems addressed to Mahmoud Darwish, and has translated Israeli anglophone poet Karen Alkalay-Gut’s Miracles & More to Hebrew. She is completing a book-length translation of Israeli poet-activist Tikva Levy’s unpublished oeuvre. She will begin teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2019. For more information visit: www.moranikornberg.com