Postcolonial Predicaments: Encumbering the Emancipatory Potential in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin

ABSTRACT

The instance postcolonialism becomes hinged on liberalism, the liberating promise which postcolonialism propels considerably shrinks. This essay explains that in predicating the liberal ideology as a tool for self-determination, a crippling standstill awaits a given cause. The Palestinian question as recently imagined by the American Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa in Mornings in Jenin (2010) stands a glaring example for such a predicament. The predicament is characterized by a predilection toward ontology instead of epistemology, the personal rather than the collective, character over theme, irony and excess instead of explicit and balanced approaches and finally, discussions favoring culture and identity in lieu of class and resistance. Masking that same postcolonial predicament is the narrative obsession with the existential-ontological, turning the struggle into a textual one. All in all, the predicament expands on postcolonial experiences by raising awareness of the dialectics of emancipation discourses.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A third moment defines the contemporary liberal ideology as “…neither ideology qua explicit doctrine, articulated convictions on the nature of man. Society and the universe, nor ideology in its material existence (institutions, rituals and practices that give body to it), but the elusive network of implicit, qua-‘spontaneous’ presuppositions and attitudes that form an irreducible moment of the reproduction of ‘non-ideological’ economic, legal, political, sexual…)” Slavoj Žižek, Mapping Ideology, p.10.

2. Such a two-fold consensus is specified by Neil; Lazarus as the moment par excellence for the emergence of postcolonial studies. The Postcolonial Unconscious, p. 9.

3. S. Sayyid, “BrAsians: Postcolonial People, Ironic Citizens.”, p. 5.

4. One example regarding diaspora-positioned studies is Ayman Abu-Shomar’s.

5. Through Mornings in Jenin, Abulhawa in part revises Hannah Arendt’s definition of the category of the refugee as for Arendt: “… ‘refugees’ are those of us who have been so unfortunate as to arrive in a new country without means and have to be helped by Refugee Committees.” In: “We Refugees”, p. 264 Unlike Arendt, Abulhawa investigates into the life of the internally displaced, probing into what is it like to have one’s interiority and sense perception being marked from birth to death by such a displacement and reduction. Here, through Amal, the central character and narrator, Abulhawa dares to follow the meaning of growing up for more than six decades in a single square kilometer, the Jenin Refugee Camp.

6. Aijaz Ahmed has a fancy name to what Nur finds as the blinding effect of the Metropolitan experience. He calls it “ideological ambiguity…The ideological ambiguity in this rhetoric of migrancy resides in the key fact that the migrant question comes from a nation which is subordinated in the imperialist system of the intra-state relationship, but simultaneously, from the class more often than not, which is the dominant class within that nation. This in turn makes it possible for that migrant to arrive in the metropole country to join not the working class but the professional middle strata, hence to forge a kinship of rhetoric which …. ”.

7. “The fundamental and constant danger faced by each radicalism – whether Black, or feminist, or Third-Worldist- is the danger of embourgeoisement.” Aijaz Ahmed, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures., pp. 64–65.

8. This is political liberalism as defined by Patrick; Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed (2018), p. 21.

9. Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin. Bloomsbury, London 2010, p. 4. All reference henceforth is made to this edition.

10. Awad Halabi finds that “Arabs maintained cultural, political, and religious lines with Ottoman figures and the Turkish people, rather than earnestly seeking a divorce from their Ottoman heritage… An illustration of how Ottoman identity remained relevant to Arabs is the widespread support in Palestine for the 1919–22 Anatolian struggle against European armies later known as the Turkish War of Independence. Palestinians attentively followed the events of the Turkish War of Independence, conflating nationalist and religious images, personalities, and events and collapsing the Ottoman empire, the offices of the Sultan and Caliph, the resistance movement, and its leader, Mustafa Kamel, into one discursive field that expressed an identity rooted in Islam, the heritage of four centuries of Ottoman rule, and shared opposition to European rule.”, Halabi, “Liminal Loyalties: Ottomanism and Palestinian Responses to the Turkish War of independence, 1919–22”, p. 20.

11. Ibrahim Nasrallah, Time of White Horses.

12. Raphael; Patai refers to loyalty in the Bedouin context as belonging to family and tribe: “The Bedouin were, and are, a patrilineal and patriarchal society, kin-based and strongly kin-oriented.” The Arab Mind. pp. 81–2.

13. Aijaz Ahmad, Op.Cit., p. 105.

14. Arif Dirlik finds that “[t]he postcolonial in its contemporary appearance is shaped by the retreat from revolution with the reconfiguration of global relations in the eighties. This retreat is most readily visible in postcolonial criticism’s abandonment of two categories that were fundamental to earlier revolutionary discourses: nation and class.” “How the Grinch Hijacked Radicalism: Further Thoughts on the Postcolonial,” p. 150.

15. The idea of having a concept and its opposite simultaneously recalls the postcolonial hybrid. My worry is the extent to which one can have a synthesis (nonetheless a smooth one) from among self-annihilating hybrids. Instead of a proper definition, Robert Young delineates a justification of crude assemblage. Young defines the hybrid as the following: “Like postcolonialism, because it [the hybrid] articulates the raw, the rough, the vulgar, social and sexual tensions in a changing, torn social milieu that no longer add to a coherent civil society, it is criticized for its lack of respectability, for the impurity of its politics…” Robert J. C., Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 74.

16. Slavoj Žižek in: In Defense for Lost Causes, p. 170.

17. Ibid., p. 170.

18. During the Algerian war of independence Zoulikha in Assia Djebar’s La femme sans sépulture, mainly in the third epilogue, taps into the ephemerality of the body which Kapur specifies. Before falling a prisoner to French paratroopers, their torture (including rape) and push off from helicopter, the revolutionary Zoulikha embraces one of her daughters while fully aware that herself is no longer among the living. That mastery of detachment or what Žižek qualifies as “the preemptive self-exclusion from the domain of the living” is simply arresting and is not matched by Yousef in Mornings in Jenin. For Zoulikha is mentally clear and, importantly, at peace with the fact that she is an atypical mother; she has no qualms regarding her insurrectional choices and how such choices spill over her loved ones. For under colonial occupation she understands she cannot pretend to overlook the political and focus solely on the domestic. Likewise, readers cannot oversee how Zoulikha for two years has left her little children unparented while she is in the mountains propagating revolutionary corps.

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Notes on contributors

Fouad Mami

Fouad Mami is a Professor of English at the Department of English, University of Ahmed Draia, Adrar (Algeria). He graduated from the University of Algiers with a thesis on the oeuvre of contemporary Ghanaian novelist, Ayi Kwei Armah. He has been a visiting scholar at institutions such as The London School of African and Oriental Studies, UK, and Cornell University, USA. Working principally on contemporary fiction, he singles out themes such as illegal immigration, development and state formations in the Maghreb and the MENA region. His research has been featured in Amerikastudien/American Studies, The Journal of North African Studies, African Studies Review and other outlets.