The Expression of Palestinian Identity in Narratives About Personal Experiences: Implications for the Study of Narrative, Identity, and Social Interaction

Abstract

In this essay, I explore narratives about personal experiences as communicative means that create social reality and community. Carbaugh's (2005) approach to cultural conversations and Koven's (2002) approach to analyzing speaker roles were used to examine narratives told by self-identified Palestinians. Based on interviews and participant observation, the essay shows that these narratives expressed and constituted ways of being, acting, and relating in the speakers' lives. Being Palestinian meant to the speakers inhabiting particular social, historical, and physical spaces and expressing resistor identities. Speakers narrated consistent themes such as living in a divided space, being a dislocated person, and resisting collective punishment in their authorial roles and bridged possible identity differences with the audience through rhetorical and linguistic devices such as role reversal, parenthetical remarks, and pronominal switch. The study concludes that narrating Palestinian identities is one way of constituting community at the moment of narrating through appealing to a common humanity and mobilizing an audience to take action for social change.

I'm a Palestinian refugee. I was born in nineteen-sixty-seven (.) in a refugee camp. I was not able to go back to the village down the hill (2). A:nd we grew up with this mentality by living day by day (1). It gets into your blood. You cannot let it go. You have to resist. When you are thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old you pick up a rock and throw.

I thank Gerry Philipsen, the participants in this study who shared their stories, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. An earlier version of this study was presented at the IALIC conference in Lancaster, UK.

Notes

I thank Gerry Philipsen, the participants in this study who shared their stories, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. An earlier version of this study was presented at the IALIC conference in Lancaster, UK.

Audience emotions were not displayed in the narrative in Witteborn (2005), as they were not relevant to the analysis.

Hepburn (2004) analyzed several types of crying in interactional sequences between callers and emergency staff in the United Kingdom National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children helpline. Hepburn (2004) transcribed “wet sniffs” (p. 264) as “shih” and “snorty sniffs” (p. 264) as “skuh.” Hepburn concluded that sniffling could signal the onset of turn taking, lack of speech, and be an audible display of emotional distress.

Sobbing has been described by Hepburn (2004) as a type of crying that is characterized by voiced vowels and consonants, elevated pitch, and sharp inhalations and exhalations.