Where is Palestine?

Where is Palestine? is the title – apparently provocative in its counterfactual obviousness, since of course we all know where Palestine is, don’t we? – of Shannee Marks’s short book published in 1984. Rather tellingly, however, the book itself provides no answer and indeed does not substantively address its own central point of interrogation. Thirty years later, the question is, if anything, less easy to answer in a straightforward, confident, unqualified fashion. In moments of despondency – or, for others no doubt, mere realism – it can be tempting to answer the question “Where is Palestine?” with “Nowhere”: nowhere geographically, nowhere politically, nowhere theoretically, nowhere postcolonially.

The geographical “nowhere” of Palestine operates in a variety of different ways. At the slightly farcical but simultaneously profoundly indicative level, there is the “nowhere” which in 2004 prevented Elia Suleiman’s film Divine Intervention from being entered for an Academy Award, since in order to be accepted films have to come from a named country, and according to the Academy there is no country called Palestine. At an altogether more disturbing level there is the “nowhere” to which the Israeli policy of “facts on the ground” aims to reduce the materiality of Palestine. Much of the time, Israeli encroachment might look small-scale: Edward Said was fond of quoting the “one dunum, one goat” Israeli practice of piecemeal erosion of Palestine. Worse than this is the relentless programme of illegal settlements that fragment Palestinian land – in and of themselves and also because of the Israeli-only road networks, buffer zones closed to Palestinians and the like, that they spawn. This effect is magnified by the continuing construction of the (also illegal) Separation Wall, fragmenting the West Bank into a non-viable nowhere state. All of this will, however, become irrelevant if the current plans of right-wingers in Netanyahu’s cabinet, such as the economy minister Naftali Bennett, to simply annex 60 percent or more of the West Bank are realized. At that point, Palestine will indeed be nowhere.

Politically, what Edward Said called “The Question of Palestine” (1992) also appears to be nowhere. The decreasing frequency and increasing half-heartedness of attempts to restart the “peace process” mark the international community’s inability to maintain focus on Palestine as a problem urgently requiring resolution, while Obama’s parallel inability even to get Netanyahu to rein in the settlement programme (and failure to act in the face of such Israeli intransigence) shows how little can be expected from even the “best hope” president. The European Union looks ever more favourably on closer ties with Israel, including relaxing the regulations relating to the illegal settlements (and goods and services from them), in ways which would compound the process of the reduction-to-nothing of Palestine. Internally, too, Palestine seems to be going nowhere politically, as Mahmoud Abbas’ presidency marks the decline of a once vibrant movement of national liberation into corruption and cronyism, while worrying forms of fundamentalism emerge in Hamas-run Gaza.

Theoretically, the “nowhere” of Palestine relates particularly to the discipline which has, up until now, failed to address it, namely postcolonial studies. The easiest (though sadly not the most accurate) explanation for this omission from “postcolonial” discourse might appear to be that as the subject of an aggressive form of settler colonialism, Palestine is not yet “post-” the “colonial”. Yet scholars familiar with the field will be all too aware that anti-colonial discourse authored by those writing under the yoke of colonialism (Achebe and Cabral, for example) forms the very backbone of the field, while straightforwardly historical definitions of the “post-colonial” have been long surpassed by broader understandings of postcoloniality as “not in any sense an achieved condition, but [ … ] an anticipatory discourse, looking forward to a better and as yet unrealized world” (Williams 2010, 93): an understanding that facilitates the analysis of multiple forms of inequality, oppression and struggle. Why, then, this strange omission? The answer may lie more aptly in the restrictions on what Said (1984, 27) termed “permission to narrate” Palestine’s story as a colonized nation. The presentation of such a narrative is often perceived as a direct affront to mainstream support for Israel which, at the level of the educational establishment, has frequently led to direct attacks on the careers of academics engaging in this field by the likes of the US website CampusWatch (Said was one of their favourite targets). The resulting absence of Palestine within postcolonial studies is a situation which we, as editors and academics differently related to the postcolonial field, feel needs to change and it is precisely that feeling which provides the impetus for this special issue. It is important to recognize that it is also a situation which is indeed slowly beginning to change, though this is much more a case of individual scholars intervening where they can, rather than a more systematic attempt to address a lamentable absence. Encouragingly, a number of those individual scholars are represented in this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, their articles providing some indication of the diversity of topics and issues needing to be addressed under the rubric of the postcolonial, as well as forming part of that necessary process of change and the restoring of Palestine, analytically at least, to something like its proper place.

In the meantime, it remains the puzzling case that even the best of contemporary criticism manages to overlook Palestine. As set out in The Postcolonial Unconscious, Neil Lazarus’s (2011) project to rescue and reconstruct postcolonial studies calls on those working in the discipline to abandon their canonical blinkers and biases, and address texts, authors and topics that they routinely ignore. Texts that are unashamedly political; texts that tackle the thorny problem of postcolonial nationalism; texts from language groups other than the anglophone – these are what Lazarus rightly feels postcolonial studies should be more concerned with. All of these would seem to point unquestionably to Palestine, but apart from one brief mention it does not figure in the reworking of the postcolonial that Lazarus offers. Such a striking omission in the work of so perceptive a critic may be difficult to explain, but, for whatever reason, Palestine fails yet again to enter the postcolonial frame in any appropriate or substantive manner.

A final “nowhere” for Palestine is somewhat differently inflected. Thomas More’s Utopia offers two different, possibly overlapping, homophonic territories: eu-topia, the good place, and ou-topia, the non-place, nowhere. (The possible overlap lies in the fact that the good place may in fact be nowhere, non-existent.) The argument that postcolonial studies might profitably take on board considerations of the utopian dimensions of theory and cultural production and use them in thinking about Palestine has been made before (see, for example, Williams 2010) but may just be worth revisiting. The idea of progress in Palestine may appear to some as classically utopian, in the worst sense of fanciful, unattainable and unrealistic. There are, however, other and better ways of thinking about Utopia. The Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, in his enormous three-volume work The Principle of Hope, distinguishes between what he terms abstract and concrete Utopias. The former, characterized by conservative, contemplative, compensatory fantasizing and wish-fulfilment, has all too often come to stand for utopian thought in general, its influence uniformly negative:

Pure wishful thinking has discredited utopias for centuries, both in pragmatic political terms and in all other expressions of what is desirable; just as if every utopia were an abstract one. And undoubtedly the utopian function is only immaturely present in abstract utopianizing. (Bloch 1986, 145)

Against this, Bloch sets the category of concrete Utopia: “Expectation, hope, intention towards possibility that has still not become: this is not only a basic feature of human consciousness, but, concretely corrected and grasped, a basic determination within objective reality as a whole” (Bloch 1986, 7). The emphasis Bloch places on the materiality of the utopian, and the essential involvement of human agency in its development, echoes some of the most recent work in the field. Erik Olin Wright, for example, in his very practically focussed book Envisioning Real Utopias, argues against “vague utopian fantasies [that] may lead us astray, encouraging us to embark on trips that have no real destinations at all, or, worse still, which lead us towards some unforeseen abyss”. Instead, “What we need, then, is ‘real utopias’; utopian ideals that are grounded in the real potentials of humanity, utopian destinations that have accessible waystations, utopian designs of institutions that can inform our practical tasks of navigating a world of imperfect conditions for social change” (Wright 2010, 6). In spite of prevailing conditions it is possible to point to the emergence of “accessible waystations” in Palestinian civil society: human rights organizations, non-violent resistance movements, cooperative groups, all aiming towards the “dignity and freedom” Bloch sees as indispensable to the utopian condition.

According to Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinians have an incurable disease – hope. (See, for example, Darwish’s epic poem State of Siege on this.) Hope is also the key term in Bloch’s title, but this is not just any hope; as in the quote above, this is materially grounded, progressively functioning, future-forming hope. Bloch calls this docta spes, educated hope that has learned from the hard lessons of reality and in turn is aiming to become reality-determining. There is perhaps no hope that is more Palestinian than this – formed by years of suffering, adapting to altered historical circumstances, but still working determinedly towards the utopian horizon of the postcolonial future.

Although there is clearly a tremendous sense of urgency surrounding the need for discussion of Palestine within the postcolonial academy, the precise relationship between Palestine and “the postcolonial” is yet to be established. The “question” not only of Palestine but also of its “postcoloniality” is therefore centrally at stake within this special issue. Each of the articles within the special issue proposes its own response to this question – but rather than arriving at an exclusivist definition of Palestine’s place within the field, the work collected here instead reveals the multiple stances from which the study of Palestine can be approached through the postcolonial and, indeed, the postcolonial encountered afresh through the study of Palestine.

Of all the many reasons for scholars of the postcolonial to turn to Palestine, perhaps the most compelling of all is the ethical possibility of bringing into clear sight the violations of life and liberty that occur under colonial domination. In the opening article in this special issue, “Prison Israel-Palestine: Literalities of Criminalization and Imaginative Resistance”, Caroline Rooney turns her attention to what she terms the “settler logic” of “criminalization” exercised by Israel over Palestine. While Gaza has often been termed “the world’s largest open-air prison” due to the air, land and sea blockades imposed upon it by Israel, Rooney reveals much more extensive forms of imprisonment encircling Palestinian existence – from the literal experiences of imprisonment prevalent amongst Palestinian men in particular, to the self-imprisoning nature of Israel’s denial of individual consciousness and indeed of humanity to Palestinians. Ultimately, though, Rooney’s textual analyses of Palestinian prison narratives reveal how individual imaginative insight can break through this imprisoning “settler logic”: a powerful affirmation of postcolonialists’ long-standing belief in creativity as a form of resistance.

The relationship between creativity and resistance surfaces as a preoccupation in a number of articles, and this is hardly surprising, given Palestine’s ongoing struggle to achieve historical “post-coloniality”. Anastasia Valassopoulos’ “The international Palestinian Resistance: Documentary and Revolt” offers a rare insight into a recently discovered treasure trove of “agitprop” films made by the Palestine Liberation Organization. This article not only reveals the centrality of cultural production to nationalist resistance, but also alerts us to the mobilization of “anti-colonialism” as a discourse very much present within Palestinian creative and political imaginations themselves. Meanwhile, Anna Bernard’s timely study of recent “advocacy theatre” explores the role of cultural production in the construction of imaginative, ethical and political empathy with Palestine on the international stage. As Bernard points out, while Palestine has tremendous political appeal as “a site in which fundamental social change is still possible”, the literal “staging” of Palestinian points of view also invites an international audience to consider the complexity of its affiliation with Palestine. This is a lesson of tremendous importance to the many postcolonialists who operate from within the relative privilege of the academy and who therefore must also remain attentive to the sense in which Palestinians, “like many colonized peoples [ … ] have often been the subjects of other people’s [ … ] research, and have often been perceived as exotic others, as victims or terrorists” (Jacir 2006, 74). As editors, we hope that the articles collected within this special issue go some way towards constructing much more diverse modes of engagement with Palestinian voices and visions than has been the case to date.

While Palestine’s contemporary colonization clearly invites us to situate it within anti-colonial strands of the discourse, it is also possible to explore various facets of the Palestinian narrative through a range of “post-colonial” critical lenses. The notion of “writing back” to the colonial narrative in order to recover alternative versions of history has been a major preoccupation among postcolonialists but, as Karim Mattar demonstrates in his article “Out of Time: Colonial History in Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses”, the task of recovering such a history is by no means easy in the Palestinian case. While Mattar argues for the importance of oral history as a valid narrative mode, he also reveals how the traumas of the Palestinian past are manifested as crises of form in Nasrallah’s historical fiction. The lack of “aesthetic resolution” that Mattar senses in Nasrallah’s work points us towards the much broader crises that accompany self-representation for Palestinian creative practitioners, who not only face the silencing of their past at the hands of Israeli history books, but also find themselves confronting many practical limitations when it comes to finding forums for publication and communication. It is highly significant, therefore, that Bart Moore-Gilbert also argues for the importance of form as a means of accessing what Jameson described as the “political unconscious”: aesthetics prove intrinsically political in both of these articles. Yet in his article “Time Bandits: Temporality and the Politics of Form in Palestinian Women’s Life-Writing”, Moore-Gilbert also complicates the prevailing nationalist narrative by exploring the ways in which female life-writers simultaneously critique colonialism and “the patriarchal nature of many forms of Palestinian political organisation and mobilisation”. By revealing the productive forms of non- and anti-linearity mobilized within these works, Moore-Gilbert ultimately turns our attention to the importance of “the aesthetic” as a much-neglected area of postcolonial enquiry and shows us that Palestinian creative voices have much to contribute to our understanding of this area.

Certainly, then, it is possible to locate Palestinian cultural expression very comfortably within a number of existing postcolonial debates. Yet many of the articles within this special issue also reveal the exciting forms of interdisciplinary cross-pollination that take place when unfamiliar theoretical and textual forms are placed in dialogue with questions of postcoloniality. In “Framing Refugee Time: Perpetuated Regression in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza”, Maureen Shay turns to the realm of the graphic novel and mobilizes Fabian’s concept of “coevalness”, more usually employed in the fields of ethnography and anthropology, to expose the difficult dialogues that take place between Palestine’s past and present and between observer and observed in the traumatized minds of Sacco’s subjects. Meanwhile, Samar AlJahdali utilizes Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope” in order to analyse the politically loaded motifs of “walking” and “returning” within the work of two authors (Abulhawa and Shehadeh) who, according to AlJahdali, “perform a textual rescue of a pre-colonial space-time” through the journeys they narrate. Within these articles, Palestine’s “post-coloniality” is a discursive site of both temporal and spatial contestation, not a straightforwardly historical condition, and one at which various versions of the Palestinian narrative “wobble and strain”, as Shay (citing Sacco) describes it.

This “straining” of the Palestinian narrative is not evidence of its weakness; rather, it points us towards the sheer variety of Palestinian creative voices and perspectives in evidence within this special issue as a whole. From travelogue to “agitprop” film-making and from narratives of the Nakba to prisoners’ artwork, these articles reveal the wealth of Palestinian cultural material ripe for postcolonial analysis, much of which remains critically neglected. The reason for this neglect is, in part, no doubt political: as Said himself knew only too well, the desire to engage in intelligent debate on Palestine can engender unintelligent, even threatening responses at both individual and institutional levels. Yet lack of engagement with Palestinian texts also arises out of practical limitations. As Bart Moore-Gilbert points out in his article, while a substantial body of anglophone writing by Palestinians is now in circulation, a lack of clearly defined scholarly or public attention to Palestinian literature nevertheless limits the kind of sustained translation efforts that might improve its general accessibility. To this end, the special issue also includes Taoufiq Sakhkhane’s new translation of a lesser-known text entitled “Gradual Exile” by the late, great Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian author of tremendous fame in the Arab world who has yet to receive the attention of which he is worthy within the anglophone postcolonial academy. (A notable exception here is issue 14.1 of Interventions [2012], edited by Anna Bernard and Ziad Elmarsafy in memory of Darwish.)

Like Palestine itself, then, the relationship between Palestine and “the postcolonial” emerges as a source of both ethical commitment and ideological contestation within this special issue. However, rather than presenting Palestine as a “problem case” for the discipline, this evolving relationship in fact has the potential to position it as one of the most fruitful sites of contemporary postcolonial enquiry, for it leads us one step closer towards what Ella Shohat terms

a flexible yet critical usage [of the term “post(-)colonial”] that can address the politics of location [which] is important not only for pointing out historical and geographical contradictions and differences, but also for reaffirming historical and geographical links, structural analogies and openings for agency and resistance. (2006, 247–248)

As the articles in this special issue demonstrate, Palestine is both unique within – and intrinsically connected to – the rest of the postcolonial world. As postcolonialists, we have much to contribute to the generation of intelligent debate and dialogue around the “question” of Palestine, while responding to the voices and visions of Palestine’s many extraordinary creative practitioners will also enable us to begin generating some answers around a site of contemporary coloniality that has remained a “question” for too long.

Notes on contributors

Patrick Williams is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies in the Department of English, Culture and Media Studies at Nottingham Trent University. His publications include Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory; Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory; Ngugi wa Thiong’o; Edward Said; and Postcolonial African Cinema. Recent publications on Palestine include “Writing the Poetry of Troy”, in Locating Postcolonial Narrative Genres, edited by Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio (2013); “Postcolonialism and Orientalism”, in Postcolonialism and Islam, edited by Geoff Nash, Kathleen Kerr-Koch, and Sarah E.Hackett (2013); “‘Besiege your Siege!’ Mahmoud Darwish, Representation, and the Siege of Beirut”, in The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art, and Journalism: Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut, edited by Caroline Rooney and Rita Sakr (2013); and “Gaps, Silences and Absences: Palestine and Postcolonial Studies”, in What Postcolonial Theory Does Not Say, edited by Ziad Elmarsafy, Anna Bernard, and Stuart Murray (2014).

Anna Ball is Senior Lecturer in English in the Department of English, Culture and Media Studies at Nottingham Trent University, where she is also co-director of the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. Her Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective (2012) is reviewed in this issue of JPW. Other recent publications include articles on Palestinian cinema in Camera Obscura and Cultural Research, and one on Palestinian video art and the prose-poetry of Mahmoud Darwish in the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (forthcoming). She is also currently co-editing a collection of essays on “the postcolonial Middle East” as well as working on a new monograph, The Body in Flight, which explores the relationship between gender and the politics of mobility in the postcolonial imagination.