Palestine and Latin America: Lina Meruane’s Volverse Palestina and Nathalie Handal’s La Estrella Invisible

Abstract

This article examines representations of Palestine through the literary, cultural and political landscapes between the Arab world and Latin America in which Palestine has figured in new ways. It examines the connections between Palestine and Latin America, focusing on Lina Meruane’s memoir Volverse Palestina (Becoming Palestine, 2013), where the Chilean writer of Palestinian descent looks back at or crosses into Palestine, and the imaginative intertwinings of Bethlehem, Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the poetry of Palestinian US-based writer Nathalie Handal. Drawing on growing scholarship on literary and cultural ties between Latin America and the Arab world, this article explores the role of Palestine in Latin American literature, not only as a representation of immigrant communities and a cultural heritage, but also as part of a perception of Palestine within a broader global context.

Keywords:

• Lina Meruane
• Nathalie Handal
• Palestine
• Latin America
• cultural exchange

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Lina Meruane for generously sharing material and answering my questions and to Nathalie Handal for fruitful correspondence. I would also like to thank Kamran Rastegar for convening the panel where I presented an early draft of the article at the 2016 Modern Language Association annual convention in Austin, Texas, and the two anonymous JPW reviewers who offered helpful comments.

Notes

1. Alsultany and Shohat (2013) extend these frameworks to include cultural flows between the Middle East, including Iran and Turkey, and North and South America.

2. Another writer is Palestinian Bolivian novelist Rodrigo Hasbún, featured in Granta (Hasbún 2010). For new Palestinian writing, see Handal (2015b).

3. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Volverse Palestina (2013b) are my own.

4. For a translation of an excerpt from Volverse Palestina, see Meruane (2016). I quote from Rosenberg’s translation of the passage.