“The Arab Room”: Detention, disorientation, and displacement in Palestinian airport narratives

ABSTRACT

This article examines recent Palestinian airport narratives, with a specific emphasis on depictions of Ben Gurion/Lydda airport in Israel, a site where Palestinians often receive extra scrutiny and disparate treatment. Focusing on works by Adania Shibli, Raba’i al-Madhoun, and Randa Jarrar, it argues that such narratives reveal airports to be, for Palestinians, sites of stasis, displacement, and detention, and offers a counter-reading of the popular imaginary of airports as facilitators of unfettered global mobility. The narratives depict this stasis through the spatial and temporal distortions experienced at the airport by individuals and groups excluded from global networks of free movement, tourism, and travel, but they also use moments of suspension and immobility to imagine and stage various forms of collective, shared experiences. This suggests that the stasis of the airport can unexpectedly be a catalyst for acts of solidarity and protest.

KEYWORDS:

• Airport
• mobility
• Palestine
• Israel
• Palestinian literature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A Palestinian author who writes in English, Jarrar is best known for her semi-autobiographical novel A Map of Home (Jarrar 2008), which irreverently traces the movements of its Palestinian Egyptian protagonist across the Middle East and the US.

2. Shibli, a Palestinian author who holds Israeli citizenship, has published three novels, as well as numerous short stories and critical essays.

3. al-Madhoun is an exiled Palestinian writer and journalist, originally from Gaza, who lives in London. Destinies, his most recent novel, was awarded the International Prize for Arabic Literature (the “Arabic Booker”) in 2016. It was translated into English by Paul Starkey and published as Fractured Destinies (al-Madhoun 2018). However, all translations of quotations from Destinies in this article are my own.

4. The Israeli “model” of airport security is often touted following terror attacks at airports. See Martin (2016) for an example of this tendency.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Drew Paul

Drew Paul is assistant professor of Arabic at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he also serves as core faculty in the Middle East studies and cinema studies programmes. His research focuses on modern Arabic and Hebrew literature and film, with particular interests in space, mobility, and sexuality. His book Israel/Palestine: Border Representations in Literature and Film (2020) traces the effects of border spaces such as checkpoints and walls on contemporary cultural production.