Nostalgia, identity, and homeland: Reading the narratives of the diaspora in Susan Abulhawa’s fiction

ABSTRACT

Palestinian American writer Susan Abulhawa’s novels Mornings in Jenin (2010) and The Blue Between Sky and Water (2015) capture the experience of the Palestinian community following Israeli occupation and the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. This article explores the ways in which Abulhawa shows the dismantling of the national sovereignty of Palestine as having thrown the citizenry of the Palestinian Arabs into a state of disarray. Drawing on theories of nation, nationalism, and nostalgia, it discusses how Abulhawa’s protagonists have recourse to cultural memories of the homeland to conceptualize and rebuild their disrupted subjectivities. Analysing the important role of nostalgia in perpetuating love of a lost territory, it argues that, for Abulhawa, the yearning to return is fundamental to the social connectedness and nationalist struggles of the dislocated Palestinian Arab community.

KEYWORDS:

• Susan Abulhawa
• diaspora
• nostalgia
• homeland
• nationhood
• subjectivity

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Payel Pal

Payel Pal received her PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India and is currently an assistant professor of English at the LNM Institute of Information Technology Jaipur. Her primary research interests are in South Asian culture, feminist literature, and film studies. She has presented scholarly articles at several national and international conferences, and her research articles have been published in Notes on Contemporary Literature, Atlantic Literary Review, and South Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies. Her recent research paper is accepted in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature.