When a society experiences trauma and destruction, literature has the power to rebuild. The power of the story is one that is central to the Palestinian identity, for, as the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti (‘I Saw Ramallah’) once said, the most damaging way to dispossess a people is to “tell their story secondly.” For the Palestinian voice, words become weapons, and literature a way in which identity can be reconstructed outside of the corruptive Western lens of media and perception of the ‘Orient.’
Palestinian literature can be defined through its capturing of the fragmentation and displacement of Palestinian people across all generations. Whilst Palestinian literature today has come to encompass the many voices across the diaspora, the first stirrings of this literary tradition were sparked following the British Mandate of Palestine in 1918, where reconciliation with Palestinian cultural identity became integral to resistance against colonial rule. Poetry became especially important for figures like Abu Salma as a way to capture the collective suffering of the Palestinian people following the Nakba of 1948, with its melodic qualities resonating with the oral traditions of history that define a society’s community.
But literature transformed to become a form of protest, and the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) sparked the literary stirrings and inspirations of notorious Palestinian figures such as the novelist Ghassan Kanafani (Returning to Haifa) and the national poet Mahmoud Darwish, voices who popularised the medium of Palestinian Resistance literature. Darwish’s poem ‘I Come From Here’ resonated with many in its reconciliation and reconstruction of fragmented cultural memory, reinvigorating the stolen Palestinian “permission to narrate” (Edward Said, Orientalism) as those across the diaspora sought to remedy their relationship with their homeland.
This drive to reconcile individual and cultural identity with the homeland has become more prominent than ever, where modern Palestinian authors and poets have found greater recognition in literary translation and are able to spread the voice of the Palestinian struggle. Female voices have also found a space to capture the intersection between culture and femininity that has marginalised so many Palestinian women from the mainstream of the literary world, with Adania Shibli’s A Minor Detail amplifying the harrowing experiences of individual cases of suffering that have become lost as a ‘minor detail’ of history.
However, it is the legacy of literature which has the power to change this for the Palestinian people, whose artistic voices of resistance, rebellion and reconciliation have emboldened the identity of a society during genocide and have given voice to hope for a brighter future.
“Free Palestine” by alisdare1 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0