BALL Anna Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
BALL Anna Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
BALL Anna Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
ANNA BALL
Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of
Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide range of research into postcolonial literatures
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1. Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye by Brenda Cooper
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8. Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939: ‘A Hot Place, Belonging To Us’ by Evelyn O’Callaghan
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14. Decolonizing Culture in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction by Susan
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15. Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place by Minoli Salgado
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17. Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English by
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18. English Writing and India, 1600–1920: Colonizing Aesthetics by Pramod K. Nayar
19. Decolonising Gender: Literature, Enlightenment and the Feminine Real by Caroline Rooney
20. Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography by David Huddart
21. Contemporary Arab Women Writers by Anastasia Valassopoulos
22. Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire by Ben Grant
24 Land and Nationalism in Fictions from Southern Africa by James Graham
25. Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden by Sharae Deckard
26. The Idea of the Antipodes: Place, People, and Voices by Matthew Boyd Goldie
27. Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives: Violence and Violation edited by Sorcha Gunne and
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28. Locating Transnational Ideals edited by Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio
29. Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature: Remitting the Text by Kezia Page
30. Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present by
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31. Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory by Dennis Walder
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42. Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective by Anna Ball
Related Titles:
Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation by Bart Moore-Gilbert
Palestinian Literature
and Film in Postcolonial
Feminist Perspective
Anna Ball
The right of Anna Ball to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
List of Figures xi
Note on Transliteration xiii
Acknowledgements xv
1 En-gendering Palestine:
Narratives of Desire and Dis-Orientation 18
3 Masculinity in Crisis:
From Patriarchy to (Post)Colonial Performativity 72
Notes 165
Bibliography 199
Filmography 217
Index 219
Figures
3.2 Khaled (left) and Said (right), figures of a close and genuine
‘fraternal’ friendship. 92
4.2 Abu Shukri and his son lay an illegal water pipe that will
enable them to settle in the barren borderland. 119
5.2 Children from the Dheisha refugee camp in the West Bank
and from Shatila refugee camp in Beirut come to meet and
hold hands at the Israeli-Lebanese border. 142
Note On Transliteration
This book uses a simplified system of transliteration for Arabic terms that
denotes ‘ayn with an open inverted comma (‘), and hamza and alif with a
closed inverted comma (’). Proper names and place names are spelled as
they are commonly found in English language publications. With the excep-
tion of instances where it has been appropriate to transliterate specific words
according to a particular regional dialect, the transliteration adheres to Mod-
ern Standard Arabic.
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the many people who have
educated and supported me along the way. I am especially grateful to Dr
Anastasia Valassopoulos, whose passion for and knowledge of her field has
inspired and guided me since my PhD studies. A special thank you to Dr
Dalia Said Mostafa for her patient and careful guidance on Arabic terminol-
ogy and transliteration. Any errors of course remain my own. I am extremely
grateful to the wonderful team of academics who educated me during my
PhD at the University of Manchester, including Professor Laura Doan, Dr
Anke Bernau and Professor Hoda Elsadda. Many thanks, also, to Professor
Caroline Rooney for her insightful engagement with my research, and for
sparking the idea for this book during my Viva. At Nottingham Trent Uni-
versity, I am particularly grateful to Professor Patrick Williams for his expert
guidance and generous support, and to all at the Centre for Colonial and
Postcolonial Studies at NTU. In Nottingham, a special thank you to Cath-
erine Clay, Sarah Jackson and Bethan Stevens for their wonderful friendship
and support. In Manchester and Sheffield, thank you to Becky, Alicia and
Rizwana for their patience, good humour and sense of perspective on all
things academic and otherwise.
One of the many pleasures of working on this book has been the oppor-
tunity to communicate with some of the authors and fi lmmakers discussed
within it, and in every case, they have responded generously and graciously.
I am extremely grateful to Michel Khleifi and Sindibad Films for their kind
permission to reproduce fi lm stills from Wedding in Galilee; to Mona Hatoum
and the White Cube Gallery for permission to reproduce a still from Mea-
sures of Distance; to Elia Suleiman for his permission to reproduce a still
from Divine Intervention; to Annemarie Jacir for her permission to reproduce
a still from like twenty impossibles; and to Bero Beyer at Augustus Film for
his permission to reproduce stills from Paradise Now. I am also very grate-
ful to Arab Film Distribution for their permission to reproduce a still from
Masri’s Frontiers of Dreams and Fears; to Axiom Films for their permission to
reproduce a still from ‘Atash; and to the Palestinian Society for the Study of
xvi Acknowledgements
International Affairs (PASSIA) for their permission to reproduce the map of
‘The West Bank Wall’.
Many thanks to Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Columbia University Press, for
granting me permission to reproduce lines from ‘Abdallah Radwan’s poem
‘You Are Everything’, Laila ‘Allush’s ‘The Path of Affection’, Rashid Husain’s
‘First’, Tawfiq Zayyad’s ‘What Next?’ and Zayyad’s ‘Here We Shall Stay’,
from An Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi,
copyright © 1992 Columbia University Press. Thank you to Bloodaxe Books
for granting me permission to reproduce lines from Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘A
State of Siege’, as it appears in their 2007 edition of The Butterfly’s Burden,
and from Naomi Shihab Nye’s ‘Gate 4-A’, as it appears in Tender Spot. Poetry
from 19 Varieties of Gazelle (text copyright © 2002 Naomi Shihab Nye) is
used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Thank you to The Permis-
sions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.,
for permission to print material from Red Suitcase (© 1994 Naomi Shihab
Nye) and You & Yours (© 2005 Naomi Shihab Nye). Last but by no means
least, a huge thank you to Suheir Hammad, to Zohra Saed at UpSet Press
and to CypherBooks for their very kind permission to reproduce lines from
Born Palestinian, Born Black and ZaatarDiva respectively.
Finally, thank you to my parents and brother for their endless support and
inspiration—and to my partner, Lee Johnathan Garland, for his unwavering
patience, belief and love. I could not have written this book without them.
Introduction
Permission to Re-narrate
All narratives take the reader on a journey of one kind or another, but the
particular narrative journey embarked upon within this book—through
a ‘postcolonial feminist’ account of Palestinian literature and fi lm—is an
attempt to chart a new discursive route into a particularly fraught territory:
that of Palestinian self-representation. The necessity of undertaking such a
journey emerges from the peculiar sense in which critical inquiry into Pales-
tinian culture, particularly in the ‘Western’ academy, 2 is currently subject to
a number of discursive limits that, just like the roadblocks and checkpoints
that regulate Palestinian territory itself, have tended to restrict the narra-
tives that can be produced about Palestine, and the disciplines in which they
can be studied. Academics and creative practitioners alike have often found
themselves grappling with restrictions on what the Palestinian American
critic Edward Said termed ‘permission to narrate’ when it comes to the task
of formulating critical or imaginative accounts of Palestinian history, culture
and identity. 3 Small wonder, then, that many scholars, even in disciplines of
apparent relevance to Palestinian culture—most notably, postcolonial stud-
ies—have chosen not just to tread carefully, but often to steer well clear of
such territory altogether (of which, more later). This book, though, does
not seek permission to construct a single ‘acceptable’ or ‘official’ narrative
of Palestinian identity. Instead, it explores the compelling yet largely unac-
knowledged narratives of gender-consciousness that emerge from Palestinian
literature and fi lm when approached from a postcolonial feminist perspec-
tive. In doing so, it seeks to re-narrate Palestinian culture and identity in a
way that reveals its multi-layered and polyphonic qualities, and establishes
new critical locations from which creative, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary
dialogues might emerge. It therefore performs what the Palestinian Ameri-
can poet Naomi Shihab Nye describes (in the lines taken as the epigraph
to this introduction) as listening to ‘the words under the words’: reading in
a way that is attentive to the alternative voices, ideas and stories too often
2 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
obscured from view by the reductive surface narratives of stereotype and
polemic that have tended to dominate the representation of Palestine.4 Why,
though, should these powerful alternative narratives appear when examined
from a ‘postcolonial feminist perspective’?
The terms ‘postcolonialism’, ‘feminism’ and ‘Palestine’ do not tend to fea-
ture together in critical literature very often, but as it will become clear over
the course of this book, they in fact bear ready and productive alliances. A
‘postcolonial feminist perspective’ enables the critic to interpret and commu-
nicate variously defi ned feminist goals and gendered experiences in a way
that is resistant to the hegemonic assumptions of Western feminisms, while it
also acknowledges that the task of creating liberating alternatives to colonial
power structures must necessarily entail a feminist attentiveness to the forms
of inequality and oppression that circulate around gendered experience and
identification. A ‘postcolonial feminist perspective’ therefore combines the
insights of both postcolonialism(s) and feminism(s) in its recognition of the
need for just and creative alternatives to the intersecting power structures
of colonial and patriarchal oppression. It is from this distinctive perspective
that Palestine comes into focus in an interesting way—for while Palestine itself
can be read as a nation in urgent need of liberating alternatives to the injus-
tices of Israeli occupation, a significant body of Palestinian creative expres-
sion also demonstrates a desire to interrogate both colonial and gendered
power structures in order to imagine emancipating alternatives to its current
realities. From this perspective, the Palestinian literature and fi lm examined
within this book not only invites a postcolonial feminist approach, but also
engages in something akin to this process for itself.
There is also a deeper shared commitment that unites postcolonial, femi-
nist and Palestinian creative perspectives, though, and this is their dedication
to the recovery of narratives and voices that have been silenced or mar-
ginalised by more dominant discourses. While several critics have argued
that historical narratives of Palestinian experience have frequently been sup-
pressed in favour of the accounts presented by Israel, 5 Nurith Gertz and
George Khleifi have noted that Palestinian creative practitioners have sought
to counter this narrative suppression by formulating their own multi-layered
accounts of Palestinian experience and identity through the mediums of
fi lm, literature, art and criticism.6 While the subject matter of such works
may not always be explicitly political (though the struggle for Palestinian
self-determination often emerges as a major theme), the very act of creative
expression can be read as politically potent when viewed against the back-
drop of narrative silencing and erasure that has traditionally thwarted Pales-
tinian self-representation, both political and creative. Against this backdrop,
it becomes possible to appreciate the political as well as cultural significance
of projects such as ‘Dreams of a Nation’, co-founded by the Palestinian fi lm-
maker Annemarie Jacir and the scholar Hamid Dabashi, which aims to cre-
ate an archive of Palestinian cinema and connected resources to replace that
Introduction 3
which was lost or destroyed during the Israeli Siege of Beirut in 1982;7 or of
the annual Palestine Festival of Literature, ‘PalFest’, founded by the author
Ahdaf Soueif, which brings authors from around the world to audiences in
Palestine who would otherwise be unable to access such cultural material
due to the restrictions on travel for Palestinians.8 Projects such as these not
only testify to the significance of cultural expression as a recognition of the
Palestinian people’s humanity, but also nurture and preserve the narratives
of Palestinians themselves. Collectively, they reveal that cultural expression
is not a luxury but an essential need for Palestinians, akin to what the great
anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon termed a ‘literature of combat’: a body of cre-
ative work that operates as a tool of resistance through its ability to voice sup-
pressed narratives and mobilise a collective political consciousness through
its construction of a ‘national culture’. 9
Fanon’s ready translation into the Palestinian context (which was also rec-
ognised by the early Palestine Liberation Organization or PLO, which was
greatly influenced by other elements of Fanon’s writings10 ) gestures towards
some of the broader alliances to be found between Palestinian narratives
and postcolonial discourse. As a field that emerged out of the desires of colo-
nised peoples to locate alternatives to the power structures of colonialism
and imperialism, a key premise of postcolonialism has been the construction
of a discursive space that resists hegemonic colonial narratives by shifting the
marginalised voices of the colonised from the peripheries to the centre of cul-
tural consciousness. It is therefore a source of some irony that Palestine itself
currently remains largely marginalised within postcolonial studies, for rea-
sons that I shall explore in a moment. Yet the narratives of resistance, national
identity and cultural experience that surface through postcolonial discourse
also bear their own sites of silencing, and it is these to which feminist scholars
may seek to draw attention by locating the alternative expressions of history,
experience and imagination that emerge from women or others who are
excluded from the dominant patriarchal narrative (whether authored by the
coloniser, or by those within the colonised nation). Both postcolonialism and
feminism, then, involve an identification with the margins; but a distinctively
postcolonial feminist perspective entails a multi-directional act of ‘writing
back’ to not one but many centres of power—including those sites of cultural
privilege and silencing that may exist within Western feminist discourses,
or indeed within postcolonialism. Despite their shared ethos, though, these
discourses also generate certain forms of friction when examined alongside
one another, and this means that the terrain traversed in this book is by no
means uncontested, nor unproblematic. In order to prepare the ground for
the specific narrative journey that I undertake over the course of the next five
chapters, it is necessary to map out the disjunctions as well as connections
between these fields that must be negotiated en route: disjunctions that relate
specifically to the place of Palestine in postcolonial studies, to the nature of
feminist discourse in relation to Palestine and to the comparative approach
4 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
adopted in this book, which creates obstacles and possibilities of a different
kind, relating particularly to questions of form and language—and indeed, to
my own authorial subject-position.
The approach adopted within this book is comparative in two ways: fi rstly,
it deals with texts originally written in a variety of languages, and from
a variety of cultural contexts; and secondly, it engages in analysis of both
literary and fi lmic work. While there is much to be gained through this com-
parative approach, it is also important to demarcate the inevitable limits of
this kind of project, and the fi rst such limit emerges in relation to the scope
of analysis. The creative texts examined within this book comprise but a
small selection of the vast body of literary and fi lmic work that has been
produced by Palestinian authors and fi lmmakers living within either pre-
1948 or post-1948 Palestine and its substantial diaspora. 59 Given my preoc-
cupation with the dynamics of Palestine’s contemporary colonial condition,
all of the texts examined in this book were created either during or after
the British mandate, at a wide range of points in Palestine’s history—from
poetry produced shortly before and after the Nakba of 1948,60 to fiction of
the fi rst and second Intifadas,61 to fi lms directed from a number of diasporic
subject-positions within the last few years—in order to indicate the many
formulations of (post)coloniality and feminism that emerge out of these dif-
ferent historical moments and geographical locations. This book must not,
however, be read as an historical or geographical survey of literature and
fi lm: such a project is well beyond the scope of the present study. Instead, the
selection of texts has been driven by their relevance to the key concepts at
stake within this particular study: postcolonialism and gender-consciousness.
A further consideration has been my desire to balance rereadings of seminal
texts by some of the canonical authors and fi lmmakers in the field—such as
Fadwa Tuqan and Michel Khleifi–with work by more recent arrivals in the
field set to make important contributions to the debate—such as, for example,
Annemarie Jacir and Suheir Hammad. I very much hope that the selective
textual engagement undertaken within this book will pave the way for many
future studies of a wider range of work.
There is a further limitation on the texts open for consideration within
this study, though—and that limitation relates to language. As a scholar work-
ing within the interdisciplinary and comparative but primarily Anglophone
fields of postcolonial and gender studies, my choice of texts has been limited
to those available either in English translation, or with English subtitles. The
necessity of this is partly due to my own limitations: though a student of
Arabic for many years, my interest in Palestinian creative expression stems
largely from sources written in English, which remains the most accessible
language to me, and to the many other scholars working in the primarily
Anglophone fields of comparative literary, cultural, postcolonial and gender
studies in the UK.62 The range and quality of texts available in translation,
however, also convince me of the tremendous untapped potential for the
study of Palestine beyond the realms of Arabic language and Middle Eastern
Introduction 13
studies courses. There are undeniable limitations related to the use of texts in
translation—not least, the loss of literary devices dependent on the phonetic
qualities of language, the potential for the loss of cultural references and the
possibility of flawed, partial or incorrect translation, all of which the scholar
must remain conscious, and indeed in my textual analyses, I exercise a nec-
essary caution when it comes to making linguistically based assertions about
matters of word choice or literary device. Despite this significant limitation,
though, I remain convinced that there is also much to be gained through
engagement with texts that would otherwise remain entirely inaccessible to
an audience illiterate in Arabic. Indeed, according to Waïl S. Hassan, work-
ing with texts in translation may even prove an enriching experience for
those proficient in the original language, as it may invite them to perceive
the text ‘less in terms of equivalence than of negotiation, wandering (erre)
or play’ in a way that makes them attentive to the instabilities of meaning
and alternative interpretations present within it.63 While this book is aimed
primarily at students and scholars within Anglophone fields of study, those
who work with Palestinian texts in their original Arabic may also therefore
fi nd that new possibilities arise from studying familiar texts in an unfamiliar
language (both literal and critical).
For all of its problems, then, working with texts in translation is both
possible and at some levels productive, and here, I turn to the model of
comparative literary studies as a well-established field in which precisely this
kind of cross-cultural, interdisciplinary scholarship takes place. While some
have warned that reliance upon texts in English translation may enforce the
Anglophone academy as a site of centralised, dominant authority to which
other discourses must adapt,64 others such as Hassan have argued that turn-
ing to translated Arabic literature might in fact perform a vitally important
destabilisation of the Anglophone tendencies of the postcolonial academy.
In his article ‘Postcolonial Theory and Modern Arabic Literature: Horizons
of Application’, Hassan offers a powerful rationale for the interdisciplinary
study of postcolonial and Arabic theory and literature, even in translation:
In this passage, Said reminds the critic that they must not write on behalf of but
in response to the creative, complex, imaginative and even contradictory nar-
ratives of Palestinians themselves, who are also engaged in this process of self-
scrutiny. Over the course of this work, I therefore seek to construct a variety of
postcolonial feminist dialogues around various moments of ‘self-scrutiny’ that
have emerged in Palestinian literature and film, which engender a similarly
self-reflexive scrutiny in postcolonial feminist consciousness itself.
In Chapter 1, I establish the ‘gendering’ of Palestinian narratives of nation-
hood that emerges partly in response to Zionist expressions of gendered,
sexualised and Orientalist desire for Palestine, before exploring the willing-
ness of canonical literary and fi lmic figures such as Mahmoud Darwish and
Michel Khleifi to interrogate patriarchal gender norms and so reimagine the
very structures of nationhood within their fi lmic and literary narratives. In
Chapter 2, I turn to the work of two canonical female authors, Fadwa Tuqan
and Liana Badr, in order to investigate the very different ways in which
they construct ‘resistance narratives’ that recognise the interplay and ten-
sions between the ‘postcolonial’ and ‘feminist’. Chapter 3 explores a range
of fi lmic and literary texts by late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst century
male creative practitioners in which maleness and masculinity are placed
under scrutiny, and colonial, anti-colonial and postcolonial power dynamics
are presented as deeply implicated in its imaginative construction. Chapter
Introduction 17
4, meanwhile, turns to the potential relevance of a distinctive strand of post-
colonial feminist theory termed ‘border-theory’ to the discourses of power
relations, embodied experience and (dis)identification that have sprung up
around Palestinian borders as potentially ‘queer’ spaces in the literary and
fi lmic imagination. Chapter 5 moves beyond historic Palestine to consider
the intimate ties that diasporic creative practitioners seek to construct with
the Palestinian homeland through models of transcultural feminist solidar-
ity—models which ultimately open up beyond the Palestinian community
to all of those who wish to stand in postcolonial feminist solidarity with
Palestine. This is just one of the possibilities upon which I reflect further in
the conclusion to the book, entitled ‘Postcolonial Feminist Futures’. Here, I
consider briefly some of the debates and sites of future study that may be
opened up by examining Palestinian literature and fi lm from a postcolonial
feminist perspective. Collectively, these chapters offer an array of insights
into the many different ways in which Palestinian authors and fi lmmakers
are ‘looking [at], scrutinizing, assessing’ structures of (post)coloniality and
gender for themselves, and they invite us to consider the ways in which they
serve to re-narrate Palestinian experience, self-representation and creativity.
It is time, then, to set out on the journey that I have begun to map over
the preceding pages, and there is no better way to begin than by returning
for a moment to the words with which this Introduction began: words passed
on by the poet Naomi Shihab Nye from her grandmother, in which she asks
us to
In listening to these words, I hear a call for attentiveness to the many layers
of stories, voices and meanings that emerge through sensitive acts of read-
ing and interpretation. I also hear a powerful testament to the transforma-
tive potential of creative expression within the ‘rough-edged’, (post)colonial
world, and a vivid reminder of how those senses of belonging and identity
that may appear burdens fi lling ‘our pockets with stones’ also offer us touch-
stones to the past, and material with which to build new homes and futures.
It is in answer to these ‘words under the words’ that I embark on my narra-
tive journey through the contested terrains of the postcolonial, feminist and
Palestinian imaginations, and invite you to come with me.
1 En-gendering Palestine
Narratives of Desire and Dis-Orientation
On the one hand . . . they often symbolise the collective unity, honour,
and the raison d’être of specific national and ethnic projects, like go-
ing to war. On the other hand, however, they are often excluded from
the collective ‘we’ of the body politic, and retain an object rather than
a subject position . . . In this sense, the construction of womanhood
has a property of ‘otherness’. Strict cultural codes of what it is to be
a ‘proper woman’ are often developed to keep women in this inferior
power position.18
The linear equivalence of event and idea that historicism proposes, com-
monly signifies a people, a nation, or a national culture as an empirical
sociological category or a holistic cultural entity. However, the narra-
tive and psychological force that nationness brings to bear on cultural
production and political projection is the effect of the ambivalence of
the ‘nation’ as a narrative strategy. As an apparatus of symbolic power,
it produces a continual slippage of categories, like sexuality, class affi li-
ation, territorial ‘paranoia’, or ‘cultural difference’ in the act of writing
the nation.20
Here, Bhabha recognises that, far from authenticating any single claim to
national identity or desire, national narratives expose the very multiplicity
of the nation as a construct. For Bhabha, though, this unstable multiplicity
offers a means to challenge exclusive claims to power and authority that may
render the nation a limited, even oppressive construct. Instead, diverse and
competing narratives of national desire and belonging are able to surface
alongside one another.
Bhabha’s observation offers a contentious but productive context to this
chapter, which seeks to trace the interplay of gendered, territorial and national
identities and desires that emerge through three key narrative perspectives
that have collectively en-gendered Palestine: those of Zionist discourse, of
early Palestinian nationalist narratives and of later Palestinian deconstruc-
tions of the national narrative. These three perspectives are analysed over
the course of three sections. The fi rst two sections, ‘Virgin Territory: Colonial
Discourse and the Fertile Imagination’ and ‘Wedded to the Land: Figuring
National Desire through the Feminine’, each examine the competing ‘femi-
nisations’ of the land that appear fi rstly in Orientalist, colonial and Zionist
discourse, and secondly in the Palestinian nationalist imagination. Though
Zionist and Palestinian nationalist narratives hold opposing perspectives,
sexualised and gendered tropes appear in both discourses and appear to
inform one another, in ways that reveal their confl icting yet dialogic natures.
The third section, ‘Nation as Multiple Narration: Dis-Orienting Desire in
the Films of Michel Khleifi’, builds on these insights in order to explore the
way in which one of Palestine’s most prominent and significant fi lmmakers
simultaneously deconstructs the gendered paradigms of both Orientalist and
national desire within his fi lms, particularly within his daring work Wedding
in Galilee (1987).21 As such, his work begins to shift Palestine’s national nar-
rative beyond the confi nes of patriarchal discourse by allowing space for
multiple alternative narratives of national desire and belonging to emerge.
Collectively, these chapters establish gender as a central feature within
En-Gendering Palestine 23
colonial, anti-colonial and postcolonial feminist narratives of Palestine. If
narrations en-gender nations, then this chapter tries to reveal how telling the
story differently, through the eyes of a gender-conscious narrator, might ‘give
birth’ to a compelling new understanding of Palestine.
As a ‘land of the imagination’, Palestine has long provided a space onto which
travellers and colonisers could project their own fantasies of control, ownership
and even belonging. Yet as Shehadeh notes, such fantasies also had very real
repercussions for those within the landscape. In their desire to authenticate
their own vision of Palestine, such narratives systematically sought to erase the
presence of others who might have their own competing stories of Palestine to
tell: its Arab inhabitants. Through this narrative erasure, Palestine was pre-
sented as a blank page to be written upon, a terra incognita—virgin territory, ripe
for fertilisation and population. Yet however hard these ‘fertile imaginations’
sought to suppress the existence of the ‘other’ in their narratives of colonisation
and settlement, the ‘absent presence’ of Arab Palestinians (to use a particularly
apt phrase, given the surreal category of ‘present absentee’ employed by Israel
in the aftermath of 1948) 23 continued to surface through fears and even desires
24 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
of the ‘other’, which often found expression in gendered and sexualised terms.
This section therefore traces the narrative construction of Palestine as ‘virgin
territory’ in the Zionist imagination, and in doing so, reveals the highly gen-
dered and sexualised nature of the imperialist, colonial and Orientalist narra-
tives that sought to justify mastery of the land.
The construction of Palestine as a ‘virgin land’ was central to the Zionist
project of settling in Palestine. While Western imperial and colonial discourse
functioned as a useful model for Zionism, a key distinction was that ‘unlike
the “classical” European colonial enterprises, the Zionist movement was
historically disinterested in either culturally uplifting the natives or exploit-
ing their labor’.24 Instead, the task in hand was simply to locate an empty
land that could become a home for the Jewish population, and this desire
emerges in the narrative erasure of the Arab Palestinian population within
many elements of Zionist discourse. One of the abiding claims of the Zionist
movement was that Palestine presented ‘a land without a people for a people
without a land’.25 As Said notes in The Question of Palestine, such a slogan was
quite simply inaccurate: the British Census for Palestine (a source commonly
cited by Israeli historians) recorded the 1914 population at 689,272 persons
comprised of ‘no more (and perhaps less)’ than 60,000 Jews.26 Even in 1969,
though, Golda Meir, then prime minister of Israel, stated that when Zionists
fi rst came to Palestine,
Elsewhere, scholars such as Haim Gerber have taken pains to trace the origins
of Palestinian identity, and have shown that while it may not have existed in
the same form as European models of nationhood when Zionists fi rst arrived
in Palestine, it nevertheless has a lengthy territorial and cultural history
in the region. 28 Here, though, Meir’s limited understanding of Palestinian
nationhood elides the presence of any recognisable community of people on
the land whatsoever: that Palestinians ‘did not exist’ in any legitimate form is
the implication of her statement. Far from being an anomalous inaccuracy
in representations of Palestine, the erasure of the land’s native inhabitants
operates as a recurrent trope in both colonial and Zionist discourse—and
significantly, its implications are also gendered and sexualised.
In her work Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Con-
test, Anne McClintock writes that the narrative of male travel and territorial
expansion entailed in the imperialist project can be understood as ‘an erotics
of ravishment’ whereby the land to be colonised was represented as ‘virgin’
territory desirable for both its ‘purity’ and its potential ‘fertility’, which could
be achieved by ‘penetrating’ the landscape through the ‘massive thrust of
En-Gendering Palestine 25
male technology’ and civilisation brought from the West.29 These tropes are
particularly apparent in the writing of Theodor Herzl, the ‘father’ of modern
political Zionism who was integral to founding the State of Israel. In Old-
New-Land, Herzl describes Palestine as a ‘natural, God-given’ space that ‘lay
unseen and forgotten for long territories’: a ‘virgin land’ in which Zionist set-
tlers would ‘restore fertility to the soil’.30 As McClintock notes, though, there
are political consequences to such a discourse:
The myth of the virgin land is also the myth of the empty land, involv-
ing both a gender and a racial dispossession [ . . . ] Within patriarchal
narratives, to be a virgin is to be empty of desire and void of sexual
agency [ . . . ] Within colonial narratives, the eroticizing of ‘virgin’ space
also effects a territorial appropriation, for if the land is virgin, colonized
peoples cannot claim aboriginal territorial rights.31
Thus, the Zionist wilderness narrative of the virgin land can also be under-
stood as a typically colonial ‘rescue fantasy’ that claims to save the land from
itself, to ‘tame’ its ‘primitive’ nature and to render it productive.35 For Said,
the Zionist representation of Palestine ‘as an empty territory paradoxically
“fi lled” with ignoble or perhaps even with dispensable natives’ establishes
Zionism as a narrative of colonial domination.36 He states:
Perversely, however, the ‘lamentably alien’ qualities of the Orient also ren-
dered it a site of voyeuristic fascination, an imaginative ground for working
through the repressed desires and fears within the Western unconscious.
Shohat suggests that this simultaneous sense of repulsion and desire, dis-
dain and fascination, typically fi nds expression in Orientalist texts through
implicitly sexualised representations of the landscape as a site of ‘irrational
primitivism’ and ‘uncontrolled instincts’ in which the ‘exposed, barren land
and blazing sands metaphorize the exposed, unrepressed “hot” passion and
uncensored emotions of the Orient . . . as the world of the out-of-control Id’.41
Barbara McKean Parmenter, meanwhile, notes that on the rare occasions
when Arab inhabitants of Palestine are recognised within Hebrew litera-
ture, they tend to be viewed in Orientalist terms as figures of simultaneous
fascination and threat: both ‘part and parcel of the landscape . . . alluringly
exotic, wild, and in touch with the harsh desert’, and testament to ‘the darker
side . . . of nature . . . irrational [and] uncivilized’.42 The male Arab subject’s
imaginative location within territories of the wild, untamed and unknown
paradoxically connects him to the ‘feminine’ realm of what Freud termed the
‘dark continent’: female sexuality, an indication both of the Arab subject’s
feminisation in Orientalist discourse, and of his connection to all that is
feared and suppressed within Western cultural consciousness.43
This co-existent sense of sexualised desire and fear is typical of the Ori-
entalist imagination, though Said leaves the implications of this frustratingly
unexplored:
Why the Orient seems still to suggest not only fecundity but sexual
promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep genera-
tive energies, is something on which one could speculate: it is not the
province of my analysis here.44
En-Gendering Palestine 27
One speculative response to Said’s question, though, emerges in the form of
the Israeli author Amos Oz’s novel, My Michael: a text that dramatises the
repression of the Palestinian presence within the Israeli narrative through its
exploration of gendered and sexualised fears and desires. Set in 1950s Jerusa-
lem but published in 1968, just after the Six-Day War or Naksa, the novel tells
the story of a young, poetic, Israeli woman named Hannah Gonen, whose
restricted existence as a wife and mother within the home leads to her ner-
vous breakdown. This breakdown, however, is expressed through her retreat
into fantasies focused on two Arab twins with whom she played as a child
in pre-partition Jerusalem. Often simultaneously erotic and fearful, these
fantasies can be read as projections of the Israeli anxiety concerning the
repressed presence of the Palestinian ‘other’: a presence that Israel attempted
to excise from its own carefully policed boundaries of state identity (just
as Hannah’s existence is also rigorously constrained in the service of pro-
ducing the ideal Israeli home).45 Hannah’s fantasies therefore represent the
‘return of the repressed’ within the Israeli subconscious, and she describes
this ‘return’ in classically Zionist terms. Beyond the boundaries of Jerusalem,
for example, is the untamed wilderness where, in her imagination, the Arab
‘other’ resides: ‘If you turn your head you can see in the midst of all the
building a rocky field . . . the hills. The ruins. The wind in the pine trees. The
inhabitants’.46 In her fantasies, meanwhile, the Arab twins ‘break through’
the boundaries of her unconscious in terms that are both threatening and
desirable: ‘Silently the pair of them float over the neighbourhood at the end
of the night. Naked to the waist, barefoot and light, they glide outside. Lean
fists hammer on the corrugated iron’.47 In these fantasies, Hannah affi rms the
association of the Arab ‘other’ with natural, uncivilised ‘wild zones’ deemed
a threat to civilisation.
If read as a national allegory, then Hannah’s breakdown presents some
interesting possibilities of postcolonial interpretation. Hannah’s own break-
down might be read as a representation of Israel’s own fragile sense of ‘self’—a
fragility premised on its inherent sense of ‘lack’, not only of national security
but of narrative authority, due to that inherent, repressed presence of the Pal-
estinian ‘other’. Yet Hannah also seems to offer a psychoanalytic interpreta-
tion up for analysis, as her fantasies suggest that ‘lack’ also generates desire.
Here, that desire seems to be founded on the unavoidable but taboo intimacy
between Israeli and Palestinian, ‘self’ and ‘other’, male and female. Conse-
quently, Oz’s novel can be linked to the imperialist tradition whereby the colo-
nised ‘native’ is frequently represented as a sexually predatory figure towards
Western women: 48 a trope that reveals much about the sexually repressed
British Victorian mindset, and the imperial subject’s fears of threats to his own
‘masculine’ colonial mastery. At one level, Oz therefore appears to confront
the troubling conflation of racial, gendered and sexual ‘otherness’ within the
Israeli imagination in a way that might be considered radical.49 Yet as Yosefa
28 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
Loshitzky observes, ‘it is interesting, but also disturbing, that Oz chose to
metaphorize and embody Israeli fears through imaginary Arabs and imagi-
nary women [ . . . ] Ultimately Oz’s “binarist” and patriarchal writing distils
to a projection of fears, neuroses and fantasies, to the “other” side of Israeli
society: Arabs and women’. 50 Conscious of these problematic discourses as he
may be, Oz nevertheless appears trapped within a mindset in which anything
other than a ‘virginal’ Israel remains an aberration.
Oz’s novel ironically reveals a more astute awareness of the gendered and
sexualised dynamics of the Zionist imagination than Said’s own analysis. For
Said, though, evidence of the close connection between Orientalist and Zion-
ist discourse was to be found more readily in the numerous negative descrip-
tions of Palestinians as ‘totally destitute of all moral sense’, characterised by
‘ignorance and stupidity’, which frequently appeared in Western-authored
accounts that informed Zionist opinion; 51 tropes which are implicitly gen-
dered in their portrayal of Palestinians as ‘savage’, ‘barbaric’ and in need of
a ‘paternalistic’ colonialism. For Said, then, the Orientalist characteristics of
Zionist discourse affi rm it as a narrative of masculinist colonial mastery. A
further gendering of Palestine emerges within Zionist discourse, however,
which complicates this interpretation. Palestine was not simply considered
‘virgin territory’ but was also presented as the ‘motherland’: a site to which
the Jewish people would return home, displacing not ‘natives’ but ‘illegiti-
mate inhabitants’. Said himself recognises this when he writes:
Here, Said suggests that Zionism premised its national narrative of a Jewish
homeland on Jewish roots in the region, and historical claims to Palestinian
territory. Yet from Joseph Massad’s perspective, the narrative of the Jew-
ish ‘motherland’ is only further evidence of its colonial underpinnings, in
that ‘the image of the land as mother is linked inherently to the sexual and
reproductive project of colonial-settler nationalism’, 53 whereby settlers would
be perceived as both ‘children’ newly born into the nation, and as future
propagators of the land and population. Nevertheless, the representation
of Palestine as the motherland also offered the Zionist project the idea of
historical roots within what Daniel Monterescu describes as the ‘conceptu-
ally split and historically troubled . . . Jewish sense of place (ha-makom)’: 54
a ‘conceptual split’ that stems from a simultaneous desire to claim Israel as
the ‘promised land’ and a reluctance to ‘become native’ (in other words,
to be subsumed into Palestinian identity and culture). Instead, the Zionist
quest for roots took place through a search for alternative ways of ‘knowing’
the land—through activities such as archeology and natural history, which
En-Gendering Palestine 29
might yield alternative narratives of the landscape that linked them to it,
while remaining distinct from ‘native’ culture. Indeed, agricultural activity
became an important element of Zionist endeavor, as it employed modern
industrial technology in order to fertilise the territory and produce actual
roots in the form of crops to sustain the new national population, a process
deliberately set apart from the traditional methods of Palestinian farmers.
This agricultural discourse offers a very literal manifestation of the mascu-
linist desire to fertilise a virgin territory, and so lay claim to it. As Barbara
McKean Parmenter observes, the Hebrew term for this kind of ‘knowledge
of the land’, yedi’at haaretz, has gendered connotations: ‘The biblical mean-
ing of yedi’a relates to sexual knowledge of a woman, so that knowledge of
the land equates with physical possession’. 55 Here, knowledge is once again
implicated in the production of power, just as gender is again implicated in
discourses of national and territorial mastery. Consequently, the gendered
tropes of Zionist discourse are strongly suggestive of both a masculinist and
colonial desire for mastery—a mastery that emerged through the production
of narratives of the Israeli ‘self’, and erasure of the narrative presence of the
Palestinian ‘other’.
Powerful as this logic of the land as both virgin and mother might appear
within the Zionist narrative, though, it gave birth to a very different national
narrative within the Palestinian imagination. From the Arab Palestinian per-
spective, Zionist colonial mastery of the motherland was not viewed as an
act of fertilisation—but of rape. The gendering of the land in Zionist narra-
tives could also, it seemed, be used to en-gender narratives of resistance and
reclamation in the Palestinian imagination.
Interrogator: In this poem you are clearly saying that my wife loves
you.
The Poet: I am speaking of my land, I say I was there before you
[...]
I loved her before you, and she will always think of me first [ . . . ]
I’ll even enter your bed
on your wedding night, and come between you87
Figure 1.1 Sumaya, the mukhtar’s daughter: a powerful figure of alternative female
desires. Wedding in Galilee (1987), dir. Michel Khleifi. Image courtesy of Sindibad Films
and Michel Khleifi.
En-Gendering Palestine 41
gazes at her half-dressed body in the mirror. In a subversive and performa-
tive celebration of her own bodily agency, we see her experimenting with the
large floating cloth of a kuffiya, a traditionally male headdress often worn as
a symbol of national resistance, which she pulls about her head and torso as
though attempting to fi nd an identity that suits her.
This scene is particularly important for the way in which it subverts the
‘scopophilic’ voyeurism of both the male and Orientalist gaze. According to
the fi lm theorist Laura Mulvey, much Western mainstream cinema is charac-
terised by ‘scopophilia’, ‘pleasure in looking’, which emerges as a specifically
heterosexual male gaze in which women become the passive objects of visual
pleasure.101 The binary power dynamics of the ‘male gaze’ mirror those of
the Orientalist gaze, in which, as Said writes, ‘the Orient is watched [while]
the European . . . is a watcher’.102 Indeed, the Oriental woman appears in
many Orientalist texts as a particular object of fascination, desire and visual
pleasure, whereby ‘the Western subject’s desire for its Oriental other is always
mediated by a desire to have access to the space of its women, to the body of
its women and to the truth of its women’.103 This desire for visual access to the
Orient through its women again echoes the sexualised narrative of penetra-
tion, domination and patriarchal mastery intrinsic to the colonial narrative.
Indeed, as Said observes, Western men’s attitudes towards ‘Eastern’ women
‘fairly stands for the pattern of relative strength between East and West and
the discourse about the Orient that it enabled’.104 In this scene, though, Khle-
ifi subtly deflects both the male and Orientalist gaze. While Sumaya is semi-
clad in this scene, the sight of her body is mediated through her own gaze
into the mirror, which is angled in such a way that it denies complete visual
access to the viewer. Equally, Khleifi subverts the common Orientalist trope
of the ‘veil’ in this scene as her playful use of the kuffiya neither obscures her
body substantially, nor operates as a symbol of feminine allure. Instead, it
is a male garment that she has presumably ‘borrowed’ from a male relative,
and with which she adorns rather than conceals herself in personal celebra-
tion of her own bodily desire and desirability. The lines of sight belong to
Sumaya in this scene: the visual pleasure is all hers, and her semi-obscured
body is a locus of visual and representational agency that cannot be claimed
or penetrated by the voyeuristic viewer.
If Sumaya suggests something of an uncertain future for the national nar-
rative through a bold break from tradition, then the bride herself provides an
even more disorienting vision of Palestine in a scene that takes place within
the bridal chamber, where the bridegroom is required to consummate the
marriage so that the bed sheet bearing proof of his wife’s virginity might
be displayed to the village. Khleifi presents the bridal chamber as akin to
Foucault’s concept of the ‘crisis heterotopia’: a space constructed as ‘other’
to the rest of the public realm, in which individuals are able to undergo
traumatic processes of transition in private, without threatening the exterior
social order.105 Crisis emerges within the marital chamber when the groom
42 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
is rendered impotent by the pressure of his father’s expectations, and by the
‘emasculating’ presence of the Israeli governor.
The allegorical nature of the groom’s impotence resonates with Samih al-
Qasim’s use of the image of troubled marital union in his poem of exile, ‘You
Pretend to Die’, in which he imagines Palestine as the bride and the exiled
Palestinian as the groom, but wonders how the ‘marriage rights’ might be per-
formed when there is such distance between them.106 An interesting response
to al-Qasim’s question emerges in this film, though—through Samia’s actions.
Upon realising her husband’s inability to consummate their marriage, the bride
decides to take her own virginity by breaking her hymen so that she might
produce the evidence required to maintain her groom’s honour. In private,
though, this usurpation of phallic agency disrupts rather than affirms the patri-
archal narrative: ‘If a woman’s honour is her virginity, then where is the honour
of a man?’ she asks. In her eloquent analysis of this film, Mary N. Layoun
writes that at this moment, ‘Samia claims Palestine—herself—for herself. And
that taking suggests further a vision of self-possession that is simultaneously
sensual, sexual, and personally and communally political’.107 Yet Samia’s claim
to sexual agency operates as a paradoxical affirmation of the national narra-
tive, in which any deviation from the ‘scripts’ of femininity or masculinity must
take place within the private rather than public sphere, and in which female
sexuality remains invested with collective as well as individual honour. For all
of its disorientating dynamics, then, this scene ultimately places national above
personal desire—yet it is the bride who chooses to author this narrative, and in
doing so, to assume an ambivalent authority as both symbol and agent.
Khleifi’s fi lm presents a very different ‘story’ to that which the mukhtar
would like his sons to ‘learn by heart’. This alternative national narrative
is multi-layered and multi-voiced, and reveals many competing forms of
Figure 1.2 Khleifi’s gaze turns to the intimate realms of the bridal chamber, where male
and female ‘scripts’ of honour and agency must be privately rewritten. Wedding in Galilee
(1987), dir. Michel Khleifi. Image courtesy of Sindibad Films and Michel Khleifi.
En-Gendering Palestine 43
political and personal desire at stake. While it deconstructs the reductive
tropes of colonial and Orientalist discourse, it also destabilises the similarly
reductive gender discourse that circulates in the traditional nationalist imagi-
nation. This does not, however, render Khleifi’s fi lm ‘anti-national’. Rather, it
invites us to reconsider the symbolic and social construction of nationhood
itself, so that, like the villagers in Wedding in Galilee, Palestine might also fi nd
a way of breaking from the repetitions and confi nes of history in order to
tell the story differently. As Said writes, the desire to break from established
narratives (colonial and otherwise) is essential in the task of representing
Palestine, and in his own review of the fi lm, he suggests that ‘significant treat-
ments of the Palestinian drama can come . . . only from nonestablishment
and counterinstitutional viewpoints’ such as Khelifi’s.108 Yet Khleifi’s own
desire to de/reconstruct such a narrative stems from an even deeper belief in
the necessity of equality and individuality within the nation. Speaking of his
aims in this fi lm, he writes:
As far as I was concerned, the Palestinian cause was a just one, but
[ . . . ] we had to provide the world with another way of talking about us
[ . . . ] Our weakness . . . derives from Arab society’s archaic structures:
patriarchy [ . . . ] [and] no recognition of the person as an individual nor
of men’s, children’s and, above all, women’s rights.
These were the axes around which I wanted to organize my work
[ . . . ] By moving towards other individuals, with all our contradictions
but no fear, we will recover our faith in the past, the present and the
future of our common destiny.109
This was the case among anti-feminist nationalists in Egypt, for exam-
ple, who claimed that calls for women’s emancipation at the turn of the
nineteenth century were the product of French and British interference in
the region, and to be rejected on these grounds. Indeed, contemporary
postcolonialists such as Spivak have also claimed that there is a certain
‘inbuilt colonialism of First World feminism toward the Third’, 8 evident in
the universalising, culturally insensitive assumptions of ‘global sisterhood’
displayed by some First World feminists, who adopt a gendered version
of the ‘colonial rescue fantasy’ in their approach to non-Western women.
Yet as Kumari Jayawardena notes, ‘women’s movements do not occur in
a vacuum but correspond to, and to some extent are determined by, the
wider social movements of which they form part’, 9 and it is possible to
48 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
identify the emergence of feminism(s) that can be considered distinctive to,
and in tune with, the socio-political context of nations within the Middle
East. Miriam Cooke makes the pertinent observation that the emergence
of feminism in the Arab world in fact coincided with and arguably sprung
from the struggles for liberation from colonial rule taking place in many
Arab nations, which led to a broader desire for political agency, freedom
and responsibility.10 Thus, Nawar Al-Hassan Golley contends that certain
strands of feminism (or feminisms) can ‘be seen as indigenous’ to the Arab
world, ‘an inevitable result of [ . . . ] the struggle between the dying tradi-
tional, religious, feudal Ottoman way of life and the rising modern, secular,
capitalist European way of life’.11 Consequently, Arab feminism embodies a
‘double struggle’ that takes place ‘internally against the old religious, social,
and economic order and externally against European colonisation’.12
While feminist consciousness may have developed hand in hand with
nationalist resistance, that is not to say that they have always operated under
the same auspices, nor that they have always been emphasised equally,
and there are many tensions entailed in this ‘double struggle’. Abu-Lughod
observes that Egyptian conservative nationalists and Islamists keen to return
to an idealised pre-colonial order found the internal, gendered element of
this struggle deeply threatening to their own patriarchal systems.13 Yet other
nationalist reformers in Egypt ‘locate[d] women’s emancipation . . . at the
heart of the development of nation and of society’,14 viewing it as an inte-
gral element of anti-colonial resistance, which was believed to be attainable
only through the modernised nation. Indeed, opposing views on the neces-
sity and nature of modernity arguably lie at the heart of the relationship
between feminism and nationalism. Women have not always allied them-
selves so neatly with either of these positions, however. ‘Islamic feminists’, for
example, positioned themselves differently by arguing for women’s rights not
on the grounds of modernisation, but on the need to return to the original
commitments to justice, dignity and equality enshrined within the Qur’an,
which they believe have been desecrated through the patriarchal socialisa-
tion of the Arab world.15 Another prominent mode of struggle for gender
equality has been through direct participation within nationalist struggle
itself. Women have played vital roles in the liberation struggles of many
Arab nations, including Syria, Yemen, the Sudan, and most recently, Egypt
and Libya, during the ‘Arab Spring’.16 Indeed, in his classic study of the
Algerian anti-colonial struggle, Fanon identified the multiple roles that Alge-
rian women performed, not only through the ‘traditional’ realms of familial
support but also through active participation in militant struggle.17 While
the ultimate goal of women’s participation might have been that of gender
equality, realised through the elevated profi le of women within a liberated
and reformed nation, the banner under which such battles tended to be
fought were predominantly nationalist in nature—a strategy which, in the
Algerian context, resulted in women’s rights being considered secondary
Women Writing Resistance 49
and ultimately sidelined.18 Yet as Suha Sabbagh writes, this mediation of any
challenge to patriarchal norms through ‘nationalist work’ (‘amal watani) has
also been used as a ‘form of “protection” to feminist objectives’.19 Indeed, as
noted in the introduction to this book, women have sometimes found it more
productive to disassociate themselves from the specific cultural and political
implications of the term ‘feminism’, seeking to advance their cause instead
under the banner of less separatist and confrontational terms such as tahrir
al-mara’a (women’s liberation) which sit more easily within Palestinian soci-
ety.20 This is not to say, though, that gender inequality is felt or fought against
any less keenly than it is under the auspices of a clearly labelled ‘feminism’.
Rather, it indicates that resistance to patriarchal authority and the struggle
for gender reform are positioned in relation to nationalism in a range of
nuanced, variously articulated and often highly strategic ways. Turning now
to the Palestinian context in more detail, it becomes clear that any theorisa-
tion of a Palestinian postcolonial feminism must be attentive to the careful
inflections, alliances and distances that are constructed between nationalist
and gender-consciousness.
From the outset, nationalist and feminist commitments have been closely,
if at times problematically, aligned in the Palestinian context. Ellen L. Fleis-
chmann notes that while the birth of the Palestinian Women’s Movement
can be seen as ‘the fi rst articulation of Palestinian feminism’, the women
involved ‘did not defi ne themselves solely by gender, nor did they perceive
a sharp break between nationalism and feminism’.21 The Movement began
in 1929 as a political mobilisation of Palestinian women, many of whom had
been involved in charitable organisations, committees and protests against
British policies. Tactics of the movement included participation in demon-
strations, press and letter-writing campaigns in protest at the British man-
date and social and development activities. Such activities focused mainly
on efforts to end the British mandate and establish an independent Arab
nation, but many of the strategies employed by the women can be considered
implicitly feminist for the way in which they ‘manipulat[ed] . . . traditional
gender norms’, 22 seeking to achieve their goals through fluid performances
of gender that transformed potentially oppressive gender norms into forms
of agency. One strategy, for example, was to insist on the ‘traditional rights’
of Arab women to live in segregation from men, so that British violations of
this gender segregation (by ‘forcing’ them into protest alongside men) could
be presented as morally repugnant, while at other times, the women would
present themselves as active, independent, ‘modern’ women in order to gain
support for their cause in the West.23 This latter line was also taken by many
male nationalist thinkers, such as Constantine Zurayak, who argued that
the ‘primitive, static mentality’ of a feudal, tribal Palestine was to blame for
their loss to the ‘progressive, dynamic mentality’ of Israel in 1948; 24 thus
the Nakba of 1948 (which also saw the nationalists’ opponent shift from the
British mandate to the State of Israel) ironically provided the impetus for
50 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
a project of modernisation that would include the restructuring of gender
norms in Palestinian society.25
In her essay ‘“The Women’s Front”: Nationalism, Feminism, and Moder-
nity in Palestine’, Frances S. Hasso explores the development of women’s
quest for emancipation within the nationalist struggle, and she concludes that
much of its success was due to the fact that they ‘worked within the limits
set by a patriarchal gender order’ so that men would not be threatened by
their public activities. 26 The decision to operate primarily under the guise
of nationalism in order to further women’s goals was taken by many activ-
ists, including the prominent political figure Hanan Ashrawi, who stated her
confidence in nationalism as a framework through which women’s participa-
tion in decision-making processes and broader emancipation in society could
be achieved.27 That is not to say, however, that such participation did not
bring about tangible improvements in women’s social roles and lives. Hasso’s
research shows that women who participated in the Palestinian Federation
of Women’s Action Committees (an offshoot of the Democratic Front for
the Liberation of Palestine established in the late 1970s and one of the most
successful women’s groups) believed that simply encouraging women to take
action ‘contributes to personal liberation for women . . . [by] helping to break
down the isolation and ignorance that . . . had ensured women’s acquiescence
in patriarchal oppression’. 28 This is similar to the forms of consciousness-
raising and the challenges to traditional divisions between public and private
spheres brought about by earlier women’s social participation.
Giacaman writes that the Intifada was not only a period of renewed resis-
tance to the Israeli occupation but a ‘revolution of rising expectations amongst
Palestinian women . . . a consciousness change’.29 This consciousness change
stemmed from two main sources: firstly, the fact that women were able to par-
ticipate actively as resistance fighters during the Intifada, affirming women’s
sense of independence and their own abilities; and secondly, that as a result
of their active participation, attitudes towards the female body (and in par-
ticular, towards women’s sexual honour) were forced to change.30 This latter
phenomenon appears in Intifada discourse through the figure of Umm al-Asirah
(the mother of the female political prisoner), a figure who is radical, according
to Nahla Abdo, because she not only appropriates the traditional nationalist
figure of ‘the heroic mother’ who resists through the sacrifice of her sons, but
because she also radically destabilises the gender structures of the honour/
shame discourse that circulates around women’s sexuality in many arenas of
Palestinian society.31 Whereas sexual violations or indiscretions of women are
traditionally deemed to damage the honour of the whole family (meaning that
men are expected to guard women’s sexual honour closely), women’s impris-
onment and potential violation during the Intifada came to be seen as a source
of honourable sacrifice for women, in a way that paradoxically released them
from patriarchal expectations.32 Certainly, reading the ultimate patriarchal
violation—rape—as ‘liberating’ is highly troubling. Yet it is clear that women’s
Women Writing Resistance 51
own suffering and resilience within the Intifada resulted in forms of agency
previously unavailable to them, and energised their nationalist commitments
(as we see in Buthina Canaan Khoury’s documentary Women in Struggle, which
conducts rare interviews with four female Palestinian ex-detainees in which
the women speak about their experiences in prison, and the way in which this
cemented their subsequent desires to participate within the nationalist strug-
gle).33 Thus women’s direct participation in the nationalist struggle not only led
to a widened spectrum of possible female roles and identities, but profoundly
altered the gendering of nationalist discourse in itself.
Today, the lasting social gains of the fi rst Intifada are recognised as some-
what limited within a post-Oslo period when the Israeli occupation continues
to limit women’s access to resources, and in which the establishment of the
Palestinian Authority has brought about a profound alteration in the forms
of feminist activism available to women. In particular, Islah Jad notes that
the Palestinian Authority has gone to great lengths to ‘negate the image of
woman as militant [and] . . . promote the . . . early nationalist ideal of woman
as fertile, self-sacrificing and steadfast’,34 while it has also encouraged a shift
towards formalised and professionalised units of feminist activity, many
of which operate through NGOs. 35 While patriarchal society certainly did
not crumble during the Intifada, it nevertheless led to an awakening among
many women, who came to view themselves as potential political leaders and
agents as well as followers, with the power to remould the gendered struc-
tures of nationalist struggle. Indeed, it was during the Intifada that indepen-
dent feminist centres such as the Women’s Studies Centre in Nablus and the
Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling in Gaza were established,
indicating a newfound confidence among women to assert themselves as
forces for national development, and as gender-conscious agents. 36 It would
take another seven years from the start of the Intifada for a decisively femi-
nist statement of self-determination to appear, but this fi nally occurred in
1994 when the Palestinian Women’s Charter was drawn up by a number of
different women’s organisations and presented to the Palestinian National
Authority for inclusion in the constitution. This document was distinctive in
its demands for reforms to laws that discriminated against women, and for
the new state’s compliance with international women’s rights laws.37 It also,
according to the translation offered by Barbara Harlow, declared Palestinian
women’s unified determination
This declaration situates the struggle for women’s rights as dually resistant
to the inequalities perpetuated by Israeli occupation, and those enforced
52 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
by patriarchal structures and institutions within Palestine. Thus it presents
a nuanced articulation of feminist sentiment, and establishes the complex
power play at stake for Palestinian women, a theme that emerges in all of the
texts examined in this chapter.
That Palestinian women writers should explore these issues in their work,
particularly during periods when nationalist resistance was blossoming, seems
inevitable. What is extraordinary, though, is the variety of forms in which
nationalism and feminism appear, and the distinctive relationship that each
author constructs between them. For each of the authors examined within
this chapter, ‘resistance’ takes a different form, and writing plays a different
role in their own particular struggles. In the fi rst section of this chapter, enti-
tled ‘“I, Myself, Am a Poem”: Interior Struggle in Fadwa Tuqan’s A Mountain-
ous Journey’, the autobiography of one of Palestine’s best-known poets, Fadwa
Tuqan, becomes the battleground on which the tensions between nationalist
and feminist, public and private allegiances are fought. While Tuqan did
not identify as ‘feminist’, her concerns can be seen as indicative of early,
emergent forms of ‘invisible’ feminist consciousness. In contrast with Tuqan’s
deeply personal inner struggle, the second section of the chapter, ‘Smashing
the Worn-Out Idols? Rewriting Resistance in Liana Badr’s A Compass for the
Sunflower’, explores the portrayal of public and political female militancy
displayed in Badr’s novel, which rewrites the classic ‘resistance narrative’ by
examining the competing structures of national and gendered agency that
emerge among young women and men involved in the resistance, inviting,
among other things, a gendered reassessment of postcolonial theorisations
of armed struggle. Together, these works offer a compelling insight into the
differently constructed battles in which these prominent female authors have
had to fight, in order to imagine what it might mean to be free as Palestin-
ians, and as women.
Indeed, Tuqan herself draws a similar (if perhaps culturally misguided) anal-
ogy, based on structures of social oppression, between the dancing of Afri-
can Americans ‘to a loud drumbeat to get relief from external pressures’
(77) and her own (much-discouraged) love of dancing, singing and poetry
as outlets for her repressed individuality. While turning inwards leads to
self-destruction according to Fanon, though, inner struggle will later become
Women Writing Resistance 57
a vital means for Fadwa to liberate herself, as it is through this act that she
reaches the realms of her poetic imagination.
There is a problematic sense in which Tuqan’s account of her patriar-
chal ‘imprisonment’ might be seen to affi rm the Orientalist assumptions of
some Western feminist discourse, which would claim that accounts such as
Tuqan’s are typical of Arabo-Muslim women’s experiences, revealing them
to be a ‘homogeneous oppressed group’.65 Yet Tuqan’s ‘invisibly feminist’
critique is in fact highly attuned to the individual and social nuances of her
situation, presenting the careful sense of contextual awareness that, accord-
ing to Mohanty, constitutes a vital element of responsible postcolonial femi-
nist critique.66 Perhaps the boldest rebuff to any potential Western feminist
‘superiority complex’ emerges in her description of her mother’s feminist
activities. While her mother was one of the fi rst women to unveil in Nablus
and a member of the women’s committees, she was also forbidden from
public demonstration by Fadwa’s father, and subject to the same domestic
seclusion as Fadwa, a seclusion that caused such deep unhappiness that
she became complicit in Fadwa’s oppression by venting her frustration
against her through emotional cruelty. Tuqan therefore questions the reach
of external gestures towards modernity within the private sphere. She also
deconstructs the ‘homogeneous oppression’ of Palestinian women by rec-
ognising that her own plight is not simply premised on gender relations,
but is also the product of the distinctive conservatism deemed fitting to a
wealthy family of high status. Here, she seems to affi rm Marxist analyses
of the so-called ‘woman question’, which suggest that while working-class
women are more thoroughly exploited than their middle- and upper-class
counterparts, they are also freer to fight for social change as they are less
bound by the need to maintain social prestige, and hence by social con-
vention.67 Indeed, Tuqan describes the unveiled country women who car-
ried arms and food to the rebels in the mountains during the Arab Revolt
against the British with immense envy. For Tuqan, their greater freedom
of movement offers them meaningful possibilities of political engagement
that stand in stark contrast to the ‘trivialities’ of female community within
her home (110). Fadwa’s own oppression, then, is constructed around a
complex intersection of subject-positions relating to class, colonialism and
gendered power structures within her home that cannot be reduced to an
essential condition of ‘the Palestinian woman’.68
Just as Tuqan’s oppression raises complex questions about the relationship
between the political and personal, public and private, male and female, so
does her emancipation. Tuqan’s psychological liberation from the gendered
confi nes of her home takes place through the mental escapism of daydream
and later, through poetry: a ‘private realm’ that could not be ‘invaded’ (51).
As Lindsey Moore argues, this can be read as a process through which
Tuqan manages to ‘reclaim “self-seclusion”’ though creative means, by
‘transform[ing] [her] isolation into a “bridge” towards freedom’.69 Poetry
58 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
certainly seems to achieve this transformation, as Tuqan’s descriptions of her
life once she encounters poetic writing for the fi rst time shift from those of
domestic drudgery to mental images of birds in fl ight, hills and trees: the nat-
ural landscape of her inner ‘mountainous’ struggles. Yet her access to poetic
discourse is mediated through her brother Ibrahim, a renowned scholar,
poet and ‘voice of the Palestinian people’ (71), whose somewhat traditional
and nationally based views on poetry create a number of confl icts in Tuqan’s
search for her own poetic voice.70 Ibrahim is described as broad-minded
and endlessly kind to his sister, and his decision to teach her to write poetry
seems to be founded in a genuine desire to validate her intellectual and cre-
ative talents as a young woman. He begins, for example, by teaching Fadwa
to recite poetry by famous female elegiac poets. While this could be read as a
statement of female solidarity and creative legitimacy, it also locates Fadwa’s
early access to poetry fi rmly within the tradition of ritha’ (elegiac verse), in
which poetesses composed eulogies to male relatives, an acceptable subject
matter for a female poet.71 Fadwa, though, develops a taste for the more emo-
tive verse of poets such as Ibn al-Rumi, dismissed by her brother as ‘too per-
sonal’ in his concerns. Fadwa is therefore ‘chaperoned’ into the public realm
of poetic discourse by male family members, including by her father follow-
ing Ibrahim’s death, who demands that she produce poetry in response to
the political events that he follows in the public sphere. The hypocrisy of
his demand is not lost on Tuqan, and in her mind, she raises what might be
described as an implicitly feminist voice of personal dissent:
A voice from within [me] would rise up in silent protest: How and with
what right or logic does Father ask me to compose political poetry, when I am
shut up inside these walls? I don’t sit with the men, I don’t listen to their
heated discussions, nor do I participate in the turmoil of life on the outside.
I’m not even acquainted with the face of my own country, since I’m not al-
lowed to travel. (107)
Tuqan’s alienation from the political sphere, and her consequent lack of con-
nection to anti-colonial sentiment, therefore emerges as a product of patri-
archal dominance. It is also through this alienation, though, that Tuqan
begins to question the dominant Palestinian poetic tradition whereby poets
are expected to privilege the political over the personal. Instead, Tuqan per-
forms a subversive assertion of selfhood in her work, stating that ‘a poet is,
above everything else, a person before being political’ (125).
This emphasis in Tuqan’s poetry can be read as an implicitly feminist
validation of the personal as a source of public and political concern in itself.
Embracing her romantic tendencies and deep emotions, she begins to write
love poetry, publishing it under the pseudonym ‘Dananeer’: the name of a
slave-girl poetess, who, like many other such girls owned by the upper classes
in the Middle Ages, composed and sang her own poetry. While there is a
Women Writing Resistance 59
certain irony to the fact that such poetesses were subjugated and sexualised
figures,72 Fadwa legitimises her appropriation of this discourse by stating
that according to a male critic, Dananeer was proven to be ‘honourable
and chaste’ (73), thus proving that women could write of love without their
honour being compromised (a view later affi rmed in the Egyptian singer
Umm Kulthum’s portrayal of Dananeer in a fi lm made about her in the
1940s).73 Tuqan’s desire for male approval lingers in this careful justification,
but with the emergence of the avant-garde Iraqi poetess Nazik al-Mala’ika
in the 1940s, Tuqan fi nds she has a new role model to legitimate her break
from tradition and she begins writing in free verse. Gradually, her own voice,
unmediated by male influence, begins to emerge. By writing love poetry,
though, Fadwa does not consider herself to be composing ‘feminine’ verse,
but fi nding her own revolutionary voice: ‘Love . . . is the affi rmation of my
crushed humanity and its very salvation’ (115), she writes; it is ‘liberation’, a
‘merging with the “other”’, an ‘intensifying’ of humanity (116). This is not the
language of a sentimental poet but of a courageous woman undertaking an
inner struggle. Indeed, her poem ‘In the Flux’74 reveals how this connection
to the romantic, even erotic constitutes a crucial stage in Fadwa’s journey to
emancipation, as this poem describes her own sexual awakening as akin to
the blossoming of the natural, external landscape—an imaginative terrain far
removed from the rocky, barren existence of her former years. Intimate as
Tuqan’s tone may be, it can also be read as a daring validation of the desires
of the private female body as legitimate rather than threatening and of public
as well as private value.
This personal break-through coincides with another, more literal liberation
from patriarchal rule through the death of her father in the year of the Nakba.
Traumatic as both these events may be, Tuqan also locates a paradoxically
liberating potential in them, writing that ‘when the roof fell in on Palestine
in 1948, the veil fell off the face of the Nablus woman’ (133). Here, she identi-
fies the rupture of traditional Arab society instigated by the Nakba, which
led to social self-scrutiny and a desire to modernise Palestine in its quest for
national independence. One result of this was the encouragement of women,
particularly those in the upper echelons of society such as Tuqan, to enter
into the public sphere and participate within the struggle, resulting in what
Tuqan describes as her ‘emergence from the harem’ (117). Ultimately, though,
it would take another extreme shift in Palestine’s political environment for
Fadwa finally to experience the political as personal. Writing of the June war
of 1967, which saw the remaining portions of Palestine in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip fall to Israeli occupation, Tuqan states that these events ‘brought
back to me my sense of being a social entity’ (80). Though Tuqan wrote her
autobiography in the late 1970s, she tellingly concludes this text with extracts
of her diary from 1966–1967, indicating that this is the final stage in her ‘moun-
tainous journey’. These extracts are no more than small fragments, but they
indicate a significant shift in her poetic and emotional consciousness. Though
60 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
hampered by writer’s block with her poetry, she notes that she has begun to
experience patriotic feelings inspired by the singing of the female musician
Fayrouz: ‘When I hear her songs about my country, my emotions rise and
glow’ (185), she writes, indicating that this is a journey into the political world
in which she is not led by the demands of men, but inspired by the feelings of a
creative, passionate woman. Yet there is no doubt that her feeling for the politi-
cal realm stems from her personal experiences. For the first time, the public
sphere finally seems to mirror Tuqan’s private world: one of imprisonment,
and of subjugating, occupying forces. Palestine, in other words, has become
‘feminised’ under occupation, and it is suddenly Tuqan rather than her male
counterparts who possesses a deep connection to the psychological conditions
of the external world. As we see in her poem ‘Song of Becoming’, an ostensi-
bly political poem about the growth of revolutionary sentiment among a new
generation, it is not only the young men who have blossomed into powerfully
self-possessed subjects through their participation within the cause, but Tuqan
herself (10); for as she writes in the final lines of her autobiography, ‘all of a
sudden I, myself, am a poem’, though one ‘burning with anguish, dejected,
hopeful, looking beyond the horizon!’ (191). The competing forces in her final
statement—anguish and hope—reveal that the tensions between the inner and
exterior, public and private, postcolonial and feminist are not eliminated over
the course of Tuqan’s ‘mountainous journey’; rather, she learns to accept that
they are inherent to her existence and her voice.
The postcolonial feminist implications of Tuqan’s work are quite unique.
While she frames her journey as one that takes her from the inner realms
of her oppressive home to the external world of political commitment, the
‘invisible feminist’ struggles articulated within the text are absolutely crucial
to realising this fi nal goal. Tuqan has to fi nd ways to write and think outside
of patriarchal discourse before she can contemplate connecting with political
struggle, conjuring her journey as a uniquely female, and in many ways femi-
nist, quest for an anti-colonial politics. Yet perhaps the most powerful element
of her autobiography lies in her willingness to reveal the internal contradic-
tions and hypocrisies within the masculinist discourse of nationhood, and
the limitations of apparently feminist routes to emancipation. Instead of rely-
ing solely on either of these routes, Tuqan’s journey is founded in an absolute
integrity of feeling and belief, a trust in her own heart to navigate the best
route forwards. Though Tuqan does not label it as such, this gruelling but
revelatory process can be related to the potentials of postcolonial feminist
discourse, which similarly acknowledges the unique nature of every journey
towards national and feminist, personal and political emancipation, and the
central role that creative expression can play in this. Unique as Tuqan’s jour-
ney may be, though, this postcolonial feminist interpretation of it also reveals
paths towards emancipation that may be followed by others, who may one
day also fi nd themselves summoned to undertake their own mountainous
journeys. When this time comes, perhaps these ‘wayfarers on arduous paths’
Women Writing Resistance 61
(11) will hear Tuqan’s voice echoing to them through the mountains, just as
Fayrouz’s songs had once called to her, revealing the way forwards.
In A Compass for the Sunflower, Jinan encounters these views on her tours of
the camps, where she fi nds that men are resistant to women’s participation
on the grounds that ‘arms are never an ornament for a woman’ and that
female militancy would leave ‘no place for men in the world anymore’ (46–
47), while the families of female resistance fighters view their activities as
damaging to their daughters’ social prospects. Consequently, many of the
girls’ families do their best to avoid gossip by arranging prompt marriages
for their daughters (80). A similar attempt to contain the female militant’s
subversive bodily independence is evident in Leila Khaled’s showering
with marriage proposals following her public displays of militancy, which
can be read as symbolic attempts to reposition her within the sexualised
masculinist discourse of male desire and marriage. 93 Female militant activ-
ity may therefore be reintegrated into the patriarchal framework by its rep-
resentation as no more than a temporary suspension of the gendered order,
whereby women’s armed struggle does not testify so much to a newfound
political agency as to the utter desperation of a Palestine so emasculated
by colonial occupation that its women must bear arms. While women’s par-
ticipation in armed struggle therefore nuances the classic ‘resistance nar-
rative’ by revealing it as a forum for coexistence, cooperation and equality
between the sexes, there is the danger that such participation is subsumed
into the narratives of ‘amal watani (nationalist work) and of a masculin-
ist vision of national emergency, whereby traditional gender roles will be
restored once the resistance struggle is over.
Badr resists falling back into this masculinist narrative, however, by for-
mulating a feminist critique of both women’s and men’s participation in
armed struggle. In her work Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle
East, Evelyne Accad draws on a combination of literary and interview mate-
rial in order to critique what she views as the highly masculinist nature of
Palestinian resistance, particularly in those strands of it committed to vio-
lence. She suggests the fundamental inability of those engaged in the resis-
tance struggle to construct meaningful and equal social relations between
men and women due to men’s reliance on symbols of idealised woman-
hood, and of their own idealised manliness. 94 In A Compass for the Sunflower,
66 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
however, Badr is keen to critique the stereotypically ‘masculine’ rhetoric of
violence present within the resistance struggle, and proposes a renegotiation
of social relationships between men and women as a necessary element of
national liberation. She implies this through Jinan’s relationship with Sha-
her, a young feda’i whose commitment to the nationalist struggle leads to a
profoundly progressive vision of Palestinian society. Shaher is presented as
the antithesis of the clichéd Palestinian ‘terrorist’ portrayed in the Western
media, a stereotype that Badr also debunks through the character Amer.
Amer is a young man who has chosen the path of individual, self-destructive
resistance rather than collective struggle, by hijacking a plane. Not only
is Amer presented as both misogynistic and deeply reactionary (‘Civilisa-
tion’s a whore between the thighs of history’ [60], he proclaims, critiquing
the quest for Palestinian modernity), but he is also portrayed as both child-
like and impotent in his course of action, a ‘prisoner of his eternal hunger
and thirst’ (60) for a lost past. Despite a hint of pitying affection for the
misguided Amer, Jinan sees that the path that he has chosen leads only to
defeat, and believes that his model of outdated, individualist, machismo
violence must be rejected. Shaher, meanwhile, is presented as a ‘new man’
unafraid to confront the institutions that govern relations between the sexes,
including romance (‘Who told you that love had to have a trademark with
a certain name on it?’ [35]), family (‘[ Just] tell them that . . . [we] under-
stand one another emotionally and intellectually’, he says somewhat teas-
ingly, when told that Jinan’s family would disapprove of their match [36])
and sexual conduct (‘You’re not like the sultan’s slave girls who pretended
to be pure and unsullied’, he tells Jinan; ‘You bury your nails deep in the
mud but it doesn’t suck you under, however dirty it makes you’ [35]). Sha-
her’s fi nal statement suggests how a progressive revolutionary vision might
encourage men as well as women to review traditional gender discourses,
including that of honour (sharaf ). By praising Jinan for her active, indepen-
dent behaviour, he associates her honour not with guarded sexual conduct
(the province of the insincere ‘sultan’s slave girls’), but with a natural and
socially non-contrived commitment to the land.
In this, Shaher articulates one of the major discursive shifts that took
place following the 1967 war, where national defeat forced men’s attitudes
to shift from the idea that honour should be defended at all costs to placing
al-ard qabl al-‘ird: ‘Land before honour’. 95 This term not only made land
rather than women’s bodies the primary site of nationalist concern, but also
invited a reassessment of the very nature of honour. No longer the primary
concern nor property of the patriarch, women’s sexual honour became
something that belonged to the woman herself, and could be sacrificed
or asserted for the national cause without desecrating her social standing,
meaning that, for the fi rst time, women began to discuss acts of sexual vio-
lence against them more openly. 96 Consequently, Badr perceives women’s
participation within the resistance as a vital opportunity for gender roles,
Women Writing Resistance 67
ideals and relationships to be reconfigured between both women and men.
Such a reconfiguration is essential, Badr suggests, not just for women, but
for the future of the whole nation.
Jinan’s revolutionary romance with Shaher is not the only path towards
freedom presented to her, though, and the fi nal scene in the novel portrays
her as still very much in need of a ‘compass’. As she stands over the hospital
bed of the wounded Shaher, a young man who believes that it is better to be
‘moving forward in all different directions’ (99) than rendered static by paus-
ing for thought, Jinan feels a hand on her shoulder, gnarled ‘like the trunk of
an ancient olive tree’ (115). The hand belongs to Umm Mahmoud, a woman
who attends Jinan’s literacy class, but who in fact has much to teach Jinan
about alternative forms of female resistance. Umm Mahmoud is an icon of
traditional womanhood, and of nationhood. Her ‘abundant motherliness’
(89), reflected in her title (‘Umm’ meaning mother, ‘Mahmoud’ the name of
her fi rst-born son, a marker of respect, given the importance of perpetuat-
ing the male bloodline in traditional Palestinian and Arab society), stands
in stark opposition to Jinan’s own understanding of resistance and female
agency, and yet within the novel, Umm Mahmoud is imbued with qualities
similar to those of the female militant. Motherhood can be considered a
resistant discourse in itself, as through it, women reproduce and regenerate
the nation, both physically (by providing future Palestinians) and ideologi-
cally (by raising them in a patriotic manner). 97 Thus, as Julie Peteet notes,
women gain respect and status for their batin ‘askari: military womb, 98 and
while such women may not bear arms themselves, their provision of sons to
fight for the cause is seen as a form of implicit participation, evident in the
revered status of the Umm al-shaheed (Mother of the martyr), who is consid-
ered an inspirational figure embodying the ultimate sacrifice for the national
cause. 99 Equally, women’s domestic work—everyday tasks such as washing
and cooking—is sometimes represented not as a form of subjugation, but of
resistance. Through it, women display sumud, ‘steadfastness’ and ‘resilience’,
by maintaining normality in everyday life, even under the extraordinary
conditions of the occupation. Indeed, the qualities associated with sumud,
which is considered integral to Palestinian identity, can be understood as
traditionally feminine: stoicism, silent endurance and sacrifice for others.100
Women in the novel display these qualities when, for example, they go to
make coffee during a bombing raid, or when Umm Mahmoud stands beside
Jinan in a moment of crisis, ‘awesome and calm’ (114). Thus traditional femi-
ninity is not only associated with passivity, but offers an alternative form of
strength, founded in the model of women as qawiyyi, a word in feminine form
that literally denotes ‘strength’, but which has further connotations as a term
of praise for a woman who is ‘a savvy, strategizing actor . . . who knows how
to stand on her own, to maximize her resources, and to survive harsh cir-
cumstances with honour’, and who generally has a strong character.101 Cru-
cially, however, these traits must be displayed in ways that affi rm her ability
68 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
to perform traditional as well as non-traditional female roles; for example, as
a wife, mother and housewife as well as in the workplace and various other
public arenas.102 Describing a woman as qawiyyi therefore imbues her with
an ambivalent agency, for while it allows her to exercise typically masculine
traits such as will, proactivity, industriousness and intelligence, it also sees
her affi rming the ultimately patriarchal boundaries of her existence, and as
such, operates as a display of strength but not necessarily of power.
Does Umm Mahmoud therefore represent one of the ‘worn-out idols’ that
Shaher declares should be smashed? Badr leaves this question open, for
although Umm Mahmoud represents a domestic, traditionally feminine ver-
sion of nationhood, she also challenges Jinan’s interpretation of these things
as stifl ing by revealing that the private, domestic realm can also offer forms
of political participation, and that traditional femininity is not necessarily
submissive, but may also be premised on forms of strength and resilience.
This is not necessarily the path towards emancipation that Jinan wishes to
take, but it is significant that Badr nevertheless presents it as an alternative
direction open to her; for as she stands between the visionary Shaher, com-
mitted to the future, and the steadfast Umm Mahmoud, guardian of the
past, Jinan becomes a new figure of the Palestinian resistance, poised at the
crossroads of past, present and future, of nationalism and feminism, of politi-
cal and personal concerns.
Jinan’s own confl icts and multiple allegiances therefore become emblem-
atic of a postcolonial feminist vision of Palestine, in which nationalist and
feminist projects serve to position competing claims, structures and identi-
ties alongside one another in ways that might prove productive as well as
problematic. In this, Badr’s text presents an interesting response to Evelyne
Accad’s assessment of the relationship between feminism and nationalism in
the Middle East:
To those who believe that it is utopia that feminism and nationalism can
ever blend, I would like to fi rst suggest, that it has never been tried [ . . . ]
and second, that if an analysis of sexuality and sexual relations were
truly incorporated into revolutionary struggle . . . nationalism could be
transformed into a more revolutionary strategy. If women were to de-
mand their rights and a transformation of values and roles in the fam-
ily at the beginning of national struggles and if national struggles were
conceived with different aims that would not perpetuate domination and
ownership, we would move toward a different concept of revolution than
we have witnessed so far in history.103
Badr’s text, and indeed the actions of many Palestinian women who have par-
ticipated in nationalist struggle, refute Accad’s claim that blending feminism
and nationalism has never been tried. Indeed, both Badr’s and Tuqan’s texts
portray women enacting precisely the demands for rights and transformation
Women Writing Resistance 69
of values of which Accad speaks, and in doing so, they too formulate visions
of a more inherently equal social system. Badr’s and Tuqan’s texts also chal-
lenge the idea that blending nationalism and feminism is ‘utopian’—far from
it. Instead, their fictional and autobiographical accounts both present very
realistic assessments of the tensions generated by this process. Yet they also
suggest that it is through the tensions between the nationalist and feminist,
personal and political that gendered and nationalist discourses begin to inter-
rogate and shape one another into more inclusive, self-aware structures—and
in doing so, they imagine how these projects might truly generate the free-
dom, equality and self-determination for which Palestinian men and women
have fought for so long. As Accad suggests, only when feminist and national-
ist projects come to operate alongside and even through one another can the
resistance struggle be considered truly revolutionary.
Refiguring Resistance
Whatever form it may take, resistance clearly animates both Tuqan’s and
Badr’s creative consciousnesses, affi rming it as a key trope of Palestinian
cultural expression. Yet their very different and in some ways opposing for-
mulations of this concept show that, as Anne McClintock puts it, ‘there is
no single narrative of the nation’.104 Nor, indeed, does a ‘single narrative’ of
female identity or of feminism emerge from their works. Rather, Tuqan and
Badr each construct unique narratives of nationalist and feminist commit-
ment that are specific to their own subject-positions, imaginations and iden-
tifications. For Tuqan, individual rather than collective struggle facilitates
a personal emancipation that will later lead her towards a genuine desire
to participate within the political sphere—though the private and public,
political and personal retain a fraught relationship within her work. For
Badr, political struggle features as the primary route to female and national
emancipation—though this may be enacted through a variety of forms of
participation, including Badr’s own act of writing such a text. While their
narratives therefore display important forms of political, ideological and
social resistance, they also resist the myth of ‘national unity’ that has served
to fi x women in subservient and symbolic roles. Equally, they work against
the reductive myth of the ‘oppressed Third World woman’, who is some-
times presented in a similar manner to Spivak’s figure of the ‘subaltern’ in
Western feminist accounts—a figure so radically marginalised by structures
of cultural imperialism and of patriarchy that they lack all access to dis-
course, remaining victims of ‘epistemic violence’, with no means to make
their own histories heard.105 Both Tuqan and Badr refute their positions as
‘subaltern’ subjects of history by presenting their own idiosyncratic narra-
tives of nationalist and feminist experience, resisting their discursive rel-
egation to the realms of the symbolic and presenting themselves as active
agents of discourse, and of resistance.
70 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
Despite the distinctive natures of Tuqan’s and Badr’s texts, it is nevertheless
possible to draw some collective conclusions. Both of these texts reveal that
feminisms and nationalisms, realised in their many forms, are closely, even
inextricably interlinked in the imaginations of both authors, and indeed in
those of many Palestinian women. This is not only because Palestine’s colonisa-
tion and consequent struggle for nationhood impacts irrevocably on the lives
of all Palestinian women, but because women’s desires for freedom, equality
and agency are often articulated through the fight for broader national lib-
eration. Thus these narratives challenge the distinction drawn in much femi-
nist discourse between the personal and political, public and private, viewing
them instead as in a constant state of interplay, albeit one that often produces
tensions. In this, both Tuqan and Badr begin to enact what Joseph Massad
views as the pressing task of a thorough critique of the gendered structures of
the nation. Only then, he suggests, might nationalism reach its fully resistant
potential to all forms of inequality, injustice and subjugation:
As Tuqan and Badr demonstrate, this ‘auto-critique’ does not have to neces-
sitate a rejection of nationalist commitment altogether. Rather, it may be
enacted through many different forms of participation within the resistance
struggle itself. Indeed, it is telling that Tuqan remains unfeeling towards the
nationalist cause until she has freed herself from the restraints of patriar-
chal influence, while Badr’s character Jinan suggests that the processes of
self-scrutiny and internal critique are integral to locating the right direction
forwards for the resistance movement. Both of these authors therefore make
the decision to ‘subvert from within’, rather than to move beyond, structures
of national and gendered power.
Tuqan’s and Badr’s narratives present significant versions of the female-
authored resistance narrative, but there are many other ways in which women
have figured resistant sentiments in their work. So prevalent is resistance as
a theme that it is almost impossible to fi nd a female Palestinian author or
fi lmmaker in whose work it does not figure, in one way or another. Gen-
der-conscious accounts of nationalist resistance recur in the poems of Mai
Sayigh, for example, a Gaza-born poet, whose poem ‘Elegy for Imm ‘Ali’
mourns the death of a Palestinian woman killed during her work in the Resis-
tance.107 A more recent work, Najwa Najjar’s fi lm Pomegranates and Myrrh
(2008),108 presents its own subtle forms of resistance through its portrayal of a
young bride left to defend the family’s land when her husband is imprisoned.
Women Writing Resistance 71
Torn between a deep love of her land and family, and a potential romance
with a new dance troupe teacher who enables her to express her personal,
free-spirited desires, the central character presents the complex relationship
between female identity, cultural values, land, desire and resistance. Though
ultimately a loving and affi rmative portrait of Palestine, it also resists clear-
cut symbolic formulations of female identity in favour of a portrait of creative
female subjectivity.109 A number of fi lms by emergent female directors also
explore the relationship between female identity and resistance from a num-
ber of angles. Mahasen Nasser-Eldin’s Samia, for example, tells the story of a
seventy-one-year-old woman who has dedicated her life to the simultaneous
struggles for women’s rights to education, and Palestinians’ rights to live in
Jerusalem,110 while Alia Arasoughly’s This Is Not Living presents interviews
with eight Palestinian women from a range of social backgrounds in order to
explore their many different experiences of military occupation, their senses
of marginalisation within the struggle and the different ways in which they
imagine peace.111 While many of these texts display social realist tendencies,
the fictional work of the prize-winning author Adania Shibli makes a highly
distinctive shift away from linear narrative towards a more experimental
structure through its intimate, sensory, impressionistic account of female
experience that seems to reject all but the most subtle of connections to
the national narrative. In her novella Touch, for example, political shadows
such as the death of the young female protagonist’s brother, or fi nding out
at school that Palestine is a forbidden word, are but a backdrop for the vivid
perceptions of the little girl, which serve to structure the fragmented narra-
tive of this work.112 While Shibli may have broken from the traditional struc-
tures and tropes of women’s resistance narratives, she nevertheless speaks
to a creative tradition whereby women have sought to shift their gazes away
from the male figures who occupy the foreground of classic portraits of the
nation, in order to bring the lives of women into focus, their struggles, feel-
ings and experiences offering astonishing and often unexpected insights into
national, feminist and human experience.
Tuqan’s and Badr’s portrayals of resistance therefore offer powerful pro-
totypes of postcolonial feminist narrative, which are extended and reworked
from a number of angles by the female creative practitioners examined in
Chapters 4 and 5. Yet as Badr’s novel suggests, a gender-conscious critique
of nationhood has implications not only for women, but also for men—as the
‘crises of masculinity’ explored in the next chapter will reveal further.
3 Masculinity in Crisis
From Patriarchy to
(Post)Colonial Performativity
Somewhere on the border between Iraq and Kuwait, three Palestinian men
huddle inside the metal drum of a water tanker beneath the blazing sun,
while the driver seeks the relevant documents to continue his journey and
deliver his illicit cargo to their destinations. These men are being smuggled
into a new country and so, they hope, to new lives, where they will be able
to support themselves and their families, to have a home, and to possess a
security that eludes them within a post-Nakba, post-partition Palestine. While
the driver banters with the border officials, though, these three men slowly
suffocate to death inside the tanker. When he fi nds them, the driver—a fellow
Palestinian—will strip the bodies of their possessions and dump the men in
the municipal rubbish tip, but as he performs this fi nal act of betrayal, the
driver will reflect not on his own actions, but on theirs, asking himself: ‘Why
didn’t they knock on the sides of the tank [ . . . ] Why? Why? Why?’1
This macabre vignette of post-Nakba existence appears in the celebrated
Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s novella, Men in the Sun, and raises
many questions about agency and belonging for the newly fragmented Pal-
estinian community. From a postcolonial feminist perspective, though, the
men’s actions (or lack of action) holds a particular significance, especially
when read in light of Judith Butler’s theory of ‘gender performativity’. For
Butler, gender is not innate to our bodies or selves, but something that is
socially constructed in relation to our environments, and performed through
the body. As she puts it:
While we perform such ‘acts’ to the extent that we experience them as quite
natural (producing what Butler terms ‘the illusion of an abiding gendered
Masculinity in Crisis 73
self’),3 and thus cannot simply stop ‘performing’ our genders, Butler sug-
gests that we may nevertheless become conscious of the performative nature
of gender at moments when a ‘failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic
repetition [of a gendered ‘act’]’ occurs, which ‘exposes the phantasmic effect
of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction’.4 Thus it is not so
much the driver’s actions (which can, after all, be read as those of a neces-
sary self-preservation in a time of political turmoil), but the men’s failure to
perform the acts expected of them (that is, to knock on the sides of the tank)
that reveals something about the relationship between Palestine’s colonial
condition and gendered identity in this episode. Torn between their desire
for escape and fear of discovery, between the need for silence and speech,
self-assertion and disguise, the men fi nd themselves rendered entirely inert,
unable to ‘act’ in any way. It is also at this moment, though, that their very
identities as Palestinians, and as men, are exposed as constructs of Palestine’s
colonial situation. No longer ‘masters’ of their own environments, identities
or destinies, the men fi nd themselves suspended in a ‘no-man’s land’ strongly
reminiscent of Palestine itself, 5 in which they are unable to perform even a
basic ‘masculine’ mastery of their own bodies or situations. Reading this epi-
sode in light of Butler’s theory of performativity, the men’s failure to perform
basic acts of masculine agency makes it clear not only that Palestinian and
gendered identity are closely entwined for Kanafani’s characters, but that
Palestinian masculinity is in crisis.
As Joe Cleary notes in Literature, Partition and the Nation State, creative por-
trayals of Palestinian masculinity ‘in crisis’ are in fact a fairly well-worn feature
of post-1948 literature.6 Such portrayals, however, have tended to present any
disruption to the patriarchal order as symbolic of a weakened and ‘emascu-
lated’ nation: a state of aberration requiring remedy, and a source of sorrow,
even trauma. At first glance, the shared generational identities of all of the
creative practitioners examined in this chapter—the directors Elia Suleiman
(born 1960) and Hany Abu-Assad (1961), and the author Samir El-Youssef
(1965)—seem to connect their creative interests in crisis-ridden masculinities
to the experience of national trauma. All were born shortly before the Naksa
of 1967 and experienced two further periods of major societal unrest at key
stages of their personal and creative maturation: from 1987 to 1993, during
the first Intifada, and again during the second Al-Aqsa Intifada, meaning that
El-Youssef’s, Suleiman’s and Abu-Assad’s personal experiences have been
shaped in various ways by key events in the national narrative. Yet all three of
the works examined in this chapter—Samir El-Youssef’s short story, ‘The Day
the Beast Got Thirsty’, included in the collection Gaza Blues,7 Elia Suleiman’s
film Divine Intervention (Yadun Ilahiyya) 8 and Hany Abu-Assad’s film Paradise
Now (Al-Janna Al-A’an) 9 —present very different visions of what it means to be
‘Palestinian’, ‘male’ and ‘masculine’, and in doing so, appear to interrogate
the very fabric of Palestinian patriarchal relations. The question posed by
these works, then, is whether the crises in paternal and fraternal identification
74 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
presented within them denote a nostalgia for the trappings of pre-colonial
patriarchal power—or whether they might also express a desire to reimag-
ine and reconstruct Palestinian masculinity, and hence, society. This chapter
therefore explores a variety of different ‘performances’ of masculinity—from
‘honourable’ to ‘shameful’ behaviours, and from male inertia to martyrdom—
in order to consider the ways in which masculinity and (post)coloniality might
be constructed creatively in relation to one another, and to surmise whether
the disruptions, ‘de-formities’ and ‘parodic repetitions’ that occur in these per-
formances of masculinity might bear a postcolonial feminist potential.
How, then, might we theorise a ‘Palestinian masculinity crisis’? The con-
cept of a contemporary crisis in masculinity has been popular in the North
American and European academies since the 1990s, when the emergent field
of masculinity studies (which drew on the insights of feminist and gender
studies more broadly, including theories of ‘gender performativity’)10 began
to identify a sense of uncertainty surrounding the roles and identities avail-
able to men in the wake of feminism’s ideological and social advances, and
so to explore the construction of patriarchal power and hegemonic (that is,
culturally normative) masculinity.11 Although some gender-conscious schol-
ars have begun to turn their attention to masculinity within the context of the
Middle East,12 patriarchy often tends to be viewed as prevalent and secure in
many Arab societies.13 There are, however, a handful of scholars who have
begun to interrogate the construction of masculinity within the specific socio-
political landscape of Israeli-Palestinian relations. One such study is that of
the cultural anthropologist Amalia Sa’ar and political sociologist Taghreed
Yahia-Younis, whose research offers a gendered reading of the ‘discourse
on crisis’ that has emerged in the Arabic press, through which Palestinians
living in the State of Israel have attempted to articulate their predicament.14
They argue that the ‘political economic location’ of Palestinian Israeli men
‘does not allow the realization of militaristic masculinities [ . . . ] while alter-
native scripts of less violent masculinities’ (founded on traditional patriarchal
qualities of strength, honour and community standing) are also unavailable
to them.15 Thus their socio-political location makes it difficult for these men
to perform what they understand to be ‘masculine’ identities, leading to a
sense of emasculating crisis. Joseph Massad, meanwhile, has produced an
insightful study of the masculine codification of Palestinian nationalism, and
of the way in which Israeli colonialism has brought about a number of crises
within this discourse (the object of further scrutiny within this chapter).16 It is
clear, therefore, that the discourse of Palestinian masculinity has begun to be
understood as something that is performed and constructed not only through
the framework of gender relations, but also in relation to the structures of
power that underpin Palestinian nationhood and colonial relations. In doing
so, such theorists appear to affi rm Judith Butler’s own assertion that ‘perfor-
mativity’ might be usefully translated beyond its immediate application to
gender. As she writes in the preface to the 1999 edition of Gender Trouble:
Masculinity in Crisis 75
The question of whether or not the theory of performativity can be trans-
posed onto matters of race has been explored by several scholars [ . . . ]
My view is that no single account of construction will do, and that these
categories always work as background for one another, and they often
fi nd their most powerful articulation through one another. Thus, the
sexualization of racial gender norms calls to be read through multiple
lenses at once, and the analysis surely illuminates the limits of gender as
an exclusive category of analysis.17
As a young man in his early twenties, El-Youssef would no doubt have been
familiar with the images of the ‘Children of the Stones’ during the fi rst Inti-
fada that so captured the stark power imbalances of colonialism, as Palestin-
ian children sought their own role in the resistance by hurling stones at fully
armed members of the IDF. 39 Yet in his own portrayal of life in a Lebanese
refugee camp during the fi rst Intifada, El-Youssef would portray not ‘Chil-
dren of the Stones’ but young men who preferred to ‘get stoned’ in a very
different way, turning to drugs as a form of refuge from their surroundings.
This off-beat, tangential take on the Palestinian situation is in fact typical
of El-Youssef, who has acquired a reputation as a controversial critic of the
second Intifada and of the Palestinian ‘Right of Return’, though his com-
mitment to literary and political expression—even at the cost of nationalist
solidarity—has earned him the 2005 PEN Tucholsky award for promoting
peace and freedom of speech in the Middle East.40 In the same way, the dis-
tinctive angle that he adopts on the lives of marginalised young Palestinian
men in ‘The Day the Beast Got Thirsty’ can be read not only as El-Youssef
thumbing his nose at the dominant narratives of national solidarity, but as an
important, if irreverent, deconstruction of Palestinian masculinity itself.
Samir El-Youssef was born in 1965 in the Rashida refugee camp in Leba-
non, to which his parents had fled following their expulsion from their Pales-
tinian village during the Nakba. He moved from the refugee camp at the age
of ten, fi rst to a village and then to the city of Sidon in southern Lebanon,
where he lived until immigrating to Cyprus in 1989 during the fi rst Intifada.
He subsequently moved to London in 1990, where he studied philosophy and
began to write for the international media, and still lives today. El-Youssef
displays a consciousness of the fragmented and disparate nature of Palestin-
ian nationhood at personal and literary levels alike. He states in interview
that his birth into a Palestinian family with a Sunni father and, very unusu-
ally, a Shi‘ite mother ‘has contributed to the diversity of my understanding
of things—from the beginning you are aware of yourself as someone differ-
ent’.41 This consciousness of the disparate nature of Palestinian identity also
perhaps stems from El-Youssef’s own marginal position in relation to the
Palestinian nation through his location in the Rashida refugee camp. Dur-
ing the 1980s, Lebanese refugee camps became sites of extreme depravation
and persecution, most notably through the massacres of Palestinians in the
Sabra and Shatila camps in 1982, conducted by Christian Phalangists who
operated under the supervision of the Israeli General Ariel Sharon.42 While
Lebanon’s refugee camps had been placed under PLO control through the
Cairo Agreement signed between Nasser and Arafat in 1969, the authority
of the PLO had begun to disintegrate by the time of the fi rst Intifada, and
80 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
various local and international factions were competing for power on the
ground in Lebanon.43 Consequently, El-Youssef reports ‘a terrible anti-Pales-
tinian attitude in the country’ and the array of ‘militias, armed factions and
political organizations with ridiculous or bankrupt agendas’ as key factors
that influenced his decision to leave.44
His 2007 novel, The Illusion of Return (his fi rst work in English),45 reflects
upon the fragmented nature of the Palestinian community through the voice
of an exiled narrator, who recalls the stories of variously marginalised char-
acters within Lebanese society. From the tale of the narrator’s friend Ali,
forced into collaborating with the Israelis, to that of the narrator’s beloved
sister driven to suicide by her older brother’s bullying, to the story of a young
man murdered for being homosexual, an oppressively heteronormative and
patriarchal masculinity surfaces in ways that seem to erase the possibility of
communal cohesion or of national liberation. Faced with such accounts, the
narrator comes to understand ‘the idea of return [as] actually an attempt to
escape the inhospitability of the present state of the world’ and to perceive
Palestine as a utopian concept that cannot be located in reality.46 This por-
trayal of Palestinian space and identity as illusory is extremely controversial,
but the justification for El-Youssef’s profound sense of national alienation is
expressed only too clearly by the narrator of his earlier short story, ‘The Day
the Beast Got Thirsty’. Written in the fi rst person from the perspective of a
young man enduring life in Lebanon during the fi rst Intifada, this story offers
an at once disturbing and darkly comic insight into the marginal and dis-
sociated experiences of Palestine’s shebab (young ‘revolutionary’ men), who
contest any sense of the nation and its diaspora as a ‘fraternity’.
‘The Day the Beast Got Thirsty’ is El-Youssef’s contribution (originally
written in Arabic but published in the author’s own English translation) to
the short story collection Gaza Blues, which he co-authored with the contro-
versial Israeli writer, Etgar Keret. The very juxtaposition of El-Youssef’s and
Keret’s works can be read as a subtle disaffi liation from the expected bonds
of male Palestinian fraternity. Keret’s works, such as Missing Kissinger and
The Nimrod Flipout, are known for their quirky surrealism and occasionally
tasteless humour.47 As portraits of a disgruntled Israeli ‘generation X’, they
are neither patriotic nor ostensibly engaged with politics, and El-Youssef’s
intension in collaborating with Keret therefore remains ambiguous, appear-
ing neither wholly oppositional nor reconciliatory. Rather, the positioning of
their stories alongside one another remains awkward and inconclusive: an
apt reflection, perhaps, of the contemporary Palestinian condition, which
shares an equally uneasy intimacy with its Israeli neighbour and occupier.
The fraternal ties conjured in El-Youssef’s work therefore seem to be predi-
cated on a sense of political disaffi liation and national disconnection, senti-
ments that are echoed in the voice of the story’s fi rst-person narrator, a young
man named Bassem, who is stuck in a Lebanese refugee camp during the
fi rst Intifada. Bassem’s existence revolves around his futile and increasingly
Masculinity in Crisis 81
absurd attempts to secure an exit visa from the country, and around his rec-
reational drug taking. It is telling that the opening lines to the story, while
ostensibly establishing fraternal bonds between Bassem and his politically
active best friend Ahmed, also reveal the artificially induced nature of these
brotherly feelings, and evoke a simultaneous sense of spatial and psychologi-
cal entrapment:
There were two rows of Cubs parading in a military fashion, while the
trainer was walking up and down, and asking them in a strident voice,
‘Are you hungry?’
‘Beasts!’ the Cubs responded in voices no less loud and strident.
‘Are you thirsty?’ the trainer asked again [ . . . ]
‘Beasts! Beasts!’ I heard the Cubs crying out loud, and I was still look-
ing over the wall of the school.
I felt thirsty. I felt thirsty and hungry. I nearly cried out, ‘I wish I were
a Cub!’
But instead, I cried, ‘I wish I could leave this country!’ (172)
Bassem’s raging senses of hunger and thirst are, perhaps, no more than the
result of him being stoned. Yet as he mentally allies himself with the com-
munal cry of the Cubs, his hunger and thirst seem to express a longing for
a sense of national belonging, and with it the forms of militarised aggres-
sion, resistance, unity and communal identity that the children are being
taught to perform: all traditionally masculine gender roles, of the kind that
he is now deprived. Yet Bassem undergoes an extreme internal crisis at
this moment. Watching the young children being trained to serve a cause
that he has long given up on, he also seems to despair at the masculine
and nationalist identities that these children are being taught to perform.
Conscious of his simultaneous desire and repulsion at such a performance,
84 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
his contradictory feelings are too much to express. His fi nal spontaneous
utterance (the most active performance of agency that he has managed
throughout the entire story), which is so nearly to join the cause, is fi nally
a cry of total impotence: a desire for escape from the Palestinian refugee
camp and diasporic community, and an inability to undertake even this
form of negating action. His fi nal cry suggests an immense sense of stasis
and frustration, torn as he is between a desire for a regression to a state of
innocence, connection and jouissance embodied in the youthful nationalist
fervour of the Cubs but now only obtainable through his drug use—and for
an impossible exit from his country.
El-Youssef’s short story might seem to offer an uncompromisingly bleak
vision of Palestine’s fraternal community. Not only is political fraternity con-
veyed as internally consumed by pettiness and schism, but its male subjects
project hatred towards themselves as much as towards one another. Dis-
empowering as this vision may seem, it also in fact poses a transgressive
potential. In his refusal to conjure simplistic discourses of masculinity and
nationhood that strive blindly to fulfi l the ideals of nationalist rhetoric, El-
Youssef recognises the contradictory and confl icted pressures that underpin
these ideals, which ultimately render them no more than discursive con-
structs. Rather than positing this as a source of unequivocal pathos, however,
El-Youssef expresses this Palestinian masculinity crisis with a level of dark
and irreverent humour that reveals a strong sense of self-awareness and a pro-
pensity for self-critique within his central character, traits that offer him forms
of mental resistance. This resistance can be seen towards the end of the story,
when every one of the protagonist’s hopes of escape has been frustrated.
Bassem’s fi nal response is neither despair nor anger but to begin laughing
hysterically. Bassem stands fi rm against the onslaught of reality by retaining
a consciousness of the simultaneously absurd and surreal nature of Palestin-
ian existence. As he tells Ahmed, ‘didn’t I tell you that our cause has grown
out of the phase of realism and has become surrealist? [ . . . ] Everything has
become surrealist now!’ (168–169). Though Bassem’s response may appear
irrational, even insane (a stereotypically ‘feminine’ rather than ‘masculine’
condition), 53 it is paradoxically a strategy that facilitates his mental endur-
ance; for Bassem recognises that basic notions of reality, logic and rationality
are rendered impossible in his environment. Instead, an altogether more
subversive understanding of the ‘manly’ qualities of strength, endurance and
rationality is required, one that rests on a self-awareness of the surreal and
absurd as powerful modes of self-representation. Fraternity, then, is an impos-
sibility within the world of El-Youssef’s short story; but the freethinking and
independent, albeit marginal male subject may nevertheless retain a level of
imaginative agency. It is this consciousness of the absurd and imaginative as
strategies of resistance that brings us to Elia Suleiman’s fi lmmaking: work
with which El-Youssef might, after all, fi nd himself able to connect.
Masculinity in Crisis 85
Figure 3.1 The deadpan ES (pictured here with his anonymous lover from Ramallah,
who he must meet at the checkpoint due to her inability to cross into Jerusalem): a
silent witness to the emasculating injustices of the Israeli occupation. Divine Intervention
(2002), dir. Elia Suleiman. Image courtesy of Elia Suleiman.
Masculinity in Crisis 89
the second Intifada, for example, when checkpoints became prominent sites
of confrontation between Palestinian male youths and Israeli forces. Protests,
stone throwing and confrontations all became increasingly common, and led
to a considerable increase in injury among young male Palestinian youths
in particular.61 As well as sites that demand the performance of violent viril-
ity, though, the checkpoint is also a space of emasculation. The deadpan ES
both bears witness to and embodies such emasculation, as he watches at the
checkpoint as an Israeli guard armed with a loudspeaker parades along the
line of waiting cars, intent on belittling their occupants during Ramadan
by forcing them to swap vehicles arbitrarily, sometimes making them dance
and sing along the way. Reduced to interchangeable bodies malleable to the
guard’s boorish whim, the border-crossers are unable to assert agency and
must endure their abuse, carried out through emasculating humiliation and
cultural degradation rather than physical violence. ES watches from a simi-
lar point of powerlessness in his car. The checkpoint emerges as a space of
emasculation and national inertia here, offering few possibilities of fulfi lling
masculine codes of honour.
Or does it? Suleiman’s own behaviour, and indeed that of the border-
crossers, can also be read according to alternative codes of masculinity
which suggest how Palestinian nationalism might subvert the gendered codes
inscribed by dominant Israeli discourse. Julie Peteet states that during the
fi rst Intifada, the valorisation of Palestinian masculinity shifted from the
assertion of active and autonomous behaviours to qualities of endurance,
sacrifice and dignity, which came to be understood as alternative means of
fulfi lling honour (sharaf ). Acts used to humiliate Palestinian subjects by way
of their inability to resist, such as torture and beatings, have become rites of
passage which attest to the male subject’s commitment to the national ‘cause’
(qadiyyah), and this is reflected in the open display of marks of violence upon
the male body, which are appropriated less as marks of subordination than
as testament to his endurance, imbuing him with communal standing.62 Such
an understanding of masculinity recognises and addresses the powerlessness
of the Palestinian subject while suggesting this has become the condition of
resistance in itself—a subversion of the gendered power structures of Israeli
authority. This has been extended to Palestinian readings of Israeli military
behaviour. Military responses to unarmed Palestinian youths are read as
‘cowardly and immoral’, ‘lacking in the emotional . . . qualities of manhood’
or as ‘rude and boorish’.63 This facilitates a ‘poetics of contrast’ between
Palestinian and Israeli subjects, which enables Palestinians to reclassify their
own behaviour not as passivity but as dignity, politeness and the ability to
empathise with others—important ethical qualities that reposition the Pales-
tinian collectivity on the moral high ground.
In this light, ES’s actions at the border-checkpoint and indeed his charac-
terisation in general—his stone-faced silence, lack of response and inertia—
can be reread as markers of his enduring dignity as well as emotional and
90 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
moral strength, and thus as a manifestation of sumud. This quality is most
usually understood as a non-violent form of resistance that is carried out sim-
ply by standing fi rm in the face of threat or danger, and it circulates widely
as a valuable Palestinian characteristic in the cultural imagination.64 ES’s
endurance of the marginalising conditions of occupation—and indeed the
‘real’ ES’s creation of a fi lm that testifies so eloquently to the psychological
and social fragmentation that it produces—therefore constitute assertions of
physical, mental and visual agency. These assertions of agency transform
our vision of Palestine from one of marginal stasis and paternal inertia to
a subtler conceptualisation of the nation as a space constituted through an
altogether more self-aware, enduring and cerebral masculinity. Suleiman’s
Chronicle of Love and Pain therefore suggests the overhaul of patriarchal and
traditional concepts of masculinity as a traumatic and painful but neverthe-
less regenerative process for the nation.
Suleiman’s revalorisation of masculinity appears transgressive in postco-
lonial feminist terms as it seems to break free of the traditional patriarchal
orders that characterise both nationalist and colonial power structures. Yet
Suleiman’s fi lm nevertheless portrays the male subject as somewhat isolated,
the bonds of fraternity replaced with a process of self-scrutiny that he must
ultimately undergo alone. This wilful rejection of national fraternity might
be said to retain a level of elitist and artistic privilege, however, that very
same charge which has been levelled against some postcolonial theorists,
who bear what Patricia Price-Chalita describes as ‘the rather playful lux-
ury of choosing to be marginal’.65 For those who do not bear ES’s powers of
creative representation, altogether more radical forms of ‘speech act’ might
seem the only way of valorising masculinity—acts that may be performed
through the destruction of the male body itself, as Hany Abu-Assad’s fi lm
Paradise Now explores.
Figure 3.2 Khaled (left) and Said (right), figures of a close and genuine ‘fraternal’
friendship (portrayed by Ali Suliman and Kais Nashef). Paradise Now (2005), dir. Hany
Abu-Assad. Image courtesy of Bero Beyer, Augustus Film.
Figure 3.3 A haunting presence: Said’s mother senses her son, already lost to the sub-
terranean world of self-destruction. Portrayed by Kais Nashef and Hiam Abbas. Para-
dise Now (2005), dir. Hany Abu-Assad. Image courtesy of Bero Beyer, Augustus Film.
though sensing his presence, his mother comes to the window and the cam-
era dwells for a moment on the juxtaposed images of the mother and the
child who is already lost to her. Each figure unseeing of the other, Said is a
ghostly presence in this scene, poised on the brink of slipping not only into
the night but into a more complete self-erasure.
The lyrical yet ambivalent pathos of this scene resonates with Mahmoud
Darwish’s attitude towards martyrdom in his well-known poem, ‘A State of
Siege’. In this poem, Darwish contrasts the perspectives of the martyr before
and after death. Initially, the martyr perceives his death as a route to ‘free-
dom’ and ‘rebirth’:
Darwish’s poem appears both a lamentation for the martyr’s loss of life, and
a warning that the official rhetoric of sacrifice and heroism, evoked in the
image of ‘the women’s zaghareed’ (their ululations, expressions of celebra-
tion), must not obscure an awareness of the personal and familial suffering
also caused through such an act.
It is important to note that Darwish’s poem, like Abu-Assad’s fi lm, retains
a focus on the discourse of Palestinian national solidarity. It does not mourn
others killed through the martyr’s actions; rather, the pathos of such an act
emerges through the disruption that it causes to structures of family and
paternity, and through the crisis evoked by the male subject’s willingness to
erase himself. As such, Abu-Assad seems not so much to contest the neces-
sity of resistance, but to refigure the terms on which it must take place. Sig-
nificantly, these alternative terms are articulated by Suha, whose position
as a woman, as an international subject and crucially, as the daughter of a
famous martyr, appears to mobilise a radical postcolonial feminist potential
within the fi lm. Speaking of her father, she debunks the values of ‘pride’
and ‘honour’ associated with martyrdom: ‘I’d rather he were still alive today
than be proud of him’, she tells Said. Indeed, she points towards the counter-
productivity of martyrdom in a later conversation with Khaled: ‘You give
Israel an excuse to carry on’, she tells him; ‘We have to turn it into a moral
war’. Suha reveals the alternative ways in which Said’s martyred body will
be inscribed: as that of the violent, irrational terrorist who must be sup-
pressed by Israel, and crucially, this awareness stems from her ‘contrapuntal
consciousness’ as a subject who is aware both of how such acts will be per-
ceived beyond the boundaries of the nation, and of how Palestinians will
perceive them from within. Her status as daughter to a Palestinian martyr is
also highly significant. As ‘other’ to the structures of paternity, fraternity and
patriarchy, Suha does not appear to feel any obligation to perpetuate them;
rather, she bears witness to the human loss entailed in her father’s sacrifice.
Her contrasting solution to Palestine’s marginalisation is not conceived in
98 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
corporeal terms, but rather in cerebral ones, for it transpires that she has
been working as a foreign journalist, reporting overseas on the conditions of
life in Palestine. As such, Suha’s marginal position as woman and as exile
seems to offer the most productive articulation of agency within the fi lm. Yet
Suha’s ‘postcolonial feminist’ agency also reveals these margins to be sites
of relative privilege. Denied access beyond the borders of the West Bank,
Said is unable to move beyond the radical margins at either the physical or
psychological levels that Suha can.
Abu-Assad’s location of Palestinian masculinity in the radical margins,
conceived as sites of the political ‘underground’ and of a more permanently
subterranean existence, therefore testifies to the extreme ambivalence of sha-
hadah as a form of national and gendered agency. This ambivalence is sym-
bolised by the fi nal frames of the fi lm, which appear to evoke the instant at
which Said detonates his bomb. Said’s act of martyrdom is not portrayed as
a moment of chaos, destruction or heroism, however. Rather, is it represented
quite simply through a whitening of the screen and a silence. This image (or
lack of image) allows a number of connotations to circulate: from light and
transcendence to total negation. Crucially, it also suggests an absence of sig-
nification, pointing towards the sense in which such an act cannot be easily
deciphered or transcribed; it exceeds the boundaries of that which can be
represented or imagined. Yet this white blankness also appears to conjure a
blank inscriptive surface. In this, Abu-Assad perhaps suggests that while the
radical margins of Khaled and Said’s world may not facilitate ‘speech acts’
beyond the corporeal, the privileged margins occupied by the fi lmmaker and
implicitly the postcolonial feminist theorist pose other possibilities of articu-
lation, and more productive and connective acts of representation remain to
be written. These are possibilities that must surely be embraced, in the hope
of arriving at a more connective understanding of the radically marginalis-
ing conditions that incite such radical acts of (self-)destruction.
That space in the margin . . . is a site of creativity and power, [an] in-
clusive space where we recover ourselves, where we meet in solidarity
to erase the category colonized/colonizer. Marginality is the space of re-
sistance. Enter that space. Let us meet there. Enter that space. We greet
you as liberators.82
There is perhaps no other space that has captured the imagination of post-
colonial feminist theorists quite like that of the border. Many strands of post-
colonial feminist theory turn towards the margins, edges or boundaries of
social and representational structures in order to challenge the dominant
and centralised paradigms of various power/knowledge systems, including
those of postcolonialism and feminism as disciplines. Consequently, for some
theorists, the border has come to represent the disciplinary location of post-
colonial feminism itself, symbolising both ‘[the theorist’s] own estrangement
from the centre of her discipline’,1 and the ‘liminal’ nature of postcolonial
feminist discourse, poised as it is on the threshold or ‘limen’ of competing
critical spheres and intellectual worlds. Borders therefore signify ‘a place of
politically exciting hybridity, intellectual creativity, and moral possibility’2
for many theorists, who emphasise the inherent ambivalence of the border
as a site that not only separates but also forges connections between two or
more spaces, cultures or subject-positions. Hence, as Michaelsen and John-
son put it, borders are frequently imagined as a ‘privileged locus of hope for
a better world’ in the realms of critical theory.3 Yet for Palestine, a nation
much in need of ‘a better world’, borders also represent traumatic sites of
spatial and psychological experience and it is for their oppressive permeation
of everyday existence that they have taken hold in the imaginations of many
Palestinian directors and writers. To what extent might it be possible to cre-
ate productive critical exchanges between these two vastly different visions
of the border? This chapter turns to recent ‘border-narratives’ by the authors
Randa Jarrar, Liana Badr and Raeda Taha, and by the contemporary direc-
tors Tawfi k Abu Wael and Annemarie Jacir, in order to explore the alterna-
tive politics of gendered experience, identification and (post)coloniality that
circulate around borders in the Palestinian imagination. Collectively, these
narratives not only break down some of the securely utopian assumptions of
postcolonial feminist theory, but also reveal a politics of gendered representa-
tion that is boundary-breaking in its own right.
It is hardly surprising that borders should have emerged as such promi-
nent tropes in Palestinian creative consciousness, given the way in which
102 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
shifting claims to the land have been reflected in the constant redrawing of
territorial boundaries. The territory comprised today of the State of Israel,
Gaza and the West Bank has been held by various regional and imperial
powers throughout its contested history, and the region has, to an extent,
always been defi ned by territorial flux and shifts in power.4 As the poet
Tawfiq Zayyad puts it in his poem, ‘What Next?’: ‘on this land of mine /
conquerors never lasted’. 5 Yet the period that has been most influential in
building a contemporary Palestinian consciousness of borders has been
that of European political intervention in the early twentieth century. Dur-
ing this period, European powers carved nation-states out of the former
territory of the Ottoman Empire, leading to the establishment of Palestine
as a British mandate in 1922. Despite initial promises from the British that
Palestine would eventually be established as an independent Arab nation,
Lord Balfour’s 1917 statement of commitment to the creation of a home
for Jews in Palestine later resulted in the passing of the United Nations’
Resolution 181 in 1947, which established a plan for partition of Palestinian
territory into independent Israeli and Palestinian states in which 56% of
land would be ceded to the Jewish minority and 43% to the Arab majority.6
This divisive imposition of boundaries reflects Joe Cleary’s observation
that ‘most of the major partitions in the twentieth century have occurred
in territories previously subject to colonial rule’,7 and Palestine appears
no exception. The borders imposed on Palestine by external forces have
tended to operate as colonial usurpations of self-determination rather
than as markers of independent nationhood, and this trend has continued
throughout the twentieth century, fi rstly with the Nakba of 1948, which
extended Israeli territory beyond the initial UN plans for partition, and
subsequently during the Naksa of 1967, through which Israel gained con-
trol of all remaining Palestinian territory. 8 Rather than integrating these
areas into the State of Israel, however, Gaza and the West Bank have been
maintained as clearly distinctive territories. In 1993, the border with Gaza
was sealed and, though granted ‘self-rule’, it is still unable to control its
own boundaries, while the West Bank has been designated as ‘occupied
territory’, never having been formally annexed to Israel or Jordan. As
such, its ‘jurisdiction is yet to be decided’. 9 The result of this is that Pales-
tine’s borders occupy a paradoxical status: they are at once entirely absent,
since there is no self-determined Palestinian nation-state; yet Palestinians
remain subject to Israeli-enforced boundaries that are controlled according
to some of the most rigorously divisive mechanisms operating anywhere
in the world today. Consequently, it can be said that Palestinian borders
testify both to the colonial control and settlement of formerly Palestinian
land, and to Palestine’s oddly postmodern (some might say ‘post-national’,
or even in this case ‘pre-national’) condition of stateless liminality. As the
director Elia Suleiman puts it, ‘Palestine does not exist. It has no borders.
It has all the chaotic elements that lead you to question space, borders, and
Bodies Beyond Boundaries? 103
crossings . . . The Palestinian people is partitioned into various segments,
but there is no real border’.10
While Palestinian borders are, at one level, entirely absent, a mentality
of boundaries has nevertheless come to defi ne Palestinian existence. Indeed,
Rashid Khalidi has suggested that ironically, borders have come to stand
as sites of ‘quintessential Palestinian experience’, for whether at ‘a border,
an airport, a checkpoint’, ‘what happens to Palestinians at these crossings
brings home to them how much they share as a people’.11 The shared condi-
tion experienced by Palestinians is that of having their right to movement,
to freedom and to belonging called into question. Since the fi rst Intifada of
1987–1993, a policy of ‘internal closure’ has been implemented in the West
Bank, where hundreds of barbed wire fences, roadblocks and checkpoints
have sprung up, and since 1993, all Palestinians living in the West Bank have
required an Israeli-issued permit in order to visit Jerusalem, during which
they are required to pass through militarily controlled checkpoints at which
such documentation is verified or rejected. Those living in Gaza, meanwhile,
require three documents in order to pass into Israel or elsewhere, documents
that are only held by 5% of the population.12 In recent years, borders have
become increasingly restrictive in material terms, affi rming their function as
elements of what the architect and theorist Eyal Weizman has termed Israel’s
‘architecture of occupation’: the use of spatial mechanisms to assert Israeli
control of every element of Palestinian space, from surveillance strategies
implemented through its airspace, to the construction of segregated road
systems, to the control of subterranean water supplies in the West Bank.13 In
2007, for example, following the democratic election of Hamas, an air, land
and sea blockade was imposed on Gaza by Israel and Egypt.14 Perhaps the
starkest visual reminder of the borders imposed by the occupation, though,
takes the form of the 26-foot-high ‘Separation Fence’, or ‘Apartheid Wall’,
which began construction in 2002 (in violation of the Green Line outlined
in 1949, and declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004)15
and runs along the entire northwest face of the West Bank, not only dividing
the West Bank from Israel but West from East Jerusalem, carving out numer-
ous enclosures within the West Bank itself. As Islah Jad writes, the path of
the Apartheid Wall within the West Bank has ‘resulted in the creation of
localized identities which acted to destroy the social fabric and undermine
Palestinian unity’.16 This very distinctive type of border, then, has served to
fragment rather than to affi rm Palestinian national boundaries.
This ‘Apartheid Wall’ eerily echoes the commitment to spatial, cultural
and ideological segregation outlined by Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist
Zionism, in an article entitled ‘The Iron Wall’:
Percentages of
Palestinian West Bank Population
Directly Affected by the Wall
PopulationIsolatedalinn
Outside the walled 10.2%
Population Separated
8.9%
by the Wall
Population Separated
from Cultivated Land 3.1%
by Wall Section
Ariel Settlemenl Bloc
Septemper 2005
End of the settlers occupation
oftheGazastrip, redeployment
of the Israeli army
Figure 4.1 Map of the West Bank Wall, 2006.2006. The Wall is indicated by the thick solid
line, while the Green Line of 1949 is indicated by the dashed line. Israeli settlements are
are
denoted by triangle shapes. Map courtesy of PASSIA (Palestinian Academic Society for
the Study of International Affairs).
Bodies Beyond Boundaries? 105
of a force independent of the local population—an iron wall which the
native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy to-
wards the Arabs.17
Following Said, A.H. Sa’di points out the clearly colonial, even Orientalist
mentality of this policy, which seeks to establish its difference and superi-
ority to a ‘native population’ that must be controlled and expelled to the
margins of both the Israeli State and Israeli consciousness. This mentality is
not unique to colonial Palestine. Indeed, the postcolonialist Avtar Brah has
drawn attention to the segregationist and indeed constructivist tendencies of
all borders in her description of them as
arbitrary dividing lines that are simultaneously social, cultural and psy-
chic; territories to be patrolled against those who they construct as out-
siders, aliens, the Others; forms of demarcation where the very act of
prohibition inscribes transgression; zones where the fear of the Other
is the fear of the Self; places where ownership—claims to ‘mine’, ‘yours’
and ‘theirs’—are staked out, contested, fought over.18
This vivid description draws attention to the way in which borders must be
understood not only as sites where space and nationhood are delineated, but
as intimate sites at which identity and selfhood are also produced. This inter-
play of the political and personal, spatial and subjective emerges as a major
theme within many of the recent literary and fi lmic works that have focused
their sites on borders as a theme or motif.
While borders and border-regions hold a longstanding presence in Pales-
tinian creative consciousness,19 they have surfaced most extensively follow-
ing the proliferation of material boundaries set up in the wake of the fi rst
Intifada in the form of roadblocks, checkpoints and concrete barriers, which
serve as highly visible surfaces onto which a director or author may project
their creative vision or interpretation.20 Indeed, this has taken place to such
an extent in fi lm that the critic George Khleifi has identified a whole genre
of ‘roadblock movies’ which focus their plot and setting at the checkpoint,
with its emergent dramas.21 Yet a broader cross-genre examination of both
literature and fi lm suggests that borders have come to signify more than sim-
ply division and oppression, and instead, have begun to represent sites where
the politics of identity and selfhood are played out in complex ways. Particu-
larly fascinating within these narratives is the emphasis on the body itself
as a bounded, self-contained entity that is forced into confrontation or even
contact with the border. Hence the border emerges as more than a straight-
forward manifestation of the ‘architecture of occupation’: it also delineates
the social, ideological and personal boundaries that circulate around the
gendered body and intersect with physical borders in a variety of ways.
106 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
In this recognition of the border as a site that reveals multiple cartogra-
phies of power and identity, Palestinian border-narratives seem to resemble
postcolonial feminist theorisations of the border which view it as a space
that constructs ‘membership in divergent, even antagonistic, historical and
national identities’, 22 and thus transcends binarised identity politics. As
Naficy contends,
To what extent, however, does the interplay of bodily and spatial boundaries,
of national and gender politics, and of competing structures of power result
in this radically postcolonial, even post-patriarchal state when it comes to
the Palestinian border? Over the course of this chapter, I turn to some of
the more unusual narratives that evoke the interplay between borders and
bodies as their subject matter in order to suggest the variety of restrictive and
transgressive scenarios imagined through them.
In the fi rst section of the chapter, I explore the figure of the ‘checkpoint
heroine’ who appears in the work of several contemporary female authors,
including Randa Jarrar, Liana Badr and Raeda Taha, whose ‘border-nar-
ratives’ are anthologised in the collection Qissat. 24 In the second part of the
chapter, I turn to more radically deconstructive explorations of Palestine’s
liminal spaces and subjectivities through Tawfi k Abu Wael’s fi lm ‘Atash25
and Annemarie Jacir’s short fi lm like twenty impossibles, 26 both of which con-
jure the ‘borderland’ as a site at which the politics of bodies and identity are
thrown into disarray. Throughout these analyses, I employ tools drawn from
postcolonial feminist theorisations of the border such as the work of Gloria
Anzaldúa and D. Emily Hicks, and from Palestinian cultural concepts of
gender, in order to suggest the forms of interplay and discrepancy that are
opened up when Palestinian and postcolonial feminist visions of the border
are placed alongside one another. Where might this act of border-crossing
lead us, as theorists and as readers? In order to answer this question, we must
fi rst confront one of the most traumatic but imaginatively productive spaces
within the Palestinian imagination: the checkpoint.
La mestiza [woman of mixed racial heritage, but also woman of the ‘in-
between’, or border-region] undergoes . . . a struggle of borders, an inner
war [ . . . ] [She] copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions . . . To
juggle cultures . . . she operates in a pluralistic mode . . . Not only does she
sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else.35
For Anzaldúa, the female subject situated at the intersection of cultural, gen-
dered and social boundaries fi nds her own way to cross the multiple borders
that confront her on the ‘social map’. The condition of border-crossing is,
according to Anzaldúa, therefore inherent to the existence of any woman
who feels herself to belong to more than one cultural sphere or affi liation—a
condition that the Palestinian woman, confronted with simultaneous strug-
gles for national and gendered agency, also faces. How, then, are women’s
statuses as ‘border-guards’ and ‘border-crossers’ mobilised in the figure of
the ‘checkpoint heroine’?
It would be tempting to imagine the ‘checkpoint heroine’ as a glamorous,
larger-than-life figure, and indeed, in Elia Suleiman’s fi lm Divine Intervention
(examined in the previous chapter), this is exactly how she appears: as a
bold, sexy young woman who marches defiantly across the border and, with
Bodies Beyond Boundaries? 109
the magic realism typical of Suleiman’s fi lms, brings the checkpoint control
tower crashing to the ground in the process.36 In the border-narratives pre-
sented by several female authors in the short story collection Qissat, however,
the acts of border-crossing accomplished by their female protagonists are of
a much more everyday nature. Nevertheless, the forms of resilience, courage
and even heroism they display render them ‘checkpoint heroines’ in ways
with which Palestinian women might be more readily able to identify. Qis-
sat, edited by Jo Glanville, brings together sixteen short stories by Palestin-
ian women of many different generations and locations. Despite the variety
of subject-positions and geographical locations from which these women
write, however, the act of border-crossing recurs in several of the stories,
and indeed forms the focus of three narratives within the collection: Randa
Jarrar’s ‘Barefoot Bridge’, Raeda Taha’s ‘A Single Metre’ and Liana Badr’s
‘Other Cities’. The border therefore acts as a connective site of imaginative
and experiential empathy for these female authors. Yet the women in their
stories are faced with numerous spatial and social boundaries, many of them
linked to the communal expectations mapped onto the female body. In each
of these stories, though, the woman’s act of border-crossing brings different
social boundaries into focus, and maps out the potential for alternative mod-
els of strength, heroism and transgression through her actions.
Raeda Taha’s short story, ‘A Single Metre’, focuses on the fi nal moments of
one woman’s journey to the border. This focus seems to echo Homi Bhabha’s
poignant observation that ‘the globe shrinks for those who own it . . . but for
the displaced or dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is more
awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers’; 37 for in this story, ‘a sin-
gle metre’ is the distance between the protagonist and the Qalandiya check-
point, between imprisonment and freedom and potentially even between life
and death, as the female protagonist fi nds herself inadvertently drawn into a
potential act of violent resistance. Taha, a Ramallah-based writer, constructs
a third-person narrative that intimately explores a single nameless woman’s
thoughts and observations as she tries to cross the border. The story opens
by conjuring the woman’s sense of weariness at the inevitable discourtesies
and humiliations that she has come to expect in crossing the Qalandiya
checkpoint to Jerusalem in her attempt to meet with relatives there: ‘She’s
tried several times to avoid that arduous trip to Jerusalem; she can no longer
stand that close-by far-away city’ (128). Central to this weariness, we learn, is
the material and bodily experience of crossing the border:
She decided, without any hesitation, that she wouldn’t squeeze herself
into a circle of sweat mixed with hatred, malice and perversion. For a
moment she imagined her body sandwiched between two young men
thirsty for a piece of flesh. She didn’t want to allow herself to be an object
of masturbation, or for a moment to lie of a fi lthy bed, under a yellow
blanket, in one of their fantasies. (128)
110 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
The protagonist’s sense of repulsion at the border not only stems from
the ways in which her personal freedoms are curtailed by Israeli controls
on space, but also at the way in which this space collapses respectful and
humane social conditions between those forced to cross it. Such an observa-
tion is supported by Eyal Weizman’s research into checkpoint mechanisms,
in which he fi nds that although they are designed to create total physical
separation between the Palestinian border-crosser and Israeli regulator, they
encroach in deliberately tangible and spatially limiting ways upon the body
of the border-crosser, evident in the design of turnstiles which can be halted
at the touch of a button, trapping several people inside them at once, and
which have deliberately shortened arms so that they press against the body
in order to ‘ensure there is nothing under their clothes’, 38 making the experi-
ence claustrophobic, intrusive and distressing.
For these reasons, the fi rm-minded heroine makes a bold and in some
ways ‘unfeminine’ move at the checkpoint. Determined to avoid the queues
and crowds, she marches up to a vehicle waiting at the crossing and, after
‘pointing at the back seat questioningly’, gets in and demands a lift from
the driver. Such an act of defi ance might seem to cast the protagonist as
a ‘checkpoint heroine’ for the way in which she sidesteps the intimidating
atmosphere of the checkpoint through a subversion of gender norms; as
Monterescu notes, this somewhat impertinent though assertive act is untyp-
ical of women’s social expectations, and may lead to her being labelled
‘mdakara or . . . mara mzambara—[a] virile, impertinent woman’. 39 The pro-
tagonist, though, considers her behaviour an accomplishment, for she is
‘proud of herself, as though she’d won an historic victory’ (129). Yet as she
looks around her, other anxieties emerge.
The driver was a bearded young man . . . and his friend seemed equally
well behaved. She noticed a small Qur’an in the driver’s hand. He was
reading it intensely, in a voice like a secret delight. (129)
From these observations, a concern emerges in her mind: ‘What if he’s plan-
ning to blow himself up?’(129). Given the protagonist’s earlier harsh judg-
ments of her imaginary male border-crossers as ‘thirsty for a piece of flesh’
(128), we might dismiss her analysis as no more than an overly cynical,
even paranoid interpretation of these men. Yet the tense uncertainty of her
situation (and its bleak irony—that having avoided the crush of disrespectful
young men at the checkpoint, she has possibly rendered her body supremely
vulnerable by demanding this proximity to her polite and respectful male
drivers) also vividly evokes the unpredictability and inherently traumatic
nature of the border-crossing experience, which is never guaranteed to be
successful or safe.
Whether or not the protagonist has in fact located herself alongside
would-be ‘suicide bombers’, her response to this hypothetical situation is
Bodies Beyond Boundaries? 111
interesting; for while her immediate thought is that ‘I want to get out, I want
to cry’, her next is that ‘maybe I want to be the heroine’ (129). Although only
a metre away from the checkpoint by this stage, the protagonist still has the
opportunity to flee, as the driver’s glance at her in the rear-view mirror might
imply; yet instead, ‘she gave him a quiet look, and a smile of surrender’ (129).
In this act, the checkpoint heroine becomes an altogether more ambivalent,
even poignant figure. Is her act of courage, her willingness for self-sacrifice,
coerced or voluntary? Is it to be interpreted in radical Fanonian terms, as an
act of necessarily violent resistance, the protagonist assuming the controver-
sial role of the female martyr typifying societal crisis—or is it symbolically
indicative of the denial of female agency and the dominant circuits of male
power that condition, control and constrain female bodies at every level?40
However we interpret the protagonist’s situation, it is deeply symbolic of the
immense corporeal and psychological pressures placed on the Palestinian
subject, which crystallise at the site of the border in terms of the multiple
threats posed to bodily integrity. Thus Taha’s protagonist offers a radical
and controversial recognition of borders as sites of violent confrontation not
only with the limits imposed by the occupation, but with the pressures and
power structures that emerge within Palestinian society itself. Though she
approaches the border bravely, Taha’s protagonist does not cross communal,
gendered or ideological boundaries entirely on her own terms. Instead, her
journey displays the limbo-like uncertainties and confl icted loyalties of the
female border-crosser, and the ways in which she might suffer as a result.
While Taha’s story casts her protagonist as a somewhat unwitting ‘check-
point heroine’ caught up in external forces, Randa Jarrar’s story ‘Barefoot
Bridge’ offers a different take on border-crossing as a process that may also
entail liberating possibilities. Told in the fi rst person from the perspective of
a young girl raised in the Palestinian diaspora in Egypt and hence poised at
the cusp of cultures and worldviews, the story offers a poignant portrait of
the subtle resistance of the female border-crossers around the young girl, and
of the other traumatic border-crossings that have also liberated her from the
restrictions on women in the West Bank. ‘Barefoot Bridge’ is the name given
to the Allenby Bridge border-crossing between Jordan and the West Bank
by the narrator, and through the girl’s young eyes, we see how her journey
across this bridge comes to symbolise her transition from privileged naïvety
to a gathering realisation of the restrictions that demarcate many elements of
Palestinian existence.
The story opens with the child explaining that this is her fi rst trip ‘to Pales-
tine, which Baba calls the bank—el daffa—to bury my Baba’s baba’ (19), and
it is through her inexperienced eyes that the complex and seemingly absurd
restraints on Palestinian space become apparent: ‘We have to fly to Jordan
and then . . . cross a bridge . . . so I ask Baba, “Why can’t we just drive there,
or take a plane straight there?” He tells me to be quiet’ (19). When they reach
the Allenby Bridge (a crossing also vividly described at the start of Mourid
112 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah), the experience of border-crossing emerges as
an intrinsic element of Palestinian experience, and indeed, it seems to con-
jure an eclectic female community among women otherwise distinguished
by religious and cultural differences: ‘There are women in pretty dresses,
women in jeans, women in veils . . . women in traditional dresses . . . women
in khaki shorts’ (21), the little girl observes with wonder. Regardless of what
they are wearing, however, all are stripped of their identities and dignity in
the same way at the border. The little girl describes her sense of humilia-
tion at watching her mother being searched: ‘Mama takes off her skirt and
blouse and is left in tight underwear that is meant to tuck her tummy in, and
a see-through bra . . . I feel embarrassed for her, who’s naked in front of this
rough-handed stranger’ (22). Jarrar intervenes at this distressing moment by
employing humour as a subversive strategy, for the mother’s response is to
‘fart a huge silent fart that stinks up the fitting room and forces the soldier to
leave for a few seconds. We giggle and Mama says “Kaffik”, and I give her
five’ (22). Though far from an act of serious resistance, this moment of shared
childish silliness with her daughter sees the mother regaining some kind of
control over their dehumanising situation. The child’s enduring impressions
of the border are of people collectively forced to endure exhaustion, heat
and discomfort. In contrast to this, the boundaries of her father’s family seem
much safer and more welcoming—but as the child fi nds out, these also have
their own restrictions.
These restrictions emerge through the figure of Sitto, the father’s sister.
Sitto is conjured as an enchanting figure of traditional Palestine, a guardian
of folktales and family recipes who ‘doesn’t care she can’t write, because she
tells tales and winks and makes cheese’ (26). Sitto is the female ‘border-guard’
charged with preserving the boundaries of communal identity through her
affi rmation of gender norms, but it is in fact the figure of the patriarch, the
girl’s father, who draws attention to the boundaries that also exist within
this close-knit, family-oriented community. Standing outside his old family
home, he shows his daughter the whitewashed wall in front of which all of
his sisters were married before seventeen, ‘like prisoners awaiting execu-
tion’ (28). The father reveals how the experience of being forced beyond the
borders of one’s own home might be both traumatic and liberating. He tells
his daughter that ‘I was sad [to leave because of the war] but going to Egypt,
going to university, gave me my freedom. Your aunts never received such
an opportunity. I want more than anything else in the world for you to have
that opportunity’ (28). Jarrar’s story reflects Edward Said’s observation in his
essay ‘Reflections on Exile’, in which he suggests that while exile is a painful
condition entailing loss of one’s home, ‘there are things to be learned [from
it] [ . . . ] Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience’,
resulting in a ‘plurality of vision’ that allows them to negotiate their exilic
existence.41 This ‘plurality of vision’ can arguably be applied in gendered
terms to this story, in which the father’s exilic consciousness allows him to
Bodies Beyond Boundaries? 113
perceive the multiple structures of power, privilege and oppression entailed
in both communal belonging and in exile for the female subject; indeed, it
is perhaps his status as ‘border-crosser’ which allows him to challenge the
patriarchal assumptions of the community into which he was born. In this
story, then, the young girl bears witness to the traumatic border-crossings
that have shaped her family’s lives, and senses the comforting closeness and
romance of a culture that she can never quite access, but she comes to under-
stand how her father’s border-crossing has placed her in a privileged position
beyond the restraints of a traditional rural patriarchal community. That the
father’s diasporic liberation should take place when exiled in Egypt rather
than the West problematises the notion that women’s rights to education are
inherently Western, neo-colonial influences;42 rather, they are revealed as
elements of a modernising Arab world that, like the political landscape and
the ‘nomadic, decentred, contrapuntal’43 life of the exile, is subject to shift-
ing spatial, societal and gendered boundaries. While the little girl of Jarrar’s
story endures her border-crossings bravely, she is therefore a ‘checkpoint
heroine’ by proxy, for her own ability to break free from boundaries is a
product of her father’s own painful passage across borders.
Can the restrictions on women’s freedoms and ambitions only be overcome
by moving beyond Palestine’s borders altogether, then? The protagonist of
Liana Badr’s story ‘Other Cities’ would suggest otherwise. The protagonist,
Umm Hasan, expresses a desire to break free from the spatial and patriar-
chal restraints imposed upon her very early in the story, as she draws paral-
lels between the restrictions enforced by her husband, by her community in
Khuzq al-Far, the ‘mouse-hole neighbourhood of Hebron’ (40) in which she
lives, and by the occupation. Umm Hasan’s existence appears a subordinate
and limited one, particularly in her dependence on her husband—a man who
is portrayed as lazy, unemployed and patronising towards her. This portrait
can be read as a brave feminist affront on Badr’s part to the notion of kinship
loyalty that is often seen to defi ne Palestinian familial relations, and indeed
to provide support networks for women.44 Yet her life within this insular com-
munity is also subject to rigorous restraints on identity and space imposed
by the occupation. We’re told of how ‘the number of security patrols . . . in
the streets of Hebron kept growing’; of how ‘the settlers often clashed with
residents, spitting on them, pelting them with stones, beating them’ (40);
and of how ‘the trip to Ramallah [that] had once been a forty-minute drive
. . . now required an entire day of meandering from village to village along
rocky, hilly roads’ (42) due to the roadblocks and checkpoints imposed by
the occupation. Umm Hasan fi nds herself enclosed by literal borders and
social boundaries on all sides.
Against this oppressive backdrop, Umm Hasan develops a daring plan:
to take her children to Ramallah with ID cards borrowed from a neigh-
bour and money secretly saved from her housekeeping allowance. Summon-
ing up all her courage, Umm Hasan puts her plan into action, achieving a
114 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
transgression of patriarchal and colonial boundaries, and a longed-for inde-
pendence—until her money runs out and she is forced to return home. Yet her
most subversive act of border-crossing in fact takes place during this return
journey. Stuck in a queue of traffic in the sweltering heat with a bawling baby,
Umm Hasan steps out of her taxi and marches up to the border, where she
confronts the guard by telling him that her child is sick and he must let the
cars go. At this moment, Umm Hasan asserts her position as mother: a highly
traditional role, though one that here assumes a transgressive potential. Her
simple assertion of motherly authority facilitates a radical border-crossing
within the narrative, as we see when Badr suddenly shifts to the third-person
perspective of the Israeli soldier:
we are confronted with the nation split within itself, articulating the het-
erogeneity of its population. The barred Nation It/Self, alienated from
its eternal self-generation, becomes a liminal signifying space that is
internally marked by the discourse of minorities, the heterogeneous his-
tories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations
of cultural difference.48
Palestinians to live suspended between earth and sky, like the figures in
a Marc Chagall painting’,49 he offered a compelling image of Palestinians’
liminal existence. As inhabitants of a stateless nation lacking self-determina-
tion over its own boundaries, Palestinians are poised in a ‘no-man’s land’ in
which they nevertheless remain subject to the shifting regulations, bound-
aries and territorial claims cast upon them, and for critics such as Kamal
Abdel-Malek, this condition leads to a profound consciousness of the liminal
not only in socio-political and spatial terms, but also within the creative
imagination. 50 While, for Abdel-Malek, this liminal consciousness appears
in the work of authors including Fawaz Turki and Mahmoud Darwish, it has
also emerged in several recent fi lms that conjure a vivid sense of liminality
through their portrayals of what might be described as the landscape of
the ‘borderland’. Turning to two particularly evocative fi lmic renderings of
borderland space, in Tawfi k Abu Wael’s 2004 feature fi lm ‘Atash (Thirst) and
Annemarie Jacir’s 2003 short fi lm like twenty impossibles, the following analy-
sis explores the deconstructive aesthetics of (dis)identification which seems
to surface through the realm of the liminal, and considers its postcolonial
feminist potential.
The term ‘liminality’ means, literally, ‘of the limen, or threshold’51 and while
it defines a state of suspension or of the ‘in-between’, it is also suggestive of a
non-static condition in which boundaries are being constantly tested and desta-
bilised: a state of ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’, to use the Deleuzian term.52
Such a state could be said to characterise Palestine in itself—a nation defined
by, as Edward Said puts, it, the condition of ‘a protracted not yet, which is
not always a very hopeful one’,53 and this is a condition that is in many ways
affirmed by the simultaneously present and absent nature of national boundar-
ies. As Gertz and Khleifi note, ‘borders have . . . become a sign of oppression
characterised by an Israeli definition of Palestine as a non-existent, split or
broken identity’54 in recent Palestinian cinema, pointing towards the absence
of self-determination but also to the enduring presence of a traumatised Pal-
estinian national identity. Yet Said has made the radical suggestion that Pales-
tine’s liminal state need not necessarily be defined solely as one of oppression.
Instead, he has suggested that it might be embraced as the very character of
Palestinian experience, and employed as a mode of representation in itself. He
writes that ‘since the main features of our present existence are dispossession,
dispersion, and yet also a kind of power incommensurate with our stateless
exile, I believe that essentially unconventional, hybrid, and fragmentary forms
of expression should represent us’.55 For Said, the possibilities of Palestinian
self-representation lie in the very qualities of liminality, transition and place-
lessness that also deny its existence as a nation-state.
This appropriation of a radically marginal condition as one of potential
transgression is characteristic of postcolonial and indeed feminist theorisa-
tions of the border, and here, the motif of the ‘borderland’ emerges with
Bodies Beyond Boundaries? 117
a particular force. In its literal sense, the borderland refers either to ‘the
region in one nation that is significantly affected by an international border’,
or ‘the region on both sides of the border’. 56 The latter approach emphasises
the sense of cultural interaction engendered by the border, affi rming its
status as a space with a cultural character of its own. As an ‘in-between’
space, the borderland is characterised not so much by the specificity of
its cultural codes as by a multiplicity of languages, cultures and identi-
ties. Its distinctive character therefore stems from its identity as a space
where the authority of all cultural and social constructs is called into ques-
tion. Unsurprisingly, postcolonial theorists have adopted the borderland
as a potent metaphor for cultural hybridity akin to Homi Bhabha’s ‘Third
Space’, which he describes as a space of the ‘in-between’ and ‘of transla-
tion: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a
political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our
political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recog-
nition of the moment of politics’. 57 As a space in which the boundaries of
space, power and identity are called into question, the borderland has also
proven attractive to deconstructivist strands of feminist and ‘queer’ the-
ory, in which the possibility of a radically ‘nonunified subject’, 58 liberated
not only from patriarchal boundaries but from the restraints of identifica-
tion altogether, might emerge. Indeed, for some theorists, the borderlands
constitute an alternative representational space in which ‘all forms come
undone, as do all the significations, signifiers and signifieds to the benefit
of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs’59 —
forms that might be represented through highly experimental modes of
‘border-writing’ or other expressions of ‘border-consciousness’.
The postcolonial feminist potentials embedded in the borderland make
it an incredibly exciting site from which to consider the politics of represen-
tation in Palestinian cultural consciousness. Yet the very specific nature of
Palestine’s borderland status means that these theoretical potentials must be
approached with caution. In the following analyses, I therefore attempt to
tease out the distinctive nuances of Palestine’s liminal states in two recent
portrayals of Palestinian borderlands as locations where both space and self
are radically destabilised, and alternative creative possibilities of representa-
tion begin to emerge.
One of the most visually evocative representations of the Palestinian bor-
derland appears in Tawfi k Abu Wael’s 2004 fi lm, ‘Atash (Thirst). Abu Wael,
like Annemarie Jacir (whose work is discussed later in this chapter), is of a
younger generation of fi lmmakers whose work has risen to prominence in
the twenty-fi rst century,60 and his work displays an interest in the interplay,
and the tensions, between the personal and the political.61 Despite the fact
that ‘Atash is a rare collaboration between a Palestinian director and Israeli
producer (Avi Kleinberger), its political stance remains ambivalent and Abu
Wael focuses instead on the evocation of atmosphere, symbolism and place
118 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
in ways that allow a number of interpretive possibilities to surface. Indeed,
the fi lm establishes a close link between exterior and interior worlds through
its strong reliance on pathetic fallacy. Set in a wasteland that appears bereft
of all the basics for survival, the fi lm portrays the attempts of the Abu Shukri
family to create a life and home for themselves there. The setting therefore
mirrors the confl icted and yearning psychologies of its characters, all pos-
sessed by their own thirsts and hungers—whether these are for water, for
education, for independence or simply for love. While ‘Atash is at one level an
existential drama evoking the liminal psychology of Palestinian existence, it
is also an intimate portrayal of personal as well as political longings, which
are played out through the specifically gendered and generational confl icts
within the family itself. Bodies and selves as well as spaces therefore undergo
forms of transition within the borderland realms of ‘Atash, and between them,
these borderland bodies present some astonishing and transformational pos-
sibilities of self-representation.
‘Atash immediately evokes the qualities of the borderland through its ele-
mental setting. Though fi lmed in Umm el-Fahim, a Palestinian town right
next to the Green Line in Israel where Abu Wael was born, the setting in fact
takes on a more allegorical status as its identity is described only through
the anonymous empty shells of an abandoned settlement, possibly a military
outpost or deserted village, that we learn is on land confiscated by the Israeli
State. Consequently, the Abu Shukri family live there illicitly, remaining
unseen by the local authorities as they go about carving out a meagre exis-
tence from the land by trapping birds and stealing wood for their charcoal
business. Much of the fi lm’s lyrical and understated symbolism derives from
these activities, which invoke the elements of earth, air, fi re and water through
shots of the wood being chopped and burned, and of pluming smoke, flames
and embers being raked. ‘Atash therefore subverts the Palestinian pastoral
tradition which portrays the landscape as lush and fertile, with the peasant
as its deeply rooted custodian.62 Instead, this rocky, barren realm is better
described by the Arabic term jarda’ which, according to Parmenter, ‘means
bleak, barren, without vegetation but can also refer to open, unprotected
borders’.63 This kind of landscape often appears in Palestinian and indeed
Arabic literature more broadly, where it symbolises ‘existential alienation’
in the way that ‘while providing nearly limitless space, [it] cannot provide a
place, a home’, coming to stand as a representation of literal and psychologi-
cal exile, homelessness and even ‘unreality in the world’.64 This ‘no-man’s
land’ can therefore be read as an allegory of colonial Palestine more broadly:
an indeterminate realm in which its inhabitants must live without sanction or
a true sense of belonging, embodying the ‘prohibited and forbidden’ inhabit-
ants of the borderland described by Anzaldúa.
The Abu Shukri family’s struggle against this sense of estrangement from
the land is dramatised through a quest for something that concerns many
Palestinians: water. Following the Naksa of 1967, Israel seized control of the
Bodies Beyond Boundaries? 119
Figure 4.2 Abu Shukri and his son lay an illegal water pipe that will enable them to
settle in the barren borderland. ‘Atash (2004), dir. Tawfik Abu Wael. Image courtesy
of Axiom Films.
water supplies within the West Bank, and their appropriation of this resource
is a source of outrage for many Palestinians, who struggle to obtain water
even within the territories from which it is originally derived.65 Abu Shukri,
the father of the family, engages in an act of affront to this appropriation of
natural resources by building an illegal pipe that diverts a constant supply of
water to their home.
The fervour with which he protects this pipe indicates Abu Shukri’s thirst
not only for water but also for ownership of the land, and perhaps even for his
own patriarchal status within it. Consequently, the borderland emerges not
simply as a site of oppression but as one of potential subversion; for here, the
panoptic gaze of the state seems to peter out, presenting a wild and socially
marginal zone open for appropriation by its illicit inhabitants. Indeed, as
Salma Khadra Jayyusi points out, the similarly wild, barren and liminal
space of the desert also features in classical Arabic poetry as a symbol for
‘man’s torturous journey through life’ that ‘determin[es] the fate of [the] pro-
tagonist’,66 meaning that it may operate not only as a site of struggle but also
of transformation. The barren borderlands of ‘Atash prove similarly integral
to determining the Abu Shukri family’s fate, as they too undergo dynamic
and momentous shifts within them.
120 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
These shifts emerge around the relationship between the father of the
family (played by Hussein Yassin Mahajne) and his eldest daughter, Gamila
(Ruba Blal). Though ‘Atash retains a level of deliberate ambiguity in its plot
details, encouraging the viewer to ‘read’ the characters at multiple levels, it
is hinted that Gamila has carried out some act of sexual ‘indiscretion’, most
probably a love affair, which has damaged the family’s honour to such an
extent that the father has moved them away from their village.67 This social
exile indicates the rigorous imposition of patriarchal boundaries and social
expectations upon the female body, and the fi lm’s indeterminate landscape
therefore acts as a projection of the family’s marginalisation within the Pales-
tinian community: a marginality that is gendered and sexualised in nature.
Over the course of the fi lm, Abu Shukri’s quest to master the resources of
the borderland mirrors his attempts to control his family, and thus redeem
himself from his emasculating status as a tartur: a man who has failed to
control the women in his family and who is therefore considered to be weak
and humiliated.68 As a result, Abu Shukri imposes strict patriarchal bound-
aries on his family, keeping his own rooms and belongings under lock and
key, denying education to his children, particularly his two daughters, and
reprimanding Gamila for any expression of will, emotion or pleasure. The
symbolic relationship between patriarchal mastery of the land and control of
the family is established further through the motif of the water pipe, which
will allow the family to settle permanently in this liminal environment. Yet
the eldest daughter realises that permanent settlement in the borderland will
see her condemned to a life in which the women’s only functions are to make
charcoal and look after the family, and in which the education and human
contact that she so longs for will become impossibilities. The borderland
therefore gives rise to competing but similarly overwhelming ‘thirsts’ for
both father and daughter.
‘Atash conveys Gamila’s thirst for freedom through a distinctively female
and feminine aesthetic that stands in stark contrast to the barren landscape,
which we might read as the patriarchal realm. In one scene, in the interior of
the house (similar in tone to the interior sequences in Wedding in Galilee), we
see the sisters sharing perfume, their loose wet hair illuminated in the gentle
glow of the indoor light. At other points in the fi lm, a distinctively ‘feminine’
mode of expression also emerges in the music played by the younger sis-
ter, which she not only produces on an old, out-of-tune qanun (a traditional
stringed musical instrument), but which she also creates from the artefacts
of violence and confl ict around her. In one scene, for example, we see her
stringing wires with landmine pins that she plays like a harp; in another,
she tosses used bullet cartridges in a metal pan, delighting in the sharp,
sparkling clatter that they produce. Significantly, we rarely hear the young-
est daughter speak. Instead, she fi nds her voice through this transformation
of all that is threatening and violent around her into gentle and beautiful
sounds. A similar appropriation of the language of ‘masculine’ oppression
Bodies Beyond Boundaries? 121
also appears in a scene in which Gamila teaches her illiterate mother to trace
her name in Arabic on the wall, using the charcoal produced by the family.
Here, the very substance of their father’s livelihood, and of their servitude, is
transformed into something with creative, self-expressive potential.
Language, music, creativity and expression are all therefore celebrated
as transgressive and feminocentric forces within this fi lm, which might be
likened to D. Emily Hicks’ theorisation of ‘border-writing’ as a transgressive
textual practice in which systems of meaning are similarly ‘resignified’. For
Hicks, border-writing is a ‘mode of operation rather than a defi nition . . . a
strategy of translation rather than representation’,69 typified by writing that
draws on the multiple cultural codes available in the borderlands—whether
these are languages, symbols or other reference points. Gamila and her sis-
ter’s ability to conjure new modes of self-expression from the borderland,
whether through music, charcoal or water, can perhaps also therefore be
interpreted as a form of ‘border-writing’ that bears a postcolonial and post-
patriarchal potential in its break from singular, static modes of expression,
becoming instead a mode of textual representation that expresses the frag-
mented mentality of the border itself. It is significant in postcolonial feminist
terms that the authors of these ‘border-writing’ processes are women; for it
appears that the daughters in ‘Atash pose a redemptive or transformational
alternative to the rigorous patriarchal connection to the land established by
their father, and indeed, in one highly significant scene, Gamila herself is
established as the quintessential borderland subject.
In this scene, Gamila flees from her homestead and wanders out into the
surrounding environment. In shots that pull and push her face in and out
of focus with the sun (the typical guiding force in the ‘desert narrative’),
we see the bright blue sky and what appear to be new settlements built on
the land. As though sensing her own estrangement from such a landscape,
Gamila seeks refuge in the natural environment and, in the most sustained
shot of water in the fi lm, she is shown washing her hair, cleansing her face
and quenching her thirst from the rain that cascades in front of the open
mouth of the womb-like cave in which she shelters. This highly gendered
imagery conjures a naturally feminised landscape with which Gamila has
an unforced connection: a stark point of contrast from her father’s tenuous
appropriation of natural resources. Though Gamila is therefore a figure
who fi nds herself torn between competing social pressures—between mod-
ern values and traditional duties, between desire and repression, between
family loyalty and betrayal—‘Atash appears to celebrate her liminal poten-
tial, and casts Gamila as at home within the Palestinian borderland, though
estranged from its patriarchal confi nes: a transgressive vision of a postco-
lonial feminist Palestine.
For a moment, it seems that this postcolonial feminist potential might
triumph within the fi lm as Abu Shukri appears to undergo a process of trau-
matic soul-searching, and fi nally attempts to destroy the water pipe—perhaps
122 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
in order to free his family from the confi nes he has created, or by way of
admitting to his own relative powerlessness. This moment of transforma-
tion is violently short-circuited by an unexpected turn of events. The son,
who has been taught to guard the water pipe at all costs, catches his father
in the act of destroying the pipe and, whether out of hatred for his cruelly
oppressive father or out of a deep internalisation of masculinist authority,
he attacks and kills him. The end of the fi lm sees the son assuming the role
and appearance of the father, but it nevertheless retains a level of ambigu-
ity; for in the fi nal scene, we see Gamila turning suspiciously towards her
younger brother and, though they continue to rake over the charcoal, the
water pipe still in place, we sense that neither her defiance, nor her thirst
for freedom, will lessen. While ‘Atash may not therefore dramatise a total
overhaul of patriarchal or colonial power structures, it nevertheless holds
a radically postcolonial feminist potential in its ability to acknowledge the
competing languages, experiences and desires that exist within Palestine’s
liminal space. Thus, while the borderland is a zone ruled by the father, its
true inhabitant, though ‘prohibited and forbidden’, is the daughter: a ‘queer’
figure who moves fluidly among boundaries, troubling and testing them as
she goes, casting a transgressive claim upon Palestine’s liminal boundaries
as spaces that she will continue to try to make her own.
If an ‘aesthetics of liminality’ offers transgressive possibilities in ‘Atash
then it operates in very different ways in Annemarie Jacir’s 17-minute fi lm,
like twenty impossibles (2003). This fi lm also ventures into Palestine’s border-
lands by charting the journey of a small fi lm crew led by a Palestinian direc-
tor with U.S. citizenship called ‘Annemarie’ (who we might assume bears
strong parallels with Jacir herself), which is attempting to cross from the
West Bank into Jerusalem in order to make a fi lm there. Presented as docu-
mentary fi lm footage taken by the crew, this work is playfully postmodern
and self-referential, and displays a direct desire to engage with the politics of
Palestinian self-representation—for as the fi lm crew deviates from official bor-
ders and ventures further into Palestine’s liminal realms, their hold on iden-
tity and representation begins to disintegrate in ways that reveal a great deal
about the boundaries imposed on both Palestinian space and the Palestinian
subject. The following analysis therefore examines the radical shift beyond
the specific politics of the gendered body to the more complete ‘queering’70
of identity that takes place within the borderlands of this fi lm, and considers
its unique relationship to concepts of the postcolonial and feminist.
As a fi lmmaker, author, poet, festival curator, lecturer and co-director of
the fi lm project Dreams of a Nation, Jacir displays a profound commitment
to creativity and imagination as essential facets of Palestinian identity, and
as enduring features of Palestine’s struggle for self-determination. This com-
mitment also emerges in the fi lm’s title, like twenty impossibles: a phrase taken
from a line in the famous poem ‘Here We Shall Stay’ by Tawfiq Zayyad, a
‘resistance poet’ whose works have become classics of Palestinian cultural
Bodies Beyond Boundaries? 123
expression in their commitment to unending struggle and dignity even in
oppression.71 In ‘Here We Shall Stay’, Zayyad evokes a resilient vision of
Palestinian existence by contrasting the ‘impossibilities’ of Palestinian expe-
rience—the erasure of land and identity, the restrictions on movement and
agency—with the enduring cultural traditions of the Palestinian people, such
as singing and dancing, living within and caring for the land and even dis-
cussing and debating ideas. Such acts establish impenetrable, if invisible
barriers to Israeli domination, which lie like ‘a hard wall on [the oppressor’s]
breast’: a constant reminder of the Palestinian subject’s enduring connection
to the land.72 Thus cultural expression itself, including freedom of thought,
becomes a form of resistance that renders the Palestinian subject similarly
‘impossible’ to erase. Yet in this fi lm (as in her more recent feature-length fi lm,
Salt of This Sea), 73 Jacir also explores the challenges and traumas entailed in
this constant struggle against ‘impossibility’, which she dramatises through
the fi lm crew’s journey into increasingly ‘impossible’ circumstances within
the borderlands.
like twenty impossibles establishes a link between mobility, freedom and
self-representation right from the opening sequence, in which we see a hand
extended from the window of a moving car delighting in the breeze that
caresses its fi ngertips, and hear a woman’s voice recalling her happy child-
hood memories of driving with her father: moments at which she experi-
enced a sense of freedom so immense that it was ‘like we were flying and no
one could stop us’.
This focus on intimate, sensuous experience immediately imbues the con-
cept of mobility with personal, metaphorical resonances and suggests that for
the Palestinian subject, the ability to cross borders resonates with a broader
sense of political agency. It soon becomes apparent as to why this might be
the case—for the fi lm crew swiftly draw up to a checkpoint, which they are
told has closed. Here, a subtle aesthetic shift takes place from the smooth,
meditative portrayal of movement in the opening frames to jolty, disrupted
camerawork suggestive of ‘authentic’ documentary recording. Similarly,
the lyrical interior monologue of the opening frames gives way to the back-
ground noise of the crew grumbling about the ever-increasing restrictions
on their mobility. In particular, we hear the actor, who is from Ramallah in
the West Bank, grimly advising the others that ‘this isn’t a checkpoint . . .
Another year or two and it’ll be a border’. This crew is comprised of creative,
freethinking individuals, though, and when the driver declares that he knows
a side road, they do not hesitate to head away from the official checkpoint
and into the borderlands of the West Bank.
This assertion of agency incites another representational shift. As the
crew moves further away from the authoritarian stasis of the border-con-
trol, the scenery gradually changes from a militarised urban landscape
into a soothing pastoral setting of green hills and rocky paths: an image
of the Palestinian homeland much more familiar to the literary and fi lmic
124 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
the problem with terms like ‘nomad’, ‘maps’ and ‘travel’ is that they are
not usually located, and hence (and purposely) they suggest ungrounded
and unbounded movement—since the whole point is to resist selves/view-
ers/subjects. But the consequent suggestion of free and equal mobility is
itself a deception, since we don’t all have the same access to the road.75
Bodies Beyond Boundaries? 125
In this fi lm, mobility appears as anything but ‘free and equal’, for while
Annemarie may occupy something of an ‘ungrounded and unbounded’
position as a diasporic subject, her specifically located identity as a
diasporic Palestinian denies her a basic ‘access to the roads’ that should
bring her back to Palestine. Instead, like many millions of Palestinians, she
is denied this basic ‘right of return’, representing her diasporic existence
as an oppressive rather than liberating transcendence of (or estrangement
from) national boundaries.
The disjunctive maps of identity, space and agency to which Palestinians
are subjected come into even sharper focus when the crew is confronted by
an ad-hoc checkpoint that has been established by a small group of Israeli
soldiers working in the ‘buffer-zone’ of the borderland. The confrontation
begins with the soldiers interrogating each crewmember in turn and in doing
so, they reveal the array of disenfranchising, ‘impossible’ subject-positions
occupied by Palestinians. First, the soundman is told that he is forbidden from
entering the West Bank because he is from Jaffa, and therefore an Israeli citi-
zen. This ‘official’ identity appears entirely at odds with the man’s own identi-
fication as Arab, which he views as naturally aligned with Palestinian space.
His disbelieving response to the soldiers—‘Are you kidding? I’m Arab!’—also
suggests the impossible irony of his exclusion when rigorous Israeli border-
controls usually function in order to prevent the Arab Palestinian population
from crossing into Israel, confi ning them to the West Bank or Gaza. While
the actor from Ramallah is in fact from the West Bank, the soldiers neverthe-
less remove him from the vehicle and take him aside, claiming that he is on
a list of people wanted for questioning. This vague explanation may or may
not be true and suggests the ‘impossible’ sense of belonging experienced by
the West Bank inhabitant who fi nds himself estranged even within his home,
but it also implies that his involvement in the cultural sphere may itself be
deemed subversive. Finally, Annemarie is interrogated. Asked where she’s
from, she replies (with factual accuracy) ‘Palestine’: a retort denied by the
soldiers, who point out that her passport is American, and that if she doesn’t
like the way things are here, she should ‘go home’—an act that Annemarie is
in fact trying to achieve at some level by travelling into Palestine, though the
soldiers render it impossible. Despite their very different identities, then, each
and every Palestinian fi nds the legitimacy of both self and space called into
question within the borderland, and as they are separated from one another,
they fi nd their representational agency disintegrates still further.
This disintegration of identity could be seen to reflect D. Emily Hicks’
theorisation of the borderland as a space in which a ‘nonunified subject’
emerges, for whom language is ‘dismembered’ so that there is ‘no longer . . .
a clearly defi ned “subjective” or “objective” meaning’.76 According to Hicks,
this collapse of signifying boundaries presents a radically ‘queer’ transgres-
sion of subject/object relationships, and of the boundaries between ‘self’ and
‘other’. Yet for Jacir’s characters, this dismemberment of language offers
126 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
altogether less liberating possibilities. We see this in the way that the frag-
mentation of the team is mirrored by the gradual breakdown of the represen-
tational process. Despite the crew’s protestations that they carry press cards
and have permission to fi lm, they are ordered to turn the camera off, though
they manage to carry on fi lming illicitly, at a skewed angle. As the sound-
man is taken aside, the sound recording becomes oddly disjointed from the
visuals before it is fi nally switched off altogether. With both the actor and
soundman detained by the soldiers, the director is forced to leave with only
the cameraman and driver still in tow, and as they drive away, the fi lm is
soundless and the visuals are shaky and partial. The fi nal disconnected shots
try desperately to keep their focus on the soundman being guarded in a tent
and on the actor, his hands on his head, who had earlier expressed fear of
being beaten by the soldiers—but this proves impossible, and they are left to
dissolve into the liminal rural landscape in which spatial, social and political
boundaries, though invisible, are shown to fracture the possibility of self-
representation for the Palestinian subject.
Consequently, we see that the Palestinian borderland does indeed emerge
as a space in which systems of representation and identification are ‘dis-
membered’, but not in the culturally exciting or ‘queer’ ways envisaged by
Hicks, whereby the confrontation of dual cultural codes and power struc-
tures might lead to ‘the ability to see not just from one side of a border,
but from the other side as well’.77 Instead, the act of border-crossing reveals
the divisive boundaries of colonial power that endure within the Palestinian
borderlands, and shows that the attempt to transgress them may instigate a
total dissolution of political and indeed artistic agency. Jacir’s representation
of the borderland therefore dramatises the boundaries imposed on Palestin-
ian self-representation more broadly. Indeed, as Jacir observes elsewhere in
her writing, violent opposition to Palestinian cultural self-representation has
been a strategy of Israeli oppression for many years and is evident in many
forms—from the destruction of the Palestinian fi lm archives in Beirut during
the invasion of 1982, to attacks on the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre in
Ramallah, to the assassination of Palestinian creative practitioners such as
Ghassan Kanafani and Kamal Nasser. It is against this backdrop that the act
of fi lmmaking acquires a deep political significance for Jacir, since it offers
a means to ‘resist the systematic destruction of the cultural infrastructure of
Palestinian cultural life and the further fragmentation of our society’.78
What, then, does like twenty impossibles reveal about the postcolonial femi-
nist potential of the borderland as a representational space? At one level,
Jacir’s lyrical work could be said to echo Elia Suleiman’s provocative com-
ment that ‘Palestine’s chaotic status quo gives you a kind of freedom. It’s
the best place to reflect on space’,79 or even to evoke Anzaldúa’s idea that
‘living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets
write and artists create’.80 Yet Jacir’s fi lm also radically contests this view by
insisting upon the representational disenfranchisement that accompanies the
Bodies Beyond Boundaries? 127
disintegration of space and selfhood. While the fi lm certainly challenges
simplistic binary oppositions between oppressor and oppressed, male and
female, ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ in its presentation of Palestinian identity (the
diasporic Palestinian woman with U.S. citizenship and fi lm-school training,
the Israeli-Arab soundman who is the ‘ward’ of the Israeli State and the
male Palestinian actor who cannot leave Ramallah each occupy different
subject-positions of simultaneous oppression and privilege that transcend
straightforwardly gendered or national identifications), the radical ‘queer-
ing’ of identity and self-representation that takes place within the borderland
does not appear to lead to what Naficy describes as ‘border-consciousness’: a
perspective that is ‘multiperspectival and tolerant of ambiguity, ambivalence
and chaos’.81 Instead, Jacir portrays the disenfranchising effects of the politi-
cal and discursive ‘chaos’ that beset Palestinians at the boundaries of space,
colonial control and identification. As we emerge from the borderlands,
then, a question emerges: what might a uniquely Palestinian border-theory
look like?
Over the course of this chapter, it will become apparent that this statement
might be extended beyond the Arab world to encompass the tremendous
outpouring of literary and fi lmic talent from diasporic Palestinians in the
U.S. and other Western contexts. For these authors and fi lmmakers, the
‘pathos of autumn’ and ‘potential of spring’ are also to be found through the
enduring potentials of their creative imaginations within even the wintriest
conditions of diasporic alienation.
Said’s model of the ‘exilic intellectual’ also presents its own problems to
postcolonial feminist understandings of diasporic expression and identity
though. As Eva Karpinski writes, Said’s model of exile is distinctly indi-
vidualistic and ‘comes very close to the fulfi lment of a male fantasy of the
free, unencumbered, independent self’.22 By way of contrast, we might turn
instead to the alternative tradition of interpretation which seeks to ‘feminise’
the condition of exile, and so presents the female collective rather than the
male individual as emblematic of the exilic condition. While it was Virginia
Woolf who fi rst declared that ‘as a woman, I have no country. As a woman
I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world’, 23 feminist
thinkers from a broad range of disciplinary and cultural backgrounds have
since recognised the symbolic resonances between the condition of women
and that of the exile. Julia Kristeva writes that ‘a woman is trapped within
the frontiers of her body . . . and consequently always feels exiled’: 24 a pow-
erfully spatialised vision of the power-based and representational boundar-
ies that locate women in socially and psychologically marginal positions.
For Kristeva, then, the construction of gender boundaries themselves exile
women from their own potentials for human agency. Feminist theorists have
Imagining the Transnational Feminist Community 135
often sought to reveal these cartographies in their work (as have Palestinian
authors such as those examined in Chapter 4, who also explore gendered
boundaries), but more thorough mappings of the relationship between gen-
dered and geographical exile have emerged from the field of transnational
feminism. This critical approach
Figure 5.1 Palimpsestic layers of image, text and voice create a portrait of mother-
daughter intimacy that transcends diasporic distance. Measures of Distance (1988), dir.
Mona Hatoum. Colour video with sound. Duration: 15 minutes. A Western Front Video
Production, Vancouver, 1988. Courtesy of White Cube.
Lacan maintains that the infant’s earliest identity comes from its identi-
fication with its own image in a mirror. The specular or virtual space of
mirror-doubles is constitutive of whatever imaginary hold the ego has on
identity and corporeal autonomy [ . . . ]
He stresses that the mirror Gestalt not only presents the subject with
an image of its body in a visualized exteriority, but also duplicates the
environment, placing real and virtual space in contiguous relations.35
While Lacan refers to the early childhood stages of development, the sense
in which Mona and Manar’s mirroring relationship helps them to form an
understanding of themselves can also be related to their status as pubescent
girls, on the cusp of womanhood, and hence at a crucial stage of self-devel-
opment. Yet this development of self-awareness does not only take place in
relation to gendered identity, but also through their specifically diasporic
location. As Sara Ahmed writes, the construction of a ‘home’ within the
space of diaspora itself entails the encounter with ‘strange bodies’ ‘other’
than your own:
Figure 5.2 Children from the Dheisha refugee camp in the West Bank and from Sha-
tila refugee camp in Beirut come to meet and hold hands at the Israeli-Lebanese bor-
der. Frontiers of Dreams and Fears (2001), dir. Mai Masri. Image courtesy of Arab Film
Distribution.
Imagining the Transnational Feminist Community 143
write, the skin is but an ‘interface between bodies and worlds’; 41 the act of
touching is not one that conjoins or undoes distance but instead, as Sara
Ahmed writes, ‘touching, as a temporary encounter with another, involves
a movement closer . . . which does not grasp that other . . . The movement
towards, in touch, is always already a movement away’.42 The contact between
hand and soil, hand and hand therefore reveals not only intimacy but loss,
not just proximity but distance, as inscribed on each girl’s body.
Despite the incomplete nature of the ‘home’ that Mona and Manar fi nd in
one another, they nevertheless seem to affi rm Ahmed’s hypothesis that exile
may also create a ‘community of strangers’. This kind of community does not
simply seek to replace the one that is lost, but rather, forges shared connec-
tions through that very experience of loss. Ahmed writes:
Rosi Braidotti has characterised the nomad’s identity ‘as a map of where
s/he has already been; s/he can always reconstruct it a posteriori [ . . . ].’
Braidotti forgot to mention, however, that this identity has hegemonic
pretensions; it is a map wilfully written and traced over that other one
penned through the senses and fleshed out by powerful emotions. It is
hard to describe this map as anything but stones and cracks that keep
springing up as if from nowhere, jolting one back, however momen-
tarily—through hurt and pain—to that initial point, to the fault line [ . . . ]
thus nomads’ identities are anchored to bodies that will not forget.47
Measures of Distance similarly presents the sensuous and emotive female body as
a ‘vessel’ of collective memory inscribed with the scars of traumatic diasporic
experience. Within the film, this traumatic inscription of the female body takes
place quite literally through the superimposition of lines from the mother’s let-
ter onto the image of her body, as we hear the mother speak of her own move
from Palestine to Lebanon in 1948. She describes how she ‘had to separate
from all her loved ones’ who were ‘scattered all over the world’, many of them
never to be seen again. It ‘felt as though I had been stripped naked of my very
soul . . . our identity and pride in who we are went out the window’, she con-
fides. Yet this traumatic narrative also functions in a way that is connective.
It enables the mother to identify with her daughter’s own feelings: ‘When you
talk about a feeling of fragmentation, of not knowing where you belong—this
has been the reality of all our people’, she tells Mona. Mother, daughter and
Palestinian collective experience therefore find themselves connected through
the narratives that surface through the female body.
The feminocentric visions of both Frontiers of Dreams and Fears and Mea-
sures of Distance reveal a distinctive postcolonial feminist potential. While
some feminists are resistant to the way in which ‘many identity narratives
Imagining the Transnational Feminist Community 145
position “Woman” . . . as the pure space of “home”’ and hence ‘repeatedly
appropriate [the female body] as a marker of national, racial, religious and
ethnic communities’,48 both of these fi lms indicate that women themselves
may author these connections between the female body, nation and home
in order to construct new, imaginative maps of community and connection
within diasporic space. In this, they support the critic Irene Gedalof’s recog-
nition that
to shift the dominant ways in which the relations between western and
non-western people and their worlds are viewed [and hence . . . to dis-
turb] the order of the world . . . [to] threaten privilege and power [ . . . ] to
demand equality and well-being for all human beings on this earth.87
Lyrical as Nye’s and Hammad’s poems may be, they also constitute pow-
erful demands for equality and well-being through their own renegotia-
tion of the relationships between West and non-West, and through the
‘disruptions to the order of the world’ performed through their diasporic
locations and imaginations.
Both Nye and Hammad therefore mobilise their positions as diasporic Pal-
estinian women as a means to engage in the task of what Edward Said termed
‘speaking truth to power’: 88 something perceived by Said to be an obligation
of the exilic author. The forms of ‘truth’ and ‘power’ voiced by these poets
are multiple rather than singular, though, and stem from a number of differ-
ent geographical, cultural, political, ideological and gendered subject-posi-
tions. Consequently, these poets seem to affi rm Avtar Brah’s theorisation of
diaspora space as ‘embedded within a multi-axial understanding of power;
one that problematizes the notion of “minority/majority” [ . . . and] signals
. . . multi-locationality across geographical, cultural and psychic boundaries’.89 Simi-
larly, both Nye and Hammad traverse ‘geographical, cultural and psychic
boundaries’ in their work, revealing the multiple axes of power, privilege
and disenfranchisement that circulate within and across diasporic space. In
doing so, they reveal a distinctive vision of the postcolonial feminist poten-
tials embedded within diasporic space, whereby gender-conscious, feminist
and postcolonial commitments are contained within their broader ethical
and creative concerns with justice, equality, dignity and self-representation.
154 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
Perhaps the most powerful element of Nye’s and Hammad’s poetry,
though, remains its mobilisation of transnational commitments to ethics
and creativity within the diasporic landscape of the contemporary U.S. In
doing so, they arguably enact what Brah reads as the radical potential of
diasporic space to destabilise the ‘boundaries of inclusion and exclusion,
of belonging and otherness, “us” and “them”’ in a way that ‘seriously prob-
lematizes the subject-position of the native’. 90 By situating themselves in
carefully considered positions of simultaneous tension and solidarity with
different aspects of the U.S. landscape, their work encourages its readers,
whether Palestinian or American, male or female, to reflect carefully on
where they stand, as individuals and as members of a community, and to
consider what kind of world they wish to live in. In Nye’s prose-poem or
fl ash-fiction piece, ‘Gate 4-A’, we catch a glimpse of what this kind of self-
reflexive world might look like. Writing of her encounter with an elderly
Palestinian woman at the Albuquerque airport (an environment that has
become synonymous with state surveillance, cultural antagonism and fear
in a post-September 11th world), Nye unexpectedly fi nds ‘the world I want
to live in’, as the woman offers ‘a sack of home-made mamool cookies . . . to
all the women at the gate’ and fi nds that ‘not a single woman declined one’.
Looking around her, she notices, to her amazement, that ‘not a single per-
son . . . seemed apprehensive about any other person’. 91 In this poem, the
act of reaching out across cultures and subject-positions, perhaps simply by
connecting one hand to another, overcomes distance and difference, fear
and unknowing. In this instant, each and every ‘lost and weary traveller’
becomes connected to this Palestinian woman, the member of a ‘lost and
weary’ community of ‘travellers’ herself, and the diasporic landscape of
travel and transition becomes one in which things are not only lost but also
found, connections not only broken but made anew.
While both Nye and Hammad therefore remain connected to their heri-
tage as Palestinians, the diasporic landscape also presents the possibility of
forging many other communal connections based in variously postcolonial,
feminist, ethical and creative solidarities. Fraught as the divisions and injus-
tices permeating both U.S. and Palestinian landscapes may be, their work
ultimately retains a faith in the potential for transnational connection. As
Nye concludes in ‘Gate 4-A’: ‘This can still happen anywhere. Not every-
thing is lost’.
our solidarity
angers others who would always rather war [ . . . ]
[but] love is larger than our details
these are my people
and we are chosen
family eating darkness
hiccupping light
little by little by light by little by light together 94
In his classic work of anti-colonialism, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
describes the traumatic silencing of historical and cultural narratives that
takes place at the hands of the colonial power: ‘Colonialism is not satisfied
merely with holding a people in its grip’, he writes; ‘it [also] turns to the past
of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it’.2 Many jour-
neys towards postcoloniality have therefore involved turning to the past as
a source of cultural memory, historical identity and political legitimacy, and
the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle has been no exception. It, too, has often
turned to narratives that recover moments of colonial and communal trauma
such as the Nakba of 1948, or that describe a historical rootedness in the
‘motherland’; that commemorate the sacrifices of martyrs for the struggle, or
that celebrate and affi rm traditional forms of resistance such as sumud. Yet
as Laleh Khalili observes, central as narratives of the past may be to Pales-
tinian consciousness, ‘none of [the] icons [of nationalism] are stable, histori-
cally unchanging or uncontested. National(ist) narratives—and the crucial
symbols at their core—are challenged from within and without’. 3 This book
has explored one particular set of ‘challenges’ posed to traditional nation-
alist narratives of Palestinian historical and cultural identity: those of the
‘postcolonial feminist perspectives’ mobilised by creative practitioners and
theorists both ‘within and without’ Palestine, to use Khalili’s phrase. These
postcolonial feminist perspectives have destabilised, contested and reformu-
lated the representation of Palestine through their simultaneous awareness
of colonial and gendered power structures. In doing so, they have revealed
a crucial shift in the directions in which Palestinian creative consciousness
is moving, for a postcolonial feminist perspective looks not only to the past,
but also to the future, and imagines how the integrity, equality and liberation
of both the ‘body politic’ and the politics of the body might be realised in a
postcolonial Palestine. The narrative journey promised to you at the outset
of this book, then—through that fraught territory of the postcolonial feminist
imagination—leads us, fi nally, to the crossroads described by Darwish in the
158 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
epigraph to this conclusion: a point at which Palestinian creative practitio-
ners no longer simply ask themselves, ‘where have we been’, but ‘where do
we begin’? What, in other words, are the future directions for Palestinian
self-representation and its study that have been revealed through these post-
colonial feminist perspectives?
Over the course of the preceding chapters, we have seen many different
directions in postcolonial feminist enquiry opening up within the literary
and fi lmic landscape. A number of authors and fi lmmakers have revealed
how constructs of sexed, gendered and sexual power are deeply embedded
in representations of nationhood, which in themselves respond to gendered
and sexualised narratives of colonial power—but exploring this ‘gendering’
of nationhood also reveals the extraordinary willingness of some Palestinian
creative practitioners such as Khleifi and Darwish to scrutinise and interro-
gate these gender paradigms in ways that reimagine the national image. The
complex and at times troubled interplay between feminist and nationalist
commitments in the creative imagination also presents a significant direc-
tion in postcolonial feminist enquiry, as it reveals the multiple forms of per-
sonal and political, national and gendered identification that surface within
the Palestinian struggle, and suggests the plurality rather than singularity of
the ‘national resistance narrative’. Postcolonial feminist enquiry also directs
us towards scrutiny of those oft-unquestioned discourses of patriarchy and
masculinity. A performative understanding of these discourses reveals the
intersecting crises in national and gendered identification brought about by
colonial power—yet creative explorations of these crises reveal highly self-
aware, self-reflexive and subversive reformulations of gendered and national
agency taking place in the visions of fi lmmakers such as Suleiman and Abu-
Assad, and of writers such as El-Youssef. These works direct us towards a new
understanding of what it might mean ‘to be a man’ in Palestinian society.
The creative attention directed towards the site of the border in the Pal-
estinian imagination has also indicated how colonial and patriarchal power
may be enacted through space in ways that inscribe boundaries upon the
gendered Palestinian body, as in narratives of the ‘checkpoint heroine’; but
the forms of crisis and destabilisation produced at these boundaries have
also presented possibilities of liminality and dis-identification that prove
variously liberating (as in Tawfi k Abu Wael’s ‘Atash) and oppressive (as in
Annemarie Jacir’s like twenty impossibles). A postcolonial feminist perspective
also proves illuminating when directed towards the gazes of diasporic Pal-
estinian authors and fi lmmakers, who demonstrate how vital bonds of trans-
national feminist community and solidarity may be forged through a variety
of gender-conscious, transnational, postcolonial and ethical identifications
imagined through creative mediums. The images of transnational feminist
community revealed by these works present expansive future possibilities
for cross-cultural postcolonial feminist enquiry. Each of the creative works
examined over the course of the preceding chapters therefore realises a form
Conclusion 159
of postcolonial feminist potential that is unique and specific to the imagina-
tion of its author or fi lmmaker, but taken collectively, they reveal a signifi-
cant consciousness of gender inflecting their understanding of the politics of
(post)coloniality, and identify a distinctive tendency towards self-scrutiny
and self-reflexivity at the heart of Palestinian creative consciousness. Above
all, then, the postcolonial feminist perspectives examined over the course of
this book present Palestinian creative expression as a space of polyphony, in
which multiple voices and perspectives are able to circulate.
The rich polyphony that emerges from these postcolonial feminist per-
spectives serves many important functions. Firstly, it reveals that the national
narrative is not singular but plural, and composed of many different experi-
ences and perspectives of both a political and personal nature. While these
may, at times, compete with or even contradict one another, they collectively
comprise a discursive territory in which, to use Bakhtin’s description, ‘a plu-
rality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine
polyphony of fully valid voices’4 converge. By presenting a powerful discur-
sive alternative to the reductive, binarised and exclusionary politics of both
colonial and patriarchal discourses, this polyphony therefore establishes a
postcolonial feminist commitment to equality, authority and multiplicity of
voice at the very heart of Palestinian creative consciousness. It suggests that
the task of imagining a liberated, just and equal Palestine must necessar-
ily entail attention to the multiple sites of inequality, oppression and power
within the nation itself, thus revealing the importance of postcolonialism and
feminism working hand in hand. As well as revealing the multiplicity of the
Palestinian narrative, though, this polyphony also establishes space for diver-
gent perspectives on and approaches to questions of Palestinian identity and
politics: a move that might prove liberating not only to Palestinian creative
practitioners, but also to scholars.
In the introduction to this book, I gestured towards some of the ‘road-
blocks’ that have traditionally hampered scholars’ abilities to address ques-
tions of Palestinian self-representation, political identity and (post)colonial
status. Those ‘roadblocks’ include benign but often negotiable limitations
such as those surrounding questions of language and translation, which may
limit the disciplines in which Palestinian literature and fi lm are tradition-
ally taught. They also, however, include altogether more malignant limits
imposed by the Manichean and antagonistic discourse that has sometimes
surfaced against academics whose work is open to the various perspectives
and voices of Palestinians. 5 Although there are now a number of academic
arenas that seek to generate serious, nuanced and diverse discussion of
issues relating to Palestine,6 the threat of this kind of very public opposi-
tion to the exercise of academic freedom is no doubt one of the reasons
that attention to Palestinian creative expression and cultural discourse has
remained confi ned to a select number of disciplines, such as Middle East-
ern studies and international relations: disciplines accustomed to tackling
160 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
the dense political issues generated by these oppositional discourses. One
of the aims of this book, however, has been to identify alternative routes
into the discussion of Palestinian culture and self-representation that might
enable scholars to move beyond the reductive political polemics that have
so often limited debate on Palestine, and to appreciate instead the richness,
complexity and diversity of cultural identity and expression that is to be
found within Palestinian narratives themselves. This book has attempted to
bring this richness to the fore by re-narrating Palestinian cultural expres-
sion in a way that reveals its complex relevance to a number of critical
approaches and disciplines including comparative literary and postcolo-
nial studies, cultural studies and gender studies. The polyphonic perspec-
tives established by the creative practitioners over the course of this work
therefore open up numerous entry-points into Palestinian cultural expres-
sion and invite interdisciplinary investigation. This kind of interdisciplin-
ary and ultimately transnational attention to Palestinian culture might
begin to create a discursive territory that is connective rather than restric-
tive, and that reflects more accurately the commitments of the Palestinian
authors and fi lmmakers examined in this study to political, personal and
creative freedoms alike. So, too, may it begin to establish forms of dialogue
with Palestinian scholars, creative practitioners and individuals that move
beyond a confl ict-driven narrative, and that circulate instead around that
most connective and, ultimately, most human(e) of mediums: creativity.
While the postcolonial feminist perspectives examined in this book point
towards exciting future opportunities for interdisciplinary and intercultural
dialogue, they also, however, invite us to reflect critically upon the nature
and remit of the ‘postcolonial feminist’ itself. As I explored in the introduc-
tion to this work, postcolonial discourse has been somewhat reticent when it
comes to the discussion of Palestine for reasons that are both institutional and
conceptual in nature. Discouraged by the ambivalence of its (post)colonial
status and its resistance to core postcolonial paradigms such as ‘hybridity’,
as well as its somewhat unfashionable adherence to discourses of national-
ism and nationhood, postcolonial attention to Palestine has tended to remain
largely focused on Said’s distinctive contribution to the field. While Said’s
work remains extremely important to the postcolonial study of Palestine,
the postcolonial feminist analyses performed in each of the preceding chap-
ters also suggest that the remit of postcolonial attention to Palestine can be
considerably expanded beyond a Saidian approach to incorporate concepts
and theories drawn from many other facets of postcolonial and feminist stud-
ies—from Fanonian theory to ‘border-theory’, and from theories of diasporic
embodiment to those of gender performativity. Expanding the remit of post-
colonial attention to Palestine in this way performs a vital function, as it
reveals the pressing relevance of Palestine to many sites of concern within
the contemporary postcolonial agenda, while also inviting postcolonialists to
reassess the very nature of that agenda, not least by recognising the sites of
Conclusion 161
colonial oppression that endure within what many see as a primarily postco-
lonial global landscape.
Just as these theories tell us much about the complex colonial and gen-
dered power dynamics embedded within Palestinian self-representation, so
does their application to the Palestinian context also challenge and nuance
our understanding of those theories themselves. While Palestinian authors
and filmmakers engage in highly creative and imaginative explorations of
their interior worlds, the material pressures of the exterior world are never far
from their thoughts. This constant awareness of the material effects of colonial
power upon the embodied individual—effects such as violence, hunger, thirst,
cold, suffering, uncertainty, insecurity, humiliation, even death—acts as a stark
reminder to the postcolonial feminist theorist that acts of representation, while
creative, also stem from locations in reality that must not be elided through
critical obscurantism or total abstraction. Palestinian creative representation
remains, to use Said’s phrase, inextricably tied to a ‘worldliness’ that asks the
academic to remember that ‘the realities of power and authority—as well as
the resistances offered by men, women and social movements to institutions,
authorities, and orthodoxies—are the realities that make texts possible, that
deliver them to their readers, that solicit the attention of critics’.7 This ‘worldli-
ness’ presents something of a challenge to highly deconstructivist and post-
structuralist strands of postcolonial feminist theory that are keen to celebrate
the demise of boundaries, whether of the self or of the nation; for these enti-
ties, restrictive as they may be, nevertheless remain the conditions of political
agency and self-representation for many Palestinians.
The Palestinian context therefore invites postcolonial feminist theory to
‘ground’ itself in relation to the specific manifestations of power and identi-
fication that appear within the colonial and gendered landscape. While this
‘grounding’ does not have to entail statements of political allegiance, it may
nevertheless reenergise the political potentials that have always been embed-
ded in postcolonial feminist studies by inviting the scholar to engage in pre-
cisely the forms of careful contextualisation that might, according to Shohat,
produce a ‘flexible yet critical usage [of ‘the postcolonial’] that can [not only
identify] historical and geographical contradictions and differences, but also
[reaffi rm] historical and geographical links, structural analogies, and open-
ings for agency and resistance’.8 Working with postcolonial feminist theory in
the context of Palestine, then, alerts the scholar to the ways in which the form
and meaning of the ‘postcolonial feminist’ alters according to its cultural,
temporal and geographical location—but despite the divergences and differ-
ences that may appear en route, important forms of solidarity and alliance
might also come into focus.
During the summer of 2011, precisely this form of ‘grounded’ postcolonial
feminist solidarity appeared in the form of a delegation of eleven ‘indig-
enous and women of colour feminists’9 who travelled to Palestine in order
to observe the effects of the occupation for themselves. This delegation
162 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
included high-profi le activists, academics and creative practitioners such
as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Angela Davis and Ayoka Chenzira, all with
their own experiences of combating racial and gendered social injustice—
whether in the U.S., or other contexts such as apartheid South Africa. The
statement issued upon their return articulates the absolute necessity of a care-
fully located feminist awareness to their solidarity with the Palestinian anti-
colonial struggle:
1. Naomi Shihab Nye, ‘The Words under the Words,’ in 19 Varieties of Gazelle:
Poems of the Middle East (New York: HarperTempest, 2005), 15. Text copyright
© 2002 Naomi Shihab Nye. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
2. I place the term ‘Western’ in inverted commas here in order to recognize its
reductive homogenisation of various cultures and nations. This is of course
paralleled in the term ‘Middle East,’ which is similarly problematic and indeed
Eurocentric in its formulation of global geography (insofar as it is defi ned in
relation to, and by, the ‘West’). I use these terms, however, to indicate the pow-
erful ‘imagined geographies’ of ideological and cultural identification that cir-
culate around these broadly defi ned spaces.
3. See Edward Said, ‘Permission to Narrate,’ Journal of Palestine Studies 13, no. 3
(1984): 27–48. In this essay, Said discusses what he perceives as a general resis-
tance, particularly within North America, to the publication of academic or jour-
nalistic writings that either seek to critique Israeli policies, or to express support
for the Palestinian right to self-determination. See also the special edition of Arab
Studies Quarterly 33, nos. 3–4 (2011), guest edited by Tareq Ismael on ‘Academic
Freedom, Ideological Boundaries, and the Teaching of the Middle East,’ which
presents a number of important discussions of some of the boundaries that schol-
ars have encountered in their own teaching and research on Palestine.
4. Norman G. Finkelstein’s book Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict
(London: Verso, 1995) sets out to challenge what the author reads as the many
instances of Palestine’s reductive representation at the hands of the media and
indeed academics, including Israeli ‘revisionist’ historians.
5. In ‘Culture and Resistance,’ for example, Said describes Palestinians as an
‘invisible’ people. Edward Said, Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward
Said, interviews by David Barsamian (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003),
20–21. A number of other critics have also revealed the ways in which Palestin-
ian narratives of experience and memory have been ‘colonized’ and ‘silenced’
by the dominant Israeli narrative. See for example Issam Nassar, ‘Reflections
on Writing the History of Palestinian Identity,’ Palestine-Israel Journal 8, no. 1
(2001): 24–37.
6. Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, Memory
(Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2008), 1–3.
166 Notes
7. In the late 1970s, Palestinian fi lmmakers began to collate an archive of work
that would act as a form of collective memory and cultural consciousness for
Palestinians: a ‘people’s cinema,’ but it was lost almost in its entirety during the
Israeli efforts to oust the PLO from Lebanon during the Siege of Beirut in 1982.
The archive is the subject of a short experimental fi lm made by Sarah Wood,
entitled For Cultural Purposes Only (2009), which can be viewed online at www.
animateprojects.org. Accessed 14th May 2012.
8. The Palestinian Festival of Literature, or ‘PalFest,’ currently runs on an annual
basis in collaboration with a number of partner organisations in Palestine. See
www.palfest.org. Accessed 14th May 2012.
9. Frantz Fanon, ‘On National Culture,’ in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial The-
ory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Harlow: Pearson Edu-
cation Limited, 1994), 36–52.
10. See Mohammed Ayoob, Middle East in World Politics (Abingdon: Croom Helm,
1981), 83. Fanon’s writings in The Wretched of the Earth regarding the necessity
of armed struggle were particularly influential to the PLO. See Frantz Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (1961, in French; London:
Penguin, 1969).
11. Patrick Williams, ‘“Outlines of a Better World”: Rerouting Postcolonialism,’ in
Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, ed. Janet Wilson,
Cristina Sandru and Sarah Lawson Welsh (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 91.
12. This is according to Kaylin Goldstein in ‘Reading Palestine-Israel: On Colo-
niality and Other Paradigms,’ Middle East Report 225 (2002): 50–52. This view
seems to be supported in the work of scholars such as Basem L. Ra‘ad in Hidden
Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean (London: Pluto, 2010).
13. Gershon Shafi r provides a carefully nuanced exploration of the relationship
between colonialism and Zionism in his work Land, Labor and the Origins of the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996), xiii, in which he concludes that although Zionism differs from other
colonial projects in some respects, there are nevertheless points of ‘fundamental
similarity’ to models of ‘settler colonialism’ which make it appropriate to under-
stand Zionism within this context. Ilan Pappé also notes these similarities to set-
tler colonialism and provides an interesting overview of Israeli sociologists’ use
of the colonial paradigm in his article ‘Zionism as Colonialism: A Comparative
View of Diluted Colonialism in Asia and Africa,’ South Atlantic Quarterly 107, no.
4 (2008): 611–633.
14. There are many historical accounts of the long and complex history of the
region, many of which bear their own marks of political bias, and as such, it
is advisable to read a selection of texts on the subject. Good starting points
include Gudrun Krämer, A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to
the Founding of the State of Israel, trans. Graham Harmer and Gudrun Krämer
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine,
634–1099, trans. Ethel Broido (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
Ra‘ad, Hidden Histories; Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two
Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
15. In a series of documents known as the Husayn-McMahon Correspondence
(1915–1916), British officials in Cairo offered their support to Arab officials
in Palestine who wished to establish independence from Ottoman rule and
Notes 167
promised to help them to establish an independent Arab state, in the hope that
this would destabilise the Ottoman Empire (which was allied to Germany, Brit-
ain’s enemy during the First World War). Neither the Arab rebellion nor British
promises materialised, however. They were actively undermined by the Sykes-
Picot Agreement of 1916, in which the British and French outlined the forms of
direct and indirect control to be exercised by each of them over the region, and
in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British foreign secretary, Arthur
Balfour, promised the Jews a national home in Palestine: moves in direct contra-
vention of earlier promises for an Arab state. See Charles D. Smith, Palestine and
the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History with Documents, sixth edition (Boston: Bedford/
St Martin’s, 2007), 63–73.
16. Joseph Massad, ‘The “Post-colonial” Colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Pal-
estine/Israel,’ in The Pre-occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Fawzia Afzal-Khan
and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 313.
17. Ra‘ad, Hidden Histories, 123.
18. Shafi r, Land, Labour and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, xiii.
19. These forms of stringent control and appropriation of resources are discussed in
Eyal Weizman’s fascinating study of the use of architecture by the Israeli state,
Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007).
20. See Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2004) and Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and
America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (London: I.B.Tauris, 2004).
21. Joseph Massad, ‘The “Post-colonial” Colony,’ 312.
22. Ra‘ad, Hidden Histories, 10.
23. Ella Shohat, ‘The “Postcolonial” in Translation: Reading Edward Said between
English and Hebrew,’ in Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2006), 369.
24. See for example Ran Aaronsohn, ‘Baron Rothschild and the Initial Stage of
Jewish Settlement in Palestine (1882–1890),’ Journal of Historical Geography 19,
no. 2 (1993): 142–156.
25. Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge,
2004), 81.
26. Shohat, ‘The “Postcolonial” in Translation,’ 369.
27. Nur Masalha, The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem
(London: Pluto Press, 2003), 26. Other accounts place this figure as higher. Sub-
sequent waves of refugeeism and displacement have occurred at various points,
including after 1967.
28. See Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History (London: Black Swan, 2008), 45–116, for a
discussion of Jewish resistance to the British mandate.
29. See for example Gideon Shamoni’s statement that ‘whatever value inheres in
postcolonial theory for comprehending the history of Zionism relates to expla-
nation of its genesis as a nationalist movement emerging out of the emancipation
and post-emancipation situation of the Jews,’ in his essay ‘Postcolonial Theory
and the History of Zionism,’ in Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israel Conflict,
ed. Philip Carl Salzman and Donna Robinson Divine (Abingdon: Routledge,
2008), 192.
30. Massad, ‘The “Post-colonial” Colony,’ 312.
31. Massad, ‘The “Post-colonial” Colony,’ 312.
168 Notes
32. Donna Robinson Divine, ‘Introduction,’ in Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israel
Conflict, 5.
33. Anna Bernard, ‘Palestine and Postcolonial Studies,’ unpublished paper, Uni-
versity of York (2010), accessed June 2011. http://www.sas.ac.uk/fi leadmin/
documents/postgraduate/Papers_London_Debates_2010/Bernard__Palestine_
and_postcolonial_studies.pdf.
34. See particularly Divine, ‘Introduction,’ 5, 8.
35. Philip Carl Salzman, ‘Arab Culture and Postcolonial Theory,’ in Salzman and
Divine, Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 165.
36. See Bernard, ‘Palestine and Postcolonial Studies,’ 3, 6.
37. Ella Shohat, ‘Notes on the “Post-colonial”,’ in Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices,
232–249.
38. Anne McClintock, ‘The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term “Post-colonial-
ism”,’ in Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A
Reader, 293.
39. Williams, ‘Outlines of a Better World,’ 93.
40. McClintock, ‘The Angel of Progress,’ 293.
41. Shohat, ‘Notes on the “Post-colonial”,’ 247–248.
42. Shohat, ‘Notes on the “Post-colonial”,’ 242.
43. Miriam Cooke, ‘Feminist Transgressions in the Postcolonial Arab World,’ Cri-
tique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 8, no. 14 (1999): 93.
44. Lindsey Moore, Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature
and Film (London: Routledge, 2008), 2. See also Mona Fayad, ‘Cartographies
of Identity: Writing Maghribi Women and Postcolonial Subjects,’ in Beyond
Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghrib: History, Culture, and Politics, ed. Ali
Abdullatif Ahmida (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 85.
45. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills, ‘Introduction,’ in Postcolonial Feminist Theory: A
Reader, ed. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2010), 1.
46. Lewis and Mills, ‘Introduction,’ 3.
47. Anastasia Valassopoulos, Contemporary Arab Women Writers: Cultural Expression
in Context (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 20.
48. Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,’ in
Lewis and Mills, Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, 25–28.
49. Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, ‘Introduction,’ in Opening the Gates: A Cen-
tury of Arab Feminist Writing, ed. Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke (London:
Virago, 1992), xvii.
50. See Therese Saliba and Jeanne Kattan, ‘Palestinian Women and the Politics of
Reception,’ in Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women
Writers, ed. Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj (New York: Garland Publish-
ing, 2000), 86.
51. Rita Giacaman, ‘Palestinian Women, the Intifada and the State of Indepen-
dence: An Interview,’ Race and Class 34 (1993): 37.
52. Giacaman, ‘Palestinian Women, the Intifada and the State of Independence,’
35.
53. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses,’ Feminist Review 30, no. 30 (1988): 61–88.
54. Valassopoulos, Contemporary Arab Women Writers, 30.
Notes 169
55. François Lionnet provides an interesting discussion of the limits of ‘cultural
relativism’ in relation to feminism. See Françoise Lionnet, Postcolonial Represen-
tations: Women, Literature, Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 2.
56. Edward Said, ‘Travelling Theory,’ in The World, The Text, and the Critic (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 230.
57. See for example Miriam Cooke, Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism
through Literature (New York: Routledge, 2000); Evelyne Accad, Sexuality and War:
Literary Masks of the Middle East (New York: New York University Press, 1990);
Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Men, Women and Gods: Nawal El Saadawi and Arab Feminist
Poetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Leila Ahmed, Women and
Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1992); Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpreta-
tion of Women’s Rights in Islam (New York: Perseus Books, 1992).
58. Lisa Suhair Majaj, Paula W. Sunderman and Therese Saliba, eds., Intersections:
Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women’s Novels (New York: Syracuse Uni-
versity Press, 2002); Valassopoulos, Contemporary Arab Women Writers; Moore,
Arab, Muslim, Woman.
59. It is important to note that there are a number of different ways in which the
terms ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinian’ might be understood. The term ‘Palestine’
(particularly when used in the phrase ‘historic Palestine’) generally refers to the
pre-partition territory that today comprises Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. It
may, however, also refer to the concept of a future Palestinian state, or to the
current ‘Palestinian Territories,’ the West Bank and Gaza. The term ‘Palestin-
ian’ can be used as a marker of identity for those who live within any part of
historic Palestine, but it also refers to the substantial population of refugees and
members of the Palestinian diaspora who live outside of Palestine, with family
origins in historic Palestine. Thus a fi lm directed by someone of Palestinian ori-
gin, even if made outside of historic Palestine with foreign funding, can be iden-
tified as ‘Palestinian’: the term is not wholly reliant on geographical location.
60. Al-Nakba, or simply the Nakba as it is commonly referred to in English, trans-
lates from Arabic as ‘the catastrophe’ and refers to the foundation of the State
of Israel in 1948: an event that was perceived as a catastrophic dispossession of
land, identity, security and dignity for Palestinians, and created over 750,000
Palestinian refugees. See Nur Masalha, The Palestinian Nakba: Decolonising His-
tory, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (London: Zed Books, 2012).
61. The term Intifada means, literally, ‘shaking off’ but is usually translated as
‘uprising.’ It refers to the two sustained periods of resistance to occupation: the
fi rst Intifada, from 1987 to 1993, and the second (sometimes termed the al-Aqsa)
Intifada, which began in 2000 and ended in around 2005 or 2006 (the exact date
is disputed). See Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 563. See also Laeti-
tia Bucaille, Growing Up Palestinian: Israeli Occupation and the Intifada Generation,
trans. Anthony Roberts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
62. I readily acknowledge that my comparative approach to Palestinian literature
in particular does not bear the same level of historical knowledge of either field
as would be brought to it by scholars of Arabic literature. For scholars and stu-
dents in a similar position to myself who wish to learn more about the history of
Arabic literature, an excellent introductory work is Roger Allen’s An Introduction
to Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
170 Notes
63. Waïl S. Hassan and Rebecca Saunders, ‘Introduction to Special Edition on
Comparative (Post)Colonialisms,’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and
the Middle East 23, no. 1 (2003): 20.
64. See Bernard, ‘Palestine and Postcolonial Studies,’ 6, in which she discusses
some of the critiques of comparative literary studies put forward by Spivak and
Huggan, and offers her own solutions to the problems that they outline.
65. Waïl S. Hassan, ‘Postcolonial Theory and Modern Arabic Literature: Horizons
of Application,’ Journal of Arabic Literature 33, no. 1 (2002): 60.
66. See for example Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Palestinian Struggle for State-
hood (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007); Hisham Sharabi, Embers and Ashes: Memoirs
of an Arab Intellectual (New York: Interlink, 2007); Faisal Darraj, ‘Transforma-
tions in Palestinian Literature,’ trans. Michael K. Scott, in Words without Borders
(November 2006), accessed 20 th December 2011. http://wordswithoutborders.
org/issue/november-2006.
67. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed., Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1992). Due to the variety of texts included in this
volume, I make frequent reference to it and it is therefore a useful compan-
ion volume to consult while reading this book. It is also important to note the
specific sociopolitical context to this work, though, which arguably shapes the
narrative of Palestinian culture presented by Jayyusi. See Salah D. Hassan,
‘Modern Palestinian Literature and the Politics of Appeasement,’ Social Text 21,
no.2 (2003): 7–23, in which Hassan argues that the anthology can be read as
‘part of a broader agenda that sought to rehabilitate and domesticate the Pal-
estinian cause . . . within the framework of the U.S.-sponsored peace process’,
9. My discussion of extracts from this anthology may therefore be read as a
reframing of this material within an alternative postcolonial feminist narrative
that, to an extent, resists this ‘domestication’ of the Palestinian cause.
68. Nathalie Handal, ed., The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology (New
York: Interlink, 2001); Nur and Abdelwahab Elmessiri, eds., A Land of Stone
and Thyme: An Anthology of Palestinian Short Stories (London: Quartet, 1996);
A.M. Elmessiri, ed. and trans., The Palestinian Wedding: A Bilingual Anthology of
Contemporary Palestinian Resistance Poetry (Washington, DC: Three Continents
Press, 1982).
69. Hamid Dabashi, ed., Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (London: Verso,
2006); Gertz and Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema.
70. Kamal Abdel-Malek and David C. Jacobson, eds., Israeli and Palestinian Identi-
ties in History and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).
71. Ami Elad-Bouskila, Modern Palestinian Literature and Culture (London: Rout-
ledge, 1999).
72. Kamal Abdel-Malek, The Rhetoric of Violence: Arab-Jewish Encounters in Contem-
porary Palestinian Literature and Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
73. Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg, eds., Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of
Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
74. Annemarie Jacir, ‘“For Cultural Purposes Only”: Curating a Palestinian Film
Festival,’ in Dabashi, Dreams of a Nation, 29.
75. Fedwa Malti-Douglas, ‘Dangerous Crossings: Gender and Criticism in Arabic
Literary Studies,’ in Borderwork: Feminist Engagements in Comparative Literature,
ed. Margaret R. Higgonet (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 229.
Notes 171
76. Adrienne Rich, ‘Notes towards a Politics of Location,’ in Blood, Bread, and Poetry:
Selected Prose 1979–1985 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986), 219.
77. Edward Said, with photographs by Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky: Palestinian
Lives (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 166.
78. Nye, ‘The Words Under the Words,’ 15.
Notes to Chapter 1
1. This concept emerges in Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vin-
tage, 1994), xiii and Homi Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the
Margins of the Modern Nation,’ in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge,
1994), in which he describes the nation as an ‘ambivalent . . . narrative strat-
egy,’ 140. This concept also informs his edited collection of essays, Nation and
Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). However, it is worth noting that the ‘nar-
rative’ construction of hegemonic national, particularly imperialist identity
fi nds even earlier expression in Said’s Orientalism (1978; London: Penguin,
2003). This discourse is the subject of more extensive discussion within the
chapter.
2. This insight has informed much feminist scholarship on nationhood, but key
texts include Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997); Nira
Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, Woman-Nation-State (London: Macmillan,
1989); and essays collected in Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat,
eds., Dangerous Liasons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
3. See Frances S. Hasso, ‘Review of Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh’s Birthing the Nation:
Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel,’ Gender and Society 17, no. 3 (2003): 482.
4. Edward Said has described Palestine as a perennial ‘question’ ‘for anyone writing
and living in the West,’ as any consideration of it is framed as a ‘contest between
an affi rmation and a denial,’ a ‘presence and an interpretation’ of claims to the
territory. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992), 8–9. In his
recognition of Palestine as a ‘question,’ he also presents it, significantly, as a site
of discursive as much as spatial contestation. Joseph Massad extends this motif
of Palestine as ‘question’ in his important work, The Persistence of the Palestinian
Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006).
5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of
Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 1991), 6.
6. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6.
7. Said, Culture and Imperialism, xiii.
8. See the introduction to this book and Michael J. Cohen, The Origins and Evolu-
tion of the Arab-Zionist Conflict (Berkley: University of California Press, 1987)
for some of the many accounts of the foundation of the State of Israel, and the
Palestinian response.
9. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 2004), 48–49.
10. Said, Orientalism, 12.
11. Michel Foucault, ‘Interview on the Prison: The Book and Its Method,’ cited
in Colin Gordon, ‘Introduction,’ in Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of
172 Notes
Michel Foucault 1954–1984, volume 3, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hur-
ley and others (London: Penguin, 2002), xvi.
12. Tom Nairn, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (London: Verso, 1997), 168.
13. The term ‘ethno-nation’ describes a nation without state status, but with a uni-
fied ethnic grouping. Katherine Verdery, ‘Beyond the Nation in Eastern Europe,’
Social Text 38 (1994): 4.
14. Though Said’s Orientalism makes a number of references to the implicitly gen-
dered and sexualised paradigms of the Orientalist imagination, it does not
engage in substantial analysis of the significance of such tropes. As a result, it
has generated a significant quantity of feminist scholarship scrutinising Orien-
talism from a gender-conscious standpoint, including Reina Lewis, Gendering
Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996) and
Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). See also Lila Abu-Lughod,
‘Orientalism and Middle East Feminist Studies,’ Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (2001):
101–113 for an assessment of the impact of Said’s discourse within Middle East-
ern feminism itself.
15. Anne McClintock, ‘“No Longer in a Future Heaven”: Gender, Race, and Nation-
alism,’ in McClintock, Dangerous Liaisons, 90.
16. Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2005), 64.
17. Nira Yuval-Davis and Marcel Stoetzler, ‘Imagined Boundaries and Borders: A
Gendered Gaze,’ The European Journal of Women’s Studies 9, no. 3 (2002): 334.
18. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 47.
19. The term patriarchy means, literally, ‘rule of the fathers.’ There are many
analyses of patriarchy, but within the context of this book, the term should be
understood as a form of sexual asymmetry in which men are deemed to hold
‘natural’ authority within all spheres of society, from political institutions to
the family, and are positioned as hierarchically superior in ways that are often
understood as oppressive for women. For introductory accounts of patriarchy,
see Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy: The History of Women’s Subordination
(Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1988) and Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Encyclopedia of
Sex and Gender (Detroit: Macmillan, 2007); for a discussion of patriarchy within
the Arab world, see Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy,’ Gender and
Society 2, no. 3 (1988): 274–290.
20. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation,’ 140.
21. Michel Khleifi, dir., Wedding in Galilee (Palestine/Belgium/France, 1987).
22. Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (London: Pro-
fi le Books, 2008), xii, xv.
23. The paradoxical term ‘present absentee’ emerged under the Absentee Property
Laws passed by the Knesset in 1950, to describe those Palestinians who were
absent from their properties within what came to be Israel during 1948 (due var-
iously to their participation in fighting, their fl ight or their expulsion) and thus
had their properties confi scated, but who nevertheless remained in the newly
formed territory of Israel. See David Schechla, ‘The Invisible People Come to
Light: Israel’s “Internally Displaced” and the “Unrecognized Villages”,’ Journal
of Palestine Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 21–22. The poet Mahmoud Darwish was
a ‘present absentee,’ a condition on which he meditates in his work of prose/
Notes 173
poetry/autobiography, Absent Presence, trans. Mohammad Shaheen (London:
Hesperus Press, 2010).
24. Ted Swedenburg, ‘The Palestinian Peasant as National Signifier,’ Anthropological
Quarterly 63, no. 1 (1990): 19.
25. For further discussion of the ways in which the Zionist movement imagined the
land as empty, see Uri Eisenzweig, ‘An Imaginary Territory? The Problematic
of Space in Zionist Discourse,’ Dialectical Anthropology 5 (1981): 261–285.
26. Said, Question of Palestine, 17.
27. Golda Meir, Sunday Times, 15 th June 1969.
28. Haim Gerber, ‘Zionism, Orientalism, and the Palestinians,’ Journal of Palestine
Studies 33, no. 1 (2003): 23–41.
29. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), 22–26.
30. Theodor Herzl, Old-New-Land, fi rst edition (Minneapolis: Filiquarian Publish-
ing LLC, 2007), 151, 57.
31. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 30.
32. Herzl describes Zionism as an attempt to ‘transform the desert into a garden’ in
The Jewish State (Minneapolis: Filiquarian Publishing LLC, 2006), 28.
33. Massad, ‘The “Post-colonial” Colony,’ 332.
34. Said, Question of Palestine, 75.
35. Ella Shohat, ‘Gender and Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography
of the Cinema,’ in Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the
Imaged, ed. Hamid Naficy and Teshome H. Gabriel (Poststrasse, Switzerland:
Harwood, 1993), 77.
36. Said, Question of Palestine, 81.
37. Said, Question of Palestine, 81–82.
38. Lewis, Gendering Orientalism.
39. Said, Orientalism, 207.
40. Said, Orientalism, 207.
41. Shohat, ‘Gender and Culture of Empire,’ 56–57.
42. Barbara McKean Parmenter, Giving Voice to Stones: Place and Identity in Palestin-
ian Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 19.
43. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Question of Lay Analysis, pt. 4,’ in The Complete Psychologi-
cal Works of Sigmund Freud, volume 20, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage,
2001), 212.
44. Said, Orientalism, 188.
45. As David Newman puts it, Israel was envisaged as ‘an exclusive territory in
which the “Other” simply did not exist, or at the very least would be “allowed”
to reside providing they accepted the rule of the majority.’ David Newman,
‘From National to Post-national Territorial Identities in Israel-Palestine,’ Geojour-
nal 53 (2001): 238.
46. Amos Oz, My Michael, trans. Nicholas de Lange (1968; London: Vintage, 1991),
202–203.
47. Oz, My Michael, 89.
48. Shohat, ‘Gender and Culture of Empire,’ 63.
49. Oz is often viewed as a left-leaning figure in his role as a prominent member of
the Peace Now organisation, which defi nes itself as ‘an Israeli pacifi st organisa-
tion for Palestinian self-determination within 1967 borders.’ See http://www.
174 Notes
peacenow.org.il/Site/en/homepage.asp for an outline of the organisation and its
further aims. Accessed 16th May 2012.
50. Yosefa Loshitzky, Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2001), 110.
51. All cited in Said, Question of Palestine, 79–81.
52. Said, Question of Palestine, 87.
53. Massad, ‘The “Post-colonial” Colony,’ 332.
54. Daniel Monterescu, ‘The Bridled Bride of Palestine: Orientalism, Zionism, and
the Troubled Urban Imagination,’ Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
16 (2009): 646.
55. Parmenter, Giving Voice to Stones, 32.
56. Mahmoud Darwish, ‘Identity Card,’ in The Music of Human Flesh, trans. Denys
Johnson-Davies (London: Heinemann, 1980), 10–11; stanzas 1, 3 and 6.
57. Said, Question of Palestine, 155. Darwish has come to be hailed as the most
important Palestinian poet of his age, and while his early poetry bears many of
the classic gendered traits of ‘resistance poetry,’ such as its characterisation of
the land as a ‘mother,’ his later poetry moves beyond this symbolism into highly
sophisticated meditations upon questions of loss, death, beauty, love and human
relationships, which transcend the political sphere. Reference to his work also
appears in Chapter 4 of this book. For an interesting comparative study of Dar-
wish’s poetry informed by postcolonial theorisations of ‘home,’ see Najat Rah-
man, Literary Disinheritance: The Writing of Home in the Work of Mahmoud Darwish
and Assia Djebar (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008).
58. Darwish, ‘Identity Card,’ stanzas 3–4.
59. Susan Slymovics, ‘The Gender of Transposed Space,’ Palestine-Israel Journal of
Politics, Economics and Culture 9, no. 4 (2002): 114.
60. Parmenter, Giving Voice to Stones, 19.
61. ‘Abd al-Raheem Mahmoud, ‘Call of the Motherland,’ in Jayyusi, Anthology of
Modern Palestinian Literature, 210–211.
62. Tawfiq Zayyad, ‘A Million Suns in My Blood,’ in Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern
Palestinian Literature, 329.
63. Joseph Massad, ‘Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian National-
ism,’ Middle East Journal 49, no. 3 (1995): 471.
64. Terms from ‘Communiqué 5’ of The Unified National Leadership of the Uprising,
cited in Massad, ‘Conceiving the Masculine,’ 474.
65. ‘Abdallah Radwan, ‘You Are Everything,’ in Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Pales-
tinian Literature, 264.
66. Tina Sherwell, ‘Imaging the Homeland: Gender and Palestinian National Dis-
courses,’ in After Orientalism: Critical Entanglements, Productive Looks, ed. Inge E.
Boer (New York: Rodopi, 2003), 133.
67. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, ‘In the Deserts of Exile,’ in An Anthology of Modern Arabic
Poetry, ed. and trans. Mounah Khouri and Hamid Algar (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1974), 225.
68. Slymovics, ‘Gender of Transposed Space,’ 113.
69. Swedenburg, ‘The Palestinian Peasant as National Signifier,’ 19, 26.
70. Sherwell, ‘Imaging the Homeland,’ 133.
71. Hanna Elias, dir., The Olive Harvest (Palestine, 2004).
72. Lina Khatib, Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood
and the Arab World (London: I.B.Tauris, 2006), 58.
Notes 175
73. Laila ‘Allush, ‘The Path of Affection,’ in Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian
Literature, 106–107.
74. Hanan Mikhail Ashrawi, ‘The Contemporary Palestinian Poetry of Occupa-
tion,’ Journal of Palestine Studies 7, no. 3 (1978): 77–101.
75. ‘Allush, ‘The Path of Affection,’ 106.
76. ‘Allush, ‘The Path of Affection,’ 106–107.
77. Honour is a crucial element of Palestinian culture and has traditionally been
defi ned according to the ‘honour/shame’ system, whereby men maintain hon-
our for themselves by regulating women’s behaviours and identities, thereby
avoiding ‘shame’ being brought upon the family. While concepts of honour
and shame circulate in both Muslim and Christian religious discourses, it is
such a prevalent social discourse that even secular families may adhere to it.
For a discussion of the complex circuits of gendered and sexual power that
operate in relation to family honour, see Diane Baxter, ‘Honour Thy Sister:
Selfhood, Gender, and Agency in Palestinian Culture,’ Anthropological Quar-
terly 80, no. 3 (2007): 737–775. For a more general discussion of honour and
associated ‘honour crimes’ (whereby women are punished or killed in order
to regain familial honour) in Arabo-Muslim culture, see Lama Abu-Odeh,
‘Crimes of Honour and the Construction of Gender in Arab Societies,’ in
Feminism and Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives, ed. Mai Yamani (Reading:
Ithaca Press, 1996), 141–196.
78. Sheila Hannah Katz, ‘Adam and Adama, ‘Ird and Ard: En-gendering Political
Confl ict and Identity in Early Jewish and Palestinian Nationalisms,’ in Gendering
the Middle East: Emerging Perspectives, ed. Deniz Kandiyoti (London: I.B.Tauris,
1996), 88.
79. These tropes appear in the writing of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, for
example.
80. Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed,
1979), 79.
81. See, for example, Mahmoud Shaheen’s short story ‘The Sacred River,’ a story
about Palestinian refugeeism, in Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian Litera-
ture, 525–545.
82. Arafat quoted in Massad, ‘Conceiving the Masculine,’ 473.
83. Harum Hashim Rasheed, ‘Poem to Jerusalem,’ in Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern
Palestinian Literature, 265–266.
84. ‘Umar Shabana, ‘From: The Book of Songs and Stones,’ in Jayyusi, Anthology of
Modern Palestinian Literature, 295.
85. Abu Salma, ‘We Shall Return,’ in Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian Litera-
ture, 96.
86. Ashrawi, ‘Contemporary Palestinian Poetry of Occupation,’ 96, 100.
87. Rashid Husain, ‘First,’ in Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, 175.
88. Raja Shehadeh, The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank (London:
Quartet, 1992), 86–89. See Parmenter, Giving Voice to Stones, 86–87, for further
discussion of Shehadeh’s comments here.
89. For collections of Darwish’s work translated into English, see The Butterfly’s Bur-
den, trans. Fady Joudah (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2000) and Unfortunately, It Was Paradise:
Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon
and Amira El-Zein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
90. Darwish, ‘No More and No Less,’ The Butterfly’s Burden, 49.
176 Notes
91. Michel Khleifi, ‘From Reality to Fiction—from Poverty to Expression,’ trans.
Omar al-Qattan, in Dabashi, Dreams of a Nation, 57.
92. Michel Khleifi, dir., Zindeeq (Palestine/UK/Belgium/UAE, 2009).
93. Gertz and Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema, 4–5.
94. Michel Khleifi, dir., Fertile Memory (Palestine/Netherlands/Belgium, 1980).
95. See Jeff Halper, ‘A Strategy within a Non-strategy: Sumud, Resistance, Attri-
tion, and Advocacy,’ Journal of Palestine Studies 35, no. 3 (2006): 46 for further
discussion of this term.
96. Viola Shafi k, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity, revised edition (Cairo:
American University in Cairo Press, 2007), 187.
97. Mary N. Layoun, ‘A Guest at the Wedding: Honour, Memory, and (National)
Desire in Michel Khleife’s Wedding in Galilee,’ in Between Women and Nation:
Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Caren Kaplan, Norma
Alarcón and Minoo Moallem (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 93.
98. See Gertz and Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema, 30, 40.
99. Massad, ‘Conceiving the Masculine,’ 476. The resistant undertones of the trope
of ‘the Palestinian wedding’ also appear in the title of a key poetry collection
comprised of Palestinian resistance poetry collected and translated by A.M.
Elmessiri, The Palestinian Wedding.
100. This was reportedly Meir’s response to a Polish Jewish man who had returned
from Palestine in 1920 to assess its suitability for settlement. Benjamin Beit-
Hallahmi, Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel (New York:
Olive Branch Press, 1993), 78.
101. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen 16, no. 3 (1975):
54–64.
102. Said, Orientalism, 103.
103. Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies, 72.
104. Said, Orientalism, 6.
105. ‘Crisis heterotopias’ include, according to Foucault, spaces such as the boarding
school, military service or the ‘honeymoon trip,’ which are all locations where
individuals undergoing forms of transitional crisis (such as adolescence, men-
struation, loss of virginity, development of virility) can complete these processes
without disrupting social norms. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces,’ trans. Jay
Miskowiec, Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 24.
106. Samih al-Qasim, ‘You Pretend to Die,’ in Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian
Literature, 258.
107. Layoun, ‘A Guest at the Wedding,’ 97.
108. Edward Said, ‘Review of Wedding in Galilee and Friendship’s Death,’ in The Poli-
tics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969–1994
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), 136.
109. Khleifi, ‘From Reality to Fiction,’ 48.
110. Carol Delaney, cited in Khatib, Filming the Modern Middle East, 83.
Notes to Chapter 2
1. Abu Salma was one of Palestine’s best-known poets during the period of
the British mandate and following the Nakba, and came to be known as ‘The
Notes 177
Olive Tree of Palestine’ for his fi rm commitment to his country, even when later
writing from exile. ‘Abd al-Raheem Mahmoud, meanwhile, was a poet-martyr
who wrote highly patriotic poetry that rallied the Palestinian people and contin-
ues to be memorised by some of them today. He fell while fighting for Palestine
following the partition of 1947. Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature,
95, 209.
2. Some of Suleiman’s fi lms are analysed in detail in Chapter 3.
3. Amilcar Cabral, ‘National Liberation and Culture,’ in Unity and Struggle,
Speeches and Writings, trans. Michael Wolfers (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1979), 140, 143.
4. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 45.
5. Elise G. Young, Keepers of the History: Women and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
(New York: Teachers College Press, 1992), 8.
6. Geraldine Heng, ‘“A Great Way to Fly”: Nationalism, the State, and the Variet-
ies of Third-World Feminism,’ in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Demo-
cratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (New
York: Routledge, 1997), 34.
7. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 167.
8. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘French Feminism in an International Frame,’ Yale
French Studies 62 (1981): 184.
9. Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London:
Zed, 1992), 10.
10. Cooke, ‘Feminist Transgressions in the Postcolonial Arab World,’ 93 –105.
11. Nawar Al-Hassan Golley, Reading Arab Women’s Autobiographies: Shahrazad Tells
Her Story (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 27.
12. Golley, Reading Arab Women’s Autobiographies, 27.
13. Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘The Marriage of Feminism and Islamism in Egypt: Selec-
tive Repudiation as a Dynamic of Postcolonial Cultural Politics,’ in Remaking
Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 248.
14. Abu-Lughod, ‘The Marriage of Feminism and Islamism in Egypt,’ 234.
15. For a pertinent discussion of Islamic feminism, see Cooke, Women Claim Islam.
16. Recently, women proved integral to the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt in
February 2011, and to the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya, where they have sub-
sequently demanded their rights in the post-revolutionary climate. See Leana
Hosea, ‘A Woman’s Place in the New Egypt,’ BBC News: Middle East, 23rd March
2011, accessed 18 th September 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-
east-12819919.
17. Frantz Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (1958;
New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965). See also Carolyn Fluehr-Lobhan, ‘The
Political Mobilisation of Women in the Arab World,’ in Women in Contemporary
Muslim Societies, ed. Jane Smith (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980),
235–252.
18. Indeed, this was the case in the Algerian struggle, where women participated
widely in order to bring about both feminist and national reforms in society, only
to fi nd that patriarchal order was widely reinstated and they were returned to
domestic roles upon Algeria’s ‘liberation.’ See Mounria M. Charrad, States and
Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco (Berkeley,
178 Notes
CA: University of California Press, 2001), particularly Chapter 8: ‘Elite Divi-
sions and the Law in Gridlock: Algeria,’ 169–200.
19. Suha Sabbagh, ‘Palestinian Women Writers and the Intifada,’ Social Text 22
(1989): 65.
20. See the introduction to this book, and Saliba and Kattan, ‘Palestinian Women
and the Politics of Reception,’ 86, for a discussion of many women’s decisions to
reject the label of ‘feminist’ to describe their struggles for women’s rights.
21. Ellen L. Fleischmann, ‘The Emergence of the Palestinian Women’s Movement,
1929–39,’ Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 3 (2000): 17.
22. Fleischmann, ‘The Emergence of the Palestinian Women’s Movement,’ 25.
23. Fleischmann, ‘The Emergence of the Palestinian Women’s Movement,’ 25–27.
24. Constantine K. Zurayak, The Meaning of the Disaster, trans. R. Bayly Winder
(Beirut: Khayat’s College Book Cooperative, 1956), 36.
25. For a fascinating and more extensive discussion of this early commitment to
modernisation, see Frances S. Hasso, ‘Modernity and Gender in Arab Accounts
of the 1949 and 1967 Defeats,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 32, no.
4 (2000): 491–510.
26. Frances S. Hasso, ‘The “Women’s Front”: Nationalism, Feminism, and Moder-
nity in Palestine,’ Gender and Society 12, no. 4 (1998): 449.
27. Massad, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question, 52. As one of the most prom-
inent female political figures in Palestine, Hanan Ashrawi has been written
about extensively and indeed has produced her own autobiography: Hanan
Ashrawi, This Side of Peace: A Personal Account (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1995). See also Ashrawi’s poetry in English, much of which displays a level
of gender-consciousness, in Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature,
335–341.
28. F. al-Labadi, Memories of a Palestinian Daughter, MA dissertation 1993, cited in
Hasso, ‘“The Women’s Front”,’ 449–450.
29. Rita Giacaman, ‘Palestinian Women, the Intifada and the State of Indepen-
dence,’ 40.
30. Simona Sharoni, Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women’s
Resistance (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 38.
31. See Chapter 1 for further discussion of the honour/shame discourse.
32. Nahla Abdo, ‘Women of the Intifada: Gender, Class and National Liberation,’
Race and Class 32, no. 4 (1991): 30.
33. Buthina Canaan Khoury, dir., Women in Struggle (New York: Women Make
Movies, 2004). DVD.
34. Islah Jad, ‘The Conundrums of Post-Oslo Palestine: Gendering Palestinian Citi-
zenship,’ Feminist Theory 11, no. 2 (2010), 157.
35. Jad, ‘The Conundrums of Post-Oslo Palestine,’ 160.
36. Nahla Abdo, ‘Gender and Politics under the Palestinian Authority,’ Journal of
Palestine Studies 28, no. 2 (1999): 42.
37. Maria Holt, ‘Palestinian Women, Violence, and the Peace Process,’ Development
in Practice 13, no. 2 (2003): 233.
38. ‘Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements and Draft
Basic Law for the National Authority of the Transitional Period,’ cited in Barbara
Harlow, ‘Partitions and Precedents: Sahar Khalifeh and Palestinian Political
Notes 179
Geography,’ in Majaj, Sunderman and Saliba, Intersections: Gender, Nation, and
Community in Arab Women’s Novels, 131.
39. Poetry is the most deeply rooted and highly revered literary tradition in Pales-
tinian and indeed in Arab culture, and it has often played a highly public and
political role as a mode of response to historical events. See Allen, An Introduc-
tion to Arabic Literature, 66.
40. Penny Johnson, ‘From Seclusion to Creation,’ The Women’s Review of Books 8, no.
4 (1991): 11.
41. Golley, Reading Arab Women’s Autobiographies, 114. Tuqan has been the recipient
of several literary prizes, including the International Poetry Award in Palmero,
Italy, the Jerusalem Award for Culture and the Arts in 1990 and the Honorary
Palestine prize for poetry in 1996.
42. Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, 10.
43. Omar Karmi, ‘“Enough for Me to Die on Her Earth”: An Obituary of Palestin-
ian Poetess Fadwa Touqan,’ Palestine-Israel Journal 11, no. 1 (2004): 97.
44. Magda M. Al-Nowaihi, ‘Resisting Silence in Arab Women’s Autobiographies,’
International Journal of Middle East Studies 33, no. 4 (2001): 480.
45. Fadwa Tuqan, A Mountainous Journey: A Poet’s Autobiography, trans. Olive Kenny
(London: The Women’s Press, 1990), 11. All subsequent page references to this
text will be cited in brackets directly after the quotation.
46. After its initial serialisation in the Palestinian press, it was subsequently serialised
for the broader Arab public in the magazine al-Doha in 1984, and printed in book
form in 1985, with subsequent reprints. See Al-Nowaihi, ‘Resisting Silence in Arab
Women’s Autobiographies,’ 480; Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ‘Foreword,’ in Tuqan, A
Mountainous Journey, viii; Golley, Reading Arab Women’s Autobiographies, 114.
47. Leila Khaled with George Hajjar, My People Shall Live: Autobiography of a Revo-
lutionary (Toronto: NC Press Ltd., 1975); Raymonda Tawil, My Home, My Prison
(1979; New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980). The text was initially
published in Hebrew, but is published in this edition in the author’s own English
translation.
48. While a traditionally male-dominated genre, many autobiographies by Arab
women emerged in the twentieth century, including those of prominent femi-
nists such as Huda Sha‘rawi. Fedwa Malti-Douglas, ‘Introduction: A Palestinian
Female Voice against Tradition,’ in Tuqan, A Mountainous Journey, 2.
49. Al-Nowaihi, ‘Resisting Silence in Arab Women’s Autobiographies,’ 478.
50. This is the view expressed by some female Palestinian students interviewed
in the West Bank by Saliba and Kattan. See Saliba and Kattan, ‘Palestinian
Women and the Politics of Reception,’ 89.
51. A powerful example of ‘personal account literature’ by a female author is Ghada
Karmi’s In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story (London: Verso, 2002), in which
Karmi tells the story (in English) of her family’s own violent displacement in 1948.
52. Samih Al-Qasim is a highly political poet who was born to a Druze family in the
Galilee region in 1939. He is of the same poetic generation as Mahmoud Dar-
wish, with whom he published poems in the 1984 collection Victims of a Map. See
Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim, Victims of a Map: A Bilingual
Anthology of Arabic Poetry, trans. Abdullah al-Udhari (London: Saqi, 1984).
53. Badran and Cooke, ‘Introduction,’ xviii.
180 Notes
54. Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, 8.
55. Carol Hanisch, ‘The Personal Is the Political,’ February 1969, accessed 12th Sep-
tember 2011. http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html.
56. Samih K. Farsoun, Culture and Customs of the Palestinians (Westport: Greenwood
Press, 2004), 32. For a gender-conscious account of the way in which the ‘self’
is understood in relation to the family construct, see ‘Introduction,’ in Intimate
Selving in Arab Families: Gender, Self, and Identity, ed. Suad Joseph (New York:
Syracuse University Press, 1999).
57. See for example Ibrahim Wade Ata, The West Bank Palestinian Family (London:
KPI Limited, 1986).
58. Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Soci-
ety (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing, 1975), 4.
59. See Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 81–87.
60. Western feminist geographers, for example, have questioned the idea that pri-
vate space is a realm of female power, stating that ‘it is men who decide which
“women’s space” other men may enter, and it could be argued, therefore, that
this is to be understood as part of men’s space also.’ Shirley Ardener, Women and
Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 21.
61. Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 84.
62. See Chapter 1 for further discussion of the honour/shame discourse.
63. Jayyusi, ‘Introduction,’ in Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, 20.
64. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Preface,’ in Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 15–16.
65. Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes,’ 70.
66. Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes,’ 61–78.
67. Golley, Reading Arab Women’s Autobiographies, 121, 125.
68. Though Tuqan does not claim this to be the condition of all Palestinian women,
it is nevertheless interesting to note a number of features of her autobiogra-
phy, such as the tyrannical father, the overbearing older brother and the ‘single
error’ in conduct that brings about punishment, that recur as common tropes in
a number of autobiographies by both Arab men and women. These narratives
do not necessarily critique such behaviours; rather, they operate partly in the
service of drama. See Hartmuch Fähndrich, ‘Fathers and Husbands: Tyrants
and Victims in Some Autobiographical and Semi-autobiographical Works from
the Arab World,’ in Love and Sexuality in Modern Arab Literature, ed. Roger Allen,
Hilary Kilpatrick and Ed de Moor (London: Saqi, 1995), 106–115.
69. Moore, Arab, Muslim, Woman, 109.
70. Ibrahim Tuqan (1905–1941) was a well-known poet, scholar, activist and broad-
caster of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Fadwa was devastated at her brother’s death
from an illness that he developed while teaching in Iraq. She would later write
several elegies for her brother, echoing the voice of Al-Khansa: the female ele-
giac poet with whose poetry Ibrahim had fi rst sought to inspire her. See Terri
DeYoung, ‘“Love, Death and the Ghost of al-Khansa”: The Modern Female
Poetic Voice in Fadwa Tuqan’s Elegies for Her Brother Ibrahim,’ in Tradition,
Modernity and Postmodernity in Arabic Literature, ed. Kamal Abdel-Malek and
Wael Hallaq (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2000), 45–75.
71. Malti-Douglas, ‘Introduction: A Palestinian Female Voice against Tradition,’ 7.
It should be noted that ritha’ was also composed and recited by male poets.
72. Malti-Douglas, ‘Introduction: A Female Voice against Tradition,’ 7.
Notes 181
73. Ahmed Badrakhan, dir., Dananeer (Egypt, 1940).
74. All poems cited here are translated by Naomi Shihab Nye and included as
appendices to A Mountainous Journey. For further English translations of poems
by Tuqan, see Handal, The Poetry of Arab Women.
75. Therese Saliba, ‘A Country beyond Reach: Liana Badr’s Writings of the Pales-
tinian Diaspora,’ in Majaj, Sunderman and Saliba, Intersections: Gender, Nation,
and Community in Arab Women’s Novels, 132–133.
76. Other works by Badr available in translation include her collection of three
novellas, A Balcony over the Fakihani, trans. Peter Clark and Christopher Tingley
(1983, in Arabic; Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 1995) and The Eye of the
Mirror, trans. Samira Kawar (1991, in Arabic; Reading: Garnet, 2008), both of
which are set during the Lebanese Civil War. Her fi lms include Fadwa (Pales-
tine, 1999) and Zeitounat (Palestine, 2000), a fi lm about the relationship between
women and their ancestral olive trees.
77. Liana Badr, A Compass for the Sunflower, trans. Catherine Cobham (1979; Lon-
don: The Women’s Press, 1989), 69. All subsequent page numbers from this text
will be cited in brackets directly after the quotation.
78. For further information on Kanafani, see Chapter 3. Harlow draws on Ghas-
san Kanafani’s work, Literature of Resistance in Occupied Palestine: 1948–1966
(Beirut: Institute for Arab Research, 1981), in her formulation of this term.
As Kanafani’s work is not available in English translation, I work primarily
with Harlow’s subsequent translations of his work and theorisation of this
term.
79. Indeed, a cross-cultural example of this appears within the text. The female
character Shahd presents her friend Samar with a book of poetry by Pablo
Neruda, the Chilean poet and activist, which she describes as works ‘for hunted
people everywhere’ (96). Elsewhere in the novel, the character Jinan also cites
the Vietnamese struggle against the U.S. as a source of inspiration for the Pales-
tinian resistance (76).
80. Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987), 3, 11. Harlow
engages in some interesting discussions of examples of Palestinian ‘resistance
literature’ in this work, as she does in her later text, After Lives: Legacies of Revo-
lutionary Writing (London: Verso, 1996).
81. Liana Badr in personal interview with Saliba and Kattan, ‘Palestinian Women
and the Politics of Reception,’ 100.
82. See Helena Lindholm Schultz with Juliane Hammer, The Palestinian Diaspora:
Formation of Identities and Politics of Homeland (London: Routledge, 2003), par-
ticularly Chapter 3, in which the authors provide an account of the various
diasporic populations living in Jordan and Lebanon, and the political trajecto-
ries that brought many of them there.
83. Frances S. Hasso, ‘Feminist Generations: The Long-Term Impact of Social
Movement Involvement on Palestinian Women’s Lives,’ American Journal of Soci-
ology 107, no. 3 (2001): 589.
84. See Harlow, Resistance Literature, 12.
85. Philippa Strum, The Women Are Marching: The Second Sex and the Palestinian Revo-
lution (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1992), 32, 39.
86. Leila Hudson, ‘Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine: Engendering the Inti-
fada,’ Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East: Tradition, Identity, and Power, ed.
182 Notes
Fatma Müge Göçek and Shiva Balaghi (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), 133.
87. Bouthaina Shaaban, Both Right and Left Handed: Arab Women Talk about Their
Lives (London: The Women’s Press, 1988), 164.
88. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 73–74.
89. Frantz Fanon, ‘Algeria Unveiled,’ in Studies in a Dying Colonialism, 35–67. See
Nigel C. Gibson, ‘The “Absolute Originality” of Women’s Actions,’ in Fanon:
The Postcolonial Imagination (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 139–148 for further dis-
cussion of Fanon’s views on women’s significance to the resistance struggle.
90. Julie Peteet, ‘Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada:
A Cultural Politics of Violence,’ in Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Cul-
ture in the Modern Middle East, ed. Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb
(London: Saqi Books, 2000), 154.
91. Khaled, My People Shall Live, 122.
92. Rajeswari Mohan, ‘Loving Palestine: Nationalist Activism and Feminist Agency
in Leila Khaled’s Subversive Bodily Acts,’ Interventions 1, no. 1 (1998): 68–69.
93. Mohan, ‘Loving Palestine,’ 69.
94. Accad, Sexuality and War, 73–74.
95. Hasso, ‘Modernity and Gender in Arab Accounts of the 1948 and 1967 Defeats,’
495.
96. Sharoni, Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 39.
97. See Katz, ‘Adam and Adama, ‘Ird and Ard,’ 91, and Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh, Birth-
ing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005).
98. Julie Peteet, ‘Icons and Militants: Mothering in the Danger Zone,’ Signs 23, no.
1 (1997): 114.
99. Abdo, ‘Women of the Intifada,’ 25.
100. Julie Peteet, Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 153.
101. Amalia Sa’ar, ‘Feminine Strength: Reflections on Power and Gender in Israeli-
Palestinian Culture,’ Anthropological Quarterly 79, no. 3 (2006): 408.
102. Sa’ar, ‘Feminine Strength,’ 408.
103. Accad, Sexuality and War, 18.
104. Anne McClintock, ‘“No Longer in a Future Heaven”,’ 93.
105. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?,’ in Colonial Discourse
and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman
(Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd., 1994), 83.
106. Massad, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question, 54.
107. Mai Sayigh, ‘Elegy for Imm ‘Ali,’ in Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian
Literature, 280–281.
108. Najwa Najjar, dir., Pomegranates and Myrrh (Palestine, 2008).
109. Despite the highly affi rmative portrayal of Palestine in this fi lm, Najwa Najjar
states in interview that there was public outcry when her fi lm was fi rst screened
in Ramallah, for what was deemed its ‘unpatriotic’ portrayal of an untrust-
worthy wife of a political prisoner (an iconic trope of masculinity in nationalist
consciousness). The subversive potential of even the subtlest of gender-conscious
disruptions to the national narrative is clear from this account. Najwa Najjar in
Notes 183
Q&A Session, London Palestine Film Festival, Barbican Centre, London, 2nd
May 2010.
110. Mahasen Nasser-Eldin, dir., Samia (Palestine, 2009); a Shashat Production with
support from the European Union.
111. Alia Arasoughly, dir., This Is Not Living (Palestine, 2001).
112. Adania Shibli, Touch, trans. Paula Haydar (Northampton, MA: Clockroot Pub-
lishing, 2010), fi rst published in Arabic under the title Masas. Shibli, born in
Palestine in 1974, has twice been awarded the A.M. Qattan Foundation Young
Writer’s Award, and was described as ‘the most talked about writer on the West
Bank’ by Ahdaf Soueif (front cover of Touch).
Notes to Chapter 3
1. Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories, trans. Hilary
Kilpatrick (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999), 74. For a much more
detailed interpretation of Kanafani’s Men in the Sun as a novella portraying ‘mas-
culinity in crisis,’ see Joe Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture
and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 186–225.
2. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge Classics, 2006), 179.
3. Butler, Gender Trouble, 179.
4. Butler, Gender Trouble, 179.
5. Here, my reading follows that of Joe Cleary, who writes that ‘the tragedy that
brings the narrative to conclusion occurs in a space which is quite literally a
“no-place” since the men die in a juridical “no-man’s land” between states [ . . . ]
[that] must ultimately be read as a figure in the text for Palestine itself—a land
that officially disappeared from the map in 1948.’ Literature, Partition and the
Nation State, 198.
6. Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation State, 212. There are many works that
can be read as portrayals of a Palestinian ‘masculinity crisis,’ including Emile
Habiby’s The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, trans. Salma Khadra Jayyusi
and Trevor Le Gassick (London: Arabia Books, 2010), a tragicomic novel about
a Palestinian citizen of Israel named Saeed who becomes a collaborator with the
Israelis, but whose incompetence sees him fail at every turn.
7. Samir El-Youssef, ‘The Day the Beast Got Thirsty,’ in Gaza Blues: Different Sto-
ries, Samir El-Youssef and Etgar Keret (London: David Paul, 2004), 111–173. All
subsequent references to this work will be cited as page references in brackets
directly after the quotation.
8. Elia Suleiman, dir., Divine Intervention (France/Morocco/Germany/Palestine,
2002).
9. Hany Abu-Assad, dir., Paradise Now (Palestine/France/Netherlands/Germany/
Israel, 2005).
10. See R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995) and Lynne
Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (London: Virago, 1990)
for examples of studies that ‘denaturalise’ and scrutinise patriarchal power.
184 Notes
11. See for example Roger Horrocks, Masculinity in Crisis (Basingstoke: Macmillan
Press, 1994) and Ronald F. Levant, ‘The Masculinity Crisis,’ The Journal of Men’s
Studies 5 (1997): 221–231.
12. See, for example, Evelyne Accad, Sexuality and War, particularly ‘Part Three:
War Unveils Men.’
13. See for example Ghoussoub and Sinclair-Webb, Imagined Masculinities, 8–9, and
Hisham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988), in which Sharabi argues that the emergence of
‘modernity’ in Arab nations has not led to a critique of patriarchy; rather, patriar-
chy has adapted to and renewed itself within the modern environment.
14. There are around 1.3 million Palestinian Israelis: 20% of Israel’s citizens.
Although their Israeli citizenship ostensibly grants them equal rights to Israelis,
they nevertheless face social discrimination and are overrepresented in unem-
ployment and poverty statistics. Amalia Sa’ar and Taghreed Yahia-Younis,
‘Masculinity in Crisis: The Case of Palestinians in Israel,’ British Journal of
Middle Eastern Studies 35, no. 3 (2008): 309.
15. Sa’ar and Yahia-Younis, ‘Masculinity in Crisis,’ 322.
16. Massad, ‘Conceiving the Masculine,’ 467–483.
17. Butler, Gender Trouble, xvi.
18. Butler, Gender Trouble, 178.
19. Butler, Gender Trouble, 178.
20. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of Interna-
tional Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 44.
21. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian National Identity: The Construction of Modern National
Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 6.
22. At various points in its history, Palestine had had to revise its understanding of
national identity—in response to the fall of the Ottoman Empire, for example,
and to the formation of the State of Israel. Pan-Arabism has also been a signifi -
cant regional influence. Palestine’s national origins are a source of much (often
polemical) debate, and so extensive is scholarship in this area that I do not wish
to deliver what would inevitably be a reductive account of it here. However, for
a considered discussion of ‘The Formation of Palestinian Identity: The Critical
Years, 1917–1923,’ see Khalidi, Palestinian National Identity, 145–175.
23. Massad, ‘Conceiving the Masculine,’ 478.
24. Various branches of Palestinian nationalism include Fateh, the Palestinian Lib-
eration Organization (PLO), Palestine National Front (PNF) and Democratic
Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), all of which have mounted dif-
ferent forms of action at varied points in the nation’s turbulent history. For
an introduction to Palestinian nationalism, see Helena Lindholm Schulz, The
Reconstruction of Palestinian Nationalism: Between Revolution and Statehood (Man-
chester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
25. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 16. See Chapter 1 for further discussion of the ‘imag-
ined community’ and its link to the postcolonial concept of the ‘nation as narration.’
26. Massad, ‘Conceiving the Masculine,’ 472. Significantly, this patriarchal basis to
national citizenship was revised in 2003 following pressure from the women’s
movement to include blood ties to both parents. Jad, ‘The Conundrums of Post-
Oslo Palestine,’ 153.
27. Massad, ‘Conceiving the Masculine,’ 472.
Notes 185
28. Massad, ‘Conceiving the Masculine,’ 472. Translation of the Charter is Mas-
sad’s, as is the emphasis in this quotation. Further discussion of the traditional
gendered symbolism of the nation appears in Chapter 1.
29. Massad, ‘Conceiving the Masculine,’ 479.
30. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 120.
31. Peteet, ‘Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance,’ 107.
32. Sharabi, Neopatriarchy, 35, 41.
33. Butler, Gender Trouble, 179.
34. According to the director of the Trauma Rehabilitation Centre in Ramallah,
approximately 40% of men in the Occupied Territories have been detained at
some point and 86% of those detained have been tortured. Michael Kennedy,
‘Prison Is for Men: Remembering Al-Fara’a,’ Surfacing 2, no. 1 (2009): 92.
35. Peteet, ‘Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance,’ 103.
36. Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns, trans. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Osman Nusairi and
Jana Gough (1976, in Arabic; London: Saqi, 2005), 116.
37. Khalifeh, Wild Thorns, 149.
38. Butler, Gender Trouble, 179.
39. For further discussion of this phenomenon, see Marouf Hasian Jr. and Lisa A.
Flores, ‘Children of the Stones: The Intifada and the Mythic Creation of the
Palestinian State,’ Southern Communication Journal 62, no. 2 (1997): 89–106.
40. Matthew Reisz, ‘Samir El-Youssef: At Home with the Heretic,’ The Indepen-
dent, 19 th January 2007, accessed 27th July 2010. http://www.independent.co.uk/
arts-entertainment/ books/features/samir-elYoussef-at-home-with-the-here-
tic-432650.html.
41. Reisz, ‘Samir El-Youssef,’ online.
42. Katherine Viner, ‘Despair As Usual for Palestinians,’ The Guardian, 7th Febru-
ary 2001, accessed 26th November 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/
Story/0,2763,434655,00.html. For further discussions of other creative works set
in or exploring life in Lebanese refugee camps for Palestinians, see the analy-
ses of Liana Badr’s novel A Compass for the Sunflower in Chapter 2, and of Mai
Masri’s fi lm Frontiers of Dreams and Fears in Chapter 5.
43. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 435.
44. Reisz, ‘Samir El-Youssef,’ online.
45. Samir El-Youssef, The Illusion of Return (London: Halban, 2007).
46. Mary Fitzgerald, ‘A Faraway Country,’ The New Statesman, 15 th January 2007,
accessed 20 th November 2009. http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2007/01/
return-palestinian-Youssef.
47. For example, the narrator of Keret’s short story ‘Missing Kissinger’ in Gaza
Blues expresses his hatred for his girlfriend in highly misogynistic sexual terms.
There are parallels between the disaffected male narrators of both Keret and
El-Youssef’s stories. See also Etgar Keret, The Nimrod Flipout (London: Vintage,
2006) and Missing Kissenger (London: Vintage, 2008).
48. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 412. As leader of the PLO, Arafat
was, by this stage, exercising control from a state of exile in Tunis, having been
expelled from his former seat in Beirut during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon
from 1981–1982, and support for him as leader was beginning to wane. Smith,
Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 379.
186 Notes
49. Laleh Khalili, ‘A Landscape of Uncertainty: Palestinians in Lebanon,’ Middle
East Report 236 (2005): 35.
50. Arafat did not defect; rather, the PLO absorbed factions such as Fatah into it,
leading to Arafat’s election as head of the PLO in 1969. Smith, Palestine and the
Arab-Israeli Conflict, 314.
51. Hajj Amin al-Hussainy is a controversial figure within the history of Palestinian
nationalism. He was appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British man-
date, and was a leading anti-British and anti-Zionist Arab nationalist, but many
of his strategies and actions have been criticised from various angles. See Philip
Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al-Hajj Amin Al-Husayni and the Palestinian National
Movement, revised edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
52. Horrocks, Masculinity in Crisis, 107.
53. Conditions of irrationality and insanity have traditionally been understood as
‘female’ conditions—a result, many have argued, of the patriarchal structures
that underpin discourses of psychology and medicine. See Elaine Showalter,
The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London:
Virago, 1987).
54. Elia Suleiman, dir., Chronicle of a Disappearance (Palestine/Israel/France/Ger-
many, 1997).
55. Hamid Dabashi, ‘In Praise of Frivolity: On the Cinema of Elia Suleiman,’ in
Dabashi, Dreams of a Nation, 146.
56. Elia Suleiman, ‘A Cinema of Nowhere,’ Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 2
(2000): 98; 97.
57. Dabashi, Dreams of a Nation, 8.
58. Elia Suleiman, dir., The Time that Remains (UK/Italy/Belgium/France, 2009).
59. Frances S. Hasso, Resistance, Repression, and Gender Politics in Occupied Palestine
and Jordan (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 18.
60. Peteet, ‘Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance,’ 107.
61. Penny Johnson and Eileen Kuttab, ‘Where Have All the Women (and Men)
Gone? Reflections on Gender and the Second Palestinian Intifada,’ Feminist
Review 69 (2001): 31.
62. Peteet, ‘Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance,’ 109.
63. Peteet, ‘Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance,’ 114–116.
64. See the discussions of Khleifi’s fi lm Fertile Memory in Chapter 1, and of Liana
Badr’s novel A Compass for a Sunflower in Chapter 2, for further examples of this
trait.
65. Patricia Price-Chalita, ‘Spatial Metaphor and the Politics of Empowerment:
Mapping a Place for Feminism and Postmodernism in Geography?,’ Antipode
26, no. 3 (1994): 247.
66. B. Ruby Rich, ‘Bomb Culture,’ Sight and Sound 16 (2006): 28.
67. Hany Abu-Assad, dir. Ford Transit (Palestine/Israel, 2002). Film release.
68. Hany Abu-Assad, dir. Rana’s Wedding (Palestine/Netherlands/UAE, 2002). Film
release. This fi lm was co-written by Liana Badr, one of the authors discussed in
Chapter 2.
69. Linda Pitcher, ‘“The Divine Impatience”: Ritual, Narrative, and Symbolization
in the Practice of Martyrdom in Palestine,’ Medical Anthropology Quarterly 12, no.
1 (1998): 9.
Notes 187
70. The fi lm received significant critical attention in both the West and Middle
East, and while it received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film in 2006
(the category from which Divine Intervention was excluded), it was also met with
hostility both within the U.S., where it was seen to humanise an ultimately inhu-
mane act, and in Palestine, where some lobbies felt it presented an unfavourable
view of an oversimplified national resistance. See Rich, ‘Bomb Culture,’ and
James Bowman, ‘Humanized without Honour,’ American Spectator 39 (2006):
58–59.
71. Eyad El Sarraj and Linda Butler, ‘Suicide Bombers: Dignity, Despair, and the
Need for Hope; An Interview with Eyad El Sarraj,’ Journal of Palestine Studies 31,
no. 4 (2002): 71.
72. Claudia Brunner, ‘Female Suicide Bombers—Male Suicide Bombing? Looking
for Gender in Reporting the Suicide Bombings of the Israeli-Palestinian Con-
fl ict,’ Global Society 19, no. 1 (2005): 29.
73. Hilal Khashan, ‘Collective Palestinian Frustration and Suicide Bombings,’ Third
World Quarterly 24, no. 6 (2003): 1052.
74. Robert Brym and Bader Araj, ‘Suicide Bombing as Strategy and Interaction:
The Case of the Second Intifada,’ Social Forces 84, no. 4 (2006): 1974.
75. Butler, Gender Trouble, xv.
76. Butler, Gender Trouble, 192.
77. Johnson and Kuttab, ‘Where Have All the Women (and Men) Gone?,’ 35.
78. Brunner, ‘Female Suicide Bombers,’ 46.
79. Mahmoud Darwish, ‘A State of Siege,’ in The Butterfly’s Burden, trans. Fady
Joudah, bilingual edition (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2007), 123.
80. Darwish, ‘A State of Siege,’ 163. Note that the term ‘martyr’ is replaced with
‘victim’ in alternative translations of this poem.
81. Suleiman, ‘A Cinema of Nowhere,’ 97.
82. bell hooks, ‘Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,’ in The Femi-
nist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. Sandra G.
Harding (New York: Routledge, 2004), 159.
Notes to Chapter 4
1. Jane Marcus, ‘Alibis and Legends: The Ethics of Elsewhereness, Gender and
Estrangement,’ in Women’s Writing in Exile, ed. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela
Ingram (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 273.
2. Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson, eds., Border Theory: The Limits of Cul-
tural Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 2–3.
3. Michaelsen and Johnson, Border Theory, 2–3. According to the authors, ‘border-
theory’ can be identified as a development within ‘liberal-to-left’ work within
the humanities and social sciences that began with developments in ‘Chicano’
writing and theory concerning the U.S.-Mexico border. Other critics, mean-
while, posit the development of border-theory as a product of ‘postmodernism’s
introduction into geography in the late 1980s,’ which led scholars across the dis-
ciplines to reflect on ‘the textual character of space.’ Keith Woodward and John
Paul Jones III, ‘On the Border with Deleuze and Guattari,’ in B/Ordering Space,
188 Notes
ed. Henk Van Houtum, Olivier Kramsch and Wolfgang Ziethofer (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2005), 235.
4. See the introduction to this book for further discussion of Palestine’s shifting
status under various authorities.
5. Tawfiq Zayyad, ‘What Next?,’ trans. Sharif Elmusa and Jack Collom in Jayyusi,
Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, 330.
6. Robert C. Cottrell, The Green Line: The Division of Palestine (Philadelphia: Chel-
sea House Publishers, 2005), 28, 44–45.
7. Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation-State, 3.
8. Cottrell, The Green Line, 115.
9. Newman, ‘From National to Post-national Territorial Identities in Israel-Pales-
tine,’ 238.
10. Suleiman, ‘A Cinema of Nowhere,’ 96.
11. Khalidi, Palestinian National Identity, 1.
12. Khalidi, Palestinian National Identity, 3.
13. Weizman, Hollow Land.
14. See Mehdi Hasan, ‘No End to the Strangulation of Gaza,’ New Statesman, 3rd
January 2011, 29 for an account of the enduring impact of the blockade on
Gaza.
15. A.H. Sa’di, ‘The Borders of Colonial Encounter: The Case of Israel’s Wall,’
Asian Journal of Social Science 38 (2010): 55.
16. Jad, ‘The Conundrums of Post-Oslo Palestine,’ 150.
17. Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs),’ 1923/1937, cited in
Sa’di, ‘The Borders of Colonial Encounter,’ 47.
18. Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (New York: Routledge,
2002), 198.
19. See, for example, Ghassan Kanafani’s novella, Men in the Sun, which casts the
frontier or border-crossing as the site at which the Palestinians’ powerlessness
comes into sharpest focus. Joe Cleary discusses the politics of borders in this
novella in some detail in Literature, Partition and the Nation State.
20. For further discussion of the visual status and representation of borders in the
Palestinian imagination, see Anna Ball, ‘Impossible Intimacies: Towards a Poli-
tics of “Touch” at the Israeli-Palestinian Border,’ Cultural Research 16, nos. 2–3
(2012): 175–195.
21. Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi, ‘Palestinian “Roadblock Movies”,’ Geopolitics
10 (2005): 320. Examples include fi lms ranging from Rana’s Wedding, dir. Hany
Abu-Assad (Palestine, 2002), a fi lm about a young woman determined to marry
her lover whose marriage eventually takes place at the border due to restrictions
on their travel, to Rashid Mashrawi’s Ticket to Jerusalem (Netherlands/Palestine/
France/Australia, 2002), which tells the story of a fi lm projectionist who travels
among Palestinian refugee camps to screen fi lms for children. He encounters
severe restrictions on travel (and also, by implication of his profession, on cre-
ativity, self-expression and imagination) in the form of checkpoints, permit sys-
tems and the presence of the occupation.
22. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001), 31.
23. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 31.
Notes 189
24. Jo Glanville, ed., Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women (London: Telegram,
2006). All subsequent page references to this text will be cited in brackets,
directly after the quotation within the body of the text.
25. Tawfi k Abu Wael, dir., ‘Atash (Palestine/Israel, 2004).
26. Annemarie Jacir, dir., like twenty impossibles (Palestine, 2003).
27. Weizman, Hollow Land, 143.
28. Weizman, Hollow Land, 146.
29. Azmi Bishari, quoted in Weizman, Hollow Land, 147–148.
30. Michiel Baud and Willem Van Schendel, ‘Towards a Comparative History of
the Borderlands,’ Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (1997): 211.
31. Yuval-Davis and Stoetzler, ‘Imagined Boundaries and Borders,’ 329.
32. John Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1982), 6, 242.
33. Shirley Ardener, ‘Ground Rules and Social Maps: An Introduction,’ in Women
and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 5.
34. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco:
Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 60.
35. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 100–101.
36. For a discussion of the female border-crossers who appear in Suleiman’s fi lms,
and of the confl icted gender politics that accompany them, see Anna Ball,
‘Between a Postcolonial Nation and Fantasies of the Feminine: The Contested
Visions of Palestinian Cinema,’ Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media
Studies 23, no. 3 (2008): 1–35.
37. Homi Bhabha, ‘Double Visions,’ Artforum 30, no. 5 (1992): 88.
38. Weizman, Hollow Land, 151.
39. Daniel Monterescu, ‘Masculinity as a Relational Mode: Palestinian Gender
Ideologies and Working-Class Boundaries in an Ethnically Mixed Town,’
in Reapproaching Borders: New Perspectives on the Study of Israel-Palestine, ed.
Sandy Sufi an and Mark LeVine (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publish-
ers, 2007), 191.
40. For a discussion of the emergence of the figure of the female ‘martyr’ or ‘suicide
bomber,’ see Brunner, ‘Female Suicide Bombers.’
41. Edward Said, ‘Reflections on Exile,’ in Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and
Cultural Essays (London: Granta, 2000), 184–186.
42. See Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women for further discussion of this, particularly in
the context of Egypt.
43. Said, ‘Reflections on Exile,’ 186.
44. See, for example, Samira Haj, ‘Palestinian Women and Patriarchal Relations,’
Signs 17, no. 4 (1992), in which Haj writes that ‘some debates that have so occu-
pied Western feminism [ . . . ] for example, the family as the principal site
of women’s oppression—have no resonance among women whose families and
communities are under assault by an occupying power,’ 778. While it is impor-
tant to note that gender is a socially nuanced construct and that forms of power
and solidarity may in fact be carved out between women within an extended
family, the perspective that emerges in this short story is at odds with such an
idea, and represents an important assertion of individualism. See Chapter 2 for
further analysis of work by Liana Badr.
190 Notes
45. See Sean D. Murphy, ‘Self-Defence and the Israeli Wall Advisory Opinion: An
Ipse Dixit from the ICJ?,’ The American Journal of International Law 99, no. 1 (2005):
62–76 for a discussion of the International Court of Justice’s rejection in 2004 of
Israel’s legal claims that the Wall was justified on the grounds of self-defence.
46. Laleh Khalili, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemora-
tion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 37.
47. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffi n, The Empire Writes Back: The-
ory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures, second edition (London: Routledge,
2003), 40.
48. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation,’ 148.
49. Peter Lagerquist, ‘Fencing the Last Sky: Excavating Palestine after Israel’s “Sep-
aration Wall”,’ Journal of Palestine Studies 33, no. 2 (2004): 30.
50. Kamal Abdel-Malek, ‘Living on Borderlines: War and Exile in Selected Works
by Ghassan Kanafani, Fawaz Turki, and Mahmud Darwish,’ in Israeli and Pal-
estinian Identities in History and Literature, ed. Kamal Abdel-Malek and David C.
Jacobson (London: Macmillan, 1999), 179–193.
51. The term ‘liminal’ is defi ned as ‘of or pertaining to the threshold (“limen”) or
initial stage in a process,’ or in psychological terms, as the point of defi nition
or deviation from a standard. Like the border, it is therefore a simultaneously
spatial and psychological construct. J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, Oxford
English Dictionary, volume 8, second edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),
964. The idea of the ‘liminal’ has been extensively evoked in critical theory as
the place where a boundary is crossed and the normal regulations on identity,
society and thought are relaxed. See Victor Turner, ‘Betwixt and Between: The
Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,’ in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu
Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 93–111.
52. ‘Becoming’ implies constant process, as opposed to the static nature of sim-
ply ‘being.’ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 2004), 270. See Plateau 10, ‘Becoming-
Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible’ for a fuller explanation of
‘becoming’ as oppose to simply ‘being,’ A Thousand Plateaus, 256–341.
53. Said, After the Last Sky, 155.
54. Gertz and Khleifi, ‘Palestinian “Roadblock Movies”,’ 320.
55. Said, After the Last Sky, 6.
56. Baud and Van Schendel, ‘A Comparative History of the Borderlands,’ 216.
57. Bhabha, Location, 25.
58. D. Emily Hicks, Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1991), xxiv.
59. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dora
Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 13.
60. Abu Wael was born in the Palestinian town (situated in Israel) of Umm el-Fahim
in 1976 and graduated in fi lm studies from Tel Aviv University in 1996. He now
lives in Tel Aviv. Other fi lms include Waiting for Salah Addin (Palestine, 2001),
a documentary depicting the everyday life of eight residents of East Jerusalem.
See Gertz and Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema, 197.
61. This interplay between the personal and political is also evident in Abu Wael’s
short fi lm Diary of a Male Whore (Palestine, 2001), which depicts a young man
named Esam, whose physical exploitation bears symbolic parallels to the
Notes 191
everyday humiliations, forms of domination and violations that he must endure
as a Palestinian.
62. See Swedenburg, ‘The Palestinian Peasant as National Signifier,’ 18–30.
63. Parmenter, Giving Voice to Stones, 53.
64. Parmenter, Giving Voice to Stones, 53, 67–68.
65. See Jan Selby, Water, Power and Politics in the Middle East: The Other Israel-Pales-
tine Conflict (London: I.B.Tauris, 2004).
66. Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, 31.
67. See Chapter 2 for further discussion of the honour/shame discourse that is often
portrayed as a feature of Palestinian familial and social relations.
68. Monterescu, ‘Masculinity as a Relational Mode,’ 191.
69. Hicks, Border Writing, xxiii.
70. My use of the term ‘queer’ here refers to its manifestation in the field of ‘queer
theory’ that has evolved in gender studies, where its archaic usage as a deroga-
tory term for homosexuality is subverted by returning to its original meaning as
something that incites instability or strangeness. Hence ‘queer theory’ describes
a deconstructivist approach to gendered, sexual and indeed all forms of identity
as it seeks to ‘estrange’ identities from secure or essentialist boundaries. Both
Judith Butler (examined in Chapter 3) and Gloria Anzaldúa (examined in this
chapter) are often defi ned as ‘queer theorists.’ For a basic introduction to queer
theory, see Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2003).
71. Many of Zayyad’s songs have been put to music and are popular songs in Pales-
tine. Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, 65.
72. Tawfiq Zayyad, ‘Here We Shall Stay,’ in Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian
Literature, 328.
73. Jacir’s Salt of This Sea (Palestine, 2008) tells the story of a young woman (played
by Suheir Hammad) born to Palestinian refugees in Brooklyn who longs to
return to the West Bank—where she meets a young man who longs to emigrate.
Rather than offering a straightforwardly romanticised vision of ‘return,’ how-
ever, the fi lm explores the complexities of the search for belonging and identity
for Palestinians both within and beyond Palestine.
74. Michel de Certeau, ‘Walking in the City,’ in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans.
Steven Rendall (Berkley: University of California Press, 1988), 96.
75. Janet Wolff, ‘On the Road Again: Metaphors of Travel in Cultural Criticism,’
Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (May 1993): 253.
76. Hicks, Border Writing, xxiv–xxv.
77. Hicks, Border Writing, xxiii.
78. Jacir, ‘“For Cultural Purposes Only”,’ 26.
79. Suleiman, ‘A Cinema of Nowhere,’ 96.
80. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 95.
81. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 31.
82. Ian McLean, ‘Back to the Future: Nations, Borders and Cultural Theory,’ Third
Text 57 (2001–2002): 27.
83. Kathleen M. Kirby, Indifferent Boundaries: Spatial Concepts of Human Subjectivity
(London and New York: Guilford press, 1996), 119.
84. Spivak employs the term ‘strategic essentialism’ to describe the process
whereby subjects may fi nd it necessary to adopt particular essentialist stances
192 Notes
in response to specific political challenges, while retaining multiple other
subject-positions at the same time. See Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean,
eds., The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London:
Routledge, 1996), 214.
Notes to Chapter 5
1. Oxford English Dictionary Online, ‘diaspora, n.,’ June 2011, accessed 13th August
2011. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/52085?redirectedFrom=diaspora.
2. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, ‘Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points
of Contention in Diaspora Studies,’ in Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, ed. Jana
Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 1.
3. Masalha, The Politics of Denial, 26. There are, of course, competing accounts
of the policies that underpinned this mass exodus of Palestinians. For alter-
native accounts, see Anita Shapira, Land and Power (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1992) or ‘new Israeli historian’ Benny Morris, The Birth of the
Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988).
4. It is important to note that figures for refugee populations vary and are prob-
lematic because they require refugees to be registered with organisations such
as UNRWA. Figures cited in Schulz and Hammer, The Palestinian Diaspora, 45.
5. Sari Hanafi, ‘Opening the Debate on the Right of Return,’ Middle East Report
222 (2002): 2–7.
6. Muhammad Siddiq, ‘On Ropes of Memory: Narrating the Palestinian Refu-
gees,’ in Mistrusting Refugees, ed. E. Valentine Daniel and John Chr. Knudsen
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 87.
7. James Clifford, ‘Diasporas,’ Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 306.
8. Edward Said, After the Last Sky, 115.
9. Schultz and Hammer, The Palestinian Diaspora, 20.
10. These defi nitions of ghurba and manfa are both outlined in more extensive detail
in Juliane Hammer’s publication, Palestinians Born in Exile: Diaspora and the
Search for a Homeland (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 60.
11. Kathleen M. Kirby, ‘Re-mapping Subjectivity: Cartographic Vision and the
Limits of Politics,’ in Body/Space: Destabilising Geographies of Gender and Sexuality,
ed. Nancy Duncan (London: Routledge, 1996), 51.
12. Masao Miyoshi, ‘A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism
and the Decline of the Nation-State,’ Critical Enquiry 19 (1993): 726–751. Wilson
and Dissanayak among others argue that technology, travel and communication
have delimited space and subjectivity. See Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayak,
eds., Global/Local (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
13. See Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contem-
porary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 5.
14. ‘Abdallah Radwan, ‘Deformed,’ in Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian Lit-
erature, 263.
15. Fawaz Turki, Soul in Exile: Lives of a Palestinian Revolutionary (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1988), 26.
Notes 193
16. Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, ‘Introduction,’ in Displacement, Diaspora,
and Geographies of Identity, ed. Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1996), 12.
17. Edward Said, ‘The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile,’ Harper’s (Sep-
tember 1985): 55.
18. Said, ‘The Mind of Winter,’ 52.
19. Said, ‘The Mind of Winter,’ 55.
20. Said, ‘The Mind of Winter,’ 54.
21. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ‘Palestinian Identity in Literature,’ in Abdel-Malek and
Jacobson, Israeli and Palestinian Identities in History and Literature, 175.
22. Eva C. Karpinski, ‘Choosing Feminism, Choosing Exile: Towards the Develop-
ment of a Transnational Feminist Consciousness,’ in Émigré Feminism: Transna-
tional Perspectives, ed. Alena Heitlinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1999), 21.
23. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt Inc., 1938), 109.
24. Julia Kristeva, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1986), 298.
25. Karpinski, ‘Choosing Feminism, Choosing Exile,’ 7.
26. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and
Transnational Feminist Practices (St Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1994),
94.
27. See Maha El Said, ‘The Face of the Enemy: Arab-American Poetry Post-9/11,’
Studies in the Humanities 30, nos. 1–2 (2003): 200–217.
28. Mai Masri, dir., Frontiers of Dreams and Fears (2001; Seattle: Arab Film Distribu-
tion, 2009). DVD.
29. Mona Hatoum, dir., Measures of Distance (Vancouver: A West Front Video Pro-
duction, 1988). Video recording.
30. Rebecca Hillauer, ‘Mai Masri,’ in Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers, trans.
Allison Brown, Deborah Cohen and Nancy Joyce (Cairo: The American Uni-
versity in Cairo Press, 2005), 223–227.
31. Rebecca Hillauer, ‘Mona Hatoum,’ in Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers,
212–214.
32. See Bayan Nuwayhed Al-Hout, Sabra and Shatila: September 1982 (London:
Pluto, 2004) for a detailed discussion of the massacres.
33. I concur with the view of Schultz and Hammer here, who write that even those
Palestinians living within the Occupied Territories can be considered ‘diasporic’
Palestinians as they have been alienated from their land, and denied citizenship
and statehood, which has ‘implications for feelings of meaningful belonging.’
Schultz and Hammer, The Palestinian Diaspora, 73.
34. Another fi lm portraying the feminocentric nature of community within a Pal-
estinian refugee camp is Dahna Abourahme’s documentary The Kingdom of
Women (Lebanon, 2010), which depicts the women of the Ein El Hilweh refugee
camp in South Lebanon, who showed remarkable independence and resilience
when all of the men in the community were imprisoned and the women man-
aged to construct a town from scratch.
35. Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1995), 86–87.
194 Notes
36. Sara Ahmed, ‘Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement,’
International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, no. 3 (1999): 340.
37. Schultz and Hammer, The Palestinian Diaspora, 181.
38. An exciting body of work on the significance of Internet communication to
Palestinians within and beyond the Palestinian Territories is starting to emerge.
See Miriyam Aouragh, Palestine Online: Transnationalism, the Internet and the Con-
struction of Identity (London: I.B.Tauris, 2011) for a contribution to this debate.
39. Ahmed, ‘Home and Away,’ 343.
40. The withdrawal of Israeli troops from South Lebanon took place in May 2000,
after more than twenty years of confl ict. See Sune Haugbolle, War and Memory
in Lebanon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) for insight into the
ways in which this and other confl icts have been processed by various commu-
nities within Lebanon.
41. Jackie Stacey and Sara Ahmed, ‘Introduction: Dermographies,’ in Thinking
through the Skin, ed. Jackie Stacey and Sara Ahmed (London: Routledge, 2001),
1.
42. Sara Ahmed, ‘Intimate Touches: Proximity and Distance in International Femi-
nist Dialogues,’ Oxford Literary Review 19 (1997): 28.
43. Ahmed, ‘Home and Away,’ 337.
44. Moore, Arab, Muslim, Woman, 145.
45. Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the
Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 188.
46. While jouissance is essentially phallic for Lacan, he writes that there is a ‘jouis-
sance of the Other’ that is essentially feminine and ‘beyond the phallus.’ Jacques
Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX. Encore, 1972–73, ed. Jacques-
Allain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (1975; New York: W.W. Norton and Company,
1999), 74.
47. Verónica Schild, ‘Transnational Links in the Making of Latin American Femi-
nisms: A View from the Margins,’ in Émigré Feminisms: Transnational Perspectives,
ed. Alena Heitlinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 71.
48. Irene Gedalof, ‘Taking (a) Place: Female Embodiment and the Re-grounding
of Community,’ in Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration,
ed. Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller
(Oxford: Berg, 2003), 95.
49. Gedalof, ‘Taking (a) Place,’ 92.
50. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington:
Indiana, 1994), 124.
51. Nye’s awards include the National Poetry Series selection and Pushcart Prize,
and fellowships include Lannan, Guggenheim and Witter Bynner fellowships,
while other publications not discussed extensively in this chapter include Never
in a Hurry: Essays on People and Places (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1996) and the edited poetry collection The Flag of Childhood: Poems from
the Middle East (New York: Aladdin Paperbacks, 2002).
52. See Kate Long, ‘Roots: On Language and Heritage. A Conversation with Naomi
Shihab Nye,’ World Literature Today (November–December 2009): 31–34.
53. Sharif S. Elmusa, ‘Vital Attitude of the Poet: Interview with Naomi Shihab Nye,’
Alif 27 (2007): 107.
Notes 195
54. Poetry slams have emerged as a prominent part of the performance poetry scene in
the U.S. They are typically competitions where poets read, recite or perform their
work. Hammad does not generally perform her work in competitive contexts, but
the style of her performance is certainly influenced by the sense of energy, spontane-
ity and connection with the audience that characterises slam poetry.
55. Suheir Hammad, ‘fi rst writing since,’ in ZaatarDiva (New York: Cypher, 2005),
98–102.
56. Suheir Hammad, Born Palestinian, Born Black & the Gaza Suite (1996; New York:
UpSet Press, 2010).
57. Suheir Hammad, Drops of This Story (New York: Harlem River Press, 1996).
58. See Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman, ‘Interview with Suheir Hammad,’ MELUS
31, no. 4 (2006): 71. For further discussion of both Nye’s and Hammad’s work
within the context of Arab American cultural expression, see Layla Al Maleh,
‘From Romantic Mystics to Hyphenated Ethics: Arab-American Writers Nego-
tiating/Shifting Identities,’ in Arab Voices in Diaspora: Critical Perspectives on Anglo-
phone Arab Literature, ed. Layla Al Maleh (New York: Rodopi, 2009), 424–448.
59. These lines are cited by Suheir Hammad in the author’s preface (1996) to Born
Palestinian, Born Black, 11.
60. Knopf-Newman, ‘Interview with Suheir Hammad,’ 77.
61. See Keith Feldman, ‘The (Il)Legible Arab Body and the Fantasy of National
Democracy,’ MELUS 31, no. 4 (2006): 33–53, for further discussion of the way in
which Arab American communities may seek ‘racial visibility’ in order to assert
political agency.
62. Kathleen Christison, The Wound of Dispossession: Telling the Palestinian Story
(Santa Fe: Sunlit Hills Press, 2002), 74.
63. Naomi Shihab Nye, ‘Jerusalem,’ in Tender Spot: Selected Poems (Tarset: Bloodaxe,
2008), 120.
64. Long, ‘Roots: On Language and Heritage,’ 32.
65. Naomi Shihab Nye, ‘Brushing Lives,’ in Red Suitcase (New York: BOA Editions,
1994), 91.
66. Naomi Shihab Nye, ‘My Father and the Fig Tree,’ in Tender Spot, 102.
67. Knopf-Newman, ‘Interview with Suheir Hammad,’ 78–79. Indeed, it is interest-
ing to note the potential overlap between the oral emphasis of poetry slams and
musical influences on Hammad’s work, with the oral tradition of improvised-
sung poetry (al-sicr al-murtajal) in Palestinian culture, which is often sung at wed-
dings and other celebrations, and also includes an element of debate between
singers and interaction with the audience. See Dirgham H. Sbait, ‘Debate in
the Improvised-Sung Poetry of the Palestinians,’ Asian Folklore Studies 52, no. 1
(1993): 93–117.
68. Suheir Hammad, ‘daddy’s song,’ in ZaatarDiva, 29.
69. Hammad, ‘mama sweet baklava,’ ZaatarDiva, 36–37.
70. See Michelle Hartman, ‘“this sweet / sweet music”: Jazz, Sam Cooke, and Read-
ing Arab American Literary Identities,’ MELUS 31, no. 4 (2006): 145–165 for
further discussion of the influence of jazz in Hammad’s work.
71. Naomi Shihab Nye, ‘My Grandmother in the Stars,’ in Red Suitcase, 41.
72. Naomi Shihab Nye, ‘The Words under the Words,’ in 19 Varieties of Gazelle,
14–15.
196 Notes
73. Naomi Shihab Nye, ‘Voices,’ in Red Suitcase, 28.
74. Mohanty, ‘Introduction: Cartographies of Struggle,’ 4.
75. Suheir Hammad, ‘rice haikus,’ in Nye, The Flag of Childhood, 62.
76. Suheir Hammad, ‘blood stitched time,’ in Born Palestinian, Born Black, 24.
77. Suheir Hammad, ‘What I Will,’ 60.
78. See Carol A. Stabile and Deepa Kumar, ‘Unveiling Imperialism: Media, Gen-
der and the War on Afghanistan,’ Media, Culture and Society 27, no. 5 (2005):
765–782 for further discussion of this gendered dynamic.
79. Shohat, ‘Gender and Culture of Empire,’ 63.
80. Said, ‘The Mind of Winter,’ 49–50.
81. Naomi Shihab Nye, ‘He Said EYE-RACK,’ in Tender Spot, 142.
82. Samina Najmi, ‘Naomi Shihab Nye’s Aesthetic of Smallness and the Military
Sublime,’ MELUS 35, no. 2 (2010): 162.
83. Naomi Shihab Nye, ‘For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15,’ in Tender Spot,
138.
84. Naomi Shihab Nye, ‘Parents of Murdered Palestinian Boy Donate His Organs
to Israelis,’ in Tender Spot, 156.
85. Suheir Hammad, ‘of woman torn,’ in ZaatarDiva, 75–76.
86. Hammad, ‘of woman torn,’ 76. It is significant to note, however, that other of
Hammad’s poems are equally critical of the gender structures she observes in
parts of ‘Western’ culture. Poems such as ‘delicious’ and ‘exotic,’ for example,
critique the ‘Orientalist,’ sexualising gaze of white American men, while ‘yo
baby yo’ critiques the machismo posturing of young African American men in
Brooklyn. All poems in Born Palestinian, Born Black.
87. Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 2–7.
88. The term ‘speaking truth to power’ expresses Said’s belief in the critic’s function
as a voice of opposition who must strive for truth and justice through their writ-
ing. The term appears as the title of an essay: Edward Said, ‘Speaking Truth to
Power,’ in Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1996), 85–102.
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Postcolonial Feminist Theory, 622–625.
90. Brah, ‘Diaspora, Border and Transnational Identities,’ 632.
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93. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Expe-
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94. Suheir Hammad, ‘some of by best friends,’ in ZaatarDiva, 89.
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Abourahme, Dahna, dir. The Kingdom of Women. Lebanon, 2010. Film release.
Abu-Assad, Hany, dir. Ford Transit. Palestine / Israel, 2002. Film release.
Abu-Assad, Hany, dir. Paradise Now. Palestine / France / Netherlands / Germany /
Israel, 2005. Film release.
Abu-Assad, Hany, dir. Rana’s Wedding. Palestine / Netherlands / UAE, 2002. Film
release.
Abu Wael, Tawfi k, dir. ‘Atash. Palestine / Israel, 2004. Film release.
Abu Wael, Tawfi k, dir. Diary of a Male Whore. Palestine, 2001. Film release.
Abu Wael, Tawfi k, dir. Waiting for Salah Addin. Palestine, 2001. Film release.
Arasoughly, Alia, dir. This Is Not Living. Palestine, 2001. Film release.
Badr, Liana, dir. Fadwa: A Tale of a Poetess. Palestine, 1999. Film release.
Badr, Liana, dir. Zeitounat. Palestine, 2000. Film release.
Badrakhan, Ahmed, dir. Dananeer. Egypt, 1940. Film release.
Elias, Hanna, dir. The Olive Harvest. Palestine, 2004. Film release.
Hatoum, Mona, dir. Measures of Distance. Vancouver: A West Front Video Produc-
tion, 1988. Video recording.
Jacir, Annemarie, dir. like twenty impossibles. Palestine, 2003. Film release.
Jacir, Annemarie, dir. Salt of This Sea. Palestine, 2008. Film release.
Khleifi, Michel, dir. Fertile Memory. Palestine / Netherlands / Belgium, 1980. Film
release.
Khleifi, Michel, dir. Wedding in Galilee. Palestine / Belgium / France, 1987. Film release.
Khleifi, Michel, dir. Zindeeq. Palestine / UK / Belgium / UAE, 2009. Film release.
Khoury, Buthina Canaan, dir. Women in Struggle. New York: Women Make Movies,
2004. DVD.
Mashrawi, Rashid, dir. Ticket to Jerusalem. Netherlands / Palestine / France / Austra-
lia, 2002. Film release.
Masri, Mai, dir. Frontiers of Dreams and Fears. 2001; Seattle: Arab Film Distribution,
2009. DVD.
Najjar, Najwa, dir. Pomegranates and Myrrh. Palestine, 2008. Film release.
Nasser-Eldin, Mahasen, dir. Samia. Palestine, 2009. Film release.
Suleiman, Elia, dir. Chronicle of a Disappearance. Palestine / Israel / France / Germany,
1997. Film release.
Suleiman, Elia, dir. Divine Intervention. France / Morocco / Germany / Palestine,
2002. Film release.
Suleiman, Elia, dir. The Time that Remains. UK / Italy / Belgium / France, 2009. Film
release.
Wood, Sarah, dir. For Cultural Purposes Only. London: Animate Projects, 2009. http://
www.animateprojects.org/fi lms/by_date/2009/for_cultural. Short fi lm. Accessed
16th May 2012.
Index