BALL Anna Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective

PALESTINIAN
LITERATURE AND FILM

IN POSTCOLONIAL
FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE
ANNA BALL
Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures

Palestinian Literature and Film in
Postcolonial Feminist Perspective
ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH IN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES
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
by specialists in the field. Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in previ-
ously (or presently) colonized areas, and will include material from non-anglophone as well as
anglophone colonies and literatures. Series editors: Donna Landry and Caroline Rooney.
1. Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye by Brenda Cooper
2. The Postcolonial Jane Austen edited by You-Me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
3. Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style by Denisede Caires Narain
4. African Literature, Animism and Politics by Caroline Rooney
5. Caribbean–English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition by Tobias Döring
6. Islands in History and Representation edited by Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith
7. Civility and Empire: Literature and Culture in British India, 1822–1922 by Anindyo Roy
8. Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939: ‘A Hot Place, Belonging To Us’ by Evelyn O’Callaghan
9. Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the body by Michelle Keown
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11. Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence by Priyamvada
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18. English Writing and India, 1600–1920: Colonizing Aesthetics by Pramod K. Nayar
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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
32. Publishing the Postcolonial: Anglophone West African and Caribbean Writing in the UK 1948–
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33. Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and Environment by Anthony Carrigan
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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
NEW YORK AND LONDON

First published 2012
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ball, Anna.
Palestinian literature and film in postcolonial feminist perspective / by Anna Ball.
p. cm. — (Routledge research in postcolonial literatures ; 42)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Arabic literature—Palestine—History and criticism. 2. Arabic literature—20th century—
History and criticism. 3. Feminism and literature—Arab countries. 4. Postcolonialism in
literature. 5. Motion pictures—Palestine. I. Title.
PJ8190.P3B35 2012
892.7'0989274—dc23
2012010858
ISBN: 978-0-415-88862-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-09866-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Baskerville by IBT Global.

To my parents, who showed me the many freedoms
that can be found through the creative imagination—
and to the authors and filmmakers of Palestine, who
continue to seek their own freedoms through their creativity
Contents
List of Figures xi
Note on Transliteration xiii
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction: Permission to Re-narrate 1
1 En-gendering Palestine:
Narratives of Desire and Dis-Orientation 18
2 Women Writing Resistance:

Between Nationalism and Feminism 46
3 Masculinity in Crisis:
From Patriarchy to (Post)Colonial Performativity 72
4 Bodies Beyond Boundaries?

Transitional Spaces and Liminal Selves 101
5 Imagining the Transnational Feminist Community 131
Conclusion: Postcolonial Feminist Futures 157
Notes 165
Bibliography 199
Filmography 217
Index 219
Figures
1.1 Sumaya, the mukhtar’s daughter: a powerful figure of

alternative female desires. 40
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. 42
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. 88
3.2 Khaled (left) and Said (right), figures of a close and genuine
‘fraternal’ friendship. 92
3.3 A haunting presence: Said’s mother senses her son, already

lost to the subterranean world of self-destruction. 96
4.1 Map of the West Bank Wall, 2006. 104
4.2 Abu Shukri and his son lay an illegal water pipe that will
enable them to settle in the barren borderland. 119
4.3 An image of freedom, mobility and connection: an

outstretched hand caresses the breeze at the start of the fi lm
crew’s journey. 124
5.1 Palimpsestic layers of image, text and voice create

a portrait of mother-daughter intimacy that
transcends diasporic distance. 139
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
‘Answer, if you hear the words under the words–

otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges,
difficult to get through, and our pockets
full of stones.’
—Naomi Shihab Nye, ‘The Words under the Words’1
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
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.
Connections and Disjunctions (1):

Palestine and the Postcolonial
For all of the connections between the Palestinian narrative and the ethos
of postcolonial studies, it remains the case that—with the exception of a
handful of scholars including Edward Said, Ella Shohat, Joseph Massad,
Smadar Lavie, Patrick Williams and Anna Bernard—Palestine remains
largely ‘off-limits’ in the realm of the postcolonial. Is this, as Williams sug-
gests, ‘a triumph of the Israeli propaganda machine’, or might there be
other reasons for this puzzling silence on what Williams describes as ‘the
worst example of colonialism in the modern world’?11 This silence, it seems,
is not simply a product of the suppression of the Palestinian narrative, but
of the contested nature of the terms ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ when it
comes to speaking of Palestine.
While Palestinian scholars have long advocated the colonial paradigm as
a means to understand their relationship to Israel,12 it is only recently that
this concept has received acknowledgement in other arenas—including, for
example, among Israeli ‘new historians’ such as Gershon Shafi r and Ilan
Pappé.13 According to the colonial paradigm, Palestine can be understood as
the victim of colonisation at a number of moments in its history, but while it
was the object of conquest by empires ranging from the Persian to the Greek,
and from the Roman to the Ottoman in eras past,14 its modern colonial con-
dition can be said to begin with the establishment of the British mandate for
Palestine in 1922 (the culmination of several years of British presence in the
region), which followed the fall of the Ottoman Empire to European powers
at the end of the First World War, and its subsequent partition into territories
administered by Britain and France. During its political and administra-
tive control of the region, Britain ceded to growing Zionist pressure and
established plans for a ‘Jewish national home’ within Palestine, overriding
the promises it had made to the Arab population for an independent Arab
state.15 These plans were put into action via a process of partition approved
by the UN in 1947, which sought to divide mandated Palestine into separate
Israeli and Palestinian states—a move against which Palestinian Arabs fought
but ultimately lost. With the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, Zion-
ism, the Jewish political movement that underpinned the foundation of the
State of Israel, can be interpreted as a new form of colonialism that replaced
the British mandate. As several critics have been keen to point out, not only
did Zionist ideology appear to be heavily influenced by models of European
colonialism,16 but the Zionist establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine
also bore a striking resemblance to the ‘settler colonies’ founded in North and
South America, Australia, South Africa and on the Indian subcontinent,17
Introduction 5
which aimed to exploit the land of the colonised population and ultimately to
erase (or enforce apartheid upon) the native population.18 Israel subsequently
occupied the remaining territories of Palestine that it did not seize in 1948
during the Six-Day War or Naksa (the ‘setback’) of 1967, and this occupation
can be understood as colonial in nature not only due to its stringent adminis-
trative control of the population and appropriation of resources within these
territories,19 but also due to the fact that Israel continues to receive heavy
fi nancial and political support from the U.S. government, locating it as one
of several territories within the Middle East subject to what critics such as
Rashid Khalidi and Derek Gregory view as a manifestation of contempo-
rary Western imperialism in what they term the ‘colonial present’.20 Con-
sequently, the colonial paradigm reveals Palestine as subject to intersecting
colonial processes at the hands of the British, Zionist and North American
political powers. Indeed, as Massad notes, ‘to call it Palestine [not Israel, or
the Palestinian/Occupied/Disputed Territories] is to refer to it as a colonized
space in both the pre-1948 and post-1948 periods and to signal its continued
appellation as such for a postcolonial period still to come’.21
Yet this thesis has been hotly contested from a number of angles, particu-
larly by Israeli scholars who have tended to treat the description of Zionism
as a form of ‘colonialism’ as strictly taboo. Certainly, it is necessary to rec-
ognise that Israeli colonialism bears many ‘peculiarities’. 22 Crucially, as Ella
Shohat puts it, ‘unlike colonialism, Zionism . . . constituted a response to
millennial oppression’23 and emerged as the result of a stateless people’s vic-
timisation, not of another nation’s desire for territorial expansion; hence its
description among some Israeli critics as ‘colonization without colonialism’,
which emphasises the process of territorial settlement over other colonial
concerns such as exploitation or dominance of the native peoples. 24 Indeed,
this backdrop of ‘millennial oppression’ seems to distinguish Zionism from
other forms of colonialism in the minds of many scholars, who shy away
from criticism of Israel out of a misguided sense that to defend the Palestin-
ian right to self-determination and thus to question the current basis of the
Israeli State might be taken as evidence of ‘anti-Semitism’: a gross contortion
of the commitments to ethics and human rights that underpin many people’s
support of the Palestinian cause (which are, ironically, those very same com-
mitments that demand rigorous opposition to anti-Semitism).
This paradoxical stance was famously adopted by that strident supporter
of the Algerian anti-colonial struggle, Jean-Paul Sartre, who became the sub-
ject of what Benita Parry describes as ‘a disappointed and just account [by
Edward Said] of a silence that can be explained, if not justified, by Sartre’s
anguish over the fate of the Jews in Europe’.25 Aside from the ethical com-
plexities that accompany the discussion of Zionism, though, the absence of
a ‘mother country’ in the Zionist settlement of Palestine constitutes a further
‘contradistinction to the classic colonial paradigm’.26 From the Zionist perspec-
tive, the act of colonising Palestine could be viewed as a return to a homeland
and as the ending of the Jewish people’s diasporic existence, rather than as
an act that created around 750,000 Palestinian refugees in 1948 alone.27 It is
this very different vantage-point on Zionism which renders its relationship to
‘colonialism’ so complex for many critics; for while some dismiss any rela-
tionship between Zionism and colonial or postcolonial discourse, others in
fact see Zionism itself as discourse of emancipation that liberated the Jewish
people from their diasporic existence and broke free from the constraints of
British-mandated Palestine: an administration that was viewed as oppressive
by some Jewish communities who contested the limits placed by the mandate
on Jewish immigration, making it the target of Jewish resistance movements
in the 1940s.28 Some scholars therefore argue that Israel can be viewed as a
postcolonial nation in its own right.29 Indeed, as Massad points out, ‘socialist
variants’ of Zionism presented themselves as an alternative, even an affront, to
a capitalist and imperialist world order: a truly ‘postcolonial’ model of nation-
hood.30 Thus the various interpretations of the relationship between Israel/
Palestine and colonialism renders its classification complex and reveals a ‘syn-
chronicity of the colonial and the postcolonial’ which might most aptly be
described through Massad’s deliberately paradoxical term, the ‘“post-colonial”
colony’.31 It is for this reason that I sometimes employ the term ‘(post)colonial’
(rather than simply ‘colonial’, ‘post-colonial’ or ‘postcolonial’) within this book,
in contexts where I wish to denote something of the ambivalent synchronicity
of Palestine’s colonial conditions and postcolonial desires. Why, though, have
the majority of postcolonialists failed to engage with this challenging yet rich
and vitally important ground for debate? The answer might lie not only with
Palestine, but with the dynamics of postcolonial studies itself.
Despite Donna Robinson Divine’s claims in Postcolonial Theory and the
Arab-Israel Conflict that Edward Said’s prominent legacy in postcolonial stud-
ies ‘demands that postcolonialism champion the Palestinian cause’, 32 evidence
of a sustained postcolonial defence (or indeed thorough exploration) of Pal-
estine is in fact somewhat lacking. As Anna Bernard points out in her own
study of the relationship between Palestine and the postcolonial, Palestine
tends to figure only symbolically on the peripheries of postcolonial discourse,
the Palestinian appearing either as a figure of ‘abject’ homelessness, as in
Bhabha; or as an exception to the largely celebratory poststructuralist mod-
els of diaspora as indicative of a liberated, ‘borderless world’ (an extremely
troubling idea for Palestinians, as revealed in Chapter 4 of this book). 33 Ironi-
cally, it is limited and restrictive figurations of Palestine such as these that
have fed a more general resistance to what has sometimes been read as a
‘polemical’ treatment of Palestine among postcolonialists, 34 who fail, accord-
ing to Philip Carl Salzman, to engage in critique of the Palestinian’s status as
‘other’ (which might, among other things, entail the destabilisation of images
of Palestinians as either simply ‘powerless victims’ or ‘resistance fighters’).35
Over the course of this work, I hope to demonstrate that there is ample room
for postcolonial analysis to move beyond this limited set of tropes by incit-
ing a range of discourses of immense relevance to Palestine, which establish
Introduction 7
diverse and self-reflexive reassessments of Palestinian culture and identity:
from Fanonian discourses of resistance to those of postcolonial performa-
tivity; from theories of nationhood and nationalism to those of diasporic
‘transnations’ and ‘borderlands’. One of the many advantages of widening
the scope of study in this way is that it may also reveal some important chal-
lenges to the pre-conceptions of postcolonial discourse itself—relating, for
example, to the assumptions of ‘poststructuralist’ postcolonialisms, which,
as Bernard notes, are radically contested when translated into a Palestinian
context; 36 or to ‘unfashionable’ models of nationhood and anti- or neo-colo-
niality, which remain, according to Shohat, concepts of pressing importance
within Palestine’s landscape of contemporary colonialism. 37 Indeed, Pales-
tine arguably presents an important affront to the limitations of what Anne
McClintock describes as the implied temporal linearity present in the term
‘post-colonialism’, which renders it ‘prematurely celebratory’ within a world
still very much confronting colonial phenomena.38 This does not have to
render postcolonialism (particularly not in its unhyphenated form, which has
come to denote a conceptual movement beyond straightforwardly temporal
ways of interpreting the term) an historically inappropriate discourse for the
study of Palestine, however. Rather, it demands a renewal of the truly radical
potential of the discourse, by viewing the ‘postcolonial’ as ‘not in any sense
an achieved condition, but . . . an anticipatory discourse, looking forward to
a better and as yet unrealized world’, as Williams puts it. 39
Palestine also presents an excellent opportunity to address a concern
shared by both Anne McClintock and Ella Shohat: that, as McClintock puts
it, ‘the singular category of the “post-colonial” may license too readily a
panoptic tendency to view the globe within generic abstractions voided of
political nuance’.40 Similarly, Shohat warns that ‘the concept of the “postco-
lonial” must be interrogated and contextualized historically, geopolitically
and culturally’; the task in hand, therefore, is to locate a ‘flexible yet critical
usage that can [not only identify] historical and geographical contradictions
and differences, but also [reaffi rm] historical and geographical links, struc-
tural analogies, and openings for agency and resistance’.41 Nuanced, sensitive
employment of postcolonial discourse therefore presents a vital opportunity
to reveal the simultaneous disjunctions and connections between Palestine
and other colonial (or indeed postcolonial) contexts. Yet there is a further
way in which I seek to open up, renew and diversify postcolonial conceptu-
alisations of Palestine within this book—and that is by employing a gender-
conscious framework of reference.
Connections and Disjunctions (2):

Palestine and Postcolonial Feminism
Why might it be so important to inflect the postcolonial analyses per-
formed over the course of this work with a feminist commitment to
gender-consciousness? The answer lies in the mutually illuminating quali-
ties of ‘postcolonialism’ and ‘feminism’ when they operate alongside one
another. In ‘Notes on the “Post-colonial”’, Shohat writes that one of the
implications of the term ‘postcolonial’ is a shift beyond the binary power
structures of the colonial relationship, towards what she terms ‘decentred
multiplicities of power relations’ within and beyond the nation itself—notably
among, for example, ‘colonized men and women’.42 As such, postcolonial
discourse reveals important sites of gendered struggle and self-representa-
tion, for as Miriam Cooke notes in the broader context of the Middle East,
women have ‘written themselves into postcolonial struggles’ in a variety of
ways, sometimes through self-identified feminist struggle but also, at other
times, through nationalist activity, engagement with religious discourse or
other forms of cultural identification, and the very act of ‘naming their par-
ticipation in their people’s confl icts’ constitutes ‘a form of combat’ in its
own right.43 Indeed, Lindsey Moore extends this argument to suggest that
the ‘productive crisis’ that accompanies the very term ‘postcolonial’ (in its
desire to rupture temporal, ideological and power-based structures) presents
a challenging but potentially empowering alternative to the often limiting
narrative of ‘national’ experience as the primary construct through which
gendered narratives have often had to be mediated.44 As such, the use of
postcolonial discourse may in fact enable previously unacknowledged nar-
ratives of gendered experience and imagination to emerge.
Turning to the variety of critical tools presented under the broad banner
of ‘feminism’ also offers much to postcolonial discourse, however. As Reina
Lewis and Sara Mills argue in their introduction to Feminist Postcolonial
Theory: A Reader, feminist enquiry establishes alternative ways of ‘mapping’
postcolonialism by revealing the multi-directional relationships between
power, equality, identity and struggle that operate around a multiplicity of
subject-positions. A gender-conscious focus may also serve to establish alter-
native narratives of postcolonial experience, authored from the perspectives
of those who are often ‘written out’ of dominant, often male-authored nar-
ratives (not only of anti-colonial struggle, but also of postcolonial theory
itself).45 Consequently, feminist-informed analysis might encourage postcolo-
nialists to reassess and extend their understanding of core postcolonial com-
mitments, such as the nature of ‘resistance’, ‘oppression’ or ‘liberation’. Thus
a ‘postcolonial feminist’ framework enacts a two-way critique, serving both
to ‘racialize [read also ‘contextualise’, ‘nationalise’] mainstream feminist
theory and to insert feminist concerns into conceptualizations of colonialism
and postcolonialism’.46
These productive alliances are all the more important to bear in mind
when translating postcolonial feminist insights into a Palestinian context,
because they may help to overcome what Anastasia Valassopoulos describes
as the many ‘problematics’ that have tended to accompany the study of femi-
nist issues in the Arab world, particularly when advanced from within the
Introduction 9
Western academy.47 Central among such ‘problematics’ are the apparently
‘universalising’ assumptions of some Western feminist theory, and indeed
the cultural associations borne by feminism in the Arab world. The writer
and critic Audre Lorde expresses the fi rst of these concerns through her iden-
tification of what she terms ‘unthinking racism’ in the views of some Western
feminists, who assume their cultural perspectives to be shared universally
and so present their discourse as one of benevolent redemption for those of
cultures less ‘fortunate’ (here, we might instead use the term less powerful)
than their own. This kind of stance reproduces a binarised and hierarchi-
cal set of power relations suspiciously similar to ‘paternalistic’ formulations
of colonialism, while failing to consider questions of cultural difference.48
It is within this context that feminism has sometimes been regarded as an
attempt to import Western values and to further Western cultural influence
by certain social sectors (particularly nationalists resistant to Western colo-
nial intervention) within the Arab world (a view offered up for debate in
Chapter 2 of this book). This has, in turn, led to a level of ambivalence in the
use of the term ‘feminism’ within an Arab and indeed Palestinian context.
As Badran and Cooke note in the introduction to their remarkable collec-
tion of Arab feminist writing, Opening the Gates, there was for a long time no
unequivocal term for ‘feminism’ in Arabic, the nearest equivalent being nisai:
a term which can mean either ‘feminist’ or ‘feminine/womanly’, depending
on context and interpretation,49 though more recently, the term al-nasawiyya
has entered into common usage as an equivalent of the term ‘feminism’. In
a specifically Palestinian context, meanwhile, there is evidence that some
apparently ‘feminist’ organisations may resist the use of the term ‘feminism’
precisely because they feel it may limit receptiveness to their work. 50 As Rita
Giacaman, a Palestinian woman’s health scholar, states in interview:
We [at Women’s Affairs, a resource and research centre] are against

the use of the word ‘feminist’ precisely because of the western connota-
tions it harbours. Look, we are trying to build a movement which all
Palestinian women feel is habitable . . . If we are going to frighten off a
single woman because of the word, then it is better to ditch the word.
So instead of calling our programme a feminist agenda, we’ll call it an
agenda for women . . . It is how we agree and defi ne the agenda that is
important, not which label we pin to it. 51
Here, Giacaman paradoxically reveals that despite a technical resistance to the

term ‘feminism’ due to its Western connotations, what might be described as a
feminist commitment to advancing women’s well-being, equality, representa-
tion and inclusion is well and flourishing. Indeed, Giacaman herself states that
within her organization, ‘we have a very strong feminist ideology—Palestinian
feminist, not Western feminist’. 52 Over the course of the following chapters,
I hope it will become evident that one of the most convincing reasons for a
postcolonial feminist approach to Palestinian culture is that gendered concerns
are a prominent feature of Palestinian cultural expression, and indeed (post)
colonial experience, whether they are labelled as ‘feminist’ or not.
While my use of the term ‘feminism’ is founded in a basic commitment
to equality of rights, opportunity and representation for men and women,
and in a resistance to oppression on any grounds, including those of sex,
gender or sexuality, it is important to acknowledge that the term can retain a
level of fluidity and multiplicity which enables it to translate across cultural
perspectives and experiences. Indeed, it is the postcolonial feminist Chan-
dra Talpade Mohanty who reminds us that ‘Western feminism’ should no
more be viewed as a ‘monolith’ than should all ‘Third World women’: femi-
nisms are multiple, contingent and, like gender itself, constructed in relation
to a variety of social and ideological circumstances. 53 For Valassopoulos, it
is precisely this multiplicity of the term that enables a productive process
of what she describes as ‘feminist postcolonial cultural translation’ to take
place at the various ‘“locations” of encounter’ between different feminist and
cultural perspectives. 54 This kind of self-reflexive, multi-directional enquiry
transcends both universalism and a limiting ‘cultural relativism’ that views
cultural difference as an impassable boundary, 55 and it informs the approach
within this book, which similarly seeks to acknowledge both the connections
and disjunctions between postcolonial feminist theories and Palestinian cre-
ative explorations of gender. Despite the apparent singularity of the ‘postco-
lonial feminist perspective’ that appears in the title to this book, then, that
‘perspective’ should be understood as a constantly shifting line of sight that
examines its subject matter from a plurality of angles, while also, at times,
seeking to turn that gaze back on itself. It is not only Palestinian cultural
expression that appears in a different light when examined from a postcolo-
nial feminist perspective, then; what constitutes the ‘postcolonial feminist’ is
also placed under scrutiny.
The ‘feminist postcolonial translations’ performed over the next five
chapters are facilitated by a range of critical tools that include the work of
postcolonial feminist theorists such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gloria
Anzaldúa and Sara Ahmed; of less traditionally gender-conscious works by
postcolonialists such as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha; and
of feminist work not often encountered in a postcolonial context, such as that
of Judith Butler. Many of these theoretical tools have not previously been
applied to a Palestinian cultural context, but they circulate at a transnational
level through the broad reach of postcolonial feminist studies, and my use
of them operates according to Said’s concept of ‘travelling theory’, through
which he argues that even though some theoretical concepts may fail to
translate fully across cultural contexts, the very act of attempting such trans-
lations is transformational in its own right as it may reveal crucial insights
‘about theory itself—its limits, its possibilities, its inherent problems . . . the
Introduction 11
relationship between theory and criticism . . . and society and culture’. 56 The
postcolonial feminist perspective of this text is also strongly indebted to the
significant body of work that has emerged from literary, cultural and socio-
logical scholars who examine issues of gender specifically within a Middle
Eastern or Arab cultural context, including Miriam Cooke, Evelyne Accad,
Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Fatima Mernissi and Leila Ahmed. 57 Scholars such
as these present vital alternatives to Western feminist interpretations of gen-
der discourses in the Middle East and in Arab culture, and their insights
have been employed in highly productive ways by an exciting new wave of
scholarship that approaches cultural expression by Arab women from what
might be termed a postcolonial feminist perspective. Important examples
of such work include the edited collection, Intersections: Gender, Nation, and
Community in Arab Women’s Novels, and recent texts such as Valassopoulos’
Contemporary Arab Women Writers and Lindsey Moore’s Arab, Muslim, Woman.
58
While this book is inspired by such critical approaches, it differs from them
in two important respects. Firstly, it adopts a feminist approach that views
texts by both men and women as important subjects of feminist analysis,
and as capable of gender-conscious concerns. Secondly, it hones the remit
of its study down from the traditionally transnational scope of such works
to a nationally specific focus on Palestinian creative expression. These shifts
in focus strike me as essential because while Palestinian creative expression
certainly resonates with broader understandings of Arab cultural identity
at a number of levels, it also emerges from an historical and political con-
text that sets it apart from any other cultural context in the Arab world,
and as such, presents a highly distinctive site of (post)colonial analysis. It is
my belief that the tendency towards transnational studies of Arab creative
expression has at least partly obscured the very specific trajectory of gender-
conscious expression under construction in Palestinian literature and fi lm; a
trajectory that only becomes wholly apparent when texts by both men and
women are examined alongside one another, and which reveals this dialogue
as integral to Palestine’s anti-colonial struggle. Not only does this act of refo-
cusing reveal a very different version of Palestine’s ‘national narrative’, but it
also establishes a startling portrait of the extreme self-reflexivity, complexity
and creativity of Palestinians’ self-image—an image in stark defiance of the
reductive tropes that have often been used to characterise Palestinians.
The most important impetus for adopting a postcolonial feminist perspec-
tive therefore lies with the literary and fi lmic texts themselves, which estab-
lish many of the critical trajectories that I pursue further within the book.
This, then, is the multi-directional, much-disputed critical and theoretical
territory that I traverse, in order to establish an alternative polyphonic nar-
rative of Palestinian cultural identity, experience and imagination. Yet there
is one fi nal set of dynamics to this critical territory—and this relates to the
textual politics of comparative study.
Palestinian Literature and Film: A Comparative Approach
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:
[The] emergent canon of postcolonial-literature-as-world-literature privi-

leges texts written in English at the expense of enormously varied litera-
tures written in other, especially non-European languages [ . . . ] The
current impasse in postcolonial studies may therefore be overcome by
opening the field to comparative literary studies and to comparative
critical methodologies that rigorously interrogate the limits of postco-
lonial theory’s founding discourses, from the multiple perspectives of
Arabic, African, and Asian philosophies, realities, cultural worldviews
and cultural memories.65
While my interrogation of postcolonial theory itself may not be as far-reaching

nor as multi-directional as Hassan indicates here, the exploration of literary
and fi lmic sources originally in Arabic, and of critical material drawn from
scholars of Palestinian history, politics and culture such as Rashid Khalidi,
Hisham Sharabi or Faisal Darraj, begins to perform the refraction of the
‘postcolonial canon’ that Hassan fi nds so necessary.66 The comparative study
of Palestinian literature and fi lm is also facilitated by the conscious efforts
of a number of scholars and practitioners dedicated to making a range of
Palestinian literature and fi lm readily available to an Anglophone audience.
The renowned poet and literary scholar, Salma Khadra Jayyusi, has made
a major contribution through the publication of her Anthology of Modern Pal-
estinian Literature: a collection of poetry, short stories, extracts of fiction and
criticism in English translation by authors writing over the course of the
twentieth century.67 Poetry by Palestinian authors features in anthologies of
Arabic poetry in English translation such as Nathalie Handal’s The Poetry of
Arab Women, while a number of other anthologies dedicated specifically to
Palestinian poetry or short stories also provide useful resources.68 In recent
years, organisations such as the women’s fi lmmaking NGO ‘Shashat’ have
consciously sought to promote access to Palestinian cinema (including within
Palestine itself, where access can often be limited due to the restrictions of
the Israeli occupation). In the UK, the annual London Palestinian Film Fes-
tival, supported by the Palestine Film Foundation, provides ready access to
releases by established and emergent fi lmmakers. Production companies such
as Sindibad Films and distributors such as Arab Film Distribution have also
served to increase the circulation of Palestinian cinema to international audi-
ences. A number of critical works that engage in Anglophone discussions of
either literature or fi lm have also begun to emerge, and between them, they
facilitate comparative literary and fi lmic discussion. Here, Hamid Dabashi’s
edited collection, Dreams of a Nation, constitutes a seminal contribution to
the study of Palestinian cinema, as does George Khleifi and Nurith Gertz’s
Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory.69 Literary studies include
edited collections such as Kamal Abdel-Malek’s Israeli and Palestinian Identi-
ties in Literature and History,70 and Ami Elad-Bouskila’s monograph Modern
Palestinian Literature and Culture.71 Resources such as these offer important
routes into the study of Palestinian literature and fi lm for an Anglophone
audience, and the range of such materials will only increase as they receive
prominence through a wider remit of scholarly attention.
With the exception of a few works such as Kamal Abdel-Malek’s The Rhet-
oric of Violence: Arab-Jewish Encounters in Palestinian Literature and Film,72 the
majority of criticism produced to date has tended to remain restricted to the
study of either literature or fi lm (or, more recently, to the study of popular
culture, as in Rebecca Stein and Ted Swedenburg’s edited collection Pales-
tine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture).73 Within this study, though, I
view it as vitally important to work across both of these genres. While adopt-
ing a comparative approach to the study of these different creative forms
inevitably limits the range of either literary or fi lmic texts that can be placed
Introduction 15
under scrutiny and reveals a number of important distinctions between the
forms, this approach also generates insights into the historical, cultural and
ideological connections that circulate across creative forms, not least, relat-
ing to the politics of gender, and (post)colonial power relations, when they
are placed in dialogue. Indeed, working within the inherently interdisciplin-
ary field of postcolonial studies, the comparative study of these two differ-
ent forms strikes me as a natural and productive decision (though there are
clearly more detailed studies of either form waiting to be written). There is
one further act of crossing between cultural boundaries entailed in this work,
though, and that relates to the politics of my own subject-position.
As a white, Western, British woman approaching the study of Palestinian
culture from a comparative perspective, it is necessary to recognise that I am
also implicated in the problematic networks of power that circulate around
the act of representation. As someone who is not a ‘native informant’ on
Palestinian culture, the specific insights I offer are mediated through critical
and textual rather than ‘lived’ understanding, but even a flawed and partial
act of representation such as this risks reproducing the forms of discursive
privilege that have often served to suppress the voices of Palestinians. The
fi lmmaker, poet and curator Annemarie Jacir notes that ‘like many colo-
nized peoples, Palestinians have been the subjects of other people’s fi lms and
research, and have often been perceived as exotic others, as victims or ter-
rorists [ . . . ] [but there is] a complete absence of our own voices and images
[in widespread circulation]’.74 Even well-intentioned acts of representation
may therefore serve to speak for rather than seek to listen to or forge dialogue
with the voices and perspectives of Palestinians themselves. This proves all
the more problematic when such acts of representation are produced from
within a political and social system such as the UK that has, at various points
in history, also been the author of that same people’s oppression. Indeed,
my engagement with feminist enquiry into Palestine also invokes a highly
problematic legacy since, as Fedwa Malti-Douglas notes, gendered critique
of Arab society has frequently formed the basis of Orientalist and colonial
discourses determined to prove the ‘inferiority’ of the ‘other’. Malti-Douglas
therefore asks a provocative question: ‘If the Arabs already have a bad press
(as we know they do), are gender critics not aggravating this problem by rais-
ing questions that should better remain dormant?’75 In other words, might
not the very act of seeking to counter the silencing of Palestinian and gender-
conscious narratives ultimately end up working within or even reinforcing
the mechanisms that have constructed Palestine’s oppressive alterity?
This is a troubling situation indeed—yet I would suggest that the price
of refusing to speak for fear of alignment with such ideas would be the per-
petuation of a further, unbreakable silence—not simply of the Palestinian
narrative, but of the forms of solidarity and dialogue that may in fact be
established with Palestine’s own ‘others’. While there is surely no infallible
solution to this double bind, one response must surely be to employ this
discursive privilege in a way that is willing to test and trouble its own founda-
tions. The approach that I adopt here, then, is one of full acknowledgement
when it comes to the limitations, privileges and power dynamics that accom-
pany what Adrienne Rich terms the ‘politics of location’. By ‘recognising our
location, having to name the ground we’re coming from, the conditions we
have taken for granted’,76 Rich suggests that it becomes possible to identify
and negotiate the sites of difference and of common ground that emerge
across critical and cultural locations. It is also through this attentiveness to
the politics of location that the critic might become receptive to the return
of their gaze, or indeed to challenges to their critical preconceptions. Said
articulates this view in what can be read as a powerful call for cross-cultural,
self-reflexive dialogue:
We Palestinians sometimes forget that—as in country after country, the

surveillance, confi nement, and study of Palestinians in part of the politi-
cal process of reducing our status and preventing our national fulfi lment
except as the Other who is opposite and unequal, always on the defen-
sive—we too are looking, we too are scrutinizing, assessing, judging. We
are more than someone’s object. We do more than stand passively in
front of whoever, for whatever reason, has wanted to look at us. If you
cannot fi nally see this about us, we will not allow ourselves to believe
that the failure has been entirely ours. Not any more.77
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
‘Answer, if you hear the words under the words–

otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges,
difficult to get through, and our pockets
full of stones.’ 78
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
It is only appropriate that a postcolonial feminist study of Palestinian litera-

ture and fi lm should begin by turning to a concept that has been profoundly
influenced by critical dialogue between postcolonialism and feminism, and
that lies at the heart of Palestinian creative consciousness: nationhood. If
postcolonialists established the view that ‘nations are narrations’,1 constructs
that are not simply cartographic entities but power structures created and
controlled through the production of knowledge and representation, then
feminist scholars have subsequently inflected this discourse to show the ways
in which such ‘narrations’ are gendered, revealing further axes of sexed and
gendered power in operation within that very nation.2 As a result, postco-
lonial feminist scholarship has shifted gender-conscious analysis from the
margins to the centre of how we understand nations to be ‘imagined’. For
Palestine, whose embattled national condition has sometimes been summed
up in pertinently corporeal terms as a confl ict over ‘land and bodies’, 3 these
insights offer a fresh angle from which to approach what Said famously
described as the perpetual ‘questions’ of Palestine’s national desires and iden-
tifications.4 Yet any account of the gendered narrations that have constructed
fi lmic and literary visions of Palestine will inevitably reveal a further set of
power dynamics at stake. These are the dynamics of colonialism: a discourse
that is in itself constituted through gendered tropes and symbols that reso-
nate with many elements of postcolonial theory, including Said’s conceptu-
alisation of ‘Orientalism’. As a fi rst step towards ‘en-gendering’ postcolonial
feminist analysis in the service of a greater understanding of Palestinian
cultural consciousness, this chapter therefore examines the gendered tropes,
symbols and iconographies mobilised in both Orientalist and Palestinian
nationalist narratives, which reveal the competing desires, senses of belong-
ing and identities that underpin Palestine’s complex national existence. In
doing so, this chapter asks: how is Palestine en-gendered, brought into creative
being, through gendered narrations of its nation?
In order to answer this question, a fuller explanation of each of these cen-
tral propositions—that ‘nations are narrations’, and that such ‘narrations’ are
gendered—is required. The idea of the ‘nation as narration’ neatly describes
En-Gendering Palestine 19
a move within postcolonial theory to reveal how the nation, like other catego-
ries of belonging or identity (such as gender), is constructed. Such a view is
heavily informed by Benedict Anderson’s work Imagined Communities, which
argues that nations are ‘imagined political communities’ realised through
‘image[s] of communion’, kinship, inclusion and exclusion. 5 This does not
mean that nations do not exist and are simply imaginary; rather, the nation
must be understood as not only a geographical but also a discursive con-
struct through which a particular communal identity comes into being. As
Anderson puts it, ‘communities are to be distinguished not by their falsity/
genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’.6 This process of
‘imagining’ takes place through narratives that formulate notions of shared
origins, space and identity, which quickly come to be naturalised and under-
stood as ‘ancient’ or ahistorical. The idea of the ‘nation as narration’ bears
further implications for postcolonialists, however, who are mindful of the
potential for narratives to be employed as a means to exploit and dominate
others, or indeed to resist such domination. As Said writes in Culture and
Imperialism, ‘the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from form-
ing and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism’; yet nar-
ratives have also become ‘the method colonized people use to assert their
own identity and the existence of their own history’.7 Here, the intersecting
narratives of Israel and Palestine operate as a pertinent example; for while
the State of Israel is often presented as ‘ancient’, it was established in its cur-
rent form in 1948 as a direct product of the British mandate of Palestine, and
Palestine’s subsequent struggle to establish an independent nation-state can
consequently be read as a manifestation of anti-colonial nationalism formu-
lated in response to these narratives of domination.8
From a postcolonial perspective, then, viewing the ‘nation as narration’
should not be taken as evidence of its imaginary nature. Rather, as Said
notes, it reveals that ‘all representations . . . are intimately tied up with world-
liness, that is, with power, position and interests’. 9 For Said, the ‘worldly’ sta-
tus of narrative is only too evident in the imperialist underpinnings of what
he termed ‘Orientalist’ discourse, through which a hazily defi ned realm of
‘the Orient’ or ‘East’ as one of inherent ‘otherness’ came into being within
the Western imagination. Orientalism operated through ‘a distribution of geo-
political awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, histori-
cal and philological texts’ that collectively gave life to a ‘manifestly different
. . . world’ formulated in terms that fed the Western imperial desire to ‘under-
stand . . . control, manipulate’ territories other than its own.10 Thus narratives
of the Orient became implicated in what Foucault understood as the ‘power/
knowledge’ relationship, in which ‘the exercise of power perpetually creates
knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power’.11
Imperialist power therefore came to be exercised and reproduced through
the narrative construction of the Orient as ‘other’—an image that, as we shall
see, played a significant role in Palestine’s own colonisation. The coloniser
does not hold a monopoly on the ‘worldly’ implications of narratives, though.
For the colonised, narratives of national collectivity may assume immense
material importance, as they do in the lives of Palestinians, for whom nation-
alism is not simply about inclusion or exclusion but also, as Tom Nairn puts
it, about ‘no more disappearance. For the majority of the collectivity, the
collectivity itself remains the sole redemptive possibility’.12 The redemptive
possibilities of community are heavily evident in Palestine, where national
identity endures in spite of a lack of national self-determination through nar-
ratives of cultural communion and belonging, which construct Palestine as
an ‘ethno-nation’.13 ‘Imagined’ as narratives of national communion may be,
they offer a powerfully resistant potential when such a collectivity is placed
under threat of erasure. Clearly, then, it is possible for several different nar-
ratives to construct different versions of nation, even within the same space,
and this has certainly been the case in Palestine, where colonial, Orientalist,
Zionist and Palestinian nationalist narratives have all come to bear on vari-
ously defi ned versions of Palestinian space in ways that imagine its origins
and identity in radically different manners.
From a postcolonial feminist perspective, though, a further narrative
emerges within this discursive mesh: gender. As a significant quantity of
feminist scholarship has now shown, colonial and Orientalist narratives are
underpinned not only by desires for national domination, but by a com-
plex interplay of sexed, gendered and sexual desires, forms of representation
and power politics.14 These desires inevitably fi nd their response in narra-
tives of anti-colonial nationalism, which produce gendered and sexualised
dynamics of their own. Postcolonial feminist scholarship has traced the gen-
dered nature of national narratives even further, however, by suggesting that
feminisation is inherent in the very ‘birth’ of nationhood as a concept. As
Anne McClintock notes, the English word ‘nation’ is derived from the Latin
term natio: to be born, a derivation that constructs the nation as a ‘family’,
guarded over by a maternal and fecund ‘mother’.15 This ‘image of commu-
nion’, to use Anderson’s phrase, fi nds an echo in the Arabic term al-watan
al-umm: the ‘motherland’ or ‘homeland’, a trope that resonates across many
cultures and not only describes the place of one’s birth or origins but also
associates that territory with the fertile, nurturing and domestic qualities of
traditional femininity. This association is also apparent in the figure of the
‘mother of the nation’, who appears in numerous cultural contexts—from
the UK’s ‘Britannia’ and France’s ‘Marianne’, robust female figures denot-
ing protection and guardianship who also became ‘maternal’ figures of the
‘paternalist’ project of Empire, to portrayals of Egypt as Isis, ancient goddess
of motherhood, magic and fertility, through iconography that emerged dur-
ing the Egyptian revolution of 1919 against the British occupation.16 These
symbolic connections between woman and nation can perhaps be read as
no more than extended metaphors for the deep-rooted desire for protection
and belonging inherent in the very idea of the nation. In Gender and Nation,
however, Nira Yuval-Davis makes the critical observation that such discourses
do not readily translate into social empowerment. The symbolic construction
of ‘woman’ as iconic guardian of national identity carries a heavy burden for
real women, who come to reproduce the nation ‘biologically, culturally and
symbolically’.17 As a result, women occupy an ambivalent position within
narratives of the nation, as Yuval-Davis explains:
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
Casting women in the role of ‘woman-as-nation’ consequently enforces her

affi liation with nature rather than with society, with origins rather than
evolution and with the traditionally feminine roles of mother, nurturer and
object of desire (rather than active desirer). The nation therefore emerges
as a narrative in which women feature as symbols, but lack access to any
representational control: a classically patriarchal manifestation of power/
knowledge.19 As Chapter 2 of this book explores, such a discursive construc-
tion of womanhood places very real social pressures on women and means
that when they seek to formulate narratives in which they do not play the
role of ‘mother of the nation’, their stories may be considered unacceptable,
subversive and even unnatural.
In the context of Palestine, as for many other colonised nations, though,
the patriarchal nature of the nationalist narrative must also be understood in
relation to the gendered dynamics of colonial discourse. From this perspective,
the imagery of desire, sexual union, penetration, fertilisation, love and family
that emerges within the masculinist national imagination (the primary subject
of this chapter) must be read in the context of similarly gendered narratives
formulated within the Orientalist and Zionist imagination, which also view
Palestine as an ‘alluring’ space of desire ripe for fertilisation and hence, for
patriarchal mastery. The en-gendering of Palestine examined over the course
of this chapter cannot, therefore, be read simply in terms of women’s discursive
exclusion and thus as a specifically female tragedy. Rather, the desire for patri-
archal power that emerges within these narratives also dramatises a struggle
for representational, territorial and political power in which both men and
women are implicated—though not always in equal ways.
A postcolonial feminist perspective therefore reveals the complexity and
ambivalence of the narrative construction of nationhood, rather than simply
affi rming its authority. This perspective does not undermine the importance
of the nation, though; rather, this inherent instability might make it all the
more productive, as Homi Bhabha suggests in his essay, ‘DissemiNation:
Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation’:
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
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.
Virgin Territory: Colonial Discourse

and the Fertile Imagination
In his memoir-come-travelogue, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Land-
scape, the Palestinian lawyer, activist, author and hill-walker Raja Shehadeh
records his perceptions of the changes undergone by the Palestinian land-
scape in which he has lived since a child. Through his accounts of seven
sarhat (wanderings or walks in which the traveller roams freely, at will and
without restraint—a task of increasing difficulty under Israeli occupation),
Shehadeh describes how the landscape once so familiar to him is vanishing
beneath successive layers of restriction, construction and usurpation, as new
names, narratives and settlements emerge at the hands of the Israeli State.
As he reflects in the introduction to his book, though, this desire to erase the
Palestinian presence within the landscape in order to inscribe a new master-
narrative is nothing new:
Palestine has been constantly re-invented, with devastating conse-

quences to its original inhabitants. Whether it was the cartographers
preparing maps or travellers describing the landscape in the extensive
travel literature, what mattered was not the land and its inhabitants as
they actually were but the confi rmation of the viewer’s or reader’s politi-
cal beliefs [ . . . ] Western travellers and colonizers . . . simply would not
see the land’s Palestinian population. When they spared a glance it was
to disregard the Palestinians with prejudice and derision, as a distraction
from the land of their imagination. 22
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
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,
there was no such thing as Palestinians . . . It was not as though there

was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian
people and we came and threw them out and took their country away
from them. They did not exist. 27
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
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
The representation of Palestine as a highly desirable, virgin but potentially

fecund ‘land without a people’ within Zionist discourse functions in precisely
these terms for its Arab inhabitants, whose claims to territorial control would
come to be progressively supplanted by the Jewish population. What can
be read as an act of territorial usurpation, though, was instead represented
according to a rhetoric of fertility. Zionism was replete with the imagery of
‘making the desert bloom’; 32 the strong, virile young ‘Sabra’ (representative
of an idealised model of a new Jewish masculinity) would be both ‘deflowerer
and inseminator of his mother/virgin land’33 and master of a new civilisation
that, like all colonial enterprises, operated on the understanding that
a civilized man . . . could cultivate the land because it meant something

to him; on it, accordingly, he bred useful arts and crafts, he created,
he accomplished, he built. For an uncivilized people, land was either
farmed badly . . . or left to rot. 34
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:
Zionism essentially saw Palestine as the European imperialist did [ . . . ]

It allied itself . . . with the imperial powers in carrying out its plans for
establishing a new Jewish state in Palestine [ . . . ] Zionism not only ac-
cepted the generic racial concepts of European culture, it also banked
on the fact that Palestine was actually peopled not by an advanced but
by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominant.37
For Said, further proof of Zionism as a form of colonial mastery is to be
found in the links between Zionist narrative and the gendered discourse of
‘Orientalism’, which informed the European imperialist mindset.
Said’s description of Orientalism as an ‘exclusively male province’ has
been challenged by postcolonial feminist thinkers such as Reina Lewis, who
note the complex but complicit position of Western women within Oriental-
ist and imperial discourse, 38 but his initial analysis of Orientalism as a ‘male
power fantasy’ of control over a feminised Orient still rings true in relation
to Palestine.39 Said writes that
Along with other peoples variously designated as backward, degenerate,

uncivilized, and retarded [ . . . ] the Oriental was linked . . . to elements
in Western society (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) having in
common an identity best described as lamentably alien.40
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
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
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:
The colonization of Palestine proceeded always as a fact of repetition:

the Jews were not supplanting, destroying, breaking up a native society.
That society was itself the oddity [ . . . ] In Jewish hearts . . . Israel had
always been there. 52
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
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.
Wedded to the Land: Figuring National

Desire through the Feminine
Put it on record.
I am an Arab
And the number of my card is fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth is due after the summer
[...]
My roots
Took hold before the birth of time
Before the burgeoning of the ages,
Before cypress and olive trees,
Before the proliferation of weeds.
[...]
Put it on record.
I am an Arab.
You stole my forefathers’ vineyards
And the land I used to till
I and all my children,
And you left us and all my grandchildren
Nothing but these rocks.
—Mahmoud Darwish, ‘Identity Card’56
In The Question of Palestine, Said describes Mahmoud Darwish’s early poem

‘Identity Card’ as a work that ‘did not represent as much as embody the Pales-
tinian’ through its portrayal of the oppressive controls placed on Palestinian
identity and territory by the Israeli State.57 This poetic account of an encoun-
ter between an Israeli police clerk and Palestinian Arab also, however,
operates as an ironic inversion of the demand for the Palestinian subject to
legitimate his or her presence, as it instead produces a passionate articulation
of the Palestinian’s ancestral connection with the land, undermining the offi-
cial rhetoric of Israeli ownership. Although not immediately apparent, a gen-
dering of this territorial narrative also occurs within the poem. His account
of a bond with the land that ‘took hold before the birth of time’ and has been
kept alive through successive generations by his ‘family of the plough’58 casts
Palestine in the role of a nurturing mother who has born many children. As
revealed in the fi rst stanza of the poem, the Palestinian subject may have
been reduced to ‘number fi fty thousand’ on his identity card, but he has
‘eight children / And the ninth is due after the summer’: population figures
are appropriated as a resistant discourse of maternity here, for they testify to
the endurance of the Palestinian people, despite repeated attempts to erase
them from the land. Yet the fertility of the pre-colonial landscape imagined
by the poem’s narrator, brimming with ‘cypress’, ‘olive trees’ and ‘vineyards’,
is juxtaposed with an uncultivated present-day image of a barren, meager
existence in which the Palestinian people have been left with nothing but
‘rocks’: an image of territorial theft, even rape of the land. Darwish’s poem
therefore reveals the ways in which the colonial and Zionist representations
of Palestine as fertile ‘virgin land’ and ‘motherland’ might be appropriated
in order to foreground rather than erase the Palestinian presence, and to
render the Israeli narrative of territorial belonging illegitimate. Most power-
fully of all, though, Darwish’s refrain of ‘Sajjil’—‘Write down’ or ‘Record’—
throughout the poem demands that this account of Palestinian identity and
territorial belonging should be textually inscribed, and in doing so, he con-
veys the determination of Palestinians to construct an alternative master-nar-
rative that reclaims and so en-genders a postcolonial Palestine. The question
remains, though—what does this alternative en-gendering of Palestine reveal
about the power relations not only between coloniser and colonised, but
between men and women within the Palestinian nation itself?
Gender relations are embedded at the very heart of Palestine’s national
identity, and this is, in part, the product of its status as a colonised space. As
Susan Slymovics puts it, ‘all descriptions of Palestine as a contested, colonized
space . . . illuminate gender issues where interactions between colonizer and
colonized are imagined as relations between males and females’. 59 For the
male colonised subject, the task in hand is therefore to reclaim his status as
male ‘self’ rather than feminised ‘other’. This assertion of masculine self-
hood appears through motifs of familial relations in Palestinian nationalist
expression, where the male subject is represented both as the patriarchal
‘father’—the master, defender and inseminator of the ‘motherland’—and as
a ‘son of the soil’: a child of Palestine, legitimate heir to the land whose
duty is to protect his ‘mother’ from harm.60 Such affi rmations of masculin-
ity occur particularly frequently in poetry written at significant moments in
the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, such as the work of ‘Abd al-Raheem
Mahmoud, a poet who died fighting in 1948 and whose poem ‘Call of the
Motherland’ describes the task of defending Palestine as a means for men to
affi rm their masculinity by acting as ‘true lions on the battlefield’.61 In the
poem ‘A Million Suns in My Blood’, meanwhile, the famous ‘resistance poet’
Tawfiq Zayyad describes himself as the ‘son’ and ‘offspring’ of Palestine, who
views the task of national resistance as a birthright transmitted through the
familial ‘bloodline’ of the nation.62 In works such as these, the affi rmation
of masculine selfhood also leads to the familiar symbolic construction of
women as maternal guardians and propagators of the nation. Indeed, Mas-
sad notes that this highly binarised construction of traditional gender roles is
embedded in the Palestinian Nationalist Charter, where, according to Joseph
Massad, Palestinians are described ‘as the children of Palestine, viewed as
a mother’.63 Envisioning the land as maternal and women as symbolic enac-
tors of this ‘mothering’ discourse, Massad states that nationalist discourse
constructs women as ‘“manabit”, or the soil on which “manhood, respect and
dignity” grow’.64 As iconic guardians of national dignity and cultural iden-
tity, women come to perform a symbolic function that affi rms patriarchal
control of Palestine through their highly traditional supporting roles as wives
and mothers. Indeed, this idealisation of traditional femininity is evident in
‘Abdallah Radwan’s poem, ‘You Are Everything’, subtitled ‘For Palestine’, in
which he states that he sees in Palestine ‘a mother, a sister, a wife’, indeed an
entire ‘family’ and ‘tribe’, who has nurtured him back to health through her
love and warmth, casting him in the role of ‘a child in your arms’.65 Here,
Palestine assumes several female roles at once, which represent the benevo-
lent and protective structures of the national community for Radwan, who
is himself the beneficiary of the nation’s maternal care: a ‘son’ of the nation
being tenderly raised as its future inhabitant. Consequently, the affi rmation
of masculine selfhood appears to be strongly dependent on the symbolic
construction of traditional femininity at the hands of the male author.
Just as masculinity and femininity are discursively formulated in relation
to one another, so are Zionist and Palestinian nationalist discourses when it
comes to their respective claims to the land, which are advanced through
images of fertility and propagation. As we saw in the previous section,
Zionist rhetoric sought to lay claim to Palestinian land through its ability
to ‘make the desert bloom’ with modern technology that presented Zionist
settlers as more ‘civilised’ than the Arab Palestinian farmers. Palestinian
nationalist discourse, however, appropriates this trope in order to present
the Arab propagation of the land as a natural, age-old practice and a birth-
right: the very basis of its national family. In her study of imagery used to
represent the Palestinian homeland, Tina Sherwell notes that the Palestinian
peasant woman became an iconic figure in artwork produced from the 1960s
onwards, a time of renewed resistance in Palestine. Particularly significant
is that such women would often be shown wearing traditional embroidered
dress. Such dresses are significant within Palestinian culture as their embroi-
dery patterns are specific to each region, meaning that ‘in the aftermath
of the loss of Palestine as homeland, the costumes have become a way of
mapping the lost homeland onto the bodies of women . . . re-configur[ing]
places lost to Palestinians’: 66 a motif that appears in Jabra’s poem ‘In the
Deserts of Exile’, where he conveys the strong attachment he feels to the lost
landscape of Palestine through an image of traditional femininity, describing
the verdant fields dotted with flowers as akin to the embroidery patterns on
women’s gowns.67 Similarly, Susan Slymovics identifies the practice of nam-
ing female Palestinian children after destroyed villages or towns as a way of
inscribing Palestinian history into the very fabric of female identity.68 In both
cases, women assume a symbolic function as bearers of history and repre-
sentatives of the homestead. Equally significant, though, is the appearance
of the peasant woman within nationalist discourse. The figure of the male
peasant or fallah bears a heavy weight within Palestinian cultural discourse,
where he is a ‘unifying symbol’ of both authenticity and ‘active resistance
to outside intervention’.69 Yet the specific figure of the peasant woman (fal-
laha) connects the traditional propagation of the land to her own fertility
and as Sherwell notes, she is often represented in a variety of roles linked to
propagation of both land and family, including participating in the harvest,
and mothering her children. Thus, as a figure of both maternity and rural
life, she offers a ‘representation of the homeland in which a Palestine of the
future is imaged as a return to a golden past of a land rich with crops and
harmonious communities’.70
An interesting contemporary reworking of these tropes occurs in Hanna
Elias’ fi lm The Olive Harvest (2004),71 which dramatises the simultaneous
struggle between two brothers for the same woman, and between Israeli
settlers and Palestinian villagers for the land. Though set against the contem-
porary backdrop of the occupation (one brother, Mazen, has recently been
released from prison, while the other, Taher, works on the Palestinian Leg-
islative Council, which attempts to curtail the spread of Israeli settlements),
the fi lm constructs a somewhat traditional symbolic connection between the
female character Raeda, and the land. Raeda, a village girl, is presented
as an icon of traditional femininity, who wears embroidered dresses and
‘smells of olives’. She is depicted as a participant within the olive harvest,
during which traditional music and women’s singing fi ll the orchard. At one
point in the fi lm, Raeda’s father renders the link between female identity
and the land explicit by telling her that the olive trees represent her ‘aunt’
and ‘grandmother’: they embody their family heritage and ties to the land,
just as Raeda herself does. Yet the fact that Raeda must choose between
two suitors complicates her straightforward function as a symbol of national
unity. Both Taher and Mazen love Raeda equally, and her fi nal inability to
choose between them is represented in her fusion of their names into ‘Maher’
as she calls after them. According to Lina Khatib, The Olive Harvest can
therefore be read as allegorical of the dual territorial claims of both Israelis
and Palestinians, and of the need to recognise them as ‘brothers’ united in
mutual love for the same land/woman.72 The fi lm also, however, dramatises
the dilemmas facing Palestinians concerning the best way to love and care
for their land: to engage in physical resistance, as Mazen does, or legislative
struggle, like Taher. Equally, Raeda is presented as a figure torn between
past and present, political and personal concerns. While the close connection
between woman and land is therefore placed within a contemporary context
in this fi lm, it nevertheless upholds her primarily symbolic status as a figure
of national desire.
While women’s symbolic connection to the land is often mobilised by
male authors in order to affi rm their own ancestral claims, a particularly
interesting inflection of this discourse occurs in Laila ‘Allush’s poem, ‘The
Path of Affection’. Born in the year of the Nakba, ‘Allush has always officially
been a citizen of Israel—yet in this poem, she reveals how her own sense of
connection with the land unearths an alternative narrative that authenticates
its Palestinian identity. The poem begins with her setting out on a journey to
New Haifa, to meet her relatives. All around her, she sees Israel’s presence
inscribed on the land: ‘The estrangement of signs, shops and graveyards’,
‘pawned trees on the hillsides’, ‘water sprinklers spinning so efficiently’,
‘modern tunes’, ‘modern buildings’.73 Here, the discourse of modernisation
so proudly displayed within Zionist rhetoric is represented as ‘otherly’, even
unnatural from the perspective of the Arab inhabitant. Indeed, in her brief
analysis of this poem (which deals with it in the original Arabic), Hanan
Ashrawi notes that the ‘foreignness’ of the landscape is conveyed through the
use of common Hebrew words: a feature of the poem that is lost in transla-
tion.74 Nevertheless, the intrusive influence of Israel remains strongly appar-
ent—but as the poem’s narrator progresses on her journey, she discovers that
she is able to look beyond the palimpsestic presence of Israel to fi nd ‘the land
. . . gently defying it all’.75 Looking at the landscape through Arab eyes, she
perceives it as a nurturing, connective space in which she hears ‘an apology
for my father’s wounds’ and sees ‘the shape of my Arab face’ in the landscape
and architecture around her, ‘the trees . . . smiling at me with Arab affec-
tion’, ‘the red soil . . . shining / with Arab modesty’.76 As in ‘Identity Card’,
the narrator’s bond with the land therefore generates an alternative narrative
of territorial belonging that undermines its official Israeli inscription. Yet
‘Allush’s account is very different in tone from the defiant, manly anger of
Darwish’s narrator. Instead, ‘Allush locates her own claims to the territory
through the gentle affection and modesty of the motherland, in a way that is
redemptive and empowering for the female narrator. While this poem there-
fore draws on some of the traditional tropes of the motherland as nurturing
and maternal, ‘Allush engages with them in a way that casts her as more than
simply a symbolic guardian of the land; she is also an active and individual
figure within the poem, and the author of its imagined postcoloniality.
Exciting as this appropriation of gendered imagery may be, ‘Allush’s
poem remains something of an anomaly, and the alliance between women
and land that emerges in much nationalist discourse tends to affi rm male
rather than female agency. This is keenly evident in the masculinist tropes
of territorial protectionism that functioned in early Palestinian nationalism,
embodied in the popular tenet ardi-‘irdi. Translated literally as ‘my land is
my honour’, the phrase also has gendered implications due to women’s status
as guardians of the family’s honour;77 thus land and womenfolk are both
presented as possessions of the patriarch, whose own honour is dependent
upon their defence.78 It is within this context that the image of Palestine as
a victim of rape emerges. The linkage of colonisation with rape has been
made by many anti-colonial and postcolonial thinkers, who not only cite
rape as a strategy employed to suppress the ‘native’ population of a coun-
try, but who also view it as a metaphor for the colonial exploitation of the
land.79 For Palestinians, the very real concern of rape surfaced in the wake of
Deir Yassin in 1948, when 245 Palestinian villagers were massacred during
Israel’s struggle for independence. The Red Cross reported this massacre to
have involved the rape of women and butchering of children, and the fear
of similar incidents is said to have informed the fl ight of other Palestinians
from their homes during the Nakba.80 This event continues to resonate as a
source of horror and as a representation of vulnerability in the Palestinian
imagination, and appears in a number of literary works.81 Rape also surfaces
as a metaphor for Zionist conquest in the Palestinian Nationalist Charter and
in then PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat’s address to the UN General Assembly,
where he describes Zionism as a desire to ‘rape the Palestinian homeland
and to exploit and disperse its people’.82 In literary discourse, too, Palestine
is represented as a vulnerable woman; in Harun Hashim Rasheed’s ‘Poem
to Jerusalem’, for example, Jerusalem is personified as the ‘weeping’ female
victim of a rape who must be rescued by her protectors, Palestinian men.83
While the metaphorical link between colonisation and rape operates as a
powerful representation of the sense of violation experienced by male and
female Palestinians alike, it also enacts an elision of the distinction between
the literal rape of women and crimes committed against the ‘body politic’
that is problematic in feminist terms. This metaphor once again relegates
female sexuality to the realms of the primarily symbolic, whereby women’s
violation assumes a political status as an affront to the patriarchal order of
the nation. Indeed, the structural centrality of patriarchal relations to the
discourse of land ownership emerges in the anti-colonial inversion of the
rape metaphor, whereby legitimate and sanctified union with the land is repre-
sented through the image of the wedding.
Images of being wedded to the land abound in Palestinian poetry, and
they present a discourse of heteronormative male desire in which Palestine
is eroticised and personified as a ‘lover’. Palestinian poetry is replete with
such imagery: from ‘Umar Shabana’s ‘The Book of Songs and Stones’, in
which Palestine is a woman holding roses (possibly, in their redness, also an
image of sacrificial blood spilled) from her lovers, 84 to Abu Salma’s vision of
return to Palestine as a moment of sensuous romantic union at which he will
‘kiss the moist ground’ and a romantic attachment will blossom between the
united ‘lovers’.85 According to Hanan Ashrawi, many of these love poems to
the homeland can be read as expressions of their own sense of impotence
and sterility, which may be manifested in expressions of male desire that
verge on the sexist.86 One such example of this emerges in Rashid Husain’s
poem ‘First’. Imagined as a ‘play’ between two characters in an interroga-
tion, and so, we might assume, enacting a dialogue between Israeli coloniser
and colonised Palestinian, this poem renders the territorial implications of
the marriage metaphor deliberately explicit:
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
In this poem, beloved Palestine is cast as the object of romantic rivalry

between her new suitor, Israel, and her fi rst love, the Arab people of Pales-
tine. Rather than celebrating the love between bride and groom, though, the
poem becomes something of an exercise in male jealousy and sexual prow-
ess in which Palestine herself becomes no more than the ground on which a
tussle for patriarchal power takes place.
The problematic nature of this reductive gendered characterisation of Pal-
estine has not been lost on Palestinian critics. In his work The Third Way, Raja
Shehadeh explores his temptation to fetishise the Palestinian landscape and
to read it as a series of symbols that represent his stifled desire for the home-
land. Yet Shehadeh perceives something reductive, even ‘pornographic’ in
this kind of engagement with the land, as it ultimately denies him any sense
of genuine emotional, personal or literal connection to it:
When you are exiled from your land . . . you begin, like a pornographer,
to think about it in symbols [ . . . ] You articulate your love for your land,
in its absence, and in the process you transform it into something else
[ . . . ] [Now] as I am looking at [an olive tree], it transforms itself before
my eyes into a symbol . . . of our struggle, of our loss. And at that very
moment I am robbed of the tree; instead there is a hollow space into
which anger and pain flow.88
Palestine’s transformation into no more than a set of symbols proves ‘hol-

low’ for Shehadeh because, just as he fi nds his own sarhat through the Pal-
estinian hills to be subject to increasing restriction, so does this restricted
narrative of Palestinian identity limit his own acts of wandering in the
literary imagination. Shehadeh is not alone in this recognition. Despite
the strident and somewhat masculinist tone of his early poem ‘Identity
Card’, Mahmoud Darwish would later flourish into one of Palestine’s
most sophisticated poets whose meditations on the Palestinian condition
would undergo constant transformation throughout his lifetime, explor-
ing a multitude of facets of his existence that extend well beyond national
concerns. 89 It is appropriate, then, that it should be Darwish who offers a
pertinent deconstruction of the masculinist rhetoric that simultaneously
exalts, reduces and silences women in his poem ‘No More and No Less’,
in which he transforms his own voice into that of a woman to remind the
reader that ‘I am not a land / or a journey / I am a woman, no more and no
less’. 90 In this ‘radical’ act of imagining a woman who sets the boundaries
to her own identity and transcends the realm of the primarily symbolic,
Darwish begins to rework the relationship between national desire and
gendered identity in ways that might destabilise rather than simply affi rm
patriarchal power. This is the exciting possibility pursued still further by
one of Palestine’s most significant fi lmmakers: Michel Khleifi.
Nation as Multiple Narration: Dis-Orienting

Desire in the Films of Michel Khleifi
The fi lms of Michel Khleifi have been subject to both acclaim and contro-
versy within and beyond Palestine. His work is distinctive within the Pales-
tinian cinematic canon for its constant willingness to expand the Palestinian
national narrative through a style of fi lmmaking characterised by a mul-
tiplicity and self-reflexivity of perspective. As Khleifi himself writes of his
fi lmmaking practice:
The prevalent political language aims at determining a harmony of

concrete interests [ . . . ] My cultural action . . . aims at liberating
spaces where everyone can be moved . . . [and] marvel at the world
[ . . . ] My fi lms’ cultural world is made up of both reality and the
imagination . . . It is like a child’s quest for identity: he or she needs
these two levels—reality and dream—to approach life in a balanced and
non-schizophrenic way. 91
While Palestine remains at the heart of Khleifi’s fi lmmaking, his engagement

with nationhood therefore operates in a way that not only embraces its nar-
rative nature, located just as much in ‘dream’ and subjective consciousness
as reality, but that also seeks to expand rather than limit or unify narratives
of national identity. Indeed, this trait recently emerged in his fi rst solo fi lm
for fourteen years, Zindeeq (2009), the title of which can be interpreted as
‘atheist’, ‘heretic’ or ‘freethinker’. This fi lm portrays the return of a Palestin-
ian fi lmmaker from Europe to his hometown of Nazareth, where he is forced
to confront the confl icting narratives of nostalgia for the past and desire for
the future that construct his own ambivalent relationship to Palestine. While
in many ways a personal meditation on the creative imagination, the fi lm is
also a reflection of the complex social narratives of confl ict that exist within
the Palestinian community itself. 92
It was his fi rst fi lm, however, which he made upon his return to his home-
town of Nazareth in 1980 after a period of studying fi lmmaking in Belgium,
that would ignite what George Khleifi has termed the ‘fourth period’ in Pal-
estinian cinema: an era in which fi lmmakers rejected either the idealisa-
tion of the past or its portrayal of Palestinian history as one of unequivocal
trauma, and instead ‘attempted to extract the Palestinian narrative from the
story of the actual land, the real place, and the life being played out there
[ . . . ] deconstruct[ing] Palestinian society’s image of unity and homogene-
ity’. 93 This fi lm was his feature-length, prize-winning documentary Fertile
Memory (1980), 94 a work in which Khleifi mediated the national narrative
through the perspectives of two very different women. While the fi lm draws
on land-based motifs related to ideas of history and memory, the women
who construct narratives of this land operate as much more than its symbolic
guardians. Roumia, an elderly woman (and Khleifi’s aunt), is a powerful fig-
ure of sumud (the quality of ‘steadfastness’ or ‘resilience’, an important form
of resistance for Palestinians, who may possess no other form of agency than
their simple refusal to give in) 95 as she refuses to give up her land in the Gali-
lee, even after thirty-two years of pressure from Israel to do so. The other,
Sahar Khalifeh (who would go on to become a famous novelist and feminist
figure in Palestine), is a divorcee in her thirties who possesses a different kind
of attachment to the land. She has returned to her hometown of Nablus from
Libya and, despite the social stigma that she encounters as a single mother
in her community, refuses to leave. Rather than operating as silent symbolic
presences within the fi lm, both women are instead the active narrators of
their own stories, which deviate from the traditional national narrative in
their accounts of what Viola Shafi k characterises as the ‘double occupation’
they endure living not only under Israeli occupation, but also beneath ‘their
men’s claims of ownership and the restrictions imposed on them by patri-
archal society as a whole’. 96 Thus the ‘fertile memories’ of these women not
only yield alternative female-authored versions of Palestinian history, but
they also reveal the many forms of gendered power, agency and knowledge
that circulate within the nation. This simultaneous invocation and subver-
sion of the national narrative is a recurrent feature of Khleifi’s work, and it
surfaces in particularly pertinent form in his 1987 fi lm, Wedding in Galilee.
By exploring the multi-layered desires that intersect in this fi lm—not only
between women and nation but between men and women, young and old,
Israelis and Palestinians—the powerfully ‘disorienting’ qualities of his work
emerge: a ‘dis-Orientation’ of the reductive Orientalist tropes of the Zionist
gaze, and a ‘disorientation’ of traditional nationalist symbolism that achieves
an infi nitely richer, if more challenging, portrait of Palestinian existence.
Confl icts and disorientations of desire lie at the heart of Wedding in Galilee,
and they are in fact evoked in the fi lm’s title, which neatly summarises its
central premise. The fi lm tells the story of a mukhtar (head or ‘mayor’) of an
Arab village in the Galilee, Salim Saleh Daoud (played by Ali el Akili), who
wishes to hold a traditional wedding for his son, despite the restrictions on
life under Israeli governance. As Mary N. Layoun notes (and as suggested
in the analysis of nationalist imagery in the previous section of this chapter),
the wedding is a highly politicised trope in Palestinian cultural expression
as it represents unity not only of the family but also of the nation. Hence the
establishment of the State of Israel was represented as a ‘violent conjugal
separation’ that tore a land and culture apart.97 As a traditional celebration
of union between individuals in the service of the propagation of the national
‘family’, the wedding within the fi lm therefore operates as a powerful sym-
bol of resistance. Indeed, the fi rst Intifada (an event that began shortly after
Wedding in Galilee was released, and which is seen by some to be symboli-
cally foreshadowed in the fi lm’s destabilisation of traditional gender roles,
which would also later occur during the Intifada) 98 is sometimes referred
to as ‘the Palestinian wedding’, 99 as it was designed to unite the divided
lands of beloved Palestine. In the fi lm, the wedding celebrations are simi-
larly designed to incite a sense of pride in the village, and there is a strong
emphasis on tradition in Khleifi’s portrayal of the wedding, which takes place
over the course of a whole day and permeates every space of the village,
drawing its inhabitants together. Yet the mukhtar’s desires confl ict with those
of another patriarchal figure: the Israeli governor (Makram Khoury), under
whose jurisdiction the village falls. Their competing desires emerge in the
opening scene, in which Daoud sits in the governor’s office in order to ask
permission to hold his son’s wedding: a necessity, given that there is a curfew
imposed on the village and gatherings of people have been banned, since it
is, according to the governor, ‘one of those extremist villages’. In the encoun-
ter that plays out between governor and mukhtar, each the patriarch of their
respective political systems, a deal is struck: the wedding can take place,
provided that the governor is present as the guest of honour. The premise
upon which Khleifi establishes this wedding therefore disorientates its uto-
pian nationalist connotations of unity and resistance. Instead, it becomes a
motif of patriarchal rivalry and contested desire. Indeed, this disorientation
of the wedding motif inadvertently evokes the assessment that was offered
to Golda Meir of Palestine’s suitability for settlement: ‘The bride is beauti-
ful, but she has got a bridegroom already’, to which she was said to have
responded that ‘I thank God every night that the bridegroom was so weak,
and the bride could be taken away from him’.100 Wedding in Galilee challenges
the power dynamics implied by Meir through its portrayal of the strong rela-
tionship between the Arab village and its traditions, and of the desire that
connects it to its land. Yet confl icts and disorientations of desire do surface,
and not only between the Israeli and Arab patriarchs, but also among the
wedding participants themselves.
Early in the fi lm, immense dissatisfaction at the wedding arrangements
emerges within the patriarchal sphere itself. Many of the men within the
village view the presence of the governor as an insult, and question whether
it will be possible to hold a sense of pride in the celebrations when they
take place on his terms. The groom (Nezih Akleh) displays unease at the
situation, which his younger sister Sumaya (Sonia Amar) teasingly sums up
when she tells him that he must choose between his ‘bride or his patriotism’.
Ironically, Daoud’s wife appears to foresee this confl ict when she warns her
husband that he must ‘try not to cause a split within the village and the fam-
ily’, though Daoud remains publicly adamant that the wedding will restore
the village’s identity. Privately, however, his patriarchal desires are in a state
of disorientation. As his youngest son, a child of around eight or nine years
old, lies sleeping, we hear Daoud asking him in a soft, wistful tone: ‘Are your
dreams like mine? . . . Why do I want you to learn my story by heart?’ In
these darkened, disorientating sequences of dream and meditation which
punctuate the fi lm, Khleifi offers an important deconstruction of the public
narrative of authority and tradition presented by the patriarch, suggesting
instead the competing desires and dreams that may circulate in his son’s and
his own mind, and indeed in Palestine’s future.
A tension between public and private desire, and between repetition and
disruption of the traditional national narrative emerges over the course of
the wedding itself. Many of the performances of ritual and tradition that
take place during the wedding do indeed affi rm the gendered iconography
of national unity, such as the songs sung by the men in the presence of the
Israeli governor, the lyrics of which describe male qualities of strength, unity
and brotherhood: a subtle display of resistance. The ritual cleansing and
dressing of both bride and groom that occurs early in the fi lm, meanwhile,
presents them as glorious figures of idealised Palestinian identity who are
significant for their representational rather than individual qualities. Yet over
the course of the wedding, alternative forms of desire disrupt these gendered
narratives. In particular, the mukhtar’s eldest daughter, Sumaya, displays
strong desires of her own.
Confident, wilful and conscious of her own beauty, Sumaya is unafraid to
demand attention from the young men in the village and indeed expresses a
desire to leave there altogether, a display of independent agency that is met
with a recommendation by her grandmother for her father to ‘marry her
off’ in order to ‘shut her up, and the others [those talking about her] too’.
Sumaya, though, seems to have little interest in performing the traditionally
feminine and nationally affi rmative role of bride. While we see Samia (the
bride, played by Anna Condo) standing static and passive so that she can be
dressed by the other women, Sumaya slinks away to her own room where she
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.
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
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.
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
Khleifi’s view signifies a radical break from the traditional structures of

nationalist discourse. Yet Khleifi is not alone in his creative desire to break
from such structures; indeed, his work also points towards a tradition of
gender-conscious Palestinian expression that stretches far before him into the
past, and ahead of him into the present day. This alternative tradition of gen-
der-conscious expression is explored over the course of the book, through
the work of the many fi lmmakers and authors who, like Khleifi, challenge
the structures of inequality and silencing within the nation in search of a
truly postcolonial vision of Palestine. Khleifi’s work represents an important
conceptual starting-point for this study as it reveals that ‘nation’ is comprised
of not one but many ‘narrations’, each of which have their own compelling
stories of Palestine to tell.
En-gendering a Postcolonial Feminist Perspective

This chapter has sought to guide the reader towards an understanding of
the competing desires and confl icting discursive territories that have come
to shape Palestine’s narrative construction of nationhood. Drawing on
postcolonial feminist critical frameworks such as gender-conscious use of
Said’s theory of Orientalism, and of the ‘nation as narration’, the chapter
suggested the ways in which gendered and sexualised dynamics of patriar-
chal mastery could be seen to underpin colonial and Zionist narrative con-
structions of Palestine, evident in the classically colonial desire to construct
Palestine as ‘virgin territory’. These desires found their match, though, in
the expressions of deep-rooted connection to this very same territory that
emerged from its Arab Palestinian inhabitants. Palestinian nationalist dis-
course therefore responded directly to the gendered and sexualised tropes of
colonial discourse by appropriating the dynamics of masculine mastery and
patriarchal power for itself. Consequently, the narrative struggle between
colonial and national visions of Palestine emerged as stridently patriarchal,
and Michel Khleifi presented us with a potent motif of this power struggle
between colonial and nationalist discourse in Wedding in Galilee, through
the figures of the two patriarchs: the Israeli governor and the Palestinian
mukhtar. Each of these figures wishes to assert their superior relationship
with, and authority over, the ‘bride’ of Palestine; yet this fi lm also reveals the
multiple alternative desires that surface among Palestine’s supposed ‘brides’
and indeed ‘grooms’ within the Palestinian community, rendering the heter-
onormative and patriarchal narrative of national desire unstable.
At one level, this chapter has sought to establish the productivity of read-
ing the Palestinian situation as ‘colonial’, by revealing the ways in which nar-
ratives of Orientalist, colonial and national desire come to intersect within,
and to shape, a range of Palestinian poetic and fi lmic expression. These
works also, however, reveal the necessity of postcolonial feminist critique, for
even narratives of apparently emancipating anti-colonial nationalism appear
to construct a problematic set of power relations in which women are sub-
jected to forms of discursive silencing analogous to those performed by colo-
nial discourse. To put it simply, the paradox of the ‘emancipating’ nationalist
narrative appears to be that ‘women may symbolise the nation, but men represent
it’ (italics in original).110 From a postcolonial feminist perspective, this situ-
ation is deeply troubling as it reveals the structures of inequality that may
circulate around gendered identity within national consciousness. As we saw
in the fi nal section of this chapter, though, some forms of Palestinian cultural
expression prove remarkably conscious of the gendered power dynamics
within the nation itself, and resist this symbolic silencing of women, even
at the expense of narrative or national unity. That this highly progressive
awareness of the complex interrelationship between colonial, national and
gendered narratives should be found in the work of one of Palestine’s most
seminal fi lmmakers alerts us to the fact that Palestinian creative conscious-
ness presents a particularly rich arena of postcolonial feminist possibility. In
this opening chapter, then, the theoretical tools of postcolonial feminist dis-
course have helped to illuminate the presence of what might be considered
a postcolonial feminist perspective within Palestinian cultural expression itself,
as a creative discourse that is already engaged in the task of dismantling and
reformulating the gendered structures of nationhood.
In the next chapter, then, we move far beyond the view that ‘women sym-
bolise the nation, while men represent it’, by turning to the astonishing nar-
ratives of personal and political struggle that have emerged from the pens of
two of the most prominent female figures in Palestinian literary history: Fadwa
Tuqan, and Liana Badr. In these narratives, Tuqan and Badr leave Orientalist
and patriarchal desires far behind, and author their own versions of a concept
that lies at the heart of Palestinian creative consciousness: resistance.
2 Women Writing Resistance
Between Nationalism and Feminism
Resistance infuses many elements of Palestinian identity and stands proudly

as a central preoccupation of much Palestinian literature and fi lm. From the
sentiments of courage and defiance expressed by poets during the British
mandate such as Abu Salma and ‘Abd al-Raheem Mahmoud1 to the sur-
real fantasies of affront to Israeli occupation in the fi lms of Elia Suleiman, 2
creative expression has presented a medium through which writers and fi lm-
makers have been able to express resistance to colonial domination and
political injustice in a variety of ways. Indeed, much Palestinian creative
expression seems to typify the views of the great anti-colonial theorist Amil-
car Cabral when he states that ‘to take up arms to dominate a people [is to]
neutralise and paralyse . . . their cultural life’; consequently, ‘national libera-
tion is necessarily an act of culture’. 3
Yet as we saw in the previous chapter, cultural discourses of national resis-
tance have often been formulated in vehemently patriarchal terms, which
perpetuate deeply conservative structures of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’.
Women therefore come to bear the ‘burden of representation’ within nation-
alist discourse as the ‘symbolic bearers of the collectivity’s identity and hon-
our’,4 and as a result, fi nd themselves restricted to highly traditional female
identities, roles and behaviours. Women’s position within the nationalist sym-
bolic order is paradoxical, though. While female identity seems to be subject
to discursive ‘colonisation’ at the hands of the patriarchal order, it is also
through participation within the national symbolic order that women may
gain protection and agency. As Elise G. Young writes:
Nationalist ideology extols women, drawing upon phallocratic myths

that sustain the reality of women’s colonization. He calls his country
‘she.’ She is his domain. Within his domain, she stumbles over her occu-
pied body, carrying the flag. The flag promises that she will be rewarded
for her suffering. Her role in carrying the banner earns her the possibil-
ity of being counted [ . . . ] The flag earns her the possibility of protec-
tion. It also earns her rights and the right to advocate for rights. Without
that, there can be no peace and justice. 5
Women Writing Resistance 47
Faced with this complex interplay between their colonial oppression as
Palestinians, their patriarchal oppression as women and the possibilities
of agency afforded by their involvement within the nationalist cause, and
indeed by their positions within ‘private’ realms such as the home, how do
female Palestinian creative practitioners formulate and even reconfigure
resistance within their writing? This chapter examines the ways in which two
female Palestinian authors, the renowned poet and author of an autobiog-
raphy, Fadwa Tuqan, and the novelist, Liana Badr, negotiate these tensions
between nationalist and feminist commitments in their work. As their nar-
ratives reveal, these commitments have led to complex struggles that must
be fought on many fronts, not only between the patriarchal and feminist or
colonial and anti-colonial, but also between allegiances to the nationalist and
feminist, the public and private, and the political and personal. The texts
explored in this chapter therefore invite us to reconsider the creative con-
ceptualisation of power, oppression and identification within narratives of
Palestinian resistance, and in doing so, they draw us towards an imaginative
understanding of what it might mean for the women and men of Palestine to
be truly free.
The tension between anti-colonial nationalism and feminism has been the
subject of much postcolonial feminist debate. Many critics, including Ger-
aldine Heng, have noted that ‘feminism’ has often been viewed within the
Third World as a Western import that is in fact at odds with nationalist com-
mitments, the ‘feminist’ presenting a ‘subversive figure, at once of a destabi-
lising modernity and of a presumptuous Western imperialism’.6 Indeed, Leila
Ahmed writes:
Colonialism’s use of feminism to promote the culture of the coloniser

and undermine native culture has ever since imparted to feminism in
non-Western societies the taint of having served as an instrument of co-
lonial domination, rendering it suspect in Arab eyes and vulnerable to
the charge of being an ally of colonial interests.7
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
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
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
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
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
to abolish all forms of discrimination and inequality against women,

which were propagated by the different forms of colonialism on our land
. . . and . . . reinforced by the . . . customs and traditions prejudiced against
women, embodied in a number of existing laws and legislations. 38
This declaration situates the struggle for women’s rights as dually resistant
to the inequalities perpetuated by Israeli occupation, and those enforced
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.
‘I, Myself, Am a Poem’: Interior Struggle in

Fadwa Tuqan’s A Mountainous Journey
Fadwa Tuqan is recognised as a ‘major lyrical and outstanding nationalist’39
writer within the revered tradition of Palestinian poetry,40 a figure who pos-
sesses an almost ‘mythological image . . . as a resilient woman who fought
against British and Israeli imperialism by the power of her poetic discourse’
in Palestinian cultural consciousness.41 Though she began publishing highly
acclaimed poems in the 1940s, many of these displayed a reflective introver-
sion that was unusual during a highly nationalistic period of poetic expres-
sion.42 It was during the 1960s and 70s that a political shift took place in
Tuqan’s poetry, and she began to produce works of such nationalistic power
that the former Israeli minister of defence, Moshe Dayan, reportedly stated
that ‘one Fadwa Tuqan poem was the equal of [i.e. enough to recruit] twenty
commandos’.43 Yet in 1978, a very different creative voice emerged from
Tuqan—and it came as a shock to a Palestinian audience accustomed to the
nationalist commitments of her poetry. This voice took the form of sirah
dhatiyyah (autobiography) 44 and it revealed a life of deep inner torment and
struggle; a ‘mountainous journey’ comprised of ‘struggle, depravation and
enormous difficulties’45 undertaken not in the rocky terrain of public national
struggle, but in the private, secluded world of the patriarchal home where,
according to Tuqan, ‘the female lived out her dark, pinched-up existence’
(106). Tuqan’s competing voices raise a number of questions for the post-
colonial feminist reader. What is the relationship between Tuqan’s public
poetic persona and her private, autobiographical intimations? What might
the ‘inner journey’ that she undertakes in the text reveal about the personal,
gendered and national landscapes of Palestine? And to what extent might
Tuqan’s account of her ‘mountainous journey’ be read as a prototype of
postcolonial and/or feminist commitment? By tracing the difficult route that
Tuqan follows, from secluded girlhood to politically astute womanhood, it
becomes possible to map out the distinctive path towards emancipation that
she seeks as a Palestinian woman and as a poet.
A Mountainous Journey was fi rst published in serialised form from 1978 to
1979 under the title Rihla Jabaliyya, Rihla Sa‘ba (A Mountainous Journey, A
Difficult Journey) in the Palestinian journal Al-Jadid, and was subsequently
published in English translation in 1990 as part of Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s
Project of Translation from Arabic literature.46 Completed in the late 1970s,
it emerged at a time when an increasing number of prominent Palestinian
female authors and public figures were publishing autobiographies, includ-
ing the revolutionary Leila Khaled, and the journalist and activist Ray-
monda Tawil.47 While, as stated in Fedwa Malti-Douglas’ introduction to the
text, the phenomenon of Arab women’s autobiographical writing is nothing
new,48 the act of producing an autobiography, ‘the ultimate site of confes-
sion and self-exposition’,49 nevertheless remains a daring act for a woman
(particularly for Tuqan whose public, poetic voice establishes certain politi-
cal expectations) as it opens the text up to either the traditionalist view that
women’s writing is ‘too personal’ and does not warrant serious attention, 50
or to general disapproval at the sharing of ‘private’ information about the
family within the pubic sphere. Yet her text also acts as a forerunner in what
would later become a vital genre in Palestinian culture: personal account
literature, in which the narrative of the individual comes to function in the
service of collective memory. 51 Tuqan’s autobiography complicates this usual
function, however, for rather than constituting a public narrative that sup-
ports the collective memory of events, hers is a deeply personal account that
reveals sources of schism, even dissent from the official national narrative.
For Tuqan, this fraught relationship between the personal and political, pub-
lic and private, stems from one key source: her identity as a woman.
Tuqan does not identify herself as a feminist or even as a writer concerned
directly with gender issues, and nor has her Palestinian readership tended
to interpret her in these terms. Instead, she has been celebrated as a poetic
voice on a voyage of self-discovery—a line enforced in the Arabic book edi-
tion bearing an introduction by the renowned Palestinian poet Samih al-
Qasim, which can be interpreted as an act of mainstream, male validation
of the text. 52 Yet many elements of A Mountainous Journey can be interpreted
in terms of what Badran and Cooke term ‘invisible feminism’. This phenom-
enon, they write, emerges at times when ‘patriarchal authorities suppress
public feminist movements’ and ‘private . . . authorities within the family . . .
enforce silence’, meaning that while ‘feminism [is] removed from sight . . .
it is not necessarily extinguished’. 53 Instead, ‘invisible feminism’ takes the
form of actions and expressions that may not be labelled as feminist or even
recognised as such by the person enacting them, but which nevertheless seek
emancipation for women and so participate within wider feminist discourses
in circulation. Tuqan’s autobiography is replete with ‘invisible feminist’ acts,
and one of the key forms in which they appear is through her insistence on
the political importance of her personal life, which refutes the nationalistic
view of the personal as secondary to the political. The now iconic state-
ment, that ‘the personal is political’, was fi rst formulated by second-wave
U.S. feminists of the 1960s and 70s, who were keen to break down the dis-
tinction between women’s personal feelings and experiences, and their ‘self-
less’ public activism. That there should ever have been a distinction drawn
between these constructs is a source of some amazement to many Third
World feminist critics, who have long insisted on the close-knit connection
between conditions of domestic disenfranchisement, and women’s desire for
political involvement. 54 Interestingly, one key feminist whose work came to
be associated with the slogan in the U.S. was Carol Hanisch, who argued
that the ‘consciousness-raising’ groups that became popular in the U.S. dur-
ing the late 1960s and 1970s, in which women shared their feelings about
their individual lives, were not simply forms of personal therapy but of politi-
cal significance as they revealed the varied but socially pervasive forms of
oppression experienced by women. 55 This validation of women’s innermost
feelings as a topic of public concern and political significance is also the
stance adopted by Tuqan in her autobiography, in which she imagines her
readership as ‘wayfarers on arduous paths’ (11) similar to her own. Although
emotional revelation marks Tuqan’s text from the outset, her work is also
resistant to the idea that her experiences can be read as indicative of all
Palestinian women; rather, she treads carefully on the path between the per-
sonal and the political, leading her to a destination that is uniquely liberat-
ing, but performed through an insistence on individual rather than external
or collective struggle.
The ‘mountainous journey’ that Tuqan describes in her autobiography
begins with her birth into a wealthy, prestigious and highly conservative
family in Nablus in 1917. Though Tuqan records that this was the year
in which the British completed their occupation of Palestine, it is a more
personal act of apparent betrayal that creates the young Fadwa’s sense of
disenfranchisement in the world. She records that her mother, overwhelmed
by the burden of six children already, had tried to abort her: a controversial
revelation, given the reverence afforded motherhood in Palestinian society.
From an early age, then, Fadwa experiences herself as partially negated and
unwanted, emotions that she is no doubt attempting to lay to rest through
the act of ‘birthing’ a complete narrative account of her life. Here, there is
an obvious political analogy to draw between Palestine’s emergence into an
era of hostility and Tuqan’s own entrance into the world. Yet the structures
of oppression that negate the young Fadwa’s existence are not, in her mind,
those of the British colonial presence, but of another oppressive force experi-
enced within the private realm of the home: her family.
Samih K. Farsoun describes the family, or al-‘a’ilah, as the primary source
of ‘economic, psychological, and social security’ within the often insecure
Palestinian landscape, and as ‘the basis of Palestinian identity’. 56 Many stud-
ies have noted, however, that in the period of the British mandate, and even
more so post-Nakba, both of which provide the backdrop for parts of Tuqan’s
autobiography, the construct of the family underwent significant change as
traditional models of the extended family, in which several generations would
live together, began to disintegrate and give way to more insular forms of
family life due to modernising influences and to the fragmentation of Pal-
estinian society. 57 Fadwa’s emphasis on family life within her text therefore
presents an interesting dramatisation of this process, but even in its more
insular form, patriarchal authority remains a structural principle of the fam-
ily. As in many other cultures, the Palestinian family is organised according
to a patriarchal and patrilineal structure, in which the father stands as the
male head of the family, to be replaced by the eldest son upon his death.
The mother, meanwhile, holds authority as a senior figure within the family,
though this is usually limited to authority over the women and girls in the
home. It is within the family homestead that these gendered power struc-
tures are affi rmed in spatial terms. As Fatima Mernissi writes in her study
of Arabo-Muslim culture, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Mod-
ern Muslim Society, the construct of the family provides a point of contrast
from the Ummah, or community of Muslim believers. While the Ummah is
a spiritual, communal, public realm, the family is the private realm where
more ‘worldly’ contact occurs between the sexes; thus the public realm is
accessible primarily to men, while the private, domestic realm is inhabited
by women. Such spatial segregation rests, Mernissi explains, on the Muslim
view of female sexuality as capable of producing fitna: social disorder, chaos,
or strife. 58 So powerful is fitna that men must be protected from it through
segregation of the sexes. Thus women in conservative, traditional Arabo-
Muslim families are traditionally confi ned to the domestic realm, with any
interaction into the public realm carefully regulated either through veiling or
male chaperoning, particularly for women of the upper classes. 59 While many
liberal Western feminists have tended to read this system of gender segrega-
tion as unequivocally oppressive of women, 60 Mernissi argues that in fact,
‘the seclusion of women [ . . . ] is seen by many Muslim women as a source
of pride’,61 a way of protecting the purity of the female body, of affi rming the
power of women’s sexuality and of designating a separate arena of authority
to women. Yet within her autobiography, Tuqan portrays the secluded realm
of the home as anything but empowering.
Despite the image of expansive travel evoked in the title of her autobiogra-
phy, the ‘mountainous journey’ undertaken by Fadwa is performed within a
highly restrictive domestic arena. Evoking classic images of female seclusion,
she states that ‘the reality of life in that bottled-up harem [was] humiliating
submission’ (106); for rather than the private realm operating as a form of
sanctity, it instead clips the young, creative and romantic Fadwa’s wings,
confi ning her to a home that she views as a ‘large coop fi lled with domesti-
cated birds’ in which it is women’s vocation to ‘hatch chicks’ and feed others
(110). We learn that Fadwa’s confi nement to this realm emerges precisely in
accordance with the discourse of sexual regulation identified by Mernissi. As
a thirteen-year-old girl, Tuqan is given a jasmine flower by a sixteen-year-old
boy, much to her delight, and she confides to the reader the lofty romantic
feelings that accompanied this event. When this becomes public knowledge,
though, her brother Yusuf proclaims it a slur on the family’s reputation.62
Fadwa is taken out of school and confi ned entirely to the home in order to
control her burgeoning romantic and erotic self-awareness, and to restore the
family’s honour. This is a move that will later prove deeply ironic, as one of
the things for which the adult Tuqan’s poetry will become best known is her
‘liberation of the erotic’ as a legitimate subject matter for a female poet.63 At
this stage in her life, though, the young Fadwa’s removal from school, from
the public realm and from intellectual stimulation condemns her to physi-
cal and mental imprisonment, and Tuqan describes herself as ‘a wounded
animal in a cage, fi nding no means of expression’ (107), which instead bears
its ‘savage claws of hatred created and fomented in us by those who rob us
of our freedom’ (79). Here, Tuqan adopts a voice similar to that of Fanon’s
‘auto-destructive’ colonial subject described in The Wretched of the Earth:
At this fresh stage, colonial aggression turns inward in a current of terror

among the natives [ . . . ] If this suppressed fury fails to fi nd an outlet, it
turns in a vacuum and devastates the oppressed creatures themselves.64
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
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
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
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
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’
(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.
Smashing the Worn-Out Idols? Rewriting Resistance

in Liana Badr’s A Compass for the Sunflower
The quest for postcolonial feminist agency takes a dramatic shift from inner
struggle to external resistance in Liana Badr’s 1979 novel of the Palestinian
resistance, A Compass for the Sunflower (Bousala min Ajl ‘Abbad al-Shams).
Badr was born in Jerusalem in 1952 and raised in Jericho, but fled with her
father to Jordan during the 1967 war and then to Beirut following the Black
September of 1970, where she spent eleven years before escaping the Israeli
invasion of 1982 by moving to Tunisia. She fi nally returned to the West
Bank in 1994.75 She is no stranger to political and cultural activism her-
self: during her time as a student at the University of Amman, she became
involved in the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and while in Beirut, she
worked with women’s organisations in refugee camps. Upon her return to
Palestine, she began working for the Palestinian Ministry of Culture. Many
of Badr’s works (which comprise both fiction and fi lm) reflect these diasporic
dislocations,76 and A Compass for the Sunflower, which travels between time-
frames and locations in the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon, is no excep-
tion. Yet the focus within all of her works is on the Palestinian revolutionary
struggle. This struggle may, at times, take place far from the homeland, but
it nevertheless operates as a guiding force in her characters’ lives, just as
it has in Badr’s own. In A Compass for the Sunflower, the character Shaher
sums up this view neatly when he states that ‘there are a lot of questions
to be answered [ . . . ] [but] the one certainty is Palestine’.77 This constant
focus on political struggle means that it is possible to defi ne Badr’s writing
according to what Barbara Harlow, drawing on the work of the Palestinian
author and political figure Ghassan Kanafani,78 terms ‘resistance literature’:
literature produced within an arena of struggle, by authors actively engaged
in that struggle, who express their ideas and feelings about resistance and
liberation through their texts.79 Following the theories of Cabral, Kanafani
concluded that cultural expression is as important a form of resistance as
armed struggle itself (and here, it is important to note the mutuality of these
things), as like armed struggle, it offers an affi rmation of collective political
identity and presents a powerful narrative of resistance to colonial domina-
tion, which operates in part through the production and control of discur-
sive representation. 80 Badr herself appears to concur with this view, as she
states in interview that one of the ways in which the ‘Palestinian movement
outside [i.e. in exile]’ formulated resistance was to ‘work a lot in the cultural
field to build the independent Palestinian characteristics in literature and
arts’.81 Badr, then, locates her personal, literary resistance fi rmly within the
broader political battlefield.
While Badr clearly views her literary expression as part of a wider col-
lective struggle, A Compass for the Sunflower also complicates the clear-cut
‘resistance narrative’ by raising some unsettling questions about the rela-
tionship between gendered and nationalist agency. In this text, Badr pres-
ents us with an array of different characters scattered across various sites of
Palestinian experience ( Jericho, Nablus, Amman and Beirut), who are all
involved in some form of muqawamah (resistance) for the Palestinian cause.
Despite the presence of iconic male feda’iyeen (resistance fighters) in the text,
Badr focuses her novel through the fi rst-person narrative of a young woman
named Jinan, who is the metaphorical ‘sunflower’ in need of a ‘compass’ in
the novel’s title, constantly turning in different directions in search of (en)
light(enment), growth and a way forwards for both herself and for the Pal-
estinian resistance. This unusual focus on a young woman, a figure usually
considered peripheral to or anomalous within the resistance, can be seen
as an attempt to relocate revolutionary struggle within a gender-conscious
framework of reference, and even performs what one character within the
novel describes as the ‘smashing’ of ‘worn-out idols’ (77) through its chal-
lenge to the gendered symbolism of nationalism. Consequently, Badr’s (en)
gendering of the national struggle enables her to rewrite the ‘resistance nar-
rative’ in ways that can be considered postcolonial feminist in nature.
Jinan, the young woman at the heart of the narrative, is described as a
naturally spirited ‘tomboy’ of a girl who, from her earliest schooldays in
Jordan when she is punished for organising a demonstration in support of
Palestine, demonstrates an unyielding commitment to the Palestinian resis-
tance by participating in numerous fields of activity: from nursing in the fi rst
aid centres of Jordanian camps to armed resistance among the feda’iyeen.
Jinan’s own diasporic movements map out a common trajectory in traumatic
Palestinian existence ( Jinan, like many Palestinians, is forced to flee the West
Bank for Jordan during the June war of 1967, then flees from Jordan for
Lebanon following the Black September in 1970, which ousted the Palestin-
ian resistance from Jordan),82 while her actions also map out the multifarious
forms of resistance in which women have participated. Thus Jinan comes
to represent a Palestinian ‘everywoman’ whose individual experiences are
symbolic of the broader struggle. Some of Jinan’s activities, while under-
taken in the ‘masculine’ public sphere, assume a feminocentric and arguably
feminist character. One example of this is her provision of literacy classes to
Palestinian refugee women living in Lebanon through a women’s centre: an
activity that can be interpreted as both feminist and nationalist. Advancing
women’s literacy can be read as a feminist act since it imbues women with
the possibility of self-representation at personal and political levels. Indeed,
Frances Hasso has argued that ‘everyday, individual acts whose focus is cre-
ating or maintaining dignity, self-defi nition, self-reliance and independence’
can be interpreted as ‘feminist’, 83 and education seems to offer precisely
these possibilities. Significantly, though, such activities do not have to be
self-proclaimed as feminist, and can equally be understood as nationalist,
not least because the attempt to improve women’s literacy within the novel
is driven by a desire to enable them to communicate with their families else-
where in the diaspora, hence keeping a sense of communal identity alive: a
primary function of ‘resistance literature’.84 Equally, their education can be
read as integral to the task of building a capable, modern Palestine founded
in equality of opportunity: a truly postcolonial nation. As Philippa Strum
notes in her sociological research into women’s participation in the nation-
alist struggle, literacy programs and schools were frequently set up by the
PLO in Lebanese refugee camps and, unlike earlier charitable work enacted
primarily by ‘elite women’s groups’ which patronised the poorer classes, such
activities tended to be undertaken by ‘grassroots organizers’ and ‘well-edu-
cated children of poorer families’,85 representing a shift in structures of class
and social privilege that was deemed essential to revitalising the nationalist
project. For Badr, education therefore emerges as a vital tool within the inter-
related feminist and nationalist agendas.
Jinan’s work as a nurse in a Jordanian hospital can also be seen as an
acceptably feminine role, through which she affi rms her nurturing, life-giv-
ing capacities as a woman, and works in a supporting role for her male col-
leagues. Jinan’s experiences echo Leila Hudson’s observation that women’s
roles in the resistance often tended to conform to the masculinist models of
‘women’s work’, which were confi ned to the domestic, caring or administra-
tive.86 In the novel, Jinan is critical of the PLO’s failure to address the way in
which binarised, masculinist gender relations seem to underpin the reality
of what is claimed as a ‘progressive’ revolution committed to ‘women’s lib-
eration [and] transforming the old society’ (20). Indeed, Badr suggests that
women’s primarily symbolic status within nationalist discourse may have
undergone no more than a superficial change through an episode in which a
male colleague criticises Jinan for her decision to wear a scarf over her head—
which happens to be for no other reason than a lack of time to wash her hair.
Though she apologises (somewhat tersely) for the fact that her ‘scarf reminds
[him] of the era of female seclusion’, she confides in the reader as to what she
wishes her retort had been: ‘You ultra-progressive man, would you prefer us
to wear either khaki uniforms or eastern dress so that you could . . . give us
pluses and minuses?’ (105). Here, Jinan implies that she has been subsumed
into a masculinist discourse of nationhood in which women once again play
no more than a symbolic function, as icons of the ‘modern, liberated nation’.
Thus, the declaration of Shaher ( Jinan’s feda’i lover) that she should ‘forget
everything that brings back the resentment you felt towards the old worn-
out idols, because it’s we who are smashing them’ (77) does not ring entirely
true, for Jinan may have become implicit in the resurrection of a nationalist
iconography that, however hard she tries, she cannot shatter.
Badr’s feminist critique of the gender inequality integral to the PLO may
seem paradoxical, given that her characters clearly remain committed to
the nationalist cause, and that Jinan plays a number of vital roles under
their auspices. Badr states in interview, though, that ‘my struggle for eman-
cipation as a Palestinian is inseparable from my struggle for genuine libera-
tion as a woman; neither of them is valid without the other’. 87 From this
perspective, any quest for feminist emancipation that takes place through
nationalist discourse must entail the thorough scrutiny, even criticism of
the gendered structures of the nationalist project, in order to ensure its
efficacy in both nationalist and feminist terms. The interrelated nature of
national and gendered, political and personal struggle emerges in another
arena in which Jinan and her female friend Shahd both participate: that of
armed resistance.
In The Wretched of the Earth, a study of anti-colonial rebellion that has
inspired many resistance movements including the Palestine Liberation
Organization, Fanon writes that the use of violence is not only justified but
socially and psychologically necessary to both the collective and the indi-
vidual. For the individual, violence operates as ‘a cleansing force [that] frees
the native from his inferiority complex [ . . . ] [and] restores his self-respect’,
while for the collective, it offers a ‘common cause . . . a national destiny and
. . . a collective history’ that unifies the people. 88 In his writing on the Alge-
rian liberation struggle, meanwhile, Fanon identified women’s participation
as absolutely central to revolutionary success, not only because he perceived
the female body as a key site of colonial control, but also because this partici-
pation would enact a double liberation for Algerian women, and for Algeria,
freeing them from both ‘feudal traditions’ and from colonialism.89 These
discourses merge for the female characters in A Compass for the Sunflower, for
whom armed struggle initially seems to hold a unifying and psychologically
cleansing potential. Just as armed struggle is said to restore the self-respect of
the colonised subject, so might collective action free these women from the
allegedly feminine passivity and powerlessness that characterises patriarchal
social relations. Indeed, Jinan’s own participation leads her to reject the con-
fi nes of feminine identity. This reflects Julie Peteet’s research, which shows
that women integrated into military training within the PLO came to occupy
a ‘“gender-neutral”, or “desexed” position’. 90 Jinan similarly displays a desire
to erase gender difference in her comment that ‘in the end I . . . resented my
woman’s body . . . and no longer wore anything but khaki trousers’ (19).
Such a rejection of individual, gender-conscious identity also emerges in
interesting form in the autobiography of Leila Khaled, Palestine’s (in)famous
female militant who performed two plane hijackings while affi liated with the
PFLP. In her autobiography, she writes that true commitment to the ‘politico-
military’ phase of the revolution ‘meant the fi nal break with her past and rel-
egating her private life and desires to a secondary position’. 91 The distinction
that Khaled draws between the private and public realms portrays armed
struggle as entry into a ‘male’ arena in which women must place nationalist
concerns above their personal status as women, and even assume ‘masculine’
identities. Yet women’s entrance into this masculine sphere of resistance was
often viewed as highly problematic, and in her postcolonial feminist study of
Khaled’s autobiography, Rajeswari Mohan pinpoints the ‘crisis of authority
and meaning’ brought about by acts of female militancy:
[Such women’s] act of taking up arms against an enemy, their attitude

of unfl inching commitment to a cause, their acceptance of men as allies,
and their contingent abandonment of ‘feminine’ values of nurturing,
non-violence, and pacifism have led to their being seen by some . . . as
grotesque aberrations of femininity. 92
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,
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,
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
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
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.
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:
In the language of national liberation, one might add that no nation is

free with half of its members being secondary and subservient. That this
might be considered a specious argument is itself part of the symptom.
If the Palestinian struggle does not develop this persistent auto-critique
at its most embattled hour, the neglected lessons of history will make a
possible victory pyrrhic.106
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.
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:
Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency

from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously
constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized rep-
etition of acts.2
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
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:
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
Similarly, it also seems possible to transpose questions of race with those of

national, socio-political and (post)colonial identities, and to consider how
they, too, might be ‘performatively’ implicated in the construction of Pal-
estinian masculinity. How, then, do these multiple discourses play into the
construction of what it means ‘to be a man’ in Palestinian society?
Like any form of identity, the ‘ritual social drama’18 of hegemonic
Palestinian masculinity must be understood as multiply and fluidly con-
structed through a number of discourses. As Butler reminds us, gender is
‘at once a reenactment and a reexperiencing of a set of meanings already
socially established . . . [and] the mundane and ritualized form of their
legitimation’.19 Although it is possible to identify many different influences
underpinning the ‘socially established meanings’ of Palestinian masculin-
ity, three intersecting discourses are particularly influential when it comes
to its ‘reenactment’ and ‘legitimation’: those of nationhood, of Arab cul-
tural identity and of colonial oppression. Between them, these discourses
produce a spectrum of ideals, behaviours, roles, identities and relations
through which men are able to fi nd various paths leading them towards the
performance of hegemonic masculinity.
As we saw in Chapter 1, unified Palestinian nationhood has often tended
to be imagined through discourses of idealised femininity, where Palestine is
represented as a mother or beloved. Yet as Cynthia Enloe writes, ‘national-
ism typically has sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humilia-
tion and masculinized hope. Anger at being “emasculated” [ . . . ] has been
presumed to be the natural fuel for igniting a nationalist movement’.20 If
a beautiful, nurturing, feminised Palestine is the object of national desire,
then the desiring subject of Palestinian nationalism is certainly male, seeking
to affi rm his territorial position as master of his land. As Rashid Khalidi
reveals, though, the identity of the nationalist subject is far from straightfor-
ward. In his important work Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern
National Consciousness, Khalidi traces the origins of contemporary nationalist
consciousness and fi nds that ‘it is so difficult to perceive the specificity of Pal-
estinian nationalism . . . partly because of the way in which identity for the
Palestinians is and has always been intermingled with a sense of identity on
so many other levels, whether Islamic or Christian, Ottoman or Arab, local
or universal, or family and tribal’.21 Here, Khalidi suggests that Palestinian
identity is itself comprised of multiple discourses of belonging, rendering the
quest for a coherent vision of national community somewhat complex. Yet
this quest for a unified national identity has nevertheless been an essential
response to the shifting territorial claims and power dynamics within the
region, which have threatened to erase its Palestinian inhabitants and their
claims to territory.22 Nationalism therefore emerges as a necessary but con-
structed rather than innate feature of Palestinian identity. As Massad puts
it: ‘Nationalist agency, like sexual and gender identities, is performatively
produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of [ . . . ] the category of
nationalist agency itself’.23
The ‘regulatory’ qualities of nationalist discourse are perhaps particularly
visible within a discourse that has been characterised as ‘Palestinianism’,
which denotes a transcendent desire for Palestinian national independence
and a distinctive identification as Palestinian that underpins the ethos of all
branches of the nationalist movement.24 ‘Palestinianism’ appears to operate
according to what Benedict Anderson has described as the ‘deep, horizontal
comradeship . . . [based on] fraternity’ that binds the loyalties of those within
the nation as an ‘imagined community’,25 and indeed the distinctively mas-
culine qualities of ‘fraternal’ relations also feature heavily within Palestinian
nationalist discourse. The idea of ‘fraternity’ or brotherhood is particularly
evident in the Palestinian National Charter of 1968, for example: a document
through which the PLO sought to assert itself as the sole representative of
Palestinians. In this document, Palestinian identity is defi ned as ‘a genuine,
inherent and eternal trait that is transmitted from fathers to sons’, a defi nition
that disrupts the traditional gendered symbolism of the nation represented
as a mother. 26 Massad explains this gendered shift as a product of the colo-
nial environment, in which a ‘maternal’ Palestine is considered to have been
‘tainted’ by the violations of Israeli colonialism, rendering her unable to pro-
duce legitimate ‘children of the nation’.27 Thus, as Massad puts it, ‘it is now
fathers who reproduce the nation’.28 Nationalism therefore emerges as a dis-
course of specifically masculinised resistance, and this is evident in the rheto-
ric of the UNLU (Unified National Leadership of the Uprising), for example,
which addresses its male students as ‘the stronger body . . . the continually
pulsing artery among our people’ who should ‘rise as one man’. 29 A potent
combination of virility, resistance, unity and strength therefore affi rms Pales-
tinian nationalist politics as vehemently and hierarchically masculine/ist.
Two further discourses are also integral to this masculinist conception
of Palestinian nationalism: colonialism, and specifically Arab conceptuali-
sations of gender. In The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories, Partha Chatterjee points towards the complex processes of identity
construction that formerly colonised nations must undergo as they seek to
redefi ne themselves in a way that rejects colonial influence. 30 This process
often involves pinpointing what is deemed to be ‘authentic’ about a particu-
lar national culture, beneath its layers of colonial construction. In the case of
Palestine, nationalist discourse constructs its idea of ‘authenticity’ by align-
ing itself with Arab identity. It seeks to reconnect Palestinian identity to the
broader cultural attributes of the Arab world, looking to a pre- and implicitly
postcolonial model of the Middle East that transcends European and Israeli
influence. Gender plays a crucial role in this construction of authenticity.
Upholding traditional concepts of Arab masculinity (rujulah), which rests
on social attributes of honour, kin and community, for example, presents
a distinctive vision of social relations deemed to be ‘authentic’, and hence
in defiance of external cultural influence. 31 These social structures demand
stereotypically ‘masculine’ behaviours of men (courage, bravery, strength,
protection of the nation and of women), which justify male privilege and
dominance within the hierarchical social structures such as the family, the
clan and the religious or political group, which are all founded on the patri-
arch’s authority and domination, and on the dependency of others. 32
In his study of ‘neo-patriarchy’, Hisham Sharabi is keen to point out that
patriarchy is not simply the anathema of Arab cultural tradition, but a dis-
course that is constantly reshaping itself in response to its environment: a the-
sis that echoes Butler’s own understanding of gender as ‘an identity tenuously
constituted in time’, whose performance is dependent on contextual social
norms.33 This ‘reshaping’ of patriarchal relations has been central to the
formulation of anti-colonial masculinities, and emerges in men’s responses
to conditions previously assumed to be ‘emasculating’ under Israeli occupa-
tion, such as imprisonment or beatings, common occurrences for men liv-
ing in the West Bank in particular.34 Rather than such events being viewed
as forms of victimisation, beatings and imprisonment have instead become
‘rites of passage . . . central in the construction of an adult, gendered (male)
self’, 35 whereby paternal sacrifice and endurance become ways of participat-
ing in the struggle and of attaining honour. Indeed, in Wild Thorns, a novel
by Sahar Khalifeh, the character Basil is interred by the Israelis, and the
marks he bears from beatings are described as ‘badges of honour’,36 while
the other prisoners tell him that ‘those who don’t go for prison, even for a day,
will never become real men, even if they grow two moustaches rather than
one’.37 Thus, the very conditions of male oppression are here appropriated as
a form of masculine anti-colonial resistance.
While, at one level, this reveals the Palestinian commitment to sumud—
steadfastness, or resilience—it also suggests something of Butler’s theo-
risation of ‘gender performativity’ as a discourse that cannot simply be
overturned, but that is open to subversion through ‘parodic’ or ‘discon-
tinuitous’ performances of gendered identity, in ways that reveal it to be
a ‘politically tenuous construction’. 38 Similarly, Palestinian men’s creative
appropriation of their imprisonment as a discourse of resilience rather than
victimisation could be said to constitute a ‘parodic’ or ‘discontinuitous’
appropriation of Israeli colonial discourse, in a way that also reveals its
‘politically tenuous’ nature. Palestinian masculinity therefore emerges as
a complex construction predicated on multiple simultaneous affi rmations,
rejections and appropriations of nationalist, Arab, anti-colonial and gen-
dered identities. The Palestinian male must ‘create’ the nation, but through
masculine resistance and patriarchal authority rather than feminine nur-
turing. He must embody ‘Arab’ gender norms—but as they are conceived
within the Palestinian rather than Zionist or Orientalist imagination. And
even when faced with suffering and victimisation, he must reconstruct this
as an opportunity to demonstrate his strength of will and character. For
Palestinian men, the task of ‘being a man’ therefore mirrors the uncertainty
of Palestine’s own condition, suspended in a state of continuous desire and
struggle for a securely defi ned identity. How, then, might creative practitio-
ners respond to this profound uncertainty, even crisis, in Palestinian mas-
culinity? To what extent do they remain defi ned by colonial constructions
of gender and nation, and how far are they willing to deconstruct these
paradigms in order to arrive at what might be described as alternative
postcolonial performances of masculinity? These are the central questions
asked of each of the texts examined in this chapter.
The fi rst section, ‘The Shebab Get Stoned: Samir El-Youssef’s “The Day
the Beast Got Thirsty”’, turns to a short story about the highly disaffected
male youth of a Lebanese refugee camp in order to explore the relationship
between national disenfranchisement and the performance of masculinity. El-
Youssef’s disarmingly irreverent portrayal of masculine relations and national
politics offers a radical debunking of the ‘official’ discourse of masculinity by
constructing an alternative vision of the male ‘drop-out’—yet even this appar-
ently negative portrayal of Palestinian masculinity poses some transgressive
possibilities. The second section, ‘From Stasis to Sumud: Elia Suleiman’s
“Chronicle of Love and Pain”’, turns to the fi lm Divine Intervention by one
of the most innovative Palestinian directors to date: Elia Suleiman. While
the fi lm is often interpreted as an artistic representation of the Palestinian
national condition, it is also a study of the distinctive relationship between
a father and son, and of the fraught fraternal relationships within the Pales-
tinian community. In this fi lm, Suleiman radically reconstructs visions of
masculine resistance and resilience within the (post)colonial landscape. The
fi nal section, ‘Masculinity in the Margins: The Subterranean States of Hany
Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now’, turns to one of the most controversial discourses
of Palestinian resistance, and arguably of masculinity: that of martyrdom, or
‘suicide bombing’. This section analyses the relationship between violence,
self-destruction and colonial power, as they are inscribed through the male
body. Collectively, these analyses reveal a variety of masculine performances
that each present a different form of crisis. Traumatic as these crises may be,
though, they also offer intensely creative opportunities to reflect upon the
performance of Palestinian masculinity, and to consider how its scripts might
perhaps be written anew.
The Shebab Get Stoned: Samir El-Youssef’s

‘The Day the Beast Got Thirsty’
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
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
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:
I liked listening to Ahmed. I liked listening to Ahmed especially after

I had a couple of joints. But sometimes Ahmed used to say things that
made me realize that unless I leave the country I shall go mad. (111)
Bassem’s blunt and bleakly comic narrative tone—typified by his qualifying

admission that Ahmed’s stories become infi nitely better ‘after a couple of
joints’—jars the reader out of any illusion of nationalist sentiment. Life seems
bearable only when viewed through a lens of hazy disconnection for Bas-
sem. Yet Bassem’s psychological disconnection also reveals him as ‘on the
edge’, in danger of ‘cracking up’ if he cannot escape his political and national
confi nes. Fraternal and psychological fragmentation emerges as more than
simply a threat over the course of the story, however. Rather, it is the central
characteristic of life for the shebab, the young men typically charged with the
communal task of political resistance, in the marginal space of the Lebanese
refugee camp.
The fraternal disconnection that marks this story can be taken as a broader
representation of the state of nationalist politics at this point in Palestinian
history. The fi rst Intifada was, at one level, a spontaneous uprising of the
Palestinian people that initially occurred in protest at the killing of four Pal-
estinians in Gaza. This event was the catalyst for a much broader outpouring
of anger by the Palestinian people at the daily indignities, attacks and land
seizures that they endured under Israeli occupation—but it was also, in part,
an expression of exasperation at the Palestinian leadership.48 In Lebanon, a
further result of the Intifada was that the focus of resistance was transferred
from Lebanese refugee camps to the West Bank and Gaza. Coupled with
waning support for the PLO among the younger generation, this led to the
emergence of factions and competing causes on the ground, including those
of the Islamists, of the PLO, and of various Lebanese, Syrian and Kurdish
political factions.49 Set against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that El-
Youssef’s short story should express an extreme sense of nationalist disillu-
sionment as he reveals the schisms among the male population of the refugee
camp to darkly comic effect.
A running joke throughout the story is the common distrust of Yasser Ara-
fat among members of Fatah, the party that Arafat founded and led before
becoming head of the PLO.50 Labelled the ‘Walking Disaster’ by Bassem’s
friend Ahmed, who is himself a Fatah member, Arafat is a figure of distrust
and a focus of contempt for his collaboration with the PLO: ‘Arafat cannot be
trusted for a moment’, he tells Bassem. ‘What do you expect from someone
whose uncle was Hajj Amin al-Hussainy?’ (115–116). 51 Ahmed does not con-
fi ne his distrust to the leader of his own party, however. Bassem tells of how
Ahmed ‘started swearing about Abu Shivan, the Kurds, the Palestinians’
(156): no one is immune from Ahmed’s contempt in his extended commu-
nity. Indeed, Ahmed’s political and personal relationships with Abu Shivan,
the leader of the Kurdistan Liberation Party (KLP), traditionally the ‘sister
party’ of the Palestinian resistance, are equally lacking in fraternal solidarity.
The KLP members only seem concerned at being scammed of 40,000 liras
by Ahmed, who has promised to produce a newsletter for them. The project
is of little interest to Ahmed beyond its immediate fi nancial promises, since
this young Fatah member ‘knew from experience that political newsletters
and leaflets were rarely read, and at best they were used for no better pur-
pose than to wrap up falafel sandwiches’ (122). As Bassem’s ‘brother-in-arms’,
Ahmed therefore represents a highly cynical and unfraternal comrade.
Bassem’s response to the fragmentation of fraternal sentiment is to opt out
of any political affi liation by removing himself to the margins of society and
striking up friendships with junkies, misfits and liars. When his drug dealer,
an Iraqi man named Salim, is arrested, Bassem articulates one of the few
moments of emotional connection within the story: ‘All of a sudden I noticed
that I kept saying I must save Salim’ (143), he tells us. Yet conditions of pow-
erlessness have become de rigueur for Bassem to the extent that he is swiftly
struck by the absurdity of his heroic intentions: ‘Who the hell was I? I asked
myself, the Scarlet Pimpernel? The brave knight who saved members of the
French nobility from the guillotine of the French revolution?’ (143). Bas-
sem’s shock at his ‘masculine’ response undercuts the nationalist rhetoric of
Palestine’s young male community as a strong, unified and committed entity.
Instead, they appear so deeply disempowered that any expression of solidar-
ity appears laughably unrealistic. Indeed, Bassem experiences difficulty in
connecting with anyone around him at an emotional level and this emerges
to the extreme in his loveless relationship with a girl named Dalal. His sense
of entrapment manifests itself in grotesquely self-defeatist and emasculating
fantasies of getting married to this woman who he fi nds physically repulsive
and of having ten children destined to be killed, before, as he puts it in
hyperbolic and near-hysterical terms, ‘Israel . . . invade[s] Lebanon again,
destroy[s] the Camp and fuck[s] us all up, so we die and get the hell out
of this fucking life’ (170). For Bassem, even the prospects of marriage and
fatherhood—which are strongly affi rmed in the Palestinian National Charter
as important ways to further the bloodline of the nation, passed from father
to son—pose an ultimately futile prospect. Bassem’s disconnected relation-
ship with Dalal can be read as a manifestation of the emasculation that he
experiences through his inability to perform a virile and powerful version
of masculinity within these conditions of profound social depravation and
fragmentation. Crises of intimacy, impotence and self-worth therefore plague
both the interior and exterior existences of Bassem, and are revealed to be
just as much a projection of the Palestinian condition as they are of the indi-
vidual male subject.
Instead of throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, then, Bassem’s response to
this unbearable situation is quite simply to get stoned. His drug taking can be
read as deeply symbolic of the communicative and emotional difficulties that
are often seen to characterise the ‘masculinity crisis’. According to Roger
Horrocks, ‘a state of being cut off from natural feelings and expressiveness
and contact with others’ typifies this ‘male malaise’, a condition for which he
has loosely coined the term ‘male autism’. 52 Communicative crisis certainly
plagues Bassem at the fi nal moments to the story, which suggest the poignant
possibility that he may not be as comfortable with his state of disconnected
marginality as he at fi rst appears to be. As Bassem watches the students at
the elementary school being trained as ‘Cubs’ (children linked to the activi-
ties of the PLO, who were taught to take an oppositional stance to the Israeli
occupation), he is prompted to remember how he once tried to join the Cubs
during his own childhood, against his father’s wishes. Bassem recalls how
his father discovered him during training—but his response was not to repri-
mand his son but to buy him a huge ice cream. His father’s subtly considered
act of generosity of course won Bassem over at the time—but now, watching
them in his adulthood, he fi nds that he has an unexpected response:
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,
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.
From Stasis to Sumud: Elia Suleiman’s

‘Chronicle of Love and Pain’
Elia Suleiman has come to be recognised as one of the most experimental

and challenging Palestinian fi lmmakers working today. Not only do his fi lms
demonstrate a willingness to confront contemporary political issues and to
break from traditional nationalist sentiment, but they are also characterised
by a distinctive fi lmic aesthetic that resists traditional linear narrative and
instead employs fi lmic fragments and vignettes that are sometimes highly
surrealist or magic realist in tone. This readiness to contest traditional fi lmic
structure reflects his desire to challenge accepted narratives of nationhood,
and indeed, as this analysis will argue, to deconstruct the ‘scripts’ of mas-
culinity upon which this discourse is premised. Focusing on the distinctive
range of masculinities displayed in Suleiman’s fi lm Divine Intervention there-
fore reveals Suleiman’s vision of Palestine as a nation in crisis. Rather than
this simply operating as a form of tragedy, though, it seems that this crisis
might ultimately facilitate a certain renewal of the structures of both nation
and masculine identity in Suleiman’s imagination.
Suleiman was born in 1960 and raised in Nazareth—a location within
Israel itself that appears in several of his fi lms, including Chronicle of a
Disappearance and Divine Intervention. 54 He left to develop his fi lmmaking
practice in Europe and in New York in the 1980s before returning to Pal-
estine in 1994, where he established the Film and Media Centre at Birzeit
University with funding support from the European Commission. 55 Despite
this strong commitment to the development of Palestinian cinema, though,
Suleiman holds an altogether more fluid understanding of national identity,
stating in interview that ‘I don’t want to tell the story of Palestine; I want to
open the way to multiple spaces that lend themselves to different readings
[ . . . ] My challenge is to avoid a centralized, unified image that allows only
a single narrative perspective’. 56 The postcolonial potential of this fluid,
‘decentralised’ vision of Palestine is particularly interesting in the context of
Suleiman’s 2002 fi lm, Divine Intervention, which inadvertently demonstrated
the negation of Palestinian national identity when the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences refused it for Oscar nomination on the grounds
that Palestine was not a nation recognised by the Academy. 57 While ostensi-
bly a portrait of the turbulent conditions within Palestine, though, the fi lm,
subtitled A Chronicle of Love and Pain, is also Suleiman’s own account of the
illness and death of his father, and this establishes strong links between
Suleiman’s personal tragedy and that of the nation. Structures of paternity,
fraternity, family and community therefore lie at the heart of this fi lm (as
indeed they do within his most recent fi lm, The Time That Remains, which
portrays his father’s own role in the Palestinian resistance). 58 Turning to the
construction of masculinity within this fi lm therefore reveals the complex
forms of crisis within both national and gendered discourse that generate
Suleiman’s radical vision of Palestine.
Divine Intervention’s subtitle, A Chronicle of Love and Pain, is in fact more
representative of the dynamics that underpin paternal and fraternal relations
within this fi lm, and as such, is the title used throughout this discussion. Like
many of his earlier works, this fi lm rejects linear narrative in favour of a
sequence of fi lmic vignettes, which range from bathetic realism to the pyro-
technics of Matrix-style action sequences. In this fi lm more than any other,
though, Suleiman’s fi lmmaking style becomes a reflection of the psychologi-
cal state of its central protagonist, the enigmatically titled and silent ‘ES’,
played by Suleiman himself (suggesting a strong autobiographical dimension
to the character). Plunged into familial and implicitly patriarchal crisis at his
father’s demise, the fragmentations and lamentations of ES’s grief-stricken
mind are projected through the formal characteristics of the fi lm, and this
focus on Suleiman’s interior world seems to locate the fi lm fi rmly in the
realms of subjective, wayward creativity, rather than external reality. Yet the
disjunctive nature of these fi lmic fragments can also be seen to reflect the
essential heterogeneity of Palestinian experience and the sense of crisis that
accompanies any attempt to ‘make sense’ of the Palestinian condition. As
such, the interplay of style and symbolic subject matter establish a deeply
internalised sense of representational crisis in both the male central charac-
ter’s self-perception and in the director’s own vision.
The intrinsically gendered nature of this fragmentation emerges most
clearly in vignettes that portray familial, communal and even psychological
breakdown. The opening sequence to the fi lm is a striking example of the
surreal and somewhat macabre humour that accompanies such visions. In
this sequence, a man dressed as that most benevolent of paternal figures,
‘Father Christmas’, runs in fear of his life through the hills of Nazareth,
pursued by a group of young boys from whom he tries to defend himself
by hurling presents at them. Finally, he can run no more, halted, we see,
by a huge knife with which he has been stabbed in the torso. The political
subtext that circulates around this image is complex: is this an image of
apparent ingratitude for the ‘gifts’ offered by other paternal figures in the
form of the Oslo Agreement, for example—or could it be a religious motif,
in which Christ’s sacred origins in the region are violated through violence?
Suleiman playfully allows these ideas to circulate while an altogether more
banal possibility surfaces: that for young men who have grown up accus-
tomed to disenfranchisement, aggression and hostility, this is no more than
a natural expression of male ‘pack’ mentality; a way to alleviate boredom,
when more innocent childhood pursuits have been denied to them. Later,
we see a similar group of young men engaged in what looks like extreme
revolutionary violence, as they beat, shoot at and fi nally set fi re to another
intruder into their territory—which turns out to be no more than a snake.
Meanwhile, Father Christmas recovers in hospital, where the wards are lined
with patients smoking endless cigarettes with such determination that they
seem intent on their own demise. These vignettes of fragmented community
and self-destructive propensities employ a deadpan, off-beat humour that not
only subtly subverts our expectations of Palestine (where has the idyllic pas-
toral Palestine of Khleifi’s Wedding in Galilee gone?) but which also captures
the odd contortions in communal and particularly male relations perceived
by Suleiman.
The strangeness of male relations portrayed here can be related to the
disruptions to the patriarchal order that followed the major defeats suffered
by Palestine in 1948 and 1967, when a younger generation of Palestinian men
sought to overturn the values and structures of an older generation of nation-
alists in order to bring about national progress. This move was described in
highly patriarchal terms as the ‘overthrow of the fathers’, and such a usurpa-
tion of power by the ‘sons’ of the nation must have created a deeply unnerv-
ing uncertainty over the hierarchical and indeed emotional structures of the
community. 59 Arguably, ES allegorises the sense of trauma that accompanies
this crisis in patriarchal power in his role as the grieving son in A Chronicle of
Love and Pain, and this appears in one particularly poignant episode in the
fi lm. Set shortly before his father’s death, we see ES sitting at his father’s hos-
pital bedside, apparently arm-wrestling with him. It is not until his father is
levered up to a sitting position that we realise the image is not one of struggle
but of love: ES is helping his aged and infi rm father to sit up in his bed. Patri-
archal frailty is accompanied by what might initially appear as confl ict in this
scene—but it in fact reveals a poignant reversal of roles that inspires not so
much empowerment on ES’s part as a deep sense of melancholy.
Indeed, ES’s silence and relative stasis throughout the fi lm points towards
a sense of emasculation rather than masculine rejuvenation. In this, the rela-
tionship between the nation’s fathers and sons can be read as a traumatised
one. Julie Peteet connects such a crisis specifically to the occupation:
The occupation has seriously diminished those realms of practice that

allow men to engage in, display and affi rm masculinity by means of
autonomous actions. Frequent witnesses to their fathers’ beatings by sol-
diers and settlers, children are acutely aware of their fathers’ inability to
protect themselves and their children.60
The disruption of patriarchal hierarchies therefore produces a sense of emas-

culation among the nation’s male subjects. Indeed, the fi nal scene of A Chron-
icle of Love and Pain appears to evoke this emasculation through an image of
male impotence that bears interesting parallels with Bassem’s frustrated viril-
ity in El-Youssef’s short story. In this scene, we see ES sitting alongside his
mother, rendered inert as he watches the temperature of a pressure cooker
swiftly rising and surely about to blow its top. While deeply symbolic of the
containment imposed upon Palestinian space and national aspirations, there
is also something of the masculine erotic about this image as the steam rises
and its screeching prepares us for an almost orgasmic moment of release
and explosion. The political implications of this image, though—Palestine
as pressure cooker, a space of confi nement that brings its inhabitants to the
boil—are also suggestive of both a frustrated and potentially self-destructive
male virility; for the release will surely be a violent one, and perhaps a literal
as well as metaphorical ‘petite mort’.
Faced with such deeply internalised senses of crisis, fragmentation and
frustration, how might it be possible for Suleiman to imagine forms of agency
for the male inhabitants of the Palestinian nation? Like El-Youssef, Suleiman
also refuses to validate traditional ideals of ‘manliness’ in his work. Rather,
he can be seen to undertake subtle and subversive reconfigurations of what
characterises Palestinian masculinity, and by extension, of what can be con-
sidered ‘manly’. One such reconfiguration is staged in A Chronicle of Love and
Pain at what might be considered a particularly potent site of emasculation
for the male Palestinian subject: at the border-checkpoint (a highly gendered
space explored in further detail in the next chapter).
Suleiman portrays the checkpoint as a space at which the power dynamics
between the Israeli occupier and Palestinian subject are rendered intensely
visible and tangible, and this in turn leads to similar intensifications of the
performances of masculinity that take place at them. This was evident during
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.
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
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.
Masculinity in the Margins: The Subterranean

States of Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now
Hany Abu-Assad has emerged as one of the most prominent Palestinian
directors on the world stage in the twenty-fi rst century, particularly in the
wake of his critically acclaimed 2005 release, Paradise Now, which not only
won a Golden Globe, but was also the fi rst Palestinian fi lm to be nominated
for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Like Suleiman,
Abu-Assad grew up in Nazareth in the 1960s. Born in 1961 into a relatively
prosperous family involved in the transport business, he describes himself as
a ‘privileged Palestinian’ who enjoyed comforts not always afforded to oth-
ers: the balcony seats in the local cinema as a young boy, for example, and
later, a relatively smooth transition to life in Amsterdam in the 1980s, where
he fi rst studied to be an engineer, then later trained as a fi lmmaker.66 Despite
his own transcultural location, many of his fi lms, including the works Ford
Transit67 and Rana’s Wedding,68 remain focused on the creative exploration of
aspects of Palestinian experience, and indeed, Paradise Now confronts one
of the most controversial and traumatic aspects of Palestinian existence: the
practice of ‘suicide bombing’ or ‘martyrdom’ (shahadah).69 The fi lm focuses
on two best friends who are struggling to get by, fi nancially and emotionally,
in the present-day (post-al Aqsa Intifada) West Bank. This is no straight-
forward ‘buddy movie’, however, for the young men are quickly recruited
into militancy by the paternal figure of Jamal, the local schoolteacher, and
dispatched on a ‘martyrdom’ exercise over the border in Israel. The fi lm
charts their contrasting responses to their impending mission. While criti-
cal attention to the fi lm has often focused on the question of whether or not
Abu-Assad seeks to justify violent resistance, Paradise Now in fact reveals less
about the act of suicide bombing than it does about the interpersonal, specifi-
cally masculine bonds that structure and inform such acts within the context
of the occupation.70 The following discussion therefore explores the various
constructions of paternal and fraternal relations that emerge in Abu-Assad’s
fi lm, which present an ambivalent vision of a Palestinian masculinity torn
between heroism and dehumanisation, resistance and futility. In particular,
the analysis focuses on motifs of the ‘subterranean’ that circulate at a number
of visual and symbolic levels in the fi lm, which tell us much about the com-
plex relationships between male marginalisation, militancy and ultimately
(post)coloniality imagined by Abu-Assad.
Paradise Now portrays the recruitment of two young men, Said (played by
Kais Nashif) and Khaled (Ali Suliman), into the militant ‘underground’ of
Palestinian resistance. While they also experience the socially marginalis-
ing and emasculating effects of the occupation, they are portrayed in very
different ways from the aloof and isolated male characters of El-Youssef’s
and Suleiman’s works, however. For Said and Khaled, a genuine sense of
fraternity binds them to each other, and we fi rst see them working together
on clapped-out cars in an old car yard, before they fi nish the day by sitting in
the hillsides overlooking the city, smoking a water pipe and drinking tea. In
their jeans and worn tee shirts, sporting slightly scruffy hair and a little stub-
ble, they appear completely average and entirely likable young men whose
friendship is close and genuine.
The two appear a little unmotivated—but that’s to be expected when, as
Said tells us, work permits to Israel are impossible to come by and day-to-
day life consists of menial work and boredom. As the fi lm unfolds, however,
the extraordinary backdrop to their ‘mundane’ lives becomes apparent. Said
reveals that he grew up in a refugee camp and has only left the West Bank
once, at the age of six, before his father was executed for collaborating with
the Israelis. Khaled, meanwhile, casually lets slip that his father’s limp was
acquired when Israeli soldiers broke into their house during the fi rst Intifada
and asked his father which leg he’d rather keep. ‘I’d rather they’d broken
both of them than left him so dishonoured’, is Khaled’s verdict on the story.
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.
A culture of patriarchal disempowerment and masculine humiliation there-

fore underpins both Said’s and Khaled’s experiences.
While this affront to patriarchal authority leads to an off-beat, aloof and
cerebral masculine mentality in El-Youssef’s and Suleiman’s works, Abu-
Assad’s characters initially adopt an altogether different logic, centred on the
rationalisation of violence. Such rationalisation is often cited as a psychologi-
cal response to severe conditions of depravation, and to the fusion of social
and personal trauma. Eyad El Sarraj, a psychiatrist and founder of the Gaza
Community Mental Health Programme, states that ‘the people who are com-
mitting the suicide bombings in this [second] Intifada are the children of the
fi rst Intifada—people who witnessed so much trauma as children. So as they
grew up, their own identity merged with the national identity of humiliation
and defeat’.71 The apparent normality of violence within Said’s existence, and
the link between the self-defensive and self-destructive, becomes apparent in
an episode when we see Suha, a young Palestinian woman born in France
and newly returned to Nablus, chatting (and perhaps fl irting a little) with
Said. ‘Do you ever go to the cinema?’ she asks Said. ‘Yes, once, ten years ago
when we burned [it] down’, Said replies, ‘a demonstration ended there’. From
her vantage-point as partial outsider, Suha is astonished at his casual attitude
towards this violent act. ‘Why the cinema?’ she asks. ‘Why us?’ Said replies.
Here, Said reveals the way in which the seemingly irrational oppression of
the Palestinian people also engenders a skewed logic of protest and counter-
violence in response. The schoolteacher and militant figure Jamal also pres-
ents the idea to Said and Khaled that violence is morally justified and indeed
unavoidable in chaotic social conditions such as theirs, in his attempts to
recruit them into the militant ‘underworld’. We see him philosophising with
the young men in an intimate and brotherly style: ‘What can you do when
there is no justice or freedom?’ he asks Said. ‘If we give in to the law that the
strong devours the weak, then we reduce ourselves to the level of animals.
That’s intolerable . . . Whoever fights for freedom can also die for it. You are
the one who can change things’. Rather than pointing towards their inevi-
table self-destruction, Jamal’s logic of violence promises the young men the
reclamation of their humanity, predicated on masculine qualities of strength,
resistance, will and agency.
Said and Khaled’s indoctrination according to this logic offers an insight
both into the alternative terms in which ‘suicide bombing’ is perceived within
segments of Palestinian culture, and into the highly gendered terms of its dis-
course. While ‘suicide bombing’ is classified as terrorist activity in the West-
ern imagination, it is understood neither as ‘terrorism’ nor as ‘suicide’ (an act
forbidden within the Qur’an) within a Palestinian context. As Brunner notes,
the term istish-hadi has emerged as an Arabic neologism for ‘suicide bomber’
but the term shaheed, meaning ‘martyr’, is the most common term for such
acts in Palestine. This term retains connotations of self-sacrifice, honour and
struggle against the occupation and is applied to many different kinds of suf-
fering and victimhood.72 Within a radical Islamic context, the preconditions
for shahadah (martyrdom) include not only a ‘commitment to Islam’ but also
‘maleness’, ‘sanity’ and ‘freedom of choice’.73 In this sense, the act of martyr-
dom comes to be perceived as both an assertion of agency and as a sacrifice
of selfhood which affi rm the typically ‘masculine’ traits of heroism, strength
and defence of one’s community. Recent social research has also emphasised
the importance of personal or communal losses of male relatives or figure-
heads as motivations for attacks.74 This emerges in the fi lm when Jamal tells
Said that his mission will ‘answer the assassination of Abu Hazem and Umm
Jaber’s son’ who died in a recent bombing, and in the way that Khaled wants
to avenge the maiming of his father, while Said wishes to atone for his father’s
collaboration with the Israelis. Shahadah therefore emerges as a discourse
through which the male subject’s masculinity, and hence the authority of the
patriarchal community, might be reinstated. Yet Abu-Assad does not allow
this rationale to go untroubled. Rather, he reveals its tenuous masculinist
authority by exposing the performativity of martyrdom as a discourse.
The ‘performative’ nature of martyrdom emerges in the fi lm both at the
level of a literally dramatic performance screened through visual media, and
in the terms outlined by Butler in her theory of ‘gender performativity’. For
Butler, gender is not an innate quality of our being but something constructed
through the repetition of gendered ‘acts’ that come to appear ‘natural’. As
she puts it: ‘What we take to be an “internal” feature of ourselves [that is,
gender] is one that we anticipate and produce through certain bodily acts,
at an extreme, an hallucinatory effect of naturalized gestures’.75 In Paradise
Now, one scene in particular exposes the ways in which the masculine aura
afforded the martyr is in fact a ritualised fetishisation of the male body and ‘a
performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including
the actors themselves, come to believe and perform in the mode of belief’.76
This scene portrays Said and Khaled deep in the subterranean world of Pal-
estinian militancy, in a darkened and ramshackle building where they are
recording their martyrdom videos. These scenes appear uncanny to a West-
ern viewer more accustomed to encountering such images as news footage in
the wake of an attack. Yet Abu-Assad complicates the identity and authority
of the militant, masculine martyr within this scene. We fi rst see Khaled in a
guise that appears distressingly familiar: that of the armed militant, posing
in front of banners sporting militant slogans. He hoists a heavy gun aloft
and, with a deep breath signalling the gravity of his words, begins his fi nal
official goodbyes to friends, family and nation, before declaring the fatalistic
justifications for his mission. By the end of his speech, Khaled is drained and
Said appears moved by his friend’s words. Yet Abu-Assad deftly debunks
the authority of this performance: ‘The sound didn’t record’, the cameraman
announces. ‘We’ll have to do it again’. Jamal, meanwhile, starts munching on
a pita bread as Khaled begins reading from the top of his script once more.
Khaled’s assertion of masculine agency is rendered absurd and even parodic
in this scene, offering the very ‘failure of repetition’ that Butler views as such
a productive means to expose the performative nature of gender and, here,
of masculine martyrdom. This scene therefore offers a poignant reminder
that these men are not entirely free-acting agents; rather, they occupy a sub-
ordinate position within the very patriarchal structures that they seek to
affi rm, and their value within this order exists primarily at a corporeal and
symbolic level that could be read as a form of exploitation and dehumanisa-
tion. Indeed, this scene can be read as a broader comment on the illusory
nature of fraternal relations in contemporary Palestine. While, as Johnson
and Kuttab note, the fi rst Intifada was characterised by communal activity in
which the shebab would be supported by the physical presence of others, com-
munity in the second Intifada now functions primarily as an ‘audience’ rather
than a protective environment, which bears witness to the martyr’s sacrifices
at a distance, through visual media.77 Abu-Assad reveals the fallibility of the
martyr’s masculine authority by disrupting the authority of the sympathetic
(implicitly fraternal) cinematic gaze in this scene and revealing an alterna-
tive, distancing visual engagement that is just as ready to render the male
body no more than a disposable commodity as it is to immortalise it.
If Said and Khaled initially display a naïve belief in the potential of mar-
tyrdom to affirm their masculine and nationalist agency, then they also arrive
at a more self-aware understanding of this discourse over the course of the
film. This ultimately leads to a division of their brotherly bond, as Khaled
decides that his violent self-sacrifice will only perpetuate further conflict, while
Said’s initial misgivings evolve into eventual certainty at the necessity of this
act. Interestingly, though, Said’s final conceptualisation of martyrdom encom-
passes a recognition of its fallibility, and of the conflicted status of the male
body within it. He articulates the paradoxical and problematic nature of shaha-
dah when he states that ‘if they [Israel] take on the role of oppressor and victim
then I have no choice but to also become a victim, and a murderer as well’.
Indeed, he does not conceive of martyrdom as a primarily spiritual act but as
something primitively corporeal: ‘Our bodies are all we have left to fight with’,
he tells Khaled. ‘Not our death, but the continuance of resistance will change
something. I have no other option’. Here, Said articulates a view of martyrdom
that presents it as a form of ‘speech act’ for the male subject who otherwise
lacks a political voice, while also recognising the inherent partiality and fal-
libility of this discourse. This leads to an interesting alternative gendering of
shahadah—for as Brunner writes, martyrdom can therefore be interpreted, in
some senses, as a ‘feminine’ act: ‘Suicide bombings are highly emotive and
refer to the weakness of the enemy as well as to the weakness of the society
they pretend to defend [ . . . ] Corresponding to the inevitable thinking in
dichotomies, [they] can be located on the feminine side of the scale’.78 While
Said is not straightforwardly feminised through his self-sacrifice, he neverthe-
less expresses an understanding of martyrdom as an act that does not simply
affirm masculinity but which attests to the contradictions and flaws that are
entailed within both masculinity and resistance as discourses.
Abu-Assad suggests the ambivalent status of the male martyr’s body still
further through a series of images that associate the would-be bombers with
the (literally subterranean) state of death. Said’s own statement that ‘under
the occupation we’re already dead’ points towards his limbo-like existence
under occupation, but Suha’s reference to him as ‘her guest of the night’ is
more strongly suggestive of haunting and ghostliness. A sense of the uncanny
also emerges in a highly disconcerting moment during the fi lm when we
see Said and Khaled being prepared for martyrdom. In this scene, the men
undergo their Muslim funeral rites while still alive. We see them being washed
and shaved in an act that simultaneously prepares them to carry explosives
while mirroring the practice of washing the body after death, before they are
wrapped in white sheets that are perhaps no more than towels, but which
resemble the kafan, or clean white cloth, in which bodies should be buried.
Through this image, Abu-Assad appears to be inviting the viewer to mourn
both the men’s premature deaths and the states of obliteration that they have
already endured in life. An altogether more poignant and ambiguous image
of the would-be martyr’s liminal state occurs when Said returns to his home
after the failure of his initial mission. As Said steals up to his house in the
soft afternoon light, he catches one last glimpse of his mother through the
window, before pressing his back to the wall so that he cannot be seen. As
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’:
On the brink of death he says:

I have no foothold in me left to lose,
I am free near my freedom
and my tomorrow is in my hand . . .
I will enter, in a little while, my life
and become born free and parentless,
and choose for my name letters of lapis79
Darwish’s evocation of martyrdom remains ambivalent, though, for the mar-

tyr’s search for freedom through death is far from glorified. Instead, both
desperation (‘I have no foothold . . . left to lose’) and a certain naïve romanti-
cism (that his tombstone should be written in ‘letters of lapis’) underpin his
painfully idealised suicidal ‘speech act’. This is an act that breaks the struc-
tures of family, community and love, infl icting grief on the father who will
no longer ‘walk ahead’ of his son to death and on the parents that remain on
the earth while the martyr ascends after death, ‘parentless’:
The martyr cautions me: Don’t believe the women’s zaghareed

and believe my father when he looks into my picture tearfully:
How did you swap our roles, my son,
and walk ahead of me?
Me first
and me first! 80
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
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.
Performing Postcolonial Masculinity

While El-Youssef, Suleiman and Abu-Assad all present highly distinctive
visions of Palestinian masculinity, their works all have one thing in com-
mon: they do not present masculinity as an innate, pre-given identity, but
rather something constructed in relation to the colonial environment. For all
of these creative practitioners, Israeli colonial power engenders significant
forms of crisis for the male subject, and this crisis is manifested variously
as the experience of impotence or emasculation, as a social inertia and lack
of voice or as destructive tendencies towards oneself, and others. At one
level, these performances of masculinity in crisis therefore evoke the broader
national crisis of Palestine, and suggest the colonised status of both the male
body and the body politic. Yet there is also an important sense in which all
of these creative practitioners move beyond the straightforward equation of
masculine and national crisis—for instead of portraying the crisis in patriar-
chal power as a situation to be remedied in the transition to postcoloniality,
El-Youssef, Suleiman and Abu-Assad locate creative postcolonial possibili-
ties in the very denaturalisation of this discourse.
We see these creative postcolonial possibilities emerge out of various crises
experienced by all of the male characters within each of these works. In ‘The
Day the Beast Got Thirsty’, for example, Bassem presents an initially challeng-
ing portrait of emasculation, disaffection and disengagement. Yet this char-
acter also reveals the unachievable nature of the models of male nationalist
heroism demanded of him, and presents instead a fallible but self-aware mas-
culinity that breaks from the scripts of nationalist identity. While Bassem does
not necessarily locate a viable alternative to models of nationalist masculinity,
his denaturalisation of this discourse nevertheless presents a creative and inde-
pendent alternative to the dogmas of patriarchal nationalism. Similarly, Sulei-
man’s character ‘ES’ offers a poignant portrait of the pain that accompanies
filial and fraternal love in the crisis-ridden patriarchal structures of contempo-
rary Palestinian society. Although Suleiman’s character is unable to perform
traditional models of nationalist masculinity, a new form of cerebral, stoical
manliness emerges from these conditions of crisis. In the process, Suleiman
seems to suggest that idealised models of ‘authentic’ pre-colonial patriarchy
must be dispensed with, in favour of new understandings of post-patriarchal
identity befitting the postcolonial future. Abu-Assad’s portrayal of Said and
Khaled, meanwhile, suggests that the patriarchal structures of both colonial
and nationalist militancy perpetuate cycles of self-destructive violence that can
be broken only by challenging the ‘scripts’ of hegemonic masculinity through
which these discourses are performed. While Said finds himself unable to
achieve this reconfiguration of masculinity, we see its possibility in the fig-
ure of Suha, who calls for an ethical and moral reconfiguration of Palestinian
resistance, and so of social (including gender) relations. In all of these works,
then, performances of masculinity are disrupted in ways that not only portray
a crisis in patriarchal power, but which also figure this crisis as a moment
of potential transformation: an opportunity, perhaps, to challenge the binary
structures of oppressor and oppressed, masculine and feminine, that have long
characterised colonial domination.
The radical potential that emerges from these works, though, is far from
utopian. Indeed, while they display a willingness to challenge the scripts of
nationalist masculinity, this is in some ways a highly introspective mascu-
line self-reflexivity that does not necessarily extend to the reexamination of
the relationships between masculinity and femininity, or between men and
women. Nevertheless, we might say that these works establish the potential
for these processes to occur, through the shift from an allegiance to centra-
lised power structures to what we might describe as a more tangential, even
‘marginal’ perspective. Suleiman himself describes this shift in perspective
as central to his work:
I want to create a ‘decentred’ image [ . . . ] My challenge is to avoid a
centralized, unified image that allows only a single narrative perspec-
tive and, on the contrary, to try to produce a kind of decentralization of
viewpoint, perception, and narration.81
In this model of the ‘decentred’ gaze, Suleiman describes a commitment

to plural dialogues that can be more readily achieved by turning to the
margins. Here, he evokes something of the postcolonial feminist potential
identified by bell hooks in her own description of the margins as a meeting-
place for all oppressed, excluded and colonised peoples that bears a radical
creativity. As she puts it:
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
Consequently, the postcolonial feminist potential of El-Youssef’s, Suleiman’s

and Abu-Assad’s works is to be found in the way that they relocate their
portrayals of masculinity fi rmly in the margins, and in doing so, conjure this
space not simply as a source of crisis but also of a creative potential—a loca-
tion where the dialogues and new solidarities described by hooks might be
achieved. In order for this postcolonial feminist potential of the margins to
be fully realised, though, such self-aware performances of maleness and mas-
culinity must surely be placed in dialogue with those of other genders, identi-
ties and subject-positions. This is the intriguing possibility that the creative
practitioners examined in the next chapter explore by turning to the difficult
encounters that occur in Palestine’s literal margins: its borderlands.
4 Bodies Beyond Boundaries?
Transitional Spaces and Liminal Selves
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
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’:
Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated

or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colo-
nization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection
104 Palestinian Literature and
Palestinian Film in Postcolonial Feminist
and Film Feminist Perspective
Perspective
West Bank Wall - Map 2006
West Bank Area Percentages

After t h e Wall
Areas West of the Wall 9.5%
Areas behind the Wall 8.0%

Jordan Valley 23.5%
54%
Remaining
Palestinian Areas
East of the Well
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
Settlers in OPT 2005

247.100 Settlers In West Bank
190,000 Settlers in East Jerusalem
Land Control in East Jerusalem
34.0% expropriated for

designated for 90% "Public use"
settlement expanison
13.0% left for Arab

'Green Areas' nighborhoods
Jordan Valley 250,000 dunums
Israel controls 200,000 dunums

Palestinians control 50,000 dunums
85% water controled by Israel
3,500 - 4,000 Jordan Valley settlers
Septemper 2005
End of the settlers occupation
oftheGazastrip, redeployment
of the Israeli army
15th June 2007

Hamas's take over of the
Gaza strip
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).
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.
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,
as a result, border-consciousness, like exilic liminality, is theoretically

against binarism and duality and for a third critique, which is multiper-
spectival and tolerant of ambiguity, ambivalence and chaos. 23
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.
Narratives of the ‘Checkpoint Heroine’

Checkpoints have become a familiar if unwelcome part of the landscape for
any Palestinian seeking to travel into, out of or within the West Bank. Accord-
ing to Eyal Weizman, ‘between 1994 and 1999, Israel installed 230 check-
points and imposed 499 days of closures’,27 but in the wake of the second
Intifada, Israel expanded its use of checkpoints to ‘isolate and fragment Pales-
tinian resistance’ by employing ‘an extensive network of barriers that included
permanent and partially manned checkpoints, roadblocks, metal gates, earth
dykes, trenches [and] “flying” or mobile checkpoints’ which, by September
2006, ‘comprised a system of 528 physical obstacles’.28 In the present day, IDF-
manned checkpoints exist at every possible point of crossing out of the West
Bank, but they also frequently spring up between towns and villages within
the West Bank itself, creating unpredictable and often torturously lengthy con-
ditions for travel. So extensive has Israel’s use of checkpoints become that
the writer and activist Azmi Bishara has described Palestine as the ‘land of
checkpoints’. Thus checkpoints result in chaotic and ambivalent experiences
of travel and indeed existence for Palestinians: ‘The checkpoint takes all that
man has, all his efforts, all his time, all his nerves . . . The checkpoint is the
chaos and the order, it is within the law and outside of it, operating by rational-
ity and idiosyncrasy, through both order and disorder’.29
Checkpoints are therefore more than simply border-controls where identity
documents are checked (and frequently refused) by Israeli forces. They are
also sites of inherent psychological and physical trauma, where the vulner-
able human body is forced to endure indignities such as queuing for hours in
cramped conditions or body searches, and to surrender itself to the possibility
of violence erupting at these traumatic sites, either through the actions of the
armed IDF or at the hands of Palestinians themselves, who may seek to protest
or attack Israeli forces at what has become a common site of confrontation.
Consequently, checkpoints present peculiarly intimate and embodied experi-
ences of the border, and from a Palestinian perspective, this confrontation
between militarised border and individual body draws attention to the vast
discrepancies in power between the Israeli occupation and Palestinian subject.
Despite its vehemently oppressive traits, however, the checkpoint has also sur-
faced in the creative imagination as a site that Palestinians remain determined
to cross—whether out of necessity, as an act of sumud or as a deliberate act of
transgression. In this, they reflect Baud and Van Schendel’s observation that
‘no matter how clearly borders are drawn on official maps, how many customs
officials are appointed, or how many watchtowers are built . . . people . . . take
advantage of borders in ways that are not intended or anticipated by their cre-
ators’.30 Borders, then, are sites that produce a subversive desire within those
who are limited by them most. It is therefore significant that this transgressive
potential has often been realised in the Palestinian imagination by figures
who are specifically female. What might these female figures, who might be
described as ‘checkpoint heroines’, reveal about the ways in which power, iden-
tity and gender politics are imagined in Palestine’s liminal landscape? Before
answering this question, we must become a little more acquainted with the
‘checkpoint heroines’ themselves.
It is, in some ways, unsurprising that the border-crossers of so many
checkpoint narratives should be women. As Nira Yuval-Davis and Marcel
Stoetzler point out, ‘women both embody and cross collectivity boundaries
and territorial borders’.31 As figures celebrated within nationalist discourse
for their roles as wives, mothers and care-givers, women have come to func-
tion as ‘border-guards’ according to John Armstrong, since they serve the
symbolic function of regulating members of the collectivity by maintaining
traditionally ‘feminine’ behaviours that, in turn, cement the cultural bound-
aries of the community and, ultimately, of the nation. 32 Yet this symbolic
status also positions women in what many feminist theorists have read as
marginal or subservient social roles, locating them as ‘others’ to the patriar-
chal national order, in which they are typically deemed to belong in less pow-
erful, even disenfranchised positions on what Shirley Ardener has termed
the ‘social map’.33 Indeed, in her postcolonial feminist work Borderlands / La
Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa, writing from her own context of the U.S.-Mexico
borderlands, constructs an inherent alliance between women and all of those
relegated to the ‘margins’ of society. For Anzaldúa, borders are socially and
metaphorically populated by ‘those who do not feel psychologically or physi-
cally safe in the world . . . those who are pounced on . . . the females, the
homosexuals of all races, the darkskinned, the outcast, the persecuted, the
marginalized, the foreign’.34 Thus women are symbolically located as simul-
taneous guardians of communal boundaries and as inhabitants of the social
margins, and at a crossroads between national empowerment and gendered
disempowerment: a situation that casts them as both ‘self’ and ‘other’. While
this might appear a tenuous position to occupy, Anzaldúa goes on to suggest
that this situation at the cusp of multiple spatial and social, national and
gendered boundaries can in fact be negotiated in a way that allows women
to claim it as a psychological and literal space of their own:
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
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)
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
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
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
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
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:
The captain . . . didn’t quite understand what had happened . . . It

seemed as though her voice echoed to him out of a deep and cavernous
ravine [ . . . ] He suddenly found himself contemplating all the things
he felt he couldn’t bear to lose on account of this accursed prison [ . . . ]
He had to escape from the dangerous assault of emotions he didn’t want
to face. As the soldiers looked on in disbelief, he held out his arm and
signalled to the cars to move. (57)
This face-to-face confrontation with the disenfranchised Palestinian ‘other’

instigates a collapse in binary subject-positions in the final moments of the nar-
rative. We, as reader, are briefly transported to the ‘other side’ of the border-
control as we hear the soldier’s thoughts, but he too begins to identify with the
sense of vulnerability, constraint and isolation experienced by the Palestin-
ian border-crossers. Though the soldier focuses on his own pain, rather than
that of Umm Hasan or her baby, he nevertheless experiences a moment of
connective humanity due to Umm Hasan’s transgression of her role as silent,
oppressed ‘other’. Her act of courage establishes her as a ‘checkpoint heroine’
who not only stands up to patriarchal, colonial and material boundaries, but
also instigates shifts in the power structures that govern them.
Collectively, these narratives of the ‘checkpoint heroine’ reveal her to be a
complex figure who challenges the ‘social maps’ of colonial and patriarchal
authority in a number of ways. At one level, the ‘checkpoint heroine’ presents
a stark affront to the narratives of ‘self-defence’ and classically colonial ‘pater-
nalism’ that Israel often employs in order to justify its military presence and
use of checkpoints.45 These narratives instead portray the majority of border-
crossers as ordinary, vulnerable people, many of them women and children,
whose own physical and psychological integrity comes under threat at these
sites of stringent colonial authority. In this sense, the ‘ordinary’ rather than
‘extraordinary’ nature of these women’s acts of heroism (which often simply
consist of a determination to cross the border) serves an important political
function, affi rming what Laleh Khalili describes as a ‘politics of sympathy,
pity and intimacy’ that presents a ‘feminised’ alternative to the ‘masculine’
‘muscular politics of collective violence’.46 Yet the ‘checkpoint heroine’s’ acts
of bravery do not necessarily affi rm her as ‘border-guard’ of a unified Pales-
tinian nation. Instead, she may also reveal the sources of gender inequality
and marginality embedded in her own community, which she must fi nd ways
to negotiate. In doing so, she evokes the border as a powerful site of alterity
(radical ‘otherness’) from which those relegated to the margins might under-
mine and even deconstruct the authority of the ‘centre’.47
The ‘checkpoint heroine’ therefore seems to affi rm Homi Bhabha’s asser-
tions in his essay, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the
Modern Nation’, in which he suggests that the alternative histories, identi-
ties and experiences that emerge from the margins disrupt the authority
of national discourse in a way that might be potentially liberating. Bhabha
writes that by turning to the margins,
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
This ‘heterogeneity’ of nationhood emerges from the alternative spatial,

national and gendered experiences articulated within the border-narratives
of the ‘checkpoint heroine’, who similarly disrupts dominant narratives of
both colonial power and of national belonging. For Bhabha, these disrup-
tions are far from negative, signifying a break from the monolithic, essential-
ist confi nes of a securely mapped nation, and offering instead a liminal and
plural model of postcolonial space that deconstructs colonial and patriarchal
binaries or hierarchies. For the ‘checkpoint heroine’, though, this ‘liminal’
territory proves a more ambivalent state of being—for while she may there-
fore initially appear a subversive figure of the radical margins, she is also
shown to inhabit a territory in flux, in which boundaries must be continually
renegotiated and certainties dispensed with. While such conditions might be
liberating in the realms of the imagination, their spatial reality presents far
less enticing prospects for everyday existence. Through this realisation the
‘checkpoint heroine’ leads us into another territory of the Palestinian imagi-
nation defi ned by liminality and uncertainty, which bears its own forms of
postcolonial feminist potential: the ‘borderland’.
Liminal States: Into the Borderlands in Abu Wael’s

‘Atash and Jacir’s like twenty impossibles
When Shimon Peres responded to criticism over the land ceded by his
government to the Palestinians by asking whether his critics ‘expected the
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
Figure 4.3 An image of freedom, mobility and connection: an outstretched hand

caresses the breeze at the start of the film crew’s journey. like twenty impossibles (2003),
dir. Annemarie Jacir. Image courtesy of Annemarie Jacir.
imagination. The crew therefore appear to be engaging in what Michel

de Certeau terms ‘tactical’ traversals of space, whereby unsanctioned and
unexpected appropriations of official topographies demonstrate the pos-
sibility of human agency, will, resistance and opportunism, constituting ‘a
proliferating illegitimacy [whereby they have] developed and insinuated
themselves into the networks of surveillance’.74 Though the crew engages
in subversively fluid movement here, a consciousness of spatial boundaries
nevertheless remains with them, as we hear from the intimate conversation
inadvertently recorded between the director and actor. We hear the actor
asking why she has been away so long, to which she replies that it is expen-
sive and difficult to ‘come and go’: it is easier to stay put within boundaries
than to be forced into constant confrontation with them, even within the
diaspora. In this, the director presents a subtle challenge to some of the
more utopian theorisations of diaspora that have emerged from postcolo-
nialists keen to celebrate models of the ‘borderless’ world, reminding us
instead that, as Janet Wolff puts it,
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
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
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
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?
Towards a Palestinian Border-Theory

Borders clearly occupy a significant status within Palestinian creative con-
sciousness, just as they do in Palestinian existence. While physical borders
attest primarily to the enduring occupation of Palestinian land and so to
its colonial status, creatively imagined boundaries also present an array
of complex postcolonial feminist possibilities. In postcolonial terms, bor-
ders frequently operate as vital sites of witnessing, where the production
of narratives enables the individual to testify to the oppressive and trau-
matic experiences that are so often entailed in encounters with the border.
We see these acts of witnessing occur in Taha’s, Badr’s and Jarrar’s short
stories, for example, and in Jacir’s short fi lm, which each present vividly
rendered accounts of the border-crossing experiences common to so many
Palestinians. Consequently, many border-narratives can be understood
as acts of ‘writing back’ to the Israeli-enforced discourse of borders as
fairly policed security measures. In other works, though, the socio-spatial
characteristics of the borderland itself offer a distinctive aesthetic through
which creative practitioners are able to construct the liminal insecurity of
Palestinian space as a source of self-representation rather than negation.
Here, Abu Wael’s and Jacir’s fi lms seem to echo Said’s calls for the use
of ‘unconventional, hybrid and fragmented’ forms as a means to repre-
sent Palestine. Border-narratives therefore expose the unique and ambiva-
lent nature of Palestine’s colonial condition: one that is at once premised
on stringent material restrictions, and on a deconstructive liminality that
threatens to negate Palestine’s national identity, while revealing the many
different ways in which it might be possible to negotiate these very different
kinds of spatial oppression.
Borders also acquire a further significance in their interaction with gen-
dered bodies, however. In all of the narratives examined in this chapter,
borders do more than simply reveal Israel’s enduring colonial presence; they
also expose the less immediately visible social boundaries structured around
the gendered body, which intersect with the ‘social maps’ of the Israeli occu-
pation and of Palestinian community in multiple ways. At these boundaries,
the interplay between the colonial and patriarchal becomes visible, and we
see how socio-spatial restrictions may emerge through both official and unof-
ficial boundaries instated by the occupation, and according to gender norms
constructed within the Palestinian community itself. As a result, in narratives
such as Badr’s ‘Other Cities’ and Jarrar’s ‘Barefoot Bridge’, or even in ‘Atash,
physical borders become sites that dramatise other forms of social marginal-
ity circulating around the gendered body within a patriarchal society. Signifi-
cantly, though, borders also emerge as sites of postcolonial feminist potential.
Indeed, when confronted with a border or boundary, most of the characters
within the border-narratives examined in this chapter attempt to cross it.
Narratives such as Badr’s ‘Other Cities’ and Abu Wael’s ‘Atash even appear to
suggest that women’s attempts to challenge and transgress social boundaries
may play an important role in establishing a postcolonial Palestine, by chal-
lenging the structures of patriarchy that seems to mirror the binary terms
of colonialism itself. Thus border-narratives do not simply seek to present
women as ‘victims’ of the ‘social map’, but as agents who are able to navigate
the intricate interplay of national and gendered subject-positions in order to
produce new, creative delineations of selfhood and space for themselves.
Borders therefore appear as loci of creative potential as well as oppression
within the Palestinian imagination. They act as important sites of witnessing
and testimony, but they are also places that produce forms of simultaneously
postcolonial and feminist agency. These creative potentials emerge from
very different understandings of space, identity and representation to those
held within more traditional postcolonial feminist theorisations of the bor-
der, however. While theorists such as Anzaldúa, Hicks, Bhabha and Naficy
all celebrate the potential deconstructions of self, space and identity that
can be theorised within the ‘hybrid’ realms of the borderland, Palestinian
border-narratives tend to represent the liminal dissolution of subject-position
as a source of disenfranchisement rather than liberation. In doing so, they
suggest that tendencies towards poststructuralist border-theory prevalent
in the postcolonial feminist academy to date do not readily translate into
the very specific conditions of Palestinian colonialism and gender relations.
Instead, the emphasis placed on bodily agency and political positionality
within Palestinian border-narratives seems to demand a return to more mate-
rially grounded understandings of both borders and bodies. This, according
to Ian McLean, might in fact incite an important recognition in postcolo-
nial and indeed cultural theory more broadly: that despite the claims of
some postmodernists, ‘we don’t live in a post-national landscape, but in an
inter-national and transnational one in which the nation-state remains all-
powerful’.82 Within this context, it remains clear why the construction rather
than deconstruction of self-determined borders remains key to postcolonial-
ity for Palestine. Within a materialist feminist context, Kathleen Kirby also
recognises the importance of boundaries to the realisation of specifically
gendered agency. She writes that
in political terms, entirely sacrificing boundaries—such as that between

‘man’ and ‘woman’—makes impossible the usual political tasks of iden-
tifying group interests and seeking them through to realisation. Con-
ventional though they may be, it may prove necessary to preserve the
bounds of the subject in order to make political action imaginable.83
While Kirby’s calls for a bounded gender-consciousness might seem lim-

ited when contrasted with the radically deconstructive tendencies of ‘queer’
theory, Kirby suggests here that this very recognition of gender boundaries
is in fact a premise of agency. As Spivak reminds us, turning to apparently
‘essentialist’ subject-positions does not have to be a restrictive end-point for
the individual but can be enacted ‘strategically’, so that gendered or national
identity, for example, might be mobilised in order to respond to a specific set
of political circumstances.84 Instances of ‘strategic essentialism’ are integral
to the postcolonial feminist potential of many border-narratives examined
in this chapter. In Raeda Taha’s ‘A Single Metre’, for example, an insistence
on the materiality and vulnerability of the body as a bounded entity proves
essential to her critique of the border as a site of patriarchal violence, pain
and all too physical suffering, while in Liana Badr’s ‘Other Cities’, Umm
Hasan’s assertion of her identity as a mother is integral to her successful
transgression of colonial power. Both Gamila in ‘Atash and Annemarie in
like twenty impossibles, meanwhile, testify to the loss of political agency that
emerges within an indeterminate socio-spatial landscape bereft of boundar-
ies with which to ally oneself.
A uniquely Palestinian border-theory therefore reveals significant points
of tension as well as overlap with existing postcolonial feminist theorisa-
tions of the border. Palestinian borders appear to incite a return to concepts
of political agency, opposition and materiality, and to inherently ‘bounded’
models of space and selfhood within postcolonial feminist discourse. In
doing so, they invite theorists to reconsider the role of borders in the con-
temporary postcolonial landscape, which seems to be increasingly defi ned
by border-control mechanisms. This is, after all, the age of the biometric
passport, of the Border Agency and the Immigration Detention Centre: per-
haps now more than ever before, borders regulate, defi ne and produce our
identities and our movements. Yet against this backdrop, Palestinian border-
narratives also offer us a source of hope. Through them, we see the creative
and courageous ways in which individuals stand up to and transgress even
the most rigorously enforced and unjust of boundaries within real and imag-
ined worlds alike.
For the millions of Palestinians displaced from Palestine’s boundaries alto-
gether, though, the distance that separates them from their homeland is much
greater than the few traumatic metres of the checkpoint or border-crossing.
In the next (and fi nal) chapter, we therefore venture beyond national bound-
aries altogether in order to explore the creative identifications and postcolo-
nial feminist affi liations of those within the diasporic community.
5 Imagining the Transnational
Feminist Community
Diasporic space haunts the (post)colonial Palestinian imagination. Millions

of Palestinians have endured conditions of displacement, refugeeism, migra-
tion and exile as a result of Palestine’s traumatic colonial history, and those
within the Palestinian diaspora testify to the simultaneously spatial and polit-
ical dispossession of their nation. Despite the uprootings and dislocations
experienced by those within the diaspora, though, diasporic space has also
emerged as a site of creative energy from which many authors and fi lmmak-
ers have sought both to affi rm structures of belonging, and to engender new,
imaginative forms of community. This fi nal chapter therefore explores some
of the ways in which creative practitioners within the diaspora have imag-
ined forms of community according to variously feminist, anti-colonial, post-
colonial, ethical and transnational identifications. While these communal
identifications present vital forms of solidarity with Palestine, they may also
pose a powerful potential within the transnational landscapes of inequality,
injustice and communicative breakdown that have surfaced at the boundar-
ies of ‘West’ and ‘Middle East’ in a post-September 11th environment. As
such, these works draw us towards the tantalizing possibility of a distinctively
transnational postcolonial feminist community.
Experiences of displacement and dispersal are integral to Palestinian
national identity itself. The specific nature of the Palestinian experience,
though, means that the notion of ‘diaspora’ has very different resonances to
Palestinians than it does to many postcolonial theorists. The term ‘diaspora’
derives from the Greek, where dia (through, across) and speirein (to sow,
scatter) are conjoined in the word diaspeirein (to disperse).1 Broadly speak-
ing, it refers to communities of people who have been dislocated from
their original homeland, either through voluntary processes of migration
or through the forced experience of exile, displacement or refugeeism. 2
This ‘scattering’ of people has certainly taken place for many Palestinians,
but in a much more traumatic way than the original Greek term seems to
imply. The Nakba of 1948 created some 750,000 Palestinian refugees con-
sisting of Palestinians internally displaced within the new State of Israel
and those forced beyond the boundaries of historic Palestine altogether. 3
Most of these people were barred from ever returning to their homes. A
subsequent major wave of displacement occurred following the Naksa of
1967, but instances of traumatic dispossession have recurred throughout
the history of Palestine’s confl ict with Israel and thus are an inherent fea-
ture of Palestine’s colonial condition. In 2001, the number of registered
Palestinian refugees stood at 3.9 million according to the United Nations
Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine refugees in the near East,
the majority of whom live in the Arab world, with a substantial proportion
based in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza.
Figures from 1991 place the number of Palestinians living in ‘non-Arab
states’ at 325,000, most of whom live in the U.S.4 Despite the passing of
Resolution 194 by the United Nations in 1948, which guaranteed the ‘right
of return’ to Palestinian refugees displaced from their homes, this right has
not been recognised by Israel and remains a central debate within Palestin-
ian political discourse. 5 While a substantial proportion of Palestinians live
within diasporic communities, displacement therefore permeates national
consciousness and indeed, Muhammad Siddiq describes Palestine itself
as a ‘refugee nation’.6 This idiosyncratic state of affairs also leads to a dis-
tinctive understanding of Palestinian belonging and identity, however—for
while many diasporic communities tend to be understood as separate from
the homeland, Palestinian diasporic subjects are still considered to be very
much a part of the Palestinian population. Indeed, to many Palestinians,
the diasporic community is a symbol not only of the enduring injustices of
colonial rule but of the ongoing struggle to achieve a unified postcolonial
nation to which those in the diaspora should have the right to return, if they
should wish to do so.
The political context surrounding the creation of the Palestinian diaspora
therefore raises certain problems relating to terminology. While the term
‘diaspora’ has, as Clifford writes, been ‘widely appropriated’ and applied
to a number of victimised communities defi ned by ‘a shared, on-going his-
tory of displacement, suffering, adaptation, or resistance’,7 it was originally
associated with, and remains strongly related to, the Jewish experience of
displacement. This bears a certain irony for many within the diasporic Pales-
tinian community, who read their own displacement as premised on Israel’s
attempts to territorialise the Jewish diasporic population. For this reason,
Edward Said states that ‘I do not like to call it a Palestinian diaspora: there is
only an apparent symmetry between our exile and theirs [ . . . ] Our ghurba
or manfa is a much different thing’.8 The term manfa is derived from the verb
nafa, which means ‘to banish or expel’, hence it refers to a literal or technical
sense of exile. A comparative term is al-shatat, which denotes being scat-
tered, dispersed or separated, which might be seen as most closely akin to
the connotations of scattering implicit in ‘diaspora’. 9 The term ghurba has a
richer and more symbolic resonance, however, and is used widely by authors
and scholars. Al-ghurba is translated literally as banishment, estrangement or
Imagining the Transnational Feminist Community 133
separation from one’s country, but in Qur’anic Arabic, it is linked to the verb
gharaba, the opposite of sharaqa: a verb that denotes being oriented towards
the rising sun, and hence to the East or Orient. As Juliane Hammer explains:
‘The West, as the opposite, implies being away from the sun, in the darkness.
Thus, the term ghurba means religiously and philosophically barred from the
light’.10 Ghurba is therefore a highly emotive term which implies a psychologi-
cal as well as literal sense of alienation or exile, and it gestures towards a
sense of loss and longing for return (al-‘awda) to the homeland (al-watan).
The psychological implications of ghurba are very different to the associa-
tions attached to diaspora in the postcolonial imagination. Theorists such
as James Clifford and Arjun Appadurai have tended to view diaspora as an
inherently open, egalitarian and deterritorialised process of spatial interac-
tion which reveals the ways in which well-worn configurations of space and
self as ‘form[s] of closed interiority encapsulated in a boundary’11 no longer
seem adequate within our increasingly ‘borderless world’.12 The Deleuzian
‘nomad’ typifies this image of diaspora: a figure whose rootlessness is often
equated with the ‘deterritorialised’ liberation offered by postmodern, glo-
balised space.13 Yet for many Palestinians, the flux and fluidity of diasporic
existence is not liberating but deeply oppressive (as we also saw in Chapter
4). The poet ‘Abdallah Radwan, for example, describes exile as akin to a
‘deformed birth’: an existence in which his very sense of being and identity
is distorted and ‘abnormal’.14 The prominent Palestinian writer and intellec-
tual Fawaz Turki, meanwhile, describes the Palestinian diaspora as ‘a reality
scorched by alienation . . . a ceremony of shadows that was to become our
homeland in exile’.15 The painful, involuntary nature of Palestinian diasporic
experience therefore stands at odds with its postmodern celebration. This
leads Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg to conclude that ‘hybridity . . .
does not appear to be a viable strategy in the struggle for Palestine’; it is
instead ‘a case of an exilic identity demanding return to its historic territory’
in which ‘essentialism is a political necessity, particularly when the group or
culture is threatened with radical effacement’.16 Palestinian diasporic expe-
rience therefore affi rms rather than destabilises the value of borders and
locatedness in the transnational landscape.
Just as Palestinian creativity proves resilient under the conditions of occu-
pation though, so has a significant body of creative expression emerged from
within the context of ghurba. Edward Said is the most prominent diasporic
Palestinian theorist to have considered the nature of exile. In one particu-
larly famous discussion of the topic, he draws on a phrase by Wallace Ste-
vens in order to characterise exile as the condition of ‘“a mind of winter” in
which the pathos of summer and autumn as much as the potential of spring
are nearby but unobtainable’.17 Said formulates his understanding of exile
specifically in relation to intellectual and creative activity, which he views as
‘compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule’.18 While
exile is therefore an inherently painful state for Said,
seeing ‘the entire world as a foreign land’ enables originality [ . . . ] and . . .
plurality of vision [which] gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimen-
sions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal.19
Exile facilitates a certain creativity of vision for Said; hence, as he writes,

‘exiles cross, break barriers of thought and experience’.20 Said is not alone
in recognising the creative possibilities that may be mobilised by the exile.
In her overview of ‘Palestinian Identity in Literature’, the esteemed writer,
scholar and translator of Palestinian literature Salma Khadra Jayyusi states
that a blossoming of literary talent among Palestinian authors emerged partly
from their exilic conditions:
A fantastic change in the cultural identity of the Palestinian poet and

writer of fiction has indeed taken place since 1948. This, however, was
due not to cultural encounter with Israelis, but to the fact that Palestin-
ians living in the Diaspora . . . came into direct contact with the vibrant
literary currents blowing over the Arab world . . . and acquired new
ambitions that the pre-1948 generations did not experience. 21
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
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
acknowledges both the specific local and national forms of patriarchy,

as well as the ways in which global economic restructuring and transna-
tional cultural influences shape and link the material and cultural lives
of women around the world.25
Thus transnational feminism recognises the multiple structures of gendered,

economic, political and social power that intersect within the diasporic
landscape, forming a complex mesh of solidarities and differences among
women. A transnational feminist approach therefore reveals what Grewal
and Kaplan term ‘scattered hegemonies’: 26 structures of power and authority
that arise fluidly within diasporic space. Thus diasporic movement does not
simply enable the gendered subject to transcend oppressively patriarchal,
colonial or national boundaries: new hegemonic relations may resurface
within diasporic space itself. For diasporic Palestinians, these ‘scattered hege-
monies’ might appear around official discourses of national belonging within
their host nation, for example, or through communal gender norms that are
resurrected within migrant communities. Indeed, for Palestinian Americans,
these ‘scattered hegemonies’ have assumed a particularly troubling form fol-
lowing the events of September 11th 2001, as prejudice, harassment and hos-
tility towards those associated with the Arab world have increased, at the
same time as military policy towards the Middle East has become increas-
ingly aggressive: conditions that evoke the hegemonic relations of imperial-
ism.27 Against this backdrop of simultaneously spatial, social, gendered and
political power dynamics, the quest for postcolonial feminist agency within
diasporic space appears all the more challenging.
How might creative practitioners negotiate the ‘scattered hegemonies’ of
diasporic space, and the senses of loss and fragmentation as well as potential
that emerge out of the experience of displacement and rehoming? For all of
the creative practitioners examined in this chapter, one particular concept
emerges as a vital touchstone: community. In each of the works examined,
this concept is premised on distinctive understandings of affi liation, ‘together-
ness’ and agency. The fi rst half of the chapter, entitled ‘Cartographic Bodies
and Textual Intimacies in Masri’s Frontiers of Dreams and Fears and Hatoum’s
Measures of Distance’, turns to two very different forms of fi lmic work. Yet in
both Mai Masri’s documentary fi lm Frontiers of Dreams and Fears28 and Mona
Hatoum’s work of video art, Measures of Distance, 29 distinctive visions of con-
nection between women separated within diasporic space emerge through
the conditions of female embodiment and textual communication. These
themes inspire connections with a variety of feminist theories of embodiment
and location, but particularly interesting links emerge with Sara Ahmed’s
work on embodiment, skin and intimacy within a diasporic context. In this
opening section, then, concepts of feminocentric community appear at a
microcosmic level, borne out of the deeply personal ties conjured between
women through the realms of the body and the textual imagination. The
second part of the chapter, ‘“Not Everything Is Lost”: The Creative Soli-
darities of Palestinian American Poetry’, turns to the work of two female
poets born into the Palestinian diaspora in the U.S.: Naomi Shihab Nye
and Suheir Hammad. For both Nye and Hammad, diaspora emerges as a
space that facilitates multiple forms of connection and solidarity with many
different geographical, political, ethical and gendered communities. Within
their work, both feminist and postcolonial commitments emerge as part of
broader ethical and creative struggles for justice, equality and representation
that speak not only to Palestine, but also to the interrelated landscape of U.S.
imperialism. Consequently, these poets present the opportunity to explore
the postcolonial feminist potential of theoretical models such as Avtar Brah’s
‘diaspora space’, and indeed enable us to consider the ways in which postco-
lonial feminism may come to play an increasingly important transnational
function within a post-September 11th world.
Cartographic Bodies and Textual Intimacies

in Masri’s Frontiers of Dreams and Fears
and Hatoum’s Measures of Distance
How might the visual and emotional potentials that circulate around the
female body help diasporic fi lmmakers to imagine forms of transnational
connection and even community in their work? This is just one of the ques-
tions that emerges from two distinctive portraits of feminocentric Palestinian
diasporic experience: Mai Masri’s documentary fi lm Frontiers of Dreams and
Fears (2001), and Mona Hatoum’s 15-minute work of video art, Measures of
Distance (1988). While very different in terms of style, content and context,
both of these visual works place female bodies and relationships at the heart
of their explorations of diasporic experience. Within both fi lms, visuality
and textuality are placed in interplay with one another through the use of
epistolary communication as a device that forges an emotional, experiential
and even embodied intimacy between women separated from one another
within diasporic space. The following analysis therefore explores the com-
peting forces of separation and distance, of embodiment and absence, and
of the visual and textual that surface in both Masri’s and Hatoum’s works, in
order to consider how new forms of connection and community might come
to be mapped out in feminocentric terms.
Diasporic experience has been central to both Masri’s and Hatoum’s lives.
Masri was born in 1952 in Jordan to a Palestinian father and an American
mother, and spent her early years between Amman and Nablus, before mov-
ing to Beirut in 1966. She relocated to Berkeley, California in 1976, the year
after the Lebanese Civil War broke out, where she studied fi lm theory. After
meeting her husband, the Lebanese fi lmmaker Jean Chamoun, she lived
in Paris and London but fi nally moved back to Beirut when the Civil War
ended. 30 Hatoum was also born in 1952, to Palestinian parents who had
been forced to flee from Haifa in 1948 and to relocate to Beirut. Hatoum
herself was forced to relocate to London when, during her stay there, civil
war broke out in Lebanon, preventing her from returning to Beirut. While
living in London, she studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art and then the
Slade, before going on to make video productions in Canada, and work-
ing as a guest professor across Europe. 31 While neither Hatoum nor Masri
therefore experienced the Nakba directly, its traumatic legacy no doubt has
a place within the collective memories of both of their families. Masri’s and
Hatoum’s own diasporic movements, though, are distinctive in many respects
from the straightforwardly traumatic experience of the Nakba. Their time
studying in Europe, and Masri’s chosen return to Lebanon, points towards
a level of transnational mobility that may have also facilitated access to a
number of different artistic worlds. Equally, the fi lmmakers’ own creative
relationships to diasporic experience appear very different from one another.
Hatoum—unable to return to Lebanon at the time of making Measures of
Distance—reflects upon her own traumatic separation from her family and
home, in particular from her mother, from within the diasporic space while
Masri—able to return to Lebanon, and indeed to travel into parts of Pales-
tine—instead chooses to explore the traumatic separations endured by oth-
ers within the Palestinian diaspora. Thus the autobiographical backdrop of
each fi lmmaker’s diasporic experience resonates in a quite different way in
each work. It is interesting to note that there is nevertheless a common spa-
tial orientation towards the Middle East in both of their fi lms, even though
they retain access to non-Arab cultural frameworks through their travel, and
that despite what some critics might describe as the ‘masculine’ possibilities
of mobility and agency afforded them by their travels, their gazes remain
inexorably drawn towards feminocentric experience. What, then, do these
distinctive orientations of the gaze reveal about the dynamics of belonging,
identification and space in each of the works?
Both Frontiers of Dreams and Fears and Measures of Distance explore relation-
ships between female figures who occupy different locations within the Pales-
tinian diaspora. Masri’s Frontiers of Dreams and Fears focuses on the experience
of two girls, who were each born into a different Palestinian refugee camp.
Mona Zaaroura, aged 13, lives in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut: the site
of the notorious massacres of Palestinians carried out in 1982.32 Manar Majed
Faraj, aged 14, lives in the Dheisha refugee camp in Bethlehem, a territory
officially within the West Bank and under the governance of the Palestinian
Authority.33 While there are many male inhabitants of these camps, including
older figures who perhaps possess a greater ‘authority’, Masri chooses instead
to focus her gaze on the friendship that emerges between Mona and Manar
when they are placed in contact via organisations within each of their camps
that seek to improve life for young Palestinians. Masri’s portrait of the girls
also explores the female-dominated communal structures that envelop their
lives. Mona in Shatila records that her father died in 1989 when she was two
years old, and that many of the teenagers in the camp are without fathers
because of the 1982 massacre. Indeed, her closest friend Samar has neither
a mother nor a father, and Mona identifies very closely with Samar, to the
extent that their relationship assumes a ‘sisterly’ dimension: ‘As soon as I laid
eyes on her, I felt she was like me’, Mona says of Samar; ‘everyone thought we
were sisters’. Women, not only mothers but also female friends and neighbours,
therefore play a central role in Mona’s life. This is also the case for Manar in
Dheisha. She records that her father was imprisoned when she was born, and
remained absent for much of her childhood. Her main communal structures
have been her own family, which includes her mother, three brothers and two
sisters, and the Ibdaa‘ cultural centre (ibdaa‘ translates as ‘creation’ or ‘creative
ability’), which provides cultural activities, particularly dance, through which
Manar connects with her mainly female friends and is also put in touch with
Mona. This feminocentric experience reflects the gender structures that typify
Palestinian diasporic communities, particularly within refugee camps, where
communal trauma has often led to a depleted male population due either to
their imprisonment or death.34 Female relationships therefore present maternal
and sisterly support networks for the girls. Indeed, Masri’s own directorial
gaze might also be aligned with this commitment to supportive female com-
munity, for while she has access to the ‘male’, ‘public’ realms of the Palestinian
refugee community as a diasporic filmmaker, she instead chooses to focus on
the private worlds and desires of these two young girls, offering an intimate
and even maternal insight into the ‘dreams and fears’ of the film’s subjects at a
formative point in their lives. As such, Masri’s own filmic gaze can be read as
feminocentric and even feminist.
Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance, meanwhile, offers an intimately
autobiographical but equally feminocentric exploration of diasporic space.
Originally displayed as a video installation, this 15-minute work of video art
consists of a layering of visual imagery and voice-over, in which a woman—
presumably Mona—reads extracts in English from letters that her mother has
sent to her from Beirut. These letters reveal the diasporic context to the fi lm:
Mona is in London, while her mother is in Beirut (also a diasporic location
since her mother was forced to flee from Palestine in 1948). While the visual
imagery is initially abstract, consisting of blurred hues of dark blue, crimson
and black, the camera gradually pans out from what is revealed as a close-up
detail of a photograph of her mother in the shower taken by Mona during a
visit to Beirut. This image is, in turn, layered with handwritten Arabic text
from the mother’s letters to Mona.
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.
These layered narratives evoke a portrait of tremendous emotional close-

ness between mother and daughter. While the letters initially establish a
somewhat conventional mother-daughter relationship founded in the moth-
er’s desire for her daughter to return to her (described as a physical intimacy
by the mother, who states that ‘I long to hold you in my arms’), the letters
soon reveal other forms of intimacy between them based around gender
rather than diasporic location. The mother speaks of the episode during
which Mona took the photographs of her in the shower and tells of how they
were discovered by her father, who appeared deeply shocked. The mother
describes how, although they laughed off the episode, she was left with a
clear sense that her husband felt as though Mona had ‘trespassed on his
property’. Despite the fact that he speaks dismissively of the ‘women’s non-
sense’ that Mona and her mother discuss—what the mother terms ‘intimate
conversations about women’s things’—the mother retains a clear sense that
he feels somehow excluded, even hurt that Mona does not discuss personal
matters with him. Nevertheless, the mother reveals the strong bond she feels
is forged between them through such conversations, not only in terms of their
mother-daughter relationship, but also at a ‘sisterly’ level: ‘I felt we were like
sisters—close together with nothing to hide . . . I enjoyed the feeling of inti-
macy’, she writes. Mona’s diasporic location therefore evokes a simultaneous
distance from and closeness to her mother, which are mediated through the
realms of both body and text, image and voice.
The interplay between body and text also proves central to the connec-
tions forged between Mona and Manar in Measures of Distance, but so too
does the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’. While the discursive rela-
tionship between ‘self’ and ‘other’ most usually refers to the binary distinc-
tion constructed between ‘man’ and woman’, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ in
patriarchal discourse, the feminocentric space of exile posits the ‘other’ as
an/other female figure, who is at once closely connected to the female sub-
ject’s sense of ‘self’. In Frontiers of Dreams and Fears, Mona and Manar are
one another’s ‘other’, but this ‘otherness’ is constructed as an almost uncanny
doubling, evident not only in the similarity of their names (Mona /Manar),
ages (13/14), situations (both born as refugees in Palestinian camps, with
absent fathers) and temperaments (thoughtful, bright, creative and kind) but
also in the way in which they construct their own self-awareness through
their correspondence with each ‘other’. This ‘doubling’ or ‘mirroring’ of
experience can be read in psychoanalytic, specifically Lacanian terms, as
Elizabeth Grosz describes:
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:
There is always an encounter with strangerness at stake, even within

the home: the home does not secure identity by expelling strangers, but
requires those strangers to establish relations of proximity and distance
within the home [ . . . ] There is already strangeness and movement
within the home itself.36
In Frontiers of Dreams and Fears, it certainly seems true that the girls estab-
lish a sense of diasporic ‘home’ through one another. Crucially, though, this
reconstruction of ‘home’ takes place through a specifically textual medium:
written correspondence.
Within the film, we learn that the girls are initially placed in contact through
a ‘pen friend’ scheme set up by the cultural groups in each of their camps, and
further research into the context of the film by Helena Schultz reveals that this
initially occurred through a project set up by the Information Technology Unit
at Birzeit University, called the Across Borders project, which aimed to act as
a ‘virtual space’ in which refugees could communicate without the restrictions
of borders or separation of distance.37 It is tempting to theorise ‘cyberspace’
as a connective, transnational realm where identities, including gendered and
national affiliations, can be reinscribed at will38 —but it is interesting to note that
the physically written word, transmitted from hand to pen to paper—becomes
the chosen medium of correspondence for the girls. Their letters soon become
deeply personal, and over the course of a year, which includes the outbreak
of the second Intifada in Palestine, the girls strike up an epistolary connection
through which they support and comfort one another.
Interestingly, many of their letters discuss their sense of longing for Pal-
estine, and for home: a (be)longing that, in some ways, they come to fulfi l
through one another. We see this, for example, when Mona asks Manar, as a
West Bank resident, to fi nd and visit her family’s former village of Saffouria
from which they were exiled. Manar fulfi ls this request and constructs a
narrative of return, which she sends to Mona. Though the houses have been
erased and many trees planted to obscure the site of destruction, Manar
attempts to fi nd traces of Mona’s family history. She tells Mona that she
found a cactus which seemed to mark the entrance to the village, and tells
her that ‘your village is beautiful. It takes your breath away’. Most signif-
icantly, though, Manar collects and sends soil from the village to Mona,
and Masri fi lms Mona allowing the earth to run slowly through her fi ngers.
Manar’s body, given free(er) access to areas of the West Bank, therefore
enables Mona to complete her diasporic quest for return at some level. In
this way, loss of the homeland emerges as both a shared source of pain and
collective memory, but also as a ground for connection between the girls.
Mona and Manar’s written correspondence could therefore be seen to affi rm
Ahmed’s view that
stories of dislocation help to relocate: they give a shape, a contour, a

skin to the past itself. The past becomes presentable through a history
of lost homes (unhousings), as a history which hesitates between the
particular and the general, and between the local and the transnational.
The telling of stories is bound up with—touched by—the forming of new
communities. Memory is a collective act which produces its object (the
‘we’), rather than reflects on it. 39
Here, Ahmed’s description of the narrative as a ‘skin’ that ‘fleshes out’ an
absent or erased space evokes the heavily embodied dynamic to the girls’
diasporic experience. Not only is Mona’s reconnection to her former home
instigated through Manar’s bodily travel to her family home, which in turn
enables her to touch its soil, but the culmination of their story sees Mona and
Manar managing to meet at the Israeli-Lebanese border and to hold hands.
This encounter is made possible by Israel’s withdrawal from South Leba-
non, and Masri fi lms hundreds of people flocking to the border in order
to catch a glimpse of, communicate with or even reach out their hands to
friends and relatives from whom they have been separated for many years.40
This marks a significant moment in the traumatic collective memory of Pal-
estinian refugeeism, then, and it is appropriate that Mona and Manar, two
young representatives of the legacy of this trauma, are brought together at
this point. Meeting at the border, the girls speak to one another and share
narratives about the difficulties that they face in the camps, fi nding many
similarities—the lack of water and electricity, for example. Only later, though,
do they reveal the poignancy of this moment for them. Mona speaks of how
‘when I held Mona’s hands and we sang, it felt very special’, while Manar
says that ‘I felt something was calling me to hold onto their hands and to
tear down the barbed wire’. Yet Mona and Manar’s touch evokes not only
closeness, but also irreconcilable distance. As Jackie Stacey and Sara Ahmed
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.
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:
We need to recognise the link between the suspension of a sense of hav-

ing a home with the formation of new communities. The forming of a
new community provides a sense of fi xity through the language of her-
itage—a sense of inheriting a collective past by sharing the lack of a home
rather than sharing a home. In this sense, the movement of global nomads
allows the fi xing rather than unfi xing of the boundaries implicated in
community and identity formation.43
In postcolonial feminist terms, it is highly significant that this ‘community of

strangers’ should also emerge from the specific parameters of feminocentric
experience and female identity. For Mona and Manar, heritage, collective
memory and the loss of home provide an important sense of connection to their
past, but it is through their identities and emotions as girls shortly to become
women that they also construct visions of community that connect them to the
future, remapping the boundaries of community on their own terms.
Bodily and textual correspondence with an ‘other’ also proves integral
to the construction of selfhood and belonging in Measures of Distance. For
Mona (Hatoum), this ‘other’ is literally her m/other, with whom a certain
doubling or mirroring of experience also takes place in the fi lm, just as it
does for Mona and Manar in Frontiers. Here, the Lacanian parallels are more
direct. As Lindsey Moore writes, the fi lm portrays, at one level, ‘a univer-
sal gendered experience: a daughter’s self-differentiation from, but ongoing
identification with, her mother’.44 Laura U. Marks is also keen to emphasise
the fi lm’s psychoanalytic possibilities in her reading of it as a dramatisation
of ‘an erotic relationship that is organised less by a phallic economy than by
the relationship between mother and infant’.45 This resistance to the ‘phallic
economy’ appears particularly in the presentation of the mother’s body. As
the photograph of her in the shower slowly comes into focus, her nakedness
is revealed to the viewer but the effect of this image, shot in indistinct hues
of indigo and maroon and semi-veiled by her words, is not that of a sexual-
ised striptease but of a closeness and connection to the voluptuous, maternal
female body. This celebratory sense of maternal intimacy recalls Lacan’s
theorisation of feminine jouissance: a pleasure that recalls the sense of bliss
experienced by the child when still at a stage of total unity with the mother.46
In this way, Hatoum resists the ‘phallocentric’ voyeurism of the male gaze
in favour of an affi rmative vision of female intimacy, identity and embodi-
ment. Indeed, the mother’s letter reveals that although she has found Mona’s
questions about her sexuality ‘probing’, they have also ‘ma[de] me think
about myself in a way I hadn’t . . . before’. Consequently, the fi lm’s visual
engagement with the ‘other’ becomes a representation of a dual process of
self-exploration on the parts of both Mona and her mother.
Connective though Mona’s visualisation of her mother might appear,
though, loss remains indelibly inscribed upon her mother’s body. Here, it is
useful to turn to Verónica Schild’s evocative critique of the classic postcolo-
nial model of the ‘liberated’ diasporic subject, or ‘nomad’, as formulated by
Rosi Braidotti. Schild 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
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
when women of a given community are targeted by racism, ethnic abso-

lutism, religious hatred or other forms of intolerance or violence because
of their membership in that community, it makes no sense to claim that
these women’s sense of themselves as women is not intimately bound up
with their sense of belonging to that community.49
Hence, the drive towards feminocentric connection and community can be

read as a postcolonial response to the traumatic colonial legacies of Palestin-
ian diasporic experience. Yet these feminocentric communities do not simply
seek to recuperate traditional gender norms or social structures. Instead,
they place women’s bodies and subjectivities at the generative heart of com-
munal structures, producing what Elizabeth Grosz describes as ‘the possibil-
ity of occupying, dwelling or living in new spaces, which in their turn help
generate new perspectives, new bodies, new ways of inhabiting’. 50 Despite
the very different diasporic experiences and relationships between women
visualised by Masri and Hatoum, their fi lms nevertheless display a common
commitment to this search for ‘new perspectives, new bodies, new ways of
inhabiting’ diasporic space that resist women’s disconnection not only from
Palestine, but from one another. In this, their fi lms look beyond the divisive
‘frontiers’ of colonial and patriarchal authority to ‘dreams’ of a connective
postcolonial feminist future.
‘Not Everything Is Lost’: The Creative

Solidarities of Palestinian American Poetry
The Palestinian diaspora stretches across the world, creating many different
communities that must each find their own creative ways to mediate their
relationship to Palestine through the transnational location and socio-political
landscape in which they find themselves. Over the past few decades, particu-
larly distinctive creative explorations of transnational Palestinian identity and
community have emerged from the Palestinian American poets Naomi Shihab
Nye and Suheir Hammad, who share a preoccupation with the many differ-
ent possibilities of belonging and solidarity that may be mobilised through
the medium of poetry. For both Nye and Hammad, though, the contempo-
rary U.S. landscape also presents a particularly challenging environment in
which to locate these possibilities. While Nye and Hammad each employ very
different poetic strategies in order to negotiate the transnational and U.S. land-
scapes in which they find themselves, it is nevertheless possible to identify a
common humanitarian commitment in their work that is often expressed in
either explicitly or implicitly gendered terms—whether in the form of familial
relationships between daughters, mothers, fathers and grandmothers, as in
Nye, or through strident expressions of opposition to the masculinist rhetoric of
violence perpetuated against Palestinians and against women, as in Hammad’s
poetry. While the gendered undertones of their work must be situated within
a much broader matrix of political commitments and concerns, the structures
of family, solidarity and alliance that circulate around gendered identities and
bodies in their work nevertheless prove integral to their search for imaginative
and connective relationships to, and indeed between, Palestinian and U.S.
communities within the diasporic landscape.
Naomi Shihab Nye and Suheir Hammad are two of the most prominent
contemporary Palestinian American poets writing in English today, and each
of them shines as a leading light in different poetic ‘scenes’. Nye is the author
of more than twenty-five books, which include poetry anthologies, novels
and collections of poetry and prose written for both adults and younger read-
ers. She has received many literary awards and fellowships, has had work
presented on radio and television, and has even read at the White House. 51
She was born in 1952 in St Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father, the author
Aziz Shihab, who came to settle in the U.S. following his displacement from
Palestine by the Nakba, and to an American mother of European descent.
Nye has subsequently lived in St Louis, Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas
and has travelled across Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, Central and South
America and the Middle East. She continues to travel widely in order to
read and take writing workshops. Her poetry is taught in schools in the U.S.,
and she cites the American poet and pacifist, William Stafford, as one of her
greatest inspirations. 52 Despite her inauguration into U.S. literary culture,
though, Palestine remains a touchstone in much of her work. Indeed, writing
of Nye’s work in light of his interview with her, the Palestinian American poet
and environmental scholar Sharif S. Elmusa writes: ‘Perhaps I would not
be off the mark to say that the Palestinian plight is constitutive of the poet’s
sensibility: empathy with the vulnerable, aversion to loss, and abhorrence of
aggression and violence’. 53 Nye’s work therefore displays a deep commitment
to the connective and healing powers of creative expression, and to its social
potentials to educate, inspire and forge dialogue within and across many dif-
ferent kinds of community.
Suheir Hammad, meanwhile, has risen to prominence as a cultural edu-
cator, activist and actress (she starred in Annemarie Jacir’s 2008 fi lm Salt
of This Sea), but as a poet, she is known for an altogether different style of
poetry that draws on the rawness, spontaneity and self-assertion of the U.S.
musical traditions of hip hop and rap, and on the contemporary tradition of
the poetry slam. 54 Hammad sprung to public prominence for her poem ‘fi rst
writing since’, 55 which was circulated widely on the Internet as one of the
fi rst poetic responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001. Already
an acclaimed poet (the recipient of the Audre Lorde Writing Award, among
other accolades and fellowships) and author of two works (the poetry collec-
tion Born Palestinian, Born Black56 and prose reflections Drops of This Story57),
Hammad was invited to perform on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam and on
the Broadway show that later emerged from it, establishing her as one of
the freshest and most politically strident voices in Palestinian American and
indeed Arab American poetry. 58 The diverse cultural influences in Ham-
mad’s work stem from her upbringing in a multi-ethnic Brooklyn neighbour-
hood from the age of five, where she grew up listening to music by the likes of
Public Enemy and came to be inspired by the stridently feminist and politi-
cal voices of African American writers including Audre Lorde and June Jor-
dan. Indeed, in her author’s preface to Born Palestinian, Born Black, Hammad
attaches particular importance to Jordan’s poem ‘Moving Towards Home’,
written in response to the Sabra and Shatila massacres. The poem includes
the lines: ‘I was born a Black woman / and now / I am become a Palestinian
/ against the relentless laughter of evil / there is less and less living room’. 59
Here, Jordan articulates a certain fluidity of communal identification as inte-
gral to the expression of her political solidarities, and this intercommunal
identification also proves important within Hammad’s own work, evident in
her multi-ethnic identification as ‘born Palestinian, born Black’.60 For Ham-
mad, then, communal identification does not signal a straightforward desire
to assimilate or to exclude, nor to arrive at a fi xed sense of belonging. Rather,
it presents her with the conditions for political agency and social visibility: a
way of viewing community that has proven integral to struggles for equality
and justice throughout U.S. history, notably during the campaigns for racial
equality undertaken by the Civil Rights movement.61 For Hammad, then, it is
possible to belong to many communities, and different potentials for agency,
opposition and solidarity are to be found in each.
For both Nye and Hammad, their identity as specifically Palestinian Amer-
icans nevertheless remains at the heart of their imaginative explorations of
diasporic belonging and community. As the children of 1948 Palestinian
refugees who sought sanctuary in the U.S., they are members of a U.S.-based
diasporic community of over 200,000 Palestinians of various generations.62
Traces of their parents’ traumatic experiences surface in many of Nye’s and
Hammad’s poems, and inflect the ways in which they understand the con-
cepts of ‘home’ and ‘community’. As Nye puts it in her poem ‘Jerusalem’,
‘each carries a tender spot: / something our lives forgot to give us’,63 and in
Nye’s case, this tender spot could be said to relate to the traumatic legacy
of her father’s displacement from Palestine during the Nakba: an event that
has, in turn, shaped Nye’s own consciousness of her identity. In interview,
she speaks of how her father carried the memory of the Nakba with him in a
way that meant
[his] entire life was shadowed by grief over loss of his home [ . . . ] [He]
never stopped describing what he saw as the terribly unfair situation
in his homeland, supported mightily by the U.S. government [and so]
issues of identity and empathy, or lack thereof, became a big part of
my awareness.64
So it is that many of Nye’s poetic explorations of her own diasporic situation

connect to her father’s sense of loss, which engenders an acute awareness of
the fragility of ‘home’ in Nye. In her poem ‘Brushing Lives’, for example, she
conjures the silent legacy of collective loss that underpins her own and, to an
extent, all diasporic people’s existences: ‘Who else? They’re out there . . . /
the ones we’re lonely for . . . / the ones who know the story before / our own
story starts’.65 Here, the loss of the homeland is something that produces an
inherent sense of absence and negation, but it also forges a community of its
own kind: what Sara Ahmed terms a ‘community of strangers’. Nye suggests
that the diasporic landscape is inevitably inscribed with a sense of loss, and
that the search for a way to return to or reconnect with the lost home endures
within the diasporic environment. In her tender poem ‘My Father and the
Fig Tree’, for example, her father’s sense of longing for his homeland appears
through his vivid descriptions of the delicious, fragrant figs that used to grow
in Palestine. The poem subtly suggests his inability to reconcile himself to
his diasporic existence through his poignant refusal to try to grow figs; thus
‘home’ remains intangible, absent, a perfect memory that can never be lived
up to in the reality of his new environment. In the fi nal stanza of the poem,
though, Nye reveals how, within the last home in which he lives, her father
fi nally fi nds himself able to nurture his memories of home while allowing
himself to ‘root’ in his new location. She describes how
He took me out to the new yard.

There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,
a tree with the largest, fattest,
sweetest figs in the world
[ . . . ] fruits like ripe tokens,
emblems, assurance
of a world that was always his own.66
Here, Nye reveals a sensitive awareness of her father’s desire to fi nd some

way to reconnect to his homeland, and for a ‘rootedness’ in his new home:
a desire that is at once specifically connected to Palestine, but that is also
deeply human. As both a living plant and a symbolic entity, the fig tree
therefore suggests the way in which new senses of belonging may blossom
from new soil, even as its meaning and memory remains inextricably tied to
the losses of the past.
An awareness of her parents’ traumatic displacement also infuses many of
Hammad’s poems. Both of Hammad’s parents were 1948 Palestinian refugees
originally from Lydd and Ramleh (now in the Tel Aviv area) who initially
fled to Jordan, where Hammad was born in 1973, then moved to Beirut, and
on to New York in 1978. In interview, Hammad recalls how she was exposed
to many different cultural influences during her childhood in New York.
While she grew up listening to ‘very nationalist PLO chants’ and poetry by
‘Fadwa Tuqan and her brother [Ibrahim]’, which her parents would ‘chant in
that oral tradition of Arabic poetry’,67 her poem ‘daddy’s song’ also reveals
the presence of jazz and blues music in her home. In this poem, she describes
how she hears echoes of her father’s fl ight from Palestine in the lyrics of Sam
Cooke’s Civil Rights anthem ‘Change Is Gonna Come’:
that was you

daddy born by a river
in a little tent and i swear
you been running
running ever since68
Here, then, Hammad displays the ability to connect experiences of ethnic

and political disenfranchisement across cultures and communities, while
conjuring the diasporic landscape as a palimpsest of spaces, times and expe-
riences that come to be layered upon one another. As such, Hammad’s work
constructs an interplay between personal and communal narratives of iden-
tity and belonging.
The construct of the family therefore proves integral to both Nye’s and
Hammad’s personal relationships to diasporic space. While families transmit
burdens of trauma and loss, though, they also become the medium through
which both poets construct affi rmative and connective relationships with Pal-
estine. Significantly, these connective potentials appear particularly through
the figures of resilient and maternal Palestinian women in their poetry. In
Hammad’s poem ‘mama sweet baklava’, for example, the ‘sticky’, ‘sweet’,
‘layered’ Middle Eastern delicacy baklava comes to represent not only a link
to Hammad’s Palestinian heritage, as it is a ‘recipe old and passed / down
through word / of hand creating and sustaining’, but it also evokes woman
herself as the bearer of Palestinian identity, her ‘backbone strong foundation
/ layers thousand layers / [ . . . ] pressed / into steel children marriage / nation
woman’.69 Woman, in this poem, is the bearer of history and nation, yet
rather than functioning simply as a cipher or symbol, she is also a figure who
is complex and ‘layered’—just as the rhythmic, stream-of-consciousness move-
ment of Hammad’s lines invoke her own ‘layered’ connection to Palestine,
her style conjuring the lilts and leaps of jazz as much as it does the fragrance
and intimacy of a Palestinian kitchen.70 In Nye’s poem ‘My Grandmother in
the Stars’, meanwhile, her relationship with her grandmother also conjures
her simultaneous closeness to and distance from Palestine, as she describes
how they sit together, ‘our two languages adrift, / heart saying, Take this
home with you’.71 In ‘The Words under the Words’, her grandmother is also
a vessel of memory, place and wisdom,72 while in ‘Voices’, she describes how
she experiences her grandmother’s dispossession from her land ‘like a debt’,
which makes her ‘want to walk among silent women / scattering light’.73 Her
grandmother’s trauma therefore lives on in Nye, but assumes a regenerative
potential, her poetry the ‘light’ that she scatters: a means, perhaps, to give
voice to Palestinian women’s silenced histories.
Imaginative identification with maternal female figures therefore enables
both Nye and Hammad to construct a sense of connection to Palestine. Yet
this connection is not simply nostalgic; it is also the basis of a powerful ethi-
cal commitment to justice, equality and freedom for those within and beyond
Palestine, which often takes the form of anti-colonial sentiment. Here, we
fi nd echoes of Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s subversive feminist theorisation
of diasporic space as a landscape in which the movement of people decon-
structs spatial and ideological distinctions between ‘East’ and ‘West’, ‘North’
and ‘South’. Through the relocation of ‘Third World’ women into the ‘First
World’, Mohanty suggests that they carry with them an insurgent political
opposition to conditions of exploitation, imperialism and neo-colonialism.
Thus, diaspora creates ‘imagined communities of women with divergent
histories and social locations, woven together by the political threads of
opposition to forms of domination that are not only pervasive but also sys-
temic’.74 These ‘threads of opposition’ emerge in many of Hammad’s and
Nye’s poems, where the intersecting structures of Israeli colonialism and U.S.
imperial domination are placed under scrutiny and actively resisted, often
through specifically feminocentric communities. In Hammad’s poem ‘rice
haikus’, for example, we hear the imagined voices of Palestinian women who
have given food to resistance fighters describing how the occupying forces
have punished them by ruining their food supplies, pouring sugar into their
rice. Now, though, it is the women themselves who engage in their own oppo-
sitional activity, by ‘eat[ing] sweet rice . . . / meals of resistance’.75 In ‘blood
stitched time’, meanwhile, the voice of a mother, perhaps the embodiment
of Palestine itself, declares herself ‘no longer willing to sacrifice sons / to
wars of men and / gods of war [ . . . ] / to sons gone crazy’.76 Here, cycles of
violence are portrayed as inherently masculinist, and while women are often
the victims of such cycles, they may also be the ones imbued with the power
to break them.
A strong sense of feminist pacifism also emerges in Hammad’s poem
‘What I Will’: a work that can be read as an expression of opposition to
the U.S.’s many forms of imperialist intervention in the Middle East. In this
poem, Hammad engages in playful linguistic dances around the motif of the
‘war drum’, which morphs into a metaphorical representation of a ‘drummed
up war’ to which all citizens of the U.S. are supposed to ‘dance’, a likely refer-
ence to the rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’ and subsequent invasions of Iraq
and Afghanistan which were contemporaneous to the writing of this poem.
Yet Hammad refuses to ‘dance to your / beating’ because, the poem reveals,
she identifies intimately with ‘that skin / you are hitting . . . / alive once /
hunted stolen / stretched’.77 Through this extended metaphor, Hammad dis-
plays an array of anti-imperialist sentiments. By not only standing in solidar-
ity but also identifying with the victimised populations of the Middle East,
Hammad draws attention to the long history of imperialistic intervention in
the region, evident in the potently colonial image of the drum-skin as a ‘spoil
of war’ or hunting trophy. Hammad’s opposition to the war also implicitly
challenges the paternalistic rhetoric employed by the U.S. government in the
run-up to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, through which the inva-
sion was presented as an opportunity to ‘rescue’ Afghan women from Tali-
ban oppression:78 an eerie reincarnation of the ‘colonial rescue fantasy’.79 By
allying herself with the ethnic and gendered ‘other’ in this poem, Hammad
projects a powerfully postcolonial feminist voice, with which she vows to con-
struct a community of her own founded not in a masculinist logic of destruc-
tion but in a generative (arguably maternal) faith in creativity. In ‘What I
Will’, Hammad states that she will ‘gather my beloved / near and our chant-
ing will be dancing. Our / humming will be drumming’. This, Hammad sug-
gests, is a music that stands in strident opposition to the ‘lifeless’ beat of the
‘war drum’, because it is founded in a deep-seated belief in life, affi rmation
and collective ethical responsibility that amounts to the palpitations of love: a
‘heartbeat . . . louder than death’. In this poem, the rich and varied cadences
of her language, drawn from hip hop, the Brooklyn streets, from Arabic oral
poetry and from her allegiances as a Palestinian, an American, a woman and
a lover of peace, all harmonise in a way that is, to use Said’s appropriately
musical term, truly ‘contrapuntal’. In this poem, then, Hammad’s diasporic
consciousness connects her to communities and vantage-points both within
and outside of the U.S., enabling her to fulfi l what Said views as the resistant
potential of the exile: the ability to perform ‘elucidating and critical tasks’
through their ‘cross-cultural and transnational visions’.80
Like Hammad, Nye also displays an anti-colonial sentiment founded heav-
ily in pacifism. The feminist commitment underpinning this stance is subtler
in Nye’s case, however, and takes the form of a vocabulary of the domestic
and ‘feminine’, which stands in opposition to the ‘masculinist’ rhetoric of
colonialism, violence and warfare. While many of her earlier poems from the
1990s are concerned with possibilities of travel and connection, Nye’s 2005
collection You & Yours addresses a more heavily divided and fragmented
global landscape. The influence of U.S. imperialist policy in the Middle
East forms an undeniable backdrop here, but Nye does not situate herself
in straightforward antagonism with the U.S. Rather, she travels back and
forth across subject-positions within this fraught global landscape in order to
invoke a variety of powerfully dissenting voices. In her poem ‘He Said Eye-
Rack’, for example, the anonymity of official military language employed by,
we assume, George Bush—‘He said, “We are not dealing with peaceful men.”
[ . . . ] He said, “reckless aggression”’—is rendered absurd by its juxtaposition
with the language of the vital and quotidian: ‘Tell that to . . . the bride, / . . .
the peanut-seller, / the librarian careful with her shelves . . . / the ants tunnel-
ling through the dirt’.81 Here, Nye employs an arguably feminised language
of ‘smallness’ which, Samina Najmi argues, subverts the ‘binary gendering
patterns that cast emotional realities as feminine and reason as masculine’,
by revealing that ‘not focusing on the small, the particular, and the concrete
results in forfeiting rational thought processes’; thus, she ‘makes visible what
the gendered discourse of war conceals’.82 This is the irrational, unthinking
cruelty of war and destruction, epitomised by the cultural ignorance and
hostility evident in the sinister dismembering of ‘Iraq’ into what sounds like
an instrument of torture on George Bush’s tongue: ‘EYE-RACK’.
Like Hammad, then, Nye’s own personal connection to, and experience
of, Middle Eastern culture demands that she intervene in the dehumanis-
ing discourse of violence, and this desire to resist through the humanisation
and individualisation of the ‘other’ emerges strongly in several poems which
memorialise Palestinian children who have died through the violence of the
occupation. All of these poems reveal the colossal scale of injustice for Pal-
estinians through their focus on ‘smallness’: the ‘small’ life of a child, once
with ‘secret happy hopes . . . singing . . . with eyes closed / under the bridge’,
killed by a ‘stray’ bullet, as in ‘For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15’; 83
or the ‘small’ ‘kidneys . . . liver . . . heart’ of Ahmed Ismail Khatib which,
donated to an Israeli boy, remind Nye that ‘we must—simply must—be bigger
too’.84 While Nye’s focus on the loss of young life invokes an obvious sense
of humanitarian and ethical outrage, it also perhaps suggests an implicitly
maternal dimension. Writing from a diasporic location, Nye’s focus here may
also enable her to establish wider bonds of subversive maternal connection
beyond the victimised Palestinian community itself.
Hammad’s similar commitment to cross-cultural ethical solidarity assumes
an altogether more visceral feminist dimension in her poem ‘of woman torn’.
This poem presents a harrowing account of an ‘honour killing’, but within
it, Hammad not only condemns the violently patriarchal ethos of this social
phenomenon but seeks to honour and connect with its victims. In this poem,
Hammad’s voice resonates with a sisterly intimacy as she shows how female
bodies, desires and rights may be constructed as illicit and subversive within
the patriarchal system. Drawing upon the imagery of resistance and combat,
she writes of how, for ‘palestine’s daughter love / making can be as danger-
ous / as curfews broken / guerrillas hidden’.85 Here, Hammad conjures an
analogy between the abuses of the occupation and the violence of patriarchal
power: just as Palestine is dispossessed of its own self-determination, so is the
woman dispossessed of her own body. In its critique of patriarchal ‘honour/
shame’ codes, though, this poem also displays a willingness to condemn
structures of oppression and violence wherever they may occur, including
within the Palestinian community itself. Here, then, Hammad displays an
ethical commitment to the view that women’s rights are ultimately human
rights and must be defended across all cultural boundaries: a task in which
her own transnational location may be of assistance. In the fi nal lines of the
poem, Hammad evokes a deeply connective love that may be founded in
feminocentricity, but that is ultimately committed to wider qualities of justice
and equality: ‘this is a love poem / cause i love / you now woman [ . . . ] /
under my skin / i carry your bones’. 86 Hammad therefore stands in solidarity
with this woman as a Palestinian, a woman and a supporter of human rights,
and she reveals that ethical solidarities construct communities every bit as
intimate as those based around more traditional notions of geographical
belonging. While her commitments in this poem appear specifically femi-
nist, they are also inherently postcolonial since they can be seen to enact
what Robert J.C. Young terms the ‘radical agenda’ of postcolonial studies,
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.
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’.
Expanding the Postcolonial Feminist Community

Over the course of this chapter, we have seen the variety of imaginative
means by which female creative practitioners have begun to expand the
parameters of the Palestinian postcolonial feminist community. While
estranged from the physical space of historic Palestine itself, many diasporic
fi lmmakers, artists and poets have nevertheless found creative means to forge
communal identities founded variously on Palestinian, gendered and ethical
identifications that mobilise different forms of postcolonial feminist potential.
In Masri’s and Hatoum’s fi lmic works, for example, we saw how the site of
the female body itself might operate both as a textual surface that enables
the female subject to testify to individual and collective trauma, and as a
vehicle that enables them to reach out and ‘touch’ others across spatial and
communal boundaries. The communities forged by Masri and Hatoum are
highly feminocentric, yet women’s bonds, bodies and identities are shown to
inscribe a sense of national as well as gendered identity, through which they
may formulate politicised senses of belonging that connect them directly to
Palestine, and to one another. In Nye’s and Hammad’s poetry, meanwhile,
feminist dynamics are implicit rather than explicit, but are nevertheless inte-
gral to the formulation of anti-colonial, ethical alliances with both U.S.-based
and Palestinian communities. While diasporic space is far from utopian for
either of these poets, given the sense in which it remains deeply connected
to the loss of homeland experienced by the personal and national family, it
nevertheless emerges as a space of creative interventionist possibilities within
the contemporary landscapes of colonial, imperialist and patriarchal oppres-
sion that resonate within and between Palestine and the U.S.
Collectively, these works radiate a powerful postcolonial feminist poten-
tial. The enduring connections to Palestine constructed by those within the
diaspora can be read as inherently postcolonial: not only does their refusal to
renounce their Palestinian affi liations present an important form of solidarity
with Palestine’s political claims to self-determined national status, but it also
displays a commitment to basic human rights and equality within the global
landscape. This global landscape, though, remains tied to the politics of the
human body, as well as to the body politic. Hence the diasporic landscape
constructed within these works seems to emerge out of what Avtar Brah
describes as a transnational feminist awareness of the ‘politics of location’.
Brah writes that
feminist politics have constituted an important site where issues of home,

location, displacement and dislocation have long been a subject of con-
tention and debate. Out of these debates emerges the notion of a ‘poli-
tics of location’ as locationality in contradiction—that is, a positionality of
dispersal; of simultaneous situatedness within gendered spaces of class,
race and ethnicity, sexuality and age.92
Rather than privileging gender as the primary category of identification,

then, the kind of transnational feminist awareness described by Brah maps
out a more complex yet complete understanding of the different subject-posi-
tions, situations and spaces that both distinguish and connect women within
the global landscape. All of the creative practitioners examined within this
chapter display an awareness of their ‘simultaneous situatedness’ within
different, often contradictory locations, yet rather than this leading to a sense
of fragmentation and political incoherence, their attentiveness to ‘historical,
geographical, cultural, psychic and imaginative boundaries’ might also,
according to Mohanty, provide ‘the ground for political . . . self-defi nition’.93
Through the maps of experience, identification and creativity demarcated by
the women in this chapter, then, we see how neither postcolonial nor feminist
allegiances can be extricated from, nor privileged over, one another. Instead,
they appear as absolutely integral to one another’s existence.
Perhaps the most radical feature of the postcolonial feminist communities
that emerge in this chapter, though, is their potential to operate at a trans-
national level, and to construct forms of solidarity and identification with
Palestine that extend beyond the boundaries of national or ethnic identity.
As Hammad and Nye demonstrate, their positions within and between U.S.
and Middle Eastern cultures enable them to project dissenting voices within
the imperialist landscape of the U.S. itself, while destabilising the very struc-
tures of cultural ‘otherness’ on which imperialist intervention in the Middle
East is premised. While Palestinian diasporic experience remains inexorably
tied to the space of the homeland, these creative practitioners demonstrate
that the ethical, emotional and personal debates inspired by their work pos-
sess a transnational potential that may generate new networks and connec-
tions beyond the Palestinian body politic: a task of vital importance in the
increasingly fraught landscape of cultural dialogue between the ‘West’ and
‘Middle East’. In Hammad’s poem ‘some of my best friends’, this transna-
tional connectivity fi nds particularly potent expression as a celebration of
those who transcend cultural, religious and national differences in order to
stand together for peace, for equality, and for Palestine:
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
The community with which Hammad connects here is at once Palestinian

and transnational, at once political and inspired by a raw commitment to
humanity—and in its desire for equality between and rights for all human
beings, alongside its respect for cultural identity, it is also, of course, postco-
lonial feminist.
Conclusion
Postcolonial Feminist Futures
A country on the verge of dawn . . .

In a little while, we will bid this long road farewell
and ask: Where do we begin?
- Mahmoud Darwish, ‘A State of Siege’1
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
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
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
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:
As feminists, we deplore the Israeli practice of ‘pink-washing,’ the state’s

use of ostensible support for gender and sexual equality to dress-up its
occupation. In Palestine, we consistently found evidence and analyses
of a more substantive approach to an indivisible justice. We met the
President and the leadership of the Arab Feminist Union and several
other women’s groups in Nablus who spoke about the role and struggles
of Palestinian women on several fronts. We visited one of the oldest
women’s empowerment centres in Palestine, In’ash al-Usra, and learned
about various income-generating cultural projects. We also spoke with
Palestinian Queers for BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions], young
organizers who frame the struggle for gender and sexual justice as part
and parcel of a comprehensive framework for self-determination and
liberation. Feminist colleagues at Birzeit University, An-Najah Univer-
sity, and Mada al-Carmel spoke to us about the organic linkage of anti-
colonial resistance with gender and sexual equality, as well as about the
transformative role Palestinian institutions of higher education play in
these struggles.10
The many expressions of commitment to ‘an indivisible justice’ identified

by the delegation can be understood as postcolonial feminist in nature, for
they too view the struggle for gender equality and anti-colonial resistance
as ‘organically’ linked, and recognise that a liberated Palestine will only
emerge when external opposition is combined with internal self-scrutiny.
Yet the delegation also identifies the fraught power politics that surrounds
acts of feminist solidarity, and reminds us of the importance of locating
feminist aspirations in relation to the broader politics of (post)colonial-
ity and indeed social injustice, both within and beyond Palestine. While
the postcolonial feminist perspectives of Palestinian creative practitioners
therefore enable us to scrutinise the complex dynamics of colonial and gen-
dered power that circulate within the Palestinian landscape, they also alert
us to the necessity of turning this postcolonial feminist gaze beyond Pales-
tine itself, to the international landscapes through which representation of,
antagonism towards and indeed support for Palestine are mediated. As the
delegation of ‘indigenous and women of colour feminists’ demonstrated, a
postcolonial feminist understanding of the power dynamics at stake within
our own environment may ultimately enable us to forge more productive,
Conclusion 163
creative and nuanced forms of dialogue and alliance across geographical,
cultural and discursive boundaries.
Palestine’s journey towards self-determination has indeed been arduous
and painful, and this book cannot foresee when that ‘long road’ will end.
Yet the astonishing visions of the authors and fi lmmakers explored over the
course of this work testify to the creative resilience with which the women
and men of Palestine continue to seek new directions forward in this journey.
While the postcolonial feminist perspectives that surface through Palestin-
ian literature and fi lm reveal the many intersecting injustices, inequalities
and struggles that have marked Palestine’s history so far, they also gesture
towards the intensely creative possibilities that lie in Palestine’s future, and
invite us to consider how the paths of postcolonial, feminist and cultural
enquiry might cross on Palestine’s journey towards liberation.
Notes
Notes to the Introduction
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.
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.
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.
37. Said, Question of Palestine, 81–82.
38. Lewis, Gendering Orientalism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
103. Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies, 72.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
89. Avtar Brah, ‘Diaspora, Border and Transnational Identities,’ in Lewis and Mills,
Postcolonial Feminist Theory, 622–625.
90. Brah, ‘Diaspora, Border and Transnational Identities,’ 632.
91. Naomi Shihab Nye, ‘Gate 4-A,’ in Tender Spot, 157.
92. Brah, ‘Diaspora, Border and Transnational Identities,’ 628.
93. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Expe-
rience,’ Copyright 1 (1987): 31.
94. Suheir Hammad, ‘some of by best friends,’ in ZaatarDiva, 89.
Notes to the Conclusion
1. Darwish, ‘A State of Siege,’ 169.

2. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 169.
3. Khalili, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine, 2.
4. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, volume 8 of Theory and History
of Literature, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1984), 6.
Notes 197
5. See the introduction to this book and the 2011 special edition of Arab Studies
Quarterly for further discussion of the problems encountered by academics wish-
ing to engage with issues relating to Palestine.
6. Since this kind of very public opposition to debate on Palestine tends to emerge
most strongly within the U.S. and at times in Europe, I am mainly referring to
the work of research centres within these areas, such as the Institute for Pales-
tine Studies based in Washington and Beirut, the Center for Palestine Studies at
Columbia University, the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the Univer-
sity of Exeter and the Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS.
7. Edward Said, ‘Introduction: Secular Criticism,’ in The World, the Text and the
Critic, 4–5.
8. Shohat, ‘Notes on the “Post-colonial”,’ 247–248.
9. Ali Abunimah, ‘After Witnessing Palestine’s Apartheid, Indigenous and
Women of Color Feminists Endorse BDS,’ Electronic Intifada, 7th December 2011,
accessed 15th February 2012. http://electronicintifada.net/blog/ali-abunimah/
after-witnessing-palestines-apartheid-indigenous-and-women-color-feminists-
endorse.
10. ‘Justice for Palestine: A Call to Action from Indigenous and Women of Colour
Feminists,’ cited in Abunimah, http://electronicintifada.net/blog/ali-abunimah/
after-witnessing-palestines-apartheid-indigenous-and-women-color-feminists-
endorse.
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release.
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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.
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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
A 124, 133; border-theory, 101, 106,

absurd, the, 84–6 128, 187n3; border-writing, 121;
Abu Salma, 46, 176n1 Israeli-Lebanese, 142; patriar-
Abu Wael, Tawfik, 117; ‘Atash, 117–122; chal boundaries, 114, 120, 134
190n60, 190n61 (see also space: public/private
Abu-Assad, Hany, 90–100; Paradise dichotomy).
Now, 90–98 Brah, Avtar, 105, 153–155
Accad, Evelyn, 65–66, 68 British mandate, 4, 54–55, 102
Ahmed, Sara, 140–141 Butler, Judith, 72–73. See also performa-
Allenby Bridge, 111 tivity.
‘Allush, Laila, 33–34
Al-Qasim, Samih, 42, 179n52 C
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 108, 118, 126, 128 Cabral, Amilcar, 46, 61
Arafat, Yasser, 79, 81, 185n48, 186n50 Certeau, Michel de, 124
Arasoughly, Alia, 71 checkpoint, 88–89, 103, 106–7, 109–115,
armed resistance, 64–65, 91, 94, 111; 123, 125; ‘checkpoint heroine’,
rationalisation of violence, 92–93. 106–115
See also martyrdom; masculinity: cinema, ‘fourth period’ of, 37
and violence; militancy, female. class, 57
Ashrawi, Hanan, 33, 35, 50, 178n27 Cleary, Joe, 73, 102
autobiography, 53, 137, 138, 180n68 Clifford, James, 132–133
collective memory, 53, 137, 141–144
B colonial ‘rescue fantasy’, 25, 47, 151
Badr, Liana, 61–69, 181n76, 186n68; community, 131, 135, 147; diasporic, 145,
Compass for the Sunflower, A, 154–155; feminocentric, 138, 143,
61–69; ‘Other Cities’, 113–114 145, 155; Palestinian American, 145,
Balfour Declaration, 102, 167n15 147, 155; ‘of strangers’, 143, 148
Barghouty, Mourid, 111–112 comparative analysis, 12–14
Bhabha, Homi, 22, 109, 115, 128; ‘Third contrapuntal consciousness, 97, 134, 151
Space’, 117. See also hybridity. Cooke, Miriam, 8, 11; and Badran, 9
body / embodiment, 105, 107, 109–112, ‘crisis heterotopia’, 41
129, 136, 140, 143–144; skin, cultural expression / creativity: as target, 126;
142–143; touch, 142–143 as healing, 146, 151, 160; as resis-
border / boundary, 101–130, 133; tance, 2–3, 120–121, 122–123, 126
borderland, 106, 116–127;
‘border-consciousness’, 106, 117, D
127; ‘border-guard’, women as, Darwish, Mahmoud, 29–30, 36, 96–97,
107–108, 112; ‘borderless world’, 157, 174n57
220 Index
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix: H
‘becoming’, 116, 190n52. See also Hammad, Suheir, 145–154
nomad. Hassan, Waïl, 13
desire / longing, 27, 38–41, 118–122, 141, Hatoum, Mona, 136–137; Measures of
152. See also sexuality. Distance, 136–140, 143–145
diaspora, 61–62, 111, 112, 124, 131–156, Hicks, D. Emily, 121, 125–126, 128
193n33 home, 140–141, 143, 147–148; female
documentary, 71, 122–123, 136 body as, 144–145; ‘rooting’, 148
domesticity, 55–58, 63, 67–68, 149, 151. honour/shame, 34, 42, 50, 56, 66, 89, 120,
See also space: public / private 152–153, 175n77. See also land
dichotomy. and honour.
‘Dreams of a Nation’, 3. See also Jacir, hooks, bell, 100
Annemarie. humour, 81–82, 84, 86, 112
Husain, Rashid, 35
E Husayn-McMahon Correspondence,
El-Youssef, Samir, 79–84, 99–100; ‘Day 166n15
the Beast Got Thirsty, The’, hybridity, 101, 106, 108, 116, 128, 133
80–84; Illusion of Return, The, 80
exile, 112–113, 131–133; exilic commu- I
nity, 143; and female identity, identity papers / permits, 30, 103,
134. See also diaspora. 125–126
imagined community, 19, 76, 150
F impotence, emasculation, 42, 82, 87–89,
family, 55, 112, 113–114, 117–122, 149, 120. See also masculinity in
189n44. See also motherhood; crisis.
patriarchy. imprisonment, 56–57, 77, 138
Fanon, Frantz, 3, 48, 56, 64, 111, 157 Intifada, 38, 50–51, 73, 79–81, 89, 92, 94,
female relationships, 137–146, 149–151, 103, 106, 141, 169n61
152–153 intimacy, 107, 123, 139–145
femininity, 110; ‘feminine aesthetic’, Israel, 2, 5–6, 19, 27–28, 33–34, 38,
120–121; ‘feminised language’, 74, 89, 91, 77, 80, 102–103,
152 106–107, 125, 127, 142, 162;
feminism, 47–52, 62; Arab, 8–9, 48; ‘invis- withdrawal from South Leba-
ible feminism’, 54; Islamic, 48; non, 142. See also occupation,
and pacifism, 150–151; Palestin- Israeli; Zionism.
ian, 9, 49–52, 57; transnational
feminism, 131, 135, 153, 155; J
Western, 57. See also postcolo- Jabra, Ibrahim Jabra, 32
nial feminism; nationalism: and Jacir, Annemarie, 2, 117, 122, 126; like
feminism. twenty impossibles, 122–126; Salt
film archive, 2–3, 126 of This Sea, 191n73
filmmaking, 122–127 Jarrar, Randa, 111–113
fitna, 55 Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, 14, 53, 119, 134,
Foucault, Michel, 19, 41. See also power/ 170n67
knowledge. Jordan, June, 147
‘fragmentation, aesthetic of’, 86, 116,
122–127 K
Freud, Sigmund, 26 Kanafani, Ghassan, 61, 72, 126, 188n19
Keret, Etgar, 80, 185n47
G Khaled, Leila, 53, 64–65
Gaza, political status of, 102–103 Khalidi, Rashid, 5, 75, 103
Glanville, Jo, 109; Qissat, 109–114 Khalifeh, Sahar, 37, 77
Grosz, Elizabeth, 140, 145 Khalili, Laleh, 114–115, 157
Index 221
Khleifi, George, 2, 14, 27, 105; ‘road- music, 120, 123, 151; Fayrouz, 60–61;
block movies’, 105 improvised-sung poetry, 195n67.
Khleifi, Michel, 36–44; Fertile Memory, See also contrapuntal conscious-
37–38; Wedding in Galilee, ness.
38–43; Zindeeq, 37
Kristeva, Julia, 134 N
kuffiya, 41 Naficy, Hamid, 106, 127, 128
Najjar, Najwa, 70–71, 182n109
L Nakba, 34, 49, 55, 59, 72, 87, 102, 131,
Lacan, Jacques, 140, 143–144 137, 147–148, 169n60
land, 32, 123–124; claims to, 102–103, Naksa, 73, 87, 102, 132
123, 118–119; feminisation of, Nasser-Eldin, Mahasen, 71
31–37, 121; and honour, 34, nation, 128–129: borders / boundar-
66–67; and natural resources, ies, 101–105 (see also border
118–119, 121; sexualization of, / boundary); ethno-nation, 20;
26, 29, 34–36; soil / earth, 25, 141, fragmentation of, 80–83, 85–88,
143, 148; ‘son of the soil’, 31 103, 131, 144; and gender, 20–21;
Lewis, Reina, 8, 26, 41 75–76, 89–90; ‘nation as narra-
liminality, 73, 95, 101–130, 190n51 tion’, 18–20; multiple narratives
literacy, 62–63, 121 of, 37, 42–43, 69, 159; unity of,
39; ‘woman-as-nation’, 21, 31–32,
M 44–46, 63, 67, 108, 149 (see also
Mahmoud, ‘Abd al-Raheem, 31, 46, border / boundary: ‘border-
176n1 guard’, woman as).
male gaze, 41, 143–144 nationalism, 75–76, 184n22, 184n24; and
margins / marginality, 98, 100, 101, 105, feminism, 47–52, 58–60, 62–71
115, 120, 134 neo-patriarchy, 77, 184n13
martyrdom, 91, 93, 95–98, 110–111; nomad: Braidotti, 144; Deleuze and
performativity of, 93–95. See also Guattari, 133.
masculinity in crisis. Nye, Naomi Shihab, 1, 17, 145–154,
masculinity, 31; and Arab identity, 78; 194n51
and colonisation, 75–77, 87; in
crisis, 72–100; and nationhood, O
76–77; and postcoloniality, occupation, Israeli, 5, 37, 51, 60, 81,
99–100; and violence, 92–93,114– 87–88, 90–91, 103, 113, 127, 152.
115, 150–152. See also nation: See also Israel; Palestine, coloni-
and gender. sation of.
Masri, Mai, 136–137; Frontiers of Dreams Olive Harvest, The, 32–33
and Fears, 136–138, 140–145 oppositional stance: to colonialism and
Massad, Joseph, 5–6, 28, 70, 76 imperialism, 150–153; to the
materiality, 128–129, 161 occupation, see resistance; to
McClintock, Anne, 7, 20, 24–25, 69 academic debate on Palestine, 1,
Mernissi, Fatima, 55–56 159–160 (see also Palestine: self-
militancy, female, 64–65, 67. See also representation, restriction of).
armed struggle; Khaled, Leila. Orientalism, 19; and gender, 26; and
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 10, 57, 150, desire/fear, 26–27; and Zionism,
156, 162 28–29. See also Said, Edward:
Moore, Lindsey, 8, 11, 57, 143 Orientalism.
motherhood / maternity, 54–55, 67–68, Orientalist gaze, 41
114, 138–9, 143–144, 149–150, Oslo Agreement, 86
152; grandmother, 149–150. See ‘other’ / ‘otherness’, 19, 27–28, 31, 33,
also family; female relationships. 108, 114, 140, 143, 151–152, 156
Mulvey, Laura, 41 Oz, Amos, 27–28; My Michael, 27–28
222 Index
P R
Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Radwan, ‘Abdallah, 31, 133
81, 83, 185n48. See also Arafat, rape, 34–35
Yasser. refugee: 132; camp, 79, 81, 83, 137
Palestine: colonisation of, 4–6, 44, 73, resistance, 46–71, 82; ‘resistance litera-
102–107, 118, 126–127, 132, ture’, 61, 63; resistance fighter,
166n13 (see also occupation, 61–69; ‘resistance narrative’, 62,
Israeli); feminisation of, 26, 65, 70; ‘resistance poet’, 122–123.
28–29, 30–31; as ‘lover’, 35; and Resolution 181, 102
the postcolonial, 4–7, 85, 128, ‘Right of Return’, 79–80, 125, 132,
160, 131, 132; and postcolonial 191n73. See also diaspora, exile,
feminism, 7–11, 44, 49–52, 121 refugee.
(see also postcolonial feminism);
self-representation, restriction S
of, 1, 23–24, 32, 122, 125–126, Sabra and Shatila massacres, 79,
157; study within the ‘Western’ 137–138, 147
academy, 1, 159–160; as ‘virgin Said, Edward, 1, 10, 16, 43, 116; Culture
territory’, 23–25 and Imperialism, 19; on exile,
pan-Arabism, 77, 184n22 112–113, 132–134, 151; Oriental-
Parry, Benita, 5 ism, 19, 26, 28, 41; The Question
pathetic fallacy, 118 of Palestine, 24–25; ‘speaking
patriarchy, 21, 31, 39, 55, 76–77, 82, truth to power’, 153; ‘worldliness’,
85–88, 97, 119–120, 122, 172n19. 19–20, 161. See also Orientalism.
See also masculinity; neo-patri- Sartre, Jean-Paul, 5
archy. Sayigh, Mai, 70
peace / pacifism, 146, 150–151, 156 ‘scattered hegemonies’, 135
peasant, figure of, 32 seclusion of women, 55–57
Peres, Shimon, 115 September 11th 2001, post-, 131, 135, 147,
performativity, 72–78, 83–84. See also 154
Butler, Judith. sexuality, 26, 56, 59
poetry, significance in Arab culture 52, Shehadeh, Raja, 35–36; Palestinian
179n39; elegiac poetry, 58; female Walks: Notes on a Vanishing
tradition of, 58–59 Landscape, 23
political/personal dichotomy, 54, 57–60, Shibli, Adania, 71
64, 69, 117 Shohat, Ella, 5, 7–8, 26, 161
‘politics of location’, 16, 155, 162 solidarity, 15, 82, 131, 146–147, 153–156,
polyphony, 159–160 161–162
postcolonial feminism, 2, 7–11, 60, 90, space, 101–130; ‘architecture of occupa-
97–98, 145, 153–163; and border- tion’, 102; desert, 119; ‘East’ /
theory, 101, 106, 117, 122, 127; ‘West’ dichotomy, 150, 165n2
translation into Arab cultures, 9, (see also Orientalism); ‘internal
48–50. See also feminism. closure’, 103; as palimpsest, 149;
postmodernity, 102, 122, 133 public / private dichotomy, 39,
power/knowledge, 19, 21, 101. See also 53–60, 70; ‘social map’, 108, 114,
Foucault, Michel. 128; ‘tactical traversal of’, 124;
‘present absentee’, 23 virtual / cyberspace, 141, 194n38.
psychoanalysis, 27, 140, 143. See also See also border / boundary;
Freud; Lacan. diaspora; travel / mobility.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 47; strategic
Q essentialism, 129, 191n84; subtal-
queer theory, 117, 122, 125–127, 129, ternity, 69
191n70. See also Anzaldúa, Glo- statelessness, 102, 116
ria; Butler, Judith. subterranean, 95–96
Index 223
suicide bombing. See martyrdom. visual media, 94
Suleiman, Elia, 46, 85–90, 99–100,
102–103, 126; Divine Interven- W
tion, 85–90, 108–109 Wall (‘Apartheid’ or ‘West Bank’; ‘Sepa-
sumud, 37, 67, 77, 90, 107, 157 ration Fence’), 103–105
wedding, 65; symbolic significance of,
T 35, 38
Taha, Raeda, 109–111 Weizman, Eyal, 103, 106–107, 110
translation, 12–13, 121, 159. See also West Bank, status as ‘occupied territory’,
comparative analysis. 102
trauma, 92, 101, 107, 110, 113, 116, 137– witnessing, 87, 89, 94, 113, 127–128
138, 142, 144–145, 147, 149–150, Women’s Charter, Palestinian, 51
157. See also Nakba. Women’s Movement, Palestinian, 49–51
travel / mobility, 3, 123–125, 137, writing: body / text relationship, 136, 141,
150–152, 154; ‘travelling theory’, 143–144; letter-writing / the epis-
10. See also checkpoint. tolary, 138, 141, 143–144; ‘writing
Tuqan, Fadwa, 52–61, 149; Mountainous back’, 3, 127
Journey, A, 53–60
Tuqan, Ibrahim, 58, 149, 180n70 Y
Turki, Fawaz, 116, 133 Young, Robert J.C., 153
Yuval-Davis, Nira, 21, 107–108
U
Ummah, 55 Z
United States of America, 145; Civil Zayyad, Tawfiq, 31, 102, 122–123,
Rights Movement, 147, 149; 191n71
imperialism, contemporary, 148, Zionism, 4–5; and colonialism, 4–6, 25;
150–151, 156; musical culture of, ‘a land without a people’, 24;
146–147, 149. See also com- gendering and sexualization of
munity: Palestinian American; Palestine, 24–25; Herzl, Theodor,
September 11th 2001, post-. 25; ‘Iron Wall, the’, 103–4; Meir,
Golda, 39; ‘motherland’, Palestine
V as, 28–9; and Orientalism, 28–29.
Valassopoulos, 8–9, 11 See also Israel.
video art, 138–140, 143–145 Zurayak, Constantine, 49

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PALESTINIAN

LITERATURE AND FILM

Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures

NEW YORK AND LONDON

Simultaneously published in the UK

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2012 Taylor & Francis

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: 978-0-415-88862-2 (hbk)

Typeset in Baskerville by IBT Global.

Introduction: Permission to Re-narrate 1

2 Women Writing Resistance:

4 Bodies Beyond Boundaries?

5 Imagining the Transnational Feminist Community 131

Conclusion: Postcolonial Feminist Futures 157

1.1 Sumaya, the mukhtar’s daughter: a powerful figure of

1.2 Khleifi’s gaze turns to the intimate realms of the bridal

3.1 The deadpan ES (pictured here with his anonymous lover

3.3 A haunting presence: Said’s mother senses her son, already

4.1 Map of the West Bank Wall, 2006. 104

4.3 An image of freedom, mobility and connection: an

5.1 Palimpsestic layers of image, text and voice create

‘Answer, if you hear the words under the words–

Connections and Disjunctions (1):

Connections and Disjunctions (2):

We [at Women’s Affairs, a resource and research centre] are against

Here, Giacaman paradoxically reveals that despite a technical resistance to the

Palestinian Literature and Film: A Comparative Approach

[The] emergent canon of postcolonial-literature-as-world-literature privi-

While my interrogation of postcolonial theory itself may not be as far-reaching

We Palestinians sometimes forget that—as in country after country, the

‘Answer, if you hear the words under the words–

It is only appropriate that a postcolonial feminist study of Palestinian litera-

Casting women in the role of ‘woman-as-nation’ consequently enforces her

Virgin Territory: Colonial Discourse

Palestine has been constantly re-invented, with devastating conse-

there was no such thing as Palestinians . . . It was not as though there

The representation of Palestine as a highly desirable, virgin but potentially

a civilized man . . . could cultivate the land because it meant something

Zionism essentially saw Palestine as the European imperialist did [ . . . ]

Along with other peoples variously designated as backward, degenerate,

The colonization of Palestine proceeded always as a fact of repetition:

Wedded to the Land: Figuring National

In The Question of Palestine, Said describes Mahmoud Darwish’s early poem

In this poem, beloved Palestine is cast as the object of romantic rivalry

Palestine’s transformation into no more than a set of symbols proves ‘hol-

Nation as Multiple Narration: Dis-Orienting

The prevalent political language aims at determining a harmony of

While Palestine remains at the heart of Khleifi’s fi lmmaking, his engagement

Khleifi’s view signifies a radical break from the traditional structures of

En-gendering a Postcolonial Feminist Perspective

Resistance infuses many elements of Palestinian identity and stands proudly

Nationalist ideology extols women, drawing upon phallocratic myths

Colonialism’s use of feminism to promote the culture of the coloniser

to abolish all forms of discrimination and inequality against women,

‘I, Myself, Am a Poem’: Interior Struggle in

At this fresh stage, colonial aggression turns inward in a current of terror

Smashing the Worn-Out Idols? Rewriting Resistance