Palestinian literature

Last updated

Palestinian literature refers to the Arabic language novels, short stories and poems produced by Palestinians. Forming part of the broader genre of Arabic literature, contemporary Palestinian literature is often characterized by its heightened sense of irony and the exploration of existential themes and issues of identity. [1] References to the subjects of resistance to occupation, exile, loss, and love and longing for homeland are also common. [2]

Contents

Historical Origins

Palestinian literature is one of numerous Arabic literatures, but its affiliation is national, rather than territorial. [3] While Egyptian literature is that written in Egypt, Jordanian literature is that written in Jordan etc., and up until the 1948 Arab–Israeli war, Palestinian literature was also territory-bound, since the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight it has become "a literature written by Palestinians" [4] : 9  irrespective of their place of residence. [3]

Overview

Palestinian literature spoke to other causes of oppression and discrimination across the world. In his book, one of the foremost leaders of Palestinian literature and the person who coined the term Palestinian Resistance Literature, Ghassan Kanafani says, "In my stories I give my characters the freedom to express their own positions without reservation". [5] This sense of international solidarity can also be found in Palestinian poets' work such as in Mahmoud Darwish's poem Cuban Chants, "And the banner in Cuba.. The rebel raises it in the Aures.. Oh a nation that feels cold", [6] and in Samih Al-Qasim's poem, Birds Without Wings.

In the period between the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight and the 1967 Six-Day War, Palestinian Resistance Literature played a significant role in maintaining the Palestinian identity; forming a bridge between the two periods, which allowed the Palestinian identity to survive especially in the absence of armed resistance. In his book, Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation, [7] Ghassan Kanafani argues, "Palestinian resistance literature, just like armed resistance, shapes a new circle in the historical series which practically has not been cut throughout the last half century in the Palestinian life". [8]

Since 1967, most critics have theorized the existence of three "branches" of Palestinian literature, loosely divided by geographic location: 1) from inside Israel, 2) from the occupied territories, 3) from among the Palestinian diaspora throughout the Middle East. [9]

Hannah Amit-Kochavi recognizes only two branches: that written by Palestinians from inside the State of Israel as distinct from that written outside. [3] [4] : 11 She also posits a temporal distinction between literature produced before 1948 and that produced thereafter. [3] In a 2003 article published in the Studies in the Humanities journal, Steven Salaita posits a fourth branch made up of English language works, particularly those written by Palestinians in the United States, which he defines as "writing rooted in diasporic countries but focused in theme and content on Palestine." [9] However, Maurice Ebileeni argues that a fourth branch referring exclusively to anglophone literary works is not sufficient. Rather, Palestinian displacement both in Israel/Palestine and the diaspora have led to cultural and lingual diversification among Palestinians that exceeds experiences in Arabic- and English-speaking locations. Ebileeni suggest a polylingual branch that entails works by Palestinian authors – or authors of Palestinian descent – written in English as well as Italian, Spanish, Danish, Hebrew and several other languages. [10]

Palestinian literature can be intensely political, as underlined by writers like Salma Khadra Jayyusi and novelist Liana Badr, who have mentioned the need to give expression to the Palestinian "collective identity" and the "just case" of their struggle. [11] There is also resistance to this school of thought, whereby Palestinian artists have "rebelled" against the demand that their art be "committed". [11] Poet Mourid Barghouti for example, has often said that "poetry is not a civil servant, it's not a soldier, it's in nobody's employ." [11] Rula Jebreal's novel Miral tells the story of Hind Husseini's effort to establish an orphanage in Jerusalem after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the Deir Yassin Massacre, [12] [13] and the establishment of the state of Israel.

Novels and short stories

Susan Abulhawa 's book Mornings in Jenin tells the story of a Palestinian family lost their homes during the 1948 war. [14] In A Rift in Time author Raja Shehadeh explored the relationship between the decline of the Ottoman Empire, British colonialism and Palestinian self-identity in a novel about his great-uncle Najib Nassar.[ citation needed ]

Short stories in Palestinian literature started with writers like Samira Azzam. [15] Censorship of written material made short stories particularly popular under occupation for the relative ease in distribution. Author Atef Abu Saif has said that "Gaza was known as the exporter of oranges and short stories" in the 1980s and 90s. [16]

Poetry

Poetry, using classic pre-Islamic forms, remains an extremely popular art form, often attracting Palestinian audiences in the thousands. Until 20 years ago, local folk bards reciting traditional verses were a feature of every Palestinian town. [17]

After the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, poetry was transformed into a vehicle for political activism. From among those Palestinians who became Arab citizens of Israel and after the passage of the Citizenship Law of 1952, a school of resistance poetry was born that included poets like Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, and Tawfiq Zayyad. [17]

The work of these poets was largely unknown to the wider Arab world for years because of the lack of diplomatic relations between Israel and Arab governments. The situation changed after Ghassan Kanafani, another Palestinian writer in exile in Lebanon published an anthology of their work in 1966. [17]

The work of Nathalie Handal an award-winning poet, playwright, and writer appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. She has been translated into twelve languages. [18] She has promoted international literature through translation, research, and the edited The Poetry of Arab Women, an anthology that introduced several Arab women poets to a wider audience in the west. [19] [20]

Palestinian poets often write about the common theme of a strong affection and sense of loss and longing for a lost homeland. [17] In a poem about the Israeli bombing of Lebanon, published in the Palestinian literary magazine al-Karmel, Mahmoud Darwish wrote: [21]

Smoke rises from me, I reach out a hand to collect my limbs scattered from so many bodies, besieged from land and sky and sea and language. The last plane has taken off from Beirut airport and left me in front of the screen to watch
with millions of viewers
the rest of my death
As for my heart, I see it roll, like a pine cone, from Mount Lebanon, to Gaza.

Hakawati

The art of story telling was for a long time part of the cultural life in Arabic speaking countries of the Middle East. The tradition of "Tales From a Thousand and One Nights" is not an exception. In each small town or village of Palestine, itinerant story tellers called hakawati would visit and tell folk stories they knew, often in teahouses. The tales of the hakawati, once told for all ages, are now sometimes emerging from the Palestinian diaspora as children's books. [22]

Hikaye

Palestinian hikaye is a form of oral literature created, performed and preserved by women. Usually narrated in winter, the performers are usually older women, who tell them to younger women and children. [23] [24] [25] Some versions of hikaye were published in the 1989 volume Speak Bird, Speak Again. [26] In 2008 they were inscribed by UNESCO to their list of intangible cultural heritage. [27]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ghassan Kanafani</span> Palestinian author and resistance leader (1936–1972)

Ghassan Fayiz Kanafani was a prominent Palestinian author and politician, considered to be a leading novelist of his generation and one of the Arab world's leading Palestinian writers. Kanafani's works have been translated into more than 17 languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mahmoud Darwish</span> Palestinian writer (1941–2008)

Mahmoud Darwish was a Palestinian poet and author who was regarded as Palestine's national poet.

Saqr Abu Fakhr is a Palestinian writer living in Lebanon. He is a researcher and author specialized in Arab Affairs, with special focus on Palestinian affairs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Samih al-Qasim</span> Palestinian poet

Samīħ al-Qāsim al Kaissy was a Palestinian poet with Israeli citizenship whose work is well known throughout the Arab world. He was born in Transjordan and later lived in Mandatory Palestine and Israel. Before the Six-Day War in 1967 he was mainly influenced by Arab nationalism; after the war he joined the Israeli Communist Party.

The 1988 Arab League summit held in June in Algiers, Algeria was the fifteenth Arab League Summit. The conference which has been held since 1964 had as focus, the topic of the First Intifada, an uprising by the Palestinians against Israeli occupation and the consequent upswing in Israeli-Palestinian violence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Salma Khadra Jayyusi</span> Palestinian poet, writer, translator and anthologist (died 2023)

Salma Khadra Jayyusi was a Palestinian poet, writer, translator and anthologist. She was the founder and director of the Project of Translation from Arabic (PROTA), which aims to provide translation of Arabic literature into English.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Najwan Darwish</span> Palestinian poet

Najwan Darwish is a Palestinian poet described by The New York Review of Books as "one of the foremost contemporary Arab poets".

The El-Issa Family is an Arab Christian family that emerged from Jaffa, Palestine in the 20th century. The family is known for its "intellect, politics and literature", its members Issa El-Issa and his cousin Yousef El-Issa were among the first who warned about the Zionist movement in Mandatory Palestine. They were also among the first to promote Palestinian nationalism through their family's numerous newspapers and journals, most notably Falastin which was established in 1909. Other examples include Al-Asma'i, Alif Bā’ and Al-Bilād. The family now resides in Jerusalem; however, many family members are living in the diaspora, mainly in the surrounding Levantine countries and Western countries such as the United States, and Chile.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rashid Hussein</span> Palestinian poet

Rashid Hussein Mahmoud was a Palestinian poet, orator, journalist and Arabic-Hebrew translator. He was born in Musmus, Mandatory Palestine. He published his first collection in 1957. He was the first prominent poet to appear on the Israeli Arab stage. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish called him "the star", who wrote about "human things" like bread, hunger and anger.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Izz al-Din Manasirah</span> Palestinian poet and critic (1946–2021)

Izz Al-Din Manasirah was a Palestinian poet, critic, intellectual and academic born in the town of Bani Naim, Hebron Governorate, Palestine. Winner of several prizes as a cadet and an academic, he was a poet of the Palestinian resistance from the late 1960s on, and his name was associated with armed and cultural resistance. He was with such poets as Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim and Tawfiq Ziad, or as they are collectively called, the "Big Four in Palestinian Poetry." He sang poems by Marcel Khalife and others and was famous for his poems "Jafra" and "The Green Kannah."

Suheil Kiwan is a Palestinian journalist and novelist. He won the Tawfiq Zayyad Institution Award in 2002 for his critical study titled ‘Ghassan Kanafani: Al-Jamal Al-Hazeen wa Al-‘Ata’ Al-Mutawahij'.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abdul-Ghani Al-Karmi</span> Palestinian politician

Abdul-Ghani Saeed Al-Karmi (1906–1974) was a Palestinian politician. In 1946, he and King Abdullah I bin Al-Hussein, founded the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. He served as the head of the Jordanian Royal Court. He was closely connected to King Abdullah the First, and one of the leaders of the Palestinian Arab Communist Party.

Nejmeh Khalil Habib is a Palestinian writer. She obtained a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Sydney in Australia. She was awarded a scholarship from the Australia Council for the Arts, as well as The Gibran Khalil Gibran International Prize issued by the Association for the Revival of Arab Heritage in Australia. In addition, she received a certificate of appreciation from the General Federation of Palestine Workers, Australia Branch.

Salim Qabain (1870–1951) was a Palestinian teacher, journalist, writer, historian, and translator. He is considered one of the most important Palestinian and Arab literary figures, especially in translation, and one of the first Arab translators who introduced the Arab reader to Russian literature, as he was nicknamed "The Dean of Translators from Russian."

The Land of Sad Oranges is the second collection of stories written by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. Originally published in 1962, the stories follow the perspective of a Palestinian as they and their family are dispossessed in the wake of the 1948 Palestine war. The collection includes:

A Death in Bed No.12 is the first collection of stories written by Ghassan Kanafani. It was published in Beirut in 1961 with a short introduction by Ghassan that said: "I believe that the book should introduce itself, and if it fails to fulfill part of its writers' ambition, then the writer must simply accept it, as before- times and times- before the writers rips the stories to write them again, and like that, I push "A Death in Bed No.12" to find its own way, if it could find the beginning of the way". This collection of stories mainly explore the feeling of exile, which is portrayed through unilateral attachment to the past. The title comes from a story in the second part of the book. The revolves around a patient writing a letter to his friend Ahmed telling him about a death incident in bed 12, and about how each one of us hears about and perceives death differently. Ghassan Kanafani send in the introduction to an anonymous family whom their eldest son "Mohammed Ali Akbar" died away and alone in bed number 12.

Returning to Haifa is a novella by Palestinian author and journalist Ghassan Kanafani depicting the Israeli occupation of formerly British-controlled Palestinian land during and after the 1948 Battle of Haifa.

<i>Umm Saad</i> 1969 novella by Ghassan Kanafani

Umm Saad is a novella written by fiction writer and journalist Ghassan Kanafani. The book discusses themes of war, patience, and resistance through a first point of view perspective. Upon its release, its political and social themes were generally praised.

Ahlam Bsharat is a Palestinian writer and poet, born in the village of Tammun in the Jordan Valley, and a trainer specialized in creative writing. She is an author of short stories, picture books, novels, and memoirs. Ahlam Bsharat is considered one of the most prominent names produced young people's literature and short stories in Palestine. She has written four novels for young people, dozens of children's stories, and two short story collections. Bsharat gained great attention after publishing the novel "My Kinetic Name is a Butterfly", a novel addressed to young people that reached the list of the 100 most important books for young people in the world in 2012, and the novel was reprinted in both Arabic and English. Bsharat's career as professional writer began in 2005, although she had this talent since the primary stage in her school. She composed stories and drew a visual narrative parallel to the text, so she acquired both skills at a young age.

The Stolen Shirt is one of the first published stories by the Palestinian author, Ghassan Kanafani. It was published as part of his first short story collection, Death Bed No. 12 in 1958. The story won first place in a literary competition in Kuwait. In it, Kanafani looks at Palestinian suffering under the occupation through his employment of symbols.

References

  1. ↑ Ibrahim Muhawi; et al. (2006). Literature and Nation in the Middle East. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN   978-0-7486-2073-9.
  2. ↑ "Palestinian Literature and Poetry". Palestinian National Information Center. Archived from the original on 2007-09-25. Retrieved 2007-07-28.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Hannah Amit-Kochavi. "Hebrew Translations of Palestinian Literature — from Total Denial to Partial Recognition" (PDF). Beit Berl College, Israel. Retrieved 2007-08-17.
  4. 1 2 Elad-Bouskila, Ami (1999). Modern Palestinian Literature and Culture. London & Portland, OR, Frank Cass.
  5. ↑ "Ghassan Kanafani: The Symbol of the Palestinian Tragedy" . Retrieved 2016-07-30.
  6. ↑ كنفاني, غسان (1968). الأدب الفلسطيني المقاوم تحت الاحتلال (PDF). بيروت: مؤسسة الدراسات الفلسطينية. pp. 63–64.
  7. ↑ كنفاني, غسان (1968). الأدب الفلسطيني المقاوم تحت الاحتلال (PDF). بيروت: مؤسسة الدراسات الفلسطينية.
  8. ↑ كنفاني, غسان (1968). الأدب الفلسطيني المقاوم تحت الاحتلال (PDF). بيروت: مؤسسة الدراسات الفلسطينية. p. 10.
  9. 1 2 Steven Salaita (1 June 2003). "Scattered like seeds: Palestinian prose goes global". Studies in the Humanities. Retrieved 2007-09-06.
  10. ↑ Ebileeni, Maurice (20 October 2016). "Palestinian Writings in the World". Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. 18 (7): 258–281. doi:10.1080/1369801X.2016.1231590. S2CID   152225007.
  11. 1 2 3 Adnan Soueif (21 October 2006). "Art of Resistance". The Guardian . Retrieved 2007-09-06.
  12. ↑ "Jewish filmmaker tells Palestinian story - Israel Culture, Ynetnews". Ynetnews. Ynetnews.com. 1995-06-20. Retrieved 2011-03-25.
  13. ↑ Associated, The (2010-10-08). "Jewish film maker directs Palestinian story in 'Miral' - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News". Haaretz. Haaretz.com. Retrieved 2011-03-25.
  14. ↑ Doyle, Martin. "Holiday reading: Irish diplomats on what books to read where". The Irish Times. Retrieved 2018-07-09.
  15. ↑ Piselli, Kathyanne (1988). "Samira Azzam: Author's Works and Vision". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 20 (1): 93–108. doi:10.1017/S0020743800057524. JSTOR   163587. S2CID   162612983.
  16. ↑ Farag, Joseph R. (2017). Politics and Palestinian literature in exile: gender, aesthetics and resistance in the short story. SOAS series on Palestine studies. London New York: I.B. Tauris. ISBN   978-1-78453-655-8.
  17. 1 2 3 4 Mariam Shahin (2005). Palestine: A Guide . Interlink Books. pp.  41–55. ISBN   978-1-56656-557-8.
  18. ↑ Institut fuer Amerikanistik der Uni Leipzig / American Studies Leipzig. "Nathalie Handal - American Studies Leipzig".
  19. ↑ IMEU. "Nathalie Handal: Poet and Playwright". Archived from the original on 2013-07-14.
  20. ↑ "Arab-American writer is ambassador for Middle East". The Washington Post .
  21. ↑ "Ahdaf Soueif on Palestinian literature". The Guardian. 2006-10-20. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2018-07-09.
  22. ↑ Sonia Nimr, Hannah Shaw, Ghada Karmi (2008) “Ghaddar the Ghoul and Other Palestinian Stories”, frances lincoln ltd, ISBN   1-84507-523-4
  23. ↑ "Żeby nie zapomnieć | Tygodnik Powszechny". www.tygodnikpowszechny.pl (in Polish). 2020-11-30. Retrieved 2023-11-22.
  24. ↑ Rivoal, Isabelle (2001-01-01). "Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory. Arabs and Jews Narrate the Palestinian Village". L'Homme. Revue française d'anthropologie (in French) (158–159): 478–479. doi: 10.4000/lhomme.6701 . ISSN   0439-4216.
  25. ↑ Timothy, Dallen J. (2018-12-07). Routledge Handbook on Tourism in the Middle East and North Africa. Routledge. ISBN   978-1-317-22923-0.
  26. ↑ Seikaly, Zeina. "Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, ed. by Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana (Book Review)." Middle East Journal 44.2 (1990): 337.
  27. ↑ Adam, Thomas; Stiefel, Barry L.; Peleg, Shelley-Anne (2023-04-17). Yearbook of Transnational History: (2023). Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 17–18. ISBN   978-1-68393-379-3.

Additional references

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.