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    Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home
    Unavailable
    Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home
    Unavailable
    Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home
    Ebook263 pages2 hours

    Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home

    By Raja Shehadeh

    5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    How do Palestinians live, imagine and reflect on home and exile in this period of a stateless and transitory Palestine, a deeply contested and crisis-ridden national project, and a sharp escalation in Israeli state violence and accompanying Palestinian oppression? How can exile and home be written?

    In this volume of new writing, fifteen innovative and outstanding Palestinian writersessayists, poets, novelists, critics, artists and memoiristsrespond with their reflections, experiences, memories and polemics. What is it like, in the words of Lila Abu-Lughod, to be drafted into being Palestinian?” What happens when you take your American childrenas Sharif Elmusa doesto the refugee camp where you were raised? And how can you convince, as Suad Amiry attempts to do, a weary airport official to continue searching for a code for a country that isn’t recognized?

    Contributors probe the past through unconventional memories, reflecting on 1948 when it all began. But they are also deeply interested in beginnings, imagining, in the words of Mischa Hiller, a Palestine that reflects who we are now and who we hope to become.” Their contributionspoignant, humorous, intimate, reflective, intensely politicalmake for an offering that is remarkable for the candor and grace with which it explores the many individual and collective experiences of waiting, living for, and seeking Palestine.

    Contributors include: Lila Abu-Lughod, Susan Abulhawa, Suad Amiry, Rana Barakat, Mourid Barghouti, Beshara Doumani, Sharif S. Elmusa, Rema Hammami, Mischa Hiller, Emily Jacir, Penny Johnson, Fady Joudah, Jean Said Makdisi, Karma Nabulsi, Raeda Sa’adeh, Raja Shehadeh, Adania Shibli.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOlive Branch Press
    Release dateOct 1, 2013
    ISBN9781623710415
    Unavailable
    Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home
    Author

    Raja Shehadeh

    Raja Shehadeh is Palestine's leading writer. He is also a lawyer and the founder of the pioneering Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq. Shehadeh was a National Book Award finalist in 2023 and is the author of several acclaimed books published by Profile, including the Orwell Prize-winning Palestinian Walks. He lives in Ramallah.

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    • 5/5
      15. Seeking Palestine : New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home edited by Penny Johnson & Raja Shehadeh (2013, 210 pages, read Mar 21-29)Not that I’ve had time to review lately, but I’ve stalled on this partially because I don’t want to figure out my own contradictions. Not that I can’t, although maybe it’s true I can’t, it’s that I don’t want to go there. I developed such a deep affection for Israel during my visit there last summer. I’m not ready to pick up those emotions and look at what ugly things might be underneath them, I’m not ready to challenge them with any reality. A book such as this does not allow me to get out of all that so easily. This is a collection of personal memoirs by Palestinians about Palestine. The collection is superb, and some of these authors are simply spectacular, at least they certainly are here, in this form. Every entry is strong. Either Johnson and Shehadeh had a great wealth of material to work with or they really mined the material well. Or both could be true. What to take form all this? Surely we are all aware on some level of the costs of Israel’s existence to the Palestinians. Israel marks for them the end of a long continuous history in large parts of one-time Palestine, tearing at cultural foundations and leaving a large Palestinian diaspora. And while we debate where to point the finger, or simply cringe at the stiff necked simplifiers with fingers in their ears who stand my their weapons and declare themselves right, we don’t have much a chance see the humanity in the consequences. That is, I think, what this book offers. An artistic exploration of the humanity within the Palestinian loss.I took notes as read this, then passed the book on, leaving me with only my notes to review from. Hopefully there will be some value in the rest of this review. My favorites get an asterisk. *Susan Abulhawa : Memories of an un-Palestinian story, in a can of tuna - I wish I could capture this. Susan lived for brief periods of time with each of her parents and various other relatives, and various orphanages, moving back and forth between the US and the Middle East. She touches on most of her childhood and its many horrors and varieties of abuse, while recounting a brief stay at an orphanage for Palestinians in Palestine, called Dar al-Tifl...a tough place she can only capture with an affectionate wistfulness.Beshara Doumani : A Song from Haifa - Writes about his father in Palestine between WWII and Israel (1945-8) through a Palestinian bar song from the era about beautiful Jewish woman.*Sharif S. Elmusa : Portable Absence: My Camp Re-membered - Bitter as Elmusa is, his writing, a mixture of poetry and prose, is beautiful. He discusses taking his children to the now-destroyed refugee camp that he grew up in. But this essay goes many places, and includes thoughts on his decision to write in English, references to the Odyssey and Ibn Battuta, comparisons between Palestinians and Native Americans, an interesting look at Cairo, and a frustration with America’s one-sided support of Israel over Palestine. He writes, “It is a politicized oxymoron, even if a privilege, to be from a tiny, colonized country struggling to rid itself of Israeli domination and, at the same time, to be a citizen of an empire that is the principal keeper of Israel.”Lili Abu-Lughod : Pushing at the Door: My father’s Political Education, and Mine - A memoir about Lili’s father, a leading Palestinian intellectual, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. The memoir includes, prominently, his story about his mother, Lili’s grandmother, and her lost world of pre-Israel Jaffa.*Adania Shibli : Of Place, Time and Language - Shibli is a master of sorts at subtly. In these three pieces she says everything through what she doesn’t say. It’s very clever and striking. In the second piece, Out of Time, she begins by discussing a Palestinian short story she read in school, permitted by the Israeli authorities who were generally very thorough censors. What caught her attention with the story (The Time of Man by Samira Azzam) was not the writers intent, but the regular day-to-day life he describes. She asks, “Was there ever once a normal life in Palestine?” Later in the story, as she carries on about a watch that stopped while traveling, leading to an Airport interrogation in Israel, where she causally mentions, “Everything proceeded as normal in such situations”Suad Amiry : An Obsession begins with a poem whose attributions I was confused on, but was either hers with quotes from Mahmoud Darwish, or entirely from Mahmoud Darwish. But then she goes to discuss three questions she hates: Are you married? Do you have children? and Where do you come from? In the later she tells us that when she doesn't want to talk, she answers that she is from Amman, Jordan. ”Sorry, Jordan, much as I am indebted to you and love you, somehow you do not inspire interesting conversations.” - I find that line such a wonderful commentary on the crazy story that is Israel and Palestine.Raja Shehadeh : Diary of an Internal Exile: Three Entries - Shehadeh probably can be more highly regarded for his frustrated observations than his limited prose. Still he marks an interesting history of Palestine through the history of a building that was originally built the British military, but later had many lives, including serving as the bombed out headquarters of Yassar Afafat. Reflecting on Arafat he writes “I could see how failed armed struggle had completely dominated our leadership’s vision, taking precedence over the nonviolent resistance waged in the streets as well as in the courts by challenging Israeli legal maneuvers.”*Mourid Barghouti : The Driver Mahmoud - This was a wonderful fictional story about taxi van full of passengers who together form a cross-section of Palestinian society, driven my a young man trying to avoid suddenly-appearing Israeli checkpoints through heroic maneuvers and the use of what I can only call a divine crane. Rema Hammami : Home and exile in East Jerusalem Hammami, an anthropologist studying Gaza, chronicles the sad history of her Palestinian neighborhood, Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, from roughly 1989 when she confronts an Israeli soldier arresting a nine-year-old girl by asking him if he has children, and he responds, “Yes, I have a little girl but she doesn’t throw stones,” through to 2002 where she finds herself surrounded by checkpoints.Rana Barakat : The right to wait: exile, home and return - My notes begin to fail about here. For this essay about Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Said, the nature of exile, and a curious comparison of an intellectual with an exile, my notes include the comment, “intelligent but big-words…flawed writing, IMO”...but don’t over-inflate my flippant notes while reading, this was interesting.Fady Joudah : Palestine that never was: five poems and an introduction Lois/avaland quoted one or two of these elsewhere, nothing to add hereJean Said Makdisi : Becoming Palestinian - An interesting essay by the sister of Edward Said, unfortunately I don’t have any notes.Mischa Hiller : Onions and diamonds - no notes...and I forgot what this was about...Karma Nabulsi : Exiled from revolution - ditto, sigh...
    • 5/5
      One of the most powerful books I have read,  this is another one of those non-fiction books that almost reads like a novel.  I found it emotionally evocative as well as educational.There are three sections of essays.  The first section tells what it is like to be an exile living outside of your home country, while the second part talks about being an exile within your occupied home country.  The last section brings things together and talks about the future.  Different perspectives are presented as these authors make themselves vulnerable by exposing their truths.Here are a couple of  excerpts that I found interesting:From Sharif F. Elmusa   "Portable Absence" , talking about the Palestinian style of mixing poetry and prose which was new to me and very intriguing:"Perhaps poetry is a form of exile or the two interact, like two medications, and amplify each other's actions.  Perhaps a poem is the silence in which the stranger wraps himself to preserve memory, to resist the gravity of the new abode.""Writing in English brought me into a more intimate relationship with American culture and, at the same time, heightened my sense of exile.""Britain sends expats to other lands. India immigrants, and Palestine exiles." and this heartbreaking insight from Raja Shehadeh "Diary of an Internal Exile"  "We had lost the confidence to rely on ourselves rather than waste our energy by blaming our troubles on others and expecting them to do what we could do ourselves."This collection certainly brings up many questions about belief systems such as that of private property, government, solidarity, types of power and power dynamics, state, self-defense and on and on. Never mind the idea of how you define home. I have never lived in a place where my family lived for generations and have not felt this attachment to a place, although if someone told me to get off mine, I'm sure I'd understand quickly. I do get the attachment to the ideas and symbols and people. These issues are all explored as the authors investigate these things for themselves and wrestle with their own identity issues. Clearly the group culture of other countries compared to the more individualist U.S., a country of immigrants who kept moving west as soon as they got settled are big influences from my perspective. This book brought me a lot of clarification. And made me think a lot about comparisons with U.S. govt. versus Native Americans, Irish versus English, English versus Maori, and too many stories about ethnic cleansing. I highly recommend this book - 5 stars