Throughout his long and diverse career, writer, critic, translator, artist and memoirist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra has always returned to the nakba as a primal scene that both haunts and motivates the trajectory of his career. In his early fiction, his translations, and his late memoirs, the events of 1948 which led to the expulsion of so many Palestinians are a haunting presence. Jabra's work traces the conjoined leitmotifs of exile and the intellectual through the multiple genres of fiction, translation, and memoir. Through this network of allusions, the strong connection between the Palestinian crisis and the rise of postcolonial Arab nationalist thought comes into focus. Jabra's is a literature of exile devoid of the romantic idealism so prevalent in the earlier exilic nationalist fiction of the Muhammad Hussein Haykal/Taha Hussein generation. The form of Jabra's art, as exemplified in these multiple genres suggests the cultural connection between the history of the nakba and the ideological commitment to Pan-Arabism. This aesthetics of exilic form in Jabra's work should be read as running parallel to the anti-Arab nationalist discourse of U.S. regional hegemony. Particularly in the aftermath of the Cold War, nationalist thinking is openly demonized and made equivalent to terrorism by U.S. discourse about the region. Rereading the formal structures of Jabra's aesthetic response to the nakba constitutes a disruption to the pervasiveness of post-postcolonial, non-nationalist discourses, both those aimed at the Arab Middle East and those coming from inside the region itself.