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Exilic Poetics and the Refugee Settler Condition: A Relational Reading of Vietnamese Israeli and Palestinian Poetry
Abstract
This paper grapples with the vexed positionality of Vietnamese refugees and their descendants in Israel-Palestine via a relational reading of Vietnamese Israeli and Palestinian poetry. In the late 1970s, following the end of the Vietnam War and forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, the State of Israel granted asylum and eventual citizenship to 366 refugees from Vietnam. In government speeches and media reports, Israeli leaders drew parallels with the Jewish history of Holocaust refugees, even as they elided the contemporaneous history of ongoing Palestinian displacement and refugeehood. Vietnamese Israelis thus became implicated in the Zionist nation-building project, positioning them in a structurally antagonist relationship to the Palestinian liberation struggle: what I call the “refugee settler condition.” This paper turns to poetry to think across these structural antagonisms and to probe possibilities for solidarity between Vietnamese Israelis and Palestinians, along shared experiences and formal thematics of forced displacement, listless travel, and restless memories. Via a relational close reading of Vaan Nguyen’s book of poetry, The Truffle Eye, and Mourid Barghouti’s long-form prose poetry, I Saw Ramallah, I attend to incessant translations between the unstable signifiers of native, settler, refugee, and exile in these texts. Destabilizing the very categories that divide Palestinians and Vietnamese Israelis under the refugee settler condition, I posit an exilic poetics that critiques the settler colonial state’s forms of exclusion in favor of more pluralized modalities of belonging. Key to my analysis is an engagement with temporality: a critique of linear narratives of autochthony in favor of recognizing what Barghouti calls overlapping “shape[s] of time” (shakl awqātinā fīhi).
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Israel
Palestine
West Bank
Sub Area
None