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Homeward Bound: Toward a Pan-Levantine Acoustic Politics in Emile Habiby’s "Sudasiyya"
Abstract
In December of 1968, the Lebanese journal al-Tariq released a special issue dedicated to Arabic literature in Israel. Emile Habiby’s Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (The Sextet of the Six Days), a collection of six vignettes set in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, was featured in this issue and garnered significant critical attention throughout the Arab world. Originally published in al-Jadid, the cultural supplement of the Israeli Communist Party Arabic language newspaper, The Sextet went largely un-noticed by Arabic readers in Israel and Palestine until the text made its way back “home” as radio shorts broadcast via Cairo’s sawt al-‘arab. Habiby’s Sudasiyya broaches one of the most enduring and problematic facets of the discourse on Palestinian self-determination, that is, the fraught position of Palestinians citizens of Israel vis-à-vis the notion of a Palestinian state. With the geo-political upheavals of the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli Wars, Palestinian political consciousness became increasingly concentrated in the Diaspora with the activities of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the largely self-exiled cadre of Palestinian intellectuals. Palestinian citizens of Israel, meanwhile, became increasingly marginalized due to their status as a non-exiled group with cultural and linguistic ties to Israel. The journey of The Sextet across borders and through different mediums (serialized entries in literary journals, radio shorts, and printed editions) highlights the channels through which a text must travel in order to make itself audible within a given political framework. Can we approach The Sextet as a diasporic text? How do we account for the fact that Palestinian readers within Israel did not recognize their own narrative until it made its way back “home” through a cultural circuit characterized by both expressive opportunity and the legitimizing function of certain way stations? In tracing the journey of The Sextet, I will address the concept of a Pan-Levantine “acoustic politics”: the ideological and geo-political frames of reference that dictate which narratives are heard and in what form they must be articulated in order to be heard.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
The Levant
Sub Area
Comparative