Narratives of return, in which exiled Palestinians visit the people and places in Israel/Palestine that they fled years or even decades earlier, have proliferated in literary representations in recent years. In many of these works, the Israeli border checkpoint – the site of access to Palestine – occupies a central position in the narrative. Though these narratives have garnered scholarly interest, little attention has been given to the border as a mechanism that permits and mediates the return. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau conceptualizes the border as a space that is paradoxically both a void and a point of contact. The act of crossing the frontier is a transgressive act that creates exteriority and opens the self to the other. In this paper I draw on de Certeau’s work to stage a reading of two narratives of exile and return, Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s autobiographical I Saw Ramallah (1997) and Rabih al-Madhoun’s semi-autobiographical The Woman from Tel Aviv (2009), in which the returning exile is an author whose own novel is included within the larger text. I argue that in these narratives, the act of crossing the border necessitates a reconfiguration of the exile’s intertwined conceptions of self and of Palestine, both past and present. In Barghouti’s narrative, the abstract Palestine of resistance poetry and political slogans that defines the exile’s conception of nation disintegrates in the face of the physical land of Palestine, which the author encounters as he crosses the Jordan River into the West Bank. In The Woman From Tel Aviv, the exile relies on memories of his youth in Gaza to define his conception of both himself and Palestine, yet his encounter on his return journey with an Israeli woman disrupts these notions by calling the memories upon which they rely into question. The exile’s encounter with the border checkpoint prompts further disruption at the moment of arrival, at which point the narrative abruptly switches from the main character’s voice to that of the novel he wrote; crossing the border brings about the loss of voice and of self that is only recovered through recourse to fiction. In both works, crossing the border functions as an act of displacement that necessitates a transgression of carefully constructed notions of the self and the nation. Based on this reading I theorize the border checkpoint as a literary device that textually recreates the original displacement of exile.