Ghassan Kanafani’s well-known novel Return to Haifa belongs to what Marianne Hirsch describes as the narrative of return, in which displaced people or their descendants seek to return to their former homes. Published in 1969, the novel is credited with sparking the interest of Palestinian writers in fictionalizing the repercussions of the return of Palestinians to their homes, their encounters with Israelis, and the myriad questions of memory, belonging, and closure that surround these encounters. But while Kanafani’s vision of this return was articulated very few decades after the 1948 Nakba, it is only recently that Palestinian writers began experimenting with the narrative of return. Several contemporary Palestinian novels feature Palestinians in the West Bank or in the diaspora visiting their former villages and homes inside Israel. This paper examines two recent Palestinian novels that revolve around the narrative of return: Rabai al-Madhoun’s 2015 Destinies: Concerto of the Holocaust and the Nakba and Walid al-Shurafa’s 2017 The Inheritor of Signs. It argues that these novels testify to the power of what we could call the Kanafani plot of return, where a tripartite relationship is established between the Palestinian returnee, the Israeli occupant, and their contest over the objects of memory, such as the house, the land, or the tree. In these narratives, the Israeli functions as an intermediary between the Palestinian and his/her memory, barring the latter from an unmediated, uncontrolled encounter with the past. The Paper will demonstrate how these novels rework the Kanafani plot in order to illustrate their disenchantment with the current realities of the Palestinian condition. If the return in Kanafani’s work signifies a call for militant optimism, these novels present a return that reflects the current mood of loss and defeat. The paper argues that these novels feature not only their protagonists’ attempted return to Palestine but, as importantly, their authors’ patent return to the richness of the Kanafani plot.

In both Palestinian and Israeli cultures, mothers hold a central and significant social role and status, which is amplified when the mother loses a child in the context of the ongoing political violence in the area. The mourning mother becomes a figure symbolizing the nation, despite women's precarious position within the national project writ large, as explained by Anne McClintock and other feminist scholars. In this paper, I examine the function of the mother in mourning in two literary texts, one Arabic-Palestinian and one Hebrew-Israeli: Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Sa’ad’s Mother (1969) and David Grossman’s novel To the End of the Land (2008). While these texts were written decades apart, they both describe a mother dealing with the loss of her son in the conflict between Jews and Arabs in Israel/Palestine; the titular character’s son in Kanafani’s novella enlists as a fighter (fedaii) against Israel, and the protagonist’s son in Grossman’s novel is called to serve in a fictional military operation as an Israeli soldier. Importantly, the sons do not die during the events described in either of these texts, and yet they are engulfed in mourning. Death is constantly implied and even presupposed throughout these works, suggesting it is omnipresent even before it takes place and is an inescapable reality. Thus, the mothers’ mourning is not premature, because death is in fact imminent. Rather, the constant presence of death in situations of political turmoil disrupts the temporality of mourning, in what Ruth Ginzburg terms “pre-trauma.” Through these texts, I examine how being both before its time and in abeyance influences the concept of national mourning, as well as the function of motherhood and the gendered dynamics in relation to the national project. In the context of political violence and occupation, loss and mourning are often used to demarcate and separate between “us” and “them”, and so against this trend I suggest reading these texts together. My goal is not to create a flat symmetry, in a situation where the power dynamics between occupier and occupied are clear, but rather to challenge the national separation and view mourning as a deeply political process that requires contextualization. A comparative analysis allows me to read each text on its own terms, but likewise to bring the shared concepts and ideas into conversation with each other, beyond the national fortifications which engendered the loss in the first place.

This presentation analyzes Sonallah Ibrahim's debut novel, That Smell (1966), as a novel staging dissensus through failure. While the vast majority of critics assert that the protagonist's failures inaugurate the impotent and emasculated Arab subject in Arabic literature, I argue that this novel instates the political subject as a dissenting one. I draw on Jacques Rancière's conceptualization of dissensus as the moment of the production of the political subject. Sonallah Ibrahim is one of the Arab leftist intellectuals who found themselves in an impasse during Gamal Abdel Nasser's regime. While they supported Abdel Nasser's anti-imperialist stances, they disagreed with his domestic policies, a stance for which most of them were imprisoned and persecuted. This novel captures the dilemma in which Sonallah Ibrahim and other leftists and communists were caught. For this reason, in line with Melanie Klein's theorization of guilt and reparation that alternate with hate and hinder productivity, I analyze the narrator's failures, including failure to complete an account about himself "as he is," by arguing that, following Judith Butler, an account of the self is always doomed to failure. The narrator also fails to have intercourse with a prostitute; he reiterates throughout the text that he is failing at producing a coherent novel, writing instead fragmented récits. More importantly, this failure signals an unbridgeable gap between the narrator's and the collective's morals, and this sends the message of Ibrahim as an uncompromising writer and intellectual who struggles to reconcile his ideals with his duties as a citizen.