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.

Due to its particular status as an object of colonial rule and expropriation, Palestine has since the Mandatory period played a significant role in the articulation of Arab identity. I focus in this paper on the shift in modes of solidarity with Palestine as a result of the 1967 war and its aftermath. The widely articulated Arab “self-critique” engendered by the loss of this war has been much commented upon and is not my immediate interest. The focus here is on the shift in depiction of Palestinians primarily as dispossessed refugees who have lost their homeland, in the post-1948 period, to depictions of the Palestinian situation through the idolized figure of the fida’i, the heroic Palestinian commando, in the post-1967 period. I argue that in both cases, solidarity attaches to Palestine as a figure of sacrifice for the regeneration of Arab identity. The Palestinian refugee of post-1948 is a passive sacrificial victim that displays the fallen condition of the Arab nation and must find redemption in the rebirth of this nation. The pity elicited by the wretched figure of the refugee should be the catalyst for the rejection and destruction of the status-quo. The post-1967 Palestinian fida’i, on the other hand, whose very appellation signifies sacrifice, is the active agent of self-sacrifice who enacts the potential of the Arab nation to achieve agency and come into being. The death of the fida’i is to engender Arab resurrection. In both cases, Palestine is the redemptive sacrifice required for the birth or rebirth of the Arab nation. In these forms of representation, it is seen that Arab solidarity with Palestine hinges on the function that Palestine can be made to bear in the constitution of Arab identity. To make this argument, I will draw primarily on poetry, and focus particularly on poems of Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati, Nizar Qabbani, and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. The works of these poets enable an analysis of the shift in the depiction of Palestine before and after 1967 while revealing the underlying continuity of symbolic function.

“Who Will Write the History of the Moss?”: 1948, 1971, 1982, 2002, 2008, 2014 M. Darwish This question posed by Mahmoud Darwish in Thakira lil nisyan/ Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut 1982, his memoir of the Israeli siege of Beirut, is in direct communication with Jean Genet’s account of the same event in Un Captif amoureux/Prisoner of Love, like Darwish’s text, a memoir and an act of cosmopolitan witnessing and solidarity. With simplicity, Darwish’s question digs out an image, one that embodies the division of affirmation from witnessing that circumscribes the problématique of solidarity, which our panel locates in the global extension of a cosmopolitan Palestine, one woven into the weft of social justice movements from Ferguson to Capetown, Okinawa to Bangladesh. That summer Israel laid siege to the city for 88 days, cutting off water, supplies, movement and subjecting the population to constant bombardment, including the use by the IDF of vacuum bombs, prohibited by the Geneva Convention. In a testimony to the inhabitants of Shatila and Sabra, massacred by the Phalangists, aided and abetted by Isreali troops, Genet affirms a materialization at the heart of “adherence”, his preferred term, to the Palestinian revolution over and against the international politics of the image which captures it. Today living within the circuit of this mediatic economy and its politics, artists in Gaza circulate images that cite traditions of renaissance painting and vernacular vocabularies of militancy. In the call and answer of international solidarities, Darwish’s question from Genet’s text still resounds.

This paper focuses on the figure of the Gazan child as a cypher of conflicting humanitarian, ethical, and political inscriptions in what Anna Bernard calls “metropolitan culture”. Given Israel’s blockade on the Gaza Strip, not to mention the brutality of Operations “Cast Lead”, “Pillar of Defense”, and “Protective Edge”, the child, in his/her traumatized innocence, has emerged as a particularly volatile media image of the region’s crises and catastrophes. Focusing on Selma Dabbagh’s novel Out of It (2011), I start by exploring how this figure has been appropriated in the metropole to domesticate critique of Israeli neo-imperialism in the more universally acknowledged, thus ‘acceptable’, terms of trauma, PTSD, and physical violence. While certainly effective in garnering wider public awareness, such re-presentations potentially obscure the deeper history of colonial violence into which the Gazan child is born, and by which his/her current experience is inevitably mediated. I then turn to a series of recent Gazan literary and cultural texts (Fida Qishta (dir.), Where Should the Birds Fly (2013); Atef Abu Saif (ed.), The Book of Gaza (2014); Refaat Alareer (ed.), Gaza Writes Back (2014)) that, by or about Gazan children, present their voices in their immediacy. I argue that such voices, while highly affective and to a degree tragic, also, in the fluency of their habituated idiom, reflect a local and multilayered historical consciousness that remains untranslatable within the parameters of metropolitan engagement. Thus de-universalizing themselves, these voices and the textual forms through which they circulate inscribe, I conclude, a language of resistance to both Israeli silencing and metropolitan (mis)translation.