In light of numerous statements by Palestinian and allied writers on the felt inadequacy of language to respond to the images of extreme violence coming from Israel’s genocidal campaign against Gaza beginning October 2023 and the simultaneous push from the right to empty the legal terms invoked to hold Israel accountable to international law of their meaning, what can language provide us as we bear witness to extended genocide? What purpose can the practice of literature—which requires time and solitude—serve in such a moment, when with every passing minute, more Palestinians are murdered, injured, and displaced? Simultaneously, a battle occurs on a different form of language at the hands of mainstream news media and the politicians: the Arabic word “intifada” was mistranslated to mean a genocide of Jews in United States Congress; pundits on the right and center left have claimed that to invoke words such as “genocide” and “apartheid” in the context of Israel’s occupation of Palestine renders them meaningless. This paper argues that these two seemingly disparate reactions are in fact linked. The speechlessness in the face of violence and attempts to obfuscate the precision of legal terms constitute two sides of the same violence through which colonialism wages war on language, cultural meaning, and morality. I thus return to Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail [Tafsil Thanawi] and Assia Djebar’s Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade [L’amour, la fantasia], alongside theoretical works such as Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine, and Noura Erakat’s Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, in probing the limits and possibilities of language in moments of prolonged, extreme violence. Language in these texts is inextricably tied to violence; they each present a different model or case study of how language is manipulated in violence, whether in the gaps and silences of official archives or the loopholes of legal interpretation. This paper develops a theory of ethical engagement with language during violence through these texts and applies it to our current debates, arguing that the dual loss of language occurring as we witness active genocide is both a branch of this same violence and an avenue through which it can be understood and held accountable.

Assia Djebar’s “Algerian quartet,” a series of four novels which chart her exilic relation of belonging to Algerian history and culture, is usually analyzed through a postcolonial tropology of fragmentation and liminality, in which critics identify a dialectic of subverted self-location—autofictional attempts at the remediation of her split identity between French, Arabic, and Amazigh languages. This paper proposes to read anew two novels in the tetralogy, Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade and So Vast the Prison, by analyzing the implications of their reliance on a distinct narrative strategy to tell their stories: the unmotivated and unexplained, abrupt collision of distant historical planes. In both novels, Djebar subjects historical time to great compression and places side by side episodes of the same history set more than one hundred years apart, linking the situation of Algeria after the independence to the scene of colonial conquest by the French. Her aim is to make emerge repressed points of friction about the history of language politics in Algeria: how, to put it in Djebar’s own words, “the tongue of the murderers of her great uncles” would be the instrument of her own intellectual and gendered liberation. Yet, beyond the ideological contradiction—oppression turned emancipation—and the historical tautology—French colonialism explains the appropriation of the French language by Algerians—at no point does Djebar attempt to show how the conquest might have durably structured the linguistic situation of Algeria. This paper argues, first, that the unexplained gaps in both narratives constitute a distinct formal strategy on the part of Djebar. Their recurrence produces a silence at the core of her texts, which I term a poetics of historical discontiguity, and analyze as a mode of representation for the layers of mediation which tie the scene of conquest to the scene of writing. Second, the paper probes the historical unconscious of Djebar’s novels, by showing how one important intertext, Hamdan Khodja’s The Mirror—the first Algerian anticolonial pamphlet published in Paris in 1833—constitutes the filigree linking these textual silences together. In his counter-history of the Algerian nation, Khodja shows how colonial rule asserted itself from the outset through a project of linguistic engineering, and thus brings into view the historical processes only operative in the blanks of Djebar’s novels—how the imposition of her own language of writing, French, was predicated on the destruction of Ottoman Algiers and the erasure of its language, Arabic.

This paper explores the formulations and sociopolitical implications of the concept of “al-aṣlaniyya” or “indigeneity” in 20th century Basra, Iraq. In the context of the collapse of Ottoman rule, the 1920 British mandate and American imperial presence, and subsequent arrival of British and American missionaries in Iraq, I navigate iterations of indigeneity in Basra as a mode of embodied knowledge production beyond the nativist genealogical logic of blood and soil and reactionary mainstream nationalism. By engaging the experimental aesthetics of content and form of Mortaḍā Gzār’s Hāthā al-Nahru Ya‘rifu Ismī (The River Knows My Name) (2023), I argue that the Arabic novel conceptualizes al-aṣlaniyya as an alternative historiographic method that rewrites Basra’s history through embodied entanglements between human and nonhuman bodies. Indigeneity, as imagined in the narrative prose of an Irāqī queer diasporic writer, is racialized and gendered structure, and a relational way of life which reveals the irreconcilable tension between local communities and colonial power. I locate moments of indigenous life-making by attending to the formal novel structure, cartographic journey of the protagonist through the landscapes and waterscapes of the Mesopotamian marshes, and memorial and mythmaking practices in Southern Iraq. The novel ultimately produces an archive of embodied memory. It rewrites the colonial and extractive history of Basra from the embodied experience of indigenous encounters between human and ecology. By drawing on the frameworks of Hisham Aïdi’s problematization of “indigeneity,” Naveeda Khan’s “chars,” or sandbars, and Anna Tsing’s “conditions of precarity,” I demonstrate how indigeneity is a self-reflexive construct which both problematizes colonial racial discourse in tandem with global capitalism. Yet, it is also at risk of being weaponized as an essentialist orientalist tool that dichotomizes native and colonist, desert and sea, and history and myth, which are co-opted by nationalist claims to an authentic “Arab” identity and narrative of modern progress in Iraq. Indigeneity, then, renders a decolonial historiography that rethinks categories of race, gender, and religion through bodies.