Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer of fiction, whose work is mainly set in the contemporary Middle East. In this original essay for Port, she explores how literature, especially from Palestine, confronts the violent erasure of identity and existence
On 28th August 2024, more than 65 Palestinian filmmakers signed a letter accusing Hollywood of dehumanising Palestinians on screen for decades, a process that has helped to enable the ongoing genocide and devastation in Gaza. We are told, all too frequently, that literature and culture generally humanise ‘the other’. But cultural production can also prime people to allow for killing en masse; it can reduce a people to targets, ungrievable bodies, dispensable ‘others’ stripped of history and humanity.
‘When in doubt,’ seems to go the unwritten dictum of Hollywood scriptwriters, ‘just kill an Arab.’ And they do, over and over, in countless thrillers and action movies. Arabs portrayed in film continue, in the main, to be depicted as nameless, odiferous and duplicitous. None more so than Palestinians, a national identity that for years has been repeatedly and deliberately fused with associations of terrorism. Around 14 million people globally have been characterised, year in, year out, through projects of cultural distortion, as having no individual agency other than to cause harm. They are depicted as devoid of basic needs or desires such as having jobs and families or falling in love. Instead, Palestinians are portrayed as a distinct species bred to kill innocents, making it, according to this perverse logic, justifiable to kill them before they do so. The heterogeneity of Palestinian existences continues to be flattened and denied. The most, it seems, to be allowed for in terms of potential humanity, is that of the pitiable victim.
As a reader who became a writer, I approached Palestinian literature from an awkward angle. I have an English mother and a Palestinian father, and grew up in Kuwait which, as a teenager, bored the hell out of me. Like many aspiring writers, my portal out of the ignominy of my unprepossessing surroundings was literature. I read only in English, particularly Russian and French classics, admiring works where the female protagonists had power and lovers most. Being Palestinian was nothing special in Kuwait at the time: around one in four people in the country fell into that category before 1991. But the unhappiness my father’s violent refugee experience brought to aspects of our family life felt, to paraphrase Tolstoy, like a very specific unhappiness, a private and wretched trauma; one that the world should know about, but somehow could not be shared. When I moved to England at 16, it became even more of a secret hurt, rarely exposed. The word identity was not in my vocabulary, and my approach to wounds was to not lick them too much.
Most Palestinian literature available in English at the time — and I am talking about the ’80s and ’90s here — was produced by small publishing houses and consisted of poetry or mediocre translations of novels. At that age I was rarely still enough in myself to be able to give poetry the focus it required. Mahmoud Darwish, the icon of Palestinian poetry, was a name I knew, but I assumed he belonged to others, like the boys at school in Kuwait who wore keffiyehs.
That all changed when I read Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, a collection of short stories that featured Jaffa, Gaza and Kuwait, while living in Cairo in my 20s. I read my father’s childhood stories in a house by the sea. Expulsion from Palestine in 1948 became multidimensional and palpable, as did the world of the country where I grew up. Rather than being escapist, literature became a way of discovering my core emotional fibre. It was a route to self-inquiry that was as self-affirmative as it was probative.
In recent years, the quality, diversity and quantity of Palestinian literature available to the English language reader has transformed and expanded beyond recognition. I believe that literature, together with art and films, both documentary and feature, coming from Palestinians in Israel, the occupied West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza, the Arab world and the broader diaspora, writing in Arabic, English, Hebrew, French and Spanish, is some of the most exciting, innovative and challenging work available globally. It comes naturally to Palestinian writers to see the political in the personal and to make the personal political. Moral choices that pit the communal against the familial imbue every quotidian interaction. Characters are pressurised by states of siege. Actions have consequences. Honour is valued and at stake. Freud claimed humour and altruism as the only positive psychic defence mechanisms for dealing with trauma and anxiety, and they abound in the worlds of Palestinian poetry and novels. For humour, I would direct the reader to the work of Mazen Maarouf’s Jokes for the Gunman and Suad Amiry’s Sharon and My Mother-in-law. For altruism, it goes by another name, more one of a generosity of spirit and concern for others. It runs deep in the spirit of every line, with even the grieving, starving survivors of genocide struggling to find ways to help others, in Don’t Look Left; A Diary of Genocide by Atef Abu Seif (2024) and Messages from Gaza Now, the accounts sent from Gaza by Hossam Madhoun in the period since 7th October 2023. If what we see in Gaza is a “rehearsal of the future”, as the Colombian President Gustavo Petro stated at the recent UN Climate Summit, then these are the works that demonstrate how to prepare oneself for coming times.
In the past, it was my experience that literature translated from Arabic linguistically failed to translate culturally. This was not the translator’s error; there are just regional variations in taste and behavioural codes. I always sensed that there was a higher degree of tolerance for what is deemed to be ‘sentimental’ to those coming from more puritanical Anglo-Saxon cultures. Not to mention other variations in cultural norms, for example with regards to women. Translators and publishers act as gatekeepers to another culture and are sensitive to, and influence, how people of another language are perceived. In other words, what the English language reader is exposed to is subject to fashion, and some of these trends, such as the ‘saving Muslim-women’ genre, are now dated and dismissed. Kudos should be given to initiatives like ArabLit and translators like Marcia Lynx Qualey, Wen-chin Ouyang, Katharine Halls and others for pushing back on patronising, politically motivated demands of publishers for veil-covered women on their covers; opening pathways for new voices and realities to come to the fore.
When it comes to literary styles, there is no defining form. Palestinian literature is an eclectic, absorptive mixture of languages and global sources of inspiration. The Palestinian ‘cause’ is an anti-apartheid quest for liberation. The post-Nakba trend, particularly in the ’60s–’80s, for art and culture embodied the revolution, and Ghassan Kanafani was the epitome of the resistance writer, combining political work with fiction and historical writing. He was assassinated by the Israelis in 1972, together with his niece. At that time, the revolution that embraced cultural output was influenced by the legacy of Marx, Trotsky and the Fourth International. The battle was then and is now, not just for land and freedom, but against erasure at every level, from buildings to documentary records, archives, libraries and photographs. Physical erasure of the Palestinians by Israel has now reached the heights of high tech, including, it has recently been reported, the mystical erasure of WhatsApp accounts of those killed in Gaza, the last remnants of relatives’ voices and messages being eradicated with their bodies. The banning of Palestinian artists at festivals, the refusal of venues to host events, the censoring of content, the sacking of editors of magazines that call for ceasefires — this too is erasure, not as visual or physical as the destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages in 1948, or the destruction of every university in Gaza and over 200 archaeological and cultural sites, but another (outrageous) affirmation that Palestinians are not, according to powerful narratives, supposed to exist. Literature becomes a tool, among many others, to be innovatively deployed, to write people back to life.
And Palestinian writers and artists are responding to their threatened eradication with eloquence, style and fury. The writing ranges from the visceral and explosive, to the contained and reflective. For work in English, one eye could be seen to be turned to the powers in the West, urging them to recognise Palestinian humanity, presence, history, complexity, interiority. This approach of writing intending to ‘inform the West’ was one the Palestinian-born writer Soraya Antonius (1923–2017) adopted in her novels of the 80s and later questioned: “Today,” she wrote in 2001, “I think this was rather a colonisé reaction, implying as it did that Westerners were inherently godlike in their impartiality and that their injustice was born of misinformation.”
Style is not just a question of preference, but of circumstance. For those living under bombardment or occupation, or both, the short form (Nayrouz Qarmout, Maha Abul Hayyat) or the diary (Raja Shehadeh, Atef Abu Saif), or letter (Hossam Madhoun) can prevail. In exile, the Nakba generation, like my father, were frequently treated with incredulity when relating their history and identity. They wrote to recreate a destroyed world and took to their memoirs. Themes of exile, diaspora and transit repeat for all Palestinians, wherever they are. For readers who feed off the delicacy, fine tuning and balance of a phrase, I would recommend the poets – not just Darwish, but also Samih al-Qasim and Mosab Abu Toha. Palestinian novelists outside Palestine write in styles that have been compared to the epic-like remit of Stendhal (Isabella Hammad) or the spareness of Raymond Carver (Adania Shibli). The young essayist NS Nuseibeh’s Namesake is a searing, contemplative account of, among other things, the microaggressions of racism and Islamophobia experienced in Britain.
Since the genocide on Gaza began, a morbid genre of poems has emerged: elegies anticipating writers’ own deaths. Some call for no more than a grave, or to die in one piece, or not to wait for their own death for days under the rubble, as seen in these lines from a poem published on social media by Ibrahim Al-Ghoula hours before he was killed in an air strike, together with his wife and five-month-old baby daughter:
I don’t want to end up in a bag!!
Everything is negotiable except my death!
I want a full shroud, 192 cm long.
I don’t give up any part of my body,
I want it whole.
It must not only be about death. Poet Rafeef Ziadah’s We Teach Life, Sir goes to the heart of the battle. There is a desire pervading Palestinian writing to overcome destruction with humanity, community, family and love. The urgency transmits. Palestinian literature refuses to accept that art is one thing and politics another: the fusion is as compelling as it is essential. In our tens, in our millions, as they say at demonstrations, we are all Palestinians.
Illustrations Alec Doherty
This article is taken from Port issue 35. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe here
