“Cached memories”:Spatiotemporal (Dis)ruptures and Postmemorial Absence in Palestine +100

This article argues that spatiotemporal (dis)ruptures in the collection Palestine +100 (2019) extend and problematize Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory to produce what I call a “postmemorial absence.” Each story takes place in 2048, or 100 years following the collective trauma of the Nakba. However, when articulated through a critical framework of Absence and Loss (Dominick LaCapra, 1999), the stories attest that this event has not been relegated to the past but continues to reverberate through successive generations, resulting in a uniquely Palestinian postmemory. Collective traumatic remembrance is a burden leading to isolation and alienation. Science fiction, with its future orientation, has not been popular with Palestinian authors whose literature is largely characterized by allegiance to the past. Palestine +100 is unique in that the intentional framing compels writers to contend with a future imaginary. This results in stories dominated by spatiotemporal (dis)ruptures: characters inhabit parallel spaces and simulations; time moves backwards or stands still; and the notion of “return,” which looms large in the Palestinian psyche, is digitized in innovative and unique ways. The article argues that these stories illuminate a narrative present (which, for the reader and writer, is the near future) characterized by profound absence and alienated suspension. It is a present (future) which lacks meaningful existence in light of a past that has not passed. In such a void, memory and, by extension, history become the enemy. Consequently, characters are trapped between a duty to remember and a desire to forget. This tension illustrates an attempt to sever the inter- and transgenerational link of trauma that is produced by the structure of postmemory

Palestinian Postmemory:Melancholia and the Absent Subject in Larissa Sansour's In Vitro, Saleem Haddad's "Song of the Birds," and Adania Shibli's Touch

This article argues that Sansour's In Vitro, Saleem Haddad's short story "Song of the Birds," and Adania Shibli's novella Touch present a uniquely Palestinian postmemory, or what I call a postmemorial absence, which critiques the viability of a future when individuals feel trapped by memories of a traumatic past that prevent a meaningful present from materializing. I argue that these works further invite the question of a Palestinian identity that moves beyond the Nakba and what form such an identity might take. The first section discusses how Haddad's and Sansour's works exemplify the burden of collective memory, using the medium of science fiction to explore spatial imaginaries and the precarity of the Palestinian present. The second section illustrates how Shibli's Touch constitutes a powerful imagining of an identity unanchored to a collective traumatic past, whereby severing the inter- and transgenerational traumatic link is attempted. Her work, through its experimental form and style, suggests that negation of subjectivity—a breaking down to build anew—may be necessary to realize an identity unencumbered by past trauma

"Perhaps I was a Lebanese Hamlet":Uncanny Modernity and the Ontological Un-Being of the Modern Arab Male in Ghada Samman's The Square Moon

This paper demonstrates that uncanny, exilic estrangement in Ghada Samman’s short story collection The Square Moon (1994 [1998]) presents an opportunity for a radical re-imagining of the Arab intellectual as a woman, which registers the full scope of disharmony between theory and praxis that epitomises the intellectual’s melancholic anxiety. Repurposing Lacan’s statement la femme n’existe pas, by which he asserts that Woman lacks a signifier in the Symbolic order, I argue that Samman’s perennially alienated Lebanese émigrés indicate that there is no signifier for the “modern” Arab male. Her stories are replete with Arab men unable to navigate the trappings of modernity, resulting in the infliction of trauma on those around them. Having left behind a Symbolic order (culture, laws, traditions) they understood and in which they were integrated and privileged, exile presents its own Symbolic order in which these men have no place. Thus, the diasporic site is where the modern Arab male is made to face his own ontological un-being

“That hateful limit”:Narrative distancing and Palestinian subjectivity in the post-sumud fiction of Adania Shibli

This article argues that Adania Shibli’s fiction explores the limits of individual and collective Palestinian subjectivity in order to emphasize a profound sense of estrangement from representational systems, which strikes at the heart of the redemptive function of postcolonial literature. Through concerted acts of narrative distancing in her novellas, Touch, We Are All Equally Far from Love, and Minor Detail, Shibli pushes the reader into a suspended state of jarring alienation, which results in a foregrounding of tensions between empathy and the ethics of representation. In doing so, these works of fiction become performative of a Palestinian identity that has been evacuated by the processes of postmemory in addition to continued erasure as a result of an ongoing state of coloniality and present-day injustices. The article concludes that Shibli’s fiction hails a new era of Palestinian literature, a post-sumud (steadfastness) sensibility, which is marked by unbearable fragmentation, futility, and melancholic despair

The Arab Intellectual as a Woman: The Writings of Ghada Samman

Ghada Samman (b. 1942) is a prominent literary figure with an established legacy across the Arabic-speaking world. Through her widely-acclaimed writings, the Syrian author, journalist, and critic occupies a unique position in Arab intellectual circles as a woman who combines a commitment to the peoples’ causes with an innovative literary style vividly capturing the estrangement faced by the modern Arab subject. Samman has spent her life in exile, first in Beirut and eventually settling in Paris when the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) escalated. She has published 10 poetry books, 6 short story collections, 5 novels, and 20 collections of essays. However, despite her influential writings, Samman is relatively unknown outside of the Arabic-speaking world and a negligible portion of her corpus has been translated into English. My presentation posits the reason for this exclusion being that the Anglophone world does not know where to place Samman as she refuses the mould of “women’s writing” to which the Western academy is accustomed. Hers is the broad, interdisciplinary concern of the intellectual, writing on themes of exile, diatribes against capitalism and classism, the liberation of sexuality from prescribed norms, as well as how patriarchal hegemonies victimise both men and women. Even in the Arabic-speaking world she has pushed back against reductive labelling of her work, writing in a 1987 article: ‘My allegiance is to my freedom and my faith in a woman’s ability to write great human literature. There’s no need to call it “feminist” when its defence of women is part and parcel of its defence of all who are oppressed in Arab societies.’ My presentation will explore the life and work of Ghada Samman from the position of an Arab intellectual rather than a limited (and expected) reading of her as a woman writer exclusively concerned with “women’s issues”

Indexing Futility:Neopatriarchal Trauma, Expressions of Grief, and Constitutions of Subjectivity in Contemporary Arab Women’s Fiction

This thesis identifies futility as a subtending structure and critical target of Arab women’s contemporary fiction, manifesting as recurring sociopolitical crises and failure of lasting change in normative gender relations. The six texts I analyse, spanning a broad historical and geographical range, have been selected from a wider body of Arab women’s fiction in English and Arabic. I contend that they constitute articulations of a Benjaminian historical materialism, arresting a traumatic present that was foretold by past failures and which foretells future failure. Thus, this thesis argues against conventional views of trauma narratives as redemptive tools of sociopolitical transformation. My project stands at the intersection of literary trauma theory and scholarship on Arab women’s literature, extending both fields through a Freudo-Lacanian reading of Arab women’s fiction as an index of futility and shared articulations of neopatriarchal trauma. The Introduction and Methodology trace key theoretical developments in psychoanalysis, literary trauma theory, and the formation of the Arab social subject. Chapter Two explores duelling narratives where male narrators construct female protagonists in symbolic terms and (re)write their stories. Conversely, protagonists highlight embodied trauma in order to emphasise subjectivity. Chapter Three illustrates how mourning and melancholia elucidate responses to traumatic loss while providing an innovative lens for identity and empathy. Finally, the Coda locates the root of neopatriarchal trauma in the failed self-realisation of the modern Arab male. Theorising the Arab intellectual as a woman registers the scope of disharmony between theory and praxis, which epitomises the intellectual’s melancholic anxiety. I argue that this space between thought and practice is where futility resides. The Arab intellectual as a woman lays bare what is always-already lacking, the traumatic Real at the core of the modern Arab male which manifests in compulsive returns to atavistic norms and leads to the perpetuation of trauma

“My country, my language, my daughter”:Melancholic Self-erasure in Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma

This paper presents an innovative reading of Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma (2007), viewing it through the framework of literary trauma theory, which provides fresh insight into the purview of Arab-Anglophone literature by women. Faqir’s third novel has been studied almost exclusively through the lens of migration and/or racial and ethnic identity. It is also predominately seen as a site of East-West dialogue. The novel has not been read within a literary trauma theory or memory studies framework, and this paper seeks to fill that gap in scholarship. It argues that Salma’s forays into British capitalist society are not the assimilative acts of a new migrant but are, in fact, symptomatic of a Freudian (pathological) melancholia that afflicts her following the traumatic memories of her past, loss of the daughter she conceived out of wedlock, and continued threat of death by “honour killing” from the tribal kin she left behind. These events have shattered her identity, and so her attempts to create a new “self” in her Western alter-ego Sally constitute an act of self-evacuation, or what I call a “melancholic self-erasure,” which ultimately proves ineffectual. Her manifold losses have no substitute; there is no suitable re-cathexis, and she eventually succumbs to her melancholia by seeking death in returning to her village. Thus, this paper moves beyond the explicit and implicit referral to Western expectations — as though they constitute an a priori rubric by which to evaluate Oriental literary output — which operate as yet another level of silencing that compounds a history of public and private erasure of women’s voices in the Arab world. The paper seeks to disrupt prevailing analyses that place Salma in a (failed) encounter with a dominant West whose approval she seeks