Memories, Resistance and Existence in Susan Abulhawa's Mornings In

Interventions International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

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The Burden of the Past: Memories, Resistance and Existence in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin and Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses

Wael Salam

To cite this article: Wael Salam (2021): The Burden of the Past: Memories, Resistance and Existence in Susan Abulhawa’s MorningsinJenin and Hala Alyan’s SaltHouses , Interventions, DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2020.1863840 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2020.1863840

Published online: 20 Jan 2021.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=riij20 THE BURDEN OF THE PAST: MEMORIES, RESISTANCE AND EXISTENCE IN SUSAN ABULHAWA’ S MORNINGS IN JENIN AND HALA ALYAN’ S SALT HOUSES

Wael Salam Faculty of Languages, English, University of Jordan, Jordan ...... The act of remembering a traumatic past has become one of the strategies for Abulhawa, Susan Palestinians to counter-assert settler colonial efforts denying Palestinians the right of return and obstructing their reclamation of memory. I examine the Alyan, Hala poetics of memories and the politics of representations in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010) and Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses decoloniality (2017). These novels present memory, whether individual or collective, as memory ﬁction a non-violent resistance against the oppressor and an afﬁrmation of the Palestinian national identity. Although Palestinian memories are Palestinian displacement characterized by compulsion to repeat, I argue this compulsive return goes beyond the psychodynamics of remembering purported by trauma theory, resistance and includes moral, political and ethical responsibilities. Reading ...... Palestinian literature in line with trauma theory decolonizes the theory and extends its analysis to events happening in the global South.

Introduction

In his “Appeal of the Palestinian People on the Fiftieth Anniversary of al- Naqba,” Mahmoud Darwish states Palestinians “have refused to adopt their distorted version of history,” and they “remain advocates and witnesses of the authentic narrative of Palestinian endurance and will to live” (2008, 515). Darwish distinguishes between the dominant narratives publicized by the victor and the personal and collective memories of Palestinians (Rahman 2015). The anniversary itself points to the Palesti- nian will to remember to keep their cause alive and resist metanarratives of the powerful. The Palestinian American novelist Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010) and Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses (2017) are counter-narratives par excellence. They depict the prolonged history of Palestinians’ displacement and assert their will to remember and thus reclaim their distorted history. While Mornings in Jenin represents the protracted endurance of a refugee family destined to wars and death, Salt Houses details the forcible relocation of a rich middle-class Palesti- nian family whose socioeconomic status does not protect them from displacement and exile. The novels portray the salience of individual and collective memories, particularly those blotted with death and eviction, in legitimizing the Palestinian right of existence and non-violent resistance. Rather than reducing traumatic memories to amnesia and the traumatized to passive victimhood (Felman and Laub 1991; Caruth 1996), they weave traumatic narratives of intrusive ﬂash- backs and nightmares along with transgenerational memories as aesthetic techniques to accentuate the durability of Palestinian collective memories. While trauma theory has been utilized to examine representations of Palesti- nian experience, I argue that exploring the representation of traumatic memories in Palestinian literature decolonizes the theory and extends its analysis to templates from the global South in which history and group agency are of paramount importance. Many Palestinian novels in Arabic, English and other languages deal with the aesthetic depictions of memories and their role in shaping Palestinian national identity and collective consciousness (e.g. Kanafani 2000; Barghouti 2003; Shehadeh 2008; Jarrar 2009; Karmi 2002; Darraj 2015. However, this essay places the recently published novels Mornings in Jenin and Salt Houses within Arab American literature (Salaita 2011; Fadda-Conrey 2014). They are written by emerging female minority writers, who offer new insights into the representation of the Palestinian trauma. They portray events such as the 1948 War (known as Nakba), the 1967 War (known as Naksa), the 1982 Lebanon War, and the 1990 Gulf War, not to mention the interminable wars on Gaza. In these novels, Palestinians are either internally displaced or forced to live as refugees in neighbouring host countries and as exiles around THE BURDEN OF THE PAST ...... 3 Wael Salam

the globe. The exilic feeling permeating these novels captures how Palesti- nians are caught up in political and cultural exigency to remember their past and prove their presence and existence. While Mornings in Jenin has stimulated debates about Palestinian identity (AlJahdali 2014; Abu-Shomar 2019; Ebileeni 2019), Salt House has been far less widely reviewed, which is itself perhaps of significance. A few works have investigated Mornings in Jenin concerning traumatic memories, but they have ignored the politicization of the theory (Abu- Shomar 2015; Raslan 2017; Andersen 2018; Waheed 2019). Ayman Abu-Shomar (2015) discusses “dramatic triangulation of love and trauma in the times of war” (135). He argues the protagonist Amal embodies two conflicting feelings of love and trauma. Yet he does not tackle the individual and collective acts of mournful remembering perti- nent to the Palestinian past. Iman Raslan explores traumatic representations in Mornings in Jenin, examining “the stages of trauma response, namely regression, fragmentation and reunification which the main character passes through” (2017, 184). She, however, treats the novel as trauma fiction without questioning the absence of non-western cases in trauma theory’s analysis. Similarly, Helle Andersen investigates the politics of trauma and home in Mornings in Jenin and Salt Houses, arguing traumatic recollections hinder characters from belonging and hence from “creating a home in exile” (2018, 3). Nevertheless, I contend that traumatic memories, though causing a sense of homelessness as Andersen suggests, are employed by Abulhawa and Alyan to challenge forgetfulness and show Palestinians’ agency in remembering their painful past collectively. Unlike Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin, Alyan’s novel has received scant attention, except in a few reviews of the novel or interviews with the author (Boullata 2017; Hankir 2017). Three works have so far explored Alyan’s novel in terms of traumatic memories, identities and narrative techniques (Andersen 2018; Aladylah 2019 ; Salam and Mahfouz 2020). Wael Salam and Safi Mahfouz (2020) touch on the relationship between the Palestinian diasporic condition and their traumatic past. They show how memories of flight remind Palestinians of their homelessness, and hence their diasporic condition. Furthermore, Majed Aladylah (2019) analyzes the narrative techniques used in Alyan’s novel, which he describes as “a new kaleidoscope of narrative fiction” (44). While Aladylah emphasizes the modernist techniques of polyphony and multiplicity of voices, these techniques reflect the characters’ traumatic past and contribute to Palestinian collective memory of flight and dispersal. Additionally, fragmentation and the stream of consciousness mirror characters’ internal world, which has been affected by catastrophes and uprooting...... interventions – 0:0 4

Palestinian dissident collective memory

Most Palestinian writers have produced autobiographical and literary works that chart attempts to retell the Palestinian tragic history and prevent it from forgetfulness and erasure (Majaj 2001; Rahman 2015; Taha 2017). Edward Said points out that while Israelis reinvent their tradition by often misrepre- senting the Palestinians’ history, it becomes urgent for Palestinians to reconstruct their own history to legitimize the right of return. He contends, “Perhaps the greatest battle Palestinians have waged as a people has been over the right to a remembered presence and, with that presence, the right to possess and reclaim a collective historical reality” (2000, 175). Nur Masalha states Palestinians can discredit Israeli efforts to deny the Nakba by commemorating their collective memory both individually and collectively to “consolidate national bonds, mutual solidarity and shared history, memories and struggles” (2005, 243). Ilan Pappé (2006) explains that the Palestinian effort to remember their past is a viable tactic for undermining “cultural memoricide,” a term he defines as the Israeli systemic efforts to silence Palestinian history that registers their existence in Palestine. The narratives of return and rearrival, rooted in memories and stories of the past, are leitmotifs in Palestinian literature (Majaj 2001). Lisa Majaj posits “the homeland to which [Palestinian writers] seek return is one rooted in history and in memory” (115). This return can be literary (Palesti- nian authors writing about loss of home and displacement), fictional (characters returning to Palestine to gain self-awareness and connect with their homeland) and mental (traumatic memories returning as flashbacks, nightmares and snippets of a fragmented past). Premised on the Bakhtinian con- cepts of space and time, Samar AlJahdali (2014) considers the Palestinian acts of walking and returning to the homeland a chronotope that disrupts settler colonialism and reconstructs Palestinian collective memory. The iterability of the Palestinians’ tales of dispossession and displacement creates a collective narrative that makes their voice heard (Jayyusi 2007; Hassan 2011; Rahman 2015; Aboubakr 2019). It is a creative historiography in which fiction and memory intersect to voice to the Palestinian will to survive and reclaim history. As Lena Jayyusi explains, “The Palestinians may perhaps, however, be singular in their narrative awareness and rendition of this, a marker perhaps of the consciousness of its still unfolding character and the collective need to hold fast: memory as resistance” (2007, 116, emphasis in original). Individual memories are thus conducive to shaping collective memories which may differ from one person to another (Farag 2017). According to Ahmad Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod (2007), the Palestinian dissident memory bears a moral, political, and cultural accountability. They view the Nakba as a site of loss and dispersal, yet as a protection against the effacement of Palestinian national identity and memory. They THE BURDEN OF THE PAST ...... 5 Wael Salam

maintain there is “strong evidence that making memories public affirms identity, tames trauma, and asserts Palestinian political and moral claims to justice, redress, and the right to return” (3). Memory is thus dynamic, stres- sing not what has happened, but how it has happened and is remembered; and how it, being filtered in terms of gender, age, and political and ideological orientations, redresses injustice. They also discuss the relevance of place to memory by invoking Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire (site of memory). They argue Palestinians constantly revisit the Nakba as a collective memory and Palestine as a geography to reconstruct the Palestinian sense of communitas and national identity. To highlight the salience of memory in Palestinian resistance, it is a requisite to comment on the critical reception of trauma theory by postcolonial critics (Visser 2011; Craps 2013). Trauma theory may provide explanations of the Palestinians’ insistence on remembering their terrible past, notably the Nakba. Yet it falls short in explaining the Palestinian traumatic narratives that are instrumental in preserving the collective memories and effecting political change. Trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth (1996), Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1991) reduce the traumatized to passive victims who are unknowingly and belatedly haunted by their traumas. “The wound of the mind,” Caruth explains, “is experi- enced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (1996, 4). Caruth stresses the reappearance of traumatic memories, yet her reference to “unknown acts” of trauma points to lack of agency and passivity of trauma survivors, a proposition criticized by many critics and historians (Leys 2000; Luckhurst 2008). While traumatic memories reflect the individual and collective psychological suffering, the literary representation of traumatic memories carries political and ideological dimensions. Trauma theory has been questioned for neglecting the historical and political importance of colonialism in understanding the psychological responses of oppressed groups. A few critics have responded to the theory by extending the analysis to catastrophes and events happening in colonial and postcolonial space (Visser 2011; Craps 2013; Ifowodo 2013; Buelens 2014; Ward 2015). “Postcolonial Trauma Novels,” a special issue edited by Stef Craps and Gert Buelens in 2008, is devoted to the exploration of postcolonial traumas, and how this interdisciplinary conversation has led to cross-cultural and globalized understandings of human suffering. In their introduction to the issue, they maintain trauma studies can be globalized by shifting research “from the individual to larger social entities, such as communities or nations” (2008, 4). This essay, therefore, explores the literary representations of traumatic memories, capturing the prolonged Palestinian suffering and hence extending the theory’s analysis to non-western templates (Visser 2011)...... interventions – 0:0 6

Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin

Susan Abulhawa, an Arab American writer, was born in Kuwait, where her parents had been displaced during the 1967 War. She has written two novels: The Blue between Sky and Water (2015) and her debut Mornings in Jenin 1 1 Mornings in Jenin (2010 [2006]). In these two novels she portrays how Palestinians are sub- was published in jected to death, violence and relocation. In Mornings in Jenin she incorpor- 2006 under the tile of The Scar of David. ates historical events, which go in line with her creative representations of memories. She rewrites the Palestinian memories of the past and presents them in a language accessible to a worldwide readership. So far, the novel has been translated into twenty-seven languages. Mornings in Jenin is a tale of tragic deaths and displacements inﬂicted on four generations of the Abulheja family, starting from 1941 up until the Israeli aggression on Jenin refugee camp in 2002. After living a tranquil and serene life, farming and taking care of their groves, the Abulheja family were displaced from Ein Hod, a village located in northern Palestine, and were relocated to a refugee camp in Jenin during the 1948 War. The protagonist Amal, born in Jenin’s refugee camp, witnesses the Naksa, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, and the 2002 Battle of Jenin, where she gets killed to save her daughter, Sara. Although Amal did not experience the 1948 War, she is affected by that cataclysmic event, since Jenin camp was established after that catastrophe. She has endured multiple losses of her family members, including her grandfather Yehya, her father Hasan, her mother Dalia and her brother Ismael/David, who was taken by the childless Jewish couple Moshe and Jolanta Aviram during the 1948 War. During the Sabra and Shatila massacre, her husband Majid and her bother Yousef’s family were all killed. As a response, her brother blows himself up in the US embassy in Beirut. These are just a few of the experiences that have shaped Amal’s identity as a Palestinian, rendering memory indispensable in understanding Mornings in Jenin. Abulhawa incorporates historical events in her novel, blurring the line between history and ﬁction and reminding us of the importance of history for Palestinian collective memory. Mornings in Jenin draws a picture of the historic Palestine, the idyllic and peaceful land that Palestinians cherish:

IN A DISTANT TIME, before history marched over the hills and shattered present and future, before wind grabbed the land at one corner and shook it of its name and character, before Amal was born, a small village east of Haifa lived quietly on ﬁgs and olives, open frontiers and sunshine. (Abulhawa 2010,3)

This opening paragraph is ﬁlled with metaphors foreshadowing upcoming events. Depicting the idealized past is a reclamation of a history ruptured by atrocity, and a land usurped by force. “Distant time” points out the prolonged THE BURDEN OF THE PAST ...... 7 Wael Salam

period when the inhabitants of Ein Hod, a village near Haifa, lived quietly in peace and harmony, when they took care of figs and olives, the trees that sym- bolize Palestinian presence and existence (Bardenstein 1999). It goes against the Zionists’ claim that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Yet history is negatively presented, hinting at what is about to happen. It “marches” as though it were an army invading the land and inflicting its inhabitants with painful memories. It marks the confiscation of Palestinian lands, and the displacement of many Palestinians inside and outside Palestine. Palestinian collective memories are narrated as fragments of individual stories. The repetition and compilation of these stories register their losses yet their ownership of the dispossessed land (Jayyusi 2007; Saloul 2012; Aboubakr 2019). These individual stories cannot be separated from Palesti- nians’ collective identity and social structure in that the very existence of these individual stories is conducive to building national identities. As Hannah Arendt argues, “the private interests assume public significance that we call ‘society’” (1958, 35). In Mornings in Jenin the residents of Ein Hod have their own private stories of their expulsion and of their dire living conditions in Jenin camp. The narrator brings up Haj Salem’s story, one of the refugees who represents the wretched Palestinians victimized by depopulation: “His story was everyone’s story, a single tale of dispossession, of being stripped to the bones of one’s humanity, of being dumped like rubbish into refugee camps unfit for rats” (Abulhawa 2010, 78). Haj Salem – haj means old and sagacious – is an archetypal figure embodying the bearer of Palestinian heritage, culture and memories of the past. He is a hoarder of memories, whose tales, like many Palestinian tales, constitute their collective memory and society. But Haj Salem may not be categorized as a traumatized subject by trauma theory because he has passed down his painful past to younger generations: “Haj Salem had seen it all. That’s what he used to tell us youngsters. It took many seasons to learn his story because he gave it in pieces” (66). Thus, I disagree with Caruth’s contention that trauma’s “very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on” (1996, 4, emphasis in original). Palestinians are aware of the original event that caused their trauma, and like Haj Salem, many attempt to pass it down to younger generations, a stance that shows their agency. As memories are recollected in Mornings in Jenin, the Palestinian present is evaluated and judged; the future is (re)imagined and reworked. Since Palesti- nians live under occupation, in refugee camps or in the diaspora, their future, though hopeless for some, is an unfinished process (2014, 226). When Amal is offered to go to an orphanage in Jerusalem to receive a better education, Ammo Darweesh, a symbol of sumūd (steadfastness), tells her: “The future can’t breathe in a refugee camp, Amal. The air here is too dense for hope...... interventions – 0:0 8

You are being offered a chance to liberate the life that lies dormant in all of us. Take it” (Abulhawa 2010, 112). Like many Palestinians, Ammo Dar- weesh foresees a gloomy future in the camp as a site of memories of eviction and inability to return to one’s own land. While camps are built temporarily to house refugees, they are paradoxically permanent for Palestinians, and the very existence of these camps will always remind Palestinians of their painful past and their hopeless future. Jenin camp reshapes Amal as a Palestinian refugee and renders her memory ineradicable. As an omniscient narrator, she speaks on behalf of other characters or comments on their emotional distress as they endure the hardships of life in the camp. Since the camp is a residue of the 1948 and the 1967 wars, it is difficult for Amal to escape this site of memories. She is compelled to remember her harrowing experience, which is tied to other characters’ experiences. It is helpful here to invoke Nora’s(1989) concept of lieux de mémoire, which views the Jenin camp and its association with the Nakba as a site of memory. Nora defines lieux de mémoire as “any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the mem- orial heritage of any community” (1989, xvii). The camp as lieux de mémoire is Amal’s membership of her group. She muses, “Growing up in a landscape of improvised dreams and abstract national longings, everything felt tempor- ary to me” (Abulhawa 2010, 126). The temporariness of the camp does not mean the return of Palestinians to their homeland. Rather, it portends the looming danger and death that lurk behind, reaching a crescendo in the tragic death of Amal during the Battle of Jenin in 2002. The memories of Jenin camp serve as a centripetal force that helps Amal identify as a Palestinian in the United States (Fadda-Conrey 2014). She feels threatened by that colossal place: “I spun in cultural vicissitude, wander- ing in and out of the American ethos until I lost my way. I fell in love with Americans and even felt that love reciprocated. I lived in the present, keeping the past hidden away” (Abulhawa 2010, 138). But this does not last long, since she has no control over her past. Overwhelmed by the memories of Jenin, the past haunts Amal in the present and pulls her back to where she comes from:

Amy. Amal of the steadfast refugees and tragic beginnings was now Amy in the land of privilege and plenitude. The country that ﬂowed on the surface of life, supine beneath unwavering skies. But no matter what facade I bought, I forever belonged to that Palestinian nation of the banished to no place, no man, no honor. My Arab- ness and Palestine’s primal cries were my anchors to the world. And I found myself searching books of history for accounts that matched the stories Haj Salem had told. (Abulhawa 2010, 143) THE BURDEN OF THE PAST ...... 9 Wael Salam

Though she becomes a US citizen and acquires the Americanized name “Amy,” which temporarily distances her from her Palestinian roots, her memories retrieve her Palestinian identity by regaining the name she was assigned in Jenin camp (Abu-Shomar 2019, 103). Abulhawa adds political and ideological dimensions to the creative representations of memories. Memories are not mere psychological manifestations of a passive amnesic individual. Rather, they lead Amal to be an active Palestinian who remembers and acknowledges her people. As has been suggested, traumatized individuals cannot often forget their past. Trauma theory, however, focuses on the amnesic aspect of memory, that is, individuals may sustain brain damage that causes a tragic memory loss and a repetition of bits and pieces of memories that do not make a whole. Yet the theory eclipses the political, ethical and cultural aspects of memories that make it increasingly imperative for Palestinians to reclaim the past and resist settler colonialism, not as amnesic subjects but rather as a group conscious of the salience of memories. Amal’s memories, therefore, are not mere silences or a reflection of her mental disturbance as trauma theory suggests, though they play a key role in showing the magnitude of the Palestinian predicament. The repetitive and intrusive nature of Amal’s memories play a key role in preserving her memories of Jenin camp from erasure and forgetfulness. Mornings in Jenin depicts the intrusiveness of memories as ghosts that remind Amal of the Palestinian tragic history. She is notably disturbed by the terrible memories of her mother Dalia’s death: “I do not know when its ghosts stopped haunting me or when my baby girl became a woman. Or when I grew into Dalia’s legacy as a distant mother” (Abulhawa 2010, 220). In the United States, Amal cannot forget her life in Jenin camp, a memory that contributes to her cultural resistance: “Dalia, Um Yousef, had bequeathed to me the constitution that could not breathe while holding hands with the past. She could isolate each present moment while existing in an eternal past, but I needed physical distance to remove myself” (138). Amal’s failure to “remove” herself from her past reflects the authority of the past (Abu-Shomar 2019). She has no control over it since it is collective and shared by all Palestinians. When she has a chance to meet her brother Ismael/David, she suddenly remembers her painful past, which “riled ghosts of a nation, their torment unmitigated by justice or remembrance, coming to my side in flickering black and white movie reels” (Abulhawa 2010, 207). This past helps her retrieve her brother’s mistaken identity and bring him back to his “Palestinianness” and his original name, Ismael. The memories recalled during Amal’s meeting with her brother consolidate her position as a Palestinian whose ethical role is to continue the struggle. Her memories of the past infuse her with anger rather than sadness: “I submitted to the memories of a dense past and it filled me with a sadness that I wished ...... interventions – 0:0 10

were anger instead” (Abulhawa 2010, 207). For Amal, memories are not mere expressions of helplessness and subjugation as suggested by trauma theory. They are defensive tactics that protect and hence preserve the Pales- tinian collective memory. Before leaving the camp to study in an orphanage, Amal tries to “use my mind and my heart to keep our people linked to history, so we do not become amnesiac creatures living arbitrarily at the whim of injustice” (110, emphasis in original). She is committed to her people’s struggle by remembering the past as an imprint of lands lost and homes dispossessed. This individual memory serves as a basis for the right of return in her invocation of the pronoun “we.” Though Amal’s memories are personal, her past is collective. Rooted in memory and history, Abulhawa offers a third space for the reader to see how both Palestinians and Jews can have a constructive conversation and can be sensitive to each other’s predicament. This globalized understanding of trauma, I contend, entails putting the Holocaust in dialogue with the Palestinian case to address human injustice, a stance that extends the analysis of trauma theory beyond the individual mental disturbance and offers a cross-cultural understanding of human suffering (Craps and Buelens 2008). Ari Perlstein, a son of a German professor who has survived the atrocity of Nazism and has settled in Jerusalem, becomes the closest friend to Amal’s father Hasan. Both Hasan and Ari Perlstein share a history of oppression and victimhood. Additionally, Abulhawa presents Jolanta as a victim of the Holocaust looking for a stable life after she has been maimed by Nazi soldiers. Although abducting a Palestinian child is not justifiable and is considered a crime, Abulhawa connects Jolanta with her painful experience of being victimized: “Jolanta wanted a child. But Jolanta’s body had been ravaged by Nazis who had forced her to spend her late teens serving the physical appetites of the SS” (Abulhawa 2010, 35). Abulhawa does not follow the binary categorization of Jews versus Palestinians. Rather, she humanizes “the Other” and provides a chance for both to sympathize with each other without yielding the right of dissent, a position that helps her criticize and thus resist metanarratives of the oppressor. Returning to one’s homeland, though temporarily, is an act of resistance and an affirmation of the Palestinian will to return. Amal returns to Jenin refugee camp to fulfil her daughter’s wish of knowing who she is as a Pales- tinian American. It is a chronotope of return, as AlJahdali (2014) puts it, rooted in the Palestinian collective memory and aiming to destabilize settler colonialism. Amal’s visit agitates her hidden memories of the past, allowing her to pay homage to her people:

But this time my defenses were no match for the oppressed memories and loves, rising up behind my ice with torches, blazing and demanding. Demanding that I THE BURDEN OF THE PAST ...... 11 Wael Salam

cry for them, at last pay them with the tears they deserve. Release their dues in fury and sadness. Give them their long-overdue acknowledgment with remembrance and pain. (Abulhawa 2010, 224)

This quote suggests that it becomes a ritualized practice for Amal to remember and acknowledge her oppressed people. Perhaps memories are the only means for Amal to express her belonging and allegiance to her society. Abulhawa stresses the burden of memories reflected in bodily scars. It is no coincidence that she used The Scar of David as an original title for her novel because Ismael/David’s scar represents what cannot otherwise be expressed by memory or language. The scar of Ismael/David is more than a physical wound healed by time, since it is a residue of the Nakba: “The physical remnant of that day was a distinctive scar that would mark Ismael’s face forever, and eventually lead him to his truth” (24). In comparison with Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa (2000), the lost child Khaldun/Dov, raised by a Jewish family, cannot associate himself with his biological parents. But in Mornings in Jenin, Abulhawa extends the notion of abduction by the irremovable scar inflicted upon Ismael/David’s body. She allows a Palestinian child to pass as an Israeli, giving him an advantage to judge the Palestinian status from “the no-man’s-land of Palestinian imaginings” by which Ismael/David can negotiate the Palestinian living conditions without being influenced by political ideologies (Ebileeni 2019). This scar affirms one’s own identity and preserves the Palestinian national history. Like her brother, Amal’s abdomen scar functions as a repository of painful memories that force her to live in her past: “I pressed my palm over my own scar, felt the callus ruts and harsh furrows, and remembered the whoosh of the bullet that had plowed my abdomen. I needed to be in the belly of my memories, to hear what David would reveal” (Abulhawa 2010, 208). Amal’s scar does not age, and hence her persistent memories: “Only the scar on my abdomen had not aged. The webbed skin was as young and tight as it had always been, embalmed by cruelty, that indelible ink of memory and preservative of time” (220). It is through this scar that memory becomes an indelible past and a defensive mechanism by which she can avert forgetfulness and self-identify as a diasporic Palestinian. Memory, as depicted in this novel, is not a mere pathological ailment where individuals are passive and defeated. Rather, memory is a cultural celebration of one’s own identity and a subscription to the collective memory of a people. At the same time, it is a peaceful resistance by which Amal reclaims the right of resistance and existence. interventions...... – 0:0 12

Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses

Alyan was born in the United States and lived with her family in Kuwait and Lebanon. She is a clinical psychologist living in New York City. She has written three collections of poetry: Atrium (2012), Four Cities (2015) and Hijra (2016). Her prolific output of poetry has influenced her debut novel Salt Houses (2017), and as written on the book blurb, the novel is described as “lyrical” and “poetic.” Salt Houses differs in terms of narrative voice from Mornings in Jenin. While Mornings in Jenin mainly focuses on Amal as an omniscient narrator, Salt Houses is polyphonic and is narrated by different voices – every chapter has a different narrator and perspective in terms of gender and age (Aladylah 2019). Without undermining the literary merit of Alyan’s novel, she benefits from her experience as a clinical psychologist by employing traumatic narratives to draw the reader’s attention to the psychological turmoil of Palesti- nians surviving cataclysmic events. In an interview with John Stintzi, Alyan stresses the impact of her clinical work on Salt Houses: “Idefinitely found myself inundated by clinical material, particularly traumatic stories of displacement and asylum seeking” (Alyan 2018). Hence, Alyan takes her novel beyond the psychodynamics of traumatic memories to comment on the political and social dimensions of trauma. Salt Houses tells a story of the Yacoubs, who have endured the Nakba, the Naksa and the Gulf War. They end up living scattered in Jordan, France, the United States, and in summer vacations, in their apartments in Lebanon. Their exilic consciousness and their estrangement never let them feel at home, and they feel insecure as they relocate constantly. Although the novel starts with Nablus fifteen years after the Nakba,itflashes back to that cataclysmic event by remembering the past, not nostalgically, but with pain and sadness (Salam and Mahfouz 2020). As Alia, one of the protago- nists, puts it, nostalgia is “an affliction … Like a fever or a cancer, the longing for what had vanished wasting a person away” (Alyan 2017,74– 75). This fever reflects the Palestinian exilic consciousness, a disease meta- phor that underscores the burden of the past. Salt Houses presents a series of events that cause the Yacoubs to live an unstable life. Displaced in Nablus due to the 1948 War, the Yacoubs are sub- jected to loss and dispersal anew. During the 1967 War, Mustafa is impri- soned, tortured and killed. Salma resettles in Jordan; her daughter Alia is married off to Atef, and both relocate to Kuwait. The story then shifts its focus to Alia, her husband Atef and their children Riham, Karam and Souad. With the outbreak of the Gulf War, Alia’s family moves to Jordan. Riham is married to Latif, a doctor residing in Jordan. Souad goes to Paris, marries Elie and has two children: Manar and Zain. She then relocates to the United States and lives as a single mother with her children. Karam THE BURDEN OF THE PAST ...... 13 Wael Salam

marries Budur, another exiled Kurdish woman from Iraq. They move to the United States and have one daughter, Linah. The Yacoubs’ story orbits around homelessness and relocation, a condition that reminds them of their vulnerability and instability. This traumatic past is taken up by Alyan as an aesthetic technique to portray Palestinian suffering and show how this traumatic past serves as a resistant memory. Unlike Abulhawa’s emphasis on refugees’ depopulation and flight, Alyan provides a new insight into Palestinian endurance and will to survive, namely, the Yacoubs’ socioeconomic status: “Money carried them to Nablus, over the threshold of this house. Money kept them fed and warm, kept their windows draped in curtains and their bodies clothed” (11). In Jaffa they live in a big mansion; in Nablus they live in a house near a refugee camp. Dispersed in Amman and the United States, they gather in their apartments in Beirut for summer vacations. Their social status, however, does not secure them from relocation and homelessness. Like Mornings in Jenin, Salt Houses accentuates the salience of memory in the Palestinian resistance, resilience and survival. The tragic events that have afflicted Alyan’s characters bring them back to their originary predicament, the Nakba. As Manar, one of the grandchildren of the Yacoubs, puts it, “Palestine was something raw in the family, a wound never completely scabbed over” (281). Typically, Palestinian memories of homeland are not mere nostalgia or recollections of a past event, but a past-in-the-present event, that is, an unfinished past. Their understanding of homeland and the right of return is thus “grounded not just in the past, but also in the future” (Majaj 2001, 115). Therefore, memories in Salt Houses function as mental maps that remind the Yacoubs of what they have lost and chart their future resistance. Analogous to the ghosts in Mornings in Jenin, Alyan illustrates the ineradicable imprints of memories that have moral and ideological bearings. Dreams and flashbacks are uncontrolled manifestations of terrible memories (Whitehead 2011). They intrusively return against the individual will as persistent symptoms of psychical ailment (Caruth 1996). However, Alyan deploys these psychical manifestations as aesthetic tropes to stress the indel- ibility of Palestinian collective memories. At the same time, they serve as tools of empowerment to accentuate the durability of traumatic memories, an argument that is pitted against the contours of trauma theory, namely, the passivity of the traumatized subjects when they experience flashbacks. At the outset of the novel, the matriarch Salma is disturbed by a flashback of the family’s flight during the Nakba. She remembers her husband crying out, “They took my home, they took my lungs. Kill me, kill me” (Alyan 2017, 3). This flashback, though showing Salma’s mental disturbance, iter- ates her family’s existence in Jaffa. It is a resistance memory emanated from an unforgettable past “tied to the occupation of Jaffa” (3). interventions...... – 0:0 14

Additionally, her daughter Alia, after surviving the Naksa, the Gulf War and the 2006 Lebanon War, does not come to terms with her dreams (Salam and Mahfouz 2020). In her eighties and struggling with dementia, she confesses she “hates dreaming, hates the people that populate her dreams, arriving for brief slivers before vanishing, leaving her with bits and pieces out of which a whole can never be made” (Alyan 2017, 306). While dementia often causes memory loss, it cannot make Alia forget her painful memories of dispersal. Therefore, Alyan adds a political dimension to her characters’ psychical ailment, that is, their agency and active role in demanding their basic human rights. She successfully uses dementia to showcase the persistence of Alia’s memory and its resistant role against forgetfulness and erasure. Excruciating memories are often irreparable, and when they are experi- enced firsthand, they will certainly leave long-lasting effects, as illustrated by Alia’s husband Atef. A displaced Palestinian in Nablus, he witnessed the tragedy of the Naksa. He is physically scarred and detained for days, endur- ing torture and bloodletting. The memories of the Naksa keep haunting him for a long time: “THAT DAY, half a century, the sun rose onto a cool and pink morning. Israel had invaded Gaza and the Sinai. There was fighting near the old city. Atef’s skin prickled with anticipation. It’s happening,he thought. It’s happening” (239, emphasis in original). Trauma theory often regards these snippets of memories and flashbacks as psychological symptoms of an individual trauma (Caruth 1996). The traumatized individual, Caruth argues, becomes passive and unwillingly disturbed by memories. Nevertheless, in Atef’s case, the intrusive return of his flashbacks is a remin- der of his displacement from Nablus. Alyan employs epistolary writing as an aesthetic narrative to point out Atef’s attempt to register his experience in violence and displacement. While these letters may provide a psychological relief for Atef, they also have a political function, which is to preserve the memories of his family’s dispersal. He is agentic in writing these letters and keeping them safe: “My husband, the hoarder, Alia used to say. It’s come to good use, he returns silently now. I’ve kept your whole history” (Alyan 2017, 253, emphasis in original). As Salam and Mahfouz rightly state, “Atef resorts to ‘scriptother- apy’ as a coping strategy to pacify his trauma and write out his terrible past” (2020, 4). For Atef, writing is part of his commitment to register the memories of loss and landlessness in the face of forgetfulness. His letters are written testimonies of the family’s presence in Palestine and lack of a stable place they can call home: “For years, that was his fiction. Here is Pales- tine, he would think. Here are the streets we’d walk in Nablus, the neighbor- hood we grew up in. Here is everything we love. With a mental brushstroke, he re-creates it, everything” (Alyan 2017, 271, emphasis in original). Atef is a cartographer of knowledge who draws a map of Palestine based on his THE BURDEN OF THE PAST ...... 15 Wael Salam

memories of the past. His “ﬁction” is rooted in his experience and his understanding of the world in which he lives. Atef’s letters are historically signiﬁcant. Losing them means the disappear- ance of a prolonged history of his dispersal. He feels relieved when he knows that his grandchildren took hold of these letters, as if passing the family’s legacy to a younger generation:

His grandchildren are staring at him, Atef understanding that he is changing their lives, these children who will take this moment and make something out of it, turn it into their own lives, remember on their deathbeds the cool air, the stars, their grandfather weeping under a ﬁg tree. (Alyan 2017, 274)

These grandchildren inherit the legacy of their grandparents as memories and stories that guide their future resistance and their demand of the right of return (Aboubakr 2019). They do not experience the Nakba and the Naksa, yet they aspire to fulfil their grandparent’s will, which is to keep these letters safe and preserve the whole history of the Yacoubs. Many Palestinian children, who have grown up listening to their ancestral stories of Palestine, crave for a return to their homeland (Fadda-Conrey 2014, 38). This return is a way for self-identification, especially for those who live in multi- and cross-cultural communities. Ahmad Sa’di explains that Palestinian returnees often have a “sense of overwhelming urgency and apprehension regarding whether [they] will be allowed in or not” (2015, 237). Arriving at Ben Gurion International Airport, Manar becomes con- fused because the officer demands that she hand over her grandfather’s letters found in her purse. But Manar refuses to comply: “Pick your battles, Manar, she could hear Seham saying” (Alyan 2017, 285). She faints due to her pregnancy, saving “an entire history in words” (286). This is a moment of triumph for Manar and her people, particularly when the Israeli officer looks “irritated, as though they were playing a game and she had cheated” (286). She knows the value of these letters and the memories associated with them. Her indirect refusal to give away the letters is an act of non-violent resistance. Although visiting Palestine may complicate Palestinian self-identification, it is a form of commitment to one’s own origin and an expression of sumūd (steadfastness). AlJahdali (2014) explains that the Palestinian return is a chronotope of “walking” and “returning” that destabilizes settler colonialism and keeps the collective memory of Palestinians alive. After visiting Jaffa, her family’s original city, and dancing on the beach with Jimmy, Manar realizes her actions are a betrayal to her family and community. Like Amal’s visit to Jenin refugee camp to connect with her original land, Manar’s visit to Palestine reflects her commitment to her national cause. She contemplates: “‘Our remembering the hundred names of that land,’ interventions...... – 0:0 16

she continues. ‘This is what it means to be alive’” (Alyan 2017, 295, emphasis in original). She also says in another place, “Our mutiny is our remembering” (294). Living in the United States does not make her forget her mission in Palestine, namely, tracing her ancestral past. For Manar, remembering becomes a mutiny against oppression and systemic political and cultural memoricide (Pappé 2006). Alyan creatively draws on silences and pauses to expose her characters’ overwhelming experiences. These silences, pauses and fragmented sen- tences figure prominently when Salma, on her deathbed, insists that her daughter remember, but she does not explain what and why she must remember: “‘You must remember.’ Salma spoke urgently …‘When it happens, you must find a way to remember’” (Alyan 2017, 141). Salma leaves gaps that need to be filled by her daughter and hence the reader. She then clarifies: “I saw the houses, I saw how they were lost. You cannot let yourself forget” (141, emphasis in original). Since Salt Houses is a narrative of remembering, Salma wants her daughter to remember the family’s history of homelessness, a demand that exemplifies the Palestinians’ commitment to their collective memories and their cause. While these silences and pauses are reduced by trauma theory to mean- ingless pathologizing manifestations, Alyan infuses these traumatic manifestations with political messages that bespeak the Palestinian predicament.

Conclusion

Abulhawa and Alyan use trauma ﬁction to depict the Palestinian suffering. Through narratives of return and remembering, their novels resist the politics of erasure and forgetfulness by focusing on individual and collective memories. While trauma theory focuses on the passivity of the traumatized as they are bothered by their painful memories, this essay has shown how individual memories can serve political interests. The novels weave traumatic narratives to capture the enormity of the Nakba and its subsequent events that have disturbed Palestinians for years; to reﬂect the Palestinian collective memories of displacement and homelessness; and to refute the distorted version of history. I contend that examining traumatic narratives in Palestinian literature decolonizes the theory and extends its analysis beyond western examples. The inclusion of traumatic literature of the global South can lead to a cross-cultural understanding of human suffering. THE BURDEN OF THE PAST ...... 17 Wael Salam

ORCID

Wael Salam http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3786-8607

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