ABSTRACT ALMARHABI, MAEED., Ph.D., December 2020 ENGLISH
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ABSTRACT ALMARHABI, MAEED., Ph.D., December 2020 ENGLISH CULTURAL TRAUMA AND THE FORMATION OF PALESTINIAN NATIONAL IDENTITY IN PALESTINIAN-AMERICAN WRITING (192 PP.) Dissertation Advisor: Babacar M’Baye This dissertation examines the relationship that the Palestinian diaspora maintains with the motherland of Palestine. Specifically, it studies the factors contributing to the fostering of such a sense of affiliation among Palestinian diasporic communities despite the absence of a Palestinian political entity that could undertake such a process. This dissertation proposes that the Palestinian master-narrative plays a significant role in maintaining and enhancing the attachment and affiliation of Palestinian diasporic communities with their original homeland. The Palestinian master-narrative, it is contended, is one of the main vehicles through which Palestinian national identity is built within and beyond the geographical realm of historic Palestine. This research claims that Palestinian diasporic writing (including Palestinian- American writing) has been circulating the Palestinian national narrative, which plays a significant role in enhancing the connection between Palestinian diasporic communities and their original homeland and helping them build a national identity. In addition, the circulation of these national narratives establishes the Nakba as a traumatic event in the collective imagination of post-Nakba Palestinian generations, making them equally traumatized as those Palestinians who experienced these events firsthand. Specifically, this dissertation focuses on representations of two main Palestinian national narratives in Palestinian-American writing and their role in building Palestinian national identity. The first narrative is that of the right of return and it is traced in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in i Jenin (2006). The second one is the narrative of sumud and it is examined in Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home (2008). In addition, the relationship between memory and Palestinian identity- building via national narrative is explored in Shaw Dallal’s Scattered Like Seeds (1998). ii CULTURAL TRAUMA AND THE FORMATION OF PALESTINIAN NATIONAL IDENTITY IN PALESTINIAN-AMERICAN WRITING A dissertation submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Maeed Almarhabi December 2020 © Copyright All rights reserved Except for previously published materials i Dissertation written by Maeed Almarhabi B.A., King AbdulAziz University, 2007 M.A, Kent State University, 2014 Ph.D., Kent State University, 2020 Approved by Dr. Babacar M’Baye , Co-Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Dr. Yoshinobu Hakutani. , Co-Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Dr. Christopher Roman__________________ Dr. Amoaba Gooden____________________ Dr. Paul Haridakis______________________ Accepted by Dr. Babacar M’Baye , Chair, Department of English Dr. Mandy Munro-Stasiuk_______________ , Interim-Dean, College of Arts and Sciences ii TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS ........................................................................................................... III ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................ V INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE ......................................................................................................................... 18 RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST THROUGH MEMORY IN SHAW DALLAL’S SCATTERED LIKE SEEDS ....................................................................................................... 18 1.1 MEMORY AND IDENTITY ....................................................................................................... 23 1.2 THE INDIVIDUAL MEETS THE COLLECTIVE ........................................................................... 26 1.3 REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING ........................................................................................ 40 1.4 IDEALIZING MEMORIES OF THE PALESTINIAN PAST .............................................................. 53 CHAPTER 2 ................................................................................................................................ 68 NARRATIVE OF RETURN AND PALESTINIAN NATIONAL IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION IN SUSAN ABULHAWA’S MORNINGS IN JENIN ............................. 68 2.1 NOSTALGIA AND THE CONTINUITY OF NATIONAL IDENTITY ................................................ 74 2.2 CONCEPT OF RETURN AND EMERGENCE OF THE NARRATIVE OF RIGHT OF RETURN IN THE PALESTINIAN NATIONAL CONTEXT ............................................................................................ 77 2.3 RESISTANCE, HOPE, AND CONTINUITY OF NATIONAL IDENTITY ........................................ 106 2.4 ESTABLISHING A NOSTALGIC BENCHMARK AND CONTINUITY OF PALESTINIAN NATIONAL IDENTITY ................................................................................................................................. 112 CHAPTER 3 .............................................................................................................................. 127 iii REPRESENTATIONS OF PALESTINIANS SUMUD IN THE DIASPORA IN RANDA JARRAR’S A MAP OF HOME ............................................................................................... 127 3.1 SUMUD IN RANDA JARRAR’S A MAP OF HOME .................................................................... 140 3.2 RESISTANCE THROUGH CELEBRATING TRADITIONAL CLOTHING IN THE DIASPORA ........... 146 3.3 NATURAL ENVIRONMENT AND PALESTINIANS’ SUMUD IN THE DIASPORA .......................... 151 3.2.1 Reproducing Home in Exile and Through the Olive Tree .......................................... 159 3.3 PALESTINIAN TRADITIONAL CUISINE AS A FORM OF SUMUD .............................................. 163 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 171 CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................... 174 REFERENCES .......................................................................................................................... 178 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor Prof. Babacar M’Baye for his advice and continued support throughout my graduate career. His guidance helped me in all the time of research and writing of this thesis. I could not have imagined having a better advisor and mentor for my PhD study. Besides my advisor, I would like to thank the rest of my thesis committee: Prof. Yoshinobu Hakutani, Prof. Christopher Roman, and Prof. Amoaba Gooden, for their insightful comments and encouragement, but also for the hard question which allowed me to widen my research from various perspectives. Thanks also to my family, especially to my mother, Salha Alhulasi, and to my older brother, Yahyia Almarhabi for always encouraging me to move forward with the degree and motivating me in times of desperation when I wanted to quit. Many thanks are also due to my colleagues and friends at Kent State University whose support has sustained me through this project. In particular, I’d like to thank Sonali Kudva, Dexter Zirkle, Mathieu Hudnall, Moad Aldabbagh, Majid Nasser, Ali AlNawaiseh, Rawan Alshareef, Abdualrahman Abushal, Nisreen Yamani, Ammar Aqeeli, Savanna Wagner, and Megan Feezle. v For Mannar, Yara, Mohammad, and Maya vi INTRODUCTION The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no different from other conflicts throughout history; it has two sides, and each side has its own story, to which it clings tightly. The interesting thing, however, about this war of narration is that both parties assume the position of victimhood (Enns 12). The Israelis, on the one hand, see that the Jewish people have been the target for oppression and persecution through the centuries and are entitled to establishing their own state, where they can live peacefully and securely. According to this narrative, the horrors of the holocaust and the concentration camps suffered by the Jews in Europe during the Second World War are a meager part of a history of racial prejudice and religious repression that befell their wretched People. In addition, the establishment of a Jewish state in the “Land of Israel” is seen by the Israeli narrative as a fulfillment of the biblical prophecy of their return to the holy land. In fact, the Jewish Myth maintains that the Jewish people were exiled from Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C. Their return, therefore, to their ancestral homeland is a justification corresponding with the prophecy of the reunification of the Jewish race in Jerusalem. The Palestinians, on the other hand, believe that they fell victim to a global conspiracy against their defenseless people – a conspiracy led by the world's superpowers, and carried out by Zionist organizations in Israel. Moreover, the SikesPicot-agreement and the British mandate is seen by Palestinians to have paved the way for Israel to take over their homeland and their displacement out of Palestine (Chiller-Glaus 72). Hence, they see their struggle to restore their homeland as a legitimate right guaranteed by all international conventions and norms, especially 1 by the U.N. resolution of 1947 that decreed the establishment of two states: one Jewish