Rhetorics of Belonging Postcolonialism across the Disciplines 14 Bernard, Rhetorics of Belonging.indd 1 09/09/2013 11:17:03 Postcolonialism across the Disciplines Series Editors Graham Huggan, University of Leeds Andrew Thompson, University of Exeter Postcolonialism across the Disciplines showcases alternative directions for postcolonial studies. It is in part an attempt to counteract the dominance in colonial and postcolonial studies of one particular discipline – English literary/ cultural studies – and to make the case for a combination of disciplinary knowledges as the basis for contemporary postcolonial critique. Edited by leading scholars, the series aims to be a seminal contribution to the field, spanning the traditional range of disciplines represented in postcolonial studies but also those less acknowledged. It will also embrace new critical paradigms and examine the relationship between the transnational/cultural, the global and the postcolonial. Bernard, Rhetorics of Belonging.indd 2 09/09/2013 11:17:03 Rhetorics of Belonging Nation, Narration, and Israel/Palestine Anna Bernard Liverpool University Press Bernard, Rhetorics of Belonging.indd 3 09/09/2013 11:17:03 First published 2013 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2013 Anna Bernard The right of Anna Bernard to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-84631-943-3 cased Typeset in Amerigo by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY Bernard, Rhetorics of Belonging.indd 4 09/09/2013 11:17:03 Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 Reading for the Nation 17 2 Exile and Liberation: Edward Said’s Out of Place 42 3 ‘Who Would Dare to Make It into an Abstraction’: Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah 67 4 ‘Israel is not South Africa’: Amos Oz’s Living Utopias 89 5 Intersectional Allegories: Orly Castel-Bloom and Sahar Khalifeh 115 6 ‘An Act of Defiance Against Them All’: Anton Shammas’ Arabesques 136 Notes and references 160 Bibliography 177 Index 196 v Bernard, Rhetorics of Belonging.indd 5 09/09/2013 11:17:03 Bernard, Rhetorics of Belonging.indd 6 09/09/2013 11:17:03 Acknowledgements Rhetorics of Belonging Acknowledgements It is my pleasure to thank the people and institutions that helped me to complete this book. This book began life as a doctoral thesis written at the University of Cambridge, under the wise and patient supervision of Priyamvada Gopal, whose example as a scholar and activist continues to inspire me. The book owes its conception and a great deal else to her. I am grateful also to Tim Cribb, Sarah Meer, Ato Quayson, and Chris Warnes for their support and guidance throughout my studies, and to Ben Etherington, Rahul Gairola, Jana Giles, Georgina Horrell, Anouk Lang, Sharanya Jayawickrama, Megan Jones, Mark Mathuray, Laura Pechey, Sean Pryor, Bede Scott, and Jarad Zimbler for their camaraderie and friendship. Nadira Auty, Kate Daniels, Rachael Harris, and Makram Khoury-Machool were generous and forbearing teachers of Arabic. Financial support from Pembroke College, the Cambridge Overseas Trust, the Cambridge University Board of Graduate Studies, the Cambridge Faculty of English, and the Newby Trust made it possible to embark on this research. At the University of York, I am especially grateful to Ziad Elmarsafy, for his sage advice, his encyclopaedic knowledge of all things Arabic literature, and many wonderful meals. Warm thanks go also to Derek Attridge and David Attwell, whose encouragement and support, both intellectual and practical, made my time at York immensely rewarding, as did the kindness and good humour of all my colleagues in the Department of English and Related Literature. The generous research leave policy at York and the awarding of a University of York Anniversary Lectureship and several travel grants made it possible for me to turn the thesis into a book. I am grateful for the support at various stages of Elleke Boehmer, Ferial Ghazoul, Barbara Harlow, Nick Harrison, Graham Huggan, Stuart Murray, and Patrick Williams. Special thanks go to Tim Brennan, Neil Lazarus, and Benita Parry, for the example of their scholarship and for their incisive vii Bernard, Rhetorics of Belonging.indd 7 09/09/2013 11:17:03 Rhetorics of Belonging suggestions and feedback from the early stages of this project. For various intellectual collaborations, conference catch-ups, and moral support, at York and elsewhere, I would like to thank Nazneen Ahmed, Anna Ball, Claire Chambers, Sharae Deckard, Jane Elliott, James Graham, Michelle Kelly, Karim Mattar, Emilie Morin, Zoe Norridge, James Procter, Gemma Robinson, Robert Spencer, Neelam Srivastava, Sarah Turner, Anastasia Valassopoulos, Jim Watt, and Claire Westall. Thanks also to my new colleagues in English and Comparative Literature at King’s College London for a warm welcome, especially Javed Majeed and Jo McDonagh. I am grateful to the outstanding students whose thinking has contributed to the ideas in this book: Hannah Boast, Isabelle Hesse, Izzy Isgate, Tom Langley, Nicola Robinson, and Charlotta Salmi. Thanks to Neil Armstrong, Catriona Kennedy, Stuart Kenny, Alison O’Byrne, Helen Smith, and Jim Watt for keeping me sane throughout, and to old friends near and far, especially Jessica Manvell and Cathryn Rees. I am grateful for the support of my editor Alison Welsby at Liverpool University Press, and for the input of the anonymous readers who made very helpful comments on the manuscript. Particular thanks go to Ziad Elmarsafy and Yonatan Mendel for proofreading the Arabic and Hebrew transliterations; any errors that remain are my own. An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared in Textual Practice 21.4 (2007): 665–86. Earlier versions of parts of Chapters 1 and 5 appeared as ‘Reading for the Nation: “Third-World Literature” and Israel/Palestine,’ in the special issue ‘Reading After Empire,’ ed. James Procter, Bethan Benwell, and Gemma Robinson, New Formations 73 (2011): 78–89, and ‘Another Black September? Palestinian Writing After 9/11,’ in the special issue ‘Literary Responses to the War on Terror,’ ed. Anastasia Valassopoulos and Robert Spencer, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46.3–4 (2010): 349–58. In all cases, the previously published material has been substantially reworked here. This book is dedicated to my family. My grandfather, Sam Lacy, was the first person to tell me not to believe everything I read in the papers; his many decades of activism provide the best example I know of optimism of the will. My parents, Jim and Susan, and my sister Sara have been an extraordinary source of support, strength, and love from a long distance. My UK family, Pip, Matt, Ken, and Ann, have helped to stand in for them from a shorter distance. And finally, my deepest thanks and love to Nick Robinson, for all this and everything else. Note on transliteration I have generally followed the IJMES system for the transliteration of Arabic and Hebrew. For the names of authors studied in this book, however, and for other well-known proper names and place names, I have relied on the spelling commonly used in English-language publications (hence, Mourid Barghouti rather than Murīd al-Barghūthī). viii Bernard, Rhetorics of Belonging.indd 8 09/09/2013 11:17:03 Introduction Introduction In 1948 the Israelites walked on water to the promised land. The Palestinians walked on water to drown. Shot and counter-shot. Shot and counter-shot. The Jewish people rejoin fiction; the Palestinian people, documentary. Jean-Luc Godard, Notre Musique (2004) I doubt that any of us has figured out how our particularly trying history interlocks with that of the Jews who dispossessed and now try to rule us. But we know these histories cannot be separated, and that the Western liberal who tries to do so violates, rather than comprehends, both. – Edward Said, ‘Nationalism, Human Rights, and Interpretation’ (1993) This is a book about the cultural representation, transmission, and circulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It examines the ways in which Palestinian and Israeli writers whose work achieves the status of ‘world literature,’ in David Damrosch’s sense of texts that travel beyond their culture of origin (2003, 4), intervene in the asymmetrically waged local and international contests over the region’s political past and future. It is also a book about national narration as a reading and a writing practice, which draws its evidence from a settler-colonial context that is still only controversially recognized as such in North America and Europe. This is true even within metropolitan formations of postcolonial literary studies where, for various reasons – political, institutional, linguistic – the region’s literature has often been overlooked. The book sets out to show that an engagement with contemporary Palestinian and Israeli writing can invigorate the common 1 Bernard, Rhetorics of Belonging.indd 1 09/09/2013 11:17:03 Rhetorics of Belonging and yet commonly dismissed question of how writers and their readers conceive of the idea of the nation, within and against colonial forms of rule and thought. It aims to complicate a reader-response understanding of national narration (we want to read Palestinian and Israeli texts as national allegories, for ‘cultural information’1 and because they seem to give us access to a particularly intense kind of national belonging) with an appreciation of how writers anticipate such readings, and how they wrestle with the problem of needing to envision a future territorial and demographic nation-state in a political and cultural context that is saturated with competing ideas of national sovereignty, identity, and citizenship.