Godless

by Omar Ayoub

During Israel’s latest escalation of violence to subdue the armed and popular resistance against the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians throughout historical Palestine, the issue of Palestine resurfaced in international media. These short windows of opportunity to (re)present Palestine, specifically to English-speaking Western audiences, have appeared during particularly horrid bouts of colonial violence and have increasingly become the task of a  select group of Palestinians — typically those with dual citizenship or those who have spent significant periods of a time abroad — and our allies.

This marks a significant shift from the trend of political spokespeople and so-called “experts,” such as media veterans, former ambassadors, political analysts, etc., representing Palestine in the media.  In their place, a more comprehensive range of storytellers speak through multiple platforms. This shift highlights the tension between the plurality of complex and sometimes contradictory counter-narratives that reflect the lived experiences of Palestinians worldwide, varying visions of liberation, and the perceived need for a monolithic narrative digestible to Western allies. This tension, in addition to its observable televised manifestation, is also evident in Palestinian literature. The curation of narratives suitable to specific readers to garner empathy and solidarity for a political struggle in which a few deified figures are continuously referenced raises the question: Who are these narratives for? What purpose do they serve? Are these narratives reflective of how we Palestinians see ourselves or how we think we need to be seen?

In the introduction to The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, Amit Chaudhuri discusses how the history of the colonized only becomes relevant to Western contexts when it is part of Western history. He notes that India entered Western history through British colonization, entirely void of the ways in which India has seen itself and its history. This void has produced perceptions of India through Western perspectives meant for Western consumption. Whether consciously or not, prioritizing narratives that revolve around nation-state ambitions above all other self-perceptions establishes a narrative limited to how different struggles interact with the West and how it fits into the greater scheme of Western history. If the West remains solely interested in understanding its history, then we are bound to continue telling the Palestinian story as part of a narrow set of narratives.

In this way, the dimensions and complexities of the issue of Palestine have collapsed into a canon of national literature facilitated by the Palestinian National Authority, non-profit organizations, and foreign funding, in which the image of Palestine and Palestinians are limited to specificities that are in turn used to manufacture a singular persona with a specific history. In this narration of the issue of Palestine, our culture is reduced to commodified symbols. Eventually, the stories of the Palestinian people have and continue to become memories waiting to be forgotten, replaced by a national story dictated by the needs of the nation-state project.

This is evident in Adania Shibli’s extraordinary novel Minor Detail. In the second half of the book, the narrator, a Palestinian woman from what is now commonly referred to as the West Bank, is consumed by piecing together the death of a woman who was killed by the Israeli military in 1949, a year after the creation of Israel; a murder that readers are privy to through the first half of the book. The short bits of information the narrator obtains about the woman’s death are void of information on her life, merely noting her execution. Numbed to the perpetual violence of the Israeli occupation, the narrator engages in a brief but determined search for details surrounding the life and death of the woman.

Her quest requires life-risking travel to parts of historical Palestine she no longer recognizes in efforts to find any documentation that could lend information on the woman’s life. Suddenly, the narrator’s life is, too, subjected to an abrupt end, suffering an eerily similar fate to the subject of her inquiry. In addition to providing a gripping account of the long-standing, extensive violence intrinsic to the Israeli colonial project in which all Palestinian life is discardable, Shibli highlights the deadly consequences of daring to tell our own stories through counter-narratives.

The issue of Palestine attempts to escape the conditions of occupation and its colonial reality by emphasizing the existence of Palestinian history beyond the reality of the occupation, resurrecting the lives of those who came before, or confronting the history and origins of the occupation. Yet, in an attempt to sidestep, contextualize, or confront our colonial history, we cannot escape it. This, too, Shibli’s novel makes evident. This challenge stems from the need to narrate the Palestinian story to affirm Palestinians’ belonging to Palestine. In Palestinian literature, this is often iterated by overtly serving to construct the nation of Palestine. If not in the literature itself, the construction of the issue of Palestine centered on a nation-state project is reinforced in the choices surrounding the translation, publication, and anthologizing of Palestinian literature.

In addition to muting the pluralities inherent to Palestine, this flattened (re)presentation of the issue of Palestine in literature engages in the mythological exceptionalism of Palestine. The notion of the “last man standing” offers a vision of emancipation through demands of a state rather than national liberation, ultimately serving as a consolation to the extended suffering of Palestinians under occupation, in refugee camps, and in exile. In Ghalib Halasa’s book Choosing the Sad Ending, Halasa saw the struggle for liberation as part of a Pan-Arab project that requires the Palestinian struggle to be embedded in other dimensions beyond nation-state identities and ambitions. The construction of the issue of Palestine as unique in its suffering merely allows for its exploitation, serving an elite that speaks on behalf of Palestine to Western audiences without driving action that leads to its liberation.

Our struggle is not unique because the colonial project is not exclusive. The struggles for the liberation of Palestine and the plurality of narratives are inherent in the Red Nation, Kashmir, Hawaii, Western Sahara, South Africa, and Puerto Rico, to name a few. Our histories are not limited to our encounters with oppression. Therefore, our stories, whether biographical or fiction, cannot be limited to our suffering. We are not, as Khalil Gibran asserts, half beings that fantasize about half hopes; we are wholes that exist.