Representations of Exile in Palestinian Fiction

1948 is the year in which many Palestinians have had to face the crippling effects of dispossession and displacement from the land of Palestine. Palestinians refer to that year as „Al-Nakba‟, the catastrophe. This set the Palestinian fiction into motion to represent the crippling effects of dispossession and displacement. Palestine became bound in memories for many of the refugees, migrants, exiles that these conditions produced. The events that took place in the Middle East after 1948, the six day war in 1967, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the atrocities in the refugee camps in 1980s further intensified the deprivation, the suffering of Palestinians and the burden of their memories of Palestine. They produced works of fiction that primarily represented these events, a romanticized version of Palestine prior to these events and the problems Palestinians have had to face afterwards. Ghada Karmi‟s autobiography In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story is a clear example of this tradition that will be studied under the typology of „first wave‟. The autobiography as well as other works mentioned or studied makes this tradition much more visible. On the other hand, it has been 65 years since the first exiles ran away from what they knew as their home. For 65 years they have been living in their new home whether it is England, America or a refugee camp. The primacy of the disturbing political events of 1948 and 1967 is slowly losing its thematic value in the representation of Palestinian exile. The „inbetweenness‟ of Palestinian exile is not the end result of these representations anymore, but a characteristic that continuously reshapes it. Samir El-Youssef‟s novella The Illusion of Return holds the characteristics of „second wave‟ style of representation. The study of these representations provide the dialectics of the representations of exile and help us in placing these representations under these two lucid categories in which the various variations between these two styles of representation could be understood . The categories distinguish the representations according to the primacy of events they represent and what they suggest about Palestinian exile. It seems a necessity to study these texts under these two lucid categories since the characteristics of representation of exile seem to hint at various shifts and turns in relation to the stance of these Palestinian exiles towards nationalism which tends to produce hybrid identities. Keywords: Palestine, Exile, Representation, Gender.