Summary
Palestinian novelist whose Rabīʿ ḥārr (Eng. Hot Spring, 2004; The End of Spring, 2008), a documentary-style fiction of Palestinians withstanding the siege of Jenin in 2002, is read with Orly Castel-Bloom’s novels in Chapter 5 of Rhetorics of Belonging (PDF p.24).
Details
- English translations of Khalifeh’s novels were among those produced by Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s Project of Translation from Arabic (PROTA) in the 1980s and ’90s (PDF p.11).
- Bernard notes Khalifeh has name recognition in postcolonial studies but nowhere near the status of a Chinua Achebe or a Salman Rushdie, despite the ready availability of her work in translation (PDF p.28).
- Her work vividly shows the difficulties Palestinian protagonists encounter traversing borders (PDF p.19-20).
- In Bernard’s account her novel embeds a critique of the gender-nationalism nexus within a defensive national allegory, using gender relations to represent a nation defined by patriarchy, poverty and violence, while positioning an independent Palestine as the framework within which women’s liberation will take place (PDF p.24).
- She is placed, with Mourid Barghouti, among the writers positioning themselves most explicitly as expressing a national consciousness (PDF p.33).
- Chapter 5’s epigraph is Khalifeh’s: “our political defeat was the result of our cultural defeat […] Mothers can be both the dough-baker and the steel-maker of nations. Mothers are the nation because they are the source and the cornerstone.” (‘My Life, Myself, and the World’, 2002, quoted PDF p.123).
- Chapter 5’s opening (PDF p.123-126) gives Khalifeh (born 1941) as often named the most frequently translated Palestinian writer after Mahmoud Darwish — five of ten novels in English — and a Naguib Mahfouz Medal recipient (2006); regularly described as a feminist writer, she is controversial at home for outspoken criticism of Arab social structures and, in post-1994 writing, the Palestinian Authority (PDF p.126).
- Bernard’s claim for the chapter is that Khalifeh’s and Castel-Bloom’s writing is linked by a shared preoccupation with Intersectionality as a literary strategy: depicting the nation, however compromised, as a still-valid means of social organization, while representing gender equality as a desire and political goal (PDF p.126).
- Chapter 5 in full (PDF p.136-143) gives her biography as central to her feminist reputation: married at eighteen to a man chosen by her parents, she left her husband in 1972 after thirteen years of marriage to pursue writing — ‘I wanted words and ideas, I wanted color, my wings, and music’ (Khalifeh, 2002, para. 8, quoted PDF p.136) — and described Wild Thorns (1976) as a deliberate ‘man’s novel’ (Saliba and Kattan, 2000, 90, quoted PDF p.136).
- Bernard reads Wild Thorns as emphasizing the costs of the masculinist articulations of the Palestinian struggle for men themselves (Harlow, 2002, 122, PDF p.137), answers Amireh’s charge that Khalifeh recycles Palestine as ‘a female body possessed by others’ (2003, PDF p.137) by noting she may stage such narratives to interrogate them, and reads The End of Spring (2004) as a dissensual Bildungsroman that inverts the woman-as-victim narrative, demystifies the heroic narrative of Palestinian nationalism through Laleh Khalili’s heroic/tragic framework, and strategically appropriates human rights discourse in its documentary-style account of the 2002 siege of Jenin (PDF p.138-143).
Related pages
Rhetorics of Belonging, Orly Castel-Bloom, National allegory