Summary
Palestinian-British novelist who writes in English, used by Anna Bernard as the brief example of a writer refusing — and in his fiction confirming — the demand for National allegory (Rhetorics of Belonging, PDF p.34-35).
Details
- In a BBC News interview El-Youssef complained: “My narrator does not want to act out his life according to the fact that he is a Palestinian – so what that he is?” (Greene, 2004, quoted PDF p.34).
- Bernard reads the complaint as attesting to the coercion of the expectation that a Palestinian writer represent a collective Palestinian experience, and the desirability of asserting a ‘private subjectivity’ denied to Palestinian literature (PDF p.34).
- In the novella The Day the Beast Got Thirsty (2004), the narrator Bassem is trapped in a refugee camp in Lebanon during the first intifada; Bernard argues there is no private narrative without the public predicament, and that the refusal prefigures, negatively, a utopian future in which Palestinianness would not matter because the question of Palestine had been justly resolved (PDF p.34-35).
- In his review of Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah (2001, 132), El-Youssef reads the returnee’s shock at the bare hills as the moment Barghouti ‘realises how wide the gap is between the real land and the image in which it appears in his, and other’s [sic], poems’; Bernard disagrees, reading Barghouti’s exaggerated dismay as an artificial staging of that discovery rather than a genuine epiphany (PDF p.84).