Soraya Antonius’s Arab awakening: Palestinian identity, activism, and Anglophone literature

ABSTRACT

While scholarship on Anglophone Palestinian literature has burgeoned in recent years, there has been no attempt to retrieve and assess the work of Soraya Antonius (1932–2017), author of two remarkable English-language novels depicting British-ruled Palestine from the 1910s to 1948, The Lord (1986) and Where the Jinn Consult (1987). Exploring and contextualising Antonius’s contribution to this literary corpus, this article examines the cultural, political and linguistic forces shaping her writings. It begins by tracing the fusion of Anglophile mimicry and anti-colonial resistance typical of her parents – George Antonius, author of The Arab Awakening (1938) and Katy Antonius, Mandatory Jerusalem’s leading socialite. While her parents funnelled their Levantine-cosmopolitan options into a distinctive Palestinian identity, the Nakba compelled their daughter to take the opposite trajectory, leaving Palestine to pursue cosmopolitan possibilities elsewhere. The article’s second section thus considers her work in 1960s and 1970s Beirut, first as a journalist and editor, committed to developing a critical discourse on Western Orientalism, and subsequently as an activist and spokesperson, advocating the Palestinian cause. Probing how these biographical and professional strands shaped her fiction, the final section demonstrates how the first novel’s Anglophile fascination with the coloniser’s mindset is replaced, in the second novel, with a decided focus on Palestinians’ perspectives. Echoing Albert Hourani’s critique of the ‘Politics of Notables’, Where the Jinn Consult thus offers a loving yet bitter account of her parents’ generation, complacent and ineffectual in the face of looming catastrophe.

KEYWORDS:

• Soraya Antonius
• Anglophone Palestinian literature
• Palestinians
• Mandatory Palestine
• George Antonius
• Zionism

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to James Downs, archivist of the Middle East Collections at the University of Exeter, for his archival assistance; and to Ayelet Ben-Yishai for her useful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The ‘nationalist’ school was probably Madrasat al-Umma, founded by Shukri Harami.

2 The most comprehensive biography is Boyle 2001 (abridged in Silsby 1986). See also Cleveland 2001; Thornhill 2004; Lazar 2015.

3 A student and later ‘native instructor’ at the Syrian Protestant College (renamed the American University of Beirut in 1920), Nimr left the College (and Beirut) following a bitter controversy concerning the study of Darwin’s theory. The attack on Darwin was incited not by Arab students but rather by the overly-anxious, ‘pious’ Protestant-American faculty. See Elshakry 2013.

4 Antonius is identified in two photographs of EGC senior boarders taken in May and Summer 1948. See https://www.flickr.com/photos/cam37/2410646850/in/photolist-75GTDY-75D27D-4F2cjJ

5 Occupying the house, Haganah members confiscated discreet family letters, now held at the Israel State Archives. On the house’s highly symbolic history after 1948 see Hasson 2009, Dabbagh 2021.

6 Interestingly, neither was Jabra born in Palestine (rather in Adana, then part of the French Mandate of Cilicia). Nevertheless, he was an infant when his Syriac Orthodox family settled in Palestine in the early 1920s (Tamplin 2021).

7 See correspondence in the papers of Sir John and Lady Diana Richmond, Special Collections, University of Exeter, EUL MS 115/4/4. Sir John’s father, architect Ernest Tatham Richmond, was a colonial administrator in Mandatory Palestine. On the history of the Richmonds’ pro-Palestinian sympathies and activities see Downs 2023.

8 Antonius funded two important initiatives honouring her father: an annual memorial lecture at St Anthony’s College, Oxford (est. 1976); and a post-doctoral fellowship at Birzeit University, sponsoring scholars’ research trips to Oxford.

9 The narrator’s childhood acquaintance with Buthaina and Saqr in Jerusalem could explain, retrospectively, her journalistic attempt (in the earlier novel) to piece together Tareq’s history.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation Grant 933/17.

Notes on contributors

Eitan Bar-Yosef

Eitan Bar-Yosef is Associate Professor at the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Specialising in Postcolonial Studies in both British and Israeli contexts, he is the author of The Holy Land in English Culture, 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (2005) and A Villa in the Jungle: Africa in Israeli Culture (in Hebrew, 2013). His current research project explores representations of Mandatory Palestine in British literature and culture after 1948.

Eli Osheroff

Eli Osheroff is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His first monograph, which he is currently completing, explores the Arab political imagination before 1948 regarding the future of Jews in Palestine. Focusing on Palestinian and Arab intellectual history within the context of the Arab-Zionist encounter, his essays have appeared in the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, and other venues.