Abstract
This article examines the process of identity formation as it pertains to two Palestinian American women in the United States, specifically in New York City. It considers the answer to a characteristically conversational question in the West: “What is this Palestine, anyway?” through a reading of Najla Said’s and Suheir Hammad’s memoirs, Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013) and Drops of This Story (New York: Writers & Readers, 1996), respectively. While the memoirs are set in socioeconomically different parts of New York City, both narrators chronicle their complicated negotiations around issues of belonging, integration, self-worth, and body shame as second-generation Palestinian women in the United States. The paper argues for the necessity to narrate such experiences, or else risk being outwritten by various Others. Given the reality of “Palestine” geographically and politically, the literary space can be powerful in locating and registering an imagined postcolonial Palestinian experience today. It can coherently articulate a broken Self, rehabilitate body politics, retrace violently digressive journeys, find meaning in a confounding kind of nationalism, and resist dominant and hostile ideologies. Indeed, the act of narration could not only heal the fraught relations between the Palestinian Self and various Others, but can allow for the envisioning of a postcolonial space from within.
Palestine Is an Idea, as Obscure as the Moon
What is this Palestine, anyway? One might think the creation of the State of Israel with the unbridled blessing of the US, its biggest supporter, is enough to indefinitely stifle the question. One might likewise think that the subsequent rendering of Palestine as a nowhere place geographically, politically, and postcoloniallyFootnote1 is more than enough to bury it altogether. But the question persists, perhaps not in modern maps, history books, news soundbites, or even mainstream popular consciousness, but peculiarly, “What is Palestine?” is a question that persists for Palestinians in the US diaspora who have never lived in Palestine—for that second generation who did not go through the physical experience of exile in 1948, whose parents managed to escape the refugee camps and alien statuses, yet failed to hide the marks of disaster etched on their faces; for those born and raised elsewhere, who have acculturated in host countries and acquired foreign passports; for those who seem to have disappeared in other landscapes, whose progress is all digression;Footnote2 and for those who cannot connect the dots from homeland to birthplace, to school, and to adulthood. Those Palestinians amount to seven million in the global diaspora today,Footnote3 yet are largely unaccounted for as Palestinians. To those, the homeland is the unknown in their gene pool, a blind spot in a rearview mirror, a place they cannot see, but could still sense. Palestine to those Palestinians is an idea, as obscure as the moon.
It is complicated enough being told to belong to a place which you have never lived in, to an idea. What is worse, however, is to have your adopted home be a place that denies this idea, a home that refuses to recognize your homeland. As Edward Said puts it in After the Last Sky, “Any Palestinian who wishes to understand the peculiar miseries of his or her situation today must reckon with an almost total official American opposition to us as a people, as a society, as a cause.”Footnote4 This opposition is what renders one on the other side of history. By default, to be Palestinian in the US is to be anti-Semitic, a victim of the archetypal victim, with no Holocaust to protect you with US compassion, or guilt. By default, you are a threat to Israeli security, to its occupation. You are a suspect and could very well be a terrorist, a troublemaker, backwards, and “the subject of an inferior race, of classic imperialism.”Footnote5 This is the starting point for those Palestinian Americans who wish to read themselves today. They must read themselves against another people’s perception, a perception that is dominant, hostile, and rendered official.
Indeed, the reading of the Palestinian American Self in the US is rife with ambiguities. As a complex identity, one is muddled in two systems of thought, beliefs, biases, cultures, and loyalties. The land of democracy, diversity, and refuge, which has given you a home, is also a land that contributes to denying those rights in your homeland. Truly, “it is a peculiar thing being Palestinian in the US,” writes Lama Abu-Odeh in Being Palestinian, for one becomes “the particular on whom the judgment of the universal is never bestowed.”Footnote6 It is hard to belong or integrate when you are that kind of anomaly. In US schools, you want to learn about your roots, but the textbooks do not mention you. At home, your parents speak in Arabic and you answer in English. You are “too American for the Palestinians and too Palestinian for the Americans.”Footnote7 You are stuck in an existential limbo where it is hard to rework or unsettle dominant ideologies and categorizations about your place in the United States and Palestine.Footnote8 You want to be visible, and you are, but for all the wrong reasons: you are a “racialized visible subject.”Footnote9 You are racialized until you give up on visibility altogether, self-sabotage, and opt to become invisible.
For a second-generation Palestinian anywhere, it is also easy to be invisible. Entire empires, nation-states, and systems of knowledge have actively faded you out, and “most obviously in the US”Footnote10 for that matter. The Palestinian image has been co-opted by many: Zionists and different Islamist groups, Israeli and Arab governments, foreign media, and international peace treaties. Erasure starts from the inside, in the “occupied Palestinian territories” and lands occupied in 1948, where Palestinian culture is continuously under attack, where institutions are ransacked, national television and radio stations are reduced to rubble, archives are stolen, streets are renamed, homes are razed, and olive trees are uprooted. Erasure then trickles down and proliferates, imposing canonical blinkers and political biases far and wide. As a result, Palestinian cultural and literary production must remain invisible, because otherwise, it would expose Israeli occupation, violence, and erasure, and inevitably reveal the historical, political, geographical, and socioeconomic contexts that continue to render it possible. Palestinians, as it were, cannot articulate the Self without responding to a particular historical moment, the Nakba, and that, in itself, is a problem, because the Nakba challenges the legitimacy of the State of Israel.
However, it is precisely because Palestinian literature is obscured and marginalized that Palestinians must make their presence known. As Said puts it, you must give yourself “permission to narrate.”Footnote11 The story must be told, to “register your presence in a scene,”Footnote12 to transport the reader into your own skin and its various tones, to moor yourself against impermanence, and to articulate this confounding kind of nationalism so you become “a coherent subject capable of meaningful resistance to received ideologies and of effective agency in the world.”Footnote13 You must narrate in English, too, to address the powers that be, to debunk their myths about your land and people, and in so doing, perhaps it is preferable if you are a woman, because there is no one subject more tauntingly invisible for the white man than a Palestinian woman. Of all the problems of Palestinian Americanism, she represents the most complex and multilayered.
As a Palestinian American woman, you must give yourself permission to narrate for many added reasons. Beyond the modern geopolitics dictating east and west dichotomies, you are also distorted and exoticized through a colonial lens of the Orient versus Occident. Beyond a forbidden history, there is also a forbidden body, mangled in shame, desire, and beauty; and beyond all this, you are also, often, restricted by various shades of patriarchy that prevent you from properly integrating within Palestinian communities and US society. Said had this to say about the Palestinian diaspora: you “stand out like bold print imposed on faint pencil traces. The fit between your body and your setting is not good. The angles are wrong. The lines are supposed to decorate a wall, but instead form an imperfectly assembled box, in which you have been put.”Footnote14 Nowhere is this more applicable than on the body of a Palestinian woman in the United States.
To unpack this imperfectly assembled box is thus your urgent task. You need not stand anywhere other than where you find yourself, two generations down the line. You need not bring coherence to the act of narration for it to be meaningful, for answers to be found. The box, that space from which you write, is what Tom Brocket calls “positioned belonging,”Footnote15 the third space you must create as a response vis-à-vis a number of “others” to implicitly articulate your own identity.Footnote16 It is an uncharted exploration, but within that unique, individual space is a universal truth that will shock and resonate in equal measure, and that is ultimately what makes a powerful story. In this vein, this article considers the answers of two Palestinian American women, Najla Said (born 1974) and Suheir Hammad (born 1973), to the question I pose: “What is this Palestine, anyway?,” as explored in their memoirs, Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013) and Drops of This Story (New York: Writers & Readers, 1996), respectively. In order to do so, it applies the theoretical frameworks discussed thus far to underpin the challenges inherent in the formation of Palestinian consciousness in the United States, and to contrast how these two authors create a third space in which they articulate their sense of Palestinian Self.
“Just How Powerful Honesty Can Be”
Let us begin with Najla Said’s memoir, Looking for Palestine. From the outset, we encounter a series of multiple identities, or what could be called the intersection of the “roots” and “routes,”Footnote17 informing the various tensions and sites of exclusion forming the identity of our author. “I am a Palestinian-Lebanese-American Christian woman,” she begins, “but I grew up as a Jew in New York City.”Footnote18 Already here, we encounter a dilemma with an enormous amount of complexity. First, the hyphen itself: a neat, tiny, straight line that initially seems to connect rather than segregate, and to show a linear progression from one identity to the next rather than the jagged fault lines of history. Beginning with the roots, we have the author’s father, Edward Said, one of the most recognized voices for Palestinians in the West who also happened to be born into US citizenship and thoroughly immersed in Western intellectualism. With no option to “return” to Palestine, Said would take up permanent residence in the United States. As a result, his daughter knew no home other than New York City, and growing up, Palestine was thus, to her, a foreign idea: “The Palestinian thing never made sense,” she writes, “It was this funny word that my dad used to describe himself and I didn’t know it referred to a place. It could’ve been a dietary practice, a blood type or a disease.”Footnote19
Now, let us examine the author’s Lebanese connection. Said’s mother is from Lebanon, a country which, due to its civil war between 1975 and 1990, became associated with “violent, machine-gun-wielding lunatics”Footnote20 in mainstream US consciousness. As a young Palestinian-Lebanese girl in the United States, Said was privy to conversations in school where children made comments about the war in Lebanon such as, “Israel is fighting in Lebanon to save everyone from the Palestinians.”Footnote21 Aware of her difference and struggling to integrate, coming from a Christian family was the one thing to which the young girl clung to in order to be accepted. “I clung joyfully to the fact that I was baptized Episcopalian,” she explains; “I dropped that piece of information into whatever conversation I could.”Footnote22 Indeed, for a Palestinian-Lebanese girl growing up in a predominantly Christian and Jewish Western country that commonly conflates Arab with Muslim, to be anything other than Muslim was, to her young mind, the only ticket to acceptance.
Next is the Jewish connection. New York City is home to more than 1.77 million Jews,Footnote23 the largest community outside Israel. Attending the Chapin School, one of the most exclusive girls-only private school in the city, Said tells of how she celebrated Hanukkah and belted out songs like, “Close Every Door to Me,” which includes the lyrics, “For we know we shall find/Our own peace of mind/for we have been promised/a land of our own.” By the time Said reached high school, she relays how she was more likely to say “Oy vey” and “I’m shvitzing” than dare utter a word of Arabic,”Footnote24 a particularly perplexing position for a Palestinian girl to be in.
These series of hyphens segregate and isolate the author along spatial, racial, and sexual lines. First, spatially: although, she attends one of the most exclusive schools in New York City’s Upper East Side, she does not fit in. Unlike her classmates, the rich, “real Americans,”Footnote25 she lives in the Upper West Side where every child had one parent from another country, or one parent who was a professor, like her father who taught literature at Columbia University. This is the first instance in which Said experiences difference, where she becomes visible in ways that delineate her from her community. “The West Side Bus was not big and fancy and did not belong to Chapin like others did,” she notes; “it was small and dirty and yellow,”Footnote26 while the Upper East Side bus seemed to shuttle girls who “exist in a different world where families sat at the breakfast table together and ate eggs and toast and played with their golden retrievers.”Footnote27 Even her bus driver detects this difference and, in turn, translates it in racial terms, taunting the young Palestinian Lebanese American girl every morning about her foreign name: “Frank was one of the many people who thought my name was pronounced ‘Nadj-uh-luh’ and unfortunately he decided ‘Nadj-uh-luh’ rhymed with ‘Snots-a-lot.’”Footnote28 The trials of bearing a foreign name burden Said throughout her school years and eventually exoticize and sexualize her once she hit puberty. “Hey, meNajla trois,” the boys would tease, “what’s up?”Footnote29 These endemic alienating practices prompted the young girl to incrementally suppress the Arab parts of her identity in fear of sticking out for all the wrong reasons, until she eventually chooses to become invisible altogether. “I gradually came to learn what an Arab actually was and consequently spent a good portion of the rest of my childhood avoiding the fact that I might actually be one.”Footnote30
In time, this silencing slowly starts to eat away at her body. According to Rachel N. Spears in “Let Me Tell You a Story,” the Greek word trauma, or wound, originally refers to an injury inflicted on the body,Footnote31 and that is precisely where it manifests most. We are told Chapin boasts among its alumnae such perfectly formed and well-groomed blue bloods, such as the legendary Jackie Kennedy, that the girls were regularly weighed in school and expected to live up to those all-American body measurements and beauty standards. Said, with a few pounds of “extra” weight, “a dark-haired rat in a sea of blondes,”Footnote32 eventually developed a sense of shame around her body difference. Time and time again, she would try to escape into a world of fantasy. Role playing with friends, she would disappear into the character of “a gorgeous, perfect blonde”Footnote33 princess.
That was before 9/11, before her body became embroiled in even more polarizing identity politics, making her difference impossible to escape and, more than ever, necessary to suppress. We are told, the term “Arab American” became official following the 9/11 attacks, making her visible in a whole set of new and flawed ways. Said reflects on how, overnight, she became a glaring “Other” in the only home she had ever known, an Episcopalian New Yorker associated with “Arab terrorists”Footnote34 just because she was Arab. With her worlds colliding so disconcertingly, she had no option but to recede in shame to a blind spot. “It got to the point,” she writes, “that whenever anyone would ask where my parents were from, what kind of name I had, … I would reply with one stock answer, ‘I don’t know.’”Footnote35 This disappearing act enmeshes her body as well. Needing to disappear, she begins to put starvation to practice, developing an acute case of anorexia nervosa along the way.
To demonstrate how issues of belonging and identity politics affect the body, the author chronicles her journey to the root of the problem, to the lost point of origin: to “Palestine.” Following her father’s diagnosis with leukemia in the early 1990s, he decided to travel to Gaza and Jerusalem and take his family with him for the very first time. There, Said describes herself in a blue crepe agnès b. skirt, “long” by her standards, above the knee, and brown suede Oxford shoes from Fratelli Rossetti, visiting an “enormous concentration camp,”Footnote36 feeling like a complete outsider and more like a privileged American girl. Here, she is too American to be Palestinian. She does not look like “them,” act like “them,” or speak like “them,” she recounts. If anything, “the Arabs spoke to (her) in Hebrew or Italian or Spanish.”Footnote37 In The Object of Memory, Susan Slyomovics reflects on such experiences of “return” and offers: “many discover that a return to Palestine brings a heart-breaking realization that they feel out of place there too, that feeling of belonging and home are not automatically forthcoming.”Footnote38 Amid all the suffering and poverty that Said describes, she recalls how she wanted so desperately to suffer, too. “I wanted to go away,” she writes, “I wanted to scream loudly, ‘why is all this happening?’ but I had no voice. My body had become my voice. Starvation more than ever would be my language.”Footnote39
But, as with all narrative arcs, the dark night of the soul is followed by a shift, one that makes change possible. At home, in private, Said identifies that moment as when her parents sat her down to discuss her anorexia, to question what might have caused it, and how they might have contributed to the problem. “I felt seen for the first time,”Footnote40 she writes. There were positive shifts in the public sphere as well. Said recounts images of the first Palestinian intifada on US television. “Young Arab boys throwing rocks at enormous Israeli army tanks became our sympathetic, albeit unintentional calling card,” she writes; “Palestinians, while still in many ways a mystery to most Americans, seemed to be tugging at our collective heartstrings in much the same way that the Chinese man in Tiananmen Square and the young Germans who rejoiced as the Berlin wall crumbled would.”Footnote41 The 1993 Oslo Accords were another shift for Said. They “transformed the PLO overnight from the world’s leading terror organization into a peaceful political actor.”Footnote42 Her father’s star was on the rise, too. He had already written Orientalism, a work that had begun to reshape “the way a whole generation of students thought about history and culture from Africa to the American West.”Footnote43 But he was now also appearing on television, becoming famous. To immigrants in the United States, Edward Said was the American dream personified: an Ivy Leaguer in a fine British suit, a brilliant academic star with an exquisitely eloquent voice that spoke very unpopular truths to power.
In feeling seen, in seeing her father author that third space vis-à-vis a number of Others to effect change, Said begins to unpack her imperfectly assembled box. She begins to flourish. She becomes president of the Arab Society of Princeton where she enrolls, and next, joins the Arab-American Theater Company with a project that asks: what comes to mind when you hear the word Arab? “When I began performing,” she writes, “I realized people were willing to listen, because it was simply my story, and precisely because it was sort of messy and embarrassing and atypical, yet universal in all its complexities.”Footnote44 It is then that she experiences the healing power of telling the story. Said relays how following a performance of the show, a young woman wrote a paper about the experience of seeing her where she confessed to her own eating disorder, and asked her parents and teachers for help. The show had similar effects on students in schools around New York City. One Palestinian mother reached out to thank Said for saving her daughter’s life. By reassembling what is in her box, in all its messiness, Said began to create a third space that is uniquely hers, and in this space, she began to understand the power of her story as one that might be specific in its details, yet universal in its themes. As a result, she started to build a circle of reciprocity and connectivity with others with similar experiences. The experience left Said with a revelation of “just how powerful honesty can be.”Footnote45
“I No Longer Excuse Myself for Being All and More”
Let us move to another Palestinian American memoir, Drops of This Story, by Suheir Hammad, and compare how issues of identity formation as a second-generation Palestinian woman in the US diaspora transpire here. Unlike Said, who was raised with relative privilege in Manhattan, Hammad grew up poor in Brooklyn. “I was raised around the delicious stinks of the ghetto,”Footnote46 she writes. Unlike Said, who was born into US citizenship to parents whose careers brought them relative acculturation, Hammad was born in a refugee camp in Jordan to traditional Arab parents who barely spoke English. And unlike the melting pot of the Upper West Side bubble of international academics in which Said grew up, Hammad grew up in a melting pot of Hispanics, Africans, Asians, and poor Whites with “fried plantains and smoked reefers … and smells of the East, the Caribbean and the South”Footnote47 permeating the air. Yet, just like Said, who grew up thinking Palestine was this funny word, Hammad, too, grew up not knowing much about Palestine. “My mother would try to get this Pakistani doctor to check me out, cause he was Muslim,” she writes; “I thought that Pakistan was Palestine, or at least close by, so I thought he was pretty cool.”Footnote48 Like Said, and all second-generation Palestinians in the diaspora, we are told she is sick of being “implicated in a history [she] did not participate in making and exhausted by battles [she] did not choose.”Footnote49 Herein lies the shared existential crisis, what Edward Said described as “the missing foundation of our existence, the lost ground of our origin, the broken link with our land and past.”Footnote50 As such, although the routes the narrators took to and through the United States are different, the root, the origin story, and the inherited trauma, are the same.
First, there is the intergenerational conflict between Hammad and her immigrant parents who remain unintegrated in United States; they have not been acculturated and remain very much focused on the idea of “return” as one that entails clinging to traditional ways that alienate them from their daughter. As Hammad writes, “this is when I tell you about my father’s heart of gold and mouth of bile. How my orphaned father—landless, motherless, nationless—can’t deal with New York and can’t deal with me.”Footnote51 We are told that there is so much hurt and fear in the house, that the father is physically abusive, and that the bottle is his only means of escape from his predicament in exile. “The only thing he can deal with is his bottle,” she writes, “and that relationship he cherishes. As though it was Hennessey and not me who came from his loins.”Footnote52 As a traditional Arab father, he expects to marry his daughter off as soon as she comes of age, to protect her from sin. “My father let me know I was going to get married our way, his way,” she writes; “how was I supposed to explain that this was the twentieth century and people didn’t do this in New York. In Palestine. Or in hell?”Footnote53 She was also going to be a doctor, whether she liked it or not; “end of discussion.”Footnote54 This is a far cry from the home Said inhabited, “a beautiful, comforting and loving world,”Footnote55 she writes, with parents who prized education, did their best to communicate openly, and, most importantly, embraced, rather than escaped from, their “predicament in exile.”
Next are the racial and spatial dimensions. As it turns out, it is racially more challenging to grow up surrounded by white privilege than to grow up poor among marginalized and oppressed minorities. While Said felt alone in trying to escape into the world of perfect blonde princesses in the Upper West Side, in the poorer parts of Brooklyn, everyone was an outsider aspiring to the American dream. Hammad explains:
Little kids wanted to grow up to be movie stars. Acting out famous movie scenes on the stoops of Brooklyn. Too bad all Latina girls had to play sluts. Asian boys had to be grocers. Black boys, thieves and pimps. Someone always had to play the Indian. Too bad the slut was always shot, the grocer always robbed, the thief always lynched and the red land was always stolen.Footnote56
Still, while Brooklyn seemingly provides a safety net against the prejudices of the outside world, Hammad must cross over and experience other sites of tension and exclusion in the United States. Going to Staten Island, she becomes aware of her skin color and temperament being different. She notes, “Staten Island let me know that any shades other than pale winter pink and temporary summer weren’t cool.”Footnote60 In school, we are told the teacher refuses to call her Palestinian. “It didn’t exist as an ethnicity,”Footnote61 she told her. In seventh grade, when she tells the teacher she had read Tolstoy, the teacher calls her a liar: “These teachers wouldn’t admit that a Black, Asian, Latino, or Arab kid would read the Western masters and understand them.”Footnote62 In these spaces, she does what Said tries to do as well: she tries to suppress her Palestinian parts in order to blend in. “When it became cool to eat hummus, falafel, tabouleh and pita bread,” she writes, “it was already too late. I had already wasted years trying to trade in my labneh sandwiches for peanut butter and jelly, which I didn’t even like.”Footnote63 Like Said, too, the need to fit in implicates and problematizes Hammad’s name. Suheir sounded like ‘Sue-her-hair,’Footnote64 as ridiculous a name as “Snots-a-lot,” or like “Sahara,” a form of mockery similar to “meNajla trois.”
This hostile foreignization implicates Hammad’s body as well. At home, her short, frizzy hair worn loose and free went against her father’s ideas of virtue. “It had to be braided into submission,”Footnote65 she writes. Outside the home, she is painfully aware that she does not meet the beauty standards necessary for acceptance in the United States. Instead of eyes “the color of swimming pools,”Footnote66 hers gave biting, dirty looks.Footnote67 Boys would colonize her body then dump her, come close with their “nasty breath” and tell her she was lucky to be with them, and that she “couldn’t tell their girlfriends.”Footnote68 This kind of systematic shaming led her to feel that her Arabness was her fault, like she could never feel beautiful without feeling dirty afterward, and that she did not deserve to be seen or loved for who she was. In an act of self-sabotage, Hammad chops her hair off, forsaking one of the main markers of female identity, social rank, and racial difference altogether. “I didn’t want the weight of it bending my neck down. Didn’t want to recognize myself,”Footnote69 she writes.
Like Said, Hammad also arrives at the conclusion that the last architecture of resistance available to her as a Palestinian American woman is to tell her story. And like Said, the turning point had to do with experiencing a key Palestinian moment of resistance: the first intifada. “Them young kids,” she writes, “inspired an entire generation to write poetry.”Footnote70 It is then that she recalls she stood up in class to let her teacher know she is Palestinian. Like Said, she also arrives at the conclusion that people will listen if she just brings her testimony forward. Comparing writers to prophets, she writes, “no matter what we think of one’s politics or personal business, if they do us right with their song, ‘kill us softly,’ we listen with intent, we listen to find ourselves in their voices.”Footnote71
Even though both writers were inspired to tell their stories by seminal moments in Palestinian resistance, the routes they took to arrive to this point vary significantly. While Said grew up with relative privilege, she also grew up among rich, “real Americans” against whom she constantly felt the need to measure up to—a fact that burdened her throughout her childhood and adolescence, until university. In Hammad’s case, we have a troubled household, but we also have an empowering community. The poorer areas of Brooklyn shielded Hammad from the prejudices of the outside world, and from the oppressive expectations of her home. Among those who are oppressed and marginalized, who are united in their Otherness, she found that her story fits; she found purpose and her third space to which others could relate and respond.
Interestingly, both writers turned to performance, but while Said turned to theater, Hammad turned to poetry, two artistic fields on one platform: the stage—a space that relies on immediate connection and receptivity vis-à-vis an audience. In December 2011, Hammad performed her poem, First Writing Since, on the HBO program Def Poetry Jam—a performance that, according to Dashiell Moore, “sheds valuable light on cultural discourse after 9/11 by working to challenge the reductive binaries inherent to the ways in which this discourse has often been framed.”Footnote72 While consciously engaging with a counterculture literary community, Hammad held a microphone, choosing to “amplify one voice over others,”Footnote73 her own. The imperfectly assembled box in which she had been placed was full of tools she acquired along the way: in her performance, her third space, she relied on gesture, a way “to disrupt the stable appearance of her as a performer,”Footnote74 as well as the audience’s preconceptions; she relied on code-switching, shifting between languages to locate and confront the sites of violence, and to rewrite her own identity; and she relied on hip-hop, a genre that is inherently transnational and that pays particular attention to the “break-beat” as a structural and metaphoric device,Footnote75 whether through “breaking” the rules of language, foregrounding its “brokenness,” or simply incorporating the “break-beat” rhythm.Footnote76 Hammad did not need to stand anywhere other than where she found herself, two generations down the line, nor did she need to bring coherence to the act of narration for it to be meaningful. It was meaningful in its brokenness, its transnationality, and in the connections it built with various Others.
Hammad’s foray into American public literary culture also drew her to film. In Salt of This Sea,Footnote77 she stars as Soraya, a young woman from Brooklyn who “returns” to Palestine, to the point of origin, to find roots. However, just like Said, the idea of return is not immediately forthcoming for Hammad. At the airport, Israeli occupation forces interrogate her aggressively, bringing up the messy and complicated issues of her identity in the process. First, she needs to enter as an American, if she is to enter at all, to hide who she really is. To then enter the occupied lands of 1948, to get to her grandparents’ home in Jaffa, she has to dangle a Star of David from the rearview mirror and speak English in order to pass the foreboding checkpoint. And to remain there, she must overstay her Israeli visa and become a fugitive, chased by occupation forces until her eventual arrest. At the end, her Israeli detainer asks, “Where are you from?” and she replies, “I’m from Palestine.” Footnote78 Confronted with her US passport and her refusal to use it as a ticket out of the situation, there is a moment of silence laden with all the complexities of her journey up to that point. Here, too, is a moment of reciprocity between the character and the film’s audience where the message is clear: Soraya opts to restore her voice and agency despite the consequences—an act of self-sabotage that leads to a radical form of freedom.
So, What Is This Palestine, Anyway?
Let us end with the beginning and ask again: so, what is this Palestine, anyway? In reading two memoirs, two testimonials side by side, this article has tried to answer this question, to locate and define Palestine as it plays out in the lives of two second-generation Palestinian women in New York City. A few conclusions emerge: Palestine is an absence that is ever so present. More than seventy-five years after the Nakba, it remains “a generational site, even if lost.”Footnote79 It is a “return” of an abstract nature, one that restores voice and agency, yet reclaims no land. While the two authors exist on different sides of the socioeconomic spectrum, they both suffer from the same origin trauma, the same issues of belonging, integration, self-worth, self-blame, and body shame as women in a diaspora setting dominated by the patriarchy. They are both by-products of a Palestine that is receding. As Edward Said puts it, “The further we get from the Palestine of our past, the more precarious our status, the more disrupted our being, the more intermittent our presence.”Footnote80
However, both memoirs show us that the act of narration can help in conceiving the postcolonial space that we Palestinians so keenly need, despite geographical erasure and political manipulation, and despite dominant and hostile narratives. The act of narration can create the postcolonial third space by defining the present for itself, instead of allowing others to define it; by embracing what is uniquely ours instead of trying to squeeze our bodies into settings of submission that simply do not fit; by realizing that self-determination needs a voice, not a “nation-state”; and by building communities that thrive on storytelling, connection, and reciprocity. The idealized postcolonial third space is made up of hope, recreated time and time again through an act of popular will.
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Notes on contributors
Mai Serhan
Mai Serhan is a writer, editor, and translator. Her forthcoming memoir, Return Is a Thing of Amber, won the Narratively Spring Memoir Prize 2022. She has a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Oxford. For more about her work, visit www.maiserhan.com.
Notes
1 Patrick Williams and Anna Ball, “Where is Palestine?” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50, no. 2 (2014): 127–33, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2014.883164.
2 Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 20.
3 Ola Awad, “Brief Report on the Population of Palestine at the End of 2021,” Arab Center Washington DC, January 3, 2022, https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/brief-report-on-the-population-of-palestine-at-the-end-of-2021/.
4 Said, After the Last Sky, 133.
5 Said, After the Last Sky, 130.
6 Lama Abu-Odeh, “Disrupting the Peace of Others,” in Being Palestinian: Personal Reflections on Palestinian Identity in the Diaspora, ed. Suleiman Yasir (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 34–36.
7 Esmat Zaidan, “Palestinian Diaspora in Transnational Worlds: Intergenerational Differences in Negotiating Identity, Belonging and Home” (working paper, Birzeit University, 2012), https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2009267.
8 Tom Brocket, “From ‘In-Betweenness’ to ‘Positioned Belongings’: Second-Generation Palestinian-Americans Negotiate the Tensions of Assimilation and Transnationalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 43, no. 16 (2020): 135–54, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2018.1544651.
9 Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber, eds., Race and Arab Americans before and after 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008).
10 Helga Tawil-Souri, “The Necessary Politics of Palestinian Cultural Studies,” in Arab Cultural Studies: Mapping the Field, ed. Tarik Sabry (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 137–61.
11 Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate,” JPS 13, no. 3 (1984): 27–48, https://doi.org/10.2307/2536688.
12 Said, After the Last Sky, 48.
13 Suzette A. Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life Writing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), xix, as quoted in Rachel N. Spear, “‘Let Me Tell You a Story’: On Teaching Trauma Narratives, Writing, and Healing,” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 14, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 53–79, https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2348911 (emphasis added by Spear).
14 Said, After the Last Sky, 2.
15 Brocket, “From ‘In-Betweenness’ to ‘Positioned Belongings.’”
16 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 396.
17 Helena Lindholm Schulz and Juliane Hammer, The Palestinian Diaspora: Formation of Identities and Politics of Homeland (London: Routledge, 2003), 183.
18 Najla Said, Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013), 1.
19 Said, Looking for Palestine, 51.
20 Said, Looking for Palestine, 52.
21 Said, Looking for Palestine, 87.
22 Said, Looking for Palestine, 53.
23 “Jewish Population by State,” World Population Review, last modified March 2023, https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/jewish-population-by-state.
24 Said, Looking for Palestine, 127.
25 Said, Looking for Palestine, 29.
26 Said, Looking for Palestine, 43.
27 Said, Looking for Palestine, 47.
28 Said, Looking for Palestine, 46.
29 Said, Looking for Palestine, 132.
30 Said, Looking for Palestine, 52.
31 Spear, “‘Let Me Tell You a Story.’”
32 Said, Looking for Palestine, 2.
33 Said, Looking for Palestine, 29.
34 Said, Looking for Palestine, 214.
35 Said, Looking for Palestine, 103.
36 Said, Looking for Palestine, 168.
37 Said, Looking for Palestine, 160.
38 Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jews Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).
39 Said, Looking for Palestine, 174.
40 Said, Looking for Palestine, 187.
41 Said, Looking for Palestine, 134.
42 Eytan Gilboa, “Americans’ Shifting Views on the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict,” Middle East Quarterly 28, no. 4 (Fall 2021): 3, https://www.meforum.org/62604/americans-views-on-the-palestinian-israeli-conflict.
43 Robert Marquand, “Conversations with Outstanding Americans: Edward Said,” Christian Science Monitor, May 27, 1997, https://www.csmonitor.com/1997/0527/052797.feat.feat.1.html.
44 Said, Looking for Palestine, 254.
45 Said, Looking for Palestine, 256.
46 Suheir Hammad, Drops of This Story (New York: Writers & Readers, 1996), 6.
47 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 6.
48 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 17.
49 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 69.
50 Said, After the Last Sky, 26.
51 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 5.
52 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 5.
53 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 36.
54 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 83.
55 Said, Looking for Palestine, 3.
56 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 87.
57 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 49.
58 Hammad, Drops of This Story, Author’s Note, no page number.
59 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 86.
60 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 73.
61 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 50.
62 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 50.
63 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 51.
64 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 79.
65 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 14.
66 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 53.
67 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 18.
68 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 11.
69 Hammad, Drops of This Story, Forward, no page number.
70 Hammad, Drops of This Story, 49.
71 Hammad, Drops of This Story, Forward, no page number.
72 Dashiell Moore, “‘Breaking Language’: Performance and Community in Suheir Hammad’s Poetry,” Journal for Postcolonial Writing 56 no.1 (2020): 111, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2019.1702083.
73 Moore, “‘Breaking Language,’” 117. The microphone is a key tool for creating a third space, seeing that it allows her to speak up over everyone in the audience and articulate her own experience.
74 Susan B. A. Somers-Willett, “From Slam to Def Poetry Jam: Spoken Word Poetry and Its Counterpublics,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 10, nos. 3–4 (2014): 1–2, http://liminalities.net/10-3/spoken.pdf.
75 Moore, “‘Breaking Language,’” 110.
76 Moore, “‘Breaking Language,’” 110.
77 Salt of This Sea, directed by Annemarie Jacir (Paris: Pyramide Distribution, 2008), https://www.netflix.com/watch/70117041?source=35.
78 Jacir, Salt of This Sea.
79 Nina Fischer, “Remembering/Imagining Palestine from Afar: The (Lost) Homeland in Contemporary Palestinian Diaspora Literature,” in Spiritual Homelands: The Cultural Experience of Exile, Place and Displacement among Jews and Others, ed. Asher D. Biemann, Richard I. Cohen, and Sarah E. Wobick-Segev (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 53.
80 Said, After the Last Sky, 34.