The Other Version of the Story: National Identity in the Modern Palestinian Novel

This survey article explores the parameters of the Palestinian national identity as represented in the fictional world of a number of Palestinian narratives written in Arabic and other languages over the past hundred years. More specifically, the article traces the dramatic transition of identity formation from personal discomfiture with the breakdown of self-interested enterprises to mass awareness of the existential threat posed by the Zionist Movement Project1 against the national aspiration of the Palestinian people in Palestine as their only homeland. The threat in question was the consequence of the militant immigrant Jewish settlers who infiltrated into Palestine in successive waves of European Jewish immigrants in the wake of Sykes-Picot Agreement2 and Balfour Declaration. 3 Ever since the coming out of the first Arab Palestinian novel, al-Wareth, 4 the issue of identity has been steadily gaining a central place in the Palestinian narrative art, irrespective of the stance and angle of vision from which the story is told. As a form of art of fiction, the Palestinian novel says something about the loss or distortion of the Palestinian national identity through a deliberate, programmed erosion of individual and collective memories, including history and popular culture. This purposeful erosion has been consistently the target of the single-handed historical narrative provided by the official annals of Israel5 as an immigrant settlers’ colonial project replacing the state of Palestine on the world map. The Palestinian narratives under study bring out into the open the long-denied version of the truth by unfolding the hidden narrative account of the Palestinian national identity for the fullness of history.