The parallels between the historical experiences of dispossession
and colonization of the Palestinian and Native American peoples,
and the similarities in the discourses of land and belonging of the
two peoples, proved strong enough to once move Palestinian poet
Mahmoud Darwish to write the poem "Speech of the Red Indian."
Darwish, assuming the voice of a Native American faced with the
brutal reality of violent conquest, yokes the Native Americans and
Palestinians together, with the poem's narrator urging a
Columbus-type figure, "Then go back, stranger/Search for India once
more!"1 The plea is a plaintive and hopeless desire for the return
of an irrecoverable past, indicative of much of the
post-dispossession literature of both Palestinians and Native
Americans. Darwish's eloquent rendition of the Native American
voice, as a comparison to the Palestinian narrative, is just one
example of contemporary Palestinian literature reaching for an
understanding of the exile's relationship with the land through
metaphor or analogy.
There is relatively little critical material contrasting the
relevant texts of these two communities, despite there being
fascinating comparisons to be made between contemporary Palestinian
and Native American literary efforts to articulate and grapple with
the collective trauma experienced by their peoples. Evaluating two
peoples in different cultural contexts who share a passion for the
land and comparable experiences of dispossession, offers fresh
insights as to what "moves" are required to transform displacement
and exile into literature, and how these "moves" differ between
cultures. By observing the points of convergence and divergence in
Native American and Palestinian literature, as they express both a
relationship to the land and the experience of dispossession, one
can then see how self-conceptualization and the relationship
between self and the community affects the way land and exile are
represented in literature.
Relationship with the Land - Material versus Spiritual
Ghassan Kanafani's short story, Men in the Sun, explores the plight
of the displaced Palestinian through the central metaphor of the
desert - a place loaded with practical and symbolic significance
for the Palestinian refugee. The beginning of the story introduces
the reader to one of the protagonists, Abu Qais, and he is
immediately represented as intimately connected with the
earth:
Abu Qais rested on the damp ground, and the earth began to throb
under him with tired heartbeats, which trembled through the grains
of sand and penetrated the cells of his body.2
As the earth and his body throb in unison, Abu Qais seems to become
one with the earth, his very being an extension of the land. That
the heartbeats are "tired" introduces a note of melancholy into the
depiction, while "trembled" and "penetrated" are words of delicacy
that also carry sexual connotations. This representation of the
soil as an extension of the body bears strong similarities with the
Native American idea of the land-human relationship, though some
Native Americans take the idea of the human body as a continuous
part of the land even further: "The mountains and hills, that you
see, are your backbone and the gullies and the creeks, which are
between the hills and mountains, are your heart veins."3
The spiritual dimension of the articulation of the relationship
with the land marks the key difference between the Native Americans
and Palestinians, ideas of the soil also shaped by the fact that
the Native Americans see their ancestors as having "returned" to
the land. By contrast, in Kanafani's story, we find that for the
Palestinian, the relationship with the soil, while special, is not
primarily spiritual but sensual and material. Lying on the ground,
Abu Qais' mind recalls the time when he was still on his own land,
and made a similar comment to his neighbor "with whom he shared the
field in the land he left ten years ago." Here it seems that the
land is significant because of its integral role in Palestinian
society, a parochialism expressed in a Mourid Barghouti poem: "I,
the one leaping through the ages toward particulars/the address of
a house, a roof, a guest, a neighbor to be visited,/a stroll in
streets which my footsteps long for,/a friend's knock at the door,
not the night police."4 The society of the Palestinians, divided
broadly speaking between rural farming and town, lends their
understanding of the land a more domesticated and quotidian tone,
where the economic life of the community is intertwined with a
husbandry of the land.
Personalizing the Political
The differences in the responses to dispossession between Native
Americans and Palestinians most clearly emerge when one examines
the techniques used to produce literature out of dispossession. A
typical example of this is rendering the physical, or political,
estrangement a personal "exile," or alternatively, expressing the
communal trauma in the terms of an individual's internal
existential conflict. Mahmoud Darwish, more than most, perhaps, has
eloquently expressed the Palestinian experience of dispossession,
while investing "Palestine" with its heavy metaphorical symbolism.
Since Palestine as a modern nation-state is as yet unrealized, in
the hands of Darwish, the name becomes a cipher for existential
ruminations on the nature of both physical exile, and a more
characteristically modernist personal "exile" in the world. This is
part of a more general trend, in the years following on from
another devastating Israeli military victory in 1967, to
personalize the political, and clothe it in metaphor. Strong
affinities emerge between the fragmented individual typical of the
Palestinian diaspora, and literary modernism, an aesthetic that, as
a result, often becomes the preferred form for Palestinian writing
about land and belonging.
In one of his later poems, 'Who Am I, without Exile?' it is as if
Darwish has had a moment to stand back and look at his work and
life, and realizes the intensity of the tie between his own
identity and his status as an exile. From initially being a
practical circumstance, the question of his exile from Palestine
has become inseparable with the question of his personal identity:
he is first and foremost, a "stranger."5 With his cartographic and
historical imagination, Darwish audaciously appropriates the exilic
lexicon of the Scriptures for the Palestinian diaspora,
highlighting the curious mirror image of the once-exile becoming
the instrument of another people's dispossession. Darwish seems
gripped by a despair and hopelessness that leads him to repeat
"Nothing" like a mantra:
Nothing brings me back from this distance to the oasis: neither war
nor peace. Nothing grants me entry into the gospels. Nothing.
Darwish can never now "undo" the distance created. This is because
the exile is now a state of mind, and even in the event of a
"peace" emerging, the separation between the poet and his homeland
over the years has created an unbridgeable gap. The nostalgia
expressed in late twentieth-century Palestinian literature is all
the more terrible for its being not only spatial, but temporal -
there is no going back to a pre-Nakba Palestine. In a thoughtful
essay reflecting on exile, Edward Said writes: "Exile is strangely
compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the
unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place,
between the self and its true home."6
Different Responses to Dispossession
Cultural differences between the Native Americans and Palestinians
inform and shape the literary responses to the tragedies these
communities experience. Most notably, the two peoples' differing
understanding of the relationship between self-conceptualization
and community has a defining influence on the possibility for
personal regeneration, as in the case of the hero of Leslie Marmon
Silko's novel Ceremony. In Ceremony, the community's struggles are
compressed into the tribulations of a particular individual, an
allegorical approach that helps facilitate the exploration of
larger issues in a less nakedly polemical or instructive mode of
personal narrative. This move can also make the text accessible to
a wider audience, who initially engage with the literature on the
level of the protagonist's narrative, and are then open to the more
social or political dimensions of the story. For Tayo, struggling
to come to terms both with his time spent in Japanese captivity
during World War II and his role in U.S. society, the connection
between individual and the wider Native American community,
enforced by spirituality and ritual, is fundamental to his own
recovery. The Palestinians' collective awareness has been
irrevocably molded by the experience of dispossession and
dispersal, while for the Native Americans similar practical
circumstances have shaped a collective identity that maintains an
organic, spiritual character as its crucial resource for
resistance, a character that existed long before the arrival of the
settlers.
Many Native Americans are still physically on their ancestral
lands, and therefore, coupled with their spiritual relationship
with the earth, are still in a position whereby they can harness
the physical soil in a process of personal restoration or
regeneration, and the associated literature. The Palestinian in
exile, however, is not on the land anymore, and therefore this
particular avenue of personal regeneration is closed. This means
s/he is compelled to seek an internalization of the exile and a
merging of the personal and the political, a subjectivity that
comes across in the poetry of Darwish and his peers. The
Palestinian diaspora's self-consciousness has evolved differently
to the Native American sense of collective identity, with the
former generally more fragmented, while the latter harks back to a
lost spiritual wholeness. The Native American
self-conceptualization tends to have a more organic and spiritual
character, while at the same time, a trend amongst many Native
American novelists, is to convey a communal identity through a
subjective personal story of self-discovery.
In contrast to the solidity afforded the Native American by this
group identity, exile has given the Palestinian Darwish a profound
sense of insubstantial existence, left with "butterflies of dream,"
and "dust, nor fire" able to provide a sense of reality. So
far-reaching in its effects, this transience has meant that they
[the exiles] "have become weightless,/as light as our dwellings in
distant winds." Darwish describes their plight thus: "We have both
been freed from the gravity of the land of identity."7 While a
Western postmodern critical sensibility would pick up a positive
intonation in such a line, for a Palestinian, to be "freed" from
that kind of relationship with the land is equivalent to unmooring
a ship, or perhaps more pertinently, cutting off a tree at the
roots. The logical culmination of this all-consuming embrace of
exile is expressed in the final stanza of Darwish's poem: "Nothing
is left of me except you./Nothing is left of you except me." It is
a bleak vision, and stands apart from the conclusions of Native
American novels such as Ceremony, where individual regeneration,
but not collective restoration, has been facilitated by the
spiritual and communal characteristics of the remaining
population.
Why Literature?
Palestinian and Native American literatures stand apart form other
post-colonial literature engaging with questions of identity and
exile, as they do not fit comfortably into contemporary definitions
of the postcolonial canon. This is because neither group has
enjoyed a decolonization process in their homeland, and therefore
exists in a unique space in which to examine the dynamic between
literature and collective tragedy. In the face of such physical and
political obstacles to individual and communal well-being and
identity, why do the Native Americans and Palestinians turn to
literature? Firstly, it is something that can be possessed by the
dispossessed. Land can be taken, but the mind's defenses remain
unbreached. Secondly, literature offers the chance to explore
issues of identity and self-regeneration, a luxury not afforded by
the harsh realities of the particular sociopolitical circumstances.
Linked through their common love and identification with the soil
of their land, the Native Americans and Palestinians have also had
this relationship violently ruptured, provoking collective and
individual crises explored in the literature considered in ways
that bring these issues to a wider audience.
1. Darwish, The Adam of Two Edens, p.132.
2. Ghassan Kanafani, "Men in the Sun," in Men in the Sun and Other
Palestinian Stories (Covent Garden, 1999) pp.21-74 (p.21).
3. Angie Debo, A History of the Indians in the United States
(London, 2003) p.2.
4. Mourid Barghouti, translated by Lena Jayyusi and W. S. Merwin,
"I Run toward You…I Run with You," in Anthology of Modern
Palestinian Literature, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (New York, 1992)
p.130.
5. Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, p.113.
6. Edward Said, "Reflections on Exile," in Reflections on Exile and
Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London, 2000) pp.173-186
(p.173).
7. Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, p.114.
