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...origin distributed by American publishers, pose meaningful questions about translation and categorization. More importantly, they are emblematic of a recent trend in Palestinian literature: writing rooted in diasporic countries but focused in theme and content on Palestine. This essay, which explores how these themes and settings function in Scattered Like Seeds and On the Hills of God, highlights ways in which contemporary Palestinian literature embodies the reality of today's Palestinian Diaspora.
Since 1967, most critics have theorized the existence of three "branches" of Palestinian literature, namely works produced inside Israel, in the occupied territories, and in exile throughout the Middle East. After a brief analysis of each book, I will appraise the possibility of incorporating a fourth branch into discussion: Anglophone works, particularly those written in the United States. This move will help us reassess both Palestinian and Arab American literatures by complicating categorizations and thereby urging critics to interrogate more carefully the social conditions that inspire literary developments.
Although diasporic literatures are common in today's world, the phenomenon is generally more manifest among Palestinians, not only because their diaspora was largely involuntary and remains extensive, but also because of a continual (and ardent) emphasis on the motherland. Anglophone Palestinian literature has blossomed since the 1980s, and has seen the novel and memoir compete with poetry and historiography in the drive to render Palestine a living reality. Palestinian authors have penned English work in Ireland, England, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Hundreds have also published in English in the United States. Palestinian prose, therefore, has gone global even while remaining at home.
I have not chosen to examine Scattered Like Seeds and On the Hills of God because of their poetic features, nor am I concerned exclusively with textual aesthetics. Better work exists in these contexts. (Certainly Jordanian-Palestinian-American Diana Abu-Jaber is the most artistically refined of the Palestinians writing fiction in English.) I will instead focus on what I consider to be their greatest strengths: the manner in which Dallal and Fawal typify the relationship of Palestinian exiles and their descendants with their diasporic countries (in this case the United States) and with Palestine. These relationships are crucial to the realities Palestinian Americans face in the twenty-first century.
SCATTERED LIKE SEEDS
"Like most first novels," John B. Harcourt observes in the introduction, "some parts of [Scattered Like Seeds] are unabashedly autobiographical" (xii). This quality renders the novel relevant to American readers of Palestinian origin, and, to a lesser degree, all Americans concerned with ameliorating the poor living conditions in refugee camps and the occupied territories. To this end, Dallal negotiates the most pressing question facing diasporic Palestinians: how to remain committed to their brethren in the Middle East while forging a satisfactory life in the Western hemisphere. Harcourt notes that "[t]he move to the United States and the decades of Americanization [in the novel] follow the broad outlines of Shaw's career" (xii). By extension, it also parallels in broad outlines the lives of most Americans with Palestinian blood.
The plot of Scattered Like Seeds heavily emphasizes sacrifice, acculturation, and devotion. The chief protagonist, Thafer Allam, the son of Ayoub, a famed leader of the 1936-39 rebellion, emigrated to upstate New York as a young man in the early fifties. He weds an Irish American, Mary Pat Connally, a remembered character for most of the story, and fathers four children, Colleen (his stepdaughter), Andrew, Katherine, and Sean, who are raised without emphasis on their Arab background. They initially know little about their deceased grandfather's heroic status among Palestinians, or about their living grandmother, Jihan, a refugee in Tulkarm.
Thafer, a lawyer, is introverted about his family's past, and, like nearly all Arab immigrants of the fifties and sixties, works to make sure his family has a life free of conflict in the United States by downplaying revolutionary attitudes and assimilating into American life. The children nevertheless detect an attachment to Palestine and the Palestinians, but have no means to articulate their feelings. When teachers, students, and journalists make negative comments about Arabs, Thafer's kids recoil with confusion and discomfort; at times they internalize the Orientalist images to which they are constantly exposed.
Thafer undergoes a catharsis with the outbreak of the 1967 War, when, tellingly, the novel begins. Trapped in upstate New York, he takes off time from work in order to cope with the pain of defeat. All of his suppressed feelings about Palestine surface, and he finds himself compelled to some sort of action. Shortly thereafter, he is offered a job in Kuwait as chief legal counsel to the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC). He accepts the position because he feels he can help his people by moving to Kuwait and employing his professional training. Dallal's choice of the 1967 War to highlight this heightened awareness is salient. This is the year generally cited by historians as the point when Arab Americans abandoned their assimilationist attitudes and undertook various forms of political action.
After Thafer relocates to Kuwait, one year after Mary Pat's death in 1971, the novel's tone changes considerably. The largely provincial scenes to which readers were...
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