LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

1The Production of Locality in the OralPalestinian Poetry DuelNadia YaqubAt the end of his introduction to Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha regretsthat he has not included the voices of those who, and I quote, ‘have not yetfound their nation: amongst them the Palestinians.’ Their voices, he goes on tosay, ‘remind us of important questions: When did we become “a people”? Whendid we stop being one? Or are we in the process of becoming one? What do thesebig questions have to do with our intimate relationships with each other andwith others?’ (1990: 7)These questions are, of course, too broad to be addressed in the present article,especially for Palestinians whose varied experience, as a minority group whetherin Israel, under occupation or in diaspora, means that any serious treatment oftheir national identity will be especially complex. Moreover, individual Palestinians,like other people, belong to different groups, enjoy diverse relationshipswith various ethnic, cultural and political entities, and at different times andplaces may express and, indeed, feel differently vis-à-vis their Palestinian-ness.We cannot hope, then, to answer Bhabha’s questions for Palestinians (Whendid they become ‘a people’? When did they stop being one? Are they in theprocess of becoming one, and so on) in any definitive or complete way. Rather,to understand the ‘people-hood’ of Palestinians generally we must begin byconsidering how that notion is engendered locally, among discrete groups ofPalestinians. Towards this end, I will explore how some Palestinians use atraditional poetic genre, namely the oral Palestinian poetry duel, continually tocreate and maintain their Palestinian-ness and to define it, at least amongthemselves, on their own terms.Intimately related to the question of national identity is that of locality, theprocess of locating the subject, a concept discussed at length by ArjunAppadurai in Modernity at Large (1996). Because he is concerned with globalcultural flows and the production of locality on the part of the dispossessed, thede-territorialised and the transient, he is careful to distinguish between locationin a given place which may or may not be coincidental with locality, but whichis not a necessary component of it, and a relationship with place which is a vitalelement of locality (1996: 199). People may define themselves in relation toplaces in which they do not reside, have never resided, and may never reside.— 16 —www.taq.ir