LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

12Irony and the Poetics of Palestinian ExileIbrahim MuhawiNo, I do not have an exileTo say that I have a homeland– Mahmoud Darwish 1The subject of this study was inspired by the seemingly unanswerable questionasked by a colleague at a conference. ‘Where is Palestine, then?’ she wanted toknow. The more thought I gave it, the more I realised Palestine has remained aquestion whose answer was like the Hindu meditational practice called ‘neti,neti’. Whenever a thought comes into the mind, you negate it by saying toyourself ‘neti, neti’, meaning ‘not this, not this’. Thus Palestine is not the WestBank, and it is not Gaza; and it is not the West Bank and Gaza combined. It isnot the Palestinian Authority; and it is not Israel. It is not even historicPalestine except as a dream. Palestine exists in exile as a signifier whose signifieddoes not match its shape or magnitude. To a large extent then, this nation existsin the dream of signification projected on it by its members because thehistorical process that would create a correspondence between signifier andsignified seems to be endlessly postponed. Like the Buddhist Self, it is somethingthat is, and is not; it is both present and absent. More than anything else, it isperhaps a metaphysical condition resembling Hamlet’s dilemma. ‘Nothing is leftfor us,’ says Mahmoud Darwish, ‘except the weapon of madness [al-junun]. Tobe, or not to be. To be, or to be. Not to be, or not to be. Nothing is left exceptmadness’ (1995: 118). The difference is that Hamlet faced only the firstquestion, while the Palestinians, as we shall see in the course of this chapter, arefaced with all possible combinations of being and not being. Homeland is notthis, or that; not the negation of this, or that; or, ultimately, the negation of thatnegation – as we can see from the epigraph to this chapter.The Palestinian people entered European history through the event that ledto the establishment of the state of Israel on the land of Palestine in 1948. Thisact of negation, referred to by the Palestinians as the nakba (catastrophe), resultedin their fragmentation, dispersal and exile. The consciousness of exile is anintense awareness of absence, of being present where one does not necessarilywant to be. Edward Said encapsulates this state in the ironic double-entendre ofhis autobiography’s title, Out of Place. An exile is a present-absent, or an absent-— 31 —www.taq.ir