'A person in the form of a specter searching': Darwish and the Aesthetics of Palestinian Spatiality

• In Event: Out of Place: Arab and Arabic Narratives Between Empires

Abstract

This paper begins to elucidate a distinct literary aesthetic of Palestinian spatiality, which has been illustrated most markedly in the works of the great poet Mahmoud Darwish but is increasingly present in works by diasporic Palestinians who are often both writing from and depicting empire. Postcolonial scholars like Achille Mbembe have accurately described the relationship between coloniality and space; but whereas Mbembe’s analysis of spatialization relied on physical demarcations of the colonial world–occupation, borders, territorialization–I have argued elsewhere that Palestinians outside the Occupied Territories illuminate the role of space in a colonial modernity that is increasingly characterized by global mobility and transnational movement: it is the colonized’s dispossessed relationship to space and place that has become a crucial operative of coloniality. In this paper I will look to Darwish’s Exile to establish my terming of an aesthetic of Palestinian spatiality, which I consequently attend to as an utmost site of colonial oppression. This analysis relies on conjunctures between a Lefebvrian rendering of Thirdspace and assertions offered by a new spatial literary studies[1] that is committed to the representation of space and place. In its frequent narration by an exiled speaker, Darwish’s poetry offers the representational metaphor in which I define a Palestinian spatiality implicated by coloniality beyond occupational borders. Taking Darwish’s representation of a dispossessed Palestinian spatiality as my theoretical framework through which to examine literature of diasporic Palestinian authors writing from and about colonial empires–Salt Houses by Halal Alyan, for one–I hope to simultaneously affirm the presence of a distinct aesthetic of Palestinian spatiality; and, in engaging the overarching questions of this conference, consider how the dispossession represented in Palestinian spatiality is confounded by its physical proximity to empire.

[1] Tally Jr., Robert T., editor. Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination. Routledge, 2021.

Author

• Yasmeen B Ayoub, Loyola University Chicago