Anton Shammas
Introduction: Palestine: Writing on the Move

ANTON SHAMMAS

Palestine: Writing on the Move

This is a very special issue of Banipal, not only because we are celebrating, with its indefatigable and deeply committed editors, its fifteenth year of publication, but also because we are celebrating Palestine. Through a very special amalgam of young Palestinian voices, whose writing offers a new and refreshing literary map of that forsaken country, and whose almost unprecedented collective presence realizes a long over due literary dream, Banipal is reconfirming its longstanding promise: to be the most open, daring, democratic and attentive magazine of modern Arabic literature.

You may have come across some of the Palestinian poets and writers included in the special portfolio, either in English translation or in the Arabic original, and you may be missing some more familiar and more established names, as we do, but the main drive behind this Palestinian initiative was to open up the English gates for some new waves, some new and young and uncompromising voices from all regions of Palestine (totally ignoring what is euphemistically referred to as the Green Line). And they are relatively young and new not necessarily because of age but, rather, because of a fresh and ingenious look at Palestinian realities, which the older generation was probably unprepared to fathom. Theirs is a look that pays tribute to the older and perhaps legendary generation of writers and poets, while at the same time rejecting self-effacement and reaffirming an independent voice.

These are, all in all, writers and poets who no longer seem to be the passive captives of a nationalist utopia, nor of the grand Palestinian design. They are, for the most part, the more realistic and sober anti-heroes, full of doubts and questions and anxieties, fully aware of the limits and the limitations of Palestinian realities, and of their inalienable right to challenge and question and reconfigure and, above all, resist those realities in the most incisive critique that literature can offer. For their resistance is, undoubtedly, of a different brand. It’s a double-edged resistance, and unflinchingly so – targeted against the dark forces that made the Palestinians bereft of time and place, as well as against the borrowed time and place inside which the failed leadership, Palestinian and otherwise, has confined them since the infamous Oslo accords.

Nothing now is above criticism, or safely positioned inside the national decorum; nothing is sacred or untouchable; nothing is protected by old loyalties or from new desires and appetites. The PLO and other national institutions are no longer sacred cows, nor is the social fabric of Ramallah or the fabricated society of “Palestinians of the Inside”, let alone the unspeakable and hopeless misery of the hapless refugees, scattered time after time, always in transit between diasporas.

It’s writing on the move, capturing shifting and constantly changing realities, trying to make literary sense of an illusive and condemned world, granting local validity to a consciousness that, for too many generations, has been lacking a solid Palestinian locale.

The Writers in the feature:

Maya Abul Hayyat, Ala Hlehel, Dalia Taha, Ibtisam Azem, Eyad Barghuthy, Najwan Darwish, Tamara Naser, Ziad Khaddash, Einas Abdullah, Basem el-Nabres, Tarek al-Karmy, Aliaa Saqqa, Raji Bathish, Isra’a Kalash, Marwan Makhoul, Mahmoud Abu Hashhash, Haneen Naamneh, Reem Ghanayem, Yousef el Qedra, Majed Atef, Asma’a Azaizeh, Akram Musallam, Muheeb Barghuty, Marzuq Halabi.

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