Culture

Reflections on teaching literature in besieged Gaza (and envisioning an alternative future)

Studying (post)colonial literature shows how Palestinian state building has failed to achieve the liberatory promises of contemporary Palestinian nationalism.

I teach a course on the novel as a literary genre and my view of narrative is not just as something that I teach and study in a classroom, on the contrary, it has everything to do with real life including our resistance to settler-colonialism and apartheid in Palestine. This is a reflection of my belief in the rationale behind our profession as teachers of literature worldwide, in general, and in the (post)colonial world, in particular.

What we need for literature and literary criticism is a critique of institutional thought by offering an alternative.

Literature in most (post)colonial countries has been reduced to composition classes in which learning is represented by knowing only “great authors” and “great books”; the ultimate goal of such learning process is memorization, rather than possessing analytical and critical thinking. Unfortunately, we expect our students to memorize plot summaries and lists of themes and typical characters and so on and so forth. But what we need for literature and literary criticism is a critique of institutional thought by offering an alternative. And that can only happen if teachers and students set themselves free from the prison of “meaning!” Sadly enough, our ultimate goal has been to produce parrots through the teaching of English Literature. This is why we need to read literature differently and teach it as a critical activity.

Hence the question I have been contemplating: isn’t it time to include Palestinian literature into the body of research that became known as critical race theory, since most of it has been ideologically committed to the struggle against institutionalized racism?

This is precisely why I decide to include Ghassan Kanafani’s novels in my course. Reading his heart and mind-wrenching Returning to Haifa as a teenager I ended up believing that he was a challenging thinker who understood that the most profound truths tend to bewilder, breaking with inherited paradigms and so-called common sense, especially when it comes to nationalism(s). It is a typical Palestinian story of a couple from Haifa who were, together with more than 750,000 Palestinians, ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias in 1948. They leave their newly born baby behind and when Israel occupies the rest of historic Palestine, they decide to try their luck and look for their missing child. In a plot twist, they find out that he has become an Israeli officer in the occupation forces as he has been adopted by a holocaust survivor. 

The conversation taking place between the “returning” Palestinian father and his Israeli soldier son is not only a serious challenge to what is taken for granted, but also a form of radical thinking envisaging an alternative future. The ultimate question we are left with is about the best ways of fighting the Zionist matrix of power, namely settler-colonialism, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing.

And the reaction of my students has been beyond my wildest expectations. This the Facebook, Twitter and sitcoms generation who prefers summaries of texts, images, movies…etc. Hence the challenge.  My students are grandchildren of refugees who were ethnically cleansed in 1948; they are familiar with the stories of the Nakba and, therefore, have not forgotten, as Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion was hoping. Their questions center around the best practical ways of returning to Haifa (Palestine) and the possibilities of coexistence with Israeli Jews based on justice and equality. This, for most of them, means dismantling settler-colonialism and apartheid in Palestine all together. And this the major theme of Returning to Haifa     

The conclusion of our reading of this novel, amongst other texts from South Africa and other previously colonized countries [1], is that neither the kind of state building that emerged out of the Oslo accords, defended by both right-wing and left-wing politicians and pseudo-intellectuals, nor the version of a mini-Islamist state defended by Hamas in Gaza has truly fulfilled the liberatory promises of contemporary Palestinian nationalism. Rather, the future of Palestine is lying in a renewed and joint effort by Palestinians and the very few anti-Zionist Israelis to enact a more inclusive, sustainable, and equitable vision of a secular democratic state within a more fully emancipatory decolonization.

Notes

1. These texts include Jabulo Ndebel’s “Music of the Violin”, Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl, V.S Naipaul’s racist novel A Bend In the River, Nurrddin Farah’s “My Father, The English Man, and I,” Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things, and Nawal Sadaawi’s short stories, among others . . .

1 Comment
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

I’ve just finished reading the reflections. Being deprived from studying Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa with you is a big loss!

I enjoyed reading this piece, but there must be a re-read.

I feel sorry about myself being forced to be part of a corrupt teaching system as a student and as a teacher now. We are just bringing more parrots to this world, I still remember how shocked I was, as a freshman, seeing many of my colleagues at Al-Aqsa Uni escaping the short novels at Dr. Haidar’s classes and attending Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick , or Wordsworth’s Scarlet Letter, knowing that these are massive novels. However, after being blessed with Men in the Sun, everything was clear, they just wanted to be parrots and get the easy marks.

The teaching method through which I studied Men in the Sun (the first novel I read in my life) changed the way I perceive things, it happened 7 years ago, but still remember every single detail and by details here I mean the feelings, emotions and the suffering of the characters, us. I was shocked, how come I cry just reading a novel !! Am I that sensitive? Or is it the first time I truly read something thoughtfully? And many other questions were all over my mind that time.

I am not exaggerating saying that this applies to The Black Girl, My Father, The English Man and I, The Garden of Forking Paths, Death of Bed 12, I still have all the details and even the feelings of the characters.
You made us live the novels and stories, I don’t teach literature now, I teach World’s History and Translation, I always get notes form the school’s administration about me turning everything into Palestinian, all texts, tasks, history, colonization, apartheid, liberation, why they occupy, how students should perceive things and understand what goes around them…
I am always trying to use the advantage of having a lot of young Palestinian students, who are deprived from living in their homeland, to expand their consciousness about the cause.