Let us now move to consider the margins (one can just as well say the silent, silenced center). (gayatri spivak, “can the subaltern speak ?” 78) when i first read mourid barghouti’s two memoirs, i saw ramallah and i was born there, i was born here, i did not think that it would lead to a long-term research project. at the time, i was immersed in algerian literature (assia djebar) and the study of cultural memory as an alternative means to contest historical hegemony. upon reading the memoirs, i was impressed by the similarity in the ethical/aesthetical representation of the (post)colonial subject, as one that conducts its play at the margins; a decentred, abstracted, and alienated subject whose identity is already parenthetical and fragmented. a further coincidence occurs when the marginal is conflated with the diasporic and the exilic; when the writer of the margins is a writer on the margin. i found out that my project of writing the narrative, political, and cultural forms of the margins had, necessarily, to expand so as to include palestinian literature and place it in a traceable lineage that conflates the modern age history of tragedies (occupation and colonialism) with the conception of marginalized postcolonial subjectivities. i assume rather than argue that, in point of historical fact, the major function of postcolonial literature came to be the reconfiguration of past stories and histories and the formation of new historicities across the word. this book is the fruit of these ruminations.i have been already exposed to much (biased) first-world media coverage of the israeli-palestinian conflict, with its tendency to convenient, universalizing approaches to palestinians as always on the offence and israelis as always on the defense. reading the memoirs not only turned what was initially abstract knowledge into concrete life stories, but also exposed the banality and ease of the western hegemonic rhetoric. the palestinian catastrophe became increasingly palpable to me through the writer’s stories, incidents, and memories. the new understanding, i, the third-world intellectual, gained was not only one of knowledge; it was of the necessity of commitment. for me, to write about the palestinian trauma of occupation is not just to highlight some scholarly contribution; it is also a moral imperative of acknowledgement and redemption. the notion that literary studies should be a force for change is nothing new. writing has a decisive role in defending the rights of those to whom rights have been denied, and mine particularly is ethical in that it is committed to the cause of the “margins”. after all, the value of research is to be judged by its social utility, and mine, hopefully (and ideally), strives towards social change. i wish my book to be read as a window to ponder palestinian diaspora politics of identity through gauging the complexity of their poetics of homeland. i discuss how mourid barghouti’s two memoirs intervene in the diaspora discourse surrounding the issue of home return and belonging. the two narratives resist classical conceptualizations of home as the ultimate backdrop of identity. instead, they negotiate the difficulty of identification and the threats of cultural marginalization. i draw on diaspora and postcolonial theorizations of “home” to argue that these two narratives, which are grounded in critical histories rather than timeless myth, encapsulate the trauma of dispossession and loss of a whole post al-nakba and al- naksa generation at the aftermath of the israeli occupation of historical palestine.
