Literary Trespassing in Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin and Sayed Kashua's Second Person Singular

Abstract

This article focuses on a rare leitmotif in literary productions by Palestinians. Both Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin and Sayed Kashua's Second Person Singular present Arab characters who, under unusual circumstances, impersonate or literally acquire the identity of the Israeli-Jewish other. In the fictional creations of Ismael/David and Amir/Yonatan, Abulhawa and Kashua, respectively, construe characters whose existence blurs the borderline between various versions of today's Palestinian Arab and mainstream projections of its Israeli-Jewish counterpart. These characters represent, as the article demonstrates, the authors' attempts to work out the implications of the idea that — as a result of the historical events of Israeli Independence and the consequent Palestinian Nakba — the collision of two national yearnings has created a liminal space in which both Israeli and Palestinian narratives gradually infiltrate one another, developing an inextricable and dynamic bond between the Palestinian identity and its counterpart.

Entangled suffering and disruptive empathy: The Holocaust, the Nakba and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin

“…Given the novel’s reach, it has received scholarly attention. Research has focused on issues of identity (Abu-Shomar, 2015; Al-Ma’amari et al, 2014; Ebileeni, 2017), trauma (Raslan, 2017) and postcolonial approaches to Palestinian literature (Al-Jahdali, 2014), but none of the scholarship to date has engaged with the question of Holocaust memory within the Palestinian novel.…”