Reflections on a National Cartography: The Freedom to Roam and the Right to Imagine in Raja Shehadeh’s Travel Writing

Salmi, Charlotta

doi:10.1080/17449855.2011.633015

Cited by 5 publications

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“…Since Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks won the Orwell Prize in 2008, postcolonial scholars have turned their attention to Palestinian literary engagements with the environment (see, for example, Kennedy, 2012;Salmi, 2012;Spencer, 2010). Even if criticism has so far largely remained limited to Shehadeh's writings, this development begins to counter the neglect of Palestinian literature within postcolonial ecocriticism (Boast, 2012: 46).…”

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“A river without water”: Hydropolitics and the River Jordan in Palestinian literature

Boast

2016

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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In this article I examine the representation of the River Jordan and ecological crisis in recent works by two of Palestine's best-known writers: the poem "A River Dies of Thirst" by Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti's memoir I Saw Ramallah. Ecocritics have paid scant attention to these writers' works, or to Palestinian literature in general; but the environment is a major domain of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and ownership of the River Jordan is a key source of tension, often discussed within the framework of "water wars". The River Jordan is currently in a highly degraded state due to pollution and the diversion of most of its waters by Israel. I examine the ways in which Darwish and Barghouti portray the Jordan's ecological decline as the outcome of Palestinian dispossession and Israeli occupation, suggesting that the texts form a literary counterpart to claims by Palestinian activists and solidarity groups of what Al Butmah and colleagues termed an "environmental Nakba". In particular, I build on Tricia Cusack's work on "riverscapes" and nationalism in order to draw out the different strategies used by both Darwish and Barghouti to express the impact of the loss of the River Jordan on Palestinian communities. While Darwish emphasizes the affective and communal consequences of Israel's exhaustion of the river, in a poem which can be read as an environmental analogue to Palestinian "memorial books", Barghouti stresses the links between hydropolitics and uneven development in the present day. I conclude with a caution about Darwish and Barghouti's shared reliance on an anthropocentric discourse of theft and ownership, which, I argue, ultimately facilitates unsustainable water use.

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“A river without water”: Hydropolitics and the River Jordan in Palestinian literature

Boast

2016

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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Travel and Utopia

Ashcroft¹

2015

New Directions in Travel Writing Studies

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Against a reading of a sacred landscape: Raja Shehadeh rewrites the Palestinian presence in Palestinian Walks

Nashef

2020

Prose Studies

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In his introduction to Palestinian Walks, Raja Shehadeh remarks that in spite of the great number of travelers to Palestine, travel literature, for the most part, willfully ignored the living experience and existence of the land's inhabitants. Often, Palestine was the imaginary place that was continuously invented to confirm religious and political beliefs. The Biblical imagination, along with the orientalist gaze, informed the accounts, and anything that did not correspond to the preconceived repertoire was quickly discarded. The native inhabitants were the first victims. At best professed the savage other, they were not considered the land's rightful owners. Palestine was symbolically colonized in the Western imagination long before the British mandate. This vanishing homeland is a subject that dominates Shehadeh's nonfiction narrative. Accounts of his walks expose parts of his homeland's beauty and rewrite the Palestinian presence in its place, providing a counter-narrative to the Biblical imagination.

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Reflections on a National Cartography: The Freedom to Roam and the Right to Imagine in Raja Shehadeh’s Travel Writing

Cited by 5 publications

References 5 publications

“A river without water”: Hydropolitics and the River Jordan in Palestinian literature

“A river without water”: Hydropolitics and the River Jordan in Palestinian literature

Travel and Utopia

Against a reading of a sacred landscape: Raja Shehadeh rewrites the Palestinian presence in Palestinian Walks

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