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Palestinian autobiographies, unlike those written by other Arab authors, use the text as a document to emphasize their attachments to Palestine, the country they visit by remembering and writing. Various Palestinian experiences of displacement have been expressed in the form of autobiography, conveying the author's reconnection with his or her past, family, and community. This article illustrates how displacement from Palestine motivates, shapes, and contributes to the Palestinian discourse on the meaning of homeland and identity formation. Edward Said's Out of Place and Fawaz Turki's The Disinherited are texts that fit a subcategory I call displaced autobiography, where Palestinian autobiographies overlap between personal experiences and the creative expression reconstructing such experiences. I argue that the Palestinian identity of these autobiographers is challenged by displacement and that their response to such challenge is to write self-narratives reasserting their relationship to their homeland. Even though both of these displaced autobiographies show a facet of constantly shifting locales determined by exile, they still centralize Palestine as the place where their identity was formed and where they still belong.
Introduction and Context
What does it mean to be a Palestinian writing about his or her life? The answer to such a complicated question is related to the dialectical relationship between Palestine and Palestinians. Whether living inside or outside Israel, the Palestinian has an affiliation to a country that no longer exists, yet he or she carries a Palestinian national identity and belongs to a land they still call Palestine, typically without the denial of the existence of Israel. Although the source of this identity, Palestine, has been replaced politically by the establishment of Israel, Palestinian writers in particular identify themselves with Palestine, a country many of them remember or about which they romanticize its former existence before 1948 or the lands unoccupied before 1967. As a medium of revisiting the old homeland, oral testimonies, memoires, and autobiographies prevail in the modern Palestinian literary and cultural scene. Some of these narratives are commonly used in the popular culture and Palestinian politics as part of what is called the "national memory" to record and deliver stories of suffering (from occupation), protest, and complaint. Many Palestinian writers in exile tend to participate in this paradigm by writing autobiographies and memoirs that recount...