Two memories: Darwish and Shehadeh recount their days under siege

What is it about?

In the 2002 siege of Ramallah, a man asks one of the Israeli soldiers storming his house, “Do you consider me a human being?” The quotation is from Raja Shehadeh’s When the Bulbul Stopped Singing, a book consisting of diary entries of a month long siege. The work details the anguish, disruption, and terror faced by Ramallah’s inhabitants during the siege and the implications this had on both Israelis and Palestinians. In 1987, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish published Memory for Forgetfulness, documenting the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut. The book records the daily struggles of those caught in the fire, and recalls earlier memories of the homeland through the poet’s unique style of poetry and prose. The pervading question in both works is who is human. Drawing on Agamben and Butler, I argue how these texts provide a counter-narrative to the dominant history as they resist the Homo Sacer status.

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