Literary Trespassing

What is it about?

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 respective fictional creations of Ismael/David and Amir/Yonatan, both Abulhawa and Kashua construe characters whose existence blur the borderlines 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 at working out the implications of the idea that, as a result of the historical events of the Israeli Independence and the consequent Palestinian Nakba, the collision of two national yearnings has created a liminal space in which both the Israeli and the Palestinian narratives gradually infiltrate one another, developing an inextricable and dynamic bond between the Palestinian identity and its counterpart.

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Why is it important?

Comparative analysis