The camp in the Palestinian novel: on the spot, memory and pain

► Mahmoud Shukair: One of the bitter manifestations of the disaster
Palestinian writer and historian Mahmoud Shukair (1941), who lives in Ramallah, tells us that the camp was one of the bitter manifestations of the disaster of 1948, and its images in the Palestinian novel are different. iba. In Heavenly Water (2008), Yahya Khalaf watched the construction of the camp that began after people were forced to leave their homeland by Zionist aggression, and then how awareness of the tragedy began to push the people who take organized action to keep the fire of hope alive. of souls. We see the same thing in Rashad Abu Shawar’s novel The Lovers (1973) and his observations on daily life in the camps of Ain as-Sultan, an-Nuima and Aqabat Jabr, and in Hasan’s novel Hamid Come Let’s Fly Autumn Leaves, published in the early nineties, there is hardship and suffering, and then the beginning of the transition to resistance. In the novel “Makhmal” (1993) by Khizama Khabaiba, the main character of the novel continues to fight for a decent life for himself and his family, then his fate is killed by his brother and son only because they suspect him of his behavior. , and he was not mistaken. In Sobhi Fahmavi’s novel Bilquis Pants (2019), people’s main concern was how to make a living, and then political awareness began to emerge in the behavior of the new generation. ”

He continued that “this awareness grows and flourishes during times of rising resistance, as in Ghassan Kanafani’s novel Umm Saad, where there is confidence in the future and perseverance in resistance, and in the biography of Ibrahim Nasrallah, My Childhood is So Far, appears the camp, where the writer lived his childhood, a temporary abode, in addition to human models who love life. He was driven by pleasant memories of his first place in Palestine, in conjunction with continued interaction with political events in the place of refuge. In my novel Praise to the Women of the Kind (2015), the camp appears in a state of submission and a new spirit of resistance emerges here, in which some abnormal behavior occurs, represented by the fall of a pistol in an unconscious hand. , then the image of the camp collapses when resistance is reduced to levels of manipulation of women’s bodies and destruction of their dignity, as described in Samia Issa’s novel Fig’s Milk (2010). Shukair believes there are other variations. In Gharib Ashkalani’s Nights of the Lunar Months (2002), the protagonist returns as a result of the Oslo settlement to the camp where he lived in his childhood, as if all these sacrifices led to nothing but losses. , but hope remains determined A new generation of young people. Shukair lives in the novel “Mirror Eye” (1991), in which Liana Badr writes about the lives of the people in the camp, following their concerns and aspirations; and their sorrows and their joys, and puts this camp through intimate details in the spotlight. In the novel Al-Batin (2017), Safi Ismail Safi approached the environment of a camp adjacent to a village to describe the lives of people struggling with poverty and misery by insisting on the love of life. Jerusalem prisoner Husam Zuhdi Shaheen wrote “Zagruda al-Finjan” (2015), which indicates the places where the main character moves, such as the camp of Deyshe and the cities of Bethlehem and Yabus. The released prisoner Saleh Abu Laban wrote The Third House (2013), discussing the Dheshe camp, which was one of the most important revolutionary hotbeds of the first intifada. In Atef Abu Seif’s Need for Christine (2016), opportunity plays a role in moving the heroine of her novel from her original place in Jaffa to live in London, then in one of the Gaza camps, and then left the camp in a noticeable paradox. On one level of his novel Bab al-Shams (1998), Elias Khoury wrote the stories of refugees from the Shatila camp to ensure the preservation of Palestinian memory and that it was not fun, and also on one level The Girl from Shatila. (2019) Akram Muslim. Shukair concluded what writer Marwan Abdel-Al said when he received the “Al-Quds Award in 2016”: “This award is a medal for the chest of the camp, and the chest of a simple, poor, kind and Palestinian militant (..) camps that produced Naji Al-Ali and his hero Handalu, Ghassan Kanafani and the heroes of his novels that we know. ”

► The Hawamde Revolution: A Way to Document Tragedy
Tunisia -based Palestinian writer Tavra Hawamdeh (1990) argues that the phrase “camp, place and identity” represents a holistic view in the Palestinian narrative of the situation in which the camp became memory and remembrance. Between an artificial place and a person derived from the original environment; Several issues have been identified, from hiding people as a historical grievance that threatens memory, to a literary appeal to creatively remembering this geographical space and preserving places as much as possible as they leave. of their owners, and not as before. From above, the image in which the camp is present in Palestinian literature can be determined once within the result, i.e. cut between dirt and dirt/man and place. Talking about a group of people in a small square, carrying the architecture of their dwellings, their origins, their stories, their sufferings and their moments, looking for them in their eternal conversation before they could be traced in the literature to access their native place-Palestine-was the easiest they had traversed during the years of occupation. When the camp was there as a start. The beginning of things formed and accumulated and accumulated. New neighbors, new roads, new images, mother and father unlike before, intrusive dreams, the absence as part of the scene left behind by the mountains, the absence of hands from the trees he planted. All of these are images taken by literature as a creative witness, its tools use the opportunity to speak about reality as before, and more importantly, it follows the obesity of the body in its denial of being and the ability to call the Palestinian in the human comedy “refugee”. “But that is not enough; Overtime can be credited for stories and fiction written and documented within the Palestinian narrative, but it is not enough, it revolves between right and duty. Many fictional works can be seen as evidence of death in the camp quarters. There is a clear difference between a novel written about the camp and what was said in the camp. An example of this is “The Girl from Shatila” by Akram Muslim. Based on my reading of this article, I can call it a “camp novel”. This type of writing does not stop at asylum as a case, but instead extends to the psychological and cultural environment of the refugee, keeping in mind that the camp, up to the present moment, will not go beyond reaching the Palestinian narrative, being one. of doors for documenting the tragedy. It has not been a subject that brings its own problems and mentality of its inhabitants. Here I remember what my friend Rakhim, the son of the Jalazun camp, told me: In politics and literature, everyone has succeeded in decorating this place called “camp”. They gave her plastic surgery to make her home, but she never became home. The camp does little to erase the idea of ​​forced relocation as it reminds us every day of our occupied country, and if a refugee is convinced that the camp is his or her home, he or she loses the compass of return. ”

► Hossam Maarouf: Between the Environment of Origin and the Environment of Emergency
Gaza -based Palestinian writer and poet Hussam Maarouf (1981) states that “the Palestinian camp, as a temporary structure of the engineer, has been a symbol of the Palestinian purpose for more than seventy years. He was someone with human privacy and with a thorny relationship with the area, with concepts and human rights. A Palestinian knows what a fragile and false peace is just by looking at the state of the camp. And when the literature gets into the details of the camp, the task becomes difficult, because the sociology of the camp is based on the hybridization of customs and human nature. This is from the point of view of collective consciousness, and as for self-consciousness, there is confusion in the formation of personality, whether it is the carrier of the environment of origin, which is a place rooted in the same camp of a resident. , or an emergency environment where the camp is located as a dense mass of population. Therefore, the camp, as a newly formed society, exposed the writer to a risk of possible failure. Palestinian novelists have made dozens of attempts to describe the camp in their writings, and the roles of Ibrahim Nasrallah, Sahar Khalifa, Yahya Khalaf and Rajab Abu Sariya have emerged.About the true identity of Umm Saad. The novel represents the crushed class in the camp, as well as the germ of armed partisan struggle, and as a bearer of reality is closest to the heroes of the camp.