Faculty of Humanities

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Browsing Faculty of Humanities by Author "Hamamra, Bilal"

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    The colonisation of the female body in Liana Badr's The EyeoftheMirror
    (2017-12-27) Eshtya, Ala'; Dodin, Eman; Saeed, Jomana; Hindi, Rawand; Hamamra, Bilal
    Lina Badr's The Eye of the Mirror (1970) is, by and large, a narrative documentation of the 1975-6 siege and fall of Tal el-Zaatar in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. Through her female protagonist Aisha, Badr introduces the Palestinian collective trauma as it is enacted on Aisha whose desire to free her body from the confines of traditions is a reflection of the Palestinian nostalgia to liberate themselves and their land from the Israeli occupation. We argue that Badr depicts the experience of women and reveals the ways that the Tal al Za'atar war both oppresses women by merging traditions and function as an arena of emancipating women from gender roles. In doing so, Badr undermines the masculine discourse that excludes and marginalizes women's war experiences and their roles in narrating and preserving Palestinian memory through the act of narration.
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    The Specters of Nation and Narration
    (2017-05-01) Abusamra, Sanaa; Hamamra, Bilal
    Since 1948, the Israeli occupation has strived to push Palestinians and Palestine to the sphere of absence to legitimize their presence and claim over Palestine. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a conflict of narratives over a nation (Palestine), revealing that the nation is discursively constructed and power structures are created and controlled through discourse. Thus, in response to the Zionist discourse that justifies and legitimizes the presence (establishment) of Israel and obliterates and negates the Palestinians and Palestine, many Palestinian authors such as Ghassan Kanafani, Samih al-Qasim, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Fadwa Touqan, Sahar Khalifeh, Mahmoud Darwish, among many others, orchestrated their literary works with themes of exile, psychological trauma, nostalgia and return. In other words, they have put their pens at the service of the nation so as to reclaim the absent paradise (Palestine). In this paper, I will explain the ghostliness of the self, land and language in Mahmoud Darwish’s self-eulogy, Absent Presence (2006/2010), drawing on Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993/1994) and Barthes’ post-structural seminal (ghostly) text, “The Death of The Author” (1967).