Faculty of Humanities

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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).