"Words That Turn Mirrors of Words": Political Intertextualities in Elias Khoury's Children of the Ghetto
Twenty years after his monumental Gate of the Sun , Elias Khoury returns to the Nakba in Children of the Ghetto , evoking it through a more powerful allusion to the Holocaust already apparent in its title. I argue that revisiting the Palestinian trauma, in a complex confrontation with literature, te...
Main Author: | |
---|---|
Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
Language: | unknown |
Published: |
Zenodo
2022
|
Subjects: | |
Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6787043 |
id |
ftzenodo:oai:zenodo.org:6787043 |
---|---|
record_format |
openpolar |
spelling |
ftzenodo:oai:zenodo.org:6787043 2024-09-15T18:33:35+00:00 "Words That Turn Mirrors of Words": Political Intertextualities in Elias Khoury's Children of the Ghetto Yehuda, Omri Ben 2022-06-30 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6787043 unknown Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6787042 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6787043 oai:zenodo.org:6787043 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode Postcolonial Interventions: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Studies ISSN 2455 6564, Vol. VIII, Issue 2, June 2022, 134-185, (2022-06-30) Palestinian Studies Jewish and Holocaust Studies Hebrew Literature info:eu-repo/semantics/article 2022 ftzenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.678704310.5281/zenodo.6787042 2024-07-26T05:21:00Z Twenty years after his monumental Gate of the Sun , Elias Khoury returns to the Nakba in Children of the Ghetto , evoking it through a more powerful allusion to the Holocaust already apparent in its title. I argue that revisiting the Palestinian trauma, in a complex confrontation with literature, testimony and accountability, is the outcome of a protracted and exhausting failure to reach out and find a listener. Paradoxical as this may seem, it is the novel’s deficiencies of excessive speech and monologism that convincingly capture the Palestinian aporia of a testimony that has no addressee. Through a close reading of several intertexts – Gate of the Sun, Anton Shammas’s Hebrew-language novel Arabesques and Sami Michael’s Refuge – I seek to unravel the relationship between colonial mimicry and cultural appropriation, the representation of trauma and its clichés, and the fragmented identity of Palestinian Israelis, bound by the Jewish question of a traumatized self, and torn between narcissism and melancholy in the possibility of dialogue and self-(mutual-) determination. I argue that while dialogue informs Gate of the Sun in its insistence on language’s ability to reach out, Children of the Ghetto turns to futile immersion in one’s own words, in an endless paratext. I also examine the way Children of the Ghetto avoids one of the fundamental and universal aspects of the Holocaust, that of the “gray zone” where no clear differentiation between perpetrators and victims is possible, a phenomenon which its two intertextual predecessors courageously confront. Article in Journal/Newspaper sami sami Zenodo |
institution |
Open Polar |
collection |
Zenodo |
op_collection_id |
ftzenodo |
language |
unknown |
topic |
Palestinian Studies Jewish and Holocaust Studies Hebrew Literature |
spellingShingle |
Palestinian Studies Jewish and Holocaust Studies Hebrew Literature Yehuda, Omri Ben "Words That Turn Mirrors of Words": Political Intertextualities in Elias Khoury's Children of the Ghetto |
topic_facet |
Palestinian Studies Jewish and Holocaust Studies Hebrew Literature |
description |
Twenty years after his monumental Gate of the Sun , Elias Khoury returns to the Nakba in Children of the Ghetto , evoking it through a more powerful allusion to the Holocaust already apparent in its title. I argue that revisiting the Palestinian trauma, in a complex confrontation with literature, testimony and accountability, is the outcome of a protracted and exhausting failure to reach out and find a listener. Paradoxical as this may seem, it is the novel’s deficiencies of excessive speech and monologism that convincingly capture the Palestinian aporia of a testimony that has no addressee. Through a close reading of several intertexts – Gate of the Sun, Anton Shammas’s Hebrew-language novel Arabesques and Sami Michael’s Refuge – I seek to unravel the relationship between colonial mimicry and cultural appropriation, the representation of trauma and its clichés, and the fragmented identity of Palestinian Israelis, bound by the Jewish question of a traumatized self, and torn between narcissism and melancholy in the possibility of dialogue and self-(mutual-) determination. I argue that while dialogue informs Gate of the Sun in its insistence on language’s ability to reach out, Children of the Ghetto turns to futile immersion in one’s own words, in an endless paratext. I also examine the way Children of the Ghetto avoids one of the fundamental and universal aspects of the Holocaust, that of the “gray zone” where no clear differentiation between perpetrators and victims is possible, a phenomenon which its two intertextual predecessors courageously confront. |
format |
Article in Journal/Newspaper |
author |
Yehuda, Omri Ben |
author_facet |
Yehuda, Omri Ben |
author_sort |
Yehuda, Omri Ben |
title |
"Words That Turn Mirrors of Words": Political Intertextualities in Elias Khoury's Children of the Ghetto |
title_short |
"Words That Turn Mirrors of Words": Political Intertextualities in Elias Khoury's Children of the Ghetto |
title_full |
"Words That Turn Mirrors of Words": Political Intertextualities in Elias Khoury's Children of the Ghetto |
title_fullStr |
"Words That Turn Mirrors of Words": Political Intertextualities in Elias Khoury's Children of the Ghetto |
title_full_unstemmed |
"Words That Turn Mirrors of Words": Political Intertextualities in Elias Khoury's Children of the Ghetto |
title_sort |
"words that turn mirrors of words": political intertextualities in elias khoury's children of the ghetto |
publisher |
Zenodo |
publishDate |
2022 |
url |
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6787043 |
genre |
sami sami |
genre_facet |
sami sami |
op_source |
Postcolonial Interventions: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Studies ISSN 2455 6564, Vol. VIII, Issue 2, June 2022, 134-185, (2022-06-30) |
op_relation |
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6787042 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6787043 oai:zenodo.org:6787043 |
op_rights |
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.678704310.5281/zenodo.6787042 |
_version_ |
1810475285372469248 |