Transformations in Palestinian Literature<br />AL Mustaqbal College<br />Asst Lect: Mohammed Salim<br />Palestinians to this day still fashion their sorrows in the first person plural, whether or not they have heard of Tolstoy's remark. For if the Palestinian people have a collective narrative-a story, rooted in history and usually beginning with Balfour's 1917 Declaration, a promise to European Jewry of a homeland for Jews in historic Palestine—this nation possesses-in the human sense-a wealth of stories that compile the variegated destinies of Palestinians, cutting across themes of exile, resistance and homeland. These stories-both those that are constantly being reinvented and those that are still possible-center around the "ordinary human rights" that Palestinians have been deprived of, thereby transforming the Palestinian into a wretched human being narrating his own private wretched tale.<br />Thus before the disastrous Nakba of 1948, as Arab historians tell us, Palestinians lived in fear of losing the homeland; after the Nakba they came to know the meanings of loss and alienation. During the next period-of resistance and armed struggle-they contemplated danger and death. Then, following "the Peace that didn't come," they combined disappointment and frustration with deep doubt regarding the possibility of human justice. Throughout, Palestinian writing has been nothing but, essentially, a confrontation with a Zionist will that effectively transported Palestinians from normal human circumstances to those of displaced "immigrants" or "refugee," deprived of the rights enjoyed by other peoples.<br /><br />At the end of the first decade of the last century, Rawhi Yassin al-Khalidi (1864-1913), in his Zionism, compared the modern Jewish farmer and the circumstances endured by poor Palestinian peasants. Here al-Khalidi, a pioneer of modern Arabic literature, was not analyzing the differences between traditional and modern agriculture; rather, he was expressing his apprehension about the ability of "the people of Ottoman legacy" to resist "a Zionism of a European nature and outlook." Such apprehension could wreck the life of an ordinary human being, but it is what led this intellectual, whose life in France enabled him to become truly acquainted with the Zionist project, to set aside his literary interests and to devote his attention to "the obligatory theme" that directly concerned his past and his future..<br /><br />If such an enlightened intellectual has added this "obligatory" specialization "imposed" by the Zionist project to his various literary concerns, Najib Nassar (1865-1948), on the other hand, devoted his entire life-from the moment he founded the al-Karmel newspaper in 1959 as the first newspaper in the history of Palestine- to warning of "an inevitable displacement," and a "certain forced migration" of the Palestinian population. An astute intellectual, well-read in English, German and Farsi, Nassar abandoned his beloved legal practice for a profession that he found to be forced upon him "by necessity," namely, journalism. It is no wonder that in his novel The Tale of Muflih al-Ghazzali, the very first Palestinian narrative, he recorded his feeling of panic upon hearing the Balfour Declaration.<br /> Nassar had held the belief that "Shakespeare's nation" could never undertake any action that might harm the "refined cultural values" for which it was famous. Nor would matters differ greatly with regard to the great educator Khalil al-Sakaakini (1878-1953), the most prominent Palestinian intellectual of the first half of the twentieth century, who devoted a large part of his Diaries now recently published in several volumes-to that "obligatory anxiety" which carried the weight of ill-fated destiny. For this reason, al-Sakaakini found himself leading his life in two stages. In the first stage he established the constitutional school, composed his Readings in Language and Literature, and took up responsibilities as a member of the Arabic Academy in Cairo; in the second stage, he would emigrate to Egypt, rejecting the authority of pro-Zionist British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel in Jerusalem and giving up his work as an executive in radio broadcasting-in protest against the radio station's announcement declaring "This is the Land of Israel." In 1948, as a result of the Nakbah catastrophe, he fled to Egypt, leaving behind his famed library.<br />