Blurring the Boundaries between History and Fiction in Khoury's Gate of the Sun and Ashour's The Woman from Tantoura

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Winter 2021

Abstract

The 1948 Nakba has been misrepresented on both the mainstream Palestinian/Arab narrative and the Israeli one. Unfortunately, the Palestinian/Arab narrative of 1948 has always been élitist and male dominated. The Zionist one, on the other hand, has propagated a falsified narrative of the Nakbeh. Luckily, in 1979 a group of Palestinian historians began a project of narrating the Nakbeh “from the ground up” as the Palestinian historian Nur Masalha (b. 1957) calls it. Relying on oral testimonies of women, fellahin and refugees, the project gives the aforementioned Palestinians a place in the Nakbeh narrative. On the Israeli side, during the 1980s, a group of Israeli historians, later called new historians, sought to revisit the Israeli archives of 1948 with the aim of presenting a “new” Nakbeh narrative. In some cases this “new” Nakbeh narrative was close the Palestinian/Arab one. The fall of two Palestinian villages, namely Al-Jaleel village ‘Ayn al-Zaytun and the coastal village Tantoura, is equally represented in the Palestinian historical narrative and the Israeli “new” Nakbeh narrative. The fall of ‘Ayn al-Zaytun and Tantoura are not only represented in historiography but also in literature. The narratives of the new historian Ilan Pappé (b. 1954) and the Palestinian historian Nafez Nazzal (b. 1941) are echoed in Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun/ Bab El-Shams (1998). Further, the narrative of the Israeli scholar Theodor Katz is echoed in Radwa Ashour’s The Woman from Tantoura/ Attantourya (2010). As exemplary of Linda Hutcheon’s (b. 1947) historiographic metafiction, Gate of the Sun and The Woman from Tantoura blend the historical reality with fiction to defy the official Palestinian/Arab narrative and to deconstruct the Zionist one. Thus, my presentation seeks to analyse the historical representation of the fall of ‘Ayn al-Zaytun and Tantoura in the literary works of Khoury and Ashour.

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