Geopolitics of Home in Ghada Karmi’s In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story and Return: A Palestinian Memoir

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Fall 9-2025

Abstract

This paper argues that Palestinians, whether inside Palestine or exiled, are subjected to various racial palestinianisation practices. One of the exiled Palestinians is the Doctor of Medicine Ghada Karmi (b. 1939), who wrote extensively on the Palestinian cause. Among her writings are two memoirs in English: In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story (2002) and Return: A Palestinian Memoir (2015), tackling racial palestinianisation practices on the collective and personal levels. These two memoirs are part of the recent proliferation of Palestinian life writings, primarily driven by the urge to narrate and document Palestinian writers’ experiences facing the politics of denial and/or misrepresentation. Karmi’s both memoires narrate her lifetime experience beginning with pre-Nakba Qatamon, Jerusalem (Al-Quds), later outside Home in exile (manfa), and her intermittent returns Home to Palestine. I contend that racial palestinianisation practices have shattered the Palestinians’ life experiences since the Nakba and has since been extended over different temporalities and spatialities, impacting their collective and personal experiences simultaneously. The collective Palestinian quotidian life in the Occupied Palestinian territories is demarcated by the Annexation Wall, borders and checkpoints, resulting in a continuous geopolitical spatial precariousness evoking Bentham’s Panopticon and the American Pelican Bay prison. At the personal level, racial palestinianisation practices have blighted Karmi’s perceptions of Home and its interrelated Palestinian identity construction. Thus, this paper seeks to analyse how racial palestinianisation practices have resulted in stifled ubiquitous experience and precarity, resulting in a prolonged sense of loss and alteration of Home perception.

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