Writing Palestinian exile: The politics of displacement in the narratives of Mahmoud Darwish, Mourid Barghouti, Raja Shehadeh and Fawaz Turki

This article explores experiences and notions of exile and return as attempts at the reconstruction of identity and nation in Palestinian literature: Raja Shehadeh's Strangers in the House (2002), Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah (1997), Fawaz Turki's Exile's Return (1994), and Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness (1986). The exilic experience represents an act of ejection and dispossession, feelings of displacement and poignancy and a capacity for survival and resistance. While return represents the recapture of being Palestinian, and of Palestine. The interweaving of history, politics and religion in the creation of Palestinian exile is met with the interweaving of things literary, political and spiritual, in the reconstruction and re-affirmation of identity and geography. This literature is an attempt at re-narration, re-constitution and continuity: the collective quilting together of experiences of exile and dispossession in an effort to re-possess not just an identity, but a nation, forming Palestinian return.