Giving Voice to Stones: Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature

by Barbara McKean Parmenter

"A struggle between two memories" is how Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish describes the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. Within this struggle, the meanings of land and home have been challenged and questioned, so that even heaps of stones become points of contention. Are they proof of ancient Hebrew settlement, or rubble from a bulldozed Palestinian village? The memory of these stones, and of the land itself, is nurtured and maintained in Palestinian writing and other modes of expression, which are used to confront and counter Israeli images and rhetoric. This struggle provides a rich vein of thought about the nature of human experience of place and the political uses to which these experiences are put. In this book, Barbara McKean Parmenter explores the roots of Western and Zionist images of Palestine, then draws upon the work of Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, and other writers to trace how Palestinians have represented their experience of home and exile since the First World War. This unique blending of cultural geography and literary analysis opens an unusual window on the struggle between these two peoples over a land that both divides them and brings them together.

127 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 1993

Reviews

[Beatrice Pistola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for my thesis next year. Really good book and really detailed, provides amazing examples for all the claims the author makes. Should be a bit longer in my opinion, i think there’s a lot more to say on the topic. Really enjoyed it

[Leila · Rating 4 out of 5]

good index, reads like a thorough briefing