Giving Voice to Stones: Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature - Hardcover

Parmenter, Barbara McKean

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0292727518 ISBN 13: 9780292727519

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 1994

Synopsis

"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.

About this title

Review:

"This study provides a useful survey of contemporary Palestinian culture through a reading of the relationship between literature and land. Drawing on the methods of both geography and literary criticism, it traces the evolution of what Raja Shehadeh has called a ‘Palestinian "land rhetoric"’ from the late 19th century through the Intifada conflict." (Choice)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0292727518
• ISBN 13: 9780292727519
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 127