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Like all Palestinians who have lived in historic Palestine since its fragmentation in 1948, Palestinian writers face enormous day-to-day challenges. Four contemporary Palestinian writers living in the occupied West Bank—Mahmoud Shukair, Suad Amiri, Sahar Khalifa, and Raja Shehadeh—are meeting these challenges, each with a unique and powerful voice.In Palestinian writing, the historical, the political and the literary are inextricably entwined. The Arabic novel in general has had a history of transgression against the repressive regimes whose demise the world has recently witnessed. Writers have often used allegory and an odd mixture of fact and fiction to bypass censorship, as in, for example, several of Naguib Mahfouz’s novels. This trend of locating the powerful influence of government in people’s lives is sometimes viewed as a drawback, holding Arab writers back from more imaginative and literary modes of writing, but Palestinian writers feel that they have no choice in the matter and have succeeded in transcending the limitations of this genre.
Displacement, exile, and alienation from the world, but also endurance, ultimately, are at the heart of the Palestinian story. More than 600,000 Palestinian refugees were refused the right of return to their homeland by the newly established Jewish State of Israel in 1948. There are today an estimated 6 million Palestinian refugees, 1.4 million of whom live in fifty-eight recognized refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Over four hundred Palestinian villages were physically erased, and the Palestinians who did manage to stay in what is now Israel proper (about 1.5 million today) continue to be discriminated against and denied basic rights....READ MORE
Rima Najjar Merriman is a professor of English literature at Al Quds University. She is one of the contributing writers for the recently published Al Jazeera English - Global News in a Changing World, and she contributed a chapter on Palestinian children in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Children’s Issues Worldwide.
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