From Family Bedtime Audience to Universal Readership A Study in the Development of Modern Palestinian Novel

Only the voiceless remain unheard until they choose to break their silence. In the aftermath of Palestine Nakba of 1948, some Palestinian story tellers, whether those in exile or those who remained under occupation, chose to resuscitate the visibility of the Palestinian people as well as their voice which was long silenced and muffled during the British Mandate for Palestine (1918-1948). Most of those storytellers wrote tales that dramatized both their personal and national plight. Unfortunately, however, the messages carried by those tales seem to have reached a tiny audience. It was left for the new post-Nakba generation of storytellers, who wrote in Arabic and other languages, to readjust the obfuscated focus on their national narratives. Accordingly, this study traces the development of the Palestinian art of storytelling by looking at some key narrative works, starting with Isaac El-Husseiny’s Memoir of a Mother Hen (1943) through Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun (1962) up to Emile Habibi’s The Pessoptimist (1974) and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s In Search of Walid Masoud (1978), ending with Anton Shammas’s Arabesques (1989). It also looks at the impact of these narratives on both local and global levels of readership and reception. To be more specific, the study looks at how the post-Nakba storytellers have scored an advancement over the earlier generation of their native storytellers by appropriating their tales for the parameters of the art of prose fiction. It also looks at how the modern Palestinian novel has constantly tried to deliver the Palestinian voice to both the local and the universal audiences, thus gaining broader reception, recognition, and readership. Keywords: Palestinian voice, narrative art, visibility, local, universal, readership, Nakba