Writing/righting pain : negotiating human rights and empathy in Susan Abulhawa’s fiction

This article examines Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010), The Blue Between Sky and Water (2015) and Against the Loveless World (2019) as exemplary works of contemporary Palestinian literary activism. Her novels inscribe the ongoing Nakba as a continuum of juridically legible violations under international law while simultaneously generating modes of empathic identification that exceed the affective limits of liberal pity and instead precipitate an ethically implicated demand for historical accountability and structural restitution. Through deliberate interweaving of embodied testimony and counter-archival reconstruction, Abulhawa makes a decisive ontological shift. She displaces the Palestinian subject from its reification as passive object within humanitarian spectacle and reinstalls it as an agential bearer of historical truth and juridical claim. This paper argues that Abulhawa’s fiction transcends the limitations of humanitarian spectacle and liberal empathy. While the former reduces suffering to consumable, decontextualized tragedy and the latter fosters shallow, self-soothing identification, Abulhawa’s novels render Palestinian pain epistemologically legible and politically urgent - as concrete evidence of specific, ongoing violations, above all the continuous Nakba and settler-colonial dispossession.