Palestine, My Love: Place and Home in the Literary Works of Sayed Kashua

Abstract

Kashua’s spatial biography moves in ever-expanding circles, which slowly grow apart, as he lets the reader travel with him between his home in Tira – his birth place and where his family lives to this day – and other locations in Israel and elsewhere. In his books, newspaper columns, and television series, this movement is interlinked with the attempt to understand the nature of home, in both the private and public domains.

 This article explores the concepts of place and home in the literary works of Sayed Kashua. In his first book, Dancing Arabs (2002), Kashua already constructs the concept of home from two interwoven circles: the private-concrete and the nationalideal. While the first is related to the personal and intimate, the latter is linked to the state of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. These two orbits are distinctly and critically expressed in each of Kashua’s works and provide a spatial perception of the texts. In Let it be Morning (2004), space is manifested in the form of dystopia. Second Person Singular (2010) explores the possibility and complexity of leaving home behind, and Track Changes (2017) describes the choice of exile. The vicissitudes of the concept of home on the personal and national levels underscore an important trajectory in his writings about Israeli-Palestinian identity and place Kashua at a key poetic and political intersection.