Return to/through Postmemories: ʿAraba qadīma bi-satāʾir (2011) by Ġassān Zaqṭān

This paper scrutinizes return narratives in Palestinian fiction with a specific focus on adab a-ʿāʾidīn, a term referring to literary works by Palestinian authors who returned to their homeland after the Oslo Accords of 1993. Testing Hirsch’s conceptualization of postmemory, the paper conducts a close reading of the novel ʿAraba qadīma bi-satāʾir (2011) by Ġassān Zaqṭān (1954), with references to his essay “Nafī al-manfī” (1997). It argues that adab a-ʿāʾidīn raises critical questions about the memory-trauma nexus in the Palestinian experience, highlighting Palestinian literature’s active role in shaping and producing memory processes, and positing return journeys as key dynamics for the reverberation and reworking of trauma across generations. After discussing the challenges of applying postmemory to the Palestinian case, Zaqṭān’s return is situated as both personal and collective. The close reading then unfolds across four interconnected sections addressing respectively: the need to repair fragmented memories on personal, collective, and historical levels; the overlapping of physical, remembered, and imaginary spaces through the trope of ghosts; the affective dimension of family transmission; narrative reflexivity as potentially healing in the face of return’s (im)possible closure.