What is it about?
The paper examines the poetry of the two Palestinian American poets, Naomi Shihab Nye and Hala Alyan within the concept of the “thirdspace” of resistance literature.
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Why is it important?
The study uses Edward Soja’s concept of “thirdspace” (1998) to examine the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye and Hala Alyan as an articulation of “resistance poetry” exemplified in Ghassan Kanafani’s book entitled Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine 1948-1966 (1966). The poem itself, as a form, is an imagined geography constructed by the poet’s personal and collective memories that build up his/her spaces of resistance poetry. In these artistic cartographies, memories traverse from contested lands and geographies to a “thirdspace” that recreates a timeline of stories and narratives that unfold the poems’ resistance manifesto. To foreshadow these imagined memories, the poem functions as: first, a documented tool of resistance to forgetfulness; second, an artistic device for articulating memory; third, a “thirdspace” where contested geographies of resistance and resilience dissolve to re-visioning history that curates hybridized literary spaces of prose poetry and cartographies of memory.
Perspectives
Acts of resistance in Nye’s and Alyan’s poetry differ from the five stages of resistance poetry to which Kanafani refers; instead, their poems blossom from a different stance where memory is guarded through developed narratives of the past. The authenticated history in these narratives is linked metaphorically to the past, the present, and the future in a “thirdsapce” that is authentic, real, and yet selective and imagined. The act of imagination by Palestinians who rebuild their homelands, houses, and memories of sound, smell, touch, taste, and sight highlights the story of individual and collective dispossession and displacement and varies from the act of distortion and fabrication by Israelis/Zionists who strive to replace the history of Palestinians by negating the presence and marginalizing their narratives. For Palestinians, their memory is not a past occurrence, but rather an ongoing postmemory that transfers from one generation to the other linearly and conjunctionally creating more space to trace land, people, and history. Naomi Shihab Nye and Hala Alyan’s exemplary Palestinian American poetry re-vision the land/the narrative as a part of the future and not as an incident from history. Accordingly, retrieving stolen memories, dispersed people, or a dispossessed land through postmemory is an act of resistance that resides in a future-oriented “thirdspace”. Through this minimal scrutinized examination of Nye’s “1935” and Alyan’s “Hijra”, this study concludes that Palestinian American prose poem is the poetry of resistance because of its unique free experimentation in form, style, and language. Prose poetry facilitates the intention of narrating and commenting on catastrophic incidents through brevity in Language and the employment of thematic techniques in favor of style i.e., photography, biography, letters, news reports, and others. Both poets become cartographers of a “thirdspace” through their exploitation of their familial and affiliative stories and transforming them into current remembrance through “postmemory”. Like some monuments that are constructed to tell a story in history, Palestinian American poetry initiates a movable monument in every poem to keep the narrative never-ending.
Professor Wafa Awni Alkhadra
American University of Madaba
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Thirdspace of Resistance Literature in Naomi Shihab Nye’s “1935” and Hala Alyan’s “Hijra”, Theory and Practice in Language Studies, September 2023, Academy Publication,
DOI: 10.17507/tpls.1309.12.
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