The Presence of Absence: The House in Palestinian Exilic Writing

Abstract:This article explores representations of the home in Mahmoud Darwish's poem "The House as Casualty" and Hala Alyan's 2017 novel Salt Houses. The article builds on the psychoanalytic discourse of home in literary analysis but focuses on the materiality of the house to consider the role of the house in broader struggles of national identity and claims to place. In the case of exilic Palestinian representations of displacement, scholars' reliance on models that focus only on the psychological ramifications of unhoming and/or limit the material world to a metaphor for a person's inner world may diminish the role the built environment plays in politics surrounding Palestine. My approach privileges the role the house plays in retaining memory and cultural practices that constitute the fabric of the nation. Darwish's and Alyan's texts necessarily engage with the deterritorialized nature of Palestinian identity and the psychic trauma of displacement but also fight against erasure by utilizing the materiality of the pre-al-Nakba house as the manifestation of displacement and its memory as a claim to place.