Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s suitcase: Carrying modernism and exile across borders from Palestine into Iraq

In ‘The Palestinian exile as writer’, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra gives a brief description of his suitcase that he carried over from his life in Palestine before the Nakba of 1948 to his life in Iraq thereafter. Reading his suitcase as a literary trope, I aim to unpack his suitcase and to re-vision, in fragments, what it contained. At the same time, I aim to show the limits of what can be recovered and explore silences in the archive. Drawing on studies in global modernism in addition to archival research and the close reading of Jabra’s autobiographical writing, I argue that Jabra and his Palestinian co-wanderers did not come to Iraq and all the other places they turned to after 1948 empty-handed; rather, they carried suitcases filled with past experiences as well as dreams and expectations for the future, which placed them at the avant-garde of cultural and intellectual life.