By Bernie DeGroat
News and Information Services
Although it has been 45 years since the state of Palestine existed, novelist Anton Shammas believes it is possible for Palestinians to go “home.”
Shammas, speaking Nov. 5 at the Institute for the Humanities conference on “Remapping Identities: Colonial and Post-Colonial Societies,” addressed the meaning of geography and identity for American Palestinians.
Using the example of a young Palestinian woman who wished to leave her home in Dearborn to live in her grandmother’s Palestine, Shammas illustrated that it is possible to go home to a place where one has never been.
“This is not about going back somewhere, but rather about going ‘home,’” he said. “The difference being as simple as this: you go back to some place that you have lived in the past, but you go home to a place that even though you may have never seen it in your life, it is as if you did; a place which is the other, the deep end of that pool of your created, acquired and invented memories.”
For the “800,000 Palestinians who were de-territorialized with the establishment of the state of Israel,” sense of identity is strong, Shammas said.
“The post-colonial, post-communist, post-nation-state, post-modern world has shown us, quite recently, that the smaller the territory, the more passionate and consuming—or more fanatic and lethal—the nationalism that comes with it or works against it, depending on which side you are,” he said.
Shammas compared this sense of identity with a sound or noise that “interferes with the messages that we transmit and receive.
“It’s hardly audible to the others, but we hear it loud and clear,” he said. “However, it’s not the kind of noise that bothers us; on the contrary, it gives us a sense of reality, a measure of empowerment.”
Shammas said that the “Palestinian noise of identity has been muffled for nearly a century, and it’s only recently that it has become audible enough for the Palestinian case to be addressed.”
For the young woman in Shammas’ example, thoughts of “going home” are inspired by her grandmother’s mourning for a symbol of her homeland—a lemon tree in the back yard of her former home in Palestine—and by “an imagined geography, created by personal, oral histories and images that were conjured up while looking at the Michigan landscape.
“But deep down, she knew that something was wrong, that these images belong to her immediate present, that the language she speaks is not the language of that tree, and that this language of hers will never be able to contain, let alone transmit, her grandmother’s memories,” Shammas said. “And that’s when she would realize that one does not return to Palestine, one should simply go, and if that is impossible, one should create one’s own Palestine.”
Heeding the advice of an American friend, the young woman decided to move to Palestine—not her grandmother’s Palestine, but the Palestine in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, one of several such towns scattered across the United States, Shammas said.
Raising the question, “Has Palestine lost its ‘aura’ then, its unique existence, its authenticity?” Shammas said, “assumes that the American Palestines are exact replicas of the original.
“But, alas, this is not the case. However, imagine this: a Palestinian refugee who makes Palestine, Mich., her home—hasn’t she, in a way, ‘returned’ to Palestine? Hasn’t she, in a way, blown the whole concept of displacement from within? Hasn’t she, by this simple twist of fate, actually won the case in the most unexpected manner?”
