Conclusion

In his classic work of anti-colonialism, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon describes the traumatic silencing of historical and cultural narratives that takes place at the hands of the colonial power: ‘Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip’, he writes; ‘it [also] turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it’. ² Many journeys towards postcoloniality have therefore involved turning to the past as a source of cultural memory, historical identity and political legitimacy, and the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle has been no exception. It, too, has often turned to narratives that recover moments of colonial and communal trauma such as the Nakba of 1948, or that describe a historical rootedness in the ‘motherland’; that commemorate the sacrifices of martyrs for the struggle, or that celebrate and affirm traditional forms of resistance such as sumud. Yet as Laleh Khalili observes, central as narratives of the past may be to Palestinian consciousness, ‘none of [the] icons [of nationalism] are stable, historically unchanging or uncontested. National(ist) narratives–and the crucial symbols at their core–are challenged from within and without’. ³ This book has explored one particular set of ‘challenges’ posed to traditional nationalist narratives of Palestinian historical and cultural identity: those of the ‘postcolonial feminist perspectives’ mobilised by creative practitioners and theorists both ‘within and without’ Palestine, to use Khalili's phrase. These postcolonial feminist perspectives have destabilised, contested and reformulated the representation of Palestine through their simultaneous awareness of colonial and gendered power structures. In doing so, they have revealed a crucial shift in the directions in which Palestinian creative consciousness is moving, for a postcolonial feminist perspective looks not only to the past, but also to the future, and imagines how the integrity, equality and liberation of both the ‘body politic’ and the politics of the body might be realised in a postcolonial Palestine. The narrative journey promised to you at the outset of this book, then–through that fraught territory of the postcolonial feminist imagination–leads us, finally, to the crossroads described by Darwish in the epigraph to this conclusion: a point at which Palestinian creative practitioners no longer simply ask themselves, ‘where have we been’, but ‘where do we begin’? What, in other words, are the future directions for Palestinian self-representation and its study that have been revealed through these postcolonial feminist perspectives?