ABSTRACT
The Palestinian catastrophe (known as Nakba) that resulted in the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians out of their lands in 1948 at the hands of the Israeli settler-colonial project is not merely an event consigned to the past. Rather, it is an ongoing process of oppression, silencing and marginalisation that Palestinians experience inside Palestine and in exile. Palestinians who were forced out of their homeland are currently scattered across multiple geographies around the globe. The majority of the Palestinian displaced population, however, currently reside in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. In this chapter, I specifically focus on the experiences of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon through reading Radwa Ashour’s novel The Woman from Tantoura, which grapples with the subjective and affective realities of exile (ghurba) and the process of re-making home away from the homeland. The chapter focuses on the novel’s narration of the forms of legal, economic, and political exclusion and othering Palestinian refugees in Lebanon experience as well as the ways in which Palestinian refugees affectively experienced and resisted the imposed marginalisation through memory, community and home-making.
