ABSTRACT
A Culture that Challenged the Chain was the title of a series of seven TV programmes broadcast by Watan TV that focused on political captives’
cultural productions. The series was first broadcast in the third week of
April 1999, which coincided with the Palestinian Memorial Day for the
political captives, 17 April. The programmes, which were broadcast nightly
at 9.00 p.m. and lasted an hour and a half, dealt with different genres of
literature, art, journalism, and academic research. The first programme
focused on the short story and its history in the colonial prison. The parti-
cipants in the programme included two former political captives who were known for their creative work in a specific area, a professional on the sub-
ject in question, and Hasan Abdallah, who organized and hosted the pro-
grammes. The audience could phone in and join in the discussion. Many
times it seemed as if it was the audience that was present in the studio
rather than the participants themselves. Acquaintances of the participants
from the period of political captivity called to say hello and encourage
them. There were so many requests from the audience that the whole series
was aired again two weeks later. The fifth programme in the series was dedicated to a discussion of the
novel. Wisam al Rafydy and Izzat al Ghazzawi were former political cap-
tives who had written novels while in captivity. Mahmoud al Atshan parti-
cipated as a literary critic and professor of Arabic literature, and, as in all
the programmes, Hasan Abdallah was host. Al Ghazzawi, Secretary-Gen-
eral of the Palestinian Writers Union, had written several novels before he
was captured in 1988 and jailed for two years.1 The novel that he wrote in
captivity was translated into English by himself with the title Letters Underway. Wisam al Rafydy had not written any literary work before his time in cap-
tivity. His novel al Aqanym al Thalathah (The Three Domains) was written
during his incarceration in Israeli prisons, and published in 1995. A year
later, when I saw the TV programme about the novel, I decided to study
Wisam’s novel. The reason for this decision was that Izzat and I had been
close friends for several years, a fact I thought might obstruct the type of
research I wanted to do, whereas I knew Wisam by name only, so his writ-
ing was new territory for me. The primary research question for me was to investigate the relationship between the experience of captivity and certain
literary narrative characteristics. In the course of interviewing Wisam and
reading Domains, and as the ethnographic fieldwork unfolded in different
directions, the research questions concerning the novel changed. The proxi-
mities of the real and the fictional, the tangible and the imagined, the
rational and the mythical, in the national/colonial context of Palestine as
represented in literary writing became the prime focus of my investigation.
The question that this chapter explores is how the threads of these seeming dichotomies interact and interplay in The Three Domains to constitute the
national identities and ideologies of the Palestinians.
