In The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present, Bashir Abu-Manneh aptly charts a ‘materialist framework for interpreting the Palestinian novel through two major trajectories: historical processes (including social and political developments) and literary form (including distinct aesthetic characteristics and features)’ (4). More specifically, he insightfully emphasises the ‘structurally disordered conditions of struggle, mass mobilization, and terrains of cultural production’ in Palestine (4). While Abu-Manneh’s study is concerned with the novel, this essay explores this ‘uneven condition’ of struggle and cultural production in relation to life writing and testimonial literature. The focus will be on the Gazan mixed-genre illustrated prose–poetic war-chronicle in diary form, exemplified by Atef Abu Saif ’s The Drone Eats with Me: Diaries from a City Under Fire, which both mediates the formal and ethico-political implications of the severed limb in Gaza in terms of the challenge of embodied relationality to the dismembering impact of technobiopolitical violence and reconfigures the implications of the Derridean concept of ‘hospitality’ as ‘a self-contradictory concept’ (Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’ 5) in the context of the Israeli Operation Protective Edge (8 July–26 August 2014). From this perspective, Derrida’s etymological and philosophical study of ‘hospitality’ as ‘a word which carries its own contradiction incorporated into it, a Latin word which allows itself to be parasitized by its opposite, “hostility,” the undesirable guest [hôte] which it harbors as the self-contradiction in its own body’ (‘Hostipitality’ 3) can be the starting point for an investigation of the paradoxical state of co-extensive and disjointed embodiment as it is re-imagined in The Drone Eats with Me. In this work, Abu Saif delineates an aesthetics of the re-membered and reconstituted severed limb that brings together the structure of the diary with the resources of the prose–poetic war memoir, the philosophical treatise, the socio-political study, and the testimony.

Conditions of siege and war in both Ramallah and Gaza have initiated an increase in the production of the diary form. However, the uneven political geography of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict have inflected the two contexts with differing formal and socio-political parameters, particularities and potentials for the diary.