Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Reading for the Nation
- 2 Exile and Liberation: Edward Said's Out of Place
- 3 ‘Who Would Dare to Make It into an Abstraction’: Mourid Barghouti's / Saw Ramallah
- 4 ‘Israel is not South Africa’: Amos Oz's Living Utopias
- 5 Intersectional Allegories: Orly Castel-Bloom and Sahar Khalifeh
- 6 ‘An Act of Defiance Against Them All’: Anton Shammas’ Arabesques
- Notes and references
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Intersectional Allegories: Orly Castel-Bloom and Sahar Khalifeh
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Reading for the Nation
- 2 Exile and Liberation: Edward Said's Out of Place
- 3 ‘Who Would Dare to Make It into an Abstraction’: Mourid Barghouti's / Saw Ramallah
- 4 ‘Israel is not South Africa’: Amos Oz's Living Utopias
- 5 Intersectional Allegories: Orly Castel-Bloom and Sahar Khalifeh
- 6 ‘An Act of Defiance Against Them All’: Anton Shammas’ Arabesques
- Notes and references
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I discovered that our political defeat was the result of our cultural defeat. I could see very clearly that the debacle of 1967 was the fruit of a rotten tree that needed a cure - the internally defeated do not triumph. The cure must start with our households and those in power, with our social values and ties, with the fabric of the family, with the rules and basic upbringing of the individual at home, in school, and at university, and then progress to the street. Mothers can be both the dough-baker and the steel-maker of nations. Mothers are the nation because they are the source and the cornerstone.
– Sahar Khalifeh, ‘My Life, Myself, and the World’ (2002)The point of intersectional analysis is not to find ‘several identities under one’ […] Instead, the point is to analyse the differential ways in which social divisions are concretely enmeshed and constructed by each other and how they relate to political and subjective constructions of identities.
– Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Intersectionality and Feminist Politics’ (2006)In one of the most famous scenes in Orly Castel-Bloom's 1992 novel Doli siṭi (Eng. Dolly City, 1997), the protagonist, Dolly, carves a map of Israel into the flesh of her adopted infant son. Dolly does this because she has an extreme case of ‘Jewish mother’-hood, or so she has been diagnosed by several of the novel's critics (Hoffman, 1997, 63): she feels compelled to cut open her son's chest to check on his heart, to give him chemotherapy in case he has cancer, and, in one of the novel's most disturbingly comic episodes, to travel to Germany to steal kidneys from German orphans when she decides that her son needs a kidney transplant. Dolly narrates:
I took a knife and began cutting here and there. I drew a map of the land of Israel - as I remembered it from the Biblical period - on his back, and marked in all those Philistine towns like Gath and Ashkelon, and with the blade of the knife I etched the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River which empties out into the Dead Sea that goes on evaporating for ever.
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- Rhetorics of BelongingNation, Narration, and Israel/Palestine, pp. 115 - 135Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2013