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chapter 3 The Country of My Dreams Departure, eternal departure when will exiles sit around one table and a family rejoice knowing that despite sorrow it is our homeland! (ali al-khalili, in jayyusi 1992, 196) Exile and diaspora are the antithesis of home and homeland. The traumatic loss of the homeland strengthens the connection of refugees and exiles to the homeland, and it continues to play an important role in their individual and collective imagination, constituting a central aspect of their self-definition. Where do the notions of being refugees, exiles, and members of a diaspora intersect? Can Palestinians be described as a diaspora, based on the larger theoretical application of the term to different types of modern migration? And if, as modern diaspora studies claim, the ‘‘myth of the homeland’’ plays such an important role in the definition of diaspora communities , how is Palestine ‘‘imagined’’ and how is the process of developing images of Palestine as a homeland linked to literature, poetry, and visual arts? During the early stages of my research I frequently encountered images of Palestine, stories of the sweetest grapes and figs, the most beautiful orange and lemon trees, the amazing seashores, and the friendliest and most educated people in the Middle East. Similar images can be found in Palestinian poetryand literature.They raised the question of how relevant these images were for theyoung generation of Palestinians that I was interviewing . Did they subscribe to the same idealized image of their homeland ? What happened to that image when they actually arrived there? With all these questions in my mind, I was relieved when the first inter- The Country of My Dreams 51 view partner told me exactly what I had expected. I am telling his story here to show his individual way of connecting image and reality. It is a narrative about his images of Palestine as much as about his return, as the two are inseparable to him. Majid’s Story Majid was twenty-seven at the time of the interview and returned to Palestine in March 1998. His parents were refugees from a village near Ramleh, ‘‘from 1948,’’ as he said. They fled to Bethlehem in 1948 and became second-time refugees in 1967 when they left theWest Bank for Jordan in the wake of the war. Majid grew up in Jordan, in Aqaba and Amman, where most members of his family still lived. He left Jordan in 1987 to study and work in Tunisia. The memories of his childhood reflected two main points of reference for his feeling Palestinian: the stories he heard from his mother about Palestine and the Palestinians, and the treatment of Palestinians in Jordan. The life of a Palestinian in Jordan is hard for him, because the opportunities are limited, unlike for a Jordanian. A Jordanian is in his country, but the Palestinian doesn’t interact with Jordan as his country, because it is not his. There are a lot of small things where they always let you know this is not your country, especially in government activities or such things as the military. The Palestinian does not participate in that, has never been responsible for a country. He is always loyal to Palestine. Because of that, he has to work in special factories, in special businesses. It is the only way to make a living. That is why his situation is not very safe or stable in Jordan. One cannot rely on anything one achieves and have continuity in it, even for two or three years. There are always dangers ahead of him; his life can be turned upside down at any moment. Although this is clearly his own experience of living in Jordan, he chose to speak in the third person, thereby projecting the frustration, anxiety, and uncertainty onto the Palestinian per se instead of speaking about himself . This strategy of expression points to his feeling of belonging to the Palestinians as a group, community, and people. Personal experience is translated into more general expressions in order to strengthen the group feeling. His image of Palestine and his feeling of not belonging in Jordan were born out of being ‘‘the other’’ in the Jordanian context, his being non-Jordanian in turn defines him as Palestinian. Balancing this negative side of identity, the stories about Palestine that he heard as a child pro- 52 palestinians born in exile vided a positive image as he developed his own identity. The stories, told by...

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