In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction And so I come to the place itself, but the place is not its dust and stones and open space. –—Taha Muhammad Ali1 In one of his best-known works, “The Place Itself,” the shopkeeper and poet Taha Muhammad Ali explores the tensions embodied in conceptions and practices of memory, homecoming, and return. As Ali stands amidst the ruins of Saffuriya, the village from which he was expelled in 1948 at the age of eleven, he recognizes that the physical topology of the present-day site no longer corresponds with the Saffuriya of his memory. Today, like so many other internally displaced Palestinians from the lower Galilee, Ali lives in Nazareth, less than ten kilometers away from the remains of his natal and ancestral home.2 This proximity, however, is only physical: the people who turned the “open space” into the “place” of Saffuriya—Taha’s best friend Qasim; his early adolescent object of adoration, Amira, with the “ease” of her braid; peasants in their fields—are nowhere to be found. The village of his memory, a pastoral landscape of persons, animals, herbs, and fruit and nut trees, has, like hundreds of other Palestinian towns and villages, been erased from the map, leaving only traces on the landscape in the form of crumbling ruins, trees spared the axe and the chainsaw, and clumps of prickly-pear cactus. Ali’s bewildered plea of “where?” drives a plaintive litany running through the poem. Where “are the red-tailed birds/and the almonds’ green?” Ali asks. Where are the “hyssop and thyme?” The “rites and feasts of the olives?” These questions drive home the realization that a restorationist return of the past to the present is out of the question. The remembered village has been snatched away, just as, at the end of Ali’s poem, a speckled hen is grabbed by a kite diving from the heavens. Saffuriya may be gone forever, but the poet can, like the tragicomic figure of the peasant woman yelling at the kite in the poem, curse the Israeli Jewish subject responsible for Saffuriya’s destruction, with the hope that the Israeli erasure/digestion of the Palestinian landscape will not be 1 completely successful and will at least cause a serious case of heartburn or constipation: “You, there, in the distance: I hope you can’t digest it!”3 Palestinian Theological Autobiographies of Exile Ali’s reflections at the ruins of Saffuriya poetically map Ali’s exile from “the place itself,” while also ruminating on what appears to be the impossibility of return—at least the impossibility of return understood as the reclamation of prelapsarian village life, the reconstitution of individual and communal existence as it was prior to what Palestinians term the nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948, the events of which left hundreds of thousands of Palestinians refugees and hundreds of villages in ruins.4 “They scattered us on the wind to every corner of the earth,” proclaims the Latin (Roman Catholic) priest Manuel Musallam, reflecting not only on the forced dispersion of Palestinians during the nakba but over the ensuing six decades as well. Yet, despite this involuntary exile, Musallam continues, “they did not eradicate us.”5 Assertion of endurance and presence in the midst of exile has marked Palestinian responses to the nakba. Not only does the language of exile and return permeate Palestinian poetry, political speeches, memory books, and websites dedicated to specific villages destroyed in 1948, exile is the location from which Palestinians imagine and remember home.6 This exilic imagination also shapes a particular form of Palestinian Christian theological reflection one could call “theological autobiography of exile.” Across the ecumenical spectrum, Palestinian Christian theologians narrate the exiles they and their families have endured, with such narratives providing the framework for their theological interpretation of Scripture and Zionism and for their theological visions of the future. The stylistic similarities among these theological autobiographies reflect growing ecumenical cooperation across confessional lines within Palestinian Christianity over the past two decades, a cooperation driven in large part by the pressing need to present a united political front to the Israeli state and toward the global Christian community.7 The rhetorical parallelism between Palestinian Christian and Palestinian Muslim accounts of exile, meanwhile, reveals that Palestinian Christian identity participates in a broader construction of Palestinian identity marked by exile and dispossession.8 These autobiographical narratives of exile, meanwhile, issue in differing understandings of what return, as a counterpoint to exile, might mean. For some Palestinian Christian...

Share