'Changed Landscape' of an 'Arab Place:' A Study of an Interpellated Realm in Karmi's Return.

• Author: Aamir, Rabia
• Position: ARTICLE

Background of the Selected Text: Its Socio-Political Importance

We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population [...] In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. (2)

World peace has been threatened with the recent incidents at Sheikh Jarrah, in the surroundings of Jerusalem. However, a British Palestinian Doctor of Medicine and daughter of a famous linguist and BBC broadcaster, Ghada Karmi, born in Jerusalem in 1939, records a similar experience of forced eviction in her 2002 memoir, In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story. Karmi being a writer, academic, and lecturer at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, writes prolifically for newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The Nation, and the Journal of Palestinian Studies. Critics like Said view this story of exile and displacement as a poignant, remarkable, and well-written text about the personal and communal life in mandatory Palestine, which brings out her skill and insight, and "intermesh...the political and the personal." (3) Her second book, Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine (2007) is a critical work of great enterprise and importance, highlighting the political and historical drama transpiring in the story of the plight of Palestinians.

The selected text for this study, Return: A Palestinian Memoir (2015) is a memoir, a documentary source to show ramifications to the Palestinian side of what happened in 1948. Historians like Ilan Pappe, find Return as a "journey into the heart of occupation's darkness;" (4) and I find this book as a synthesis and denouement of thoughts of a mature woman who, not only has witnessed the devastating events of 1948 but has been living and breathing the issue of Palestine.

Many other writers have raised similar concerns through their memoirs and narratives. (5) Salman Abu Sitta, though spared the intensity of brutalities of the Palestinian Nakba himself, is a distinguished historian who discusses the issue of return from the perspective of a Palestinian refugee in his book, Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir (2016). Belonging to an old influential family in Beersheba, Sitta wants to return to his home and wants to understand the "hatred" that brought this century-old refugee status for many Palestinians like him around the world. Similarly, memoirs of Amira Haas, Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege (1999), Miko Peled, The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine (2012), and Reja e Busailah's In the Land of My Birth: A Palestinian Boyhood (2017) discuss the atrocities befalling Palestinian land and society from different perspectives. Therefore, the issue of return, the Palestinian dilemma, and the Jewish question are some of the leading arguments of the Palestinian issue. Addressing these main questions,

Karmi's narrative shows how Palestine is undergoing an ongoing Nakba, because of it being treated as a 'friendless orphan,' (6) and states an environmental ethic for the land of her birth.

Karmi, with her hybrid existence as a British-Palestinian, writes Return as a journey of an 'outsider insider,' who is 'not Arab enough' in Palestine, but 'too Arab in England.' (7) With this hybridity of a westernized

Palestinian identity and appointed by United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to work as a consultant in the Ministry of Media and Communications for the Palestinian Authority (PA), Karmi brings out an understanding of how the work in the ministry is an extension of the impacted Palestinian life under the Israeli occupation. By giving an in-depth insight into the workings of these PA ministries with her keen observations on their internal dynamics, she shows through her memoir the double marginalization of Palestinians in the twenty-first century and states the environmental ethic of her place.

Environmental ethic, a major theoretical lens used in this study, is a term defined by Deane Curtin as a postcolonial concern of a place that accounts for environmental justice, social justice, and economic justice as parts of the same whole, not as dissonant competitors. In other words, environmental ethics check the blanket assertions of environmentalism, by foregrounding the ethical rationale of the existence of a place with its historical manifestations and exposing the ideological and interpellative strategies of the occupying forces. Environmental ethic, therefore, supports measures for decolonization or environmental resistance movements so that social justice, peace, and stability of a region may prevail. Consequently, postcolonial environmental ethic is an ethic of resistance or eco-postcolonial justice defined as one of the many "indigenous environmental resistance movements that are emerging around the globe." (8) While, interpellation is a process of accepting and internalizing the cultural values as they are presented to us without much choice left, but to accept. The primary reason for acceptance and internalization is the governing ideology which basically manipulates everyday individual and collective decisions.

The following discussion shows how any concerns and efforts for seeking peace, reconciliation, or justice in Palestine have been disregarded because of the social, economic, legal, political, and consequently, environmental injustices meted out towards this land and its people. While its leadership, or its lack thereof (if we may say so) which led to strategic profligacy, is also exposed by Karmi's memoir. By stating a postcolonial environmental ethic of Palestine,

Karmi's narrative brings forth the need to resist all kinds of injustices mentioned above to attain any meaningful peace and reconciliation in this realm.

The Cataclysm of Homecoming: A Return of 'Crestfallen' 'Flotsam and Jetsam' (9)

For Karmi, Return: A Palestinian Memoir is an 'emotional and intellectual gauntlet,' which makes a reader experience the appropriation of Palestinian land and culture through Karmi's visit in 2005, to the place of her birth and childhood. After her first visit to Palestine in 1991, she had promised to herself never to return to "this torn-up, unhappy place" because she could see the Palestinian society interpellated (10) to live a life under occupation. Nonetheless, she comes several times after her first visit, as if she is dithering drawn to its devastated landscape.

Arriving in Ramallah, this time, to work as an official of the UNDP, she describes the painful journey of acknowledging her appropriated Palestine and seeing the "triumph of those who had taken our place." (11) Gemzo Suites, the place she has to stay, "stands in place of 'Jimzu,...a village East of the town of al-Ramallah in pre-1948 Palestine." The village was "built on a hillside and surrounded by cactus plants and olive trees, before it was demolished in September 1948 by Palestine's new owners," (12) as Karmi tells us. The manifestation of this appropriation of land, culture, and resources is a motif that is discussed in various forms in her memoir. Through her text, a reader can envisage the erasure of Palestinian identity.

Working as a consultant for the Ministry of Media and Communications, to devise effective media strategies for the cause of Palestine, Karmi gets an acute understanding of the working of different ministries and the interpellated reality of her fellow Palestinians with almost no choice but to seemingly work for the Palestinian cause. These ministries, with their added internal rivalries, are a typical example of Bhabha's term of a "comprador class." (13) Through her narrative, Karmi tells us, how in a typical colonial fashion, this class is cultivated and given privileges and are led to believe that they are doing some real task, that these are actual ministries, and they are performing some genuine work, but it is a surreal world. Though living in the diaspora, but because of her being extremely dedicated to the Palestinian cause, Karmi makes her reader aware of how the different Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) are given aid by the European Union, to let the people in this small world live in a pseudo-reality of convening conferences and envisaging a future of building infrastructures.

However, she shows, how the EU and other foreign powers, "a garden variety bigotry," are complicit in creating this make-believe world, and therefore, "U.S. policy, and the seemingly unconnected question of Palestine" are quite intertwined. (14) This world, ostensibly, makes the people busy in important vocations of arranging literary and art festivals, but, in reality, are a means of making them compete with each other in a vicious cycle of securing coveted foreign funding. Consequently, this place becomes what Nadia Abu El-Haj contextualizes as 'Assumed Nations' (15) in her book, Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israel Society (2001). Karmi sees the brutal manifestations of oppression and colonization that are continuing unabated, in the places supposedly under PA control, a bitter contrast to this make-believe world, literally littered with NGOs. She exposes the farce of this bizarre world in which these NGOs and so-called ministries, are allowed to engage in activities that do not threaten the status quo of ongoing appropriation, marginalization, and erasure of the Palestinians. She sees this as a threat to the environmental ethic of her land, manifesting as a self-perpetuating system, creating quasi-normality, while the restraints at the horrendous checkpoints tell a different story. She does not spare the genomic politics of PA and political persons like the compromising figure of Mahmood Abbas who appears towards the end of her memoir or the ministers organizing the...