Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s In Search of Walid Masoud’s intertextuality with William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Abstract

This article argues that Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s In Search of Walid Masoud parallels Shakespeare’s Hamlet by exploring various themes and motifs such as the ghost, the gravedigger, Ophelia’s suicide, adultery, chastity, and madness. Through these themes and motifs, Jabra weaves a narrative that simultaneously recalls and reinvents Shakespeare’s classic play in a contemporary, politically-charged context. This article shows that Jabra utilizes Hamlet as a pivotal reference to represent the main concerns of his Palestinian people from a new and distinctive literary perspective. This is explicit in Jabra’s representation of revenge, in particular. In Hamlet, Shakespeare explores the theme of a son’s revenge for his father. Jabra, on the other hand, structures In Search of Walid Masoud around the revenge of a father for his son, which makes the revenge at the heart of the novel not personal but rather collective (the father’s revenge for his motherland/Palestine). This demonstrates Jabra’s proclivity to render the national plight of Palestinian people global and permit the Palestinian struggle to be perceived on a larger scale.