Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa: tracing memory beyond the rubble

Abstract

This article argues that Ghassan Kanafani in his 1969 work Returning to Haifa portrays a new conception of home as a postcolonial site that transcends the physicality of geography to create a new collective fluid memory. Kanafani’s narrative explores the chasm between the imaginary or utopian territory that exists simply in the memory of the indigenous people, and the real site which exists geographically, and how this makes ethical representation of the traumatised subject virtually impossible/an impossibility. Kanafani’s allegorical journey of Returning to Haifa records the bruised memory of the Palestinian refugees, and reveals a desire to recreate a protean memory for this traumatised people so as to transform them from the state of victimhood to that of resistance. Hence, the three physical sites explored here: body, land and text are opened to the processes of becoming.