Poetry, Palestine and posthumanism

Abstract

Palestinian poets Nathalie Handal and Naomi Shihab Nye deploy nonhuman perspectives to mourn the lost homeland, reflecting on the Nakba (‘the Catastrophe’, the 1948 Palestinian exodus) as a site of environmental and social rupture. Representations of environmental ruptures as means of reflecting on the Nakba are not new to the Palestinian literary tradition. Understanding these ruptures by way of posthumanist appeals is, however, a radical gesture that we can locate at the centre of troubled attempts to merge, or at a minimum ‘converge’, the ‘respective preoccupations of ecocriticism and postcolonial studies’, to use Robert Spencer’s enunciation. Through close readings of the multispecies ecologies deployed by Nathalie Handal and Naomi Shihab Nye, this paper reconciles postcolonial Palestine with posthumanist Palestine, honouring the poets’ compositions of vistas of nonhuman animals and habitats, and studying their experimentation with interspecies kinship.