Exilic Narrativity: Audiovisual Storytelling and Memory

Abstract

e engage in history not only as agents or actors, but also as storytellers or narrators. In this chapter, I take this idea as my starting point. This activity of storytelling is fragmented in a case of historical disaster. Above, I cite the brief extract from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” to emphasize the fragmented sense of storytelling (or fragmented narrativity) of the Palestinian loss of homeland as a subjective mode of cultural remembrance in exile.¹ This mode, I argue, does not strive toward articulating the historical past as self-identical, “the way it really was,” rather, Palestinians’ memories of al-Nakba encompass first and foremost a configuration formed out of past as well as present images in the context of their everyday practices and lives at the time of remembrance. Within these narrative memories, the catastrophic event in the past is constantly modified. Those transformations occur because memories of the place are unleashed, to borrow Benjamin’s phrase, “at a moment of danger.” In the Palestinian case, the moments of danger, as I attempt to show below, represent moments of collective annihilation in the present: 64 years after al-Nakba, exiled Palestinians still exist under a daily threat of being nullified as a people. The text through which I will demonstrate how such fragmented storytelling functions is this time a film, which deals with the Palestinians’ loss of homeland by Egyptian director Tawfiq Saleh.²

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” […] It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger […].

—Walter Benjamin (1977: 257)