Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin and Returning to Haifa : a contrapuntal analysis of adaptation

This article offers a contrapuntal reading of Returning to Haifa and Mornings in Jenin to examine how Palestinian narratives of return, displacement, memory, and cultural sustainability are reconfigured across generations. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis and adaptation theory, the article argues that Mornings in Jenin functions not only as a thematic continuation of Returning to Haifa but also as an adaptive reconfiguration that expands its historical, psychological, and narrative scope. While Kanafani foregrounds the immediate trauma of dispossession through Said and Safiyya’s return to Haifa, Abulhawa extends this trajectory through Amal’s intergenerational experience of exile, postmemory, inherited loss, and the struggle to sustain Palestinian identity under prolonged settler colonialism. Read contrapuntally, the texts reveal how Palestinian subjectivity is shaped by evolving structures of colonial violence, where return becomes both desire and traumatic confrontation. The protagonists’ encounters with occupied homes mark an encounter with the Lacanian Real, exposing the irreversibility of displacement and affirming literature as a site of resistance and cultural memory.