Landscape writing and the critique of masculinity: countering the loss of Palestinian landscape in Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape

This paper examines the memoir of Palestinian Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, through the lenses of masculinity and landscape writing. The article explores the strategies that the author deploys to write his account of the landscape which questions and challenges the dominant land rhetorics in Palestine. Locating the text within the new body of literature identified as New Nature Writing through the medium of walking, the paper argues that Shehadeh pens his own account of the landscape from a position that is critical of the masculinist-militant land rhetorics prevalent in this conflict zone. While navigating the landscape that makes up the natural setting of his narrative, Shehadeh’s gaze champions the ever-entangled nature of the masculine body with its natural setting and refuses to put the “hu-man” in a superior position to “his” environment, undermining masculine ideas of power and control of nature.