Literary analysis reveals evolving autobiographical forms across memoirs by exiled Palestinian authors, highlighting shifting narrative expressions of identity, displacement, and survival.
Amid Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, its expanding campaigns of conquest and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Lebanon, and beyond, four Palestinian scholars, activists, and writers in exile have published their debut memoirs, charting new paths in the genre of the Palestinian autobiography. Abdalhadi Alijla’s Fearful in Gaza recounts Alijla’s childhood growing up under siege in Gaza and surviving repeated Israeli incursions before being exiled to Europe. In I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, Hala Alyan narrates her experience of motherhood through surrogacy while grappling with a legacy of displacement. Tareq Baconi’s Fire in Every Direction intertwines Baconi’s personal reflections on growing up queer in Amman with the intergenerational story of his family’s exile from Palestine. And Mai Serhan’s I Can Imagine It for Us is a lyrical account of Serhan’s journey of reconciliation with her father and stolen homeland.
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Alijla et al. (2026) studied this question.
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