Hegemonic (Israeli) Time and Minority (Palestinian) Space: Sayed Kashua’s Chronotopic Approach in Let It Be Morning

Sayed Kashua, a Palestinian writer in Israel who has published novels exclusively in Hebrew, was celebrated as a successful writer and journalist in the Hebrew literary field. If the author’s usage of Hebrew and his novels were examined from an Israeli and a Jewish perspective and from the prospects of minority speech acts, these critics did, however, situate his literature within the immediate political context, that of the impossible situation of Palestinians in Israel. This article reads his second novel, Let It Be Morning (בוקר ויהי(, from a different perspective and considers Kashua’s literary strategy that consists in transforming a futuristic and allegorist perspective into a chronotope set between hegemonic (Israeli) time and minority (Palestinian) space. This novel highlights, between text and context, different visions of the future: a dystopian situation reflecting both a disastrous outcome of the Zionist wing calling for the transfer of the Palestinians and an internal conflict between Palestinians (fitnah); the utopian vision of the writer, who used his writing in Hebrew to create a hybrid space of negotiation with the Hebrew reader and therefore suggesting literature as a way to prevent dystopia. This article emphasizes a futuristic storytelling from its content to its form used by Kashua as a literary strategy to express the impossibility of a Palestinian voice, his voice, in Hebrew fiction.