Among the acts of the Israeli genocidal assault against the Palestinian people have been the sustained attacks upon archives, libraries, universities, schools, and museums in Gaza. These Israeli attacks upon Palestinian collective pedagogical and epistemic existence—what has been called “scholasticide”—is not new (United Nations Press Release, April 18, 2024). The present reiterates the past, from Israel’s theft of Palestinian books in 1948 and their incorporation into the Jewish National and University Library, as documented by the historian Gish Amit (“Ownerless Objects?,” Jerusalem Quarterly 33 Winter 2008), to its looting of the P.L.O. Research Center in 1982 in Beirut, including, as explained by the Center’s director at that time, Sabri Jiryis, “its entire library of 25,000 volumes in Arabic, English, and Hebrew, a printing press, microfilms, manuscripts, and archives” (New York Times, October 1, 1982), and more.In this frame, Refqa Abu-Remaileh’s Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature, an online, interactive book, is not only a deeply and meticulously researched, brilliantly laid-out, and much-needed scholarly resource for Palestine Studies, Arabic Studies, and Arab and Arabic literature studies; it is an invaluable archival repository of the literary heritage of a people under genocidal assault. There is no single resource, in any language, that maps out the formation of Palestinian poetic, cultural, critical, and literary life in a manner that demonstrates its global, cross- and multilingual, and transnational dimensions in such a detailed and finely organized manner. There is no human being who will not learn immensely and in profound ways from this work.The reader of Country of Words enters into a multipart work, accessible through several highly interactive frames. A table of contents outlines the following: “Home,” “Introduction,” “Timeline,” “Network,” “Visualizations,” “Audio Interviews,” and “About.” The Introduction outlines the frame of the work in expository prose, noting the contributions of figures such as Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Hanna Abu Hanna, and Edward W. Said, each of whom is an “intellectual mentor” for this project. And yet each section intersects with the others so that the reader is taken from one moment, author, periodical, city, or movement to another in a nonlinear fashion. This interactive method embedded in the structure of the work becomes itself a manner of reading. Rather than presume the stability of state institutions and forms, there is, in the reading practice fostered through this book, a deterritorialization of literature studies, a reduplication of the social field that is generated through the cultural, literary, and intellectual practices, and the construction of forms of knowledge, which Country of Words traces.The Introduction underlines this book’s emphasis on the periodical as a literary and cultural form, and through this emphasis, Country of Words creates a significant contribution to Palestinian and Arabic literature studies. The normative frame for scholarly writing in these fields can tend to privilege the individual author, for example in the valuable contribution of Nora E. H. Parr, in Novel Palestine: Nation Through the Works of Ibrahim Nasrallah (University of California Press, 2023), or the literary work, for example, in the important intervention of Bashir Abu Manneh, in The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Country of Words takes on a special importance because of the way in which it decanonizes particular authors, makes visible the contributions of writers whose work has been understudied in Anglophone contexts, and presents a reflection on Palestinian literary and cultural history as collectively generated rather than as a practice of the aesthetic grounded in the social understanding of the individual author.The section entitled “Timeline” closely resembles a normatively constructed literary history, and in its outlining of this history, Country of Words creates a substantial contribution to Anglophone scholarship in Palestinian and Arabic studies. The Timeline includes seven overlapping sections, from “Literary Diasporas: The Mahjar, 1880–1950” and “Literature under British Occupation, 1900–1948,” to “Literary Diasporas: Post Nakba Scattering, 1948–1967” and “Literary Diasporas: Post-Beirut Fragmentation, 1982–1994,” and these are filled out in close details in the cross-linked pages of this work. Clicking on the book’s final section, “Literary Diasporas: Post-Beirut Fragmentation,” one encounters a prose description of Palestinian literary life after the collective exodus from Beirut in 1982. The work offers a narrative of post-Beirut literary and critical productions, which highlights the work of over at least forty-six authors (including Sabri Jiryis, mentioned above), and it traces their work across Tunis, Nicosia (in Cyprus), Damascus, and London, as well as Jordan, Kuwait, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the United States. The chapter then traces the periodicals through which literary and intellectual life was created and sustained during this period, from Lotus, “a trilingual literary periodical issued by the Afro-Asian Writers Association in Arabic, English, and French,” which had been published, as Abu-Remaileh outlines, in Cairo (1967–1978), Beirut (1978–1982), and then in Tunis (1983–1991). The scholarship here is archival—the book presents images of issues of Lotus, in English and Arabic—as well as historical, contextual, philological, and analytic. Abu-Remaileh sketches a relation to other Arabic-language journals, which, she observes, either ceased publication or relocated in 1982, and outlines in detail a number of other journalistic collaborations: for example, the French-language Revue d’études palestiniennes, which was founded in 1981 and was forced to move to Paris in 1982; al-Yawm al-Sābiʿ, an Arabic-language publication founded in Paris in 1984, where Darwish wrote a weekly column; and al-Karmel, which was edited by Darwish and founded in Beirut in 1981 and relocated to Nicosia in 1982.The richness of the work presented in Country of Words is further made visible through the visualizations it provides, which allow one, in “Literary Diasporas: Post-Beirut Fragmentation,” to click on a city in which literary journals were published, Tunis, for example, and encounter a list of all of the persons who published in journals there, in this case, seventy-six in total. Another provides a configuration of no less than forty journals, gathered into subgroups based upon site of publication, where one is able to click and see the title, author, and date of publication of articles that address Palestinian literature during this period. A third allows one to click upon the name of a journal and see a list of contributors, with a link to biographical data, including birth date, place of birth, and date and place of death. Finally, an interactive map highlighting thirteen major locations across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa enables one, when selecting a location, to see a listing in Arabic of the articles published there on Palestinian literature. This practice of visualization, collocation, bibliography, biography, and archival presentation generates work of significant scholarly value, which is not available—and certainly not visually presented in a synthesizing manner—in any other resource.Country of Words, detailed as it is, is simply not summarizable. A practice that mirrors what I have outlined here is presented in each section of the Timeline of this work, in a stunning articulation of detailed presentation, cross-referencing, and visualization. Framing each section in the Timeline is a temporal, historical, and analytic prose articulation, as well as visual renderings. The section entitled “Literary Diasporas: Post-Nakba Scattering,” for instance, contains a map detailing the dispersal of Palestinian literary figures across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and North and South America, as well as cross-locational outlines of periodicals and contributors to them, and a zoomed-in focus on a number of distinguished Palestinian literary writers, scholars, and translators—and, in the case of figures such as Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Salma Khadra Jayyusi, all of these in one. The discussion of these figures, and others—the literary historian, editor, and critic Ihsan Abbas, for example, is a monumental figure in Arabic literary studies—becomes also an occasion to trace the proliferation of literary periodicals such as Shiʿr and al-Adāb, through to the writings of Ghassan Kanafani in the early 1960s, where one is able to gain access to a “first iteration” of Kanafani’s articulation of “resistance literature” in a link to a two-article sequence published in al-Adāb in 1966. All of this leads, finally, to a discussion of “institution building,” where Abu-Remaileh outlines the founding of the Institute for Palestine Studies in 1963 and of the PLO Research Center in 1965—the very institution whose library, archives, and manuscripts were stolen by the invading Israeli army in 1982.Country of Words contains, finally, a series of ten audio interviews with Palestinian and Lebanese literary writers, poets, and scholars. This section supplements the main body of the book and suggests a continuation of the work it describes. This book, one might say, presents a collective biography of Palestinian literary, cultural, and intellectual life, as it also provides a model for studying it and learning from it. In the context of the present-day genocidal assault, perhaps all that we can do is thank Abu-Remaileh and the team of scholars that supported this work, as outlined in the section entitled “About.” This book is a vital contribution to transnational, cross-regional, and comparative literature studies, and at the same time it curates an archive which, thanks to its online format, the colonizer will remain forever unable to steal.
Jeffrey Sacks (Fri,) studied this question.