Identity Crisis of the ‘I’and ‘the other’in Gassan Kanafani's Returning to Haifa and Anton Shammas's Arabesque

Abstract

This paper focuses on the identity of the ‘I’and the ‘other’in the novels of both Gassan Kanafani's Returning to Haifa and Anton Shmmas's Arabesque. It falls into two parts; the first part investigates Kanafani's technique in handling the identity of the colonizer both collectively and individually through the construction of characters. The collective image of the Israeli occupation is traditionally shown as an aggressive force of destruction while he was very adept in using the postcolonial discourse to reflect a human enemy in his portrayal of individual Jewish characters. He presented the crisis by using a postmodern technique which is based on juxtaposition and parallelism whereby he was able to delineate the boundaries of individual/collective or national/personal identities. The second part involves the issue of identity crisis in Shammas's Arabesque. Again Shammas in this novel uses the dialectics of the postcolonial discourse to bring to the foreground the issue of the Palestinian identity in the wake of 1948 Nakba. Shammas was very creative in mixing the fictional with the non-fictional, the autobiographical with the baffling historical. In addition, Shammas's use of Hebrew as a medium of writing was point of departure in the ongoing inter-group dialogue over the issue of identity.