The Grandchildren of Yūnis

In January 2013, Palestinian activists set up a camp on Israeli-occupied land in the West Bank to protest Israeli settlement plans. They named their village “Bāb al-shams,” or “Gate of the Sun,” after Ilyās Khūrī’s novel by the same name that chronicles the Palestinian refugee experience from the beginning of the conflict to the present. A subsequent protest camp, called “Aḥfād Yūnis” or “the Grandchildren of Yūnis,” positioned the protesters as the heirs to the struggle waged by the novel’s hero, Yūnis, an aging Palestinian freedom fighter who has fallen into a coma. They drew upon the novel’s narrative and characters to create videos, images, and songs in support of their protest. This article uses this moment of interaction between literature and politics to consider how the protesters’ invocation of the novel complicates the relationship between literature, memory, and political activism. Just as the novel critiques an overreliance on certain forms of memory of Palestine, the protesters use the novel’s narrative to move beyond memory as a primary mode of articulating Palestinian political aims in the present. They seek a mode of engaging with the past that is not bound by the fragmented and unreliable recollections of earlier generations, but rather one that is dynamic and constituted through acts of infiltration and movement

Ancient history · Art · HERO · Literature · Narrative · Palestine · Palestinian refugees · Political science · Politics · Politics of memory · Sociology · Terrorism · Gender Studies · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Middle East Politics and Society · Philosophy · Religious studies

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