Arab Literary Travels

Lili Clift: Introduction Page

          For my final project I chose to focus on Ghassan Kanafani’s “Return to Haifa” and the travels of the characters within the story and how this relates to the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My project follows the journeys of Said and Safiya and Miriam and Evrat, while leaving out the stories of their children. I thought it was important to focus on the adults of the story because most of the story itself focuses on both couples’ forced moves from their homelands, and of course Said and Safiya’s return, whereas their children, though undoubtedly affected by the experiences of their parents, remain in the same location for the majority of the story. It was also important for me to explore the paths of both couples rather than just one because the similarities between their emigrations make their intersection in Haifa all the more interesting. Both couples were fleeing dangerous situations when they left their homeland (though in the case of Said and Safiya this move was much more directly forced). They both also had to deal with how to define their identities in relation to their new homelands.
          My project will both start and end in Haifa; I will first follow the path of Miriam and Evrat from Warsaw to Haifa, then the path of Said and Safiya from Ramallah and back to Haifa. Though the story tells of the travels of Said and Safiya before Miriam and Evrat’s, I think it makes more sense to go in order of events (WWII, the creation of Israel, and then the Six Day War) to make the narrative seem more fluid rather than jumping from present to flashbacks of the different couples like it does in the story.
 

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