Arab Literary Travels

Lili's Project Proposal

For my final project, I will be tracing the movements of the characters in “Return to Haifa” by Ghassan Kanafani. I intend to focus on the journey of Said and Safiya as well as the journey of Miriam and her husband. Though this map will end up being expansive, as it will encompass two completely different journeys, I think it is important to see how the movements of these two sets of people overlap. For Said and Safiya my main plot points would be their expulsion from Haifa, their movement to Ramallah, their return to Haifa, and possibly their return to Ramallah (this time focusing on why it is important that they didn’t remain in Haifa). For Miriam and her husband my main plot points would be the beginning of their story in Poland (and how this connects to the Holocaust and Auschwitz in particular), their movement to Italy, their migration to the Jewish refugee camp in Palestine, and then their final move into Haifa. In order to properly discuss all of these plot points I will need to research the movement of Jewish refugees out of Europe and into Palestine and Israel, the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, the specific invasion and expulsion of Palestinians from Haifa, and the Six Day War along with its aftermath. Though this will be a lot of research, I think all of these points are important to truly understand the travels within this brilliant piece of literature, and to illuminate all the real world struggles that these characters would have experienced.
            This map would obviously intersect with the content of this class in that it is one of the texts that we were assigned to read and analyze. I think this text is really important to the overall class because it really highlights the Arab issues and the idea of travel that we focus on throughout all of our readings. I think this map will help to contribute to the class’ knowledge of Palestinian displacement and removal, which is one of our core units. I believe the characters in this story also have a shared experience with many of the other characters in the stories we have read and will read throughout the semester. In my map I hope to illuminate the experience of these characters, which will in turn shed light on the experiences of characters in our other texts as well as the people who actually went through this displacement in reality. I hope to teach my classmates about how the Holocaust and the Israeli and Palestinian conflict intersect with each other and about their role within the characters’ journeys in “Return to Haifa”. In my map I intend to illustrate these characters travels in order to really bring this story to life.
           
Works Cited
Kanafani, Ghassan, Barbara Harlow, and Karen E. Riley. Palestine's Children: Returning
      to Haifa & Other Stories. N.p.: Lynne Rienner Publishing, Inc., 2000. Print. 
 

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