This chapter will explore aspects of the Lapita culture of the Western Pacific, the culture of the initial colonizers of ‘Remote Oceania’, the area beyond the main Solomons chain around 3000 BP (Figure 9.1). The Lapita culture appears earliest in identifiable form in the Bismarck Archipelago off New Guinea a century or two earlier but derives in large part from the strand of the Island Southeast Asian Neolithic traceable to Taiwan around 5500 BP and beyond to southern China. There is evidence for Lapita long-distance interactions across some of the greatest distances found in Neolithic societies worldwide. The question must be posed, however, as to whether this represents exchange, particularly of prestige goods, or whether it signals some other form of interaction?

Archaeological discussions commonly link the trade and exchange of precious metals, shells, feathers, and other exotics to the demands of a prestige-goods economy (e.g., Friedman and Rowlands 1978; Earle 1987: 294–297; Hayden 1998; Kristiansen and Larsson 2005; Earle and Spriggs 2015). These claims are sometimes challenged, both at a general (Barrett 2012) and specific level (Kienlin 2015), but attempts to investigate them run into serious difficulties because so many dimensions of prehistoric prestige economies are archaeologically invisible. Some of the goods traded and transacted in these economies are durable enough to survive in the material record, but others are not, and much about the political, social, religious, and aesthetic contexts that gave them social force and meaning were insubstantial or transient and are now beyond recovery.

This chapter examines Francophone representations of the Israeli– Palestinian conflict as it spills over into the twenty-first century. As the European country with the largest Jewish and Arabic-speaking Muslim populations, France is uniquely situated as an observer of these disparate and often competing cultures not only because of its current demographics but also because of its colonial history in the Maghreb and the Levant. French cultural production about and around this continuing geopolitical crisis is particularly relevant in our global conversation about this conflict, because France remains a primary diplomatic force for both Israelis and Palestinians: it was one of the first nations to recognise the state of Israel and also to advocate for the creation of a Palestinian State. While Belgium does not share France’s colonial history in the Middle East and North Africa, it does have one of Europe’s largest Jewish communities and the economic and diplomatic ties between Israel and Belgium continue to grow stronger, as evidenced by the billions of dollars in trade between the two countries. Like France, Belgium has been committed to Israel’s withdrawal from the Occupied Territories and to the Palestinians’ rights of self-determination for decades. Belgium’s foreign policy can be best described as one of ‘ethical diplomacy’ or ‘equidistance’ during the early 2000s, which aimed at treating all parties equally and allowing the EU to play its mediating role (Herremans 81). It is within this foreign policy context that I analyse a European Francophone cultural response to Israeli–Palestinian relations after the Second Intifada through two graphic novels: Faire le Mur (a play on words that can alternately mean Build the Wall, Go Over the Wall, or Sneak Out) by Maximilien Le Roy from France and Les Amandes vertes: Lettres de Palestine (Green Almonds: Letters from Palestine) by Anaële and Délphine Hermans from Belgium.

The graphic narrative seems particularly appropriate for historical representations of the ongoing geopolitical struggles between Israel and Palestine because such a narrative spatially juxtaposes ‘past, present, and future moments on the page’ (Chute 453). Much in the same way that Art Spiegelman’s enunciation of history in his Maus series weaves through ‘paradoxical spaces and shifting temporalities’, namely the reliance on space to illustrate time – these French-language graphic narratives and novels incorporate an array of modalities (Chute 456).

This chapter will explore different conceptions of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict elaborated in two Bildungsromane or coming-of-age themed twenty-first century graphic novels: Harvey Pekar’s Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me (2012) and Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (2010). Both novels are written by Jewish-American authors for whom the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is an abiding personal preoccupation that shapes their sense of self, thus requiring an immersive exploration of their changing relationship to the Jewish state. As neither novel ends with a protagonist who is confident in their judgments about the conflict or reintegrated into a community after a period of wandering and alienation, some commentary on the evolution of the Bildungsroman in recent genre studies might be helpful in elucidating the subtleties of Pekar and Glidden’s hybrid deployment of autobiography, quest narrative and historical analysis.

A recent article by Harriet Earle reminds us that genre criticism of the Bildungsroman has in many ways moved beyond the assumption that the principal animus of the form is to ‘trace the journey of the [foundling] protagonist from adolescence to adulthood’ and explore their achievement of ‘emotional maturity and social position’ (430). Where the classic Bildungsroman, itself a contested genre concept, was held to have focused on the hero’s naïvety and development from innocence to maturity through mistakes and testing ordeals, Earle registers the formal and narratological interest of current criticism. She cites Julia Round’s summation of critical tendencies that no longer prioritise the successful self-determination of the protagonist as a defining feature of the genre:

[This new shift in critical focus] defines the plot events in terms of self-understanding rather than personal growth; emphasizes the dual position of the protagonist (as both reflective narrator and developing subject); and notes a circular (rather than linear) narrative structure. (Round cited in Earle 431)

Earle and the critics she cites deploy a more dialectical and self-reflexive conception of the genre, in which the narrative is often simultaneously about ingenuous child and wizened adult. As a form that blends literary realism with fairy-tale and Gothic elements, the Bildungsroman often imbricates developmental plots of youthful formation with recursive psychological and symbolic preoccupations, and as a genre congenial to motivated selfexploration, the Bildungsroman renders the formation of the self an ongoing task cathected to the problem of the subject’s relationship to the past.

In Stephen Knight’s essay ‘The Postcolonial Crime Novel’, his broad investigation into the contours of the transnational detective novel, he writes that in the context of some national crime fiction, the genre is able to ‘combine procedural detection with social issues’ (172). Moreover, he argues that ‘many recent writers around the world have used the modes of crime fiction to juxtapose crime and investigation and explore abuses, corruption, and imbalances of power both past and present in their own countries’ (178). Indeed, he points to the ways in which certain authors who follow this trajectory ‘adapt and expand the single inquiry form of disciplinary crime fiction to tell a fuller and more complex story about threats and values’ (178). Pearson and Singer argue that recent critical work on crime fiction has ‘refocused around fundamentally different arguments about how the genre engages structures of knowledge, especially those “external” to the text’ (2). These external worlds can often be very complex and involve navigating multiple and diverse iterations of the law and broad differences in the understanding of justice. As such, it is worth looking closely to see what the genre of crime fiction offers to an evolving geopolitical dynamic such as that found in Israel/Palestine.

Tellingly, recent work in the area seems to acknowledge that crime fiction texts ‘dramatize the challenges of formulating a genuinely democratic approach to knowledge-production, justice, and human rights in a transnational and postcolonial world’ (Pearson and Singer 3). Knowledge-production, questions of justice and the representation of the question of human rights are all issues engaged with at length in Matt Rees’ popular detective novels, the Yussef Mysteries (2007–10), set in the West Bank and Gaza. In many ways, these very issues and concerns structure the development of the novels and provide coordinates that shape the trajectory of the schoolteacher-turneddetective Omar Yussef and his investigations.

It is useful then, at the outset, to read these novels in the context of transnational detective fiction. In practice, this encourages us to consider the genre as one that has ‘evolved from seeing transgressions of national and racial boundaries as preconditions for crime to seeing them as keys to its detection and resolution, especially where such solutions include indictments of broader social and political conditions’ (Pearson and Singer 7, my emphasis).

The poet Mahmoud Darwish (1964–2008) is regarded widely as ‘the voice of Palestine’ (N. Bernard 52) and ‘one of the finest poets of his entire generation’ (R. Khalidi, ‘Remembering’ 75). His goal was to prevent those who had colonised the land from ‘colonizing memory’ (Abu Eid 64). Today, one way of preventing such colonisation of memory is by teaching children about, and reminding adults of, the modern history of Palestine, mainly the 1948 catastrophe known as al-nakba, and its subsequent Palestinian struggle and displacement, which continue into the present. In his poem ‘al-ward wal Qamus’ (‘The Rose and the Dictionary’), Mahmoud Darwish writes,

This chapter analyses how an Egyptian illustrator, Sahar Abdallah, and an Egyptian publisher, Tanmia, use picture books to give Mahmoud Darwish the ‘new poetry’ of which he had endlessly dreamt. The chapter investigates an Egyptian artistic reinvention into picture books of three poems originally written for adults by Darwish. The poems are entitled ‘ila Ummi’ (‘To My Mother’; 1966); ‘hakadha qalat ash-shajaratu al-muhmalah’ (‘According to the Neglected Tree’; 1977); and ‘Fakkir bi-ghayrika’ (‘Think of Others’; 2005). It also considers how the emergent genre of children’s picture books can help Darwish, and Palestinians, to ‘refuse to die’ in oblivion, and to stay vivid in a troubled region where voices calling for resistance to the Israeli occupation are getting fewer every day. These books, addressing readers of all ages, are written and published against, and in spite of, deliberate attempts to erase Palestinian history.

Haim Bresheeth notes that ‘the narrative of Palestine in the cultural arena carved out by Zionism is, first and foremost, a story of erasure, denial, and active silencing by historians and intellectuals’ (179). Such Zionist erasure does not find adequate resistance in Egypt, especially following the ‘Arab Spring’, which placed the individual and the collective challenges of Egyptians before the Palestinian struggle.

In The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present, Bashir Abu-Manneh aptly charts a ‘materialist framework for interpreting the Palestinian novel through two major trajectories: historical processes (including social and political developments) and literary form (including distinct aesthetic characteristics and features)’ (4). More specifically, he insightfully emphasises the ‘structurally disordered conditions of struggle, mass mobilization, and terrains of cultural production’ in Palestine (4). While Abu-Manneh’s study is concerned with the novel, this essay explores this ‘uneven condition’ of struggle and cultural production in relation to life writing and testimonial literature. The focus will be on the Gazan mixed-genre illustrated prose–poetic war-chronicle in diary form, exemplified by Atef Abu Saif ’s The Drone Eats with Me: Diaries from a City Under Fire, which both mediates the formal and ethico-political implications of the severed limb in Gaza in terms of the challenge of embodied relationality to the dismembering impact of technobiopolitical violence and reconfigures the implications of the Derridean concept of ‘hospitality’ as ‘a self-contradictory concept’ (Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’ 5) in the context of the Israeli Operation Protective Edge (8 July–26 August 2014). From this perspective, Derrida’s etymological and philosophical study of ‘hospitality’ as ‘a word which carries its own contradiction incorporated into it, a Latin word which allows itself to be parasitized by its opposite, “hostility,” the undesirable guest [hôte] which it harbors as the self-contradiction in its own body’ (‘Hostipitality’ 3) can be the starting point for an investigation of the paradoxical state of co-extensive and disjointed embodiment as it is re-imagined in The Drone Eats with Me. In this work, Abu Saif delineates an aesthetics of the re-membered and reconstituted severed limb that brings together the structure of the diary with the resources of the prose–poetic war memoir, the philosophical treatise, the socio-political study, and the testimony.

Conditions of siege and war in both Ramallah and Gaza have initiated an increase in the production of the diary form. However, the uneven political geography of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict have inflected the two contexts with differing formal and socio-political parameters, particularities and potentials for the diary.

In his 1999 multi-modal work, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, Edward Said argued that ‘[p]articularly in fiction, the struggle to achieve form expresses the writer’s efforts to construct a coherent scene, a narrative that might overcome the almost metaphysical impossibility of representing the present’ (Said and Mohr 38). Said emphasises the capacity of literary form, which is often neglected at the expense of historical and political analysis, to represent an increasingly complicated present. Considerations of form permeate After the Last Sky, which combines narrative text with haunting photographs taken by Jean Mohr of Palestinians engaged in their everyday lives in familiar yet culturally significant settings. Literary Representations of the Palestine/Israel Conflict After the Second Intifada reprises Said’s notion of form and the struggle to understand and represent an often mystified present, from a post-Second-Intifada perspective (2000–5 and its aftermath). Our cover image, Palestinian artist Hazem Harb’s Al Baseera #1, exemplifies these ideas. While presenting an abstract image that needs deciphering and demystifying, Harb’s work was inspired by the Arabic word ‘Bazaar’, which can be interpreted both as seeing and seeing through something (Google Arts and Culture). Hence, this image not only emphasises the importance of looking at and seeing the world from different perspectives but acknowledges how representation plays with and challenges our perceptions, which is also at the heart of our edited collection.

We take the onset of the Second Palestinian Intifada (2000–5) as a starting point for our examination of literary representations, as it marked a significant and material experiential change for both Palestinians and Israelis.

For Palestinians, this era constituted an important moment of (sometimes armed) resistance against Israel as an occupying power, the subjection to more intensive military control and surveillance through the proliferation of checkpoints, somatic vulnerability exacerbated by the use of drones, and the endurance of destructive military bombardment in Gaza after the Israeli withdrawal. For Palestinians, the Second Intifada also produced intense debate over strategies of resistance (violent nationalist struggle versus civil rights and BDS – Boycott, Divestment, Sanction – campaigns). For Israeli Jews, the new millennium marked a pronounced surge in Palestinian attacks, especially on civilians, which led to an increased sense of vulnerability and a desire for security during and after the Second Intifada.

In ‘broken and beirut’, the closing poem of her 1996 debut collection Born Palestinian, Born Black, the Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad describes Palestinian life as an unending state of siege:

The lines evoke two massacres of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians: the 1994 Al-Ibrahimi Mosque massacre in Hebron, when the American settler Baruch Goldstein opened fire on worshippers, killing twenty-nine people; and the 1996 Qana massacre in South Lebanon, when the Israeli military shelled a UN compound sheltering 800 refugees who had fled bombing in Beirut, killing 106 people, half of them children. Hammad sharply reminds her reader that despite the promises of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian catastrophe continues unabated. The only return that Palestinians can be certain of is the return of more violence and destruction.

This book’s focus on international representations of Palestine/Israel since 2000 asks us to take stock of what has changed since Hammad wrote these lines, and what has stayed the same. In many ways, the Palestinians’ political and socioeconomic situation is even bleaker, reflecting the consolidation of the US-backed ‘imperial restoration’ in the region that has taken place from the early 1970s onwards, facilitated not only by Israel but also by counterrevolutionary regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, and other Arab states (Abu-Manneh 32). Since the Palestinian leadership’s ‘capitulation’ in Oslo, as Edward Said famously put it (‘The Morning After’), Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have lived through the eruption of the al-Aqsa intifada and Israel’s massive retaliatory invasion of the West Bank; the transformation of Gaza into what is routinely described as the world’s largest open-air prison; the vast expansion of Israeli settlements and of the system of checkpoints, barriers and permits restricting Palestinian movement in the West Bank; and the Israeli aerial and ground assaults on Gaza in 2008–9 and 2014. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Syria have been displaced once again, and the already precarious living conditions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon (whose numbers now include many Palestinian refugees from Syria) have deteriorated even further (UNRWA; McCloskey).

Palestinian life writing is an expanding field of inquiry in Anglophone postcolonial studies, where postcolonial criticism has increasingly focused on autobiographical literature and its relationship to the ongoing Palestinian colonial predicament. The field is notably acknowledging the significance of autobiographical writing as a compelling cultural form of narration which highlights the intertwined relationship between individual life, national history and political reality. This critical interest in life writing can be particularly attributed to the way the genre is produced and received as a form of Palestinian testimony and its capacity of prescribing the effects of the political conflict on the lives of individuals (Bernard, Rhetorics 4). Having achieved a wide critical exposure, Palestinian life writing today is one of the major genres of contemporary Palestinian literature and is, as Karim Mattar notes, ‘a uniquely compelling means to transmit the archetypal features of Palestinian reality – exile, diaspora, dispossession, occupation, and war – to international audiences otherwise exposed mainly to foreign, corporate narratives, if to any at all’ (54).

This chapter considers the contemporary Palestinian diary as a cultural form of self-expression which reinvigorates the imbrication of personal and national narrations. It argues that the formal and thematic capacities of the diary form enable life writers to present life under occupation as monotonous, daily encounters. The diary form, as I demonstrate, challenges the fundamentally political and conflict-centred discourses that govern the representation of Palestine and Israel which, as Anna Bernard notes, ‘continue … to determine the conditions of reception for Palestinian and Israeli writing in English and in English translation’ (Rhetorics 7). Instead, the diaries under discussion, I argue, are motivated by the desire to record, represent and testify to the mundane dimensions of contemporary local Palestinian life by privileging the quotidian experience of the occupation. While one could argue that examining life writing as politically driven is not a new route of research in Palestinian literature, the study of the diary form, I assert, emerges as an important concern for postcolonial autobiography studies not only as an under-examined subject of inquiry but also as an increasingly emerging form of Palestinian life writing which highlights the discursive relationship between national narration and self-representation as important cultural sites for manifesting Palestinian daily resistance.