Our member, Dr. Hanan Mousa (Sakhnin College, Israel), talks about her new book, Palestinian Memory and Identity in Modern Children’s Literature (Routledge, 2024).
This book delves deeply into representations of folk culture in Palestinian children’s literature from 1967 to the present day. This study is novel, examining the myriad ways Palestinian authors have interwoven motifs and elements from popular culture into Palestinian children’s literature, and the evolving purposes served by these motifs and elements across time and space. This approach provides the readers with fresh insights into how the interplay of these elements both shaped the character of Palestinian children’s literature and how it contributed to the construction and evolution of national identity and consciousness among young Palestinians.
This is a timely and significant contribution to the literature, given the growing interesting in understanding different cultural perspectives, not least that of the Palestinian people, whose fraught history is marked by conflict, displacement, and struggles for identify. Throughout these long-standing struggles, Palestinian children’s literature has played a significant role in shaping and preserving Palestinian heritage, culture, and collective identity.
The medium of children’s literature is a powerful one, through which values and cultural identity can be instilled at an early age. Frequently constituting the child’s first encounter with larger social and national narratives, this literature can help shape their understanding of the world and their place in it. Despite its critical role in conveying, framing, and preserving Palestinian identity, Palestinian children’s literature has received scant attention in the literature, particularly in terms of its use of folk culture and its role in constructing national identity.
My book aims to fill a conspicuous void in the literature. To the best of my knowledge, there are no academic books in English on the subject of Palestinian children’s literature or on the representation of collective Palestinian identity in children’s literature. It is a surprising gap, given the vast and diverse range of such literature. This book is also the first in English to discretely analyze literary texts by Palestinian writers who live inside Israel, in the West Bank and Gaza, and across the Palestinian diaspora.
This book makes a foundational contribution to these fields of inquiry. It will appeal to academics engaged in the field of children’s literature and literature generally, as well as undergraduates and postgraduates. There is also a significant community within Palestinian society involved in children’s literature, the preservation of oral heritage and folklore who will find this book illuminating. Internationally, this book should attract those engaged both in cultural and sociological study as a seminal case study in the issues in the context of very particular and yet diverse circumstances. University libraries and other intellectual centers will undoubtedly be interested in acquiring this to help advance further research.
The book is divided into two main parts.
PART ONE
Chapter One: The theory of children’s literature
This chapter demonstrates how relevant theories of intertextuality have a distinct application in relation to children’s as opposed to adults’ literature. The relationship between the components of intertextuality in children’s literature (writer/text/reader-text/reader/context) has distinct characteristics children’s literature. My theoretical framework perceives children’s literature as autonomous. It operates within the constraints of children’s culture, but responds to society’s moral and educative demands. Society’s preoccupation with children’s literature stems from importance ascribed to the development of collective identity among children, their internalizing of hegemonic narratives, and the way they are passed on intergenerationally. There is also a preoccupation with them among those who promote subversive rather than hegemonic narratives.
Zipes emphasizes the importance of folk heritage in strengthening the connection between individuals and society and in strengthening the sense of belonging, especially among children. Therefore, the use of folk culture representations in children’s literature, especially those geared to the developmentally crucial five-to-nine-year-old stage, not only greatly contributes to children’s psychological, emotional, and social development, but also develops in them a sense of national and communal belonging, collective identity, and connection to the past.
My discussion of representations of folk culture in children’s literature examines the three key stakeholders in the process: The author, who shapes heritage according to current needs and according to his educational, ideological and cultural vision; The child and its psychological, emotional, and educational needs; and the children’s text, built on the delicate balance that exists between the objective and the attractive in representations of folk culture.
Chapter Two: Historical review of Palestinian children’s literature
This chapter provides a preliminary historical overview of Palestinian children’s literature since the 1917 establishment of the British Mandate in Palestine before focusing on the period of 1948 until today. It divides Palestinian children’s literature into three periods: Palestinian children’s literature in Israel since 1948; in the Palestinian diaspora since 1948; and in the Palestinian Authority since 1967.
Until 1948, children’s literature expressed a predominantly pan-Arab narrative and broader Islamic and Arab heritage. Up to 1948, the conflict with British Mandate occupiers and the Zionist movement encouraged Palestinian national aspirations that were expressed in Palestinian writing for children. In the first decades after the establishment of the State of Israel, very few original children’s books were written by its Palestinian populations. Institutions encouraged the publication of original and translated works that preached good neighborliness and peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs. In contrast, communist and nationalist circles tried to offer an alternative by editing folk tales from Palestinian heritage and emphasizing the Palestinian character of the narrative. In the Palestinian diaspora, political and ideological messages that highlight the traumatic Palestinian past, the harsh experience of displacement and exile, longing for the homeland and so on were also emphasized in children’s literature at that time.
Following the war of 1967, the preservation of national heritage was perceived by the Palestinians as a crucial means to protect their land and their national identity. In this period, the number of original works intended for children in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian diaspora significantly increased.
Since the late 1980s, we have witnessed a surge in writing of, translation of, research on, and distribution of children’s literature by institutions and organizations founded for these purposes in Israel and the West Bank. The events of the Intifada (1987) redressed flagging resistance, sacrifice, and steadfastness and this was reflected in Palestinian children’s literature. The need to preserve the embers of cultural heritage to unify Palestinians was also important in this regard. Key authors in this period in Israel are Nabihah Jaberin (1950–), Fawzi Ali (1953–), and Mohammed Badarneh (1955–). Significant contemporaries of theirs outside Israel are Mahmoud Shakir (1941–), Abdul Rahman Abad (1945–), and Liana Badr (1951–).
Chapter Three: Popular culture and folkore
This chapter examines notions about the development of the popular culture and examines how the scientific study of folklore began at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the emergence of romantic and national movements in Europe, given their emphasis on popular culture. European writers started archiving popular stories, songs, and traditions that reflected the past in order to rebuild this heritage.
This chapter also introduces historical background on popular culture among the Arabs. This study found that political factors, especially after defeats of experienced by Arab countries, encouraged writers to take an interest in and be inspired by their heritage due to the esteem in which it is held in terms of their national consciousness and because of its connection to the complex reality of their daily lives.
Finally, the chapter also defines the most important forms of popular culture and its characteristics, and discusses the predominant forms of Palestinian popular culture that are common in Arabic literature in general, and children’s literature in particular.
PART TWO
Chapter One: Palestinian folktales
This, the longest chapter, introduces my argument that Palestinian folktales are the most important source that has inspired the Palestinian writers in the period I examine and scrutinizes the unprecedented and remarkable way Palestinian writers returned to the roots of popular tales and adapted them for children.
The chapter addresses whether and, if so, how these modern stories benefit, in form and content, from drawing on popular and folklore culture and the way they reconstruct and deconstruct traditional narrative structures and styles and addressing issues of repetition and stereotyping. I examine selected examples that show how Palestinian writers have rewritten Palestinian popular tales without interference in the text, except in specific and limited cases.
The book corpus includes about 30 diverse works from about 30 Palestinian authors from Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian diaspora selected as a representative sample of Palestinian children’s literature after 1967. Together, they show how Palestinian children’s underwent many thematic and stylistic changes over the years, with distinct periods observable between 1967–87 and from 1987 to the present. I have sought to give a fair representation of the different and the different representations of popular culture, such as stories, poems, proverbs, games, and so on. The key focus is on the folk tale, due to its prominence in Palestinian popular culture. I have also sought to provide a balance of works from within Israel, from the West Bank and Gaza, and from the Palestinian diaspora. I have also sought to provide a balanced picture of the literature across the various age groups.
Chapter Two: Palestinian popular proverbs
This chapter shows that the employment of the Palestinian popular proverb is limited to the first period identified. Writers have not shown much interest in employing popular proverbs in their stories for children. Most probably, the writers in that period were not aware enough of the importance of the employment of popular culture in children’s literature. Some writers even chose to use only standard Arabic in their writing, thinking that spoken Arabic was at a lower level than standard Arabic, especially if the receiver was a child.
That said, some writers have deployed popular proverbs in their stories, but not to serve the story in a conscious way. It is noticed that retrieving the popular proverb in that period was not well-developed as it was in the second period.
Chapter Three: Palestinian popular songs
This chapter shows the disparity in the employment of the popular children’s songs in the texts in the first period. The songs were was used as a metaphor that conveyed a clearer meaning to the readers did its original artistic meaning. Several texts included some segments of well-known popular songs that fit in with the narrative context only, but without performing any other function in the story. However, with regard to this phenomenon in that period, employing popular songs achieved several goals, some of which were related to the contents of the text.
I show that, during the second period examined, Palestinian writers showed much interest in the Palestinian popular songs and increased their employment of popular styles and popular singing techniques in their texts.