XXX Международный конгресс ИИСАА. 19–21 июня 2019 г. Т. 1

Литература стран Азии и Африки к 150-летию академика В. В. Бартольда (1869–1930). Ч. 1 359 try, usually as small compilations on bad quality paper. But all these books were quickly sold out, passed from hands to hands, the poetry was memorized. Instead of the Soviet censorship came a new kind of censorship, which can be called the “self-censorship”. The poets do not only worry about the fate of their motherland, but also feel their responsibility for the possible consequences of the careless word, and sometimes restrain themselves by avoiding the topics which can be misinter- preted as a call for the new redistribution of power or as an expression of offense. Farzaneh’s verse mentioned above – full of tenderness and love – is a characteristic example of that self-censorship. Omar Khalifah (Georgetown University, Qatar) The Kanafani Plot: Staging the Palestinians’ Return in Contemporary Palestinian Novel Ghassan Kanafani’s well-known novel Return to Haifa belongs to what Mar- ianne Hirsch describes as the narrative of return, in which displaced people, or their descendants seek to return to their former homes. Published in 1969, the novel is credited with sparking the interest of Palestinian writers in fictionalizing the repercussions of the return of Palestinians to their homes, their encounters with Israelis, and the myriad questions of memory, belonging, and closure that surround these encounters. But while Kanafani’s vision of this return was artic- ulated very few decades after the 1948 Nakba, it is only recently that Palestinian writers began experimenting with the narrative of return. Several contemporary Palestinian novels feature Palestinians in the West Bank or in the diaspora visiting their former villages and homes inside Israel. This paper examines two recent Palestinian novels that revolve around the narra- tive of return: Rabai al-Madhoun’s 2015 Destinies: Concerto of the Holocaust and the Nakba and Walid al-Shurafa’s 2017 The Inheritor of Signs . It argues that these novels testify to the power of what we could call the Kanafani plot of return, where a tripartite relationship is established between the Palestinian returnee, the Israeli occupant, and their contest over the objects of memory, such as the house, the land, or the tree. In these narratives, the Israeli functions as an intermediary between the Palestinian and his/her memory, barring the latter from an unmediated, uncontrolled encounter with the past. The рaper demonstrates how these novels rework the Kanafani plot in order to illustrate their disenchantment with the current realities of the Palestinian condition. If the return in Kanafani’s work signifies a call for militant optimism, these novels present a return that reflects the current mood of loss and defeat. The paper argues that these novels feature not only their protagonists’ attempted return to Palestine but, as importantly, their authors’ patent return to the richness of the Kanafani plot.