Politics of Space and the Question of Palestine

Book excerpt: "This may be imagined as a weave-work of memories, time, space and a beginning by a research scholar on a political and historical subject geographically torn into shreds. The essays in the book are intended to appear in the form of sarha - a journey, a walk, a stroll, wandering into the landscapes - thresholds of the earth, exile, childhood, and memories of the other. The work is an attempt to look at the problematiques of the spatial representations of violent geographies in the autobiographical works of Israeli and Palestinian writers - Amos Oz, Raja Shehadeh and Mourid Barghouti. The relation between the colonizer and colonized is not only a conscious, geographical and temporal one involving authority, power and its contestations, but also concerns the darker geographies of psyche and the mind. Rift would be an appropriate word to understand this book, as rift is suggestive of the geographical depredations - exile and alienation as well of cracks within the unconscious. How do Israelis and the Palestinians trudge and inhabit each other's inner geographies of psyche as Colonizer and the Colonized and how do the traces autobiographical works which present themselves before us as rifts. No matter how high, durable, and indestructible the colonial architectures of walls, barbed wires, checkpoints and fences are, the Colonizer's mind has already been trudged upon by the absences and presences of the Colonized as scattered fragments of being. The name, Palestine - opens before us as many rifts in space, time and the mind. And these rifts are essential for being, loving, living, thinking and writing." (Publisher's description).