In ʿishnā lan nansā wa-lan nusāmiḥ: Transitioning from a Necropolitical Today to a Decolonial Tomorrow | ||
| Cairo Studies in English | ||
| Article 10, Volume 2024, Issue 2, December 2024, Pages 130-150 PDF (386.55 K) | ||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/cse.2024.317131.1184 | ||
| Author | ||
| Michael Williamson* | ||
| Binghamton University | ||
| Abstract | ||
| This paper analyzes the temporal and spatial dimensions of Israel’s illegal occupation of and “war” on Gaza and argues their continuity with Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and genocide of Palestinian people in the longue durée, at least since 1948. We aim to utilize the words of one of our friends (Yousra) who is currently displaced in Gaza, In ʿishnā lan nansā wa-lan nusāmiḥ (“If we live, we will not forget, and we will not forgive”), to draw a triptych, using each of the phrases, to project the potential afterlife of Palestinian existence in the wake of a genocidal war. We ask how Yousra’s gesture to the precarity of Palestinian life invites us to read Israel’s ongoing aggression on Gaza since October 7th as a continuing traumatic moment; how the remembrance on which she insists represents Palestinian’s prior knowledge of themselves (memory) despite the colonizer’s distortion of their time and space; and how the death of forgiveness she projects is a paradoxical survival of memory. Using Achille Mbembe’s “reverse reading of our present” as our methodological point of departure, we harness the “present”–both the Palestinian present and the contemporaneity of twenty-first century theories of colonialism and decolonization. It is our aim read the “past”—both the Palestinian past and the past of other colonialisms and decolonization struggles—as articulated in mid to late-twentieth century theoretical pronouncements like Frantz Fanon’s and Edward Said’s, as well as the creative, decolonial poetics of Andrea Abi Karam. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Postcolonial; Zionism; Epistemology; Palestine; Israel | ||
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