The Intersection of History and Personal Narrative in I Saw Ramallah and Returning to Haifa

Sabah Nouri; Fazel Asadi Amjad

doi:10.33193/IJoHSS.69.2025.899

Sabah Nouri Ph.D., Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Letters and Humanities, Kharazmi University of Tehran, Iran
Fazel Asadi Amjad Ph.D. Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Letters and Humanities, Kharazmi University of Tehran, Iran

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33193/IJoHSS.69.2025.899

الكلمات المفتاحية: Collective Trauma, Identity, Memory, Orientalism, Postcolonial Experience, Resistance

الملخص

This study examines the close association between historical occurrences and individual explanations in two key texts, I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti and Returning to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani, with an eye to show the difficulties of the postcolonial experience. By studying how these novelists re-count and associate their personal stories with some magnificent historical agenda of Palestinian displacement and identity, the present article emphasizes that personal narratives are perceived as active tools for understanding communal trauma and resilience. Employing Edward Said's theories of Orientalism and the conception of identity, the analysis discusses how personal experiences are not only anecdotal but are forcefully ingrained in the socio-political truths of colonialism and postcolonialism. The article also intends to show that the act of storytelling becomes a method for confrontation attributable to assisting the repossession of identity and memory while going through exile. Through a complete consideration of both texts, this paper discusses the implication of personal narrative as a means for relating the past with the present.

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