Re-Mapping Identity and Memory in Ghada Karmi's Return: A Palestinian Memoir and Edward Said's Out of Place: A Memoir

Abstract

Building on the theoretical ideas of Paul Ricoeur, Walter Benjamen and Pierre Nora, this article examines the anticolonial aspect of Edward Said’s and Ghada karmi’s memoirs, which includes Palestinian voices that articulate the crisis of memory and touch on the significance of memory in the narration of history. It demonstrates that the personal memories of Karmi and Said function as the main component of their incoherent and transient national experience, as well as the potential for resistant acts against the erasure and denial of Palestinian history. These memories, therefore, contribute to the formation of the Palestinian collective narrative as well as maintaining the historical continuity of Palestinians that is obscured by their permanent dislocation.   It shows that the act of narration in these memoirs is an act of remembering images from the past through looking inside memory’s archives “because this image is an impression left by events, an impression that remains in the mind” (Ricoeur 1984, 10). Both authors seem to write the official history of Palestinians that underlies their struggle for legitimizing their existence in historical Palestine before the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. They write it in the form of a historical document that needs to be archived and remembered. This article further demonstrates that both memoirists recall moments and flashes of the past to respond to a state of emergency and a collective crisis that demands memory to be remembered, and necessitates the articulation of memorial sites as historical archives.

Keywords: Memory, Archive, Identity, History, Nation.