Return to Haifa is a novella by writer and political activist Ghassan Kanafani who was assassinated by Mossad in 1972. The story was written in 1969 in the aftermath of the 1967 June War (or Six Day War), in which the Israeli army defeated Arab forces and took control of new swaths of territory. The book focuses on Palestinian husband and wife Said and Safiyya, who, in the chaos of 1948, were forced to leave their home and baby behind in Haifa. Now, twenty years later, the borders are open, and they return back to Haifa and their house. There they discover that their long-lost son has been raised by Jewish parents, given a Jewish name, and is a member of the Israeli military. In this work Kanafani is critical of Palestinians who cling to the past like Said and Safiyya do initially. In the story, we learn that Said had stopped his second son, Khalid, from joining the Palestinian resistance before traveling to Haifa. After his unsettling homecoming, he decides that his son is right to want to fight and die for a future homeland, and that he and Safiyya are searching for “something buried beneath the dust of memories,” a past that they cannot return to. Kanafani’s argument, similar to his character Said’s conclusions, seems to be that Palestinian liberation is something that must be fought for through armed conflict and that Palestinians cannot simply hold onto the past. As Said tells Miriam and Khaldun/Dov, “You two may settle in our house temporarily. It will take a war to settle that.”
Lila Abu-Lughod’s essay “Return to Half-Ruins: Memory, Postmemory, and Living History in Palestine” is from the book Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. Abu-Lughod is the daughter of notable Palestinian scholar and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. In this essay she discusses the idea of “postmemory,” as postulated by Marianne Hirsch as a way to explore the way that she is “overshadowed” by her father’s memories. Ibrahim fled his childhood home of Jaffa in 1948, and after making a life for himself in the US, his daughter does not fully understand his desire to return to live on the West Bank. In the chapter, she contrasts her father’s perception to her own. “Half-ruins he built in his imagination, while I strained to make them out amidst the ugly concrete.” and, “What I, as the daughter of someone who lived through the Nakba learned from my father’s return to Palestine, was that, for Palestinians, both memory and postmemory have a special valence because the past has not yet passed.” (p. 84)
Both Haifa and “Return to Half-Ruins” detail returning to a home that has become unfamiliar. In both instances the characters or individuals see signs in Hebrew, streets’ names changed, and familiar landmarks gone — Kanafani through the eyes of his protagonists, and Abu-Lughod through the memories of her father. But while Ibrahim Abu-Lughod remained hopeful in the struggle to reclaim the Palestinian homeland, his daughter finds that it is difficult to reconcile her father’s perspective with the grim reality she has experienced.
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Hi,
Great introduction and summery of the readings, you really captured the essence of the two readings.
It would be heartbreaking to return to your childhood home to see everything has changed, down to the street names. Although the story “Returning to Haifa” is fictional, it offers a very realistic look into what many Palestinians probably felt when they eventually returned to their homes, and you did a great job at conveying that essence in your blog, especially at the end.