Borrowing part of its title from a chapter in Said’s The Question of Palestine (1979), this session emphasizes that some of the issues it brought to the fore persist. While Palestine has received scholarly attention in French and Francophone studies, particularly through works written by French as well as North African, Lebanese and Syrian authors (who constitute the majority of Francophone authors from the MENA region), this session aims to give visibility to Palestinian Francophone voices. The authors and filmmaker analyzed in this session address the “prolonged denial” of being “disinherited outsiders” (Said); their works draw attention to long-standing disputes, including recognition of the Nakbah, the right of return and for self-determination, and the need to establish new solidarities.

In “‘A Terrible Closeness’: Elias Sanbar’s Writings about Palestinians and American Indians,” Harrison focuses on Elias Sanbar, a Palestinian refugee who was studying in Paris at the height of Third Worldist and Marxist-Leninist support for Palestine, who played a crucial role as interpreter and advisor for some of Godard’s films. Sanbar was the first Palestinian scholar to draw a comparison between the colonization of Palestine and the settlement of North America, in Palestine 1948: L’expulsion, Le bien des absents, and Palestiniens: La photographie d’une terre et de son peuple de 1839 à nos jours. Harrison establishes a Palestinian genealogy of transindigenous identification with American Indians, focusing on Sanbar’s pioneering role in what Steven Salaita has dubbed inter/nationalism. Sanbar’s imagined transindigenous community was influential both in Palestine, through exchanges with Darwish, who penned “The ‘Red Indian’s’ Penultimate Response to the White Man,” and in France, in Godard’s Our Music, in which two indigenous American actors perform Darwish’s poem. Drawing from Sanbar’s writings and archival documents from his collaborations with Darwish and Godard, this paper analyzes Sanbar’s role in laying the foundations for solidarity across Palestine, France, and Turtle Island, and the possibilities that emerge from a triangulated approach to Palestinian literature and activism.

In “Cinematographic Journey of a Return and Narratives of Reclamation in Carol Mansour’s Aida returns,” Matar examines Carol Mansour’s documentary Aida returns (2019), a film that delves into the poignant and complex theme of Mansour’s mother’s burial in her native land, against the backdrop of the impossible return to Palestine. Mansour intricately weaves together fragments of film captured during encounters with her mother to reconstruct history, while retracing the path from Montreal to Jaffa via Beirut, and literally returning her mother back home when Aida’s ashes are smuggled to her forbidden native land. This talk highlights recurrent themes and motifs in Palestinian literature and film, such as homecoming, reconstructing a shattered sense of belonging, and questions of memory and national erasure that are intensified by Aida’s Alzheimer’s. In addition, this analysis emphasizes the singular construction of both the story and the film focusing on the concept of mediation and transportation as means to surpass geopolitical boundaries. Mansour's defiant endeavor transcends a personal quest for her mother's burial, a narrative of repatriation, or a filial connection, unfolding, most notably, as a political gesture, reminiscent of Antigone's act of re-founding the city.

“Writing Une enfance à Gaza (1942-1958) in 2002” focuses on Arlette Khoury-Tadié’s memoir about her childhood in Gaza (and Egypt). The beginning emphasizes the fact that Khoury-Tadié attempted to write down her memories several times before. Describing her narrative as a testimony, she bears witness to what Gaza used to be, in stark contrast to what it has become as she sees it on the news, leaving the Strip for good in 1958 to Egypt, then France. In this talk, Bourget analyzes the leitmotiv of before and after 1948 that establishes various contrasts throughout, situating it in the long-standing denial of the Nakba in Israeli history as examined by the New Historians. Shifting to the point of view of the child at key moments, the narrator shatters the myths exposed by Ilan Pappé and others. Khoury’s depiction of Gaza City as “a little Switzerland” (as it was nicknamed) underlines “the imposed regression” as an effect of occupation, and thus the possibility of what it could become again: a place where diverse communities lived peacefully. In addition, I examine the upcoming reedition of the book in France, in a context where president Macron referred to “Christians of the Holy land” in December 2023.

These talks help fill a gap caused by the relative absence of Palestinians in Francophone/Postcolonial studies in the US. Each speaker is limited to 20 minutes, leaving 15 minutes for discussion. Speakers represent diverse tracks and institutions.