Palestinian Women Literature PDF

Palestinian Women Literature  Palestinian literature is one of numerous Arabic literatures, but its affiliation is national, rather than territorial. While Egyptian literature is that written in Egypt, Jordanian literature is that written in Jordan etc., and up until the 1948 Arab–Israe...

Palestinian Women Literature  Palestinian literature is one of numerous Arabic literatures, but its affiliation is national, rather than territorial. While Egyptian literature is that written in Egypt, Jordanian literature is that written in Jordan etc., and up until the 1948 Arab–Israeli war, Palestinian literature was also territory-bound, since the 1948 Palestinian exodus it has become "a literature written by Palestinians“ irrespective of their place of residence.  Palestinian literature refers to the Arabic language novels, short stories and poems produced by Palestinians. Forming part of the broader genre of Arabic literature, contemporary Palestinian literature is often characterized by its heightened sense of irony and the exploration of existential themes and issues of identity. References to the subjects of resistance to occupation, exile, loss, and love and longing for homeland are also common.  One of the foremost leaders of Palestinian literature and the person who coined the term Palestinian Resistance Literature, Ghassan Kanafani says, "In my stories I give my characters the freedom to express their own positions without reservation". This sense of international solidarity can also be found in Palestinian poets' work such as in Mahmoud Darwish's poem Cuban Chants, "And the banner in Cuba.. The rebel raises it in the Aures.. Oh a nation that feels cold", and in Samih Al-Qasim's poem, Birds Without Wings. Ghassan Kanafani Mahmoud Darwish Samih Al-Qasim Tawfiq Zayyad  In the period between the 1948 Palestinian exodus and the 1967 Six- Day War, Palestinian Resistance Literature played a significant role in maintaining the Palestinian identity; forming a bridge between the two periods, which allowed the Palestinian identity to survive especially in the absence of armed resistance.  Ghassan Kanafani argues, "Palestinian resistance literature, just like armed resistance, shapes a new circle in the historical series which practically has not been cut throughout the last half century in the Palestinian life”.  Since 1967, most critics have theorized the existence of three "branches" of Palestinian literature, loosely divided by geographic location: 1) from inside Israel, 2) from the occupied territories, 3) from among the Palestinian diaspora throughout the Middle East.  In a 2003 article published in the Studies in the Humanities journal, Steven Salaita posits a fourth branch made up of English language works, particularly those written by Palestinians in the United States, which he defines as "writing rooted in diasporic countries but focused in theme and content on Palestine."  However, Maurice Ebileeni argues that a fourth branch referring exclusively to anglophone literary works is not sufficient. Rather, Palestinian displacement both in Israel/Palestine and the diaspora have led to cultural and lingual diversification among Palestinians that exceeds experiences in Arabic- and English-speaking locations. Ebileeni suggest a polylingual branch that entails works by Palestinian authors - or authors of Palestinian descent - written in English as well as Italian, Spanish, Danish, Hebrew and several other languages.  Palestinian literature can be intensely political, as underlined by writers like Salma Khadra Jayyusi and novelist Liana Badr, who have mentioned the need to give expression to the Palestinian "collective identity" and the "just case" of their struggle. Salma Khadra Jayyusi Liana Badr  There is also resistance to this school of thought, whereby Palestinian artists have "rebelled" against the demand that their art be "committed". Poet Mourid Barghouti for example, has often said that "poetry is not a civil servant, it's not a soldier, it's in nobody's employee." Mourid Barghouti  Before the so-called "Peace," a Palestinian could derive hope from contemplating the future. But "after Peace arrived"-and of course it didn't really ever arrive-a Palestinian would have to be content with desperate waiting, putting hope aside for better times, if and when they should come. Perhaps this continual postponement of the act of hoping, going on now for nearly a hundred years, has led Palestinian writers to revisit- and rewrite-the stories of the old deprivations, even if newer ordeals have now added an unprecedented depth of depression to inherited sadnesses.  Palestinians to this day still fashion their sorrows in the first person plural. For if the Palestinian people have a collective narrative-a story, rooted in history and usually beginning with Balfour's 1917 Declaration, a promise to European Jewry of a homeland for Jews in historic Palestine—this nation possesses-in the human sense-a wealth of stories that compile the variegated destinies of Palestinians, cutting across themes of exile, resistance and homeland.  These stories-both those that are constantly being reinvented and those that are still possible-center around the "ordinary human rights" that Palestinians have been deprived of, thereby transforming the Palestinian into a wretched human being narrating his own private wretched tale.  Thus before the disastrous Nakba of 1948, as Arab historians tell us, Palestinians lived in fear of losing the homeland; after the Nakba they came to know the meanings of loss and alienation. During the next period-of resistance and armed struggle-they contemplated danger and death. Then, following "the Peace that didn't come," they combined disappointment and frustration with deep doubt regarding the possibility of human justice.  Throughout, Palestinian writing has been nothing but, essentially, a confrontation with a Zionist will that effectively transported Palestinians from normal human circumstances to those of displaced "immigrants" or "refugee," deprived of the rights enjoyed by other peoples. Literary Genres Poetry As in the case of all agricultural societies, poetry played a commanding role in Palestinian national culture, prior to the establishment of the Israeli state. Poetry, using classic pre-Islamic forms, remains an extremely popular art form, often attracting Palestinian audiences in the thousands. Until 20 years ago, local folk bards reciting traditional verses were a feature of every Palestinian town.  After the 1948 Palestinian exodus, poetry was transformed into a vehicle for political activism. From among those Palestinians who became Arab citizens of Israel and after the passage of the Citizenship Law of 1952, a school of resistance poetry was born that included poets like Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, and Tawfiq Zayyad.  The work of these poets was largely unknown to the wider Arab world for years because of the lack of diplomatic relations between Israel and Arab governments. The situation changed after Ghassan Kanafani, another Palestinian writer in exile in Lebanon published an anthology of their work in 1966. Palestinian poets often write about the common theme of a strong affection and sense of loss and longing for a lost homeland.  The work of Nathalie Handal an award-winning poet, playwright, and writer appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. She has been translated into twelve languages. She has promoted international literature through translation, research, and the edited The Poetry of Arab Women, an anthology that introduced several Arab women poets to a wider audience in the west. Nathalie Handal Hakawatis The art of story telling is part of the cultural life in Arabic speaking countries. The tradition of “Tales From a Thousand and One Nights” is not an exception. In Palestine in each small town or village an itinerant story teller or hakawatis would visit and tell the stories they knew. The tales of the hakawatis once told for all ages are now emerging from the Palestinian Diaspora as children's books. The Novel But the arrival of some well-educated and cultured personalities in the Arab cities such as Baghdad, Beirut, and Damascus was crucial in the development of the novel without affecting the important role of poetry. The most important contribution in terms of the novel came from Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, who wrote his first novel, A Scream in a Long Night, in 1946, publishing it later after his departure from Palestine for Baghdad. This novelist, who graduated from Cambridge University, pioneered the formation of a vanguard of Arab novelists, mainly through his successive novels but especially with his novel as- Safiina, which brought about an unprecedented modernity and renewal of the Arabic novel. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra  Alongside Jabra-the novelist, the critic, the translator, the short story writer-there was Ghassan Kanafani (1936-72), who united creative writing in a variety of formats with engagement in partisan politics. Although Kanafani was initially known as a novelist due to his famed Men in the Sun, his production as a short story writer is both more creative and more developed; he is without a doubt one of the leading names of the Arabic short story of the twentieth century.  His importance in this respect is matched by Samira Azzam-also Palestinian-who began writing her short stories in Palestine and continued without interruption until her unexpected death in 1967. Samira Azzam  A third key figure, who completes the vanguard of the Palestinian- Arab novel, is Emile Habibi. His Six Days Sextet and The Pessoptimist: The Strange Circumstances Surrounding the Disappearance of Saeed Abi Nahas are two works of distinction: written in the wake of the June 1967 defeat, they conveyed the experience of the Palestinian "refugee" in his own land. Emile Habibi  Sahar Khalifa represents a unique contributor to Palestinian literature. Whereas poetry saw a leading female voice in Fadwa Touqan, and the short story saw a female leading voice in Samira Azzam, Sahar Khalifa has stood, most prominently, for the feminine voice-or the voice of women-in the novel, offering readers a variety of works. Khalifa has united criticism of male chauvinism in traditional Palestinian society with criticism of the Israeli occupation, in a controversial form that renders women's liberation the necessary prelude to national liberation. Sahar Khalifa  The novel, as well as the short story, manifested a "literature of the oppressed" that extended hope to those who have none. Such traits can be seen in three key features and dimensions of the novel. First, there is a romanticization and beautification of the lost homeland, casting "old Palestine" into the mold of a unique paradise-on-earth and instructing the Palestinian to reflect the sanctified image of his land.  A second dimension emerges from this first one, namely an image of the opening up to a future that is the very image of the past: the original blessed pristine Palestine, endowed as it is with sanctity, will return in the future, and it will be blessed just as it was in the past.  A third aspect of the Palestinian novel is an outcome of the above two. It manifests itself in the significance of the period of flight and refuge-a sick and transient time of tribulation that tests the mettle of the Palestinian, and then proclaims his coming victory. The whole concept, one can see, clearly begins in the period of the Fall. This is then followed by a time of loss and suffering, leading ultimately to a moment of absolution and of overcoming exile and alienation. Struggle-or the will-plays the role of the intermediary between the first period and the last.  If the writers of exile were excessive in their "religious optimism," which helped them to unify the past and the present, Emile Habibi, living with the Israeli occupation, chose the blackest sarcasm that yearns for the past but whispers to us that the past is not coming back.  In the writings of many Palestinian authors the Palestinian tragedy in modern times is expressed, deciphered and shown to the world. Through varying literary forms and genres the Palestinian literati encapsulated the Palestinian cause and envisaged the looming horrors that afflicted the dispossessed, exiled and disabled Palestinians.  Many writers, born in Palestine before 1948 or in the diaspora, wrote about Palestine they knew or imagined; they tried to recollect Palestine from the faint memory of the self or from the vivid memories told by the fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers. Palestine is recreated through literature; in poetry, short stories and novels written by different generations during the second half of the twentieth century. Taking into consideration the recent Palestinian divisions and deadlock, it is a fact that without literature, which revived Palestine from its remoteness, the Palestinian cause was doomed to be annihilated.  Women’s Literature Palestinian literature can be classified as a bildungsroman (a story of growth and development) in relation to the portrayal of Palestinian women, as it reflects the chronological, all-encompassing changes women have undergone, starting from the 1948 catastrophe through to the 1967 setback and return to the life of refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan, and reaching to the Uprising and the peace process period from 1987 onwards.  The portrayal of women in early Palestinian literature starts with domestic woman whose sphere of influence is the home, and shifts to the image of the revolutionary comrade in contemporary literature. The bulk of early Palestinian literature focuses on themes of freedom and revolution; characters, whether male or female, are catalysts that help achieve the desired end. The flatness or roundedness of their character is event-based. Maternalism and paternalism were replaced by nationalism.  In general, the feminine-masculine struggle for domination does not receive much focus. Gender issues, especially in early Palestinian literature are presented in the traditional pattern of female followers and male leaders, females weakened by their femininity and males empowered by their masculinity, housewives and battlefield soldiers. The concept of ideal womanhood is determined by male writers, who preceded women in writing the war story, setting national and mythical archetypes of women as emblems of the nation.  Judith Tucker remarks that for some Palestinian women ‘the very existence of a European feminist movement was a problem, both in the imposing of its agenda on Arab feminists, and in the unfortunate association of feminism with the West and thus with everything the nationalist movement stands against’.  Miriam Cooke records how Arab women revolutionaries, reformers and writers — Palestinian included — rejected the feminist brand and tried to find alternative nationalist terms and practices in order to emphasize the uniqueness of the Palestinian female gender and femininity.  The concept of ‘familialism’, which honors and stresses the role of Palestinian women in nurturing and raising future warriors, best describes the trend adopted by most women in real life. This familial role of women, as loyal, self sacrificing and obedient wives and mothers, was later highlighted and iconised in literature.  Palestinian feminism under war conditions erected its own models. A radical feminism that stressed the superiority of the female gender over the male, associated with the idea that men and women occupy different spheres in life, has not found much ground in Palestine, since the struggle requires the efforts of both sexes. If radicalism has appeared in any form, it was directed towards the oppressor of both males and females. Radical Palestinian feminism was modified into militarized feminism that was also sometimes associated with the femme fatale.  This feminism depicts women engaging in mortal combat with the enemy, hijacking aeroplanes, planting bombs in enemy positions, and uses stereotypical femininity as a camouflage to distract or capture enemy soldiers.  Writers presented Palestinian feminism as a revolutionary rather than political theory and practice. They represented women practising a form of reconciliatory feminism, where women worked with men in the war effort against occupation in order to achieve long-lasting gains for both sexes. Supporting this argument, Tamar Mayer mentions that ‘Palestinian women have stopped short of issuing a direct challenge to the patriarchal structures … they feel the need to struggle alongside men against this external threat … Many feel that this is an inappropriate time to be alienating their male compatriots’.  As for writing the female image, there seems to be a subtle, unwritten ‘literary contract’, a ‘communal language’ of images and phrases. According to Nabahani, a representative national literature should depict the partnership of women in life and war. Honouring fellow women is deemed to be a guiding principle in the code of ethics Palestinian writers hold.  In his critical analysis of the human aspects in the novels of the nakba, Nabahani makes the claim that Palestinian novels give equal place and agency to women as to men. ‘Women are no different to men. They are assigned the same roles on all levels of resistance as prisoners, martyrs and freedom fighters and are depicted exerting similar behaviours of heroism and steadfastness’.  Literature has celebrated these images after the 1948 war as the projection of the emancipated characteristics of the future Palestinian women, and as a form of wishful thinking about how women should become, not how they were at the time. This characterisation of women emanates from a strict code of didacticism that has no grey colours.  It either elevates women to the status of motherland, sainthood, and martyrdom or casts them out as immoral traitors to the cause, the Palestinian people and the country. The pattern of literary didacticism commits the writer to what can be seen as a checklist of what and how women should be written, with the effect that the individual writers’ words may be different but they represent more or less similar truths and messages.  Palestinian women writers had to create their new paradigms for portraying women and conflict in literature, ones that promote women as empowered subjects and highlight the varied experiences of women in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Liana Badr (1950-)  Badr is a novelist, story writer, journalist, poet and cinema director. She was raised in Jericho. She studied at the University of Jordan and graduated from the Beirut Arab University with a BA in philosophy and psychology. Badr studied at the Lebanese University. She earned her M.A. from Birzeit University. She lived in Beirut and worked as an editor for Al Hurriyya. After 1982, she moved to Damascus, then Tunis, and Amman. She returned to Palestine in 1994. She worked in the Palestinian Ministry of Culture (PMC) as a general director for the Arts. She worked in the Cinematic Archive through their Audiovisual department. She was editor of Dafater Thaqafiyya.  Badr published her first novel in Beirut in 1979, A Compass for the Sunflower. She has also published since, short story collections, novellas, and a book about poet Fadwa Touqan. Liana Badr has also published five children’s books between 1980 and 1991. Her works have been translated into a number of languages. Her works mainly focus on themes of women and war, and exile. Her style has been described by the Times Literary Supplement as "defy the laws of fictional gravity", and "densely lyrical". “Other Cities” What is the main theme of the story?  Resistance. In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this term is fraught with complex connotations, calling to mind Palestinian youth throwing stones, freedom fighters, and suicide bombers. It suggests checkpoints and military outposts, guns and soldiers, barbed wire and tear gas.  Emerging in the wake of occupation, exile, and struggle, Palestinian resistance literature provided a voice to the Palestinian story of suffering and hardship. It sought what Edward Said called the “permission to narrate,” or “the power to communicate their own histories both to themselves...and to the world outside hypnotized by the Zionist narrative of 'a land without a people for a people without a land'”.  In her story, Badr as a female writer in the midst of a male-dominated literary sphere, complicates the idealistic views of “resistance” and “liberation,” highlighting the complexity of the multiplicity of Palestinian responses to the occupation and the Palestinian situation.  Women have repeatedly been marginalized and disregarded under historical hegemonic power structures in which men hold the bulk of authority. This, many feminist conflict theorists contend, gives women a unique reason to search for alternative power structures and seek for peaceful pathways to conflict resolution. Resistance What does Umm Hassan resist? Who does she resist? How does she resist?  Against all power structures that surround her and shape her world.  Umm Hassan is overwhelmed by her memories of Ramallah since she had to leave her home town to marry Abu Hassan. Despite being beautiful and having many children, she is not a fulfilled wife or mother. The burdens she has to bear are too heavy, since the head of the family can’t make ends meet. They are poor and they don’t have any promises for a better future. However, her hardest burden seems to be her homesickness to Ramallah, which she has transferred to all her kids.  The challenge of taking the journey in spite of all odds controls the text from the very beginning. Ramallah appears like a dream to Umm Hassan and her children; it is the beautiful star shining in their morbid skies, always shining and beckoning, albeit being unattainable. The obstacles standing in her way are many. She needs money that she doesn’t have, she needs to have a valid ID, which is also missing, and she has to take the car ride under the most dire circumstances forced by occupation at check points.  Umm Hassan resists. She resists the occupation by taking the risk of borrowing her neighbor’s ID and asking the kids to lie about their names at the check points. She resists her husband by taking the little amount of money they have as a family and spending it all on a trip, where it could have been more wisely spent. She resists the soldiers and speaks to the captain courageously to let the cars move and to have mercy on the baby.  Her decision to go to Ramallah signifies her brave resistance to all the oppressive forces in her life. The reader follows her throughout the stages of her trip and senses her happiness and victory when she arrives safely. Although it is only momentarily, and although she will be getting back to all the unjust oppressions in her life, whether they stem from the occupation forces or her patriarchal society, or good- for-nothing husband, her victory is still significant for her and for her children as well. Rootedness  Umm Hassan’s resistance is crucial because it is closely related to the theme of rootedness. Palestinians have rich and significant relationships with the land, and their connection to the land is a powerful symbol of rootedness, making clear the injustice of displacement. The core meaning of rootedness is found in the sense of literally belonging somewhere, but the place is denied to them. This is best exemplified in her memories and references to Ramallah.  Both themes of resistance and rootedness intersect in the motif of the journey that Umm Hassan undertakes to Ramallah with her children. The journey is a powerful symbol often used to represent a character’s adventure leading to an epiphany, or some sort of self- realization. This literary device can be applied in the background, working invisibly alongside the plot, or it can comprise the entirety of the plot itself so that all of the character’s experiences are centered on the journey.  Although the way to Ramallah is easy to take while going, it is quite hard to take on the way back. The sweet dream of the journey’s first phase turns into an ugly nightmare when the cars are standing still in the heat amid much tension and fear in the second phase of the journey.  Her wish to go is tainted by the reality of her situation when she is returning. Talking to the captain marks the climax of her journey and draws its ultimate success that displays her resistance and resilience. But it is all temporary. Nothing changes radically in the life of Umm Hassan despite her brave resistance. The Palestinian Mother The entire identity of the protagonist of the story is summed up in being a mother, we are even given her personal name, she is Umm Hassan.  The symbolic importance of motherhood is largely uncontested in most Palestinian works of art. At the social level, the exploitation of the institution of motherhood is a must if any society at war is to reach its goals. Mothers are essential to war, producing, nurturing and educating the children who become its soldiers. The concept of nation itself derives etymologically from ‘natio’ meaning to be born, and as giving birth to humans is the role of mothers, giving birth to the nation might be said to follow.  Because men were killed in armed uprisings, men were imprisoned, and men were exiled, more and more women had to fill the place vacated by men. Women and mothers were left alone as their fathers and husbands were imprisoned, and the family unit was no longer a stable purveyor of traditional gender roles, as many women were left single or widowed, both with and without children.  One Palestinian woman described the situation this way: “The Palestinian woman knows that she can’t count on the presence of a man. He may die as a martyr, be imprisoned, be exiled, live underground or just disappear in a struggle...the woman has to play the male role as well as the female role”.  Because of the need for increased participation from women, they were allowed greater autonomy and authority in the struggle for nationhood. This participation took many different forms: women participated in both peaceful and violent protest marches, encouraged their children, husbands, and brothers to fight, and formed special nationalist women's movements, such as the Palestinian Women's Movement.  In literature, motherhood is iconised into many images, blessed with a spiritual drive to act not only as an individual mother of flesh and blood, but also as the mother of the nation, the symbolic motherland, and the mother of martyrs. The image of the Palestinian mother was elastic and writers stretched it to accommodate all the facets of self-denial, heroic service, and mobilisation according to the necessities of the war.  The maternal role demonstrates the complexities of gender negotiations where female agency is mediated at the price of backbreaking labor, (self )-sacrifice, and loss. The collapsing of the inside/outside dichotomy, while providing women with spatial mobility between the home and the outside, has also led to the added burden of shouldering the responsibility of the collectivity in an undifferentiated war zone that has nevertheless maintained its fissures and fault lines.  If Palestinian female authors write about feminist struggles in a patriarchal society, they could easily be viewed as traitorously rejecting the national struggle, placing their own needs as women above the needs of the nation, or even supporting the enemy by exposing weaknesses in their own society. However, if the female author continues to portray women either as symbols or as traditional players in patriarchal societies, they are merely perpetuating the stereotypical views and treatment of women as weak, vulnerable, and unable to participate in societal power structures.  In light of this difficulty, some Arab women writers chose to emphasize topics completely removed from the female/national identity struggle. Joseph Zeidan, writing on the history of Arab and Palestinian women's literature, stated: Over time, the search for personal identity became absorbed in the search for national identity, even to the extent of sacrificing the former for the sake of the latter... [female novelists] push aside the immediate problems of women struggling for individual freedom in a conservative society, and emphasize instead the heroines' childhoods in their homeland before they had been uprooted from it.  Other writers imbued their female protagonists with masculine traits, thus overcoming the stereotype of women as a symbol of land but perpetuating the stereotype of the dominance of masculinity and power in conflict. The complex definition of the female's role in society is thus complicated by a protagonist who is not able to fulfill either a traditional masculine or feminine role in a conflict-ridden society.  Other Arab women writers produced narratives challenging the dominant war narrative of glorified violence and nationalism. These feminine war narratives, “challenge the prevalence, the silence, hegemony, inevitability, and the intactness of the patriarchy- manufactured War Myth,” one that exists in part due to the domination of women in society.  Destabilizing the myth of the war story, “necessitates a constant reshuffling of the centers of power to allow fluidity and space for the emergence of a dynamic, new nationhood.” These women, writing about conflict and exposing the nihilism of the dominant narratives of violence and war, offer “peaceful alternatives for conflict resolution and national reconstruction”. This is very close to what Badr does in her story.  Um Hassan is not a stereotypical delineation of a mother and her character is far from simple. She is burdened by her own personal and familial issues, and fighting against the patriarchal system in some way. Far from being a feminist or nationalist typical figure, Um Hasssan complicates the simplistic answers to issues of identity and nationhood. Resisting both simplistic national fervor and a singular definition of womanhood, Badr creates in Um Hassan a new model of the representation of women in a society filled with conflict.  She makes her own choices in a hierarchical patriarchal society torn by conflict twice, when she decides to take the journey to Ramallah, and when she speaks directly to the captain. She might not appear as a heroic superwoman, her actions are too simple yet incredibly courageous and brave.  The intersection between gender and nation in Arab women's novels is complicated for “nationalist causes often situate women between two extremes, viewing them either as emblems of cultural authenticity locked within traditional roles or as participants in masculinist political struggles—struggles that typically impel women to lay aside female roles in response to nationalist exigencies”.  Um Hassan transcends this binary. She is not trying to be a man, she retains her femininity, but at the same time, she takes matters into hands when all the men in the car think she is crazy to even consider leaving the car and talking to the captain. Women's role as a symbol of national honor is disadvantageous to women's position in a patriarchal society because it perpetuates power structures that place women as the dominated “other,” at the mercy of the dominant men in society. Um Hassan refuses to be that ‘other’.  When women are portrayed as symbols of nationalist dreams and hopes, they lose any authority or autonomy as nationalist subjects and instead become objects of desire, viewed not as acting agents but rather as passive dependents. Badr gives Um Hassan her agency back by marginalizing the presence of her husband in the family, as he is always absent, and also in the text, which rotates primarily around Um Hassan.  It is within Palestinian literature's struggles with nationalism and the woman's voice that Badr has established herself as a woman writer, actively working to advance the cause and position of women in society. Not content with merely advancing the nationalist cause at the expense of women's rights, Badr exposes both the political and the social problems within Palestinian society in her story.  As a self-proclaimed feminist, Badr actively renounces women's traditional oppression in Palestinian society in her story, portraying a female protagonist who is emotionally and socially active and who become aware of her unique position as oppressed women in an oppressed society.