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This literature was not limited to the Palestinian experience, but is part of Arab and international creativity. But in the Palestinian case, there is some peculiarity, that this occupation is an occupation of a replacement narrative that tries to impose itself on the narrative of the other. The novel “Life After Death” by Alexander the Khoury Betjali was the first Palestinian fiction to deal with the subject of imprisonment during the time of the Turks between 1914 and 1918. Many also wrote about imprisonment without experiencing the experience, like Emile Habibi in “The Peasants” (1974) and Sahar Khalifa in “Al-Sabbar” (1976) and “Sunflowers” (1979). However, there are many novels recently released with their former or current inmate writers that reflect what else shines about the art of storytelling within prison and its development and departure from captive language:
In his novel Hassan Al-Suba’i (Dar Al-Farabi – 2019), Ismail Ramadan goes beyond questioning the Palestinian struggle movement, by evoking the character of prisoner Hassan al-Laawi, who spent 42 years in prison, while interviews other inmates within detention centers. Thus, we look at the prison world with all its brutality, the novelist makes us look from the inside out, where we see things differently. We believe that Palestine is captive and that Hassan the Levite is all Palestine through the struggles of his people. There is a different presence of details, so we imagine that the prison world is completely different from that of life, where the relationship between the prisoners is not restricted by age difference, but by belonging to the camp itself. But Ismail Ramadan does not stop to describe this world, but makes us fall into a narrative that differs from a novel or a text, perhaps due to the desire that its text does not fall into the ordinary classification, giving it the freedom to be a novel and literary text at the same time.
Here the writer is predisposed towards his personal questions that he wants to ask in any style. He gives reality ample space in the book without forgetting to take the questions to a deeper human level: When asked this question that surprises us about death: Is mass death from a nuclear bomb or tsunami less shocking or sad than individual death? Or is cutting down a tree that we know is more painful than burning or drying up a forest? Although the author poses these questions in a context separate from the facts, they deserve to be considered as an introduction to a way of thinking emerging from prison. It is the writer’s way of questioning the small details of our life. Elsewhere, he sees that all of life becomes a real prison, so he says: We have all experienced hardship, detention, harassment and travel prevention and even imprisonment, and many of us live with the retention of thought and its control. about their minds and their transformation into prisoners of evil beliefs that disappeared in their minds. Then he adds: All our lives and our geography are material and intellectual prisons, so are we a good Levite? Ismail Ramadan reads the past, but from the point of view of realistic figures, so that his question is clear and without fictional plots and a language that wants to triumph through realistic history.
There is another path sculpted by other creators, such as Al-Khandaqji, as he refuses to associate his name as a creator with being a captive. It is preferred when a novel or collection of poems is published for him, qualifying him as a novelist or poet, noting that he seeks to put a special mark that changes the stereotype on prison literature.
The novel “Misk Al-Kifaya” escaped from prison while smuggling sperm, but Basim was also escaping the idea of the place and its power. He wants to delve into history, open a tunnel in which he draws his narrative from the reality of the prison. In “Misk Al-Kifaya” (Arab Science Publishers Publishers – 2014), he lists on behalf of a period in Arab history and somewhere in southern Arabia outside the rule of the Abbasid caliph, where the family lived whose breadwinner family died. But in the center of the narrative, we find the protagonist of the novel, a beautiful girl, who is carried away by events to become a teacher of free shadows and faces the masculinity of the story and triumphs over it . There is an overwhelming desire among the novelist to speak with a voice other than his own, and to speak with a woman’s voice to ask questions beyond the prison … It is an interrogation of the male questions found in the prisons of the history. Basim wants women to tell this story for themselves, and he elevates storytelling from the research level to the architecture of the novel, despite the painstaking research that he spent a long time searching through heritage and historical books. “Misk Al-Kifaya” leads us to face it and read it, a reading that differs from that of a prisoner. We notice that we are in front of characters from the history books. Here he is writing about the secret of his discovery to the subject of the novel, and he says in the introduction: “I only wrote my madness, amazement and sadness while stumbling upon his mysterious name in a historical book that was stained only by the ink of his blind and overwhelming masculinity ”. Basim aspires to liberate history in the name and voice of women, and this is his liberation project.
As for the “secret of the oil”, it arises from another secret. It is the first youth novel to be released from prison, and was written by novelist Walid Daqqa in Gilboa Prison in 2017. After the novel, the occupation detention administration imposed many penalties on the Daqqa prisoner, including confiscation of his books and deny him a visit for two months. Here the writer invokes the child’s imagination as a free and purposeful refuge, so the child’s presence arrives with a group of animals and an olive tree to share his question about freedom. But as Walid said at the beginning of the novel: “I am writing so that I can be free from prison, hoping to free him from me. But Walid also frees his characters from seriousness and adds an innocent and dreamy childish touch to the atmosphere of the story. Although it tells a story about the prison, but with high art, it makes us think of the story as an artistic and narrative project, where the question arises: “How will Judd visit his father in prison?” It becomes an existential, humanitarian and political issue at the same time.
Jude, the boy escaped from his father’s sperm in jail, and as punishment for him, the occupation prevented him from visiting his father in jail, so all the animals gathered to think with him about the dilemma of arriving his father without permission: or jump off the walls or fly. But they could not find a solution, until the Umm Romy tree appeared, who told him about the secret of the oil, which is the disappearance. And if Judd smears it on his body, he will become invisible and will be able to see his father. But this is not the solution, it is the correct ethical decision represented by scientific research that will allow Judd to recover from the occupation.
Families show an existential dilemma that puts us in front of the question of freedom, in which people share with the animals and trees that have also suffered the occupation. The solution is not to be invisible, but to think about seeking knowledge that will free us from the oldest Arab captive, which is the future, as Judd said at the end of the novel. Walid Dakka wants to liberate the future in the minds of young people, and it is the most profound question about freedom, in Jamali’s proposal, which is to liberate the language of serious narrative and its approach to childhood and superstition and play with the magic of other worlds.
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