Reclaiming National and Cultural Identity in Selected Irish and Palestinian Literary Works

Richness and variety are two key concepts that come to one’s mind when considering Arabic and Irish literature, a literature that has been affected by a long painful history of European colonialism.  Through that literature, Arabic (Palestinian in particular) and Irish authors present the story of colonialism and its consequences from their perspective. As examples of settler colonialism, the claim of ‘the white man's burden’ is a theme that both British and Zionist colonialists in Ireland and Palestine had in common. The Irish cultural renaissance was influenced by comparisons with other nationalist literary movements and in turn became a significant model for postcolonial writers.  In his seminal book Culture and Imperialism (1993) Edward Said  associates a major strand in  W.B.Yeats’s poetry  with the poetry of decolonization and resistance. He notes the  resemblance between the poetry of Yeats of the early 1920s to the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish (232).  In fact the centrality of the question of identity to Irish and Palestinian writing shows how the two experiences illuminate each other. Working within the paradigm of cultural, memory and postcolonial studies, the proposed paper aims to conduct a comparative study of selected Irish and Palestinian literary works in order to examine the reclaiming of national and cultural identities within them.  Brian Friel’s Translations (1980) and some selected poems by Seamus Heaney on the one hand and  Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa (1969), and some selected poems by Mahmoud Darwish on the other,  will be  examined to show how they construct a counter discourse  of national and cultural identity against British and Israeli colonial discourses respectively.