Reclaiming Homeland: Nativism and Identity in Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World

Abstract

Palestinian literature underlies the category of postcolonialism which explores oppression, violence and its effects especially nativism in the shape of displacement, resistance, exile, violence, nostalgia, crisis of identity, migration both forced and voluntarily. The present research focuses on Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World (2019) that tries to explore how Abulhawa represents the issues of nativism raised due to the displacement/dislocation of the natives in the occupied territory and what tactics have been used by the natives of the land of Palestine to resist against the occupiers. The main purpose of the present study is to understand this notion through tracing out the different concepts of nativism such as resistance, displacement and crisis of self-image presented in novel. The present study highlights the role of displacement, trauma and memory in shaping lives of the characters in the novel. It has been focused here to determine diaspora’s identity of protagonist Nahr and identity of other Palestinian characters as well. The investigation takes place in the theoretical framework by studying the various postcolonial theorists like Bill Ashcroft, Edward Said and Maxwell. For this purpose, a postcolonial term; nativism was applied by considering the postcoloniality model of Maxwell (1965) to explore the basic reasons of resistance and displacement including the sub factors such as alienation, transportation, migration, enslavement and intervention in the said novel. Hence, the violence and oppression has caused the crisis performing to self-identity which appeared as the primary reason of all the aspects which have been tried to investigate through the postcolonial notion of nativism. The findings of the research show the affected lives of the people of Palestine by uprooting them from their own land.