RECLAIMING THE MOTHERLAND: (ECO)FEMINISM IN

SAHAR KHALIFEHS THE INHERITANCE AND THE END OF

SPRING

by
Kristen Nancy Angierski
February 2014

A thesis submitted to the

Faculty of the Graduate School of
the University at Buffalo, State University of New York
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts

Department of English

UMI Number: 1553021

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Table of Contents

Abstract .................................................................................................................... iii

Chapter 1: Ecofeminism.............................................................................................1
Chapter 2: Introduction to the Literature .................................................................11
Chapter 3: An (Eco)Feminist Reading of The Inheritance ......................................16
Chapter 4: Motherland: Gender in Palestinian Resistance Literature and The End of
Spring .......................................................................................................................52
Chapter 5: Conclusion..............................................................................................75
Works Cited .............................................................................................................80

ii

ABSTRACT
My thesis explores the (eco)feminist implications of two novels by feminist, socialist, and
Palestinian nationalist Sahar Khalifeh. Although not explicitly ecofeminist, Khalifehs The
Inheritance (1997) and The End of Spring (2008) are both deeply engaged with ecofeminist
and more straightforwardly feministconcerns. In The Inheritance, Khalifeh highlights the ways
in which patriarchal norms impede liberation in Post-Oslo Palestine; through an interrogation of
the hierarchical, binary thinking that places women and nature below men and culture, Khalifeh
demonstrates how the devaluation of women obstructs nationalist aims. She does so most
explicitly through her description of the three failing projectsindustrial, cultural, and
maternalthat structure the novel. In The End of Spring, Khalifeh moves away from the
pessimism that occupies The Inheritance and reclaims the traditionally masculinist narrative of
Palestinian liberation and resistance. The novel emphasizes womens bodily and maternal
contributions to Palestinian resistance movements and makes visible the compatibility of
feminism, motherhood, and the notion of a motherland. That is, Khalifeh evades simplistic
representations of woman as land or woman as motherland and shows how the maternal woman,
rather than conceding to patriarchal behavioral norms, might be both a nationalist resistance
fighter and a creator of feminist children. Ultimately, Khalifeh calls for a celebration of feminine
embodiment without reducing women to their reproductive capabilities and in so doing, also
reveals ecofeminist leanings.

iii

CHAPTER 1: ECOFEMINISM
In 1999, Armenian Communist leader Karen Demirchyan voiced his support for Russias
austere anti-terrorism policies. Terrorism, he claimed, has no motherland and terrorists have
no nationality (Armenia Supports Russia). Demirchyan excludes the terrorist from the human
community by alluding to his lack of a homeland and more specifically, to his lack of a
motherland; dehumanization takes place through the denial of his specifically feminized origins.
These remarks suggest that the terrorists betrayal of the human species is so great that it
prohibits her from making reference to a national, familial, and even biological (natal) birthplace.
Of course, it is equally if not more often the case that the terrorists actions are used to malign
not only himself, but also the entirety of his nation, ethnicity, or religion. This form of
dehumanization frequently relies on the gendered metaphor as well, highlighting its
inescapability.
As an example, one might point to the American medias sexualization of the Middle
Eastern enemya rhetorical move that both makes use of long held stereotypes about the
hyper-sexuality of the Other and translates incomprehensibly large-scale violence into the
smaller, more comprehensible realm of interpersonal and gendered sexual assault. Certain
American media outlets, for example, described Gulf-War era Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi
soldiers as rapists invading the metaphorical body of Kuwait and the actual human bodies of
Kuwaiti women and female American soldiers. As Ella Shohat argues, the rescue of women from
a dark-skinned rapist is basic for most colonial narratives, whose conclusion is the assertion of
patriarchal and imperial world order. The historical over-sexualization of Blacks and Indians
continued in the image of Saddam and the Arabs. The dark rapist must be punished . . .
supposedly in the name of the raped victim (153). In this rhetorical system, the nations

ruptured borders transmute into a penetrated female body; the rape of actual women justifies the
rape of the land by a military force. At the same time, this formulation represents the Middle
Eastern male as both hypersexual and impotent; that is, it suggests that Kuwaiti men cannot
protect their women from the voracious Iraqi male and therefore require the white knight
aide of the American military. This discourse participates in a long tradition of hyper-sexualizing
the Muslim male, a stereotype that feeds on the trope of Muslim womens bodies as disposable
for the unquenchable appetites of Muslim men and obscures the agency of Muslim women in
sexual relations (Saeed).
In a different formulation of the woman as land trope, the sexual predator is not the
Muslim male, but the hypermasculinized American military in its war on terror. Meghana
Nayak describes how sexual and racialized rhetoric inflected post-9/11 discourse: The attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon . . . destabilized the US sense of self and thus
necessitated a particular reassertion of state identity that pivots violently on gender and race
(42). In other words, in the face of the horrifying violation that was 9/11, the American military
needed to reassert its manliness and did so through violent metaphors and acts. As evidence,
Nyak argues, one might point to the rape of Arab/Muslim men at Abu Gharib. Underlying this
particular assault was the assumption that feminization is the most efficient way to dehumanize
the enemy because Muslim culture, the orientalist logic goes, represents the epitome of
misogyny: The worst thing that can happen to a man, here or there[back in his Muslim
country], is to be treated like a woman, i.e. raped and made powerless (51). Thus womens
bodies and mens feminized bodies become metaphorical battlegrounds and literal sites of
violence in complicated ways in the context of war.

I reference these variant uses of the feminized body and the woman as land trope in
violent conflicts to highlight both the gendered metaphors enduring extra-literary relevance and
to introduce some of the ecofeminist questions my thesis will analyze at length. Why is it
important that cultural commentatorspoliticians, newspapers, and authorscontinue to
identify women with land and with the nation state? What difference does it make when the
attack of a nation is described as a sexual, rather than physical, assault? Why does gender matter
when we discuss the politics of land and conflicts over that land within literature? What power
and what limitations come with womens association with the natural world?
Here I take an ecofeminist literary critical perspective to these questions in the context of
Palestinian resistance literature. My main author of interest is Sahar Khalifeh, a Palestinian
socialist and feminist. Critics have by and large ignored Khalifeh and the two novels I examine
at length here: The Inheritance (1997) and The End of Spring (2008). Indeed, there exists very
little criticism on Khalifeh in general and no criticism whatsoever on her texts engagements
with ecofeminism. This lack of critical attention is perhaps surprising given the land-based
nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the emergence of a Palestinian feminist
movement1given the prevalence of ecological and feminist concerns in Palestine.
Understandable anxiety over translation issues might explain this inattention in part,2 even as
more translations of Palestinian works make it to the Anglophone world. My thesis works to fill

As Nawal El Saadawi explains: Women have always been an integral part of the national
liberation movement in the countries of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. They
fought side by side with the men in Algeria against French colonization, and as part of the
Palestinian Liberation Organizations struggle against Zionist and imperialist aggressive policies
aimed at depriving the Palestinian people of their national right to self-determination (xxix).
I am working wholly from translations, as I do not read Arabic. Although gaps inevitably exist
between the original text and a translation, these gaps are not so large as to prohibit worthwhile
literary study.
2

this gap in the criticism by examining the political applicability and literary significations of an
ecofeminist standpoint within a contextPalestineinundated with ecofeminist concerns:
control of the land, violence over the land, control over women, violence against women.
Ecocriticism is both an ecologically-informed political standpoint and a way of reading
literature. In Critical Insights: Nature and the Environment, Scott Slovic argues that the natural
world is relevant in every contextthat the environment always matters to texts; while we all
know that we need nature in order to survive and are ourselves creatures of nature, we like to
think of ourselves as being free from the encumbrances of physical needs (3). Literary critics
perpetuate this fantasy when they ignore the natural world and solidify an understanding of
nature as simply novelistic white noise or descriptive filler. David Mazel puts the ecocritical
stance to literature most succinctly: Ecocritics simply study literature as if the earth matters
and as if there is something to be gained from bringing the purported background to the forefront
(qtd. in Slovic 5). When one brings the margins to the center, new insights into the relationship
of human to nature and of nature to human develop. New understandings of what the
environment is in and of itselfwithout any ideology attachedform.
Ecocritics strive to consider nature as nature rather than nature as manipulable symbol.
This reading practice aligns with an environmentalist ethos, which underscores both human
reliance on the environment and the destructiveness of a capitalist perspective of natures use
in industry. Ecocritics examine the potential hazards of natures metaphorical use and the
effects of this utility-based ethos on extra-literary, real world environmental degradation. As
Lawrence Buell argues: The conception of represented nature as an ideological screen becomes
unfruitful if it is used to portray the green world as nothing more than a projective fantasy or
social allegory (36). Buells ecocriticism as well as the fields rising popularity indicates that at

least some literary academics desire to engage environmentalism in their work and to
acknowledge increasingly worrisome global (indeed, planetary) environmental hazards: global
warming, the increasing acidification of rain, the increase in severe weather events including
hurricanes and typhoons. Ecocriticism thus appeals to an academic world long-relegated and
limited to the study of representation.3 Jay Parini writes that ecocriticism marks a reengagement
with realism, with the actual universe of rocks, trees and rivers that lies behind the wilderness of
signs and with the materiality of the body and its processes: life, death, pain, birth, and aging
(qtd. in Newman 9). Relatedly, Khalifeh argues that what separates her from Palestines
resistance poets is her engagement with the real, the earthly and the bodily:
Ive presented Palestinian society in a realistic mannerearthly, visible,
embodied. Ive portrayed characters from the very bottom of society, but also
intellectual and politically active characters . . . Palestinian society is not only
made of heroism and struggle, nor is it merely a Spartan community. . . It is a
society of fathers, mothers, children, workers, farmers, artists, and intellectuals. In
other words, its a society rather than a symbol, a slogan, a song, or an allegorical
beloved. Were people of blood and flesh and weaknesses, as well as strengths.
(Jaber)
Thus Khalifeh very actively and consciously engages with questions of representation
versus reality, allegory versus society, in her writing. Her realist conventions undergird,
moreover, a refreshing ethics of comprehensibility and anti-elitism. Khalifeh utilizes realism to
make her characters real and embodied and also switches between Classical Arabic and local

Of course, this has been largely a self-regulation and self-limitation, reinforced by an academic
structure unsupportive of ecocritical work.
5

dialects to make her work comprehensible; she wants to write about people, Palestines poor
included, who can then read and understand what she has written about them. In the
aforementioned Jaber interview, she says: Im absolutely against elitist literature, and my
conviction is that literature is from the people, towards the people. This ethics of legibility
syncs with an ecofeminist ethos that connects the devaluation of women and nature vis--vis the
worship of high culture and its (often male) creators of less comprehensible texts.
Khalifehs ideology aligns her with many ecocritics such as Barbara Cook, Heidi Hutner,
and Allison Steele who contend that nature itself is an unstable, unnatural, changeable
category. 4 These ecocritics disagree with Buells contention that nature should or even can be
understood outside of culture because, for ecofeminist literary critics, gender is always
implicated in representations of the natural world which are inevitably inundated in dualistic and
hierarchical thinking. I align myself with this ecofeminist view of an interlocking system of
environmental ethics and womens rights, but with a caveat; to say that a relationship exists
between the degradation of women and the natural world does not necessarily also mean that one
cannot read nature as naturea tree as a treeeven as women are conceived as somehow closer
to trees, to Mother Nature, and farther from the privileged realm of culture.
For Sahar Khalifeh, resistance to destructively binary thinking lies in elucidating the
problems that arise from particular forms of binary thought. She demonstrates how categories
nature/culture, male/femaleexist in symbiosis; their definition is relational. Problems arise
when that mutuality is deemphasized, ignored, and replaced with a hierarchy. One of Khalifehs

All of these scholars appear in Barbara Cooks Women Writing Nature and argue from an
explicitly ecofeminist standpoint.

main projects in both The Inheritance and The End of Spring is to bring womens participation in
nationalist Palestinian resistance movements to the forefront and to problematize the traditional
masculinization of Palestinian resistancethe reading of liberation as the sole province of men
that benefits, but does not meaningfully involve, women. Her novels consider the ties between
the liberation of women and Palestinian resistance and also question the false prioritization of
nationalist over feminist concerns.
As Nawal El Saadawi explains, Arab women have always been key players in
revolutions, both on and off battlefields. However, their contributions and sacrifices do not
always translate into material gains for women or any diminishment of patriarchal hegemony,
even when a revolution is successful; The new ruling classes and governments are composed of
men, and have a tendency quickly to forget the problems faced by women . . . Instead of
attempting to sweep away patriarchal class relations within the family, these are maintained in
one form or another, and the values related to them continue to hold sway (xii). Khalifeh
acknowledges womens specifically maternal power and their particular contributions to
resistance efforts and takes a critical stance toward Palestinian revolutionaries uninterested in or
unsympathetic with the status of women. Khalifeh revalues the caretaking and maternal acts that
Palestinian patriarchy devalues; she bolsters the ecofeminist cause by arguing for a revaluation
of womens unique, bodily contributions to Palestinian resistance without also reducing women
to their procreative capabilities through static motherland symbolism.
My ecocritically-informed feminist readings of Khalifeh strengthen the ecofeminist
contention that the domination of land and the domination of women under a patriarchal system
are connected. Ynestra King describes how womens historical relegation to the natural realm
(as opposed to the higher, privileged realm of culture) has served to justify their subjugation.

King states: The building of Western industrial civilization in opposition to nature interacts
dialectically with and reinforces the subjugation of women, because women are believed to be
closer to nature (qtd. in Gaard 3). Sherry Ortner makes a similar argument; she insists that all
cultures associate women with nature based on their bodily characteristics and in particular,
womens procreative abilities.
Ornter also complicates the simplified equation of woman and nature and finds that in the
patriarchal cultural imagination, woman does not exactly equal nature, but rather, woman is
devalued because she is perceived as less capable of dominating nature: It might simply be
stressed here that the revised argument would still account for the pan-cultural devaluation of
women, for even if women are not equated with nature, they are nonetheless seen as representing
a lower order of being, as being less transcendental of nature than men are (73). This theory
coincides with capitalist notions of the free, autonomous5 and (importantly) generically male self
that have their roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concepts of personhood. Rousseau, for
instance, defined humanness as reason and womenas beings of the body rather than the
mindas something less-than-human. For Rousseau, women are inherently, naturally more
dependent on men than men are on women:
Woman and man are made for each other, but their mutual dependence is not
equal. Men depend on women because of their desires. Women depend on men

As C.B. Macpherson persuasively argues in The Real World of Democracy, capitalism and
freedom actually exist in contradiction: Human beings are sufficiently unequal in strength and
skill that if you put them into an unlimited contest for possessions, some will not only get more
than others, but will get control of the means of labour to which the others must have access. The
others then cannot be fully human even in the restricted sense of being able to get possessions,
let alone in the original sense of being able to use their faculties in purposive creative activity. So
in choosing to make the essence of man the striving for possessions, we make it impossible for
many men to be fully human. By defining man as an infinite appropriator we make it impossible
for many men to qualify as men (79).
8

because of their desires, and because of their needs. We would sooner subsist
without them than they without us. For them to have what is necessary, for them
to be in the condition proper to them, we [men] have to give it to them . . . to
esteem them worthy of it . . . By the very law of nature, women, as much for their
own sake as for that of their children, are at the mercy of mens judgments. (73)
In this formulation of personhood, women are tangential to and dependent on the category of
man. This assertion of unequal mutual dependence poses men as the superior, and thus also the
default, form of the human being.
As Ann Cahill relatedly argues, humanness has typically been defined in opposition to
the body and through reason; in order to justify notions of womens inherent inferiority and to
separate men from beasts, theorists like Hegel and Rousseau defined humanness as mastery
over the intellectsomething which women (who have more insistent ties to the body due to
bodily realties like menstruation and pregnancy) could not achieve in equal measure to men.
Cahill writes: In a double movement characteristic of the logic of patriarchy, the definition of
the generic human was made at the cost of the exclusion of women (52).
In a sense, then, the refusal to acknowledge human reliance on nature can perpetuate a
devaluation of women; Rousseau suggests that women, like nature, are necessary, but less so
than men. Women, Cahill writes, absorb, embody, and satisfy material human needs demanded
by the fact of embodiment, so that the (male) intellect might fulfill its project unfettered by such
lowly, worldly exigencies . . . Women were bodies so that men could be mindsso that men
could be human (52). Nature and women are thus only worthwhile as providers and
metaphorical foils to men and to culture. Ecofeminism rejects this notion of women and the
environment as oppositional structures that make defining the human possible. Khalifeh too

rejects this hierarchical vision of personhood in the context of Palestinian resistance; she
celebrates womens unique bodily capabilities, rather than treating them as less important than
the contributions of the mind. I read her emphasis on motherhood not as anti-feministnot as a
regressively traditional association of women with the maternal as critic Amal Amireh
arguesbut as a self-conscious reclamation of a very specific patriarchal trope: that of the
motherland.
These general ecofeminist tenets provide the critical framework for my thesis, which is
not to say that I will only use Khalifehs texts to demonstrate the accuracy of ecofeminist
thought or represent texts as mere representations of ecofeminist thinking. It is also important to
note that there is no one ecofeminist ideology even if one can discern certain consistencies like
those mentioned above. Many ecofeminists view this philosophical plurality and ongoing
theoretical dialogue within ecofeminism as one of its marked strengths (Gaard and Murphy 4).
However, obstacles remain to the creation a global, transnational, and cohesive ecofeminist
movement that one cannot accuse of being bourgeois and apolitical (Carr 15). In short,
ecofeminism is not an unassailable analytic lens.
Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, for example, draw attention in their treatise Ecofeminism
to white feminists inattention and inaction (on a large scale, at least) in response to the unequal
division of labor between women in the Global North and the Global South and to the unequal
ecological damage this economic system (capitalism) inflicts. Although certain feminist circles
such as Marxist feminists or socialist feminists attempt to centralize labor as an analytic
category, they do so within existing critical paradigms and thus, according to Mies, lose sight of
the true goals of feminism: All of these efforts to add the woman question to existing social
theories or paradigms fail to grasp the true historical thrust of the new feminist rebellion, namely

10

its radical attack on patriarchy or patriarchal civilization as a system, of which capitalism

constitutes the most recent and most universal manifestation (13).
Thus while ecofeminists attempt to bridge the gap between ecological and feminist
concerns, obstacles remain to complete solidarity within the transnational ecofeminist
movement. I would argue that ecofeminism requires the voices of more postcolonial
ecofeminists, Gurpeet Kaurs term, to better unify the tenets of postcolonial and ecofeminist
thought. Indeed, a large part of my project here is to examine how Sahar Khalifehs texts
theorize a more inclusive ecofeminist paradigma paradigm more in tune with not only gender,
but also issues of class and colonialism. Ultimately, through an elucidation of the problems
arising from a nature/culture divide in The Inheritance and a revaluation of motherhood in The
End of Spring, Sahar Khalifeh powerfully underscores how the exploitation of nature and the
oppression of women are intimately bound up with notions of class, caste, race, colonialism and
neo-colonialism (Kaur 100).

CHAPTER 2: INTRODUCTION TO THE LITERATURE

The remainder of my thesis focuses on Palestinian feminist author Sahar Khalifeh and
two of her novels: The Inheritance (1997) and The End of Spring (2008). These two texts tackle
feminist, ecofeminist, socialist, and Palestinian nationalist questions in the contested space
between colonizer and the colonized.
Sahar Khalifeh was born in Nablus, the West Bank, in 1941. She describes her childhood
as suffocating and dull; indeed, she says, she began to write as a means of escape: My passion
for writing developed every day, because of the enclosed atmosphere I was living under
(Renowned Palestinian Writer). Khalifehs childhood under patriarchal norms proved
11

foundational to her development of a feminist ethos. As Gustafson et al explain, Sahar Khalifeh,

born the fifth girl to a Palestinian family . . . was seen as a disappointment to her parents from
the start. In order to preserve the Palestinian bloodline, name, and inheritance, a son was
necessary. Even as a very young child, Khalifeh sensed that her gender was a handicap and a
limitationsomething to mourn rather than enjoy or celebrate; indeed, her birth was met with
sadness and disappointment:
Within the family where I was borne, I was received with disappointment that
reached sobs and tears. Everybody was waiting for a boy . . . Since childhood, I
repeatedly heard them say that we girls of the family, girls of the neighborhood,
and all girls of the world were powerless, helpless, a sex doomed by nature, the
sex that is permanently weak. Thus, as far as I can remember, I started my fight
with nature since I was a child. (Khalifeh, Caught Between, emphasis mine)
After an unhappy childhood and a frustrating and unsatisfying thirteen years in an arranged
marriage, Khalifeh, at the age of thirty-two, enrolled at Birzeit University, received her B.A. in
English, and, after acquiring a Fulbright, finished her literary education in the United States.
Khalifeh has written extensively on the Israel-Palestine conflict, Palestinian culture, feminism,
and language. Her works include novels, lectures, and articles. A prolific and incisive writer,
Khalifeh has received some critical attention but not, in my view, in equal measure to her talents.
Thus part of my project here is to write extensively on a heretofore under-analyzed and underappreciated woman author with a unique perspective on patriarchy and colonialism and a
refreshing interest in the ethics of realism.
Khalifehs 1997 novel The Inheritance examines life in occupied Palestine after the Oslo
Accords. Hammered out in secrecy in Oslo, Norway, by Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, the

12

Oslo Accords forced both sides to come to terms with each others existence. Israel agreed to
recognize Yasser Arafat as its partner in peace talks, and agreed to recognize Palestinian
autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by beginning to withdraw from the cities of Gaza
and Jericho (Oslo Accord). The Oslo accords set up a two-part peace process. In the first five
years of the agreement, Israeli and Palestinian officials were to formulate solutions to (what were
imagined to be) the easier issues of the conflict. After officials resolved the easy issues, they
would then move on to the more difficult and complicated aspects of the conflict. Unfortunately,
the small interim issues (the release of prisoners, a Palestinian airport, economic
considerations) proved to be much thornier than initially imagined. As Phyllis Bennis writes,
no one ever even got around to discussing the final status questions. And no onemeaning
the U.S., which remained the sponsor of the diplomatic processwas prepared to weigh in on
the side of the Palestinians in the hope of balancing the extraordinary disparity of power that
characterized relations between the two sides (45). Ultimately, the peace process failed and
violence resumed. The Inheritance examines Palestinian political and family life in this postOslo landscape.
The story follows a (gradually less and less present) protagonist named Zaynab, a halfPalestinian American academic who returns to Palestine in search of her father and her identity.
Once in Palestine, she finds her father, Hajj Muhammad Hamdan, non-responsive as the result of
a stroke. She also finds him married to a young woman, Futna, who we learn is pregnant. Futna
(secretly) underwent artificial insemination in Hadassa Hospital in hopes of birthing a male heir.
The discovery of the pregnancy initiates conflict over the inheritance Muhammad Hamdan
leaves behind. Other conflicts in the novel center on the themes encapsulated in Futnas story:

13

artificiality versus naturalness, property, industry, wealth, the distribution of wealth according to
gender.
The End of Spring reads at first like a coming-of-age novel. Khalifeh sympathetically
depicts the habits of a peculiar and sensitive little boy named Ahmad who loves a little white
kitten, photography, and a blonde girl on the other side of a fence separating his village from an
Israeli settlement. The novel shifts quickly into history; a tale of a family expands into a
chronicle of the Second Intifada (Al-Aqsa Intifada), including the 2002 attack on Yasser Arafats
headquarters and Palestinian resistance fighters response. The Second Intifada came after the
failure of the Oslo Accords and the deterioration of President Clinton-sponsored peace talks at
Camp David. The Second Intifada initially strongly resembled the First Intifadamass protests
in the streets, checkpoint conflicts, and Palestinians (including children) throwing rocks at Israeli
Defense soldiers and vehicles (Bennis).
Khalifeh depicts this violence in The End of Spring as well as womens acts of resistance
in her birthplace, Nablus, led by a surrogate mother and leadership figure called Mother Mayor
(Umm Suad). Neither novel ends, I would argue, very happily, though neither is without
moments of hope. Both novels end in the death of a woman as the direct result of the Israeli
occupation. Both novels also show, however, weaknesses in resistance strategiesweaknesses
that might be overcome. But Khalifehs work is not solely historical and political; it is also a
study of family dynamics and interpersonal power struggles; part of the magic of Khalifehs
writing is her ability to translate the enormity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into small, microlevel interactions without resorting to propaganda. She puts a human face on everyone:
Palestinians, Israelis, and even animals; this empathetic eye makes her work particularly fruitful
for postcolonial ecofeminist analysis.

14

Throughout The Inheritance, Khalifeh examines how thinking according to hierarchical

binary codes contributes to the marginalization of women and the destruction of nature. In The
End of Spring, Khalifeh works against the reductive, metaphorical uses of women as land (and
especially as the motherland) found in resistance poetry and stories by her literary predecessors
by creating her own, more complex woman-as-land metaphors. Although Amal Amireh argues
that Khalifehs reliance on the maternal harmfully recycles a patriarchal trope, I maintain that
such a reading problematically devalues motherhood and the realities of female embodiment.
Indeed, Amirehs reading participates in what Chandra Mohanty has described as the
production of the Third World Woman as a singular monolithic subject (61). Mohanty
demonstrates how Western feminism often elides differences between women for the sake of
constructing a singular Womanand more specifically, in order to construct the Average Third
World Woman defined only by limitations and in subordination to the modern Western
woman; This average third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her
feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being third-world (read: ignorant, poor,
uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.) (66). The third world
woman is denied specificity and context; under Western universalisms, she becomes a type
deployed in the interests of the academic feminist complex. My thesis will work against
Amirehs implicit devaluation of the maternal woman (of woman as woman). What Khalifeh
ultimately offers is an understanding of liberation (of nature, of women, of Palestine) that does
not equate sameness and equality.

15

CHAPTER 3:
THE INHERITANCE: AN (ECO)FEMINIST READING
Sahar Khalifeh reveals an ecofeminist and feminist-socialist stance throughout The
Inheritance. She often does so through gendered language, including an equation of woman and
land and (admittedly briefly) woman and animal. Amal Amireh criticizes Sahar Khalifehs
gender politics and her mobilization of these gendered metaphors. While she clearly admires
Khalifehs feminist ethos, Amireh takes issue with her persistent representations of characters
defined by sexuality. For Amireh, this emphasis on the sexual, the maternal, and the bodily
problematically centralizes the gendered body as a communicative structure in patriarchal ways.
She writes of The Inheritance:
But this critique [of gender politics by Sahar Khalifeh within The Inheritance], I
would argue, is contained by a nationalist ideology that views victory and defeat
in terms of mens and womens bodies. What Khalifeh does in Al-Mirath in
1998, is what Kanafani did in Men in the Sun6 in 1962that is, figuring
Palestinian defeat through sexuality. Khalifehs men in the novel are either
sexually impotent, physically repulsive, or, like Mazen, symbolically
castrated. The womens bodies are sexually frustrated, exploited, or, in the case
of Futna, penetrated by the enemy. (764-65)
I take no issue with Amirehs assertion that the characters that people this narrative are, by and
large, frustrated. However, I read Khalifehs reliance on gendered metaphors of victory and
defeat not as a problematic recycling of patriarchal tropes, but rather as an ecofeminist

I, generally-speaking, agree with Amirehs critical reading of Men in the Sun, as explained at
length in the next chapter.
16

technique of postcolonial resistance. Khalifeh conflates womens bodies with the land of
Palestine in order to elucidate the interconnectedness of political, ecological, economic, and
feminist struggle. Khalifeh translates political frustration into sexual and sexualized frustration
not to re-inscribe women into the category of the sexual object or the asexual virtuous mother as
many Palestinian resistance and martyr poets have already done. Rather, she exposes through the
motherland trope an intricate blend of ecofeminist and postcolonial thought that complicates
gender essentialism and any simplistic association of woman and nature, man and culture.
Ultimately, Khalifeh demonstrates the inefficacy of dualistic thinking and the dangers inherent to
living according to binary codes without also arguing for a mere reversal of the hierarchy or a
complete negation of sexual difference.
The novel follows the protagonist Zaynaba half-Palestinian academic. She goes to
Palestine to see her father, who had attempted to kill Zaynab years earlier when he found out she
was pregnant (and thus had sullied the family name): I went to the West Bank looking for
him, looking for them, searching for my face in the land of exile. I wanted to know how it would
look (3). Zaynab makes an explicit connection of self to place and self to family. Eschewing the
individualistic American ethos (for example, she points out that each of her academic colleagues
was for himself . . . all moved in their own orbits), Zaynab goes to post-Oslo Palestine seeking
the familial connections she cannot find in the United States (16). She wants to see how it
her facelooks in Palestine, as if she cannot truly see herself without having seen her fathers
homeland, connecting herself to the land.
The novel opens with the description of the attempted murder of another young pregnant
girl named Hoda. Hoda manages to escape her fathers wrath, but everyone agreed that
Hodas father was no longer a man since he had not washed his honor in her blood (6). Khalifeh

17

brings attention to a patriarchal culture of honor that reads daughters aberrant, unmarried
sexual practice as a direct affront to male authority.7 As Zaynabs father says: I want my
daughters to be brought up as Arabs, clear and transparent as a candle. I want them to marry
Arabs and Muslims . . . to be impregnated by Muslims (8). The daughter is valued here as an
innocent (transparent) bride and a reproducer of culture, ethnicity, and religion; she is valued
only insofar as she is a good Arab and Muslim woman. At the same time that Khalifeh
critiques patriarchal ideology here through Zaynab and Hoda, she also complicates this depiction
by drawing Zaynab to itto Palestine, its culture, and to the father who left her, emphasizing the
importance of family ties and origins to Zaynab regardless of the gender politics that should, in
theory, temper a desire for travel to Palestine.
This opening foregrounds the patriarchal binary that values women only for sanctioned,
monitored uses of their bodies in sex and reproduction. In a culture that supposes that women
must be subservient to men, that daughters must be subservient to fathers (and brothers), and that
the female body is an instrument of male honor, a daughters unmonitored sexuality upends the
male/female and culture/nature hierarchy. The daughter usurps the fathers power over her and
over her biological nature; she disobeys. She therefore must be punished in order to reinstate
the hierarchy and patriarchal dominance of reproduction. Without this reinstatementwithout
murderthe father remains in a state of shame. It seems important that Khalifeh imbues the
opening of her novel with gendered meanings centered on the problem of pregnancy,
conceived of as the most natural of womanly states. As pregnancy represents a (potential)

This is not to say that the United States has no such honor system. Indeed, the protection of
girls virtue by overprotective brothers or fathers (greeting a daughters date at the door with a
gun, for example) is an ongoing joke in American sitcoms and commercials. Moreover, it is
difficult to make meaningful distinctions between honor killings and what Americans call
crimes of passion.
18

natural reality of female embodiment,8 the patriarchal attempt to control it also represents a sense
of ownership over nature and over what women do with bodies that nature made capable of
reproduction; any attempt to manipulate a womans most natural version of bodily autonomy
also represents a struggle against unrestricted natureagainst nature gone wild, so to speak.
Khalifeh also explores at the outset of the novel how patriarchal thinking (the attempted
murder of daughters) damages natural familial bonds. It is rumored that Hoda must remain
with her American grandmother, estranged forever from her immediate family. Zaynab too
experiences a sort of exile in America, even before her estrangement from her father,
Muhammad Hamdan. My fathers birthplace was Wadi alRihan and mine was Brooklyn. As
Zayna, I was caught between two languages and two culturesmy fathers Brooklyn and the
West Bank on one side and my maternal grandmothers American culture on the other. I was
later left without any culture and lived in a vacuum (9). Zayna (the Americanized version of
Zaynab) feels keenly her lack of belonging and of place. Her success as an academic does not
placate her, and indeed, she finds the American academic life barren, full of only selfinterested individuals (19). She feels no connection to an American identity. She says: I am not
American . . . not truly American (17). We are confronted with the vision of a selfish,
disconnected, individualistic America where extended families do not seem to exist.
An old man to whom Zaynab goes to learn of her fathers whereabouts notes of American
self-involvement: In the old country, whenever a horse fell ill we used to stay with it, we did the
same for a donkey. We would talk to it . . . as if it were a family member or a neighbor. Here,
however . . . Each one minds his own business (23). In Palestine, then, there was once,

Of course, I mean to imply neither that infertility does not exist, nor that infertility excludes one
from the category of woman, except in patriarchal thinking.
19

according to this old mans nostalgic recollection at least, a sense of connection among people
and the animals that cultivated the land. There is no distinction here between the treatment of
non-human animals and the treatment of neighbors or a family member, which is particularly
striking if one considers the very high value many Palestinians place on ones responsibility to
ones family. The old man thus presents Palestine as a more ecologically-connected, more
communal, more family-oriented space than America; he poses Palestine as a kinder place and
Palestinians as a people more capable of empathy with the non-human world.
Attracted by these stories of community and home and encouraged by a potential
inheritance from her father, Zaynab travels to Palestine. Thus, in the opening scenes of the novel,
Khalifeh depicts patriarchal attempts to control nature and women through the regulation of
womens procreative possibilities in marriage. She also opens up a hopeful space that suggests
what Zaynab seeks a home, a family, a connectionmight be found in Palestine. However,
Zaynabs gradual disappearance from the novel complicates a particularly hopeful reading. The
initial protagonist becomes a marginal character and increasingly silent. Zaynab does find a
family, but one rife with gender-based conflicts and frustrated hopes and desires. Perhaps
Zaynabs fading voice emphasizes Khalifehs refusal of Western modes of individual-based
writing (the novel is in fact more about a family than about any one person) at the same time that
it mirrors Zaynabs fading hope in finding a Palestine like the one the old man describes. Though
at first she describes Palestine as a place of supreme feeling, empathy, and altruism (here
they love from the bottom of their hearts, and their hearts are offerings on the altar of
selflessness), the arc of the plot complicates nostalgic visions of the motherland.
When Zaynab arrives in Palestine, she is confronted with a difficult family situation. Her
father is dying and his much younger wife, Futna, is pregnant and hopeful for a male child.

20

Although the application of sharia inheritance law varies across locations, one assumes that
Futnas desire for a son relates directly to sharia inheritance structure. Put most simply, women
receive half of what men receive. Sisters and daughters receive half of what brothers and sons
receive. Fazli Sameer explains that sharia inheritance law comes from sacred Quranic
prescriptions. For instance, in Chapter Four, Verse Eleven of the Quran it is written: Allah
commands you as regards your children (inheritance), To the MALE, a portion equal to that of
TWO FEMALES. Thus Futnas child, if male, will receive a greater share of the inheritance
than Zaynab. Futna explains this situation to Zaynab: You are a girl, however . . . A boy
protects the inheritance. Without a boy your uncle inherits (44). This system clearly favors sons
over daughters in that it gives primary authority over wealth and land to men. The logic
undergirding this system is that women do not need as much money as men, because they are, in
theory, already being provided for by men in the form of husbandswho are therefore in greater
need of money.
The provider/provided for paradigm is reversed dramatically in The Inheritance through
Nahleh, whose plight represents the inadequacies of a binary system that devalues womens
labor and cultivates sons at the expense of daughters. Nahleh spends her youth in Kuwait as a
teacher so that her brothers can get an education. The ingratitude she receives from her brothers
for this remarkable self-sacrifice pains her deeply. She connects her plight to that of farm
animals; They became engineers, with Gods grace, while I worked in Kuwait being milked like
a cow, teaching and bringing them up . . . each one of them has a large family . . . and Im here
like a billy goat, cajoling the stricken man, and spoiling the rotten Guevara . . . your cousin
Nahleh, a forgotten cow in the barn, now that her breasts are dry (52). Like the old man Zaynab
searches out in the beginning of the novel, Nahleh expresses her feelings about her home life

21

through animals. Nahlehs story, however, contradicts the old mans nostalgic recollection of an
empathetic paradise that makes no differentiation between donkey and man. Nahleh exposes how
the concept of utility aligns her with animals. Once she is no longer useful economically
once her breasts are dryshe is forgotten and ignored like an old cow no longer capable of
producing milk. Nahlehs treatment at the hands of her brothers engenders the feelings of
loneliness that lead to her dangerous affair with Abu Salem which in turn leads to the failure of
the sewage factory project.9 Thus at the heart of the failed economic project (portrayed as a part
of Palestinian liberation) is the mistreatment ofthe animalization and self-animalization ofa
woman.
Nahleh attempts to assuage her loneliness and to satisfy her sexual desires through selfornament and her affair with Abu Salem. Dismayed by her reality, she has a mid-life crisis
brought on by aginga natural occurrence very much at odds with a youth-obsessed culture
that refuses to reconcile aging and beauty. Zaynab notes that Nahleh had once been beautiful,
fresh, young, and full of love and feelings, then she had been hit with the realization that she was
fifty, homeless, aimless, and unsatisfied (72). Nahleh feels that her youth was stolen from her
and because youth and femininity are inextricable terms in a patriarchal culture, she feels
compelled to reinstate herself as a feminine object of desire through makeup, clothing, and
jewelry. Nahleh attempts to work against an increasingly ageist societya reality that marks,
perhaps, the increasing Westernization of a Palestinian culture that was once more respectful not
only of non-human animal life, but also of elders:

Their affair leads to Nahlehs kidnapping, which ultimately leads Kamal (the engineer brother)
to drop out of the sewage factory project which leads to its eventual failure.
22

As women mature, gaining an average of 16 pounds by midlife . . . they lose two

essential components of idealized beauty: youthfulness and thinness (Pipher,
1994, 1997). The perception that a heavier, aging body can no longer be beautiful
is exacerbated by Western cultures devaluation of elders, especially older
women . . . Ageism, fueled by the denial and fear of aging, has created a cultural
perspective that old is ugly. (De Jong 308)
Nahleh attempts to beautify (that is, youth-ify) herself in order to alleviate her feelings of
loneliness and to combat the signs of aging which would mark her as a more natural, but less
beautiful woman. She also seeks to make herself more desirable because she desires Abu
Salem physically. She participates in beauty culture due to her dissatisfaction with her physical
herself and her sexual frustration. Nahleh
started using makeup, taking small, timid steps, and secretively applying small
amounts of eyeliner. She used blush and put rollers in her hair every night. She
started going to Nablus every Thursday and returning with piles of clothes and
trinkets. She would spend hours in her room, trying on the dresses, the mascara,
the eye shadow, the lipsticks, the various creams for her skin, moisturizer,
cleansing, anti-wrinkle, and neck and eye creams . . . She would spend hours in
her room . . . exercising to lose weight. (72)
Nahleh puts on the trappings of traditional femininity by taking smaller steps10 and exercising
(explicitly) for weight-loss rather than strength. She hopes to reverse the natural aging process

10

Ann Cahill discuses feminine bodily comportment at length and connects it to rape culture;
the threat of rape is a formative moment in the construction of a distinctly feminine body
characterized by attempts to take up less space (143). Marion Young in Throwing Like a Girl
also points out how gender expectations limit womens movements, including walking, running,
and throwing (qtd. in Cahill).
23

through artificial substances, like anti-wrinkle creams; Nahleh lamented over her fate in
disbelief that she had reached fifty, whose youth was totally gone or almost gone (76).
One can connect the cultural distaste for aging women or for the unmade-up (noncompliant) woman under beauty culture with the general devaluation of nature. Women are
devalued, the ecofeminist argument goes, because they are perceived as either closer to nature or
as less capable of transcending nature (Ortner). Women attempt to transcend their natural
selves because the unornamented face and undisciplined body are perceived (on a cultural, rather
than individual level) as ugly. As Naomi Wolf argued in The Beauty Myth,11 beauty work keeps
women in a state of constant striving after an unattainable (and unnatural) ideal. Distracted by
the pursuit of beauty, women become, according to Wolf, a tractable population obediently
spending billions of dollars a year on makeup, fitness, surgeries, and dieting supplements. I
would extend Wolfs argument by pointing to how beauty work could be read as womens
attempt to transcend nature; beauty work underscores the internalization of patriarchal codes that
read women as imperfect in their naturalness. Men, then, do not need makeup (though certain
men of course elect to wear it) because they have already proven themselves capable of
overcoming nature (through their less bodily bodiesthrough bodies unencumbered by
menstruation and possible reproduction).12 Women are thus kept in a state of perpetual striving
after an unnatural bodily and aesthetic ideal. This condition links women to the natural world

11

Wolfs argument clearly emanates from a Western perspective, but I think it is nonetheless fair
to use her insights in the case of Nahleh because of context. Nahleh turns to beauty work not for
personal enjoyment, but explicitly in order to relive her lost youth. She participates in beauty
culture, as Wolf argues Western women often do, in order to assuage feelings of
unattractiveness and inadequacy, at the same time that she seeks sexual satisfaction from men.
Men have their own set of beauty culture norms. It seems clear to me, however, that women
bear the brunt of aesthetic demands. When a woman gets older, she becomes ugly, whereas an
aging man is often understood as distinguished.
12

24

because the environment under capitalism is also read as a space of perpetual development and
improvement. Just as the air, water, and land as well as its nonhuman animal and human
animal inhabitants are often poisoned through irresponsible development practices, beauty
culture harms women. Eating disorders and carcinogenic makeup are two of a myriad of possible
examples that highlight the damage done to womens bodies as a result of a culture that deems
them less-than-human because of their relationship to the natural world.13
The ageist culture Nahleh works against through makeup and diet also harms her lover,
Abu Salem, though in a markedly different way. His dissatisfaction with his wifes (and his
daughters) appearance encourages his sexual relations with Nahleh. As he notes, his wealth does
not make him happy because it does nothing to change his spouse. When his realtor calls him to
inform him that a lot he owns is worth a quarter of a million dinars, he claims:
It didnt matter to him whether the land was worth a quarter of a million or half or
even ten million . . . Would this change the face of the earth, his feelings, or this
woman standing before him? But was she a true woman? A female? A human
being? Despite his money, his travels . . . his wife had a rancid odor and smelled
of the country oven . . . Despite all his wealth, at the end of the day he spent the
evening watching television with his two daughters who look like frogs and the
barrel wife. (79)

13

In the U.S., major loopholes in federal law allow the cosmetics industry to put thousands of
synthetic chemicals into personal care products, even if those chemicals are linked to cancer,
infertility or birth defects. At the same time as untested chemicals have been steadily introduced
into our environment, breast cancer incidence has risen dramatically (Chemicals in
Cosmetics). Moreover, 85-90% of eating disorder sufferers are women (Eating Disorders
Statistics).
25

Abu Salems misery, then, arises from his disinterest in his wife and his disinterest in acquiring
more wealth. He has lost the drive both for sex (with his wife, at least) and for money, leading
him ultimately to become enamored with Nahleh and the newness, beauty, and sexuality she
seems to offer in contrast to his barrel-like wife.
Whereas Nahleh strives to adhere to codes of traditional femininity through beauty work,
Abu Salems wife seems more interested in religion and prayer. This displeases Abu Salem who
notes, as he stares at Wardehs (a famous singers) surgically-altered face on television: She
[Wardeh] was very beautiful after her face-lift and the weight loss; she looked younger and more
radiant than before. Her face was like a rose and her neck slender . . . How lovely Wardeh is
looking, so young and energetic. Thats the way to live . . . not like my life, worthy of cows
(80). Thus Khalifeh connects Nahleh and Abu Salem partially (and admittedly, only very briefly)
through their descriptions of their animal lives; that is, Nahleh compares her life to that of a
forgotten barn cow (whose breasts are empty) and Abu Salem, similarly, thinks his life is
unworthy of cows.
Nahleh and Abu Salem both adhere to patriarchal norms that celebrate youth (over aging)
and read a womans non-compliance with standard beauty culture as ugliness. Abu Salem thinks
Wardeh looks markedly more beautiful after a face-lift and weight loss, while he looks at his
natural wife and two daughters with disgust; the artificial, even when it is acknowledged as
such, remains more beautiful to Abu Salem than the mother of his children, about whose
humanity and female status he remains skeptical. Moreover, he finds himself attracted to Nahleh
who has only recently begun to spend an inordinate amount of time on her appearance. Thus
ultimately the two loverswhose affair fuels the dissolution of the sewage projectare brought
together by an attachment to artificiality, beauty culture and by a mutual dissatisfaction with

26

what one might call more natural (less cosmetically-altered) appearances: Nahleh with her own
and Abu Salem with that of his female relatives. They are also brought together by fervent sexual
desire, of course, and not merely cultural norms. Both intertwine in the development of their
relationship.
Khalifeh also reveals feminist leanings through her description of the relationship
between Bey Abd-al Hadi and Violet. The Bey is Futnas aristocratic cousin; the term Bey is
largely a term of respect reserved for Palestinian notables. Violet met Nahleh when they were
both teachers in Kuwait, and have remained friends. The Bey takes an interest in Violet because,
in his mind, they are very similar to one another; He, a man, wanted to have what she had
because she was an artist, she was beautiful . . . they were very much alike (175). Khalifehs
pause in this sentencea manunderscores the Beys sense of entitlement to Violet and her
body. As a man, he has certain privileges in relation to women. He expresses his sense of
entitlement (and his woeful misreading of Violets interest in him) when he starts massaging her
thigh with his elbow underneath a table at a gathering of Kamal (Nahlehs engineer brother),
Mazen (another brother, and Violets true love interest), and the Bey: [Violet] was startled and
held her breath in order to find out what was happening. A few minutes later the elbow was
moving in circles and meaningful pressures, rising then falling and plunging in her flesh (176).
This invasive, innuendo-laden display of affection humiliates, enrages, and sickens Violet. She
had a strong urge to vomit (177). Violet stands up suddenly to get away and when the Bey asks
her, appearing innocent to those at the table, where she is going she expresses her anger in a
hissing whisper: To hell (177).
In the next section of the text she describes at length the patriarchal culture in which she
finds herself and how it dehumanizes women:

27

She knew that men looked at women as mere sex objects, at least thats how they
saw Violet and those like her. Respectable women achieved respect only because
they gave birth to a dozen children or because they covered their heads, sacrificed
their spirits, and became colorless and tasteless, just bags . . . They were looked at
as mere sacks, similar to a sack of lentils. (177)
Women like Violetwomen who are hairdressers, nurses (like her mother), or otherwise
outside of the aristocratic circleare read as sex objects, available to the upper-class Beys of
Palestine. Women can only gain respect by attaching themselves to a wealthy man or by
repressing their selfhood and becoming colorless and even edible, like lentils. Women exist in
order to nourish and in order to give birth; only by doing both can a woman gain the status of
respectable. Violet goes on to assert the injustice done to women even by those men most
interested in justice, equality, and freedom: men like Mazen (whom she desires, just as Nahleh
desires Abu Salem) a former PLO-fighter, as well as the poets and politicians voicing the
Palestinian revolution and the fight against Israeli colonization:
She was a member of that generation of the 1970s, when a girl would watch the
leaders of the revolution with awe, listen to the roar of voicesShe saw them as
their nations leaders, geniuses of their time . . . She would follow them like their
shadow, seeking their blessing, while they smiled and made her believe that she
was the woman . . . the element of change . . . Then came the fall, nine girls she
had known had traveled that road and fallen, becoming like prostitutes, with one
major difference that the prostitutes were paid for their services, whereas the girls
were cheap prey, the rewards of the revolution and the liberation. (178-79)

28

Violet reveals how a revolutionary ethos did not include a belief in the necessity of a gender
revolution in 1970s Palestine. Separating feminist concerns from Palestinian nationalist
concerns, the (male) revolution leaders interested themselves only in a partial, patriarchal
liberation.
Violet portrays the revolutionary leaders like celebrities, but becomes disillusioned when
nine girls are seduced and then left in the cold, left with only talk about the revolution, an
addiction to hashish or morphine, and an emotional affliction that crushed them (179). Violet
describes these men in terms of emotional and even biological manipulation; revolutionaries
would reel women in through poems and powerful speeches, only to abandon them after sex or
to leave them addicted to drugs or emotionally-crushed. Women are bodies, invaded
emotionally, physically. Although we assume these women consented to the sex (at least
Khalifeh does not describe their actions in terms of rape), the harm that follows is like that which
is often described after rape: emotional destruction, self-blame, and public disgrace. In the
eyes of a patriarchal society that conflates a womans worth with her sexual purity, she
becomes secondhand goods (179).
Violets denunciation of the Beys actions follows this discussion of the revolutionaries
hypocrisy and cruelty. She demonstrates how revolutionary menthe freedom fighters like
Mazen boldly putting their bodies at riskare not all that different from regular men lessinterested in revolution than in self-comfort and wealth. (Indeed, the Bey zooms past the
ambulance in which Futna lays bleeding and dying at the end of the novel: The Bey passed
through the checkpoint in his car without stopping . . . He crossed the checkpoint with a
Jerusalem license plate (237).) Violets discussion highlights the continuing failure on the part
of revolutionaries to connect a feminist to a nationalist struggle.

29

Khalifeh described this phenomenon in a 2009 interview, explaining that, while women
are expected to hold down the fort when husbands and sons are imprisoned (or worse), and
have done so admirably, male revolution leaders persist in ignoring womens contributions to
Palestinian resistance: As for her rights, these are often forgotten, even within leftist parties and
progressive institutions. Just take a look at our male leadership and try to find a single female
face among all those faces that we have to watch on TV every night (Jaber). The Inheritance
highlights this maltreatment of women through Mazen and the Bey and the male-dominated
major projects that structure the novel. Khalifeh underscores (and this is, perhaps, her most
forceful point in both of the novels I examine here) how a patriarchal understanding of liberation
actively obstructs nationalist aims.
Accordingly, Khalifeh structures the novel in such a way that forces acknowledgement of
the interconnection of feminist and anti-colonialist struggles. At a micro-level, Violets
discussion of the Bey reveals similarities between Mazen (the injured freedom fighter and
emotional manipulator of Violet) and the Bey. On the level of gender relations, these men are
very much the same as they operate in a patriarchal system.14 Both men are deeply invested in
the success of the cultural fair, suggesting that patriarchy invades all levels of culture and
society: from the high-class Bey (who abandons the fair at the end of the novel and the dying
Futna) to the lower-class revolutionary (who also fails Futna at the novels end), patriarchy

This is complicated, of course, by the fact that Violet desires Mazen, but not the Bey; her
attraction to the patriarch suggests that embodied desire informed by cultural norms that pose the
revolutionary man as a worthwhile object of female desire, but the pure intellectual (the noncombative) and less attractive man as less desirable, remains relevant and important. Women, as
complicated human beings, can desire that which oppresses them and become enamored by
physical attractiveness. (Also see my discussion of Suads tortured refusal of a marriage proposal
in The End of Spring.)
14

30

penetrates all aspects of Palestine and to the detriment not only of individual Palestinian women
but, again, all of Palestinian society in its fight against Israeli occupation.
Khalifeh characterizes the post-Oslo era, with its promise of temporary peace and its
damaging gender relations firmly in place, in somewhat Darwinist terms: People scurried to
projects . . . with no other aim but financial gain (102). Khalifeh contrasts the Western
understanding (a German [Kamals engineering colleagues] understanding in this case) of the
Middle East with what it seems to become under an increasingly capitalistic cultural paradigm.
Kamals friend states: People there are better than us, we in the West are mere machines,
without the ability to dream and have emotions (189). Zaynab also notices different emotive
modes when she arrives in Palestine. Here singing is different and talking is different; here they
love from the bottom of their hearts, and their hearts are offerings on the altar of selflessness
(45).
Zaynabs and the Germans sense of cultural openness differs sharply from Palestinians
less romantic readings of their own culture. For instance, one of Nahlehs kidnappers says to
Kamal before threatening to harm Nahleh: Youre worth what you have, whether in money or
in power, and if you have nothing youre worth nothing, you can be blown away easily (174).
Worth equates with possessions and Nahleh, according to the kidnapper, is worth nothing
because she owns nothing; she is not worthy of consideration and can be blown away (killed,
forgotten). Nahleh also reveals her understanding of women as victims of the market. She says
of Violet: Nahleh had also said that being in a polygamous marriage was better than being a
widow or an old maid, referring both to Umm Grace and her daughter [Violet], who was over
thirty and still unmarriedin other words, she wasnt marketable! (117) Women are
commodities, objects, animals, marketable.

31

Utility is bound to worth and womens worth comes through attachment to a man and
eventual childbirth, preferably of a male child. Futna, for instance, tells Zaynab that she would
have made up for her birth by providing Zaynabs father with a son: Had I been lucky . . . I
would made it up to him and given him a boy (44). Nahleh feels her own inadequacy in this
regard and laments her lack of children and the absence of a husband. She describes herself as an
unproductive piece of land: A spinster? A spinster! A flat word that conjures selfish personal
worries and a barren woman, one like the fallow land, unappealing and uninspiring, like a land
without rain (47). The non-birth-giving woman is read as selfish, as less of a woman because
she does not fulfill a biological role. Nahlehs lament also equates the worth of land with its
productivity, reiterating the bond between the natural world and women. Nahleh internalizes this
cultural code which leads, alongside her palpable sexual desire, to her self-loathing and eventual
affair, which is at the heart of the novels most tragic moments.
A productivity-centric ethic also informs the inheritance laws that lead Futna to go to
such lengths (artificial insemination by, the novel suggests, Jewish seed) to become pregnant;
that is, to secure her financial future, Futna must produce, must give birth to a male child, or
Zaynabs uncle will inherit the lions share of the inheritance; the ultimate result of this cultural
emphasis on childbirth institutionalized though sharia inheritance law (and, of course, Israeli
occupation and border patrolling) is Futnas death. Thus as socialist Khalifeh emphasizes twice
in the novel, the dream of capitalistic industrialization relies on or results in the equation of
human worth and possessions and the equation of human worth and productive-capabilities. This
culminates in a nightmare: The dream of industrialization . . . then turned into nightmares
(102). Near the tragic end of the novel, the narrator (whether or not Zaynab or Khalifeh is
speaking remains unclear) states: The liberation dream has become a mere slogan that doesnt

32

relate to the land, a nightmare (238). Khalifeh characterizes post-Oslo Palestine as a nightmarestate, emptily hoping for liberation through industrialization that turns allmen and women
into animals valued solely for production and women, for reproduction. Liberation no longer
relates to the land.
One senses, however, that the emotional depth Kamals colleague and Zaynab perceive in
Palestinian culture has not disappeared entirely. Kamal says of life in Germany:
If you slow down even for a second, the wheel and the machine will crush you.
Over there, youre like a beast attached to a wheel in perpetual motion; you dont
have the right to be sick or feel tired, you dont have the right to be bored or to
rest. You arent allowed to make a mistake or give into your moods, to be
compassionate or emotional. (154)
Khalifeh represents Palestine as increasingly capitalistic, but not yet as wholly Western; to
Kamal, Palestine is still a more compassionate, emotional, and more human(e) land.
Nonetheless, one cannot ignore the general pessimistic strain in the text and its descriptions of an
increasing masculinization of the motherland (or the fact that Kamal eventually abandons the
sewage factory project and returns to Germany). As Vandana Shiva notes regarding India:
The feminine attribute, as a symbol of the land and its people, has slowly
disappeared . . . During the four decades from 1947 to the end of the 1980s when
development was the major target of the nation state, the motherland
metaphor disappeared from the discourse of nation building. The state behaves as
parens patriaethe patriarchal parentdominating life. (108)

33

Khalifeh represents something similar, though not identical, occurring in Palestine, particularly
though her representation of Kamal and his initial attempts to persuade his brothers and his
father into joining him in a project: the building and running of a sewage factory.
After spending time (against her will) in Nablus with her brother Said due to the
institution of a curfew that prevented her return home to Wadi al-Rihan,15 Nahleh finds that her
engineer brother Kamal has returned home from Frankfurt. She knows he has returned home not
to see her, but to take advantage of this time of relative peace: Of course he had, he had come to
be the first to take advantage of the promising conditions for the future (94). Nahleh cynically
refers to those who have made a living outside of Palestine and are just now returning as
returnees. She states in a tone I read as sneering and mocking: The returnees would usually
bend down and touch the earth with their forehead, and declare before the cameras and the
journalists with tears in their eyes, that the homeland was like the lap of a mother and without it
they were nothing (94). It seems clear that Nahleh sees the returnees as phonies.
They returned for money, not for love of the land or the love of the motherland. The
returnees love the homeland for its use, for what can be extracted from it. Khalifeh reveals the
artificiality of this performance of maternal/land-love in front of journalists and cameras through
her depiction of Kamal, who evinces no attachment to the land of his birth and his fathers farm.
He asks his father, Abu Jaber Hamdan: If we want to start a project, such as building a factory,
would you join us? (95). His father responds emphatically that the farm has been in the family
for generations and that he has no interest in selling it: As long as Im alive on this earth, this
land will not be sold . . . it belongs to the Hamdan family (95). He also becomes incensed

15

Nahleh travels to Nablus to buy clothing and makeup. She becomes stranded after the murder
of a truck driver, which leads to searches, curfews, strikes, road blocks, and the shop closures
(85).
34

when Kamal refers to the land as cake of which he would now like a slice. A cake? A cake! Is
this what the homeland represents for you? (95). Kamal makes his stance vis--vis his father
explicit when he notes that the land is not sacredthat industrialization is the way of the future
and the path to Palestinian progress: Good people, be realistic, nothing will pull this country
out of its mess but industry and industrialization. Youre holding onto the land as if it were
something sacred! (96).16 Thus to Kamal, the land is not sacred. It is a means to an end. Abu
Jaber still will not budge, marking him as the texts most-dedicated landowner: He who sells
his land sells his soul, and Im not selling (97). Once again, Khalifeh presents the reader with a
dichotomy of values. Kamal, on the one hand, loves Palestine and its different emotive mode of
being. On the other, he exhorts his family members to be pragmatic and abandon any romantic,
emotional notions of the land. He is a capitalist who also yearns for the romantic. Kamals
devaluation of the land alongside Nahlehs mocking remarks about the returnees connects the
devaluation of women and the Palestinian land; though on the surface, for the cameras, the
returnees need the land like they need their mother (or a sister who, like Nahleh, fulfills the
caretaker role of the mother), the sway of capitalism leads to an increasing devaluation of both.
Khalifeh discusses the large-scale fleeing of Palestine at length in a 1977 letter she wrote
in response to Emile Habibis (of Saeed the Pessoptimist fame) critique of her novel Wild Thorns
(1975). She discusses the wealth disparity between Arabs in Israel and those who stayed in the
West Bankbetween the relatively comfortable life of those who left compared with that of
those who stayed: Those who stayed behind in the playgrounds of childhood [those who
remained] were barefoot [poor]. But the moneyed and the potbellied just ran away and went on

16

Abu Jaber wittily responds: Since the land has no value why are the Jews killing themselves
over it? (97).
35

piling their riches all the over the Arab World, and bought, instead of plantations, buildings,
villas and firms that yield exorbitant profits (7-8). This describes men like Kamal and like the
Beymen who have left and continue to leave, finding wealth and comfort elsewhere as their
motherland decays into chaos and stagnation. Khalifehs problem is not with those who left out
of economic necessity, but with the wealthy Beys of Palestine interested but not engaged with
revolutionheads of households that would lounge in salons munching on politics while
poorer Palestinians starved and died in the streets (9).
Thus Khalifeh reveals ecofeminist leanings in The Inheritance by linking women and
mothers to Palestinian land. The novel takes on ecofeminist questions most directly through its
depiction of the three projects that push its plot forward: Futnas artificial pregnancy, the
sewage factory project, and the cultural fair.17 To take advantage of the time of relative peace
post-Oslo, Kamal, Nahlehs engineer brother, and Mazen, the former freedom-fighter, take on
projects. The engineer decides to start a sewage factory; Mazen believes, along with the
Hemingway-emulating Bey, that a cultural fair is the best way to fight Israeli occupation. Thus
Khalifeh confronts the reader with two version of revolution: industrial and cultural. Women are
generally not involved in the formulation of these projects (although the Western Zaynab appears
to be assisting Mazen to such an extent that Violet becomes jealous and suspicious). Womens
primary projects in the novel, excluding the increasingly silent Zaynab, are beautification,
pregnancy, and the manipulation of highly-gendered inheritance laws in order to secure their
own financial futures; in this way, Khalifeh highlights how patriarchy (only partially, of course)
structures womens ambitions and desires. With other opportunities closed to them, women like
Nahleh and Futna lead lives of self-sacrifice in order to achieve love or wealth; Nahleh

17

I am very much indebted to Professor James Holstun (University at Buffalo) for this insight.
36

beautifies, Futna gets pregnant, Violet pines after Mazen. This selfless state of being proves
unsustainable and unsatisfying, as Nahlehs relations with Abu Salem and Violets tortured love
for Mazen and her related desire to move to the West make clear.
Futnas pregnancy by artificial insemination ultimately forms a crucial subtext in the
novel; the pregnancys silent presence throughout the textits marginalized status in
comparison to the very large projectsmakes a statement on womens perceived place in
revolution and progress informed by dichotomous thinking in an increasingly industrialized
landscape. Khalifeh shows how neither industry nor culture aloneneither mind nor body alone,
neither male nor female alonecan push Palestine forward. The dichotomous thinking that
undergirds the nature/culture divide permeates the strained and ultimately failed relationships
between men and women in the novel. And it is ultimately these failed relationships that lead to
the devolution of the projects into chaos and the death of Palestinian futurity embodied in the
figure of Futnas orphaned child.
Kamals idea for a sewage project is, at first, met with laughing suspicion and anger.
Khalifeh describes in an amusing and lengthy rant peoples thoughts on a proposed shit factory
that would turn sewage and garbage into fertilizer and recycling. When the nature of the
proposed factory became known, people were astounded. They said:
By God! Are you kidding? . . .A recycling and sewage factory? Are you serious?
A factory to can garbage? . . .It means that your shit comes back to you in a can
like the beer can and you would drink it . . . Hes [Kamals] going around
bragging to everyone that theyre working for the future, for history, for the
people and the country on the best project ever. But did the best project have to be
a shit project? (99)

37

The municipality, too, did not immediately embrace Kamals seemingly ecologically-sound and
business-savvy ambition. Kamal is perplexed by the resistance; Kamal . . . found himself
fighting a battle he didnt understand (99). Why, one can imagine Kamal thinking, are people
protective over their own waste? Why does it matter if he wants to industrialize a human byproduct? Those opposed to the project in the Palestinian and the omnipresent but silent Israeli
bureaucratic circles are worried less about the symbolism of a shit factory than about how
Kamal seeks to own something considered public property (which ironically is not public at
all, but rather government-owned and supervised for the benefit of the public; public property
includes things like the water supply and roads).
In a move typical of bureaucratic government structures, the Palestinian Authority is
paranoid about its own power more than its presumed duty to protect people and the environment
from the possible ecological damage inherent to the construction of any type of factory, but
especially one dealing with substances that can, if not dealt with properly, spread disease; If a
person satisfies the Authority, he might upset the power [Israel], and if the power is not pleased,
it will not trust you or provide you with facilities to deal with the environment and its sewage
(99). The problem is one of power for the Israeli municipality as well, not of environmentalist
concern. The problem for the people rests primarily, it seems, in the realm of the symbolic; they
do not want to be the home of the shit factory.
All of these objections fail to account for the very real possibility of environmental and
human harm and to acknowledge the possible ecological benefits of such a factory, including
the reduction of garbage (100). Indeed, sewage factories can be environmentally-sound and
assets to a community; if safety concerns are dealt with properly, there is no reason to read
Kamals project as an anti-environment campaign, though it does bring up questions about the

38

ownership of wastegarbage and human excrement. One American company, called Black
Gold is a modern example of Kamals imagined, best-case-scenario factory.18
It is only when the realtor, Nahlehs lover, steps in and plays Israeli Authority politics
that Kamal manages to acquire a permit for the oft-mocked feces factory. Khalifeh shows how
even the best-intentioned, environmentally-minded industrial practices cannot get (easily) done
in present bureaucracy-ruled Palestine with Israeli officials controlling perhaps the most
important resource required to deal with sewage: water. She also highlights how Kamal is
particularly ill-suited as a returneeas one who has returned only for profit rather than a
Native Sonto navigate Palestinian politics.
Women, importantly, are only tangentially-involved in the project. However, it is a
womanNahlehthat leads to its ultimate destruction, though the factory was failing even prior
to Nahlehs kidnapping and Kamals self-removal from the project because, one must assume, of
the factorys improper distance from the community and inadequate mechanisms for dealing
with the odors inherent to the handling of waste. The root problem, however, is Kamals inability
to access an adequate amount of water. The Oslo Agreements do not provide for a share in the
water they need:
He [Kamal] felt dizzy from the overpowering smell of the urine and was suddenly
struck by the thought that this mixture needed millions of liters of clean water for
treatment. Where would he get so much water . . . he remembered what he had

According to a Think Progress article by Lisbeth Kaufman on Turning Sewage Sludge into
Energy Dollars, sewage factories can be a win-win situation for communities, for the
environment, and for businesses. According to Black Gold, their work is both environmentallysound and lucrative; The beauty of Black Golds product is that we are taking this
environmental pollutant, this cost liability thats also an environmental liability and providing
our customers with the technology and the equipment to convert that into a renewable energy
asset, something that actually offsets their costs and that they can sell for direct revenue stream.
18

39

heard . . . people explaining that the Oslo Agreement did not provide them with a
share in the water. They would have to pay, in dollars, or in stocks and bonds, for
the water they needed. But the capital invested would hardly cover the cost of the
equipment . . . In Frankfurt the sewage isnt disgusting like this frightening lethal
stuff . . . What was the use of all the efforts when the source of life was missing?
(152)
Crucially, Kamal follows this meditation on water, the source of life, with thoughts of Nahleh
who is still captive (152). Nahleh is missing, just like the water that would allow the sewage
project to move forward and to work. Khalifeh thus makes an ecofeminist reading available here
by linking Nahleh to the source of life. Women, as humans with reproductive bodily
capabilities, are very literally the sources of life. To exclude them in the processes of resistance
including industrial, environmental, and cultural projects is to neglect a crucial, integral element.
Without water and without women, resistance fails. Khalifeh creates an intimate link between
reproduction and revolution; one literally cannot reproduce without women just as an
androcentric revolution cannot succeed without womens voices, efforts, and bodies.
The sewage project also fails on a literal level because of women. Khalifeh in no way
blames women for the devolution of the sewage project; rather, she blames the patriarchal
culture that pushes women into economic dependence on men or into a position of self-sacrifice
wherein her salary is reserved for others (mens) educations. After learning of the relationship
between Nahleh and the realtor, Abu Salems children are enraged, both by the disgrace of the
situation and economic factors: Abu Salems children, both boys and girls, were up in arms, and
as the girls usually have nothing to fight with but tears, their brothers volunteered to do what was
necessary and made up for the difference. The news of the company shares that reached them

40

was overblown (134). The overblown rumor refers to the suspicion that Abu Salem had
signed over his shares in the sewage project to Nahlehshares that were destined to be parceled
out after his death to his children according to sharia inheritance laws.
This leads Abu Salems (male) children to kidnap Nahleh and demand that she relinquish
her shares. Nahlehs brothers come to rescue her, while her women friends and family ask Abu
Salems wife and daughter to ask their male relatives to return Nahleh. Abu Salems pregnant
daughter provides a bitter and threatening account of the aftermath of the relations between
Nahleh and Abu Salem and its effect on her inheritance; My husband divorced me when my
father took a second wife and signed his fortune away to her. Im neither fearful for the baby Im
carrying nor concerned about my husband divorcing me, or my father disinheriting me. I have
nothing to lose . . . Ill drive you out by hitting you on the head (147). At the core, then, of any
familial moral disgust about Nahlehs sexual drive are economic considerations that affect both
Abu Salems male and female children, but clearly fall most heavily on the shoulders of
womenwomen like Abu Salems daughter divorced by her husband due to inheritance
considerations.
Inheritance laws thus impede not only the relationships between men and women,
brothers and sisters, and families, but also between women by making all other women
competition. In a patriarchal order, women must compete with one another (here we see the
partial origin of what has come to be termed cattiness in English) for men in order to survive
economically. Because resources are limited and hetero-patriarchy demands, in the context of the
novel, that women sacrifice themselves and their salaries for love, for family, and for the
revolution, women denigrate one another to achieve status and attractiveness to men.

41

Psychological, sociological, feminist (The Beauty Myth) and biological studies support this
business model of heterosexual relationships.19
The internalization of this cultural messaging about male-determined worth (and worth as
attractiveness) by women leads perhaps to what has come to be known in feminist academia as
slut-shamingthe distrust or hatred of women even by other women because they dress or act
in a way perceived as sexually-promiscuous or even just sexually-available. As a Huffington
Post article from October of this year explains: Women often punish perceived sexual
transgressions . . . Studies in dozens of countries have found that women use indirect aggression
against other women for being too sexually available . . . because if sex is a resource, then more
sexually promiscuous women lower the price of it (Ghose). While it seems clear to me that the
situation is far more complicated than this article allows, it also seems clear that under
patriarchy, women are far more valued for attractiveness than are men, who are valued for their
wealth. Under this paradigm, sex becomes a womens primary source of power, and women who
are just giving it away are diminishing that power, a notion that relies on the assumption that
men are very easily swayed by attractiveness. A more extreme version of this assumption
underlies rape culture rhetoric that poses men as unthinking beasts who are not responsible for
rape if the victim was dressed sexily.20

19

Maryanne Fisher explored this phenomenon in a 2004 article in which she explained, with an
unfortunate blindness or at least under-acknowledgement of the influence of culture, the
mechanisms of intrasexual competition: Evolutionary theory predicts that female intrasexual
competition will occur when males of high genetic quality are considered to be a resource. It is
probable that women compete in terms of attractiveness since this is one of the primary criteria
used by men when selecting mates (283).
One nauseating example of this ideology at work occurred in London earlier this year. In early
August, a 41-year-old man was sentenced to eight months in a London prison for two counts of
making extreme pornographic images and one count of sexual activity with a child. The judge
on the case, Nigel Peters, suspended the already-lenient sentence because the thirteen-year-old
20

42

And so, the daughters threat to Nahlehs compatriots encapsulates an entire troubled
history of gender relations and gendered violence. Her threatIll drive you out by hitting you
on the headis crucially followed by an attack on both Nahlehs and Futnas promiscuous
appearance and actions; If they knew what shame meant they would have brought up their
daughters well and taught them not to steal men. They would not have taught them shameless
manners and exposing their merchandise in the street. It is well-known that men are smallminded and their eyes dazzle at the sight of flesh, painted nails, and blonde hair (146). Her
contention that Nahleh is at fault for the sexual activity that occurred between her and Abu
Salem carries with it rape culture connotationsthe suggestion that sexy women are asking for
it. She also refers to Nahleh as the harlot who took away my father from us . . . She used such
powerful magic to win him over that even the Sumerians were unable to undo it (146). Abu
Salem cannot be held responsible for his sexuality and women who engage in sinful sex like
Nahleh must be harlots, sorceresses, and above all, ashamed. The daughters threat and diatribe
is also meant to shame those engaging in more traditionally Western cultural practices of beauty,
like Futna (more bodily exposure, blonde hair). Indeed, Futna unconsciously . . . looked at her
nails and began to shake in anger, shame, or both (146). This is in line with Nawal El Saadawis
description of the Arabic term fitna (which sounds, of course, very similar to Futna):
For the Arabs, the word woman invariably evokes the word fitna. Arab women
combined the qualities of a positive personality and fitna, or seductiveness, to
such an extent that they became an integral part of the Islamic ethos which has, as
one of its cornerstones, the sexual powers of women . . . their seductiveness can

female victim of the assault was predatory and she was egging [him] onYou might say it
was forced upon him despite his being older and stronger than her (Kaufman).
43

lead to a fitna within society. Here the word is used in a different but related sense
to mean an uprising, rebellion, conspiracy, or anarchy. (203)
Khalifeh thus shows Futna bringing fitna into the world of the novel; she is seductive and
sexually attractive (and much younger than her deceased husband) and also brings chaos into the
novel when she begins to give birth at the cultural fair. Nahleh also brings fitna through fitna
chaos through seductiveness. Her beauty enraptures Abu Salem and instigates the tragic turn of
the novel. Khalifeh demonstrates how the very concept of fitna (the idea that womens
seductiveness is something men must arm themselves against and that with women comes chaos)
catalyzes chaos. Thus in the novel, the very idea of fitna is a self-fulfilling prophecy that pits
men against women and women against each other and ultimately fractures the possibility of a
cohesive, non-patriarchal Palestinian liberation movement.
Indeed, Kamal, perturbed by the violence of Nahlehs kidnapping and Nahlehs refusal to
escape her circumstances through travel, withdraws from the factory project, instigating its
failure. Although he claims that his life in Germany is empty and meaningless and is clearly
pained by his familys pleading demands that he stay, he returns to Germany: He was
determined to avoid working in an atmosphere of fear, that was all. That was the reason and
nothing else (187). Kamal does not want to work with Abu Salems sons, who are prone to
violence and better-rooted in Palestine and more attuned to its cultural nuances: He was
different and he will stay different (172-3). Particularly confusing for Kamal is his sisters
refusal to travel to Frankfurt to enjoy herself after he begins to see Nahleh as a sexual human
being rather than as, in his words, an angel: The problem is that weve gotten used to seeing
her as an angel (124). Kamals brother Mazen similarly reveals his adherence to Madonnawhore dichotomous thinking in reference to Nahleh when he states: He had discovered that after

44

all these years he had been cheated and stupid. Nahleh was no better than other women or men or
above sexual temptations . . . He was scared and shaken, seeing her in a different light, as a
blood-sucking ogress (122, 125). Once he discovers Nahleh has sexual desires, Mazen becomes
disgusted by her, the woman he had previously thought above all other women (122). Mazen
thus imbricates womanly value with chastity and asexuality. Kamal temporarily overcomes
deeply-gendered thinking in a moment of epiphany wherein he describes the only universality of
human experience: embodiment.
The human being is the child of its civilization, he eats and drinks from it, he
sucks its milk, its values . . . but the excrements are the same everywhere, and the
digestive system is the same, the mouth and orifices are the same. Why then do
we worship an orifice or an organ when science has proven that man is in
majority water, excrements, gases and metals? He is a mere tube with an entry
hole and an exit hole. (162)
Civilization is metaphorically a motherthe teacher of culture and cultural norms that, for
Kamal, have created an atmosphere of fear in Palestine.
The demise of the cultural fair is likewise instigated by failed gender relations and more
concretely, by communicative failures. Ultimately, the novels plot reveals a domino effect
wherein the patriarchal foundations of inheritance law (the title of the novel is of course
important here) create a cultural illness that, like the nauseating smells of the sewage factory,
invades every cultural crevice and impedes every attempt at progress. Mazen believes the Israelis
can be beaten on the level of language, art, and culture. Mazen tells Zaynab, pointing to his head:
The project begins here. According to him, the mind is mans treasure,
the most valuable of our possessions. If it moves, we move, it is the leader

45

. . . we were looking for an old castle to bring the past into the present, to refresh
peoples memories through art and culture . . . Mazen commented on the
project in these words, They defeated us through the war but we will
defeat them with our culture. This is a cultural struggle. (103)
Khalifeh sets this proposed artistic solution to Israeli colonization in opposition to Kamals
vision of a factory (and capitalist development) concerned with the body and its excrements.
Khalifeh thus sets up contrasting, binary visions of progress and development. This
dichotomous reading of revolution relates directly, I think, to Khalifehs obvious interests in
gender relations (and economics) in the novel as both projects failures can be linked at least
partially back to gender inequity. It should also be mentioned that the year before The
Inheritance was published, a cultural center reminiscent of Mazens fair was established outside
of Ramallah called the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center. It is possible that Khalifeh is
parodying this institutions unilateral focus on culture and, at the same time, showing remarkable
predictive skills; the center was raided in 2002 and according to the Miami Herald, Israeli
officials seized a computer and a cellphone, broke dozens of windows, swept books off shelves,
peppered walls with shrapnel and bullets, spit pumpkin seeds on the floor and allegedly stole
3,700 shekels (Johal). Khalifeh may also be referencing the Palestinian Heritage Center (PHC)
in Bethlehem which was established in 1991 by Maha Saca. According to its website, the
center tirelessly works to promote, revive, and preserve Palestinian cultural heritage, especially
the arts of embroidery and traditional dressmaking. The PHCs main goal is to educate the public
about the meaning and significance of Palestinian cultural heritage (Palestinian Heritage
Center).

46

Although one would expect Khalifeh to come down on the side of culture in a debate on
the economic versus the cultural source of anti- or decolonization efforts, she does seem
interested in highlighting the inadequacy of cultural revival when that culture remains invested in
patriarchy and capitalism. Indeed, I read Khalifehs voice into the following quote from the Bey:
Wasnt he the one who had said literally that a people cannot be counted and cant progress if
they dont rebel against themselves and against their values, then rise culturally to erase the days
of disgust and the crimes committed in the name of the homeland and in the name of
patriotism? (201). In her representation of the cultural fair in the final chapter of the novel,
Khalifeh calls for Palestinians to rebel not only against Israel, but also against themselves and
the patriarchal underpinnings of a culture that persistently forces women into economic
subjugation and devalues or ignores, as will be seen again in The End of Spring, their
contributions to resistance efforts.
On a literal level, the cultural fair devolves into violence because of the sewage factory
and a linguistic confusion. The smell of the sewage factory, now without Kamal at its head,
permeates Wadi al-Rihan: The headache caused by the oil fields is at least beneficial and
doesnt impact the environment and the nostrils the way sewage does. It doesnt stink like
sewage, which attracts rats and wasps (211). As he plans for the fair, Mazen is in denial about
the strength of the smell throughout the municipality. Mazens father states: I dont understand,
you used to say that the project without Kamal wouldnt take, because he was the specialist . . .
Now you tell me that the project is working well and the odor isnt too strong and doesnt affect
the people! (214). Of course, the reader learns that the people are very much affected by the
smell and the rodents it brings. As the fair and its surroundings overfill with multitudes of
excited people, government officials, and Israeli overseers, panic ensues, especially after Futnas

47

water breaks. No one knows exactly why the festivities got out of hand and people rushed out
and fought with the police . . . someone stated that the checkpoint had refused to let the
ambulance through to transport Futna to Hadassa hospital (230).
Another story goes (and no one story is ever pinpointed as the root of the chaos) that rats,
attracted by the sewage smell, caused the panic. The fair succumbs to chaos in part due to a
linguistic error based on the phonetic similarity in Arabic between far [rat], nar [fire], and tar
[revenge]. There wasnt a big difference between the way they sounded in Arabic; as for their
impact and their result, that was a different manner (231). The mayhem was caused by a
multitude of factors, including poor planning (the fair is over-filled), cultural nostalgia (which
leads those who hear shouts of revenge to attack the police), and fear (shouts of Rats! and
Fire! in a confined space can lead to nothing but panic). At the root of all these issues is the
fairs overpopulation. Mazen failed to account for the bodily realities of the fair. Too focused on
cultural elements, on poetry, on dancing, Mazen fails to engage in more Kamal-like, practical,
bodily-based thinking that would have better-anticipated what it means to have a large number of
bodies in a confined space. Too focused on one aspect of revolution (Kamal on the body, Mazen
on the mind), both men fail. Khalifeh thus poses the problem of revolution as a partially
linguistic problem to be solved though communication and dialogue between binaries and
against the dichotomies at the heart of ecofeminist theory: man/woman, nature/culture.
Of course, one would be remiss to not mention the greatest dichotomy of all in the
novelthe one that, according to Professor James Holstun, is at the heart of this novel in an
omnipresent but largely silent way: Israel and Palestine. The final scenes of the novel force
confront readers with the realities of Israeli colonization. At the fair, Futnas water breaks and
she gives birth to a very small and thin newborn boy in need of medical care. Futna is bleeding

48

very heavily as well. Futna and her mother Sitt Amira are encouraged to board a bus carrying the
journalists and the consuls in order to get to the hospital in Nablus, but Sitt Amira refuses. She
objected strongly and categorically to the very idea of crossing Kiryat Rahil to reach the hospital
in Nablus (236). A Palestinian governor also refuses to take the bus, knowing the symbolic
weight of crossing through an Israeli settlement town while his people are at the citadel fighting.
When they (Mazen, the governor, Sitt Amira, Futna and her newly born son) reach the Kiryat
Rahil checkpoint in an ambulance, a long and tiring wait awaited them. It is at this point that
the men in the ambulance engage in conversation about revolution, America, and family. Over
the dying body of Futna, the governor notes that The liberation dream has become a mere
slogan that doesnt relate to the land (238). The mens dialogue reveals the hopelessness and
exasperation undergirding their calls for change, progress, and revolution. The governor, who
had written successful revolution plays earlier in life, has given up both on finding solutions and
making inspirational art in the post-Oslo era: He had gotten used to living without a solution
(243).
One can read this final scene as commentary on ineffective Palestinian leadershipits
demand for patience when patience is far, in Mazens mind, from a revolutionary ethos and
actively dangerous when people are dying. The governor, referring both to revolution and to the
literal line ahead of them to get to the checkpoint, says Well get there, but as you see the line is
long, you must be patient . . . We must be patient and look beyond the horizon (242). Futnas
weakening voice punctuates these demands for patience: Futna said in a faint voice, Mother,
Im bleeding heavily. Amira knocked at the window and Mazen turned his head . . . What can
we say, the line is long (242-3). As Futna lay dying, Sitt Amira demands that the two mena
revolutionary and a government officialdo something. As people in power and as men, Sitt

49

Amira expects them to be able to find solutions. The men meekly claim they cannot. The
governor does not know English and Mazen replies to Sitt Amiras demand, infuriatingly, with
an explanation of his language prowess. I know a little English and Russian. But they
understand our Arabic. Its not a question of language, however, the fact is that theyre upset
(249). Sitt Amira responds: My daughter is about to die and they dont want me upset? (249).
Disappointed with Mazen and the governor, Sitt Amira ultimately gets out of the ambulance to
speak with the Israeli soldiers herself, but Futna had already died. She takes the newborn child
and throws him into the arms of an Israeli soldier, noting this is your share (251).
There are at least two different ways of reading this assertion. Of course, the assumption
is that the child has an Israeli father because Futna was impregnated in Hadassa Hospital through
artificial insemination. I am more inclined to read the line as Khalifehs final word on
inheritance, the ineffectiveness of the Oslo Palestinian government, and the threat Israeli
colonization continues to pose. In this Post-Oslo world ruled by gender dichotomies, patriarchal
inheritance laws, efforts at progress that are wildly out of conversation with one another, and, of
course, Israel, reproduction remains impossible. Khalifeh seems to argue that so long as the
cultural order remains the sameso long as the Palestinians do not revolt against themselves and
an ineffective patriarchal culture of hopelessnessstagnation and life under the thumb of the
colonizer is the only possible result. The novel ends, tellingly, with Zaynab getting back on a
plane to America. Her uncle promises that her inheritance will always be there for her, marking a
continuing adherence to the gendered laws at the heart of the novels tragic climax. I [Zaynab]
shook my head without commenting, and walked toward the plane (251).
As demonstrated above, The Inheritance is a novel deeply invested in ecofeminist and
feminist concerns. Sahar Khalifeh theorizes the interconnectedness of the degradation of women,

50

of land, and of the colonized, and therefore also feminized, Palestinian population under the
Israeli regime. Specifically, Khalifeh takes aim at the patriarchal elements of Palestinian culture,
especially those which value women only insofar as they are useful for reproducing, both
literally and metaphorically, the economic and cultural system undergirding their own
oppression. Khalifeh imbues her female characters with humor and liveliness, certainly, but also
with an omnipresent and poignant sadness. No one is consistently happy in the world of The
Inheritance and one cannot help but feel that the ending, a death-birth, reverses with fierce irony
the typical symbolism of birth. There is no sign of progress, of growth in Post-Oslo Palestine.
Israeli occupation along with gendered turmoil within Palestinian culture itself creates a culture
of orphansa culture with neither a mother nor a stable motherland. Like the black, excrementfilled landscape newly-abandoned by a disillusioned Kamal, the orphaned child is left behind in
a static world. With Zaynabs departure, the reader is left with this sense of stagnation; the
novels plot turns back on itself and the characters of the novel are all, essentially, right back
where they startedor dead, leaving, or deeply unhappy.
Although I have focused primarily on the gender ethics of the novel and Khalifehs
narrative ecofeminist theorizing, one should not forget or ignore the fact that the novel is an
examination of life after Osloof what it means and what it is like to live in occupied Palestine
in this temporary and illusory state of peace. Thus the two major project failures that structure
the end of the novel cannot merely be understood in terms of language (rat versus revenge), in
terms of gender, or in terms of economics. Israel exists as the ultimate catalyst, the ultimate
center of the novel though it speaks only at the end. The Israeli forces are a silent, but
omnipresent force in this novel, making their physical presence known only at the end through
the death of a woman. Thus The Inheritance brilliantly demonstrates how patriarchy and colonial

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domination are in conversation. Khalifeh examines the patriarchal underpinnings of colonialism

and the patriarchal culture of the colonized in order to emphasize their similarities.
Khalifeh leaves us with a world in which state power has gotten its way, though I do not
think her message is a wholly hopeless one. Perhaps without the distraction of cultural infighting and the devaluation of women like Nahleh (a woman willing to sacrifice), Violet (a
smart woman with a deep capacity for love), Futna (a woman, though unlikeable, with
undeniable economic savvy), and Zaynab (the American academic yearning for her homeland),
Palestine would be better-equipped to fight Israeli state power and to rewrite the masculinist
narrative of liberationa project Khalifeh takes up in The End of Spring.

CHAPTER 4:
MOTHERLAND: GENDER IN PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE
LITERATURE AND THE END OF SPRING
Khalifeh showcases the negative influence of patriarchy on Palestinian liberation in The
Inheritance. In The End of Spring, she highlights womens resistance to patriarchy and to
colonialism, and thus moves away from the portraits of generally (but not wholly) disempowered
women she sketches throughout The Inheritance. Instead of disheartening representations of
Zaynab quietly observing Palestinian self-destruction21 or silently shaking her head and returning
to America, one hears the powerful voices of Umm Suad and SuadMother Mayor and her
resistance fighter daughter. Through depictions of these two women, Khalifeh shows how

21

Israeli colonization helps this self-destruction along, of course.

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motherhood is no less important a liberation project than a sewage factory or a cultural fair and
moreover, how it is not anti-feminist to value maternal, caretaking women, especially in a
struggle against a powerful colonialist force.
Indeed, Palestinian feminists seem to place a very high value on motherhood; in honor of
International Womens Day, 1999, West Bank feminist groups hung banners inscribed with the
following slogan, which celebrates the mothers of Palestine: Woman makes up half of society
and gives birth to the other half (Amireh 765). According, once again, to Amal Amireh, this
motto, which emphasizes womens maternal powers, represents a persistent obstacle to the
progression of the Palestinian feminist movement. Indeed, as mentioned previously, Amireh
argues that the maternal is one of the fundamental patriarchal metaphors which, when
utilized by feminists, denotes the limitation of the current Palestinian feminist discourse that
continues to recycle nationalist patriarchal ideology regarding womens bodies and sexuality
(765). Amireh claims that Sahar Khalifeh is guilty of this recycling of patriarchal metaphors.
Although she acknowledges that the celebration of the maternal might be a useful tactic for
Palestinian feminists (and a way of differentiating Palestinian feminism from the more
individualistic American brand), Amireh ultimately argues that the configuration of woman as
mother and motherland draws on patriarchal discourse regardless of who is employing that
discourse; Sahar Khalifehs admirable and vocal public feminism does not entitle her work to a
free passto complete freedom from feminist critique.
While I agree with Amirehs reading of the problematic slogana Womens Day banner
should, perhaps, focus on womens contributions both within and beyond the sphere of
motherhoodI disagree with her reading of Khalifeh and her general sentiment that the figure of
the maternal woman or the configuration of woman as land always plays into patriarchal

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hands. In this chapter, I examine the sexism and even misogyny that can accompany the
symbolic usage of women in the context of Palestinian resistance, while also demonstrating how
one might read Sahar Khalifehs emphasis on motherhood not as anti-feminist, but as a selfconscious reclamation of a patriarchal trope. Khalifeh reclaims the motif of woman as mother
and motherland to make visible what patriarchal resistance leaders have made invisible: namely,
womens contributions to the anti-occupation struggle.
Palestinian literature has erased womens role in the resistance; the persistent linkage of
woman to landwhich exists crucially alongside the absence of actual womens voices and
experiencesmanifests strikingly in three texts: in Abd al-Raheem Mahmouds The Martyr
and Call of the Motherland, in Taha Muhammad Alis Ambergris, and in the novella Men in
the Sun (1963), by Ghassan Kanafani. In all three texts, the authors limit womens sphere to
marriage, to motherhood, and to the realm of landscape symbolism; Mahmoud, Ali and Kanafani
deny women the complexity of personhood by representing them as objects or symbolsas
muses, mothers, whores, and as Palestine itself. They engage, though in importantly different
ways, in the figurative displacement of women in . . . national discourse which manages to
suspend Palestinian womens agency in an ahistorical and apolitical realm (Khader 81). Near
the end of the chapter, I examine Sahar Khalifehs The End of Spring (1998) which, rather than
merely recycling patriarchal tropes, challenges Mahmoud, Ali, and Kanafanis gendering of
resistance and nationalism as male. Indeed, Khalifeh boldly uncovers the feminine and maternal
foundations of Palestinian resistance and as such, I argue, reveals herself as a postcolonial
ecofeministas one who recognizes that the exploitation of nature and the oppression of
women are intimately bound up with notions of class, caste, race, colonialism and neocolonialism (Kaur 100). By reclaiming and complicating the woman as motherland trope,

54

Sahar Khalifeh connects the invasion of Palestinian lands with the invasion of womens bodies
and freedoms at the hands of both Israeli soldiers and Palestinian men; she also complicates this
depiction by showing how occupation led unintentionally to material and social gains for
women.
Khalifeh counteracts Palestinian resistance poetrya genre that relies very heavily on the
woman as motherland trope; this trope is one of many that consistently inform and structure
the resistance poetry genre. Indeed, according to Hanan Mikhail Ashrawi, politically-committed
resistance poets employ particular motifs so frequently that the Palestinian poetic landscape is
often predictable and bland; an understandable eagerness to express and affirm Palestinian
identity translates into formulaic and repetitive poetry, limited by its adherence to longhonored forms (82). These long-honored forms often include an attachment to patriarchal
ideology. As Honaida Ghanim writes:
Despite their national enthusiasm and appeal for social change, [the resistance
poets] were unable to transgress the patriarchic rule that was hegemonic in
Palestinian society. This hegemonic narrative was interwoven in . . . themes [such
as] representing the Palestinian defeat in 1948 through the patriarchal language of
collective shame, land rape, and honor lost . . . [They also articulated] the
national liberation project as masculine, promising to liberate the captured landwoman and to recover the collective honor of the nation. (23)
The gender politics in the poetry of Abd al-Raheem Mahmoud and Taha Muhammad Ali
support Ashwaris reading of poetic repetition and Ghanims reading of resistance poets
patriarchal treatment of land.

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Mahmoud employs the woman as land trope while also asserting the primacy of
masculine performance in resistance efforts. In other words, he relegates women to the realm of
the symbolic while representing menmanly menas the sole actors of resistance. In The
Martyr, Mahmoudthe foremost Palestinian poet-martyrwrites that the spirit of an honorable
man has two aims: / to die fighting, or to achieve victory (qtd. in Jayyusi 209). Thus men of
the noble sort should be either perpetual warriors or dead. The noble man should also love the
sound of the clashing of swords and should desire a martyrs death: Behold the martyrs body
. . . I swear this is how men should die / for how can I tolerate the harm of my enemys malice, /
how can I endure his aggression? (210). Mahmoud suggests that martyrdom is the only truly
masculine death in the face of an aggressive enemy; martyrdom is the only honorable demise
possible according to a hyper-masculine Palestinian worldview formulated to counteract the
subjugation and feminization inherent to Israels colonial project. Mahmoud posits that any other
form of male existenceany deviation from the resistance fighter lifeis shameful.
In Mahmouds Call of the Motherland, the speaker attempts to shame the man hesitant
to involve himself in battle by claiming that his own heart leapt with joy when The slain
motherland called for our struggle (210). He notes: Isnt it my simple duty to redeem my
country? . . .Would you back away from facing the enemy? / If so, then go hide in your mothers
bedroom! / May your hesitation humiliate you! The speaker does not admit to hesitation or to
fear. It is his simple duty to redeem Palestine; it requires no thought and provokes nothing but
action. And if the circumstances of war cause a man to think rather than act, he is, in the
speakers view, a coward who should find solace with his mother in a feminized domestic space.
Thus the motherland requires defending, while actual mothers are antithetical to masculine
ideals and symbols of (degraded) femininity. Mothersas sources of solace and comfort and

56

loveactively obstruct resistance. Mahmoud thereby eliminates mothers from the project of
liberating the motherland.
In the context of armed resistance, this type of rhetoric is entirely unsurprising. In order
to foment armed rebellion, the resistance poet would want to provoke mens sense of their duty
as soldiersas protectors and defenders of the motherlandand not as mamas boys. The
problem with this sort of discourse is not necessarily its celebration of mens armed resistance;
indeed, one can easily understand the attractiveness of this discourse to Palestinians attempting
to resist the daily inscription of power onto the unwilling bodies of Palestinians as a means
of fashioning a domesticated subject whose terrorized silence would confirm the mythical
Zionist landscape of an empty Palestine (Peteet 33). However understandable their resistance to
domestication and silencing, the resistance poets domestication, objectification, and silencing
of women as a means of fashioning a hyper-masculine self remains open to critique. It also
highlights how cycles of oppression might work; as a defense mechanism and as assurance of his
masculinity, the colonized male asserts his power over women with greater force than in precolonial times. Women in the context of colonization are thus burdened by a twice-disabling
discourse: the disabling master narrative of colonialism and an exact duplication of the
colonizers discourse by colonized men (Weagel 28). In resistance poetry, the treatment of
women as voiceless objects rather than as thinking and resisting actors recycles colonial
discourse.
It is crucial that in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, women are not symbolic
objects that remain unperturbed in their object status. Rather, they stand in for a violently
invaded, occupied, and, as in The Inheritance, an increasingly capitalistically-developed space.
The rhetoric, then, of woman as motherland or motherland as bride (Abu Salma says of

57

Palestine, Weve woven your wedding clothes with red thread / dyed from our own blood)
poses women not only as voiceless objects, but also as rape victims (qtd. in Jayyusi 95). The
motherland trope represents women as defenseless, as in need of male defense from the bodily
invasion of Israeli soldiers. This recycles the Victorian and patriarchal notion that women need
men to defend their honoran ideology that links womens sexual virtue and pre-marital
chastity to their identity as good women (rather than the ostracized fallen woman whose
sexual laxity prevents her from achieving the primary goals of women in patriarchal logic:
marriage and eventually children). The victimizing rhetoric of land-rape undergirds what is
known in feminist academia as rape culture, a phenomenon that makes women fearful of
public space and poses men as both the cause of and solution to that fear. As Rebecca Whisnant
writes:
A central element of rape as a terrorist institution . . . is a protection racket in
which men, as the group both creating the danger and proposing to deliver
women from it, dole out protectionsometimes temporary, sometimes
permanent, often illusoryin exchange for women's service, loyalty, and
compliance. In this system, good men protect virtuous and deserving women
from bad men, and part of what defines a woman as deserving protection is her
conformity to rules of patriarchal femininity.
Whisnants reading, though useful in its theorization of rape as a patriarchal cultural
phenomenon, diminishes the contributions of men very sincerely working to halt violence
(sexual and otherwise) against women. However, even a positive reading of certain mens
kindness is not without flaws. As Wally Secombe argues, though feminists have undertaken
many analyses of the grossest forms of violence against women, they have been less adept at

58

examining the other face of that violence. Feminists tend to ignore the degree to which
masculine civility, beneficence, and protectiveness anchor male dominance, precisely because
these dispositions embody masculine ideals and tend to elicit positive co-operation from wives
who feel fortunate to have considerate husbands who do not beat them (35).
Palestine, the patriarchal logic goes, deserves the defense of good men because she is a
good woman. Creating a parallel between woman and land supports rape culture ideologyan
ideology that restricts womens movement in the public sphere and demonizes the woman in
charge of her own sexuality. Thus in the poetry of Abd al-Raheem Mahmoud (and also that of
other famous resistance poets like Abu Salma and Ibrahim Tuqan) the woman as land trope
serves damaging patriarchal purposes; it represents Palestine as a silent and virtuous damsel in
distress who, through her silence and goodness, becomes worthy of defense.
Resistance poets most often use the woman as land trope to express their love for
Palestinetheir admiration for its beauty and their gratefulness for its fruitful land. Although
this is, as I have argued, harmful and patriarchal discourse, Taha Muhammad Ali re-writes the
trope in perhaps an even more damaging manner. He represents Palestine not as a beautiful,
chaste woman, but as a whore. His poem Ambergris begins with the speaker lamenting the
changeability of the landscape and the erasure of any signs of Palestinian existence within what
is now Israel. Our traces have all been erased, / Our impressions swept away . . . and I, if not for
the lock of your hair . . . would feel not a thing / linking me / to this land (41). What connects
the speaker to the unfaithful, impressionable land is a lock of hair, presumably that of a beloved
female partner or friend. This appears at first to be a turn away from resistance poets tendencies
to deny womens individuality and even an interesting critique of land-based, rather than
relationship-based, nationalism. However, Ali swiftly transforms this potentially radical love

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poem into a misogynistic re-writing of the woman as land trope; he translates the ineffective
anger of the colonized (ineffective in that the colonizer remains in Palestine) into male anger
toward a whorish (a sexually unrestricted) woman:
The land is a traitor
and cant be trusted.
This land doesnt remember love.
This land is a whore
holding out a hand to the years,
as it manages a ballroom
it laughs in every language
and bit by bit, with its hip,
feeds all who come to it.
The land denies,
cheats, and betrays us; (43)
Alis outright misogyny and disgust with womens free sexuality is striking. The line
The land is a whore unequivocally genders the traitorous, cheating, betraying land female and
troubles any attempt at a more generous reading of the poems gender politics. The land is not, in
Alis formulation, the virtuous woman worthy of defense. As one who laughs in every
language (one who enjoys the company of diverse groups of men), she is unworthy of the
speakers affection and attention. Ali also rewrites the typical valorization of land and women as
nourishing, reproductive entities by describing the woman-lands nourishing capabilities as
merely and disgustingly sexual; the land nourishes men sexually with its hip. Alis assertion
that the woman-land denies us moreover suggests that she has some form of sexual
responsibility to a particular group of men. Sheitowes them her body; her corporeal self,
though not accorded human status by Ali, still belongs to other men. Although Ali surely means
to do more than demonize the sexual woman in this poemto express his frustration with the
continuing success of Israels colonial projectone can still fairly criticize him for his reliance

60

on harmful stereotypes about women and female sexuality, as other representational strategies
could be equally as comprehensible.
Admittedly, though, Ali is working within a poetic tradition that often makes women
comprehensible only through a very restricted lens: the Madonna-Whore complex. Together,
the resistance poets and Ali in Ambergris reveal an adherence to this dichotomous
understanding of women. Derived from Freudian psychology, the Madonna-Whore complex
refers to men forcing all women into a dichotomy of being either pure, motherly and on a
pedestal or being a lustful, and presumably depraved, prostitute (Napikoski). Ali certainly
represents Palestine as a stripper-prostitute; Our land makes love to the sailors / and strips
naked before the newcomers; / rests its head along the usurpers thigh, / is disgraced and defiled
(45). These lines contrast sharply with Mahmouds treatment of Palestine as the glorious,
spotless, virtuous motherland for whom he battles and for whom he would gladly die a martyrs
death. Indeed, Ambergris ends with the assertion that, if not for the lock of hair I would not
know it [whore-Palestine], / and would not love it . . . Your braid / is the only thing / linking me,
like a noose, to this whore (45). This speaker is not interested in Mahmouds martyrdom; if not
for another woman, whose lock of hair somehow obstructs his agency, he would have nothing to
do with it. Thus both Taha Muhammad Ali and Abd al-Raheem Mahmoud fail to produce an
empathetic poetic exploration of womens experiences (although one exception might be No,
Papa, Please! in which Ali voices the concerns of a girl trapped by an arranged marriage
agreement). Generally speaking, however, Mahmoud and Ali ignore real womens experiences;
they confine women to the realm of the symbolic and further confine them within that realm by
limiting the range of representation, in these particular poems at least, to the only two available
options within the Madonna/whore symbolic system.

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Ghassan Kanafanis Men in the Sun (1963) has a more complicated relationship with
patriarchy. Set in 1958 (ten years after the disaster of the Nakba), Kanafanis novella represents a
certain kind of masculinity as deadlyas an empty symbolic system that no longer serves and
actively harms men. But Kanafani critiques patriarchy only, it seems to me, from a fraternal
perspective. He explores the harmful effects of patriarchy on his fellow-men and on sons
(especially under the thumb of corrupt male Palestinian government leaders who represent an
impaired and corrupted [or castrated, if one prefers] version of masculinity), but fails to consider
with any depth the harm done to women and daughters in this system. Instead, Kanafani depicts
women, like the resistance poets, as passive participants in patriarchal discourse, thereby eliding
their victimization and ultimately representing Palestines liberation as a masculine project based
in armed resistance. Several scholars have already pointed out the centrality of gender to
Kanafanis canonical text and its formulation of Palestinian identity. Amal Amireh argues that
Men in the Sun represents Palestinian mens degradation and humiliation as refugees through
the ideology of male virility and concludes that, for Kanafani, National defeat is experienced
as castration (752-53). Amy Zalman similarly argues that in the novella national loss is a
particularly male trial (17). Indeed, patriarchal ideology alongside economic forces push the
three menAbu Qais, Assad, and Marwanto undertake their fatal journey in a water-tank to
Kuwait for work. Thus the harmful gender politics found within the poetic usage of the woman
as land trope appear within other, longer genres; even in extended literary explorations of the
occupation and of the damaging nature of patriarchy, women appear only briefly and generally,
silently.
The story opens with the aging peasant Abu Qais and the familiar linkage of woman to
the land. However, in this case, the land recalls a specific beloved womanAbu Qais wife; the

62

smell of the earth recalls to Abu Qais the smell of a woman who had washed with cold water
and covered his face with her hair while it was still damp (21). A sudden remembrance of his
location interrupts this sweet and sexual peasant reverie. Abu Qais asks himself: Have you
forgotten where you are? Have you forgotten? (21). Abu Qais remembers where he is: not on
his own land, which was lost in the Nakbaforced exile which pushed him into emasculating
poverty. Thus at the beginning of the novella, Kanafani links the loss of the land with the loss of
virility, with frustrated desire, and with the emasculation inherent to exile and poverty. Saad, a
family friend, means to help Abu Qais out of poverty by shaming him into fleeing across the
desert to Kuwait to find a crust of bread (24). He reminds him of his responsibility as a
provider:
In the last ten years [since the Nakba] you have done nothing but wait. You have
needed ten big hungry years to be convinced that you have lost your trees, your
house . . . People have been making their own way during these long years, while
you have been squatting like an old dog in a miserable hut . . . Its disgraceful.
Your son, Qais, when will he go back to school? . . . How will you be able to
look at him . . .You are responsible for a big family now. (26-7)
Kanafani reveals the inadequacy and disgracefulness of a passive, sit-and-wait type of
resistance that drives Palestinian men into povertypoverty which is then transferred to wives
and children. He also reveals how the Nakba has stolen mens ability to perform the traditional
masculine role of the provider, thereby humiliating and feminizing them especially, and crucially
I think, in front of women. Indeed, after listening to Saads accusation, Abu Qais hopes that his
wife will avoid eye-contactwill not shame him with her eyes: She did not raise her eyes to
Abu Qais, who was hoping she would not (26). Saads angry diatribe also extends to Umm

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Qais. Saad demands to know what she thinks about her husbands hesitation about going to
Kuwait, but she was silent . . . was still rocking her child (27). When Abu Qais asks her
opinion she says, Its just as you think (27). Although Umm Qais does not speak here, her face
speaks volumes. Abu Qais had known that she would start weeping; her lower lip would
tremble a little and then one tear would well up, gradually growing bigger and slipping down her
brown, wrinkled cheek (27).
With the entirety of this androcentric novella in mind, one can fairly read this passage as
a continuation of the resistance poets erasure of womens voices alongside a use of women as
symbols. Umm Qais remains voiceless; her assertion It is as you think does not constitute, in
my view, a real attempt on the part of Kanafani to examine what women think and what women
have lost in the Nakba as individuals, rather than solely as wives.22 Kanafani also relegates Umm
Qais to the realm of the symbolic when her face, rather than her words, finally convinces Abu
Qais to make the final, fatal journey. This reading relies heavily on the thematic elimination of
womens voices throughout the novella (thematized right from the beginning when Abu Qais
remarks to his pregnant wife that he wants a boy, not a baby girl); if this excerpt were
surrounded by in-depth explorations of womens complex experiences as a result of the Nakba,
then perhaps one could read Umm Qais merely as a shy woman unwilling to shame her beloved
husband with her words. However, throughout the novella we hear of women only as catalysts
for the mens fatal movements, which marks them as silent sources of patriarchal influence. In

22

There are, however, moments of recognition of womens lossnot enough, I think, to

dismantle arguments about the narratives understanding of resistance as male (though where the
line can be drawn between enough and not enough representation is a hard one to draw).
Ultimately, and based on the general voiceless-ness of women in the novella, I think
victimization is gendered both male and female throughout the text (Abu Qais daughter dies of
extreme emaciation and Marwans new wife has lost a leg), but resistance to that victimization
remains masculine.
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all three mens experiences, national defeat is experienced as economic disadvantage and a
loss of their traditional role as providers for themselves and their families, including their
women (Amireh 753). Fifteen-year-old Marwan leaves home to become a provider for his
mother, whose husband, Marwans father, left to live with a wealthier disabled woman. Assad
goes to Kuwait, fleeing from the arranged marriage tradition which will force him to marry his
cousin against his will. Although a more generous reader might argue that Kanafani ultimately
means to show how patriarchy harms both women and men by murdering husbands (Abu Qais),
potential husbands (Assad), and male providers (Marwan), I would argue that such a reading
denies women an identity outside of their relationships with men. By saying that the Nakba
harmed women only insofar as it impeded mens ability to provide for women, one erases the
very real trauma women experienced not as wives and potential wives, but as people forcefully
removed from their homes and forced to witness violence and murder.
Thus Men in the Sun ultimately represents the Nakba as a disastrous loss of male virility,
embodied, as numerous critics like Zalman have pointed out, in the literally castrated character
Abul Khaizuran. Women are only symbols in the novella, which is in line with Kanafanis
politics; he believed (male) armed resistance was the only way to regain Palestine and
Palestinian manhoodto redeem Palestine from the impotent leaders who had failed to fulfill
in actual military confrontation the promises of the rhetoric of aggression which had
characterized their espousal of the Palestinian cause (Harlow 4). According to this ideology,
women, as non-combatants (except in a few very rare and generally symbolic instances), are
irrelevant to the resistance movement. The 1964 Palestinian Liberation Organization charter
reinforces this perception of irrelevance when it denies womens importance even as mothers.
Article 4 of the charter states: the Palestinian character is an essential and undying feature

65

that is passed from fathers to sons (qtd. in Amireh 754). Palestinian political cartoons likewise
emphasized womens irrelevance to resistance in the 1960s and after, particularly by
representing men as the Nakbas and the occupations primary victims. According to Nadia
Yaqub, these cartoons pose men as the most-affected victims because, according to patriarchal
logic, The disruption affects mainly the public sphere of military action, politics, and wage
labor (187). This argument deemphasizes womens victimization and erases their resistance to
that victimization. Thus in Men in the Sun and in its immediate context, women are denied a
voice, total personhood, and equality as resistors. Like the resistance poets, Kanafani denies
women a place in the anti-occupation strugglea terrible irony when read in relation to his
tragic biography. Kanafani died alongside his beloved seventeen-year-old niece as the result of a
Mossad-placed car bomb on July 8th, 1972 (Riley 9).
Sahar Khalifeh boldly counters these reductive depictions of women in The End of
Spring, a 2008 novel about the Second Intifada. The End of Spring re-writes the woman as land
trope in a way that challenges Amal Amirehs assertion that a focus on the maternal always
kowtows to patriarchal ideology. Khalifehs Palestinian brand of ecofeminism troubles the
relationship between woman, land, motherhood, and development in complex ways; on the one
hand, Khalifeh demonstrates how the occupation and the associated development of land
corresponds with a metaphorical occupation of womens traditional space (the domestic sphere)
and their bodies. In this way, Khalifeh represents a common ecofeminist stance, captured
succinctly in the following quote from Leila Brammers Ecofeminism, the Environment, and
Social Movements:
Ecofeminism is a joining of environmental, feminist, and women's spirituality
concerns . . . As the environmental movement along with environmental crises

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raised the consciousness of women to the decay of the earth, they began to see a
parallel between the devaluation of earth and the devaluation of women. Women
began to see . . . the violation of women and the earth as part of the same drama of
male control.
However, Khalifeh resists any mystical or romanticized representation of women and land,
marking her as a particularly postcolonial ecofeminist; she problematizes images of a
romanticized and naturalized . . . third-world peasant by showing how Palestinian women
resist being easily dichotomized to fit the nature/culture binary (Kaur 103; 109). The End of
Spring moves between these ecofeminisms and recovers womens voices and experiences within
Palestinian resistance.
Khalifeh links the invasion and occupation of Palestinian land with misogyny in two
ways in the text: through the characterization of Issa and in her descriptions of the attack on
Nablus towards the end of the novel. IssaAhmads cousin from the camp who works on
Israeli landcauses trouble for a young Majid (Ahmads older brother). Issa convinces Majid to
work the land with him to make money, which infuriates his father and anti-occupation journalist
Fadel al-Qassam (23): Ok I can understand you working in their factories, but the land? . . .
Working for the Jews on our own land . . . Isnt that wonderful! (24). Majids father identifies
agricultural work under Israelis and on former Palestinian land as degrading and as a betrayal; he
threatens to publicly disown his son if he catches him working the fields with Issa again. He
notes that working in their factories is understandable; however the land, as a powerful symbol
for the exile and degradation of Palestinians, remains off-limits. Due to poverty and perhaps
indifference to the symbolic weight of Palestinians working Israeli land, Issa continues to
undertake land-work. Indeed, the first time the reader hears of Issa he is working in the fields

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behind the fence through which Ahmad sweetly lusts after a young Israeli girl; this young girl
excites and frightens the sensitive and rather queer Ahmad, but Issa finds her utterly nonthreatening. He teases Ahmad about his fear in a way that foreshadows Issas more explicitly
misogynistic view of women later in the novel. Issa says, Afraid of her? Shes just a little girl.
A puff of air could blow her away He pressed his index finger to his thumb as if to squash
something and said, Like a louse . . . Like a louse (26-7). Issas poverty, degradation, and
especially his emasculation via the occupation lead him, I would argue, to view women as
squash-able thingsas louses and later, as fuck-able sexual objects. He says of the
brave, intelligent, and complicated Suad:
She was just another of those stupid idiots. He knew her and knew her type. There
were many just like her at the university . . . carrying books so everyone would
know they were educated and well-bred and respectable. And they were nothing
but tramps. They were only good for that kind of thing. And despite that, they
hold their noses in the air. Girls puffed up like stinkweed thistlesif you poke
them just the tiniest bit, they explode and spray their stinky juice everywhere.
What a sight! (131)
One senses in this passage Issas insecurity and his jealousy of a more privileged class,
particularly a privileged female class who should be, in Issas mind, subservient to him in their
female-ness. Uppity womenmodern in their pants and short haircuts, markers of male
privilegeenrage Issa, who has spent his life more directly, perhaps, under the thumb of Israel
as a land-worker and as such, has felt more forcefully the shame of poverty than the other
characters. This rage manifests (Ali-like) in misogynistic language suggestive even of sexual
violence. Women are likened to stinkweed thistles that when pokedwhen penetrated

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release a stinky juice. In Issas view, these womens educations and presentations of a
respectable image are collapsible affectations; women are in their essence debased (and rather
disgusting) sexual creatures. Khalifeh thus links debased manhood with misogyny. Israeli
oppression leads Issa take on degrading field-work, which leads him to resent and hate a certain
privileged and modern class of women. Like Kanafani, Khalifeh examines the way occupation
debases traditional masculinity and forces men to engage in degrading forms of wage labor.
Unlike Kanafani, however, Khalifeh connects this degradation of men with the damage
patriarchy does to people other than grown men; she shows how the occupation generates the
hatred which undergirds violence (sexual and otherwise) against women.
The theme of sexual violence reappears towards the end of the novel. As the Israelis
attack Nablus during the Second Intifada (a period of increased violence between the Israeli
Defense Forces and the Palestinian resistance between 2002 and 2005, with a battle at Nablus
taking place between April fifth and the eighth) the soldiers call out a grim warning from
loudspeakers placed on minarets. This warning represents Khalifehs most explicit association of
the sexual invasion of women and the violent invasion of Palestinian land; People of Nablus,
you whores, were coming to screw you! (184). The same threat appears ten pages later:
People of Nablus! All you whores! Were coming to fuck you! Thats what they shouted from
loudspeakers (194). The IDF uses a rape metaphor to describe their military project in Nablus;
they describe their colonial project of invasion and penetration in terms of violent sexual mastery
over womens bodies. Khalifeh makes the IDF voice rape culture rhetoric (rather than using the
less sexually violent threat Were coming to kill you) to underscore the malevolently hypermasculine character of the IDF soldiers; by using the term whore to describe and feminize all

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Palestinians, male and female, these soldiers mark themselves as more manly than their
military adversaries, Palestinian men.
The IDF also threatens womens traditional space in the novel: the home. Indeed, the
novels violent ending occurs during anti-demolition demonstrations, which were and remain
popular anti-occupation strategies for groups like the Israeli Committee Against House
Demolitions (ICAHD). The constant invasion of private spacethis persistent threat of homerape which Khalifeh describes obliterated Palestinians sense of safety and privacy in real
life and in their own homes. Eyal Weizman points out in his article Walking Through Walls
how the Israel-Palestine conflict changed Palestinian concepts of the sanctity of the home space:
Walls, in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, have lost something of
their traditional conceptual simplicity and material fixity, so as to be rendered . . .
as flexible entities, responsive to changing political and security environments; as
permeable elements, through which both resistance and security forces literally
travel. (8)
Just as the threat of rape restricts womens movements, the colonized populations mobility
becomes restricted under the colonizers eye; at the same time, the colonizers mobility and
surveillance capabilities increase. Thus within the context of both colonization and patriarchy,
borders and consent to cross those borders becomes less meaningful; as in the quote above from
Rebecca Whisnant, rape manifests as a terrorist institution that restricts womens ability to
move in public space and assures their proper gender performance; in the case of colonization,
an entire populationPalestiniansare controlled, dominated, violated, and murdered for their
resistance. By showing how the rhetoric of violent masculinity undergirds both colonialism and

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patriarchy, Khalifeh highlights how violent conceptions of masculine gender performance inform
institutions of domination.
Khalifeh does not, however, connect women to the land in any mystical or romantic
wayin a way that would deny women a place in the resistance. She does not associate the
violation of the land with the violation of women without also showing how women participate
in the formation of Palestinian nationalism. The character Umm Suad or Mother Mayor
reinterprets the woman as motherland trope in fascinating ways. She is, on the one hand, a
symbol for a place; she is the motherland. Indeed, she becomes the mother of Nablusfeeding,
nurturing, knitting, wondering If every mother asked her son to make the . . . promise [not to
fight], would we still kill and fight? (191). As Yahav Zahour notes in a book review, The hard
working single mother becomes Madame Mayor . . . organizing food and shelter, sharing out
warm clothing . . . acting as surrogate mother to so many lost boys. Umm Suad longs for peace
as a mother and fulfills a mothers traditional roles.
But as Khalifehs biography of Umm Suad makes clear, her maternity also serves
nationalist and feminist goals. The reader learns that Umm Suads husband used to verbally
abuse her; When he was around hed been like a mule, a numbskull. Hed bellow and shake the
whole house with his voice. Hey woman, hed say to her [Umm Suad]. Hey stupid. Hey idiot.
. . . And she would run here and run there, wipe up after this one and breastfeed that one and help
her old mother-in-law hobble to the bathroom (178). Khalifeh describes womanhood and
motherhood as a full-time emotional and physical occupation for which the caretaking woman is
neither praised nor paid; Khalifeh thus represents Umm Suad here as a victim of patriarchal
demands and as a victim of abuse. Imprisonment changes Umm Suads husbanda resistance
fighterand his absence paves the way for her coming-to-consciousness, her development of

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self-esteem, and even her business savvy. She notes that the Jews came along to spare her by
taking the prize roosterher husband (177). At first, his absence causes her severe anxiety,
but she learns to cope and to meet the economic demands placed on her; She screamed and
yelled and pulled out her hair, and then she got up on her feet and went to work (177). Umm
Suad sells a bracelet for a weaving loom and develops a weaving workshop to make enough
money to care for herself and her family and to allow other women to care for themselves and
their families. Thus the occupation provides women with opportunities for self-advancement and
economic independenceboth of which fostered greater self-esteem and less tolerance for
debasement. As Umm Suad notes, if her husband were to call her stupid today she would bring
the whole world crashing down on his head (178). Khalifeh thus takes the woman as
motherland trope and rewrites the mother as a feminist-nationalist business person. She becomes
complicated; the mother becomes human. Khalifeh does not, then, utilize the woman as land
trope merely to showcase the interconnectedness of certain visions (like the resistance poets) of
masculinity and violence. She also reveals how the occupation expanded womens sphere in the
absence of men in ways that contributed to the resistance. Women held down the fort at home
and also cultivated nationalism in their childrena project that one need not understand as antifeminist.
SuadUmm Suads daughteris serious, hardworking, and fiercely antioccupation. She is also a feminista trait perhaps passed down from her mother. Suad proves
herself her mothers daughter when she ultimately, though with great anguish, refuses to attach
herself to a brutish man who struggles with his societys messages about women. Whether he
knew it or not, there was a doubt planted deep within his soul . . . a woman was just a fling, a
fleeting emotion . . . she was a jinn who would sap his manhood and toss him aside. A woman

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was fire. A woman was a shadow. A woman was a horse, and he was the horseman (225). Suad
reveals here the conflicting symbolism surrounding womanhood which I delineated above using
the term Madonna-whore complex; women are both teasing whores and innocent virgins, both
dangerous and meek, both subservient mules and domineering wenches, so that no matter what
they do, their behavior can be reduced to their womanhood, to their type. By refusing to take
on any particular role, Suad remains steadfast to herself and to the cause, though not without
significant emotional turmoil. She listens to her mothers advice and rejects the marriage offer.
Suad refuses to succumb to any relationship with degraded foundations: between herself and a
man, between herself and Israel. She also perceives the ludicrousness of her fathers assertion
that she needs a man to take care of her:
Just because her father had forgotten, or pretended to forgetshould she? Who
raised her? Who taught her everything? Who carried the whole family on her
back, ran the workshop, looked after the neighbors during the incursionsAnd
even him, even this father . . . who looked after him . . . The caretaker had been
his wife. And she had done it in silence, without fireworks or slogans or
declarations, without medals of honor and victory torches. (232)
Suad knows and values her mothers quiet and thankless contributions to the family and to the
resistance. She also understands, thanks to her mother, that marriage is not a necessity. Amal
Amirehs assertion that a reliance on the maternal is anti-feminist is difficult to accept in this
context. Women as mothers are teachers of feminism. Mothers create feminists. Umm Suad
inspires her daughter not only to reject a problematic marriage proposal, but also to be loving
and kindwhich is certainly not in contradiction with feminist ideology and indeed, her
kindness distances her from the one-dimensional typology of the strong female character. She

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proves herself an environmentalist, a soft-hearted animal-lover, and a didactic mother-figure by

cooing at kittens and telling a young Ahmad that we shouldnt pick flowers and uproot trees,
and we should treat cats like human beings (78). She also explains that Jews, too, should be
understood as people; Of course the Jews are people (79). She is strong, but she is also kind in
a way that does not in any way diminish her strength. In short, Suad participates in the resistance
and is also a feminist, just like her mother. Ultimately, then, Khalifeh represents maternal power
as central to the reproduction of feminist ideals and to the development of feminist children.
Thus I read the woman as motherland trope in the context of The End of Spring not as reductive,
dehumanizing, or objectifying, but as multi-layered and, against Amireh, as feminist; Khalifeh
demonstrates how the woman as land trope performs complicated symbolic work; it connects
colonialism and patriarchy at the same time that it acknowledges and celebrates the contributions
of women and especially mothers to Palestinian resistance efforts.
As demonstrated above, resistance poets like Abd al-Raheem Mahmoud and Taha
Muhammad Ali employ the woman as land trope in damaging, patriarchal ways. In Abd alRaheems The Martyr and Call of the Motherland women are relegated to the realm of the
symbolic; this poetic use of women ignores their efforts to the resistance. Taha Muhammad
Ali likewise denies women a voice in Ambergris. In this poem of misdirected blame and
anger, Ali rewrites the woman as land trope using misogynistic diction; the land is a whore.
This metaphor not only demonizes the sexual woman, but also erases womens victimization at
the hands of the occupiers. Ghassan Kanafanis Men in the Sun laments the Nakba as a loss of
male virility without considering what women have lost besides sons, husbands, and providers.
Sahar Khalifeh works against reductive treatments of womens experiences.

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As she says in a 2009 interview: So have I offered something different from what the
Resistance poets have contributed? I think so, or rather, Im certain I have (Jaber). Indeed, in
The End of Spring, Khalifeh reworks the woman as land metaphor to reclaim Palestine for
Palestines mothers, but without succumbing to any romanticized view of the peasant woman
and her land. Her womenher Suad and Umm Suadare not Madonnas or whores, nor are they
ecofeminist mystical nature goddesses. They are complicated feminist-nationalists with a voice
and economic and emotional obligations to the family. They are also mothers who, rather than
failing to meet feminist standards through their maternal behavior, actually reproduce feminist
ideals in others at the same time that they instill nationalism and kindness. Khalifeh thus equates
women with Palestine to explicate their victimization and their growing strength, marking her as
a postcolonial ecofeminist who refuses to deny that women also benefit from the use and even
the invasion of land. Her invigoration of this tired metaphor includes a remarkable feminist
celebration of motherhood. This is an important lesson, it seems to me, for modern feminists who
have understandably tried to move as far away as possible from definitions and valuations of
women according to their reproductive capabilities. But this is not what Sahar Khalifeh does
here. Instead she boldly shows how women might just as easily be Republican mothers as
feminist mothers, and might even justly be both in the context of colonization and resistance.

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION
Sahar Khalifeh reveals ecofeminist, feminist, and socialist (anti-capitalist) leanings in The
Inheritance and The End of Spring. In The Inheritance, the three projects of the novelthe
sewage factory, the cultural fair, and Futnas pregnancydevolve into chaos as the result of the
interconnected devaluation of women and nature under patriarchy and capitalism. The novel
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ends pessimistically. Zaynab returns to America and the problematic inheritance laws, the gender
divisions, and the Israeli occupiers remain firmly in place in Palestine. In The Inheritance,
women are excluded from the major industrial and cultural resistance projects and are thus left
with birth, sex, and the courting of men. The End of Springs ecofeminism lies in its rewriting of
the patriarchal woman as land tropea trope revealed in other, earlier Palestinian texts and
poems. The novel reinterprets nationalism and resistance to colonization as both male and female
projects, and even as specifically maternal endeavors. Khalifeh acknowledges women like
Nahleh in The Inheritance and Umm Suad in The End of Spring and celebrates mothers, sisters,
and daughters as potential creators of feminists and nationalists. In my discussion of both novels,
I have disagreed with Amal Amirehs readings of Khalifehs gender politics. It seems to me that
in both texts, Khalifeh does something fundamentally different from what Ghassan Kanafani
does in Men in the Sunsomething feminist rather than anti-feminist or overly traditional in
its adherence to patriarchal norms. Khalifeh herself argues (and I agree) that her work has
something more, something better, to offer readers, specifically through its realist exploration of
the lived, embodied experiences of Palestinian women:
Ive also shed strong light on the Palestinian woman from all walks of life . . .
Ive also taken up the social conditions that lead to her being treated unequally
whether in terms of rights or duties, and the hypocrisy, injustice, and harshness
that exist along the way. At the level of duties, the woman is required to accept
her burden fully, when her breadwinner is jailed or martyred. So she takes up his
responsibility and makes up for his absence, including the task of confronting the
occupiers and fighting them. As for her rights, these are often forgotten, even
within leftist parties and progressive institutions . . . for the first time in our

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Palestinian literature [through my (Khalifehs) texts], we are able to get to know

the familial and social texture of the society without sloganeering, grandiloquence
or inflating what we are truly capable of. (Jaber)
Khalifeh cannot be read, then, as Amireh reads her, as a novelist who simply reuses familiar
patriarchal tropes subconsciously and carelessly. Rather, she utilizes traditional Palestinian and
Arab concepts (like fitna or the motherland trope) and rewrites them self-consciously though a
feminist, socialist, and, as I have shown, ecofeminist lens.
Although Khalifeh is not explicitly an ecofeminist, she is explicitly a feminist and her
work gestures toward ecofeminist narrative arguments. Kamal describes Nahleh, for instance,
as the source of life at the same time that he laments Israeli ownership of the water supply.
Mother Mayor (Umm Suad) represents the motherland; she is a type, a trope, but not a voiceless
stereotype standing in for the land. Futnas pregnancy is borne out of the explicit desire for an
inheritance that belongs primarily to a son under sharia inheritance law; the naturalness, then,
of motherhood by choice and by desire on part of the potential mother becomes disturbed by
pure economic considerations. Nature and naturalness form a backdrop to both of these
heretofore under-examined novels and do so in ways that bolster the general ecofeminist claim
that the oppression of women and the oppression of nature under capitalism and patriarchy are
intertwined.
Throughout my thesis, my aim has been not only to shine light on a particular theoretical
lens often, but increasingly less so, ignored by English academia (ecocriticism remains a rather
marginalized field in relation to other theoretical viewpoints though one can find expressions of
it in fields like indigenous or Native American studies) but to add to the work that has been done

77

and continues to be done on Sahar Khalifehan extraordinarily talented woman who has written
novels uniquely-suited to ecofeminist, feminist, and postcolonial analyses.
Questions about land and nature dominate not only Khalifehs work, but also Palestinian
and even Israeli literature more generally; this includes the poems and short story mentioned
above and other Palestinian classics like Memory for Forgetfulness (1986) by Mahmoud Darwish
and Israeli novels, like Khirbet Khizeh (1949) by S. Yizhar and The Yellow Wind (1988) by
David Grossman. For instance, in Grossmans novel, he describes at length the grim, real-life
manifestations of the sewage issues explored by Khalifeh throughout The Inheritance. In a
refugee camp school at Deheisha, the bathroom is a hole in the ground and a porcelain platter.
Little piles of excrement all over, and the urinating boy steps in some . . . With the all-pervading
stink rising from the bathroom, a grotesque symbol of their situation (26). As an additional
example, S. Yizhar describes in a stream-of-consciousness form the remarkable beauty of the
Palestinian landscape in Khirbet Khizeh:
And below, divided with hedges into squares, some large and some small, dotted
here and there with patches of dark vegetation, or with spherical green
canopies . . . with hills yellowed with a profusion of groundsel, and plowed fields
here and there . . . there was no cause for shame and not a human soul to be seen
in the land and the song of the luxuriant land rustled in blue, yellow, brown, and
green, and everything between them, warming itself in the after-rain sun, gazing
in total silence toward the light and the gold, throbbing. (24-5)
This is a literature obsessed with landwith borders, farming, industrialization, and place, with
who owns what and why and what atrocities can or cannot be done in the name of a place.

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Ecofeminism, then, is a highly productive lens through which to view Palestinian and Israeli
literature and poetry.
Moreover, as we, as a planet, move into an increasingly environmentally-worrisome age,
ecofeminist questions like those analyzed above seem not merely the province of the graduate
student interested in obscure literature, but crucial questionsquestions integral for continued
comfortable existence on Earth. Indeed, climate scientists predict that if we do not alter our
industrially-aggressive and unethical relationship with the environment, disasters like Hurricane
Katrina and Typhoon Haiyan will only increase in number and in severity. It falls primarily on
the shoulders of those of us in the Global North to stem the rising temperatures wreaking havoc
on the global ecosystem. As Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva argue, quoting a United Nations
report on population growth: By far the largest share of the resources used, and waste created, is
currently the responsibility of the top billion people, those in the industrialized countries . . .
countries overwhelmingly responsible for the damage to the ozone layer and acidification, as
well as for roughly two-thirds of global warming (278).
The reports suggestions, however, do not fall in line with this factual analysis. Rather,
the UN argues that women are to blame; decreasing population growth in the fertile Global
South remains the top priority. Thus, Shiva and Mies conclude from the report, it is not the
rich, who have caused the problems, who must take action, but the poor, in the exploited
countries of the South and especially the women living there (278). What is required, then, for
an ethical ecofeminist politics, is a regard not only for micro-level conflicts like the IsraelPalestine conflict or like the fight against hydro-fracking in Western New York or even in the
United States, but also the macro-level, transnational, and global reality of climate change. To
acknowledge this reality is to move outside of a feminist politics that focuses on the gendered

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effects of climate change; that is, ecological damage harms everyone, male and female, and
ecofeminism, though it claims that the degradation of women and nature are interconnected, does
not claim that environmental disasters only harm women. Ecofeminists demonstrate how, in the
long run, it is in the best interests of all human beingsespecially those leaving behind children
on this planetto form a more ethical relationship to nature and to eschew voluntary blindness
to the finitude of natures resources.
As my thesis has demonstrated, ecofeminism is a literary theory, a vital practice and a
critical lens with significant explanatory power. Sahar Khalifeh utilizes an ecofeminist lens to
remarkable effect in The Inheritance and The End of Spring, and in doing so, reveals herself as
an author highly-attuned to the layered nature of oppression and the relationship between the
mothers of Palestine and the Palestinian Motherland. Indeed, she demonstrates how the struggle
of one might be the struggle of bothhow women and land are sisters in struggle.

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