Reflecting on Creative History-writing

I remain cautious of assuming that history-writing alone can adequately convey lived experience. Indeed, the implication that constructed historical accounts are adjacent to trauma risks conflating representation with experience. 

Fiction, by contrast, carries both the potential and the responsibility to symbolize complex political realities without claiming authority over them.

In Writing History, Writing Trauma, LaCapra suggests that theorists such as Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler are among those who “act out”; their engagement with trauma is repetitive and self-motivated, resulting in “a melancholy re-enactment of trauma” (Sanyal, 2002, p.304). 

This framework guided my restraint through my formal choices. Time skips functioned not as word-count management, but as an avoidance of reiterating what Palestinian voices have already articulated.

This allowed me to “work through” key points in Palestinian history, maintaining a chronological narrative order that allowed me to acknowledge trauma without appropriating it, and, most importantly, ensuring historical accuracy. 

However, this restraint was not without cost. By refusing moments of overt violence, I risked producing a narrative that does not fully register the emotional weight of trauma. This tension between ethical caution and narrative absence remained unresolved, forcing me to confront the possibility that restraint itself can verge on evasion. 

By adopting fiction in this way, I aimed to remain closely aligned with the historical truth of the Nakba while avoiding the ethical risk of speaking on behalf of Palestinian voices. 

For instance, rather than illustrating violent events in exhaustive detail, my narrative gestures toward trauma through shifts in landscape, disrupted routines, and character absences. A recurring hilltop functions as a symbolic constant amid social and personal upheaval, evoking rupture without depicting violence directly.

In this way, my memoir mediates historical truth while acknowledging its own limitations.  

 

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