Identity and Memory in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin: A Saidian Reading

Abstract

Using Edward Said’s concepts of Orientalism, imaginative geography, and contrapuntal reading, this article examines how Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin connects identity and memory to the politics of representation. Although previous scholarship has analyzed trauma, exile, national identity, memory, metaphor, and Palestinian self-representation, the formal relation among focalization, spatial narration, naming, and mnemonic transmission requires further clarification. Through a qualitative close reading of the 2010 Bloomsbury edition, the study traces recurrent passages in which narrative perspective, place, names, bodily marks, and family testimony converge. It argues that memory becomes counter-Orientalist not merely because suppressed events are recalled, but because remembered experience reorganizes narrative authority: Palestinians become historically situated subjects who perceive, interpret, and transmit the past. Ein Hod, Jenin, and the United States operate as unequally accessible geographies, while the Ismael/David plot exposes identity as institutionally produced but never reducible to one national designation. Family memories function as a selective counterarchive rather than a substitute for historiography. At the same time, Ari, Jolanta, Moshe, and David complicate collective binaries, allowing the novel to criticize acts, institutions, and structures of domination without essentializing Jewish identity. The novel’s counter-Orientalist force therefore lies in the formal conversion of memory into narrative authority and in an ethically contrapuntal account of loss and relational identity.