Postcolonial Discourse in Walid Al-Sharafa’s Novel Heir of the Tombstones""

Abstract

If narrative is regarded as a “field of struggle” as proposed by Wallace Martin (Martin, 1998, p. 6), and if nations are essentially narratives, as Edward Said argues (Said, 2014, p. 83), then postcolonial discourse has sought to reclaim homelands whose history was erased (Hashima, 2023, Hadfnews, internet source), portraying the struggle of colonized peoples and their continuous resistance to colonial ideology. Specially its practices at various levels, particularly the cultural level (Ashcroft, 2010, p. 63). The word post, it doesn’t mean the end of Colonial domination by withdrawal of invading armies at the time of new colonial emergence, which characterized more subtle and insidious to regaining control on the previous colonies, and control them politically, economically and culturally as described by the Senegalese President "Kwame Nkrumah" (ibid). The suffix post means, the moment follows the initial communication to a certain Nation of its Colonial Oppressor (Tyson,2021, p.439). This moment showed the keen to destruct the colonial continuous discourse, and undermine its claims and assertions through various practices. It does so by occupying the colonizer's language to reconstruct its historical presentation against the colonial discourse (ibid). They subsequently recognized the necessity of accomplishing all this in their own local or indigenous languages after reviving them and promoting writing in them (Ashcroft, 2010, p. 132). This became particularly evident in the Palestinian Arab novel after the Nakba of 1948 and until the present day, especially in the novel "Heir of the Tombstones" by Waleed Al-Sharfa, which allied with other Palestinian Arab novels in its resistance to colonial ideology and its various manifestations. The novel adopts a strategic discourse of resistance that demonstrates its awareness of the effectiveness of this strategy and explicitly articulates it in the words of the Prophet Solomon when he asked the jinn about speech. The jinn replied “The wind scatters it, and nothing remains”.  He then asked  “What restrains it?”; the answer was  “Writing” (Al-Sharafa, 2017, p. 7).