A Work of Fiction and the Traces of History: The Palestinian Creoles

Abstract

Fiction writing is a path to understand the ways in which History becomes personal. My first novel, Salt Crystals (Charco Press, 2022), addressed questions about Creole identities in the Archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina, in Colombia. As part of a larger literary project to develop fictional narratives about diasporas and Creoleness in the region, I offer a review of the Arab Caribbean in a personal key, involving emotional and political matters that generally concern second and third generations of Palestinian immigrants. My second novel, Capitán, focuses in the regions of Barranquilla and San Andrés Island, and the experience of my ancestors and family of aviators, the Christian Palestinian Al-Bandaj family, which arrived from Bethlehem in America between 1914 and 1917. The Creole cultural space of the Caribbean and the Palestinian diaspora affect each other and the traces of this interaction are present in all aspects of life. Fictions allow one to encompass such complexity, and to explore how personal trauma, geopolitics and colonialism are intertwined, in an attempt to recover what has been lost, or withheld, from one generation to the next. New generations have emerged in territories in which certain material and cultural elements condition the degree of awareness of the Palestinian self. A perspective on relations of language, body and territory, I provide insights into creative ways of becoming, performing and representing that which is Palestinian Arab, while already rooted in the contemporary Caribbean. Imagining motives, motivations and emotions based in global movements becomes a strategy to unravel wounds of hopelessness and displacement, as well as a strategy to approach the colonial experiences from the Caribbean. An emotional cartography emerges from the routes of migrations, and often it is only through art and fictions that a way back, and forth, can be attained.