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

Sabah Nouri1, Fazel Asadi Amjad1
1Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran
DOI: https://doi.org/10.70517/revcc2624106
Published: 17/09/2026
: Sabah Nouri, Fazel Asadi Amjad. Identity and Memory in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin: A Saidian Reading. Revista Cultura Científica, 2026 Issue 24. pg. 1265-1279.

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.

Keywords: cultural memory; identity; imaginative geography; Orientalism; Palestinian literature

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.

Keywords: cultural memory; identity; imaginative geography; Orientalism; Palestinian literature

References

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Sabah Nouri
Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran
aldurghi@gmail.com
Fazel Asadi Amjad
Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran

How to cite:

Sabah Nouri, Fazel Asadi Amjad. Identity and Memory in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin: A Saidian Reading. Revista Cultura Científica, 2026 Issue 24. pg. 1265-1279.

Publication History

  • Received: 25/06/2026
  • Accepted: 13/09/2025
  • Published: 17/09/2026
Copyright © 2026, Sabah Nouri, Fazel Asadi Amjad. Published by Revista Cultura Científica. This article is published as open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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