Melting of the Spaces of Memory: A Study of Raja Shehadeh's A Rift in Time

Abstract

Conflicts mostly rip lives apart. But sometimes they extend beyond personal boundaries to encroach upon
communal spaces. The century-long Israel-Palestinian conflict turned the Palestinian geographical spaces
into debris. Along with the lost spaces, millions of memories that connected the refugees and their lost
homeland were fragmented forever. This was melancholic for Palestinians who took to the aid of memory
to eradicate the spatiotemporal distances. The cry for the lost spaces found a place in the personal narratives
of the refugees. Their chronicles about the land of their memories gave them scope to relive their past. For
Palestinians who lacked a national historiography, memoirs serve the purpose well. Over the years, Israel's
nation-building projects drastically degraded the resplendent landscape of Palestine. Eventually, the
ongoing conflict and its ramifications wiped out the heartwarming memories of many Palestinian refugees
who found solace in the memories of their lost nature. Thus, everyday urbicide and spaciocide culminated
in memoricide. This paper examines the depiction of the extirpation of memory in Raja Shehadeh's A Rift
in Time. The memoirist places the autobiography of his uncle against his own experiences in occupied
Palestine and laments over the huge transformation the country has undergone over the years. This
conceptual study aims to bring to light how a landscape transformed and how the memories of the lost
landscape evade Palestinians, through the lens of memoricide.