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Review Essay: World Intifada

‘I write what I like’, South African freedom fighter Steve Biko famously claimed (I Write What I Like, Heinemann, 1979). His defiance was aimed at the censorship practices of the apartheid government that claimed to be a democracy. That said, when your historical fate offers you a script of violent colonisation entailing the denial of your humanity, there is also a sense in which you are not free to write what you like. Such a dilemma is implied in two recent works of Palestinian fiction, Shake Off by Mischa Hiller and Out of It by Selma Dabbagh, that both may be said to grapple with the responsibilities, obligations and blind-spots that come with histories of dispossession. Theirs is a horizon of inheritance which affects not only the dispossessed but their chroniclers who have before them, prior to them and as an expectation, a literary history of resistance writing.