Exile's Return: The Making of a Palestinian American
- ISBN-10
- 0029327253
- ISBN-13
- 9780029327258
- Series
- Exile's Return
- Category
- Political science (General)
- Pages
- 274
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1994
- Publisher
- Free Press
- Author
- Fawaz Turki
Description
Palestinian writer Fawaz Turki was expelled from Israel in 1949 along with his family, and spent his boyhood in the refugee camps of Beirut. As a young man living in Paris, where he became active in the Palestinian nationalist movement, he met and married an American and returned with her to the United States, only to be quickly caught up in the currents of social protest and rebellion of the 1960s - experiences which had a powerfully transformative effect on him, though many years would pass before he realized its actual extent. In Exile's Return, Turki tells the story of this personal and political odyssey in a highly evocative memoir that interweaves scenes of his life as an exile with incidents of his visit, after a forty-year absence, to the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Though he continued to think of himself as an exile, Turki writes, during his years in the U.S. he had unconsciously absorbed the liberal values of American society. Now, like any ethnic American in search of his roots, Turki returns to his birthplace wanting badly to identify with native Palestinians of the "homeground". But what he finds there is a pattern of complexity beyond his expectation, one that leads to a defining moment of ultimate self-revelation. Turki admires the ardor and intensity of his Palestinian "cousins", holding it superior to the uninflected "coolness" of Americans; but he is equally repelled by their backward and repressive cultural mores - especially the rigid patriarchalism and stifling religious conformity of native Palestinian society. The youthful leaders of the Intifada and the fundamentalist fanatics of Hamas seem scarcely better to Turki that their corrupt and cynical elders in thePLO. Further - much to his surprise - Turki is not immune to the sting of the bitter anti-American attitudes he encounters in the West Bank. This reaction leads to the discovery that in the course of his journey he has in fact become a Palestinian American. Having ceased to be an exile he cannot "go home" to Palestine. Thus his story recapitulates the immigrant experience of millions of Americans who feel loyal to their native lands but prefer to live in America's more open and secular society. Courageously dissenting from the Arab "line" on Middle East affairs, Turki may be compared to dissident black writers Shelby Steele and Stephen Carter. Like them Turki insists impressively upon his own humanity, thereby challenging not only Jews and Arabs but all Americans to rise above the poisonous dichotomies imposed by racial and ethnic solidarity.
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