A Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language,
"Homelandic," is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A
Jewish-Israeli author imagines a "language plague" that infects
young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the
narrator in search of his Arabic heritage. In Poetic Trespass,
Lital Levy brings together such startling visions to offer the
first in-depth study of the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic
in the literature and culture of Israel/Palestine. More than that,
she presents a captivating portrait of the literary imagination's
power to transgress political boundaries and transform ideas about
language and belonging. Blending history and literature, Poetic
Trespass traces the interwoven life of Arabic and Hebrew in
Israel/Palestine from the turn of the twentieth century to the
present, exposing the two languages' intimate entanglements in
contemporary works of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by both
Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. In a context where
intense political and social pressures work to identify Jews with
Hebrew and Palestinians with Arabic, Levy finds writers who have
boldly crossed over this divide to create literature in the
language of their "other," as well as writers who bring the two
languages into dialogue to rewrite them from within. Exploring such
acts of poetic trespass, Levy introduces new readings of canonical
and lesser-known authors, including Emile Habiby, Hayyim Nahman
Bialik, Anton Shammas, Saul Tchernichowsky, Samir Naqqash, Ronit
Matalon, Salman Masalha, A. B. Yehoshua, and Almog Behar. By
revealing uncommon visions of what it means to write in Arabic and
Hebrew, Poetic Trespass will change the way we understand
literature and culture in the shadow of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
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