Palestinian Magical Realism and the Politics of Imagination
A conversation with Sanabel Abdel Rahman
What role can literature play when reality is shaped by colonialism, dispossession, and an ongoing genocide? For Palestinian writer and researcher Sanabel Abdel Rahman, it is asked to do far more than simply bear witness or preserve the record.
Her research, rooted in her thesis on magical realism in Palestinian literature and folk tales, moves across speculative fiction, ecosurrealism, futurisms, Indigenous narratives, and ghost stories. But for her, these forms are never merely objects of study. They allow us to imagine a Palestine that is not confined by its borders, its present, or the limits of the living: a Palestine inhabited by ghosts, animals, plants, stories, and futures.
To open this month’s conversation, Sanabel Abdel Rahman speaks with us about the Nakba, Gaza, ghosts, and the land — and about what literature can make possible when it refuses the boundaries imposed on reality.
1/ Could you introduce yourself and tell us how you first encountered magical realism in Palestinian literature?
I am, first and foremost, a Palestinian writer. I am also an academic and cultural worker currently based in Amman, the city where I was born. I began writing when I was very young. I had no name for the forms I was trying to flesh out then, and I took my time to discover what writing was for me. I scarcely thought about what publication demands and entails. I have come to experience writing as the only time when everything else, for me, stops or disappears. There would be nothing else but me and the text. Everything that I do is connected to writing; sometimes clearly and vividly, other times less so.
I realised only when I started my doctoral studies in Germany that all my favourite works of literature and modes of writing belonged to the magical realist mode. Crying Over the Ruins by Ghaleb Halasah, The Impossible Novel by Ghada Samman, The Stuffed Son (Le fils Empaillé) by Vénus Khoury-Gata, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, and Beloved by Toni Morrison are some of the works closest to my heart. I began seeing the profound possibilities of this literary mode, especially in its capacity to contain multiple worlds. And so, the term magical realism emerged, emitting a kaleidoscopic light on all these works that I loved so much.
It took me some time to arrive at magical realism. Working on my doctoral research and organising public programmes further clarified how I have always been intuitively drawn to the mode. I still find myself constantly going back to One Thousand and One Nights and Palestinian folktales (which Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana collected in an invigorating book titled Speak Bird, Speak Again). These tales are integral not only to my research but also to my experience as a writer and Palestinian, as well as to my overall worldview. I use these magical realist folktales as an ‘intertext’ of contemporary literature. I argue that these tales constitute the very origin of magical realist literature – at least in the Palestinian case.
Before starting my doctoral studies in Germany, I had decided to study Palestinian poetics of space. At some point, I changed my mind and decided that literary surrealism would be a more apt topic. Yet, something still felt off. The practices of hope in Palestinian life that are so imperative for me, both personally and intellectually, were not sufficiently present within those frameworks. When I arrived at magical realism, everything fell into place. I began observing the potency and dynamics of the mode beyond the text. I saw it in the video works of Jumana Emil Abboud, the talismans of Raghad Rasras, and the stunning sculptures of Samara Sallam.
In my forthcoming book, Magical Realism in Palestinian Literature and Folk Tales: Reading the Distorted Spaces of the Nakba, I take a deep dive into Palestinian magical realist themes. I mobilise magical realist literature, film, and visual arts to reframe settler and postcolonial realities while offering alternative readings of non-material resistance. My work draws on collective Arab memory and folk narrative to interrogate colonial violence against space, time, and the imagination. In my research and writing, I draw on Global South magical realism, speculative fiction, Indigenous temporalities, futurisms, and hauntology. I forge connections with other pertinent and serious issues and recurring tropes that are of huge import not only to Palestinians but to Indigenous people generally. The persistence of hope, forms of life beyond the human, ways of being after death, the criticality of resistance, and the speculative return to the land that was colonised are some of the impetuses that inform my research. This is how I connect magical realism with Indigenous climate fiction and non-linear temporalities.
My writing practice has been decidedly affected by the study of magical realism. I have recently published Mā’ Ward (Rosewater), a book of Arabic fiction and analogue photography. It is, obviously, magical realist. I have been wary and careful, though, not to impose my investigative academic voice on the work. The experience of writing it has been deeply fulfilling but emotionally taxing. Mā’ Ward is an account of witnessing the genocide in Gaza from Tunis. The poetics of the North African city could not prevent the familiar Palestinian melancholy from entering through the sea. This is, in essence, what the book is about. I have also been working more with friends who are artists, writing exhibition texts and further experimenting with medium.
Yet, I still felt a need to share this research and practice in ways that go beyond the solitary act of writing. This is why organising and leading public workshops is important to me. I have always been careful not to confine intellectual work to the academic sphere. This is why, during my stay in Tunis, I co-founded ʻAyn Ḥawḍ, with my partner Gabriel Possamai. ʻAyn Ḥawḍ is an initiative for interdisciplinary research and artistic practice. The project continues in Amman, where we have been organising reading and writing sessions on Arabic and Latin American literature and film. Our ongoing workshop is a series of study sessions titled ‘About Some of What the Falcon Saw’ (inspired by a chapter title from Hussein Barghouthi’s The Blue Light), which looks at instances of zoomorphism in Palestinian literature and folktales. Over the past two years, I have curated public programmes concerned with unearthing magical tools for imagining future ecologies. The participatory project, Towards Life: Tools for Ecological Imaginations, aims to explore the conditions for creating and articulating images of solidarity, human and climate justice across the Global South by dialoguing with and commissioning a selection of artists. The project resulted in a website containing a glossary of these digitised ‘tools’. As the reader will see, magical realism found its way into this project as well. Investigating magical realist phenomena in group settings illuminated routes to concretise other futures. I found a rare joy in translating literary phenomena into imaginal tools that could be actively used to liberate the imagination and work, materially, towards bringing about alternative presents.
2/ When it comes to Palestine, literature is often expected to document a reality of violence and dispossession. You seem to suggest that testimony alone is no longer enough: at what point does fiction become not an escape from reality, but a way of expanding what reality makes thinkable?
I recall a distinct moment at the very beginning of my doctoral programme. I had just moved to a quaint little student village, Marburg, home of my university. Marburg is where the Brothers Grimm lived and studied. That alone was a foreshadowing moment in my life. I lived in a tiny apartment on the outskirts. I had a small back garden that overlooked massive forests on the horizon. At night, nothing could be seen but the tips of the tall trees. The pandemic soon reached Germany. I stayed in my apartment and conducted my research there. I remember one day, after having spent hours reading heartbreaking Palestinian literature that documents the unfolding realities, I went out to the back garden. I gazed at the forest. I thought to myself that there must be something more. More than ‘realism’, more than ‘trauma’, more than the crushing weight that Palestinians endure and convey in their literature. I wanted to look beyond the travelling pain that Palestinians are inflicted with without dismissing it.
Despite the scenery that unfolded in front of me, I saw a great wall in front of me; I saw in my hand a singular spoon. It was then that the notion of magical realism appeared in my mind. Portals opened. The wall began to crack. I recalled the magical realist texts that I loved so much; their piercing hope, their fluidity and unrestrainedness, the flights of Palestinian imagination, and the non-conforming movements and textures of Palestinian temporalities. Magical realism generously contained all of that – and more. Perhaps, most pressingly and importantly, Palestinian magical realism illuminated a way that did not escape the heaviness of reality but forcefully acknowledged it while offering ways to challenge it.
Under magical realism, the Palestinian strife and struggle were no longer markers of a protracting collective trauma. Instead, they transformed into malleable and potent tools that could be used to challenge the ongoing ramifications of the Nakba. Magical realism moved beyond the crushing weight of the ‘real’ without negating or dismissing it. It caused, within the same grave reality, fractures, portals, dents, and passageways so that Palestinians can find a way to other futures. It challenges trauma, which is oftentimes the lens through which Palestinians are collectively seen, and which tends to freeze them in the past and continues to immobilise them in the present. Within magical realism, the Palestinian is no longer a passive witness of their unfathomable reality but an active agent – sometimes taking beyond and non-human forms – who challenges Israel’s settler-colonialism. New forms of agency prosper within this mode.
Palestinian magical realism illuminated a way that did not escape the heaviness of reality but forcefully acknowledged it while offering ways to challenge it.
3/ You write that Palestinians simultaneously inhabit two spaces: the material reality of occupation and a collective imaginary space where the Palestine before the Nakba, and the Palestine of liberation, continue to exist. You also speak of “distorted spaces”. What can a distorted or bent space do that a realistic depiction of the same land cannot? Is belonging restored through the distortion itself, or through what the distortion lets the reader imagine?
A purely ‘realistic’ depiction of the Palestinian reality is destined to trap and doom Palestinians. This is because the Palestinian reality often feels insurmountable. Occasionally, in genres like science fiction, the seemingly hopeless reality that exists because of Israel’s vicious settler-colonialism is augmented and stretched to the very limits of suffering. Within these frames, usually (and not always), the already unbearable Palestinian reality is presented as permanent. Consequently, conjuring futures that elude its protraction becomes impossible. It is therefore imperative to carve out spaces of stubborn hope that are embedded in the present realities but capable of imagining and conjuring liberated futures.
I use the term ‘distorted’ space to refer to Palestinian realities and experiences of space – physical, spiritual, intellectual, memorial, metaphysical, social, political, and creative. This is because the term implies a reversal of the distortion. Rather than refer to those spaces as ‘shattered’ or ‘lost’, distorted spaces imply agency and collective work towards reversal, not necessarily to ‘return’ to a Palestine pre-Nakba but to one post-Liberation. That is, a return to the future. Without imagining the reversal of distorted space, Palestinians will not be able to practise it. Magical realism provides a thrilling, agential, innovative, and liberating space to practise this imagining.
4/ You describe magical realism as a political "tool" rather than simply a literary genre or stylistic device. Why is that concrete, practical language important to you? Can you share an example, or a few, where magical realism does something more than metaphor: opens up a different way of inhabiting the world, resisting, or imagining new futures?
I consider magical realism to be a narrative mode that is inherently transgressive, affective, and malleable. This is why I do not approach it as a genre that is subject to certain indicators, themes, and manifestations. The origins of magical realism, which are embedded in oral culture, make for a capacious collective experience of worldbuilding. This abides by my approach to literature. I demand a lot from literature. I am not content with simply identifying and archiving literary phenomena. I consider literature to be an organic and vibrant space for imagining, acting, and concretising our lives, and I believe that it must be approached with this potency in mind.
I also insist that language is everything. The deeply troubling experience of Palestinians across the world, especially academics in Germany, was the result of distorted language. The very ‘real’ consequences that Palestinians and allies continue to endure have been the result of their refusal to conform to the opaque, misleading, and complicit language meant to obscure the ‘origin’ of Palestinian pain, mortality, alienation, mental and bodily torture. We saw this when conscientious scholars withdrew contributions or refused to attend events because the word ‘Genocide’ was not ‘permitted’. What this implied is that the systems of power recognised that by omitting the word ‘Genocide’, reality itself would be altered; a reality in which the Zionist entity was innocent, Palestinians were criminals, and all forms of Palestinian resistance were categorically inhuman.
Magical realism was particularly cathartic during such moments. The mode allowed me to speculatively return to a Palestinian space that was not held hostage by governments, cultural spaces, social gatherings, or academic spaces. This is why I often linger on the great possibilities of magical realism outside the text. For example, during one of the workshops that I designed and led, titled Re-Landing: Writing Eco-Connections within Speculative Frames, participants were invited to write a text or create a visual work using a set of magical realist tools. Together, we read decolonial essays, fiction, and folktales, identifying magical realist transitions. Based on the readings and discussions, I invited the participants to set up a speculative setting with non-linear time. I then asked them to identify what I called the ‘black goat’ in their narrative. The black goat is a native animal to Palestine and other areas in al-Shām (The Levant). In 1950, Israel implemented the Black Goat Act, which restricted and criminalised Palestinians’ free grazing of black goats. The black goat instinctively knew the Palestinian terrain. Israel did not want the animal ‘trespassing’ into colonised territories. The law was later reversed because of the detrimental environmental impact. The colony realised that the black goat had kept nature in balance. Inspired by the fugitive and transgressive powers of this animal, I invited participants to identify or create a ‘black goat’ agent: an indigenous/native agent that disrupts colonial spaciotemporalities. They then wrote stories they wished to (re)tell using the new speculative frames.
By creating ‘other’ possible worlds through (re)writing historical narratives and personal stories that take place in the present, past, and/or future, the workshop strengthened our agency as storytellers, observers, and active agents. I have observed how, by (re)visiting these contexts, we can bend, upset, halt, and otherwise disrupt the colonial language and its concomitant violence, especially when talking about the Global South.
5/ Through figures like animism, metamorphosis, or resurrection, the texts you analyse seem to dissolve the boundary between humans and the rest of the living world. Would you say this absence of separation is, in your view, one of the keys to understanding the Palestinian relationship to the land?
The absence of binaries has always characterised Palestinians’ relationship to their land and the creatures that inhabit it – whether human, non-human, or magical. I see this abundantly in Palestinian folktales. Over the summer, I curated a series of workshops at MMAG Foundation in Amman that were centred on this human-animal connection that has always existed in Palestinian tradition and the imaginary. ‘About Some of What the Falcon Saw’ followed magical animals and instances of zoomorphism that permeate Arabic folktales and literature. Palestinian folktales tell us of witches who transform men into birds, women who turn into ogresses at night, and humans who develop animal parts. In Barghouthi’s The Blue Light, the narrator grapples with the animal within him and tells us a great deal ‘About Some of What the Falcon Saw’. In these study sessions, we engaged in a collective reading of folktales and novels, as well as prompt writing, to trace the emergence and movements of magical, folkloric, theological, and made-up animals. These sessions invited thinking and writing about human-animal enmeshment within the space of fiction and in the real world.
6/ One could read your work as research on ecology, but it seems to be, above all, about relationships: between humans, landscapes, animals, the dead and the living. You also show that colonial violence targets not only human bodies, but also the trees, animals, and forms of life that make a land habitable. Why is it important to think these forms of violence and these relationships together?
Israel’s project of total colonisation can only succeed if the settler-colony captures the Palestinian imagination. The violence that it inflicts on the Palestinian land and body extends to Palestinians’ magical geography, sense of time, memory, their space in this world, their ability to create, their belief in this world, and their hope. Palestinians share a wondrous and intricate bond, which manifests in expansive and intricate forms, between the living and the dead, the forgotten and the remembered, the human and the object, the future and the past, the body and the imagination, and the individual and the collective.
The collective Palestinian body comprises humans, ghosts, animals, magical and ecological creatures. Consequently, the forms of violence that Israel exerts against Palestine extend far into the exiles of Palestinians outside of Palestine and delineate their collective memory. It is therefore important to think of the violence against Palestinian existence as expansive. Despite the agony that this causes, it inspires similarly expansive ways of resisting, coming together, and inventing tools to mend what has been wounded. This is why it is not possible for me or anyone else to sever this bond or ‘cleanly’ divide it into parts.
7/ Why did you feel the need to use the term "eco-surrealism"? What does this concept allow us to think that magical realism or political ecology alone did not?
I propose this term as a way to encapsulate the myriad connections that Palestinians have with their land outside the parameters of the ‘material’. As the reader must know, the Palestinian experience is marred by variegated forms of exile and dispersal. A painful longing towards Palestinian ecologies characterises the lives of Palestinians in exile, in refugee camps, and those living within the sequestered and colonised parts of Palestine. I define eco-surrealism as a distinct form of surrealism that characterises narratives describing Palestinian connection to the land. I consider it a subcategory of magical realism generally and Arabic surrealism specifically.
Palestinian folktales, literature, and film are rich with eco-surrealist images, such as women turning into trees, magical humans living inside the sea and saving their human counterparts when summoned, girls who control the weather, and everyday Palestinians ‘descending’ to find entire cities underground. This imaginal exercise of return keeps hope intact for Palestinians and allows them to perform transmaterial forms of return to the land they long for without dismissing the lack of ‘material’ fulfilment. It creates an active repertoire of speculative returns that must make do in the present before eventual, real, and ‘material’ returns in the future. I must also point out that while tracing these connections across mediums, I was taken aback by the depth and breadth of Palestinian forms of connecting to their land, all the way from pre-Nakba to a post-Liberation Palestine.
Though I go beyond the man-woman dichotomy in employing eco-surrealism, I understand and deeply respect this kind of connection because it is, above all, a return to the land and a promise of resistance until return. I believe that this connection was crucial, for a certain period at least, especially towards constructing Palestinian connections to each other. It allowed a displaced and resisting people to connect to the geographies from which they were robbed. What I do suggest is that eco-surrealism allows for the creation of potent connections that go beyond this dichotomous form of connecting with the land. This is chiefly due to the magical-realist possibilities that such a framework allows and activates. By transcending human form without ever dismissing the corporeal suffering of the Palestinian body, eco-surrealism allows human, non-human, and beyond-human creatures to unite and connect to the land in ways that transcend gender, body, positionality, and geography.
9/ You bring Palestinian literature into dialogue with Indigenous Futurisms and climate fiction, and you're critical of much contemporary climate fiction for narrating catastrophe while leaving out the colonialism that produces it. Can an ecological catastrophe really be told without also telling the story of land dispossession?
Unfortunately, this has been the case for a long time. This is what many Indigenous scholars have been pointedly arguing. Eve Tuck, C. Ree, Joni Adamson, Salma Monani, Pietari Kääpä, and of course Muhawi and Kanaana (Palestinian anthropologists and collectors of Speak Bird, Speak Again) are some of the authors who have touched on this topic. Many of them have also underlined an important and precipitous phenomenon in climate fiction and science fiction generally, and that is the persistent figure of one man who is tasked with ‘saving’ the world from the impending doom of natural ‘catastrophes’. The reason for these ‘natural crises’ – colonisation and its aftermath – is usually concealed. Indigenous climate fiction and the collective practice of conjuring and concretising other futures therefore transform into an adamant practice against this intentional concealment and a clear practice of collective agency. By tracing the protracting effects of colonisation not only on the body and the imagination but on ecology as well, a new praxis around ecological belonging, sustainability, and return becomes possible. This is especially pertinent in the Palestinian case today.
10/ Ghosts occupy a central place in your work. They don't return simply to recall the past; rather, they continue to act in the present. What do ghosts make possible that the living can no longer do?
Ghosts are Palestinians’ kin. They are the loved ones who passed into the other world so that living Palestinians can continue to exist, survive, and resist. Ghosts roam Palestinian novels, short stories, and film. Their existence is believed and revered by living Palestinians in all these stories. Their persistence was something I have been heavily focusing on. Emile Habiby, Ghassan Kanafani, Ghaleb Halasah (a Jordanian with a Palestinian heart), Shaykha Hlewa, Ibtisam Azem, Ibrahim Nasrallah, and Barghouthi are only some of the Palestinian authors whose seminal works centre the emergence and movement of ghosts. In fact, the ‘wandering ghosts’ tend to be the main driving force in their works.
Rather than return as melancholic apparitions, Palestinian ghosts come back to their people and to the places from which they were killed and expelled. They remind the living of what happened to them and instil in them a stubborn hope towards liberation. This happens in contexts when ‘reality’ feels hopeless and insurmountable. Ghosts are also the embodiments of collective Palestinian memory. They are the fugitive agents that transgress and destabilise Israel’s physical and metaphysical barriers. This reading follows my belief that no matter the place or the realm, the Palestinian is always a destabilising agent. By merely existing, the Palestinian destabilises ‘concrete’ truths about who can exist and live in freedom; who is expected to die without sound; and who is ‘allowed’ to rebel. The Palestinian disrupts established order that thrives on dehumanising them and refuses to quell the collective revolutionary spirit in order to appease. Had the Palestinian not been a destabilising agent, Palestinians would not have continued to fight the vicious fight for freedom, all the way in their exiles, almost a century after the Nakba.
11/ If literature is a tool for imagining and building other futures, what do you hope it can help us imagine, or bring into being, today?
I remember one time, while in Berlin, when I was approached by a disgruntled academic. The academic suggested that I stop writing politically to the public and “just focus on researching literature”. I smiled wryly and asked them, only half seriously, “what do you think literature is?”. It struck me that the person in front of me had failed to make a very simple observation: literature is testimony. The Palestinian story could be told from the point of view of an absurd man abducted by aliens, as in the case of Emile Habiby’s The Pessoptimist, and it would still be the most political thing you will ever read about Palestine. A Palestinian writer talking about Palestine, even in the most abstract forms, is a political gesture. A Palestinian writer refusing to even mention their positionality and background as Palestinian is also a political gesture. There is no evading this.
Literature, as martyr Kanafani told us over and over again, is the means through which we achieve liberation; it starts there. Literature can help us imagine and then concretise futures in which Palestine is liberated and Palestinians return to their spaces while continuing to undertake diligent and crucial work towards intersectional solidarities. Literature has already proven its efficacy as a tool in exploring Palestinian feminist possibilities that reject Western dictations of feminism. At the height of the Gaza Genocide, we saw how many feminists – activists, academics, writers, and cultural workers – in Germany and the rest of the European World maintained the Palestine exception. They intentionally ignored the existential threat that women in Gaza are constantly under while underscoring that these women are simply ‘oppressed’ by their own societies and need to be saved by Western powers.
In Gaza, women play crucial roles ‘on the ground’ in maintaining their own survival and that of their families. We see this form of Palestinian feminism in the works produced by Palestinian artists, writers, and academics, who refuse to adopt the orientalist and Islamophobic lens when looking at Palestinian women in Gaza and the rest of Palestine. Alaa al-Qaisi, who is a literary translator and researcher from Gaza, embodies this in her work, as do other women who are doing the invisible work of eluding the constricting and violent practice of Western feminism. These forms of Palestinian feminism prepare the ground for forms of belonging to each other as humans, and to relate to our spaces while re-integrating our collective imaginations. This is all while treating our ghosts, ghoul(eh)s, jinn, animate objects, therianthropes, eco-surrealist creatures, and cyborgs with the same love, respect, and humanity as their human counterparts.
