“Where alone we are authentically at home”: Speculative fictions of Palestinian futurity

Abstract

This article examines the 2019 anthology Palestine +100: Stories from a Century After the Nakba, edited by Basma Ghalayini, to highlight the “futurist turn” in Palestinian science fiction. Set 100 years after the 1948 Nakba, these stories envision a Palestinian future intertwined with historical trauma and the erasure of the present. Key stories include Ahmed Masoud’s “Application 39”, a darkly comic narrative of escalating crises; Samir El-Youssef’s “The Association”, depicting a future of mass forgetting; and Selma Dabbagh’s “Sleep it Off, Dr. Schott”, which presents dystopian visions of ethnonationalist segregation. The article argues that Palestinian speculative fiction challenges colonialist narratives through “counterfuturisms”, as defined by Jussi Parikka, but often succumbs to the echoes of historical erasure. For instance, Saleem Haddad’s “Song of the Birds” and Samir El-Youssef’s “The Association” struggle to assert Palestine’s epistemic existence beyond future technologies of occupation. Haddad’s story, in particular, portrays a liberated Palestine revealed to be an Israeli-controlled simulation, with real-world Palestinians continuing a losing battle against occupation. Hoda El Shakry notes that these speculative futures manipulate the present to make certain futures conceivable, even if unattainable, reflecting a sense of fatalism in Palestinian imagination. Carl Freedman describes a “dimension of futurity” as a space outside of historical time, creating a “homeland where no one has ever been but where alone we are authentically at home” (2000: 85). Ultimately, this article argues that the current wave of Palestinian futurism is best understood as both a transformational imaging of home beyond diasporic wandering, and a tacit acknowledgement that this home no longer exists in the present.