The Poetics of Opacity: Disappearance in Emile Habibi’s The Pessoptimist and Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance

Abstract

This study is concerned with the politics of visibility and the politics of recognition that pervade the current political climate in Palestine shaping how the struggle of Palestinians circulates locally and on an international level. It addresses the political and ethical limitations of seeking visibility and recognition from Israelis and the world at large and how it exacerbates the unequal distribution of power. This thesis investigates two novels in their English translations, Emile Habibi’s al-Waqā’i‘ al-Gharıb̄ah fı̄ Ikhtifā’ Sa‘īd Abı̄ al-Naḥs al-Mutashā’il (1974; translated in 1984) and Ibtisam Azem’s Sifr al- Ikhtifā’ (2014; translated in 2019) to advance a poetics of opacity as an alternative to audiovisual documentation, testimonials, and other modes of representation that depend on direct appeal. Using Glissant’s notion of opacity, I approach the trope of disappearance as an unassimilable fantastical element in an otherwise realistic narrative world that instigates epistemological revisions and new modes of engagement with settler-colonialism in Palestine. This study also attends to how disappearance and other figurations of opacity which include spectrality and practices of secret-keeping and non-disclosure could preserve the irreducible singularity of Palestinians against Israeli state power and afford room for the exercise of political agency.