A New Literary Theory Emerges
Fall is book awards season, with the National Book Award finalists announced. This year, the list includes three authors whose work focuses on the new literary theory of generational colonial trauma. These are not First Nations authors, West Indian authors, or African authors, but Palestinian authors, the cause celebre of the publishing world.
In the fiction category, Hannah Lillith Assadi’s work Paradiso 17 tells the story of Sufien, a Palestinian born on the eve of the Nakba, who is forced to leave his home (the author describes it as “the one on the hill with a beautiful blue door”). The 2026 National Book Award website states the book asks the question of belonging after exile.
Fady Joudah’s work Exhibit G: Poems, Essays and Photographs of Gaza is a finalist in the poetry category. Summarizing the work, the National Book Award website uses the following:
Throughout the book, beauty insists on its survival not only through the Palestinian people but also through the nonhuman world, to which he occasionally takes refuge from the devastation humanity brings upon itself.
By placing before readers a series of carefully chosen images from Gaza, Joudah presses his reader to comprehend that the experience of both the individual and the whole is integral to an explicitly Palestinian understanding of genocide, even if that rendering is a nearly impossible endeavor. Exhibit G insists on the immensity of Palestinian interiority, and finds in this collective act of creation a hyperpresent awareness. “By claiming what is being actively erased,” Joudah writes, “I become presence.”
Author Samar Yazbek’s work Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life: Voices of Survival and Witness in Gaza is a finalist for Translated Literature. Yazbek’s work focuses on interviews done post-October 7th with “survivors from Gaza.” In the description, the National Book Awards calls these experiences “chilling accounts” of “one of the most savage military offensives of our time.” But it doesn’t stop there. The final paragraph from the publisher states:
Their stories reveal a nightmarish dystopia, where each survivor has endured unimaginable loss—homes shattered, loved ones vanished, limbs obliterated—and many have been treated in hospitals ravaged by Israeli attacks. But these survivors remain determined to share their experiences and cling to the hope that their voices will resonate.
Recently, Gaza-based playwright Ali Abu Yasin won the English PEN Writer of Courage Award for his plays, including The Gaza Monologues (2008). The press release reads as follows:
Ali Abu Yassin, a playwright from Gaza who continued writing even as Israel’s genocidal campaign devastated the world around him, has won a prestigious award in London.
Each of these works exemplifies generational colonial trauma, a literary theory I was only made aware of a month ago. In the past, English scholars used the theory of intergenerational trauma when teaching Holocaust literature. Now, in an effort to fit everything into the pro-Palestinian camp and to justify the plethora of Palestinian stories hitting your local bookstore, a new theory emerges. Let’s break down this theory:
- Stories that focus on genocide, forced assimilation, land dispossession, and settler colonialism (sound familiar?)
- Refers to psychological, emotional, and physical distress that is cumulative
- This distress is passed down through communities
- This form of trauma is ongoing due to continued structural violence and systemic inequalities
In her essay for Medium, Denise Zubizaretta argues that colonialism is a “system that festers across generations” and “does not disappear with time.” Graduate student Hillary Husson Bawab Yousif, in her thesis paper “My Teta’s Pain: Generational Trauma and Language in Palestinian-Americans,” goes so far as to call October 7th the day genocide against Gaza began; her paper is written to “give justice to the martyrs” in her family. George Abraham, writing for Public Books, argues that:
This war against memory takes many explicit forms: from the casual denial of Palestinian existence embedded into political and legal rhetoric within the ethno-supremacist states of Israel and America to the ongoing censorship and destruction of Palestinian historical records within Israeli archives.
Language matters, and it’s important to critically analyze the words used in these works: genocide, martyrs, savage military offensives. Such words paint the Israelis as oppressors, without historical context. Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, leading to the current conflict. However, Israel had left Palestine years prior – the colonizer had physically left the “colony.”
Publishers are pushing a one-sided narrative that fails to acknowledge the crimes committed on October 7th. Jewish authors, globally, are being dropped by their agents and publishers; Israeli authors are unable to get their work distributed or read. While Palestinian stories should be published, the press surrounding them (including the publisher blurbs) showcases the narrative that has grown since 10/7/2023: Israel is the evil colonizer, Gaza (and even Hamas) are the victims responding to years of repression.
When new literary theories are created to further a political agenda, one must question where they emerge and from whom.
