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The future Palestinian present
Palestinian science fiction and the protracted now.
This piece was initially published on Mangal Media on August 25th, 2019.
There is a concept coined by the Lebanese writer Walid Sadek which denotes a present endlessly postponed by the lack of pasts and futures. He calls it ‘the protracted now’. Since discovering it in his The Ruin to Come, Essays from a Protracted War, I have been carrying this concept around with me, like an overweight suitcase that I’d rather check in at the nearest counter than shove it in the overhead compartment as I fly over fictional borders that harm real people. During the flight, it is checked in and, in those few hours, past and future exist in perfectly linear forms as places I leave from and places I go to. This, of course, does not last. The plane lands, the border acknowledges me with its usual disdain and I pick up my suitcase. And, just like that, the protracted now is back.
Reading the science fiction anthology Palestine+100, edited by Basma Ghalayini and written by 12 Palestinian writers, I couldn’t help but feel that the writers were also carrying an overweight suitcase with them. Theirs is a different protracted now, however, brought about not by a lack of a coherent past (as might be argued in the Lebanese case) but, on the contrary, from the past’s overwhelming presence. As Ghalayini explained in her introductory words, this relationship with time is why science fiction is not a common genre among Palestinian writers: “The cruel present (and the traumatic past) have too firm a grip on Palestinian writers’ imaginations for fanciful ventures into possible futures.”
This makes Palestine+100 all the more remarkable. Set in 2048, 100 years after the Nakba (Arabic for Catastrophe), the mass expulsion of 700,000 Palestinian Arabs (around 80% of the population) by Zionist forces during the 1948 Israeli-Arab war, the contributors of Palestine+100 have imagined different scenarios for what that year might look like. The uniqueness of their different visions speaks to both their skills as established writers and to the inherently uncertain nature of a Palestinian future.
We start the book with Song of the Birds by Saleem Haddad and are immediately grounded in reality as the story is written in memory of Mohanned Younis, a 22-year old…
