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…
