Personal Becomes Collective: Construction of Collective Memory in Susan Abdulhawa’s novel Mornings in Jenin

Abstract

Personal memories maintain their existence by keeping on appearing in repeated recollections of the given event and by testifying to their authenticity through a constant process of sharing. Different people with a shared past maintain this shared memory by telling and retelling their personal stories, and on the basis of common traces, a collective narrative is built. The current article deals with the construction of collective memory through repeated remembrance of a shared past in Susan Abulhawa’s novel Mornings in Jenin. The article has employed the theory of Collective Memory by Maurice Halbwachs to explain the process of remembrance under the impact of the present  condition of the characters. Using the guiding principles of the theory, the researcher has highlighted the collectively built narrative of the Palestinian exodus of 1948 and its transmission to post-Nakba generations as a source of collective identity. The article maintains the stance that older characters in the novel build a collective narrative of the past through careful remembrance and allow the members of the given community to identify with this collective knowledge.