Fiction as Counter Memory: Writing Armenia and Palestine in Aline Ohanesian’s Orhan’s Inheritance and Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin

Abstract

Abstract:This article examines the role fiction plays in retrieving pasts that have been suppressed or occluded within dominant narratives by grafting these counter memories onto memorable forms. It investigates the way two novels, Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010) and Aline Ohanesian’s Orhan’s Inheritance (2015), guide us to rethink well-known narratives that shape our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the negotiations around the recognition of the Armenian genocide, respectively. These novels aim not only to portray the past but to rework, rewrite, and interrogate it. In addition to revising a contested past for an international readership, we argue these novels are “meta-mnemonic”; they stage the process of historical recollection, both individual and collective, and thereby interrogate the ways past events accrue meaning for future generations. The novels’ use of literary techniques like multiple temporal perspectives, characters of different nationalities, and interwoven narratives present a nuanced, multi-perspectival understanding of the past, one which resists a simple repositioning of blame. Instead, these authors challenge their readers to revise their understanding of the past and create bridges between different versions of history. In so doing, they carve for literature a potent role in the formation of collective memory. Taken together, Mornings in Jenin and Orhan’s Inheritance demonstrate the political power novels can have if conceived as a part of a national, ethnic, or religious memory-making process, not only to continually explore the past and attest to its ongoing effects but to imagine transformed futures.