Memory as a Scandal. The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in ‘Ayn almir’ā (The Eye of the Mirror) by LianaBadr

In her masterpiece ‘Ayn al-mir’ā (“The Eye of the Mirror”, 1st edition in Arabic 1991) the Palestinian writer Liana Badr uses women’s collective memory to create a “fictionalized chronicle”, which aims at providing the reader with a plural account of the Tel al-Zaatar massacre of 1976. This narrative can be read as a counter-history that denounces the military/national narrative on the one hand and the written, official and recorded history on the other. After placing Badr’s narrative in the context of the Palestinian literary field, I analyse the two major narratives that underpin the whole novel: the transformation, and subsequent crisis, in ‘Ā’isha’s body and, in parallel, the chronicle of the siege of the refugee camp of Telal-Zaatar. I analyse the multi-layered trope of personal and collective memory in this narrative in the light of the theoretical consideration by Portelli on oral history and on the ‘scandalous’ dimension of memory in uncovering the more concealed sides of history.