Palestinian trauma is a continuing and continually present trauma. One of the best sources for understanding the nature of Palestinian trauma is Palestinian cinema which has devoted itself from its inception to providing true-to-life – if not necessarily realist – portrayals of the Palestinian situation (Nurith Gertz & George Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory, 2008). This chapter focuses on ways in which Palestinian trauma is represented in Omar Robert Hamilton’s short film Though I know the River is Dry (2013). We argue that the film, typical of recent cinematic narratives of Palestinian loss and trauma, is structured so as to represent trauma as an ever-present reality of Palestinian lives. First, the film does so through the connections it makes between the iconic Palestinian Nakba of 1948 and other catalytic events in the modern history of Palestine, most notably the 1967 Naksa and the First and Second Intifadas. Second, not only do these connections indicate that trauma lives on the consciousness of the Palestinian people; they also mirror the apparent futility of the Palestinian struggle to make visible this trauma. In Edward Said’s view, international recognition of Palestinian trauma is the cornerstone of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination (‘Invention, Memory and Place’, 2000). Third, we suggest that the film evinces that the way out of recurrent Palestinian traumas resides in finding ‘a way to tell the story’ occluded by the Israeli colonial narrative (Cathy Caruth, ‘Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History’, 1991). We conclude with a wider reflection on ways in which Palestinian cinema mirrors the current Palestinian campaign for international recognition of their Nakba, a campaign which ‘poses the greatest challenge to Israel’s exclusionary use of trauma in its foreign policy’ (Douglas J. Becker, ‘Memory and Trauma as Elements of Identity in Foreign Policy Making’, 2014). 

Title

Palgrave

Publisher

Palgrave

Publisher Country

United Kingdom

Publication Type

Prtinted only

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