Draft:Fawaz Turki

Fawaz Turki
فواز تركي‎
Fawaz Turki in 1995
Born	(1940-09-04) September 4, 1940 Haifa, Mandatory Palestine
Nationality	Palestinian, Australian, American
Alma mater	University of New South Wales
Occupation	Writer, Poet, Essayist, Activist, Political Commentator, Teacher
Organization	Syrian Social Nationalist Party
Notable work	The Disinherited, Soul in Exile, Exile’s Return
Children	2

Fawaz Turki (Arabic: فواز تركي, romanized: Fawāz Torki; born 1940) is a Palestinian writer, poet, teacher, political commentator, and human rights activist. A prominent figure among Palestinian and Arab nationalist intellectual movements of his generation, Turki's memoirs about his family's exile from Palestine following the Nakba and upbringing as a refugee in Beirut were one of the first English language autobiographies that shed light on the plight of Palestinians.

Turki has written extensively for major publications such as The Washington Post and Arab News, addressing complex political dynamics in the Arab world and advocating for justice and peace. He is also the author of several notable books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile (1972) and Soul in Exile: Lives of a Palestinian Revolutionary (1988), which offer personal and political reflections on the Palestinian diaspora.

Biography

Early Life

Born in Haifa, Mandatory Palestine in 1940, Turki and his family (consisting of two sisters and a brother) fled to Lebanon during the Nakba in 1948, becoming refugees. This formative experience deeply influenced his work, imbuing it with themes of exile, identity, and resistance. After completing his secondary education at an UNRWA school in Beirut in 1958, Turki spent the next decade traveling across the world. In 1959 he was living in Queensland, Australia where he worked in sheep shearing and at a sugarcane plantation. In 1962 Turki obtained a Bachelors degree from the University of New South Wales. During this time he obtained Australian citizenship. Thereafter he continued travelling on popular hippy trails travelling from outback Australia, to Singapore, Nepal, India, Afghanistan, Türkiye, Austria, and the Netherlands. In recounting his journey around the world in his works, Turki conveys the stories of his family, friends, and acquaintances, many who participated in Palestinian armed resistance. Together, the stories encapsulate a comprehensive oral history of the first generation of Palestinian Nakba survivors who came of age in exile, contextualizing the turbulent events of the late 20th century Middle East.

Career

His travels concluded in 1970, when he settled in Paris and began writing his first book. By 1973, Turki had relocated to the United States where he worked as a lecturer at the State University of New York in Buffalo. After returning to Beirut in 1979, Turki undertook the Hajj Pilgrimage. He participated in the 16th Annual Session of the Palestinian National Council held in Algiers in 1983. Since then, Turki has resided in the United States where he has devoted his time to writing at both the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Books and Writing

The Disinherited

The first Palestinian memoir published in English, The Disinherited details Turki’s family’s flight from Haifa to Beirut, where they lived in the Bourj el-Barajneh refugee camp before moving to the Basta quarter of West Beirut. The family’s flight in 1948 was part of the Palestinian Nakba that displaced more than 700,000 Arabs from the territory of the British Mandate for Palestine. Told through personal recollections and concise histories of the region’s complicated politics, The Disinherited primarily conveys the damaging psychological effects of being forced to live outside one’s homeland. Thus, the book argues passionately for the right to Palestinian self-determination over and above any one particular political stance. Yet Turki hopefully identifies “two roads” available to Palestinians: the creation of a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, supported by “the first truly popular government in the Arab world” but vulnerable to becoming “a puppet…entity”, or continued resistance aimed at “galvanizing the Arab masses” to completely revolutionize the geopolitical realities of the region.

Originally penned and published in 1972, the authoritative version of The Disinherited is now the 1974 paperback, which includes an epilogue in response to the events at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Here, Turki chastises his earlier utopian vision of the Palestinian right to choose one of two roads and argues instead for an uncompromising alliance with the Arab world beyond nationalism to the detriment of Zionism.

Turki’s work in The Disinherited situates itself as part of an emergent literary space defined by a dual positionality; one anchored in the hopes and imaginations of a pre-Nakba Palestine, while the other oriented toward a progressivist Third-World future. Written from exile, Turki comments on the corrupted communal imagination of successive generations in the struggle for Palestinian nationhood. Employing internal critique, Turki asserts that imagining Palestine has fundamentally become halted due to reliance on the “arrested past.” Where a pre-Nakba Palestine became, in the collective imagination, a mythic redemptive force. One that could be returned to, and having done so would alleviate all ails of its people. However, Turki views this transformation more akin to an opiate haze than a productive anchor. By halting progressing temporality, this tragic nostalgia cements the idea of Palestine as never coming to fruition. The present is then approached passively, for the expectant Palestinians are merely resigned to the day when “the wrongs will have been righted, the grievances removed, and our cause justified.”

Contrasted to Turki’s own envisioned narration of a late 1960s Palestine as existing within a broader ecosystem of a liberated Third-World future. Recognizing the Palestinian struggle as existing alongside those of the Vietnamese, Kenyans, Algerians, and others striving for a transnation, decolonialist future. This posture, Turki contends, breaks the nostalgic resignation of the Palestinian experience and redefines the identification of the struggle as a slice of the broader worldwide revolutionary atmosphere. Removed from the hands of external actors, Turki envisions this progressivist orientation as liberating not only the territory, but the consciousness of its people. This revolutionary emergence positions The Disinherited as a piece of literature that alludes to the unleashing of suppressed energies - one which positions itself in relation to the material objective of Palestine, but in a more fundamental sense centers on the reanimation of the community’s psyche.

Soul in Exile

In contrast to the literary project of The Disinherited, Soul in Exile is rooted in a regressionary redefinition of the revolutionary vision. Written in the wake of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the piece is haunted by the horrors perpetrated by Israel during this time. By the 1970s the Palestinian Liberation Organization had pockets of near autonomous power throughout Lebanon, it was this power base that Israel sought to exterminate while the nation was embroiled in civil war. Israel successfully sequestered the PLO to West Beirut, and following a lengthy siege, decimated this section of the city leaving 50,000 Palestinians and Lebanese killed or wounded. A US-brokered agreement allowed PLO forces to withdraw from the city - Israel recommenced their attack on the now defenseless areas. Their genocidal massacres at Sabra and Shatila defined their tactics.

For Turki, this sequence of events reconstituted the prior positionality of nostalgic failure within his own generation. His equation of this mentality with that of the nakba illustrates the tragic collapse of the revolutionary spirit within succeeding generations. Handing the struggle onto the next generation, Turki resigns the Palestinian struggle to a cyclic temporality - an experience marred by the transgenerational failure and resignation of identification.

Exile's Return

Using his 1990 visit to Palestine and the impending Gulf War as a framing device, Turki channels the anger bred by exile towards what he calls the “neobackwardness” of Palestinian cultural tradition. Unlike former writings, Exile’s Return is deeply informed by Turki’s status as an American intellectual and self-proclaimed Woodstock Nation ex-pat, a perspective through which he struggles to understand the homeland he was never able to call home. Return for Turki is further evidence of his otherness, rather than the sigh of relief he expected; he is “a stranger in a strange city,” rather than the prodigal native son. During his visit, he meets with members of the PLO, for which he briefly worked as the Director of Writing and Research in the late 1970s, a leader of Hamas, and young men from the PLO’s underground complement. While Turki sees the PLO as an ineffective and corrupt entity and fears the religious component of Hamas’s proposed governance, he is inspired by the underground’s clear-eyed vision of a Palestinian future. The book ends on a hopeful note, published just after the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords.

The hope of this work is complicated by Turki’s own struggle with Palestinian identity. As he envisions it, this identity is grounded in redefining the consciousness and “dream[ing] of a different reality.” Positioning his work as imagining self-conceptions of Palestinianness as coinciding with global struggles for liberation, how through this self-conception the Palestinian identity is grounded in perpetual creation of new futures. This vision, this definition, becomes incompatible with the stipulations of Oslo. Where a nation-state defined through the Zionist entity constricts the imaginative futures of the Palestinian psyche. That a once revolutionary force in the PLO becomes the sedentary perpetrators of Zionist policy within the occupied territories. This conclusion, for Turki, is the last gasps of a Palestinian identity within the territory once known as Palestine. Positing that it is within the exilic, transnational, imaginative journey in which Palestine defines their self-conception and identity.

Turki’s dearth of writings on Hamas’ role of internal struggle, of definitional identity within the Palestinian territories is striking. However, Hamas assumed this role primarily in the new millennium. Perhaps Turki would merely assign their role as the echoes of prior generations, or, perhaps, he would view their work as productively defining the Palestinian identity within the nation. Social reproduction defined not in oppositional relationality to Zionism, but upon its own imaginings - even if as a Third-World Leftist he would condemn the conception, but not the process of Hamas’ socio-political imaginings.

Quotations

• “It becomes ever more difficult every day for a Third World person to communicate the essence of his experience to people in the West; not only because they remain so unyielding in their attitudes, their myths, and their blatant racism. Not only because he finds it increasingly urgent to return to his roots and scour the culture of the West off his consciousness and off his back. Rather it is because a Third World person’s linear development, his idiom and his metaphor, will forever remain alien to Western society. He is located in a spatial and temporal reality where his sensibilities respond to issues and feelings that to a Westerner are an abstraction.”

“My reality as a Palestinian, the total collage of graphic166 Fawaz Turki images that I carry in my consciousness as an Arab, is derived from a process of violence. Violence that was inflicted on me every day of my life and the life of a whole generation of Palestinians till we grew up with it like we grew up with our skin. Made inert by my condition, all that I am left with, all that is open for me is to face up to those who negate my birth right and human right. Confronting them and their system, on any level, as an individual or with a group, is the true link to my past.”