Scattered Like Seeds: Palestinian Prose Goes Global (Critical Essay‪)‬

This essay's title is borrowed from Shaw Dallal's 1998 novel, Scattered Like Seeds, a novel that, along with Ibrahim Fawal's On the Hills of God (1998), allows us to assess the shifting location of modern Palestinian literature. Both novels, written in English by Americans of Palestinian origin and distributed by American publishers, pose meaningful questions about translation and categorization. More importantly, they are emblematic of a recent trend in Palestinian literature: writing rooted in diasporic countries but focused in theme and content on Palestine. This essay, which explores how these themes and settings function in Scattered Like Seeds and On the Hills of God, highlights ways in which contemporary Palestinian literature embodies the reality of today's Palestinian Diaspora. Since 1967, most critics have theorized the existence of three "branches" of Palestinian literature, namely works produced inside Israel, in the occupied territories, and in exile throughout the Middle East. After a brief analysis of each book, I will appraise the possibility of incorporating a fourth branch into discussion: Anglophone works, particularly those written in the United States. This move will help us reassess both Palestinian and Arab American literatures by complicating categorizations and thereby urging critics to interrogate more carefully the social conditions that inspire literary developments.