Soraya Antonius’s Arab Awakening  
By Eli Osheroff

Despite a recent surge in scholarly interest in Anglophone Palestinian literature, Soraya Antonius (1932–2017), the author of two notable novels depicting British-ruled Palestine from the 1910s to 1948, namely The Lord (1986) and Where the Jinn Consult (1987), remains largely overlooked. In an article I recently published together with Eitan Bar Yosef, we evaluate Antonius significant contribution to this literary tradition. The Lord revolves around Tariq, a young Palestinian man from Jaffa in the early days of the Mandate, whose magical powers and persecution by the British authorities make him a Muslim Jesus figure of sorts. The novel simultaneously tells the story of Palestinian society in the late Ottoman and early Mandate periods. Where the Jinn Consult moves away from this mystic overtone to present a realistic national saga, focusing on notable Palestinian families that, in Antonius’s eyes, did not always fully grasp the political danger posed by the British Empire and by Zionism.

Appreciation of Antonius’s short yet bright literary career, requires familiarity with her family background. She was the daughter of George Antonius, renowned for The Arab Awakening (1938), an English-language history that introduced the Palestinian case to the international community. Soraya’s mother, Katy Nimr, was a leading Palestinian socialite of Mandate Palestine and a political activist in her own right. Her parents both acted as cultural mediators between Arabs and the English-speaking world and as staunch, yet polite, critics of British imperialism. Soraya Antonius continued this legacy in a different genre—fiction—and in a much more critical, anti-colonial discourse. As a Palestinian activist whose worldview was shaped in the era of decolonization, she critiqued British and, later, American hegemony much more straightforwardly and pessimistically than did her parents, who believed that Britain could somehow be persuaded to stand by the Arab side.

Despite her clear anti-colonial tone, Antonius’s literary output bore the marks of an inner conflict that was the product of cultural imperialism. As a daughter of the Levantine-Arab elite of the colonial era, Antonius received her education in Jerusalem and Egypt, primarily attending English schools. While she spoke Arabic, her writing was English. This linguistic divide was a source of frustration and pain, as she felt a sense of muteness, especially when she became active in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Beirut during the 1960s and 1970s. She became an author, but not for the audience she longed to write for, as she eloquently expressed in a marvellous essay in the journal Alif in 2000.

Antonius’ story is part of my project as a post-doctoral fellow at the Jacob Robinson Institute. I am researching Palestinian politics between 1948 and 1988 through the prism of recognition of the “Other.” The story of Antonius, as well as of other understudied Palestinian figures and institutions, is part of the larger question of how the Palestinian national movement finally came to recognize the State of Israel in November 1988. Antonius’s writings make for a fascinating case study in the context of my project, first and foremost for its literary qualities, but also because her literary career represents a continuity in Palestinian politics from the Mandate era to the 1980s. Her literature incorporates some of the fundamental issues that remain at the heart of the political debate over Israel/Palestine. In her books, for examples, she raises questions of national loyalty and betrayal, the role of imperialism in the creation of the conflict between Zionism and Palestinian Arab nationalism, political violence, and more. It is symbolic that shortly after she published her novels, the Palestinian Intifada broke out, in December 1987. This event put the Palestinian struggle on the map, as Antonius strove to do in her writing.  

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