Beyond Distorted Realities: Palestine, Magical Realism and Climate Fiction

In one of the most widely recognized images of Palestinian reality, 60-year-old Mahfoza Oud embraces an olive tree with her eyes closed.11.This essay is based on my doctoral thesis, currently being edited into a book with the provisional title Magical Realism in Palestinian Literature and Folktale, to be published by I.B. Tauris in 2025. An Israeli soldier is ensconced behind her in his truck, looking down at her, his face hidden by sunglasses and a combat helmet. Mahfoza’s trees were chopped down by Israeli settlers in 2005: the Israeli practice of obliterating Palestinian presence from the land is not a new phenomenon, but under the current fully fledged genocide, carried out by Israeli soldiers and settlers in Gaza and the West Bank, violence against Palestinian nature takes on an increasingly vengeful streak. Since the genocide in Gaza started in October 2023, Israeli soldiers and settlers have been uprooting and burning Palestinians’ trees and killing their livestock with new intensity.22.See, for example, Carolina S. Pedrazzi, ‘In the West Bank, Israeli Settlers Are Burning Palestinians’ Olive Trees’, Jacobin, 11 October 2023, jacobin.com; and ‘Israeli snipers target sheep in Gaza’, Al Jazeera, 7 February 2024, aljazeera.com. The hanging of a donkey head on the fence of a Muslim cemetery in Al-Quds in December 2023 by an Israeli man is emblematic of the intensification of collective acts of violence by the Israelis against animal, as well as human, life in Palestine.33. ‘Israeli settlers hang donkey head on Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem’, Al Jazeera, 28 December 2023, aljazeera.com.

Palestinians’ relationship to their land and to nonhuman life is diametrically opposed to such grotesque treatment. Investigating the magical-realist mode in Palestinian literature, especially in conversation with Indigenous climate fiction, offers piercing and comprehensive insights into this relationship. A study of this kind also helps us to understand Palestinians’ conceptualizations and practices of love and dedication towards the land, and their concomitant tenacity in defending it against atrocities.

Palestinian (Magical) Realism

First, let us consider the term ‘Palestinian realism’. As documented in several books in the field of Palestinian studies, Palestinian literature and life are often viewed through the lenses of realism or more specifically trauma.44.See, for example, Bashir Abu-Manneh, The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present, Cambridge University Press, 2016. This literary tradition is often understood as an extension of post-1967 ‘Arabic realism’, which prevailed following the Arab–Israeli War of 1967. Palestinian commitment to realist writing took form across documentary, social and poetic realisms.

Though accurate in depicting present realities, such lenses often fail to capture the nuances and paradoxes of Palestinian life, ranging, for instance, from exile and refugee experiences to everyday life under violent settler colonialism and the phenomenon of the ‘present-absentee’ Palestinian.55.‘Present absentees’ are Palestinians who were forcefully expelled from their villages in 1948 and after and forced to live under the State of Israel. See Himmat Zu'bi, ‘Present Absentees in Israel, Exiled in Their Own Homeland’, The Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, palquest.org. A (purely) realist view confines Palestinian agency and dreams of liberated futures within harsh realities and tropes of trauma. This, in turn, freezes Palestinians in the present and deems almost impossible their ability to comprehend the past and act with agency towards the future.

Magical realism can be mobilized to address this conundrum. As a kaleidoscopic literary mode, operating beyond reality – in a magical reality – it can play a significant role in reinstating Palestinian presence and agency. In my research, I have used magical realism as a tool to investigate settler- and post-colonial contexts. I view this tool as capable of creating a dynamic and potent space in which Palestinian collective agency, imagination and future liberation can be reified.

The term ‘magical realism’ was initially coined within the visual arts in the early twentieth century and morphed to become a literary genre. It is often studied within the Latin American context, such as in the works of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges and Isabel Allende. Arabic and Palestinian magical realism, however, are under-researched.

Magical realism remains an elusive term. In its broadest meaning, it is defined as ‘fiction which mixes and disrupts the ordinary, everyday realism with strange, “impossible” and miraculous episodes and powers…’.66.Martin Gray, A Dictionary of Literary Terms, London: Longman, 1993, p. 167. It is often referred to interchangeably with genres such as fantasy, speculative or science fiction, surrealism, absurdism, and the Gothic. By approaching magical realism as a hybrid literary mode, elements from these different genres can be injected into the ever-transforming frameworks and modes of ‘political realisms’.

This is especially pertinent in the Palestinian case as the Palestinian struggle for liberation is itself concerned with distorted material realities. The forms of distortion inflicted upon Palestinian realities extend beyond the physical occupation of the land, demolishment of houses, uprooting of indigenous trees, firing of rockets and destruction of material structures; they are also wrought on corporeal space, as in martyrdom, maiming, massacres, imprisonment, torture, rape and the destruction of Palestinians’ senses, such as sight and smell. They include the erasure of memory and recurrence of nightmares, as well as threats to mobility, as in refugeehood and exile. These distortions are synonymous with Israel’s systematic land grabs, ethnic cleansing, destruction of Palestinian homes and gentrification of Palestinian neighbourhoods, and the imprisonment, maiming and killing of Palestinians bodies. The ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has brought forward horrific accounts of rape, the mutilation of corpses (running over living and dead Palestinians with tanks has become a common phenomenon), and the burning of refugees in their tents. These testimonies, recounted daily in the news, underscore Israel’s desire not only to kill Palestinians, but to experiment with different forms of death, more horrific than could be imagined in even the most graphic work of fiction.

Given the seemingly paradoxical composition of magical realism, whereby the real and the magical coexist without contradiction, the mode’s base in ‘realism’ holds political and revolutionary potential. At the same time, the magical aspect buttresses this potential and accentuates the aberrant realities, which usually emanate from settler- and post-colonial contexts. Such is the case with Palestine.

Certain figures, tropes, transitions and transformations recur through many magical-realist texts. In the Palestinian case, these elements play pivotal roles by keeping Palestinian memory alive while foregrounding hope and agency. The power of mythical creatures, for example, transcends mortal threat from Israeli violence. We see this in ‘Saraya Bint al-Ghoul’ (retold in Emile Habiby’s 2006 novel of the same name, in English, Saraya, the Ogre’s Daughter), where the figure of farāsha (butterfly) is able to penetrate Israel’s elastic borders without being seen, and where the young mythical boy Badran, who lives inside Palestinian rocks and waters, saves Palestinians from Israeli danger when summoned.77.Emile Habiby, Saraya, the Ogre’s Daughter: A Palestinian Fairy Tale (trans. Peter Theroux), Jerusalem: Ibis, 2006.

Ghosts and Eco-Surrealism

In relation to Palestinians’ connection to nature within the genre of magical realism, I suggest the term ‘eco-surrealism’. The term encapsulates surreal instances that reflect Palestinian connections to the land within magical-realist frameworks, and how this connection moves beyond gendered dichotomies of a man saving the female land into surrealist associations and potentialities. One such instance of eco-surrealism can be discerned in Shaykha Hlewā’s story ‘Mi’at Hikaya wa Ghaba’ (‘One Hundred Tales and a Forest’) when a young woman literally glues herself to the land and grows a blossoming branch on her shoulder.88.In Shaykha Ḥlewā, Ṭalabiyya C345, Palestine: Barāʾāt al-Muṭawaṣit, 2018, pp. 51–52. In the same story, a tree uproots itself and picks up the young girl to save her from a fire before returning to its roots. Hlewa’s use of eco-surrealism therefore offers the possibility for Palestinian agency amid impending disaster.

Such eco-surrealist instances in contemporary writing reflect developments and transformations in parts of Palestinian literature. They take on a special function when describing the crucial relationship between Palestinians and their land. These relationships are surrealist in that they recur in dream and nightmare spaces. Dreams and, more commonly, nightmares also constitute the surrealist streaks of magical realism. They reflect the damage inflicted on the collective psyche since the Nakba. Yet they simultaneously draw on dreams of future liberation, giving power to Palestinian steadfastness.

From Gabriel García Márquez to Toni Morrison and Mahmoud Darwish, ghosts play pivotal roles in magical realism. Palestinian ghosts, usually emerging from martyrs’ bodies, help reframe and rethink common traditional Palestinian tropes such as martyrdom and connections to the land. Ghosts usually linger in liminal or third spaces. When they emerge from the bodies of martyrs, visiting the living, they are accepted by living Palestinians as real, and sometimes even protected from the gaze of foreign voyeurs, who seek to turn Palestinian tragedies into plays, like the European characters represented in Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun.99.Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun (trans. Humphrey Davies), Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2006. In addition to fuelling practices of perseverance and resistance, many Palestinian ghosts evoke guilt, such as when the ghost of the aforementioned Saraya emerges from the water to meet the narrator, who has just returned to Palestine after years of exile, and poignantly asks him: ‘Have you forgotten us?’1010.Habiby, Saraya, the Ogre’s Daughter, p. 35. Such a confrontation challenges the distortion of Palestinians’ spaces, which suffer from physical erasure as well as erasure from memory.

Further, in the essay ‘The Glossary of Haunting’ Eve Tuck and C. Ree present a glossary of lingering ghostly presences in the wake of colonization.1111.Eve Tuck and C. Ree, ‘A Glossary of Haunting’, in: Handbook of Autoethnography (ed. Tony E. Adams, Stacy Holman Jones, Carolyn Ellis), New York: Routledge, 2013, pp. 639–58. Tuck and Ree begin by speculating that:

the glossary appears without its host – perhaps because it has gone missing, or it has been buried alive, or because it is still being written. Maybe I ate it… The glossary is about justice… It is about righting (and sometimes wronging) wrongs; about hauntings, mercy, monsters, generational debt, horror films, and what they might mean for understanding settler colonialism, revenge, and decolonization.1212.Ibid., p. 640 

Tuck and Ree offer definitions of terms such as ‘Agent O’, ‘Beloved’, ‘Decolonization’, ‘cyclops’, ‘monsters’ and ‘revenge’. They describe the glossary as ‘fractal; it includes the particular and the general, violating the terms of settler colonial knowledge’.1313.Ibid. They open the ‘A’ section with ‘American anxieties, settler colonial horrors’, explaining that ‘settler colonialism is the management of those who have been made killable, once and future ghosts – those that had been destroyed, but also those that are generated in every generation’; in short, ‘settler horror’.1414.Ibid., p. 642. The authors explain how haunting challenges the ‘relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by the settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation’.1515.Ibid.  Their argumentation is summed up in the statement ‘for ghosts, the haunting is the resolving, it is not what needs to be resolved’.1616.Ibid. 

In ‘A Glossary of Haunting’, we can observe links between the poetics and the agencies of Palestinian and Indigenous martyrdom within the magical-realist mode. Indigenous hauntology and Palestinian magical-realist martyrdom open up potent spaces for the colonized, who have been negated in both physical and metaphysical forms through settler-colonialist violence. The possibility to have agency even after their death weakens the dominance of settler colonialism and the power of the colonizers.

This phenomenon can be discerned in Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance.1717.Ibtisam Azem, The Book of Disappearance (trans. Sinan Antoon), New York: Syracuse University Press, 2019 [2014]. At the end of the novel, it is implied that Palestinian ghosts return to haunt the Israeli settlers following a magical phenomenon where all Palestinians mysteriously disappear overnight. The sudden and forced disappearance of Palestinians is presented as a realization of the Israelis’ deep-seated desire for Palestinians to cease existing, a desire shared across the society. This chimes with Tuck and Ree’s assertion that ‘decolonization must mean attending to ghosts, and arresting widespread denial of the violence done to them.’1818.Tuck and Ree, ‘A Glossary of Haunting’, p. 647. This is echoed in Sinan Antoon’s afterword to The Book of Disappearance in which he states: ‘the ghosts of the dead will continue to haunt, demanding justice and recognition, and the living will write and remember’.1919.Azem, The Book of Disappearance, p. 241.

Indigenous Climate Fiction

Indigenous climate fiction opens up generous spaces to attend to such ghosts while giving agency to the occupied lands to free themselves from settler colonialism. By remaining true to collective struggle and liberated imaginaries, Indigenous climate fiction exposes what has been concealed about violence against nature under settler colonialism. Briggetta Pierrot and Nicole Seymour unpack the topic of climate fiction within Indigenous studies in their essay ‘Contemporary Cli-Fi and Indigenous Futurisms’.2020.Briggetta Pierrot and Nicole Seymour, ‘Contemporary Cli-Fi and Indigenous Futurisms’, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, vol. 9, no. 4, December 2020: pp. 92−113. The authors first highlight the origins of ‘climate fiction’, the name journalist Dan Bloom gave to the category of speculative fiction concerned with climate change and catastrophe, before critiquing its scope. Pierrot and Seymour’s criticisms centre on the claim that climate-fiction texts do not address how climate catastrophes are caused by settler colonialism.

Pierrot and Seymour present various approaches to the climate-fiction genre but insist that in most cases, Indigenous experiences are either absent or appropriated. When mentioned, Indigenous experiences and connections to the land are added with a heavy hand, merely to ‘provide a disembodied source of wisdom and a veneer of multiculturalism.’2121.Pierrot and Seymour, ‘Contemporary Cli-Fi’, p. 97. The authors note that, in advanced university courses that study climate fiction, the analyses around the works usually ‘invoke indigenous peoples only to absent and sometimes even appropriate their experiences and traditions’.2222.Ibid., p. 95.

The empiricist approach usually employed when describing climate crisis – measuring CO2 emissions, the greenhouse effect, acid rain, earthquakes, neurophysiological research, rising sea levels – although to some extent apposite, serves to negate thousands of years of lived knowledge and experience accumulated by and shared among Indigenous peoples. Rebecca Evans (cited by Pierrot and Seymour) underlines this tendency: ‘popular climate-catastrophe narratives… focus on the future of destabilization of white Western privilege rather than the environmental and climate injustices that are ongoing yet ignored in the present.’2323.Rebecca Evans, ‘Fantastic Futures? Cli-Fi, Climate Justice, and Queer Futurity’, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, vol. 4, no. 2–3, 2017: p. 104, cited in Pierrot and Seymour, ‘Contemporary Cli-Fi’, p. 95. Pierrot and Seymour then go further to argue that ‘intentionally or not, some mainstream cli-fi functions in large part to justify settler colonialism.’2424.Pierrot and Seymour, ‘Contemporary Cli-Fi’, p. 107. 

Studies of climate fiction often neglect to mention an alarming feature of the genre, inherited from science fiction: the persistence of a single, usually white male hero, who saves the world from an impending catastrophe. Tuck and Ree make a similar observation about horror films, writing that:

mainstream narrative films in the United States, especially in horror, are preoccupied with the hero, who is perfectly innocent, but who is assaulted by monstering or haunting just the same. … The hero spends the length of the film righting the wrongs, slaying the monster, burying the undead, performing the missing rite, all as a way of containment.2525.Ibid., pp. 640–41.

Pierrot and Seymour meanwhile introduce an important related term, coined by April Anson, ‘settler apocalypticism’. Here, ‘the “state of emergency” story serves the settler state’s white claims to the land.’2626.April Anson, ‘Recovering the Genre of Settler Colonialism, A Genealogy’, Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, Detroit, MI, 20–24 June 2017, cited in Pierrot and Seymour, ‘Contemporary Cli-Fi’, p. 107. Anna E. Younes’s eye-opening essay ‘Palestinian Zombie: Settler-Colonial Erasure and Paradigms of the Living Dead’ is insightful in this regard.2727.Anna E. Younes, ‘Palestinian Zombie: Settler-Colonial Erasure and Paradigms of the Living Dead’, Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2022: pp. 27–46. Younes places the figure of the zombie in the Palestinian context within the frameworks of land conquest and erasure under capitalism. ‘From the 20th century onward,’ Younes writes, ‘a white (genocidal) gaze eventually turned the zombie myth into a flesh/meat-eating figure, roaming the land without direction and in need of cleansing from the earth.’2828.Ibid., p. 27. Younes explains how this zombie figure emerges from colonialist capitalism: ‘Today, zombies represent capitalism’s surplus populations: they are passive and excluded from political projects.’2929.Ibid., p. 31. In this reading, the ultimate zombie that must be annihilated so that the Western order can be restored is the Palestinian zombie.

In these settler-colonial narratives, it becomes one hero’s ‘mission’, perhaps even his ‘fate’ to cleanse the conquered lands from their zombie residue. Such an individualist approach within non-Indigenous climate/science fiction negates the collective work of imagining that recurs in magical realism – and specifically, eco-surrealism – with the latter mode’s emphasis on the popular, the communal, the collective and the traditional.

Folktales and Science Fiction

This solipsistic view on how to deal with a man-made colonial disaster is constantly challenged in both Palestinian folktales and contemporary literature. For example, in the folktale ‘The Louse’, an entire Palestinian village self-annihilates in an act of mourning when a flea’s husband (also a flea) falls into an oven and burns to a crisp.3030.See Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana, ‘The Louse’, in Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021, pp. 288–90. The tale begins with the flea asking her husband to bake bread, but then he falls into the oven and dies. She applies soot to her face to mourn him and goes around the village telling the river, the goat, the tree, and others what happened. In an act of collective mourning, the tree breaks its own branches, the river dries itself up, the goat makes itself limp, and so on, until the entire village makes itself disappear. The manifestation of more-than-human solidarity within Palestinian culture explored in this folktale not only insists on the need to come together as a nation, but also allows the land to have agency over its very existence and to partake actively in building communities.3131.It is important to bear in mind that, arguably, the term ‘nation’ (and similarly ‘nation state’), of which the West is wary given its fatalistic applications, does not hold the same connotations in the Palestinian context. Belonging to a community that exists between refugeehood, exile and occupation, and that has been forced out of the geographical boundaries of its land and place of origin, Palestinian nationalism is often centred around liberation and return rather than colonization and xenophobia. This strengthens Palestinians’ connection to places from which they were forcefully expelled and portends transgressive relationships and futures in which the liberation of the land can be conceived of and materialized.

The absence of spaces of agency, unity and solidarity within mainstream climate fiction underscores the need to incorporate, critically and expansively, Indigenous and native experiences, histories and associations with the land, outside of settler-colonialist and capitalist systems. How can those who have been severed from their land be welcomed back rightly to the place they inhabited for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, before these places were ‘discovered’ for their natural riches? What is climate fiction without settler-colonial and imperialist critique? How can we place Indigenous forms of knowledge of the land and about the climate under serious academic investigation?

In a conversation between the editor of the anthology Palestine + 100, Basma Ghalayini, and the cofounder of Comma Press, Ra Page, we hear similarly about the colonial origins of the science-fiction genre.3232.‘Palestine + 100, In Conversation with Basma Ghalayini and Ra Page’, Androids and Assets Podcast, 15 May 2021, spotify.com. While focusing on Palestine + 100, a collection of science-fiction stories about Palestine one hundred years after the Nakba of 1948, Ghalayini and Page highlight science fiction’s original planetary-scale wish to occupy faraway lands beyond the Earth. From this critical conversation around science fiction as a genre, it follows that climate fiction could be susceptible to falling into similar traps when it is presented or created without any critique of the conditions of settler colonialism, imperialism and capitalism, which gave – and continue to give – rise to climate catastrophes.

Similar to these Palestinian attempts to redress science-fiction tropes, Indigenous Latin American climate fiction subverts the genre. Dominican writer Rita Indiana’s novel Tentacle centres a magical sea anemone that possesses magical powers to manipulate time and make people transition across genders.3333.Rita Indiana, Tentacle (trans. Achy Obejas), London: And Other Stories, 2018 [2015]. The anemone also has the power to force humans into many kaleidoscopic material realities at once. One of the novel’s protagonists is Argenis, an artist who was pushed into a parallel reality after being stung by the creature’s tentacle. Argenis is forced to relive the city’s colonial history as a labourer for a buccaneer, while still living in the current time as a contemporary artist, thus living two lives simultaneously, in the same place but at different times.3434.Buccaneers were English, French or Dutch sea adventurers who haunted the Caribbean and the Pacific seaboard of South America, preying on Spanish settlements and shipping during the second half of the 17th century.

The sea anemone, a venomous creature, manifests the notion of nature fighting back. That, in Tentacle, the anemone has the magical powers to make human beings literally relive history, including the origins of colonization, invokes an eco-surrealist relationship between humans and nature, a relationship that has been sacrificed for settler-colonialist fantasies, which led to the very climate catastrophes of Argenis’s life in the present.

It is in this same nature (or ‘real’/material world) that the blood of Palestinian martyrs makes the anemone grow – not as in the sea creature, but the flower, a potent symbol in Palestinian culture. The way in which the anemone exists in both marine and floral forms in Indigenous Latin American and Palestinian literary works exceeds this wondrous homophonic coincidence to fatefully signify the shared histories of these cultures through connections to, love for, and loss of the land.

This essay has attempted to show how Palestinian magical realism and Indigenous (critiques of) climate fiction can enrich the ways we see and interact with the world through enshrined knowledge, experience and care for the land. Capitalism and other expansionist systems of living can never reach such goals. The generative overlap between Palestinian magical realism and Indigenous approaches to climate fiction evokes hopes of reversing the effects of climate catastrophe and gives agency and power to the Indigenous and colonized peoples who reimagine and die for the land and strive for the liberation of their peoples – from Turtle Island to Palestine.