{"id":2922,"date":"2023-03-21T09:36:59","date_gmt":"2023-03-21T06:36:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/?p=2922"},"modified":"2023-03-21T09:39:40","modified_gmt":"2023-03-21T06:39:40","slug":"becoming-palestine-by-palestinian-chilean-lina-meruane-author-jumko-ogata-aguilar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/?p=2922","title":{"rendered":"Becoming Palestine’ by Palestinian-Chilean Lina Meruane AUTHOR:\u00a0 Jumko Ogata-Aguilar \u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"
Review: ‘Becoming Palestine’ by Palestinian-Chilean Lina Meruane<\/div>\n
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DATE:<\/div>\n
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March 16, 2023<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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AUTHOR:<\/div>\n
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Jumko Ogata-Aguilar<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Lina Meruane’s\u00a0\u201cBecoming Palestine\u201d\u00a0narrates the exploration of her Palestinian heritage. It also discusses her first trip to the motherland.<\/p>\n

While the book is less than 100 pages, she manages to dissect each step of her path carefully and beautifully. She reflects on the losses her family has faced due to the imposition of assimilation into Chilean society throughout the 20th century while also actively returning to re-learn that history and preserve the knowledge that remains.<\/p>\n

The title itself dives into this theme of return and loss. Andrea Rosenberg \u2014 the English translator \u2014\u00a0mentions the difficult process of choosing \u201cBecoming Palestine\u201d as the title\u00a0due to the many connotations and meanings each word contains. In Spanish, the word\u00a0volver<\/em>\u00a0has two distinct meanings depending on the context; it can refer to the process of\u00a0becoming<\/em>, but it can also refer to the act of\u00a0returning<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 of re-tracing one’s steps, presumably to the place where one began.<\/p>\n

In this context,\u00a0Palestina<\/em>\u00a0can be used to refer directly to the country, as well as the feminine demonym for Palestinians. This multiplicity of meaning is present throughout Meruane’s journey, as she not only physically returns to a place she’s never been to, but she also returns to understanding herself in racialized terms that she had not experienced in Chile the way her ancestors had.<\/p>\n

In this sense, it’s necessary to contextualize Palestinian migration toward Latin America and Lina Meruane’s own family history within this larger movement.<\/p>\n

Lina Meruane is a Chilean writer of Italian and Palestinian heritage, born in Santiago in 1970. Her paternal family migrated to Chile when her grandparents were just children \u2014 part of the waves of mostly Christian Arabs that migrated to Latin America during the late-19th century and the beginning of the 20th.<\/p>\n

Many Christian families migrated after a conscription law in 1908 was enforced upon all Ottoman subjects\u00a0in <\/a>order to protect their sons from having to serve in the army. Meruane’s family isn’t certain of her grandfather’s date of birth due to the likelihood that his birth certificate was falsified to avoid being drafted.<\/p>\n

Palestinians that arrived during this era mostly became itinerant salesmen, thus accruing important capital that allowed them to expand into other business ventures that flourished throughout the 20th century. However, all migrants from the Levant simultaneously faced racialization in the new regions they began to inhabit, including Chile. In fact, he Chilean governm in 1927, tent sent a confidential letter to all its ambassadors,\u00a0in which they were urged to reject \u201cundesirable immigration\u201d \u2014 particularly Chinese, Syrians, and Africans \u2014 \u201cdue to their race.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lina Meruane speaks to this institutional racism by narrating the process through which her grandparents assimilated into Chilean society, describing the difficult choices made by her ancestors to \u201chold their tongues before passing down the stigma of second-class citizenship because there was a shadow stuck to the accent that was as evident as the worn clothes of their poverty. They had to rid themselves of both.\u201d<\/p>\n

This highlights another valuable contribution made by Meruane’s experience. Despite Arab Latin Americans being associated with prosperity, there are also many valuable stories that have not been told as frequently about the less affluent members of the Palestinian diaspora. Those like Meruane’s family couldn’t afford the membership fees of their local Palestinian country club. These histories not only contribute to questioning the hegemonic narratives regarding immigrants from the Levant, but allow us to understand the two contexts of violence Palestinians and their descendants face in Latin America. On the one hand, they are pushed to migrate to Latin American countries due to multiple socioeconomic factors and conflicts \u2014 including the aforementioned forced conscription to the Ottoman army, the\u00a0Six-Day War<\/a>, and the\u00a0Nakba, to mention just a few. Upon arrival, they had to learn a completely new language and culture, and make a living while simultaneously being subjected to the racist policies of the Latin American countries where they resided.<\/p>\n

While each has their own particularities, they are all inscribed into a logic of \u201cwhitening\u201d that included (but was certainly not limited to) the erasure of non-white languages and cultures. There was a demand that these populations be assimilated into mestizo society to avoid being the targets of racist violence. In this sense, while Lina Meruane mentions largely avoiding any sort of allusion to her heritage in Chile \u2014 except to clarify that she’s Palestinian and not\u00a0turca\u00a0<\/em>(\u201cTurk\u201d being the catch-all term for migrants from the Levant) \u2014 once she begins the journey back to Palestine, she is suddenly thrust back into what she feels so distanced from: Palestinianness.<\/p>\n

At the beginning of her narration, she seems to distance herself from \u201ctrue Palestinians\u201d that are still connected to or inhabit the territory. However, as she inches her way towards the ancestral home, she is reminded by those around her about who they take her to be, in a positive and negative light. For Jaser, the taxi driver that takes her to the airport in the US, she is a comrade. When she mentions being a run-of-the-mill Chilean, he abruptly corrects her: \u201cyou are Palestinian, you are an exile.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once she arrives at\u00a0 the designated area in Heathrow airport, she is subjected to a series of interrogations, searches and treatment that show her exactly what being a Palestinian in the present means. The author realizes that her Palestinianness \u201cacquired density\u201d once she went through this process: she suddenly finds affinity with others who are being questioned by envoys of the apartheid regime \u2014 those who share her features; her curly hair and olive skin. She boards the flight that will take her to her origins, proud of what she now recognizes is a \u201cthick scar that she wants to show off.\u201d<\/p>\n

The beauty of Lina Meruane’s\u00a0Becoming Palestinian<\/em>\u00a0is the re-tracing of the author through the pain of Latin American racism and whitening towards the \u201cotherness\u201d her migrant grandparents experienced. She re-opens the scar she possesses \u2014 an heirloom whose pain has dulled with each passing generation, discovering the wounds that her body has inhabited. She is finally able to discover and understand the universes within her, veiled by Latin America’s own forms of violence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:<\/div>\n
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Jumko<\/span>\u00a0Ogata-Aguilar is a Mexican writer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Review: ‘Becoming Palestine’ by Palestinian-Chilean Lina Meruane DATE: March 16, 2023 AUTHOR: Jumko Ogata-Aguilar Lina Meruane’s\u00a0\u201cBecoming Palestine\u201d\u00a0narrates the exploration of her Palestinian heritage. It also discusses her first trip to the motherland. While the book is less than 100 pages, she manages to dissect each step of her path carefully and beautifully. She reflects on …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2923,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}