Counter memories: A reading of the “Absentee” novels about the place.

Counter memories: A reading of the “Absentee” novels about the place; the sea and the borders as exclusion spaces.


Abstract:
The Gaza Strip as a space of uncertainty offers a special definition to the chronology and time philosophy and all its aspects, particularly the history, memory, archives, and narrative novels. Time seems to be a daily problematic issue in management, mobilization, and even archiving and documentation due to the rapid fluctuations with political consequences that dominate the entire chronological scene.
It becomes more critical when it is related to geographic peripheral/marginal/boundary spaces such as the sea, borders, and crossings, which are often directly and explicitly exposed to the current politics and experiencing rapid fluctuations of events, that limit time validity to practice remembering, reflecting, and narrating. The narration is absent due to the rapid and sequential event frequency, which may later become an ordinary urban routine or a transient neglected event that does not need documentation.
From a gender perspective, this narrative, as well as the space, witness an apparent exclusion of women, leaving an absent narrative for the feminist experience about events and history, as well as about a balanced construction of epistemology later.
The research will present a reading of both place and narrative from a gender perspective. It will highlight the images of exclusion and marginalization practiced in these spaces through analytical reading of some women's narratives - who were called absentees due to their excluded narratives and spatial marginalization- and a study of power relations and dominant forms of authority its related policies.
These novels constitute documentation of images of spatial interaction from the perspective of gender and the viewpoint of marginalized memory, thus becoming counter-memories that present an opposite narrative from what is predominant.


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