One could say that Farah Aboubakr's book The Folktales of Palestine: Cultural Identity, Memory and the Politics of Storytelling is yet another instance of the fallout from the Nakba. Clearly the Aboubakr family is part of the Palestinian diaspora. In her introduction, the author writes of a childhood lived constantly on the move but never in Palestine. Yet she knew she was Palestinian and felt nostalgia for the place she had not seen because of the folktales her mother used to tell in Palestinian colloquial Arabic. For her, these oral tales embodied Palestine. Her book, originally a PhD thesis at the University of Manchester, is an analysis of cultural identity and memory as manifested in traditional Palestinian folktales and of the preservation of this oral art as a form of resistance.
In another part of the world, and thirty years earlier, anthropologist and folklorist Sharif Kanaana, returning to Palestine after...
