Description

Lina Meruane is one of Chile’s most critically acclaimed emerging fiction writers. She is also one of a handful of Chilean artists and intellectuals belonging to the Palestinian diaspora. Her recent book Volverse Palestina (2013) uses the non-fiction genre of crónica to trace her family history of emigration from Beit Jala to Santiago de Chile. She then travels to Tel Aviv and various cities in the West Bank as a form of poetic memory. Meruane witnesses what life is like in the Israeli occupied territories and empathizes with others caught in the middle of the geopolitical conflict. Meruane navigates a precarious intermediary position both politically and culturally to create a first-person account of diasporic identity. Using Edward Said’s, Stuart Hall’s, and Marianne Hirsch’s theories of identity and diaspora, this chapter analyzes how the author’s expression of interstitial identity is developed in this crónica.