تمثّلات الطفولة في القصّة القصيرة الفلسطينيّة المحلّيّة: محمد نفّاع نموذجًا

Abstract

Childhood is a universal experience; it is a phase shared by all people. Therefore, it is natural for children’s characters to appear largely in literary texts. This study investigates the representations of childhood in literature in general and in the local literature of the Palestinian minority in Israel more particularly. Additionally, the ‘village’ has acquired a prominent status in the Palestinian minority literature since 1948 (especially in the short story genre). This is since the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel largely resided in villages following the 1948 war. Hence, it is natural for the ‘village child’ to have prominent status in the atmosphere of this literature. The image of the village child has been dealt with in Local Palestinian minority literature from multiple aspects, including the child’s relationship to life in the village, their relationship with Palestinian folklore such as customs, traditions, games and songs, their relationship with the Israeli occupation, and their relationship with ideology and identity.

This article presents examples of children’s representations in local Palestinian minority short stories by examining the work of Muḥammad Naffāꜥ (1939-2021) who is considered one of the most prominent Palestinian minority literary writers. More specifically, the study relies on mapping and discussing a large collection of stories written by Naffāꜥ that feature children’s characters. This mapping shows the different representations of childhood that were constructed according to the cultural representations that the writer intends to highlight. Surveying this large collection of short stories by Muḥammad Naffāꜥ has revealed six major representations of childhood, these are (1) the victimized child, (2) the displaced child, (3) the child of worldview, (4) the child as a representative of folkloric rituals, (5) the worker child, and (6) the 21^st-century child.