Rooting and Rerouting Palestinian Memory into Thirdspace Resistance in Mourid Barghouti’s I Was Born There, I Was Born Here

This article rethinks the first chapter of Mourid Barghouti’s I Was Born There, I Was Born Here , “The Driver Mahmoud,” as an example of a memory that roots itself into Palestinian consciousness and, as a result, reroutes the Palestinian struggle into Edward Soja’s concept of “Thirdspace Resistance.” Similar to many writings about Palestine, this article argues that each remembrance of the past is inevitably tied to the future. Barghouti’s first chapter is a symbolic representation of “the restless spirit” that imagines victory rather than defeat, because of the internalization of Palestine’s “catastrophic” past (Hamdi 2023, 27). It is also an example of how each new recollection of the Palestinian experience extends its reroots which allows the process of rerouting into Thirdspace. What makes Barghouti’s chapter unique is that his memory displays the driver rerouting both physically and metaphorically into Thirdspace, and also demonstrates the ways in which the internalization of Palestinian roots is the direct cause of rerouting. The retrieval of memory is carried by the objects of memory that connect the present to the past. Heavily informed by Tahrir Hamdi’s theorization of Palestine, this article first aims to analyze objects and sites of memory that “reroot” the Nakba into Palestinian consciousness; this article will analyze the ways in which the internalization implied by rerouting is a closure by means of navigation and mobilization. Rerouting may therefore be read as a political act of Thirdspace resistance both in the chapter and until this day.