Rewriting the Oppressor’s Narrative: Literature as Resistance in Ramzy Baroud’s My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story

Abstract

Words have the unique potential to sensitise human beings to issues that they have been ignorant of and to transport them to unseen or unexperienced realities. Literature by Palestinian diasporic writers has become a poignant tool to provide comprehensive and realistic glimpses of the massive sufferings of Palestinians which have been camouflaged by distorted historical accounts, literary works and manipulative media. This paper tries to analyse Ramzi Baroud’s memoir My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story as an instance of resistance against the continued oppressive occupation of Palestine by Israel, the settler state. Moreover, the paper digs deep into how Baroud subverts the popularly accepted version of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and lays bare the profundity of the trauma and tribulations that Palestinians have been undergoing for years. The paper examines the potential of writing as a tool for persistent and sustainable resistance against oppression and how ‘counter writing’ can be used as a sharp weapon to subvert the falsity of the grand narratives in the spectrum.