Mason, Victoria (2007) Ghurbah : constructions and negotiations of home, identity and loyalty in the Palestinian diaspora. In: Loyalties. Symposia . API Network Press, Perth, Australia, pp. 131-144.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Following the Gulf conflict of 1990-91, approximately 650 Palestinians from Kuwait found themselves refugees and migrants in Australia. For a number of these people, it was their third exodus since the establishment of the State of Israel, and the move to Australia meant once again trying to rebuild their dislocated community and sense of home. This chapter explores the experiences of settlement in Australia for these exiles and the resulting structure and character of the community that evolved. It demonstrates that the home-building processes of this community have been aimed at engendering both the recreation of the Palestinian exile community, and the feeling of being at home in Australia. It also demonstrates that as a result of the nature of their multiple exiles, notions of identity, belonging, home and loyalty for this group are necessarily hybrid, and to use Edward Said's term, contrapuntal. This chapter then examines the impact of wider paradigms of acceptance and belonging in Australia for this community, arguing that discourses questioning the very compatibility of Arab ethnicity and Muslim faith within the wider Australian context undermine many of the home-building efforts of such communities, and mean that their lives are underlined by that which is known in Arabic as ghurbah, a notion encompassing homesickness, estrangement, isolation and lack of belonging.