A Morphology of the Wolf’s Mouth: The Language of Walid Daqqah (1961-2021)

This article investigates the Palestinian political prisoner Walid Daqqah's relationship with the Zionist regime through the Hebrew language in three geographies: the rural colonized periphery (the village of Baqah al-Gharbiyyah), the urban colonial center (the city of “Tel-Aviv”), and the prison as a parallel space. Through problematizing Hebrew as a local pre-colonial language in Palestine before being Zionized, the article reads the social history of Hebrew throughout the three geographies, as the morphology of “wolf’s mouth,” reflected in Daqqah’s unpublished autobiography. Methodologically, the article utilizes two acts of “critical fabulation” to recover the autobiography from the archive in a manner that devictimizes it from both the divine and mythical violence of Zionism. The article resolves around this quandary suggesting a reading contract that interrogates prevailing theoretical mythologies in reading the colonial condition in Palestine, sexualizing cultural relations and solidarity in the Zionist pariahdom, and the wars of position and movement between Arabic and Hebrew.

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This article investigates the Palestinian political prisoner Walid Daqqah's relationship with the Zionist regime through the Hebrew language in three geographies: the rural colonized periphery (the village of Baqah al-Gharbiyyah), the urban colonial center (the city of “Tel-Aviv”), and the prison as a parallel space. Through problematizing Hebrew as a local pre-colonial language in Palestine before being Zionized, the article reads the social history of Hebrew throughout the three geographies, as the morphology of “wolf’s mouth,” reflected in Daqqah’s unpublished autobiography. Methodologically, the article utilizes two acts of “critical fabulation” to recover the autobiography from the archive in a manner that devictimizes it from both the divine and mythical violence of Zionism. The article resolves around this quandary suggesting a reading contract that interrogates prevailing theoretical mythologies in reading the colonial condition in Palestine, sexualizing cultural relations and solidarity in the Zionist pariahdom, and the wars of position and movement between Arabic and Hebrew.

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