Digital Echoes and Hybrid Forms: The Aesthetics of Displacement in Abulhawa’s Fiction

Abstract

This article explores the aesthetic strategies of displacement in Susan Abulhawa’s fiction, with a primary focus on Mornings in Jenin and supporting analysis form The Blue Between Sky and Water and Against the Loveless World. Abulhawa constructs a literary form that reflects the fragmented experience of Palestinian exile, through a hybrid narrative structure that blends historical fiction, poetry, memoir, magical realism, and digital testimony. In accordance with the theoretical frameworks of Linda Hutcheon’s ‘historiographic metafiction’ and Gloria Anzaldua’s ‘borderland aesthetics’, this study examines Abulhawa’s prose dissolves genre boundaries to embody the trauma, resilience, and memory of dispossessed identities. The concept of “digital echoes” is explicit through the character Yousef, in Mornings in Jenin. Yousef’s use of the web (page) is to counter media silences, by focusing on the convergence of technology and confessional writing to narrate political realities. The article also analyses the integration of poetry as a intertextual device to reinforce the collective memory and cultural identity. Abulhawa, through her unique hybrid style, reclaims narrative agency and offers a poetics of survival for displaced communities.