The City is Closing in: Raja Shehadeh’s Going Home Searches for a Homeland

Growing constrictions and suffocating borders, due to an unrelenting occupation, continue to plague the lives of Palestinians living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Raja Shehadeh’s 2019 book, Going Home, illustrates how this stifling existence has only worsened with time. His work provides a chronology of events and highlights changes within Ramallah, which he meticulously records on 5 June 2017, a date that coincides with the 50th anniversary of Israeli occupation. As he roams through his home-town, he chronicles the changes that have taken place under occupation. His recollections revive a history that is being eroded. In his search for the metaphorical home, he identifies places that no longer exist, and his diaries allow him to preserve a lost history. As he walks, he reflects on how this once sleepy town has evolved into a claustrophobic and foreboding place, caging its citizens, offering nothing but ‘blocked’ spaces. Here, I argue that Shehadeh’s work not only provides a documentation of a vanishing space but is also an attempt at preserving what is left through memory, while deciphering the meaning of home and identity in this dwindling world.