Voices of Freedom: Fadwa Tuqan’s Contribution to Palestinian Literature and Feminist Discourse

الملخص

This study seeks to assess both the literary and cultural implications of Fadwa Tuqan. She is among the poets and memoirists in Palestine who have had the most impact on communicating the notions of national consciousness and feminist perspectives. It is guided by the following question: In what ways do her poetry and autobiographical writings reflect and resist the synergetic forces of colonial occupation and patriarchal limitations? It also seeks to understand the broader picture that Tuqan's personal narrative and cultural symbolisms create regarding Palestinian identity, resilience, and emotional truths.

The methodology includes qualitative textual analysis of selected poems, excerpts from Tuqan's autobiography A Mountainous Journey, and contextual framing through postcolonial and feminist literary theories. The results reveal that Tuqan's writing is not simply translatable into any political or subject position. Instead, Tuqan weaves her personal experience with a national traumatic experience, and in so doing, she can speak for herself as a woman and for her people as a poet of resistance. Tuqan’s natural imagery, lyrical contemplation, and autobiographical directness help expand the types of Palestinian literature. It also helps counter dominant masculine narratives. This research also explores the ecological and spiritual themes in Tuqan's later poetry, manifested as bridges under the umbrella of relationships between land, identity, and survival.

This research contributes to the scholarship and adds an integrated reading of Tuqan's prose and poetry. More generally, it adds to contemporary knowledge of how women writers are drawn into national narratives and the preservation of culture, opening up new lines of inquiry into the relationship of literature to memory and gender among Palestinians