The Sky Is Incomplete

Travel Chronicles in Palestine

Irmgard Emmelhainz

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780826505651
  9780826505668
• eBook ISBN:
  9780826505675
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Social Sciences

Translated from Spanish for the first time, and with a new introduction to the English edition, The Sky Is Incomplete comprises sixty short entries detailing life in and reflections on the Occupied Territories of Palestine in the twenty-first century over prolonged stays between 2007–2015. In this collection, Irmgard Emmelhainz operates in the committed literature tradition of Walter Benjamin and André Gide in Moscow in the 1920s, and Susan Sontag and Juan Goytisolo in Sarajevo in the 1990s—writers and cultural observers grappling with the political processes of others, elsewhere.
 
In order to render the issue of representation, of speaking on behalf of the Palestinian ordeal in all its complexity, The Sky Is Incomplete is composed as a collage, gathering diary entries, letters, experimental passages, script, poetry, art criticism, political analysis, and other genres to convey an opaque view of the Palestine Question. Beyond representation in the sense of giving testimony or speaking on behalf of the Palestinians, however, the author's parting point is relational: The Sky Is Incomplete is about encounters—with friends, mentors, interlocutors, lovers, children, activists, and soldiers (Israeli and Palestinian).

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction to the English Edition
• Introduction to the Spanish Edition
• The Sky Is Incomplete
• Brownie and Brownie
• A Bohemia in Ariha (Jericho)
• To Get to Palestine You Must Pass through Israel
• Dialogue in Bed
• Solidarity, Empathy
• Chronicle of a Centrifugal Fearless Delirious-Becoming
• War against the Night
• United Hands and Feet of Benetton
• “Don’t Think This Is the Next Chiapas”
• Scapeg(h)o(s)at
• Meanwhile, I Avoid Looking for Your Voice in Soundwaves
• Second Version
• ʾUm Al Burjayn (The Mother of Two Towers)
• A Lesson to Be Learned from Palestinian Icons of Resistance?
• Of Marbles and Almonds
• Encounter with Mahmoud Darwish at the Grand Park Hotel in Ramallah
• You’re Trapped in a Maze of Tiny Little Passages, All Different
• Finally, Awdati
• From Ramallah to Tel Aviv
• Avatar in Palestine
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments