Fieldnotes - Fatima Abdallah

Fieldnotes Graduate Speaker Series: The Palestinian Mulalat: Polyphonic Prison Poetry and Political Transformation

The paper examines the use of the mulalat—the repetitive addition of the non-lexical vocable la to words in poetry/song, as a remarkable and multifaceted moment within contemporary audiovisual works of historical prison texts. This study argues that these audiovisual renditions of folkloric Palestinian songs inaugurate a technique of what Fatima calls "prosopopoeic polyphony." This technique enables Palestinian women writing poetry from various points of spatial and temporal exile to bring forth figures of absent women—what is known as prosopopoeia—to reclaim memories of a fragmented nation. These figures, brought to life in various poetic imprints conjoined by the mulalat, enable a polyphony of silenced voices to recapture a history stolen by various processes of forced silencing and erasure.

This presentation will take an experimental approach, featuring three music videos that illustrate these concepts and inviting the audience to engage in theorizing their polyphonic dimensions. If this sounds interesting to you, please stop by!