Echoes in the Void: Transgenerational Haunting and the Persistence of Palestinian Memory in Azem’s The Book of Disappearance

Abstract

The present paper brings forth to the speculative yet most realistic pronouncement of the current era in which all Palestinians vanish overnight, leaving behind empty homes, and disrupted social systems by providing testimony through tear-filled diaries and recollections. While employing Meera Atkinson's (2017) transgenerational lens, the researchers investigate the characters’ fractured memories and traumatic experiences in Ibtisam Azam’s The Book of Disappearance. Azem dramatizes the delicate yet robust mechanisms through which trauma, memory, and silence are passed down through the generations despite systematic erasure. Even after more than seventy years of the Nakba (1948), characters are preserving their memory as this has passed across generations featuring that while bodies may disappear, trauma and memory remain as spectral legacies, shaping the present and unsettling dominant narratives. The novel’s central conceit: the sudden disappearance of Palestinians functions not as absence but as a heightened presence that exposes the continuity of loss and remembrance. Through a close reading of recurring images of emptiness, repetition, and silence, the study demonstrates that Azem constructs a poetics of haunting in which memory reverberates across bodies, generations, and silences.  In bridging Palestinian narrative with transgenerational (2017) trauma theory, the paper contributes to a growing body of scholarship that reads political displacement through affective inheritance. Ultimately, it proposes that Azem’s (2019) novel renders the void itself resonant, turning disappearance into a living archive of collective memory.