Erased Identity and Collective Memory in Sayed Kashua’s Work

This presentation is focusing on identity and memory Sayed Kashua’s works. Kashua has published four novels in Hebrew. In each of his works, the protagonist is an Arab man, and the emphasis is on his anonymity: The protagonist is an Arab man belonging to the Israeli society. Three of all are "successful" but paranoid, living in fear of the end of their success, which could be said to represent the writer himself. However, the fact that Kashua does not give them names can be seen as a recognition that the protagonist is not his alter ego but "Arabs" as a collective identity, living in Israel.

A short story written between the second and third of his works features a protagonist named Herzl Haliwa, while the second protagonist of the third is named Amir. But this is also part of anonymity. Because Herzl Haliwa is a Jew by day and an Arab by night. And Amir receives his identity when he takes care of Yonatan, a bedridden Jew whom he "encountered" by chance. That is, even if a person has a name, that name is changed and the identity itself is rewritten.

These styles of work continue in a different form in the fourth novel, Track Changes. The protagonist of the story is Saeed. By giving him a common Arab male name, Saeed, he is still perceived as ubiquitous Arabs rather than a specific "individual" character. And Saeed`s occupation is that of a ghostwriter who collects memories of people. In other words, this story itself may be the same as Kashua`s method of writing novels in his previous works that is, the story of a man who takes a personal and unique memory, "personal history," and makes it into a completely anonymous memory by having someone else reconstruct it.