Children of the Idea: Testimonial Objects, Digital Witness, and the Reality of Palestinian Return in Susan Muaddi Darraj’s Behind You Is the Sea

In the study of the Palestinian diaspora, the trauma of displacement is not a closed historical chapter but an ongoing, inherited reality. This paper explores how the second generation of Palestinian Americans processes this inheritance in Susan Muaddi Darraj’s novelin- stories Behind You Is the Sea (2024). Severed geographically from their ancestral homeland, the second-generation characters occupy what Homi K. Bhabha calls the “Third Space,” where they must balance the inherited “roots” of their parents’ unarticulated grief with the forwardmoving “routes” of their assimilated American lives. Because they did not directly experience the 1948 Nakba, this paper applies Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” to examine how trauma is transmitted across generations. However, since dominant Western trauma models assume the catastrophe is completely in the past, this analysis decolonizes the paradigm in dialogue with the decolonial turn (Mignolo 2011; Maldonado-Torres 2007) and with postcolonial and Palestinian trauma scholarship, including the work of Stef Craps, Rosemary Sayigh, Ahmad H. Sa’di, and Lila Abu-Lughod. It argues that the second generation experiences a doubling of memory, in which inherited ancestral pain collides with ongoing systemic marginalization in the United States. Finally, this paper investigates how the younger generation utilizes material “testimonial objects” and digital networks of witness to bridge paralyzing silences and construct an “imagined homeland,” and demonstrates how this diasporic sanctuary clashes with the occupied geographic reality upon physical return.

Keywords: postmemory, third space, testimonial objects, Palestinian American diaspora, hybrid identity