Wilderness Abroad: From Twain to Shehadeh

The wilderness tradition in 19th century U.S. literature is conventionally read as bound up with the rise of nationalism and the concept of purity in regard to both land and person, both untouched or uncorrupted by modernity.... [ view full abstract ]

The wilderness tradition in 19^th century U.S. literature is conventionally read as bound up with the rise of nationalism and the concept of purity in regard to both land and person, both untouched or uncorrupted by modernity. Rob Nixon argues that the reason post-colonial literary studies often reject ecocriticism is that they find ecocriticism complicit with the U.S. wilderness tradition. I argue, however, that this reading of “wilderness” is reductive, since the idea of wilderness transforms as it travels from the U.S. to different cultural sites. In this paper, I read Mark Twain’s 19^th century travelogue The Innocents Abroad alongside Raja Shehadeh’s travelogue Palestinian Walks. A Palestinian writer and reader of Twain’s travelogue, Shehadeh recycles parts of Twain’s narrative, but also transfigures them in a way which intentionally refutes a monolithic meaning of the term wilderness. Twain’s influence is present in modern discourses regarding the Holy Land where his labeling it as “a blistering naked treeless land” lead to a renewing of the biblical narrative of “making the desert bloom,” that is the slogan for the Jewish National Fund and the inspiration behind Israeli agricultural policy.  Shehadeh’s reflection on the beauty of the desert ecosystem comes as a direct response to Twain’s disdain and to those discourses which value “wilderness” only for the productive capacity they see in it. Shehadeh’s reflections thus suggestively parallel Jeffery Cohen’s Prismatic Ecology that works to move beyond the usual privileging of green readings within ecocriticism.