The Semiotics of "Left-Behind Things" in the Contemporary Arabic Novel: A Study in the Literature of Memory and Refuge

Abstract

This study examines the presence of small material objects such as keys, photographs, suitcases, garments, kitchenware, and documents in contemporary Arabic novels of refuge, migration, and exile, proceeding from the hypothesis that these inanimate items do not perform a marginal descriptive function within the narrative structure, but rather transform into central semiotic systems that reproduce memory, identity, and belonging in the absence of the sensory homeland. The research adopts a composite methodology combining semiotic analysis of the object-sign, cultural criticism approaches associated with the "material turn" and thing theory, and concepts from memory studies such as "sites of memory" and "postmemory," applying this framework to Arabic novelistic samples extending temporally and geographically from the experience of the Palestinian Nakba to contemporary waves of Syrian, Iraqi, and Lebanese displacement.

The study concludes that the left-behind or carried object in these novels performs a triple function: a documentary function converting absence into a tangible trace, an identitarian function restoring the fractured self, and a resistant function dismantling official historical narratives through an "alternative archive" of inanimate things. It further concludes that Arabic refugee writing has shifted from the discourse of the collective cause toward the poetics of everyday material detail, thereby founding an aesthetics of "fragility" and "incompleteness" as new forms of literary legitimacy. The study recommends extending this approach to other genres and to comparison with world refugee literature, calls for establishing an explicit sub-field in Arabic academic studies devoted to the materialities of literary refuge, and emphasizes the necessity of documenting actual refugee objects in field archiving projects that integrate literature, anthropology, and oral history.