ABSENCE AS TESTIMONY: SETTLER COLONIAL ELIMINATION AND NARRATIVE RESISTANCE IN AZEM'S THE BOOK OF DISAPPEARANCE

Abstract

Azem’s The Book of Disappearance envisions a sudden vanishing of Palestinians from contemporary Israel, leaving behind their homes, possessions, and memories. The silence that follows is not emptiness but a spectral reminder of historical and ongoing attempts to erase Palestinian presence. The novel’s speculative premise illuminates the structures of settler colonialism where disappearance, renaming, and cartographic control operate as mechanisms of domination, and where memory becomes a counterforce that resists elimination. Disappearance functions not merely as absence but as a haunting that unsettles the colonizer’s narrative of permanence. The text repeatedly demonstrates that the logic of elimination cannot fully succeed, for absence itself bears witness. Through the intertwined voices of Ariel, the Israeli journalist struggling to make sense of a world without Palestinians, and Alaa, the Palestinian photographer whose memories saturate the narrative, the novel stages a confrontation between colonial dependency and indigenous persistence. Spaces are deterritorialized through acts of erasure; maps redrawn, streets renamed, identities displaced, yet simultaneously reterritorialized through remembrance, testimony, and imagination. The analysis highlights how Azem transforms speculative fiction into a political mode, one that both reflects and contests the conditions of dispossession. Literature here becomes a space where silenced histories return, not as nostalgia, but as an active force that destabilizes power. The Book of Disappearance demonstrates that what is made invisible continues to shape the visible; what is denied still asserts its presence. The novel stands as a testament to the impossibility of complete erasure and the persistence of resistance embedded within memory and storytelling.