Literature

The focus on images of Palestinian villages coincided with a revival of Palestinian heritage and folklore beginning in the late 1970s. Since more explicit forms of national expression were censored by the Israelis, the village with its pastoral

image served as a suitable metaphor for the nation. The representations were not of specific villages but rather combined elements which together constituted an idyllic utopia. These included a landscape in full spring bloom, stone houses, and women wearing traditional Palestinian costume, surrounded by children and engaged in domestic activities such as baking bread, grinding wheat or harvesting crops – as we can see in many of Mansour’s works, such as The

Harvest.