The Wounded Journey: Intergenerational Trauma and Redefining Palestinian Identity in Sahar Mustafa’s The Beauty of Your Face

Abstract

This study explores the crisis of migrants' identity as the central theme in Sahar Mustafa’s The Beauty of Your Face. Mustafa’s fiction addresses a migrant’s search for self-knowledge and identity. From a postcolonial and trauma perspective, this study examines migrants’ experiences and their various strategies (poetics) for managing internal conflicts between their desire to stay detached from their homeland and their challenging situation in their adopted state, which offers no promise of a sense of belonging or personal identity. The new country becomes a battleground where the self struggles with questions of belonging and detachment, inclusion and exclusion, hope and despair. Mustafa aims to illuminate the profound crisis of migrants’ identity, offering alternative perspectives to stereotypes that highlight their uniqueness and complexity, emphasizing their fluid identities as they navigate multiple cultural spaces, balancing ‘hybridity’ and ‘mimicry.

Received: 08 August 2025 / Accepted: 18 October 2025 / Published: 05 November 2025