The Sky Is Incomplete

Translated from Spanish for the first time, and with a new introduction to the English edition, The Sky Is Incomplete: Travel Chronicles in Palestine is comprised of sixty short entries detailing life in and reflections on the Occupied Territories of Palestine in the twenty-first century. In this collection, Irmgard Emmelhainz operates in the committed literature tradition of Walter Benjamin and Andre Gide in Moscow in the 1920s, and Susan Sontag and Juan Goytisolo in Sarajevo in the 1990s—writers and cultural observers grappling with the political processes of others, elsewhere.

 

In order to render the issue of representation, of speaking on behalf of the Palestinian ordeal in all its complexity, The Sky Is Incomplete is composed as a collage, gathering diary entries, letters, experimental passages, script, poetry, art criticism, political analysis, and other genres to convey an opaque view of the Palestine Question. Beyond representation in the sense of giving testimony or speaking on behalf of the Palestinians, however, the author’s parting point is relational: The Sky Is Incomplete is about encounters—with friends, mentors, interlocutors, lovers, children, activists, and soldiers (Israeli and Palestinian).