Bondage of Jewish Messianism: The Silent/ Non Silent Subaltern in Yehuda Amichai’s “Jerusalem 1967” and Marco Antonio Campos’s “Friday in Jerusalem”

The religious textures of Jewish Messianism which the Zionists support in order to defend the righteousness of the sons of Zion in Palestine constitute a postcolonial pejorative discourse of alterity. Though critics like Binta Parry criticize Gayatri Spivak’s viewpoint of the silent subaltern, the researcher believes that her deconstructive approach paves the way for an attack against the marginalization of the colonial subject. In subaltern studies, Homi Bhabha has another point of view which is different from that of Spivak. For instance, his views of the failure of the colonial gaze and mimicry show that the subaltern can speak. Consequently, the research believes that Spivak and Bhabha’s viewpoints complement each other in expounding an analysis of the chosen poetic discourse of this postcolonial paper. A study of the two poems elucidates Bhabha’s belief in ambivalence of the postcolonial discourse. Thus, the researcher believes that the somewhat derogatory language of the Latin American poet Campos and the Israeli poet laureate Amichai, constitute a Manichean dualism of projection and rejection. Moreover, the strategic manipulation of repetition raises a discussion of Bhabha’s concept of the stereotype and its relation with ambivalence. A postcolonial study of the two poems shows that the Jewish Messianic connotations, which depict a colonizer/ colonized polarity, give voice to the subjugation of the subaltern whose silence can now be heard. The researcher supports her analysis with the views of a number of scholars who belong to the fields of aesthetic, and postcolonial studies and Jewish-Christian theology. The paper shows that a Zionist call for a Jewish Messianic affiliation defends a kind of a postcolonial penality, and inferiority of the subaltern.