Imagined motion in Haifa: Digitally reading space and time in Ikhtayyi by Emile Habibi

Literary cartography is used to analyze space and spatial acts in literary texts. The visual outcomes, maps and networks, enable readers and scholars to ask diverse questions about the plot, the characters, the imagined geography and the interrelations between space and time. 

This paper examines the spatial and temporal movement in a book that has a seemingly static narrative. Ikhtayyi by Emile Habibi tells a story of a traffic jam in the Israeli city of Haifa that stimulates the narrator’s search for his lost childhood memory, which faded after the establishment of the state of Israel.

this paper suggests two spatial readings of a novel: the first one is anchored on the physical world, which structures a spatial narrative of a bildungsroman; the second reading is anchored on a networked geography, which does not have directionality but rather an accumulation of all the occurrences past, present and future. These interpretations complement each other and reflect the complexity of defining a “place”.