"Listen, the Path Has Sounds"

An Alternative Space for Alternative Ethics in To the End of the Land by David Grossman

Abstract

The article suggest a new reading of David Grossman's novel, To the End of the Land (2008), which focuses on a soldier's mother who decides "to be the first notification-refusenik," abandons her home and sets off on a hike throughout Israel. Drawing on Michel de Certeau's spatial theory and gender theories of the ethics of care, the article argues that Grossman adopts a female-mother's position as amoral civic strategy, allowing him to subvert the construction of the Israeli space as a heroic national space and imbue it with a semiotic "mother-tongue" based on sensations, care and intimacy. Grossman, who is associated with voices of peace and protest such as the Four Mothers movement, the Coalition of Women for Peace and Machsom Watch, that called for a new civil discourse by consciously using the discourse of motherhood, outlines a trajectory for an alternative civil discourse for a different kind of nation-building: he weaves together maternal language and maternal thinking about the Israeli space and reconstructs it as a space of ethics, non-violence and peace.