Commentary | Mishika Chauhan, Resisting Erasure, Claiming Space: Memory, Belonging, and Palestinian Identity in Mo
Co-created by Mohammed Amer and Ramy Youssef, the semi-autobiographical comedy-drama series Mo made its mark by receiving critical acclaim for starring a Palestinian refugee as a protagonist in a major American television show. Amidst either the naked absence or blatant attempts at removal/silencing of Palestinian narratives from the popular media landscape, Mo stands as a critical cultural intervention against this erasure. In this commentary, I argue that besides being a deeply personal story of a Palestinian refugee struggling and barely surviving through the absurdities of the US immigration system, Mo is a deeply personal, thus, a politically layered account of resistance against the systemic erasure of Palestinians and everyday negotiations to belong to the diaspora through humor, faith, trauma, and hustling/entrepreneurialism (Suhail Sultan et al. 2024). With a perfect blend of humor and heart, Mo is an archive of Palestinian loss, displacement, and daily precarity in the diaspora—a work embodying what scholars of memory and trauma studies call “postmemory” (El-Sayed 2024). Through a selective analysis of scenes from Season 1 and Season 2, the commentary highlights that this act of archiving insists on the humanization of the Palestinians.
Postmemory is a framework used to understand not only that there is a transmission of collective trauma across generations through objects (for instance, the key of return), photos, and storytelling (El-Sayed 2024), but also how the postgenerations continue to embody and narrate the histories (Hirsch 2008). In this semi-autobiographical comedy-drama, the protagonist, Mo Najjar, born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, went through displacement due to the Gulf War of 1991. They fled Kuwait and ended up in Houston—“which is the natural place you land,” jokes Mohammed Amer (Amer 2025). Mo Najjar’s family resettled in America, the land of the American dream. In the hearing preparation scene with their lawyer (Episode 7, Season 1), Yusra’s testimony, in which she narrates their family history of displacement, underscores not only intergenerational trauma but also how refugees often have to politically claim their personal stories for legal protection in the host country.
Now, in the face of the systematic erasure of Palestinians, what does it mean to resist the erasure through comedy? Without being didactic, the witty and creative writing of Mo weaves political stakes into every episode. It manages to portray trauma, longing, loss, and tragedy; in a sense, it manages to portray life as it is for refugees in America without being paralyzed by it. When a store clerk makes a mistake about hummus (Season 1, Episode 1), Mo corrects her by repeating, "It's Palestinian." This brief yet deliberate “act of importance and positive political assertion,” done through reclaiming the food, destabilizes the casual “more negative and threatening denial” or “continuing avoidance” (Said 1978) of the existence of Palestinians, so intricately and carefully woven into the fabric of Western interpersonal, media, and bureaucratic registers. There are many moments throughout the show that visualize Palestinian memory and assert Palestinian identity through cuisine and objects, whether it's hummus or the dream sequence (Episode 7, Season 2), highlighting the significance of the key of return as an emblem that stands against the “memoricide” of Palestine and Palestinians. In Palestinian history, this key is emblematic of the right to return that Edward Said advocated for.
However, Mo’s assertions are also marked by a sense of carving out a space of belonging in America. A sense of belonging in which the figure of a refugee can embrace productive ambivalence of not only embodying resistance but also seeking participation in American life, as a son, neighbor, lover, brother, and Palestinian-American. This constant friction between resistance to and reconciliation with the host culture is the productive ambivalence that organizes the everyday reality of the refugees, which Said aptly called “contrapuntal” conditions of exile (Said 2000).
Mo’s embrace of entrepreneurialism by selling knockoff luxury goods from the trunk of his car, as well as Yusra’s olive oil business adventure, so aptly named “1947,” is a stark example of how these ventures are not only a survival strategy but also an expression of “metonym of memory” (Shohat 2006). 1947—the bottle of olive oil—symbolizes the connection Mo and his family have to the land/home lost to occupation and the economic necessity for the future in America rather than the simple assimilation into the American dream. Yusra (Mo’s mother, played by Farah Bsaiso) in the interview scene (Episode 6, Season 2) with the prospective investors says, “Olive oil is more than money; this oil is our identity. Our family planted olive trees in Palestine for generations. It’s in our blood. Houston is home, and Palestine is our homeland, but the oil we make here is what ties them together.” For Mo, his family, and friends, both “the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally” (Said 2000).
Mohammed Amer’s purpose for creating this show was to “recreate actual memories,” which, as he mentioned, is a “painful thing to go through” (Amer 2025). Most of all, to consciously decide to not talk about October 7, 2023, in the show, precisely because it would’ve made it sound as if “everything started on October 7” (Amer 2025), is positively reaffirming to note that October 7, 2023, is not the “quilting point” of this erasure in the show. The storytelling of the show, thus, does not fall into the “trap” (Amer 2025) but, instead, assumes a sense of narrative control through humor. It portrays trauma, longing, loss, and tragedy without being paralyzed by it. To the credit of the artistic endeavor of the show, the reception was positive in the liberal media; reviewers praised it for its “hilarious, heart-rending” quality. In the face of the violence injunctions by “media society,” the society of power—“the power of capital in nexus with the power of the state system” (Choudhury 2024)—to silence pro-Palestinian expressions of solidarity, the existence of this show as a story of a Palestinian family serves as a cultural resistance.
Bibliography
Amer, M. (2025). "Mo Amer—'Mo,' Honouring Palestine & Absurdities of the U.S. Immigration System." The Daily Show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89YNlUEUMRI
Choudhury, S. (2024). Thoughts of Gaza Far from Gaza. Navayana Publication.
El-Sayed, A. (2024). The Perpetual Nakba: Postmemory in Suheir Hammad’s Born Palestinian, Born Black & the Gaza Suite (2010). Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies, 6(1), 226-241. doi: 10.21608/ttaip.2024.400411
Hirsch, M. (2008). The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Columbia University Press.
Said, E. (1978). The Idea of Palestine in the West. MERIP Reports, 70, 3–11. https://doi.org/10.2307/3011576
Said, E. (2000). Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Granta.
Said, E. W. (1980). The Question of Palestine. Vintage Books, New York.
Shohat, E. (2006). “Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices.” Duke University Press.
Mishika Chauhan is a researcher based in Bangalore, India. Her research interests lie at the intersection of violence, gender, apathy, necropolitics, indifference, state-sponsored violence, and accountability. Her focus is the socio-political landscape of Northeast India within the larger context of Southeast Asia. She has worked with institutions such as the French Institute of Pondicherry, the Centre for Community Knowledge, Ambedkar University Delhi, and the Centre for Equity Studies. Her writings have appeared in Social Scientist, The Polis Project, Countercurrents.org, and Newslaundry.
To cite this essay, please use the entry suggested below:
Mishika Chauhan, “Resisting Erasure, Claiming Space: Memory, Belonging, and Palestinian Identity in Mo,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, July 15, 2025; https://doi.org/10.52698/OWZG6167.