An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba

by Doctor Nahla Abdo

  At this point I would like to say that recent feminist contributions by Lena Jayyusi and Diana Allan have made an important feminist breakthrough in discussing the relationship between epistemology and ontology based on women’s memories and stories of the Palestinian genocide. Using interdisciplinary approaches, these authors employ powerful concepts such as “valency” and “affect” to describe the implications of the Nakba/genocide for women’s bodies, enriching, in the process, feminist understanding of such severe losses or genocide (see both chapters in this volume).

  Finally, feminist conceptualization and contextualization of indigeneity and settler colonialism expands feminist research methods, and especially oral history, by focusing on questions such as how the very existence of a whole collectivity – or part thereof – along with its economic, cultural and geographical identity, gets wiped off of the map. How do women remember land and genocide? How do they recount or remember their experiences of death, loss, absence and so on? With such questions asked, feminist analysis will be able to surpass its purely academic state and move into the practical realm of acknowledging the plight of indigeneity. This recognition would be an important message to the state and the world, asking for recognition of its role in land theft and genocide and, implicitly, would demand that the right of the indigenous to their lands and homeland be respected. In the Palestinian context such a vital message would remind the world as well as the settler-colonial states, including Israel, of the just right of the Palestinians to return; it would remind them of the needs, wants, hopes and dreams of Palestinian refugees/expellees.

  In other words, using anticolonial feminist methodology can turn feminism from its existing purely academic endeavours into an active call for the right of indigenous peoples; it would transform the discipline of feminism into an anti-colonial voice of action. With such a message, feminist oral history of indigenousness would become entrusted with not only reinstating women into their own history, but also reinstating the history of indigeneity itself, that of both women and men. Within the context of the Middle East in general and the Palestinians more specifically, an anti-colonial feminist methodology would become a means to counteract both Israel’s continuing settler-colonial policies and its denial of the very existence of Palestinians. Used as a compass for feminism, anti-colonial analysis would serve as the true voices of women (and men) from below. Such a position, I conclude, can contribute to solving existing feminist debate on who can research whom or the debate between a generalized theory and the unique/essentialist one.

  NOTES

  1See http://www.palestineremembered.com/OralHistory/Interviews-Listing/Story1151.html.

  2The question of whether there was a class difference between peasants, for example between the peasant and the big landlord or landowner, is clearly to be answered in the affirmative. However, and throughout British colonialism, considering that most Palestinian landlords were absentee, this meant very little to the peasants, who in most cases recognized the landowners not directly but indirectly as crop-sharers. Peasants recognized the land which they have been living on and off for hundreds of years as being their own possession. The division among Palestinian women in terms of work and education was rural–urban. It is important to note that many villages never had a school under British colonialism. Children, mostly boys, would travel by foot to a nearby village or town for basic elementary schooling (grades 1–4), whereas most cities had some schools, primarily but not solely built by Christian missionaries. This point was clarified by Mary from Tiberias, who attended elementary school in her city and went to the teachers’ college in Jerusalem. Mary also named several other upper-middle class urban women from Nazareth, Yafa and Jerusalem who attended the collage at the same time.

  3The oral narratives also contradict male Palestinian impressions of women as hadar (stay-at-home women with no presence in the public sphere), as some men interviewed in the same refugee camp suggested. It is important to remember that all interviewers in the Palestine Remembered project were males, who, when interviewing the men, hardly asked them about women’s work.

  4During the late 1960s and early 1970s I, along with many other young women in Nazareth, used to don this kind of headdress as a national marker.

  REFERENCES

  Abdo, N. (2011) Women in Israel: Race, Gender and Citizenship. London: Zed Books.

  Abdo, N. (2014) Captive Revolution: Palestinian Women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System. London: Pluto.

  Abu-Lughod, L. (2002) “Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Reflections on Cultural Relativism and its Others”, American Anthropologist 104(3): 783–790.

  Armitage, S. and S.B. Gluck (1998) “Reflections on Women’s Oral History: An Exchange”, Journal of Women Studies 19(3): 1–11.

  Boyle, F. (2013) “The Palestinian Genocide”, A testimony before the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, 21–24 August.

  Churchill, W. (1998) A Little Matter of Genocide. San Francisco: City Lights.

  Crenshaw, K. (1989) “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique”, University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–167.

  Crenshaw, K. (2016) “The Urgency of Intersectionality”, http://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality.

  Davis, A. (1981) Women, Race and Class. Toronto: Vintage.

  Davis, U. (1987) Israel, an Apartheid State. London: Zed Books, The Holocaust Industry.

  Finkelstein, N. (2015) The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. London: Verso.

  Fleishmann, E.L. (1996) “Crossing the Boundaries of History: Exploring Oral History in Researching Palestinian Women in the Mandate Period”, Women’s History Review 5(3): 531–571.

  Jewel, A. (2013) “Narrative: The Road to Black Feminist Theory”, Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice 12(1): Article 5.

  Lemkin, R. (1945) “Genocide – A Modern Crime”, http://www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin/freeworld1945.htm.

  Masalha, N. (2012) Palestine Nakba: Decolonizing History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory. London: Zed Books.

  Matsuda, M.J., C.R. Lawrence, R. Delgado and K.W. Crenshaw (1993) Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the First Amendment. Boulder, CO: Westview.

  Nadan, A. (2007) “The Palestinian Peasant Economy under the Mandate: A Story of Colonial Bungling”, Middle East Journal 61(4): 734–736.

  Pappé, I. (2006) The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld.

  Pappé, I., ed. (2015a) Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid. London: Zed Books.

  Pappé, I. (2015b) “A Brief History of Israel’s Incremental Genocide”, in N. Chomsky and I. Pappé (eds.), On Palestine. Chicago: Haymarket.

  Sangster, J. (1994) “Telling Our Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History”, Women’s History Review 3(1): 5–28.

  Sangster, J. (2012) “Oral History and Working Class History: A Rewarding Alliance”, http://www.oralhistoryforum.ca/index.php/ohf/article/viewFile/459/538.

  Shaw, M. (2010) “Palestine in an International Historical Perspective on Genocide”, Journal of Holy Land Studies 1(13): 1–24.

  Weiss, P. (2017) “Israel’s Efforts to Erase Palestinian History Reflect ‘Incremental Genocide’, Ehrenreich Says”, http://mondoweiss.net/2017/02/palestinian-incremental-ehrenreich.

  Yuval-Davis, N. (2006) “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics”, European Journal of Women’s Studies 13(3): 193–209.

  PART II

  Between epistemology and ontology: Nakba embodiment

  3

  What bodies remember:

  sensory experience as historical counterpoint in the Nakba Archive

  DIANA ALLAN

  A place is not only a geographical area; it’s also a state of mind. And trees are not just trees; they are the ribs of childhood. (Darwish 2010: 15)

  Mahmoud Darwish’s autobiographical prose poem, Journal of an Ordinary Grief, opens
with a dialogue between the author and his childhood self as he recalls the events that led his family into exile in 1948, first to Lebanon and then as internal refugees in the newly-formed state of Israel. The five-year-old apprehends the scope and meaning of violent dislocation through the growing despair of those around him. He recalls the sound of his mother’s melancholy songs of loss, “like primitive psalms” (Darwish 2010: 22), and his grandfather’s daily ritual of reading the news to gathered relatives in exile, “a weakness beginning to creep into his voice” (2010: 12) as the months pass. Fragmentary memories, charged with the heightened perception of childhood, evoke the experience of living through the disastrous events of 1948. Darwish’s visceral descriptions of places, things and ways of being, and the “ordinary” grief taking hold around him, as it settles into permanence, reclaim the dilatory contingencies and particularities of lived experience. A language of the body shapes intellection and expression, underscoring how social and material worlds are sensed, and how sense matters for communicating experience. At other moments Darwish invokes corporeal knowledge to advance moral and political claims. Later in the text he addresses an imagined Israeli reader: “The true homeland is that which cannot be known or proved. Your ability to manufacture proof does not give you priority of belonging vis-à-vis someone who can tell when the rains will come from the smell of that rock. For you that rock is an intellectual exercise, but for its owner it is a roof and a wall” (Darwish 2010: 39).

  This struggle between these two different kinds of knowing ‒ one epistemological, the other ontological, with the former learned and the latter lived ‒ has its scholarly analogues in the production of Palestinian pasts. The linear, teleological narrative of Palestinian nationhood that reasserts the links between history, identity and territory and enacts a sovereign national consciousness, consistently trumps the more amorphous elements of lived experience and sense perception, what Siegfried Kracauer called “the half-cooked states of our everyday world” (1920, cited in Harootunian 2004). Burdened by the political imperative to document and transcend ongoing, colonial destruction, Palestinian historiography and memorial practice have often been conceptualized as tools of resistance that bridge a catastrophic past and a nation yet to come. This suturing of history and nation, as a redemptive purposeful form, has functioned as a category of exclusion, privileging certain events and causal factors ‒ colonial forces, political figures, government commissions, traumatic violence and modes of resistance ‒ over accounts of everyday experience, which tend to figure as irreducible and unassimilable.

  Predictably, the exclusions have also been gendered (the heroic, “political” sacrifices of men taking precedence over the private, domestic worlds of women) and affective, with expository, event-driven history occluding embodied forms of knowledge and recollection. Affective states often appear at odds with national ones: rooted in highly localized forms of knowing, inscribed in bodied selves, and regarded as irredeemably subjective, they appear out of synch with the urgency of Palestinian politics and scholarship. Scholars are more likely to turn to historical “documents” and sift for “facts” than attend to the complex interplay of experience and expression, subjective and objective reality, or how the senses and emotions inform representation. This hesitancy is perhaps understandable. Media portrayals of Palestinian political culture as violent and impulsive may have inclined scholars to invest agency in more rational, dispassionate actors. It also expresses the desire for an effective and credible counter-narrative, capable of matching, mirroring and disrupting the positivism of the Israeli narrative, what Edward Said (1984) called “permission to narrate”. The enduring legacy of Said’s critique of Orientalism (Said 1978) has also contributed to wariness about reinforcing a specious dualism of Western rationalism and Eastern sensualism. Even more broadly, the Cartesian privileging of cognition and speech over the embodied sensorium continues to set parameters not only for analytical rigour and academic value, but for what in informal contexts counts as intelligible and communicable.

  While we might intuit why trees for Darwish are “the ribs of childhood”, the phenomenological intimacies of attachment that underpin allegorical imagery and sentiment in Palestinian narratives are more often assumed than analysed. What might a study of how people know the time of rain from the smell of a rock entail? What is distinctive about olfaction, as opposed to touch, and what possibilities does it afford for comprehending and representing experience in this context? How is the act of imagining the smell of stone different from the sensory experience of perception itself? And why might this line of inquiry trigger a twinge of scepticism for many readers? Similarly, affective experience often appears too suffused to be a coherent object of study in and of itself, imagined more like an aggregation of elements on the edge of consciousness. By normative measures of social and political accountability, addressing how Palestinians apprehend and are tethered to the world through their senses seems an epiphenomenal detour that risks deflecting attention away from the political forces at work at precisely the moment they demand close scrutiny. Pre-modern temporalities ‒ along with other preliterate cultural registers and non-word-based forms of knowing that diffract or disrupt the spatio-temporal unity of nation-formation and rational subject-formation ‒ appear problematically opaque. While sensory perception continues to figure prominently in Palestinian literature, with a few notable exceptions it remains understudied in Palestinian scholarship.1

  This tacit hierarchy has had profound implications for our understanding of Palestinian history and experience as something fundamentally discursive rather than embodied, eventful rather than durational. It posits agency as an attribute of conscious mind, while affect is located in the body, beyond interpretive reach. Despite a growing recognition that Palestinian memory and history are sites of struggle and contestation, with greater attention given to regional and economic diversity, and to groups hitherto marginalized in Palestinian historiography (women, peasants, Bedouin, poor city dwellers, refugees), this revisionism has not extended to a more radical rehistoricizing of historical experience itself.2 Embodied experience ‒ the “felt immediacies” (Desjarlais 1997) of everyday life ‒ is rarely explored as historical sense. Instead, polyvocality often stands in for those “semi-raw” elements of the past and their complex, lingering affects in the present. “Structures of feeling” add colour or depth to historical narrative more often than they constitute subjects of study in and of themselves. The body, however, is not only a bio-political subject but a locus of knowledge, both in its individual particularity and as a shared “common sense”. Habit, routine and embodiment are modes of knowing that shape how people comprehend and ascribe meaning to their material and social environment over time. While Darwish’s staged encounter of what is felt with what is “known” mobilizes sensory registers for ideological ends, his poetry also underscores the significance of corporeal experience for rethinking established historical genres and, more broadly, our categories of truth and plausibility. The affective intensities of sense perception ‒ what Lauren Berlant (2011: 53) calls the “elsewhere to sovereign consciousness” ‒ which shape all aspects of subjective life and connect individuals to each other, represent another point of entry and site of inquiry.

  It was the experience of working on the Nakba Archive in the Palestinian community in Lebanon that led me to recognize the importance of embodied knowledge and the relative impoverishment of analysis of the senses.3 Recording interviews on film with Palestinian elders revealed the gravitational force nationalist narrative exerts on individual recollection (Allan 2007, 2014), and the tensions and synergies between embodied and discursive forms of meaning-making. As a medium, the indexical properties of film afforded different possibilities for exploring the affective and sensorial registers lost or distorted in transcription, and the role non-verbal modes of expression play in communicating experience.4 As the ethnographic filmmaker and theorist David MacDougall (2006: 1) insists, “seeing not only makes us
alive to the appearance of things but to being itself”. Watching elders speak and listening to their stories, rather than reading them in text, altered my understanding of how experiences are lived, remembered and represented, their complex texture and acute affectivity. As oral historian Alessandro Portelli (1991) observes, meaning emerges in oral narratives as much through the metacommunicative energies of performance as through linguistic content. Recorded narratives had their own velocity and force. Rhythm, gesture, tone and inflection were often as important for communication and apprehension as what was said. Pivotal events could be described in moments, while seemingly incidental occurrences could take hours. An interview recorded in 2005 with Said Otruk, an elderly fishermen from Acre, is dominated by lengthy and evocative descriptions of long days at sea, the fish he caught ‒ the peculiar marvel of “boneless fish” found off Acre’s coast that were “all flesh” ‒ nets and particular fishing techniques, and his relations with his crew.5 His description of his flight into exile in April 1948 is reduced to a single, repeated sentence: “And we got on the boat.”6

  While Otruk’s descriptions of line fishing and purse-seining techniques ‒ jarjara, sharak and jaroofi ‒ might at first sight seem insignificant, or at least lack the moral imperative that would lead to broader historicizing reflection, they are bound up with other genealogies of knowing. His accounts of the material and social world of work at sea reveal an orientation to place rooted in everyday relations and routines of labour. When Otruk describes the tug on the fishing line as “beautiful” and mimics the action of the sinking float with his hand, we sense the “social aesthetics” (MacDougall 2006) recalled in that gesture and feel the pleasure it evokes. Thought becomes kinaesthetic as memories are recalled in the muscles, illustrating the tactility of knowledge (indeed, metaphors of comprehension through contact abound: we grasp meaning, are touched, struck, moved and so on). Daily routines also figure as the site where Otruk’s relations with Jewish settlers were played out. He recalls Jewish families living in a nearby coastal settlement who would come to the beach and watch them work (“never bother[ing] us”).7 In such moments, other ways of conceptualizing the relation between Palestinian “self” and Israeli “other” ‒ beyond the paradigm of national‒ethnic partition ‒ come into view (Azoulay 2013).8 As the Palestinian struggle is re-conceptualized as a project of decolonization, pre-statist imaginaries of land, self and society embedded in customary practices and habitual ways of life offer alternative avenues for conceptualizing social relations and what it means to belong to a particular place.