An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba

by Doctor Nahla Abdo

  If a cartographic imaginary of nationhood and native sovereignty have rendered some experiences more valuable than others, how might we reclaim remaindered forms of historical sense? For Jean Genet, another chronicler of Palestinian life, affect and the senses are central for rendering experience. “I’m not an archivist, or a historian or anything like it”, Genet confesses at the outset of Prisoner of Love (1986), which describes the nine months he spent with Palestinian fedayeen fighters in the Jordanian desert in 1970. He continues with the disarming admission that he had failed to understand the Palestinian revolution he witnessed. “If the reality of time spent among ‒ not with ‒ the Palestinians resided anywhere”, he writes, “it would survive between all the words that claim to give an account of it” (Genet 1986: 5). The acknowledgement of a reality beyond and between words is neither paradox nor mere rhetoric but rather a call for a different order of engagement. The embodied world of the military camp he conjures seems suspended, untethered to chronology, to plotlines partisan or otherwise; he catches the spirit of revolt mid-moment, in the gestures and body language of military commandos. Genet gives us fighters playing cards with an imaginary deck, through carefully choreographed gestures, or singing to each other across hills, competing with the “voice” of stream below; the rituals of washing and shaving; banal moments of listlessness and boredom. Bodies ‒ Genet’s and those of others around him ‒ are instruments of perception and inscription, “a general setting” that “co-exists with the world”, in the manner envisaged by the phenomenological philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962: 250).

  Said once described Genet’s account of Palestinian experience as seismographic, “drawing and exposing the fault lines that a largely normal surface had hidden” (cited in Soueif 2003: xiv). Genet was indifferent to the success of the national project and keenly aware of the threat posed by statist and institutional ideologies.9 His close examination and interpretation of everyday life in Ajloun is concerned with causal structures rather than with the moment captured, and offers a generative model of sensory poetics. It is embodied and intensely felt. If event-driven historical narratives have constrained our ability to engage the affective complexities and contradictions of indigenous pasts, sensory poetics may suggest alternatives. “Accounting for what duress looks like needs the poetics of thought to make its case”, observes Ann Laura Stoler (2016: 36), highlighting the importance of sensate bodies for accessing pasts. “Sensorial insights”, Stoler continues, are “crucial to the critical impulses that hover unarticulated on our tongues and that flourish in what some are already saying and others of us cannot hear”. By circumventing familiar representational strategies and methods of inquiry, embodied experience and poetics may introduce new possibilities for scholars of Palestine.

  DISPLACED PASTS

  Not long after I began research in Shatila in 2002 I was drawn into a discussion that seemed to perform the intergenerational transmission of memories of the expulsion that I had come to Beirut half-expecting to find. I was sitting drinking tea with Umm Mahmud and her husband Munir on the roof of their home between lines of billowing laundry when we were joined by their elderly neighbour, Abu Hamadi. After more tea and banter, it became clear that he had come to us to escape domestic turmoil. His son was visiting from Berlin with his German wife, and she had refused to travel to Nahr el-Bared camp, in north Lebanon, to see relatives. “When I was young marriage was not for love like nowadays”, complained Abu Hamadi, alluding to the fact that his lovesick son had lost all ability to reason with his wife. “You know how I met my wife?”, he asked:

  When I was eight years old I got beaten up at school. A boy in my class defended me and we became good friends. Later he suggested we swap sisters. How could I say no? I was engaged at thirteen. After the events [1948] I risked my life to bring my wife to Lebanon. I returned a year later to get her. She had not left with me, but remained with my mother in Nahef [a village in the Northern Galilee]. When I came to Lebanon I first lived in Bint Jbeil [in south Lebanon]. It took me a day and a night to walk to Nahef. I walked through the mountains in the dark … There was no border then, it was open, you could move freely … I remember feeling very thirsty. There was no water anywhere ‒ no rivers or streams to drink from. In the morning I collected dew from the leaves and small puddles. I found fruit to eat and I slept in snatches. It was cold. All I had with me was my coat ‒ I pulled up the collar like this [gestures with his hands]. At one point some Jews that were camped in the woods saw me, and they started shooting. I ran, zigzagging, through the trees to dodge the bullets [laughs, mirroring the movement with his hand]. I was too swift, I flew!

  At this point, Munir leant forward and exclaimed, “Uncle, you’re a hero!” [ya battal!] You were strong then ‒ not like now. You could run fast, you knew the way!” Abu Hamadi laughed and continued:

  I arrived in Nahef the second night. I followed the stars. Our house was at the edge of the village so I took the path through the orchards without being seen [Israeli soldiers were patrolling villages to prevent refugees from returning]. I knew the hidden paths, the trees that marked our land and the places where I could hide; my feet led me. I spoke to my mother through the window at the back of our house. I told her to tell my wife to meet me on the hill above the village that night. Then I hid and waited for her in that place. She came with my mother – they called to me … What can I tell you? [pauses]. My mother embraced me. “Why are you leaving me a second time? Who will look after me?” “Yamma”, I said, “I’ll come back and look after you, don’t worry.”

  Abu Hamadi struggled to maintain his composure and was unable to continue. We sat silently, stunned by the story’s abrupt and painful conclusion.

  “People in those days were courageous”, Munir reflected, after Abu Hamadi left. “Look what they did and how they suffered.” Turning to me, he added, “Look how we’ve suffered”. Sensing my discomfort, Umm Mahmud quickly interjected: “My parents’ generation was uneducated and they didn’t understand. They were like Tarzan – strong but ignorant. When they left they had no idea what would happen, that they would not return. Our generation is different.” She went on to anticipate what the loss of this generation and their stories would mean for the community. “Who will remember?” she lamented. “Sometimes when I listen to Abu Hamadi or to my parents talk about Palestine I realize they will soon be gone. When I remember this I feel life has stopped.”10 This sense of proleptic nostalgia for the imminent loss of ontological connection to the material and social worlds from which these stories emerge, which one hears often, lends a predictable intensity to such moments and forms the implicit backdrop of first-generation narratives. It also gestures to the complex temporality of refugee experience, as the exigencies of the present are experienced both as the continuation of a traumatic past and the past of some diminishing future. As statelessness and deepening deprivation revives and revises the erasures of 1948 in camp communities, past, present and future tenses overlap, challenging normative sequential chronologies of rupture in complex ways (Jayyusi 2007; Khouri 2012).

  Much could be said about intergenerational dynamics at work in this exchange – the pervasive sense of guilt that hovers over it, and the particular social context of remembrance. Munir’s assertion that Abu Hamadi’s story illuminates communal suffering highlights how individual biographies are affectively experienced and collectively interpreted. The story introduced me to the concept of mubadale (the practice of “swapping” sisters which allowed poorer families to avoid onerous dowries). It also highlighted the permeability of borders in the aftermath of 1948, as refugees found ways to return to their homes and lands (and the efforts by Israeli forces to prevent return), and navigated the radical discontinuities of their condition.11 It revealed the gaps in our understanding of these events. Why did Abu Hamadi’s mother and wife stay behind? (This detail goes against the grain of official histories of the 1948 expulsion, which often foreground fear of violence towards women as one of the prim
ary reasons villagers fled.) What factors determined who left and who stayed?12 At the time I was struck by the way Abu Hamadi’s painful account of returning to Nahef surfaced in a mundane conversation about a domestic dispute, and by the failure of narrative to bridge past and present. As with many accounts of the expulsion, it underscored the extent to which emotion structures recollection and is elemental to its illocutionary force: here experience is communicated not only through language, but in the sudden curtailing of speech.

  “To comprehend”, writes Merleau-Ponty (1962: ii), “essentially means to describe what we know of the world and how we know. And we know not through our intellect but through our experience.” Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological insights, Lena Jayyusi coined the term “in-vivo subjectivity” for states of being in which Palestinians experience, recall and make meaningful former ways of life through reference to the body. “It is in and through this (mindful) body that we are in ‘place’”, writes Jayyusi (2007: 121), and “it is through this relationship to the body that [place] is remembered and narrated”. In Abu Hamadi’s narrative, remembrance of place is firmly grounded in bodily experience, just as the material environment of exile and old age shape the act of recollection and its reception by others. As he spoke his hands instinctively traced his movements across hills, over rocks, between trees, down paths, spatializing memory through a “corporeal lived geography” (Jayyusi 2007: 125). The thirst quenched by dew gathered from leaves and the feet that find their way home reveal knowledge charged with the cumulative force of lived experience. Descriptions of climbing over mountains and the agility with which he dodged Israeli bullets intensify and accrete meaning in the cramped setting of the camp: each inflects the other. They also suggest a mobile and dynamic relation to landscape, where attachment to place is inscribed through habitual activity and movement (Ingold 1993).13 If nationalist teleology streamlines the past, organizing experience according to linear narrative logics that unfold towards a conclusion, embodied memories are recursive, collapsing time through repetition and unsettling the temporal boundaries separating past and present.

  As Samera Esmeir (2003: 45) argues, the elliptical and truncated quality of many expulsion narratives enact “the doubling of witness”. They convey not only the historical details, but also how these events continue to be felt in the lives of those who lived them.14 In Abu Hamadi’s account we feel the density of grief that resists formulation. When Umm Mahmud’s mother, Umm ‘Ali, sang of a woman newly displaced to Bint Jbeil who entreats a bird to fly over the mountains to find her lost child, she was unable to finish. As soon as she began singing, the moment of impasse was anticipated, and when it came, the others present would also weep.15 In the moments when language fails, experience is communicated as an affective charge that is culturally constituted and constitutive, connecting speakers and listeners in both predictable and unexpected ways. The expression of emotion and the triggered physiological response is, arguably, another means by which the continuity of valued lifeworlds are sustained as “simultaneously historical, figurative and biographically bodied” (Jayyusi 2007: 130). Affective modes of expression, which are first and foremost felt, draw upon the affective energies simmering in the substrata of camp life that “push a present into composition” (Stewart 2011: 452).

  Elders sometimes actively resisted speaking about the past. In certain cases this resistance seemed connected to a residual fear that committing memories of pre-1948 Palestine to the historical record was in some way to recognize them as past and over, imposing finality on a story still unfolding and unresolved. However, the repeated refrain in many interviews ‒ “What can I tell you?”, “What can I say”, “This is what I know”, or, in Otruk’s case, “What can I remember? What should I remember?” ‒ also suggests a lack of conviction about the purpose and usefulness of recounting these events at all. Recalling the battle to liberate the village of al-Birwa in 1948, Mahmoud Hajja describes how, after a long and valiant fight, the village was handed back to Zionist forces by the Arab Army of Salvation. Hajja trembles and looks away from the camera, the pain of betrayal still keenly felt. “You’re clearly an educated man”, he says, turning to the interviewer, “you study what happened … This is history, and history is merciless.” He raises his hand to emphasize that there is nothing more to say. Here, again, somatic and affective registers accentuate verbal meaning while simultaneously marking its communicative limits. Hajja’s challenge that the interviewer measure the distance between resistance and betrayal for himself inverts the assumption that he should want to give an account of his experiences, or recruit them to a moral position. He seems to question storytelling as a reconstitutive tool, or a means of bearing witness. By extension, he also implicitly questions the project of archive – the unequal power relations and imperial logics and complicities it instantiates, and the conceit that documenting histories of dispossession can bring justice for victims, or alleviate suffering.

  GENEALOGIES OF LABOUR

  When the Nakba Archive was established in 2002, almost no Palestinian oral history had been recorded on film. In turning to film the aim was to document the social and material contexts of remembrance, and to take seriously the embodied and performative dimension of these narratives. At the most literal level, audio-visual media affirm the corporeal dimension of human experience. More than any other medium, film manifests the sensory expression of experience through experience (Sobchack 1992). Film grounds signification in embodied language as an instrument of expression and site of meaning-making, and challenges the primacy of language for understanding. Its power as a medium lies in its immediacy, its ability to reach the body and emotions of viewers directly, circumventing intellectual understanding and proscriptive categories, and enabling imaginative faculties.16 More broadly, film makes visible the intersubjective and enactive dynamics at work in human communication and the central importance of performative context. Because filmic meaning-making emerges as a result of responsive, dialectical processes, which implicate subject, viewer and filmmaker, it resists interpretive closure, introduces ethical dimensions and complicates telos.17

  While the primary goal in building the archive was to create a historical resource, in reviewing the collection as it has grown over the years, I have come to see the possibilities of a phenomenological study of its contents. Descriptions of labour, childhood, sociality, pain, joy, love, poetic performance, and so forth, archive the past in bodily practice, disrupting the trim lines of event-based histories, and even historicality itself. Like Otruk, most of the elders interviewed were of peasant origin or poor city dwellers and illiterate. Many had lived and worked as farmers and herders in Palestine, and it was chiefly through descriptions of work (and its associated matrix of relationships, places and practices) that they would remember the towns, villages and social worlds they had left behind. Recollections of fishing, tending flocks, sowing and harvesting, and the domestic economy articulate ‒ and bring into alignment ‒ the people, land, routines and affective ties formed through them. The labour involved in maintaining a household, bringing up children or working the land reveals the seasonal rhythms and richness of familial and communal life that fulfilled social, biological and existential needs. Narratives of labour are generative for thinking about the senses as “both sensible and sense-making” (Sobchack 1992: 7), because they reveal and thematize embodied consciousness realizing itself in the world. In the context of performance we become aware not only of a psychic labour of remembrance replacing the physical labours recalled, but also the sensory labour involved in “making something of things” (Stewart 2011: 447).

  While individual actions are instinctively understood to be the expression of spontaneous choices, they invariably draw on a reservoir of embodied experiences and cultural conventions that are passed down but not always recognized (Fassin 2007).18 The reproduction of the past through bodily practice, which records its own history of sensation separately from the mind, can be knowing or unconsc
ious, explicit or implicit.19 When Umm Wissam, an elderly relative of Umm Mahmud’s, described for me the domestic chores she performed as a young girl in Sufsaf, she recalled shaking out the mattresses during the summer months when the family slept outside to make sure no snakes were coiled inside. If she came across one she would talk to it: “Let us treat each other well, you go your way and I’ll go mine and no one will be harmed.” As she recounted this story, she mimicked the action of peeking between the folds of cloth, noting how she still continued to shake the rugs in the same way she had been taught as a child. When I recalled this conversation after her death, her daughter noted how she herself vigorously shook the rugs the same way each morning, reflecting that it was in such everyday gestures that she kept the memory of her mother alive. Beyond its intimate dimension, the action of shaking out bedding also connected her daughter, if not always consciously, to a more distant past in rural Palestine that she had never experienced. Although inherited bodily memories and habits lose their experiential referents over time, they continue to carry overtones of their original meaning, while producing new ones that, in turn, may be materially inscribed and passed down.