An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba

by Doctor Nahla Abdo

  Said Otruk’s interviews also reveal how bodies remember and filter experience. A complex picture of attachment rooted in work emerges. “Palestine”, to the extent that it figured at all in his narratives, appeared to signify a constellation of material and embodied practices and social relations connected with fishing as much as an iconic, place. Fishing, and the communities of practice it sustained, knitted together cities and villages along the coast stretching up to Latakia, making social and spatial configurations fluid. When I asked if he had ever visited the border by boat in his many decades of exile, he responded that he no longer had the right nets to fish in those waters, making such a trip futile and meaningless. While my question was informed by an abstract and sovereign logic of maps and borders – Palestine as seen from above – his response charted the corporeal coordinates of a fisherman at sea. For Otruk, Palestine was inseparable from the experience of fishing in particular waters with particular nets. It was also tied to the embodied experience of youth. Describing a photo of himself as a young man reclining in his boat on Acre’s waterfront as capturing the “golden age”, Otruk appears to gesture as much at the splendid figure of his own youth as at the halcyon days of pre-1948 Palestine: the loss of Palestine appears lyrically convergent with the felt loss of bodily vitality. Such accounts of everyday material and affective life do not simply constitute the narrative tissue connecting more significant events, but emerge as the very ground of social and political life, its embodied habitus. We begin to comprehend, pace Darwish, how place is not simply geography but a state of mind.

  “TWO KILOS AND A BOX OF SONGS”: ARCHIVE AND POETIC OPACITY

  Sa’da Kayed, a Bedouin Palestinian from the clan of ‘Arab al-Hayb, living in Bourj el-Shemali, recalled tending camels as a child: the sound of their bells, their speed when running, the pastures where they grazed, the games she played while working. When her family fled to Lebanon by camel in 1948, thenceforth “moving among strangers”, the sound of their bells took on a forlornness, symbolizing the traumatic loss of a way of life but also, paradoxically, its continuity. Camels and bells – like fishing lines for Otruk – functioned as touchstones of memory that connect generations and places across space and time.20 In her narrative, loss and longing are made meaningful through descriptions of a world rich with sensory and affective experience, mediated through poetic formula. Kayed was first introduced to us as a gifted singer of ‘ataba, a traditional form of lament, largely associated with Bedouin culture. While ‘ataba is a carrier of social memory, values and cultural allusions, the short verse units afford considerable creative latitude. Verbal formulae are interwoven with improvised phrases integrating different temporal registers, linguistic and non-linguistic elements. Her songs are history in another form: describing daily life, work and courtship, they represent a mode of historical consciousness that reproduces cultural patterns rooted in a social somatics of practical activity and verbal play. As pre-literate oral memory they are another form of archive, one that draws upon and enriches a deeply embodied tradition of oral epic.21

  The laments recorded with Kayed are about love, loss and struggle – themes affectively connected in performance. Recalling a lament she sang during a funeral procession for the resistance fighter Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, Kayed admits that she could not remember the year it took place, or how old she was. “I wasn’t married then – I was still a young girl”, she explains, describing how she walked in the procession “all the way from Haifa to Balad al-Sheikh”.22 Later she sings the groom’s song, “Zareef al-Toul”, which she concludes by vigorously cursing Arab governments: “It’s a loss that Israel took our homeland, but the shame and disgrace is with the Arab Kings.” She laughs and adjusts her scarf, as if taken aback by her own forthrightness, but also emboldened by the affirmation she receives from other family members who are listening. In the background a baby cries: “See, even Nassir’s daughter wants to curse them!”, she teases, shifting focus to the present realities of camp life and redirecting discourses of blame and responsibility to host governments in exile. Desire and betrayal are routed through each other, knitting together histories of violent expulsion and protracted exile, colonial pasts and a “(post) colonial” present (see Stoler 2016).

  When Kayed is asked if she used to dance dabkeh at weddings, she responds effusively. “And how … Yeee! We were singing for the flute players”:

  If you were a golden ring I would hide you,

  And put you between my eyes [laughs and covers her mouth]

  Play your flute, play!

  Your height is admired,

  Let those who hate you become sick, blind and mad!

  Ala dal’ouna, Ala dal’ouna,

  The beloved has left without bidding us farewell.

  Oh birds, fly together,

  Let us exchange sad times for happy ones.

  I wish I were a garden planted with date palms,

  And let my parents not give me to anyone by you! [Laughs and looks away]

  She put on her kuffiyeh and corduroy dress,

  And on the inside her heart is burning.

  May God avenge women like us

  … There were many songs [pauses]

  I have two kilos and a box of songs,

  Those that are on my lips are different from those in my heart.

  This variation on the well-known song “Dal ‘Ouna” (literally, “Let’s go and help”, from the word ta‘awon, “cooperation”) was traditionally sung to ease the tedium of physical labour in agricultural work and encourage collective effort.23 The rhythm of the refrain-like stanzas are said to mimic the sound of a scythe cutting wheat, or stamping feet compacting dirt and straw in building work.24 While Kayed’s performance renders these kinetic registers forcefully, the images and syntactical constructions appear confusing and opaque, more like a stream of consciousness. Tense shifts and inconsistent use of pronouns (“I”, “she”, “us”) make it hard to locate the speaking subject, while her assertion that “the songs on my lips are different from those in my heart” communicates incompleteness and experiences that resist inscription, or will not be shared. In performance, the non-linear quality seems to mimic the intensities of grief and desire – “a reenactment of what the senses do when they’re catching up to something” (Berlant 2011: 59).

  Meaning emerges through vocal pitch, gesture and Kayed’s extraordinarily mobile facial expressions. The moments when she laughs ebulliently, turns her head, covers her mouth with her hand, looks down, or suddenly appears melancholy and exhausted tell us something else. As her voice rises and falls, vibrates and extends, her words take on a kind of incantatory power whose meaning is no longer tethered to language, but is intensely visceral. (I have watched this interview countless times and it always makes my hair stand on end and my throat tighten.) We sense the erotic charge and longing of the phrase “And put you between my eyes”, just as we feel the weight of grief contained in “Two kilos and a box of songs”. These are moments when we see and hear bodies remembering, but also where we become aware of the autonomy of subjects to redirect, interrupt or confound conventions of signification through a liberated lyricism of gesture and poetic practice.

  DEAD LETTERS

  While the Nakba Archive may have helped preserve the narratives of a passing generation, its modes of mediation, transmission and selection have also contributed to the encoding of representational forms. Converting spoken narrative into text is not without its risks, chief among them a disregard for how oral performance “lives by its fluidity” (Harris 2002: 84). Inevitably, the filmed testimonies recorded for the archive will outlive the vitality of their performance. What happens to embodied memory at this point of transition from history as lived to history as text? How is it affected by capture – what is lost? Hannah Arendt (1998) cautioned that the cost of reifying remembrance – of turning it into a “worldly thing” – is paid for in the “dead letter”, which replaces a sense of history as lived experience, practice and possibility.
Umm Mahmoud was perhaps alluding to this when she compared the loss of these stories as a lived component of everyday life to a kind of death. As lived experience is inscribed as text and “events” are sutured to narrative, vitality as potentiality is lost. “My feeling of belonging was no longer instinctive”, writes Darwish (1973: 17). “It became more mature, and the content of the dream, not its eruption, became my cause.” Raja Shehadeh has similarly described how narratives of national attachment alter ‒ and paradoxically compromise ‒ his sense of relation to place:

  Sometimes when I am walking in the hills, say Batn el-Hawa, unselfconsciously enjoying … the smell of thyme and the hills and trees around me, I find myself looking at it, it transforms itself before my eyes into a symbol of samidin, of our struggle, of our loss. And at that very moment, I am robbed of that tree; instead, there is a hollow space into which anger and pain flow. (Shehadeh cited in Parmenter 1994: 86‒87)

  Palestinians are in this way doubly dispossessed.

  Archives create the illusion of distance and transcendence that are both lacking in refugee camps. To understand the full scope and significance of the events of the expulsion for Palestinians in Lebanon is to recognize that they are not only remembered discursively but embodied, passed down not only historically but existentially. When Palestinians say “the Nakba is still happening”, they speak on two levels. The Palestinian refugees newly displaced from Yarmouk, Daraa, Neirab and the other Palestinian camps in Syria to Lebanon, Turkey and elsewhere, form simply the latest chapter in a history of displacement that began in 1948. The meaning of the Nakba is not stable, nor can it be disconnected from performative context: attunement to the past necessarily entails engagement with the present and future, as histories of violent dispossession and exclusion are anticipated as much as remembered. As Jayyusi (2007: 110) notes, any discussion of Palestinian memory has to be understood in cumulative terms and in relation to “the continuing figure of erasure and denial that marks the contemporary Palestinian condition”. A friend born and raised in Shatila put it simply: “I know about the Nakba because I live in Shatila” (Allan 2014: 51). These narratives suggest a historicity not linear but recursive and open-ended. As with many other sites of (post-)colonial study, Palestinian pasts demand “recursive analytics” characterized by an “unsettled, contingent quality of histories that fold back on themselves, and in that refolding, reveal new surfaces” (Stoler 2016: 26).

  In a recent email exchange about the “archive fever” (Doumani 2009) taking hold in Palestine studies with a friend – a scholar of Palestinian history, and herself Palestinian – she writes: “Something anarchic in me finds the invisible so much more desirable because everything is being claimed … We are a settler colony now and everything has to be indexed through this analytical/political frame.” She continues: “I think about the desire I have to shield the gesture and the illegible from the hunger to capture, acquire, incorporate.” As scholars of Palestine return to historical sources with different plotlines in mind, broadening our frameworks of inquiry in search of new political and social formations through which to conceptualize the past and imagine the future, it is perhaps worth pausing to consider her note of caution. In a similar vein, the cultural critic Édouard Glissant (1997: 11) advocates what might be called intimacy without transparency: “We preserve difference by granting opacity to others, which is to surrender power.” More important than the right to difference (which he says is exhausted) is the right not to be understood. Opacity recognizes the stubborn, and potentially empowering, irreducibility of otherness. “I claim the right to opacity for everyone, which is not a withdrawal”, writes Glissant. “I do not have to ‘understand’ anyone, an individual, a community, a people to ‘take them with me’ at the price of stifling them, of losing them in an amorphous totality” (cited in Murdoch 2013: 886).

  Inevitably, any effort to render the embodied and affective complexity of refugee experience through verbal description will fall short.25 The will to take seriously the idea that “bodies remember” does not translate to certainty of insight into what elders actually feel in these moments. The subjective nature of interpretation does not, however, invalidate the project. These constraints can be productive, inviting us to engage in another reality, one that, in Genet’s (1986: 3) words, is “fertile in hate and love; in people’s daily lives; in silence, like translucency, punctuated by words and phrases”. They enable us to perceive commonalities of experience and larger political forces as they manifest in individual bodies and lives, “formulat[ing], without closing down, the investments and incoherence of political subjectivity and subjectification” (Berlant 2011: 53). In the gestures, dispositions and idiosyncracies of speech and voice, we apprehend – however inadequately, and partially – the forces and pressures of world-historical processes; we recognize loss, and all that is enfolded in that word, as something embodied and lived, whose meaning continues to evolve.

  Azoulay reminds us that as witnesses to the ongoing destruction of Palestinian society we too are complicit. She exhorts us to attend to the relationship between politics and aesthetics (in its old, etymological sense of sensuous perception), and to the role sensory experience might play in the (re)ordering of relations of power, resistance and the “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière 2001). Politics determines what can be seen, said and heard in the public sphere; aesthetics can in turn resist and disrupt that regime.26 In this sense, filmed interviews are both objects of study and instruments for rethinking the privileging of the verbal and the national, and truth and value (as transparent given categories, rather than contingent ideological constructions). Much that is meaningful is only communicable in non-verbal form. The affective intensities of performance, silence and refusal reveal different ways of “speaking”. As MacDougall suggests, foregrounding “knowledge as meaning” over “knowledge as being” has prevented scholars and filmmakers alike from actively inhabiting what they see, hear and feel. If an emotional and visceral response to our subjects feels analytically awkward, it is also an ethical imperative. Perceiving more attentively, in ways that neither compromise historical and political claims, on the one hand, nor cast aside sensory, embodied experience on the other, requires a perceptual untethering. Recovering the complexity of lived experience demands that we disconnect subjects from the larger ideological narratives to which they are often tied, and refer back to the ordinary sensory worlds people inhabit, past and present.

  NOTES

  1See Allen (2009), Esmeir (2007), Jayyusi (2007) Salih (2017) and Sayigh (1997, 1998a, 1998b). Much of the scholarship that has engaged the body and senses as sites of meaning-making has tended to focus on traumatic rupture, rather than more routinized forms of embodied experience.

  2Early interventions came from the social historians Salim Tamari (2001) and Beshara Doumani (1992: 6), who called for “a live portrait of the Palestinian people, especially the historically ‘silent’ majority of peasants, workers, women, merchants and Bedouin”.

  3The Nakba Archive is an oral history archive I co-created with Mahmoud Zeidan. Since its inception in 2002 it has been run as a collaborative project in the twelve official UN refugee camps in Lebanon. Over the course of six years we were able to record around 475 interviews with refugees from 135 Palestinian villages and towns, mainly from the northern Galilee and the coastal cities. The archive is currently housed at the American University of Beirut and has been developed into an online database under the direction of Kaokab Chebaro and, formerly, Hana Sleiman. For more information: http://www.nakba-archive.org.

  4Because the vast majority of Palestinians who fled in 1948 were illiterate peasants, refugee accounts are vitally important and can compensate for an incomplete written record that has been dispersed or destroyed. The interviews recorded for the archive unearthed many details about the events of the expulsion that had not been part of the official historical record.

  5A number of the audiovisual recordings under discussion here can be vie
wed online at www.nakba-archive.org

  6Otruk is also the subject of an ethnographic film I directed, Still Life (2007). http://store.cinemaguild.com/nontheatrical/product/2482.html.

  7The narrative of coexistence between Palestinians and Jews prior to 1948 is a recurring element of many of the interviews recorded by the Nakba Archive. Friendships seem to have been particularly strong between women, often forged through the give and take of neighbourly ties. The interview recorded with Hamdeh Jouma in 2004, which recalls her Jewish comrade and “blood sister” Fifa Hadeve, who advised her on matters of love and marriage, is one example.

  8Ariella Azoulay’s theory of “potential history” derives precisely from such forgotten moments of alliance, which allow a speculative return to an “archival zero point” (2013: 551), before enmity between Arabs and Jews seemed inescapable, reconnecting histories that have grown rigidly separate

  9Genet made clear that should the Palestinians ever achieve statehood, he would lose interest in their case.

  10Sayigh (1979) has described how in the early years of exile, refugees described the experience of displacement in similar terms, as non-existence and “paralysis”.

  11I heard similar stories about surreptitious returns to Palestine, a practice that continued until Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in 1967, when border controls began to be rigorously enforced.

  12Like a number of other villages, half of Nahef’s residents remained.

  13Tim Ingold’s (1993) theory of “taskscape” – the socially constructed nature of landscape, formed through human activity – is helpful for conceptualizing the temporal dimensions of people’s relations to place as something processual rather than static and immutable.

  14“Death generates present absence and nonexistence”, writes Esmeir (2003: 45). “It is something that lives on with its survivors … Incoherence, contradictions and absences should be understood as signifiers of something that is still present.”