An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba
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6
Shu’fat refugee camp women authenticate an old “Nakba” and frame something “new” while narrating it
LAURA KHOURY
The scene of a married middle-aged woman with a knife walking to the checkpoint of Shu’fat refugee camp in 2015 is not what Umm Shadi dreamed her daughter would do when she was expelled from Beit Tool village in 1948. She said, “my one daughter is in prison not for what she has done but, when you think about it, it is what we have instilled in her, to love and protect her land and family”. It turned out that her daughter’s son had been taken to prison the day before for throwing stones at Shu’fat refugee camp checkpoint. She was so angry and upset: “This is what the Nakba did to us women!”, she said. “The worry of ever losing anything anymore!” This was not the first statement I recorded in which a connection between the Nakba and today’s misery is made. What interests me most is the logic embedded in her statement; it is the social residual impact not the psychological impact that concerns me.
I offer an indigenous feminist reading of the memorization of the Nakba by Palestinian women of the Nakba generation living in refugee camps, as they transmit some of the past, the enduring social framework, both consciously and subconsciously, to the present, creating continuity and transcending the present. The transcendence means going beyond but staying within the realm of the experience, and the continuity encompasses assertions that the scars of colonialism, alienation, as well as the accompanying pride, despite the dehumanization, made those memories not a simple recitation for oral histories, but something else. What is under scrutiny here is what was not disrupted: something “old” that transformed into something “new”. New in its effect or its use, new in terms of formulating new activism and situating it in the present. Collective memory emerges when people exchange remembrances of events and draw on others’ memories (Zelizer 1995: 226), and “both the medium and the outcome of social configurations” (Olick 2007: 118). It is social, not just cognitive, and it brings forth women’s voices, like “the diamonds of the dust heap” (Woolf 1954: 7).
Refugee Nakba-generation women circulating their stories permeated everyday life as an “everyday practice” (Allan 1995: 48). Coming from semi-agricultural societies, where land was their source of livelihood and their work was mainly in the fields, authenticated it and transmitted its logic to other generations. In terms of gender relations, what has been negotiated between men and women then also transcended because:
The dynamics of gender in each society or region operate not through grand revolutionary upheavals but through the ongoing negotiations between men and women both at the individual and collectively organized levels. Masculinity and femininity exist not simply in opposition but equally in relation to each other. (Mohammed 1994: 32)
Additionally, “patriarchy under capitalism takes a specific form that is different under feudalism” (Federici 2004: 25); therefore, whichever patriarchal logic existed then, at the time, when they were peasants, was retrieved as they shared their stories collectively. But this is a two-sided process as the logic itself shapes memory making, but also the opposite, and in turn their shared memories sustain that logic.
This chapter exposes the desire of the Nakba-generation refugee women to consolidate pre-1948 Nakba memories for the purpose of transcending constellations of societal meanings that allow for continuity and resistance. This involves relationality to knowledge frameworks of the times:
Once memory items are sufficiently bound so as to determine what they are, they can be related to one another forming the higher-order systems of relationships that give memory its value. It is only in relation to other objects, events, or ideas that memory items contribute to knowledge, because then it becomes possible to surf between memories and to bring learned information to bear in different situations. The webs of associations the relater element establishes can be useful in themselves, and they also serve as the organized substrate from which generalized, stable memory is consolidated. (Anastasio et al. 2012: 124)
Relationality makes “memory items (mental representations of objects, facts, events, ideas, etc.) meaningful because of their objective connections to other items” (Anastasio et al. 2012: 106) and consolidation is best understood as a process that continually reshapes “less changeable” memory in a constant, recursive loop of reconstruction (recall) and reconsolidation (reformation) (Anastasio et al. 2012: 251). Sartre (2004: 5) asserts that the image and perception differ but that the image operates thinking. Women applied their imagination to the fullest but they created an “existence-as-image” (L’existence en image) or a mode of being. The association women make is important to our work here, especially when discussing their collective imagination.
“MEMORY IN THE GROUP”: AN “OLD” LOGIC REASSIGNED AS “NEW”
Collective memory is the experience of creating and producing meaning in the present by referencing the past. Though memory may imply a complex web of intersecting messages about society, I suggest that it, principally and ultimately, implies consolidating an “old” logic of thinking, a certain arrangement that sounds comfortable and fit for the present. Re-experiencing memories unconsciously and emotionally suggests experiencing harmony, but at a fundamental and conscious level it reinvigorates a social framework. In other words, “societal logics shape memory making and the reproduction and reconstruction of history itself” (Ocasio and Mauskapf 2016: 4). So Umm Imad in 1948 told her husband “we are not leaving Palestine”; her word was final, but she is still the decision maker in her household.
As a starting point, conceptually, scholars using old categories to understand women in their work made that work useless and “conceptually unclad” (Mackenzie 1989: 56). In fact, using Western-imposed binaries implants a divided mentality, which I refrain from advancing. I argue that there are, at times, negotiated gender-related categories especially when they are tied to the social framework of the old times. A memory theory that can be considered constructionist is that of Halbwachs, who coined the term. It provides insights about a “memory in the group” not “of the group”. His work investigates many forces, such as social interactions, familial ties, time and especially social structure. Collective memory, to him, is also based on lived experience. He wrote: “Our memory truly rests not to learned history but on lived history” (Halbwachs 1980: 57). He studied the transformation of memory over time to show how the images a community makes of itself are slowly transformed and that: “[W]hat is essential is that the features distinguishing it from other groups survive and be imprinted on all its content” (Halbwachs 1980: 87).
Halbwachs rejects concepts that are connected to the psychology of the individual and argues directly against psychological notions about the origin of memory. I agree that “the individual mind is ultimately incapable of producing memory by itself; rather, the individual mind succeeds only in storing memory images” (Halbwachs 1992: 41). These images, when isolated from society’s influence, “have no consistence, depth, coherence, or stability” (Halbwachs 1992: 44). These stored images cannot be recalled or constructed as memories without a number of social frameworks that influence the different groups to which an individual belongs. Therefore, Halbwachs offers us a new venue for analysing the social framework. I wonder how women independently construct today’s lived e
xperience in very creative ways by building on “old” social framework.
Palestinian refugee camp women’s uprooting testimonies gave them strength to overcome their alienation in the refugee camp (Khoury 2005). Their imagination and pre-Nakba memories are both produced and a product to be consumed for continuity and to overcome alienation. In fact, something “new” develops when social space is both a field of action and a basis for action. “Social space can be shown to be a medium and outcome of social practice” (Brenner and Elden 2009: 372). The practice of sharing memories and remembrances of events, at times involves drawing on others’ memories, narrating their past and conveying it as part of the present. During the Third Intifada of October 2014, I witnessed women coming together, creating a strong sense of community and a resistance model of lived experience. The specific themes that surfaced in their narratives were not different from much of what other scholars explored.1 However, how and why did they reassign the “old” social framework and transform it into something “new”? This cannot be answered using Western-imposed binaries, because they implant a divided mentality.
THE NAKBA GENRE: MEMORIES OF MEMORIES
I find it useful to engage in Olick’s (2007) investigation of the “memory of memory”, applying Bakhtin’s (1963) dialogism that unfolded particular dialogues in time and through time. Bakhtin, made a distinction between influence ‒ awareness of texts ‒ and genre that possesses an organic logic or the sharing of a common “way of seeing”. Genres are used as a system of dialogue to better understand the past through the lens of the present. “A genre lives in the present, but always remembers its past, its beginning” (Bakhtin quoted in Olick 2007: 121). The beginning for most refugees is tied to the Nakba genre, which possesses a logic and a way of seeing. An indigenous approach is an epistemology or a different way of knowing (Smith 1999); this epistemology is relational in nature, acknowledging the interconnectedness of the physical, mental and emotional.
The settler-colonial scheme remains the best interpretive paradigm. It allows for viewing the Nakba as a process of elimination of the indigenous people by seeking land but also replacing aboriginals with settlers, with attention to its counter-hegemonic implications.2 Nonetheless, for lack of a better descriptive model to explain the Zionist movement’s colonization of the land of Palestine since 1948 (Khoury et al. 2013b), this particular colonization scheme allows for understanding the development of new layers of resistance, and how refugee women’s “memory is neither something pre-existent and dormant in the past nor a projection from the present, but a potential for creative collaboration between present consciousness and the experience or expression of the past” (Boyarin 1994: 22). There is another “level of colonialism” that refugees face in “the extent to which a colonizing power installs economic, political, and socio cultural institutions in a colonized territory” (Mahoney 2010: 23). Judaization, a complex amalgam of exclusion/transfer/wiping out, is one other level of colonialism. Its artefacts are: erasure of the memory including changing the names of towns, villages and cities; the removal of people through genocide, eviction, transfer, or wiping their identity; and the depletion of archaeological sites (see Masalha 2012).