An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba

by Doctor Nahla Abdo

  Umm Imad used to knit Palestinian peasant dresses. She would put her small children to sleep and begin knitting traditional dresses that peasant women still wear (she was wearing one and it was colourful). She said: “My father used to tell me that I will lose my sight”. She used to be paid 20 pennies for each ball of thread, which was a lot at the time. Umm Imad was proud of her paid labour. She also showed me her wedding dress, which she had cut and put in a frame to hang on the wall.

  Most of the women showed their strength and determination to contribute to their households in one way or another. Some women expressed how qawiyya they were, while others presented their life stories, which reveal much about their strength. Umm Saad from Beit Nuba said: “When women want to wash their clothes near the water spring they used to do that at once. All of them together”. She said that they would occupy the streets for ten days for wedding ceremonies and it became their territory. They would dance and entertain themselves for long days. Their agency is grounded in everyday experiences. Umm Waleed, from Beit Nateef said: “Women used to get together by the water fountain and sometimes play games with water”. She explained that women would bring the water home but when they were by the fountain, men disappeared. “I enjoyed playing with the girls my age, but we had to go back because my brothers and father are waiting to take a bath.”

  The gender division of labour was not based on narrow specialization. The division between public and private spheres was not clear, as in the simple pre-capitalist peasant mode. Mies (1998: xvii) suggests looking for what was better in the past, in non-industrial societies, and argues, like many others who are attempting to write history from below, that it was the bourgeoisie that established the gendered division of labour as a characteristic of capitalism. She wrote: “They withdrew their women from the public sphere and shut them in their cozy homes” (Mies 1998: 104). History is written based on diaries of the Victorian middle classes (Coontz 2000).

  Umm Ziad, from Beit Mehseer, believed that men have the right story about what happened during the deportation. (Some scholars contend that men had the role of telling stories: Humphries and Khalili 2007, Sayigh 1998.) But in telling the story she chose certain parts over others, intentionally or unintentionally, because this was what she wanted to pass on. Umm Hussein, eighty-two years old, from Sarees, was relaxed when talking about her village. It sounded as though she had selective amnesia regarding certain lived experiences. Umm Hussein did not have amnesia, as her granddaughters said; she was selecting the stories and memories. And although these were of a place where she spent the shortest time in her life (eighteen years), these were the stories that she wished to relive. Therefore she still returns to Sarees as if it is in her dreams.

  THOSE DECLARED VULNERABLE ARE IN FACT RESISTING

  Butler exposes the logic behind vulnerability/invulnerability of how those in power strategize to present themselves as vulnerable. This suggests that it is politically produced and suggests moving behind the human rights framework (which negates the capacity for those declared vulnerable to act politically). Thereby, Butler asserts how all this gives value to collective resistance (Butler et al. 2016). Refugee women, who are vulnerable, are resisting by “claiming the right to public space … or continuing to exist, and or breathe” (Butler et al. 2016: 26). “Being while Palestinian” is ultimately an “everyday revolution” (see Khoury 2012), because inherent in rejecting the colonizer is refusing to submit to the colonizer’s state. Women’s contribution to political movement has always been crucial (Abdo and Lentin 2002). Public space, the colonizer’s tool of domination, was a site of women’s actualization, of breaking out of gender constraints, offering resistance to gender hierarchies; it provided an alternative configuration that could be used to subvert the oppressor‒oppressed paradigm (Wrede 2015: 10).

  The dialogue between women included imaginative re-creations of the villages, displayed sentimental attachment to their villages and re-created an idyllic peasant life.6 They exhibited an ability to devise new layers of resistance. Some clearly perceived themselves as resisting, while others did not. The home remained a “site of commemoration that celebrates Palestinian history, heritage and culture” (Kassem 2012: 195), but the way they structured it and designed it was based on their desire to reassign “new” societal experience. Keeping culturally specific spatial practices like cooking, attending to the needs of the neighbours, caring for each other, displays how they practised “resistance through imagination”. Their lived space became a meeting place (locality) that embodied social relations to talk about the times and social frameworks before the Nakba.

  As the women recounted their memories, it was a reflective practice by which they related to themselves and others in a form of a dialogue. Even though most women’s memory of the Nakba is based around the experience of loss of community (see Humphries and Khalili 2007: 216; but also Sayigh 1998, 2007),7 it is the space of interaction where their resistance is most needed and critical. They tell themselves about how the refugee camp is standing like a discarded island, and that it should remain as a space of resistance, a site for the right to return. Thus women revived those memories to keep the struggle alive. Ultimately, the colonial space is contested and resisted by reinstating a sense of community, which they have transmitted from their past lived experience in the village. They have reinstated the social framework of the past so that they could transcend it.

  The awareness that refugees have constantly been subjects of memory and knowledge opened the way to giving more weight to the unspoken words. It is indigenous knowledge, from “the conceptualization, formulation, and eventually the knowledge produced” (Al-Hardan 2014: 63), and women’s unspoken words reveal what has been underscored. This work dovetails with Sayigh’s (2015) investigations into what women wish to pass on to their children. Umm Shadi sometimes openly encouraged women to tell their Nakba stories to their grandchildren, recounting and creating a knowledge base to yield a continuity in the struggle as they revive their collective memories, also extending the societal logic that existed in pre-1948’s gender relations and structure. Along with other women, they constructed a reflexive critical base connecting the past to the present and the space in the diaspora with the space in the village. This is what Umm Shadi wished to pass on to the younger generation.

  Colonial space remains a field of controversy due to variations in the modes of resistance. Refugee spaces are controlled and disciplined (Hanafi 2008). Foucault (1979: 196) viewed resistances as distributed in an irregular fashion, with “the points, knots, or focuses of resistance … spread over time and space at varying densities”. The irregularity is present in Shu’fat refugee camp because “[T]here is no single locus of great refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances” (Foucault 1979: 95‒96). Today, the sites of oppression and discrimination have turned into spaces of resistance (Pile and Keith 1997).

  As women recounted pre-Nakba and Nakba tales, they framed newer concerns asserting the resistance option (as opposed to the concession option that the PA chose). They tackled many concerns, from overcrowding, to pollution, to raids, to check-point intimidation, to fear for their children, which signify care for the community.8 The collected narratives displayed how they identified themselves as strong and active in public life. Their characterization is based on Sayigh’s (1998) tellers of the Palestinian present, where half (four) had the “struggle personality”, with strength and courage, two were “sit fil beit” (women who stay at home) and two had the “challenge” and “confrontation” personality, attempting to challenge gender norms historically (Umm Hisham). None wanted their maternal sacrifice to become a symbol of loss, a passive identification (as identified by Sayigh and Peteet 1986). Johnson (2009) also found “struggle personality” and “sit fil beit” self-identification in al-Amari refugee camp.

  Refugee women, the Nakba generation, positioned themselves in a routine collective
memory practice revealing slightly different symbolic meanings ‒ like guardians. As they told their stories they displayed an ability to practise some power. For the first time, there appeared to be an attempt to position themselves as village women with a knowledge base (see Hatoss 2012).9 Positioning, as a concept, facilitates the thinking of social analysis in such a way that the use of “role” – which is static, formal and ritualistic ‒ may be limited linguistically (Davies and Harre 1990). This positioning by Nakba-generation women was enhanced through using the ground-truthing approach, because it permitted the events to be narrated by constructing an old social framework (relations of production per se) to a new place at a different time. In other words, their social (lived) space became women’s field of action and simultaneously the basis for their action too. Thus, Umm Shadi’s attachment to her village was narrated as the story of abundance of water in wells or springs but simultaneously as a source of power.

  CONCLUSION: DEMYSTIFYING THE NEUTRALITY OF SOCIAL DIVISIONS

  The study breaks away from a long tradition of scholarship that submits to blind binaries of male/female, active/passive, public/private and victim/agent, but without sacrificing the intersected forces that shape subjectivity. It looks a bit beyond the thinkable frame of reference (monolithic thinking) to enable a reflexive framing of memory in the form of a dialogue. It abandons the Westernized notion of agency (see Mahmood 2005; Khoury and Da’Na 2013) because it found agency to be grounded in everyday experience. I also agree with Hanafi (2008) that camps are not boundless spaces with an ongoing process of assimilation into the urban fabric. I see the camp space as a colonial space par excellence, where spatial colonial practices make them places in the making. I see camp residents resisting spatial domination from within the old structures. Women have the agentive capacity of making their own histories (as in Sayigh 1998). Women cannot live an ordinary life under colonization. They recreated camp space as a site of a new type of resistance that corresponds with the new levels of colonialism. They made the camp a space of inclusion, when it was intended by the colonists to be one of exclusion.

  Anderson (2010: 89) suggests that women organizing is an indigenous thing: “our pre-colonial societies were sustained by women’s work”. Even though women are generally excluded from memory politics (Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007; Peteet 1992, 2005; Sayigh 1998, 2002), the dialogues explored here evoked a wealth of knowledge about the past and displayed an outstanding ability to win little battles in their everyday lives. They actually developed a shared language, sustained a resistance culture and negotiated their vulnerability as women, as refugees and as colonial subjects. In other words, in an analysis of their discursive practices, their vulnerability was a source of power. Their discourses were an action, not merely a representation. Even though most women’s memory of the Nakba circled around the experience of loss of community (see Humphries and Khalili 2007: 216; but also Sayigh 1997, 1998, 2007), but also because the camp is isolated, facing attempts at eroding it as a space of resistance, the tales about loss of community need to be revised. Similar to Humphries and Khalili (2007), who found refugee women to be uncertain whether their knowledge is authoritative, apart from two women the rest fell into this category. More importantly, women consolidated memories and made associations between then and now in such a way that the social framework of that pre-Nakba time was activated and sustained the previously negotiated status in regard to men and society. As Umm Shadi reminded her husband, who wanted to flee in 1948: “see if I followed you we would have been slaughtered now in Sabra and Shatilla massacres”.

  I found a pattern of Nakba-generation women who were directly involved in decision making and had a strong presence in the public space in the pre-Nakba period (working on the land, fetching water and so on). In the women’s reflections I found knowledge of the history of practices in their community (history is thus extended in practice), invoking an ability to produce and re-appropriate their selves through many epochs as they framed the old into something “new”. This attests to the notion that what came to be known as public vs private spheres was a creation of the capitalist system, not part of the peasant structure in pre-Nakba Palestine. I am not suggesting that gender hierarchies did not exist or that there was the absence of a system of oppression based on patriarchy, but identification with Western forms of feminism is problematic. Refugee women of the Nakba generation are constrained by tradition and as they reinvigorate that social framework they also revive traditions. I argue, along with Naber (2006), that they face multiple oppressions, but the imposition of the binaries which constrain them further is what I critique (see Khoury et al. 2013a). Some scholars shed light on how women became the main enemies of colonial rule (Federici 2004); other indigenous feminist researchers dismissed feminism, emphasizing the difficulties indigenous people face when attempting to identify with Western forms of feminism (Anderson 2011). Palestinian refugee women of the Nakba generation are able to make oppression visible. This, to them, is an everyday revolution (Khoury 2012). It is “existence-as-imaged” in reflective experience, a mode of being (Sartre 2000).

  NOTES

  1Brand (2009) summarizes some traits that my research methodology holds back from engaging in about women and their collective memory, because I avoid questions framed in a Western lens. I truly believe that even the way the question is posed reveals Eurocentric tendencies, and conscription to Western modernity. For example: Do women see things in the eyes of their husbands? Are they only supporting men in their struggle? Did they glorify the past, idealize their villages, remembered it as living happily, in Paradise? I posit that using Western-imposed binaries implants a divided mentality.

  2Busbridge (2017: 1) says that the settler-colonial paradigm has counter-hegemonic implications for reframing Israel-Palestine in its prescription for decolonization. It is in the context of decolonization that the limits of the settler-colonial paradigm become most apparent.

  3There exists an impressive amount of research on memory regarding the Palestinian refugees (Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007), some are ethnographic accounts (Sayigh 1997, 1998, 1995; Farah 2006; Khalili 2008) and others focus on gender (Sayigh 1981; Peteet 1992, 1994).

  4Zoe Todd (2016: 15) explains how, “with the wave of the post-colonial wand, many European thinkers seem to have absolved themselves of any implication in ongoing colonial realities throughout the globe. And yet, each one of us is embedded in systems that uphold the exploitation and dispossession of Indigenous peoples”.

  5I combined field observations of camp space spanning three years 2013‒2016, in-depth participation and visitations with eight Nakba-generation refugee women (see Table 6.1) spanning almost a year ‒ from soon after the third Intifada started ‒ October 2015‒August 2016, and a content analysis of media messages and women’s gatherings over the three years. Six months after the end of the collection period (December 2016 and February 2017) I revisited the women to follow up on some interviews and witnessed new colonial spatial practices that helped shape the work. This will appear in a larger project.

  6Khalili (2007) captures the social invocation of past events, places and symbols in various social contexts and analyses mnemonic practices; and Davis (2007), in her content analysis of the memorial books written by villagers themselves about the history of their village, identified “[t]he past that is mapped consists of memories and idealizations”. I identified some other moments that are peculiar due to the methodology of ground-truthing employed.

  7Most research about women came to this realization.

  8I did not discuss the role of NGO’s due to its irrelevancy here but does not mean that they are not playing a role in how camp women are represented.

  9While Hatoss (2012) was studying refugees she used semi-structured interviews and found out how refugees had a strong ethnic self-concept.

  REFERENCES

  Abdo, N. and R. Lentin, eds. (2002). Women and the Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives
of Dislocation. New York: Berghahn Books.

  Abdul Hadi, F. (1999‒2001) Al tareek al-shafawi: Adwar el-mara’ al-Filasteenyah [The Oral History: The Roles of the Palestinian Woman]. Center for Palestinian Studies, Archiving and Researching, Lebanon [in Arabic].

  Al-Hardan, A. (2014) “Decolonizing Research on Palestinians: Towards Cultural Epistemologies and Research Practices”, Qualitative Inquiry 20(1): 61‒71.

  Allan, D. (1995) “Mythologizing al-Nakba: Narratives, Collective Identity and Cultural Practice Among Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon”, Oral History 33(1): 47‒56.

  Anastasio, T.J., K.A. Ehrenberger, P. Watson and W. Zhang (2012) Individual and Collective Memory Consolidation: Analogous Processes on Different Levels. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

  Anderson, K. (2011) Life Stages and Native Women: Memory Teachings and Story Medicine. Winnipeg, Canada: University of Manitoba Press.

  Bakhtin, M.M. (1963) Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaja literature [in Russian].

  Boyarin, J., ed. (1994) The Politics of Timespace. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.

  Brand, H. (2009) “Palestinian Women and Collective Memory”, in M. Litvak (ed.), Palestinian Collective Memory and National Identity. London: Palgrave-Macmillan.

  Brenner, N. (1998) “Between Fixity and Motion: Accumulation, Territorial Organization and the Historical Geography of Spatial Scales”, Society & Space 16: 456‒481.

  Brenner, N. and S. Elden (2009) “Henry Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory”, International Political Sociology 3: 355‒377.

  Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge.

  Butler, J., Z. Gambetti and L. Sabsay, eds. (2016) Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press