An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba

by Doctor Nahla Abdo

  Whispered Yafa till her final breath. …

  48 ways to flee, and she found Beirut. (Kanazi 2015)

  “Nakba”, a poem Remi wrote from the memory of his teta’s experience of 1948, was intended to tell the story of violence that his grandparents experienced at the hands of Zionist militias – the Irgun and Haganah – which led to their forced expulsion.

  He deploys the terms “occupied”, “cleansed”, “conquered” and “massacre” to historicize what happened in 1948 through the perspective of his grandmother’s narrative, which contradicts the notion of “Israeli Independence Day”, as Remi outlines that what happened in 1948 was conquest. In an interview with Remi, he explains that his teta’s experience of the Nakba and her exile in Beirut were a big part of his childhood, as he always heard his grandmother say, “Yafa, Yafa, Yafa” and “Return” (Al-Awada), which inspired his poem Nakba. Hip hop (including spoken word) is a site that enables the continuity of oral histories to be transmitted across time and generations. The Palestinian spoken word and rap are not only influenced by the African oral tradition, but also by their own indigenous oral history, as orality is central to Arab culture. As such, Palestinian spoken word poets and rappers infuse indigenous oral stories and poetry with new history, beats, breaks, digitalized cuts and samples across geographic regions. Poetic Injustice, Remi’s first book of poems, is divided into four sections. Each section represents one of his displaced grandparents: Leonie, Shipro, Najla and George, which reflects the collective memory of Palestine. These poems are significant as the “Nakba generation is passing away, there is a growing anxiety that these sources of memory will be lost, a fear of forgetfulness” (Kanazi 2011: 17). Therefore, the act of narrating and re-telling these stories through their cultural texts is significant, as the repertoire acts as a palimpsest that documents memory of the past.

  For example in the poem “Leonie” Remi rhymes:

  I have never seen someone love something so much

  As if that something was a someone

  A homeland

  A companion

  I didn’t understand the need to return until I looked into my Teta’s eyes …

  She hadn’t watered her garden in days

  Can’t water with bombs falling

  Don’t know how long the water will last

  Don’t know when the bombing will stop

  Don’t know if her flowers will ever bloom again …

  She closes her eyes

  Smells the sea salt, caresses the soft sand, takes in a deep breath, and feels the wind hug her arms as her father once did

  For a split second she imagines they have returned, where she was born, where she belongs. (Kanazi 2011: 10‒12)

  Remi describes his grandmother’s love and attachment to her homeland through her senses of smell and touch and her imaginary. Exiled to Lebanon during the Nakba, Remi’s grandmother died without the actualization of the right of return that she eagerly awaited, which Remi suggests she embodied through the emotions that could be seen in her eyes. His description of her physical presence in the city of Yafa during 1948, watering her garden, is a poetic form of resisting Zionist historiography and narratives that invoke the erasure of Palestinians from their homeland, such as in Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech outlined earlier, where he claims Yafa to be “ours” (in reference to Zionists/Israeli Jews). In this way, Remi’s poem encapsulates the process of settler colonization through which the 1948 generation, of which his grandmother was part, lost everything and became refugees. The poem memorializes the Nakba and resists Palestinian displacement across generations as Remi reminds us that his grandmother, and others like her, remained steadfast (sumud) in their struggle for their homeland and never lost sight of their hope of return to Palestine. Remi encapsulates the embodiment of his grandmother’s sumud in her eyes and suggests that it was passed on to him as he began to understand the need to return to his ancestral homeland.

  In another poem, Remi describes his visit to his grandmother’s house in Yafa:

  She no longer recognizes my face

  Never will again

  But can still smell her oranges

  Feels the sun kiss her face as if on her balcony in Yafa. 61 years later

  Described like the most magnificent villa

  Must have been seven storeys tall, spanned half the neighbourhood, tree branches opened like arms, so trunks could witness its beauty

  I visited the house with my brother

  Israeli cab driver said he’d never heard of the street. Palestinian presence must have made his memory fail. (“Yaffa”, in Kanazi 2011: 24)

  By retelling his refugee grandmother’s memories, Remi affirms and memorializes the existence of a collective Palestinian identity that existed in historical Palestine, specifically in the former Palestinian city of Yafa. Invoking the national symbols of Palestinian sumud ‒ oranges and olive trees ‒ the way many Palestinian classical resistance artists also do (e.g. Kanafani), Remi beckons the imaginary of return, rooted in his grandmother’s memories, imaginary and desire. Moreover, Remi describes the cultural memoricide of Palestine when an Israeli cab driver denies the cartography of Palestine by not recognizing the historic street names that existed pre-1948, the memories of which survive among the refugees of that generation. The Israeli cab driver’s failure of memory underscores how the Zionist settler-colonial state changed the toponomy of historical Palestine and constructed new narratives of what was/is on the land, thus producing Zionist settler fantasies4 that are premised on the forgetting and erasure of Palestinian existence. By describing his grandmother’s house and neighbourhood, Remi also embodies his grandmother’s spirit of sumud by not allowing Palestinians to be written out of history. He rhymes “The outside world may never mention their names but the roots of olive trees will never forget what happened” (“Yaffa”, in Kanazi 2011: 24).

  Moreover, some cultural texts not only re-present the Palestinian narrative, re-tell stories that have been passed on to them through orality, but also invoke radical imaginaries of freedom. In the song “The Ghosts of Deir Yassin” produced by Phil Mansour and featuring Rafeef Ziadah, the cultural producers shed light on the Zionist cultural memoricide and toponymicide of historical Palestine, specifically by talking about the village of Deir Yassin.

  They pretend that it’s forgotten

  But somewhere small flowers grow

  On the weathered stones of destroyed homes

  Somewhere the light’s still in the window …

  They change the names on the signs

  But it’s in our hearts these words are written

  Of the children who don’t know their homes

  They will walk the streets from which they are forbidden

  You see that we are rising

  Our day is surely coming

  No longer in the shadows

  Of the ghosts of Deir Yassin. (Mansour and Ziadah n.d.)

  On 9 April 1948, Zionist militia from the Irgun and the Stern Gang attacked Deir Yassin, a village located between Jerusalem and what is now Tel Aviv, which was home to 750 Palestinian residents. Palestinian men “were lined up against a wall and sprayed with bullets, execution style. Teachers were savagely mutilated with knives” (Elmuti 2013: para. 6). Women were taken hostage and then returned to a bloodbath in which 120 Palestinians were massacred, houses were dynamited, the cemetery was bulldozed, and many were driven out of their village by Zionist militia (Elmuti 2013). Deir Yassin was wiped off the map; the centre of the village was de-Arabized and renamed Givat Shaul and became part of the city of Jerusalem. In Palestinian and Zionist history, the massacre of Deir Yassin is of great significance because it was the catalyst and schematic for the depopulation of over 400 Palestinian-Arab villages and cities during the Nakba, and was the blueprint for the architecture of Israeli apartheid: the wall, the settlements and the checkpoint system.

  In “The Ghosts of Deir Yassin” (Mansour 2012), the small flowers that grow on the destroyed homes a
nd the light that comes through the windows are symbolic of sumud and Palestinian presence and memory of the pre-settler/colonial, pre-Nakba landscape. Though the neighbourhood of Givat Shaul lies on the ruins of the Palestinian village Deir Yassin, and Zionist toponomy has de-Arabized and Hebrewized the landscape by changing the name of the area, this resistance song clearly underscores that Palestinians have not forgotten. The names of destroyed cities and villages remain in Palestinian memory. This is poignantly captured in the music video, which was filmed in several refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon. The names of villages, towns and cities are remembered and written on the palms and carved into the flesh of Palestinian refugees whose families were historically from those areas. These names are invoked to suggest that Palestinians, specifically those in exile who are forbidden to enter 1948 Palestine, will walk those streets again. Resistance is expressed in the lines “you see that we are rising our day is surely coming / no longer in the shadow / of the ghosts of Deir Yassin”. This song is not only about the Palestinian past; it is about fighting for a just future in the afterlife of the Nakba. As such, to rupture Zionist cultural memoricide and toponymicide, the right of return of dispossessed Palestinians is invoked in this song, as Rafeef performs revered Palestinian female poet Fadwa Tuqan’s poem “Fee Thikra Al Milad elEshreen” (Twentieth Birthday Anniversary). In the music video, she appears with name of the city of Haifa written on her palm, which, she explains during an interview, was one of the cities her grandparents were expelled from during the Nakba. Rafeef powerfully recites Tuqan’s poem in Arabic, “I challenge … No, my future / I will return with resolve and confidence / … to my beloved homeland / To the / flowers and roses / I no longer fear their power / I will return”.

  For the Zionist settler project, Palestinian narratives of the Nakba, existence on the land, return and symbols such as the key, oranges and olives undermine the national story of the Israeli state. Therefore, cultural symbols are appropriated and cultural production – poetry, music, art, books, dabke – is censored or destroyed. Nevertheless, Palestinian cultural producers creatively find ways to resist attempts at cultural genocide. During an interview with Sharaf DarZaid, the choreographer of the El-Funoun (dabke) Dance Troupe in the West Bank, he explains that El-Funoun began compiling songs from the Nakba generation onwards, and attempted to create a music archive of the important songs that were part of the Palestinian heritage. DarZaid explained that during the Second Intifada, members of El-Funoun took sections of the archive out of the Popular Arts Centre (where it was housed in Al-Bireh), for fear of an Israeli raid on their dance studio. Since Israel has a history of destroying Palestinian archives, the El-Funoun members wanted to preserve the oral (music) archive they had collected. They therefore ensured that different people took parts of it; if the Zionists confiscated the archive from one of the dancers, the Israelis would only acquire a fraction of El-Funoun’s musical archive and could only possess or destroy a small portion of it. This underscores the importance of the Palestinian repertoire and the way in which a collection of oral stories and songs that offer an anti-colonial memory of Palestinian life and heritage is/was threatening to the Zionist settler project. Despite the challenges of living under a military siege that El-Funoun encountered during the Second Intifada, they persisted in resisting the erasure of their history and identity by continuing to dance, produce music and preserve Palestinian orality (songs) by protecting the Palestinian musical – folklore ‒ archive.

  CULTURAL PRODUCTION AS RESISTANCE

  Since the Nakba, Israel has been carrying out a cultural genocide of the Palestinian people’s culture and heritage. The anti-democratic Nakba Law passed in 2012 that tries to deny the Palestinian people their history is not just a violation of human rights, it is an act of on-going cultural genocide against the Palestinian people. Fearful of Palestinian memory ‒ as seen in Netanyahu’s speech to the Knesset about a little girl carrying a key – national mythologies are produced through rhetoric about land ownership such as “It wasn’t a key to their houses […] it was the key to our houses” (Netanyahu speech and translation in Tarachansky 2013). Despite such national mythologies and constant attempts by the Zionists to erase Palestinian collective memory, history and identity, and the cultural siege it has placed on the Palestinian narrative, resistance continues. As I have shown in this chapter, Palestinians across generations have and continue to resist their erasure through various means particularly using poetry, music, dance, theatre, etc. Orality and performance has enabled them to preserve and transmit knowledge about Palestinian politics, history, place, culture, and to resist toponymicide and memoricide across generations. By producing counter-narratives that tell stories of Palestinian land and life, particularly the historical fact about the Nakba, and archiving them through the repertoire, cultural producers such as Ghassan Kanafani, Rafeef Ziadah, Remi Kanazi, Tarik Kazaleh, Phil Mansour, members of the El-Funoun Dance Troupe and others undermine the legitimacy of Zionism while allegorically besieging their siege.

  NOTES

  1My conceptualization of the afterlife of the Nakba appears in my doctoral dissertation (Desai 2016). I draw on Saidiya Hartman’s conceptualization of the afterlife of slavery, which she characterizes as the enduring presence of slavery’s racialized violence that still persists in contemporary society on Black bodies, to conceptualize the on-going Zionist violence that persists in erasing, dehumanizing, brutalizing and annihilating Palestinian life from 1948 to the present.

  2This legislation was initiated by a Knesset member Alex Miller from the ultra-right-wing party Yisrael Beiteinu. The bill was originally drafted to incarcerate those who commemorate the Palestinian Nakba for at least three years. However, the bill was amended and called Budget Principles Law – Reducing Budgetary Support for Activities Contrary to the State (Kestler-D’Amours 2011).

  3Ras al-Naqoura is an area on the Israel‒Lebanon border, towards South Lebanon.

  4I borrow the term settler fantasies from Tuck and Yang (2012: 14), who define it in the context of settler-colonialism in North America. Settler fantasies “can mean the adoption of Indigenous practices and knowledge, but more, refer to those narratives in the settler colonial imagination in which the Native (understanding that he is becoming extinct) hands over his land, his claim to the land, his very Indian-ness to the settler for safe-keeping. This is a fantasy that is invested in a settler futurity and dependent on the foreclosure of an Indigenous futurity”.

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  About the contributors

  Nahla Abdo is an Arab Canadian feminist, political activist and Professor of Sociology at Carleton University. She has published extensively on anti-colonial feminism, racism, nationalism and the state in the Middle East with a special focus on Palestinians. She has received several research awards. Among her recent publications: Counter Revolution: Palestinian Women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System (2014) which received the Times Higher Education Book award of 2014; Women in Israel: Race, Gender, and Citizenship (2011); and Gender, Citizenship and the State: The Israeli Case (2010, in Arabic). She also co-edited Violence in the Name of Honour: Theoretical and Political Challenges (2004) and Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation (2002).