Testimonies1 commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Nakba, the
collective tragedy, in the spring of 1998 flowed in a manner that
confounded both narrators and listeners.2 The former were perplexed
at having kept silent for what seemed like an eternity before
releasing their concealed stories. The latter were confused at
having failed to explain those stories - whether they were
expressions of divine retribution or because they demonstrated a
collective inability to face a superior enemy.
The most poignant Nakba oral testimonies were contemporary
eyewitness accounts of the war of 1948. In the main, these were
unembellished episodes of events lived by the narrators, mediated
only by the problematic prism of their memories, and by the
presence of a younger audience and their recording machines. Most
of those narratives were distinguished from intellectual discourse
by their spontaneity, their simplicity, and by their distance from
the world of politicians and intelligentsia.3 Most of the narrators
were "average" people, involved in the events while on the margin
of society - mainly as drivers, fighters, mukhtars (notables),
sheikhs, peddlers and the like. Many of them were, and still are,
illiterate.
The dominant characteristic of those narratives was the emphasis on
the dramatic nature of the incident, as if the war itself and the
displacement that followed, was not dramatic enough. Siege,
confrontations with the enemy, fighting, massacres, martyrdom, and
expulsion were at the core of the stories. The following is a
typical example:
"...When the training period in Syria was over, we entered the
country via the Allenby Bridge. We then headed to Jaffa via Ramla
and then to Yazour. Two hundred and forty of us fighters gathered
in Al-Ajami in four detachments. We witnessed several skirmishes in
Tel Al-Reesh, from where we moved to Manshiyya, where the situation
started to deteriorate. I recall a Yugoslav group that included
three Christians who committed suicide at Hasan Bey Mosque, each of
them by allowing himself to be shot by his colleague. After that, I
left Manshiyya to Ajami for the second time with Musa Al-Qattan who
was an explosives expert, and from there, we went to the Salamah
Duwwar (traffic circle). When we tried to withdraw, car drivers
refused to take us with our weapons, and we refused to withdraw
without our weapons. This continued until the British secured our
exit in a caravan that included 21 fighters. I then returned to
Silwad where I joined the fighters. The last scene I witnessed was
the departure of most Jaffa inhabitants in motorboats and light
barges to the steamers waiting at sea."4
What is absent from this story - and numerous ones like it - is the
fabric of daily life, which could have provided a framework and an
explanation for these incidents. There is an assumption here, it
seems, that what is "normal", in the perception of the narrator, is
taken for granted and needs no recalling. The moderators of these
testimonies, mostly academics, tried in vain to provide the social
and political background that engulfed the dramatic moment, and to
give it the necessary context, but they invariably collided against
a barrier of astonishment, denial or forgetfulness.
Above all, however, there is an overriding sense of localism. What
happened then is seen as having happened to this town or village in
isolation from the onslaught that affected Palestine as a whole.
While the narrators recognize that the Nakba happened across the
country, this is not reflected in the protocols of narration - nor
in the stories retold. There is an astounding absence of an overall
picture and of the interconnection that affected the lives and
behavior of combatants and onlookers alike. Thus in these
narratives, the siege of Jaffa and Lydda, the massacres of Deir
Yasin and Dawaiymeh, and the exodus from Safad and Haifa - they
happened as disparate incidents, unconnected to the general saga of
war.
The Vision Transformed
With hindsight, we can explore the transformation that eventually
differentiated the consciousness of exiled Palestinians from those
who remained in Palestine, to examine the shifting concepts of what
the "homeland" meant to those who left and how they understood
notions of return to the homeland.
In the first era of dispersion (1948-1967), the concept of a
categorical "Return to Palestine" was created and linked to an
abstract vision of liberating the land. This dream/vision was
personified in the paintings of Tamam and Ismail Shammout, which
focus on the image of a Paradise Lost and idyllic peasant
landscapes. In Shammout's paintings, all internal conflicts in
Palestinian society are obliterated and a pastoral picture based on
the collective memory of Palestinian refugees in the Arab host
countries created. The most salient traits of this vision are found
in the tortured relationship between the exiled refugees, who are
continuously seeking a return to their homes/homeland, and their
usurped homeland. In this sense, their homeland was their home, in
the extremely localized sense of the village community or the town
neighborhood. The people who remained on their land, on the other
hand, were excluded from this vision in a magical act, as if their
staying in Palestine was no more than a coincidence unworthy of
consideration.
In the period of the second conquest (after the war of 1967), the
relationship between the Palestinians in exile and those who
remained in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as in Arab
communities of the Galilee, was reformulated. The Palestinians who
had remained in the Galilee - as well as in other Israeli
territories, were looked upon as heroes, albeit unsuccessful ones.
This motif prevailed until the Land Day incidents broke out in the
Galilee and the Negev, when their status was "upgraded" and they
were given an epitaph equivalent to that of the "heroes of return"
(abtal al-'awda), a term until then reserved for Palestinian
refugees living in exile.
This relationship morphed yet again after the establishment of the
Palestinian National Authority and the signing of the Oslo Accords.
The return of tens of thousands of exiles to the occupied
territories signified a shift in the weight of Palestinian
decision-making and self-identity towards a new territorial base
inside the homeland. As a result, the Diaspora Palestinians -
especially those in refugee camps - now found themselves
marginalized.
With this political/demographic transformation, the concept of
return to Palestine has acquired different nuances. This is because
the vision of an abstract liberation has collided with a
"realistic" political vision of limited and qualified repatriation.
Tension emerged immediately after the signing of the interim
accords as a result of a possible "return" to Palestine - but only
through individual visits, and the impossibility of returning
collectively due to the existing balance of forces between Israel
and the Palestinians.5
This qualified return to the homeland was mediated by two new
developments. The first involves the rediscovery - or actually the
"discovery" - of Palestinians still living in their homeland:
living communities which had retained their social fabric, their
specific cultural traditions, and their own literature and art.
This presence presented a new problem for the Palestinian society
in exile, which in the past had hardly acknowledged its
existence.
The second phenomenon involves what may be referred to as "visiting
encounters" by the third generation of Nakba victims. This
generation lived the Nakba through the imagery of their parents and
grandparents. The members of this third generation had only lived
in a Palestinian society, which had either been colonized (in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip), subjected to military invasion
(Lebanon), or lacked normal daily life (exile in the Arab
countries).
A Vindictive Return
In the summer of 1994, a number of intellectual activists, who had
returned to Palestine with the PLO cadres following the Oslo
accords, began publishing a series of essays on the experience of
return from exile.6 These pieces collectively constitute a rich
body of discourse on journeys towards the reformulation of
identity. If there is one theme that unites them, it is the shock
at the rediscovery of their homeland. They seem to have landed
after a prolonged flight, but it is unclear in whose homeland they
have landed. The poet Ghassan Zaqtan portrays the homeland as the
new exile. He returns to his village Zakariyya, now the Hebraicized
Kfar Zakariyya, and tries to recall the stories of his
forefathers:7
"Zakariyya did not look as it was described at all. The hill was
not as astonishing as in the description, and the Jews who were
wandering along the roads did not relate to the place; rather,
there was a distance separating them from it...the body
movement...shoulders in particular. It seemed to me that they were
totally removed from what was happening...I said something I no
longer remember. I did not abandon it. I have no right to do that;
I have no right to abandon it. This is a knowledge that is more
sublime than the vehicle of yearning that brought me here, or
rather the
exile that brought me to my father's place."8
Zaqtan extrapolates from his testimony, falling back on Arab exodus
from Andalusia:
"We have become the new Andalusians. It seems very appropriate. The
text has chosen its language, comparisons and exile. All of a
sudden 'our return' seems like a white lie. It seems like a
treachery of exile, text, and the idea of Andalusia, the land we
inhabited for centuries. We had to take back our suitcase and leave
without any notice. We had excluded Awda from our Andalusian
condition but have yet to find Andalusia."
Zaqtan refers to the disintegration of the concept of holiness when
imagining the sacred land as he confronts the Israeli
Other:
"Sacredness here presents another problem when facing the holiness
of the other who cannot be expunged from the scene. The ability of
the other to propagate his own sacredness and make it part of the
contemporary universal scene cannot be negated. I was never
convinced that the sacred... stands on our side. The 'other' had
already established his mythology, reformulated it as a racial
doctrine, and descended on our villages, towns and roads like a
huge silver plate coming from a neighboring unseen mythology. This
was at a time when our own myth was collapsing and disintegrating
on the ground with the lapse of time, forgetfulness and a fading
conviction."9
This fetishism of the homeland dominates the imagery of poet
Zakariyya Mohammed. Contrary to his colleagues, however, he decided
not to philosophize. He chose instead to use literary metaphors to
describe the dilemmas of the returnees.
The aridity of the new Palestinian return is equivalent to the arid
soil left to the remaining part of Palestine after the Israelis
appropriated the coastal regions:
"I thought I would double my idols and mirrors in the homeland.
What is this homeland? It is no more than a piece of land that is
left for us. It is a piece of stone. It is a land of mountains and
hills...a land of stone and rock. They took the coast and left
rocky hills for us. No, in fact, they did not leave it; we try to
make them leave it. What can we do with stone? We can at least bear
our agony."10
Hasan Khader, by contrast, attacks Palestinian narcissism and its
accompanying self-pity. This narcissism, he claims, lifts the
concept of return to the level of a cult, which needs to be
transcended in favor of "normalizing" daily life through a new
praxis.
"What we lived through in the past was a time of transitional
culture of contingencies [thaqafat tawari'], the culture of
transforming refugees into a people. The problem now is to how to
transform those people into a new normalcy away from the domain of
the 'miraculous children'." 11
This search for "normality" is viewed as the problem of a culture
that has finally shifted from attempting to rise to focus on an
"exemplary homeland" to coming to grips with a "flesh and blood"
homeland - that is to say, towards a shift from ideology to
reality. "This is a shift that requires the writer to depart from
the illusions of a 'stolen homeland'."
"There is no possibility of reproducing the homeland as a paradise
lost. The homeland is at hand, disfigured and distorted and waiting
for salvation. We have an identity that is still in the formulation
stage. This identity will become larger with every meter we are
able to extract from the occupier, with every road we construct,
every book we print, every woman we free (sic), every window we
open in our life, which is so burdened with stagnant air, and every
decision we take in the fields of social and political organization
and human rights."12
Of all the returnees, Khader is the one most obsessed with the
process of return to the normalization in Palestinian daily life -
which he sees as a categorical pre-condition for normalization with
his protagonists.
Mureed Al-Barghouthy is arguably the author with the utmost inner
peace among the returnees. He is probably the only one among them
who is not a refugee, or whose family did not leave coastal
Palestine. He is also the most relentlessly self-critical when
viewing his own past.
"How can we explain today," Barghouthy says in I Saw Ramallah,13
"after we have grown and become mature, how we in the towns and
villages of the West Bank treated our people who were expelled by
Israel from their coastal cities and villages...and came to stay in
our mountainous towns and villages. We called them refugees, we
called them immigrants!"
Barghouthy's return to Palestine involved a qualified sojourn to
his village of Deir Ghassaneh (formerly a feudal estate in the
Ramallah district). But it was Jerusalem that became the focus of a
nostalgic recollection of the sensuous memories of his
adolescence:
"That vague enjoyment we felt when our adolescent bodies touched
the bodies of European tourist women on the Saturday of Fire [Sabt
enNour, during the orthodox celebrations of the day before Easter
Sunday], when we shared with them the darkness of the Church of the
Holy Sepulcher and carried the white candles that illuminate the
darkness, just like them. This is mundane Jerusalem, the city of
our little times that we had forgotten too quickly. Because it is
normal, just as water is water and lightening is lightening, and
just as our hands were lost, it has now emerged as an
abstraction."14
To a poet who grew up in the socially repressive milieu of the
highland villages, the Old City evokes a keen sense of eroticism.
Thus tragedy for Barghouthy is not the Nakba itself, but rather the
loss of the city which gave rise to it. "The occupation has left
the Palestinian villages as they were and reduced our cities to
villages".15 At the end, the writer preserves his Palestinian
identity in his imagination, returning to his promised land in
Cairo.
Conclusion
This discussion has attempted to bring together several experiences
of exile and the reconstruction of the homeland in the imagination
of Palestinian writers. The most striking feature of this
reconstruction is the delayed reaction to the experience of war and
uprootedness, and the accompanying repression of those memories.
When the waves of disclosures did emerge, as happened during the
commemorative ceremonies of the Nakba, half a century after the
event, the ravages of war appeared as localized events,
disconnected from the larger tragedy that engulfed the
refugees.
I have discerned several trends prevalent among the exiled writers.
In the earlier generation of exiles, there is a dominant tendency
to 'freeze' the homeland into frames of pastoral idyls. This is
especially true of artists and poets, but it was also a natural
flow from the nationalist historiography of the period. Within the
second and third generations of exiles, a more radical current
appears, questioning the conventional experience of exile and the
causes of the exodus. Of particular interest here is the manner in
which these critics interrogated the composition of the pre-1948
society which allowed itself to be defeated and dismantled. The
bourgeois nostalgia was seen as a blindness that joined pre-war
fragility to its impotent behavior in the war itself.
The turning point in this nostalgic narrative was the return of the
Palestine Liberation Organisation and its intelligentsia to
Palestine in the mid-90s. Here we encounter the shock of returning
to the homeland, but under conditions of political compromises and
physical confinement. Its main impact was to de-mystify the
ideological discourse on the right of return, turning it into
political realism, and initiating a new discourse, which centred
around notions of normality and the normalization of daily life.
Here normality is related to the question of carrying on with a
dual (and conflicting) intellectual agenda; on the one hand there
is the consolidation of a new social group based on building
statehood; on the other hand, the conceptualisation and practicing
of a mundane, normal society out of the "heroic" images of
Palestine whose intellectuals had become addicted to their status
as exiles.
The main victims of this have been those Palestinians who were not
exiled, those who remained as an Arab minority in Israel. Their
portrayal in the literature of exile has shifted from the forgotten
to an abstract heroic status that remained marginal to the
Palestinian experience. The turning point referred to above is
therefore both a conceptual and historic benchmark. It refers to
the beginning of a Palestinian narrative that attempts, under the
conditions of the new, and tenuous, normality to synthesize these
different experiences of exiles, of three generations and three
geographies. In doing so, it will have to deal with exile as a
permanent condition for those who returned and experienced an
internal exile, and for those who did not return and established
their lives as part of the cultural scene in their diasporas.
1 This piece is a shorter version of a paper that will appear as a
chapter in Homelands (edited by Bo Strath and Ron Robin, European
University of Florence, Florence, 2003).
2 An earlier Arabic version of this essay appeared in al Karmil
(Ramallah) no. 54, "Ad-Dhakira al-Mu'adhabah."
3 These impressions are based on my attendance of the major Nakba
activities that took place in March, April, and May, 1998, in
Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem. The most prominent among these
activities were organized by the Khalil Sakakini Center in
Ramallah, the Popular Art Center in Al-Bireh, and the local
universities. The reader can obtain a list of those events from the
Sakakini Centre published as "Commemoration of Nakba Events:
Lectures, Films and Exhibitions," Ramallah, 1999.
4 Testimony by Hajj Hussein Abdel Rahman Al-Hilmi from Silwad,
Khalil Sakakini Center, May 2, 1998.
5 At the end of 2000, Palestinian and Israeli negotiators were
wrestling with a formula over the interpretation of UN resolution
194, which allows those refugees who, "will live at peace with
their neighbors to return to their homes" in the context of final
status talks. The refugee issue, more than Jerusalem and
settlements, proved to be the decisive factor in the collapse of
the Camp David and Taba negotiations.
6 Al-Karmil magazine in Arabic started publishing them in spring
1997 (Shahadat "Testimonies" - Al-Karmel No. 51) and continued
doing so until the summer of 1998 (Al-Karmel No. 56/57 - "The
Memory of the Place ... The Place of the Memory"). See specifically
Shafiq Al-Hoot "Jaffa The City of Stubbornness", Hasan Khader
"Al-Ghurba - Absence from the Homeland", Mohammed Ali Taha "Time of
the Lost Childhood", and Elias Sanbar, "Return to the
Homeland."
7 All references, unless otherwise mentioned, are to the respective
Karmil issues identified above.
8 Ghassan Zaqtan, Nafi Al-Manfa [The Banishment of Exile] 141-145,
in Arabic.
9 Zaqtan: 144-145, in Arabic.
10 Zakariyya Mohammed, Bone and Gold: 137, in Arabic.
11 Hasan Khader. Were You There? 124, in Arabic.
12 Khader, ibid.
13 Madbooly, Cairo. 1997, in Arabic.
14 Mureed Al-Barghouthy. Living in Time: 156, in Arabic.
15 Barghouthy: 158.