Home as a refrain: Remembering and living displacement in Gaza

History and Memory

Volumn 18, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 10-47

  Feldman, Ilana ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 57249092598     PISSN: 0935560X     EISSN: 15271994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ham.2007.0003     Document Type: Review

References (53)

1. Hannah Arendt, "The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man," in idem, On Totalitarianism (1951; New York, 1973), 293.
2. The year 1948 is obviously a crucial turning point in Palestinian history. For an exploration of its place in Palestinian identity, see Ahmad H. Sa'di "Catastrophe, Memory, and Identity: Al-Nakbah as a Component of Palestinian Identity" Israel Studies 7, no. 2 (2002): 175-98.
3. Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, trans. Ahdaf Soueif (Cairo, 2000), 4.
4. Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York, 1986), 19.
5. Fawaz Turki, Exile's Return: The Making of a Palestinian American (New York, 1994), 4. Ghassan Kanafani's well-known novella Return to Haifa (1970) comments on the same transformation of place and people that acts as a double displacement.
6. See, for example, Barbara Parmenter Giving Voice to Stones: Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature (Austin, TX, 1994)
7. Kamel S. Abu Jaber, The Palestinians: People of the Olive Tree (Amman, 1995); and references below.
8. This presentation of Palestinian naiveté is evident in Danny Rubinstein, The People of Nowhere: The Palestinian Vision of Home (New York, 1991), in which there are repeated references to people's inability, even 40 years on, to even comprehend their condition. He describes a beggar in the Jabalya refugee camp who was wandering outside during a curfew. An Israeli soldier told him "Everyone's gone home. You must go too. Where is your home?" Rubinstein describes how, "in perfect innocence and sincerity," he told the soldier that "my house is in Majdal." Rubinstein comments: "Majdal is now the Israeli town of Ashkelon. It hasn't existed for over forty years. But the beggar automatically gave the answer common to most refugees of his generation: the name of a lost village" (38).
9. Rochelle Davis explores this variety of memory collections in her dissertation "The Attar of History: Palestinian Narratives of Life before 1948" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2002)
10. Susan Slyomovics has written about memorial books in The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia, 1998).
11. Considerably more work has been done on Palestinian refugee experiences in the West Bank and the diaspora than in Gaza. Refugee experiences share many similarities across territory, but the distinctions render investigation of these different locales important. For discussion of "refugee identity" in the West Bank, see Shimon Shamir, "West Bank Refugees-Between Camp and Society," in Joel S. Migdal, ed., Palestinian Society and Politics (Princeton, 1980), 146-65
12. George Bisharat, "Exile to Compatriot: Transformations in the Social Identity of Palestinian Refugees in the West Bank," in Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds., Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (Durham, NC, 1997), 203-33
13. For Lebanon see Julie Peteet, Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (New York, 1991)
14. Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London, 1979)
15. For Jordan see Randa Farah, "Popular Memory and Reconstructions of Palestinian Identity: Al-Baq'a Refugee Camp, Jordan" (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1999). While this essay focuses on articulations and experiences of home in Gaza, comparative research in other areas would further enrich our understanding of the Palestinian sense of home.
16. Ann Stoler and Karen Strassler, "Castings for the Colonial: Memory Work in 'New Order'Java," Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 1 (2000): 4-48
17. Paul Thompson, "Believe It or Not: Rethinking the Historical Interpretation of Memory," in Jaclyn Jeffrey and Glenace Edwall, eds., Memory and History: Essays on Recalling and Interpreting Experience (New York, 1994), 1-16
18. Peter Burke, "History as Social Memory," in Thomas Butler, ed., Memory: History, Culture, and the Mind (Oxford, 1989), 97-115
19. On oral history, see Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Past: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge, 1994)
20. Luisa Passerini, "Introduction: Oral Sources and the Historical Study of Culture," and "Memories of Self: Autobiography and Self-Representation," in idem, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class (Cambridge, 1988)
21. Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past (New York, 1982)
22. On Palestine specifically, see Slyomovics, The Object of Memory
23. Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936-1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis, 1995).
24. See Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt for a discussion of the politics of memory in Palestine.
25. Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, 1994), 12.
26. Stoler and Strassler, "Castings for the Colonial," 9.
27. See for example, Helena Lindholm Schulz, The Palestinian Diaspora: Formation of Identities and Politics of Homeland (New York, 2003)
28. Carol Bardenstein, "Trees, Forests, and the Shaping of Palestinian and Israeli Collective Memory," in Meke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, NH, 1999), 148-68
29. Glenn Bowman "Tales of the Lost Land: Palestinian Identity and the Formation of Nationalist Consciousness," in Erica Cater, James Donald and Judith Squires, eds., Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location (London, 1993), 73-99.
30. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1987), 311-12.
31. Turki, Exile's Return, 5.
32. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 311.
33. Describing a very different place and moment, Nancy D. Munn notes a similar disconnect in "The 'Becoming-Past' of Places: Spacetime and Memory in 19th Century, Pre-Civil War New York," Suomen Antropologi (Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society) 29, no. 1 (2004): 2-19.
34. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2001), 8.
35. Carol Bardenstein, "Transmissions Interrupted: Reconfiguring Food, Memory, and Gender in the Cookbook Memoirs of Middle Eastern Exiles," Signs 28, no. 1 (2002): 366.
36. Julie Peteet, "Transforming Trust: Dispossession and Empowerment among Palestinian Refugees," in E. Valentine Daniel and John Chr. Knudsen, eds., Mistrusting Refugees (Berkeley, 1995), 180.
37. Tania Forte, "On the Making of Village: Transactions, Land, and History in the Galilee" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2000).
38. Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis, 1994), 169.
39. Benny Morris, Israel's Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War (Oxford, 1993), 111. Im Yahya told me that she went back to Majdal after leaving during the fighting, only later to be expelled: "I went back and I gave birth there, we had a birth certificate and he was registered⋯. They took my son's birth certificate before we left. We did not think of it, we did not think why they took his birth certificate, they were afraid that he would demand his rights because he was born in the Israeli state. They took all birth certificates, and did not allow anyone to go without giving the birth certificate." Interview, Jabalya Camp, 13 May 1999.
40. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 169.
41. Hussein Abu Naml, Qita' Ghazzah, 1948-1967: Tatawwarat iqtisadiyya wa-siyasiyya wa-ijtima'iyya wa-'askariyya (The Gaza Strip, 1948-1967: Economic, political, social, and military developments) (Beirut, 1979), 44.
42. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 311.
43. Morris, Israel's Border Wars, 40-42.
44. Cited in Morris, Israel's Border Wars, 41. An American diplomat offered a more "cultural" explanation for the border crossings, suggesting that "demarcation lines are somewhat foreign to the Arab's make-up" (cited in ibid., 46).
45. Agamben argues that the reduction of human life to bare life-biological only and not political-is an increasing condition of the modern world. Humanitarian organizations, which he argues "can only grasp human life in the figure of bare or sacred life," are thus complicit with the forces they should seek to fight. In this configuration, the refugee becomes a paradigmatic figure of the modern condition. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto, 1998), 133-34.
46. For an overview of fida'iyyin activities, see Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993 (Oxford, 1997), 60-65.
47. Ann Mosely-Lesch, "Gaza: History and Politics," in idem and Mark Tessler, eds., Israel, Egypt, and the Palestinians: From Camp David to Intifada (Bloomington, IN, 1989), 226.
48. Morris, Israel's Border Wars, 340-43.
49. Husayn Abu Niml, "Harb al-fida'iyyin fi Qitah Ghazzah" (The war of the guerrillas in the Gaza Strip), Shu'un Filistiniyya 62 (Jan. 1979): 171.
50. Gaza erupted into demonstrations against Egyptian authorities and UNRWA officials, with people shouting slogans such as: "No settlement! No relocation! Oh, you American agents!" (ibid., 170). Mu'in Basisu, a Palestinian poet and activist who was a leader of the demonstrations, describes the confrontations with Egyptian authorities: "The demonstration had to advance or be broken like an egg on a steel helmet. We marched to within 20 meters of the [military] truck, which stood in the middle of the street obstructing the demonstration-10 meters-5 meters. Then the order was given, and we were sprayed with bullets from behind the truck and the orange trees." Mu'in Basisu, Descent into the Water: Palestinian Notes from Arab Exile, trans. Saleh Omar (Wilmette, IL, 1980), 33-34.
51. These connections and relations are also connected to a variety of governing practices in Gaza in the years since 1948, both those of the Egyptian Administration and later the Israeli occupying forces and those of international agencies like the AFSC and UNRWA I explore these sorts of practice elsewhere. See my "Difficult Distinctions: Refugee Law, Humanitarian Practice, and Political Identification in Gaza," forthcoming in Cultural Anthropology 22, no.1 (2007)
52. Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule (1917-1967) (forthcoming, Duke University Press).
53. As in the aftermath of 1948, in the past few years life in Palestine has once again been in crisis. What refrain will emerge from the current conditions, where it has become unclear what would even constitute security? Even under conditions of radical insecurity, I suspect that people will continue to articulate, through their stories and their practices, a refrain that in its tenuous repetitions seeks to create a "calming and stabilizing" space (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 311) that offers some protection from the forces of chaos.