Seeing the Past: Mapping the Past, Recreating the Homeland: Contemporary Palestinian Recollections of pre-1948 Life

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Mapping the Past: Memories of Place and pre-1948 Palestine

Rochelle Davis
Stanford University
radavis@stanford.edu

*Do Not Cite or Quote without Permission*

An underlying assumption in anthropology and other fields is that when everyday people write or speak about themselves, that it gives voice to a voiceless population and provides a unique lens on a particular period. My work is based on an amazing group of texts that I have collected from inside Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon over the last seven years. These are what are known as “village memorial books” about the Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948, and they are local productions by Palestinians, who take on the task of collecting information about their villages of origin. These village memorial books, written by Palestinian refugees who have long struggled to have their voices heard, certainly are an example of the work of a segment of the population who are seizing the opportunity to express their own history and perspectives. However, as I will argue today, the way places are mapped in the memorial books positions them within a national discourse of glorification of the peasant lifestyle of living closely attached to the land. Building on Ted Swedenburg’s work on the Palestinian peasant as national signifier , I suggest that the nationalist agenda dominates how people see the past for a number of reasons: First, the continued presence of a large Palestinian refugee community in the diaspora, second, the process in 1948 which turned peasant populations into landless refugees who now work in business and civil service jobs; third, the physical destruction of the majority of the villages that fell within the Israeli state; fourth, the absence of any settlement to the Palestinan refugee issue; and fifth, Palestinian feelings that not only are they under siege but their history and memories of the past are as well. I will use the “maps of the past” that people create in the village memorial books to trace the process by which local spaces become canvases for the enactment of nationalistic visions of the pre-1948 past.

Before discussing “maps of the past”, I want to provide you with a map of my paper. I will first provide some background on the memorial books and the events of 1948. I will then present the different methods of mapping the past as they occur in the books – this includes four forms – cartographic maps, lists, poems, and journeys. As I go through the different forms, I will interpret and suggest the ways in which these spaces are being shaped, in recounting them post-1948 to create particular images of the village that conform to Palestinian idealizations of peasant life. Finally, I will conclude by discussing how to interpret these maps within the larger context that they are placed in in the books, that of mapping a particular past that ties the village spaces to the Palestinian nationalist view of village life and that offers a romanticized reconstruction of the places in the village to the new generations of refugees who are no longer farmers and peasants and who do not personally know the village.

GEOHISTORICAL BACKGROUND:

I want to begin with a bit of geo-historical background to set the stage for what I am talking about, specifically the pre-1948 villages in “historic Palestine” (i.e. British mandatory Palestine). The village memorial books that I examine are written by Palestinians who today for the most part live in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, and Israel. They are all refugees from the 1948 war which resulted in the depopulation of approximately 418 Palestinian villages and numerous cities. In terms of physical space, it is estimated that because of Israeli state policies during and after the 1948 war, 70% of these villages were totally destroyed, and another 22% were mostly destroyed with only a few houses or religious places left standing.

SLIDE: FROM THE MEMORIAL BOOK FOR THE VILLAGE OF ‘INNABA: CAPTION READS “RUINS OF THE HOUSE OF ‘ABD AL-MAJEED MAHMOUD, STEPS OF HOME ARE VISIBLE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PICTURE”

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SLIDE: ANOTHER PICTURE FROM THE KUFR SABA MEMORIAL BOOK OF THE SCHOOL AND A CHINA BARK TREE. AS YOU CAN SEE, THE SCHOOL BUILDING STILL STANDS BUT NO LONGER HAS A ROOF

Some forty years later in the 1980s and 1990s, Palestinians living in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank, as well as inside Israel began publishing books about the villages that were destroyed in 1948. As a subject of research by academics, they are almost untouched, with the exception of Susan Slyomovics’ seminal work, Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village, which relies on one of these books for the village of ‘Ayn Houd, resettled post 48 as an Israeli artists’ colony and renamed Ein Hod. Laleh Khalili in a recent article examined the village memorial books being produced in Lebanon as part of grass-roots commemorations to remember the land. She views the books as both an act of salvage ethnography as well as an act of political advocacy. My paper builds on their analyses to consider the production of these texts in all areas of the Palestinian diaspora, and the ways in which places are mapped and described in these books reifies a particular view and perspective of the idyllic peasant.

The majority of the memorial books, and there is a lot of variation here, so I can only speak in rough generalizations, are written by retired men, who were themselves born in the village, but often left as children. Many of them spent their working lives as teachers in the UNRWA schools that were set up for Palestinians in the refugee camps. The books are self-published by the author or in a few cases, they are published in conjunction with village organization especially the ones in ‘Amman, Jordan. I would estimate in my experience that there are somewhere in the range of 50 books that conform to the above specifications, including three books by a woman author and a number by younger men. The books focus on the history of the village and its name; crops grown, livestock raised; religious holiday celebrations; lists of the trades practiced, the vehicles owned, and the shops in the village; explanations of customs and traditions including songs sung at circumcisions and wedding, details of how houses were built and tomato paste was made; and huge family geneaologies.

SLIDE: ‘ABDEL DA’IM FAMILY TREE OF THE WA`REH HAMULA OF DAYR ABAN

SLIDE: MISH’AL FAMILY TREE FROM QALUNIYA VILLAGE

A unique section includes testimonies of people who witnessed the events, fighting and fleeing of 1948. The incredible detail of documentation in these books reveals what Salim Tamari and Rema Hamami refer to when discussing people’s desire to preserve Palestinian folklore, as “pickling the past”, that is, the past is inspected and cleaned-up to be preserved in a jar, untouched and on view for all to see.

For the Palestinian villagers who became refugees in 1948 and were separated completely from those places and their lands, their memorializations of the village later on in book form, can be understood as an attempt to recreate and present the village as it existed prior to 1948 and to emphasize their history and claims on the past, and to the present and future.

SLIDE COVER OF THE VILLAGE MEMORIAL BOOK FOR AYN KARIM: ENTITLED THE REALITY AND THE DREAM WHICHALSO A CONTEMPORARY PICTURE OF THE MOSQUE OF THE VILLAGE WHICH IS BUILT ABOVE THE MAIN VILLAGE SPRING

SLIDE: COVER OF THE MEMORIAL BOOK FOR THE VILLAGE OF AL-KUWAYKAT, SHOWS IN THE BACKGROUND A MAP OF HISTORIC PALESTINE IN WHITE, AND THE LOCATION OF THE VILLAGE ON THAT MAP,A SMALLER MAP OF THE ACRE/’AKKA DISTRICT WHERE THE VILLAGE IS LOCATED, A CONTEMPORARY PICTURE OF A HOUSE FROM THE VILLAGE, AND THE STAMP OF THE VILLAGE MUKHTAR FROM 1941.

As the covers show, places figure prominently into defining the village, and places function differently than the other subjects recorded in the memorial books. The wedding songs, for example, are something that the villagers may still sing, or at the very least can revive, perform, or record; likewise, the lineages are part of a continual process that the villagers modify as they have children and their children have children. Even embroidery and basketmaking are revived in forms of modern dress and home decoration. These cultural practices and material objects depict not only a “past” but are incorporated into the body of the “present” linked through cultural continuity, continuing social traditions, modified material practices. In retaining place names, however, the descendants memorize and memorialize places that no longer exist, that cannot be revisited, photographed or even recreated. Pierre Nora proposes a useful way in which humans conceive of places in the past as lieux de memoire, realms or sites of memory, which are concrete places, objects, and gestures that symbolize a break with the past. As Nora explains, “The moment of lieux de memoire occurs at the same time that an immense and intimate fund of memory disappears, surviving only as a reconstituted object beneath the gaze of critical history. This period sees, on the one hand, the decisive deepening of historical study and, on the other hand, a heritage consolidated.” Palestinians position the village and its physical spaces as carriers of all that was pre1-48 history, thus through recalling places, even ones that no longer exist, they maintain a connection to the past.

Thus we find that the Palestinian memorial books are dossiers of evidence: land records, genealogies, photographs, and stories all aimed towards showing the villagers’ relationship to the places in the village and thus proving their existence in history and their existence on the land, despite that they are no longer there and that the village no longer exists. Many of the books contain extensive reproductions of land documents, such as

SLIDE: BRITISH MANDATE LAND DEED, SALAMEH VILLAGE

Ms. Thuraya Muhammad Mustafa Qishsha bought land for building (268 m.) for fifty Palestinian pounds from Ahmed Abdel-Qader al-Banna, Hassan Hussein Kasuha and Nasra Abdelrahman al-Qarmah. August 2, 1942.

SLIDE: LAND SALES DOCUMENT FORM THE OTTOMAN PERIOD, VILLAGE OF KAWFAKHAH

The villagers relationship to the land is shown through how they read the destroyed landscape, such as this picture from SLIDE: KUFR SABA: Caption: China Bark tree that is called the China Bark of Dar Abu Ayshe. It is situated in the middle of the village, and the path to Sayidna ‘Ali passed next to it.

As Carol Bardenstein’s work shows, trees are used by Palestinians as a metaphor for emphasizing knowledge of the natural landscape and their rootedness in the land.

In this paper, I want to focus on how these village memorial books present the physical spaces of the past, in other words how they map the past, and how in presenting those places the Palestinian authors nationalize their own local experiences to conform to the politicized image of their history. I will draw to the fore the “geographic nostalgia” that dominates these “memorial maps,” maps that guide readers to recognize the physical landscape and the significance of the village to its inhabitants, by creating specific images and narratives of the village from the pre-48 period.

In the memorial books, people do more than just make what we think of as maps, two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional space. People “map the past” in a variety of ways, and I will discuss forms of mapping physical locations that appear in the books as lists, stories, poems, and journeys. Because Palestinian maps of the pre-1948 landscape consist not only of place names, as is common in cartographic representations, but also of experiences, values, and idealizations, understanding how Palestinians represent pre-1948 spaces and places relates directly to the identities that Palestinians are actively creating in the present. The physical recording of these memories, in books, is inscribed by and re-inscribes the history of what existed and was experienced by Palestinians in pre-1948 Palestine. In addition, the physical spaces are registered as collective spaces that create and “map” a communal vision of a shared village life.

Part 2: Mapping the Past

Because of the importance of place in Palestinian memory – its presence in memory necessitated by its absence from the physical reality of the present –people create maps of memory and human experience as much as or maybe more than they map geography. The collective vision and knowledge of village space dominates the maps Palestinians have created of the places they lived before 1948. Wells, caves, valleys, hills, paths, plots of farmland, buildings, mosques, churches, trees, and stores embody this collective knowledge and are recorded, post-48, as the essential components of the village or neighborhood or town. The Dayr Aban memorial book, for example, includes seven separate maps, each with the following information marked on it: maps of the mountainous areas of the village; the borders of the village and the names of the landmarks, the locations of the houses in the three neighborhoods of the village; the religious and archaeological sites.

SLIDE: HOUSES – THREE SECTIONS OF THE NEIGHBORHOODS LABELED AL-BALAD, AL-QATI’ AND AL-BATIN

SLIDE OF THE ROADS AND AGRICULTURAL AREAS

SLIDE OF THE SPRINGS AND VALLEYS

All maps express different ways of seeing the world, marking what is important at a particular time or place or to a particular population. Here they map physically visible spaces – roads, houses, wells, orchards. A close reading of the memorial book texts suggests that they also emerge out of particular modes of expression of relationships to land. So what I’ll discuss now are the different ways that Palestinians map the pre-1948 landscape in four forms: lists, stories, poems, and journeys, and suggest what type of relationships these maps create between the places of the past and the present memory of those places.

The human relationship to the land is expressed not only in terms of possession of natural spaces but also in harnessing and using the productive capacity of the land. Thus, in the memorial book for the village of al-Kababir, the author states that the natural landmarks provided the best way for people to chart their daily lives and get around, and he provides a list of these features: the mountains al-jibāl, valleys al-widyān, flat fields between two hills al-khilāyil, lands with a shallow creek through it al-shi’āb, the author lists the springs ‘ayūn.

"`Ayn Umm al-Faraj (Wad al-Siyah), `Ayn Risha (Wad Risha below the pool), `Ayn `Abdalla and `Ayn al-Tira (al-Sira), `Ayn al-`Aliq (Rishmiya), `Ayn al-Suwaniya (Rishmiya), `Ayn al-Dalia or `Ayn Abu Sa`id (Rishmiya), `Ayn al-Jawwiya (east of Rishmiya), `Ayn al-Sa`ada (east of Haifa), `Ayn al-Shalala (below Bayt Oren), `Ayn al-Hayik (west of ‘Isfiya), al-`Ayn al-Bayda’ (west of `Isfiya) and `Ayn Abu Dhahir (south of the mosque). (`Uda 1980: 39-40)"

The list of springs and wells provides the geographic markers of fresh water, a crucial part of village life since people would need to know where the springs and wells were for household use, watering herd animals, and irrigating crops. The list suggests that the relationship of the peasants to the landscape is derived from decades of work and life on particular land and of knowing and harnessing its productive potential. Divorced from their everyday use and their history, the list form makes the names meaningful through marking them as part of the village and therefore village heritage, by signifying, for Palestinians, their relationship to the land through knowledge of it. Mapping places through lists, like cartography, retains the knowledge of names and places, but divest them of social meaning, significance, and context. They function as part of the act of preserving the past, the geographic nostalgia for an idyllic village.

For example, the memorial book for the village of Suhmata, positions knowing names as part of the village heritage and the duty of all villagers. The following composition entitled, “So that we don’t forget,” is in call and response format:

"CALL: Ancestors’ words to their descendants al-aba’ wa al-ajdad yaqulun lil-abna’ wa al-ahfad: Suhmata is your village, a dear portion of your homeland, all of its land is ours, we inherited it from our fathers who inherited it from our grandfathers …Our bequest to our children and grandchildren and the generations that follow us: “remember your homeland, do not forget your village … We have put before you the names of the village lands, part by part, the names of the springs and valleys, the names of the pools and wells, the names of the fruit trees and other trees, the names of the seasonal crops and we give you the responsibility, this charge, to you, the children and grandchildren, who are the trustees…

RESPONSE: The answer of the descendants to the bequest of the ancestors: We will retain the names and places, defend our rights, and maintain the land and stone, the crops and trees. We will maintain the bequest and fulfill our responsibility, cooperating with all who are sincere, for however long it takes, and despite the hardships and difficulties to liberate Suhmata and Palestine." (Suhmata: 160)

Even though the village itself no longer exists, this call and response piece conveys the imagined bequest of the village from the elders who lived in it prior to 1948 to their children, as their birthright and their legacy. The ancestors hand down a past but emphasize the physical places of the past -- names of the springs, the wells, the crops, the village lands. This text calls on the descendants to learn these names, and thus to know the village and the location of these places, despite their absence from the contemporary landscape and despite the removal of the villagers and their descendants from that land. The composition in the Suhmata memorial book functions as a plea to both young and old: as a call to young people to know their past and to respect their history, to receive the teaching and knowledge of their elders and to continue to fight and believe that Suhmata and Palestine can be returned; and, finally, as a call to the old people, who remember their village and their village life, to ensure that their heritage and legacy are maintained. This piece illustrates one of the roles that these lists play in the village memorial books – that of preserving the names as a larger symbol of the village and as essential to claiming it and their rights to it.

Stories as Maps

The lists of places, and maps of locations of the natural and human-built environment, remain just names, which, without a social context, teeter on the edge of becoming, as the well-known Palestinian folklorist Sharif Kana`aneh fears, “only names on old maps.” (Kana`neh and al-Ka`bi 1987: 3) But for those who lived in and remember the village, these place names conjure up stories andpersonal experiences. Through these stories and accounts, the places and names take on meaning beyond their role as just location markers; instead they become signifiers and ideographs of a specific past embodied in the name, and embedded in their social construction and transmission. These stories map a lived space that has depth and meaning beyond its physical cartographic presence.

The social context for the place names on maps come from stories, which theorist Michel de Certeau believes, define how we see places, and thus stories endow places with specifically selected contextual meanings. Every story, he argues, is a journey through space, because it projects experience onto places through the actions of historical subjects. (de Certeau 1984: 118) This concept is well illustrated with an example:

This SLIDE is a photograph of a TREE that appears IN THE MAJDAL ‘ASQALAN BOOK

The caption of the SLIDE reads: Majdal ‘Asqalan: 17 martyrs of the 1936 revolt, who are known as the ‘Imran Shushar group, rest under this tree. It is only through the story that is told about it that we are able to know the significance of the tree and this place in the town.

Palestinians story the places of their past through verse, personal recollections, collective histories, maps, and artwork, and the activities of people transform the physical place -- buildings of a neighborhood, the village square, or a tree -- into meaningful spaces of village and communal life.

What are the stories that Palestinians tell about the places in their villages and what kinds of meaning do those stories give those places? In the case of the village of al-Qalunya, maps and descriptions provide the locations of all of the springs in the village, but the author’s account of the different wells tells not only where each well was located but also who owned it and the role it played in the villagers’ lives.

"Because of the springs `uyūn in our village, people didn’t need to dig private wells abār in the courtyards of their homes. But there still were a number of privately dug wells in the village. The most renowned of these was the well of Isma`il Khalil Ramadan that was in the courtyard of the tens of rooms that he owned. He offered this well to the people of the village during the days when the Jews of the settlements of Motza and Erza besieged the village. He offered a great service, providing necessary water to the families because of the impossibility of women going to the Upper Spring al-`ayn al-foqa or the Lower Spring al-`ayn al-tahta where they were easy targets for the Jewish snipers. Among the other notable wells in the village were the well of the Mosque of Shaykh Hamad, the well of Muhammad `Ali Salāma `Askar, the well of Dar Khalil in al-Matayin east of al-Jifir, the well of Dar `Issa Hamdān, and the well of al-Msawis on the lands of al-Safha and this is the well that a village woman fell in when she was with her husband."

"The people of the village dug a collective well on their land in the area of Dayr Nahla, near the village of al-Qubâb, that everyone benefited from during the harvest and threshing. I remember perfectly, the well of Mustafa Ramadân in the area of Bayt Mazza. It was the only well that had water in it year round among the seven wells found there that belonged to the tribe hamûla of `Askar in Bayt Mazza, the northernmost part of our village of Qaluniya. Those wells were “rain-fed wells” ābār al-jama` and were known from Roman times. The winter rains would collect in them—the wells depended only on the rains and surface runoff collected through small channels, and had no underground water source. Unfortunately, I have seen how neglect has affected these wells—they are now dry all year long." (Samarin 1993: 39-40)

Three points can be drawn from this example. First, this knowledge of the land and its history reflects an authority of experience. Through that authority comes the right to tell the village stories. As recounted here, the villagers’ knowledge of the natural resources and how best to use them for their own benefit – in this case the storage of rainwater as passed down from Roman times – is made into a marker of the author’s knowledge of the village and also of his familiarity and intimacy with the land, whish is implicitly contrasted with the neglect shown by the current inhabitants, Israelis, who don’t have the interest or knowledge to maintain the wells. Second, placed right in the beginning is the story of how the wells play an important role in the survival of the village in the prevailing political situation of the time. Such stories convey both individual events that took place in the village and a nationalized theme of village unity. The siege of the village by Zionist settlements and the generosity of a particular individual places the village within a national narrative of unified and successful resistance and individual sacrifice for the sake of community. Third, the narrative illustrates well ownership by specific individuals and families, and suggests that access to the well remained in the hands of a family or hamula (clan), and granting permission for access is construed as an act of generosity and communal unity. These family-owned wells contrast with the reference to the communal well, from which all benefited during harvest times. In the memorial book for Qaluniya, the maps reveal the location of the wells, but the stories highlight a particular understanding of the village social system, as understood by the author, knowledge that is influenced not only by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but also by the glorification of Palestinian peasant life. The authordoes not address that some people had restricted access to the wells, but instead he frames the story by introducing the abundant natural springs so that they didn’t need these private wells he is about to describe. The significance of this kind of story map stems from the physical locations of the wells, as well as from the relational aspect of village society and history that ties people, incidents, and groups to particular geographical features. This example shows that places are vehicles on which authors map communal relations and social structures and invoke not only communal village identity but also a larger shared Palestinian nationalist history. Other shared communal spaces, such as the outdoor threshing floor, are also mapped as part of the village. As sites of daily activities, they take on a particular symbolic role for the village. Again, from the village of Qaluniya, the author writes,

"Many memories link us emotionally to the threshing floor of the village that was so dear to us. The threshing floor was the ground of our youth and childhood games. On that floor many celebrations took place. During wedding parties, women danced and girls sang, men dabked, and old men danced the sahja. On this floor, the mats were spread, rugs laid out, and manāsif meat cooked in yoghurt and big bowls of jarīsha wheat cooked with yoghurt were offered for both men and women. On this floor, we took pride in showing the harvest of grains and fruits, represented in the threshing and winnowing days of each year." (Samarin 1993: 40)

The threshing floor of a village is a carefully cleaned and hardened space that was out in the open and served as the functional space where people threshed and winnowed the grain. In this recreation of the space however, it is not only invested with the memory of its useful function, the description also relates the other seminal parts of the collective village life that occurred there: celebrations, hosting and feeding guests, and childhood games. By presenting the account in this fashion, the author allows everyone from the village the opportunity to have a memory of it, men and women, children and old people. The hard work of harvesting, threshing, and winnowing the grain, as well as cooking the jarīsha and manāsif is absent from this account, focusing instead on the villagers’ shared good times together.

In addition to highlighting the meaningful social practices and communal values evoked by certain locations, some authors use place names to summon a location’s known character, thus tying the place to the natural features of the landscape -- the olive groves, the wildflowers, the hills of za`tar –. Poetic verse, as in the poem I will read for you in a moment, illustrates the specific names of village sites called on to invoke the memories of the past, providing a map of the village places as the author recalls the village in verse.

Trip in the ruins of al-Walaja Rihlah fî atlâl al-Walaja
by Mustafa Khalîl al-Sayfi

I’m thirsty…Where are the springs and wells? 
Nothing, only wasteland and desert,
Nothing but murky wilderness
	The earth of the fields covered in stones.
Where is “al-Dhuhûr” of almond buds
	And the “Hadâyif” surrounded by wildflowers
Where are the fields and birds of “al-Khalâyil” 
And “Wâdi Ahmed,” the grounds of the partridges
Where is “al-Ĥîna” and its flowing water 
	Its shade sheltering resting travelers
Where are the guests who suddenly appear	
And in the “Quffeh” the coals are lit to cook for them
So that in every house the men clash	
		Like a huge wave, opening the way for a tornado
As a result of their love for the guests
	They compete, young and old
And they threaten to divorce their wives if their offerings weren’t touched 
They are all butchers when it comes to hospitality
…
On the “Jurûn” were playgrounds
		On the “Ĥabâyil” was a house
Is there still enough in the coffeepots
	For people to stay up late and drink?
… (Abu Khiyara: 76)

The poem recalls various places in the village and mentions what they were known for, linking many of them closely to the generosity of the villagers towards their guests. The vestiges of the villagers’ forefathers that are called upon in this poem suggest a general ethos of hospitality embodied in the traditions of offering coffee and slaughtering an animal for a meal, rather than specific examples of visitors and the generosity shown them.

The author invokes a poetic form from pre-Islamic and classical Arabic poetry called al-atlal the ruins to lament the places of memory. In the atlal form, the poet visits the now uninhabited places of his past and bemoans his lost beloved throughout the poem , one of the most famous atlal openings Qifa nabki min dhikra habibin wa manzili, bi siqt al-liwa bayna al-dakhuli fa hawmal [Stop and let us weep, for the beloved and the home, in the lee of the sands between al-Dakhul and Hawmal] as Imru’ al-Qays famously begins is Mu’allaqa. Here Imru’ al-Qays laments both the loss of his beloved and his home, marked by place names. In the village memorial books, this poetic genre, like the story genre differs from the “list form” and the physical map of location markers because of the direct emotional relationship it creates between memory and the places of the past. Lists and physical maps concentrate on remembering what was in the village to perpetuate them for future generations. This poem about the the village of al-Walajeh, for example, bemoans what has been lost, merging the lost beloved and the barren place of memory of the traditional atlal into the same subject here, which is the village. The poetic journey through the spaces of the village recall the poet describing the characteristics of the beloved, such as her eyes and hair, paralleled in the Walajeh poem by the author as he travels through the physical spaces of the village enumerating the virtues and places of the village and the the characteristics associated with them, i.e. “al-Dhuhûr” of almond buds, the Heena with it’s flowing waters. This use of an Arabic poetic form and the content of lamenting loss and celebrating generosity inserts this memorialization of the village into a larger Arab social and cultural context, idealizing and contextualizing the sentiments of attachment and longing to a known emotional expression and form.

Journey Maps

The final type of mapping the physical past that I want to discuss is the journey map, which allows the author to reconstruct a voyeuristic visit to the village. The trip or a journey through the natural and manmade landscape, is similar to the ways that school geography books explain the geography of the country to children, especially like Jordanian school textbooks of the 1950-60s. Narrating the directions and locations of the village, the author takes the reader on a journey that places the names on the maps within a human relational framework embodied in the physical return to the village space. These journey maps provide the reader with the ability to travel the village again as it existed before 1948 and to experience the village through the eyes of its inhabitants, as this example from Dayr Aban suggests:

"This is a trip through the lands of the village through which we will get to know the major landmarks and the location of these places in the basic structure of the village. We’ll make this trip on a day in the month of June 1946, and we’ll begin in Jerusalem where we will take a car from the city heading west for 23 kilometers, when we will reach Bab al-Wad at the western edge of the Jerusalem hills. Then we’ll change our direction and head south; the lands of the villages of Bayt Mahsir and `Artuf are on the left and the lands of `Asalin, Ishwa`, and Sar`a are on the right. After nine kilometers we’ll reach the police station on the eastern side of the main road. … The private mill of Ibrahim Shuraym, and the droning of the motor as it grinds the Dayr Abani wheat, is the first landmark of the village that we pass by, located to the north after we pass the bridge over the valley of Abu Khashaba. … If we face to the north, we will be pleased to see two important landmarks: Hawwuz al-Mayya The water pool which lies 150 meters off of the main road, and the village girls are standing in front of it – they have come to fill their containers with the water from the spring of Marjalin; and the elementary school of the village with its large garden ringing with the voices of the students in their classes and the sound of the tools working in the beautiful garden of the school."

This account of the village begins from a landmark that everyone knows (Jerusalem) and takes the reader from the approach of the village into the different neighborhoods, noting their locations and their inhabitants. Such a process could be traced on a map, and all of the significant locations are commonly represented on the village memorial book maps, including this one for Dayr Aban. But this journey account also describes more than what can be represented on a map or in statistics by filling in the readers’ historical memory of the droning of the mill motor, the vision of women filling water containers at the spring, and the sounds of schoolchildren and of work. This journey map endows these spaces with a sensory element that pushes the reader to imagine observing or participating in village life, as if he or she were standing there hearing the children at play or the grinding of the wheat.

Other journey maps, such as the one in the memorial book for the village of `Imwas, describe the setting of the village and the actions of its inhabitants as if in a folkloric tableau.

"Among the famous landmarks of the village is the maqam of Shaykh `Ubayd (Abu `Ubayda ‘Amr bin al-Jarra) and the maqam of Shaykh Mu`ala (Mu`adh bin Jabal) and next to Shaykh `Ubayd was a big sidr tree Zizyphus spini-christi, as old as `Imwas. Under its shade the village elders would sit, chatting in the evenings yatasamarun and playing seeja mancala. When the tree’s fruit ripened (al-dom) you would see the village children in large numbers racing to pick the fruit. The tree was surrounded by the central cemetery of the village, and between the cemetery and the buildings of the village was a large empty square, which became the bus stop. …The street continued into a high bridge that crossed over the Shalala valley, which collected the rainwater and the water of the spring (`Ayn Nini). The young men would go to the bridge in the evenings to chat with each other yatasamarun and stroll along the empty main street until reaching Dayr al-Latrun the Latrun Monastery or the school. While they walked, they passed by the wide gate and large walls surrounding an old church. … After school the boys and young men liked to go the sports field on the awqaf religious trust lands around the maqam of Shaykh Mu`ala." (Abu Ghosha 1990: 11)

In these journey maps, the villagers re-live an idealized memory of “village life” in which the social system is orderly, people are in their places doing their appointed folkloric tasks: young women fill their containers at the well, old men sit in the village center playing a board game, the children are in school or roam freely in a large mass, and the young men claim the streets in the evening, while during the day they have their own space on the outskirts of the village away from the houses. Those doing much of the work – both women and men – are absent from the public village space, since their work keeps them either out in the fields, inside the homes, or working outside of the village. The visit is voyeuristic and yet totally controlled because he journey maps provide a unique conflation of personal and communal memories of the past. They allow the author, as the journey maker, to choose the historical time for the trip along with the elements that will be revealed to the visitor, deciding what is important to map and narrate. As such, the journey map is not only embedded in the collectively held representation of meaningful parts of the village, but it also presents the village as an object of tour with the author as guide.The journey map presents an individual understanding of the landmarks, sights, sounds, and flavors of a place in a selected image of daily life, disconnected from seasons, conflicts, weather, health, and all the other myriad unappealing or unmemorable aspects of daily life. Because these journey maps are given by individuals, they could be different depending on the author. However, they aren’t , and instead they conform to a similar vision of the village as a site for the folkloric and the traditional, a place where life was pleasant, satisfying, and idyllic, marked and circumscribed by the natural world around it.

Conclusion: Mapping the Past and Memories of Place

Creating maps hinges on several issues and what is seen and what is to be represented are central aspects of what the final map will look like. In the Palestinian case, the memorial books convey maps of a time not forgotten but of places that no longer exist. Creating maps of those places relies on the author’s specific memories as well as the memories of those he solicits. We all know that people look at a landscape and see completely different things, depending on their age, education, gender, historical knowledge, and national identity, among many other factors. The act of seeing, then, is completely tied up in the historical processes which humans create and participate in. The act of transferring what is seen and internalized into a representation for others pushes us to consider form, language, politics, ideology, and history, which I analyze here today.

Palestinian memorial books of the villages prior to 1948 are seen as entrusted with the task of representing the village, and thus they have produced (and continue to produce?) various ways of mapping the space of the village past in the form of physical maps as well as lists of place names, stories surrounding a particular place, poetry about the village, and recreated journeys. These maps of the geographic spaces take physical places and turn them into lived spaces by providing stories of human life and experiences that are inextricably tied to those very places. These maps of the past endure, to a great extent, through forms of writing and imagery that are far removed from the land as it now exists. At the same time, they map spaces that can be shared by all of the villagers – wells, springs, sentiment, journeys – in ways that include all of the villagers and for the most part don’t privilege one group or family. The villages that are created in these maps of the past present landmarks that describe a unified society of shared values and ideals, self-sufficient, free of poverty and disease and internal strife. Village life as mapped on to these spaces is one in which everyone participates, is engaged and has a meaningful role. This image of the village corresponds to the nationalized image of the Palestinian peasant – steadfast, strong, and fertile – that resounds in images, songs and poems.

SLIDE ABDEL RAHMAN AL MUZAIN USED ON A POSTER FOR LAND DAY

SLIDE: PEASANT WOMAN IN A PAINTING BY SLIMAN MANSOUR, REPRESENTING “PALESTINE”

SLIDE: PAINTING BY TALIB DWEIK, ENTITLED LAND OF OUR FATHERS, OF IRONICALLY, PALESTINIAN WOMEN HARVESTING GRAIN

Ted Swedenburg has argued that the uses of the Palestinan peasant as a national signifier by a national movement with largely a middle-class leadership has been used to create a nation with a unified culture and sense of authenticity. But this is not because Palestinians were peasants – approximately half of the Palestinian population in 1948 lived in cities -- rather it is an idealization of such practices that reinforces the land as essential to Palestinian existence and defining who they are and thus is an intrinsic part of their continued struggle. In the film The Nakba the Disaster of 1948, made by Israeli historian Benny Morris, he interviews Azmi Bishara, a Palestinian Israeli representative in the Knesset who critiques the turning of all Palestinian society into village life, at the expense of important cities like Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem. Such also is the history of the embroidered dress (the thawb) of the peasant woman, which has become emblematic of all Palestinians although it was only worn by Palestinian peasant women in the highland mountains and the southern sahel, and not by those in the Galilee and the Triangle or the cities, who in 1948 consitituted the majority of the population.

SLIDE POSTCARD: ENTITLED PALESTINIAN WOMEN PRACTICING TRADITIONAL PALESTINIAN HERITAGE

Urban Palestinian women now wear chic incarnations of the peasant embroidery tradition to weddings and other significant social and cultural occasions. The village and peasant that are portrayed in the village memorial books conforms to this idea and also portrays an idyllic social structure of village relations of solidarity, unity and generosity. There is no exploitation by urban landowners, no tenant farmers, no moneylenders, no collaborators with authorities or Zionist agents.

In a sense, the emphasis on the peasant illustrates Palestinian desires to claim land and landscape in the wake of its appropriation by Zionists/Israel, thus explaining the emphasis on village life at the expense of urban life in pre-1948 Palestine.

Peasant communities writing their own histories as they are in these memorial books are often seen in academia as a profoundly redemptive act of people reclaiming their own voices and past. However, because of the struggle over land and the powerful symbolism of the peasant within Palestinian national discourse, these village memorial books map a past that provides us with an idyllic and unified view of the Palestinian village, a people in harmony with nature and the land, working together. Thus, the voices that appear in these texts seek to reclaim their own village but through the discourses and images that tie them to the Palestinian nation.

SLIDE: COVER OF DAYR ABAN BOOK, PAINTING OF A PEASANT WOMAN BY SLIMAN MANSOUR. NOTICE HER STRONG ARM WITH THE VEINS STICKING OUT, SHE IS GRIPPING THE HARVESTED WHEAT, WEARING THE PALESTINIAN DRESS

SLIDE: COVER ART ON THE MEMORIAL BOOK FOR THE VILLAGE OF AL-KABRI. NOTICE THE GREEN MEADOW, FLOWING SPRING, ABUNDANT PRODUCE WREATHING THE NAME

The past that is mapped is a history of memories and idealizations but also a history of dispossession, that seeks to recreate the physical village in alternative ways – through lists of village lands and landmarks, through poems about the village places, and through journeys that take the readers on tours of a recreated village, recreated within the construction of a nationalized identity of an idyllic peasant life. So that while each village memorial book portrays the unique places of its past, the sentiments, activities, and associations affiliated with those places are made to correspond to a greater narrative of what it means to be Palestinian at this contemporary historical juncture.

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Posted at Feb 22/2005 02:51 AM:
Why don't you do a similar presentation for the approximately one million Jews who were driven out of Arab countries?

Posted at Apr 14/2005 08:02 PM:
shea; i don't understand

Posted at Jun 14/2005 05:40PM:
The Maqam, Overflowing Bounties

If you run into any stories about Maqams we would love to hear from you.

themaqam.org