The story of Arab Ein Houd and the Jewish Ein Hod, one village with
two identities in the Carmel Mountains south of the city of Haifa,
recounts Palestinian Arab memory covered over by Jewish memory,
just as Maurice Halbwachs observes that medieval Christian memory
superimposed itself on Jewish memory. A Jewish Israeli artists'
colony founded in 1953 has come to replace an agriculturally based
Palestinian village of traditional stone houses that traces its
establishment to the twelfth century. Twentieth-century Palestinian
Arab responses to dispossession, expulsion and forced depopulation
from Ein Houd and many other villages are discursively rich,
complex and protean. Poems, novels, videotapes, ethnographic and
photographic documentation, and an array of expressive activities
in diasporic communities have been and are being produced, many
with the aim of remedying distortions of omission and commission
that eradicate the Palestinian Arab presence on the land. Books
dedicated to villages destroyed by Israelis between 1948 and 1953,
for example, form part of a large historical and imaginative
literature in which the destroyed Palestinian villages are
revitalized and their existence celebrated. Equally important, a
new Arab Ein Houd - Ein Houd al-Jadidah of the Abu al-Hayja's, a
village rebuilt in Israel and named by Palestinians dispossessed of
their former village - is an architectural statement of a tenacious
Palestinian Arab presence.
This book centers on concepts of memory and how they inflect a
reading of a specific place by Arab and Jew, each locating and
localizing images, of a radically different past in a specific
place: Ein Houd and Ein Hod, both Arab and Jewish. The history
includes not only contested nationalist narratives of Palestinian
Arabs and Jewish Israelis but also the memory of one man, the
artist Marcel Janco, and the ways in which his selective memory of
a seminal twentieth-century art movement, Dada, came to serve as
the basis for what he and his followers proclaimed to be a new,
utopian social formation: the Jewish artists' colony, Ein Hod,
established by Janco in Israel in the Arab village of Ein Houd. The
task, framed by writings and paintings about Ein Houd or Ein Hod,
is to investigative the ways collective memories of Arabs and Jews
are constructed and presented through reliance on folklore and oral
history. By devoting attention to the written record in the act of
being created by participants still immersed in oral tradition, the
emergence of self-conscious political cultures, reinforced through
acts of commemoration, is charted. The past as it is and has been
represented - the inquiry into the archaeology of memory's
representations following Michel Foucault - is but a facet of this
study. The power of the past as it was lived and is remembered, as
it is commemorated and represented, continues to limit, define, and
inspire current narratives of Arabs and Jews.
Al 'Awdah: The Gender of Transposed
Spaces
To trace the route from exile to the Palestinian homeland when
everything is threatened - home, village, and land - the image of
woman, frequently a peasant woman, comes to embody the lost
Palestinian Arab houses and allows us to see past its ruin. Indeed,
the Palestinian peasant woman looms imaginatively larger in the
post-1948 era than she did before displacement, according to writer
Emil Habibi. In his celebrated work, The Secret Adventures of Saeed
the Pessoptimist, Habibi coins the word pessoptimism to express the
oxymoron of the Palestinian experience in Israel. During the 1948
expulsions, the hero, Saeed, is forced to accompany an Israeli
military governor. They encounter a Palestinian peasant woman and
her child on the run, hiding in the fields and terrorized into
silence. Eventually the mother utters a few prescient words: the
name of her village and that she is trying to return, items of
information extracted under duress by fresh threats of violence
against her offspring:
After continuing for a few minutes he [the Israeli military
governor] brought the jeep to a sudden halt and jumped from it like
a shot, his gun in his hand. He raced into the sesame stalks,
parting them with his paunch. I saw a peasant woman crouching down
there, in her lap a child, its eyes wide with terror.
"From which village?" demanded the governor.
The mother remained crouching staring at him askance, although he
stood right over her, huge as a mountain.
"From Berwah?" he yelled.
She made no response but continued to stare at him.
He then pointed his gun straight at the child's head and screamed,
"Reply or I'll empty this into him!"
Saeed, the luckless Palestinian "pessoptimist" commandeered to
assist the Israeli officer, witnesses this scene. Though Saeed is
prepared to defend the unnamed and silent peasant woman, he
narrates her terse response, words that resound through the ensuing
decades. The Palestinian peasant woman answers her interrogator,
the military governor: "'Yes, from Berwah.' 'Are you returning
there?' he demanded. 'Yes returning.'" Readers are not given the
woman's name, only the name of her former village, and her goal and
desire: al-'awdah (the return). The tale concludes with the
governor cursing and yelling at the woman to run to the east, never
to return lest she and her offspring be shot by him: "The woman
stood up and, gripping her child by the hand, set off toward the
east, not once looking back. Her child walked beside her, and he
too never looked back".
Under the male gaze of the colonizing Jewish Israeli and the
colonized Palestinian Arab, mother and a child are chased from
Berwah (al-Birwah) in the western Galilee, one of the many
Palestinian Arab villages forcibly depopulated and destroyed
[Nazzal]. Since its destruction, al-Birwah has gained fame as the
former home, and therefore frequent subject, of one of Palestine's
greatest living poets, Mahmoud Darwish.
Habibi's pessoptimist protagonist assumes the departing child
fleeing into exile with the woman is male, and asks himself whether
it is indeed this child who became the most eloquent and poetic
voice of the Palestinian dispossession and exile: "Was he [Darwish]
this very child? Had he gone on walking eastward after releasing
himself from his mother's hand, leaving her in the shadows?" Habibi
proposes a futuristic interpretation when both Palestinian Arab
hero and Jewish Israeli governor experience an odd visual
phenomenon, one the hero chooses to interpret as extraterrestrial.
As memory reviews the traumatic events of 1948, the hero recalls
seeing mother and child heading eastward:
At this point I observed the first example of that amazing
phenomenon that was to occur again and again until I finally met my
friends from outer space. For the further the woman and the child
went from where we were, the governor standing and I in the jeep,
the taller they grew. By the time they merged with their own
shadows in the sinking sun they had become bigger than the plain of
Acre itself. The governor stood there awaiting their final
disappearance, while I remained huddled in the jeep. Finally he
asked in amazement, "Will they never disappear?"
What happened to the mother, the Palestinian peasant woman torn
from her home, who disappears into the shadows? And the child? What
are the ways in which mother and child, even as they have been
forced to retreat from geographical Palestine, have grown in
stature? Both refuse to disappear. Why? "The further the woman and
child went from where we were [. . .] the taller they grew" is a
response to exile and dispossession, the rhetorical and figurative
creation and aggrandizement of a set of cultural images about
women. Repeated intertextually and circulated in literature, art,
and folklore are tropes of the Palestinian woman as mother and
motherland, home and homeland, lover and beloved.
When the poet "Umar Abu al-Hayja" apostrophizes from the Jordanian
refugee camp about his unseen village, Ein Houd, he calls forth a
confluence of symbols equating the feminine, in this instance, with
Ein Houd, a place he metaphorically transforms into the peasant
woman ululating at the traditional Palestinian wedding. House,
home, and woman form aspects of the Palestinian national identity,
gendered categories that derive their power and specificity from
the familiar image of the nation as a female body.
Naming
Consider the possibility, not found in Habibi's novel, that the
child walking into exile with the Palestinian peasant woman is not
a boy, not an extraterrestrial alien, but a girl. If so, she and
her younger sisters will be named after the village they were
forced to flee. It is common cross-culturally in both Arab and
Jewish practice to name children after close family members to
ensure, magically and apotropaically if only in name, that
something of the departed lives.* The right of naming is
inseparable from battles over land and language, such as the right
to name the territory of historical Palestine. The poet Hanna
Abu-Hanna argues that, especially for the embattled Palestinian
Arabs of Israel, "land (al-ard) and language (al-lughah) are the
two essential bases for the preservation of our existence."
Place-names are fiercely contested by Arabs and Jews - Arab names
are Hebraicized by Jews, and Hebrew names are deemed redeemed when
they have reverted from Arabic.
In the midst of many Arabic-Hebrew language battles, a new,
post-1948 naming tradition had emerged reflecting the various fates
suffered by the Palestinian Arab population. In Israel, those
remaining "inside" (al-dakhil), many of whom are internal refugees
from their destroyed and depopulated villages, regrouped in
different locales to create new definitions of kinship structure.
Post-1948 conditions of displacement gave rise to circumstances in
which a person from the destroyed village of Ruways, for example,
would take the surname Ruwaysi - someone from Ruways - instead of
the customary clan eponymic. Village solidarity stands in place of
the absent village and dispersed clan members:
The name of the original village replaced the name of the hamula,
and the relationship among persons who belonged to the same
original village became similar to hamula solidarity. The hamula
did not disappear or weaken, but some of its basic functions were
transferred to the wider kinship structure based on locality.
[al-Haj 1987, 72]
For those exiled outside Palestine and in the grip of places from
which they were forced to leave, another convention is to name
children for the lost but not forgotten site. Toponyms are eponyms,
unlike a famous Jewish Israeli example in which artist Gedalya Ben
Zvi and his wife named their second son Hod (glory), to mark the
first child born in the found place, the Jewish artists' village of
Ein Hod - "Hod: first grown seed of this artist village" writes
Norman Lewis in a poem of celebration. Among Palestinian Arabs, the
practice of naming a child after a lost or destroyed place seems to
be reserved for daughters rather than sons. Muhammad Mubarak Abu
al-Hayja' of Ein Houd al-Jadidah chose the name Sirin for his
daughter to commemorate a destroyed Palestinian village, in the
Baysan district, home to the greater Abu al-Hayja' clan before
1948. Afif Abdul Rahman Abu al-Hayaja', who lives in Irbid, Jordan,
named his daughter Haifa after the town where he was born. Hod
chooses not to live in Ein Hod, residing instead in the town of
Maale Adumim [Ben Zvi]; Sirin cannot live in Sirin because it is
destroyed, and Haifa, a Palestinian in Jordan, is barred from
Haifa. Examples proliferate: Nazmi Jubeh, a professor at Birzeit
University, has a daughter named Baysan, the appellation of an
entire district now in Israel; one of the names given to the
granddaughter of sociology professor Ibrahim Abu-Lughod is Jaffa,
his former home town. Also pronounced Yafa, it is a popular
post-1948 name for Palestinian girls. There are more: female
children are named Safad to mark a town depopulated of its Arab
inhabitants and Karmil for the mountains they cannot visit. After
the 1967 war, a fresh list of girls' names came into existence to
commemorate the latest group of threatened places in the Occupied
West Bank. Wasif Abboushi, for example, who resides in the US,
called his daughter Jenin, a name that passes easily into English
as Janine.
Such new, post-1948 naming traditions for daughters undercut
traditional anthropological accounts of the patriarchal Arab family
that use as evidence the enduring value of the male and his name,
in theory, opposed to the less important female offspring, however
beloved she may be within the family circle: "In the expansion and
continuance of the family name, in the holding of property, the
acquisition of wealth and defending of the interests of the clan,
sons and not daughters were and are still the precious gifts of
God" [Canaan 1927, 162]. When property and lands are confiscated
and the clan dispersed to exile, the weight of place-names may
supplement, if not supersede, clan names despite, or perhaps
because, they are currently given to women.
The new tradition of assigning destroyed village place names to
girls has some basis in earlier naming practices. Place names
expand on a traditional Palestinian principle of assigning a
child's name according to the special circumstances that surround
his or her birth. Folklorist Taufik Canaan lists examples that read
as a family album. Parents producing too many daughters, Canaan
noted in the 1920s, would name the newest, youngest female Muntaha
(the last), Tamam or Kafa (it suffices), Ziadeh (too much), and
Zmiqna (we are tired). A long-awaited baby girl arriving after many
brothers would be called Wahideh (the only one, the unique) [Canaan
1927,169].
Place possesses history and narrative. When place is gone, it is
recuperated in two ways: naming the daughter and telling the story.
When a father calls out to a daughter, pronouncing the name of the
town or village he can no longer inhabit or visit, he conjoins a
lost past and a vivid present in her person. She is surrogate, a
means of linking a place in time and in space, allowing an older,
dispossessed generation to address simultaneously the biological
daughter and the historical motherland. The daughter's name is a
mnemonic resource, but, more important, it evokes, just as she must
continue to do, a prelapsarian realm of virtues and values. Place,
attached as a name to a woman, thereby becomes an active agent of
commemoration. By these means, Palestinian women do not become the
principal narrators of the lost Palestinian history; rather, it is
inscribed on their person. Nonetheless, active agency by women
resides in taking on the multiple meanings of one's names,
effectively so in the case of Hanan Mikhail Ashrawi, a high-ranking
politician, activist, and teacher, who finds an explanation in the
Palestinian naming tradition to account for her participation in
historical and national events through speeches and writings:
My name means "tenderness." True to the Arab, and generally
Semitic, tradition, we Palestinians attach a great deal of
significance to names - their meaning and music, historical
allusion and authenticity, identification and identity. More often
than not our names are a form of indulgence in wishful thinking,
rather than descriptive accuracy as in the case of rather homely
daughters called Hilweh or Jamileh for "pretty" or "beautiful"[...]
But most important, our long series of names are proof of lineage,
or roots for a people uprooted, of continuity for a history
disrupted, and of legitimacy for an orphaned nation.[. . .] Hanan
Daud Khalil Mikhail (Awwad)-Ashrawi is my personal and collective
narrative. I am Tenderness, the daughter of David, who is the son
of Khalil (Abraham) from the family of Michael (also the name of an
ancestor), which is of the clan Awwad (the one who inevitably
returns).[132-34]
Woman as House and as Builder
[. . .] To narrate and write, and, yes, to remain selectively
silent, are strategies to bring the land back into existence. All
descriptions of Palestine as a contested, colonized space
discursively constructed by Palestinian Arab and Jewish Israeli
texts illuminate gender issues where interactions between colonizer
and colonized are imagined as relations between males and females:
the traditional stone house, identified as one embodiment of the
Palestinian woman, is currently occupied by the Israeli colonizer,
which usurpation renders Palestinians of both sexes homeless and
stateless. Theoretical parallels can be drawn between the
feminization of the colonized landscape and a spatial history of
Palestine conceived as the indigenous woman penetrated, raped,
conquered, mapped, and under surveillance by the colonizer. The
Palestinian woman is made to stand for the destroyed villages and
the dispossessed land. She represents the "national allegory" of
the lost Palestine homeland in much literary and visual imagery as
the feminine sphere reproducing, literally and figuratively, the
nation.
Inside and outside spaces, nonetheless, do not easily align into
stable categories of female and male. In contemporary Israel,
housing construction is illegal for Palestinians, male or female,
and its horrific opposite, house demolition, is mandated by the
prevailing social and legal order. Gender distinction relegating
woman to the inside and elevating men to the privileged outside
collide with formulations that celebrate all the Palestinians of
Israel, who remain on the ancestral land as the samidin (steadfast
inhabitants) living "inside" in relation to a majority of the
nation forcibly exiled "outside." As the Abu- al-Hayja's of Ein
Houd al-Jadidah have discovered, in the territory of the "inside" -
frequently consigned to the weak, the marginalized, and the female
- where Arabs inhibit the locales of Israeli-Palestinian bilingual,
cross-cultural contacts, there is no longer space for the fida'i
(freedom fighter) and the shahid (martyr). But there is always
space for the remembered past, for collective memory, and for place
as memory.
* I am named, for example, after my father's mother, who was gassed
in Auschwitz; my brother carries the names of both paternal and
maternal grandfathers, killed in Theresienstadt and Mathausen
concentration camps respectively; one of my son's given names is
also that of my maternal grandfather while another given name
commemorates my [Arab] husband's father; and so on.
References
The Object of Memory (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999),
pages xii, 199-209.
Abu Hanna, Hanna. March 29, 1990. "al-Ard wa-al-lughah."
al-Sinarah.
Ashrawi, Hanan Mikhail. 1995. This Side of Peace. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
Ben Zvi, Gedalya. August 7, 1991. Interview, Ein Hod.
Canaan, Taufik. 1927. "The Child in Palestinian Arab Superstition."
Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 7.4.
Habibi, Imil. 1985. The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessopimist. Tr.
Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Trevor Le Gassick. London: Zed
Books.
Al-Haj,Majid. 1987. Social Change and Family Processes: Arab
Communities in Shefar-A'm. Boulder: Westview Press.
Lewis, Norman. 1964. "Hod, First-born Son of Ein Hod and His
Crayons." In Norman Lewis, Ein Hod. Tel Aviv: n.p.
Nazzal, Nafez Abdullah. 1974. "The Zionist Occupation of Western
Galilee, 1948." Journal of Palestine Studies 3.3: 72-76.
