"We are a people that has forgotten its history," wrote Emil Habibi
after the 1967 war, in his book Sextet of the Six Days. Yezid
Sayigh (1998) provided the opposite version, "We are a people whom
history had forgotten." Today, with the advent of a Palestinian
historical narrative, neither of these seems true. And yet, there
seems to prevail amongst writers and researchers the idea that the
Palestinian story has yet to be told or, at the very least, to be
given adequate artistic expression. Many reasons are offered to
explain why this story has not yet been told. It may be due to the
transience inherent in refugeehood, a state that may discourage the
setting down of any fixed history, or because this transience
discourages remembrance beyond the fleeting moment. It may also be
because the Israeli narrative had not only removed the Palestinian
entity from its former villages and cities, but from history, as
well, and the Palestinians themselves have found it difficult to
present a counter-narrative because, among other things, they were
"not aware of the power of narrative to move people."1
The question that must be addressed, however, is how to construct a
history of a series of cataclysmic, destructive and horrendous
events, and how to understand this series as a clear and coherent
continuity in which the causes and effects are logically organized.
It is possible that a psychoanalytic account of trauma may provide
some explanation for the problematic Palestinian historical
narrative. Trauma is an event that is not grasped by the conscious
mind, is unrelated to prior knowledge, is not describable and
leaves no traces.2 Therefore, after a period of silencing and
repression (a period of latency, in Freud's words), it returns in
various forms and guises, appearing not as a memory of the event
itself but as a reconstruction of the event that eludes direct
access, one that can be monitored only through its effects and
traces (LaCapra, 1998). It reemerges to haunt the present as an
"acting out", as though it was fully present and not merely a
representation in memory (LaCapra, 1997; Caruth, 1991). The trauma
brings back to life not only the traces of the horrible event but
also the object that was lost in this event. It reemerges in the
present in different variations as if it still exists, as
parapraxis in Elsasser's reading (forthcoming), following Freud
(1974 [1909], 1951 [1901]).
The traces of the traumatic event and what has been lost by it
therefore lives on in the consciousness as if it still exists, thus
making time stand still. The past replaces the present, and the
future is viewed as a return to it. The more difficult the present,
and the more violent the reality that repeatedly rears its head to
strike those who have still not forgotten the initial trauma, the
harder it is to be free of this cycle of repetitions.3 Perhaps such
a psychoanalysis can describe and even shed light on the
Palestinians' narrative, constructed around three pivotal points:
The memory of a lost paradise, lamentation of the present, and a
portrayal of the anticipated return (Kimmerling and Migdal, 1993,
Tamari, 1999).
So, then, how can a coherent, systematically organized history be
constructed on the basis of a series of destructive, cataclysmic
events? Jewish history has provided a centuries-long testimony to
the impossibility of doing just that. It is a timeless history, in
which the lost past in the ancient Land of Israel, and the
destruction that precipitated that loss, is repeatedly reenacted in
the present as a traumatic neurosis (Freud, 1955 [1939]).
Yerushalmi (1982) explains this in the following way: "There is no
real desire to find novelty in passing events.... There is a
declared tendency to attribute even important new events to
familiar archetypes, since even the most horrific catastrophes will
loose some of their terrible grip if observed through old models
rather than in their astonishing uniqueness. Thus, the last
oppressor is likened to Haman and the court Jew attempting to
prevent disaster is Mordehai. The Christian is Edom or Esau and the
Muslim is Ishmael" (p123). In this manner, Jewish history had been
completely obfuscated: "Everything registered in Jewish memory was
never a recollection of any particular event as such" but, rather,
a reification of the past and, primarily, a reification of the
polarity seen in the two great exodus experiences - from Egypt to
freedom, and from Jerusalem into exile (Yerushalmi, p65).
Zionism tried to return the Jews to history by changing this
perception of time. It endeavored to construct a causal, coherent
narrative that would endow meaning to the traumatic events of the
past and place them within a continuum of "construction and
renewal." This continuum was supposed to mold the distant past and
use it as a source for constructing the future without reiterating
it, over and over again, as though it was a permanent present. But
the Jewish return into history and the healing of the Jewish trauma
has pulled another people out of history and has created another
national trauma - that of the Palestinians. Rather than enabling
the Jewish people in Israel to create a new historical narrative,
the Palestinian trauma brought them continuously back to the past.
Each violent event in the area served to enhance the Jewish
discourse that views the present as another cycle, and yet another
repetition, of the same early events of destruction and
redemption.
Such cycles exist in the Palestinian culture, and the Palestinian
cinema (among other media) recreates them. It tells the traumatic
tale of the Palestinian loss - in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1982 - and
revives what preceded it. Each new violent event returns this story
to the first trauma, that of 1948, and stages, in the present, both
its outcome and what preceded it. A study of the Palestinian cinema
will reveal how intricately connected the Jewish and the
Palestinian histories are, and how they nourish one another.
In Michel Khleifi's film Wedding in Galilee, the different elements
of the lost reality - the pre-1948 space, its relationship with
nature and the soil, the then-dominant traditional way of life,
freedom of movement and action - all of these are elevated to the
function of surrogates that superimpose the past on the present,
events of then and there on events of here and now. In this way,
the film constructs "the invisible within the visible" (Elsassar,
ibid.). Throughout the plot, a struggle is taking place between the
Israeli control of space and the camera and gaze of the Arab
heroes, who create a different relationship with the same space.4
The camera restores to the Arabs the space that the Israelis have
seized and allows it to expand past the fields and orchards to the
horizon, which it captures in long shots.5
However, the vast space depicted in the film is but a site of
nostalgia and yearning. At first glance, the events are presented
as if they are taking place in the present, but this present is
actually a reenactment of the recent past during which the military
government ruled the Israeli-Arab population, and the more distant
past when the Arab villages were built of small stone houses
surrounded by gardens and orchards. The Israeli military government
ended in 1964, and Arab villages such as the one depicted no longer
exist in Israel.
Life in the Israeli-Arab village is partitioned into squares of
time between curfews. These squares are breached by a wedding, in
which the traditional ceremonies, rarely performed in the modern
reality in which the film is set, are reenacted. Like the
restoration of the landscape of the village, its pre-State of
Israel, pre-modernization past is restored through a reenactment of
these ceremonies.6 They thus constitute a kind of parapraxis: the
past breaks into the present, and that which has been lost is
retrieved.7 The acting of the past in the present is a sign of a
traumatic memory and of the impossibility of accepting a loss. The
camera's taking possession of space is a way of overcoming the
trauma, and of controlling reality.
Unlike the cinema of Michel Khleifi, that of Rashid Mashrawi does
not revive, either directly or indirectly, the past of the old
villages and cities in the present. On the contrary, it presents
the dream of return to these places as mad folly or a joke. Instead
of a reenactment of a fantasized and beautiful traditional past, it
depicts the traumatic moments of the expulsion. His heroes live and
fight in a present that has neither a future nor a way out. The
hope for a change in the present explodes in disaster and calamity,
followed by an even greater disaster and an even more painful
calamity - a series of catastrophes that aggravate the
protagonists' situation, which goes from bad to worse, and from
worse to even more terrible. The films focus on the present lives
of the camp dwellers, and neither past nor future exists. And yet,
beyond the harsh descriptions of the present, there are echoes of
past events; the traumas of war and expulsion, that are not
expressly portrayed, are evoked indirectly as an "acting-out," that
is, an imitation, through an action in the present, of a traumatic
experience of the past, a stubborn repetition that brings the past
to the present, as if it occurred now.8
In Michel Khleifi's films the cinematic camera was used to rebel
against the Israeli "closures" and to depict a lost, non-existent
world. The reality in Rashid Mashrawi's films is a true-to-life
portrayal of oppression and siege, of recurrent calamities, and of
hopelessness. In this reality the trauma of the conquest is
revived, and not an idyllic past. And yet the protagonists in
Mashrawi's films rebel against this reality by stubbornly clinging
to and enduring their harsh life, and by ignoring the Israeli
oppressor. In this respect, the film The Milky Way sums up the two
types of past that appear in the other films. It returns in various
persistent ways to the moments of trauma, but it also returns to
the golden time that preceded it. The film depicts an Arab village
in the year 1964. "It's the same village," says its director Ali
Nassar, "that stood in 1948. Nothing has changed in it" (private
interview, 2001). It is depicted in a tranquil harmony with nature
that is harshly disrupted by the Israeli army, but the film
continues to portray that tranquillity as something not yet lost,
as a palpable entity to cling to, and thus fulfills the idea of
summed, of attachment to the land.
The landscape is a central feature in this film, as in Palestinian
cinema, in general. It is used to bring the past back to life and
to expand it over space and time. Time spread across this space is
mundane time: people walk to work and return from it, a shepherd
grazes his flock, and children go to and return from school. This
is the time of routine that gives a stable and fixed existence in
the ongoing present to what has already become the domain of the
past. This breadth of time parallels the breadth of space. The
filmed village is a reconstruction of an old village the likes of
which no longer exist in Israel, and for large portions of the
shooting the director was constrained to use El-Mujeir, a
non-modernized village located on the more barren eastern slopes of
the hills of Samaria. Thus, the landscape expands the little
village into an entire country, comprising both the Israeli and the
West Bank parts. It seems, therefore, that as in Khleifi's films,
here, too, the landscapes conquer what had been taken and expand it
into a wider space and time, a space and time that belong to the
past.
While life in the village is revived as a rural harmony of the
distant past, which has endured despite both corruption and
occupation, the trauma of destruction and loss is repeatedly
reenacted, either by the protagonist's hallucinations or by the
film's structure itself. This is done through several successive
house break-ins. The house in this case, as well as in other films
and stories, is both a private and a public-national space. "It's
not the house itself that is destroyed," a Beit Jalla resident
whose house had been demolished by an Israeli missile said recently
in a TV interview, "It's an entire history." In a society whose
national symbols had been taken away, the house, like the village,
serves as a symbol that unites the public and private spheres, both
of which are transferred as a single entity from the past into the
present. In this way, then, the house break-ins in the film are
invasions into the private and national space, and together they
echo the first break-in, the demolition of the first national and
private house in 1948.
The break-ins in The Milky Way are not all alike. Israeli soldiers
break into the house of the village teacher, who is suspected of
having forged a work permit, and destroy all that is in it. The
reprobate son of the mukhtar, the village's leader, and a friend,
break into the dispirited Mabrukh's house in order to engage in
illicit sexual activities. He then breaks into the home of Mahmud,
another of the film's protagonists, and attempts to burn it down,
thus reenacting the destruction of the village teacher's house by
the Israeli soldiers. The mukhtar's son is killed in a fistfight
with Mahmud, following which the village people break into the
house of the woman with whom Mahmud is in love, where he is hiding,
in order to seek blood revenge for the killing of the mukhtar's
son. At this stage, the film makes a transition from the present
into the past: Mahmud escapes to the ruins of an abandoned village,
one of many destroyed in 1948. In this way, the village destroyed
and abandoned in 1948 appears as the primary source, the event that
led to all the later break-ins. It is both a reconstruction and an
echo of something that cannot be described as it happened and when
it happened.
It is the break-ins into the different houses, located in the heart
of a village deeply rooted on its land, that evoke a tone of exile.
The home, the village and the homeland are transformed from a
well-known and dearly loved environment into a menacing entity. The
film set out to bring back to life, as it were, the halcyon days of
the past - but the relationship to those days is constructed after
the fall, and after the break; it is the aftermath of the
trauma.
Palestinian history, then, is torn between reenactments of the
past. It is a history of trauma, of an event that cannot be worked
through in the conscious mind and can therefore hardly be organized
within a systematic chronology of events, with rational causes and
results. Nonetheless, both Palestinian literature and cinema do not
surrender to the trauma but, rather, they attempt to "work it
through" and to construct a narrative that leads forward, into the
future. They do this by an imaginary repossession of the lost
space, as in Khleifi's and Nassar's films, by means of depicting
the stubborn, day-to-day struggle for survival, as in Mashrawi's
films, or through the drama of hostile encounters between
Palestinians and Israelis that is woven into the plots of all of
these films.
For decades, Hebrew literature depicted a society immersed in
trauma, living in its past and perpetually reenacting two key
moments of destruction and redemption. And yet, particularly in the
last few years, some Israeli films and literary works are offering
various possibilities of an alternative history, in which national
boundaries are broken and the hitherto-erased memories of others,
including those of the Palestinians, are expressed.9 Caruth (1991)
assumes the way out of trauma is in the formulation of a narrative,
in finding "a way to tell your story." However, "your story" never
exists in isolation, it is interwoven with the stories of others.
In the Israeli case, it is the story of those silenced and
oppressed by the Zionist story. The possibility of placing the
Jewish trauma within a redemptive historical narrative, in
Friedlander's (1994) terms, or within a causal narrative, in
Caruth's, is intertwined with the possibility of including within
that history those who were its victims. Though Israeli's hegemonic
discourse has not yet reached this point, some Israeli writers and
filmmakers are looking for it.
The response to the Palestinian trauma, in Palestinian literature
and film, is not far removed from the response of Jewish texts to
Jewish trauma: the transfer of an idyllic past into the present,
and the repeated reenactment of its destruction. Yet, at the same
time, there seems to be a trend in Palestinian literature and
cinema that proposes a different course for breaking free of the
trauma and looking toward the future: to struggle to regain the
rights that were lost.10 At this stage - in a situation in which
one people is the occupier and the other people is the occupied, in
which one people has won recognition and has constructed its
national narrative and the other people remains uprooted and
dispersed without a recognized national story, in which the film
and literature of the one can subvert the mainstream politics and
ideology by deconstructing the national history and the film and
literature of the other is still committed to its shaping - there
seems to be no symmetry in their future prospects.
1 According to Edward Said (2000) new literary pieces create
a historical narrative of this nature. Anton Shamas (in Huri, 2002)
doubts this: "We may certainly find parts of this narrative in
particular literary works -The Optimist, Arabesque, The Return to
Haifa, Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?- but an inclusive story
is missing: The uprooting, the deportation and the crime, the
absence." The explanation for this is reminiscent of Hamza An'aim
(2000): "The ideology of refugees ruled Palestinian culture for
many years, i.e., the transient: Despite being a fighter, the
Palestinian remains transient. And in transience, there is no room
for memory that is more than a passing moment" (p. 17). According
to Adel Mana'ah (1999), "Palestinians... whose connection to their
homeland's vistas is organic and intimate, never saw the Europeans,
and the Zionists after them, as being the strong winners in the
national conflict over the Holy Land.... The importance of history
as a valid argument for their national rights...The victors of the
national conflict over the Holy Land... usually ignored the
existence and the rights of the land's natives... The Palestinians
were described as nomadic tribes, fellahim, as various different
groups lacking any national consciousness" (pp. 9-10). Anton Shamas
(in Huri, 2002) describes the guilt and shame for 1948 as a part of
the explanation for the lack of a Palestinian history.
2 Freud, 1974 (1909), Caruth, 1991; Friedman, 2002.
3 And see Freud (1955 [1939]) on the way the Jewish people dealt
with its trauma through the idea of chosenness.
4 For the importance of space in Third World cinema see Gabriel,
1989.
5 For a discussion of this issue see B'resheet (forthcoming). For a
discussion of how the cinema depicts the Israeli, see Pinhasi,
1999.
6 On this, see B'resheet (forthcoming), who asks, "How do you make
a film about a nonexistent space?" and answers, "By telling stories
- by replacing the house-place with narrative icons of the lost
homeland." The wedding ceremony in Wedding in Galilee uses such
icons.
7 See also Gabriel (1989) for a discussion of the role of folklore
in restoring what the official memory attempts to erase.
8 Or, in Kaes' (2002) words, a mask that hides the traumatic
experience ... that could not yet be visually articulated. See also
Kaes, 1992, 1998; Freud, 1909, [1974]; see also LaCapra, 1997;
Bhabha, 1990.
9 For examples see A.B. Yehoshua's, Mr. Mani, Amos Gitai's Kedma
(2002), Avi Mugrabi's Happy Birthday Mr. Mugrabi (2000), or Nurit
Kedar's Borders (2000).
10 Exceptions are many. Among them Elia Suleiman's films and some
of Michel Khleifi's films.