Not a shirt on my back, not a penny to my nameLord I can't go a-home this a-wayThis a-away, this a-way, this a-way, this a-wayLord I can't go a-home this a-way
Hedy West's poignant lyrics could not have found a more appropriate address. For the forgotten people of Palestine, often with “not a shirt” on their back, “not a penny” to their name, the song has an identifiable factor that goes beyond the immediate. It has been this way since 1948, the time thousands of them left home and hearth, finding a toehold in lands where people could not place Palestine on the world map. Now 15 Palestinian writers have come together for a book that gives space for their reflections, their memories, even polemics.
Recently launched in the Capital by Women Unlimited, “Seeking Palestine”, co-edited by researcher-writer Penny Johnson and lawyer-writer Raja Shehadeh, takes you to the land where nostalgia is not exactly a nice emotion to nurture. Johnson and Shehadeh take in a few questions about the book and the new Palestinian writing in the Arabesque series.
In ‘Seeking Palestine' adversity is the glue that holds the writing together. Isn't it nerve wrenching for an exile to write about home?
Indeed, the writers in “Seeking Palestine” do address — and remember — both the history of Palestinian adversity and their own intimate story of the same but they also seek hope and new ways to understand both the Palestinian predicament and their very personal relationship to it. “What am I without Palestine,” writes Jean Said Makdisi, “and what is Palestine without me?” And yes, (it is) nerve-wrenching at times – but perhaps it is more wrenching to remain silent than to find your own voice and write your own story.
How difficult is it to cull together a moving story from a piece written about a place where normal means life in a refugee camp?
The refugee camp is emblematic of the Palestinian tragedy, but is of course only one site where Palestinians live, confront the past and build for the future, often in situations where the ordinary is elusive. “Nothing in my life is normal/Nothing in my life is neutral,” writes Suad Amiry, addressing her “obsession,” Palestine. Even answering the standard questions of a stranger (where do you come from?) or an airport security official (what is the country code for Palestine?) can become missions impossible. Suad makes the Palestinian story her own by comic rendition, while other writers, such as novelist Susan Abulhawa, tell a deeply moving personal Odyssey as an “un-Palestinian story”.
Sharif Elmusa talks of leaving behind the landscape, food, friends, culture on landing in the U.S. Does distance in time and space bring about more dispassionate writing? Or does today live in the shadow of yesterday?
As the American novelist William Faulker wrote, “The past is never dead. It is not even past.” This is perhaps most true for writers — and for Palestinians. In “Seeking Palestine”, the contributors, however, are not simply recounting the Palestinian past and they are certainly steering far away from the trap of nostalgic memory and the connections over distance that they find in exile are often startling.
Isn't it more painful to be an internal exile, knowing all the moments of a bleak past come revisiting without a warning?
It is difficult to determine which is more painful, to be exiled outside Palestine or inside. My own preference is to remain inside knowing that wherever I might go in the world I will carry Palestine with me. As there is no escape, better face it from inside even (when) all the reminders are around the bleak past that is impossible to escape.
Does ‘hyphen' writing (Palestinian-British, British-Palestinian) present the complete picture at the ground level? Or does it help step beyond ghettoes and self-limiting boundaries of the mind?
As novelist Mischa Hiller says in “Seeking Palestine”, humans are “a cross between an onion and a diamond, multi-layered and multi-faceted.” He recounts the “clumsy labels” given him in book blurbs (of which British-Palestinian is one) and says these labels “ghettoize more than they describe.” Mischa uses his uncertain position to find a way of being Palestinian that goes forward, not backward. “We are already re-imagining a Palestine that reflects who we are now, and what we hope to become.”
