NAKBA NARRATIVES

 

Nakba Narratives 

The Memories of Displaced Palestinians 

Kieran Beville

 

 

T

he recent conflict in Gaza has resulted in the deaths of approximately 47,000 Palestinians (mostly non-combatants – many of them women and children) as well as life-changing injuries to thousands of men, women and children and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. The turmoil did not begin on October 7^th 2023 with the brutality of the Hamas murders and abductions. It all began in 1948 with the Palestinian exodus (Nakba – literally ‘catastrophe’) when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs — about half of pre-war Palestine’s Arab population — fled or were expelled from their homes.

Nakba Day is generally commemorated on 15 May, the day after Israeli Independence Day (Yom Ha’atzmaut). The day was inaugurated by Yasser Arafat in 1998. When Israelis are celebrating Palestinians are mourning. It is something like the 12^th of July celebrations by Unionists that antagonises nationalists in the north of Ireland.

Memory narratives

The Nakba is not just a historical event it is an ongoing reality. When I was a child my mother told me about how the Black and Tans shot at her brother who had been out after curfew on Clancy Strand – fortunately they missed! But that story (and others like it) became embedded in my memory and shaped my understanding of history. That is because the person telling it was a trusted narrator and because I was in my formative years. I spent five years studying history at UCC (two as a tutor in the Irish History Department) and that is where I gained my head knowledge but my heart was won while sitting on my mother’s lap. Like many other Irish people, my republican, ideals were nurtured by the grave injustices of the Ballymurphy massacre (Belfast, 1971) and the events of Bloody Sunday (Derry, 1972).

The memories of Palestinians displaced during Nakba have been passed from generation to generation. The trauma for them personally, their family members and communities is embedded in their collective psyche. The narratives of bravery and resilience enrich not only the social, political and historical aspects of Palestinian culture but, equally, offer young generations of Palestinians a way of relating their experiences of exclusion and discrimination to a past rich with detail and personal family connections. It is a collective memory.

The dialectic of remembering and forgetting is something we know about in our own history, especially ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. The history of the Middle-East has been subject to successive deformations and susceptible to manipulation and misappropriation.

The importance of Nakba memory narratives is an essential counter force to the State of Israel’s continuing attempts to occupy, not only Palestinian territory but also Western consciousness which ultimately results in the distortion of the indigenous inhabitants’ narrative.

Palestinian culture has been resurrected from beneath the rubble, where it was supposed to lie buried. Palestinians have not only been deprived of much of the cultural heritage of their ancestors, but they are subjected daily to systematic schemes that seek to forge an alternative identity. This alternative identity is that of a ‘good Arab’ or the ‘Israeli-Arab’, one that the Israeli authorities want to design according to their interests.

The Nakba, displacement and the forced transfer of millions of people was in the interests of clearing the lands of Palestine for Jewish settlements but they were also in the interests of erasing the memory of non-Jewish pasts and the traditional lifestyle and community structures of the Palestinian people. Memories of the Nakba tragedy play a crucial role in preserving Palestinian traditional national, cultural, and social identity.

Since the Nakba, Israeli institutions, especially those concerned with education, aim to promote programmes which ‘Israelize’ the contemporary Palestinian minority in Israel and create ‘good citizens.’ These programmes incorporate many general stereotypical assumptions about the Muslim world and Israeli history. These curricula deliberately exclude references to Palestinian history or terminology. For Palestinian children in Israel the classroom might be compared to that of Irish children in English classrooms where the conquering coloniser presents a favourable perspective.

Imparting Memory

Once the real, long-term consequences of the mass displacement of Palestinians became clear – permanent loss of home, community, extended families and sentiments of belonging…Palestinians, women, in particular mothers and grandmothers committed themselves to keeping the memory of their villages and people alive in the minds of their children and grandchildren. This has proven to be of huge significance in terms of creating a counter memory to the official Israeli state remembrance of Independence Day and the establishment of new Jewish settlements.

The importance of mothers’ and grandmothers’ storytelling practices and their unwavering efforts to weave the story of place into the consciousness of the generations born outside their homes and their homeland cannot be overstated.

They impart this consciousness by telling numerous stories of the horrors of the Nakba. This storytelling gives substance to that consciousness. It animates the features of the houses and the neighbourhoods, harvest seasons, weddings, popular celebrations, the threshing floors, the orchards, and the fields, and to the injustice embedded in Israeli programmes to Judaize their country, to silence their history, literature and so forth and create a new geographical, cultural, political and social landscape of belonging.

Literature, folk song and art

               Music, poetry or painting remains fundamentally significant in Palestinian cultural life. Just as colonizers sing of their triumphs, the colonized sing of their aspiration for triumph. Using what cultural tools are available, each group tries to describe, explain, present historical events, conflict, and politics from their perspective. Readers of these cultural texts understand or ‘read’ the historical, political, and social narratives embedded within them. In this sense, cultural tools such as storytelling, poetry and folk music continue to play a vital role in the communication of historical identity.

               In addition to connecting this to history, these cultural tools also offer a means of resisting repression and attempts to obliterate a people’s cultural memory and historical identity.  

               The mass destruction and ‘disappearance’ of the physical infrastructure of Palestine’s villages, towns, and holy places have not destroyed the cultural identity and memories of Palestinians.

               Memories of the Nakba are inscribed into cultural narratives and inter-generationally shared stories, poems and songs of the hardships and suffering of Palestinian peoples in the years since. Through words, melodies, art, memory is preserved. Such cultural media perform a crucial expressive function, exploring how past, present and likely futures are woven together for Palestinians.

               Experiences of dislocation and exclusion were quickly channelled through music, song, poetry and drama. Freedom of movement, land ownership arrangements and economic security, the continual denial of their right of return to their properties, homes, sources of livelihood etc. became important mechanisms for expressing loss, anger, grief, but also a determination to keep national patriotic feelings alive amongst Palestinians.

               Folk songs and poems recounting events linked to the Nakba continue to evolve today in response to changes occurring more generally in society and the everyday lives of Palestinians. Popular songs demonstrate a sense of belonging, belonging to the land, to being a part of a people, belonging to a common history, and belonging to cultural, traditional and social customs.

Storytellers

               Stories of life before, during and after the Nakba tend to be recalled by mothers and grandmothers in the private realm of the family home. Such practices are extensive amongst Palestinian women and contribute centrally to the creation of a sense of belonging to a shared Palestinian history of tragedy, hardship as well as the resilience of the Palestinian people. Not only family identity but, equally, national and cultural identity is explored through such storytelling practices.

               Much of the disturbing detail is vividly remembered and conveyed by those who were children at the time of the Nakba and these grandmothers are trusted narrators of that traumatic history. Young Palestinians tend to come to know about the Nakba through such captivating stories. Frequently, these prove to be foundational moments when a sense of Palestinian heritage, cultural identity and endurance begin to take shape. The telling and retelling of stories of the past is a vital element of identity-building across generations. Palestinian women, as mothers; grandmothers or aunts, continue to narrate Palestine’s traumatic past through lived personal accounts, breathing new life into memories of the Nakba.

               There is, however, a process of selection involved in storytelling. Whatever narrative form it may take the hope is that storytelling will clarify to the audience the nature of the narrator’s struggles, and encourage discussion that contributes to the transformation of the story into a shared identity project, enriching connection across generations, communities, traditions, and diverse experiences.

               The storytellers have survived trauma but have been deeply affected by it. The ongoing hardships and sorrows they have endured over decades, especially those inspired by the disintegration of their social, family and community lives, lost dreams, freedoms and opportunities.  There is a difference between ‘victim’ stories and ‘survivor’ stories. Both have value to personal and collective narratives and both should be honoured.

               Experience of violence, harm or injury both individually and collectively encountered is not only cognitively registered as a major life event but also culturally translated by community members as an intergenerational tragedy affecting extended families of Palestinian peoples.

Ongoing situation

               The trauma of exile is not just reflective of the harsh conditions of the first few years of displacement but, also, the ongoing psychological and emotional effects of being separated from home, extended family, community, land, and so forth. The cultural and emotional value of the village, with its special arrangement of houses and orchards, community facilities and meeting places has a strong collective component to it. When the village/town is destroyed, something of the identity of self is also lost. It is this sense of loss of traditional social and cultural integration mechanisms (kinship, socio-economic interests, and shared experiences and circumstances) which still marks the emotional, cultural and social, as much as political and economic well-being of displaced Palestinians today.

               The Nakba and the displacement that followed shattered the lives of Palestinian families and communities and sense of self. They are refugees in their own homeland. But they are not mere passive victims of circumstances: they have been resourcefully, creatively and actively adapting to their circumstances. They have resisted political oppression; and they have been trying to keep together and sustain their families and society despite the deterioration of infrastructures, lack of security and harsh everyday living conditions. The Nakba continues!