The sources [of memory] that formed the complete picture, the most important sources were the stories that I heard inside the house. But coming of age is what clarified the meaning of the picture. You have this frame which was imparted to you from the family, but there is still—to simplify the metaphor—something foggy about it. [The clarification took place] from the outside, from the surrounding [environment], from school, from the relationships that I had in terms of my own experiences, or [through the relationships I] was compelled to form…. In this way the picture was further clarified, but the picture was already there in the first place, do you get the idea?
MUHAMMAD-KHAYR, THIRD-GENERATION PALESTINIAN REFUGEE FATHER FROM TANTURA, HAIFA
If I take a paper and a pen, and I start drawing, I will draw actual parts of Safad. I might draw the bakery of the town, the shops, the lands, the lands of Safad, the deserted lot they talk about where children used to play, the citadel where the children used to play…because of the extent to which I’ve heard about them. And then also, she [grandmother] used to say “to the north of the citadel,” “to the west of the citadel,” “facing the citadel,” you see. So our house was like—she’d give clear landmarks, she used to say if you go there, there is so-and-so’s shop, and this and that lane, in the back of this and that, there you’ll find our house.
MANAL, THIRD-GENERATION PALESTINIAN REFUGEE MOTHER FROM SAFAD
The memories of catastrophes that circulate in the guardians’ communities are only intelligible within the context of the different meanings and significations of the Nakba. These include the popular, patriotic, nationalist and the meaning embodied in the very possibility of their own communities. Similarly, second- and third-generation Palestinian refugees’ Nakba postmemories, or imagined rather than referential memories (Hirsch 1997, 2012), and narratives are also only intelligible when read as resulting from their negotiation of these different Nakba meanings. In addition, they articulate their postmemories and narratives in reference to the guardians’ own memories of catastrophes, even if this is not what they emphasized as having been the most important aspect of the memories narrated and transmitted in their homes.
The ongoing war in Syria means that the meanings of the Nakba for these generations are today articulated in drastically different ways. For the first time since 1948, the lives of generations of Palestinians who were born or came of age in Syria have been affected by unprecedented displacement, devastation, and closed borders that cut off all possible legal and safe exits from the war. As a friend unable to leave Syria put it toward the end of 2013, should I come back to war-torn Syria, I would record a Nakba that the post-Palestine generations in Syria lived through rather than one they were told about.
In this chapter, I examine second- and third-generation interviewees’ prewar postmemories and narratives, made possible by a world that is today being violently transformed beyond recognition. I draw on the notion of postmemory to argue that the objects of these generations’ postmemories are also the objects of the guardians’ memories of loss as narrated in their own families. These postmemories are of the guardians’ former lives, homes, and worlds imagined as Palestine by the post-Palestine generations. Where the Nakba does figure for second- and third-generation Palestinian refugees is in their negotiation of the guardians’ own memories of the Nakba as well as the pervasive popular significations and understandings of 1948 in their communities.
Thus, second- and third-generation Palestinian refugees are cognizant of and engage the place of the Nakba in the post-Oslo memory discourses, as well as the event’s myriad patriotic and nationalist significations. However, unlike their parents’ or grandparents’ generations, these younger generations have no referential memories to invoke, no lived memories of 1948 with which to engage the different meanings of the Nakba in these various discourses. As a result, second- and third-generation refugees articulate their understanding of 1948 through what I call “narratives on (Nakba) memory.” These take up the different meanings of the Nakba as articulated in the memories that circulate in the guardians’ communities as well as in the various discourses this book has explored. It is important to distinguish these narratives from memories, understood in a concrete and referential sense, because they are essentially an engagement with what is seen to constitute the meaning of the Nakba as well as its memory. Thus, in engaging these discourses and the guardians’ memories in generationally dependent ways, the post-Palestine generations articulate their own understandings and ultimately provide yet more possible meanings of the Nakba today. It is also within this context that the post-Palestine generations are today referring to the calamity that has struck their communities in Syria as the new Nakba.
POSTMEMORIES OF PALESTINE
Jaramana Camp, February 9, 2008; al-Husayniyya, April 22, 2008
It was on the first day of our arrival in Damascus that I first saw Jaramana Camp; the highway that connects the airport to the city cuts right through it. The closely built brick and unpainted house structures line both sides of the broad highway, some zinc roofs and the alleyways clearly visible, even to those speeding by. A couple of months earlier, a family friend from Jaramana, the neighborhood adjacent to the camp, today the site of intermittent booby-trapped car explosions and mortar attacks, told us he never knew that there was a camp on the edges of his neighborhood…. Three months after seeing Jaramana for the first time, I was in al-Husayniyya, an urban sprawl that houses purpose-built apartment blocks for those whose homes were in the way, I would learn, of the construction of that highway. Husayniyya was the site of fierce battles, and its people have been selectively allowed to return to their homes, now that the area is under the army’s control…. I was in al-Husayniyya with a friend on an unusually hot spring day, five years prior to the dislocation of its people yet again, in order to meet one of her own friends, another third-generation Palestinian refugee woman. She seemed quite hesitant and reluctant to talk at first, insisting that she knew nothing…. At one stage in our interview, after she shares the ways in which memories of Palestine were narrated to her, I remind her of her initial unfounded self-effacement: “How can you not know, you do know what your grandmother narrated to you….” She laughs and I can’t hear what she says in her defense as our three voices cross over in the recorded interview that I listen to now, after all these years that have elapsed since the encounter, and the intrusion of war into her life and the life of her family in the cruelest of ways…. “It is imperative that one knows these things,” my friend says “[because] it is about knowing your origins, where you are from.”…Little did we all know that five years later, she would be yearning for her devastated camp and her family that has now been torn between the barrel bombs of Khan Eshieh, safer neighborhoods of Damascus, the camps of Lebanon and even the processing camps of northern Europe.
The English and comparative literature scholar Marianne Hirsch (1997) first coined her notion of “postmemory” in her study of the visual representation of European Jewish family life before and after the annihilation of European Jewry. She noted that her focus on the European Jewish Holocaust is not to assert the event’s exceptional status but, rather, to explore a personally devastating episode in her family history (Hirsch 1997, 14). Understanding the Holocaust as an unexceptional historical atrocity in relation to other historical atrocities has become an important part of the so-called “colonial turn” in Holocaust studies. In this new literature, rather than considering the Holocaust as a unique and therefore ahistorical, unrepresentable, and anomalous episode of modern history, the Holocaust has been historicized. This has taken place within the context of European imperialism, colonialism, the project of modernity, and certain racist ideals of the Enlightenment (Langbehn and Salama 2011; Zimmerer 2004). This new body of work makes possible solidarity between peoples whose communities have historically been invariably colonized, enslaved, and exterminated (Rothberg 2009). It also allows for the decolonization of the Zionist appropriation of the Holocaust for its settler-colonial project in Palestine (Grosfoguel 2012).
Hirsch (1997, 22) makes important theoretical gestures that consequently make engaging her notion of postmemory possible. These include her emphasis on the autobiographical rather than the exceptional in her choice of research subject and the applicability of her postmemory to the children of Holocaust survivors as well as to “other second-generation memories of cultural or collective traumatic events and experiences.” She argues that “postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation…. [Postmemory is] the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated” (22).
In her later work, Hirsch aligns her notion of postmemory with other attempts to theorize the relationship of the generation that came of age in the aftermath of the annihilation of Europe’s Jewry to its parental past. She acknowledges the contradictions inherent in the phenomenon she theorizes as postmemory. She also argues that postmemory is a structure, the process of its generation, resulting from being “shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic fragments of events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension…. [These are] events [that] happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present” (Hirsch 2012, 5). Critics of Hirsch have argued that there is essentially no purely referential memory, that memory is always postmemory after the event, hence post/memory rather than postmemory (Stanley and Dampier 2005, 94). Clearly, however, this de-emphasizes the central generational component of Hirsch’s theorization of postmemory.
Second- and third-generation Palestinian refugees’ postmemories and their structures of attachment and generation can be considered through the relationship these postmemories have to the objects of the guardians’ memories of loss. These are, after all, the only remaining memory fragments of the worlds, communities, and lives that were lost for those expelled beyond Palestine in 1948. Here, my first departure from Hirsch is in extending the possibility of postmemories beyond the second generation. I also use the notion of postmemories to examine memories of loss, the defining feature of the intergenerational narration and transmission for the post-Palestine generations. This use is, of course, to imply neither that the Nakba has defied narrative construction nor that it has exceeded comprehension insofar as the guardians’ memories of catastrophes are concerned. Indeed, the post-Palestine generations partly engage the guardians’ memories of the Nakba when they articulate their own narratives on what they understand to constitute Nakba memory. The point is that there is a correlation between what the post-Palestine generations emphasized as having been the most important aspect of the memories narrated in their homes and what they also articulated as their own postmemories.
For example, Manal’s postmemories of Safad, as quoted in the opening of the chapter, are so powerful that she can use her postmemories to literally draw the town of her family. She related the following when I probed her about the context in which her late grandmother would narrate her memories of Safad:
When guests came and the gathering grew in numbers, my grandmother would talk, I would then at this stage become eager to sit with the people and to listen…. When she sat with the elderly, she’d ask them to affirm her story because some of them were there, sort of…like “So do you remember when a certain event happened,” “Remember the quarrel between the family of so and so and the family of so and so,” and so forth, or “No, you were too young to remember.” If a particular person challenged her story, for example, [she’d say,] “Your brother was there.” During these conversations my mother would ask me to prepare her a cup of tea or coffee, I would get upset because I wanted to listen, the whole conversation became more interesting…. You feel that the small things become bigger, the intensity increases, you see. The scenes become more interesting, the stories become nicer, a discussion takes place, and so it’s not only the voice of my grandmother narrating…. There is more of a spark, there is more of “Those were the days, remember this and that, remember Umm so and so.” As I told you, our house was the meeting place of the elderly, more than one old woman would meet in our house, and when they started to affirm or comment on each other’s stories, you feel as if you had been there…. When they spoke you’d feel that they go around and around trying to evade the subject of leaving, they want to feel that they still live there. They’d start talking about their cooking, their meals, their family, and so on, you see; that is, they would go around trying to ignore the fact that we have left…. The point of the departure in the story was very limited, why? Because it was something of a shock.
1
In this interview excerpt, Manal underscores several issues, all of which have been visited at great length. First, she affirms that the primary narrators of memory were the guardians, and in this instance, her grandmother. She points to how the narration of memories would occur during ordinary family occasions, in this case, receiving guests who could remember Safad together with her grandmother. She recollects how these guests happened to be fellow women guardians, making her grandmother’s narration more exciting for her. She underscores how these women and guests in fact constituted a community with common memories, who would affirm their memories of Safad and through this affirmation and memory-making bring it to life in the present tense. Finally, she points to how the object of these women’s memories of loss were the worlds they had lost in Safad, that they would recollect what they would cook, what they would eat, their families, lives, in other words, everything but the Nakba. The issue of the Nakba and of leaving, Manal says, was something that was evaded in their memory-making. This evasion ensured that they could continue to remember Safad in the present tense and hold on to all that it encapsulated in terms of their unfathomable loss.
Manal also relates how these family occasions and the guardians’ memory-making enabled her own postmemories of her family’s town. The presence of the guardians’ communities during the family occasions meant that for her as a child, the smaller things that were remembered became bigger, the intensity increased, the scenes become more interesting, the guardians’ stories nicer. This presence also meant that it was not only the voice of her grandmother narrating, but several voices, making her feel as though she had lived there.
This feeling that Manal alludes to, the intensity of the guardians’ stories, and her imagination of these scenes and lost places of her grandmother’s and other Safadis’ memories are her postmemories and the structure of their generation. They are postmemories, rather than lived memories of Safad, because they are informed by her “imaginative investment, projection, and creation” (Hirsch 2012, 5). This distinction between postmemories and memories is not to suggest that there exist unmediated and mediated memories. Rather, it is to emphasize two different processes. The social process of articulating memories by those who have a referentiality to draw on differs from the imagination of places in Palestine by those who never lived in Safad and other towns and worlds of historic Palestine.
That Manal’s postmemories are informed by Safad, rather than the Nakba, is the result of the ways in which survivors of catastrophes, as argued, together recollect and affirm that which was lost in the wake of catastrophic events rather than catastrophe itself. Thus, Manal argues that the departure from Safad was limited in the guardians’ memories, a point that underscores that it is loss, rather than that which led to loss, that informs the post-Palestine generations’ postmemories. Similarly, Tahani, a third-generation refugee young mother and teacher, whose family from Akrad al-Baqqara, Safad subdistrict, was expelled for the second and final time to Syria in 1956, echoed Manal’s assertion. She did this with regards to what did and did not constitute her postmemories. When I asked her about the memories that she heard during her family get-togethers, she said: “They would talk about their life there, how they lived there, and then they would talk about how they left…. It was stories, it was simply stories…. For example, my grandmother would say that we used to go and harvest, or something along those lines, and then the ogre would come out…or that so and so was killed here, and his blood was shed, these were the stories that they would tell us.”
2When asked whether memories of leaving or memories of Palestine had greater impact on her, Tahani said: “Look, she [her grandmother] wouldn’t talk more about how they left, do you see? She would tell us about the days that they had lived through there and so on, so perhaps because of this, what was implanted in our minds was about the days that they lived in Palestine, more so than them having left Palestine.”
3 Thus, like Manal, Tahani notes that her grandmother would talk about her past life, how they lived in Palestine, and relate simple storied memories of this lost life. Also like with Manal’s grandmother, the departure and the Nakba as leaving was not the focus of Tahani’s grandmother’s memories. As a result, it is Akrad al-Baqqara, rather than the Nakba, that is the object of Tahani’s own postmemories. These postmemories are based on the stories of the times of harvest, and even folk narratives of the ogre that were “implanted” in the grandchildren. In view of this, Tahani’s postmemories are also imagined as Palestine rather than as simply the world of Akrad al-Baqqara.
Like his generational peers, Muhammad-Khayr also emphasized the relationship between the guardians’ narration of memories of all that was lost, rather than the Nakba, to his imagination of his postmemories of Palestine. He said:
They narrated to each other; they’d narrate and re-narrate the same things. They’d sit together, two or three of them, and they’d repeat the same things they’d discussed before, and then on another day they’d repeat the same kind of discussions, they’d repeat it over and over…how their life was and so forth. This was the kind of talk that used to be very influential during my childhood, not the Nakba stage as such. The talk was about what the Nakba had deprived them of, more than the Nakba per se. This is what had a lot of influence during my childhood, during the early beginnings, since the first or second grade, as a seven-year old child. This is what I remember, the kiln, fishing, the small islands that face the village, how they used to swim to the island to play there, to fish, the caves under the island, how wasps stung my grandfather on his way to bring back a donkey from I don’t know whom, perhaps a neighbor from whom he had borrowed it. These were the stories that made you feel that there was another world, they spoke of something you wish to see but you can’t.
4
Muhammad-Khayr, like Tahani and Manal, points to the guardians’ memory-making during ordinary family occasions as having enabled him to “remember” the lost world of Tantura: the kiln, the fishing, the islands, the fish, the caves under the island, the wasps, and the donkey. Hirsch (2012, 5) notes that one defining feature of postmemories is that they constitute “stories, images and behaviors…transmitted so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right [emphasis in original].” This “remembering” is therefore a reference to Muhammad-Khayr’s postmemories of Tantura, of this other world he could only and also very clearly imagine, a world he has always wished to see.
Third-generation interviewees were thus adamant that the Nakba was secondary to their grandparents’ sharing of memories and that their own postmemories were informed by their grandparents’ memories of all that was lost. Second-generation interviewees, however, did not exclude the Nakba altogether. When I asked Abu Muhammad about his parents’ generation’s narration of memories, he said:
They would narrate about everything, you can say. They first and foremost used to narrate the story [of the life] which they used to live, the simple life of course, the village, the agriculture, the water well, the car of so and so, the family of so and so, the coffee shop of so and so. They would go and hear the news in the coffee shop because there was one radio in the village, there wasn’t any other. They would talk about the Nakba, about the massacres. Meaning, they would talk about more than one issue.
5
Abu Muhammad, like his children’s generation, notes that the objects of the guardians’ memories, in the first instance, are the objects of their loss. Although he does not articulate these details of village life in Tantura as his own postmemories, he nonetheless concretely lists them as the guardians’ memories. These are their former lives, what he imagines as the simple lives of peasant farming communities, the village, the agriculture, water wells, the odd car in Tantura, the families of the village, and even the communal radio in the village’s coffee shop. In a departure from the third generation, however, Abu Muhammad does not dismiss the question of the Nakba altogether. He does note the Nakba through massacres, presumably referring to the massacre of Tantura, his family’s village of origin.
Although Abu Muhammad gives the Nakba a secondary place, it does nevertheless have a place. This was common to second-generation interviewees and is what primarily distinguishes them from their children’s generation. Thus, the second generation’s postmemories, like those of the third generation, are based on the imagination of what their parents had and what they lost. Nevertheless, unlike the third generation, they emphasized the guardians as having shared memories of the Nakba. For example, Umm Muhammad (unrelated to Abu Muhammad), another second-generation interviewee and a mother whose family also comes from Tantura, told me that her grandmother “would talk, one story leads to another, you know the elderly, when they want to talk. They can talk about one topic and then switch to another one…. She [her grandmother] would talk generally, about the life they lived, Nakba and without a Nakba.”
6Umm Muhammad, who grew up with a stepmother and attributed the narration of memories of Palestine to her paternal relatives, including her father, aunts, and grandmother, underscores that her grandmother’s memories were simply about the life they had. Thus, in this she shares generational commonalities with Abu Muhammad in terms of the emphasis on the guardians’ memories of loss, as well as the presence, rather than complete dismissal of, memories of the departure.
When I asked Buthayna about the memories that were shared in her own family, she echoed both Abu Muhammad and Umm Muhammad:
It was, meaning, father would talk to us about everything—about the Nakba and about Palestine, how beautiful it is, about Tantura, our village, how it was on the sea, and how it is one of the most beautiful places on earth, meaning, it is even more beautiful than Europe. Meaning Tantura was a valley, and a mountain and the sea, do you see? There is even a picture at my parents’ house, did you see [it]?…It is so beautiful. And they’d talk to us about those that were martyred, about, meaning, the massacres that happened there.
7
Buthayna, like the other second-generation interviewees, notes that both Palestine and the Nakba informed the guardians’ narration of their memories of loss. It is her father’s, rather than mother’s or grandmother’s, memories of all that was lost that inform her postmemories of Tantura. These are an imaginative investment in the sea, the valley, and the mountains that surround Tantura. She also points to the picture of Tantura that hangs in her parents’ living room, the same post-1948 picture I saw in the living rooms and workplaces of other Palestinian refugees whose families were expelled from Tantura during the Nakba.
In Hirsch’s (1997, 23) study of postmemory, which centers on photographs, she argues that photographs are “the leftover, the fragmentary sources and building blocks, shot through with holes, of the work of postmemory.” They affirm the existence of all that was lost while at the same time signal the unbridgeable distance to it (23). However, private family photographs were the privilege of the wealthy few in historic Palestine (W. Khalidi 2010), and several interviewees referred to photographs of their families’ places of origin after rather than before their destruction. Thus Hirsch’s proposition that photographs are the “umbilical” medium that connects the generations after to postmemories of the parental past is in fact reversed by what Buthayna had to say. It is the post-Palestine generations’ postmemories that make these photographs legible. In other words, it is postmemory that forms the building blocks of these photos. This is because they allow the post-Palestine generations to imagine and inscribe the guardians’ lost lives onto photographs of places that no longer bear any traces of their parents’ and grandparents’ former lives and communities.
In addition, while relating her postmemories of the sea and the valley of Tantura, Buthayna, like Abu Muhammad before her, also notes that her parents narrated the Nakba-as-massacres. Given that all three second-generation interviewees’ families hail from Tantura, the site of a notorious 1948 massacre, this is unsurprising. However, this association of the guardians’ Nakba memories with massacres also shows that both Buthayna and Abu Muhammad filter the Nakba through some of its important patriotic significations circulated in popular memory discourses. This is the Nakba-as-death, the Nakba-as-massacres, the Nakba-as-destruction. Thus, while second-generation interviewees did not dismiss the question of the narration of the Nakba altogether, they nevertheless invoked the Nakba as it circulates in discourses in their communities, rather than as a postmemory.
These generational convergences and divergences demonstrate that the Nakba, as the imperative to remember for the return, does not figure through postmemories for the post-Palestine generations. Rather, the question of 1948 is either made secondary, as is the case with third-generation refugees, or figures as a narrative on what is understood to constitute Nakba memory, as is the case with second-generation interviewees. These narratives take up the guardians’ communities’ memories of catastrophes. They also take up these “memories” as they circulate through the activists’ created memory discourses. It is therefore through these narratives on what constitutes the Nakba and its memory, rather than through postmemories of all that was lost and imagined as Palestine, that the post-Palestine generations shared their different understandings of the Nakba.
NARRATIVES ON NAKBA MEMORY
al-Mazarib, Dar‘a, April 17, 2008
After the ruins and rubble of the destruction of Qunaitira, we continued our day trip south and drove through Dar‘a, the town where the Syrian uprising would begin three years later…. We picnicked in a beautiful green area by a lake outside of the town of al-Mazarib, another site of total war, death, and destruction today…. I wonder how history will come to remember Dar‘a, and the fire that it ignited, the one that has now engulfed the whole of Syria…. We found a spot among the many picnicking families, and spent the rest of the afternoon eating, chatting, laughing, and singing…. In between tea and chatter, one of the young women in our company asked about my research, the raison d’être of my presence, clearly always in the foreground…. As I explained my interest in memories of 1948, the third-generation Palestinian refugee woman from Khan Eshieh remarked that “yes, we learned about the Nakba in schoolbooks….” The same Ba‘thist schoolbooks, I would later learn as I browsed through the sixth grade Arab nationalism class textbook, which taught all students about the Nakba of Palestine…. “Yes, it is important,” another one of the young women in the group, interjected to tell us…. I wonder what has happened to these third-generation Palestinian refugee women from Khan Eshieh who learned about the Nakba through schoolbooks, and who nonetheless chose to wear the kufiyya that day…8 those who have left their camp, and the others who have seen their families torn apart and scattered by war yet again, some even arriving at the shores of the Ionian and Baltic Seas, to tell of the minute details of the horrors of war.
Shared second- and third-generation narratives on what constitutes Nakba memory are negotiated through the Nakba’s consequences as remembered by the guardians. The main intergenerational differences in narratives on Nakba memory therefore lie in the temporal demarcation that has led to different generational experiences (Day Sclater 2003; Scott 1992). Thus, the second generation came of age to the Nakba’s aftereffects, especially materially, while the third generation came of age to rebuilt shattered lives and communities. The latter’s narratives on what constitutes Nakba memory are primarily understood in terms of the Nakba’s impact on their own life experiences. Before the Syrian war, this impact was mainly expressed through their refugee status and a belonging to an elsewhere that complicated their belonging to Syria. Against this, I first examine the shared narratives of what interviewees understood to constitute Nakba memory before moving to the main intergenerational differences.
SHARED NARRATIVES ON NAKBA MEMORY
Shared narratives on what constitutes Nakba memory mainly center on an understanding of the Nakba as the aftereffects of the guardians’ dispossession from their homes and lands. These narratives are negotiated and understood in reference to the guardians’ memories of their former lives and their loss. For example, at one point during our interview, I asked Muhammad-Khayr whether there were contradictions in the guardians’ storied memories. He replied:
It’s not a matter of contradictions; rather, they try to attribute everything to the Nakba…. I mean, for example, if they’d buy oranges, they’d say, “If only you could see the oranges of Palestine.” If they’d buy apples, they’d say, “If only you could see the apples of Palestine.”…[It is a]n exaggeration that you feel has become a disease for the person who lived the Nakba. It’s like he wants the world to feel the greatness of his loss. My grandfather didn’t say these kinds of things, but I once heard a man named B. say, “The orange in Palestine is this big” [
gestures with his hand]. [I thought] this big?! Is it a watermelon or what?!
9
In Muhammad-Khayr’s narrative, what constitutes Nakba memory made itself evident through its psychic impact on the guardians. Thus, what constitutes Nakba memory is understood as being a “disease,” one that continuously plagues the guardians through their unrelenting need to express or make felt the greatness of their loss. This “disease” is therefore also grief, the lifelong impact of 1948 made present in the guardians’ day-to-day lives. In this instance, this grief made itself present in reference to the loss of the fruits of Palestine.
Similarly, while explaining her understanding of the Nakba as expressed through its effects on the guardians’ lives, Mayada, an engineer whose grandparents are from Safad, put forth her narrative on Nakba memory this way:
It is like they awoke from a shock. It is like they suffered from a shock. For example, imagine if your house is burnt down, ok? The first thing that you ask is not about your house or the furniture, you ask about the people in the house. If they have all left unharmed then there is no problem, later, when things calm down, they put out the fire, and you go back to the house and you see that you have no furniture left, only then do you begin to realize that you have a problem, or if the house was burnt down totally, your problem is even greater and bigger, ok? And from there your second suffering begins. But the first concerned what? It concerned the people who were with you. So I think that this is what happened to them.
10
“Shock” like “disease” points to an all-encompassing catastrophe that the guardians lived through and survived, and its afterlife is also expressed through the psychic impact it had on them. For Mayada, the meaning of the Nakba can be understood through this very shock, realized only once they awoke from it. Given the burned house metaphor, at first it was the immediate survival of their families that was the most pressing concern. It was only later, once they realized that the entire house had burned down, that the awakening from the shock began. The extent of the loss itself became even greater, with its own aftereffects revolving around suffering and grief. Thus, the Nakba for Mayada is not only the shock itself but also the awakening from it.
Other interviewees, like Khawla, shared a similar narrative on what constitutes Nakba memory. When I asked Khawla whether the Nakba was an important part of her grandmother’s memories, her answer was an unequivocal no. For her,
the most important aspect, what she used to repeat over and over was that, how after they left, how they sat in the tents, this is the most important aspect, that she would really bring up a lot. How she was hurt, and how no one took care of her and her wound was dangerous, in her head, and how she gave up [one of] her children, in the middle of the way [out], in order to [be able to] continue, and the way [itself], how they were subjected to disease along the way, to the lack of health attention, to hunger, to thirst, to the difficulties of the way, it was all, of course, walking, and they were carrying things. She was talking a lot about some who left and left their children on the way, and they kept on going. She is one of them, she left her daughter for a distance…. Then she came back for her, she couldn’t continue on the way.
11
Khawla’s assertion that the Nakba was not the most important part of her grandmother’s memories, followed by an emphasis on its repercussions as more important, means that she is deprioritizing the Nakba understood strictly as 1948. Instead, she highlights its consequences and gives them greater importantance. Thus, Khawla’s narrative on Nakba memory is what Khawla’s grandmother would repeat over and over. This is the Nakba of the tents, of injuries she sustained during the bombardment of the village, of the hunger and thirst after the departure, of leaving behind one of her children. What constitutes Nakba memory here, as with the memories of other interviewees, is negotiated through the unfolding of the story of the departure itself rather than the cause of the departure.
Second-generation interviewees’ narratives on Nakba memory are also negotiated in a similar way. For example, Fatima, a second-generation refugee whose family hails from Yaquq, Tiberias subdistrict, told me the following about her mother:
She told us, as you can say, that they actually fled twice, twice. They fled to an area called Wadi al-Samak, we fled. This is the tragedy, their departure from Palestine, they would say was fatigue, humiliation, and agony, but the tragedy was actually in Wadi al-Samak…in the Golan. They stayed there for maybe a few months, a few months. They were eaten up by, what can I tell you, humiliation, anguish, dirt. They would say it was an area that, as we would say, even monkeys won’t inhabit, but our grandmother was there for months. My mother would say we used to walk like from here to Qatana. Where is Qatana? We can reach Qatana in half an hour or an hour by car, by a minibus, but they used to walk for firewood and water so they can wash and drink…. So they can drink, so they can wash. One of them would only have one dress, imagine you left with one dress, the dress on you, how is a woman, you know [how it is] with one dress, to leave with one dress. So [there were] many tragedies.
12
Once again, for Fatima, understanding what Nakba memories are is not so much about the guardians having to leave Palestine as about the consequences of this departure. Referring to the guardians’ memories of death in the valley, she underscores the twice uprootedness of the guardians as the real tragedy, as the Nakba itself. The consequences of the loss of everything, of being engulfed by humiliation, anguish, and dirt, are what constitute Nakba memory for Fatima. This is therefore a Nakba that unfolded through its aftereffects, which lasted for months if not years.
Similarly, when I asked Buthayna about the Nakba in her family’s memories, she said:
When they would say, eat this meal, for example, why are you, why are you being picky over this meal? We were hungry, when we left Palestine, during the days of cold, we used to wish for bread. Meaning, mother would have cooked a meal that isn’t very nice, yes, like green plants, like cheeseweed mallow or dandelion greens and so forth, [we’d say], “What is this,” meaning, “Does someone cook grass?!” “One can go and eat grass, no need for cooking, Mother”…. So my mother would say, “Thank God that you have this blessing, we lived through days in which we had nothing to eat, not even a piece of bread.”
13
Buthayna, like Fatima, articulates her narrative of what constitutes Nakba memory primarily through negotiating its consequences as recollected by her mother. In the example she uses, memories of the Nakba made themselves present around food in particular. Her mother’s cooking, as well as the kind of food she would cook and her and her siblings’ reactions, facilitated her mother’s memory-making. This revolved around the days of hunger and cold to which she and the family were subjected following their expulsion from Tantura.
Abu Shadi emphasized the same facets of shared narratives mentioned by other second- and third-generation interviewees when he said:
The Nakba for my family, they didn’t live the Nakba that others lived. Like I told you, they left spoiled. When they left Safad, with horses for my mother and grandmother to ride, to take them to Bint Jbeil, where they remained as guests of leaders of the Shia in the south [of Lebanon], to remain there living in luxury, meaning, as guests, until my uncle got in touch with my father from Damascus and told him [to] come to Damascus, and we came here, do you see? Meaning, I don’t remember all these days.”
14
Abu Shadi here conveys a clear narrative on Nakba memory that takes its meaning to be, a priori, about the departure, the departure with nothing, and this departure with nothing’s consequences. He does this by underscoring how his family, unlike most Palestinian refugee families, did not in fact live through this particular trajectory that commonly constitutes understandings of Nakba memory. The women of his family left on horses and were received as guests; they were “spoiled,” to use his words. Thus, by discussing how his family’s Nakba experience was contrary to that of the average Palestinian refugee family, Abu Shadi is also clearly aware that Nakba memory is understood as being all about leaving with nothing. That it is about destitution and the immeasurable suffering as a consequence.
SECOND-GENERATION NARRATIVES ON NAKBA MEMORY
Second-generation Palestinian refugees in Syria came of age to the immediate and material aftereffects of the Nakba. This explains the main intergenerational divergences in narratives on Nakba memory. The second-generation’s narratives relate how their families were still struggling to rebuild their lives from nothing. Most third-generation interviewees, in contrast, were born into families that had already established themselves anew in Syria. As noted, this generation’s experiences and that of the fourth in particular are as a result now undergoing radical transformations in light of the war in Syria.
During my interview with Fatima, she told me that her second generation is in fact the generation of the Nakba:
Should I tell you why we are the people of the Nakba?…We lived, we lived a difficult life, we lived a difficult life, very, very difficult. No matter how much Ahlam [her present third-generation niece] tells you that we lived a difficult life, our life was more difficult. Why do I say this? First of all, our parents couldn’t dress an entire family. An entire family, they couldn’t. Imagine, for example, the son would be dressed as the first[born], and his clothes the second[born] would wear, and then the third. No one had his own personal belongings, there were always people sharing with you.
15
Fatima is no longer only relating a narrative on Nakba memory that encapsulates the aftereffects of 1948 on the guardians’ lives. She is, like other second-generation interviewees, also extending these repercussions into her own life. Third-generation interviewees also insisted that the Nakba extends to their own lives because of their ongoing statelessness. Nevertheless, for the third generation, their narratives on Nakba memory did not materially extend the Nakba to their own lives in the same way as their parents’ second generation. In other words, the poverty that Fatima stresses she was born into, one of the most concrete material consequences of the Nakba as it affected her own life, was not echoed by third-generation interviewees.
Even those second-generation interviewees whose parents could afford to rent private homes in Damascus, rather than live in the camps, underscored 1948 as extending into their own lives. While relating his father’s narration of memories of Safad as well as the Nakba, Abu Shadi said:
We lived a life, meaning, let me tell you, it was a difficult life. It is true that we came to a house that wasn’t available to other Palestinians, but I didn’t see my father until nighttime, he was working the whole time, in order to secure a living for the family members. My grandmother was here, and my mother, and my uncle’s wife, my uncle, as I told you, he was in Lebanon and he was a pharmacist, but we didn’t have the money to start a pharmacy, for example…. So most of his [father’s] time, he was preoccupied with securing a source of income for our living and for our education. You know the schools here are expensive, it is true that it is part of the state [education system], but the costs of books and the costs of uniform, and the costs of clothes, and the costs of this and that, and there was nothing with them in the first place, meaning when we came from Palestine they had nothing at all…and if it wasn’t for his reception in Lebanon as a guest, and we came here to people who also received us as guests, we would have perhaps lived in a tent for a very long time.
16
Abu Shadi, like Fatima, narrates the aftereffects of the Nakba as extending into his own life, even though he acknowledges his family’s relative fortune of having had acquaintances to host them in Lebanon and later in Syria. He links the consequences of the Nakba to his own life by highlighting what would have happened had his family not had the contacts who ensured that they did not stay in the tent camps. Nevertheless, he mentions the difficulties of not seeing his father, who had to work long hours in order to secure a decent living for his family and an education for his children. Thus, the difficulties that Abu Shadi’s family experienced, albeit alleviated in comparison to those of others, were a direct outcome of the Nakba, extending well beyond 1948 and into his own life.
Another important reason for the divergences in second- and third-generation narratives on Nakba memory stems from the second-generation’s relationship to the guardians of memory, who were mostly their parents rather than grandparents. This means that when and how they came of age is an important factor that distinguishes what constitutes their Nakba narratives from those of the third generation. As a result, the narratives of second-generation interviewees are by far less contentious than those of their children’s generation, and they more directly take up, and converse with, the memories that circulate in the guardians’ communities. These include the guardians’ mythic, heroic, survival, and ambivalent memories.
For example, while discussing whether his family would narrate how they left Palestine, Abu Bassam, a retired schoolteacher from Akrad al-Baqqara, said: “Yes, yes, they would tell us how we left, and how so and so forgot his son, and how another one forgot her daughter, and another person so and so, and another person went back and got some things for him and so forth. All the Palestinian people know the truth.”
17Abu Bassam’s narrative on Nakba memory touches on the guardians’ mythic memories of the father leaving behind his son or the mother leaving behind her daughter. At the same time, Abu Bassam is clearly engaging something other than the guardians’ memory when he affirms that all the Palestinian people know the truth. His is therefore a narrative on Nakba memory that is in dialogue with the guardians’ memories of 1948, and the meaning of the Nakba in popular memory discourses. In other words, the parent forgetting his or her child is the quintessential memory of the Nakba, the truth that all Palestinians know.
Another common second-generation narrative on Nakba memory revolves around the role of the Arabs in 1948 and also partly engages the guardians’ heroic memories. These narratives almost always center on the Arabs’ treachery and machinations against Palestine and the Palestinians. The Nakba-as-Arab-betrayal was also an important part of the Nakba’s Arab universe of discourse following the demise of the ancien régimes that presided over the loss of Palestine. Umm Shadi, a pharmacist and second-generation refugee mother who left Haifa at the age of seven, said the following when I asked her about the place of the Nakba in her father’s memories:
For example, in the story he said, when in 1948 they went to the harbor, in the middle of the Suq al-Shwam [Damascene Market], where his shop is, the harbor is close to them, he saw an armed Arab man, he had grabbed a rifle and he was breaking it, and he [father] then told him: “Are you crazy, man? Why are you trying to break the rifle?” The man said: “God curse their fathers, they have given us faulty weapons, you have no idea, and you are giving me lessons?! Those Arabs are dogs!” And he told him you shouldn’t say things like this, why do you say this when all the Arab armies are coming within the next seven days, all the Arab armies, they have already reached I don’t know where. Perhaps the Iraqi army during that time, it was the first army [to reach Palestine]. So those are things that he would say, and he would say, “Can you imagine, the Arabs have been betraying us since that time.”
18
Umm Shadi’s narrative is distinguished from third-generation narratives by her ability to recall her father’s own storied memories with vivid details. She locates the story at the Damascene Market by the harbor, where the encounter unfolds, and she also relates the conversation that took place between her father and the man who was breaking the rifle. The meaning of her narrative on Nakba memory as Arab betrayal is in its rhetorical force and moralizing impulse. This is found in her father’s cluelessness as the bombardment of Haifa was going on, followed by his later bitter realization that the Arabs not only had betrayed and let down the Palestinians in 1948 but also have been betraying the Palestinians ever since. In addition, Umm Shadi’s narrative is also about heroic Nakba memory, one in which a people betrayed nevertheless did not hesitate to take up arms. She also clearly engages the Nakba’s Arab universe of discourse, as the reference to the faulty weapons and Arab betrayal demonstrate.
Second-generation narratives on Nakba memory also take up the themes of survival memories and memories of survival that circulate in the guardians’ communities. They do this in relation to engaging what constitutes Nakba memory as centering on death, destruction, expulsion, massacres, the annihilation of communities, and the dispersal and shattering of families through their uprooting. These meanings of the Nakba, as noted earlier, are important in popular memory discourses on 1948, leveraged to mobilize memory for the return. This once again underscores how narratives on what constitutes Nakba memory converse with the Nakba’s myriad significations in Palestinian communities.
An example of this narrative was related by Abu ‘Ammar, a retired schoolteacher born in Nasir al-Din, Tiberias subdistrict, who left his village as a three year old child. While discussing the guardians’ departure as a result of the massacre that occurred in Nasir al-Din, which was critical to the Zionist conquest of the first town in historic Palestine, Tiberias, and the expulsion of its people (Abbasi 2008), he said:
No, no, there is no excuse for them [having left]. Death is more honorable in one’s homeland. Yes, death is more honorable. In our village, there was a massacre. They killed all the residents who were there…. My mother told me about it. They gathered the people and they killed them…. There was a massacre, but it wasn’t spread on a media level like Dayr Yasin and Qibya and these other places.
19In Nasir al-Din, they destroyed it, they burnt it down completely…. The Jews came and they destroyed the village, they burnt it. My mother then went out to a place outside of the village, so after the destruction, they passed near where my mother was, she was telling me [this] and I was with her, she told me they passed by this area, there was just a little distance between us and them, and my mother saw them, when they entered [Nasir al-Din] and destroyed, and killed, and they destroyed the village, they burnt it. The village of Nasir al-Din, it is known to have had a massacre like the massacre of Dayr Yasin, but no one heard about it like they heard about Dayr Yasin, meaning.
20
Abu ‘Ammar begins his narrative by contesting the guardians’ decision to leave, because as he put it, “death is more honorable in one’s homeland.” In the moment in which Abu ‘Ammar constructs his narrative on Nakba memory as a moral claim about the guardians’ departure, he is also therefore making his narrative and its claim within the context of Palestinian patriotism. This is death as more honorable in one’s homeland, those who remained as the example. He is also articulating his narrative in dialogue with and in contestation of popular memory discourses, especially which massacres they seem to have emphasized and popularized and which massacres they did not. The third layer of his narrative on what constitutes Nakba memory engages his mother’s own survival memories, despite its being shrouded with heavy patriotic rhetoric that condemns the people’s decision to leave Nasir al-Din.
Thus, while his rhetoric condemns the people for leaving, by including his mother’s memories of the massacre Abu ‘Ammar simultaneously and thereby implicitly absolves the villagers from the decisions they were compelled to make. Although he gives a nod to Palestinian patriotism by stressing what would have constituted honorable behavior, he implicitly qualifies this by conjuring up an understanding of the Nakba as mobilized for the return (the massacre in Dayr Yasin). Thus, though partly based on his mother’s memories, this understanding nevertheless also revolves around Nakba-as-massacres.
Finally, second-generation interviewees’ narratives also took up the thorny question of leaving, this time through engaging the guardians’ ambivalent memories. For example, when I asked Abu Nidal what he had heard from his family about the Nakba, he told me:
My father in particular, he told me that when the Salvation Army entered, they asked us to leave the village because the village was within the area of their artillery. So it began, and of course, in the nearby villages, the Jewish gangs began to kill and to spread propaganda of killing, it was a very big propaganda, in order to scare people, so we left, my grandfather and grandmother left in one direction, and my father and with my mother and with my sister and me—we were only two—my sister and I, they left in the direction of Syria. So, the end of the road was in the village of al-Harra, which is within Syria. We remained there for some five or six years, and there I came of age, and I remember the threshing floors of al-Harra.
21
This narrative on what constitutes Nakba memory centers on the departure, one for which the Salvation Army is to blame (see, e.g., Abassi 2004). Abu Nidal’s narrative engages his father’s memories in several ways. He does this through relating the ambivalence around the Palestine’s generation loss of agency over their lives in 1948, the sudden appearance of “Leave and you will return,” and the largely destructive role of the Arabs in general and the Salvation Army in particular. Abu Nidal’s narrative movement from his father’s memories to massacres in other villages blurs the boundaries between his father’s memories and popular memory discourses on the Nakba-as-massacres.
Thus, a defining aspect of second-generation narratives on Nakba memory is that they involve the memories that circulate in the guardians’ communities, the popular memory discourses on the Nakba, and the Nakba’s various patriotic and nationalist significations. Another defining aspect is how these narratives portray the Nakba as having found its way into the very lives of this generation’s members, especially in terms of their having come of age to 1948’s immediate material consequences. I now turn to a brief examination of the third generation’s narratives on Nakba memory. The distinguishing feature of this generation’s memories is that they contest the guardians’ abdication of responsibility for the departure during the Nakba and blame them for leaving Palestine.
“WHY DID YOU LEAVE?” THIRD-GENERATION CONTENTIOUS NARRATIVES ON NAKBA MEMORY
All seventeen third-generation interviewees, without exception, related having asked their grandparents or having pondered, “Why did you leave?” Some second-generation interviewees also noted having the same question, but the extent of the blame and contention this one query engendered was not comparable to that of their children’s generation. Neither was this question as conspicuous in second-generation narratives on Nakba memory. After I asked Suzanne whether there were issues left unanswered by her grandmother’s memories when compared with what she would hear about the Nakba outside her home, she said: “The question that I would always ask myself was why did they leave? This is really the [heart of the] issue, why did they leave? They should have remained like those who are still there now. Why did they leave, why did they leave [everything] behind?”
22Sarab, a factory worker whose family is from al-Wa‘ra al-Sawda’ in the Tiberias subdistrict, made a similar association between questioning why the guardians left and blaming them for leaving. She uses the example of those who remained as a possible alternative to the guardians’ fate in 1948. When I asked her whether she blamed the guardians for leaving, she said: “[You mean] that they should have remained and held on? Yes, they should have remained and held on because there are people who until now, since 1948, who are still in Palestine. How come they never left? Meaning there is a difference, they left and those didn’t leave, and because my cousins are there until now [as well].”
23These third-generation narratives on Nakba memory blame the guardians by mentioning those who could, for whatever reason, remain in Palestine. One possible explanation for the universal occurrence of this question among third-generation interviewees, and the blame it encapsulates, is in the temporal distance of this generation’s narratives from the memories of the guardians. Thus, while third-generation interviewees could relate vivid postmemories of their grandparents’ loss, they could not recollect the guardians’ memories of the series of catastrophes around 1948 as vividly or in the same way as members of the second generation. As a result, while third-generation interviewees’ narratives on Nakba memory included certain facets of the memories that circulate in the guardians’ communities, they nonetheless prioritized the Nakba’s meaning as furthered in popular memory discourses. They also prioritized the Nakba’s patriotic and nationalist significations.
Niyazi, a third-generation student whose family hails from Yaquq, Tiberias subdistrict, was perhaps one of the most unequivocal in blaming the guardians for leaving. His narrative on Nakba memory also most clearly included the Nakba’s myriad patriotic and nationalist significations in order to lay this blame. When I asked him on what basis he blamed the guardians for leaving, he said:
What is happening now. The people who are inside are not really manlier than those who left. What is the difference between those who left and those who remained inside? I wish one of the people who left can answer this question. Why did you leave and those inside, why did they stay inside? You, who talks to me about memory and that we fought and that we led wars, and so forth, answer me, why? Why are the ones on the inside [there], are they manlier than you? Are they better than you? Do they have abilities to withstand the killings, slaughters, and massacres and you don’t? You feared for your children and they don’t fear for their children? I want one of them to answer me.
24
Niyazi is referring to the guardians’ various responses to the question of why they left. These can be summarized as follows: “We thought it was a matter of days and we will return,” “killings,” “slaughters,” “massacres,” “fear for children,” or “We fought” (but ultimately lost because the Arabs sold us out). These possible responses to the thorny question of leaving have been examined in relation to the mythic, heroic, survival, shaming, and ambivalent memories that circulate in the guardians’ communities. Niyazi’s narrative, however, clearly prioritizes the Nakba’s patriotic and nationalist significations. He talks about those who held on and remained, the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Palestinians living under occupation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. He uses anticolonial patriotic and nationalist values associated with masculinities and manhood with which to admonish the male guardians for leaving (see, e.g., Massad 1995). He also cites these same “manly” values to challenge the justification for having left as a result of the purported betrayal of the Arab states. He does this through juxtaposing the “truly manly” endurance of sixty years of Israeli settler-colonialism in contradistinction to the allegedly “manly” endurance of a singular Nakba in 1948 by the generation that fled to Syria. This juxtaposition therefore also nullifies the male guardians’ use of patriotic values in order to justify what Niyazi sees as unjustifiable: leaving one’s home and land behind, regardless of the circumstances.
Thus, third-generation narratives on Nakba memory contest the role that the guardians ascribe to themselves in their memories of the Nakba, especially around the question of leaving and remaining. This contestation does not necessarily mean that the guardians are accused of lies, hypocrisy, or contradictions. To the contrary, in order for this contestation to take place, the guardians must be more than just the narrators of storied memories; they must also be regarded as repositories of history. In other words, it is only when the guardians’ memories are held to historical scrutiny, because these memories are regarded, a priori, as history, does the process of contestation emerge. This historical scrutiny is greatly indebted to the Nakba’s Arab and Palestinian universes of discourse.
These contentious narratives lead to different understandings of what the Nakba actually is. In this particular example, the Nakba gains meaning through a retrospective and cumulative view of Palestinian history. This is one in which 1948 is only one catastrophe in a series of catastrophes that have taught people how to persevere and hold on to the land since (see, e.g., Jayyusi 2007). This understanding also demonstrates how the Nakba’s patriotic or nationalist significations are integral to Palestinian refugees’ narratives on what constitutes Nakba memories. The guardians, as previously argued, carve themselves an acceptable heroic role in these discourses or resort to a certain ambivalence when relating their memories in order to vindicate their departure. Members of the third generation, in contrast, draw on the different Nakba meanings in these discourses as they seek to understand the departure.
Thus, seeking an acceptable answer is important to those who pose the question. As a result, third-generation interviewees often relegate the guardians’ departure to a matter of the guardians having had a limited worldview grounded in their “parochialism” at the time. Given this parochialism, the guardians are, in the third-generation’s contentious narratives simultaneously blamed and vindicated for leaving (albeit pejoratively). Later during my interview with Niyazi, I told him that he was being unnecessarily harsh in his judgment of the generation of Palestine. This question needs to be revisited today in light of the war in Syria, given that he along with most of the people of Khan Eshieh has now left the camp and many have left the country. At the time, I put it to him that he had neither lived through nor survived the atrocities of 1948. His response nevertheless remained unequivocal:
There is no awareness [among the generation of Palestine]. I told you there is an aspect of it that is related to a lack of awareness. You want me to justify them leaving. I am telling you, let us say that half of it is a lack of awareness, another aspect is fear, like I told you, “This happened in this area,” “We better leave, we are next in line,” and there is an aspect that is stupidity, [such as] “Leave and you will return in a few days.” Meaning, stupidity and lack of awareness, a part of it is fear but another part is a lack of awareness, this is what I think.
25
The guardians’ departure from Palestine as being the result of a “lack of awareness,” ignorance, and even stupidity is also Niyazi’s answer to why they left, the question so central to his narrative on what constitutes Nakba memory. This answer, however, also serves to ultimately vindicate the actions of the guardians during 1948. This is because if the patriotic values that lay blame on the guardians for the departure are taken to their logical conclusion, then the guardians could also be accused of treachery. Thus, in the third generation’s narratives, the guardians are not “traitors” but illiterate local peasant or tribal people who simply did not understand the bigger picture or the unfolding Zionist (and Arab) master plan. ‘Ammar related the following when I asked him about how his understanding of the Nakba differed from that of the generation of Palestine:
When they simply tell you, they tell you about—first of all, they left illiterate, they didn’t know what schools meant, what awareness meant, this is in contradistinction to the cities, some people left the cities and they were educated and they knew what the Nakba meant and—when they simply tell you that “we were expelled” or “we were hosted in nearby countries” so that we could go back as soon as the problem with the Israelis ends. This is a naive people’s talk, and a lack of comprehension and a lack of in-depth thinking. Now we, what do we think of the Nakba? It is a conspiring between various entities, Zionists, states, in order to expel a people from their land, and to take over their country.
26
The third generation’s contentious narratives are constructed in terms of a cumulative understanding of the events leading up to and unfolding during the conquest of Palestine, as well the conspiring of the Zionists and Arab regimes that made the conquest possible. In this narrative, it is the guardians’ parochialism that did not allow them to see the bigger, master plan. Had the guardians seen what was in store for them, they may have held on to their land at all costs, as those Palestinians who remained have been doing since 1948. Another interviewee, Ayman, summed this up as follows:
Now, look, those [survivors] of 1948 don’t have difficulties because they lived through it, they lived through the suffering, they lived through the suffering, meaning that they have the excuse that allows them to say why they left. But, this new generation, this generation is becoming aware, you can no longer tell a child, or a young man, at the beginning of his [adult] life, that they killed us. He will tell you—we are in fact having this conversation now [between the generations]—okay, they killed us, and then we went and fled because they were going to kill us. So why do you leave in the first place? Die in your own countries. This is the kind of conversation that happens between the different generations, the discussion between our generation and the generation of the grandparents, why did you leave and make us refugees, and stamped this name on our identity [cards], this word. Why didn’t you stay and die in the homeland, you would have at least died as martyrs, and at least we would have either stayed in Palestine or not have come to this life. Rather than having come—and [then] this word “refugee.” The old person [usually] says, “Well, we fought as much as we could but no one supported us.”…This is how the discussion and the conversation unfolds between [the two generations]: “No, you should have remained in Palestine.” The Nakba generation says, “No, we suffered and we saw unspeakable horrors and that is why we fled, that is why we left, on the basis that we are going back,” and of course there were Arab promises, external promises, guaranteeing the return, but no promises were fulfilled.
Ayman’s narrative is an eloquent summary of the third generation’s understanding of what constitutes Nakba memory. Blaming the guardians for fleeing in 1948 is possible only as the cumulative catastrophes of Israeli settler-colonialism in Palestine demonstrate that they could have stayed no matter what. Further, their decision to flee in part resulted from their parochial view of the events that engulfed Palestine in 1948, a “lack of awareness” of the overall plan to rid Palestine of its inhabitants. Had they known, they would have remained regardless of the massacres that they were subjected to. What is contentious is therefore not so much the details around the Nakba-as-war but the actions that were or were not taken by the guardians, articulated as the lingering effects of these decisions on third-generation lives. The guardians are therefore simultaneously blamed for leaving yet vindicated from the seemingly harsher judgment of being traitors. The guardians in these narratives thus play a very different role than the one they attribute to themselves in their own memories of catastrophes. One is, of course, also left to wonder what conversation, if any, different generations of Palestinian refugees in Syria are having now in light of the war and the unprecedented death and displacement it has wrought on the post-Palestine generations.
CONCLUSION
Second- and third-generation Palestinian refugees’ imaginative investment in their postmemories revolves around the guardians’ memories of loss. These powerful postmemories, which are imagined as memories of one’s own, are informed by the narration and transmission of the communities and worlds of the guardians’ former lives, envisioned as Palestine. In view of this, the Nakba does not figure as a postmemory; it figures in the post-Palestine generations’ narratives on what they understand to constitute Nakba memory. These narratives engage the memories that circulate in the guardians’ communities as well as the Nakba’s myriad significations in its Arab and Palestinian universes of discourse examined throughout this book.
The meanings of 1948 in the post-Palestine generation’s narratives are shared insofar as the Nakba is understood to revolve around its repercussions. There are also important generationally dependent differences in what constitutes Nakba memory. For the second generation, the Nakba is seen as extending into their own lives. In addition, their own temporal proximity to the generation of Palestine and this generation’s memories of catastrophes means that their narratives more closely and sympathetically engage these memories when making meaning of the Nakba. In contrast, the third generation’s temporal distance to the generation of Palestine’s memories means that they prioritize the Nakba’s myriad patriotic and nationalist significations when articulating their own understandings of 1948. Invoking those who remained and the implicit notion of the “ongoing Nakba” in occupied Palestine, third-generation narratives on Nakba memory challenge the guardians’ self-ascribed role, especially insofar as the question of leaving is concerned.
Thus, the Nakba has undergone numerous historically and politically contingent shifts in meaning and signification. While the Nakba was first conceptualized within the context of the ascendant Arab nationalist liberation project of the post–World War II era, geopolitical regional transformation led to the eclipse of this Arab nationalist universe of discourse in 1967. The Nakba’s contemporary emergence as a Palestinian catastrophe meant that it took on particular patriotic and memorial dimensions in light of the transformation of the Palestinian liberation movement. After Oslo, Palestinian refugee activists in Syria, as in other countries, mobilized memories of the Nakba primarily to refute the Palestinian leadership’s separation of Palestinian liberation from return. In commemorating 1948 and mobilizing for the eventual return, activists also created pervasive popular memory discourses in their communities. In these discourses, the Nakba came to occupy a singular importance in terms of marking their communities’ times and spaces, and the idea of memory itself took on a newfound political value.
In addition to the newfound meanings of the Nakba in its contemporary Palestinian universe of discourse, its memories and significations also circulate in various ways and with different competing and sometimes contradictory connotations in Palestinian refugee communities. In telling about the narration and transmission of memories in these communities, the post-Palestine generations emphasized that in their families, the generation of Palestine narrated memories that revolved around all that was lost, and what was transmitted to them was therefore loss itself. As shown in this chapter, these generations’ postmemories imagine this loss as Palestine, while the Nakba figures in their narratives on what is understood to constitute Nakba memory. These narratives engage the generation of Palestine’s memories and the Nakba’s contingent, fluid, and shifting nationalist, patriotic, and memory discourses’ significations that have been in circulation since the making of the Nakba.
The Palestine generation, whose members I theorized as the guardians of memory, given their real or purported roles in the narration and transmission of memories that are also intended to ensure the return, is the only generation with memories of both Palestine and the Nakba. Nevertheless, given the social nature of memory-making, the guardians related their memories in conversation with the various meanings of the Nakba examined throughout this book. Most important, the common memories that circulate in the guardians’ communities of memories and loss are testament to yet another meaning of the Nakba today, one embodied in the very possibility of their communities existing in light of and despite the complete devastation of 1948. The guardians’ communities today have been devastated and shattered for the final time through war, and only time will tell what is to become of their larger Syrian Palestinian refugee communities.
