Palestinian Futurism: The Ghosts of My Ancestor's Memories and A Change of Locks

SPOILER ALERT: This article includes quotes from The Book of Disappearance as well as brief descriptions from stories in Palestine+100. 

July 29th, 2020. My order of The Book of Disappearance arrives two days earlier, on July 27th. I open its first pages, beginning with a scene of a mother rushing through the streets of Jaffa, looking for her own mother, Alaa, the protagonist's Tata, a corpse by the sea. I go back to 2010, only a kid back then, sitting in a restaurant called "The Old Man & The Sea" by the port. I have had the privilege, unlike many others, to recall the winds of Jaffa, and to touch its waters for a brief, very brief moment, the time the permit would allow my family and I to stay for a few passing hours. 

Coming from Nablus, the only glimpse of water I experienced overlooked the Jaffan sea on the highest mountain when the skies were clear. I'd go up the hill when I still lived there, to stare at a blue mountain, far, far away, and reminiscent that which I could not access. And so, reading about Jaffa in this book, I felt a closeness, yet a far awayness at the same time. 

I want to begin with my ending thoughts, before moving back to my initial ones, because as Palestinians, and perhaps a peculiar trait I personally possess, the tendency to move backward occupies our very lives, how else, how else could we possibly liberate ourselves, our Palestine, if it weren't for the memories we carry, a burden at times, most of the time... 

I start with the Afterword, and Ben Gurion's "the old will die and the young will forget."  Death is inevitable, but forgetfulness is not a choice for a people who continue to be reminded. Despite the book being set in an unknown time and place, opting for a fictitious scenario, it continued to look back at the past through Alaa's letters to his grandmother, always remembering her stories, intersecting them with his. "We inherit memory the way we inherit the color of our eyes and skin." (pg. 88) 

I have delved completely into character, I prepared Arabic coffee the way Ariel, Alaa's Jewish-Israeli liberal Zionist friend did, looking through Alaa's notebook, reading them through his eyes. I smoked and drank my coffee, and scrunched my nose whenever Ariel referred to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria. I even think, that, perhaps now, I am writing this article the way Ariel did. 

But back to my ending: that feeling of defeatedness that overwhelmed me after coming to the realization, again and again, that Palestine was no longer a place which exists as an actuality, but rather as an idea. Whether in this book or the book I have read before it; Palestine +100, a collection of short stories imagining a Palestinian future 100 years after the nakba, in 2048. This idea of a place that continues to be torn apart between the past, the present, and most importantly, the future. Is all hope lost, is that why we now opt for fiction as a means to escape this dire reality? Or is it, in fact, a means to imagine a better one, to amplify that hope of return? 

I continue to see recurring patterns in both books, as well as in my own work when given the task to imagine a future scenario. Yet unlike Ibtisam Azem and the many authors who have managed to write stories, I have yet to find a future for the question of Palestine. (More on that in another blog, for another time.) 

I have indeed thought of the idea of collective Palestinian suicide, to ease the burdens of the Arab world, perhaps the entire world. I have thought of incidents that would lead to mass destruction, war robots, Jinns and ghosts and zombies for Palestinian liberation, but have ended up critiquing the prospect of a bright future, instead of creating one.  (See https://cdslab.uni-ak.ac.at/WhoseUtopia/mainpagebox.html) 

And today, after a year of searching, I analyze those patterns, those symbols, of the key, of the shore, of the Israeli perspectives, of the ghosts of Jaffa and all the Palestinian cities who continue to haunt the lives of the citizens of modern-day Israel. 

"A city dies if it does not recognize its people." (pg.9)

Which people, then? The god-proclaimed nation of the Jews? The British before them? The crusaders or the Ayubbids or the French? The Palestinians? History has never been kind to this land, smudged with hundreds of thousands of identities. 

As much as my previous sentence sounded like a defense of the Israeli state, and some people might see it as such, as a mere ending of civilizations and a creation of new ones, I am only thinking out loud, perhaps as a way to cope with this feeling of defeatedness, of anger, of a Palestine that has yet to be. Maybe now that I think about it, imagining a place, building it anew as if it has never existed before, is the only way to go about things. A Palestine that has yet to be.  

Where do I insert my key, when the entire house has long been demolished? Even return has become nothing but a symbolism for hope. Both Azem's book and Anwar Hamed's The Key end on this note, on the question: Where do I insert my keys when the locks have been changed, when the locks have been destroyed? When the place has been occupied by someone else's presence... 

"He looked at the wide hole where the door's handle and lock had once been, as well as the holes sprayed across the rest of the door, and began to chuckle. 'I can sleep quietly now! There is no lock left, where will the intruder put his key?'" (Palestine+100, pg. 76) 

"Even if the locksmith isn't open, he'll call the owner and ask him to come to change the lock. Changing the door lock. He has to change the door lock."  (The Book of Disappearance, pg. 235) 

The ghost of the ancestor's memories, and the fear of what these might ignite within our own writing of the future, intertwine to create a space for objects and for people to dream. "Do inanimate objects have a memory? Do the things around us have a memory?" (pg. 228) Here, I thought about object-oriented ontology, about a class I took once, about Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects, about how I thought to myself: Have westerners already figured humans out, that it is time for them to move onto objects? What BS! But now, I understand, that holding onto objects, onto places, was nothing new, it is something we all do in order to identify ourselves, to prove, or fake, our histories of existence. 

Enough with the blabbering, and back to the dreaming, the threat it indicates to the enemy, the stubbornness of indigenous people and their insistence on decolonizing a place that has long been altered. Even Jaffa stopped being Jaffa and became Tel Aviv instead, a White City, as Azem describes it, your queer, vegan-friendly Middle Eastern New York. 

"Your Jaffa resembles mine. But it is not the same. Two cities impersonating each other. You carved your names in my city, so I feel like I am a returnee from history. Always tired, roaming my own life like a ghost. Yes, I am a ghost who lives in your city. You, too, are a ghost living in my city. And we call both cities Jaffa." (pg.16)  

 

Here, I contrast Azem's quote with two stories from Palestine +100, Majd Kayyal's N, a future where the land was cloned twice; one Israeli, one Palestinian, with different street names, different people essentially inhabiting the same place, what holds true for most occupied Palestinian cities nowadays, holding an Arabic and a Hebrew name, as a means of erasure. Mazen Maarouf's The Curse of the Mudball Kid, the terror of dreaming, the theft of kid's imaginations, and the ghosts that emanate from the Mudball Kid's body to haunt the citizens of Israel, infiltrating their homes and waiting to return.  

Those, dear readers, are the ways in which we deflect our pasts onto our futures, building on the foundations of the nakba generation, as Azem calls them in the book. The survivors who have witnessed the atrocities of war, and chose to pass on, or to never speak of their memories again. I have been told once, that my parents and grandparents loved me because they have limited my exposure to their experiences, and I, like Alaa, insist on knowing, on asking, on bearing that weight, like many others who refuse to give in to their systems of oppression, whatever those may be. 

I end this with a quote Sinan Antoon's ended with in her Afterword: "Art here achieves one of its most powerful effects; preserving memory and defending life with beauty." (pg.242)

So make art, and dream of a Palestine, it may just pave the way for its eventual liberation... 

References: 

‘Book of Disappearance, The Syracuse University Press’. https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/100/the-book-of-disappearance/.

‘Palestine + 100 - Comma Press’.  https://commapress.co.uk/books/palestine-100.