Image: Occupied Pleasures by Tanya Habjouqa.
can a daughter can inherit her father’s longing for home? this personal essay frames returning to Palestine as a reclamation of identity and self
words Sarah Ihmoud
The following is an excerpt from Exiled at Home: Writing Return and the Palestinian Home, an exploration on returning to the home/land as a space of reconstructing Palestinian identities. Drawing on their personal experiences navigating Israeli settler colonialism and militarization, while also uplifting the voices of Palestinian women who have journeyed home or created home in spite of dispossession of the homeland and home-spaces, the authors frame ‘home’ and the act of homing as a space for yearning and belonging, as well as a reclamation of identity and a form of resistance against settler colonial violence, dispossession and erasure. This piece by anthropologist Sarah Ihmoud details her return to Palestine and considers the inheritance of her father’s longing of a homeland which she has never known as an opportunity to recover lost parts of herself.
Auntie Evelyne’s story reminded me of my first attempt to reach Palestine. It was a young Jewish customs agent in Tel Aviv who, after studying the name on my passport—an Arab name!—directed me to “step aside.” She said these words abruptly, sternly, in a tone that made me feel as though I had committed some crime of which I was not yet aware but that had nonetheless been discovered. It made me think of a poem by Mahmoud Darwish: They did not recognize me in the shadows / That suck away my color in this Passport / And to them my wound was an exhibit / For a tourist Who loves to collect photographs (“Passport”).
I watched the white tourists who had flown with me from New York breeze through customs, greeted with an easy smile and welcoming words, as a security officer escorted me to my first segregated waiting room. The other Palestinian Americans in the room greeted me with knowing looks. While awaiting what would be the first of many interrogations about my family and identity, I thought of James Baldwin’s “Letter from the South,” in which he describes his first experiences navigating the Jim Crow south. And I thought of my father’s huwiyya, the green identity card he kept tucked away in his top drawer at home in Chicago, which bore a photograph of him at seventeen years old, the name of his village, his family, and an identification number that had since been deleted from the population registry. And it dawned on me then just why my father had never taken me “back home.” It was too painful for him, too humiliating, to be emasculated in front of his daughter in his own land. And I realized that I was but one generation removed from this dehumanization. Indeed, it was in this moment of racial interpolation—like that seminal moment described by Frantz Fanon (“Look, a negro!”)—when, seeing myself in the eyes of the colonizer, I was finally driven to discover the meaning of Palestinian identity as a viscerally intimate, lived experience.
“it dawned on me then just why my father had never taken me “back home.” It was too painful for him, too humiliating, to be emasculated in front of his daughter in his own land. And I realized that I was but one generation removed from this dehumanization.”
Driving past the checkpoint and across the border later that evening from Tel Aviv to the occupied West Bank, I was transfixed by the agricultural terraces carved into the sides of mountains, each stone carefully placed, upon which olive trees stood with a dignified pose. How long had my ancestors labored to build those walls, to plant those trees, and to what acts had they borne witness? As we drove past the palm-tree-lined entrance to Turmos ‘Ayya, I remembered my father’s stories about growing up in his village. His favorite pastime was exploring these very hills, discovering ancient artifacts and wandering in my grandparents’ garden, overflowing with olive groves and fig and pomegranate trees. It was dusk and a pink light danced along the hilltops, illuminating both the beauty and the terror of that place. My father’s boyhood memories of playing in the hills were transposed by the reality that those hills were no longer ours; they had been stolen from our family and our community by a nearby settlement.
The next morning I was taken to visit an uncle I had not seen since I was a child. Nobody dares visit my uncle’s house because it is nearest to the settler road—the road separating our village, Turmos ‘Ayya, from the Israeli settlement of Shiloh. “Do you like to walk?” my uncle asks. “I want to show you something.”
We walk along a dirt path towards the road. The left side of the path is covered with olive groves; the right, scattered with trees, is mainly moss- covered rocky farmland. I follow as he points to various plots of the grove, marked only with a stick in the ground or a pile of stones. “This belongs to your uncle Ahmed, this piece is for Waleed. . . .” We continue walking through the groves as he motions towards the land inherited by each of my father’s siblings, stopping only to admire a particularly large olive tree, which must have been grafted many times over many years, and the ruins, opposite the grove, of an old Palestinian house, even closer than my uncle’s to the settler road.
“What happened to that family?” I ask.
“The settlers came down one day, went into that house and shot the man who lived there.” He motions as if pulling the trigger of a pistol. “And he died, just like that. Right in front of his mother.”
“Just like that?” I ask, trying to hide my astonishment.
“Just like that,” he shrugs. “Do they need a reason?”
We stray off the dirt road onto a path that winds through the olive trees until we come upon a clearing. Here sit the ruins of another house. This one is bigger. Blocks of Jerusalem stone encircle its cement foundation, which is cracked by small trees and overgrown with weeds. Rusted ends of thick steel wire jut out of its edges, worn by the elements.
Walking through our family’s olive grove in Turmosayya, Palestine (35 mm, B&W photograph by the author).
My uncle wanders off for a moment, so I climb onto the foundation of the old house, walking through the dividers of what I imagine were its rooms: the living room, salon, master bedroom, children’s room, guest room, kitchen, bathroom. I am admiring the view of the village from the living room— the magnificent stone villas made with remittances from the United States, Latin America, or Dubai, the two mosques, their minarets reaching beyond the highest buildings, and the rolling hills beyond which lie the neighboring villages of Sajjel and Abu Falah—when my uncle returns.
“And this house?” I ask. “Who did this house belong to, ‘Ammo?”
My uncle stares at the ground, then meets my gaze. His green eyes and graying curly hair make me feel as though I’ve happened upon my father fifteen years from now. I have never before seen this look of shame on an elder’s face. Though it pains his seventy-year-old frame, he climbs onto the foundation beside me.
“This is your house.” [Silence]
“My house?”
“It was supposed to be your house.” [Pause]
“Until the settlers came . . . Do you understand?”
It was there, standing on the ruined foundations of a house, that I began to comprehend the incomprehensible. In 1969, my eighteen-year-old father left Turmos ‘Ayya, a small village between Nablus and Ramallah, to attend college in the United States. When he returned, four years later, he was denied entry at the airport. Unbeknownst to him, the Israeli military had deleted him and thousands of others from the population registry. As part of a new policy to enact a kinder, gentler, and quieter form of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their land—a “silent transfer”—at least 140,000 Palestinians lost their residency status and were deprived of the privilege of permanently living in the occupied West Bank. Stripped of the hope of building families, communities, and livelihoods in their native lands, these “deleted” people became part of an ever-growing Palestinian diaspora heavy with despair and longing and the dream of returning home.
The destroyed foundation of what was to be my family home in Turmosayya, Palestine, with Shiloh settlement in the background (35 mm, B&W photograph by the author).
When the settlers came to claim the land they now call Shiloh, it belonged to my family. This was not a personal belonging, though my great grandfather possessed the deeds, but a communal Waqf belonging. My father, his identity card revoked by the Israeli authorities, returned to his home, his family, and his land in 1984 on a tourist visa to build a home for us on the land he had inherited. But a group of Jewish Israeli settlers from the recently founded settlement of Shiloh came down from the hilltop and threatened the workers. If he continued to build this house, the settlers warned my father, they would come back for him and his family. One night, to prove their intent, the settlers set the foundation and the field around it aflame. This was their way not only of warning my family, but also the village, that they intended to continue laying claim to the land, that they would expand the settlement. The settler road, I learned, is a border zone like any other, the West Bank a frontier-like space where the rule of law does not apply. At least not to Palestinians.
They say in some cultures that a mother passes her suffering to her child through her breast milk. Can a father pass his longing to his daughter? Can I be nostalgic for a time and place I never knew? Secretly I have shared my father’s longing for his homeland all my life, perhaps because my longing for Palestine has also been, in part, a longing for my father. It is a longing to know him and his home intimately, perhaps in the hopes of recovering some lost or vacant part of myself. Somehow, being here now, I feel closer to him.
The ruins of my unfinished family house in Turmos ‘Ayya, the painful realization of losing a home I never knew I could have possessed in Palestine, haunt me to this day. They point to the wide-ranging effects of settler colonial violence on the Palestinian diaspora. My ability to have a childhood and a future in Palestine, a Palestinian identity based in the homeland, was up-rooted even before my birth, and replaced by the settlers in Shiloh who set fire to my family’s foundations, while they claim a secure, protected, home space and identity on my ancestors’ land. Yet, coming to terms with these ruins, both physical and psychological, has also been a healing process. They inspire my desire to rebuild a home space in Palestine, to learn the stories of my people, to keep on returning, and as a politically engaged anthropologist, to tell my stories and to write against terror.
“Secretly I have shared my father’s longing for his homeland all my life, perhaps because my longing for Palestine has also been, in part, a longing for my father. It is a longing to know him and his home intimately, perhaps in the hopes of recovering some lost or vacant part of myself.”
In recalling my own border crossings and return to Palestine, I also recall my maternal great grandmother and namesake, who crossed the Rio Grande from Northern Mexico with my infant grandmother Guadalupe wrapped in a bundle on her back. They walked across the desert alone, clinging only to each other, and waded through water to cross the US/Mexico borderlands. As my grandmother Guadalupe and my mother, Emilia, often reminded me in the telling of this story, “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” A mere century before the Palestinian catastrophe, the Mexican people contended with their own Nakba, which resulted in the dispossession of half their national territory, energized by the occupation, militarization, and racialized violence inherent in the US settler colonial structure. The construction of Mexicans as archetypal figures of “illegality” in the US today, and of Palestinians as archetypal “terrorists” in the Israeli imagination, discourses framing “national security” agendas that enable continued state violence against racialized Others, suggest articulation between processes of militarized bordering embedded in settler colonial projects. Yet it also points to articulation between Mexican/Palestinian border crossings and the reclaiming of home as forms of resistance that contest settler colonial violence, dispossession, and erasure. Without my Mexican ancestors’ crossings of la frontera, and the crossings of Auntie Evelyne and other Palestinians who made the perilous journey across borders, I would not be here making my own crossings today.
Becoming a Palestinian scholar has been grounded in the processes of defining and building home in Palestine. It is the home that has been opened by my family in Turmos ‘Ayya, who have embraced me with open arms. It is the home I find in building collectivity with Palestinians from Jerusalem, Haifa, Gaza City, Birzeit, Nablus, Ramallah, and others, and those throughout the diaspora, in becoming fluent in each other’s stories, sharing our pain and our joys, in discussing difficult questions and daring to imagine and create with each other. It is the home I find in the mentorship of Nadera, a Palestinian feminist scholar whose decades of intellectual and political work, and deep commitment to our people, are a testament to the power and strength of love as a force for building counter-hegemonic knowledge. It is her work and guidance, and the voices of those I have met along this journey, that remind me constantly, as Jacqui Alexander writes, that “We can not afford to cease yearning for each others’ company”. Indeed, we cannot afford to cease yearning for home in each other, to cease yearning for home in Palestine.
Note
This essay first appeared in the volume 37, issue 2, 2014 issue of Biography published by the University of Hawai‘i Press and was republished with their permission.
Dr Sarah Ihmoud is a Chicana-Palestinian anthropologist whose work takes Palestine and Palestinian diaspora as sites from which to explore questions of race and ethnicity, gender violence, colonialism, Indigenous politics and borders/borderlands in comparative and transnational perspectives. She is a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective and is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the College of the Holy Cross. She is currently working on her first book, "Almaqdasiyya: Palestinian Feminism and the Decolonial Imaginary".