Background to the Project

Personal histories of 1948, and the creation of a collective identity in exile

The historic outline suggests the paradigmatic Palestinian experience since 1948 has been that of the refugee. Since a large part of refugees from 1948 living in the camps in Lebanon are illiterate, few memoirs or journals documenting memories of the events of 1948 exist. Instead, the oral transmission of personal histories - mainly in the context of informal family gatherings and public commemorative events - has been the primary means by which this diasporic community has preserved its cultural heritage and history in exile.

Not only have these narratives and life stories from the first generation of Palestinians living in Lebanon been instrumental to the survival of a cultural geography of places, traditions, and histories from pre-1948 Palestine, but they have also contributed to the construction of a collective identity in exile. These personal histories of 1948 effectively transmit twin legacies of alienation and belonging to subsequent generations of refugees that did not experience the moment of dispersal, while inscribing the quintessential motifs of collective dispossession, suffering and exile.

Within this frame of historical memorialization, al-Nakba, has become for Palestinian refugees the temporal marker commemorating the moment of national loss and the beginning of a stateless life in exile (al ghurbah). Personal histories of 1948 have thus come to function as a timeless metaphor of collective dispossession that continue to be highly relevant to the lives of Palestinians both in the diaspora and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. These stories have become the means to a moral legitimacy in exile, and the basis of a collective identity and communal solidarity.

The absence of oral testimony in the historical literature on 1948 and the Palestine question

While Palestinian historiography would undoubtedly be enriched by a greater emphasis on the oral accounts of the 1948 displacement, nationalist history has rarely acknowledged or engaged these oral, eyewitness narratives of the events of 1948 in any systematic or comprehensive way. Instead its focus has been largely on archival studies of the pre-mandate period, and the key political figures and military events in the history of al-Nakba, rather than on the experiences of ordinary civilians. Furthermore, the perception that "lived histories" - in the form of oral testimony and life story - threaten the coherence of a nationalist history by their diversity has been compounded by an assumption that authority, as defined by a Western, historiographic tradition, derives largely from a privileging of archival sources over the spoken word.

Similarly, the Israeli revisionist critique of Zionist historiography, while an important contribution to the historiography of the region, drew principally on archival sources from Israeli political and military records, and documents from the British mandate: oral testimony was explicitly excluded on the grounds that it was likely to be inaccurate and prone to subjective bias. Consequently, the disparate experiences of those who actually experienced the events of 1948 have for the most part gone unrecorded. The few instances in which eyewitness accounts of 1948 have been employed in recent Palestinian historiography have either been in the form of isolated example, or been subsumed into a "professional" historical discourse and refashioned as a codified, nationalist narrative.

Against this broader backdrop of exclusion, the recording of histories from the 1948 generation of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon has been limited*. While some oral histories of the memories of pre-1948 Palestine and the events surrounding al-Nakba have been collected in audio format and as transcribed interviews, narratives have not yet been recorded on video. This project seeks to build on this existing tradition of Palestinian oral histories in Lebanon by producing an archive of video testimonies specifically from the generation of al-Nakba.

Visual representation of these narratives is important because it renders clearly the startling contrast between the discursive and physical worlds which these refugees inhabit, something which is particularly true of the 1948 generation who still have memories of life in pre-1948 Palestine. It is also important that these stories be recorded in an embodied, audiovisual form capable of capturing their highly involved aesthetic. The medium of video highlights the innately performative quality of these personal histories which rely heavily on facial expression, posture, the use of dramatic emphasis in speech and gesture, as well as audience interaction - something which is, for the most part, lost in audio nor literary transcription. Video records of the social contexts in which these memories are performed will also be an invaluable interpretive tool for any analysis of the significance of these stories as social practice and the means by which a largely illiterate generation has transmitted their historical experience.

*Rosemary Sayigh's work on Palestinians in Lebanon and the work of Al-Jana and ARCPA are notable exceptions.