A letter from the editors of Volume 2
A football field between the town of Ni’lin and the village of Al-Midia during a demonstration against the wall and the Israeli occupation, as heavy-duty machinery clears the path for construction of the Israeli apartheid wall. [2007] Shachaf Polakow/Activestills.org
The projects and writing included in this volume struggle against the effects of colonialism on landscapes in Palestine/Israel and beyond. Through storytelling and participatory mapping, communal dinners and historical fiction, they declare that because violence to the earth and violence to people go hand in hand, healing must involve the land itself.
The creative work in GrayLit Volume 2 helps generate place-based knowledge and politics. It produces oppositional geographies: that is, it forces us to rethink extractive or property-based relationships to space, and to instead value heritage, preservation, sustainability, and connection. Feminist scholars invested in international solidarity and ethics, like Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Katherine McKittrick, offer us frameworks to understand the power of cultural work as it pertains to place. In contrast to the official project of geography and its instruments of names, measurements, and lines, Mohanty and McKittrick chart “cartographies of struggle.”1 They teach us to analyze how spatial formations like borders produce and contain difference; to question not only where struggle takes place but also where knowledge about struggle is produced; and to learn from the ways people negotiate their surroundings and imagine alternatives. It is our hope that the combined forces of this critical geography and cultural work can support the struggle against colonial domination by directing our focus to forms of self-expression and active presence, or what Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor and other Indigenous scholars and organizers have called “survivance.”2
Several commonalities arise across the contributions in this volume. Both individual and collective memory intervene in landscapes to reorganize the space of everyday life and assert the presence of people, plants, and traditions papered over or forcibly expelled. Memories of where one’s family lived, what they ate, and where they traveled plant footholds we can use to fight for people’s return to ancestral homes and lands. Collecting and sharing stories fosters feelings of belonging and connectedness that are foundational for people to take responsibility for each other and for the very physical land in which stories are rooted. Storytelling can also redefine and reinvigorate elements of landscape that have become symbols—like the oranges that appear in several pieces throughout this volume.
For the contributors to GrayLit Volume 2, land is both physical and more than physical. Soil and seeds remind us that care for land and care for bodies are inseparable, and that cultural work dealing with seemingly abstract conceptions of space must always be grounded. Through visual art and food culture, MIRNA BAMIEH reflects on Palestinian legacies of connection and survival. She describes and contributes to “a new kind of consciousness and awareness in the way we are dealing with our bodies on this land.” Cooking and agricultural research become a way to reclaim land and history and to access the “survival tools and sensibilities [of] ancient wisdom that might save us in a future of scarcity, vulnerability, and uncertainty.” Also protecting land and stories, TARA RODRÍGUEZ BESOSA takes us through a day in the life of the queer farming and seed preservation collective they and others are growing in Puerto Rico. They illuminate the colonial ecosystems that continue to devastate the islands at an alarming pace, as well as the resilience of the land, local agricultural and medicinal practices, and cultural food heritage.
Collective mapping becomes a way to reconfigure the ownership of land, offer new perspectives, substantiate memory, and aid the process of attaining justice. In “Community Satellites,” artist HAGIT KEYSAR narrates her work with youth and residents of Silwan using kites and balloons to create a community-generated map that tells the story of daily life in this East Jerusalem neighborhood and supports efforts to contest Israeli control over their living environment. Media artist DORIT NAAMAN reflects on the process of creating Jerusalem, We Are Here, an interactive documentary project that offers virtual walking tours through the Katamon neighborhood of West Jerusalem and has become an archive of Palestinian memory. Bringing the past into the present lays the foundations for a future when Palestinians can return to the homes they and their families inhabited, by collecting and making visible memories that challenge the idea of Jerusalem as primarily Jewish and exclusively Israeli.
A map, however, can never tell a whole story. Three pieces show that landscapes are not static but rather are composed of literal and fictionalized layers that cannot be located on a map. Written as a dialogue, RIMAH JABR and NATASHA GREENBLATT’s “Umm Means Mother” records and remembers their trip together through Palestine/Israel during the research phase for their play, Two Birds One Stone, which they afterwards wrote and performed together. As they search for Natasha’s grandfather’s house in Netanya, they begin to imagine how they can adapt their family histories in order to intertwine them, and what that would look like inscribed onto the land they cross together. A conversation with writer IBTISAM AZEM also looks at the distinct geography Zionism has imposed, and speculatively undercuts it by imagining the less-than-fictive disappearance of Palestinians. Azem’s 2014 novel The Book of Disappearance (published in English translation in 2019) takes the ongoing Nakba to a frightening conclusion in order to point out how labor and language shape experiences of place. Two members of the GrayLit editorial collective discussed the role of fiction in making and remaking urban landscapes with Azem, focusing in particular on Azem’s depiction of Jaffa as a living composite of Palestinian and Jewish settler experience, memory, and naming practices. Writer, theatre artist, and member of the GrayLit editorial collective CORY TAMLER wades through DEBÓRAH ELIEZER’s solo show (dis)Place[d]. Performance, Tamler theorizes, reveals how land lives in a diasporic body and troubles links between identity and territory. She also considers the stakes of writing, researching, and performing Arab Jewish histories, given the ways those histories have been condensed and instrumentalized in Zionist claims of sovereignty to the land of historic Palestine.
All of these works reiterate the resilience of people, land, and heritage, evoking the constantly evolving concept of sumud (صمود), Palestinian Arabic for “steadfastness.”3 In the face of military occupation and colonization, to rebuild a home, to make and share food, to protest, to write poetry—these acts and many others are ways that people resist by existing. Even Azem’s novel about disappearance, which may initially seem like the antithesis of steadfastness, can be read as a manifestation of sumud in how it redefines Palestinians’ relationship to space, and in so doing, denies their colonizers the power to annihilate them. Colonial domination works culturally, from the Zionist mythology of a land without people to the imposition of a name like Puerto Rico (“rich port”) to beckon an extractive economy to an archipelago. Therefore, cultural work rooted in sumud and survivance, as well as solidarity, challenges dispossession and environmental degradation politically, spiritually, and aesthetically.
It is our hope that GrayLit Volume 2 will contribute to the work of making preservation and return real.
Volume 2 Editorial Team:
Benjamin Kersten, Cory Tamler, Shachaf Polakow, Shalva Wise
Notes
- Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Introduction: Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 1-41 and Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
- Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 15.
- Yousef Alhelou, “The living spirit of Sumud: Palestinians’ form of resistance and steadfastness continues to grow stronger,” The New Arab, October 31, 2019, https://english.alaraby.co.uk/english/indepth/2019/10/31/sumud-palestinians-form-of-steadfastness-continues-to-grow-stronger. Sumud was initially mobilized in the late 1960s and 70s in educational and welfare programs to provide a language of resistance. During the devastation of Palestinian community life in Lebanon in the 1980s, sumud came to encompass strategies of struggle alongside formalized or armed resistance. See Laleh Kahili, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 99-103 for a historical discussion of sumud as a policy of resistance in the Occupied Territories and a discourse or narrative structure in Lebanon. See Gary Fields, “‘Sumud’—The Will to Resist,” UC Press Blog, University of California Press, accessed July 22, 2020, https://www.ucpress.edu/blog/30691/sumud-the-will-to-resist/ for a recent discussion of cultivating crops as a “steadfast form of resistance to the Israeli occupation.”