Home as archive
Emerging Writers Festival transcribed talk:
I’m thankful for the invitation to contemplate ‘home as archive’ together with fellow writers and artists working from the Australian colony where home is certainly invaded and stolen.
Home is a site of memory making, archival work and with that ‘home as archive’, or variations of home is an archive, home is a denied archive, home is a living archive, each holds its truth.
With events in Palestine very present to me as I write and present this piece and we bury over 250 of our people defending the homeland, home as archive cannot but bring up embodied Palestinian poetics for me that are of lifeworlds I have inherited. The iron, rusty key is a symbol of Palestinian dispossession - the theft of our homeland so deeply marked by the stealing of our houses that were and are our homes (our grandparents homes).
In 1948 when Israeli terror in the form of massacres was employed as a strategy of ethnic cleansing, over 700,000 of my people left their villages and cities with very few belongings with the perception that this terror would end and they would walk back to the homes they left. There was no permanent colonial temporality in their minds. More than five hundred villages were emptied using this strategy where at the point of the gun and with the sight of the blood and bodies of family members on the pavement of homes our grandparents had to leave worlds behind not knowing they could never go back.
Settlers moved into their homes. My dad’s family is from a village near the city of Yafa, what Israelis have termed as Tel Aviv. I remember my grandfather saying he once, many years ago, had the chance to cross the border into Palestine but as he came close to his father’s home he stopped. He couldn’t come near or see the barbarism of what happened taking its course - he couldn’t bear that sight of a settler living life, chilling, content and prospering inside the house his father had built with his own hands.
I think of his agony, may Allah have mercy upon him, when I consider home as archive. Distance from the course of history helps sometimes. The house key of course is not merely a symbol for remembering a family past or tracing ancestry as is a common impulse within today’s eugenicist DNA tracing and construction of whiteness as humanity’s singular story. Our inherited rusted keys hold the truth of a contested history, make a material claim to a history that can be assessed by placing this key we carry into the door of a settler’s home. The key penetrates fallacies and unhinges neatly told truths that grant the settler his belonging to a home that isn’t his.
It’s always incredible to me how settlers move into our humble houses as they are, how very hardcore that they do not seek to shy from the theft of their theft. We were raised with not only existence as resistance but very much also, remembrance as resistance. For as long as I can remember, I have known that dominant knowledge does not totalise as a Palestinian born in Amman, Jordan who migrated to Aetoroa, New Zealand as a child.
In the milk bars I walked to with my cousins in the alleyways of our urban refugee camp, hung maps of the region, but instead of Israel, they marked the historic land of Palestine. The stores there were Palestinian-owned, packed side by side across now cement homes, which used to be tin, which prior to that were tents after decades of waiting a few kilometres from home for the right to return.
Where the camp’s streets labelled by the administering Jordanian government and the United Nations hold numbers even today, street 2, street 7, street 32, rather than names, whereas stores mostly hold the names “Jerusalem Boutique”, “Bethlehem bakery” and “Jaffa Jewellery” with Palestinian flags flying across the front and a cheap golden frame of the occupied Al Aqsa mosque hanging behind the cashier.
Israeli narratives were displaced here in this home outside of home, in this archive that writes us back into history. Israeli narratives held no “truth” as far as we were concerned; even as governments in the west recognised Israeli sovereignty and peace agreements neogtiated over which parts of Palestinian land to give away, Palestinian sensibilities did not surrender to the Israeli archive.
As Linda Tabar & Chandni Desai write: "Palestinian memory also plays a significant role in rupturing the colonizer’s ideology and the material edifice of the settler colonial project. More importantly, in the midst of this continued dismemberment, memory mends, repairs and keeps alive relations to place and enables a continuity of history, culture and future. These living memories - in storytelling, resistance culture, daily transmissions and texts - are part of Palestinian worldviews that articulate decolonization through their intellectual and political traditions beyond the colonial system and its ideological apparatus”.
‘Palestine is not for sale’ is what the First Intifada said after the failures of peace negotiations; Palestine is not property and even one inch of the homeland is worth more than the millions and thousands on offer. ‘Jerusalem is not for sale’ is what we protest in our present as Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem while pressuring us to accept his very Trump like Deal of the Century and as the neighbourhoods of Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah spark a unified uprising today.
We protest against mandated ethnic cleansing to the shrug of world leaders who allow the removal of Palestinians from their houses so settlers can fulfil their desire of moving in. Yakoub the Israeli settler from New York tells us how little the Palestinian archive weighs, rationalising so casually his immorality, with a banality of a coloniser who knows he has the power to enact his fantasy: “If I don’t steal it somebody else is gonna steal it”. And so Yakoub enters our archive and our representations of home while “squatting”, as 23 year old Mohammed El Kurd put it, squatting in the home of the El Kurds who have to share a house with him until Allah grants relief. I can talk about Yakoub for days.
There are a few verses that come to mind here though that I would like to end with, from a poem by the famous Arabic poet Samih al Qasim who captures Palestinian poetics like no other. These verses were composed as a song by Reem Banna, Palestinian singer and icon may she rest in peace and they really capture the Palestinian imperative to speak of home as remembrance as I have attempted to demonstrate in this piece.
The poem is an early work that most Palestinians recognise titled “I tell the world I tell it”. As one of the first and largest post World War Two refugee nations, Palestinians have been telling, crafting an archive of home wherever we are; for liberation, for refugee rights, for return and for truth.
أحكي للعالم أحكي له عن بي ٍت َكسروا قِنديله ٍس قتلت زنبقةً عن فأ وحري أودى بجديلة ٍق أحكي عن شاٍة لم حلب تُ عن َعجن ِة ّم ُخ ُأ ما بزت ُأ عن سق ٍف طين ّي أعشب أحكي للعالم أحكي له الجا المنسيّة ِر يا بن َت الُّدمية عندي محميّة الُّدمية عندي فَتعالي با ال ّريح الشرقيّة ِص في
‘I tell the world, I tell it Of a house whose lantern they have broken Of an axe that killed the lily flower Of a fire that eradicated a braid of hair Speak of some cattle that were not milked Of a mother’s dough that was yet to be baked Of a grassy mud roof I tell the world, I tell it O forgotten neighbour’s daughter The doll is with me, safeguarded The doll is with me, so do come back In the eastern winds’ bus’
Listen to Reem Banna’s singing of these verses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhC-9JrekPg
With that I’ll end with a sentiment I believe in, that no one can really steal a home that becomes an archive.
Thank you.
