Hasib Hourani and Jeanine Hourani in conversation across April – June 2024
HH: What is archive to you? What is something you've been doing lately that feels like a process of archiving?
JH: I've been thinking a lot about the process of archiving recently actually. I've been thinking about it within a broader framework of how we understand Palestinian history and how we understand Palestinian artistic and cultural production. I think archiving is understood to be a process of preserving Palestinian artistic and cultural production. But I wonder: what does that do to our understanding of Palestine? To what extent does it leave us 'stuck' in the past? To what extent does it overemphasise nostalgia at the expense of our present and future? I think the importance in understanding Palestinian history is to understand how it relates to our present and contextualising our struggle as part of a hundred-year-long legacy of resistance. Recently, I've found myself less interested in reminiscing about the past and more interested in what we can learn from our history to inform our political work today. I also think we need to emphasise the importance of artistic and cultural production beyond the performative, mechanical work of preservation but as a site of renewal and creativity for the self, the collective, and the cause.
HH: It makes sense, though, that there’s this pull towards excavation and preservation when we have lost so much. The prospect of starting from scratch can seem quite daunting and so to me it’s often like: ‘if we can just track down this one text, if we can just find this old blueprint, then maybe we can build a rectified future'. Especially now, when liberation is very much on the horizon, I think people are looking for reference points of what all we can achieve. The rationale is almost a: 'we've had this before, let's just have it again'. But the liberated Palestine we build will by no means be the Palestine of the past, so you're right in that it's steeped in nostalgia. It's not necessary from a pragmatic or infrastructural sense. But it's still a nice thing to do to solve internal knots or trepidations, at least that's what I think.
When I was in Lebanon last year, we drove out to Dibbiyeh and Baba and I hiked through the brush. I picked a pine cone from a tree and brought it back to Cyprus with me. It's still in my bedroom, I think. On the shelf by my bed. For nearly all my life, I've thought about what would have happened if we ended up in Lebanon. If we had a house there, in the mountains. It's nice to hold onto the lost possibilities, no? Reminders of where we come from, and these different dreams that would have set us down different paths.
But I'm really nostalgic, sometimes to my own detriment, and I do understand that it's not productive for building utopia. It's just... nice sometimes. And sometimes I want those nice things.
JH: On the point of nostalgia I'm reminded of a quote from Palestinian prisoner, writer, intellectual and recent martyr, Walid Daqqah, who said:
I harbour no desire to return to the Palestine of the past, to the era of mandate Palestine and its cacti, pomegranates and water mills, because, simply, it exists only in memory. When Palestine is romanticised, the right of return becomes a utopian ideal, and this romanticised return distances us further from the reality of returning. I want to return to a Palestine of the future, where the unified Palestinian national identity seamlessly intertwines with the entire expanse of our homeland's geography.[1]
Daqqah then goes on to speak about how the signing of the Oslo Accords substituted ‘return’ with ‘a tale of return’ and that ‘romantic linguistic embellishment’ aimed to fill the void ‘left by the absence of actual liberation’. I think this is where I come to this from and my hesitance around nostalgia. I'm interested in your thoughts because I know you've been quite critical of diaspora literature in the past and I think my hesitancy around nostalgia actually stems from the same place as your critique of diaspora literature, don't you think?
That's not to say there aren't differences in the way we see things and I think part of the reason we see things differently is because you come to nostalgia perhaps as a useful tool for creative practice whereas I see nostalgia as something that could stifle revolutionary potential from an organising perspective. Although, we both know that the two are not separate.
Actually, that reminds me of a second quote, this time from Ghassan Kanafani who said:
The daily confrontations with the Israel occupation led to the shortening of the genesis period of art in the occupied land, a period which the broader modern Arab literary movement had spent in a long debate surrounding the extent to which art can be politically committed and whether committed art is really a form of creative art. In occupied Palestine, however, the pressure of Israeli antagonism towards Arab culture prompted a quick conclusion to that debate. In other words, the question of committed literature was not open for debate amongst the vast majority of Palestinian literary figures in occupied Palestine. Such debates, in the face of dangerous daily confrontations, were a luxury rejected by all.[2]
I read this quote as an assertion that these philosophical debates about the role of art (and to some extent the role of nostalgia) are stolen from us when we are confronted with the urgency of a violent settler colonial project and an ongoing genocide in Gaza. Maybe that's why we're stumbling through our thoughts a bit because there is rarely room for these types of conversations...
HH: I’ve been learning, especially since 7 October 2023, that there isn’t one isolated kind of creative work that’s the ‘most generative’ response to genocide. Some function on a personal level and some function on a practical level.
An example of work with personal function was Refaat Alareer’s If I must die; which closes with the lines, ‘If I must die / let it bring hope / let it be a tale’.[3] The poem was referenced in protest speeches and written onto cardboard signs so yes the work was embodied, but ultimately Refaat’s poem propelled the community’s heart.
And for more practical creative work, NO-PHOTO 2024 is a great example. I’m not sure if you saw this, but it was a counter-initiative to Melbourne’s biannual PHOTO 2024, a festival which this year held the tagline of, The Future is Shaped by Those Who Can See It. They included no photos of Palestine, ignoring the genocide completely. It’s especially potent when what’s been propelling the current moment is the visual media now being exported from Gaza, seen by the masses. To combat the festival, a collective of artists installed posters across the CBD — black squares and rectangles in lieu of viral graphic photographs from Gaza, accompanied by image descriptions written by local writers. The NO-PHOTO 2024 tagline was, The Future is being Shaped by Those Who Refuse to See It, directly targeting arts institutions’ complicity in genocide as well as propelling the community to act.
Would you say that one of these works is more important or necessary than the other? Definitely not. They’re symbiotic, I think. Personal work (e.g. Alareer’s poem) nourishes the soul so that a person is healthy and receptive to practical work (e.g. NO-PHOTO 2024), ready to take action.
So to go back to nostalgia, would you say that nostalgia is the seed, but never the tree, never the forest?
JH: I completely agree that both of those works are important and necessary but I think neither actually engages with nostalgia. I don’t think it’s about the creative medium or even a difference between personal and practical but, to me, neither of those romanticises the past but, instead, uses art as a way to speak to the moment and to the future which is what makes them powerful. Maybe they stem from a place of nostalgia, especially Refaat’s poem, and maybe that speaks to the point you’re making about nostalgia being the seed but not the tree or forest. But also, to continue your metaphor, I don’t think that all creative work sprouts from nostalgia and so nostalgia is not the only seed but maybe one of many seeds needed to make a forest?
HH: One of many seeds. Have you been fixating on a particular seed at the moment? Or maybe what I’m asking is whether you’ve been seeking solace in any particular mode of organising right now.
JH: I think after over eight months of mobilising to stop a genocide, a lot of people are feeling a sense of cynicism, defeatism and burnout. I’ve actually been seeking solace from history — from understanding this is one moment within a broader, protracted liberation struggle. That we have gone through so many moments of grief but also victory and that this moment is one part of that broader history. I’ve been seeking solace in the importance of moving from mobilising to organising and in the role of organisation as what enables us to accumulate knowledge and skills between political moments and contribute to the arc of history and our inevitable liberation.
HH: Which brings us back to the archive in a way. People will look back on this moment as a generative point of reflection in similar ways to how we look at the first and second intifadas, or the July war. I do believe that, even though the devastation is unprecedented. It’s a cognitive effort to catalogue the moments of victory but that’s felt like the collective trajectory recently. One example is noting how protest chants have evolved — at least in so-called australia — over the past eight months. They’re more embodied now. Direct references to our martyrs, uprising, BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), resistance and resilience. In the beginning, more generic chants dominated the weekly rallies and I found it was easier to get caught in feedback loops of defeat but not so much anymore. The details and milestones we register within a movement dictate its momentum.
JH: I really agree with you that people will look back on this moment as generative but I think that raises the question: why do they need to ‘look back’ to see it as such? I think often we see devastation in the moment and only the victories in hindsight. I don’t know if you agree and it’s definitely not everything but I do think it’s a trend and it’s an interesting one.
HH: We’ve been pushing back as presenting the oppressed as victims for so long now but I feel it’s finally catching on. Reductive framings of women and children as the ‘saddest’ and ‘most innocent’ lives lost — conceptualised by Cynthia Enloe and applied by Maya Mikdashi to the Palestinian landscape — are being called out for what they are: racist and Islamophobic. Validating our men, martyrs and resistance operations is a run-on from that I think. Do you not feel like our victories are being celebrated? I don’t use mainstream media as a benchmark at all, obviously, so I’m talking more about our own communities.
JH: I definitely think the tide is turning. Palestine is becoming mainstream, Israel being known as an evil genocidal state is common sense, and more and more people are outwardly and explicitly supporting Palestinian resistance in all its forms. I think this moment has done three things actually. One, it has pushed the line on Palestine. Two, it has heightened the consciousness of the masses, not just on Palestine, but on progressive politics — people are realising through the lens of Palestine that the political class, the media establishment, the big businesses and corporations do not act in the interests of the people but in the interests of capitalism and imperialism. And three, it has clarified who is on our side and who isn’t — those who support Palestinian resistance and those who only support Palestinian victimhood and refuse to utter the words ‘martyr’ or ‘intifada’.
[1] Sana' Daqqah, caption on an Instagram post, 14 May 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/C67pbU4q3zs/
[2] Ghassan Kanafani (trans. Hadeel Jamal), ‘Digital Poetics 4/12: Excerpts from Palestinian Literature of Resistance under Occupation, 1948–1968,’ Hythe, The 87 Press12 February 2024, https://www.the87press.co.uk/thehythe-open/digital-poetics-412-excerpts-from-palestinian-literature-of-resistance-under-occupation-1948-1968-by-ghassan-kanafani-trans-hadeel-jamal
[3] Refaat Alareer, caption on an Instagram post, 14 May 2024, 14 October 2023, https://www.instagram.com/p/CyWiTgerMXT/