WRITING IN THE BLANK SPACES

Samah Sabawi

I WRITE THIS on the land of the Quandamooka people, in the Redlands Coast of Queensland, Australia. I spend a lot of time here, visiting with my aging father, Abdul Karim Sabawi, a perpetual refugee who whispers poetry like sacred prayers, even as his droopy eyelids give way, and his body slumps into a restful sleep. I watch him recite revolutionary verses as he drifts into his dreams and I smile, “Free Palestine!”

I have a theory: a poet is only truly alive for as long as his poetry lives. In the same way, a cause is only truly alive for as long as there are people who believe in it. And, here, at the end of the world, I believe in Palestine and because of it, also seek the truth of the land that I actually live upon.

How did we end up in this place? Uprooted and exiled from our colonized land—now settlers and colonizers of another people’s land. The irony does not escape me. We are beneficiaries of the white settler colonialist invasion and, from where I sit to write this, my eyes shamelessly consume the stretch of tropical green plantations that spread across the fields and into the arms of the tall palm trees that line up along the emerald coast. In the distance, the deep blue sea collides against a pale blue horizon that holds up the magnificent sky. How abundant and rich is this land! My heart aches at the impossible beauty that surrounds me, and at the knowledge of the historic pain of its indigenous inhabitants, magnified by their deliberate absence from view. This was once part of a thriving Aboriginal culture and way of life, but I do not think I’ve seen any indigenous person during any of my visits here, neither have I seen any reference to the history of these First Nations people. In this part of Queensland, I have only seen a carefree whiteness, occasionally dotted with freckles and adorned with eyes that mirror the greens and blues of this landscape.

I do my own research and I learn that the Quandamooka people lived here, that they farmed and fished for tens of thousands of years in villages around these coastal areas, islands and campsites. This ended when the Europeans came in the early 1800s and began decades of ethnic cleansing and genocide that almost erased all presence of these native nations. Will this happen to us in Palestine? Will we be erased, too?

The answer lies in the persistent need to confront erasure with the demonstrated presence of culture and memory. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people here, as well as for Palestinians in the homeland, it is impossible to imagine moving forward without acknowledgement of the traumatic events of the past and removal of the shackles of oppression from the present, in order to begin the journey of reconciliation into a just and peaceful co-existence.

For this reason, I must do my part. I acknowledge that I, the victim of settler colonialism and erasure in my home country, an exiled spirit severed from the earth that I belong to, that I live on stolen colonized land, and I pledge my solidarity and pay my respect to the elders past, present and emerging of the Quandamooka people and all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, all survivors, all freedom fighters, and I thank them for the privilege of being on their land, the land from where I write this.

Trauma and Exile

I am Generation Naksa, born in Gaza in 1967, wrapped in a shawl and whisked away in a baby basket from our home in Tuffah, all the way into exile. I am the age of exile.

I uttered my first words and took my first steps in a refugee camp in Jordan before we moved to Saudi Arabia and from there, to Australia. If not for a twist of fate, I could still be one of the two million Palestinians trapped today in the refugee camps in Jordan, or one of the two million Palestinians trapped in Gaze and surviving its siege and periodic Israeli bombardment campaigns. This feeling of having the privilege of having survived that my cousins and loved ones do not enjoy, has lurked like a shadow, following me throughout my life’s triumphs and tribulations. A source of shame and guilt, it inhabits my thoughts and actions, manifesting itself in my advocacy, poetry and theatrical productions. This shadow, my lifelong companion, sometimes inspires me; at other times, especially during the bombardments of Gaza, it leaves me traumatized and utterly devastated.

The first time I became aware of the presence of this shadow, I was 14 years old, standing in Melbourne’s City Square in 1982, protesting the massacres of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. I had been to Lebanon when I was seven. I knew people there. I played with children from there. My uncle, Abdel Muti, who was later martyred in Gaza, was there. He told me once, as he scooped me up into his strong loving arms, that he was “fighting for freedom.” He was there. They were there. And there was a massacre.

On the day of the protest, I saw photos of Palestinian families for the first time on the front page of The Age newspaper. At any other time, I might have been excited to see this. Not this time. Not like this. The families were not sitting in a circle around a tray of rice and meat. They were not standing facing the camera in their Eid clothes. They were not dancing at a wedding. The families on the front page of The Age newspaper were piled on top of each other, lifeless, limbs drooping, blood dripping, mouths open, bellies bloated … and, worst of all … worthless. They were worthless in the eyes of the world that I had just become a part of. Damn it! This was my new world, my new Australia, the country that gave me citizenship, dignity and worth: how could it care so little about the life of Palestinian refugees and align itself with the butchers? For a teenager, desperately trying to belong, that realization was detrimental. I knew, at that moment, I would never belong.

The most recent time this shadow appeared to taunt me is right now—as I write these words, the bombs are falling on Gaza, yet again. I’m riddled with fear at what might happen to my cousins and my in-laws and all those beautiful children whom I know. How is it that, in the eyes of the Western world, I, as a citizen of a settler colonial nation, have more human worth than they do, my relatives and loved ones, who are besieged refugees? Guilt drapes its shadow over me, my chest tightens, my heart races and my tears fall. Here we go again. Trauma. Do I have a right to claim trauma in the luxury of exile?

The Absence of the Nakba from the “Trauma Genre”

When I did my doctoral research,23 the question of trauma in exile was foremost on my mind. How is it that we, as Palestinians in exile, some of us never having lived in Palestine, inherit this agonizing sense of collective trauma? And how much does this trauma contribute to our understanding of our Palestinian identity and to the urgency of our advocacy?

It only took a few months at the start of my doctoral research to come to an astonishing, yet not surprising, discovery. The Palestinian experience of dispossession and trauma in 1948, the Nakba, which literally means “catastrophe,” the most significant traumatic event in Palestinian history, is absent from the “trauma genre.” In fact, research by Rosemary Sayigh24 confirms that the most highly cited literature on war and collective trauma excludes any mention of the Nakba or the larger ongoing Palestinian experience of trauma. According to Sayigh, the theoretical conceptualization of the “trauma genre” peaked in the early 1990s, with studies by theorists such as Caruth,25 Felman,26 and Felman and Laub.27 She argues that these studies focused, at first, on the Holocaust, then expanded to addressing the suffering of peoples from around the world—except for the suffering of Palestinians. Sayigh offers a critique of these studies, challenging their claim of “universality and inclusiveness” on the basis of their exclusion of Palestinian suffering, and raises the question of whether the “trauma genre” sets up “cultural frames of reference” to what is suffering and what is not and, by extension, to who is suffering and who is not. She notes that the “glaring absence” of the Nakba within the “trauma genre” in Western academic research is a phenomenon that both reflects and reinforces “the marginalization of Palestinian claims to justice,” highlighting the notion that the exclusion of Palestinian suffering from the “trauma genre” is part of the political and cultural myopia which we see in relation to many aspects that concern Palestine and the Palestinian people. This myopia is substantially constructed or enabled by the Orientalist and colonialist representations of Palestinians and Arabs.

In fact, Western power structures, and especially Western academia, have played a major role in the violence perpetrated against the Palestinian people. This was clear in the works of the late Palestinian icon, Edward Said.28 In his 1978 book, Orientalism, a foundational text for postcolonial studies, Edward Said argued that early scholarly writing from America and Europe was misleading due to its presentation of stereotypical and inaccurate depictions of the East, which hinders the true understanding of its cultures and also enables the exploitation of its resources. Said made the point that such stereotypes were deliberate and vital for the West, serving not only as a rationalization of colonial rule, but also as a means to justify it in advance by painting a picture of an Eastern world that needed to be rescued, civilised and accultured.

Said’s writing on the theory of Orientalism was sparked by the Western media coverage of the Arab Israeli war, as well as his own personal life and experiences as a Palestinian-American. In a 1998 video interview,29 he spoke of the great disparity between the representations of Arabs and Palestinians in most scholarly works and his own lived experience as a Palestinian and an Arab. These representations created fixed images of a stagnant un-developing region, an Arab world that is frozen in time and “falls outside of history.” It was a world which he, as an Arab who grew up in that region, did not recognize, but projected a vision of one that was necessary for the creation of an oppositional “Other” for Europe.

Said defines Orientalism as both research and writings about the Orient from a particular Western-focused perspective that presents itself as objective knowledge, but which is driven largely by the impetus to support and maintain a discourse of racial superiority in furtherance of colonial/imperial interests. For example, American Orientalism, according to Said, is ideologically driven and highly politicized in order to support America’s interests in the oil resources of the Middle East as well as to prop up its ally, Israel.

Seeing the Palestinians through an Orientalist lens makes it impossible to understand the context of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict yet, for decades, this was the only perspective on offer for Western scholars. Unfortunately, this perspective still persists, allowing the disappearance of an event as significant as the Nakba from the “trauma genre” of Western academia.

Growing up outside the “Moral Communities”

Sayigh proposes two theoretical frameworks to consider when trying to understand how this disappearance, this erasure, is possible: The first, she suggests, is that Palestinian suffering falls outside what literary scholar David Morris calls “moral communities.” Morris30 builds on the late philosopher Tom Regan’s term “moral communities”31 in order to illustrate the ways in which writers often work within exclusive social parameters determined by culture and history. These parameters often do not include stories of suffering of others, who are deemed to fall outside of their defined “moral community.” Israel’s lobby groups have, for decades, acted as the gatekeepers of the Western world’s “moral community.” In order to justify Israel’s past and ongoing crimes, the Palestinians needed to be seen to fall outside of the world’s “moral community.”

I have experienced this first-hand whenever I have tried to present stories of the Palestinians to the wider public. The attack was most severe in 2016 when the Israeli lobby group, B’nai B’rith, launched a campaign led by Dvir Abramovich to remove my play, Tales of a City by the Sea from the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) drama playlist. Their heavy-handed approach led to an interruption of the Budget Hearings of the Victorian State Parliament, as the Opposition confronted the government with their demands. It was surreal; the Victorian Opposition actually “used a budget hearing to attack the Government” over the inclusion of what they claimed was an “anti-Israel” play32 on the VCE curriculum. This made my modest piece of independent theater, a Palestinian love story set in Gaza, to be amongst the few, if any, independent theater productions to be debated in the Victorian State Parliament.

For days, while the controversy raged, I was talked about but never talked to by the mainstream media, who readily gave a platform to the Zionist lobby but never thought to invite me to speak. This event could have been another story of great anguish and injustice, but in fact, it turned into a positive story, a sign that the times are changing. For the first time, this Palestinian writer did not have to fight her battles alone. Australian theater-makers, artists, writers and friends spoke up in defense of my work, and my right to tell a story about my people, without running the story through the Israeli filters for approval. “Censorship” was the word many used in describing the pressure the Zionist lobby was creating. The play remained on the VCE curriculum and won two Victoria Drama Awards. The magnificent and brave La Mama Theatre was unfazed by the “controversy” and their support was overwhelming. Tales of a City by the Sea sold out its entire season, with nightly standing ovations, before going on a national and international tour. As of the time of writing this, the play has had more than 100 performances around the world and has been studied by thousands of students worldwide.

When I finally responded to the false accusations leveled at me in an opinion piece published in The Age, I wrote: “The problem with this play is not that it may dehumanize Israelis—it does not. The problem is it humanizes the Palestinians. Apparently, for some, this is too much to handle.”33

Palestinians as “Ungrievable” Populations

The second framework to explain the erasure and absence of the Nakba from the “trauma genre,” according to Sayigh, can be found in Judith Butler’s idea that “forms of racism [which are] instituted and active at the level of perception, tend to produce iconic versions of populations who are eminently grievable, and others whose loss is no loss, and who remain ungrievable.”34

We see this all the time: Palestinian children who are pulled from under the rubble of Israel’s wars are nameless, their stories seldom told, while Israeli deaths are given the dignity of a name and a story. Palestinians are seen through the eyes of Western media and scholars as “ungrievable” populations who fall outside of their “moral community.”

I look back at the 14-year-old teenage me. She is standing with her “Free Palestine” placard, protesting the massacres of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 in Melbourne City Square. She did not need to do a doctoral research to discover that Palestinians are deemed “ungrievable.” She could see it on the front page of The Age newspaper, in the nameless Palestinian dead and the bloated corpses that had no stories. She could read it in the editorials that mentioned something about Palestinian “Terrorists” and Israel’s right to defend itself. She could hear it in the voices of the news anchors who invited Israeli “experts” to explain the “conflict.” She knew it. It was her life. I wish I could go back in time and put my arms around her and tell her that this will change. She just needs to be patient.

The “Guardianship” of Palestine in the “Exile Milieu”

Simone Weil wrote that being rooted is “the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”35 Weil explains that we establish roots by belonging to a place, a community, a culture and a history that “preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.” This process of preservation is often the first casualty when a people are dispossessed and uprooted. Reviving it becomes both a necessity for the survival of those dispossessed, and an obstacle to the process of planting new roots. The hearts of exiles, Weil contended, are so “irresistibly turned towards the homeland in distress that few emotional resources are left for friendship for the land they happen to be living in.”

Edward Said wrote about the formation and nourishment of the Palestinian national identity in the “exile milieu.”36 He described exile as “a jealous state,” a condition of “estrangement” and “alienation” that guards its existence in order to establish “an exaggerated sense of group solidarity” and “a passionate hostility to outsiders” (2001, p. 141). I learned, growing up, that embracing my Palestinian identity was a duty, a conscious political decision, a familial obligation and a minimum gesture of solidarity with loved ones who are still trapped in Israel’s Occupation.

However, while identifying as a Palestinian might be a “conscious decision” and a “political” choice, I would argue that for the greater majority of Palestinians outside the homeland, myself included, being Palestinian is not so much a decision but rather simply a reflection of who we actually are. Palestinian mothers laboring over the perfect Maqluba while recounting stories of growing up in Palestine are not consciously keeping the cause alive. They are sharing a part of themselves, revealing their past and passing on the treasure trove of knowledge they inherited from past generations. When my sisters got married, my mother did not insist on having a Palestinian wedding to spite the Zionists, or to sing songs as old as the sycamore tree in her home in Palestine in order to wipe Israel from the map. She insisted on celebrating in the manner that she knew. This is her reality. Her world. Her memories. And she is Palestinian. When I joined the Dabke dance group at the Palestinian Arabic Club in Broadmeadows in my early teens in Australia, it was not because I had read Edward Said’s theories on exile and decided to nourish my national identity in the “exile milieu” through dance moves. I did it to socialize with others who shared my interests and who understood what it felt like to grow up in families like mine. This is to say that Palestinian families outside the homeland do not see their Palestinian identity as a political choice but rather as an inescapable part of who we are. What, I believe, politicizes the Palestinian identity is the negation of our right to identify as Palestinian.

Zionists have often made the argument that the Palestinian identity is a fiction that is constructed or created only to destroy Zionism. Israel’s fourth Prime Minister, Golda Meir, infamously said, “It was not as if there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”37 More recently, Ted Lapkin,38 the director of Public Affairs for the Zionist Federation of Australia, wrote this response to an article I had published in the ABC about being Palestinian: “The construction of a Palestinian something-from-nothing constitutes the most remarkable triumph of fable over fact in living diplomatic memory.”

This is the discourse and the environment in which I grew up concerning my hyphenated identity. There was no Palestine on any of the maps in my high school. There was no Palestinian food on any of the menus in restaurants. There were no Palestinian voices or characters in any of the shows or movies on television. There was no mention of Palestinians—only now and then, Arab terrorists bent on destroying Israel. The only place where Palestine existed was in our homes, at our dinner tables and within our community.

Writing Palestine into the Blank Spaces of Erasure

It is, indeed, remarkable how we Palestinians have filled up the blank spaces of erasure with a proud sense of identity and fierce resistance. Unlike families whose homes were filled with memory objects that tell their stories: a grandmother’s sewing machine, a grandfather’s old record player, family heirlooms and libraries filled with books and historic archives, I belong to a generation that had all of these—everything—taken away. I belong to the Palestinians whose parents fled or were exiled with only the shirts on their backs. As a result, I, we, have become masters at reconstructing memory, not through the presence of objects, but rather through their absence. After our exile, I spent the first ten years of my remembered life in Saudi Arabia, a desert country with endless sand dunes, listening to stories and poetry that described what my parents had left behind in Palestine. These stories and poems fed my imagination and my yearning for a place I did not live in, but one that I remember. A place I know. Most vivid in my constructed “memory” is our garden in Palestine. My parents spoke about the pomegranate tree, the jasmine bush, the thorny cactus that birthed the sweetest fruit, the sycamore tree, the vegetable garden … a life that seemed so beautiful and full of color against the backdrop of a Saudi desert city where nothing grew. But this stark contrast only added to the pain of exile, the trauma of a life disrupted, a family uprooted and grandparents that were left locked behind high walls. Forgetting is not an option. Only through remembering is our life worth living.

We cannot move on while our loved ones are under falling bombs, under siege and under Occupation. So we do not. And we pass this on to our children. This blessing and curse. And they pass it on to theirs. We pass on the guardianship of Palestine through songs, stories and poetry and we know that generation after generation of Palestinians will fill in the blank spaces of erasure. We saw this during May of 2021, the Unity Intifada. We saw a young generation of Palestinians from around the world, born and raised in exile, lead protests calling for unity and solidarity and resistance. My WhatsApp notifications were going through the roof and my heart brimmed with pride when I discovered that, in my circle of activists who were doing the things that mattered, I was one of the oldest. Most of them were in their twenties and thirties, born and raised outside the homeland. This is Generation Exile and they are writing their stories with ferocity into the blank spaces of erasure; together they will break through the boundaries of the “moral communities” of the world. I can still hear them chanting, as I did decades ago, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Such incurable hope and determination can never be defeated.

The Path Forward

When Zionism began to grow as a political movement in the late 19th century, the representation of Palestine without its indigenous inhabitants was a “trademark of the Zionist imagination.”39 By the early 1900s, the Zionist movement adopted the slogan, “A Land without a People for a People without a Land.”40 This striking ability to see the land and not its people is not unfamiliar in the history of imperial wars and conquests. In fact, in Australia, a similar phrase had been used—Terra Nullius—meaning “a land that belongs to no one,” to justify the British invasion and dispossession of the indigenous Aboriginal population.41 How do we move past that?

Truth-telling and acknowledgment of past atrocities and wrongdoings are foundational blocks for reconciliation, and I need to reconcile my identities, my Palestinian and my Australian selves. While I listen to the voices of the indigenous peoples of this land, I can imagine a future where Palestinians and Israelis can co-exist in peace. However, this is not going to happen any time soon, because peace cannot be founded on injustices and denial of past crimes. First, there needs to be a complete collapse of the structures of apartheid and oppression, before we can get to the next sweet phase, one of truth-telling and reconciliation.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former Chairman of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the post-apartheid era, points out that the process of forgiveness “requires acknowledgment on the part of the perpetrator that they have committed an offense.”42

But Israel has not offered any acknowledgment; instead, it continues on the path of more discrimination, oppression, human rights violations, ethnic cleansing and apartheid without any accountability. This is why the Boycotts Divestments and Sanctions movement is a necessary tool of resistance. Much like South Africa, Israel, too, needs to feel the pressure of the international community to stop its crimes of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Israelis have to recognize that they have colonized all the land of Palestine, and that this colonization needs to end. Ethical decolonization is the only way forward to usher in an era of freedom, justice and equality, in a one secular democratic state on all the land of Palestine.

As for me, I believe we all wage resistance using our best skills. Mine is writing. So, I will continue to write. I write the names of the nameless and tell the stories that are deliberately untold. I write to counter the Zionist erasure and, while I do that, I am mindful of my privilege as an exile whose homeland is colonized and who lives on colonized land. I write with the awareness that here, in Australia, and there, in Palestine, our struggle is one. For me to find peace on this stretch of earth, I must open my heart to the truth of its history and its violence against its indigenous people. I write with that Palestinian incurable hope, and I feel the ground swell with the energy of the Palestinian youth from around the globe, chanting in one voice “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”

23 Samah Sabawi, Inheriting Exile: Transgenerational Trauma and Palestinian-Australian Identity, Ph.D. thesis, Victoria University, 2020.

24 Rosemary Sayigh, “On the exclusion of the Palestinian Nakba from the ‘Trauma Genre.’” Journal of Palestine Studies (2013) 43(1), 51–60.

25 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the possibility of history (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1991).

26 Shoshana Felman, “In an era of testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” Yale French Studies 79 (1991), 39–81.

27 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York/London: Routledge, 1992).

28 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

29 Edward W. Said, “Edward Said on Orientalism,” interview by Sut Jhally, University of Massachusetts–Amherst, 1998.

30 David B. Morris, “About Suffering: Voice, Genre, and Moral Community,” Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 25–45. Accessed July 7, 2021 at http://www.jstor.org/stable/20027352.

31 Tom Regan, The Three Generation: Reflections on the coming revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).

32 Stephanie Anderson, “‘Anti-Israel’ play in VCE curriculum prompts attack on Government,” ABCNews, May 10, 2016, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-10/anti-israel-play-in-vce-curriculum-government-questioned/7402176

33 Samah Sabawi, “Vision of everyday life in Palestine too bleak for some,” The Sydney Morning Herald, June 2, 2016, https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/vision-of-everyday-life-in-palestine-too-bleak-for-some-20160602-gp9tmc.html

34 Judith P. Butler, Frames of War: When is life grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009).

35 S. Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind (A.Wills, Trans.) (New York and London: Routledge, 1952).

36 Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile: And Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta Books, 2001).

37 Judd Yadid, “Israel’s Iron Lady Unfiltered: 17 Golda Meir quotes on her 117th birthday: the wise, the whimsical an the downright polemical,” Haaretz, May 3, 2015, https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-17-golda-meir-quotes-on-her-117th-birthday-1.5356683

38 Ted Lapkin, “Palestinian national identity and the roadblock to peace,” Opinion, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, September 3, 2015, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-28/lapkin-palestinian-national-identity-and-the-roadblock-to-peace/6732462

39 I. Nassar, “Remapping Palestine and the Palestinians: Decolonizing and research,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2003) 23 (1–2), 149–151.

40 Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992).

41 Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal resistance to European invasion of Australia (University of New South Wales Press, 1981).

42 Desmond Tutu, The Forgiveness Project, https://www.theforgivenessproject.com/desmond-tutu