13 minute read
child's play within the Palestinian landscape
SAMER WANAN
A child finds five boxes lying on the ground. Sitting on the floor, small hands randomly pick and choose from the toys placed there: boxes all the same size and yet each feels different as if emotions are imprinted in their materials.
The first box, heavy and dusty, has pieces rattling in it. Opened, the child’s hand runs over the rough surfaces inside, discovering small gaps among its pieces, like dry cracked mud. When the box is tipped all the stone-like parts scatter on the ground, like characters brought to life.
‘Which one is next?’
One is made of old wood, with plants and trees engraved on it. Warm to the touch, this box is hard to open. When it does, the flowers engraved on the outside take on colour and vitality on the inside. Yellow toys inside feel like jellies. All together they are players in a theatre, or in a court.
Another wood box; this one is lighter. Inside, thin clear sheets hang vertically. Black marks on them appear to be a flying bird, maybe a running person, the sheets aligned like a flip-book. Turn the box upside down, they reassemble into a different pile, the birds have a different life as the sheets slide smoothly, shuffled by little hands.
The golden box is next. Cold, dense; metal. Carefully opened, a grainy sticky sand clings to fingers. Digging deeper, tiny buried objects surface and are discovered.
The last toy, a black box, is hiding in the shadows. Laying a hesitant finger on it, the mysterious box opens slowly. ‘But there is nothing in it!’ It is nudged, lights flicker inside. Trying to capture the light, a sharp pain is caught instead, a sting from something very pointed. Unpacked, a fuzzy stuffed object like a stitched glove lies on the floor. The little hand rubs it. It feels magical.
Roland Barthes, in one of his essays in Mythologies, comments on the relationship between children and adults through toys.1 An adult man sees a child as another self, demonstrated in the way that common toys – speaking about French toys at the time of his writing – are ‘a microcosm of the adult world; they are all reduced copies of human objects’. He differentiates between two kinds of toys: invented forms constituted by a set of blocks inviting an open play, and others that are manufactured in a socialised way with a literal meaning, providing no room for the child but to accept the adult world as it is, turning the child into a user rather than a creator. This questions how toys mediate the relationship between generations, or convey generational dynamics. I approach this relationship within the Palestinian context while exploring the role of play and tactility. To do so, a collection of designed artefacts are used as mediators, taking the form of toy boxes and short stories, based in research-by-design methodologies.
1 Barthes, Roland, Mythologies. Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1957, pp 52-54
The child, in the Palestinian context, is the figure onto whom ancestral generations project their own hopes for liberation and return to homeland. The child, therefore, represents a future that necessarily includes the liberation of the Palestinian people from suffering. How adults introduce historical events, cultural heritage and identity to children who embody such hopes is a particular case. With a child living in such a violent and oppressive environment, how does it affect their playing patterns and sites of play?
While the formation of a child’s subjectivity depends on the environmental experiences they are living under, there is the possibility of introducing new perceptions of the situation with each generation. Perceptual experiences and hidden narratives within a particular spatial condition and time can be traced by close attention to children’s spatial playing patterns, and material traces they leave behind. A sort of chronicle emerges out of each generation’s forms of play and their toys, carrying the particular tensions that define their environment. Reading it outward will reveal a larger system of forces at play which, in turn, shapes the Palestinian children’s playscape and its material footprints. In an attempt to adapt and appropriate, or even protest against, their imposed environment, the Palestinian child occupies the available small spaces that engulf their own bodies through play.
Studying child’s play counters any idea that play is something minor, of no value, dismissable. This design research project looks at children’s play in violent contexts with a new lens, drawing attention to its material, temporal and architectural dimensions, in search of alternative modes of reading and engagement with a child’s built environment. What can we learn or gain from narrating Palestine through a child’s point of view by bringing attention to their games and playing territories?
In her 2002 novella, Masās (Touch), Adania Shibli portrays a child, overlooked by her elder family members, mirroring the intergenerational social tensions and the internal dynamics of family relations in times of crisis. 2
2 Shibli, Adania. Touch. translated by Paula Haydar. Northampton MA: Interlink Publishing, 2013
The interplay between individual subject and collective memory, children’s world with that of the adults, shows the Palestinian situation through the eyes of a child. In a series of fragmentary scenes of the child’s daily encounters, she listens to adults, or witnesses some traumatic event unfolding in front of her eyes while not fully understanding their meaning. Touching on the absurdities of social and political rules, the child finds herself in humorous, sometimes painful, situations when she encounters these rules – living her own intimate world despite feeling the agony in the background. Shibli shows children negotiating the adult world and an imposed environment through play, combining the factual and fictional, tragedy and irony. She narrates a series of experiential situations through a child’s pre-meditated view – a not-fully-cultured look, revealing a lot about the charged environment and its complex realities. This way, Shibli goes beyond the interiority of everyday life to reach the interiority of the child herself when encountering harsh spatial conditions and social relationships in the family. 3 Shibli’s novella was written in the particular context of the Second Intifada; prevailing anxieties of that time reflect Palestinian fragmented identity and alienation of children in the third or fourth generation after el-Nakba.4
3 In Arabic, the word Masās literally means to be touched by devils or magic, and hence, being mentally affected to the point of insanity, in Arabic: jonna – the state of seeing, thinking and imagining reality in a different way than it really is. The word is also linked to love and poetry in Arabic culture to connotate a person being touched by love. In a sense, it reaches metaphysical, psychological and mental levels to mean touching the soul.
4 The Palestinian story can be narrated as a series of vignettes in relation to its generations. Jīl, means a generation when a group of people inhabits a space and a time frame within a narrative, primarily during their childhood. In the Palestinian case, we say jīl qabl elNakba (prior to the 1948 catastrophe), jīl el-Nakba (the generation who witnessed the 1948 Palestinian catastrophe and the aftermath of displacement), jīl al-fida’iyin (post-1967 ‘Naksa’ era and the launch of armed struggle), jīl el-intifada I (post-1987 uprising), jīl el-intifada II (post-2000 uprising).
The common thread among all five generations is the Palestinian aspiration for liberation and justice, though with different approaches to achieve this ultimate goal and the not-yet-attainable future. Each generation sees the next one, their children, as the source and symbol of hope, believing that they will continue their struggle to be called jīl el-tahrir (the generation of liberation). The word tahrir carries ideas of freedom and futurity within its folds, a myriad of possibilities to speculate about and (re)write the end of the open-ended story. It is not a coincidence that the word for editing a text and re-writing a story in Arabic is also tahrir.
In this project, fragments and residual traces of daily life construct constellations of images, texts and relics related to particular Palestinian conditions at certain times. 5 These assemblages work as material thinking experiments in dialogue with the interiority of the child and the subjectivities of anyone who interacts with the boxes. Though bounded by the edges of the box, situated material objects and charged relics reveal relationships with larger contexts and real-world spatial conditions. There is a reciprocal relationship between miniature toys inside each box and distant inaccessible places and times.
5 In Walter Benjamin’s sense - one interested in the refuse of history, of modernity, of the city, see Chapter 10 ‘Rag-picking: The Arcades Project’ in Walter Benjamin’s Archive: images, texts, signs. Verso Books, 2015.
Play is curated around five topics in a sequence of boxes and short stories representing specific Palestinian conditions. In each of the charged environments, a child’s point of view is adopted, a pre-mediated look that invites exploration which, in turn, makes a multitude of alternative interpretations possible.
To think about this in more detail, let us turn to the Stone Box. The first iteration was made as a gathering device for materials and ideas, specifically the extraction of resources and labour, which eventually led to a particular site and situation. The second time, the box takes the form of a toy that embodies the site’s set of relationships.
The explored site within this box is a contested landscape; the land itself has a unique value due to the sacred association of its stone materials, commonly known as Jerusalem Stone. There is a tradition of extracting material fragments from the Holy Land, which are carried away by tourists and pilgrims as souvenirs and memory objects. Charged relics, in a reliquary box, embody the stories and values of their original geographies. At the same time they raise questions about the destination and reception of this material commodity under its ‘sacred’ status. Stone can move. After being purified — leaving dust, waste and pollution behind — sacred fragments of the Holy Land are placed in synagogues around the world — sites with an indexical connection to the Holy Land through direct contact with its materiality.
With both iterations of the Stone Box, once the lid is closed, the sites of extraction – the quarries surrounding Palestinian communities and from which the stone fragments were gathered, are put in direct contact with places where stone is used as cladding; whether in Jerusalem for the first iteration of the box or in the Israeli settlements in West Bank in the second.
A short story linked to the first Stone Box narrates a fictional city built out of giant stone blocks excavated from different and distant locations. The city has a dual nature with one side depicting everyday life on its surface and the other revealing a magical underground realm. Tourists and pilgrims visit and re-enact historical scenes by entering this hidden realm and touching different stone blocks, each possessing unique spiritual effects and periods of time.
In the second Stone Box a story is reconceived as playing with the box as a toy, putting the child’s body in direct engagement with a surrounding place. By moving the arrangement of miniature paper fragments and stone crumbs inside the box, a larger effect on site takes place. A child is placed in a loop of emotions oscillating between joy and fear, accompanied by a sense of estrangement while struggling to recognise shifting ground after moving any piece in the toy.
Short fictional stories mobilise the material construction of these toy boxes. Like Stone Box, each of the other boxes imagines a scenario they would unravel in the subjectivity of the child at play in a particular spatial or architectural situation. Besides the representation of distant times and inaccessible places, the constellations of objects inside the boxes have the capacity to generate effects that extend beyond their boundaries. They collect things inside as much as they project out meanings. These boxes, their objects and stories, are tangible and intangible articulations of Palestinian collective memory. The child is able to re-order things to construct an identity and a personal relationship with home, family and the collective. Play, in this way, acts as a driver for cultural construction.
One can read the five boxes as a series of little explorations and speculations. Though constructed as toys for children, for adults they trigger reflection. Versions of oneself as a child are recovered with a small-scale, manipulable form of play. The boxes lean towards Barthes’s open-ended type of play — an invitation to read Palestinian history and culture in a simultaneously allegorical, tactile and experimental manner.
acknowledgements
I am grateful to my supervisors Professor Mark Dorrian and Dr. Ana Bonet Miro, as well as to Dr Ella Chmielewska for the fruitful discussions during my PhD journey at the University of Edinburgh. This essay would not have been possible without their invaluable input.
SAMER WANAN is currently undertaking an Architecture by Design PhD at Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, part of Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Edinburgh. He holds degrees in architecture from Birzeit University and Newcastle University.
