Speak Up

Speak Up! Nadya Tannous

Now twenty moons have passed, twenty moons, and my life continues. Your absence too continues. Only one memory remaining: The face of my stricken country filling my heart.

-Fadwa Tuqan from “Face Lost in the Wilderness”

As Palestinians in the Diaspora, we hold individual or family stories that trace the memories of those who have lived a version of the Palestinian experience before us. We know that about 50% of our people live outside of Historic Palestine and almost all of our people have experienced displacement, directly or recently inherited. While some of our inherited memories are unique to our families or villages, being Palestinian means that we are also architects of the collective narrative of the Palestinian people. Despite the fragmentation of our geographical, physical, familial or political realities, as a majority landless people with a dedicated land-based identity, our narratives are part of the glue that holds us together in the limbo of exile. And they are not just woven from events in the past.

Stories are practically an important part of our infrastructure to return home and we must be proactive in building our narratives. As I’ve learned from six years of work behind the scenes of the Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Scholarship and as a member of the Palestinian Youth Movement, Palestinian young adults are the next generation of burgeoning architects of our political and cultural realities. Our stories have power. In telling them, we are talking back to the three major beasts that inform our Palestinian experience: first the active Zionist erasure of our historic and present claims to our identity and our homeland, second the chamber of authenticity politics that tell us we are not Palestinian “enough” to claim our cause as our own, and third the rhetoric of Palestinian terrorism and securitization that are part of the web of targeted US policies that echo with the resonance of War on Terror.

A segment from the Scholarship website reads,

Without our stories, we have no voice, thus rendering us invisible to society, or worse yet, subject to the harmful stereotypes that are ever present in the general discourse around Palestinians, Arabs, and larger Muslim world.

Like any facet of structural racism, policy is both reflected in and informed by global stereotypes that broke free from the confines of prejudice and are at the forefront of violence against our people. The dominant narratives have also proliferated our own psyches and, in the process of organizing a response, we must be careful not to reflect the dominant threads that have become popularized to narrate about us. The images of Palestinian and Arab terrorism proliferate the common sense of the North American societies we live in, and we feel the impacts in more ways than one. By comparison, there is a sympathetic narrative to the Palestinian plight that only narrates about us as victims of a humanitarian crisis– a hungry, needy, unfit population. Both narratives are a trap but, of course, not with the same implications and, in the case of the latter, I would be remiss to not confirm the very real crisis of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, in camps in Lebanon, and in camps in Greece. While access to water, food and medicine are critical resources for Palestinian survival in each of these contexts, our plight as Palestinians cannot be solved by a humanitarian solution. Clean water and large shipments of food arriving to Gaza, for example, do not answer the root of the crisis, which is the deferment of Palestinian dignity, the obstruction of our Right of Return, and full liberation of our homeland. The Great March of Return has reconfirmed something we already know in our gut: there is not a resolution to the Palestinian struggle without a political solution to our crisis, one that answers our demand for self-determination.

We must narrate our own aspirations, demands, and memories. Our stories remind us of who we are, where we come from, and help point us to where we are going. We hold the power to define for ourselves who we are in the face of uncertainty and adversity. While we exist under different legal regimes as Palestinians in North America than Palestinians in ’48, Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank and other locations outside of Palestine, and we experience various historical and present realities of repression within our context, we are all tasked with writing a popular response. Another excerpt from the Scholarship reads:

Having a voice is synonymous with the capacity to influence and challenge structures of power. Our narrative should be considered one of our greatest strengths, and for this, we must use our voice to assert our commitment to our memories, imaginations, and just cause.

I encourage you to speak up. After over 70 years of Nakba and exile, in every story of estrangement or nostalgia, resilience or courage, in the same breath we speak return as a non-negotiable principle. What does liberation look like? It is our responsibility to write the answer, to share it with one another and to make it true.

Artwork by Leyla Ghobadi IG: @leylaisonfire