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    Palestinian Women: Narrative Histories and Gendered Memory
    Unavailable
    Palestinian Women: Narrative Histories and Gendered Memory
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    Palestinian Women: Narrative Histories and Gendered Memory
    Ebook370 pages9 hours

    Palestinian Women: Narrative Histories and Gendered Memory

    By Fatma Kassem

    2.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Palestinian Women is the first book to examine and document the experiences and the historical narrative of ordinary Palestinian women who witnessed the events of 1948 and became involuntary citizens of the State of Israel.

    Told in their own words, the women's experiences serve as a window for examining the complex intersections of gender, nationalism and citizenship in a situation of ongoing violent political conflict.

    Known in Palestinian discourse as the 'Nakbeh', or the 'Catastrophe', these events of 60 years ago still have a powerful resonance in contemporary Palestinian-Jewish relations in the State of Israel and in the act of narrating these stories, the author argues that the realm of memory is a site of commemoration and resistance.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherZed Books
    Release dateJul 4, 2013
    ISBN9781780321189
    Unavailable
    Palestinian Women: Narrative Histories and Gendered Memory

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    Reviews for Palestinian Women

    2.5/5

    6 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Fatma Kassem has produced a book from her PhD about Palestinian women and their stories. She quotes from them about their experiences of the Nakba, or Catastrophe, in 1948, and discusses the opposition they face in actually telling their stories. Kassem includes her own difficult experience of submitting her research proposal, and being intimidated by the then Dean into changing and deleting sentences and statements e.g. he could not accept the use of the word Nakba for what he viewed as Independence Day. A problem I find with the book generally is that the author appears to be trying to fit her narrative histories into a set of theories about the body, language, and the sense of home. One example that particularly strikes me as odd is her description of a grieving woman: 'Her black dress and white head scarf, the pain on her face and her hands stretched out skyward seeking help, drew my attention to the sophistication and depth of her body performance' (187). Referring to her grieving as a performance drew me up sharp, despite the fact that I know this is an academic work, and the author is attempting to show aspects of narration of pain and history. I wondered if the book had been translated from Arabic, but there is no translator listed, or any suggestion that the author did not write this in English. I think the book is useful, and I understand the author's framing of her interviewees' dialogue with her explanations and expansions of their stories; I don't feel that there is too little dialogue from Palestinian women. What I do feel is that the book is an awkward hybrid between the academic and the general, resulting in an unfinished-feeling text that isn't going to satisfy either the academic or the general reader. Thank you to Zed Books for the review copy.
    • 1/5
      I really wanted to read this, and I really wanted to enjoy it. The idea of giving voice to a previously-unheard group of women whose experience was surely profound was intriguing. Unfortunately, my impression of the first few pages was that this book doesn't do an awful lot to tell their stories. It is very academic, and consequently my impression is of a particularly dry and tedious book. Banished from my shelf, sadly, because I just couldn't break through the boredom.
    • 2/5
      "One had no food, thirsty for water. One would walk on and look for a drop of water to moisten on's throat and didn't find even that. Someone had some mud in a bucket, and people [asked], let us drink. So he lifted the bucket like this, just to wet their throats from the bucket.....In Salma's description of quenching her thirst with mud, there is a symbolic dimension of being torn away from one's land, compressed together into one symbol with the experience of being forced away from the elementary sources of life, water and soil."The passage I just quoted, if it's not clear, first presents a direct quote from a Palestinian woman on the Nakba, then the author's interpretation of how the woman has crafted her own oral history. This rhetoric and 'symbolization' (if I may) is par for the course for this entire book. Fatma Kassem set out to write a dissertation on the Palestinian exile of 1948 specifically told through women's experiences. It is a noble endeavor, to consider how their perception of their experiences and their meaning-making creates opportunity to reconsider "both hegemonic Zionist narratives and the prevailing masculinist discourse of Palestinian nationalism" (238).But Kassem makes her language a little too poetic, her interpretations a little too interpretive, and her magnification of the voices of the marginalized women not quite loud enough in comparison to her own. Like the above example, the symbolic and thematic meanings that she would like to draw from her interviewees' recountings may be significant, but they actually are underscored at the expense of the true suffering and humanity embodied in the anecdotes. Salma, the woman above, isn't telling about drinking mud because she wants to express her marginal, ambivalent position relative to her homeland; she's telling about drinking mud because she had to drink mud.Kassem's feminist, counter-cultural intentions are good, I have no doubt about that, otherwise she wouldn't have jumped through all of the hoops she did to even get permission to craft this dissertation. However, her methodology ends up being somewhat self-defeating, as the experiences of these women are marginalized differently, but nevertheless marginalized.
    • 2/5
      The claim made for this book is that it gives Palestinian women who remember 1948 a voice. I wish it had. The bits and pieces of their stories were enough to show that their stories would be worth hearing. But the author is the only woman who actually has a voice in this book. Even once the author gets around to including quotes from the womens' stories, she overinterprets them. Whether a woman starts her life story, by saying that she has lived in this town all her life, or that she lives here now, but was born somewhere else, it is 'political'. Actually, it is the way most people I know would start their life stories. When women say that they had been pregnant when they were forced to migrate in 1948 she claims that it 'symbolize[s] a powerful desire for life.' If the author of fiction makes a character pregnant, it may well symbolize something, but if someone was pregnant, and says so when telling about it, it is about the added difficulties this would have caused. I suspect that the narratives the women told would be very moving if they had been included at length. With only short bits quoted to support the author's polemic, I am lead to believe that the author picked the parts that suited her pre-existing position. The section on rape led me to believe that she tried to make the women say that they had either been raped or knew of rape in their immediate families and was quite disappointed that this was not the case.There is even an unsubstantiated claim that honour killings are more frequent now than before 1948, and this is blamed on Israel. It would take a lot of work to show even the first half of that reliably - even if it should happen to be true - and then comparisons to other Moslem communites, both in Moslem majority countries, and in Moslem communities in other countries to show that the specific conditions in Israel have caused it. Claims like this make any it very difficult to take any of the authors conclusions seriously.It is very disconcerting to have Hebrew words printed left to right. This is probably the fault of the publisher rather than the author, but if the Hebrew was included, it should have been printed properly. Interestingly, none of the Arabic was printed in Arabic letters, but only in transliteration.
    • 4/5
      This book is a series of accounts by Palestinian women who lived through the ‘Nakba’ of 1948, in which they lost their homes and were either forced to leave the newly-formed state of Israel or were internally displaced within it.Except that it’s not. Not really. We don’t really hear much from the women themselves – only short quotes in certain places, to illustrate a particular point. We don’t get to know each woman clearly enough to feel the full power of her story from start to finish.For a long time, we don’t get to the women at all. We hear about Foucault’s theory of the historical past as a rhetorical construct for the present. We have a chapter on the methodological aspects of telling life stories, another chapter on the author’s own life story, and detailed scrutiny of her effect on the women’s stories, their reactions to the tape recorder, etc etc. We’re 80 pages in before we get to what we came here for, the stories of Palestinian women.The book was initially a PhD thesis, and it shows. It shows in the style of writing, which is academic and often quite dry, in the extensive quoting of Foucault, Spivak, Said, Minh-Ha et al, in the constant analysis of process and acknowledgement of flaws and biases, and a lot of other tactics which are perfectly necessary in order to forestall the potential questions and objections of PhD supervisors, but which tend to distract and/or annoy the general reader.It shows also, however, in positive ways. PhD theses, after all, require rigour in the methodology and depth in the analysis, and this book displays both of those merits. I loved the analysis of language and the body, for example:"In my reading, when they describe Israeli ‘entry’ into the cities or villages in 1948 the choice of language used by the women I interviewed is linked to the penetration of the female body."Kassem then explores the multiple ways in which this is relevant, from the obvious piercing of Palestinian defences to the fact that brides on their wedding night are, like Palestinians in 1948, inadequately prepared for the sexual act, and that a woman experiences a ‘conspiracy of silence’ from her family, similar to that within the Arab ‘family’ who knew what was going to happen but did nothing.I also liked the stories of people who tried to return to their homes, as any people return to their homes after a war, but were called “infiltrators” and forcibly expelled. What struck me most was how the women themselves used this term “infiltrator” to describe themselves or their family members who tried to return to their homes. It reminded me how easily we can adopt language that doesn’t reflect our own view of reality.The account of women’s clothing was also interesting, and much more nuanced than the total condemnation of the hijab commonly seen in Western media. Kassem recognises that conservative religious dress can be seen as an assertion of male power over women’s bodies, but also points out many examples of young women choosing to wear this style of their own accord, in the face of disapproval from older family members. In the context of Palestinians living in Israel, wearing full Muslim dress is often seen as a rebellious, political act. One woman, for example, lost her teaching job over it."Covering the body from head to toe could be interpreted as women complying with the religious imperative to discipline their body and reproduce their subordination. However, the choice by a young, educated woman to dress in such a fashion that ‘this woman who sees without being seen frustrates the colonizer (Fanon, 1965: 44) … can also be interpreted as an act of resistance; a refusal to comply…"My overall conclusion: lots of good stuff here, but could have done with a rewrite to make it more appealing to a general audience rather than an academic one.
    • 1/5
      I can't think of any reason to recommend this book, short of to some researcher who wants to read the field in exhaustive depth. It is dry and academic—in fact, it felt like someone's thesis bound up and published, rather than a piece of scholarly non-fiction intended for general consumption. The reader was held at arm's length by a stream of unimaginative and somewhat pedantic prose that completely failed to deliver on what was promised. From the cover summaries, the subtitle, even the author's introduction, one is expecting to hear the stories of Palestinian women who lived through the turmoil involved in the creation of the State of Israel (something they term the Nakba, the Catastrophe) told in their own words along with commentary and analysis. However, there is a vanishingly small amount of those stories: a paragraph here or there amidst page after page of Kassem's own writing. Rather than let the women speak for themselves we are presented with her opinions and interpretations, many of which have little to do with the stories we came to hear. There are even 20-some pages on the approval process for her doctoral thesis.Everything in this book is extremely politicized, whether in terms of national relations or in terms of gender relations or, most frequently, both. In her polarization of Israelis/Palestinians and Men/Women she admits of almost no gray areas. In doing so, she forces her biases (even though she acknowledges that they may exist) to the forefront of the reader's mind rather than the issues, themselves.This is coupled with an excess of over-analysis wherein every statement made by a Palestinian woman has symbolic meaning. Women talking about Zionist Brigades entering the country aren't just talking about an invasion; they are also talking about the loss of virginity on a wedding night. Women noting that the Nakba occurred after their marriage in 1948 aren't locating the events in time; they are really speaking symbolically about patriarchal control. This overreaching—even absurd—interpretation leaves me with the sense that Kassem's positions are lenses that distort everything they touch.In this light, I found this nothing so much as a rant. It's certainly not worthwhile general reading; I question whether it's even a very good academic work. And, like most rants, it quickly became tiresome. I wanted the book described on the back cover, not the one found inside.