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Lecture at the conference about The Future of
Palestinian national identity, Inash al-Usra,
El-Bireh, 21-23 March 2008
THE STORY OF SUMUD
By Toine van
Teeffelen/Arab Educational Institute, Bethlehem
Narrating
identity
Stories help to
form and express identity. They can even create
a people, a place and a history. Conversely,
denying identity is taking away a community’s
story.
A significant
part of my professional work has been in the
field of “narrative and Palestine.” In Holland I
was involved in studies about the negation of
the Palestinian story through its
marginalization or destruction in much of
western discourse, such as in popular
literature. In Palestine I have been working
with educational organizations that aimed at the
opposite – the construction, through story, of
the Palestinian national identity.
Here are two
personal experiences that motivated me to go
deeper into the latter part of this work:
attempts at awakening the national identity in
Palestinian education through story.
My daughter goes
to a school in Bethlehem and follows the
Palestinian curriculum. When she was seven years
old, a couple of years ago, it happened that she
had to study a chapter in civics about the
Palestinian refugee camps. She learned the names
of the camps in Gaza, West Bank, and the Arab
countries by rote. But when I asked her whether
she knew what refugees were, she said she
didn’t. She did not know about the story of the
refugees and the camps, and where the refugees
come from. She learned about the central
Palestinian symbol of the refugee camp without
its story.
I was surprised
and arranged a meeting with her civics teacher
who expressed his own dissatisfaction with the
curriculum, at least as far as the
representation of the Palestinian narrative is
concerned. This story motivated me to go further
into the issue, together with others who were
already active in that field. Right now the
YMCA/Advocacy. Ittijah from the Galilee, and AEI-Open
Windows in Bethlehem work on public advocacy
regarding the representation of Palestine in the
Palestinian and the Israeli curriculum. Very
different curricular contexts of course, but the
essential aim is how to develop and strengthen
the Palestinian narrative in education.
The second story
is about a school-based oral history project a
few years ago, in which I had the chance to
work. At St Joseph in Bethlehem, female students
of 16-17 years, encouraged by their English
teacher, interviewed older persons in their
family and community, and wrote their personal
stories. One student interviewed her
grandfather, whom she had never asked before
about his experiences during the British mandate
time and the 1948 war. She was mesmerized by his
story of courage and strength in coping with the
hard circumstances at the time. When her grandpa
soon died afterwards, she felt that the
interview was a way of restoring her lost
contact with him. By listening to his story, she
was in fact able to tell him goodbye almost at
the moment of his death. After this oral history
project, the St Joseph teacher continued with a
diary writing project, up until this very day.
Narrating is
connecting. The teacher involved in this oral
history project called this process of
connecting “the golden chain of stories.”
Connecting with history, with memories of place
and community is similar to what the Dutch
historian Johan Huizinga called the experience
of feeling a “historical sensation.” Often
unexpectedly, through an eye-opening event like
talking with an older family member, you feel
that you become part of a history and you start
to identify with it, even be inspired by it. You
feel that this history becomes your own. The
words are not dead as in rote learning; they
become alive and one’s feelings resonate with
the experiences of a community. To emphasize
this element of connectedness, the book coming
out of the girls’ oral histories at St Joseph
was called “Your Stories Are My Stories.”
Stories which
resonate
Which stories
help to evoke this historical sensation or
resonance? My assumption is that to a large
extent it is about bringing back the human
element. Stories about daily life are especially
helpful. It is the daily life setting which
connects. After all, even though reality hugely
differs, the daily human concerns and values are
to a large extent the same all around the world:
Most of us are led by the concerns of raising or
sharing a family, and we struggle to preserve
the values of education, work, and health. When
we talk about connecting with history, place and
community, it is essentially about bringing back
this daily life perspective. Extraordinary
achievements within a daily life context are
particularly inspiring. When common people show
outstanding human qualities in ordinary life
while facing difficult demands and constraints,
you cannot help to feel connected.
This, I think,
ties a person with histories and stories around
the world. Huizinga said that historical
sensations are not at all limited to feeling
connected to histories of one’s own community.
It is in fact quite common to feel this magic
moment of closeness with stories from other
communities (and then it often happens that
afterwards you look at your own community in a
different way). So, something special needs to
happen to establish resonance with the stories
of your community. How does that happen?
In the case of
Palestine, not any story from Palestinian daily
life is likely to create a specifically
“Palestinian” resonance. We would have to look
to daily life stories which somehow point to
central Palestinian experiences that are part of
the collective memory.
The symbol of
sumud epitomizes, I think, such a central
experience. It is based on Palestinian stories
in which common people show extraordinary
qualities while facing extraordinarily difficult
demands in daily life. This symbol I wish to
explore in the rest of this paper.
The meaning of
sumud
Sumud
has a double meaning which is also clear from
its English equivalent: steadfastness. On the
one hand, it relates to a vertical dimension,
“standing strong” on the land, having deep
roots. On the other hand it indicates a
horizontal time dimension – an attitude of
patience and persistence, of not giving up.
Why does
sumud centrally resonate the Palestinian
experience?
Sumud
is an assertion opposing the denial of
Palestine. The denial of Palestine has of course
been a central Palestinian experience. There has
been no time when Palestine or the Palestinian
identity was not at risk. Because of this
identity-at-risk Palestinians have been
continuously challenged by fundamental and
sometimes politically motivated questions such
as who is a Palestinian, where is Palestine,
what is the connection between Palestinians and
Palestine, and whether the Palestinian cause is
viable. In opposition to the Zionist image of
Palestine as a land without a native people, an
image which aims at destroying the Palestinian
narrative, sumud asserts; I am a
Palestinian and this is my land. It is an
assertion of the core cause and an assertion
that this cause will not disappear.
The symbol of
sumud has been subject to various
discussions and also criticisms. Historically,
there is the question whether it relates to a
particular stage of grassroots community
building, in advance of and preparation for the
non-violent resistance of the first Intifada
in the 1980s. Alternatively it is seen as a
feature that characterizes Palestinian history
throughout.
Originally,
sumud was the name given to a fund in Amman
assigned to help keeping Palestinians in
Palestine, and given this origin, there has been
the discussion whether sumud is a
top-down concept, or whether it can be employed
as a source of inspiration for community
building from below.
Another
discussion relates to whether sumud is a
form of resistance or rather survival. The
concepts of struggling or active sumud
have been developed to emphasize the resisting
element and to suggest that sumud should
be understood in a dynamic and active manner.
An even more
fundamental discussion relates to the
shortcoming of national symbols in general and
sumud in particular. It is about the
tendency of such symbols to become frozen, to
loose their human story-like meaning and to
become part of political discourse divorced from
reality on the ground.
When we consider
sumud as a story concept and not just as
a static identity symbol we can avoid some of
these last problems and show its potential for a
pedagogy of national identity. In the following
I will dwell on four aspects of sumud
which relate to its potential to raise a
pedagogically relevant perspective:
§
Its
democratic or participative character, the
openness of this symbol to many different life
stories
§
The
agency or willpower it demonstrates
§
Its
esthetic perspective
§
The
possibility of connecting sumud with
wider human values and circles of community.
Participation
Raja Shehadeh’s
diary The Third Way dating back to the
early 1980s, explained the story of sumud
as one of courageous citizenship in which in
principle all Palestinians can participate, not
just in the political field but in all aspects
of life. Essentially, such stories are about the
will to keep and assert the Palestinian
identity, to keep the commitment to the land,
family and community, and to keep going on with
daily life despite the extreme adversities one
faces.
This spirit is
expressed in the typical stories of people not
to leave their land(s): for instance the family
rebuilding their home again after each new
demolition; the peasant who continues to
cultivate his land in the face of expanding
settlements, the family going on with life
despite being surrounded by the Wall on all
sides, the stories of families who maintain the
fabric of daily life despite imprisonment during
prolonged curfews. Many of these stories are to
a greater or lesser extent shared by people in
Palestine. Many of them have been documented in
diaries, human rights accounts, interviews and
journalistic articles. Though they express pain,
they have become part of the collective memory
that forms the national identity.
These sumud
stories show an element of hardiness, of
steeling perhaps, often associated with the
peasant’s connection with the land. This strong
commitment is not just expressed by staying on
the land or in your house, but also by the will
to continue with one’s daily life.
One way of
classifying sumud stories is according to
the kind of human willpower that sumud
demonstrates, the kind of extraordinary human
quality that challenges adversities. That human
quality can differ; it does not need only to be
this quality of hardiness.
For instance, it
can be about preserving the ability to dream and
to imagine another reality when you live in a
black tunnel. Several of the diaries at St
Joseph school have been about dreaming. Or it
can be about maintaining the ability to joke
under the most serious and heavy of
circumstances. (Perhaps it is possible to speak
about sumud jokes. During prolonged
curfews in Bethlehem, it was common for people
to exchange typical jokes. “See you at the sea”
… for instance).
It can be about
longing and looking for beauty when faced by the
ugliness of the Wall and other barriers. About
keeping a human view of your adversary when you
are yourself being dehumanized. I remember
moments of women challenging Israeli soldiers
through reminding them that they should act as
humans. Or it can be about taking the initiative
when there seems to be no choice. All these
abilities have as a common denominator: to stay
human in Palestine, to keep an irrepressible
human spirit under the most trying of
circumstances. In all their cultural shades and
echoes, these ubiquitous stories form a cultural
repertoire of common identity.
From a
pedagogical point of view the bringing out and
collecting of such stories is a rewarding
enterprise. Not just in terms of learning how to
interview or write such stories but especially
because they help to connect with people and
communities, help to increase a deep feeling of
appreciation. In fact, preserving the stories is
a gift to the community and the nation. Nothing
builds community so much as sharing
extraordinary human stories taking place in
ordinary daily life.
Many people like
to tell their stories of sumud and to
have them recorded. They can be put in books, on
the Internet, and in films, and that has in fact
been done in many cases, including in a range of
recent Palestinian diaries published in English.
These years, several schools in Palestine have
encouraged diary writing. Writing down stories
of sumud is in fact itself an expression
of sumud. Registering and documenting
stories in an accessible manner is an important
practical aspect of regaining the national
story. Inspiring Palestinian stories of daily
life are innumerable but they are still spread
out and fragmented over especially the Internet.
People are not aware of their existence.
Internet
documentation is nowadays becoming more
important for educating about the national
identity. I am myself involved in the
www.palestine-family.net site which
documents stories about the cultural identity,
including stories in the spirit of sumud.
It is a so-called wiki website which
encourages people themselves to submit stories
or photo stories and other items in an organized
and controlled manner, but without the
intervention of a webmaster. Such a website is
participative and people-oriented, in the same
way as the stories of sumud are.
Agency
Narrative
connects the past of who we are with the future
of how we will survive and reach out to our
dreams. This is done in an expanding present
where we share space and relationship with
communities (Lederach). The present is expanding
because there is choice, even under the most
restrictive and oppressive circumstances.
Sumud
stand for the spirit and energy to make a choice
even though one stands with the back against the
wall. The choice is both positive and negative.
Positive, as for the assertion that “one keeps
going on with keeping going on.” Negative, as
for the refusal to resign to humiliation,
discrimination and oppression. Both add to a
sense of achievement. Sumud is perhaps
not liberation but it is definitely an
achievement at a personal and community level.
Here is an
important pedagogical issue at stake. It is a
truism that education is about hope. Hope not an
easy optimism but a hard-won awareness that
there is always, even in the face of the most
extreme adversities, a human perspective and
human choice. Many of the stories of Palestine
that circulate among Palestinians are failure
stories. To bring back achievement stories, with
their support for self-appreciation and pride
because of the will to make human choices, is by
itself an educational achievement.
Taking sumud
center stage can even help to look at
Palestinian history with different eyes,
emphasizing certain elements which in the known
stories have been backgrounded. For instance, in
the history writing about the Nakbeh it
is not common to pay attention to the moments
when Palestinians were courageously holding on
at the military or civil levels. But such
stories, with their unknown heroes, exist and
could be inspirational sources of hope, also
today.
Choices imply
dilemmas. Looking and thinking through hard
dilemmas is another educational opportunity. We
discuss in our youth groups in Bethlehem the
issue of staying steadfast in the homeland or
leaving the country, the last action perhaps
considered as a contribution to the national
cause but from outside the country. Such
discussions tend to go deep. If you go deep into
existential dilemmas which relate to the
preferred life story, you face questions such
as: What is my sense of place in the world, what
are we doing, what is our purpose? What is the
meaning of home and place? Who am I? In the
perspective of Palestine’s national identity,
the understanding of such dilemmas may lead one
to learn more about the cultures and wisdom of
Palestine and its values, and may even lead one
to the holy books of Islam and Christianity
which have much to say about steadfastness and
commitment as life choices.
There is a wider
issue here. Values such as sumud open up
discussions about dilemmas. In doing so they
define and restrict dilemmas. It is possible to
take central Palestinian experiences other than
sumud and show that they evoke different
ranges of agency, dilemmas and attitudes. In
terms of a pedagogy of national identity it
would be for instance possible to choose the
value of traveling as a Palestinian experience
that is equally central as sumud. Edward
Said has written about the value of living as an
émigré in the ghurba (exile). While
deeply painful and unsettling, it can be
productive for a view of the world with
different eyes. He spoke of his preference for
travelers above sultans sticking to their seats.
Traveling can be a way to become familiar with
world cultures. It can be about a return to the
homeland but experienced from different
perspectives and angles. Traveling can also be
about letting oneself loose, which is an
interesting educational symbol by itself. In his
latest diary book, Shehadeh spoke about the
sarha, an old Palestinian custom of hiking
without destination. In such understandings,
traveling can promote educational values of
mobility, flexibility and change. Traveling is
so central a metaphor of Palestinian life that
sumud and traveling, both understood in a
context of extreme adversity and uncertainty,
might be seen as the yin and yang
of Palestinian life and identity. To say it in a
bilingual way: it is about “roots” (English) and
“routes” (from the French).
The aesthetics
of sumud
To identify, to
develop and communicate sumud requires an
aesthetic sense. Narrating is also an Art. As
many Palestinians convey their pride and pain in
relation to the homeland, they have done so by
translating that into esthetically developed
forms. Sumud has been expressed in
symbolic paintings, poetics or graphics of the
land and its community, such as in the form of
the image of the olive tree with its roots deep
in the land and branches reaching out to the
sky. Part of the educational challenge here is
to build skills and to identify genres in which
an artistic sense of sumud can be
conveyed, showing the beauty of a moral spirit
that at the same time is affected by suffering
and loss.
One can give
judgments about and discuss the aesthetics of
artistic expressions of sumud. I am not
artistically educated and would be reluctant to
join that discussion. But from an educational
point of view I think that a main challenge for
an aesthetics of sumud is to encourage
especially young persons to discover the
extraordinary qualities and deeds of
Palestinians facing the challenges of their
besieged lives.
In my
organization’s experience with school and
university youths in the Bethlehem area the
problem is not so much a lack of telling or even
writing talents. It is rather the difficulty for
many people and youth to discover the
extraordinariness of their own or family’s or
community’s stories. They often feel they have
nothing special to tell, as if the subject of
telling about daily life in Palestine is not
worth for others to know about, because
“everybody already knows it.”
The trick, for
teachers and trainers and others working with
youth, is looking at reality as if you see it
for the first time, to create this sense of
wonder and, in the Palestinian context, also of
fresh anger, needed to see the impossibility of
life here and its injustices but at the same
time discovering people’s spirit of refusal and
resistance.
Discover what
you know, said Paolo Freire. For resonance with
your own community’s stories, you sometimes need
to take a step back, a different perspective,
and here a heightened sense of aesthetics and
the identifying of new ways of expression and
communication can help. At St Joseph, students
first wrote diaries in English, then wrote a
script of some of each other’s diaries for a
drama play, then with the help of professionals
developed it into a combination of dance and
theater. Using different aesthetics, their
ordinary-extraordinary stories about life during
curfews helped them to communicate basic human
qualities from fresh perspectives.
Wider communication
Because of this
deeply human quality, sumud resonates
wider than the Palestinian community. Showing
inner strength under extreme adversities is a
universal phenomenon. A Dutch peace worker told
me that the Palestinian stories of sumud
reminded him of the spirit to which many Czechs
stuck during the times when they were oppressed
under foreign influence, before 1989. The
stories of sumud are in fact good to
share with people and youth abroad, who often
hold stereotypes of Palestinians as either
terrorists or powerless victims. They give a
different dimension to understanding the
Palestinian experience. People everywhere are
interested into this extraordinary quality of
staying put and staying human. Sumud is,
in the words of the German philosopher
Schopenhauer, about the “great will to live
which connects all the single intentions behind
people’s life stories.”
Palestinian
sumud stories resonate with similar stories
from other countries, and that is one reason why
they are so effective for communication across
cultures and contexts. Let me give you, in
ending this talk, another personal story which
illustrates this and which connects Holland and
Palestine.
When I worked in
Amsterdam some 20 years ago, I used to pass
daily along the Anne Frank house, watching the
queues of international tourists. At that time I
did not relate to Anne Frank much, never felt a
historical sensation, even though Anne Frank’s
story is to some extent constitutive of the
Dutch psyche. You may know about Anne Frank’s
story of sumud. As a Jewish girl, she was
locked up during the Second World War in a room
at one of the Amsterdam houses along the canals.
She wrote her diary until she and her family
were caught and killed in the concentration
camps. Her diary writing was an act of sumud.
For me, Anne Frank’s story became alive when the
diary project at St Joseph started. Teenager
girls of the age of Anne Frank participated. In
preparation for the diary project the girls
learned about girl’s diaries from other
contexts, such as from Sarajevo during the civil
war in former Yugoslavia or from an Indian
teenage girl in 19th century US. When
they first read Anne Frank’s story, they rolled
their eyes, according to the teacher. The Second
World War and the occupation of Holland by the
Germans was not a setting to which they easily
could relate, or desired to relate. But after a
while they started to identify with Anne Frank,
not in the least because they could understand
Anne’s predicament of being closed up in a room.
After all, curfews have been a familiar
phenomenon in Palestine.
After a while
the interest in Anne’s diary grew. The teacher
asked me to bring more books of Anne Frank, in
English. As a reliable courier I brought books
from the Steimatsky bookshop in Jerusalem to
Bethlehem. As an international I of course did
not face problems of traveling from Bethlehem to
Jerusalem. The teacher said that even from the
distant Ta’amreh area to the east of Bethlehem
there were parents interested in reading Anne
Frank’s story. So the story left its mark.
Now it happened
that one of the diary writing girls lived in a
house which was occupied by the Israeli army
during the siege of the Nativity Church, April
2002. This house oversaw Bab al-Deir, Nativity
Square in Bethlehem. The family was forced to
live in one room. They even had to get
permission to go to the toilet located on the
same floor. The girl, like her classmates,
continued their diary writing, indeed an act of
sumud under such circumstances. At one
point she went to the Israeli soldier in the
corridor and asked him: “Do you know the story
of Anne Frank?” “Of course,” the soldier said
and added, “Do you want to read it?” “No,” said
the girl, “I read it. But I want you to
read it!” A very challenging remark. As for me,
after learning about that moment I started to
become myself interested in Anne Frank’s story.
Sometimes a historical sensation goes along an
unexpected traveling route.
The symbol of
sumud can and should indeed travel into
different directions.
Thank you.
Diaries and
histories from Palestine
Suad Amiry,
Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, Ramallah Diaries,
Granta, London, 2005.
Susan Atallah
and Toine van Teeffelen, The Wall Cannot Stop
Our Stories:
A Palestinian Diary Project.
(English, with separate teacher manual and DVD).
Published by Terra Sancta/St Joseph School for
Girls, Bethlehem, 2004.
Mitri Raheb,
Bethlehem Besieged: Stories of Hope in Times of
Trouble. Fortress Press, 2004.
Raja Shehadeh,
The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West
Bank. Quartet, London, 1982
Raja Shehadeh,
The Sealed Room: Selections from the Diary of
a Palestinian Living under Israeli Occupation
September 1990 – August 1991, Quartet,
London, 1992
Raja Shehadeh,
When the Bulbul Stopped Singing: A Diary of
Ramallah under Siege. Profile Books, London,
2003
Raja Shehadeh,
Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing
Landscape. Profile Books, London 2007.
St Joseph
School/Terra Sancta Bethlehem, Your Stories
Are My Stories: A Palestinian Oral History
Project, Culture and Palestine series, 2000.
Toine van
Teeffelen, Bethlehem Diary: 2000-2002,
Culture and Palestine series, Bethlehem, 2002.
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Writings
Toine van Teeffelen