Full Text

Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, edited by Ahmad H. Sa‘di and Lila Abu-Lughod. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. xvi + 314. Bibliography to p. 337. Notes on contributors to p. 341. Index to p. 356. $72.50 cloth; $27.50 paper.

The work of memory in all its forms-historical essays, personal reminiscences, legal testimonies, imaginative recreation-is not only difficult but inherently contradictory. On the one hand, memory posits "something real outside the person's subjectivities to be . . . re-called." Simultaneously, memory work requires a narrator equipped with the interpretive filters of gender, age, generation, political intentions, and so on, through whom the objective, exogenous "facticity" (as Lena Jayyusi calls it) is to be known. The work of memory, then, must address itself not only to questions of what happened, but to questions of how we know things, whose voices we have heard, and where the silences are located.

Ahmad Sa‘di, a political science lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, and Lila Abu-Lughod, an anthropologist and gender scholar at Columbia, address these questions in their edited volume, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, by focusing on particular kinds of memories (those of trauma) in a particular historical instance (the Palestinian Nakba). Their introduction provides an excellent survey of the major forms of Nakba narratives. "Our purpose," they write, "is to critically examine this potent and painful site of memory in light of the larger comparative literature on memory, history, and trauma . . . The special character of Palestinian memory lies in the key experiences of their radical and abrupt displacement from life in situ, the continuing violence and lack of resolution theymust endure, and the political nature of the deliberate erasure of their story, which gives birth to the stubborn dissidence of their memory work" (pp. 4-5).

Having set themselves the tasks of examining both Palestinian narratives of the Nakba and the practices and conditions under which these narratives are constructed, the authors proceed by emphasizing genuine diversity in the forms of memory work that have emerged. Memory books-the memorial volumes of destroyed Palestinian villages created by displaced refugee communities-are one example and have been studied in depth by anthropologist Rochelle Davis. While Davis sympathizes with the refugees in their attempts to recreate their lost homes, she uncovers a strong sense of the idyllic inscribed in these works that undercuts their validity or usefulness as historical documents (p. 22). Rosemary Sayigh, Isabelle Humphries, Laleh Khalili, and Diana Allan have interviewed women in refugee camps. Lila Abu-Lughod and Omar al-Qattan share touching personal experiences with parents returning to Palestine; Haim Bresheeth reviews Palestinian films; and Samera Esmeir studies court documents in the Teddy Katz Tantura massacre case.

Gender as a theme is strongly emphasized in several essays. In comparing men's accounts of the Nakba to women's, it is revealed that men tend to tell the official story or sequence of events while women are more likely to describe a way of life (in the words of one particularly astute teenager: "My mother told us about Palestine, but she didn't know the plots" [p. 209]). It is further shown that gender enters not only into the narration of the Nakba but also into its constitution. Several authors (Susan Slyomovics, Sayigh, Humphries, Khalili) focus on the role of rape and Palestinians' fear of injury to family honor in motivating the flight of many communities in the face of the advancing Israeli armed forces. A number of authors (especially Sayigh, p. 139) reflect on the interpretive logic of feminist and nationalist narration-both "strong languages" that sometimes work together and sometimes contradict one another. Slyomovics, in her excellent work, "The Rape of Qula, a Destroyed Palestinian Village," notes how the term "rape" has often been used not in reference to the real lived experience of particular women but rather as a metaphor for the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian motherland.

Generational differences are also explored, and accounts of eyewitnesses and survivors are compared to those of their children and grandchildren. (Diana Allan's essay especially explores this.) Contributors attend to the fact that, while some of the elderly in refugee camps focus on life in their native villages, others are more interested in the future. Generational differences also become differences in how "real Palestinians" are defined (p. 255)-by village elders, residents of refugee camps, successful professionals in the Western diaspora-and differences of opinion about the importance of memory work more broadly.

Overall, the book aspires to focus on the process of narration, using the Nakba as an example. And certainly the book contains plenty of examples of narratives across generations, between genders, and in diverse media (oral history, film, memoire, and so on). The book also provides an excellent bibliography on the Nakba. The strength of the book, however, rests more on the power of the example than on the conclusions drawn about the complexities and the credibility of the narratives reviewed.