Full Text

Print Email Abstract Naguib: Women, Water and Memory: Recasting Lives in Palestine Isabelle Humphries Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol 39, no. 3 (Spring 2010), p. 88 Recent Books BOOK REVIEW Women, Water and Memory: Recasting Lives in Palestine, by Nefissa Naguib. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009. xvi +162 pages. Bibliography to p. 167. Index to p. 173. $87.00 paper. Reviewed by Isabelle Humphries In vivid prose evoking the climate, smells, and tastes of an unnamed village in the hills beyond Ramallah, Nefissa Naguib’s engrossing monograph examines women’s “lives as lived” through the prism of water. Utilizing narratives about fetching spring water as a starting point, Women, Water and Memory: Recasting Lives in Palestine presents a gendered critique of modernization in a Palestinian rural community, which, like other Palestinian communities, has lived for decades under military occupation. Israel’s wielding of control over Palestinian water resources is a fundamental obstacle to peace and justice, and as such is usually discussed on a grand political and economic scale supported by important but faceless development statistics. Through a gendered approach using a life story methodology, Naguib shows that by turning to the micro level there is much more to be learned about the impact of water on Palestinian lives. Writing “with the individuals and not ‘against them’” (p. 20), she follows in the footsteps of researchers like Hilma Granqvist, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Rosemary Sayigh in placing emphasis on women’s agency. Working in Palestine eight decades earlier, Granqvist had urged a focus on “women’s ways of looking at things” rather than applying the fixed terminology of the textbook. Listening to women’s narratives does not simply add color to the main story but can complicate and challenge conventional understandings. Naguib, an associate professor in anthropology and development studies at Oslo University College, has written on a variety of topics related to women, minorities, and the politics of memory, including recent work on the Armenian diaspora. Women, Water and Memory is published as part of Brill’s interdisciplinary series “Women and Gender: The Middle East and the Islamic World” edited by leading scholars in the field, Margot Badran and Valentine Moghadam. Piped water arrived in the unnamed village in 1985, ending the need for women’s daily walk to the spring to fetch water. Beginning research in 1995 during the Oslo years, Naguib tells eight life stories through which she demonstrates that talking about water and the way it was managed enables an exploration of a “world of interrelated activities, of systems of meanings, and of social and cultural identities” (pp. 3–4). Women talk of how younger, university-educated and city-dwelling generations try to persuade them that piped water represents progress. Their own experience of the end of the era of the hard labor of fetching water, however, is far less straightforward. Managing water gave women a pivotal role in the working structure of the community, a position that men recognized and that women took pride in. Their role in fetching water from the spring is remembered as giving them a significant place in society, a way in which they could command respect within the community. The village spring in these life histories becomes what Pierre Nora describes as a “site of memory.” Women recall the place as central to their lives, spending much of their time there, walking to it, waiting in line, or returning with full jars, a place to gossip, discuss marriage arrangements, and wash and relax away from men: “A woman puts the jarra on her head, and the man thinks she is going to do her housework. But we did other thing[s] we liked also” (p. 107). With the advent of piped water, a laborious task may have been lifted, but nothing replaced its social function of giving women a valued and public role in the community. Power over managing household water gave women routine and structure, and a reason to be outside—the loss of which was profound. In paying or failing to pay water bills, or waiting for Israel to turn the water back on, what was perceived by development workers as a liberating project became yet another way that women were dominated by the occupation (p. 156). Introducing her online women’s voice archive, Rosemary Sayigh gives a seemingly obvious but often ignored piece of advice from her own experience: “If you don’t have the right questions, people are not going to tell you.” Women, Water and Memory is the result of spending time with women reflecting on the right questions. What emerges is a thoughtful and thought-provoking examination both of the complexities of women’s experiences of development and of their reflections on community and individual lives spent entirely under foreign occupation.