But it was not completely empty. Behind a red velvet rope, a series of framed photographs lay on the floor. These photographs were taken by scholar
Dr. Tawfiq Canaan, who administered medical treatment throughout Palestine’s rural and agricultural regions. In the process of living amongst the
fellaheen (agricultural class), nurtured his own growing interest in traditional Palestinian cultural heritage. In the photographs protective amulets and jewelry are worn
in situ, as the
fellaheen posed for Canaan’s documentary portraits. These photographs have high archival value and serve as an enduring document of Palestine’s traditional and living heritage. Why are they lying on their backs on the museum floor?
As I came to learn through a year of research into Palestinian memory institutions in the United States and West Bank, cultural heritage preservation exists shoulder to shoulder with ongoing destruction. During my fieldwork, I learned how to fall asleep as my apartment shook from the impact of missiles miles and miles away. At the museum, Canaan’s photographs lie on the ground, so those same reverberations do not shake them down from the walls.
My research has been grounded in the question of how Palestinians persevere in archiving their histories amidst multiple, shifting scales of violence. Despite being the longest-standing population of refugees denied resettlement, despite the widescale destruction of their documentary and cultural heritage and the continuous denial of liberation and sovereignty, Palestinian archival preservation is ongoing. Its persistence lies in how it uses Palestinian epistemologies to build decolonial and sustainable archival infrastructures.
I draw upon the epistemology of
wahda as a framework for understanding Palestinian counter-archival practices. In Arabic, its basic meaning is unity, and it evokes a feeling of community, intimacy, and familiarity with another. As an epistemology, it has accrued deeper meanings in response to the dispossession of Palestinians from each other and their land. As a political ideology, it defined the 1950s pan-Arab movement where the re-unification of Arab states was a way to resist being fragmented under British, French, and Zionist colonialism (
El-Shakry, 2015;
Imseis, 2023). As a sociocultural value,
wahda also unifies Palestinians as a collective body, even if they can’t exist as an undivided nation-state (
Rijke & van Teeffelen, 2014;
Alqaisiya, 2023;
Zidani, 2024;
Khalidi, 2021). In opposition to the apartheid wall, checkpoints, and refugee camps meant to deepen the isolation of Palestinians,
wahda is a call to remain united in spirit across the diaspora. I extend this thinking to introduce
wahda as a counter-archival practice. One that guides Palestinians in how to build and sustain archival infrastructures within which they can remain united with each other and their cultural heritage.
Under the sharp knife of Israeli occupation, memory institutions in the West Bank unify the Palestinian collective in ways that cannot be restrained by the physical state of separation. The Palestinian Museum exemplifies this in how they bring the threads of personal histories together in their digital archive to cohere into a larger narrative. “It is through the histories and the stories of ordinary people that we become part of the history of Palestine,” one archivist explained to me. “Each story is a microstory that together makes the history of the nation.”
We see this in how
Nahla Qourah’s collection documents everyday life during the
First Intifada. One spectacular example photographs an elder making her way down a set of stairs. With one hand, she both carries a plastic bag bulging with bread while gathering her skirt to avoid tripping on its hem. She is remarkably unfazed by a flaming tire nearby that is hurling black smoke into the air.
Figure 2: A Photograph of Spray-Painted Slogans of the 1st Intifada, Ramallah, Palestinian Museum, 1987. [Image credit: Nahlah Qourah Collection]
Within these photographs, the quotidian moments of the First Intifada are documented, showing how the rhythm of everyday life was both changed and unchanged during Israel’s siege of the West Bank. Daily bread must still be purchased, even during an uprising.
Turning to the United States, after the Nakba dispersed Palestinians away from their ancestral home, they needed new ways to keep kinship. This dates back to 1952, when five Palestinian students at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, wanted to stay connected with others from their hometown of Ramallah. They founded a magazine,
Hathihe Ramallah, which for over 70 years has documented and shared the minutiae of the community’s births, deaths, migrations, and weddings. As the community’s most constant archive, it has become a space for the community to remake itself in the absence of the homeland.
Figure 3: Hathihe Ramallah cover, May/June 1988 [Image credit: Hathihe Ramallah]
The pages of Hathihe Ramallah are filled with a constant call for unity. In 1962, Ziadeh Bateh of Jacksonville expressed how “Hathihe Ramallah represented a symbol of unity for Ramallah folks in that it made them all feel closer together despite their wide distribution.”
Figure 4: Hathihe Ramallah, April 1962 [Image credit: Hathihe Ramallah]
Forty years later, this same sentiment is echoed by former Federation president Samir Kassees, who stated that the magazine “has linked Ramallah individuals and families through the United States and kept their ties to Ramallah alive… Without the magazine, we would have lost the unity and closeness which we enjoy today.”
Figure 5: Hathihe Ramallah, Jan/Feb 2002 [Image credit: Hathihe Ramallah]
The infrastructures of community archives are notoriously unsustainable (
Newman, 2012;
Fenlon et al., 2023;
Flinn et al., 2009). Where
Hathihe Ramallah differs is that it is inherently social. Unlike traditional archives, it is not a static storehouse. It is a living and thriving space of communication sustained by the community’s desire to cultivate proximity in any way possible.
Anthropologist
Ann Laura Stoler once posed the question of what a national Palestinian archive could look like. She asked, “How agile would such an archive need to be to cross the multiple minute and oversized scales of designed destruction?” What I establish here is that agility lies in these infrastructures’ ability to build connections in defiance of physical dispersion and fragmentation.
Wahda can be read as a collective epistemology and tool of resistance that shows Palestinians where unity can exist outside of settler spatiality.
The archive becomes a sustainable, decolonial space that exists on top of Palestinians’ fragmented reality. It provides paths of communication and cultural preservation that bypass obstacles designed to confine, isolate, and disperse Palestinians. Rather than accept the settler’s enforced reality, Palestinians dig their heels into their own epistemologies of unity and unification. As a guiding force,
wahda means mailing community history to the homes of Palestinians across the diaspora. It means building a decentralized digital archive accessible to Palestinians anywhere. It means placing archival photographs on the floor to save them from destruction.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Tamara N. Rayan is an incoming SSHRC Canada Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Toronto Faculty of Information and holds a PhD from the University of Michigan’s School of Information. At the intersection of archival studies, cultural heritage studies, and anthropology, their research investigates the tangible and intangible preservation practices used by communities and memory institutions in response to forced displacement, settler colonialism, and repression. In particular, they examine how Palestinians and other diaspora communities make sense of cultural heritage preservation within violent conditions and how they mobilize their own epistemologies in defiant acts of resistance. Their current research project investigates how Toronto Palestinians steward family archives to preserve ties across the diaspora. They serve as a co-editor of
Diaspora.
