Unlike many of the other presenters at the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, I arrived as a relatively unknown quantity. I am not a world-famous comedian like the delightful Amer Zaher. Nor am I a giant of Palestinian history like the magnanimous Salim Tamari. My presence at the festival was rooted solely in one woman’s inexplicable confidence in my ability to tell Palestine’s stories.
Four years ago I decided to start a podcast that focused on what I call the Palestine frozen in time; that is, the part of our collective memory that deals with the aesthetic, social, political, and economic histories of the period stretching from the late Ottoman era through to the eve of the Nakba.
In September of 2022, Susan Abulhawa (author of Mornings in Jenin and Against the Loveless World, and more importantly, the executive director of the Palestine Writes festival) reached out to me to express appreciation for my podcast and her interest in having me attend the festival. She wanted me to offer a modern spin on the traditional hakawati* (I obliged, though my family would insist that hakwanji — windbag — would more aptly describe who I am and what I do). A year later, I found myself standing on the biggest stage of my life.
The enormous Irvine auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania quickly swelled to capacity as hundreds flooded to their seats. The opening night featured a star-studded cast of spoken-word poets, authors and activists, and at least one storytelling podcaster who was far from home. At Susan’s request, my slot on opening night was a story about Napoleon’s arrival in Akka and Jaffa, and a poem that was used to rally the tribes of Nablus to stop the Napoleonic advance. The reception exceeded my wildest expectations. By the time I left the auditorium, nearly half a dozen people had stopped me in my tracks to share how moved they were by the heroism of the Nabulsi clans (the fact that literally all of these admirers were from Nablus is purely incidental).
For the rest of the weekend I told a variety of stories — some less flattering than others. I told a story of how the Jaffa citrus industry (one of the most potent symbols of the Palestine frozen in time) was painfully out of reach for the vast majority of Palestine’s fellahin. I shared a story about the powerful friendship shared between Hajj Salim Effendi al Husseini – the long time mayor of Ottoman Jerusalem — and his dear friend the Orthodox Christian Jirjys Jawhariyah. I took the audience on a meandering journey of the evolution of Palestinian women in public life. Finally, on Sunday afternoon as we prepared to bid farewell to the festivities, I introduced the audience to Sheikh Izzidine al Qassam, for whom my admiration knows no bounds.
As the festival progressed, conference organizers and presenters grew accustomed to following a spiraling staircase down to a make-shift green room below the hustle and bustle of the festival’s main attractions. There, over the course of two days, I experienced the full spectrum of Palestinian creative energy. It was there I was taken to task by Dr. Mohammed Sawaie (The Tent Generations) over our conflicting definitions of what constitutes an urban center, and it was there I dove into the fascinating world of nineteenth century Palestinian and Lebanese emigration with Dr. Jumana Bayeh. In what quickly felt like a gathering of longtime friends, I chatted about growing up in the war on terror with author Randa Abdulfattah and had an intimate chat about Palestinian stonemasons with Dr. Andrew Ross (Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel).
The festivities followed us back to the lobby of the Sheraton hotel, and despite all that I have written so far, it is there in that lobby that I had the weekend’s single most meaningful experience. At the end of the opening night, I met a father and his university-aged daughter who were on what can best be described as an intellectual pilgrimage. The pair had traveled to Philadelphia all the way from Florida. The father — originally from al-Bireh — told me how much he and his daughter enjoyed my opening story. He added that he hoped that there would be more stories like it at the festival. To their delight, I told him that I had many more stories planned for the weekend. For the remainder of the festival, the pair were present at every single one of my sessions. And, as we prepared to check out of our hotel rooms and return to the monotony of our lives, we were fortunate to exchange bleary-eyed farewells. For the daughter in this duo, Palestine’s story was liberated from the indignity of being obscure and unrecognizable. And if my only accomplishments from this festival are to have lifted the fog over her past, making her a little more proud of the Palestinian she sees in the mirror in the process, I will have successfully accomplished what I set out to do.
* A Hakawati is someone who practices an age-old form of oral storytelling that was popular in pre-colonial Palestine and the region at large.