I was born a refugee in Lebanon. I was displaced from the land of my ancestors, yet grew up in a Palestinian space, following the rhythms of Palestinian time. As a refugee, space and temporality have always defined my existence in ways I have not always realized. The more I thought about the intersections of space and temporality, the more I came to understand my Palestinian refugee experience — not as an abstract identity, but as one that is concrete; intensified in certain spaces, at certain times, and eased only in an existential, intangible homeland. As I move through the world, the material and social textualities of my refugee experience continue to shape the subjective emotional and psychological dimensions of my daily life, which alternate repeatedly and exhaustingly between Palestinianism and Alienation.
My journey starts in Burj al-Barajneh camp, where people have combined memories to build a replica of northern Palestine, preserving their histories and contributing to an imagined decolonized future, post liberation. Nasser Abou Rahme eloquently expresses this: “the camps connected the vanquished geography of Palestine before conquest and settlement with the potential forms of association and inhabitation of a Palestine after decolonization. In their very territorial form, they connected the historical memory of a past with the demonstration of a future.” The camp forms a space where Palestinian kinship is interwoven through its alleyways. These kinships are custodians of a time and space attempted to be erased. The kinship that exists within the camp is a support network, responsible for maintaining our Palestinian space through the performance and embodiment of rituals, traditions, and storytelling that in return serve to maintain our conception of time. In that time, Palestinian time, temporality is cyclical, influenced by past displacement, present confinement, and an ongoing struggle for liberation.
By cyclical I refer to the past as omni-present, nurturing hope for a future where space, kinship and time are to be grown in and of Palestinian soil. Our attempts as refugees to exercise control over our space and time are an act of solidifying our existence, of refusing erasure.
However, such a description of the camp is not immune to romanticization; the alleyways of the camp are also dark, tight, and suffocating with their history. So are the obligatory social expectations embedded in kinship ties, that forcibly project themselves into one’s space and future, blurring the lines between us and our community’s hopes, imaginations, and existence. The camp can thus be thought of as a prison, a space of confinement or a state of limbo, a ‘carceral continuum’ that is entangled with Occupied Palestine. Palestinian writer Fawaz Turki was the first to reflect on his journey of escapism, from Palestinian time and space in his books, Disinherited and Soul in Exile. As a refugee himself also raised in Burj al-Barajneh camp, he wrote and reflected on his continuous struggle in exile to transport us on a journey from one prison to another, through interconnected sites of struggle and resistance. Walid Dakka, a Palestinian writer and revolutionary, is one of the oldest Palestinian detainees imprisoned by the Israeli regime — he was arrested in 1986. His case has topped headlines in recent days since Israeli authorities denied his release and is deliberately neglecting his medical needs after being diagnosed with Mylofibrosis. Many of his writings have been smuggled out of what he calls the “small prison,” to the outside world or the “large prison.” His writings also beautifully reflect such attempts of escapism and liberation, most notably in his fictional book, Oil’s Secret. Dakka’s writing interrogates the limits of liberation within and outside of prison cells, and centers a demand for a decolonized subjectivity. For Dakka prisons, walls and checkpoints are all “visible features of the epidemic, but the substantial illness is the loss of the mind … [an illness] more dangerous than prisons.” When one is able to escape a space of confinement and attain freedom of movement, one remains part of an interconnected Palestinian time that enforces a Palestinian subjectivity that demands collective liberation. After all Turki’s travels and attempts to escape “the crazed condition” of his history and situation, he reflects: “I sit here thinking if we have any liberated zones I can go to, to feel free in, to be free in… when he is on the run, a Palestinian cannot affect indifference to what happens to one segment of his people, large or small…the dramatic events that have occurred to the Palestinians, whether I was there or not to participate in them, are an indivisible part of my totality, my history, my name, the nuances of my self-definition and the geography of my soul, would stand empty.” The dialectic between Dakka’s contemporary writings and Turki’s journey from 1948 until today reiterates the interconnectedness of Palestinian subjectivities and geographies of struggle.
Our ancestors had no choice but to sow the seeds of their new lives within the walls of the camp, to let these lives take root there. Today, I also write from exile and reflect on my own process of decolonizing my subjectivity. In my journey of seeking liberation beyond the confinement of the camp, I have forcibly moved through many spaces and voluntarily escaped many others. But Palestinian time has always been a restless, haunting shadow that I am never able to shake. The camp’s kinship follows me to any future I try to walk towards and any alleyway I stumble across. In my search, I've only felt free in the process of crossing borders, in the air, floating, suspended between going and reaching, coming and becoming. But when I arrive, when I reach my destination, I am still held captive by the same memories, the same maze, squeezed by alleyways of my history, neither going nor becoming but perpetually waiting for my return, frozen in Palestinian time.
Though I traverse through many foreign, beautiful, and exciting spaces, I have only found solace in alleyways. I find beauty in alleyways, perhaps because they remind me of a path I walked, of a future I once naively looked forward to. Here I am, now in that future, in a different alley, surrounded by foreign walls, a foreign history, and foreign memories that hold me captive. The alleys got me there; I've walked them knowing there must be something beyond. What was beyond, however, is only a bigger prison, whose key I'm searching for in distant alleys that trap me in new ways.
I have come to realize that my Palestinian time took refuge in my body as its camp; I have embodied the camp and its time. Now, my body is a playground for intersecting systems of oppression, whose violence is not exercised in one physical space, but on the Palestinian time which I inhabit, and this violence follows me to every space I walk in. In leaving the only space that eased the pain of alienation, I fear that I have sentenced my own social death. I embody a past which I carry with me that burdens me heavily through its presence. It tarnishes the beauty I see, a contrast of constant frictions that I cannot escape, a history that cannot be erased nor replaced nor escaped. Two realities, two times, and I'm in between — neither here nor there.
I want to reconcile the time inscribed in my soul and my skin with the spaces I now find myself in. But where do I belong now? I want to stop this exhausting flight between fleeting refuges and temporary respites. But I find comfort in the intoxicating familiarity of running. Perhaps the hardest lessons we must learn from our ancestors are how to grow deep roots in unforgiving foreign lands, how to practice and live Palestine’s liberated future in the oppressive present, and how to remain hopeful for future liberation without allowing our imagined futures to justify escapism. Until our Palestinian time finally returns to the land it belongs to.
