A piece of sky [insert the camp] can be a library too. Memories travel, breaking  the laws of time to reach our hands, our eyes, our minds. (Fernandez, 2019 p.107)

In searching for archival sources on Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, I repeatedly encountered familiar faces, to the extent that navigating any camp archive feels akin to exploring my family's history or the history of my neighbourhood and community in the camp. This forced me to consider: how can family archives be weaved into a revolutionary history? And how can the personal be explored within a fragmented history of the  revolutionary camps?

The personal reveals silent nuances of narratives that are challenging to archive —  the whispers of sorrow and the unspoken emotions. How can archiving honour the bursts of pride amidst adversity? How can a place like the camps be archived, born out of necessity yet denied existence, without reducing its people to a faded memory or a manifesto resolution?

I do not claim to have any methodological or theoretical answers to these questions, but simply want to gather the fragments of the camp’s scattered mirror. Drawing inspiration from Nona Fernandez’s evocative portrayal of memories as constellations, I perceive fragmented memories also as having an anchoring force, tethering me to my roots, land, and people in the  camp – even amidst exile. A piece of the camp therefore becomes one star in a constellation  of memories of Palestinians’ past, and visions of their future lightyears away. These memories, deeply ingrained in the camp and shared by its inhabitants, confront me with a  history often silenced—a history marked by both prideful laughter and mournful sighs. In my  journey to unearth the suppressed archives of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon's camps, our collective histories and memories seem to exert a gravitational pull, transcending time, and space, in defiance of rigid boundaries and institutionalized narratives. My research on the camps became an attempt to archive fragile cobwebs of memory. 

Palestinian history, once a crystal-clear mirror, was shattered to pieces, fragmented due to different episodes of violence all over historic Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan. I continue to encounter fragmented pieces of the camp, of my family, that bring me closer to the ever elusive full image of Palestinianess. These fragments act as flashlights from the past,  reflecting light onto the present so we do not forget our on-going struggle(s).

My first encounter with archiving was through the stories of my grandmother, stories I often thought of as myths and legends. Despite the bitterness of her stories, their vivid details and smells of horror and tragedy, they always ended with messages of hope and life. She did not speak much of Al-Nakba, but of Palestinians’ will to endure and resist the brutality of Lebanon’s fascist forces during the civil war.

If my grandmother spoke of her life in Palestine, she often told us her disappointment of wanting to go to school, but not being the child chosen by the family to attend, as they could not afford to send all their children to school. Instead of memorising academic formulas, she would commit recipes and telephone numbers and the Qur’an to heart, even though she could not read or write. Her recipes from Palestine live on in my mother and aunts, who committed her recipes to paper, preserved on the back of photographs. I continue to cook her recipes in exile to digest our history.

My grandmother spoke in length about the siege of the camps (1984-1990), about how Amal militias sieging the camp barbequed fat on the doors of the camp to torture the hungry besieged people with its smell. She often spoke about her house turning into a bakery, sharing the little flour she had. One story however, she often repeated giggling proudly about how, during the sieges of the camps, she weaponized gender to pass the soldiers surrounding the camp. During a ceasefire, when only women were allowed out to fetch groceries, she took my uncle with her – dressed as a little girl in a hijab. She recounted the story many times, with the same proud smirk on her face. She often remarked on the brutality of the siege, how the militants often mixed her sugar with flour, and the rice with lentils. Yet, she smiles, and reminds us that “your uncle passed the checkpoints with me, and the soldiers were none the wiser”. She and my uncle have also left us few years ago, passing the checkpoint of brutality on earth - unnoticed.

3. Ein-el Hilwat Oral History Project, Ameican University Beirut. Link

Her giggles, despite remaining unarchived, complimented the archived prideful smirks and stories of other Palestinian women’s resistance to sieges and invasions that are narrated in the Ein-el Hilwat Oral history project.³

My grandfather, often forgetting the cigarette in his hand as he gazes at her, frequently sighs. He isn't one to speak much, but his sighs serve as poignant footnotes, often unnoticed. The only words he frequently laments, are la ilaha ila Allah. These sighs spoke only to himself, creating a sense that his archive is sealed – only air can escape but not words or stories. When my grandmother and her stories passed away, and her giggles faded, my grandfather’s sighs grew stronger and fiercer. Finally, his words began to break the seals of his archive, and his stories complimented grandma’s ones, albeit with less optimism. It is as if he did not want to add the bitterness of the revolution’s failure to taint her sweet tales. He did not want his story to end as it starts, with horror.

I do not know if it was a conscious decision that he made after my grandmother’s death to speak more openly about Palestine, but I know that his memory has now broken free. He no longer hides his longing for his parents, friends, and sons. He no longer feels constrained by a linear timeline from past to present and present to future. 

My grandfather opens his hands to show me his scarred palms and says: “I bent iron with  these hands when I lived in the Gulf – I still feel the burn and the heat.” I used to wonder what he sees in those scars that I don’t. Later, on reading Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun (1963), I realised that my grandfather’s scars are not his alone, but those of a generation of working-class Palestinians who bled to build the Gulf. My grandfather has the scars of one who knocked on the walls of the tank, survived working in the Gulf’s heat, only to return to the camp with scars and wounds that are left undocumented. 

He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. A disease I see as an outcome of a battle, whereby long term memory wins out over the short term. Memories that matter from his past, come to occupy all the space left in his brain, reopening the strong emotions that matter. Nona  Fernandez writes that as children we are born forgetting, but the elderly too sometime die forgetting, and it is our role to remember and recount their memories so that every encounter with an archive is them shining the light of their constellation upon our present, reminding us of our struggle(s). It is our role to write their memories so they can continue to resurrect when read.

In my long nights with my grandfather, we talk about memory. His memory often betrays him. He speaks of a fading image of his father, and the smell of a fig tree. Pausing, he asks if I want some fig that my uncle brought early that morning?

I knew that the fragments and colours of the picture he tries to share with me are trapped somewhere, that we as Palestinians have always tried to fixate and reproduce what is dear to us into a frame or an image or a scent. I brought him the picture of his father, that my grandmother has given me years before she passed away to preserve. I coloured the black and white image and showed it to him. He tastes saltiness, tears stream down his face, and he kisses the photo. He says: “I have not seen his face in many years. I miss him and the fig tree.”

My family’s memory is fragmented or half-sealed. I am left to glue together their narratives,  with pieces I found in my grandparents’ house in the camp. I find recipes written on the back  of photographs, cassette recordings and VCR films, books and pamphlets. I see all as pieces  of art that “originated as an attempt to hold on to reality and pay tribute to our surroundings.”

Instants captured and eternally preserved, becoming part of the past the second they are fixed. Sounds, images, voices, exhalations, faces, thoughts, reflections, ghostly landscapes - forever reliving a piece of yesterday. 

Recorded and saved to be found again. (Fernandez, 2019 p.107)

In one excavation of my grandparents’ house, I opened one of the tatkhita (storage space above bathroom door) and found – along with a few cockroaches and wet soaked documents – a book, written by Hajj Abed Al-Majid Al-Ali, and titled Kuwaykat, one of Palestine’s bloodlines. Kuwaykat is my village, my grandparent’s village, a village whose seeds were planted by my grandparents’ memories in my head, with its trees, and stone houses,  metaphors, remedies, and traditions. Al-Ali’s book documents every fragment of village life before Al-Nakba–memorialised by those who lived there. He affirms the connection between the people and their stolen grooves of fig trees, oranges, apples, pomegranate, olives, grapes, lemon, and almonds. His book remembers every steadfast cactus, and the name of my great grandfather: Rmeileh Mohammad Ibrik. Al-Ali’s book also includes the peasants’ domestic animals, and the wild ones, and even reptiles and birds. He does not leave any element of the land unaccounted for, every living being is recorded. When Fady Joudah writes in his powerful essay on ‘A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation’:

The buffalo hearts are also native hearts.

Who will count the donkeys, dogs, and cats in Gaza?  

The birds will return. (Joudah, 2023, V)

I see Al-Ali’s spirited dedication to Kuwaykat in Gaza’s survivors. They too will forever recount and paint Gaza’s rich tapestry of life before the genocide with their stories and memories. Their memories, pregnant with cement and brick, seeds, and sighs, are an archive that will one day rebuild and resurrect what was killed and destroyed. 

I turn the pages of Al-Ali’s book to find annotations and additions made years after its initial publication. Those born after Al-Nakba not mentioned in the book’s exhaustive list of families, inscribe their names with pencilled determination, wedging themselves amidst the blank spaces, asserting their presence from exile, inscribing their existence into the continuum – asserting their rightful place within Kuwaykat.

My uncle, who inscribed his name beneath the heading ‘Engineers from Kuwaykat,’ departed from this world a few years back. Yet, his name endures, entwined with the collective memory of Kuwaykat and its inhabitants.

My grandfather walks past me while I clean the dust off the items I found. As I separate what has been destroyed by water, what needs to be passed on, and what can be preserved, he continues to sigh. I ask what is bothering him and explain that these documents are rotting here, and I need to take them somewhere clean and dry. He says: “…it is easy to destroy or throw, and hard to gather or build”. 

I reassure him: “I have no intention of discarding or destroying”. Aren't our acts of preservation and archiving inherently acts of gathering and rebuilding?

He laments: “la ilaha ila allah, I’m not saying so”. I still wonder whether my excavation of cleaning dust and recollecting the pieces of our history was a painful scene for him to witness. Can our memories – shoved somewhere deep in our minds, dusty and becoming faded – be saved if someone brushes off the dust? Or perhaps, memories are cobwebs, built to trap histories that fade if brushed or moved for preservation.

What my grandfather shares as personal and sealed away for many years is his longing for normalcy, for his family, and for his comrades. Since his diagnosis, his mind has turned into a court, ruling what memories to keep, and what to give up. He chose family and land. These are heavy memories as he shares with me – ones that kidnap him at night. He says: “when you get old, all the memories you swiped under the rug come back”. Memories trap him. His mind is no longer capable of gluing itself to optimistic memories of the revolution. These, were too, left for me to fetch and gather. 

A few months after the last time I visited my grandfather, I searched for his name on the internet, curious to see, if his memories have transcended to the cyber world. I found that he gave an interview to a grassroot oral history project called Howiyya, where they too, gather the scattered leaves of memories to restitch them back into family trees. He recounted in the daytime to an interviewer, what seems to be memories that he was held captive by the night before. I see my abundant family tree, his video recounts our story, and his love for the fig tree in Kuwaykat.

The last time I visited my grandfather, I was surprised to find the front door of the house locked. My uncle said: “your grandfather is waking up in the middle of the night and  leaving. Last night, he woke us all up at dawn, saying he has packed all the house, and telling us to hurry up, we need to return”. When I asked my grandfather, he sighed, and said, “I feel I need to go, where to I don’t know, and I don’t remember”. He explains an urge to reunite with his memories through the act of packing, walking, returning. While I strive to fetch and gather our memories to preserve them, he seems to be breaking free from their grasp, running towards them - towards his fig tree.

I had long wondered if my grandfather, a retired Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) member, who was/is a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist without ever reading any theory, was recorded in any radical or critical cultural productions. The only class-critical movie I could find was directed by the radical documentarian and engaged militant Christian Ghazi (1934-2013) titled ‘Miyat wajh yawm wahed’ (A Hundred face for a single day, 1971). It is one of 44 either lost or burnt movies that was rediscovered by Nadi Lekol Nas. The film is a critique to the Arab Marxist bourgeois, whose lives are contrasted with those of the proletarian: the refugees and the Fidayeen. I never expected to find my grandfather in the documentary, where he represented the peasant/refugee, whose life only made sense when contrasted with the life of the bizarre life of intellectual Arab, bourgeoise Marxists. In the documentary, a class of refugees are seen being taught by a cadre in the revolution about the birth of Zionism. A young, handsome man with a moustache asks: “Why are you teaching us such issues? His eyes pierce through the movie, and I felt a connection – not just to the question the young man asked, but a sense that I know the man. I asked my father, who confirmed my grandfather’s participation, while my grandfather himself did not when I asked him for the first time. My father, the keeper of this memory said that when he was a kid, he saw a camera crew filming in our house in the camp. He said that he had promised himself as a kid that he would watch the film when he grew up. He did not have the chance until I showed him, 50 years later.

I asked my grandfather another time if he remembers the film. He says he does but did not recall ever watching it. I brought him the documentary, and as we watched it, he smiled, and said: “of course I remember Comrade Castro [Christian Ghazi], and look at me, ya Habibi ya ana”. A giggle escapes from his often poker face, and he says: “that is me, Akh”. He exhales a heavy sigh, then reaches for another cigarette. I find myself pondering who chronicles and archives the sighs and counts the cigarette butts of those transformed from peasants to refugees, refugees to proletarians, then revolutionaries, only to return once more to the life of refugees.

4. Nona Fernandez, Voyager, p. 2.

Disjointed fragments, a pile of mirror shards, a heap of the past. The accumulation is what we’re made of.⁴

I visit a flea market whenever I am in Lisbon called Feira da Ladra (The Thieves’ Market). The market is full of abandoned archives scattered on the floor, family albums sit side to side with rusty lighters that do not burn and watches that rebelled and paused time. The items are a tapestry of personal, national, and international items for hungry nostalgic goers to feast on. Family albums, postcards and letters of lovers, accompany revolutionary posters, sex magazines and porn movies. I often wandered through the flea market hoping to find ghosts of my past – the closest I had gotten in 5 years of searching was revolutionary posters from different Palestinian factions, and an encounter with a the most stubborn ghost of them all – Yasser Arafat smiling alongside Fidel Castro. Then, I found a poster of Fidel Castro and the head of the DFLP - my grandfather’s party. I felt I was getting close. But this last time, I found ghosts closer to my life, revealed by the eye-catching flashes of sunlight reflecting off metal. Disguised with a craft depicting Jerusalem, I found a piece made in the camp during the 1970s, by the Samed martyr’s factory. I giggle; I see my past, my martyred uncle’s past, my grandpa’s and grandma’s militant past, and I shake my hands with the pieces. The seller does not see what I see; he says, “both for 5 euros”. I smile, and think: the sweat of our refugee workers, and the blood of our martyrs, our past and future shall not be for sale. It is perhaps, better to keep it with you, so one can ask, why Jerusalem is built by a martyr’s factory, and who paid for Jerusalem, our future to be sold so cheap in some foreign land? I sigh, and all I say aloud is: “la ilaha ila Allah” and I wonder if ghosts are thieves that sell our past in the market.

Our fragmented memories, like scattered pieces of mirrors, stand as formidable adversaries  against the Zionist efforts to obscure our history. With their sharp edges, they pierce the fabrics of lies and propaganda just as effectively. They too demand to be carefully held and pieced together.

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Acknowledgments:

I want to thank Hannah al-Khafaji for her unwavering support and patience as I delved into the memories of my family. Her invaluable feedback and dedication to reviewing and editing my efforts in unravelling my fragmented history have been immensely appreciated. I also thank Diala Lteif and Sophie Kelsch for their reflections and time reading the piece. I am also grateful to Kanwal Al-Hameed, whose introduction led me to Naja al-Achkar at Nadi Lekol Nas, where I had the privilege to explore their archive, watch ‘Miyat Wajh Li Yawm Wahad’, and delve deeper into Christian Ghazi’s biography and body of lost and retrieved work.

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Rami Rmeileh

Rami Rmeileh is a Palestinian social liberation psychologist, member, and organizer at the European Centre for Palestine Studies (ECPS), and a doctoral researcher at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on critical consciousness, indigenous modes of survival and resistance, mental health politics in settler-colonial contexts, anti-colonial archives, and refugee studies. Rmeileh has worked with the European Parliament and humanitarian organizations, advocating for refugees' rights. He also writes experimental prose and op-eds, published in various journals and media outlets.
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