I wish to live in a free Palestinian state, but I know that this is a distant wish and it will not happen in my lifetime … I believe that our struggle for freedom is long term. But everyone has aspirations and dreams, and without them we cannot live.
–Al-Barbari, p. 99
Palestinians have resisted. Yet, their resistance is not enough. [Palestinians] must be seen and understood far beyond the negative and motionless characterizations imposed upon them … They must be seen as the solution to the problems of their region.
–Roy, p. 234
Around fifteen years stand between these statements. The recordings of Sahbaa Al-Barbari in Gaza for Light the Road of Freedom and the other books within the Women’s Voices from Gaza SeriesFootnote1 were made in a three-year period toward the end of the second intifada. By this time, Sara Roy had already spent a decade working in and on Gaza, and her works featured in Unsilencing Gaza stem from her research from the beginning of the first intifada to the COVID-19 pandemic. Reading Light the Road of Freedom, an oral history of Sahbaa Al-Barbari, edited by Ghada Ageel and Barbara Bill alongside Sara Roy’s most recent book Unsilencing Gaza is to be recommended. Both books center experiences of the everyday for Palestinians from and in Gaza; prioritizing the narratives of women, young people, and those who are often excluded from the historical record. One book does this from the perspective of a Palestinian woman from Gaza, and the other, a scholar who has dedicated much of her life to trying to change the way that people beyond Palestine think about Gaza. Both are packed full of intricate details blending intellectual, cultural, political, and social life and conjuring up images of Gaza characterized by vitality, and not by lack. Together, they provide us with almost a century of feminist understanding of politics and the everyday in this part of Palestine.
Light the Road of Freedom is the second volume in a series of seven on women’s voices in or from Gaza, recounting life in Palestine prior to and after the 1948 Nakba. The series is made up of oral histories, recorded in Arabic, which aim “to re-orient the story of Palestine by restoring it to its original narrator: the Palestinian people” (ix). This particular volume is the story of a leading Palestinian Communist in Gaza, Sahbaa Al-Barbari. Born in Gaza in 1932, her narrative tells a Palestinian story crossing dimensions familiar to many: resistance, imprisonment, exile, defiance, and return. As Ramzy Baroud writes in the forward, “she is … the quintessential Palestinian woman, fighting against immense pressures from without—colonialism and military occupation—as well as from within—Arab betrayal and the stifling patriarchy” (xx). After attending Cairo University to study for a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and psychology, Al-Barbari returned to Gaza in 1957 where she became a teacher, as well as incredibly active in community mobilizing—activism that led to her being the first woman to be held in a men’s military prison in Egypt. In Al-Barbari’s words, “Prison was a very good experience for me, I learned so much” (47). She was arrested along with her husband, the renowned poet and intellectual Mu‘in Bseiso, as well as journalists, writers, artists, and teachers, all members of the Communist Party. She remained there for four months before being moved to a women’s prison for another twelve months, where she developed what became lifelong connections with Egyptian female activists.
Part of what makes this book remarkable to read is Al-Barbari’s humility. Until Najah Awadallah’s documentary The Ember Bearer, Al-Barbari was often referred to as “Mu‘in’s wife,” without acknowledgment of her own work and journey—and indeed the work she did in transcribing much of her husband’s poetry and other writing throughout his lifetime. In the film, Awadallah explains that it took years to get Al-Barbari to agree to make the documentary about herself and not about Bseiso. Reading Light the Road of Freedom, we are left with the same certainty that she considers herself a very ordinary Palestinian woman who has lived a regular, Communist Palestinian life—just once admitting, “I am proud to say that I was one of the first women who knew about and studied Marxist ideology in Gaza, at a time when it was considered against our traditions, religion, and society” (45). In the rest of the book, she lingers over the fine details of choices made, coerced decisions, the impact of political events that forced her repeated exile, family life, and the opportunities and struggles toward Palestinian liberation. The manner in which she tells her story through the different chapters of her life, beginning with memories of her childhood in Gaza: a kite flying close to her grandfather’s sesame press; the selection of films she enjoyed; summers on the beach, and days spent in the Hamam al-Samra in Gaza’s Old City. It proceeds with stories of the thriving intellectual, literary, and civil society life in Gaza between the 1930s and the 1960s. The book moves through her studies in Cairo, her arrest and imprisonment, married life, and decades spent in exile: over eleven years in Beirut, over a year in Damascus, eight months in Libya, three years in Egypt, and fourteen years in Tunis. This book, and indeed this series is a much-needed contribution to Palestinian oral history archives from Gaza. As Nahla Abdo and Nur Masalha noted in their recent collection, there has not been enough recording of Palestinian history and the experiences of communities and individuals.Footnote2 Al-Barbari’s life story is presented in this book with—as the editors write—minimal interference or interpretation. While a reflection on the circumstances of the interview(s) would have been an interesting addition to the introduction, along with information about the archival availability of the hundreds of hours of recordings made in the process, the decision to allow the almost raw transcripts to speak for themselves is both powerful and deeply evocative.
Unsilencing Gaza is the product of Sara Roy’s almost four decades of work in and on Gaza since 1985. The book is a collection of her selected writings over the last sixteen years, along with texts written and translated specifically for this collection. The book is divided into eight parts, with twenty-five pieces of writing woven together to analyze both structures and events that have impacted Gaza over the last decade, alongside opportunities that could have led to a different outcome. For those who have followed the immense body of Roy’s work on Gaza, reading this collection of texts together is like seeing a completed puzzle. There is much consistency and continuity in the trajectory of her writing and in her commitment to the importance of rigorous research, documentation, and testimony. Roy has long set the bar high for non-Palestinian researchers on what it means to be an ally in academia and beyond, and this collection of her essays, letters, articles, fieldnotes, translations, and previously unpublished texts only reinforces this.
Drawing from her own empirical work in Gaza that began in 1985, the chapters in the book are made up of her publications from 2007 onward. The different chapters reflect on earlier periods in Gaza and in this way the book almost picks up from where Light the Road of Freedom ends. The first two sections set the scene of recent history in Gaza, focusing on US policy failures and repeated Israeli military assaults on Gaza between 2008 and 2012. Moving into the aftermath of the 2014 attack in part three, Roy reflects on the long-term impact of humanitarian intervention in Gaza and the threats facing UNRWA. This discussion is continued in the next part about the events of 2018 and the decision by the Trump administration to drastically cut funding to the agency. Part five is a collection of six letters and essays that reflect in different ways on her work in Gaza and her Jewish identity, and part six moves into tributes to two Palestinians who supported Roy in her research: Eyad el-Sarraj, a psychiatrist who pioneered mental health care and ways of addressing trauma in children in Gaza, and Naseer Aruri, chancellor professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, a human rights defender and former member of the Palestinian National Council. Particularly poignant is part seven, titled “The Past as Future: Lessons Forgotten,” and specifically the chapter called “When a Loaf of Bread Was Not Enough”—which invokes a slogan from the first intifada “ragheef al-khubz la yakfii”—based entirely on Roy’s fieldnotes from the second year of the first intifada while she was living in Gaza. The chapter contains many raw descriptions and extracts of conversations with interlocutors and her immediate reflections: “… ‘see how we must live. This is the evidence. This is real. Take a good look.’ Amazingly, they retained their sense of humor and pride. Many jokes were made about luxurious living conditions, but through the giggles, insistent and tenacious hands kept grabbing me, gently pulling me into the same room, the same corner, the same crevice, for another look” (194). In another description, she shares: “The floors were stone, wet from the dampness and very cold. One small child sat on the floor with a piece of paper trying to write … it was so cold and raw inside … there were no sources of heat and many people cannot afford a space heater. I felt ashamed for shivering” (195). The effect of sharing these fieldnotes is similar to the approach of providing limited interpretation in Light the Road of Freedom. The words speak for themselves and allow the reader a deep understanding of the context without adding layers of theory. It is rare to see a senior scholar share fieldnotes with these kinds of intimacies and feelings of inadequacy and privilege laid bare. Roy’s humility in doing so is a defining feature of her work.
While Light the Road of Freedom is at its core a life story intimately shaped by politics, reflecting on how political and economic circumstances have been contested, navigated, and endured by a woman in Gaza working toward liberation, the analytical approach of Unsilencing Gaza is structured around policies and key political events, as understood through the experiences of individuals and communities. With some overlap in terms of timeframe, one book is about life as a Palestinian from Gaza, while the other is about Gaza. Whereas the authors share a similar approach in prioritizing the way in which politics is lived by Palestinians from Gaza, the positionality of the authors and the different time periods that they cover offer important points of comparison and reflection.
Particularly powerful to read in parallel are the accounts of the first intifada in Gaza as experienced by an outsider (Roy, “All I Want Is a Factory and a Flag,” 196) and from Tunis as experienced by a Palestinian woman in exile (Al-Barbari, “Tunis,” 79). Another interesting parallel is the way that both Al-Barbari and Roy use their own experiences to reflect back on the wider communities to which they belong. Speaking of the challenges of obtaining, maintaining, and using ID documents within her family (applications made, permits denied or stalled because of political events) Al-Barbari writes: “Most Palestinian families have the same story—a story of segregation, displacement, dispossession, and constant denial. Ours is not an exception” (91). In the chapter, “Tears of Salt: Israel, Palestine and the Coronavirus,” written specifically for this book, Roy states: “As a Jew, I am appalled by Israel’s behavior but also frightened in a way that is altogether new, even after more than thirty years … I am frightened by the moral atrophy that necessarily accompanies policies that adapt so easily and willingly to the withholding, in any form, of critical life-saving measures to an unprotected people”(141–42).
Al-Barbari’s book concludes during the second intifada with the certainty that nothing will deter Palestinians from seeking their rights: “… using all kinds of modern weapons will not give you security, and will not bring an end to the Palestinian cause. Neither you nor America can do this, not now nor in a thousand years” (104). In contrast, toward the end of Unsilencing Gaza, Roy reflects on her surprise at how little young people in Gaza know about the past, specifically about the first intifada and what happened during the early years of Oslo (182). Drawing from interviews conducted during a visit to Gaza in 2016, she writes of the way that young people in Gaza seem more preoccupied with the present day and aspirations for the mundane (105–6). Fast forward to 2020, and Roy shares the words of a friend in Gaza: “No one speaks of Jerusalem or the right-of-return. We just want food security and open crossings” (230). Although the positionality of these two authors must also be taken into account, both books offer powerful reflections on the ways that fifteen years of blockade have impacted Palestinians in Gaza and how they think about the future.
Together Light the Road of Freedom and Unsilencing Gaza detail life in Gaza from the perspectives of two women who center the experiences of ordinary people. While both weave in and out of encounters with intellectuals and analysts, the granular depth of both texts is in the details of everyday life for Palestinians in and beyond Gaza as affected by the Zionist settler-colonial project. The Women’s Voices from Gaza Series makes clear that there is a great need to prioritize Palestinian perspectives on the question of Palestine. And, in the words of Edward Said, Sara Roy is “humanely and professionally committed in ways that are unmatched by any other non-Palestinian scholar.”Footnote3 Reading these books in parallel makes for a fascinating comparison of insider/outsider perspectives guided by the same politics and our understanding of how close interpretations of research data and oral testimony can be read to reflect lived experiences.
This review was written before the unfolding genocide in Gaza. Never has it been more urgent that the voices and histories of Palestinians in Gaza be meticulously documented and preserved. The importance of these two books at this horrifying time cannot be understated.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Caitlin Procter
Caitlin Procter is a part-time professor at the Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute and a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow at the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding. She is a political anthropologist whose work focuses on children, youth, and forced migration in Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Tunisia.
Notes
1 For more information about this series, visit: https://www.uap.ualberta.ca/titles/989-9781772125443-light-the-road-of-freedom.
2 Nahla Abdo and Nur Masalha, eds., An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba (London: Zed Books, 2019).
3 In Unsilencing Gaza before the title page without a page number.