THE ARAB WORLD GEOGRAPHER LE GÉOGRAPHE DU MONDE ARABE Vol. 16, No. 2 Summer / Été2013 Contents Articles “Palestine as a Woman”: Feminizing Resistance and Popular Literature Laura Khoury, Seif Dana and Ghazi-Walid Falah 147 Geopolitical Representations: a Textual analysis of the Turkish Film VALLEY OF THE WOLVES—PALESTINE Necati anaz Border Crossing Between Iraq and Iran, Summer 1953 Elizabeth Bishop Information Technology and the “arab Spring” Emily Fekete and Barney Warf Research Note / Notes de recherche The Evolution of Regional Planning and Regional Economic Development in Malaysia Noor Suzilawati Rabe, Mariana Mohammed Osman, Syahriah Bachok The Arab World Geographer ISSN 1480-6800 http://arabworldgeographer.metapress.com Editorial Office: Department of Public administration and Urban Studies, Buchtel College of arts and Sciences, The University of akron akron, OH 44325–7904 United States of america Published four times a year, Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter Printed by Coach House for aWG(cid:0)The arab World Geographer © Copyright 2013 by aWG Publishing, Toronto, Canada “Palestine as a Woman”: Feminizing Resistance and Popular Literature Laura Khoury and Seif Dana Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin Parkside, 900 Wood Rd., Kenosha, WI 53144 U.S.A. Ghazi-Walid Falah Department of Public Administration and Urban Studies, The University of Akron, OH 44325-7904 U.S.A. At the present time, when desires to resist are being conscripted, the rich history of historic Palestine is being devalued, and significant concepts (such as resistance) have become inferiorized, particular powerful metaphors such as “Palestine as a woman” are maintained to subvert dominant thinking that re-inscribes colonial relations, and Palestinian women have collectively defied liberation, firmly wielded the weapons of the struggle contained in their culture, spoken a united language of resistance, and unearthed the colonial cultural matrix by feminizing resistance. The significance of the representation of Palestinian women in popular literary works reverberates in the symbols of Palestine, Beirut, Resistance, and the Palestinian Uprising (Intifada). Three renowned Palestinian intellectuals whose work informed the popular and national liberation discourse after the Nakba (the occu- pation of Palestine in 1948) have elaborated significantly on the interlacing of social and national liberation in the case of Palestine and, by implication, have contributed to the formation of women’s gender identity: the metaphor of “Palestine as a woman and women as Palestine” is found in the works of the novelist Ghassan Kanafani, the cartoonist Naji al-Ali, and the poet Mahmoud Darwish. This article offers a framework for understanding the significance of this powerful metaphor as it developed in the context of conflict and war in Palestine. Using a grounded theory approach, the authors analyze selected popular literary works and explore how women’s world is woven into the practice of everyday resis- tance, or “feminized resistance.” This process involves reconfiguring a pattern— away from Western gender politics—by confronting the rigid dichotomy of public versus private domains, de-framing domestic responsibilities, de-constraining national identity, and re-imagining feminism within the context of national oppres- sion. The authors use James C. Scott’s hypothesis that “hidden transcripts,” or the undeclared, essentially individual forms of women’s resistance, create a culture, a movement, a nation of resistance. Key words: feminizing resistance, “Palestine as a woman,” nativist nostalgia, homeland, exile À l’heure actuelle, quand les désirs de résister sont mobilisés, la riche histoire de la Palestine historique est dévaluée. Des conceptsimportantes, comme la résistance The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 16, no 2 (2013) 147-9 © 2013 aWG Publishing, Toronto Canada 148 Laura Khoury, Seif Dana and Ghazi-Walid Falah sont maintenantinfériorisés, et des métaphores particulièrement puissantes, telle que la représentation dela« Palestine commefemme»sont maintenuespour saper la pensée dominante qui ré- inscrit les relations coloniales. Collectivement, les femmes palestiniennes ont fait face à la libération, en maniant fermement les armes de la lutte contenues dans leur culture, en parlant le langage unifié de la résistance, et en mettant au grand jour la matrice culturelle coloniale en féminisant la résis- tance. L’importance de la représentation des femmes palestiniennes dans les œuvres littéraires populaires résonne dans les symboles de la Palestine, de Beyrouth, de la Résistance et du soulèvement palestinien (l’Intifada). Trois intellectuels palesti- niens de renom dont le travail a nourri le discours de libération nationale et popu- laire après la Nakba (l’occupation de la Palestine en 1948) ont développé de manière significative les intricationsentre la libération sociale et la nationale dans le cas de la Palestine et ont contribué par là à la formation de l’identité de genre des femmes. On trouve la métaphore de la «Palestine commefemme » et des « femmes commePalestine » dans les œuvres du romancier Ghassan Kanafani, du caricaturiste Naji al-Ali, et du poète Mahmoud Darwich. Cet article propose un cadre interprétatif pour comprendre la signification de cette puissante métaphore telle qu’elle a évolué dans le contexte de conflit et de guerre en Palestine. En utili- sant une approche par le biais de la théorieancrée, les auteurs analysent certaines œuvres littéraires populaires et explorent comment le monde des femmes est intégré dans la pratique de la résistance quotidienne ou dela« résistance féminisée ». Ce processus implique la reconfiguration d’un motif qui – en s’éloignant de la politique occidentale dugenre –défie la dichotomie rigide entre les domainesdu public et du privé, recadre les responsabilitésdomestiques, libère l’identité nationale, et imagine le féminismesous un autre angledans le contexte de l’oppression nationale. Les auteurs utilisent l’hypothèse de James C. Scott que les « transcriptions cachées » ou non-déclarées, essentiellement des formes individuelles de résistance féminine, créent une culture, un mouvement et une nation de résistance. Mots clés : féminiser la résistance, « la Palestine commefemme », nostalgie nati- viste, patrie, exil, Palestine Introduction We have on this earth what makes life worth living: on this earth, the Lady of Earth, mother of all beginnings and ends. She was called Palestine.Her name later became Palestine. My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life. —Mahmoud Darwish, “On This Earth” While the constant reinvention of the category of gender and the forma- tion of gender relations might seem, in its most radical form, a site of social antagonism and conflict, it becomes a less orthodox process when it takes place in the context of colonial relations. These processes not only become highly entwined with national liberation but may even signify the success or failure of the whole liberation venture. The hegemonic repre- The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 16, no 2 (2013) “Palestine as a Woman” 149 sentations of women in political literature and literary and cultural forms signify not only the agenda discrepancy of the various social forces involved in the anti-colonial struggle but also their perception of the nature of the colonial venture itself (e.g., colonial relations vs. colonial boots on the ground). Therefore, investigating hegemonic representations of women at various stages may reveal the state and conditions of the anti-colonial and liberation scheme. Reconsidering the status and role of women in national biographies is central to rewriting national histories and exposing the male- and elite- oriented accounts to justify and reinforce existing gender and class rela- tions. Equally important is the impact of research on gender that uncritically accepts Western frameworks, concepts, and meanings of gender as universal. Palestinian women may see themselves transforming their collective identity and gender roles, challenge dominant accounts of their history, and thus offer alternative versions of the national past. are Palestinian women reproducing the nation? (For an argument that women are biological, cultural, and symbolic reproducers of the nation, see Yuval-Davis 1997.) The ideological significance of studying representations in academic discourse is to bring to the forefront the ignored role of women in cultural resistance, as symbols of the homeland, and the suppressive ways in which colonial spatial relations are constituted as gendered. Mills (2005) exam- ines the possibilities of developing a materialist feminist analysis of repre- sentational and lived space. She draws attention to the differences between Western feminism and indigenous women, though the latter had a role in the way Western women defined themselves spatially within the colonial context. In addition, “the ideological strictures on women’s movement within the colonial zone were important in shaping a notion of a woman’s place” (2005, 68). Thus, any discourse on representation needs to be based on indigenous materialist re-evaluation of spatial relations. No analysis of the discourse of representation can be comprehensive if ideologies are not perceived as embedded in processes of globalization and how gender serves as a resource for capital. Gender is embedded in the process of restructuring and in ongoing global processes (Connell 2000). This also implies that in core countries, as Connell suggests, insti- tutions are gendered and, in turn, directly influence masculinity in the periphery. Palestinian women in the periphery inherit the low value of domestic labour that is maintained by globalization and transform it into a practice of resistance to occupation. Mohanty (2002) shows that colo- nized men were in fact “feminized” by European occupiers. Resistance to colonialism and to processes of globalization that oppress women in the periphery has created forms of gendered spheres of resistance. But this is not done by feminizing domestic and private spheres The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 16, no 2 (2013) 150 Laura Khoury, Seif Dana and Ghazi-Walid Falah and masculinizing the public sphere. The irony is that Palestinian women, as we will discuss, feminized resistance, or made up a disproportionate number of those who contributed to the resistance, simply because distinctions between public and private were blurred. We argue below that reproducing the feminization of resistance is a function of feminizing the landscape in concepts such as “Palestine as a woman.” To bring space into the analysis, and to avoid the taken-for-granted Western concepts and constructions of the category of gender, we must identify the counter- hegemonic conceptualization and discourse. There are implications to this indeed. What may be viewed as a distor- tion of Western conceptualizations is in fact a reshaping of Palestinian women’s representations and the construction of a resistance ritual that shaped their daily lives. This is not to suggest that men are not resisting, but we live in times—under the Palestinian authority—in which the meaning of national resistance to occupation come to be equated with terrorism as part of this silencing of the subaltern. Within this context, feminizing resistance becomes an important venue for preserving the integrity of indigenous knowledges. It was probably less significant in the pre-Oslo era. Palestinian women have constituted a self-conscious voice of dissent, revived the language of resistance, preserved the internal integrity of indigenous culture, and basically practised cultural resistance in their everyday lives. Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2005, 324) writes that “Palestinian women are the unrecognized frontline fighters who, if acknowledged, could reveal a different reality by presenting a different voice and a revisionist discourse.” In an interview, a Gazan woman tells her story: I am like all other Palestinian women that live in Gaza and survived. I will not die from poverty either but I am stronger when I see our men resist those who killed my son ahmad. I am a proud mother. I recall how my son before he was killed asked me to take him to the amusement park but I told him we cannot go because we do not have the money for it but he left the house and a bomb shell fell on him (Interview with authors, 2013). We do not present ethnographic work in this article, but we stress the need to do such work. Palestinian women, we argue, have continued their “ideological resistance,” manifested in efforts to reconstitute a “shattered community, to save or restore the sense and fact of community against all the pressures of the colonial system” (Said 1993, 209). The cultural resis- tance symbolism in Palestinian women that has significantly character- ized the period since the 1948 Nakba, we argue, has many practical implications, ranging from blurring the private and private domains to transcending domestic labour as a tool for collective behaviour. It is worth noting here that in the present Palestinian authority era, The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 16, no 2 (2013) “Palestine as a Woman” 151 scholars have identified some shifts in women’s self-representation, but this is due to the weakening of the links between everyday struggles for family and community survival and political resistance (see Johnson 2009). We do not suggest that this analysis is faulty but, rather, build on it. Johnson (2009) revises the three categories of women’s self-representa- tion introduced by Sayyigh (1998): the “struggle personality,” character- ized by strength, courage, and resourcefulness; the “confrontational personality” that is the generation of the revolution; and the “witness to tragedy” personality. Johnson (2009) explores a shift in the iconic image of women in the Palestinian national struggle as the mother of the martyr and maternal sacrifice as a symbol of the extent of Palestinian loss and suffering, explaining the reasons for the shift: Yet the erosion of solidarity, trust in the Palestinian national project, and the capacities of its leadership narrows her field of action to her own family and constricts her abilities even there … Both the hard necessity of public struggle and dreams of domesticity sit uneasily in the selves … But for both, the public is deeply troubled and the domestic highly threatened. What remains is persis- tence, a crucial element of Palestinian survival but one infected by contradiction and marked by a deep uncertainty about the future (Johnson 2009, 44–45). It is for exactly this reason that this article was conceptualized. It may not delve into this uncertainty, but does counter it by reviving the symbolic culture of resistance in “Palestine as a woman.” This article complements our work elsewhere (Khoury and Dana 2012), which aims to enhance the visibility of settler colonialism’s impact on the internal landscape (how the mind is colonized). In that earlier article we show that there is an unexamined quest to supplant an imperial subjectivity, but that a self-conscious voice is embedded in the indigenous culture. Here we discuss the inherent rationality for feminizing resistance in the concept of “Palestine as a woman.” We have defined resistance as “a deliberate exclu- sion of ‘others’ as a means of preserving internal integrity of indigenous knowledge” (Khoury and Dana 2012, 189). One indigenous Palestinian construction of the national homeland is the “Palestine as a woman” concept and the discourse around it. The Subaltern’s Collective Defiance Few studies have discussed gendering landscape (see Falkiner 1992). Landscapehere refers to a representation of anything with an imagined space, but how gendering the homeland affects the conception of resis- tance remains unexplored, especially in the context of the Palestinian cause. The discourse on the land as a Palestinian lady (as Darwish writes, “because you are my lady I deserve life …”) after the Nakba may echo The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 16, no 2 (2013) 152 Laura Khoury, Seif Dana and Ghazi-Walid Falah other discourses in the West, where the association between land and gender is made in notions such as “Mother Nature,” but we argue that the land of Palestine has been inscribed with a representation that associates the discourse of the occupation with women, so it is commonly called “raped land” (as opposed to “occupied land”). Therefore, our main premise here is that this discourse (Palestine as a woman) constructs Palestinian women as national signifiers, whereas both al-ard(the land) and gender are initially cultural constructs. The characterization of al-ard in literary works, we argue, has a direct bearing on Palestinian women’ self-identification and representation. These representations have been further invested in perceptions of women as courageous, patient, and loyal. The cultural representation of Palestinian women in popular literary works reverberates in the symbols of Palestine, Beirut, and the Palestinian uprising (intifada), constituting the homeland as a signifier of women. This, we argue, has shaped and constantly reshapes consciousness of Palestinian women’s representation in the nation. The significance of “Palestine as a woman” is to make the land a national signifier. The expressive culture of resistance, as reflected by the popular and classical literary works of three renowned Palestinian intellectuals whose work informed the popular discourse after the 1948 Nakba, especially contributed to the formation of women’s gender frame. The theme of “Palestine as a woman and women as Palestine” in the work of the novelist Ghassan Kanafani, the cartoonist Naji al-ali, and the poet Mahmoud Darwish contributed to “feminizing resistance” (intifada as female) or the de-gendered construction of resistance, which involves reconfiguring a pattern—not patterned around Western gender politics— by de-constraining the re-imagining of feminism within the context of national and colonial oppression. Fiction and other literary works, we argue, have direct implications for Palestinian women’ self-identification and representation, but Palestinian women have extended those undeclared activities (see Scott 1985, 1990, on “hidden transcripts”), essentially surrounding individual forms of women’s resistance, and have thus managed to create a culture, a movement, a nation of resistance. In other words, particular discourses that feminized resistance can also explain why Palestinian women are reproducing their nation (see Yuval-Davis 1997). There is a relationship between the political dispossession of Palestinians as an outcome of the 1948 Nakbaand the production of a political discourse conductive to feminizing resistance. Reconsidering the status and role of women in national biographies is central to rewriting national histories and exposing how they are often represented by male- and elite-oriented accounts to justify and reinforce The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 16, no 2 (2013) “Palestine as a Woman” 153 existing gender and class relations. Equally important is the impact of research on gender that uncritically accepts Western frameworks, concepts, and meanings of gender. Palestinian women may see themselves transforming their collective identity and gender roles and challenging dominant accounts of history, and thus may offer alternative versions of the national past. How is the discourse of “Palestine as a woman” furthering their efforts to reproduce the nation (see Yuval-Davis 1997) in a special way not found in the West? The next section delves into the repre- sentation of Palestinian women. Palestinian Women Foreground the Accountability of Palestinian Symbols Human geography concerns itself with, among other things, how humans represent land; cultural geography concerns itself with social and issues in the contingent nature of culture and forms of resistance. One way of bridging the two, as suggested by Jackson (2000), is by rematerializing social and cultural geography. This transcendence may represent the best framework for this article because the material basis—the land of historic Palestine—exists no matter who calls this land what. “Palestine as a woman” transmits through culture to many generations and continually reshapes the representation of women. Concurrently, resistance has become a central theme of contemporary social and cultural geography (Pile and Keith 1997). There are obvious connections between human emplacement and impersonal geographies; because resistance is not located in certain practices or places, we find that the mapping of resis- tance is achieved by attending to its outcomes. Western assumptions and discourses on the gendered nature of nationalism were thoroughly argued by feminist scholars in the 1990s (see Lake 1992; McClintock 1995) who entertained the conceptualization of nationalist identity as a male phenomenon and project. Challenging this notion by attending to strong national sentiments among women or other venues of research is not futile, but nor is it necessary. In the very special circumstances of the Palestinian cause, we argue, the identity of women has been interwoven with the notion of “Palestine as a woman,” as hypothesized in the popular and classic literature of the Nakba of 1948. Jean-Klein (2001), aware of the relationship between nationalism and gender, proposes a seminal argument that should have led the disci- pline in a new direction and, in our view, does not follow the Western path. It is not necessarily true that the gendering of the nation exists in the Third World—especially in nations that remain under colonial rule. Jean- Klein in fact proposes that in the available analysis of the nationalizing process, there is a determined politics of nationalism, as if it were deter- The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 16, no 2 (2013) 154 Laura Khoury, Seif Dana and Ghazi-Walid Falah mined or inscribed, and people lack authentic interest in nationalist activism. It is not prescribed/inscribed on the people, but Palestinian women practised domestic self-nationalization (her argument will be reit- erated in other parts below). Jean-Klein references some scholars (Brubaker 1996) who have perceived a new mission for nationalism studies in post-colonial settings.1 In general, subaltern studies allow for an indigenous interpretation of processes and cultural constructs, because these settings are inextricably connected with colonial struggles. “Thus it now stands as a fact that Third World or postcolonial nationalisms do not add up to the same phenom- enon as ‘nationalism’ in its (notorious) Western expressions: They are not ethnicity-focused, not exclusive, not Other-oppressive, and not hege- monic: they are subaltern, self-liberational, and virtuous” (Jean-Klein 2001, 85). In sum, she calls for referencing transformative agency as opposed to discursive determined agency. abu-Lughod (1990, 42) argues that the importance of looking at resistance is as “diagnostic of power.” Resistance must become feminized so that its oeuvre is maintained. Rising Above the Staged Drama: Background in Refugee Studies Studies of urban Palestinian women who are educated and politically active seem to be appealing to many, but such studies cannot include women living in the Gaza Strip (see Roy 1986), refugee camps in the West Bank (see Rubenberg 2001), or refugees in the arab world (see Sayyigh 1998). anthropologists have provided valuable ethnographies and explored how Palestinian women in refugee camps in Lebanon define themselves as minorities to accommodate their isolation from the larger Palestinian context and protest their powerlessness in the local Lebanese context as a strategy of survival (Peteet 1992). Because Palestinian refugee women saw national oppression as predominant, consciousness of class and gender oppression remained in the background. Palestinian women rose above the staged drama before their inferi- ority was epidermalized. Resistance to colonization has redefined gender roles among Palestinian women.2The Nakba of 1948 did not have equal effects on different geographical areas; unusually, cities today tend to be more conservative in their perception of women’s roles. Before the Nakba, some Palestinian cities had cultural centres, cultural production, and literary work that surpassed those of most other arab cities at the time. For example, Haifa had movie theatres, cultural centres, a film industry, and some of the best poets in the arab world, including Ibrahim Tukan of Nablus, author of the poem “Mawtini”(“My Home”), one of the most recited contemporary poems and the national anthem of some arab countries. Cities in Palestine, as everywhere else, were more developed and The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 16, no 2 (2013)