The Importance of Women's Oral Testimonies in the Production of ...

The Importance of Women’s Oral Testimonies in the Production of Palestinian History Himmat Zu’bi*

In recent decades, critical intellectual trends have increasingly made history into a subject for analysis and a domain of knowledge that reflects the relationship between power and knowledge, as well as between dominant and marginalized groups. These intellectual trends, including subaltern studies and feminist history, have given rise to a debate over the production of history itself, by addressing the following: the identity of the one who produces history; the identity of the one who writes history; the way in which history reconstructs the past and formulates the present; the sources used and sources available; and the methodologies employed in writing history. Despite the variations in intellectual backgrounds of these schools of thought, what brings them together is their critique of the production of hegemonic history in the West from the 19th to 20th centuries. This history focused on the narratives and analysis of events primarily through the elite and powerful. It is characterized by its emphasis on documenting public events, ignoring the role of women and other subaltern and marginalized groups by excluding them as actors, neglecting their experiences, and producing their absence. Women’s history has gone through two main phases since the 1960s. The first of these was marked by the expansion of historical research to include the discovery of new information about women and the separate study of their experiences and lives. This stage was characterized by maintaining the distinction between the two realms: the public domain of men, which included their relationship with work, war, and culture; and the

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Mada al-Carmel www.mada-research.org

private realm of women, with regard to their relationship with family, childbearing, unpaid labor, and nature. The second phase arrived after widespread critique from feminist historians around studies in “women’s history.” This critique centered on the idea that the attempt to write women’s history in the framework of existing standards of historical writing was insufficient to erase the long years of neglect. Similarly, these scholars argued that the new information that women’s history contributed did not change the marginal status of women’s activities. Rather, it reaffirmed their marginalization and their limited relations within relationships of power, and thus in knowledge production. From this critical perspective, feminist history formulated additional questions centered around the need to consider gender issues in particular ways and in context. Likewise, it emphasized the necessity of challenging the idea of binaries and oppositions in connection to groups, noting that they hide internal diversity and contradictions within each group. Beyond critiquing the traditional production of history and its projections on knowledge production, feminist history directed criticism in the second phase of its development at the exclusive reliance on documents and archives in the writing of history. In this, feminist history stressed the importance of oral history as a key source available for writing women’s history. Feminist history joined with the critical schools of thought that emphasized the need of adopting oral testimonies to understand the history of the oppressed, marginalized, and uneducated groups. They considered oral testimonies as one of the few means available to uneducated groups to participate in recording history through their spoken narrative of events. Likewise, this method also plays an important role in the construction of collective memory and an oppositional discourse for groups subjected to colonial hegemony. In this it becomes a tool of liberation and support for the victims of violence and injustice. If we turn to the Palestinian case, we find that oral history acquires a status of critical importance to Palestinian men and women. There are several reasons for this, the most important of which is that the Palestinian people—in addition to the theft of their land and their country—have faced serious and continuous attempts to steal their political, cultural, Jadal


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and social history and to marginalize their narrative and their collective memory since the beginning of the settler-colonial project in Palestine. The absence of organized archives for the Palestinians, and the theft and confiscation of some of them since 1948—from the theft of the shari’a court registries in Acre to the ransackings of the Palestinian Research Center archive in Beirut in 1982 and the archive of the Arab Studies Society in Orient House in Jerusalem in 2001—have a significant role in the marginalization of the Palestinian historical narrative and in putting in placing numerous obstacles to the documentation and writing of Palestinian history. This makes oral testimonies one of the key sources in this undertaking. A second reason that oral histories are important within the Palestinian case goes back to the preoccupation of most Palestinian historians after the Nakba. For the decades following, and until the beginning of the 1990s, these historians were preoccupied with political issues and the history of political elites. This contributed to the absence of social and cultural history of the ordinary Palestinian and the Palestinian family. Popular Palestinian memory was neglected, and our history was made into an incomplete history from which internal distinctions were missing. A third reason goes back to the particular importance of oral history for women. Palestinian history has, for the most part and for decades, witnessed the absence of women’s history. In those few writings in which women are included, the focus was mostly on the relationship of the Palestinian woman to politics and the Palestinian resistance movement, and on those women who took part in the political elite activities. The scarcity of sources on women’s history in general, and on women of a lower socioeconomic class in particular, and the excessive focus on public political aspects led to a lack of information on the history of the different factions of Palestinian society. On the other hand, this scarcity also caused a failure to analyze the wider economic, political, and social relations within Palestinian society in general and, particularly, within the lives of Palestinian women.

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In order to contribute to the process of writing Palestinian history and to fill the existing gaps in our historical narrative, we therefore must address the internal diversity within society. This must be done in a way that ensures the documentation of the history of society’s many segments and the relations between them, including the history of women of varying social classes and in different geographic regions. In the current circumstances, oral history becomes an urgent and necessary methodology and an important source for understanding. Through oral history, it is possible to compensate for what cannot be provided by written sources with regard to the Palestinian historical narrative. The use of oral history allows for the expression of personal, gender, and class differences. Women’s testimonies contribute to filling the gaps in our political, economic, and social history. Likewise, shedding light on the various roles of women through oral histories confirms that women make up an important part of society and defies the prevailing beliefs that do not consider women’s experiences to be an important component in the production of history. Thus, including such oral histories reshapes new values that allow the integration of women’s and men’s experiences from all sectors of society.

* Himmat Zu’bi is a PHD candidate in social sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

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