Product and Producer of Palestinian History: Stereotypes of "Self"

in Camp Women’s Life Stories

Sayigh, Rosemary.

Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Volume 3, Number 1,

Winter 2007, pp. 86-105 (Article)

Published by Indiana University Press

DOI: 10.1353/jmw.2007.0009

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jmw/summary/v003/3.1sayigh.html

Access Provided by American University in Cairo at 07/11/10 2:37PM GMT

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PRODUCT AND PRODUCER OF

PALESTINIAN HISTORY:
STEREOTYPES OF “SELF” IN CAMP
WOMEN’S LIFE STORIES
Rosemary Sayigh



ABSTRACT

This paper examines representations of “self ” embodied in the life his-

tories of women members of a Palestinian refugee camp community
in Lebanon. Stereotypes of “self ” are inherently ambivalent (Guttman
1988) as sites of both subjection and resistance. This ambivalence
is strongly exemplified around the Palestinian refugee identity (to
submit or to resist?); and again, though in different terms, for women
members of refugee communities. (In camps, gender conservatism
was multi-sourced, forming a link with Palestine, a boundary dif-
ferentiating Palestinians from the “host” population, and resistance
to coercive change.) The Palestinian resistance movement, like other
twentieth-century anti-colonialist national movements, rigidified
gender “tradition” as a key element of cultural nationalism, while
political and economic mobilization gave women new scope for action
and for “voice.” The life stories of women of Shatila camp, recorded
soon after its destruction during the “Battle of the Camps” (1995–98),
reveal “self ” stereotypes that express historic continuity with Palestine
as well as the specificity of Lebanon as diaspora region, character-
ized by PLO autonomy from 1970 to 1982, and high levels of violence
against camp Palestinians in particular. Analysis of the “self ” stereo-
JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES
Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter 2007). © 2007
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types (and of their absence) points to a “collectivization” of personal

narratives, as well as factors such as social status, age, educational
level and degree of patriotism that differentiate the speakers in terms
of presentation of the “self ” and narrative coherence. Clear challenges
to gender ideology are present in two of the life stories.

Thus, the emergence of the modern self, the self as subject, figures
prominently in the subjection of humankind, and figures promi-
nently in the genesis of those modern struggles that seek, in the face
of that subjection, to reclaim their humanity for men and women
(Guttman 1988, 118).

INTRODUCTION

T his paper begins from a triple point of interrogation regarding the

historiography of colonized peoples. In the beginning, the colonizer
writes the “natives” out of the history of the colonized area, using different
arguments to justify their exclusion. Differentiation between “advanced”
and “backward,” between “civilized” and “primitive,” offers ideological
cover for the appropriation of the resources of the weak by the power-
ful. In its struggle to appropriate Palestine, the Zionist movement en-
joyed undeniable advantages vis à vis the indigenous population, among
them one of the oldest written histories in the world. This history was the
prism through which the mainly Christian “advanced” world perceived
Palestine and the Middle East, making the Zionist movement appear in
the eyes of believers as the realization of biblical prophecy (Mattar 1999).
There has never been a more powerful historical framework for colonial-
ist appropriation, and the critical work of a new generation of biblical
scholars has not yet been able to undo the role of Gentile Zionism in the
displacement of Palestinians and the suppression of their history.1
New nation-states exhibit a second form of repression when they
write their history, one in which a taken-for-granted focus on national
leaders and formal politics excludes attention to women and the “do-
mestic sphere” in sustaining national liberation struggles. Nationalist
histories register women only as individual heroines, or as “auxiliaries,”
or when they form organizations, hence supplementary to the main-
stream struggle. The omission of women, the domestic, subaltern classes,
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ethnic minorities, and the local appears to characterize all national his-
toriography. Indeed, scholars have argued that the state arises through
suppressing alternative sites of power such as family and tribe, inventing
the nation as a myth of unity and dividing the (male) public domain
from the (female) domestic one.
No single “official” Palestinian history has yet been published, yet
we find these leader- and andro-centric characteristics in the publica-
tions of the various Palestine Liberation Organization institutions—the
Research Center, the Planning Center, the popular unions—that flour-
ished in Lebanon between 1969 and 1982. One Palestinian historian,
Abdul-Wahhab Kayyali (1979, 171–73, 191–92), observed that women
formed a vanguard within the national struggle during the Mandate pe-
riod, but this interesting suggestion has never been followed up. Among
PLO institutions, the General Union of Palestinian Women (established
in 1965) formed a subcommittee to research and publicize the history
of the pre-1948 women’s movement in Palestine, but its research ambi-
tions were pushed aside by social care work created by continual crisis
and attack.
At a third level, in Palestinian communities, women are not rec-
ognized as making or knowing history, or capable of telling it. This was
first manifested to me in the camp of Bourj al-Barajneh in 1973 when
I asked a young refugee schoolteacher (male) to help me find people to
speak on the experience of being Palestinian. Even though I didn’t use
the word “history,” he assumed that only men, and only senior men at
that, were capable of performing this national task, so that his first list
was all male, aged 50 years and above. Later, when I was conducting
fieldwork in Shatila camp, a man refused to allow me to record with his
wife (but this was in the period of greatest fear of spies and informers,
in 1982–83, when Israel occupied all of south Lebanon). When experi-
menting with interviewing husbands and wives together, and women in
mixed family settings, I found that men often “corrected” their wives or
interrupted even when it was the wife’s turn to speak. A session with an
elderly woman, recording her life story, gave me a clearer understanding
of how the collective refugee story had been constructed, when a visiting
(male) neighbor interrupted her story of her marriage with the words,
“Tell her how much land you owned!” These experiences of suppression
of female voices and the “domestic” were valuable in forcing me to ques-
 ROSEMARY SAYIGH 
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tion my earlier impressions of refugee women as politicized, articulate,

and free to speak their minds.
In exile in Lebanon, gender ideology became more discursively
explicit, as an element of identity that both linked the refugees to their
birthplace and differentiated them from the host society. Camp people’s
frequent and proud assertion that “we have preserved our customs and
traditions” (a phrase that always means the control of women) can be
taken as evidence of the centrality of gender ideology in the production
of a post-1948 Palestinian identity.2 Thus among the theoretical values of
women’s life stories is the way they express cultural stereotypes3 of the
gendered “self” that reveal both continuity with Palestine and change
in exile, whether through environmental factors (such as opportunities
for schooling and paid employment), or through Resistance movement
mobilization. This paper presents oral data from Shatila women’s life
stories with the aim of demonstrating how stereotypes of the “self” fuse
the personal and the collective, and how they are gendered, expressing
cultural models of “woman” inflected by class of origin and aspiration.
They also point to change between generations, and to the way “selves”
are creatively refashioned in response to new political contexts and new
realities. The “selves” of women oppressed by statelessness, class, and gen-
der point to the dualism that Guttman notes, subjectifying and liberating,
open equally to the stamp of conformity and to the struggle for change.

INSECURITY AS FRAME OF REFUGEE WOMEN’S

REPRESENTATIONS OF “SELF”

The empirical basis of my presentation is a set of life stories recorded

between 1990 and 1992 with eighteen women from Shatila camp. Its
closeness to West Beirut had made the camp and adjacent areas a center
of political mobilization and institution building under the PLO (from
1970 to 1982). Shatila was viewed as dangerous both by Israel and by
some Lebanese political sectors: the massacre of September 1982 was
only one in a long series of attempts to remove the camp. Three years
after the Israeli invasion, following the defeat of the Lebanese Forces
in the Chouf and the withdrawal of the Lebanese Army from West
Beirut, in the midst of rising inter-militia tension, the Shi‘ite militia
Amal mounted a surprise attack against Sabra and Shatila, destroying
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the smaller camp. The ensuing attacks and sieges (the “War of the
Camps,” 1985–87) left Shatila almost totally destroyed, and most of its
inhabitants scattered outside (see Mansour 1985). The Syrian Army, after
entering West Beirut in 1987 to end Lebanese militia conflict, proceeded
to arrest large numbers of Palestinians as “Arafatists,” and precipitated
an intra-Fateh battle that completed Shatila’s destruction. After it fell
totally under the control of the Syrian Army and pro-Syrian Resistance
groups, entry into the camp meant interrogation for myself and anyone
I visited inside the camp. I continued to visit Shatila people, but now
scattered in unfinished or war-damaged buildings all over West Beirut.
These years of visits during which I recorded oral histories of Shatila
camp helped in the selection of life story tellers in several ways, famil-
iarizing me and legitimizing me through association with respected
figures in the camp, and enabling me to learn some of the descriptives
used of women and girls, value-laden terms that show up the inadequacy
of merely demographic variables. I was also able to gauge variations in
women’s political activism and to grasp the language used for it. Hav-
ing a visiting network of my own also helped me to avoid depending on
the Women’s Union, which would certainly have proposed only women
known for their activism.
I aimed at a sample that would be representative of the community
in demographic variables such as age, pre-1948 origin, marital status,
and socio-economic position, yet also express the heterogeneity of char-
acter and type to be found among women in a small-scale Arab/Mus-
lim milieu. The prevalent insecurity meant that I could not ask about
people’s political affiliation; but what women said about each other gave
me a rough idea of degree and type of mobilization.4
History entered the Shatila life-story recordings first through
the specificity of the period in which the recordings were carried out.
The years 1990–92 were ones of heightened insecurity and poverty for
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, a result of the decline in PLO employ-
ment, services, and aid, and of the reimposition of Lebanese labor laws
which foreclosed most skilled and salaried employment to the refugees.
Such conditions created an ambiguous mood: nationalism continued
to be the dominant mode of political discourse but was now dissoci-
ated by ordinary Palestinians from the existing PLO and Resistance
leaderships. Such dissociation created a space for “revisionist” versions
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of history, both public and personal. The fact that some of the speakers
spontaneously raised problems of sexuality in sessions where family
and neighbors were present—all recording sessions were conducted in
“public”—points to the crucial importance of the historic moment in
shaping life stories.
Second, the span created by the interviewees’ ages offered a wide
sweep of Palestinian history, with the oldest Shatila speaker being aged
90 and the youngest 26. The speakers divided fairly evenly among the
three generations named in everyday camp speech as the “generation of
Palestine” (five speakers, born between 1900 and 1933); the “generation
of the Disaster” (eight speakers, born just before, during or after the
expulsion); and the “generation of the Revolution” (five speakers, born
between 1949 and 1965). It was a sign of regional and class specificity as
well as historical period that all but five of the 18 speakers had lost close
family members through war—husband, children, parents, brothers. In
several cases losses were multiple. Until the second Intifada in the Oc-
cupied Territories, Palestinian losses had been nowhere higher than in
Lebanon between 1970 and 1987, years when the camps became targets
of both Israeli and Lebanese attack.
My method of discerning “self” stereotypes in the life stories was
to look, first, at anecdotes about the “self,” and what characteristics they
emphasized; then positioning of the “self ” in relation to a collective
history of expulsion, repression, and resistance; third, metaphors of
collective situation; and finally, stance toward the researcher and the
outside world. Colleagues from milieus close to the camps listened to
the tapes with me and corroborated or contested my interpretations.
Three collective stereotypes dominated most (11) of the 18 life stories
(seven speakers seemed not to express any dominant “self” stereotype).
I labeled them as did the narrators themselves, or my Palestinian col-
leagues: 1) the “struggle personality” (five cases); 2) the “confrontation
personality” (two cases); and 3) “all our life is tragedy” (or “witness to
tragedy”) (four cases).5 The connection of these stereotypes with na-
tional struggle is obvious; so too is their idealized and didactic nature,
projected to multiple audiences—local and imaginary—in life stories
intended as witness to the tragic epic of the Palestinian people, hence
“testimonials” in the full meaning of the term, fusing the personal and
the collective in truth-claiming narratives (see Beverley 1992).
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The “Struggle Personality”: Dominant Stereotype

The prevalence of the “struggle” stereotype is indicated by the number

of speakers who expressed it (five); by its recurrence in the narratives of
all three age groups, bridging differences in educational level and urban/
rural origin; and by the fact that it occurred in the form of isolated anec-
dotes in several narratives dominated by another or no single stereotype.
Formalized in Resistance movement discourse, popularized by war
conditions in Lebanon, the “struggle personality” has both gender and
class connotations, since the human qualities it summarizes—strength,
courage, resourcefulness—are preeminently those of peasant women.
To emphasize the cross-generational transfer of the “struggle personal-
ity” through changing historical contexts, I have selected examples that
span the three main generations described above: Umm Muhammad
(born circa 1900); Umm Sobhi (born 1941); Umm ‘Imad (born 1946);
and Khawla (born 1960).
The oldest of the speakers, Umm Muhammad spontaneously pre-
sented herself in the struggle mode, focusing upon episodes of British
repression. This is her account of a British Army raid on the village of
al-Birweh during the 1936–39 Rebellion:
Someone told the Inkleez [British] that there were revolutionaries hid-
ing in al-Birweh. So they came and captured them and took them to
an open space where there were cactus bushes. It was July. They told
the young men to cut the cactus branches and then they threw them
on top of the young men and stepped on them.

Umm Muhammad’s son was in another group of men ordered to carry

heavy stones. When soldiers barred the way of village women trying to
take water to the men, Umm Muhammad’s response was to resist:
The soldier stood in my way. He said, “I’ll shoot you.” I took his rifle
and threw it on the ground, and I went on with the water to my son
and the other shebāb [young men] under the olive trees. They were
black, black, black, you couldn’t recognize them. I poured water into
my son’s mouth and said, “Share it among you.”

While telling this story, Umm Muhammad energetically acted out how she
had pushed the British soldier aside and seized his rifle. She continued:
 ROSEMARY SAYIGH 
93

The second day they told us to leave the village because the Inkleez
were going to dynamite it. We left for Kafr Yaseef. My daughter Aisheh
was about to have a baby. We went to a relative, Umm Saleh, because
we needed a midwife, but she refused to come. My daughter gave birth
into my hands.

The straightforward juxtaposition of these two anecdotes, one

political/public, the other domestic/private, is characteristic of older
refugee women’s narratives. Pushing aside a British soldier and helping
a daughter give birth in the midst of military repression are moments in
a continuous action of “living the struggle.” Both anecdotes tell of the
speaker’s courage and resourcefulness; in both, Umm Muhammad acts
primarily to help her own children, though her action includes others,
as when she instructs her son to share the water with the shebab.
Umm Sobhi, born in 1941 in a small village near Yafa (Jaffa), first
told her life story in strongly tragic mode. Yet as I continued to visit her,
she told me stories that pointed to her as an exemplar of the “struggle
personality.” Many of these arose directly from her resistance to attempts
to evict her from her home. But the following anecdote comes from an
earlier period, just after the 1982 invasion, when the Lebanese Army was
restoring its control over the Beirut camps:
People came and said that the Lebanese Army were hitting a woman....
I was washing clothes. When I got outside, I found it was true. There
was one of the sisters [i.e., a Resistance cadre], I won’t say her name,
a soldier had got her in an alley and was pressing his baton against
her stomach. No one dared to approach except me. I got closer: “Why
are you doing that? She’s a girl, not a man.” He said, “You’re from the
camp?” I said, “I’m a daughter of the camp like these kids you are
arresting.” He said, “Your children are among them?” I said, “All of
them are my children.” “And this girl, how is she related to you?” “She
is my daughter too. Every Palestinian girl is my daughter, and every
Palestinian boy is my son.”

Umm Sobhi’s courage in challenging a soldier, an action that led

to her arrest and interrogation, recalls Umm Muhammad’s action half
a century earlier confronting British troops in al-Birweh, a form of
physical resistance once specific to rural Palestinian women, and carried
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by them into exile. Yet by confronting a soldier in defense of a comrade

who is not her daughter, and of Palestinian children who are not her
children, Umm Sobhi expresses a political consciousness of the “Pal-
estinian people” formed after 1948 by two major forces: experience of
oppression in exile, and Resistance movement mobilization. Here is
clear evidence of the construction of a national “family,” a development
which women of the camps readily adopted since it consorted with their
existing roles in societal reproduction, always extended beyond the
household family to the local community.
Born in 1946, also a member of the “generation of the Disaster,”
Umm ‘Imad told an anecdote about her adolescence that prefigured her
later role as mar’a nashīta (active housewife). 6 She was around fourteen
years old when Ahmed Shukairy (later first chairman of the PLO) was
allowed by the Lebanese authorities to speak at a public meeting in
Sidon:
I was very enthusiastic and so was my father—Ahmed Shukairy is from
Akka [Acre], our city.... We went there. There were many people sitting
on the seats. He entered and people stood up and began to clap. He
approached the table with a microphone where he was going to speak.
Suddenly, in the middle of that crowd, I jumped up and shouted, “Oh,
Shukairy, we want arms!” And all the people shouted with me, “We
want arms,” and they went down the stairs to where Shukairy was, and
they carried him, shaking him from side to side, shouting, “Shukairy,
we want arms!”

When I first got to know her in Shatila, Umm ‘Imad was married,
with young children, engaged in distributing supplies to people whose
homes had been destroyed in the 1982 invasion. In her life story she tells
how she became a member of the Palestinian Women’s Union, taking
on a broad spectrum of voluntary political activities. Her husband sup-
ported her activism by staying with the children when she had meetings.
In later parts of her narrative, Umm ‘Imad told how she stayed in the
camp during the war of 1982, and continued to work with the Women’s
Union in the period of Army repression that followed the war:
People were afraid, they didn’t want to get involved in national work
after the Resistance had left Beirut.... But we began again, bit by bit,
 ROSEMARY SAYIGH 
95

with struggle, from the beginning. We reopened the Women’s Union.

The Maktab Thani [Army Intelligence] came after us, but we managed
to get a license from the Government allowing us to work.

The ending of Umm ‘Imad’s story was formal: an appeal to the

world for justice for the Palestinian people. The “public” nature of her
narrative was also signaled by her use of her ism al-haraka (movement
name) to identify herself, a rhetorical device to lift her life story into the
wider public domain. This “struggle” stance toward the world was most
marked in the case of Umm ‘Imad, perhaps as a result of her long his-
tory as a Union member. But I felt it was implicitly present in all those
women who readily and without hesitation agreed to record with me in
a time of insecurity. In such a long and unequal struggle, to speak and
to remember is to resist.
Khawla, a member of the “generation of the Revolution,” born in
1960, recollected her childhood in Tell al-Za‘ater camp in the early days
of the Resistance.7
We children used to take food and drink to the fedayeen. In 1973 there
was fighting with the Lebanese Army. The Resistance fighters were
spread out in the mountain. We made sandwiches and went up to the
mountain with them, we took them blankets and jerseys. And on the
way back we filled water gallons and took them to them. I was only six
or seven at the time but I was brave and enthusiastic. Of course my
parents were conservative, so I had to go secretly, with other women.

During the final siege of Tell al-Za‘ater in 1976, Khawla, like other
women, undertook the dangerous task of bringing water from a well
exposed to sniper fire:
I was young, I was thirteen, I used to go out and fill water, from the top
of Tell al-Za‘ater to Dikwaneh, more than a kilometer. There was snip-
ing and shelling. We used to come up carrying the tins full of water, in
the night, running. I swear by God that once I carried a whole barrel.
I’m thin but I used to carry cans of water as big as this [gesture of both
arms], and go back up running.

After the fall of Tell al-Za‘ater, Khawla married, settled near Sha-
tila, and stayed there throughout the Israeli invasion of West Beirut in
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September 1982. She described herself seeking news of her parents after
the massacre, and of her frantic search through the hospitals of West
Beirut to find a wounded sister. She ended her story with her husband’s
death in the third ‘Amal siege of Shatila: “He died. God have mercy on
him. And we are still continuing in our struggle work.”
Dominance of the “struggle personality” in camp women’s narra-
tives has multiple historical roots: in Palestine, where peasant women
participated in the earliest demonstrations against Zionist land purchase;
in the transmission of peasant culture to the camps where refugees of
rural origin formed a majority; in post-1948 Resistance and popular
discourse, which adopted the peasant as “national signifier” (Swedenburg
1990); and in the conflictual nature of refugee history in Lebanon. In
camp meetings at which women were addressed, such as International
Women’s Day, cadres used to pay tribute to “our heroic peasant moth-
ers”; camp housewives appropriated the struggle motif to describe their
domestic and maternal labor (Peteet 1991, 187–98). As is shown by the
quotations presented above, its national and popular character ensured
its transmission between generations, across the urban/rural divide,
and between schooled and unschooled women. What is most interesting
about the “struggle” stereotype is its ambivalence, recalling the epigraph
to this paper: on one hand, conservative in the way it mobilizes women
in occasional action without disturbing norms of domesticity; on the
other, flexible enough to incorporate new elements arising from changed
contexts, as well as encourage personal elaborations.

The “Challenge Personality”: Vehicle of Social Struggle

Manifested by only two of the life story tellers, the “challenge personality”
could be taken as a variant of the “struggle personality,” were it not for a
critical difference. Whereas the “struggle personality” is easily incorporated
into women’s domestic routines, even becoming a metonym for them, the
logic of the “challenge personality” is that, formed in the crucible of na-
tional struggle, it becomes a vehicle of opposition to gendered constraints
in the family. Several of the speakers who incarnated the “struggle person-
ality” voiced conservative attitudes to gender, especially when speaking as
mothers of daughters. But Umm Marwan (born in 1938) and Rihab (born
in 1964) had both challenged gender norms in their personal lives, and
each used the life story genre as vehicle for social critique.
 ROSEMARY SAYIGH 
97

Like most girls of her generation of rural origin, Umm Marwan

had been subjected to coercive marriage. But unlike others, this expe-
rience had kindled in her a life-long rebellion that had taken several
forms, some more far-reaching than others. She had brought up her
daughters differently from the way she herself had been brought up,
putting them through school (she had been unschooled), and refusing
to let them marry until they had obtained professional training. Such a
stance is not unusual among camp women deprived of schooling. But
Umm Marwan had taken her rebellion further than this, cutting herself
off from her family of origin after her husband died:
According to our traditions, the family of the father dominates, but in
our case they didn’t want the children. My family were near me.... they
came, they tried to dominate, I didn’t want it.... I wanted to raise my
children myself, so that we would become friends. I separated myself
from people for fifteen years, I was outside my family. They had forced
me to get married, that was it! I didn’t let them impose anything on
me, nor on my children. I stood against them.

An important strand in Umm Marwan’s story was women’s need

for professional training and economic independence, ideas still not
widely accepted in camp milieus. She herself had worked to keep her
family together and maintain their independence, defending her at-
titude thus:
Work isn’t shameful. I encourage women to work and to struggle.... A
woman shouldn’t depend completely on a man.... Maybe her husband
will come and tell her, “You are divorced. Goodbye!” He will give
her the mu’akhar, 8 and throw her out. The money won’t feed her two
days.

It is revealing to compare Umm Marwan’s critical views on Pales-

tinian gender norms with those of another woman of similar age, Umm
Noman. The latter told me that she had raised her sons to be patriots
and fighters, but had refused to allow her daughters to work outside
the home, either in politics or in paid employment, because this might
damage their reputations. Umm Marwan acknowledged the danger of
sexual harassment in the workplace, but said that a girl must learn how
to resist such pressures.
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Umm Marwan’s revolutionary ideas and practices seem to have had

no other antecedents than personal experience, since she belonged to a
generation that came to maturity before the Resistance movement. But
Rihab’s story shows how the practice of resistance against an external
enemy can be turned inward against family and societal gender norms.
Rihab was one of the youngest speakers, a student at the time of the
invasion of 1982, Her narrative expressed the “challenge personality”
both as dominant format for representing the “self” and as embedded
in her narrative in a series of confrontational episodes. The first of these
was her earliest recollection when, aged six, she witnessed the liberation
of Shatila camp from Lebanese Army control (1969). Confrontation is
played out again in another key episode, in the aftermath of the war of
1982. Their home in the camp had been damaged, so Rihab went with
her mother and younger siblings to a house they owned outside Beirut:
We went to the house, but there were Kata’eb9 in it.... They used the
pretext, “Your days are gone, Palestinians, this house is ours.” I am
a fanatic Palestinian, I couldn’t tolerate such a situation.... We had a
hunting rifle. I loaded it with a cartridge. I told them, “Now get out or
I’ll demolish the house over your heads....” They left and we stayed in
the house until the schools opened.

Battles structured Rihab’s narrative to a degree unparalleled in

those of other speakers, marginalizing the personal. She tells of her
divorce in a single sentence: “After finishing secondary [school], I got
engaged, then married, then divorced.” Though curtailed in her narra-
tive, divorce appears to have been a “critical juncture,” a moment in her
life when Rihab turned the capacity for challenge she had learnt in the
Resistance against societal gender constraints. This is suggested obliquely
in the context of remarks about Palestinian women in general:
This matter [independence] will need a long struggle, struggle in the
sense of conflict—with parents, with society, and with the whole en-
vironment. At the time I got married and divorced, it wasn’t easy for
a girl in our society, or in the camp, to divorce. A woman has to fight
opinions—I won’t say traditions, because we are Arabs.... Success or
failure depends on her “long breath.”

Elsewhere she forcefully asserts her independence:

 ROSEMARY SAYIGH 
99

I will choose my life according to what suits me. And there’s no way
that anyone can impose things on me. I have this revolutionary logic
not only in my national work but also in my personal life. Of course
they are linked.

Both Umm Marwan and Rihab were of rural origin; the older was
self-taught, the younger had reached university; Umm Marwan had
worked as an employee (outside the PLO) for most of her adult life, and
may have belonged to the mar’a nashita category (insecurity at the time
of recording made it impossible to ask about political activity); Rihab was
mutafarrigha (a full-time Resistance cadre). Older women tell stories of
women rebels and nonconformists, and it seems likely that, however rare
its occurrence, the “confrontation personality” is not the product of a
particular historic period, class, or diaspora region, but this is a hypoth-
esis that needs testing in historic Palestine and other diaspora areas. Leb-
anon perhaps gave greater scope for social rebellion because it provided
a wider basis for women’s economic independence. But a close reading
of these two narratives suggests that the primary element in forging the
“confrontation personality” is a determination to follow out an inescap-
able “logic.” In Rihab, the “confrontation personality” is an essential
expression of the “self” rather than a theme of incidental anecdotes, a
full-time occupation rather than an occasional irruption into politics.

“All Our Life Has Been Tragedy”

Frequent use of this phrase framed certain narratives as illustration of

national tragedy, and the narrator as witness and embodiment. More
collective in its reference than the other two modes, it was nonetheless
“personalized” stylistically and through specific content. One example
must suffice, that of Umm Noman (born in 1937, of village origin, un-
schooled).
Umm Noman gave a chronicle of displacements and loss, imper-
sonal in its focus on war and family, expressive in its bare factualism.
She began, “All our life has been lost,” and then, as if for an official reg-
ister, went on to give me the full names of two sons who had been killed
and a third imprisoned since 1976, whereabouts unknown. She then
listed all the homes she had been displaced from, in most cases through
war, beginning with Kabri (Palestine), and going on to south Lebanon,
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the Beqa‘, Nahr al-Bared camp, Bourj al-Barajneh camp, Tell al-Za‘ater
camp, and Shatila camp, where her home had been destroyed twice (in
1982 and 1985). She commented, “Since I was born I saw nothing in my
life but wars.” Part of her story ran thus:
We stayed steadfast in Tell al-Za‘ater camp for three months under
bombardment. We were living death. There was no more food. No
more water. No more medicine. They treated people who got wounded
with salt. Za‘ater fell. People went down and surrendered themselves
in Dikwaneh. From Tell al-Za‘ater to Dikwaneh we were walking on
Palestinian corpses thrown on the ground.

Umm Noman ended her story with the death of a newly married
son in the third siege of Shatila. When she had finished speaking, awed
by the painfulness of her story, I felt unable to ask her for details, though
hers was the briefest of all the recording sessions. Just as a way of closing
down, I asked her if she had anything to add. She answered:
To be honest, I don’t have anything more to say. Don’t be offended, but
I’ve given many interviews before. I’ve talked a lot. A long, wide life
we’ve spent telling our reality and we got nothing from it.

“We got nothing from it”—this is the theme echoed by Nazira

(born 1948, of urban background, a PLO employee), who said, “At the
end, all we are is widows and orphans.” As dominant frame for life
stories, this contains generational specificity, since it was women of the
“generation of the Disaster,” whose brothers, husbands, and sons were
of an age to join the Resistance, who suffered most losses. There is an
element of regional specificity also, in that Palestinians in Lebanon bore
until recently higher losses than other regions. Moreover, their emphasis
on sacrifice and loss makes it possible to read their stories as implicit cri-
tique of the PLO for having abandoned the refugees in Lebanon. A final
point not to be forgotten is that the figure of witness, or truth-teller, is
a positive one in Palestinian and Arab culture, and legitimates women’s
presence in public space.

The “Sitt fi’l-Beit”: A Latent Stereotype?

As I noted earlier, more than a third of the life stories (seven) did not
seem to express any dominant “self ” stereotype. In seven of the life
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101

stories there appeared no dominant collective stereotype. Does this

weaken my argument for their existence in the other life stories, and
for their historical/cultural significance? I would argue, rather, that the
characteristics of the seven exceptional cases usefully suggest situational
factors that influence the formation of collective stereotypes. Two of the
exceptions had left Shatila long before and were living abroad, while a
third had left after the “War of the Camps” and was living in a suburb of
Sidon. This suggests that residence in a “popular” Palestinian milieu is
a condition for the transmission of stereotypes, with separation tending
to produce more individual or fragmented narratives. Generation and
socio-economic status may also be factors that intervene in the forma-
tion of “self” stereotypes: three others among the exceptional cases came
from the oldest set of women, two from families that had prospered
enough in Lebanon to move into a suburb bordering the camp, while
the third was of urban origin, a woman whose husband had kept her
shut up at home.
Setting the absence of a dominant “self ” stereotype within an
analysis of all narrative structures used by Shatila women for telling life
stories helps to clarify the relative weight of various factors—residence,
age, education, socio-economic status, relation to the Resistance move-
ment—that may influence the formation of a “self” stereotype. In spite
of sharing so much (national identity, refugee status, local community,
somewhat similar class background), the 18 speakers differed from each
other as life story tellers in several significant ways: 1) in autonomy and
coherence of narration; 2) in the degree that national history formed part
of the structure of the life story; and 3) in the degree and form of asser-
tion of a “self.” All but three of the nine oldest speakers (unschooled) dis-
played hesitation when asked to tell their life story, and needed questions
from the audience or myself to move from one episode to another. Most
of the older speakers began their narration at the point of expulsion from
Palestine, returning to earlier recollections only if prompted, and seldom
referring to other historical events, national or local. Another narrative
characteristic of older women’s self-stories was their use of the collective
“we” rather than the personal “I.” Because these speakers depended on
audience questions, their recordings are multi-vocal and unstructured,
a collection of personal anecdotes rather than “life stories” in the clas-
sic sense. Thus their “self” emerges gradually, through relationship to
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others, personal anecdotes, expression of personal opinions, beliefs, or

tastes, just as it would in everyday social interaction. In contrast, most
of the younger women told life stories that were autonomous, composed,
sequential (usually beginning at birth, or with their earliest memories),
and that followed national chronology more or less closely. It was these
more spontaneous narratives that offered the clearest expression of col-
lective stereotypes for women’s “selves.”
Age and educational level might be seen as critical differentiat-
ing factors in producing autonomous life stories. Palestinian refugee
women born after 1945 were beneficiaries of free basic schooling, and
a minority were able to reach university level. But that education does
not necessarily produce narrative autonomy is suggested by the fact that
three out of the nine oldest women, all unschooled, gave autonomous
narratives dominated by the “struggle” personality stereotype; while
among the nine younger speakers, all with some education, four gave
fragmented narrations without a dominant “self ” stereotype. Out of
two younger speakers of similar age and educational level (primary), the
one who had worked with the Red Crescent gave a life story structured
by the history of Palestinians in Lebanon, dominated by the “witness
of tragedy” stereotype; whereas the second, of higher social status, and
affiliated less formally with the Resistance, gave a fragmented narrative
in which family relationships figured more strongly than the speaker’s
“self.” Although the number of speakers permits only tentative conclu-
sions, I would argue that political activism is a more decisive factor than
education in producing a strong “self” stereotype.
Indeed a high educational level may work against the formation
of clear “self ” stereotypes, by introducing narrative complexity and
introspection. Dalal, youngest of the 18 speakers (born in 1964, of ur-
ban background, ex-Resistance cadre), who had taken some university
courses and had read socialist feminist writing, gave a deeply intro-
spective narrative, revealing a damaged “self” torn between Resistance
activism and desire for a lost femininity. Fayrooz, a struggling writer
living in London, spoke ambivalently of her life and recollections of
Shatila. The brightest of her generation, she had worked and emigrated
and succeeded in transferring her whole family out of Lebanon. But
when I recorded with her, she was asking herself why she had sacrificed
her ambition as a writer. For her Shatila was a place of misery and back-
 ROSEMARY SAYIGH 
103

wardness that became “home” only in retrospect, in contrast with other

more alien places.10
In a final comment on the seven exceptional cases without a collec-
tive “self” stereotype, I would argue that they are actually dominated by
an unvoiced stereotype, that of the sitt fī’l-beit (the lady-in-the-house),
an urban, middle-class Arab ideal of adult womanhood. Repressed
because of its incompatibility with the discourse of national struggle,
repressed by gender norms that prevent women from forming an as-
sertive “self,” this stereotype is realized through accounts that focus
on the domestic, particularly the birth and care of children. Except for
the cataclysm of 1948, the events of Palestinian history in Lebanon are
absent from the “stories” of housewife speakers. Anecdotes—often skill-
fully narrated—are set in a family context. A basic discrimination used
by Resistance women activists about women of the camps as either “close
to” or “far from” the Revolution confirms the existence of the housewife
model among camp populations.

CONCLUSION

From a feminist perspective, the “struggle personality” deepens the

association between women and domesticity by making it part of na-
tional ideology. The second dominant stereotype, “witness of tragedy,” is
clearly one that preserves gender norms by restricting women’s activity
in public to a few limited roles. These formats can be seen as “subjec-
tifying” women, casting them in gender moulds that they perform and
transmit through narration to other women, thereby producing history.
Yet they can be listened to in another way, as expressing the self-worth
most camp women feel in being women, a pride in gender identity
that sustains them in many kinds of daily life struggle, and that can
have cumulative importance. Stories women tell about themselves as
exponents of these (and other) collective stereotypes assert that their
nationalism is no less than men’s, that they eminently possess qualities
such as courage and steadfastness, readiness to speak, and accuracy in
reporting, required by national struggle. Pride in being Palestinian and
women was expressed not only in affirmations of identity, but also in
claims to qualities such as patience, self-control, and capacity for work
that women see themselves as possessing more than men do. Pride in
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being women is essentially ambivalent, affirming gender “difference”

and stabilizing the division of labor that goes with it, but also laying
claims to recognition and equality. It is certain that when women recode
child-rearing and housework as “struggle,” they are making important
claims about the national importance of their work and hinting at the
national movement’s dependence on them. A corollary of such claims is
acknowledgement by national historians that history cannot be written
without full attention to women’s role and the “domestic domain.”
Given the centrality of gender to the construction of collective
identity and the way “self ” concepts incorporate collective identities,
questions may be put to the interplay between nationalism and gender
in Palestinian women’s representations of the “self.” Do they represent
the national leaderships’ “nationalization” of gender or do they contain
an important element of women’s own “gendering” of nationalism? As
historical and cultural configuration, could the “struggle” configuration
be redirected into social struggle or is it too deeply imbricated with na-
tionalist associations? What may be said with certainty is that women’s
life stories are an indispensable enrichment of national history: they
offer a view of the interpenetration of the “public” and the “domestic,”
how national tragedy is reflected at the family and personal level in the
refugee camps, and how that level sustains resistance. They are thus an
indispensable element in explaining the persistence of the Palestinian
struggle in the most adverse circumstances.

NOTES

The author was not able to carry out revisions of this article because of
war circumstances.
1. For a critique of traditional Biblical scholarship, see Keith Whitelam, The Inven-
tion of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (London: Routledge, 1996).
2. On the gender conservatism of Palestinian refugee communities, see Sirhan
1975 and Peteet 1991, 134–41.
3. The term stereotype used in this essay comes from Luisa Passerini who
defines it in historical and cultural, not psychological, terms.
4. Age: the speakers were born between 1900 and 1965. Origins: 14 came
originally from villages, four from cities. Marital status: seven were married, seven
widowed, three single, one divorced. Current socio-economic position (with home-
ownership as a rough guide): two owned homes outside and inside the camp; three
 ROSEMARY SAYIGH 
105

owned homes outside the camp; six owned homes inside the camp; four rented
outside; and three were homeless. Employment: five had never worked outside
the home; three had done casual labor after 1948; one had worked (after being wid-
owed) in the family shop; six were employed by the PLO/Resistance; three were (or
had been) employees in other institutions.
5. The Arabic forms are “al-shakhsiyya al-nidāliyya,” “al-shakhsiyya
muwājahiyya,” “kullu hayatna māsā.”
6. Umm ‘Imad was of urban origin and had completed UNRWA schooling.
7. Tell al-Za‘ater camp was besieged and destroyed by the Lebanese Forces
during the Civil War of 1975–76.
8. A second part of the marriage payment, usually held back in case of divorce.
9. A mainly Maronite, Lebanese nationalist party, strongly anti-Palestinian.
10. Two of Fayrooz’s stories, “Mandelbaum Gate” and “Umm Amer,” were
published in Shabnam Grewal et al., eds., Charting the Journey: Writings by Black
and Third World Women (London: Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1988).

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