Khetabat min Gidat Felastine (Letters from Grandmothers of Palestine) by Ibrahim Shalabi, Al-Ahlia Publishing, 2023, Volume I pp 118, Volume II pp 111

Looking at the essence of collective Palestinian memory – in details
 

The present cannot be lived without recalling the past, and the future cannot be gained without owing to the past. This could well represent the one-line resume of this two-volume book, Letters from Grandmothers of Palestine (Khedtabat min Gidat Felastine). This book is a set of imaginary correspondences that author Ibrahim Shalabi put together to collect some of the many thoughts associated with the heritage and history of Palestine that had been passed from one generation to another before and after the Palestinian Nakba of 1948.

These “letters” are essentially focused on the less-spoken-about-element of the Israeli-induced Palestinian Nakba: the receding presence of daily habits, cultural elements, and social norms that are deeply rooted in the collective Palestinian consciousness and memory and that represent the core of Palestinian identity.

In one of the letters, a Palestinian grandmother asks her son to ensure that his daughter has the required skills to perform the Dabke dance, cook traditional Palestinian dishes, including Maklouba, and do traditional Palestinian embroidery.

In another letter, the grandmother asks her son to be fully aware of the responsibility lying on his shoulder to pass the authentic Palestinian traditions to his children, “who would be the 4th generation of Palestinian diaspora – away from beloved Jaffa and dear Palestine.” The grandmother tells her son that she is passing things “from her memory to his” and asks him to keep on passing the memory from one generation to another, pending Al-Awda (The return to the land of Palestine).

With a set of letters covering all the key cities of historic Palestine, Shalabi offers the reader a glimpse of the associations and symbols of each of the cities. Jaffa is the land known for its tremendous orange gardens, Jenin for hosting camps for refugees of the Palestinian Nakba, Tulkarm for having the first-ever Palestinian university built in 1930 “with a donation from an Iraqi Jew,” Akka for being a previous centre for a flourishing tobacco industry and large olive and fig grooves, and ultimately Bethlehem for being the nativity city of Jesus Christ.

The letters also remind us of the need to keep the Palestinian heritage to refute the false Zionist narratives that claim that Palestine was a desert brought to life by the Zionist immigrants. “Don’t believe the Zionists” is a line often appearing in several letters in the book’s two volumes.

Also subject to frequent references in the two volumes are “anecdotes” of the flourishing life that Palestinians enjoyed with their beautiful houses — rich or poor — the promenades they went on, the musicals and concerts they attended, including those of Oum Kolthoum and AbdelWahab, and the cinema theatres and plays they frequented.

The paths of Nakba-inflicted Palestinians are reflected on across the letters — those who were scared off by the Zionist gangs into running away to neighbouring Arab countries, those who had to leave after the 1967 war, those who ended up in the Arab Gulf countries, North America, and Australia, and those who still live in refugee camps where life is seemingly safe but inevitably challenging.

The letters that Shalabi composed are based on a good deal of research, especially the extensive records of Palestinian oral history collected by several organisations, the Arab press of the early phase of Nakba, which carried the time accounts of Zionist attacks on Palestinian villages, and the history books written on the Palestinian plight.