Join Hearing Palestine and the Institute for Palestine Studies for the launch of 11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exile in an online event, featuring Nadia Fahed, Perla Issa, Muhammad Ali Khalidi, and Diane Riskedahl, on March 30th at 12pm ET / 6pm Palestine. 11 Lives is co-published by the Institute for Palestine Studies and OR Books.
About the book:
The 11 lives given voice here are unique, each an expression of the myriad displacements that war and occupation have forced upon Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948. At the same time, they form a collective testament of a people driven from their homes and land by colonial occupation. Each story is singular; and each tells the story of all Palestinians.
As Edward Said argued in 1984, the object of Israel’s colonial warfare is not only material—seeking to minimise Palestinian existence as such—but is also a narrative project that aims to obliterate Palestinian history “as possessed of a coherent narrative direction pointed towards self-determination.”
In these pages, Palestinian refugees narrate their own histories. The product of a creative-writing workshop organized by the Institute for Palestine Studies in Lebanon, 11 Lives tells of children’s adventures in the alleyways of refugee camps, of teenage martyrs and ghosts next-door, of an UNRWA teacher’s dismay at the shallowness of her colleagues, and of the love, labour, and land that form the threads of a red keffiyeh.
What unites these 11 stories is “the inadmissible existence of the Palestinian people” highlighted by Said. Their words persist, as one contributor writes, “between the Nakba and the Naksa, throughout defeats and massacres, love affairs and revolutions.” The stories of Palestinians in exile are also open-ended, and will continue to reverberate across borders until Palestine is free.
Muhammad Ali Khalidi (Editor & Translator) is Presidential Professor of Philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center, where he teaches and publishes in the philosophy of science. He has written on various aspects of the question of Palestine, including Palestinian refugee rights. His edited volume, Manifestations of Identity: The Lived Reality of Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon, was published by the Institute of Palestine Studies in 2010. He has translated a wide range of texts from Arabic into English, including the collection, Medieval Islamic Philosophical Writings. He was born in Lebanon to a Lebanese mother and a Palestinian father.
Perla Issa is a researcher at the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS) in Beirut. She holds a PhD in Politics from Exeter University, an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, a second MA in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, and a Bachelor degree in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University. Her PhD dissertation “Palestinian Political Factions: An Everyday Perspective” was the 2015 joint-winner of the BRISMES Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize for the best UK doctoral dissertation on the Middle East. Additionally, she co-Directed and co-Produced a six-part independent documentary film series "Chronicles of Refugee" that looks at the global Palestinian refugee experience since 1948.
Nadia Fahed (Author) is a Palestinian refugee from Burj al-Barajneh camp in Beirut. She holds a degree in Journalism from the Faculty of Information and Documentation of the Lebanese University and has done academic work towards a graduate degree in Media and Communication Sciences at the Lebanese University. She has worked as an editor, program creator, and producer for Filastin al-Yawm (Palestine Today) TV station. She is also a founding member of the Palestinian Media Association in Lebanon.
Diane Riskedahl (moderator) is a linguistic anthropologist in the Anthropology program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) who studies language practices as a key site for meaning-making in daily life. She has been engaged in long-term research in Beirut, Lebanon and has written about the relationship between language and politics, analyzing both state and civil society rhetoric with attention to political uses of historical memory, kinship metaphors, and interactions of orality and literacy. Currently, she is pursuing an ethnographic project on private refugee sponsorship groups in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). She is particularly interested in issues of ambiguity in both written and spoken discourse. She has taught courses on language and identity; media and publics; language ideology and political economy; language and migration; ethnographic fieldwork methods; and the politics of the everyday in the Middle East.
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