A New Generation of Returnees: Challenges in Memory Projects with Refugee Youth in Lebanon
“What use is it to remember now?”
These were the words of some Palestinian elders, as a response
to our field team's questions regarding the recalling of the
expulsions of 1948, a project that Al-Jana undertook in the year
1998, the fiftieth since the “Uprooting.”
“Nobody teaches us history”
This is the comment made by a group of refugee boys when
approached by a researcher who asked them how they would respond to
the question “who are you?” Some boys said they were Muslims, or
from Shatila camp, or both, others said from Palestine, but did not
know where from exactly.
Analyzing the views of the elders and children who made these
comments, although they are not representative of all, still
indicate that the “Nakba generation” are no longer passing on their
stories as eagerly as they used to; the schools have stopped
enlightening the young about their history and culture; and the
major influences on the identity of the children come from the
electronic media, some dogmatic interpretations of religion, and a
vague and uninspiring nationalist discourse.
After sixty years of refugee existence that still has no end
in sight, and living in a country that subjects them daily to
violence and discrimination, Palestinians in Lebanon experience
oppression on more than one level. On one level, they suffer the
denial of basic civil rights, the lack of appropriate and relevant
schooling, and the lack of prospects for decent employment and a
secure future. On another level, their insecurities, anxiety and
lack of faith about their present are all magnified by being denied
the hope of returning home.
The Palestinians in Lebanon have become ghettoized communities
under considerable pressures to disperse to new places of exile,
and to forget.
During a presentation on “historical memory, identity and
creative expression in work with Palestinian children” that I gave
at a May 2000 conference for community workers in Guatemala city,
one Guatemalan women who attended pointed out that some children
who returned from exile in Mexico to Guatemala, considered
themselves Mexican; other children said they were Guatemalan but
didn’t know why. It is important to note that Guatemalans spent
twenty years in exile compared to the sixty one years of the
largest and longest standing of the world's refugee
populations.
In facing these challenges we in Al-Jana feel that it is
important to focus our energies on several urgent tasks.
The first is toengage elders and youth in as many stages of
oral history or oral culture projects as possible. From the
conceptualizing stage, to the recording, discussing the results, to
the production of cultural and learning resources. Along these
lines, Al-Jana has undertaken two projects since 1998, the fiftieth
year since the 1948 Nakba.
One project which is relevant to discuss here is Ya Baladna
Leish Hajartina (Our Country why have you Forsaken Us) which
focused in part on answering the questions that we collected from
the fourth generation of refugee children and youth, about the
uprooting of 1948. Many of these enlightened questions are not
answered in the official Palestinian national history. We collected
the testimonies of 116 Palestinian women and men, a total of 140
hours of recorded interviews. Using this material, we worked to
produce an active learning pack consisting of a story book, twenty
testimonies, activity sheets, a video and a CD of recorded
testimonies and 'Ataba (lamentation songs) about the Uprooting. The
resource pack was tested with many children and educators before it
was published in the year 2000.
In their words, the elders who volunteered to give their
testimonies were taking part in a mission to pass on our
history to the grandchildren, our hope. As if in answer
to the question by some elders of “what use is it to
remember.”
The second main focus has been to facilitate the process by
which people of all ages can reflect and share enriching and
empowering experiences. People in the camps of Lebanon have
survived all forms of adversity through resourcefulness, community
solidarity, creative problem-solving, sheer will power, courage and
stamina. These are qualities that young people need in order to
deal with the challenges they face every day, and those that lie
ahead.
Some of these profound human experiences should be shared with
people around the world. A team of women from Al-Jana is working
with a group of women in Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp to document the
empowering experiences of the women and girls who lived under
Israeli occupation of south of Lebanon from 1982-84, while the men
and youth of their community were incarcerated in Israeli
concentration camps. Those women and girls reconstructed the
destroyed camp and undertook ingenious initiatives in community
building and civil resistance. These interviews are developing into
forums for the exchange of experiences, and the whole process
is being documented in a film directed by Dahna Abu Rahmeh and
produced by Al-Jana.
A third important focus is the transformation of historical
and cultural memory into exciting experiential learning activities
for youth. These activities should involve young people in doing
critical research with resource people in their community, and
expressing their views in creative ways that engage both adults and
children.
In a sense, this process embodies a double dialectic that
involves a community to youth and a youth to community learning
cycle. The second project undertaken by Al-Jana in 1998 was “We
exist”: Palestinian refugee children record their lives and express
their hopes.In this project a group of thirty children (between
the ages of ten and twelve) embarked on a four year active learning
and creative expression journey, that started with working
individually on family diaries. The work of the youth developed
into a kind of photo-journalism, and led to several creative
expression projects.
The children moved on to the ”young book writers” project, and
at the end of the second year (2000), the group published their
bi-lingual I wish I were a bird book in both Arabic and
English. The book included their different individual and group
projects, artwork, photos and statements, ending with moments of
hope in their lived experiences, that they can build on. Since
2000, the book has been printed in Spanish, Italian and
German.
The young book writers later worked on the “young filmmakers”
project, where they worked on three of their scenarios with three
filmmakers to produce films that received awards internationally.
The young photo-journalists, who worked on this project in groups,
chose the issues that concern them and then researched these
issues. It is noteworthy that all the groups of young journalists
chose to collect testimonies from elders on the 1948 Uprooting, and
they published some of them in the book. This goes to prove that
the fourth generation of refugee children who were born in the
camps, 50 years after the uprooting, care to know their history and
make the effort, when given the chance.
The fourth vital task is transforming oral history and oral
culture archives into an accessible hands-on, youth-friendly
resource, where keen librarians can engage children and youth and
facilitate the discovery process, through which young people find
that critical research is not only useful, but also fun.
Our pedagogical framework involves choosing projects that
engage youth in participatory research, critical thinking, creative
expression and the production of pro-active materials that will
inform and engage community members, decision-makers and young
audiences around the world. This process-oriented, problem-posing
approach, builds on the pedagogical ideas and methods of the
Brazilian educator Paolo Freire’s empowerment education; the
growing use of “photo-voice” (photos that voice the concerns of
people about their lives and rights); digital story-telling and
“photo-novellas” (picture stories) created by underprivileged
communities; and the importance of learner-developed materials as
empowering products that help participants discover themselves as
makers of culture and agents of change.
For any serious effort to succeed in engaging young
Palestinians in exile in learning from and building on the rich
historical experience, and cultural contributions of their
communities, it has to become an integral component of a wider
concerted grassroots struggle by all concerned bodies, including
Lebanese civil society, and the Palestinian communities at large,
for attaining civil rights, and the right of return and
restitution.
A struggle that rises from real popular participation in
decision making on all issues that concern the community, and which
capitalizes on the creative and positive energies of young people
and their volunteering spirit. A struggle that gives all the hope
that after sixty years in exile people can make a difference.