Occupied by Memory: The Intifada Generation and the Palestinian State of Emergency

6. “In the Beginning . . . but Afterward . . .”: Moral Chronologies and Reassessments of the Intifada

“In the Beginning . . . but Afterward . . .” Moral Chronologies and Reassessments of the Intifada An individual’s claim in telling his or her story will often be both to consistency and change, both to coherence and development. Narrators thus establish that they are both the same person they always were, and a different person, too. Thus stories change both with the quantity of time (the amount of experience the speaker had accumulated) and with the quality of time (the aspects which she or he will want to stress at the time of the telling). . . . At what time in the life cycle the story is told is, however, a crucial factor in its shape. —Alessandro Portelli It’s so hard to understand Why the world is your oyster but your future’s a clam It’s got you in its grip before you’re born It’s done with the use of a dice and a board They let you think you’re king, but you’re really a pawn —Paul Weller In conducting popular memory research, I often found that my own desire to explore the “subjective” recesses of memory seemed to conflict with the expectations many interviewees brought to the conversation . These expectations, I think, were rooted in the assumption— mistaken perhaps, but entirely understandable—that despite my stated interest in intifada stories, I must really be interested in getting “information ,” in finding out the “facts.” Ashraf, the young sociology student who introduced me to the Abu-Hawila family, was the person most 6 163 openly uncomfortable with what was, to him, a contradiction between his own inclinations toward “scientific” research projects and my tendency to ask what must have seemed like very unscientific questions about memory. At the end of our first interview, he unexpectedly broke off our conversation, saying he wanted to offer a “commentary” (tafialīq) on my research. The three of us (Ashraf, Mohammed, and I) then had the following exchange: A: You’re looking for memories of the shabāb from the intifada at a time when they are becoming more independent in their personality and their way of thinking . . . and this causes a kind of interference. J: You think this affects the way that they remember. A: You have a new situation now with the [Palestinian National] Authority . M: But Ashraf, what he’s talking about now are your memories of the intifada time, OK? You’re twenty-four years old now, right? A: Yes, twenty-four. M: He’s asking you, these memories are from a time when you were sixteen , and then another eight years passed, right? Now you’re twentyfour years old, so of course you’ve changed—you’re not Ashraf the sixteen-year-old boy, you’re a more educated Ashraf who has a B.A., who has his own independent opinion and so forth. . . . So does this awareness actually make you reflect on your memories from when you were sixteen? Does it influence them? A: Of course it influences them. J: For me, that’s one of the things that makes this interesting. A: OK, but memories are just history. M: [Laughing] Do you agree with him? J: Maybe, maybe. When I think about memory, I think about it in terms of the relationship between the past and the present. A: The past is past, and there isn’t anyone who has the ability to return yesterday to us, much less ten years ago. It’s better to think about the future. Ashraf’s obvious frustration with my queries may have signaled a desire to close the door on a past marked, in his mind, by tragedy and by the failure of the intifada to achieve its goals. It also signaled that he was quite aware of what I was trying to do with my research: the injunction 164 | “In the Beginning . . . but Afterward . . .” to “think about the future” and to leave “history” where it belongs (“The past is past”) can be read as an attempt to shore up the kind of progressive, linear narratives associated with nationalist projects in general against a conceptual framework that cannot help but disturb such narratives. Yet Ashraf can hardly be characterized as an uncritical follower of his own mainstream nationalist leadership; on the contrary, as we will see below, he adamantly insists that the leadership was responsible for “aborting” the intifada. Equally important, in reminding me that the “youth” of...