I am a historian of art, material culture, society, and ideas. I am an archives and rare books worker. I am a writer: of essays, of criticism, of academic work, of fiction—although right now that’s just for me. I am a curator who desperately wants to keep working in museums, even though I’m uncomfortable in them most of the time. And I am Palestinian. It is because I am Palestinian that I can tell you that objectivity—in history-writing, in the archives, in museums—does not exist.
The Palestinian hills, with stone terraces to help the olive trees grow. Photo provided by the author.
I mostly grew up in Palestine, with a few odd years here and there depending on where my parents were employed. But mostly Palestine. Palestine was where I learned how to ride a bike, foraged for herbs in the hills, and read science fiction outside under a tree. My parents taught me how to treat the Israeli occupation as ordinary, that I could take away its power if I did not think it was scary. I walked through checkpoints to go to school and developed reflexes I still have, that kick in whenever I’m threatened. Palestine taught me when it is appropriate to make myself small or big, depending on what’s going to help me survive. And from Palestine I also learned nuance: my mother is not Palestinian, but Mexican-American, and despite the fact that the Israelis treated her like they did the rest of us, despite the fact she served our community so well, she was never accepted by Palestinian society. When Israel forced my family out of Palestine, I had become so tired of everything.
But even though I left Palestine, Palestine came with me. It came with me into the classroom, as a student taking my first university class in Islamic political thought. At the time, I considered pursuing history as a career, and it was that class that did it. I was 19, still shell-shocked from my first academic year in America, my first time really living in the US; I had visited before, but I’d always been shielded from American society by my family. So Islamic political thought, after a lifetime of living in many Muslim-majority countries, felt familiar especially when feeling so lost. As the class progressed, I didn’t like the predominant narrative I was seeing in scholarship; I remember being angry when reading the seminal text Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age by Albert Hourani, published in 1966. While scholars often laud it as the text in Arabic-language intellectual history that started it all, I felt context was missing and I could see gaping holes, despite my lack of conventional historical training at the time. I called the text Islamophobic for its focus on Islamism, but I was told by other undergraduates, most of whom knew so little about Islam, that I didn’t know what that meant.
Classes ended and I pushed back in my own way. For my term paper, I tried to bring in more of the context. I knew this historical narrative mattered, in a way I don’t think my classmates did. And unlike them, I wove in primary sources. My bias as a Palestinian meant I knew how to write history without being told: I knew what the sources were because I had seen them in my life in Palestine under occupation, and I knew what the consequences of telling different historical methods were.
The author with her grandfather. Photo provided by the author.
I didn’t end up working on Palestine for my dissertation; it’s not even my primary project right now. But it’s in there; Palestine is in my choice of subject, my desire to document ordinary lives, to make sure they’re heard. It’s in the sources I choose. I reach for objects and texts that have been important to the people I love. I think of my grandfather and the way he dressed, which he told me spoke to his own belief in Palestinian liberation. I barely remember him without a hattah, or keffiyeh. He would get dressed, the family would have breakfast, and then he and I would disappear for long walks, full of stories about his life. He was my first history lesson; it was he, not a history book, who told me of the 1936–38 Great Palestinian Revolution, the nakba, the naksa, and even the 1987 Intifada.
My grandfather also adored my mother. After his death, my mother carried on his work, and she was the one who fueled my love of Palestinian art. It is her that I credit for my love of art history, for my taste. She took me to Armenian pottery studios, the first of which were founded in the early 20th century by David Ohannessian, the grandfather of the flutist and historian (and my dear friend) Sato Moughalian.1 My mother and my grandfather—and the Palestine in them—are why I love Islamic visual culture and contemporary Arab art; it’s about the details, the little symbols sewn in. I would not be able to pick up on them if I was not Palestinian. I would not be a historian or a writer if not for Palestine.
But just as Palestine shapes how I see history, I know that bias is everywhere. At times, I embrace it in the work of others: when an anthropologist uses their parent’s disability to tell a story of medicine and religion, or when a historian draws in their memories of a grandparent reading. I however reject the bias in much of the work I read about Islam, which fetishizes Islam or reduces the past to an Islamophobic narrative. I even see this bias in the archives, where finding aids and other resources contain language that casts Palestinians as inherently violent, when all we are is in search of liberation. And these voices are the same ones that tell me I think too emotionally. I’ve been told at conferences or in written comments on my work that my view is ahistorical, because I stoutly acknowledge my own context or footnote something a religious teacher told me; I get told my vision as a Muslim or a Palestinian is blurring my scholarship.
The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (Creative Commons).
I tune all of this out. I know I’m a better historian than they are. I see my expertise outstripping theirs when scholars of the modern Middle East can tell you what a white historian said about a given topic, like the fez, but can’t tell you what songs are core to Palestine’s resistance movement or that kifta (kofte) is a family of dishes, not a single dish. These same scholars can’t tell you how diverse Palestine is, that there are Afro-Palestinians, Ahmadis, Armenians, Assyrians. It makes them uncomfortable that I know these things and always have. I didn’t have to go to school to learn it from a book. And that when I do read those books, I can critique them on an ethical basis, I can tell them of the negative consequences of their methodology or their historiography, when maybe all they have is Foucault. This should be our foundational methodology as historians, writers, educators: that when bias does harm, it is unethical. And perhaps when history is unethical, it should not be history.
I’ll likely end up outside the academy. I want to work in cultural heritage: I’ve been working in the field for the past few years. I like being part of a world where the final product isn’t a book, but an exhibition or a digitized collection; I like finding colleagues who think of the ethics behind everything we’re doing, who I can engage for hours on whether or not the Western gaze is in a collection of art photography. Part of me, a small part, thinks there is more freedom there, more recognition that my biases make for a stronger art critic or curator. Then I remind myself that all my exceptional colleagues thus far are the exception and not the rule. I remind myself the world is full of whiteness—in scholarship, archives, museums, and more—and that my colleagues don’t want to be told they’re not objective, to be told of their harmful biases, or to be told that my biases make me a better scholar. The objectivity myth is not going to die any time soon, is it?
Abu Dis checkpoint in East Jerusalem. Photo by Kashfi Halford (Creative Commons).
- For more about Sato Moughalian and her grandfather, listen to episode 1 of the podcast Knowledge and its Producers, hosted by N.A. Mansour. The episode is an interview between Moughalian and Mansour. Also see Sato Moughalian, Feast of Ashes: The Life and Art of David Ohannessian (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019)
