Permission to Caption

[“Yasmine and Fatima”, C-Print, 2003. By Alessandra Sanguinetti.] [“Yasmine and Fatima”, C-Print, 2003. By Alessandra Sanguinetti.]

Permission to Caption

By : Amahl A. Bishara

Ever since the start of the first Intifada in 1987, the West Bank and Gaza have become the center not only of Palestinian politics but also of international coverage of the Palestinians. On the ground, these processes of media production are collaborative and dialogical. Working with visiting journalists, photographers, and other media makers, Palestinians translate, set up interviews, and navigate checkpoints. They not only interpret Arabic; they also interpret facial expressions, city streets, and landscapes. But once the visiting media makers go home and material is edited, published, and circulated, Palestinians can be cut out of the conversation. The media produced by international visitors often take on an authoritative voice, the voice of someone who has “been there,” while the Palestinians who are still “there” do not always see the final results of these projects.

As a media ethnographer, I believe it is important not only to trace the routes that media most often travel—for example through major media organizations like the Associated Press and CNN—but also to create new routes for ideas and images. Of course it is essential that more Palestinian political perspectives are represented in mainstream US news, but I have a slightly different goal in mind. We should bring in the kinds of voices underrepresented in mainstream news anywhere: those of poor people, those without a formal education, popular activists, women, youth, and others. In the Palestinian case, this also means focusing on refugees. Moreover, we should bring into political discussions a consideration of everyday life and an awareness of community histories. It was in this spirit that I began collaborating with friends at Lajee Center, a community organization in Aida Refugee Camp, Bethlehem, to ask youth to interpret images of their community that circulate internationally.

These youth, ages sixteen to twenty-two, are active photographers themselves. So the goal was not only to start a new kind of dialogue about images, but also to give the youth the chance to look at a wide variety of photography to help them develop their own work. My local Palestinian collaborator and one of the participants in the workshop, Mohammad Al-Azza, is the director of the Media Unit at Lajee Center. He gave us our name: “With Our Ideas, We Take Our Portrait.” It rhymes in Arabic: “Bi fikritna min sawar suritna.”

We started with the work of Magnum photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti, an Argentinian-American photographer who visited Palestine twice in the early and mid-2000s. As her best-known work then had been in Argentina, she saw Palestinian communities with a fresh eye, at a time when the wounds of the second Intifada were raw. One major project of Sanguinetti has been to chronicle the relationship of two cousins as they grew up in rural Argentina. In other of her work, she chronicles interspecies relationships in a farm there. These are stunning images that thematize childhood, growing up, and the inextricability of violence and everyday life; they suggest a depth of imagination and emotion in ordinary settings.

In Palestine, Sanguinetti encountered a new landscape, cast of characters, and political context, but she continued exploring relationships among people and between people and their surroundings. First, our group discussed the images, over Skype and online, and then we had a Skype conversation with Sanguinetti herself. The participants asked a number of excellent questions about her work, and then Sanguinetti asked one of her own about how the youth viewed people like her who came in to do such photography projects and left. A young woman replied that Sanguinetti went well beyond the usual parameters of international representations of Palestinian society, beyond explosions and blood and oppression. It was clear Sanguinetti was welcome back, any time.

After this, the participants wrote their own short essays about Sanguinetti’s photographs. We’ve selected a few to share with you in the post "With Our Ideas, We Take Our Portrait: Reflections on the Work of Alessandra Sanguinetti." We hope to continue this series with more of this youth commentary on photography about Palestinians. And perhaps we’ll see some of their photography as well!

The Swallows of Syria

[Note: The views and testimonies herein are the refugees’ own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author or of Jadaliyya.]

Somaya left Homs, Syria after finding the corpse of her tortured son in a sewage ditch. Zaynab escaped with her family when she discovered that Syrian soldiers kidnapped, raped, and killed three of her schoolmates. Aziza fled after snipers killed both her husband and sister-in-law. Reports indicate that refugees and residents have also been subjected to abuse and assault by unknown, non-regime, fighters.

Thousands of other Syrian women like them have escaped to Lebanon and are hiding in small villages within a few kilometers of the border, at the mercy of secret service agents allied with the Assad regime. Far from the safety of the refugee camps in Turkey, here, Syrian women live in constant fear of being kidnapped or killed. Frightened that registering with the UN will make them vulnerable to a potentially hostile Lebanese government, these women hide in filthy basements and makeshift tents while consuming their last meager savings to barely survive in a country that doesn`t want them.

Ignored by the Lebanese government, which refuses to recognize them as refugees, they cannot work and raise money for their families. While local Lebanese families initially host some of them, they soon must look for a place to rent. Separated from their relatives and friends, and unable to send their kids to school, some are even starting to question the outcome of the Syrian revolution, regretting the peaceful life they used to live before the Arab Spring.

I collected the personal stories and pictures of more than twenty Syrian women, and recorded their feelings of grief, bitterness, and hope for the future of their country. All of them are face-covered to protect their safety.

Captions

Jdeideh, Lebanon - Karam, twenty-eight, from Homs. Her house was in Baba Amr, right in front of the Syrian Army tanks. The Free Syrian Army helped her during the clandestine trip to Lebanon. “They showed us the way, they kept my little baby safe ... If it weren`t for them, we would not be here today.”

Jdeideh, Lebanon – Asma, thirty, from Al-Qusayr. "One day they knocked at the door. When I opened it, I was carrying my baby in my arms. They asked me where my husband was, and I told them he was not in. So one of the soldiers took out a knife from his pocket and cut my baby`s throat who died in my arms."

Jdeideh, Lebanon - Tara, twenty-five (left, holding her son), escaped from Baba Amr, Homs. She left Syria after they destroyed her house. Her husband stayed to help his father. She is still hoping to hear from him. Unfortunately, her family knows that the Syrian army killed him one month later, but they would rather not tell her.

Jdeideh, Lebanon - Rasha, twenty-seven, from Soran. Besides her husband and two children, the rest of her family is still in Syria. Rasha would like to settle in Lebanon. One of her brothers serves in the army, and she is concerned the Free Syrian Army might kill him.  

Sahl el Faqaa, Lebanon - Somaya, fifty-six, from Talbiseh, on the outskirts of Homs. Masked soldiers arrested her 31-year-old son Ali during a raid on her house. Three days later, his severely tortured body was found in a nearby sewage ditch. “He had a huge wound in the stomach, one of his arms was broken, and both kneecaps had been removed,” she recounts. She now lives in Lebanon with two of her sons, who work as laborers in the nearby fields to raise some money.

Jdeideh, Lebanon - Nour, five, from Al-Qusayr, escaped Syria with her mother and brothers after living in an underground cave for almost three months. A Lebanese family is now hosting her. Nour is still psychologically traumatized by the war. Every time she hears the bell ring, or someone knocking at the door, she starts to panic and cry thinking that the Syrian army is here to get her.

Tripoli, Lebanon - Samira, twenty-eight, arrived from Hama, with her four children. She had to take five cars and bribe her way through the military checkpoints up to the Lebanese border. It cost her four hundred dollars, four times her husband’s average monthly wage. She now lives in Tripoli. “I miss the soil of Syria, the land”, she explains, before bursting into tears. “We live in misery here. The kids do not go to school, and every time my husband is late I become hysterical, fearing that he might have been stopped at a checkpoint and sent back to Syria.”

Jdeideh, Lebanon - Najiba, sixty-three, from the village of Soran. She arrived in Lebanon after the first protests erupted in Hama. “The Army was shooting at everyone, I remember seeing fifty or sixty people dead.” She now lives in a concrete shed in an orchard. In exchange for looking after the trees, she can stay for free. “I would go back to Syria tomorrow, if it were not for the kids. I am very worried about their safety,” she explains, pointing at the four grandchildren she lives with.

Jdeideh, Lebanon - Aziza, thirty-five, a Turkmen Syrian from Al-Qusayr. She fled her home after sniper fire killed her husband and sister-in-law (whose kids she is now raising) while going to the souq. She constantly goes back to Al-Qusayr to check on her father, whose health is deteriorating fast. She lives in a makeshift tent camp in the Beqaa Valley, where she picks fruit to survive. She gets paid less than five dollars for seven hours of work per day.

Tripoli, Lebanon - Zaynab, sixteen, from Al-Khalidiya, in Homs. She fled with her family after the army repeatedly knocked at their door to look for her father. An honor student, she was unable to attend lessons after soldiers kidnapped, raped, and killed some of her schoolmates in January. Zaynab is taking care of her father and her siblings who are all mentally disabled. When asked what it is that she misses the most from home, she replied: “The smell of Homs.”