Sami Hermez with Sireen Sawalha, My Brother, My Land: A Story From Palestine (Redwood Press, an imprint of Stanford University Press, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Sami Hermez (SH): This book has been twenty years in the making. I would be lying if I could explain what made me write this in a few sentences. The reasons built on each other, transformed, and changed altogether. In a few words, I wrote this book to contribute to the archive of Palestinian experiences and memories. I wrote it as a form of resistance—that if people could feel the determination and heartache imprinted into the Palestinian struggle, they might be motivated to act. I wrote because I wanted to bring to the page the full life of a Palestinian resistance fighter in a way that would let the life story tell itself—“free of explanation,” in the manner of a novelist, as Walter Benjamin would say. When I first embarked on this project, suicide bombing was on everyone’s mind, the film “Paradise Now” had just come out, and I wanted another way to contextualize these actions, to make readers understand the lives of those who might engage in such acts. A story of one family could go a long way to help understanding oppression and resistance in ways that a traditional scholarly monograph could not.
As I dug deeper into the family’s story, I realized there was so much more than just telling the story of one activist, and that the Sawalha family story would give the reader an even broader sense of what it is like to live under a settler colonial regime and how people might resist such oppression. More than this, I realized very quickly that this would be a story of life in a Palestinian village, and I felt this was important because most nonfiction accounts on Palestine deal with many of the city centers and are from the perspective of notables rather than peasants. Finally, Sireen is such a fabulous storyteller that when I originally heard her tell some of her stories, I felt the world needed to hear about them, and that was probably the first motivation.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
Sireen Sawalha (SS): I like to think that My Brother, My Land addresses the history of Palestine and the struggle of a single family living under occupation—a struggle that I see mirrored in almost all Palestinian families. In the book, you will see that the conditions of occupation scatter my family around the world and leave my mother dealing with our absence. The book gives readers a close glimpse into life in a small village that is a haven for my family, but it also looks at the dark moments we suffered through, as the Israeli regime tightened its grip over us and our land over three quarters of a century.
SH: I see this book straddling a number of fields—anthropology, oral history, creative writing, memoir, Palestine studies, and Middle East studies. Here, I want to just note the intervention in anthropology, given that is my main disciplinary background. I hope what this book will do for anthropology is take more seriously the discipline’s injunction to tell the stories of people, because in the face of oppression we have nothing but our stories. Methodologically, the book challenges the limits and meaning of ethnographic writing. What constitutes ethnography? We know it is not simply the process of doing research, but also the process of writing—we do ethnography in the field but we also write ethnography and write ethnographically. What does this mean? This book will call on anthropologists to grapple with these questions. In this sense, while ultimately a work of creative nonfiction, it is also a thought and writing experiment in ethnography. The work also calls on us to question how we work with our interlocutors and involve our sources, and it carves out a different way of relaying and weaving together history. One last point relates to redefining the notion of authorship between the writer and storyteller/subject and how to work between the oral and written text. There are many ethical questions that emerge in working so closely with someone to tell their family story. I think this book forces us to think about these questions and to strive to do better for those who entrust us with their stories.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
SH: The book is a significant departure from my previous work. While it continues to be motivated by a concern for understanding violence and resistance in the context of the Levant, its style and purpose is very different. In both works, I try to be attentive to stories and to highlight the way political violence is experienced in everyday life. However, in this work, the purpose is to reach a wide public, and I chose to center storytelling rather than classical theorizing. I wanted to experiment with allowing the story to do the work of theory, and push the reader rather than the anthropologist to do the work of interpretation. In both works, I am interested in memory and how the past is retold. Whereas in my first book, War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (2017), I look at how others retell and remember, in this one, I was invested in how I would do the retelling and representing of memories fused with violence. In this work, unlike the previous work, I tackle questions of incarceration, suspicion, armed resistance, and rather than be situated in a city (Beirut), I draw out stories of a small village in Palestine.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
SS: I hope everyone reads this. We wanted the book to make its way into the homes and hands of the widest range of people. I really hope more Western readers and the younger generation, who will have an impact on the future, read it. They are the ones who can stand with the Palestinian cause and help bring peace to the region. My Brother, My Land offers readers an intimate look at the daily life of one family out of millions of Palestinian families scattered around the globe. Readers will see the way we live and how one family fights the occupation in their own way. Without people’s support and empathy, Palestine will never achieve recognition as a state. Palestinians deserve to live freely in their ancestral land. Most Western nations do not recognize us as citizens and inhabitants of this land, despite our thousands of years of history here.
SH: In addition to what Sireen said, I hope the book makes its way into high school classrooms, but also into college level ethnography and Middle East studies courses. I wrote the book the way I did because I wanted people to feel the Palestinian struggle. I think we both hope the story will move people to act.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
SH: Currently, I coordinate a working group for the Arab Council for Social Sciences (ACSS) on Critical Security Studies and I am a research fellow with Security in Context. Through this work, and especially through a hub in Qatar of the ACSS working group, I have been developing and initiating work on rethinking and reimagining critical security from the Arab region. I have also begun new work based on stories told to me by a time traveler and cannot wait to share the full extent of what this person has seen, especially when it comes to the way of life in the Levant region. I hope this will contribute to how we think of the subfield of Anthropology of the Future and the possibilities of this field.
Excerpt from the book (from the Prologue, pp. 1-2)
Visitor’s Room, an Israeli Prison, 1999
Returning to the prison consumed all of Um Yousef’s energy. Afterward, she remained in bed all day. But like the full moon, she had to return. She had to see her son. For in his absence, her chest was tight, her breaths suffocating.
“Habibi, ya ʿeni, how are you?” she asked him excitedly.
“I’m good. God makes things easy,” Iyad responded, his face lit up with joy. Then he paused and glanced around. “Where is the Haj?” he asked his mother.
“Abuk kan taʿ ban. Your father was tired the past two days. He didn’t think we would be able to see you,” replied Um Yousef. Iyad met his mother’s words with a slight frown and lowered eyebrows. He nodded. His father had been dealing with diabetes for over ten years.
Sireen examined her younger brother as he exchanged words with their mother. She could see him panning the room, as if still expecting their father to emerge from the shadows. His broad shoulders shrugged at the news. She saw her eyes in him— earthy, with a blend of green and brown, now shim-mering against his short, dark beard.
It was hard to imagine, despite all the years that had gone by with him in prison, that my brother had been involved in resistance activities. That my brother was a prisoner of war.
She thought back to the last time she saw him free, a time before she had left for the US. The two of them were brother and sister, this was true. But they might as well have been strangers leading separate lives. Strangers who left indelible marks on each other.
Sireen had been around in Iyad’s early years. She had spent many hours telling him stories and taking him on imaginary adventures. But it had been a decade and a half since they had lived under the same roof. A decade and a half since their paths began to diverge.
There is one story I always remember. The story of Shater Hasan, the brave, smart, hardworking Hasan. In my version, Hasan falls in love with the king’s daughter. The king agrees to let them marry on condition that Hasan is able to retrieve a stolen jewel on the peak of a mountain. Seven hills, each guarded by a hyena that Hasan has to outwit, stands between him and the peak. It is a near- impossible task. Sometimes the story took me two nights to complete, and Iyad listened to every word. Shater Hasan is ultimately able to outmaneuver the hyenas, free the jewel, and live happily ever after with the king’s daughter.
“Sireen, I miss your stories,” Iyad blurted out.
Sireen smiled. It was as if the two of them were little again.
He wanted her to talk about her life, but the prison walls did not inspire her. She glanced at her mother. Although she knew there was tenderness underneath, their relationship had always been rocky. She did not want to discuss her problems in the US around her. And Iyad would likely not understand or might take their mother’s side anyway. She decided the less they knew, the better, so she stuck with generalities.
Mother and sister sat with Iyad for over an hour that day. His face was bright and alive, the two women were all smiles, they all laughed together, and he felt rejuvenated. But there were moments when they avoided eye contact and fidgeted, studied their hands, repeated questions they had already asked about Iyad’s health and whether he had enough food. When they felt the sting of the place and were reminded of the walls around them. Walls within the walls of occupation within which each of their lives was framed.
Before they left, Iyad pleaded with Sireen to help him. “Sireen, you have to get me out. Use your contacts in the US. Don’t leave me here.”