Daar Al Falasşini Home, Family and Identity Among Palestinians in Britain
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Daar al Falasşini Home, family and identity among Palestinians in Britain Joanna Claire Long Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD in Geography Queen Mary, University of London January 2011 1 I hereby declare that the work presented in this thesis is entirely my own. SIGNED Joanna Long 2 ABSTRACT What do home, family and identity mean for diasporic populations? What kinds of practices, relationships and spaces are involved in making these things come alive on an everyday basis? What does an understanding of this contribute to discourses of Palestinian identity in particular and scholarship on diasporic identity more broadly? These questions are central to this thesis, which is based on qualitative research interviewing Palestinians in family groups and as individuals in their own houses. My findings are discussed in three parts. The first explores notions of al beit (house) and the practices that bring domestic spaces to life. I argue that physical living spaces are enrolled in family practices of identity but that both Arab/Palestinian family life and British domestic space adapt in the process. The second part explores the geographies of Palestinian families, how people negotiate these through everyday practices and how migration has precipitated a re-imagination of family and a reworking of family relationships. The third part explores the dynamics of social groups and collective identity, including the multiple identities and the range of ideas and conversational practices through which Palestinian social relatedness is enacted. I argue that the loss of family proximity can create opportunities for new kinds of meaningful relationships but that family remains an important coordinate for social relations through which historical family geographies of Palestine are reproduced. Examining the convergence of house, family and collective identity in this way is crucial to understanding the lives of diasporic Palestinians, as it reveals the everyday processes through which hegemonic constructions of Palestinian-ness are imagined, challenged and (re)produced. More broadly, this thesis advances the case for an integrated approach to the study of home, family and identity in diasporic contexts as a means of constructing a richer portrait of what it means to „be diasporic‟. 3 CONTENTS Abstract 3 Contents 4 Tables and Figures 6 Acknowledgements 7 1 An introduction 8 Four narratives 10 Diasporic possibilities 14 Palestinians in Britain 18 Outline 20 2 Approaching diasporic lives 23 Diaspora and identity 23 House, home and dwelling 29 Relatedness and roots 38 Collective identities, community and beyond 47 Conclusion 58 3 Researching Palestinian voices 62 Theoretical foundations 62 Research process 68 Working with families ‘at home’ 83 Participants 90 Conclusion 96 4 Spaces and practices of al beit 98 Dwellings 100 Articulating home 116 4 Spaces of identity 118 A psychology of domestic space 129 The social lives of houses 133 Conclusion 147 5 Geographies of Palestinian families 149 New family geographies 151 Elsewhere 162 Strategies of intimacy and relatedness 165 Family fil beit 180 Conclusion 191 6 Practising collective identities 193 Stories of home 195 Overlapping identities 209 Producing Palestinian relatedness 225 Conclusion 245 7 Conclusions 247 Appendix A: Transliteration and glossary 258 Appendix B: Map of Palestine 260 Appendix C: Interview themes 261 Bibliography 263 5 TABLES AND FIGURES Table 1: Research questions 60 Table 2: Anonymised overview of interview composition, size and number of meetings 70 Figure 1: Footprint of a typical English terraced house 131 Figure 2: Wadad and Tawfiq’s ground floor 139 Figure 3: Map of Palestine (1946) 260 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks to all the participants in this research for sharing their thoughts and experiences, for being so generous with their time, and for making the whole research process such a pleasure. I am also grateful to those who facilitated this research by kindly forwarding my appeals for participants to their friends and acquaintances. I am indebted to Sarah, Pete, Des and Marie for allowing me to stay with them, often at short-notice, during my various research trips, and to Caron Lipman for her invaluable advice about dictaphones. I would like to say a very big „thank you‟ to my friends and family for their support throughout the whole process, particularly Felicity for helping me to keep my feet on the ground and Shelley for the music that took my feet off it. Special praise is reserved for Ian, Marcin, Przemek, Raúl and Martin who contributed more than they know and more than I can express to my wellbeing and sanity over the past two years. Finally, this thesis and the work behind it would not have been possible without the guidance, support, understanding, flexibility, commentary and encouragement of my supervisors, Alison and Catherine. Thank you both for everything. 7 1 AN INTRODUCTION Alifa: I don‟t know if it‟s to do with the Israeli occupation [inaudible] – the other Islamic countries, they do have different accents but they‟re not so varied – but in Palestine you just pop from one village to another and it‟s just completely different. The way they pronounce different letters is just- Ilyas: in a small geographical area the diversity not only in ethnic origins but also in accents and dialects and the use of language- of course it‟s all based on Arabic language, however, the way-, even they mock, you know, they [mock] each other because it‟s so different. […] Ibrahim: we sometimes call it the city accent and the village accent or the farmer‟s accent Ilyas: or the peasant accent [Laughter] Alifa: no, farmer Ibrahim: I prefer farmer‟s accent [Laughter] Alifa: like they would call my husband a farmer and I would say to him, although he says he has farmed, I think you can‟t really call yourself a farmer. Ibrahim: […] how come you say „you farmed‟ and you don‟t want to call me a- how do you define then a farmer? Ilyas: the one who has a farmer‟s accent!! [Laughter] Alifa: he did for a while because […] his mum and dad were banned from working because of political reasons and for that small period of time they lived off farming but really they were teachers. So how can you call teachers farmers? Ibrahim: you can be- you can be both. You are making it a bit complicated, you can do both things at the same time. […] Ilyas: the concept of a farmer in Europe, especially in the UK, if you are a farmer you are rich, you are high class, you know. It‟s the other- well it‟s not now but in the past you look, a farmer he‟s the poorer guy who works on the land or Alifa: a bit uneducated Ilyas: but it‟s just a joke, it‟s not really- but you know the accents, coming back to accents and dialects, […] [the] diversity from the north of Palestine to the south of Palestine, it‟s unbelievable […] I think you can do very many PhDs on this. [Laughter] 8 This is an edited extract from a group interview conducted with the Haniyyah family in the summer of 2008. I have chosen to open with this scene because it signals some of the key themes and debates I will explore in this thesis, as well as some of the methodological and ethical concerns that underpin it. Prominent here are the contested politics of individual and collective identity. Ibrahim lays claim to the identity of „farmer‟ and dismisses Alifa‟s argument that his parents were „actually‟ teachers, asserting instead that it is possible to occupy both positions (and both identities) simultaneously. Their debate about accents also highlights the way in which a specifically Palestinian identity connects with and differs from other identities (Islamic and Arabic) and how these selective overlaps open up a range of possibilities for group belonging that include but also exceed Palestine. In a related sense, however, the extract also points towards issues around belonging and diasporic life, particularly the way in which belonging to a Palestinian collectivity is at least partly about positioning oneself (or being positioned) within a social hierarchy and of negotiating the politics that go along with that positioning. In the process, the very existence of a well-established and structurally-developed Palestinian society is asserted based on the remarkable diversity of accents, although Ilyas later went on to explain how these are shifting in the context of diasporic life. These issues around diasporic identity have much to do with the variously contested relationships between individuals and groups such as „family‟, „community‟ and „nationality‟. How did Ibrahim come to personally identify as a farmer? How does this connect with his parents‟ engagement in farming and his after-school participation, and what part might have been played by nationalist imagery of Palestinians bonded to the land through having worked it? The ways in which people navigate such questions around their identity positions in relation to others will be a key focus of this thesis. At the same time, the range of spaces in and through which individuality and collectivity are negotiated need to be drawn out in order to understand what these might mean for a sense of „home‟ in diasporic contexts. Nation and homeland have already been mentioned and allusions have also been made to the „diaspora space‟ of participants‟ lives, but questions remain about how other, more 9 intimate, material, everyday spaces figure within processes of Palestinian identity- formation. This thesis will explore the production of diasporic identities among Palestinians in Britain through the lenses of domestic space, family relationships and social groups. In the process, I will demonstrate the interrelatedness of home, family and identity, as indicated in the title, daar al Falasşini.