American University of Beirut Reorientation Toward

AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF BEIRUT

REORIENTATION TOWARD FUTURE: LIVES AMONG THE PALESTINIAN REFUGEES FROM SYRIA (PRS) IN LEBANON

by WEN-YU WU

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts to the Centre for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the American University of Beirut

Beirut, Lebanon September 2015

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My sincere gratitude goes to Umm Youssef’s family, for the generosity to take me in as a family member and the care I have been receiving. I would like to thank Nawra, a dear sister and friend, whose trust and help have been enormous. The memories we shared have been far more engaging than I had expected, and I am very grateful. My sincere appreciation is extended to friends and families who generously let me participate in their lives, and whose warmth is unforgettable. And to Akram, who never hesitates to give me a hand. May God protect you on your journey.

I would like to extend my warmest thanks to Professor Sylvain Perdigon for his guidance, patience and encouragement throughout the year. It has been an inspiring journey of thinking and writing. I would also like to thank my committee members: Dr. Anaheed Al-Hardan and Dr. Sari Hanafi, for their advice and critique.

Special thanks to Michael Schwerin, whose timely (and enormous) editorial help, careful reading and suggestions on previous drafts made this version possible. To Dr. Amy Zenger, May Habib and Timothy Eddy, for their reading and comments on drafts of chapters. To Sarah Al-Jamal, Ghinwa Najem, and Raffi Kazjian for their kind support with Arabic translations throughout the research period, and for their lovely company. And to friends in Taiwan, especially Tsai Bow, for her constant care, and Yi- Fan, for sharing her thoughts at the beginning of the project.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents Yu Mei-Ling and Wu Fu-Tai, and my Aa-Mà, for their trust and love.

AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF

Wen-Yu Wu for Master of Arts Major: Middle Eastern Studies

Title: Reorientation toward Future: Lives among the Palestinian Refugees from Syria (PRS) in Lebanon

The media coverage of the ongoing predicament of the Palestinian refugees from Syria (PRS), the reports of NGOs intervening amongst them, and the calls for international attention of UN agencies officially responsible for them tend to focus squarely on their basic and urgent needs. Portrayals of the “twice-displaced” community contribute to perpetuate a monochrome picture of weakness and dependency. The so-called “refugee issue” entails much more than the lack of food or housing. This thesis hopes to complicate the representation of this group of refugees as primarily victims in need of humanitarian relief. Refugees have experienced existential upheavals. The processes of cooping with loss and adapting to new social environments entail individual, familial, and communal decisions, plans and efforts, in contrast to the image of passive recipients of aids and foreign interventions. Through an ethnography that focused on a small number of individuals and families, this project explores the temporal experiences through which the refugees struggle to maintain, or produce, under extraordinarily adverse circumstances, the orientation toward the future that constitutes a fundamental dimension of a life worth living.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... v

ABSTRACT ...... vi

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Chapter 1. CRISIS: THE ARRIVAL OF ADULTHOOD AMIDST LOSS ...... 17

1.1. Many Proposals and Refusals ...... 19 1.2. A Confusing Try ...... 21 1.3. Negotiations Continue ...... 28

2. CHALLENGES: RETURNING AND WITNESSING ...... 32

2.1. Returning: Lebanon and the Youthful Days ...... 34 2.2. Witnessing as a Member of the Palestinian refugees ...... 37 2.3. Re-living the Young Self ...... 41 2.4. A Mother’s Witnessing ...... 43 2.5. And the Efforts ...... 48

3. HOUSE, APPLIANCES AND INVENTIVENESS FOR FUTURE ...... 50

3.1. The Challenges ...... 51 3.2. Creating, Re-creating and Dispositions ...... 56 3.3. Inventiveness and Connections ...... 61 3.4. Uncertainty Remains ...... 65

4. MEMORIES AND THE PRESENT ...... 67

4.1. Visualizing Sbeineh Camp of Syria ...... 68 4.2. Memories Triggered in the Present ...... 70 4.3. Memories in Actions and in Images ...... 72 4.4. Reminiscing as if Dreaming ...... 75 4.5. More Memories, Pleasure and Pain ...... 78

vii

4.6. Memories in Lebanon ...... 82

5. DISTANT FUTURES ...... 84

5.1. “Chauffeur al-Farsha” (the Driver of the Cushion) ...... 88 5.2. The Stagnant Life ...... 89 5.3. Saying Goodbye to Salah ...... 91 5.4. Syria as the Home to Return ...... 93 5.5. Akram’s Changing Plans ...... 95 5.6. Hope in the Passage of Time ...... 99

CONCLUSION ...... 103

REFERENCES ...... 107

viii

INTRODUCTION

It is often assumed in media accounts of the Palestinians’ predicament that the right of return, sanctioned by UN General Assembly Resolution 194 and backed by various texts of international law, sets the coordinates of the future in contemporary

Palestinian refugee communities. However, since refugees have been all but set aside in the political negotiations for the future of Palestine since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the perspective of returning to the homeland that the first refugee generation left in 1948 has been ever receding on the temporal horizon of many Palestinian refugees. While it is undeniable that the Palestinian diaspora is fundamentally attached to the right of return, the experiences of Palestinian refugees vary broadly across the Middle East according to the different political contexts of the host countries (Chatty, 2010). Three generations of the refugees have been going through countless political upheavals, conflicts, and foreign interventions, with many of the refugees being displaced for the second time (or more) in those processes (i.e. the mass expulsion from Kuwait in 1991, the crisis in Libya in 1996, and the Iraq War of 2003). Most recently, the Syrian civil war (2011-Present) has led an estimated 54,000 Palestinian refugees to flee from Syria to Lebanon, where they face a highly uncertain future at odds with what life in Syria had prepared them for (UNRWA, 2015a).

The media coverage of the ongoing predicament of the Palestinian refugees from Syria (PRS), the reports of NGOs intervening with them, and the calls for international attention through the UN agencies officially responsible for them tend to

focus squarely on their basic and urgent needs—food, water, shelter, and security.1 This not only frames humanitarian activities and aid in a manner that does not address the full scope of refugees’ needs, it also inevitably creates, more generally, an asymmetric relationship in which the agency of the refugees is negated from the start (Bourdieu,

2000).2 Portrayals of the “twice-displaced” community contribute to perpetuate a monochrome picture of weakness and dependency. The so-called “refugee issue” entails much more than the lack of food or housing. Refugees have experienced existential upheavals including the sudden loss of property, separation from friends and family members, the suspension of careers, the halting of education pursuits, and the canceling of marriage plans. Now they have to confront the challenges of integrating in a new social environment with no definite knowledge of how permanent this integration is supposed to last. These processes constantly entail individual decisions, efforts and participation in communal affairs, in contrast to the image of passive recipients of aids and foreign interventions. This thesis hopes to complicate the representation of this group of refugees as primarily passive victims in need of humanitarian relief. Through an ethnography that focused on a small number of individuals and families, this project explores the temporal experiences through which the refugees struggle to maintain, or produce, under extraordinarily adverse circumstances, the orientation toward the future that constitutes a fundamental dimension of a life worth living.

1 This is not to deny the basic needs of the refugees. UNRWA and many NGOs provide assistances that are critical to the refugees’ lives. I thus do not refer to these reports so as to avoid counter effects at the time when resources are indeed scarce for some. However, the media exposure of these needs overwhelmingly simplifies the refugees’ experiences, and this research thus wishes to complicate the picture. Through an ethnographic encounter, I address the situation regarding receiving aids (see Chapter 3, p. 51-52).

2 Bourdieu (2000) wrote that excluding the possibility of giving back, “the very hope of an active reciprocity, which is the condition of possibility of genuine autonomy” is likely to “create lasting relations of dependence, euphemized variants of enslavement for debt in archaic societies” (p. 200).

Palestinian Refugees in Syria

Prior to the Syrian War, Palestinians in Syria had enjoyed a wider range of civil rights than had Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. In the 1950s, several items of legislation were passed to incorporate Palestinian refugees into the social-economic structure of Syrian society (Law no. 260, 1956).3 Along with other government services, the rights for Palestinians to receive education, have access to healthcare, enter labor markets and practice professions were equivalent to those of Syrian citizens (Brand,

1988; Chatty, 2009; McCann, 2008). A government institution, the General Authority for Palestinian Arab Refugees (GAPAR, formerly named Palestine Arab Refugee

Institution, or PARI), was established in 1949 to regulate and administer refugee affairs

(Brand, 1988; Gabiam, 2012). Refugees were eligible not only for elementary schools and basic clinics provided by the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA), but also secondary and higher education, along with the medical system provided for the citizenry by the Syrian government. According to the survey reports by Tiltnes

(2003; 2007), the Palestinian refugees in Syria on average had better living conditions, better physical and mental health, lower illiteracy rates, and a higher labor force participation rate than camp dwellers in Lebanon. The Yarmouk Camp, from which many Palestinians refugees have fled to Lebanon since the conflict spread across

Damascus in 2012, was one important commercial center in the city and performed substantially well in terms of camp dweller’s income, level of education, and living conditions (Tiltnes, 2007). As Palestinian refugees could enjoy such relatively stable

3 The most notable law passed in 1956, Law no. 260 indicated: “Palestinians residing in Syria as of the date of the publication of this law are to be considered as originally Syrian in all things covered by the law and legally valid regulations connected with the right to employment, commerce, and national service, while preserving their original nationality”.

conditions in Syria, their lifeworlds were oriented by and toward the futures which they could reasonably expect and were preparing for. For instance, students were investing in their studies or vocational programs as they were preparing themselves for jobs they desired; young adults in their twenties could conceive a plans for marriage; shop owners ran their businesses while expecting a steady or growing income. Overall, and allowing for inevitable variations between individuals and hiccups in individual trajectories, these preparations for and expectations toward predictable forthcoming life events were in line with those of mainstream Syrian society; no major exclusion from opportunities differentiated the practical manner in which Palestinians and Syrians looked toward the future in Syria.

Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon (Palestinians of Lebanon, PoL)

While Palestinians in Syria share a similar degree of opportunities and rights as

Syrians in the social sphere, such as education and employment, the majority of

Palestinians in Lebanon are far behind the average Lebanese households in this respect.

Palestinians in Lebanon have been living in conditions of disenfranchisement under a variety of discriminative laws that limit their eligibility to practice certain professions and their access to water and electricity (Khalidi, 1995). Christian Palestinians were exceptionally naturalized in the 1950s in order to increase the numbers of the Christian constituency (Sayigh, 1994). The rest of the Palestinians in Lebanon, who remained refugees, have to hover in gray areas of laws and regulations to be able to work and sustain household needs. Many have to work in the informal economy, earning less than the legal minimal wage. Unemployment, frequent job changes and insecure working environments constitute a major part of their day-to-day uncertainty. Social exclusion

and being “othered” are also frequently experienced. The few of them who have obtained college degrees and work as teachers or in other professions often have to accept lower salaries and do not enjoy the social security benefits that their Lebanese colleagues receive. As for education, unlike the situation in Syria, where the gate of public education is opened to Palestinians, Palestinian children in Lebanon can only count on the limited educational resources offered by UNRWA and other NGOs

(McCann, 2008; Siklawi, 2010). Their future horizons diverge from those of their

Lebanese neighbors from the very beginning of their lives.

This organized social and political exclusion of Palestinian refugees originates in the fragile sectarianism of Lebanese politics. Since the refugees are in their majority

Sunni, the fear of changing the so-called sectarian balance has translated since the

1950s onwards into a Lebanese public discourse and a series of governmental measures seek to keep at bay “implantation” (tawtin), the naturalization of the refugee population.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) strength, politics and actions in the country during its civil war have also contributed to fears surrounding the Palestinian presence in Lebanon. The departure of the PLO’s leadership in 1982 as a result of the

Israeli invasion marked a major blow for the Palestinian Resistance Movement (PRM), a military and political movement that had enjoyed its heyday in the preceding decade.

Camp communities not only suffered the disarray of political leadership, but were also subjected to more conflicts and violence (Sayigh, 1994). Bearing the unhealed scars of the past, the Palestinian community continues to face societal hostility and institutional discrimination. The struggle for the community’s existence is not only a political one, but also concerns economic needs and material survival that are, in fact, dominating the day-to-day life. Camp residents continue to suffer from, while devising strategies to

deal with, underdeveloped infrastructure, the deprivation of rights to travel, to work, and to receive proper healthcare (Allan, 2014).

This long-time institutional discrimination has contributed to form and shape the temporal horizons of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon in a manner distinct from those of Lebanese citizens: the younger generation knows from the start that it will be very difficult to transform their educational achievements into jobs of an equivalent value; parents and teachers try to raise and educate children while knowing that their life chances are very limited no matter the efforts that students might make to prepare themselves for the future. The uncertainty of income and welfare also habituated refugees to a particular temporality of life: many workers go to work every day not knowing if they will still have that job by the end of the day. In order to escape these conditions, many have moved abroad, often taking the increasingly dangerous route of

“illegal” migration (Allan, 2014). Such circumstances are, amongst other things, what the Palestinian refugees from Syria suddenly had to confront in Lebanon.

Palestinian Refugees from Syria (PRS) in Lebanon

Since the Syrian civil war expanded to Syria’s Palestinian camps in the winter of 2012, more than sixty percent of the registered camp dwellers have been displaced inside Syria or in neighboring countries (UNRWA, 2015a). Many refugees who had left their camps in the major cities on what they thought was a temporary stay found themselves unable to return. Camps like Dera’a, Yarmouk, Sbeineh, and Qabr Essit in

Damascus, and Handarat camp in Aleppo have been either partly destroyed in armed hostilities or besieged by a variety of armed forces. Armed forces and militias have

taken control of some areas and also prevent the residents from going back. UNRWA is unable to resume its services in these camps (UNRWA, 2014).

Most of the Palestinian refugees from the Syrian camps arrived in Lebanon in

2013. Through friends, relatives and assistance from other local community members, some families were able to find accommodation inside the camps. However, many of them have been struggling with new, unfamiliar environments, lack of income and the legal restrictions imposed on them. Moreover, many families were torn apart in the process of seeking refuge in Lebanon. This was especially true for families affected by military conscription, which would send young men to the front lines of the conflict.

Some of my male interlocutors in their twenties came to Lebanon alone in order to escape conscription into the Syrian army while their parents and close relatives tended to stay in Syria. Palestinians are subject to arbitrary regulations at the border crossings.

During 2014, there were cases that the Lebanese authorities denied the entry of those who did not meet certain criteria (for example, having entry permit approved by the

General Security of Lebanon, presenting proof of having appointment at a foreign embassy, or holding visas to travel to a third countries) (Kullab & Obeid, 2014; Santos,

2014). In addition, PRS are facing new and drastic legal constraints, including the denial of work permits and major hurdles for the renewal of residency permits

(UNRWA, 2015b). The policy for the renewal of residency has also been arbitrary.

According to my interlocutors, some PRS are allowed to renew their residency permits for the period of three months with small fees while some are asked to pay the cost of

$200. The process of issuing the permits are usually prolonged and delayed for several weeks. Without complete and current legal documentation, many (even those holding higher education certificates) are unable to find work or have to accept work for lower

wages in construction or other hard and precarious jobs. Fearing arrest, fines and deportation, Palestinian refugees with no valid identification documents are forced to confine their mobility to the camps. Some skilled workers are also unable to market their experience because of discrepancies between professional practices of Syria and

Lebanon.4

UNRWA operates as the major agent for the registration of, and assistance to,

Palestinian refugees from Syria in Lebanon. Until June 2015, UNRWA offered pecuniary handouts ($100 toward housing and $27 [LBP 40,000] per person for food), schooling for kids, and health care subsidies. However, for some families such resources hardly meet actual needs for exorbitant rents and costly living expenses in

Lebanon. UNRWA announced in May 2015 the cash assistance toward housing would be suspended starting from July (UNRWA, 2015c). During a visit in July, my interlocutors confirmed that the $100 assistance was halted. And it was said that soon the handout of $27 per person would also be suspended. In addition, UNRWA schools and local educational NGOs have to adjust to suddenly increased student numbers by running classes in two shifts, which of course decreases the quality of education.

The wide gap between present conditions and life as it used to be leads many refugees to a state of despair. Many find themselves trapped in an existential and practical vacuum upon suddenly losing the lifeworlds they had built in Syria, confronted with a radical disjuncture between what they could expect for the future in

Syria and what the future has in store for them here and now. The relatively straight line that connected the present to expected futures in Syria has been radically disrupted. The contours and content of the future have suddenly become very difficult to conceive.

4 For instance, an interlocutor who had experience in nursing found it very challenging to work in a Lebanese pharmacy due to the different ways of labeling products.

Memories of the life in Syria come into play in the rupture of the continuity of a lifeworld, drawing comparisons between the pasts in Syria and the present in Lebanon, hence disappointments, nostalgia, and pleasure and pain in remembering.

Lifeworlds, Temporalities, and the Everyday

This project is based on the assumption that the refugees lost their future horizons and they are in the process of producing new ones. This assumption builds on

Bourdieu’s (1990, 2000) concept of habitus and its relation to time. Bourdieu defined habitus as systems of dispositions, or ways of being, which social agents acquire through early socialization experiences and upbringing in a structured social and political environment (Swartz, 1997). This legacy of past experiences enables social agents to perform “acts of practical knowledge” to respond to the world that is known by them “too well” and is “taken for granted” because of its familiarity (Bourdieu,

2000, p.138, 142). Social agents engage in practice by responding to not only the immediate present but also to the forthcoming which appears in the form of anticipation. Anticipation is embodied in the implementation of habitus which

“structure[s] the contingencies of life in terms of previous experience and make[s] it possible to anticipate in practice the probable futures” (p.211). Therefore, by “temporal horizons” or “future horizons,” I mean the futures which are implied and projected by the actions and discourses through which social agents, Palestinian refugees from Syria in this case, respond to the world. While never fully securable, such horizons are most often stabilized by and in the disposition to act in habituated ways that compose the habitus. In the case of PRS, the loss of their lifeworlds is also the loss of anticipated worlds, but new futures emerge, and are implied and projected by the social agents’

practices in Lebanon, which can be out of kilter with the once anticipated futures that life in Syria gave them.

Temporalities, or concepts of time, entail various and fundamental aspects of refugee experiences. Cwerner (2001) highlights the significance of including temporal dimensions in studies of migration. He explains that migration occurs in such a context that “the normal rhythms and flows, sequences and frequencies, the duration of activities and the pace of daily life, the social narratives and the works of memory” are possibly dislocated and “all become problematic.” And it is especially the case for forced migrants whose temporal horizons and social rhythms were ruptured unexpectedly. Cwerner suggests that a focus on temporal experiences that reveals “the interplay between ruptures and continuities, old rhythms and new routines” will help to forge an understanding of migration processes and their dynamics and possibilities (p.

15). Responding to Cwerner’s proposal, this project concerns the temporal experiences that have been particular to individual life courses of PRS in Lebanon. However,

Cwerner reminds his reader that such studies should not see the migration as “a totalising social condition that crucially determines every aspect of social and cultural life” (p. 15). I bear in mind that the purpose of this project is not to generalize the experiences of forced migration as a social label or a condition which differentiates this group of people as “the other.”

The project also addresses anthropological studies of Palestinian refugees.

Recent studies have enlarged their focus from long-standing questions surrounding political dynamics in Palestinian refugee communities, the remembrance of the Nakba and the formation and transformation of national identity in the context of exile (Al-

Hardan, 2012; Khalili, 2007; Peteet, 1991; Sayigh, 1979; 2011) to also include

questions about the coping mechanisms used in everyday life to confront marginalization and impoverishment (Allan, 2014; Roberts, 2010). As the war in Syria has added a new complexity to the social worlds of Palestinians in exile, this project aims to examine the refugees’ apprehension of time as stemming from the challenges encountered in everyday life. While some ethnographies of Palestinian refugees approach futurity in relation to the question of emigration (e.g. Allan, 2014; Roberts,

2010), this project tries to enrich such accounts by looking at more aspects of refugees’ temporal horizons as they appear in dilemmas and decisions regarding marriage and education, and as temporalities also appear in individual re-encounters with the memories of one’s political life as a Palestinian refugee. While many studies on the memories of the Palestinian refugees center on Nakba (Al-Hardan, 2008; Sa’di & Abu-

Lughod, 2007), this project collects my interlocutors’ memories of the camp life in

Syria, which come with the sense of belonging developed in the ongoing catastrophe of

1948 outside the Palestinian homeland.

Through tracking the refugee experiences of temporalities, particularly their outlook toward the futures for which they act and prepare, this research identifies moments and modalities of inventiveness and resistance to a forced “state of liminality,” a concept often used to conceptualize refugee experience (Harrell-Bond &

Voutira, 1992). To follow the aspect of creativity and resilience confronting the distress of refugeeness, this project also builds on the anthropological studies of social suffering that concern recovery and everyday life. In the introduction of Remaking the World, a collection of ethnographies on people who underwent social trauma, Das and Kleinman

(2001) write, “Clearly ethnography needs to document the recalcitrance of tragedy so as to avoid the sentimental view of suffering, but we also emphasize the creativity of

everyday life in arriving at new norms of interrelatedness in communities” (p. 25).

Their work addressed the violence and conflicts within communities as a cause of social suffering. This project, instead, centers on forced migration as the experience of social distress. Writing on such experiences in my interlocutors’ daily life, this project concerns the “recovery of the everyday” which Das and Kleinman define as “resuming the task of living (and not only surviving)” and that “asks for a renewed capability to address the future.” This project also draws on the notion of the everyday life, the site of the ordinary, for the reason that “this ordinariness is itself recovered in the face of the most recalcitrant of tragedies: it is the site of many buried memories and experiences”

(p. 4). As for the ethnographic material of this project, everyday life presents itself as the site where rupture and loss are experienced because memories hold the pasts and the lifeworlds that no longer exist. It is however also the site where one’s horizons toward futures are reoriented and renewed to continue “the task of living.”

Some studies have drawn on the idea of resilience in relation to temporalities.

Eggerman & Panter-Brick (2010) defines resilience as “the belief that adversity can ultimately be overcome and a process of ‘meaning-making’ that gives coherence to past, present, and the future experiences” (p.81). Instead of a psychological approach taken by the above study, this project, although centered on individual experiences, tries to emphasize the social, political and material determinants of resilience and its embedment in specific lifeworlds.

Encountering PRS in Shatila

The ethnographic data in this project were mainly the result of the fieldwork I undertook between May and July 2015 in Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp in the

southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon. The fieldwork primarily consisted of participation observation, complemented by ethnographic interviews and document collection. I made Shatila the research site because of my encounter with Nawra (21). I met Nawra in a children center where I volunteered during Spring 2014. 5 Her family and friends from Palestinian camps in Syria have resided in Shatila camp since 2013. Nawra was working in the center as a teacher, and our conversations began since the time I was volunteering. Nawra introduced me to her family in August 2014. In a few subsequent visits as an acquaintance and more and more, I hope and believe, as a friend, her family’s ways of speaking about the future provided me with the seed for this project.

Besides Nawra and her family, whose accounts and of whom my observations contributed a large part of the ethnography data, I interacted on a regular basis with five additional families (around four to six adults in each family) and five to six other male and female individuals (age around 25-30). During the fieldwork period, I paid visits to each family once or twice a week, mostly with Nawra. During weekends, I often stayed over in Nawra’s house, because Umm Youssef and Abu Youssef, who have cared for me as a daughter, were often concerned for my safety when I commuted between the camp and the city at night. In addition to family visits, I have attended several protests organized by a grassroots collective named “The League of Palestinian Refugees from

Syria to Lebanon,” and visited a few members of the League.6 The League’s protest initially drew attention to the so-called “protection gap” between UNRWA and

UNHCR regarding refugee rights. More details regarding the League can be found in

Chapter 5.

5 All names in this thesis have been changed in order to protect the anonymity of my interlocutors. 6 Translated from the Arabic name “rābṭat al-flsṭīnīn al-mhjrīn mn sūrīā ilā lbnān”

In light of the small number of interlocutors from whom I collected my ethnographic material, this research does not pretend to represent the majority of PRS’s experiences. It seems important to me to emphasize that the dynamics of such experiences not only exist among the group but also in the life of each individual, and that it is only possible, for the scope of this project, to write on temporal experience by working with a very small group of people. The ethnographic data were mostly my field notes, though some of the materials I used as part of the data were my interlocutors’ writings: journal entries or poems in Arabic. I sought help from other Arabic readers to transcribe them into English. When I quoted such writings, I had acquired their authors’ permission to do so in the context of my research.

Many ethical issues have arisen from research activities in Palestinian refugee communities, where the generosity and assistance typically offered to researchers rarely receive any political or socioeconomic changes in return (Sukarieh & Tannock, 2013;

Al-Hardan, 2014). I am aware that this research can hardly alleviate any distress my interlocutors undergo. The asymmetric power relation between me as a researcher, the major beneficiary of the research, and them as research subjects could never be resolved through the pages of my writing. I have tried, however, as a friend and a visitor, to behave with decorum and respect during the researching period, and will continue to do so. While the work might render their ordeal visible, I have strived in my writing to use a language not only responsive to their pain and vulnerability but also which highlight their endurance, strengths and strategies under adverse conditions.

An Outline of the Thesis

The chapters in the thesis are distributed in a manner congruent with motifs of time that emerged from my ethnographic field notes. As each fragment in the entries implies a form or figure of temporality among my interlocutors, the five body chapters present these patterns of time most resonant in the flow of my fieldwork. As a result, the five chapters are seemingly scattered and unrelated but convey the different aspects and the abrupt moments in which my interlocutors encountered memories, challenges in the present, and decisions for futures. This thesis began with the two chapters centered on characters and their individual experiences of time and the challenges it brought along, while the rest of the three chapters were more mixtures of accounts and observation data that I gathered from different individual and families. I used fragments from my notes extensively throughout the chapters in order not to undermine the context or “the mood” that I shared with my interlocutors at those moments.

The first chapter considers marriage decisions manifest in the form of a crisis when a daughter’s adulthood arrived amidst the disappearance of expected futures. The following chapter describes an individual’s experiences with the memories of a young self, and her creativities in facing new challenges in her family life. Chapter 3 shifts the focus from individual narratives to their surroundings. It asks how the interlocutors’ attitudes toward acquiring or modifying things, furniture and house appliances imply expectations toward futures; the chapter also shows their inventiveness through borrowing and lending to connect themselves to the local community. Chapter 4 is a collection of my interlocutors’ memories of life in Syria. It analyzes how memories appear in the daily life as experiences of both pain and pleasure. Chapter 5 looks toward distant futures: I discuss the despair in experiencing unemployment, the collective

organizing in appealing for the rights, the uncertainty embedded in the constantly changing plans for distant futures, and finally, parents’ expectations for their children’s futures.

* * *

On the evening of June 7th, just ten days before the start of the holy month

Ramadan, Nawra and I were flipping through her notebook (which was also her journal), reviewing Arabic and English vocabulary, one of our usual activities to pass the time.

She stopped at a page and told me, “I wrote this last Ramadan.” The first few lines went as follows:

I started counting the nights. Here comes Ramadan for the third time, with sadness. We are still waiting for our fate to be decided. Either we stay in foreign land with misery and survive or we die from the sorrow that has been killing us for the past two years.

This was Nawra’s question about her and her family’s future. While she said she was waiting, I had made the question mine. Nawra’s constant remarks about her future were what initially provided me with the subject of this project, and it is her stories that I now turn to.

CHAPTER 1

CRISIS: THE ARRIVAL OF ADULTHOOD AMIDST LOSS

The rupture of lifeworlds in Syria rendered expected futures empty, in need of new plans and imaginations. The urgency became explicit when one’s arrival of adulthood and marriage decisions needed to be addressed amidst the loss of the future.

This first chapter illustrates such a crisis, how one responds to it while giving care to close others. It also asks how the uncertainty of refugeeness became a source of confusion in a marriage decision for a family, and how the unfamiliarity to the new social environment caused discrepancies in imaginations toward futures among family members. I borrow Bourdieu’s (1990) theory of habitus to make sense of the disorientation and confusion that unfolds in the stories of this chapter. In the face of the disappearance of one’s lifeworld, ones’ knowledge concerning what is possible and what is correct can also become uncertain. Regarding “what is possible”, Bourdieu explains that our dispositions, which make up the habitus, are “durably inculcated by the possibilities and impossibilities, freedoms and necessities, opportunities and prohibitions inscribed in the objective conditions […]”; As for “what is correct”, I quote, habitus “ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms” (p. 54).

Nawra wrote in her journal on June 17, 2015, the day after a woman came to put forward a marriage proposal for her son to Nawra and her parents:

I’m building for myself a boat to go to the depth of the sea. I call it destiny. Sometimes it pleases me, but in the end it disappoints me and drowns me. I try to hang on to the boat but I see it going further and further. The whirlpool pulls me into the depth of the sea.

The son has come as his mother promised. While Nawra is still waiting, Ramadan has begun. Nawra is 21. Her narratives and experiences of love and relationships always fascinate me, because of her courage of trying out what is possible, and her unwillingness to compromise her real feelings, while at the same time cautiously following along the norms and morality of her social world. Also, in spite of the fact that Nawra and her family’s displacement to Lebanon has cast dramatic uncertainty and disorientation upon them, they have never abandoned their care toward one another at the moment it was most needed. The love stories of Nawra that she chose to share with me took place when she was a young woman in Syria, and her experiences of romance continued after her family moved to Lebanon, the later of which, for a large part, I was a witness to.

The arrival of Nawra’s adulthood becomes more definite for her and her parents over the years that coincide with their displacement to Lebanon. Time, in her stories, is less a medium that only goes by or punctuates events but more a role that indeed pushes Nawra and her parents around, somehow intrusively, demanding their actions. Confusion emerged, under the pressure of having to marry in time while being in the situation which the family had not prepared to be in and which their past experiences in Syria informed them very little about. In the following pages I hope to demonstrate the contours of the ambiguity in marriage decisions, which were negotiated, through conversations, fights and care, between daughters and parents. And how this situation comes into play in the lives of the individuals: What it is to be a

“girl” (bint, commonly referring to an unmarried female) in the age of entering

maturity, tiptoeing in and out of the world of relationships and marriage while bearing in mind the heaviness of being a member of the refugee family? What does it mean, for the parents, to have to imagine a new future for a daughter (as well as for themselves), without the stability they used to be able to offer?

1.1. Many Proposals and Refusals

Since I have known Nawra, there has been five marriage proposals, from a

Palestinian who resides in Germany, a Palestinian from Syria who is still living in Syria, a local Palestinian of Lebanon (PoL), and two other Palestinian refugees from Syria

(PRS) who were displaced to Lebanon, excluding two of her own friends who promised her to propose but failed to keep their promises. In an earlier stage of the project, I was told by Nawra’s mom, Umm Youssef, in a casual conversation, that Nawra received a marriage proposal from a Palestinian who lives in Germany and came for a visit. Nawra had refused the proposal, justifying her decision, in her words, “Because he wants me to take off my veil if I married to Germany.” She said she would not able to do it, while

Umm Youssef told me with a grin, “Because she wants to be with me.” She also said in the same conversation, contradicting Nawra, “If my husband told me to take off the veil, I would take it off!” A few months later, on Eid Ahda, I paid a visit again, and

Nawra told me that Abdul, whom she had a short relationship with7, had informed her parents that he is coming to propose after the Eid. She said he would try to stay in

Lebanon, “Inchallah,” she added. Not only did she tell me about the proposal, but also

7 I first heard the name Abdul was when Nawra’s family invited me for a day trip to Saida with their friends. Nawra and I were walking on a sandy beach along the shore when she told me about Abdul. She remembered him taking her to a similar beach, also in Saida, and him carrying her while she was sitting on a chair. They had a good time. She said he had gone back to Syria, and he wished to come across the border again to propose to her.

the neighbors we visited on the day, including Akram, a friend of hers and an admirer8, who congratulated her. At the time I did not speak about Abdul’s proposal with Umm

Youssef or Abu Youssef, but I had asked Nawra what her parents thought of it. She only told me that they were not happy because she is “the only girl in the house.”

However, later in the month on Nawra’s birthday, she told me that Abdul had not come, and they had had a fight in a series of phone messages. According to her, he refused to quit his job in Syria. In his plan, if they were to marry, Nawra was to move to Syria.

Nawra couldn’t accept it. “He told me that he has no future in Lebanon,” she said.

Afterwards, the name Abdul no longer occupied the center of our conversations. In

November, Nawra shared with me, very briefly, another marriage proposal that she received from a local PoL. I paraphrased her in my field note: “He was handsome and tall but Umm Youssef has rejected the proposal. She wants Nawra to marry someone from Syria because she has heard many bad marriage stories in the camps here in

Lebanon.” It was in fact at the time when she was in a dilemma because her parents were seriously considering another marriage proposal from Hadi, a PRS whose family also moved to Lebanon due to the war.

The constant knocking and ringing of marriage proposals has been a reminder of Nawra’s marriageable age and that, sooner or later, according to social norms, they have to seriously consider a proposal. Nawra told me she had received proposals when she was in Syria, but her parents refused straightforwardly for the reason that she was still young. After they were displaced to Lebanon, however, the series of marriage proposals that appeared in front of them did not fit well with what they had foreseen or prepared for during Nawra’s upbringing in Syria. The disappearance of Nawra’s future

8 Since the very beginning of my knowing Nawra, I have suspected that there was some sort of relationship between her and Akram. Not until much later did Nawra reveal the story between them to me. When she finally accepted his pursuit, Akram failed to keep his promise to propose to her.

in Syria that their habitus oriented them toward has rendered their hands empty, out of tools to inform what is possible and what is correct. A series of conflicts over “what is possible” has emerged in Nawra’s and her parents’ responses to those marriage proposals. Nawra’s immediate refusal of the proposals that require her to leave her family shows us that, for her, parting from family is an impossible choice, while Umm

Youssef did not exclude consenting to the proposal from Germany, however dramatic the change would be for the prospects of the family. Among these contradictory opinions, their views on the probability of marrying to a local PoL remained the most intense. Umm Youssef’s immediate refusal of the proposal from a local camp dweller for the reason that she had heard many “bad stories” shows that, her unfamiliarity with the social milieu of marrying a daughter in the camps in Lebanon has left her to depend on rumors. And more or less, her disapproval for such proposals was based on her general impression of the shebeb (young guys) in Shatila, as she conveyed to me quite often, mostly associated with drugs, knives and guns.

1.2. A Confusing Try

The upheaval began when an engagement decision was made and experimented with. On Nawra’s birthday, I planned a small surprise for her, and Hadi

(33) also came to celebrate. I met Hadi on my second visit to Nawra’s family, but not until later in the year did he become noteworthy in Nawra’s story. He is Abu Youssef’s friend from a Palestinian political faction. During a visit a month later, when I asked if

Nawra had any news, she paused a while, and seeming shy to speak, let Umm Youssef tell me: Hadi had proposed. Umm Youssef spoke to Nawra, in English, “You’re free.

It’s all your choice. I don’t want to force you.” Her usage of English seemed to indicate

her wish to let me know that Nawra was not forced, as if she had sensed Nawra’s hesitation or I can even say, reluctance, about the proposal. Nawra was not attracted to

Hadi, for, among other things, his appearance and, in Nawra’s word, his “silly” character. Nawra, however, did not talk much on the matter in front of her mother. She shared the news, again, with the neighbor upstairs, and when we left their house, she told me,

Everyone around me, my dad, my mom and my friends are all telling me he’s nice. My mom said ‘When a man loves you much more, you will be happy. Because he will do everything to make you love him back.’ I told my dad I don’t really like him, but he told me to try.

“I’m really confused,” she repeated several times when Hadi’s proposal was brought up during my following visits. Later in the month, I went for a mashawi (barbeque) gathering and Nawra asked for my opinion of Hadi. Together we listed the pros and cons. She was still indecisive, nearly terrified. Later that day, Umm Youssef and I spoke about the proposal. I don’t remember if Nawra was there listening, but after I conveyed my concern of the hasty and even, in my opinion, forceful request to Nawra, Umm

Youssef suddenly said, after mentioning Hadi’s kindness, “because I really want a grandson.”

A few weeks later, I was invited to a wedding of one of their (PRS) friends. On that day, Nawra told me, “Hadi told me we get engaged first, and then we try.” She rephrased what Hadi told her, “If it’s not working, you’re not losing anything, I lose you.” She did not tell me explicitly that she had agreed, but her words let it understood:

It was settled. The engagement date was set to be in late December. Nawra at the time was planning what to wear for the telbees (referred to the ring-wearing ceremony, but

Nawra and I also referred it to “the engagement party”). She went to try on a dress in a bridal-dress store in Shatila, and on another day, Hadi brought her (and me) to look

through more dresses in the shopping street of Dahiyeh.9 At the time, Nawra had already begun telling me about the discordance between herself and Hadi.10 On the day of the engagement, there was no rental bridal dress as planned. Nawra told me it was because one of the close relatives of Hadi’s family had passed away, so he had to avoid being extravagant.11 He still brought her a regular dress for the party, and Abu Youssef also got her a pair of high heels. She carefully put on her own makeup, straightened her hair, and wore acrylic nails12, and then we waited for Hadi to come. He was very late.

While we were waiting, Nawra was extremely upset, “If he is even later, I will cancel the engagement.” Hadi eventually came and we moved to the big hall that Abu Youssef had borrowed from his faction. I should note here that although at the time I had very little conversation about Hadi with Abu Youssef, he appeared to me to be the one who dominated the arrangement. However, Nawra’s own hesitation was in fact as decisive as the pressure Abu Youssef put on her. Before she agreed, I believed there was a moment when Nawra was actually moved by Hadi’s perseverance, generous compliments and candid affection for her.13

The “I will cancel the engagement” talk started from the very day of the engagement and did not cease. Since then, they had constant fights over so many matters that I almost lost track. Nawra conveyed to me that the thing that troubled her

9 I then gradually became the third person to accompany her when her parents or Hadi’s siblings were not available to be present.

10 Things like: “It’s me wearing the dress, not his sisters. Why would I need their approval for the dress?” (Hadi has three sisters.)

11 The average price for renting a bridal dress was around 200 dollars.

12 Nawra used to be an apprentice, working with other hairdressers in a salon when she was in Syria. She told me that she didn’t need to spend money on salon, but she was very disappointed about the dress.

13After the engagement party, Nawra and Hadi gradually established their scheme of visiting each other— Hadi would come quite frequently during weekdays for a meal with Nawra and the family, and Nawra and Abu Youssef would visit their house at the outskirt of Bourj al-Barajneh camp about once a week or every two weeks.

most was Hadi’s desire for more physical contact. Her rejection of any physical intimacy was explicit: when Hadi tried to grab her hand while we were walking through the alleyway in Bourj al-Barajneh, Nawra threw off his hand immediately and quite fiercely. Another day, while we were having a Mother’s Day celebration in Hadi’s house, Nawra and Hadi stood up and joined Hadi’s little sister to dance aside the dinner table. I saw Hadi tried to hold her waist as a move of dancing. In front of Hadi’s mother, sisters, me, and another friend, Nawra pushed him away, although smiling. She continued her dance. The discordance was also palpable for her parents. Umm Youssef had raised her concern: Once Hadi came for a meal when Nawra was still angry. While

I was standing at the hallway outside the house with Umm Youssef, she asked me quietly, “Nawra’s upset?” and asked me what Nawra thought of the relationship. I told her that I didn’t think Nawra really loved him. Umm Youssef then told me, in her own defense, “It’s her choice. She said yes [to the proposal]. I never wanted to force her.”

She paused a bit and said, “She’s my only daughter. Hadi is just an outsider.” Abu

Youssef at the time chose to see it as a “young couple’s issue,” and engaged in discussions of emigration with Hadi’s father. A week after Nawra told me that she expected the wedding to be in the summer, I stayed overnight in their house. When we were about to sleep, I laid on the cushion and listened to Nawra’s monologue about her memorable love story with Saif, who had died in the war in Syria. Then she continued,

Many people have proposed to me but I said no. I’m wondering why I said yes to Hadi. I said yes to him for my parents. My dad told me that I’m a burden for him (anā thaqīlah ‘alīh). I feel that I should get married and leave soon. But in Syria, they never said this [I’m a burden] to me. They had a house for me in Syria. Now it’s different.

Nawra’s distaste for Hadi’s behavior had only grown more intense in the following months. Whenever an emigration plan was brought up—mainly by Abu Youssef who

had come up with ideas to emigrate to Turkey, and later Brazil—she would tell me, “If we travel, I will leave Hadi here.” Her health and emotional state appeared to be deteriorating to me.14 Later, she began, more determinedly, to complain about Hadi— mainly to the mother—and thus to request the fasala (breakup). I was sitting between

Umm Youssef and Nawra the night before the breakup:

It was Umm Youssef’s birthday. Later at night, Abu Youssef had gone to the faction’s office. Nawra brought up the breakup matter with her mom. Umm Youssef became impatient and angry, “Why you always blame me? The day when you decided to get engaged I was at work. Why do we have to have this topic every day?” “You want to break up, sure, talk to him on the phone now, tell him to come and we are finished.” Nawra didn’t text him right away, trying to leave for a while. Umm Youssef caught her hand forcing her to text right away. Umm Youssef turned to me and said, “She doesn’t know what she wants! I really don’t understand.”

The same entry, right on the next day:

I tried to discuss the Nawra and Hadi matter with Umm Youssef but she seemed to not want to talk about it. I said, “I think Nawra is afraid that if she marries Hadi, you will leave, like going to Turkey or Brazil.” She was a bit surprised about the concern. It seemed like this had never came to her mind. “No,” she paused a bit and said, “we will try Brazil but it might not be successful.” She didn’t continue.

Then Abu Hadi came for the obvious reason of talking about the breakup. Abu Youssef talked with him at length, and Nawra, Umm Youssef and I moved to the room inside. We didn’t talk much, just quietly listening to them talking in the living room, until Abu Youssef called Nawra to come out to talk to Abu Hadi. Nawra talked to him a bit and came back in. Umm Youssef complained to me, “She didn’t say it all. She changed her mind again.” “I know she loves him. I know.” But I can understand under the circumstances (talking in front of the fathers), it’s impossible to speak up (things about Hadi forcing her to kiss).

Later Hadi came. [...] After they left, Abu Youssef came in and talked in a reproaching voice, blaming Nawra for her capricious mind. Nawra later told me, after her parents went to visit friends in Bourj, “He [Abu Youssef] said no one

14 In March, she was sick for a few weeks while still in constant fight with Hadi, and then she started to reminisce the months when she was working, “The doctor told me I must eat, but I can’t…I think I think too much, when I worked at the center. I didn’t think much. After a day of work when I came back, I was still thinking ‘tomorrow I’m going to work’. I ate everything, Mana'eesh, noodles and chips…” Then in April, a day when I arrived, she was praying, which wasn’t one of her routine activities. When I asked about it, she told me, “Because when I’m not praying, I cried a lot. Now… although I still cry sometimes, I feel He is with me.”

would come and propose to me again. He is with Abu Hadi. But I’m to marry Hadi, not his father!” She then repeated the burden talk again: “When I was in Syria, when people proposed to me, they would tell them I’m still young. But now they are like this (like I have to marry soon). Everything changed. Is it because we are refugees now?”

The next week the breakup decision was made definitively. Hadi sent his cousin to recover the ring and presents that he had bought for Nawra. Abu Youssef and Umm

Youssef seemed to have accepted the outcome a week later, as Abu Youssef told

Nawra, “Engagement is like a test. If it failed, then it’s finished.” Umm Youssef had changed her attitude toward the matter, she told me, “She changed right? She’s happy. I don’t feel sorry [about the breakup].”

The breakup turned out to be a relief for Nawra as well as the parents, a relief from a decision that was made under, at the same time as it created, constant confusion.

Nawra understood the time had arrived for her parents to start accepting a proposal, as she herself had welcomed other proposals (while her parents refused). Nevertheless, she did not read their urge as a gesture of them realizing her maturity, but a reminder of their displacement and financial stress. The prospect of marriage had never ceased to exist, but the rupture of the continuity of the past life in Syria created unexpected divergences in viewing morality and values. While Nawra had factored her status as refugee daughter into her decision to consent, Umm Youssef in fact did not suggest that her choice should be a “refugee one” but about “a man who loves you more.” In a conversation with Umm Youssef in April, before the engagement was canceled, she mentioned the dowry she had prepared for Nawra: “I bought a lot of things, from kitchenware to bedding. Every time I saw something I would buy and keep it for her future marriage. But now it’s all gone.” The loss of the dowry signifies the disappearance of a marriage that was imagined to be properly prepared. What remains,

for Umm Youssef, was supposed to be Nawra’s freedom of choice: “She is free” “I never wanted to force her.” However, the uncertainty of their refugee status—might be the family’s financial situation15 or, more likely, her worry about the limited prospect to have a suitable candidate again—had more or less taken away the essence of freedom

Umm Youssef wanted to give Nawra. It had become merely the word being heard.

What proved to be important for Umm Youssef was that it might be even more risky if a “good” candidate would not appear later. Under the uncertainty, waiting became more costly than giving meaning to the word “freedom.”

The divergence also appeared in the imagination of futures, the futures beyond the marriage: In the several contexts when an emigration project was discussed, no one had mentioned or implied the possibility of leaving her with Hadi in Lebanon.16 But her repeated statements of “I would leave Hadi here” showed her fear of being left alone.

As for Umm Youssef’s aspiration of a grandson, it gestured a possibility, a joyful expectation for a distant future, no matter how uncertain and temporary their circumstances were. Allan (2014), in her book on the everyday existence of the camp- dwellers in Shatila, also draws on Bourdieu’s theory of habitus to suggest that the dispositions, the “ambiguity and uncertainty” of the refugee life “become sources of aspiration of agency and aspiration as much as doubt and despair” (p. 219). Although the dispositions, the life history of a Palestinian refugee from Syria as Umm Youssef herself, were very different from the ones of the longtime dwellers in Shatila, the

15 Umm Youssef has a relatively stable income, but it is the only source of the family income and she does not know when the work opportunity will cease.

16 As shown in the previous note on my conversation with Umm Youssef. In addition, when a plan to Turkey was discussed between Abu Youssef and Abu Hadi, Abu Youssef said that the plan was “the two families go together.”

temporality and uncertainty, which they had been encountering since the war in Syria began, had gradually become their everyday living experiences.

1.3. Negotiations Continue

After the breakup, Nawra became involved in a short relationship with Ilyas, a local Palestinian of Lebanon, whom she knew through one of the friends she made in

Shatila.17 During this period, she kept it secret from her parents, knowing that her parents would be strongly averse to hear about her contact with a man who is “from

Lebanon.” This comes back to the conflict about what is doable in the absence of lived experiences in Lebanon. In fact, Nawra did try to confirm Abu Youssef’s opinion, in a hypothetical question:

Ghazi said he wouldn’t consider a girl from Lebanon as his prospective spouse. Then Abu Youssef said, “If there were anyone from Lebanon who proposed to Nawra, I would say no!” Nawra asked, “Even if there’s one who’s really good?” He gestured no. Nawra asked why, he said, “It’s destiny.” He joked (or not) that he will make Nawra marry in Brazil.

She told me once that Ilyas would come to propose, but she had to discourage him for the reason that she had just recently broke up. Nawra eventually did not continue her contact with him, after having several quarrels on the phone. As it shows, she did not, however, deny the possibility of marrying a PoL. Nawra explored the social world of young women and men in Shatila more than her parents did, because she used to work in an educational center where she made friends and acquaintances. I am unsure of why

Abu Youssef’s engagement in the faction affairs, which offered him more contacts with the locals, did not soften his view on the possibility of accepting a proposal from a

PoL—“It’s destiny” did not explain the reason, but his response showed the trajectory

17 I must note that she did not accept and tried to avoid Ilyas’ pursuit during her engagement with Hadi.

of losing an expected future and having to imagine his daughter marrying in another social world which he did not trusted (Lebanon) or had no experiences of living in

(Brazil).

The ambiguity internal to imagining a future marriage was also evident in

Ayda’s situation. Ayda (17) is a close friend of Nawra. The topic of Ayda’s marriage prospect was barely mentioned when I visited her mother Umm Mustafa. It might be because she was still young, or it was because of the reason which I heard from Umm

Youssef and later confirmed by Umm Mustafa:

She got engaged two years ago with a guy from Syria. Her father agreed to the proposal. But the guy was unable to come to Lebanon. Many people proposed to her but her dad refused every one of them. He said, ‘I’ve given my word.’ It’s too bad.

Umm Mustafa once conveyed to me that they had thought of returning to Syria one day.

She felt it was generally safe as her son Mustafa still commuted to Damascus from time to time for school administrative matters. The hope of returning to Syria might be one of the reasons for which Ayda’s parents had kept their promise for two years. It also showed that “keeping one’s promise” was an important value for the parents, while

Ayda had been (maybe secretly) seeing another man who owned a shop in the Sabra market.

In addition to divergences among individuals, the expectations toward futures and the decisions that followed were fluid and changing. In Talah’s case, during the course of one week. Talah (21) is Umm Atyaf’s second daughter. In the beginning of fieldwork, during a visit, I asked Umm Atyaf if they had received any proposals, she told me, “Yeah, a lot. But her father turned down all of them.” She herself didn’t agree to marry her two daughters here (two out of the four who have reached their marriageable age). I asked why and she said, “If one day we need to travel, we can’t

leave them here.” It seemed to me a sketchy answer only to fill in the blank of my question. The very next week when I visited Nawra, I encountered Ghazi, a PRS friend of Abu Youssef’s, who proposed to Talah on that day:

Later we came out joining their conversation. It turned out that Ghazi wanted to propose to Talah. Abu Youssef encouraged him to propose. He asked Abu Youssef (and Nawra) how much the engagement would cost. Abu Youssef counted for him: the necklace, the earrings and ring… then generously told him “I can help you.” […] Nawra told Ghazi that Abu Atyaf said no to everyone who had proposed because they might be traveling, but Ghazi still wanted to try. Abu Youssef then went to convince Abu Atyaf to agree to Ghazi’s proposal. He came back later and said that Abu Atyaf would ask Talah. Ghazi left his number for Nawra to give to Talah.

Talah agreed, and I attended their engagement party with Nawra’s family only ten days after he proposed. On the following visits I did not ask Umm Mustafa why they changed their opinion, since she told me that they liked Ghazi and that Talah and Ghazi had been happy together. Ghazi had also started thinking about the wedding already.

Talah and her family’s decision conveyed the uncertainty of expectations, and that any opportunity that offered an agreeable prospect could take the family’s future into a different direction at any time.

After Talah and Ghazi’s engagement party, at night, while watching a scene of a couple dancing and singing in the rain from an Indian romance movie, Nawra said,

“This will not happen here. If we do it, we will be struck by the electricity.” After

Nawra cut off her contact with Ilyas, she told me she would need a break, just living her life without thinking about marriage. But Talah was engaged and so was the neighbor’s daughter to whom we often paid a visit. Both of them were around the same age as

Nawra. For Nawra, the urgency of having to get married did not disappear. After a period of turmoil, Nawra still continued to encounter, as she described in her writing, “a

whirlpool” of decisions regarding love and the future, through which “being a refugee” has become an inescapable concern of hers.

CHAPTER 2

CHALLENGES: RETURNING AND WITNESSING

In Das’s (2007) ethnography on the survivors of the riots of the Partition in

1947, Manjit, a Punjabi woman who had lived in this space of violence and devastation, often reflected on her experiences with reference to time, such as “It was a bad time, but by the grace of God it passed” (p. 85). Time, in Manjit’s reiteration, appeared to be a cruel perpetrator as well as a healer. It was the passage of time that healed “a bad time.”

Das further combs through her protagonists’ temporal experiences, asking what the work of time does in a survivor’s descent into the ordinary.

In Manjit’s case the difference between the past that is preserved as if frozen and the past as the passage of events of her life after her marriage, her motherhood, and the constant work she performs on her relationships invites reflections on the modalities in which the past becomes present in our lives (p. 99).

I saw temporal characteristics similar to those described by Das about Manjit’s life in my observations of Umm Youssef, whose accounts of the pasts and whose actions of the present reflected temporal experiences in which different pasts reappeared in her present life. For Umm Youssef, it was “those good times” that she had witnessed passing, and it was also what seemed to constantly return to her in her present life, in this bad time, as she re-encountered Lebanon and returned as a working woman and a pillar of a family.

At the time of my fieldwork, Umm Youssef (48) was a mother of three children, Nawra (21), Youssef (18) and Taalib (16). The family was displaced to

Lebanon in the summer of 2013, around one and a half year before my fieldwork began.

After the family settled in Shatila, she took up working as a nurse, a profession she was

trained in and had practiced before she married Abu Youssef. She was working as a private nurse taking care of a wealthy American-Lebanese woman, making Umm

Youssef the pillar of the family’s financial stability. This was not Umm Youssef’s first visit to the Palestinian community in Lebanon. She had shortly lived in Lebanon during late 1980s. This time, the disruption of her family life in Syria and her second arrival to

Lebanon made her a witness of the dramatic change of political and material life for the

Palestinian refugee community in Lebanon. The influxes of several temporalities—her memories of the pasts, her reappearance as a workingwoman, and her witnessing of the passage of time as a mother, an aging self, and as a member of the Palestinian refugee community—emerged in our conversations and her interactions with Abu Youssef and the three children, in which I participated or which I sometimes witnessed.

Das borrows Bergson’s notion of “the past as given all at once” in her understanding of Manjit’s temporal experiences. As Manjit did not recount her past sufferings, it was in her motherhood and her efforts on her relationships that Das saw the untold past (p. 99).18 Following the same thread, I found that Guerlac’s (2006) reading of Bergson, in particular his introduction of Bergson’s idea of “character”, to be helpful in presenting the temporalities of Umm Youssef’s current life as a Palestinian refugee from Syria in Lebanon:

Our character, [Bergson] writes, is the actual synthesis of all our past states (MM 162 [146]) and it conditions, without determining, our present state (MM 164 [148]). Our previous psychological states live on in this condensed manner because we carry them with us all the time. The past is always with us. It informs everything we do (p.147).

18 Das refers to the ethnography of Desjarlais on a Yolma Buddhist who offered the temporal reflections of dying and living. Manjit’s temporal experiences took on a modality that was different from what one might experience at a time but separately and spatially as one moves his eyes from one temporality to another—for example, a dying person might experience separately the “fated time” (the time I had been doomed to die) and “unknown time” (I don’t know what is the exact moment the death will occur) (p.99).

Because our past does not determine the present, Guerlac explains further, “Character, in this sense, would enable and orient adaptation” (p. 147 n43). I understood the concept of character, “the actual synthesis of all our past states”, when I resituated myself in the scenes and the conversations that had struck me about Umm Youssef. Her temporal experiences were always conveyed to me in a very condensed manner and an intriguing way, as if her pasts were present in front of me and as if she had turned into the young self she was describing. She was, at the same time, the character whose efforts—efforts of reorienting herself in the turbulence of loss and uncertainty—were enormous and remarkable.

2.1. Returning: Lebanon and the Youthful Days

“This is not my first time to Lebanon,” Umm Youssef told me during one of my Sunday visits19,

I only had a tour in Shatila. I didn’t stay long. Shatila wasn’t like this when I visited. It only had a few houses with big yards. Now garbage is here and there and it’s so crowded. Honestly I was shocked when I came this time.

Not until much later in my fieldwork period did I realize her description of the sharp differences between her first visit and the visit this time was a witnessing: It was a comparison between the heyday of the Palestinian Resistance Movement (PRM) during

1967 to 1982 and the more recent disenfranchised camp life in Lebanon. I thus had another interview with her to piece together the story of Umm Youssef’s first visit to

Lebanon, in her youthful days: She had lived in Saida, Lebanon, for two and half years to look for her fida’yeen (freedom fighters) siblings—her three older brothers and a sister who came from Syria to Lebanon in 1980 to join Fatah, when they were in their

19 Sundays were Umm Youssef’s normal days-off and they were also the days when our conversations would be long and thick, full of her profound reflections and narrations of memories.

20s and Umm Youssef was a 13 year-old girl. Their departure had left Umm Youssef the oldest child among other siblings who stayed with their parents in Syria at the time, as she had recounted several times, “I was like a boy, you know? They called me ‘Abu

Ali’. Abu Ali was what they called someone who is a strong man. I worked with my father, carrying sands and doing construction on our house…” “Because all of my bigger brothers were in Lebanon, I felt I had the responsibility.” This sense of responsibility had eventually driven her to search for her siblings when she turned 19, after she had finished her nursing school:

“I felt like I had the responsibility to look for them. […] My parents were worried why there was no news about them, so I came to find them” She said she had a companion when she traveled to Lebanon. “He’s [the companion] dead.” She seemed to not want to continue talking about this friend, so I didn’t ask more. She came from Damascus to the Chouf, the central mountain area of Lebanon, to look for her sister first. Umm Youssef found her sister and stayed with her in Saida. Then Umm Youssef began to search for her brothers. “Because they all worked in different cities and area, some fighters were in Bekaa, some were in Tripoli, in Beirut… It was so hard to find them.” When I asked how old she was at the time, she repeated the description of herself being a boy and having short hair, “I went to Saida, to Beirut, to Tripoli, to Baalbek… It’s my responsibility. I don’t feel like a girl. I searched for them, I traveled from places to places.”

One of the brothers joined them in Saida for 2-3 months, and finally got married to a Palestinian of Lebanon, “And they lived in Saida, in the city, not in the camp,” She emphasized. The brother eventually migrated to Germany. I asked if she had convinced them to go back at that time, she said, “No, the Syrian government was arresting these fighters. I knew they couldn’t come back at the time.” She stayed for 2 and half years, and then went back, out of the same sense of responsibility, “Because only my father worked for the family, no one was there [no older sibling]. I thought I needed to go back to work, to help him.” She told me, at the very end of conversation, and lowered her voice as if it’s a secret, “And for six months, I was trained to be a fada’i. I never fought, but I knew how to.” She explained that she started training because she had initially been unable to find her brothers.

Her visit to Lebanon was approximately from 1986 to 1989, when the PRM suffered the loss of its leadership after the Israeli invasion of 1982 and when Shatila had undergone several sieges and bombardments (Sayigh, 1994). Yet, her experiences document the

ebb and flow of individual zeal toward the political struggle and solidarity with the

Palestinian refugees community.

Partly because of this experience, she and the family had finally decided to come to Lebanon in the summer of 2013, after several moves around Damascus to escape the war. After 26 years away from Lebanon, however, this visit (or the unexpected displacement) was disappointing to Umm Youssef. One day after Nawra and I went back from a visit to her friend, a scene that I was unable to forget :

Nawra seemed not well, but her mom and dad both thought she was exaggerating. Nawra expressed her anger. Umm Youssef turned to me and said, “It’s not physical. It’s psychological.” Then Nawra was even angrier, almost crying she said, “My body is hurting me. How could you say it’s psychological?” Umm Youssef wanted to ease the tension. She pointed at Abu Youssef, and half jokingly she said, “It’s you! You brought us here!” Abu Youssef then pointed back “It’s you who brought us here!” Nawra then told me, “When we were there [in Syria], she [Umm Youssef] told us there’s sea, but when we came we saw garbage!” Umm Youssef then refuted, “There’s sea! Ten minutes! You want to go to the sea? Okay, let’s go this Sunday.”

Umm Youssef also recounted her recollections of the clean environment in Saida, in which she had lived for years, “The smell of dirt…the water…once I lost my ring in the water. I looked through the clean water and I found it!” A sharp contrast from when she complained about the fishy smell in Beirut’s corniche, and more often, about the salty water in which her family bathed in Shatila. Not only had the environment deteriorated in contrast to her memories, but the solidarity she had once seen had also changed:

When I asked why she chose Shatila to stay this time instead of other camps, she said, “Because my brother came before me [and stayed in Shatila], and my children…they were so tired.” And when I asked if she had considered moving to other places in Lebanon, she told me, “No, I want to be in the camp with my people, and my husband’s, his faction is here too. But honestly they [the people in the camp] are not nice. They think we are from Syria, so we’re Syrian. They say of themselves that they are the people of war. I know. I know they had so many wars and it has been hard, but they don’t know the war in Syria is very difficult too.”

What she described of the memories—of herself as a gutsy, strong youth who had came to Lebanon to search for her similarly enthusiastic siblings who fought with “the people”—contrasted to her disappointments, showing the gap between her expectations of Lebanon and what she had experienced this time. It was as if those golden days of hers would re-emerge upon this arrival. During Umm Youssef’s return this time, as she walked through Shatila, as she revisited the sea, as she interacted with the locals, the memory images of her pasts, which she had been carrying all this time with her, seemed to relate themselves to the present scenes and came back to life. Bergson (1988) explains how memories become actual:

The memory-image itself, if it remained pure memory, would be ineffectual. Virtual, this memory can only become actual by means of the perception which attracts it. Powerless, it borrows life and strength from the present sensation in which it is materialized (p. 127).

Those virtual and powerless memories of Lebanon and of her youthfulness were actualized and returned to her in the present, through her perceptions of places and their smell and their noises. It was through her returning to the sites that she had lived and thrived that those times returned to her. The return was, however, painful, as the images of the past were suggesting a comparison between then and now. After 26 years, she seemed to arrive at a future that was once felt to be promising for the military and political resistance of the refugees. What she reached was instead the present where the refugees were instead struggling for livelihood and their everyday existence.

2.2. Witnessing as a Member of the Palestinian refugees

On the same day of the interview about her first visit to Lebanon, as Nawra had dressed up and was waiting for me to go out with her, Umm Youssef said in answer to my last question:

I asked if she had met some friends here and had met them again this time. She said no, “I don’t know where they are now. They were not from Lebanon. They were from Kuwait, Syria, …” She then said, “Fatah is not like Fatah before. Before they were army fighters. […] Now they only do political work. Everyone sits there and gets fat. They used to be so strong here in Lebanon. Everyone I met here, they went home, got married and all that.” She then mentioned Abu Youssef. She said he had never been a freedom fighter as she once was trained for, “He only does political work.”

The comparison between the party’s strong presence in Lebanon and the chaotic, factionalized political scene after the departure of the PRM’s leadership was often circulated among camp residents (Allan, 2014). However, I found it particular compelling in the narrative of Umm Youssef’s, because I had been hearing and noting her vivid self-descriptions, both in our conversations and her small grumbles, which paralleled what she had commented about Fatah:

After the ice cream, Abu Youssef went out. I sat with Umm Youssef outside in the hallway while Nawra was having her late dinner. […] After Nawra finished her dinner, she took out the broom, and told me “I want to finish everything tonight so tomorrow we can sit here, have tea and go out.” (Cleaning the house became her daily duty after Umm Youssef began to work) She put the music on and started to dance, with her right hand swinging the broom. Umm Youssef looked at her and told me, “I used to be very fit and healthy. I danced Indian dance, I ran and I did yoga. But now…menopause age.” She made fun of herself for constantly feeling warm because of menopause. We paused our conversation at some point watching Nawra dancing in the house. “Do you know how to do this?” Nawra showed the move to her mom. We were sitting beside the door. Her mom replied disapprovingly, “This is called dancing? Ah, I don’t like that.” While I was still fondly watching her sweeping the floor with dance moves, Umm Youssef got up, got through the door, and started to dance in front of Nawra, showing her how to move the head without moving the body. At a point she took the broom and danced with it as well. Nawra looked at her laughing awkwardly. (The next day, Nawra told me that was the first time her mom showed a dance move to her.) Umm Youssef got back to the seat besides me and began telling me of her memories, “After I got married and I danced for Abu Youssef, he told me he didn’t like dancing. So I stopped. He doesn’t like makeup as well…I think I was beautiful when I was young.” I laughed, she then said, “No, seriously.” I said of course, I think so too. She said, “If my sister found the photo album and sends them to me, you will see.” She continued, “I was like a boy when I was young. I cut my hair short, always wearing jeans, no girly shoes but boots…Because all my older brothers were all in Lebanon, I felt I had the responsibility. I worked with my father on the roof…”

I asked, “At what age did you start smoking?” She said, “When I was in nursing school, they taught me.” She thought for a second and told me, “And I cut my hair short. I used to have hair till here,” she pointed to her waist. “When I cut it, my mom slapped me.” I asked if she was veiled at the time. She told me she started to wear a veil only one or two years before her marriage. Umm Youssef married at 25. She once commented: “Everyone said I was too old to marry, but at 25, I had brains [to make a right decision].”

She constantly found herself becoming old and out of shape. She would say, quite often, that she’s reaching fifty, that she wasn’t as bloated, that she was pretty and active when she was young. She would sometimes sourly say in front of Abu Youssef remarks to the effect of “You would go and marry some young lady as I stay in the house being old and fat, eating like a mafjuu’ah (like a gluttonous person)” Umm Youssef, like those fighters and friends she met during her stay in Lebanon, went home, got married, had kids, and became fat. Upon her return, she saw no thriving political cause and military figures, but only found herself being a parent, bloated and frazzled, being as what happened to those fighters who were once lively and strong.

I sensed her frustration toward the effects of time. They were sometimes explicitly expressed in the speech of “I’m getting old and fat”, and sometimes subtle in her wish, if not eagerness, to display the young self that she had been: the beautiful, rebellious and unconventional young woman, and those vigorous times of hers, of which Nawra’s dance had brought the recollection. The effects of time had been bodily: her fattened belly that prevented her from bending her upper body for a yoga pose when she tried to show me what she had practiced; her constant body pains caused from work, and her deteriorated hair:

Although it was still early in the day, Umm Youssef looked frazzled. She kept leaning forward with her hand holding her waist when she moved. I asked about her work, she told me that she just came back from her patient’s house in the morning. She stayed over night to take care of her. She complained about the long hours of work.

Umm Youssef was complaining about how bad her hair has become. She described that it used to be “silky” but now it looks the wire sponge they used in the kitchen. “It wasn’t like this before. The water...” And after she showered, she patted her neck, turned to Abu Youssef and said, “It’s still sticky...What kind of shower is it?”

The feeling of aging had overlapped with her weariness toward the camp environment, and the work that demanded a large part of her time and energy. To her relief, she was not alone in experiencing the painful effects of time and displacement. In Umm

Youssef’s eyes, Abu Youssef, too, had grown older and more fragile in these restless years:

Abu Youssef asked Latif [the neighbor next door who has become a good friend of his] to come with him to the market in order to buy a hairdryer for Nawra and Umm Youssef. Abu Youssef joked with him, “I don’t have hair and neither do you. Why do we need a hairdryer?” Umm Youssef looked at his sparse hair and laughed with timidity, afraid of shaming him in front of others. Abu Youssef seemed annoyed. She told me, “Before he had hair…so long that he tied them behind the back! These five years he has lost them.” “He plucked his hair every time when he was mad at me, so…” she joked, mocking him plucking hair.

I asked about her work, she said it’s getting harder and harder since her patient became very emotional these days. And when I asked about Abu Youssef, she told me, he was fine but “now he is upset...Because my patient shouted at me, and when I came back I screamed in his face. He was very angry this time asking why I had to be like this.” She seemed regretful. “Maybe also because I was fasting. And he wasn’t. He works under the sun, he has to drink water.” Abu Youssef got a temporary job as a gardener two weeks before Ramadan. He had fasted for the first two days of the Ramadan, but on the third day, as Nawra told me, he felt his wound20 was hurting and he almost fainted. He stopped fasting since then.

During her revisit, her displacement, to Lebanon this time, Umm Youssef had witnessed the passage of time and effects of relentless wars on herself, on Abu Youssef, and on the political movement which all used to be powerful and lively.

20 Abu Youssef got injured on his head from a shelling in Syria. They rarely talked about his injury except during my first few visits when they told me how he needed to practice oud for keeping his hands nimble.

2.3. Re-living the Young Self

I found Umm Youssef’s memories of her young self, which were constantly triggered, were not only the images that appeared in her present, but also what she actually re-lived. The moment when she danced in front of Nawra, I saw that she felt her body was still able to deliver some of the strength that she once knew well. In addition to these small actions through which I saw her young self reappearing, she also re-lived the young self through her work and the “responsibility” that she once took upon herself fervently. The young lady who was learning in the nursing school, rebellious and energetic, this younger self she always wanted to show me in the photographs of her not-yet-found album, and the “Abu Ali” who was once shouldering the responsibility of a family, were all being re-lived as an unanticipated result of finding herself a refugee in Lebanon. She had been working as a private nurse for more than one year when I met her. Before this patient, she had taken care of another two and both had died. The work had made her a nurse again, an occupation she was once familiar with, and which at times contained the quintessence of her youthful self. She again owned a new world for herself, without the family by her side. Umm Youssef explored the patient’s neighborhood in Central Beirut, an area filled with luxury buildings, fancy restaurants, as well as the corniche where the patient’s family often went. She also looked through and read books on the patient’s shelves (“They have a library”, she said); she befriended her patient, her patient’s family, and her two foreign colleagues, Genat from Ethiopia and Ruby from the Philippines, who also worked there:

She would call back to the house when she was at work, and made Abu Youssef and Nawra greet Genat. Abu Youssef once told Genat on the phone, “Umm Youssef has been telling me a lot about you!” Umm Youssef also asked me once if I had any textbooks for learning Arabic in English. She wanted to buy one for Ruby, who had been here for years but still couldn’t speak Arabic. She also asked Abu Youssef once to get a pair of shoes for Ruby, “They live there in

Hamra. Everything’s so expensive there. Whenever I saw good clothes or shoes, I would take a photo of them and ask them if they want it.” And her patient, an old retired opera singer, in her description, was a woman desperately in need of Umm Youssef’s company, “She’s afraid of me leaving her, even when I went to the toilet, she would ask ‘Where are you going?’ I would tell her, ‘Hbibiti I need to go to the toilet.’” Umm Youssef told of the amusing times she spent with her patient. The patient’s son and his wife were a kind couple: “They always give me extra money.” On her birthday, she came back from work with a birthday cake: “They’ve heard it’s my birthday.”

Umm Youssef would bring home not only the stories of her patient, but also new recipes, diet chocolate that she started buying from a pharmacy next to her patient’s house, and shiny spoons, new plates, fine sweets, orchids, and paintings... While at home, she continually prepared herself for work:

I arrived at 1 pm. As soon as I arrived, Umm Youssef showed me the new clothes she bought from the “European store” in the Sabra market. She also got some shirts for Abu Youssef [...] She told me in the kitchen, “I go to work everyday so I need to wear something decent. I shopped once for the whole summer.” Later, on our way to the salon to see Talah, Umm Youssef saw a cart selling shoes and sandals. She stopped by and picked a white, waterproof pair, and asked Nawra, “This will be good for work right?” as she wears a white nursing outfit when she’s in her patient house. But she didn’t have cash with her. She asked Nawra but she didn’t have money with her either.

The work offered an opportunity for her to be youthful and energetic again; it was also a refuge, from time to time, even as short as just the duration of a shower, to forget about the sticky and bitter refugeeness. One night she was staying over at the patient’s house, she sent a message to Abu Youssef, and he read it to me and Nawra: “I’m going to shower in the fresh water.” Re-experiencing the young self was, for Umm Youssef, an unexpected result of the refugee situation. In this respect, time showed its creativity that was opposed to time being a perpetrator who brought along the erosive effects on Umm

Youssef’s body and brought away the golden time of a political cause.

Though Umm Youssef was reliving her young self and “Abu Ali,” her current responsibilities appeared to be heavier than those of her youth. And she found no where

to lighten her load—she no longer had her father and siblings but instead children and husband who were at the time dependent on her, and futures were far more uncertain.

The stability provided by her might be temporary, and she knew and prepared for it:

She recently bought a golden ring and a bracelet. She told me, “I saved a little bit every week and then I bought these. It’s saving too, you know? If I didn’t buy them, I would spend the money on other things. In Syria I used to buy jewelry too. When the war happened, I sold everything, earrings, rings...we spent a lot on his treatment,” she pointed to Abu Youssef.

[Umm Youssef lent 200 dollars to the old grandma next door, and she told Abu Youssef about it] She told me, “I was paid 240 a week, but they always gave me 250...As long as my patient is still alive, we’ll be [financially] okay. If she dies, I will eat shit.” 21

The past experience of loss had made her bear in mind the uncertainty of one’s possessions, as she foresaw the future in which the current stability might disappear at any time, when her old patient dies.

2.4. A Mother’s Witnessing

Besides the bodily effects that she had felt and seen in herself and her husband, the passage of time presented itself through another modality to Umm Youssef: The transformations of Youssef (18) and Taalib (16), her two boys who both were in the age

21 Umm Youssef’s income was in fact “very good” (as commented by a local camp dweller when Nawra mentioned to her) compared to many other families in the camp which hardly had stable incomes. The approximate monthly budget of Umm Youssef’s family (5 people) is as following:

Income Umm Youssef $960 Aids UNRWA $133 (LBP 40,000 per person) Expenses Rent $300 Electricity (EdL: see n2) $4 (LBP 20,000 for 3 months) Shared Generator Line $12 Food, Groceries, Snacks and Cigarettes $350 Fresh Water $7 Other Expenses (Outfits; House appliances) $50-60 (varies widely)

of entering adulthood during the years of their displacement. The family arrived in

Lebanon when Youssef and Taalib were 16 and 14, respectively. They had changed, as every child during adolescence will, but the boys’ changes in Umm Youssef’s eyes were more worrisome, as the environment surrounding them became unfamiliar and threatening to her:

We sat outside at the hallway. Umm Youssef and Nawra were telling me about their big house in Syria. […] Youssef came back, with a lit cigarette in hand. Umm Youssef was surprised, “Eh?! Eh?!” Her eyes followed every one of his moves looking for an ash tray. Youssef talked back to his mother and left. Umm Youssef then sighed and said, “This is Lebanon.” Later, I asked if Youssef had gotten to know some friends here, she said, “Bad, bad friends.”

Hadi came to pick up Nawra. While he was waiting Nawra to dress up, he had a discussion with Taalib and Umm Youssef on people who sell drugs in the nearby area. […] Nawra came out to ask Umm Youssef’s opinion about her outfit. While I was thinking the previous conversation was probably over, Umm Youssef continued, “That’s why I’m so afraid. Because they [the boys] were also out of work. Many kids in the camp are depressed and have nothing to do, so they do drugs.”

Her worries were often conveyed to me in the context of the presence of guns and drugs, which were “unheard” and “unheard of” in the pre-war surroundings of Sbeineh camp in Syria, where the kids were raised. During my visits to their house, the sound of gun shots was heard very often: sometimes, as celebration for weddings or commemoration events; sometimes a group of people were fighting and shooting to intimidate others, including at the location that was very close to Nawra’s house. A sharp contrast emerged when Umm Youssef and others recounted their memories of the strict law and order in pre-war Syria:

I was sitting on the cushion across Abu Youssef and Umm Youssef when the sound of gunshots began. It seemed to be celebratory. When I asked if they have the celebratory gun shooting in Syria. “In Syria,” they hastily replied together, “If you had a knife, you would be arrested!” Abu Youssef gestured handcuffing to me. Umm Youssef said, “In Syria, there was a government.”

Abu Youssef, however, saw the changes of the boys as a turning point, a chance of growing up, in contrast to the concerns of Umm Youssef:

Abu Youssef was strangely quiet today. After I got in, only Umm Youssef talked to me. She told me, “Abu Youssef was upset because we were fighting this morning.” Since the atmosphere was tense, she decided to go up to visit the neighbor to “breathe some air”. On the way upstairs, I asked what they were fighting about. She told me, “We were fighting about Taalib. He comes home so late every day. I was very worried that someone might abuse him, hit him...taking out knifes...But Abu Youssef said he can be independent. He is only 16. He’s still a child!” Taalib came back home at 2 a.m. last night.

Their ideas also diverged when Taalib started to work and explore his own social world.

Contrary to Abu Youssef’s patience, and sometimes excitement, toward Taalib’s transformation, I found Umm Youssef often disapproving:

It was the evening and Taalib was still sleeping. Umm Youssef woke him up for the cake and told us about his recent work. He’s working at polishing furniture for LBP16,000 ($10) a day. Umm Youssef told me that they originally told him it would be 20,000 ($13), but when he arrived, they told him 16,000. Deducting the 4000 for commuting back and forth, she calculated for me, Taalib would only make 10,000 ($7) a day. She doesn’t approve of him working in such conditions. “He has pain in his arms...He’ll probably be sick.”

Taalib started his new work painting with the neighbor Latif. The neighbor sent a photo of them on the corniche to Abu Youssef’s phone. He showed it to me.

Taalib came back around noon. He hasn’t been home for a whole night. Abu Youssef asked, “Where were you?” He answered “SaHraat!” (Nightlife). “So you went out the whole night and you sleep in the day?” Abu Youssef asked, and Taalib said yes, “It’s Saturday!” Umm Youssef didn’t say a word.

[Umm Youssef was still in a fight with Taalib since last week, and Abu Youssef had already started talking to him again] I sat with Nawra and Abu Youssef after our breakfast. Taalib came in with a pair of new pants. He bought it with his own money earned from his painting job. He showed it to Abu Youssef. Abu Youssef had a discussion about the design and finally said, “It’s very nice. Mabrouk.” Then Abu Youssef called him to eat mana’eesh. Taalib sat with us, and started to introduce a friend who sells drugs near the building they live. He showed Abu Youssef the picture of his friend, a man with tattoos all over his body and a gun on his side. Abu Youssef then peacefully advised him to “do things with good people.” Taalib seemed to agree and explained himself to his father.

Taalib was sitting besides Umm Youssef. It seemed they had made up after a week of no talking. I asked Nawra, who told me that Taalib had apologized. Taalib was telling Umm Youssef about Hezbollah recruiting people to go fight in Syria for 400-dollar reward (or 700 dollars, as Taalib later argued). Umm Youssef despised the idea, “Shame, Shame. For 400 dollars!”

While Abu Youssef saw Taalib’s transformations as a boy creating his own path toward manhood, Umm Youssef saw her son’s changes as destructive, as if the passage of time had taken the snuggling boy away from her:

Taalib’s friend came knocking on the door. After he went out with his friend, I asked Umm Youssef if his friend was also from Syria, she told me, “I don’t know, but he doesn’t like to go out with friends from Syria. Now he has many friends from here… Before in Syria, he was quiet and he always stayed alongside me,” she gestured that he liked to snuggle close to her.

Umm Youssef also saw her family time disappeared as she witnessed the passage of time:

[Nawra and I came back from our visit to another family.] Umm Youssef was upset we didn’t come back earlier to help with the meal. “It’s not about coming late or not. It’s that I made the shishbarak [dumplings in yogurt stew] all alone! It’s very boring!” When we sat down, she told us that Youssef had seen her making the meal alone while be went out from the house. Umm Youssef had asked him if he still remembered the times when he used to help with shishbarak. He replied that he didn’t remember and he left. “Since they were little, I taught them to share the housework, but now…no one helps…Taalib? He didn’t even talk to me before going out.” Nawra added, “We used to argue who got to help, now we fight over who has to stay to help.”

[In the same conversation in the previous note about her reminiscences of her young self] Umm Youssef told me about how the third child Taalib was born, and how fun the three kids were, “When they were small. Nawra liked to tell them ghost stories and the two boys would run to my room and sleep besides me. Then Nawra would have the room all by herself,” she laughed and repeated the memory to Nawra when she came at the doorway to listen to our conversation. We laughed for a while and Umm Youssef said, “We were a happy family.” I told her it’s still a happy family. She continued, “Before, every Thursday, we would have a meeting. Everyone would sit down and talk about their own problems, what made them upset or angry. And we would find solutions together. I liked these days...” I asked, “It’s when they were little?” She said no, “It’s until we came to Lebanon...I don’t know what happened [to this tradition]... Now no one listens to me. I did that because my father used to do it. We were nine siblings […]”

The confusion appeared, when she asked why those times—the tradition, the atmosphere of being a happy family—had gone, as she sighed, “I don’t know what happened.” Was it because of the interruption of the war and the displacement—“It’s until we came to Lebanon,”—or was it because the time had passed and the children were no longer to be treated the same way as before? The elapse of time, the boys’ emerging rebellion and their wish to grow into men had intertwined with displacement and the family’s new way of living in Lebanon:

Youssef came home around 2 p.m. after his work at Haifa Hospital. I noticed a tattoo on his left arm, a scorpion. I asked if Youssef got it in Syria, Abu Youssef told me, “In Syria it’s not allowed! He is crazy. When I was young, many people told me to get a tattoo but I refused.” I asked Umm Youssef another day, she told me, “The day he got the tattoo I beat him. Before, if he said he was going to do something like that, he would never do it. But this time...”

Umm Youssef and I laughed about Youssef using her toothbrush and Nawra’s mascara to tidy his beard. Umm Youssef told me, “He did this only in Lebanon. He used to shave it all.” I relayed what I had overheard from Nawra, “Maybe he is in love with someone.” “Maybe, I don’t know,” she answered.

Umm Youssef fought with Taalib. She couldn’t bear the way he talked to her anymore. “At first, I thought maybe it’s because he left his friends in Syria...But I left my friends, Abu Youssef left his, Nawra and Youssef too... He can’t talk to me like that” “Abu Youssef told him, ‘If you don’t respect your mother, then don’t come back.’ He slept in the faction’s office. I felt better after I knew he slept there.” I asked how she knew, and she told me that “Youssef went there everyday. They have friends there...good friends, so I feel okay.”

I also saw the worry—the worry that a child’s adulthood was arriving as they entered this new and unfamiliar environment—in Abu Amaar, an old friend of Abu Youssef’s family, he once said and Nawra explained to me, “Amaar is in his teenager years. He wants to try everything. Abu Amaar is worried that his son will learn something bad.”

The refugee uncertainty also rendered the parents unsure about which stage of life their children were at—Does the suspension of the children’s school education mean their

departure from adolescence? Does a child’s wish to work gesture towards the arrival of his adulthood?

2.5. And the Efforts

Despite what I have written about how Umm Youssef’s work having made her relive her youthful self, the work was, in most of her accounts, less a joyful experience than a frustrating responsibility, when it rendered her unable to be a mother and a wife like before:

Sunday, Umm Youssef was cleaning the cushions and doing laundry. “This is the first time I see people doing washing on a holiday,” Nawra complained as she helped her mother. I told Umm Youssef, “When you go to work, you work, and when you have a day-off, you’re still working.” She replied to me seriously, “I want to be a wife, cleaning the house and cooking. But now when I come back from work, I feel too tired to do anything. That makes me feel sorry.”

After she shouted at Nawra about us coming home, she told me when Nawra was away, “Now, I can’t control my voice... After a day of work, I have no patience.” She told me as I asked what she felt about the changes that her work had brought upon her, “Here I don’t feel like living, four, five days a week working and on off-days I stay in the house...” I asked if she used to go out a lot, “Not a lot, but I stayed in my own house, my lovely house. We went out at night, the whole family together.”

The bitterness of Umm Youssef’s work was also shown in and through her body—her weariness, her back pain, and the arm bruises on her arms, made when her patient grabbed her to get up from the wheelchair. In this sense, her work had created a paradox: while it drew her closer to her youthfulness, it pushed her to witness the passage of time as destructive, as something that takes her golden time away. Yet, for the family, she had never ceased being a mother and a wife. When she was at work, she would call back and ask if Nawra had woken up and if she had cleaned the kitchen. She would set the menu and tell Nawra what to prepare for the meal before she came back:

We went home. Abu Youssef was waiting for us and told Nawra that Umm Youssef had called. Nawra said, “I don’t know what she’s going to cook this time. She always saw something there and experiment at home... and no one liked it.”

Sunday. I watched Um Youssef making wara‘ anab (grape leaves), she told me, “When I’m at home, I try to make a bigger meal.” She also asked Nawra to bring sea salt for pickles. I watched her making the pickles later, and she told me, “It’s for Ramadan...It will need a month to be done. They always eat fatteh and foul [beans and chickpeas dishes] in Ramadan so they need it. I used to do it every time, not only in Ramadan. I don’t buy it from the market. But I don’t know why [I haven’t done it for a while].”

It was also in these enormous efforts that I saw Umm Youssef’s adaptation and reorientation as a “character”, while carrying the weight of memories and the bitterness of loss. She flipped between being a mother, a youthful self, the “Abu Ali”, and sometimes an old lady. In Das’s ethnography, time, in Manjit’s word, was a perpetrator and a healer—it was time that washed away the bad time. For Umm Youssef, while experiencing the destructive effects of time, it was the memories of her golden past, which were always with her, that unexpectedly rejuvenated her in this bad time.

CHAPTER 3

HOUSE, APPLIANCES AND INVENTIVENESS FOR FUTURE

Attitudes toward futures are often made explicit through the actions of acquiring, modifying, or improving a dwelling. Through my visits and revisits to the rented apartments of my interlocutors over a period of a few months, I tracked detailed changes addressed to the everyday needs of their surroundings. These small steps of improvement evidenced my interlocutors’ uncertain, or ambivalent, attitudes to having a future in which to dwell. In this chapter, I want to shift the focus, as well as take a break, from the confusion and paradox in imagining futures within intimate relationships, to look at the surroundings of the everyday: house, furniture, and daily necessities. And from there, I was able to make sense of my interlocutors’ inventiveness and reorientation toward new lifeworlds, where the material necessities of the everyday required them to establish new friendships and re-imagine a social circle. In Bourdieu’s

(1979) study on the rehoused Algerian families, he explained that the apartment is “a material object prepared for a certain use,” thus, “it announces its future and the future use” (p. 85). I applied this notion to my interlocutors’ decisions to arrange and purchase house appliances and furniture. The actions of modifying surroundings implied expectations toward futures—those material objects were prepared for future uses, and they accordingly represented the expectations of how my interlocutors would make use of them. The past is also shown, as another display of temporality here, when my interlocutor, through contact with their everyday surroundings, tried to re-create the

familiarity and comfort of the past. In this chapter, time therefore marks its significance in these actions of creating and re-creating.

3.1. The Challenges

Lessened spaces and lost possessions brought a series of challenges to my interlocutors, who were forced to adopt a new way of living. In Syria, Nawra and her family had a steady middle-class income. They owned two cars and a renovated, well- equipped house. Some other interlocutors, Umm Atyaf’s family for example, had a lower economic status, but still owned a house of their own. After the loss of their surroundings, my interlocutors’ habits that had been cultivated in those surroundings suddenly could not find a world which corresponded to them. Let me begin with the tasks that my interlocutors encountered amidst the lost material surroundings of the everyday:

Nawra was preparing tea in the kitchen. I stood beside her. She told me about one of her cousins who lives in Bulgaria. As we continued to talk about the cousin, she took a look at the wall behind me and suddenly said, “When I see the kitchen. I remember I’m a refugee.” She gestured at the piled boxes, plastic bags and water bottles [used for storing fresh water]22 at the corner. She continued, “My cousin posted a Facebook status saying ‘Refugee, refugee, I hate this word,’ and I commented ‘me too.’”

The walled space, the kitchen of about four square meters, which could barely hold three people, was a constant reminder of, as Nawra said, being a refugee. The cardboard boxes at the side of the bedroom, which were mostly for storing clothes and beddings for other seasons, were a mark of their unsettledness, manifesting the tracks of their moves from place to place. As Taalib, the youngest brother of Nawra, once complained,

22 The tap water in Shatila is salty. Households were forced to buy drinking water and water for domestic use. An UNRWA water tank was built and started to provide portable water for the residents in the camp (UNRWA, 2013a). Nawra referred it as “maai helo” (fresh water), in contrast to “salty water” or “sewage water.”

“Why all those boxes? What are we, homeless people?” Umm Youssef told me, explaining, “You see we are using the karatiin (boxes). It’s so messy. Everyday I’m looking for my clothes. I want to buy a wardrobe, but it’s so expensive.” While the clutters seemed to merge into the surroundings and become a usual site of the everyday, they were intrusive, from time to time, and a palpable mark of one’s refugee identity.

One continued to be reminded of the migration and of the loss of the past when encountering the inconvenience that these material objects brought along. These complaints about the surroundings were normally brief, but constantly repeated by my interlocutors whenever they came across the discomfort of what they were not used to in their times in Syria: “You see these white spots. Salts, from the water,” Nawra said, while folding the laundry; another time, when she poured more tea for me, “You see this rust,” she commented, “because of the salty water… In Syria, we could use water from the tap. We didn’t need to buy bottled water.” These remarks were very often paired with reminiscences of my interlocutors’ contrasting situations in Syria.

Nawra and I were at Ayda’s house to prepare for an engagement party. Ayda was trying to find a long-sleeve shirt. She hunted through her clothes and clutters, leaving the cupboard open. Ayda’s mother later came in and joined us. She looked at the messy scene and told me, “Our house in Syria was not like this. We had shelves. Things were organized.” I asked how many rooms they had. She answered, “Three rooms. One for me and Abu Mustafa, one for Ayda and one for Mustafa and Walid [Ayda’s two brothers],” “And two salons”, she added “one for family and one for guests.”

The sense of loss became explicit when the conversation drew a comparison between

“what we used to own” and “what you see now.” The statement of “Our house in Syria was not like this” evidenced their concerns about my judgment toward them. Ayda’s mother wished to remind me that “more organized” lifeworlds had existed and had been lived, but were now lost. Without proper spaces to contain clothes and clutter, my interlocutors had to expose a living space disorganized, and sometimes even a private

sphere of life to visitors. This brought about a feeling of shame, an anxiety to prove a life otherwise. Shame from being a refugee not only existed in the form of exposure, but also in receiving “aid.” Nawra, during a night in Ramadan, she told me “I don’t know what happened to my dad. He started having fights with me everyday. Like today, Sahar

[Nawra’s friend] brought clothes to me. I told her I didn’t need them but she seemed sad when she said ‘if you really don’t want them, give them to other people.’ So I accepted them. But my dad shouted to me saying ‘Did you beg her to give you clothes?’ I was crying before you came.” The extra, “unwanted” clothes were distributed by the NGO where Sahar worked. This kind of aid brought along an imagination of “begging,” and in Abu Yousssef’s view, it was as though his dignity had been robbed.

Housing space was not only a stimulus of shame and the pain of the loss, but also posed an actual challenge to privacy and relationships within each family, as I comprehended from Zayna’s situation:

Zayna was in her late 30s, a mother of three and a kindergarten teacher. She was paid only $100 for a month. Her family had been in Lebanon for two and a half years. They stayed in Nahr el-Bared camp in Tripoli for two months. Zayna and her son both described the camp “a closed camp”, surrounded by Lebanese army and restricted with a curfew. They couldn’t get around freely. They then moved to Sur (Tyre) to join Zayna’s parents-in-law for another month and finally decided to come to Beirut. They lived in the UNRWA building in Shatila, in which the apartment was without a kitchen and too small for Zayna, her husband and the three sons (Age 16, 6 and 4). The family moved to the current apartment with two rooms and a spacious kitchen, but was joined by Zayna’s mother, her brother’s family, and a cousin—a total of 14 people. When I asked how they arranged the room for sleeping, she said, “This room (the living room) is for my mother, my aunt’s daughter, my sister’s daughter and my brother’s family, and my brother sleeps in the kitchen. The big kitchen has a lot of space.” Zayna normally received her guests at the terrace (where guests can access without going into the rooms.) During a visit she invited me to take a look at the house before I left. When I walked into her room, she pointed to the high stack of cushions and said, “Every time when people saw these, they say, ‘wow, you got so many!’ Because we have so many people.”

Zayna once recounted to me that in Yarmouk, Syria, “Everyone has their own houses,” and her house, her parents’, and her brother’s were all “with two rooms and a big hallway.” The restrictions on space and privacy had forced Zayna and her extended family to adopt new patterns of interacting, which in turn brought tension to intimate relationships, such as that of Zayna, her mother, and her brother's wife:

Zayna had a fight with her mother. When I asked why, Zayna waited till her mother left to the kitchen to prepare meal, and told me, “Because we live in a very crowded house with 8 children. She (my mother) has to cook a big meal. Working in the house is very difficult, so she became anxious. I’m her daughter. I could forgive [make up with] her but my brother’s wife couldn’t. My mom was worried about me, but not about her... Sometimes I can’t tolerate either. I can’t take on another weight.” When I asked what’s her plan for Ramadan. She replied directly, “We have no plan for Ramadan. We are living step by step. We are thinking of what matters. We have to think about what to eat, and how to pay for so many people. My sister and brother’s UNRWA handouts got cut. We don’t have enough to pay the rent. That’s another reason why my mother got anxious.”

Zayna and her family, while dealing with the apartment needed to sustain the very existence of the household, were also confronting the challenges caused by the disappearance of certain space and privacy that they used to be familiar with among one another.

As for Nawra’s family, though they were not joined by other relatives, the lessened space had still exacerbated the frictions among the family members. Nawra’s family rented a three-room apartment with one living room (where they received guests, watched TV, and had meals), and two bedrooms. At night, Nawra slept alone in a bedroom. Her room was connected to another bedroom, where her parents rested, by a sliding door. The parents’ bedroom was openly connected to a short passageway to the living room. The kitchen and the bathroom were on each side of the passageway. As for the two brothers, they slept in the living room, since they were usually the ones who came home the latest. Unlike Zayna’s family, Umm Youssef’s family was still able to

maintain the organization of three sleeping spaces as they used to do in Syria. However, the lessened space still shifted the dynamics of communications in the family. One morning, Nawra complained, as she often would, to Umm Youssef about the overnight mess in the living room,

“Look at what your sons did!” Nawra said when Umm Youssef walked out from the bedroom. “After you get married and have children, you’ll get used to it,” Umm Youssef replied, and then turned to me and said, “Before in Syria, we had a big house, everyone had their own rooms, separate and alone. But now, they eat here and sleep here. The rooms, kitchen, and bathroom are all together… We have to see each other all the time.” Later Taalib then shouted from the room inside, “Mama!” Umm Youssef shouted back, “She’s dead!” “Ya, mama!” Taalib shouted again.

Nawra and Umm Youssef had described the “big house” to me hastily the first time I asked, “The living room was from here to Umm Ahmad’s [the neighbor’s] house,”

Nawra said, while Umm Youssef added, “Further than that! And we had everything: microwave, freezer, AC…” Their house had been renovated five years before the war began. Nawra also told me once, “I had a picture of Quds [Jerusalem] and the picture of

Massari [a Lebanese singer] in my room. We had two bathrooms and the toilet was separated from the shower.” Their rented house appeared to me a distinct contrast and a hurtful mark of loss when I tried to imagine their former house from their descriptions.

What they had lost were not only the material objects per se, but also the humanized space which contained accustomed patterns of communications, as evidenced by

Zayna’s situation. Expectations toward objects’ future use also disappeared. The dowry

Umm Youssef prepared for Nawra, as I had described in the first chapter, signified a mother’s imagination toward the day on which the dowry would be made use of for her daughter. The house renovation implied a distant prospect of staying in Syria, in the very house they had equipped and invested in, as if the house itself was their tangible promise toward the future and as if it also assured them of the future.

3.2. Creating, Re-creating and Dispositions

What struck me the most were my interlocutors’ restless efforts, while having to bear the poignancy of loss, to create or re-create, comfort, convenience, and their own practices of living. These actions reflected their dispositions from the previous lifeworlds which they had strived to sustain or rebuild with modifications to fit into new social and material environments in Shatila. The efforts ranged from major changes of moving and purchasing, to trivial attempts such as rearranging, borrowing, installing and fixing. My first field note entry on these actions, which was also where the idea for these observations was hatched, documented Nawra’s family moving, from the one apartment to another on the same floor. It was the sixth time they had moved in Shatila within two years, as Umm Youssef had recounted to me,

“When we arrived, we slept in the uncle’s place [Nawra’s uncle, Umm Youssef’s younger brother], then we moved to the house beside Umm Atyaf. There were windows but we couldn’t open them because of the rats…No air and sunlight. I couldn’t stay so we moved to another place. The house was nice and on the rooftop but there was one night in the winter when the ceiling started leaking… So we moved to another one, the one with a big kitchen, which I liked a lot, but the neighbors there were screaming and swearing everyday. We moved again to the street nearby. It was okay but once the water stop running for about 10 days. We asked the landlord but he couldn’t fix it so we moved to this building (to the first house in the row) and then here. We might move again!” I asked if this apartment is the one they have stayed in for the longest period of time, but she didn’t know. I counted for her that they have stayed here for seven months. “Walaw?” She was surprised.

Compared to the moving journey that Nawra’s family had experienced, Umm Atyaf’s family had not moved once since they moved into their current place. Their apartment was the one Nawra’s family had moved next to after a temporary stay with Nawra’s uncle. Umm Atyaf’s apartment, which Nawra and I also called “the two sisters’ house,” was one of our usual destinations for weekly visits because Nawra was a friend of the

two sisters, Talah and Sahar. During our visits, Nawra would make comments about their house,

Nawra said, “When we first came, we lived next door to them. Every morning when I woke up, I would knock on the wall, and they could hear me!”

Talah told Narwa that she felt sick. Nawra replied, “Because the camp is full of garbage!” […] They then talked about the recent water shortage. The two sisters had to bring water from outside. Nawra then said, “When we lived next door, the water didn’t come very often. But after we moved, we always have water.” She continued, “My dad found a house for them in our building, but their dad didn’t want to move!”

The two sisters’ apartment was located on the first floor of a building in one of the alleyways at the center of the camp. It was dim and stuffy. “There’s no air inside. I felt I couldn’t breathe,” Nawra once told me after a visit, and repeated the same account of how her father tried to convince them to move to their building but they had refused.

The house had one large room, a living room, and a passage to the kitchen where they had made a place to sleep. The two sisters have seven other siblings, and the living room once ran out of room when Nawra and I joined them for a meal. I asked Umm

Atyaf once about their house in Syria. She told me that although they had a slightly smaller house, they owned it, instead of renting. They had moved only once in Shatila over the course of two years, from a “shabby place” for 400 dollars a month, to the current apartment for 250 dollars a month. Their household income mostly consisted of

UNRWA handouts, since only one of the older sons worked regularly in a barbershop.

Unlike Nawra’s family, who had sufficient financial means as well as the disposition to live in a spacious house, the two sisters’ family had neither the financial stability nor the disposition that would enable them to seek continuously a better dwelling as Nawra’s family could do. However, the rooms were richly decorated with the siblings’ artwork from the learning center they attended. In the living room, an A4-sized handmade frame

with all the family members’ identity photos was hung on the wall. The TV rack was occupied by the children’s craftwork—cards, photo frames, artificial flowers… And once,

Khalid (the third son, around 18) came in with a glass decoration, which the light underneath the glass changes colors. Inside the glass was a shape of a plane. He tried to turn the light on but found that it requires batteries. He went out to buy batteries and came right back. He played with it at the corner. He passed it to Talah (the second sister) on her request. She asked how much it cost. “5000” [$3.3] he said quietly. But when Umm Atyaf asked about it, he told her 2000 [$1.3]. After passing it around, he placed it onto the shelf under the TV. Talah told him to put it in front of the photo frame (of the parents’ photo) “It’s nicer there.” Later when Abu Atyaf commented on that, suggesting that the decoration was useless, “So what’s that for?” Umm Atyaf defended her son, “He likes it. What’s the matter? And it’s cheap. How much? 2000?” Talah chose not to tell her about the real price.

To meet the family’s needs, Umm Atyaf had also purchased a second-hand medium- sized refrigerator for 100 dollars before Ramadan began, as Nawra’s family did.

Umm Youssef’s wish to find a better apartment continued vigorously:

A guy was shouting at his kids at the hallway. It was warm that day. They kept the door open to let the air flow, so the noises were hard to avoid. Umm Youssef sighed and continued cutting the tomatoes for wara‘ anab, complaining about their loud voice. Abu Youssef then mentioned another apartment in a new building nearby. It will be a single apartment with no neighbors next door and it’s 300 dollars a month with three rooms, the same as what they pay for the current apartment.

Umm Youssef’s continuous endeavor to create a comfortable dwelling was shown more palpably in the constant modification of the surroundings. Each week, when I walked into the house, I would notice something had been changed or added: The couch in the living room had been moved more than three times to each of the three available sides of the wall; the TV shelf had been moved twice, to each of the two possible corners; the old, simple stove was replaced by a new one with three burners (LBP 60,000 [$40]); a simple shelf about one arm in length was installed on the wall beside the stove, initially for spices and cans but later for placing large-sized pots and pans; in the beginning of

the summer, a second-hand refrigerator ($50) was added to the crowded kitchen, and a used fan was also bought for Nawra’s room (LBP 10,000 [$6.7]). After they purchased the refrigerator, they rearranged its place along with the stove, the washing machine, and other clutter more than three times; finally, a new wardrobe was added into the bedroom:

Umm Youssef told me that Abu Youssef went to buy a wardrobe in Bir Hassan area. It might cost $100 for a used one, plus a fee for transportation. While Nawra and I were about to leave the camp for a wedding, Abu Youssef carried parts of the wardrobe with Latif’s help. Latif is the neighbor’s son.

The wardrobe was assembled. In fact, it cost 30 dollars and LBP 5000 ($3.3) for a taxi to carry it back, as Abu Youssef proudly told me that he got a good deal.

It’s Umm Youssef’s day-off. We were sitting outside when the lively neighbor came up to greet us (She had been living two apartments away for years). Umm Youssef took the chance to borrow her steel ladder. Umm Youssef then tried to tear up all the remaining cardboard boxes, and put the winter blankets and other clutter up on top of the wardrobe herself. Standing on the rung of the ladder, she ordered Abu Youssef and Nawra to hand her stuff, and to move or remove things here and there.

These restless efforts to eliminate or rearrange the clutter and furniture were made as if the boxes and the messy kitchen—the painful reminders of the loss—were too irritating and needed to be discarded or to be left behind. But in a quite contrary sense, the continuous rearrangements also appeared to me to be efforts to re-create the comfortable and convenient surroundings which the family used to live in, as if by those small efforts they were able to reach closer to the comfort they used to enjoy in the past.

And as if, by clearing up clutter and rearranging it, they had wiped off the mark of instability and migration, and had gained back control of the messiness that had been loaded on them during these two years of turbulence.

These efforts were not only about interacting with the memories of the past.

They reflected, in a very practical sense, the necessity to make room for the needs of the

present and the futures: the new wardrobe and the kitchen shelf reflected the spatial needs that were unavoidably generated over time. The bottles and containers of seasonings accumulated as various dishes were cooked and as Umm Youssef’s new recipes were tried out. When the cardboard boxes were torn apart, several pairs of sandals for Nawra and Abu Youssef from last summer were rediscovered. The clothes for five family members had been piled up over these two years and gradually became excessive for the small rooms. The shirts and pants were either folded up and placed on top of other clutter, or hung up on the two hook racks on the wall, or onto the string that was tied across the room to create space to hang clothes. Creating extra spaces to organize and contain clothes became inescapable, especially for a clothes-lover such as

Abu Youssef:

“Helo?” (Is it nice?) was one of the most frequent questions I got from Abu Youssef, who liked to go looking for new shirts, nearly once every two weeks, in Sabra market. Once, when I went for a shopping trip with Nawra and Umm Youssef on the main street of Sabra market, Umm Youssef stopped by the “European store” that sells second-hand clothes for a good quality and price. Umm Youssef greeted the owner Abu Ziad, a Syrian who seemed to know Abu Youssef. Abu Ziad told Umm Youssef that if he had new models, he would call Abu Youssef. Ever since then, Abu Youssef became a frequent customer of the store. Once he got 10 shirts for LBP 20,000 ($13.3). He showed me and proudly said, “Outside, it’s 20 thousands for one. I’m wise with money.” He would also shop for Umm Youssef, Nawra, and the two brothers, bring the clothes back for them to try out, and go back to the store to exchange or revise lengths.

Abu Youssef eventually brought Nawra and me to the store, meaning to buy some shirts for us. Nawra and I picked some clothes and went into the back of the shop to try them on, which happened to be the dwelling of Abu Ziad’s family. Umm Ziad was feeding her baby and her four other children were beside her. There was only one room with a spacious kitchen. Nawra had a chat with Umm Ziad while we were trying on the shirts. Nawra asked her about the rent and how they came to Lebanon from Syria. Nawra later told me when we got home, “They pay 900 dollars for rent! If they can’t pay, they will be forced to leave. What if no one goes to shop there? And they still gave birth to the baby!”

Before Ramadan, Abu Youssef began his one-month job as a gardener. On a night during my stay in Ramadan, “Helo?” Abu Youssef showed me, yet another three shirts from Abu Ziad’s store. Nawra and I were already lying on the

cushion about to sleep. Nawra had to turn on the light again to let me see the shirts. We joked about how often he got clothes. Nawra told me, “Last time, I asked him if he could give me some money since he got his salary from his work. He said no, then he went to buy his clothes!” She continued, “Before in Syria, he had a million! He had two of this!” She meant the wardrobe sitting in front of us, which was eventually used to hold her and her brothers’ clothes, “I had a lot too…Before, if you took the clothes out of my closet, you couldn’t see the ground in my room! Blue, yellow, red… I had one wardrobe for summer and one for winter.”

The next week, Abu Youssef was wearing his new shirt. Umm Youssef told me, “In Syria, he had a different style. He got suits, pants and leather shoes! And millions of socks!”

Abu Youssef used to own a grocery store when he was in Syria, until the breakout of the war. He used to sell groceries, along with sweets and some clothing. He was very careful when it came to budgeting and spending money: Once when Nawra told him that she wanted mana’eesh with vegetables and cheese, which would cost LBP 500

($0.3) extra. He then up tomatoes and onions and brought them to the bakery to make the mana’eesh without paying extra. Abu Youssef’s habit of collecting shirts and bargain shopping was revived (maybe it had only been shortly interrupted) and the clothes started to mount up, but the spaces were no longer as large as they used to be.

Nawra’s family had been creatively managing the surroundings to meet the needs that they had generated—the needs that were created by their old habits and dispositions.

With the financial means, this particular aspect of their lifeworlds in Syria—their way of shopping and budgeting—was, in a sense, able to continue, with modifications— more careful budgeting or adjusted clothing styles.

3.3. Inventiveness and Connections

Apart from the lessened space, lack of necessary kitchen equipment and house appliances also generated inventiveness, and more importantly, created new connections

in the neighborhood, as well as sustained relationships within my interlocutors’ social circle. Umm Youssef, who worked as a private nurse for a wealthy family with a well- equipped kitchen, once brought home a whole plate of sfoof (turmeric cake), which she was good at making, and told me that she had used the oven in her patient’s house. She made it again in Ramadan. She needed an oven not only for sfoof, but also for the baked kibbeh. I was treated to this baked kibbeh once. When I asked how had she made it, she told me she had prepared the mixture and delivered it to the bakery downstairs to bake.

The bakery charged her LBP 1000 for using their oven. Umm Mustafa, Ayda’s mother, to whom Nawra and I often paid visits, also had her signature dishes. I was invited once to join her in making falafel:

When I arrived at her home in a building about three blocks away, Umm Mustafa had already cooked the hummus. She asked me if I wanted to go out with her to make the mixture, but I was wondering why we needed to go out. We got parsley from the nearby shop and headed to another apartment, the house of her friend Nadia. Umm Mustafa has known Nadia since a long time ago in Syria. Nadia had lived in Syria for about 12 years to flee the wars in Lebanon. She came back to Shatila in 1983. Umm Mustafa had to borrow the food processor from her. Umm Mustafa went into her kitchen to prepare onions for the falafel mixture. When I helped bringing a saucer into the kitchen, I noticed it was well equipped with a microwave, a kitchen ventilator, and a large fridge. I said, “It’s a nice house.” Umm Mustafa replied, “Yes. She’s Palestinian Lebanese.” Abu Mustafa, to my surprise, also visited the house. He called Nadia’s son to fix the water tower upstairs. Later, he also helped to install a window screen for Nadia. We got back to the house, and started frying falafel. Nadia’s son followed us to help with the falafel too.

Another time, during our visit, Umm Mustafa treated us to basbousa, another kind of cake. She pointed to the oven (of a size bigger than a microwave) in the living room and told us she had bought it from Nadia for a price of LBP 30,000 ($ 20). In addition to kitchen equipment, the borrowing extended to household appliances such as an iron and a steel ladder, which Umm Youssef borrowed from neighbors she got to know. During my first few months of visiting, Umm Youssef and Nawra had recounted to me their

feeling of being alienated by the local Palestinian community. They often brought up that exorbitant rent was charged to newcomers. Their lack of local knowledge in the camp also exacerbated the feeling of alienation:

Once, when Umm Atyaf asked her small son to get a pack of nuts to put on top of the rice she had cooked that day, he came back with just a half-handful of almonds. Umm Atyaf asked him how much, and he said 750 ($0.5). Then another son came in, and Umm Atayf told him to get some more from another place. Nawra then told them immediately that there was a Syrian shop around the corner and with 2000 ($1.3) they could get a big bag. Later the son came in with a bag of cashews. Umm Atayf then pointed at the small bag and said, “This was sold from a (Palestinian) Lebanese.” “This (the bigger one) was from a Syrian.”

Even though these sentiments were still circulated among the PRS interlocutors I had spent time with, during the course of a few months, I sensed their growing connections and interactions with neighbors and friends who were PoL. Nawra’s neighbor next door,

Umm Ahmad, an old grandmother in her eighties who lived with her two unmarried daughters and two sons was very close to Umm Youssef. Umm Ahmad and Karimah, one of her daughters, would join Abu Youssef and Umm Youssef for a morning coffee or late night tea when Umm Youssef had her days off. Latif, one of Umm Ahmad’s sons, had become friends with Abu Youssef, and he had accompanied him several times to shop for things, such as a hairdryer and the wardrobe which I have described. The two households had decided to share a private generator line which would provide them with a limited supply when the “government power”23 was gone. Nawra’s family paid

LBP 90,000 ($60) to install the line, and would split the monthly bill of LBP 35,000 ($

23.3) with Umm Ahmad’s family. In the first few weeks, when the two families were

23 The “government power” referred to the supply provided by Electricité du Liban, Lebanon’s state- owned electricity company. Nawra’s family paid a LBP 20,000 ($13) bill once every three months. Allan (2014) discussed thoroughly the power supply in Shatila and the politics generated by the growing needs of this basic daily amenity.

still unfamiliar with how much usage the generator supply could handle, the power was down several times:

6:00 p.m., the electricity was down. The new line didn’t seem to work well. Abu Youssef went out to check with Umm Ahmad. After half an hour, only a lamp lit up. I asked Nawra how they knew the guy with a generator. She told me it was owned by a local resident and that Umm Ahmad had told them about it. Later Akram paid a visit. (Akram was a PRS friend of Nawra’s who lived in the building across from them) When I asked him if his apartment had also installed the line, he said, “No, I used bicycle bulbs.”

Another night, the power was down again. Nawra’s uncle, who used to be an electrician, was also with us. He went down to where the generator was located, and came up. He counted the usage of Nawra’s house and asked about how many electrical appliances Umm Ahmad’s house have. “Two TVs, one lamp…” Umm Youssef counted. I asked her if it was because Umm Ahmad’s house was using more than theirs. She nodded quietly and said, “But they are really nice. The first month when we moved here, they gave us electricity free.”

Before the family had the refrigerator, they often borrowed Umm Ahmad’s to freeze meat. Once Nawra asked Karimah to hand her a bag of chicken nuggets that they had bought and put it in their freezer. Nawra used half the bag, and suggested Karimah use the other half. The relationship was built through these small acts, and through their everyday conversations. Umm Youssef had gotten to know Umm Ahmad’s personal troubles, and offered support. Umm Youssef helped her measure her blood sugar, reminded her to eat fewer sweets, and lent her money. Allan (2014), in her chapter on economic subjectivity in Shatila, wrote about the life of Fatimah, who valued rapport with neighbors more than familial ties. When it comes to financial needs, “The neighbor close by is better than the brother far away” (p. 83). I heard the same opinion from

Umm Ahmad when she had a morning coffee with Umm Youssef in the hallway, as

Umm Youssef repeated to me, “We were saying it’s easier to borrow money from a friend than a relative. Umm Ahmad asked her brother’s wife to lend her some money, so that she could visit her son in prison. But her brother’s wife didn’t lend it to her.”

Later, Umm Ahmad came in to the room to borrow the money from Umm Youssef.

Umm Youssef handed her 100 dollars. “It’s too much,” Umm Ahmad said. “Take it all,” she replied. Gradually, Umm Youssef and the family had taken on this rather new pattern of sociality.24 As Umm Youssef had recounted, to me that their house in Syria was in the family’s building, which was built by Abu Youssef’s father, so their neighbors were all relatives. Once, when the mosque was broadcasting that someone was in need of a donation for a medical operation, she commented, “In Syria, we have a big family. If someone needed money, we would gather from every household.

Everyone gave a little bit.” Through these exchanges of favors, Umm Youssef and the family had learnt, or gradually adapted to, the social environment in Shatila camp.

Engaging in the practices of receiving helps and reciprocating also implied, although subtly, the family’s expectation toward a future in which this type of relation might be something they would have to rely on, or something in which they would expect to invest.

3.4. Uncertainty Remains

While the actions of adding furniture and house appliances reflected a gradual formulation of futures, what also unfolded was a temporal horizon that remained uncertain and subject to more modifications or transitions. Most of the house appliances the families had purchased during the two years were second-hand, workable but not satisfying. This was, of course, for a large part due to the constraints on financial means, which were also in a state of uncertainty for many. But buying second-handed appliances also delivered a message that these appliances could only work as

24 However Allan concluded that “Family continues to anchor existence and to shape how refugees inhabit the world: to dwell on the attenuation of kin ties is also to memorialize them and to signify their ongoing importance, albeit in altered form” (p. 99).

substituting for lost possessions for the short-term, forthcoming needs. Umm Atyaf’s refrigerator she purchased this summer was the second one, as she told me that they had one last year but it was broken. They had fixed it three times but it didn’t work. The unwillingness to acquire new or better items of equipment also revealed ambivalence toward the idea of “nestling,” or settling down. While making one’s dwelling more habitable is needed to reorient oneself amidst uncertainty, it also signals that such efforts are concerned with a long-term future, further validating that this the place is where life will be.

A week before Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, I chatted with Nawra in the kitchen:

I asked her what they would do in Eid. She said they would have sweets, and before Eid, they would clean the house very well. She then said, “In Syria, we painted our house, here, we can’t. The house is not ours.”

Bourdieu wrote, “Transforming an apartment, furnishing it, decorating it, means, no doubt, making it more comfortable, but also and especially it means mastering it by imprinting one’s mark on it, possessing it by making it personal” (p. 85-86). The rented apartment of Narwa’s family was lived in to some extend, as they modified it and made it more comfortable; it was, however, in a sense, not totally possessed and less than

“personal.” The rented houses, where most of the PRS situated and moved from one to another, suggested the futures that were uncertain, but with possibilities to improve or make over. Writing on the everyday refugee existences in Shatila, Allan’s (2014) work interpreted that the uncertainty is what people “engage rather than simply something they passively endure” (p. 27). I saw this pragmatism in my ethnography of the

“newcomers” in Shatila, in their approaches to coping with loss and uncertainty, as the uncertainty of the camp life had become part of their everyday experiences.

CHAPTER 4

MEMORIES AND THE PRESENT

Listening to my interlocutors’ narratives about their life in Syria, it was easy for me to understand how the memories could be a burden for one who no longer possessed the lifeworld where those memories were lived. However, during the moments they recounted those past good times, I often found myself sharing their pleasure of remembering, at the same time bearing in mind that such remembrances were painful. The grimness of loss—the loss of a living environment, a social rhythm, or a loved one—might prompt one to think, “I need to lose my memories in order to live again.”25 But, should one let go of the memories that were a source of laughter in a harsh time such as theirs? To answer the question, I want to first make sense of how this ethnography of memories was produced, by continuing to borrow Bergson’s theory of time and memories. In chapter 2, I gave an example of how one’s memories can be triggered and realized in the present. In this chapter, I want to elaborate the circumstances and manners in which my interlocutors’ memories arose and were recounted to me. Not having participated in their life in Syria, I not only listened to but also witnessed the memories that they had recounted in the form of actions and habits.

This type of memory which materialized in my interlocutor’s physical movements in the present contrasted against the kind of memory which one could not recollect without realizing what one had lost and what must be mourned. As I became my interlocutors’ friend, my interest in the senses—tastes, sounds and smells, humor, and pleasure

25 “inī biḥājah lifiqdān al-dhākira kai a‘īsh min jadīd.” This line was in fact Umm Youssef’s. She posted it as status on her Facebook.

intertwined with their recounted memories became explicit, and I would sometimes become the trigger of the memories. However, I was fully aware that remembering could provoke profound pain and was therefore very careful not to probe into the memories associated with war or those which would elicit fear. Whether my collecting of their pasts would render my interlocutors’ sense of loss was not only an ethical question of mine, but also theirs. If memories as a faculty could bring both pleasure and pain, what was the right conduct to remembering? In other words, should one recollect those good times to share the pleasure while becoming more vulnerable to the pain that comes along, or should one let go of certain memories in order to focus on the present?

4.1. Visualizing Sbeineh Camp of Syria

“Next time when people ask you where you are from, tell them you’re from

Sbeineh,” Nawra told me, half jokingly. As my ethnicity was indeed an unusual presence in the neighborhood of Shatila, Nawra and I often got questions about my origin when we were walking on the streets, shopping in the grocery store, or when she ran into her acquaintances. And since I was taken in by Nawra’s family as a daughter in name, she urged me to simply respond “from Sbeineh” to those questions. I have never been to Sbeineh camp, or Syria. But the places in the memories of Nawra, her friends and family, the street views, the corner shop, the mosque, were recounted or shown in photos to me, and gradually, I was able to visualize Sbeineh. Here I want to reconstruct the picture of Sbeineh, one of the Palestinian camps in the suburb of Damascus, where

Nawra and her family had been living until the war began. Sbeineh was largely destroyed and became deserted during 2013 (UNRWA 2013b), and in Nawra’s opinion,

it was neglected in the media while the images of Yarmouk, another Palestinian camp that has been in siege, were circulated widely.26

A mental picture of Sbeineh began with a video and photos Nawra and her family showed me:

Once, Nawra, Umm Youssef and I visited Nawra’s uncle’s (Umm Youssef’s younger brother’s) apartment. “The uncle,” in his late 30s, single at the time when I visited, lived on his own in a one-room apartment on the first floor in an alleyway in Shatila. The only time I visited his house was when his cousin and her daughter, the uncle’s niece, came from Syria for a visit. The cousin showed a video on her phone to the uncle and Umm Youssef. The uncle replayed it for me and told me that his sister went back to his house to shoot the footage of his destroyed house: The house consisted of four rooms and two balconies; in the video most of the things were either broken, stolen, or messed up, part of the ceiling and walls were torn with holes from shelling. Umm Youssef said, “I wish someone could go to my house and take a video of it.”

Nawra showed me a photo of Sbeineh camp. It was a gray, war-torn view of a spacious main road with two-story buildings on both sides. Nawra pointed at a place beside the green-roof mosque at a corner and said, “This was where we lived.”

The street views became more vivid through Nawra’s recounting of anecdotes from

Sbeineh:

During a visit to Ayda’s house, I asked how they met each other, “We met in Sbeineh,” Nawra told me she knew Ayda back in Sbeineh but they were only acquaintances. “At that time I was arrogant. I didn’t talk to her much when she came to my salon,” Nawra laughed as she spoke. Ayda then told me, “She was more beautiful when she was in Syria. Now she is still beautiful but…” Ayda told me later it was because Nawra had become too thin.

I then asked Nawra to draw a map of Sbeineh for me. She drew a few squares representing neighborhood blocks, and told me that she and Ayda lived in different neighborhoods. As she drew, she explained, “This neighborhood was for Palestinians and Syrians. We were neighbors and brothers. We went to each other’s funerals and weddings.” She marked at a corner of a block and said, “There was a supermarket.” “The street was so wide. It’s like Hamra [a major commercial area in Beirut].” Then Nawra suddenly thought of a man whom people in Sbeineh called “Zuhair Majnun” (Crazy Zuhair) “He was always

26 I was also told, though I did not probe further, that the asymmetric exposure of the camp situations had affected the eligibility of Palestinian refugees from Syria who were not from Yarmouk to receive handouts from certain NGOs.

following girls. We would tell him ‘raH aa Danun!’ [Go to Danun!]. Because there is a place in Danun for crazy people.”

Another time, I asked Nawra how far her father’s grocery shop was from their house. She told me, “The shop was on the [main] street, just a half minute away from home.” She continued, “All of the people knew Abu Youssef. They would come and buy things from him. My uncle had a clothing store on another side of the street, so I couldn’t “run away” [staying out far from home]. They would see me whenever I went out.” She told me that if she came out from the lane where their house was located and turned right onto the main street, her father’s shop would be on her right side, and if she turned left, her uncle’s would be on her left.

These narratives presented a social geography of Sbeineh. For Nawra, remembering

Sbeineh was remembering the sociality she had—working in a salon and spending time with friends on the streets. The memories also contained the bodily orientations toward the places that were personalized through her sense of belonging to the family and to the community. Through their accounts about the camp, I was therefore able to understand Sbeineh as a living place and as a lifeworld that they had lost.

4.2. Memories Triggered in the Present

Nawra and Umm Youssef’s memories in Sbeineh were often conveyed to me in order to make a contrast between what they used to experience and the situation I saw at present. In one of the long chats I had with Umm Youssef on a Sunday visit, I asked about Ramadan in Syria while we sat at the hallway outside the apartment, looking across Shatila’s buildings:

“It was so… beautiful,” she repeated several times. “At about 5 p.m. I would go to the souk with Abu Youssef, in our car. We would buy vegetables. Everyone would get foul and fateh from a famous shop called ‘Midday.’ After that, we would go home, pray, and start to eat. Then we would go out to the mosque at midnight to pray, practicing the ‘24 Rakat’ [movements in a prayer]. Some people would stay till the dawn but I would go home and spend time with my friends and relatives. We would visit different relatives on different days. Abu Youssef would go visit his older brother and I would visit my parents and stay for a long time...” Umm Youssef described that in the familial building where

they resided, the youngest household in the family would go visit another senior family and then they would go together to the next, more senior family. “On Eid it’s a different story; we would visit graves. Before Eid, we would spend five days making a lot of maamoul [a sweet] and give them to relatives. They would also give us some.”

“People would not smoke, eat or drink on the streets. There were Christian and Druze, and Shiite on the street we lived. No one would eat in public. They showed respect. We came to Lebanon during Ramadan. When I heard the melody from the mosque here, I thought ‘I miss all of those Ramadan things in Syria.’ But the next day I saw people smoking on the street and drinking XXL [an alcoholic drink]…I was shocked.”

She then recounted about Umm Josef, her Christian neighbor in Sbeineh. “She would give us the key to her house so we could help her water her plants. She was so nice. She would ask how we were all the time… not like here.” I asked what happened to her after the war. She said she didn’t know, “When were leaving, everyone was gone. We were the last ones who left. When we were leaving, walking on the street, there were only trash and dogs.”

Umm Youssef’s account about the melody of the mosque brought us to look at how her memories were triggered, and how the memories gave meaning to her present surroundings: When she heard the mosque calling, the beautiful Ramadan times in Syria reappeared in her mind, giving Umm Youssef a sense of how Ramadan was supposed to be. Bergson (1988) illustrates that, as we experience and learn things repeatedly, each learning process develops “attitudes which automatically follow our perception of things” (p. 84). In another words, when the memories of Ramadan in Syria were triggered by the sound of the mosque, the image of the past that Umm Youssef knew very well reappeared and in turn provided her a way to interpret, picture, and compare what she was hearing and perceiving in the present. In a conversation I had with Nawra,

I saw the similar work of memory:

We were watching a janitor sweeping the ground downstairs while having our morning tea. I pointed him out and said, “It’s good that someone is cleaning.” She then said, “Yeah, but I think he’s not from the government. Before, in Syria, we had a truck that came everyday at 6 p.m. If you had trash after the truck was gone, you would keep it in the house until the next day.” Then she peered down at the parking lot next to the water tower and said, “And the cars would not park

like this. Everyone had his own house. They parked in front of their houses. My father parked his in front of his store.” I asked, “Didn’t he have two cars?” She then told me the other car was for rent, as part of his father’s business. She continued, “Before, the TV program told us about Lebanon: People listen to Fairouz in the morning and Wadih al-Safi at night. And it told us they [Lebanese] were all nice and gentle. But after I came, I was first shocked by the garbage, and then I was shocked by the people.”

These images from Nawra’s memory—the way cars were parked, the system of collecting trash, and the TV presentation about Lebanon—were what Nawra utilized to make sense of the present scene whereby the memories were evoked. The comparisons were overwhelming—“I was shocked” was repeated both by Umm Youssef and

Nawra—as they encountered the scenes at present, which triggered the memories that happened to be drastically different.

4.3. Memories in Actions and in Images

I came across my interlocutors’ pasts not only in the form of narration but also action, through which I saw the kind of memory more associated with continuity of the present than with loss. Bergson (1988) differentiates between two forms of memory, using the analogy of learning a lesson. The first type of memory is like “a lesson learned by heart.” He describes this form of memory as acquired by repetition and bearing no mark of its origin, where it was created and learned. This memory is part of the present, “exactly like my habit of walking and writing; it is lived and acted, rather than represented” (p. 81). The second form of memory is that of “each successive reading,” a kind of memory similar to a one-time learning experience that, if repeated several times, the memory of each successive reading will eventually lead to a lesson learned by heart (p. 79). In contrast to the first form of memory which has no mark of the past, the memory of each successive reading is a careful “representation” which

“neglects no detail; it leaves to each fact, to each gesture, its place and date” (p. 81).

The former kind of learning will materialize into the present without us realizing it as a memory of the past, as opposed to the latter, the careful image of the one-time experience, the memory of which may be triggered with a sense of loss, because it is an image of the past to which we can no longer return. The two types of memories—one acted and lived in a contracted form as a habit in the present, and the other preserved as a complete picture of a past time—emerged in several moments which I shared with

Nawra and her family:

At night, when Nawra was helping me fold my clothes into a certain way that would fit onto the hook rack, she told me, “I used to help in my father’s store, so I know how to do it.” I thought that Abu Youssef’s business in Syria was a grocery store, so I asked her to explain. She said that he used to sell different items for different periods of time, “Seven months, three months, when he had new ideas, he changed them.” Then she recounted the location of her father’s shop.

[A night when Umm Youssef had to stay over in her patient’s house] Nawra and I were sitting in the hallway, conversing casually. She told me suddenly, seeming secretly, “I’m waiting my dad to go out so we can order argileh.” I was surprised she had such a plan. Having ordered from the shop downstairs several times, Nawra told me Talah and Sahar (the two sisters) once joined her smoking at the hallway, even when her mom was in the house. She said she tried not to smoke in front of her parents, “for respect… but they know.” Abu Youssef finally got a phone call from the faction office and was preparing to go out. Right after he left, Nawra shouted at the shop downstairs, “Monar!” We shared the cost of LBP 3000. She poured out the chips she had bought earlier. Later Monar and her daughter brought the argileh up and we started to smoke. She told me, “In Syria we didn’t have an [argileh] shop like this. We had to go to a restaurant or a cafe.” Later, when Abu Youssef came back, Nawra was calm while I was afraid that he would get angry about the argileh, but instead he sat down and smoked with us. Abu Youssef took photos of Nawra and I, and then of himself. Nawra told him, “Do you know when I learned how to smoke? In Duwa’s [one of Nawra’s cousins] place.” Abu Youssef only commented “Eib,” (shameful) and continued to smoke.

Nawra folding the clothes, or smoking argileh, was a memory of a lesson learned by heart that had inserted itself into her present. In these scenes in which memories reappeared, I did not grasp the sense of loss, or a gesture to mourn, but more of small

steps of adaptation, or a process of continuous learning—argileh could be delivered to the front door just by shouting from the hallway; Nawra utilized the memory, the skill, of folding cloth in order to fit clothes into the smaller space available at present.

Abu Youssef’s oud also reminded me of this understanding of memory, which not only appeared through one’s bodily movement (a lesson learned by heart), but also through the form of a careful image (each successive reading) which intruded into the present with a sense of loss. Abu Youssef would normally take down the oud which hung on the wall in the living room during a mashawi night (when they grilled meat and invited three to four friends or neighbors to eat). He would play and Umm Youssef, the neighbors, and other guests would sing. Other than these occasions, he would perform during events held by his faction. He also taught the neighbor’s son Latif how to play.

However, in a conversation I had with Umm Youssef about their lost possessions in

Syria, she said,

“I don’t feel sorry to lose all those things. The only thing I feel sorry to lose is the photo album and the photos of my children and my wedding. Some friends in Syria had asked me if I needed anything before they went back to Sbeineh camp to look for belongings. I asked them to look for those photos but they couldn’t find them.” Later, she continued, “And one more thing I feel sorry [to leave behind] was the old oud. The tune was so beautiful… It was made by a famous old musician called ‘Khalife’, so they called it ‘Oud Khalife.’ The older the oud is, the better it sounds,” she told me. I asked about the oud hung on the wall. “This is just a normal one,” she answered.

Abu Youssef’s head injury affected his right arm. “When he lifts his right arm, his arm quickly goes numb. He says it feels heavy,” Nawra once explained to me. I was told that one of the reasons they had this “normal oud” was because Abu Youssef needed the practice to keep his hands nimble. When the music flowed from Abu Youssef’s hands— when he played for his guests, when he taught Latif, when he played in the faction’s events—his memories of learning and playing the oud were materialized into every

present finger movement. What I grasped from Umm Youssef’s account was a sense of loss, less from losing a possession than from losing the worthiness that could only accumulate over time—“The older the oud is, the better it sounds.” In other words, melodies could always be replayed but the quality refined only through time could not be replaced, at least for the time being. The memory of Oud Khalife was accompanied by a gesture of mourning, a moment that stood in contrast to Abu Youssef’s playing the melody, which could still be heard in the present.

4.4. Reminiscing as if Dreaming

I want to use the idea of the second type of memory (each successive reading) to answer the question I raised in the beginning of this chapter. This memory is the memory that “imagines,” (in contrast to the memory that “repeats”) and is preserved as a detailed image of a past occurrence. Bergson explains further:

To call up the past in the form of an image, we must be able to withdraw ourselves from the action of the moment, we must have the power to value the useless, we must have the will to dream (p. 82-83).

I saw this type of memory in Nawra’s reminiscences about Saif, of whom

Nawra’s introduction to me began very early, when Nawra and I were still acquaintances at the children’s center where she worked. The first time she told me about Saif, Saif was her “fiancé.”27 She told me that he had died in the war and that she had only heard the news of his death after she had moved to Lebanon. After I began frequently visiting Nawra, her descriptions of Saif continued to occur very often, and appeared vividly in my notes. I have excerpted a few of them:

27 Saif proposed to her during the war, but they didn’t get engaged. This was Nawra’s way of introducing him to me before I knew more of his story.

When we were listening to a love song in Karimah’s (the neighbor’s) house, she told me, “He once kneed down on the street, opened his arms and said, ‘I love you! I love you!’ Other people asked me, ‘Do you know this man?’ I said ‘no.’” She laughed.

Nawra and Saif were love-at-first-sight. Nawra told me about how her mom loved him as well. She said, “I would send him ‘I love you’ in the end of our text conversation, and he would reply ‘as-salamu alaykum.’ My mom loved that.”

Nawra continued to reminisce her times in Syria [after a description of their house in Syria], “I went to learn English when the school started, and went to work as a hair-dresser in the summer, there I met Saif. I can’t forget those times.”

Nawra wrote in her journal about Saif. She shared the two-pages of writing with me during a Saturday night in Ramadan. The passage said, “I thought about you as if I found you. I confided my problems to you, as if you were close, as if you didn’t disappear, and didn’t die. I have lost hope to find someone to confide in, to share the problems I’m going through. How hard is this life and this bad feeling that I’m going through? My heart started to melt and I started to feel this depression that is destroying my life. I searched in myself, in my memories for a person that I could rely on in my life. I found no one but you. You were the source of my harshness, source of my happiness, source of my sadness, source of my laughter, and source of my cries. Everything changed. Some days, I started praying and said that I wished I had not met you in these circumstances. And some other times, I wished I had died instead of you. I ended up giving up to the bitter reality that I had lost you, and it was over. I sit with hope that was inside me, which tells me, “ he is still alive fighting and resisting,” and I’m still in his memories. So the smile comes back to me, brings back my soul, and I imagine I’m hearing your voice. The voice calls me and says, “How are you?” My heart starts screaming, and it wants to ask many questions, although I know I’m just imagining that you’re asking about me. I start to talk and you listen to me silently. Then you reply with kindness, “Have trust in your God.” When I hear this, my hopes start to renew. Sometimes I think that if I went back to Syria, I would find you in front of me telling me “I miss you” and I would laugh and start to repeat your name, “Saif, Saif, Saif. I love you, and I will keep your memories the source of harshness and life.”

Another Saturday night during Ramadan, we were both unable to sleep. We conversed until the mosque called for the morning prayer at around 4 a.m. As she was waiting for the time to pray, she told me, “Once Saif called me at this hour, asking me to go wash up and pray. I told him ‘yes, yes,’ and I went back to sleep. He would call back to check and say, ‘Go wash up! I want to hear the sound of the running water.’ Then another time when I asked if he had prayed and he said, “no.” I asked him, ‘So it’s only me praying?’ ” She laughed.

I often listened to Nawra’s monologues about Saif when we were lying on our cushions about to sleep. She would go on, talking about how they met, the trip they went on together, his messages and phone calls. Most of the time I had no chance to note them down as I was falling asleep. Nawra’s recollections of Saif were not only in speech and in her writing; once, Nawra drew Saif’s name on the back of her hand, between her forefinger and the thumb, imitating a tattoo design, while her mom commented, “She’s crazy.” In her difficult times during the engagement with Hadi (see Chapter 1), her reminiscences about Saif became more frequent and intensified, often to contrast her situations in the present. Nawra’s remembering of Saif often appeared to me as if she had withdrawn herself from the action of the present moment to recollect those detailed memories she had with Saif, and those recollections incessantly insert themselves in her present, when she heard a love song, prepared to pray, or when she wrote down her thoughts in the end of a day. In the writing, it was as if Saif’s kindness and affection were all contracted into a single image, and the image became alive, talking to her, as if

Nawra were dreaming, detached from the present. Reading through Nawra’s journal painted a sad picture of loss, yet in her mourning, I saw her healing amidst the pain—

“Have trust in your God.” The memory that was “a source of harshness” turned into a hope which enabled Nawra to continue her life with this past. The recollections of Saif were precious for Nawra, not only because Saif was irreplaceable, but also because the affect of pleasure that came along in the remembering was nourishing and healing. For

Nawra, who was still confronting her refugee status everyday, the remembrances of a loved one and the good times were in fact a refuge for her to rest and heal.

4.5. More Memories, Pleasure and Pain

In addition to the individual imagining, remembering was also a collective practice that brought pleasure. But it also rendered my interlocutors more sensitive to what had been lost—for instance, the loss of one’s freedom of mobility and social rhythm. These social and family memories which I will now turn to were also rich in sensations: sights, sounds, and tastes, especially those of Nawra’s family trips to the natural sites in Syria:

On a night when Abu Youssef, Nawra and I finished dinner, the news was reporting about the siege of the ancient city Palmyra. I asked if they had ever been to the site. Abu Youssef then began listing the places in Syria that he had been to, and he started to reminisce about a place named “Wadi al-Uyun” (Valley of the Springs), where the water was cold, pure, “fresher than the fresh water [which they bring in buckets for drinking or domestic use]” Nawra said, “We rented a villa. And when you looked out from the house, you saw the steep slope covered with trees.” Abu Youssef added, “The slope was so steep that the car had to almost climb vertically,” he gestured. Nawra continued, “We stayed in a house in the town, and then stayed in a villa at another side of the city. In the first house, you could see the trees and the slope, in the villa you could see a lake.” They both said it was “so, so, so beautiful.” Abu Youssef told me to look up pictures of the valley online. They continued to tell me of their trip there, “We had halawa homsiya [a sweet]. It was so delicious.” “We made mashawi there, chicken and beef,” Abu Youssef recounted.

Another time, when Nawra and I were preparing vegetables and chopping onions and potatoes for dinner, she reminisced about how she felt “free” in Syria:

“We went to the sea at midnight. We went to Aleppo in the car,” she continued, “I was like a girl from a rich family. I woke up at 12 p.m. and the breakfast was in front of me! I sat watching TV after I ate. On normal days, I went to a salon to work. I went to English classes, visited my cousins, and we went to restaurants, or to the souk to shop, bringing new clothes.”

Nawra’s family often mentioned owning a car in Syria along with the memories of those family trips: Once when we were preparing for mashawi, Nawra told me, “My dad used to put the equipment in the car and we would have a trip to the natural area and barbeque there.” The memory of traveling in a car for leisure conveyed a loss of

mobility. The car had provided them not only the freedom to move around, but also their control over time and space—they could embark on a trip to wherever and whenever we wished. Nawra’s account of the organization of her professional and leisure time also conveyed a different social rhythm in Syria which she was accustomed to but no longer enjoyed. Once, when I was having breakfast with Nawra, I asked her what they used to have for breakfast in Syria. She answered, giving me a picture of their daily life in Syria:

“My dad had a shop. We brought groceries from there. Every Friday, we would have a full table of dishes. All of my cousins would come to have falafel, hummus, and foul. After we finished, my dad would play oud. After that, he would go stay in his market until late at night. It was safe there, young people stayed out late, playing soccer and walking on the street at midnight... My neighbor used to invite me over for argileh. During Ramadan, there would be rugs on the streets, and we played cards all night. Many things make me miss Syria.”

What Nawra recalled was not only the memory full of sensations—the taste of an argileh, the tranquil feeling of sitting on the streets, but also the memory of spending her time freely at night, a freedom which had become restricted for her in Shatila. She no longer had the same social circle (cousins) as before, and the environment also prevented her from going out.28 While remembering brought along the pain in realizing her loss, I could not say, when hearing Nawra and Abu Youssef’s recollection about the trip to the springs, that I had not felt their pleasure in recounting the freshness of the water while we sat in the stuffy living room.

Beyond the narratives of family life in Syria, I also noted the recollections of places, songs, or food that were collectively shared among PRS. Once, Nawra and I

28 As opposed to Nawra, the only girl in the family, her two brothers would normally go out in the evening, and return home late at night. Once during a night in Ramadan, when we were discussing where we should go for a visit, she told me, “We can’t go to Ayda’s house. It’s too far.” Ayda’s house was three blocks away, and we would often visit her during daytime.

attended a friendly gathering in Akram’s apartment (Akram was Nawra’s friend, and we would pay him a visit when other female guests were around):

After we celebrated Manar’s birthday, Salim told Akram that he wanted to go to the “Happy Land” (amusement park). Then they started to sing the song that was always playing in the amusement park in Damascus, “…yah Hajj Mohamad yah yoya!” It seemed that everyone could sing the song.

Public places for leisure were often the background of the collective memory. When the news was playing a clip of an old man recounting his feelings toward the Syrian conflict, Umm Youssef asked me,

“Do you know what he said? He said ‘I just want to go back to Syria and sit in Hajaz and have coffee.’ Hajaz was an old cafe” Nawra didn’t follow, “What is Hajaz?” Um Youssef was surprised and said, “You forgot?” She started to explain it was a place she always had ice cream. Then she got it. Abu Youssef mentioned that Nawra once had her birthday there. Three of them started to describe the cafe. “We used to go there at midnight. 1, 2, 3 a.m. No one slept!” Umm Youssef added, “We went by car. It was only a ten minutes drive. We would go to the foul place called ‘Midday’ and the cafe… ”

When I ask Akram another time about Café Hajaz, he told me excitedly, “That was the place I had my first argileh!” Not only places were recounted, but also tastes such as coffee, falafel—“falafel in Syria was much better”—and snacks:

Akram’s mother came for a visit from Syria and then went back. She brought two big boxes of biscuits for him. During a night in Ramadan, Nawra and I visited Akram along with his other friends. Akram treated us to coffee and before we left, he took out a box of “Ruby” biscuits and gave everyone a small package. Nawra told Akram, “I like ‘To-Do’ more.” Akram replied secretly, “I have a box of To-Do but I will give it to you when everyone’s left.” I brought my pack of “Ruby” back to Nawra’s house. Umm Youssef saw it, and said, “This is only sold in Syria!”

Even though there was always a glimpse of lament when they recounted the tastes of

Syrian coffee or falafel, the sense of loss was less intense in such social practices of remembering. I see a gesture of looking forward, instead of mourning: Akram sent a message to me when I was formulating this chapter, telling me that he and the friends I knew were going to the Happy Land at Rouche in Beirut. By saying “looking forward,”

I mean to contrast with the kind of remembering, such as Nawra’s reminiscence of Saif, that my interlocutors repeatedly practiced in order to preserve images as the way they were.

During my fieldwork, I did not ask questions about experiences of violence and conflict from the Syrian war. However, Nawra recounted a few times about her experiences during the shelling of Sbeineh, and the family’s displacements within Syria before coming to Lebanon:

“When my father was in the hospital, my aunt told me he was dead. I sat in the house with my two brothers, and I told them our father was alive. I took all the pressure on myself. Later they found him safe. […] Then we moved to another place, but the government said we couldn’t stay. We moved again, this house is the twelfth house we have moved into after we left our house in Syria.”

“When the bombs fell down, I was fixing my hair and my mom was covering her ears,” she mimicked her mom’s pose of trying to hide somewhere. “Everything became like a video game. The bombs were dropping in Sbeineh and then the other side of the town. It’s like watching something on TV. Nothing was real.”

In a later period of my fieldwork, Abu Youssef started a one-month gardening job in a public garden in Achrafieh, a neighborhood in east Beirut. Nawra and I planned a trip to the American University of Beirut and then to the garden to visit Abu Youssef at work.

A few minutes after we settled in the front seats of the van, she said, “I sat in the front seat like this with my dad in Syria when the bombing went on. I told my dad ‘if a bomb falls in front of the van, we will be the first to die,’ ” she laughed. While Nawra appeared to be calm, nearly joking, in these accounts, some of her narratives—a woman looking for fragments of her children in a ground hole from shelling; her brother saw his friend shot dead in front of him—were in fact accompanied by her descriptions of her own trauma (such as not sleeping well) that she had gradually overcome: “But I became better now. My doctor [a psychological doctor who worked in Shatila] helped

me a lot. When I had appointments with him in the center, I cried a lot, and then when I went downstairs I would become normal and laugh with other people. When he saw me laughing, he would say, ‘You were just crying!’ ” By mentioning Nawra’s narratives of her recovery, I want to finally illustrate, as opposed to the memories that must be preserved and mourned, the aspect of “forward-looking” in my interlocutors’ ethical choices to confront memories. The war scenes in Nawra’s descriptions were the images from her memory that inserted themselves into the present in a way that required her to withdraw from the actions in the present. These images, in Bergson’s words, are

“fugitive, ever on the point of escaping him [who recalls], as though his backward turning memory were thwarted by the other, more natural, memory, of which the forward movement bears him on to action and to life” (p. 83). By “the more natural memory,” Bergson means the bodily memory that works like a habit in our present. I was able to grasp this idea when I applied it to Nawra’s experience with the doctor that

I mentioned above: One minute, she was recounting her distress and the traumatic memories to a doctor, the next minute, as she walked out of the appointment and encountered her friends, she was laughing and chatting with her excellent social skills, which were her bodily memory of “a learned lesson by heart” that she acquired through numerous social events since her times in Syria.

4.6. Memories in Lebanon

Here I want to expand a bit more on the idea of “forward movement” and conclude by answering the question I raised earlier: What is one’s ethical choice in remembering? While some were to be preserved and repeatedly mourned, what kind of

memory one should set free so as to move forward? The answer might lie in my interlocutors’ narratives of their life in Lebanon during these past two to three years:

I visited Burj Shamali camp in Tyre with Akram. We visited Umm Hanan who showed me a photo of herself and her daughter with a Japanese social worker. In the same album, there were pictures of them attending the Beirut marathon last year. Umm Hanan told me that she and her family had been to the yearly event for the second time.

As Nawra reminisced about the freedom of moving around, her family’s trips to the mountains and the sea in Syria, I wondered if I could find more of her memories of those trips in the notes I took on the day of a family trip to Saida. But instead of memories of Syria, I found her account about the memories she had with a friend who was supposed to propose to her (Abdul, see Chapter 1 n8). She remembered the time when he took her to a similar beach, also in Saida. As the time went by, the new memories in Lebanon were also accumulated, or “learned,” in Bergson’s analogy. We had come to understand that, for my interlocutors, some memories could not be let go of, that they would not allow the images to be gradually replaced by new memories— those memory images were too precious and the pleasure in their remembering, though sometimes painful, was too profound. However, in the continuation of life, they, at the same time, had to make the choice to allow themselves to move forward and confront the present with their pasts. In the comment thread of Umm Youssef’s line (“I need to lose my memories in order to live again”), there was her daughter Nawra’s response:

“My dear mother, if we could wipe off the memory, we would not live with any hope in this life.”29

29 “ḥabībtī yā immi, law naqdir namsaḥ al-dhākirah mā kinnā ‘ishnā ‘lā ay amal bi hāl ḥayāt.”

CHAPTER 5

DISTANT FUTURES

In the preceding chapters I have tried to illustrate my interlocutors’ struggles for the immediate or near future in a disenfranchised world filled with sudden loss and present challenges that they had not foreseen. I now turn my focus to my interlocutors’ anticipations of distant futures, including topics such as children’s education, returning to Syria, and emigration (hijra). The conversations of my interlocutors about their plans to leave the camp in Lebanon always drew my immediate attention, because emigrating, departing from one place to another, is one of the most explicit ways to express one’s aspiration toward the future. In fact, the word “future” (al-mustaqbal) often appeared during such conversations. The challenge in formulating this chapter was the messiness of my interlocutors’ accounts. The future plans that I kept tracking during my fieldwork were always changing, sometimes even appearing to be mirages, to me, a researcher who was inclined to settle for an answer. I then came to realize the constant shifting in their accounts reflected the extreme uncertainty of their reality. I have tried to adopt the narrative strategy closest to how I received the information about their future plans— disorienting in nature. As a result, this chapter itself meanders from efforts of collective organizing, to the distress of experiencing the “forced idleness,” and finally to the volatility of the expectations toward what lies in front.

In this last chapter, I want to finally introduce Akram (24), among others, whom I befriended through Nawra during my research. I met Akram through Nawra, but it was through events of a collective grassroots movement named “The League of

Palestinian Refugees from Syria to Lebanon” that I became more familiar with Akram,

as well as two of his friends: Jalal (28), one of the members of the League, and Salah

(25), who traveled to Brazil shortly after I began my visits to the camp.30 Akram had generously offered his help after I expressed my interest to follow upon the League’s activities as part of my project. The League was formed by two PRS who organized a demonstration on September 9th, 2014 in front of UNHCR building in Beirut to call for

PRS’ right to receive UNHCR entitlements.31 32 33 The League has been calling for the right to be eligible for resettlement in a third country, which UNRWA lacks the mandate to effectuate (Erakat, 2014).34 I began to collect information about the League

30 Brazil gives humanitarian visas for Syrians and other nationals who were affected by the Syrian conflict (UNHCR, 2013). It is said to be the only country where PRS have a chance to get visas.

31 Extensive amounts of literature have written on the protection gap that was created by the confusion in the international law regime for a Palestinian to seek asylum in a third country (Al-Mawed, 1999; Allan, 2014). Many Palestinians camp dwellers in Lebanon have sought to emigrate to European countries as asylum-seekers to flee the disenfranchised life in Lebanon. However, the Refugee Convention of 1951, Article 1D states “This Convention shall not apply to persons who are at present receiving from organs or agencies of the United Nations other than the United Nations High Commissioner for refugees protection or assistance” (UNHCR, 1990). It excludes the rights of Palestinian refugees who are considered to be covered by UNRWA, which provides mainly aid and relief, and United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP), whose mandate is mostly restricted (Akram, 2002).

32 A recent study by Erakat (2014) explained the cooperating mechanism between UNRWA and UNHCR in order to bridge the protection gap, during Palestinians’ mass expulsion from Iraq, Libya and Kuwait during late 1990s. However, he explained, regarding the situation of PRS in Lebanon in 2013, the de facto mechanism had failed to be effective: “Once admitted entry, however, the refugees are housed separately and are under the strict divide of UNHCR and UNRWA mandates, including their care and assistance programmes” (p. 613).

33 The League’s official claims at the first protest, which I summarized as the following, were: 1. The predicament of the PRS in Lebanon includes i) The refusal of the Lebanese government to renew PRS’ residency permits; ii) Legal prosecution, such as deportation and prohibition of mobility; iii) The impossibility to return to camps in Syria; iv) The harsh financial situation and living condition which is resultant from the prohibition from work; v) Some families were torn apart because of denied entry to Lebanon. 2. We speak to you as you are the Higher Commission of the refugees of the earth. Based on the laws the UNHCR had been founded upon (the Convention of 1951 and the Protocol of 1967), we fit the descriptions of refugees in the conventions, and we have the right to benefit from UNHCR. There is no legal justification to prohibit us from having these rights.

34 Later on April 15, 2015, another demonstration of the League in front of UNRWA field office appealed for the communication between UNHCR and UNRWA. After two weeks, on the League’s official Facebook page, it announced that the UNRWA Beirut field office had raised the League’s statement and concerns to the head of UNRWA in Amman, Jordan: “[…] the management of UNRWA in Beirut is not authorized or able to take such a decision so it was lifted to the administration in Amman, which would end our suffering as Palestinian Syrians in Lebanon, through the way of our resettlement abroad.”

by participating in the demonstrations it organized. During one of the events, I made myself known to one of the organizers and some members. Afterwards, with Akram’s company, I visited the organizer and the members who had invited me. Those trips, in turn, helped me to understand Akram’s situation more thoroughly. Akram had also introduced me to his friend Zayna, who was living in a crowded apartment with her extended family (See Chapter 3, p. 52). During our visits to Zayna, I also came to know more about Akram’s predicament and his aspirations toward futures.

In Das’s (2007) ethnography on the temporal experiences of Manjit, who was living in a space of violence and devastation, she found that time as an agent of delivering hope was referred to far more frequently than space as the agent. She noted,

People often spoke of both their immediate space and the present time in which they were as mahaul or environment. Thus one can say yahan ka mahaul bahut kharab hai—the environment of this place is very bad—or aajkal ka mahaul bahur kharab hai—the environment of these days is very bad. […] However, while one could leave the space one was in, one could not leave the time one was in—one could only arrange one’s life keeping into account the bad times or hope that these would pass. This sense of time is also what accounts for the idea that hope lies in a second chance […] (p. 243 n12)

I have grasped the hope that lies in the passage of time in some of my interlocutors’ accounts. However, I have also come to realize how the idea of leaving one’s place becomes the only thinkable option that enables one to talk about the future. The marginalized socio-economic status that my interlocutors experienced in Lebanon had made thinking of a long-term (if not permanent) stay simply unbearable. This reality was especially harsh for those whose previous expectations and preparations toward life in Syria had suddenly disappeared. Nevertheless, the idea of where hope lies—in the passage of time or in another space—appeared to be fluid, changing, and even overlapping, in my observations of my PRS interlocutors. Rather than living in the very place of destruction like Manjit, they were in a situation of being uncertain about where

to go in the very beginning of their displacement. In the previous chapter Nawra and her family’s experiences illustrated this uncertainty—after their house was destroyed, they had moved several times inside Syria and finally decided to come to Lebanon.

The discussions my interlocutors had in Lebanon about “where to go next” included not only the option of emigrating to a third country, but also of returning to

Syria, where they were raised and had spent their lives. During a League’s demonstration in front of the UNRWA field office across from Beirut Sport City, I met

Saeed, the person in charge of the League’s affairs in Burj al-Shamali in Sur (Tyre, southern Lebanon), who also invited me for a visit to the camp. Two weeks after the demonstration, Akram and I visited Saeed’s family and friends, who had also been participating in the League’s event and were wishing to leave Lebanon.35 Saeed’s close friend, Umm Bilal, when I asked if she had thought about emigration before she came to Lebanon, she said, “For the first two to three months, we were waiting to see if we could go back [to Syria], but then the situation got bad.” Saeed’s answer to the same question was that he had not thought of staying in Lebanon even before he came: “I saw the camp in Lebanon before. I knew how bad and difficult it would be.” Umm Bilal and

Saeed’s answers suggested the divergence in viewing where the hopeful futures would be. For Umm Bilal, the hopeful future lied in the passage of time and it seemed to gradually appear in a distant place. For Saeed, hope rested in moving to another place right from the start. However, instead of preparing to leave (an option very limited for

Palestinian refugees in terms of visa acquirement and financial resources), waiting was the means by which I saw Umm Bilal and Saeed manage their aspirations. Participating in the League’s protests and calling for the right to emigrate was one of, if not the only,

35 The League had one or two people in charge of each major Palestinian camp in Lebanon. People like Saeed would inform his PRS friends (which for Saeed, happened to be most of the PRS in Burj al- Shamali) when an event or protest is coming up.

actions to address their wish. And such action always resulted in, ironically, more waiting.

5.1. “Chauffeur al-Farsha” (the Driver of the Cushion)

Allan (2014), in her chapter on emigration in Shatila, foregrounds the gendered dimension of unemployment, or “the experience of idleness” in the camp, which eventually forces many young men in Shatila to take on enormous risk to “travel” (safar, an euphemism for emigration) (p. 163). The social expectation on men to shoulder the financial responsibility of the household was also prevalent among the PRS with whom

I was in contact. For an unemployed woman, the everyday was potentially filled with housework, preparing meals, or even embroidery work offered by an NGO. A man without work such as Abu Youssef (before he found his work as a gardener) would sometimes find himself awkwardly sitting among Umm Youssef, Nawra, Karimah and me drinking coffee and chatting at the hallway. He would normally avoid such situations by returning into the living room or leaving for the faction’s office. Nawra once taught me the phrase “chauffeur al-farsha” when we were talking to Umm Atyaf and her daughter Sahar. When I asked Umm Atyaf about the family income, she told me that one of Sahar’s older brothers worked infrequently, “He works one day and rests for another ten days.” And when I asked about Abu Atyaf, Sahar answered before Umm

Atyaf, “He is chauffeur al-farsha.” Nawra told me, pointing to the cushion we were sitting on, “He is the driver of this.” The phrase was a self-irony, a dark humor my interlocutors used for generating laughter to cope with such unbearable situation.

Having said that, it was a very cruel comment to imply one’s unemployment followed from being lazy—when a reasonably paid job was nearly unattainable for him.

5.2. The Stagnant Life

The pressure of being a man unable to meet social expectations was once conveyed to me explicitly. Since he moved to Lebanon, Nawra’s uncle Rabih (36), was unable to find any work as an electrician, for which he was trained professionally in a vocational college and which he had been practicing in Syria for a living. Once, when

Nawra was unhappy about a work opportunity in a salon being canceled, Rabih, the uncle, told her, “It’s okay. You are a girl living with your family, but me…” Though

Rabih was single, he was at the age when he was expected to marry and have his own family. I once heard from Umm Youssef (Rabih’s sister) that she had once thought

Rabih would have prospect with a PRS woman whom she knew of. But the woman said, according to Umm Youssef, “I’m a refugee myself. I don’t want to marry another refugee.” Nawra once told me that in Syria, Rabih owned a house in the family’s building, which consisted of two bedrooms and two bathrooms. He also had two parrots in front of his door. “At that time everyone told him to get married but he said he was good like that. He loved someone in Syria; Now he has nothing. We told him to marry, but he said that now he can’t take care of a family.” The day after he turned 36, he came to visit Nawra’s family and we had a short conversation: When he said that he was old turning 36, I told him, “It’s not even half of your life.” Rabih replied, “There’s no life anyway. There’s no future and no past.” Losing his job and property that had provided him with an outlook toward the future, Rabih suddenly found himself unable to meet the social expectations that once seemed so ordinary for him. His feelings of being stagnant, losing the past and having no future, were expressively shown in his writing:

It’s an autumn morning There is a smell of desperation coming out of its breath

To tell a distorted pain in the womb of its hours It calls me with a confident voice…to live in its comfort and to be unified with it I run aimlessly with the hope of getting far away That I might get lost by chance and stumble on spring Running away from me or whatever is left of me It’s a wish that has grown old and that has been inflicted by overpowering paralysis I draw from it my face in the shape of ugly wrinkle I will break my mirror and burn the blind body And spray my shining ash to illuminate from my soul the way to the sky …… It might find peace near god.

This was Rabih’s Facebook post from when he was having difficulties with his legal documents required for emigration. From time to time, he would read out loud the poems or lyrics he wrote when he gathered with Nawra’s family. Rabih’s interest in writing might have become a strategy he employed to cope with the distress, such as the passage above, on his own predicament. As time passed by and the wrinkles grew, he felt his life was not moving forward—nor his plans to return to Syria or emigrate. In the beginning of my fieldwork, he told me firmly that he wished to return to Syria instead of emigrating, but later during my visiting to Nawra, he started making plans to emigrate. He had wished to apply for a visa to Brazil, but he had no valid travel document.36 He had tried to renew it—I saw him once carry a few pages of copied papers he prepared for the renewal in the Syrian embassy in Lebanon. The application was declined. Later, when I asked if he still had plans to travel, he told me his friend in

Syria was helping him apply for a new travel document, but ended his answer with “I don’t know.” Rabih’s seemingly suspended life had made the present time unbearable, and even the hope to escape, or change the current situation was equally prolonged and frustrating.

36 The “travel document” is Syrian issued laissez-passer for Palestinians refugees in Syria. Syrian Law no. 1311 of 1963 regulated the issuing of travel documents for PRS, on condition that they are registered with GAPAR (see p. 3) and hold provisional residence cards (Al-Mawed, 1999). The document allows its holders to return to Syria without a visa. My interlocutors often referred to travel document as a “passport.”

5.3. Saying Goodbye to Salah

I saw a different case with Akram and Salah, who were both in their 20s and had enough financial means or luck to be able to work out a plan to embark on their trip to a third country. I only met Salah a few times before he left, but his family—Umm

Salah and his two sisters Aisha (26) and Dana (23)—became one of the families to whom Nawra and I paid frequent visits. When I met Salah, he had acquired his

Brazilian visa and was preparing to leave. His plan was to work in Brazil, send money back to Umm Salah, receive her in Brazil, and hopefully find a chance to access a

European country with Umm Salah. After Salah left, Umm Salah (who was divorced) was living with Dana, Aisha, Aisha’s husband Mohammad (34), and two children.

Salah was her only son. The day we said goodbye to Salah, Nawra told me, “I can’t imagine how Salah can leave the family and travel, but he wants to do something big.

He wants to succeed and make the family live better.” Nawra’s comment about Salah’s departure reflected an expectation, or a moral judgment, toward men in her social world: the idea that “those who leave want to succeed” stood in opposition to the bitter comment of “the driver of the cushion,” for the men who stayed.

When I asked Umm Salah about Salah and their plans for the next step, she told me that Salah was thinking about coming back to visit and bring her with him to

Brazil. She seemed hesitant and asked me, “What’s your opinion? I would like to go to live with Salah, but could I leave these two daughters here? It’s so difficult.” Umm

Salah also asked me about my plans,

“After you go back to Taiwan, will you come back for a visit?” I replied, “I’m not sure, but if I have a chance I will. Will you all be here if I come back?” “Yes. Here,” Dana replied succinctly while Umm Salah paused a few seconds and said, “This year yes, but next year, I don’t know.”

The next week, when I visited Umm Salah with Nawra, and Nawra’s PoL neighbor

Karimah, Umm Salah told us she was planning to go to Brazil with her son-in-law,

Aisha’s husband Mohammad, and that Salah would help with their visas. Umm Salah said now they only needed the money for plane tickets, which would cost $1400. When

Karimah asked her if she would come back, Umm Salah responded quite assertively,

“Lebanon? No, it’s finished. Enough.” Karimah turned to me and said, “Umm Salah is going to Brazil and you are going to Taiwan. Where am I going to go?” However, around two weeks after the conversation, Nawra told me that Umm Salah’s younger daughter Dana got engaged to Samir (25), their next-door neighbor’s son, who was also a PRS. When I paid a visit to congratulate them, the trip to Brazil was not mentioned at all. About a month later, Umm Salah told me that Mohammad was discussing the trip to

Brazil again, and Akram might go in her place. They had estimated the budget for the trip, including the living expenses for the first few months, to be around 6000 dollars in total. “It’s too bad,” Umm Salah commented. I asked if she would go with them, and hesitant as usual, she told me, “Yes, but now…Dana’s wedding…” I asked, “So you will wait until Dana and Samir get married?” Umm Salah turned to ask Dana how long it would be, and Dana said, “One year maybe.” “So you want me to wait for you for one year huh?” Umm Salah said, with a laugh.

I had been inclined to know my interlocutors precise plans, asking who would go where and when, as if there was a concrete timeline and a place in which their futures rested. But what Umm Salah’s family showed me was a temporality in which no plan or expectation could be real until a move was made. Umm Salah’s future horizon of where she would be could only reach until the end of current year. For the next year on, plans could be abolished, and new expectations might emerge.

After Salah left, Aisha’s husband Mohammad became the only pillar of financial support for the family. Umm Salah and Dana both had worked for a short period. Umm Salah had lost her job as a nanny in a private home when she said, “Now there is no work,” and Dana left her job in a mobile shop shortly after she got engaged to Samir. At the end of my fieldwork period, Mohammad abandoned his plans to go to

Brazil and left with his friend’s family for Europe via Turkey. I heard from Nawra that

Aisha had encouraged him to leave, and Aisha would stay here with the two children until he settled. A week after Mohammad left, Umm Salah was looking for a cheaper apartment (their rent was 300 dollars a month excluding other expenses), as the family no longer had any income. Subsequent to a series of plans for the distant future in a distant place, Umm Salah was sitting in the living room without her son and son-in-law, asking where she could dwell, a question critical for her daily existence.

5.4. Syria as the Home to Return

It surprised me that when Karimah, who had been living in the camps in

Lebanon since she was born, asked Umm Salah if she would come back, Umm Salah’s answer was so short and blunt, disregarding Karimah’s feelings of being left behind, or her own sense of belonging to the camp. Umm Salah’s decision to dwell in Shatila— showed a sense of belonging to a broader community of the Palestinian refugees, or a tie since she might have known friend and relatives in the camp before she came.

However, apart from this bond, there was little sense of rootedness toward Shatila for a refugee such as Umm Salah, who had spent most of her life in Yarmouk, Syria.

Attitudes toward returning to Syria varied among my interlocutors, depending on their impressions of the ongoing war in Syria and the information provided by their family

and friends in Syria. Once Rabih mentioned that his brother was encouraging him to go back to Syria. Abu Youssef said, “There is no future, no future [in Syria].” A month later, Abu Youssef’s cousin came from Syria for an interview with the German

Embassy in Beirut in order to join her husband who had gone to Germany. She stayed for a night with Nawra’s family. Umm Youssef later told me what she had heard from the cousin about the situation in Syria, “If you are a guy in Syria now, you have only two options: join the army, or have your own production [meaning farms or industrial production],” Umm Youssef continued, “She [the cousin] earns 600 [Syrian pounds] a day, but she also spends 600 on transportation. What is she working for?” I also encountered some interlocutors who described the situation in Syria with reference to the threat to lives: When I visited the organizer of the League, his father, who had no thought of going back to Syria in the near future, told me that he still had a daughter in

Syria. I asked if the place where she lived was safe. He said, “It’s safe now, but she is afraid… In Syria, you can be sitting on the street having coffee and next second everything is destroyed.” Opposed to the these descriptions about Syria, Umm Mustafa whom I made frequent visits to because of her friendship with Nawra, was at the time preparing her son Mustafa to attend a general exam for college in Syria. She told me that travel back and forth to Syria did not worry her and that she would go back to Syria after the war ends. However, when I asked her to estimate how long it would take, she replied, “Who knows?”

In illustrating my interlocutors’ wishes to return to Syria or emigrate to a third country, I do not dismiss the right of return to Palestine, as the camps in both Lebanon and Syria remain the palpable reminders of the displaced Palestinians’ continuous refugeehood since the first generation of the Nakba (Al-Marwed, 1999). However, my

PRS interlocutors, who were often labeled as “the twice displaced,” prompted me to think of the meaning of home. Could not one be a Palestinian while making Syria home?

Does this idea of home undermine another Palestinian’s right of return to Palestine? I did not pose this question to my interlocutors, but what I had grasped from their hope of returning to Syria was resonated with a passage from Allan’s (2014) chapter on emigration and rethinking the tension between one’s political right and sense of belonging:

While the establishment of a Palestinian nation-state remains the core demand of the Palestinian struggle, its territorial rendering should not obscure other concepts of home, identity and belonging that have developed in exile (p. 189).

5.5. Akram’s Changing Plans

Now I will turn to the story of Akram, whose parents and siblings were still able to sustain their livelihoods in Syria and thus to sponsor Akram’s plans to travel.

When I met Akram, he was one of Nawra’s suitors. He had told Nawra and Umm

Youssef of his wish to propose, but Nawra told me that he did not keep his promise and the proposal was only his personal wish without his parents’ consent. Much later in my researching period, when I asked Akram why he never proposed to Nawra, he told me,

“I don’t know. I was afraid her parents would say no. I have no house and no money… and maybe I will travel.” Single and with no means to establish his own family, he was always changing his plans, sometimes planning to continue his education in college or most of the time, planning to emigrate to a third country.

He arrived in Lebanon during 2013, as he narrated to me when we were on our way to visit the League’s member in Tyre:

While the van was speeding toward the south, he pointed at a sight on the hill on my left. It was where he attended a youth program when he first came to Lebanon: “The program took two weeks. We did many activities and tours

around Lebanon. When the bus was returning to Syria, I got off at a stop and came back to Beirut. I called my mom telling her I had decided to stay.”

He never went back since then. Living with his aunt in an apartment in Shatila, he shared the rent and expenses. When I met him, Akram had been working a $400-a- month job at a social services NGO and was planning to enter a university in Lebanon:

“Last summer, I prepared all my certificates and documents [to apply for the Lebanese

University], but I was working and did not have enough money. I didn’t register; I will try again this summer.” In the spring, the NGO suspended the program in which he and his PRS friends worked. He then began working sparsely on installing and repairing electricity lines, a work he had taken over from his uncle, who had departed to Brazil.

He also earned $100 per month from UNRWA for a few months for assisting refugee families withdrawing monthly handouts from UNRWA at ATMs, a job he had found by chance. He once saw the person who was doing this work in front of an ATM, and asked how he could obtain the same work. Akram was thus still able to sustain himself.

By the middle of my fieldwork, he had given up on the idea of going to college and had applied for a visa to go to Brazil, but when I asked if he would join Salah when he went,

Akram told me that his destination would not be Brazil. He would “escape” into Turkey during transit, and then find a way to go to Europe. After a month, he was confident about his trip—to Brazil, not Turkey, as another one of his friends had arrived in Brazil.

(By then, Akram had two friends, including Salah, and an uncle in Brazil). When Nawra and I were talking about the coming Ramadan, Akram told us, “I will be in Brazil then.”

He was at the same time applying for his Palestinian travel document from Syria, through his family’s help.37 He told Nawra and I that he was once conned by a man who had claimed to help people get the travel document for $700. “I don’t know his name

37 According to the interlocutors, a new Palestinian travel document cost $400 if applied in Syria, $200 for renewal outside Syria. They could only pay in US dollars, in cash.

and where he lives and I couldn’t report him to the General Security,” Akram laughed at himself, “the law doesn’t protect stupid people.” During our trip to Tyre, he also showed me the Brazilian visa process on his phone: after he logged into the website of the Brazilian Embassy, a timeline with four points (received, proceeding, authorized, ready to be collected) appeared on the screen. Akram said, “When the red point reaches the last one, I can go get it,” before adding that his mother would come to visit him (for the first time) before his departure. In Tyre, we visited a couple with two children (one of the children was disabled and in need of affordable medical care) who had visited all the European embassies for visas in vain, and had finally applied for Brazilian visas.

Akram shared with them what he had heard: “My uncle was telling me that he wanted to come back to Lebanon at first. The first few months would be difficult;” “There were many Arabic restaurants.” Akram finally gave them his number and later he told me,

“They don’t know anyone there. I’m going first, so I will try to help them.”

Another month passed and Akram received his travel document from his family in Syria.38 I saw him showing it to his friends excitedly during a wedding that I attended. However, there was no news about the Brazilian visa. Weeks later when I met him, he appeared to be pessimistic about the trip to Brazil as he told me about his friend’s experience there, “The Brazilian visa, I think they won’t give me, and I might not go. My friend who arrived there two weeks ago told me not to go. He was very tired.

He lives with many other refugees. I have another friend who is in Serbia…” He continued to tell me about another possibility to travel to Serbia.

His mother paid a two-week visit to him before Ramadan and he took her to see different places in Lebanon. After she went back to Syria, I saw Akram again during

38 It was popular among my interlocutors to send/receive cash or presents through taxis which drive back and forth between Beirut and Shams (Damascus). It costs LBP 20,000 ($13.30) per ride.

a gathering in Ramadan, and he showed me his one-time entry Brazilian visa. He then told me about his latest plan: “During the transit in Turkey, I will have four hours. I will try to escape. If I fail, I will go to Brazil. My friend in Brazil told me he would try to go to Canada after Ramadan. If he succeeds, I will take the same route [which means going through the borders of the US—“I know it’s very difficult,” Akram added].” “I don’t want to go to Brazil, but this is my only chance.” I asked if he had enough money for the trip, he said that his previous savings from the NGO work could count some, and his father would also send him some money.

As Akram told me of this plan, his close friend from the NGO, Jalal, sat next to him listening. I had met Jalal several times at the League’s event and during their friends’ gatherings. Jalal used to be a hotel receptionist in Damascus and had a university degree in English literature. Jalal had initially settled in Tripoli after leaving

Syria, but had moved to Beirut to work at the NGO. He was also now out of work. In

Shatila, he was living with a friend and his younger brother, who was working as a painter. Although Jalal had stated that he wanted to travel, he had been hesitant while watching Akram’s continuous endeavor. Jalal said, “I want to go to Turkey, but it’s very expensive. … If Akram does stay in Turkey, I will follow him.” The very next week, when Nawra asked if Jalal wanted to go to Brazil with Akram, he told her that he had scheduled to apply for the visa in Brazilian embassy the next month. He seemed to spot my confusion about his different account and explained, “This is my last solution.”

For Akram and Jalal, the hopeful futures were lying in the distant places which they had imagined. However, each plan entailed a period of waiting, in which Akram’s future became volatile. He swung between hope and despair with each piece of progress or the news from his friend abroad. While Jalal’s initial attitude suggested a different

way of depositing hope—through watching and waiting for things to happen—at the time of writing, Jalal had packed his bags and departed with Akram on a route that I have been asked not to disclose.

5.6. Hope in the Passage of Time

As opposed to those who deposited their hope in leaving for a distant destination, Umm Youssef’s outlook toward futures exemplified the kind of hope that lies in the passage of time. Even though she abhorred the salty water and the noises of gunshots and neighbors’ fights, her desire to leave Shatila was hard to notice. Compared to Akram and my other interlocutors, she rarely brought up the topic of leaving the camp. For her, it seemed that neither leaving Shatila for other camps in Lebanon nor emigrating to a third country would help her family’s current state of uncertainty. As she said, when Abu Youssef was discussing their thoughts on a plan to Turkey,

“But you need 1000 dollars before you find a job, and that’s not for a whole family, for one person. What do you want to do on your own? I want the whole family together. We live together, we die together.”

And when a plan to Brazil emerged, I heard from Nawra,

“Like my father…he was talking about going to Brazil. My mom said then he goes with Youssef and Taalib [Nawra’s two brothers], and my mom and I stay here so she can continue to have savings. We won’t know where we could live in Brazil. If we go, are we going to sleep on the street? My dad said we can sleep in a mosque, but that’s for men. Women can’t stay in the mosque… Then my dad closed the subject… Maybe me and my mom will stay here earning money and go to a richer place!”

It is necessary to note that, Umm Youssef’s current work offered her more stability that is far more than the option of moving or emigrating. Thus, I grasped, however infrequently, the sense of hope that was offered to her by the passage of time:

A night after Iftar, the breaking of the fast in the month of Ramadan, Umm Youssef was having her cigarette with Abu Youssef in the end of the hallway

outside their rented house, as the non-stop celebratory fireworks crackled, one being set off after another. Feeling annoyed, she said, “If one day I leave Shatila, I will not miss it.” Then she peeked at the young guys who was setting off the firecrackers downstairs and said, “You know it’s not cheap. It’s like five thousands [Lebanese pounds] for each. They have money.”

“If one day I leave Shatila” implied a subtle hope of waiting for the day to come. And considering her current unwillingness to leave the camp—since leaving the space did not mean a lot to her if the state of uncertainty remained or unlessened (“one could not leave the time one was in”)—it was time that lit up, faintly, the aspiration toward futures.39

When I tried to collect Umm Youssef’s accounts of her attitude toward her children’s futures, I surprisingly found her eagerness to prepare the children, or her wish for them to prepare themselves, for the futures in Lebanon. Youssef (18) and

Taalib (16) had both left their schooling in Syria (grade 10th and 8th in an UNRWA school,) and didn’t continue after they settled in Lebanon. I knew from Nawra that both of her brothers did not enjoy studying and had not thought of continuing in Lebanon.40

However, when I asked Umm Youssef why Taalib didn’t continue his studies, her answer was what I should have already known well: “Even if he studies, there is no chance for him to enter a college here.” Her answer illuminates well her kids’ future in

Lebanon, where higher education is nearly inaccessible or impractical to invest in for a

Palestinian refugee.

I also saw the hope in Umm Youssef’s expectation toward the older son

Youssef when he briefly started training as a nurse:

39 If we recall in the first chapter: Umm Youssef’s sudden expression of “I want a grandson” also offers another example of this type of the hope that she had in the coming of time.

40 As for Nawra, I should note, she had enjoyed studying and she told me about her memories in school. But she had left her baccalaureate study after a dispute with her male classmate when she was still in Syria. She joined an English program provided by UNRWA afterward and also started an apprenticeship in hairdressing.

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I followed up on Youssef’s new work. Umm Youssef’s friend told her about the vacancy as a volunteer and a trainee as a nurse in Haifa Hospital. “It’s good. He likes it. Money is not important. It’s good that he has something to do.”

[…] I asked if Youssef would ask her about the things he learned from his hospital training, she said delightfully, “Yes, he sometimes tries to compete with me [on the nursing knowledge]! He must learn well. I was trained for three years before I started my work at hospital. For him, it’s too early to talk about work now.”

And, when Youssef quit going for the training, she was disappointed:

When I asked, she only said, “I don’t know what he was thinking. He’s lazy. Stupid.” She didn’t go on, annoyed by the thought of him quitting the good opportunity.

Umm Youssef’s initial contentment and later disappointment toward Youssef’s decisions showed her anticipation of seeing him start to prepare himself for the future.

The future was to be in Lebanon where the knowledge and skills of nursing might offer him an opportunity of a rather stable livelihood like she had.

On the other hand, from Umm Mustafa, I saw a very different projection of future for her children, and therefore, different forms of investment and efforts. She was expecting Mustafa to continue his education in college:

Mustafa just finished his baccalaureate study in a church service school in Saida. Before he traveled to Syria to attend the general exam for college, he told me he would enter college either in Syria or Germany. He wanted to go to Damascus University. When I asked what if the war went on, he said, “If the war doesn’t end soon, I will go to Germany. Berlin.” Umm Mustafa also told me before that “It is too expensive to study in Lebanon,” and that Mustafa would try to get a scholarship to study “outside” (barra). Maybe in Germany or Palestine.” A day before Mustafa embarked on his trip to Syria for the exam, I paid him a visit and overheard he and his parents discussing how much money he should bring along with him for the month-long stay. It would be around 100 dollars, Umm Mustafa told me. During Ramadan, Nawra told me that Mustafa had done well on the exam, and that he seemed to want to go for the Damascus University.

Mustafa’s parents both did not have a regular income like Umm Youssef’s, and Mustafa was the oldest son of their three children. However, as the prospect of Mustafa entering college lay in a visible and affordable short-term future, his parents had supported him.

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Even though such future was uncertain, Mustafa’s parents invested in the expectations they had, because for them, opportunities lie in the days to come.

In my ethnography, the distant futures to which my interlocutors aspired very often presented themselves in the form of hope rather than despair. For those who believed, amidst such extreme limitation in choices, that the future could only be acquired by departure, their aspirations were enormous, and the actions that followed were unthinkably bold. The disjuncture of their lifeworld had created a gap in which they restlessly sought, or otherwise invented, the expected future that they had lost. For those who chose to or were forced to wait, their patience was equally courageous and tenacious—it was sabr Ayub (the patience of Ayub, who was renowned by his patience when tested by God).

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CONCLUSION

On the day Akram and Jalal left, I visited Nawra so we could say goodbye together. When I walked into Nawra’s apartment, I saw Abu Youssef sitting on one of the newly bought couches that replaced the cushion seats. Umm Youssef came out of the kitchen and excitingly asked me to guess how much the couches cost. “It was

20,000 LBP [$13]!” Umm Youssef said, “When I heard about it, I ran to give them the money to reserve it.” It was a second-hand set. Now the couch had became the two brothers’ beds, instead of cushions. Nawra and I left to see Akram and several friends of his. After the farewell, we returned to Nawra’s apartment, and Nawra told Umm

Youssef about Akram and Jalal’s departure, and also about my date for leaving

Lebanon. When I stood up and prepared to leave, Umm Youssef turned to me and said,

“So now you are leaving too? Okay, everyone leaves.”

When we speak of “having a future,” the topics were often directed to either about arriving at a new stage of life—education, occupation or marriage, or about leaving for another place, such as moving or migration. It was, of course, especially the case for my interlocutors who had suddenly lost their lifeworlds to ask about their existences in these respects. However, the task of asking such question is, as we have seen, not only urgent, but also extremely intricate, confusing, and simply said, difficult.

Confronting the arrival of Nawra’s adulthood amidst the loss of the future in Syria that they had prepared for, Nawra and her parents were in a crisis and asked about futures in the form of marriage decisions. The turmoil of the engagement and breakup with Hadi unfolded the family’s confusion over choices entangled with their refugeehood. Coming to Lebanon to secure the family’s future free of conflicts and dead-ends, Umm Youssef

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found herself struggling to become the pillar of her family. Her adaptation to the new rhythm of the family and working life seemed to bring an interesting encounter with her young self. In searching for a future for her family, Umm Youssef was in turn seeing the different effects of time, destructive and creative, brought upon her children and herself. The decisions made to improve dwelling, however small, were my interlocutors’ answer to the question they had been confronting: whether or not to have a future here, in Shatila. And the answer was a paradox: while improving the furniture, investing in connections with the neighborhood, my interlocutors were not expecting, or were unwilling to expect, a long-term settlement. They could easily leave these newly purchased belongings (which were bought for temporary use) behind on any day amidst their uncertain future. In the face of crises, challenges and uncertainty in the everyday, memories arose and became yet another thorny decision for my interlocutors: to remember or to let go, to seek refuge in the past or to continue to confront the question about the future? Finally, when the futures that we often speak of—education and occupation—were nearly unattainable for my interlocutors, the future was only imaginable in the form of leaving. Their chasing after futures was an unfinished story.

For those who deposited their hope in the passage of time, waiting was the solution for the time being, as Nawra had suggested in the beginning of this thesis.

While waiting, the efforts and inventiveness addressed to the task of living itself were noteworthy. While refugeehood suddenly became a factor for a daughter interpreting her parents’ attitude to a marriage decision, energy was exerted in the care, understanding and communication needed to secure the intimate relationship. The efforts of family members in caring and negotiating other household responsibilities were made when a mother undertook the livelihood of a family. Numerous attempts and

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ideas were also made in an effort to create a comfortable environment for living. And then, meeting the influxes of the pleasure of the pasts and aspirations toward futures, I saw the strength to endure pain in remembering and the efforts to chisel a way out of the liminal present.

Writing such a poignant ethnography, I often drowned myself into a deep sympathetic depression, especially when the images of my interlocutors came to mind: moments such as the uncle holding a stack of copy papers for renewing his passport, an effort which turned out to be in vain, Umm Salah looking for a more affordable dwelling without her sons by her side, or the neighbor Umm Ahmad, in her eighties, having to ask for money from Umm Youssef. However, by the conclusion of my fieldwork, my interlocutors had proven that this emotional, helpless way of picturing them was often inaccurate. Enormous efforts and strength they deployed to address the suffering were often compromised in my imagination of the displaced people.

In the beginning of this project, I bore in mind to look at the future horizons of my interlocutors, to pay attention to their conversations pertaining to futures. During the fieldwork and in writing this ethnography, I found myself instead documenting the ups and downs of Nawra’s encounter during her engagement, the discussions about clothes and wardrobe, the moments of remembrance, and the numerous turns in making decision to travel. However, it was in these details, the messy and fragmented entries of notes that I came to understand my interlocutors’ temporalities to the pasts and to the futures. While some of the interlocutors had explicit statements claiming their future elsewhere, Umm Youssef, relaxing in the newly bought couch that day, reminded me that the task of living in the everyday had wrought the idea of the future indefinable:

One improves a corner for the living body to rest in at the end of the day, so as to

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continue the tasks of tomorrow. One can aspire or be pessimistic about one’s future, but in the continuation of life, the horizon that keeps looking forward says as much about the future as those far-off aspirations.

As I put on my shoes, I told Nawra that I wished to come for a visit next year.

She replied, “Next year when you visit, we might not be here. We might be in another country.” She continued, “I hope we will be back to Syria next year.” Before I could respond, she added, “But I know I am dreaming.” As Nawra had also reminded me, every answer concerning the futures should be, and can only be, incomplete and open- ended, because in the flow of time, possibilities remain.

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