[Vasundhara Mathur] Alia is our third speaker. Alia Al-Sabi will provide a brief glimpse on an archive of books and notebooks recording the textual practices and literary production of the Palestinian political prisoners’ movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Alia is a writer and researcher based in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Performance Studies department at NYU, where she is researching prison literatures in various archives in Palestine. Her research focus considers theories of movement and subversion within logics of surveillance and confinement, through examining the textual practices produced within carceral structures.
[Alia Al-Sabi] Good morning everyone. Thank you all for coming. Thank you Rosemary and Anasuya for your wonderful presentations. I’m really honoured and very pleased to be here with you today. I’m going to take you on a little journey with me, outlining an encounter that I had with an archive that many of you may not see because it exists in the depths of a very persistent and brutal military occupation. And so, yeah, I will begin.
It all began seven years ago in 2018 during a trip to my mother’s hometown in the West Bank in Palestine. It had been five years since my last visit, and I was getting reacquainted with the people and the place when a friend casually mentioned something about a prisoner’s archive located near the old market. I was immediately intrigued and decided to go see it. Upon entering the library, I was directed to the top floor and what I found was a sprawling archive, what you see in this image here, containing books and prison notebooks dating back to the 1970s and 1980s period of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement, historically considered the golden era of the movement’s cultural production and political activity. I quickly learned from the archivist working there that this collection of books and notebooks originated in various libraries inside Israeli prisons in the West Bank. After the Oslo Agreement in the early 1990s, these prisons were forced to shut down, presumably to make way for Palestinian ‘statehood’, and the contents of these libraries were then transferred to the newly formed Palestinian Authority, which in turn transferred them to the library.
I remember my first encounter with the archive very well. The archivist gave me a quick tour and then left me to my devices. So I spent a few hours leafing through pages and reading, just getting lost in this world that I had just discovered. The shelves were adorned with weathered tomes of economic theory, slim volumes of poetry, well-worn novels, textbooks on mathematics and physics, classic works of philosophy and history, and much more. Naturally, I took lots of photos of the many prisoners’ journals kept in the archive. Page after page of meticulously handwritten thoughts and reflections penned by men whose faces and fates I did not know.
I saved the photos on a hard drive and deleted them off my phone before leaving Palestine that summer, lest an Israeli soldier on the border hold me back for suspicion. As luck would have it, my hard drive crashed and I lost all photos from that day but one that was somehow still saved on my phone. That photo is of a page from an Arabic translation of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. As you can maybe see, the page shows the Israeli prison stamp, as well as one underlined sentence that reads ‘The land belongs to those who till it’. [الأرض لمن يزرعون الأرض] I’m not sure what compelled me to take this photo at the time, but something about the singular line emphasising that one sentence next to a hardly legible Hebrew stamp was captivating. ‘The land belongs to those who till it’, underlined by a Palestinian prisoner in the darkness of an Israeli prison. I wondered why these words resonated with him, why he marked nothing else on that page. Was it an affirmation, an invocation, a spell? I can only speculate, but I am nonetheless assured by the simplicity of this directive. It’s like he knew, in his prison cell, the grain of truth the simple formulation contains and wanted to shine a light on it for himself and for others like me reading it after him.
Long after my visit to the archive, I would describe my experience of it as a haunting. I can’t really claim a reason for using that word specifically other than that it was just the word that came back to me all the time. A lingering feeling of being unsettled by something I encountered, of standing at the precipice of something so large and all-consuming before the cognition of any idea is formed. Scholar and archivist, archivist, Avery Gordon interprets this kind of archival haunting as an emergent state that calls for something to be done. She writes in her book The Hawthorne Archive: ‘Haunting is an emergent state: the ghost arises, carrying the signs and portents of a repression in the past or the present that’s no longer working. The ghost demands your attention. The present wavers. Something will happen. What will happen, of course, is not a given, is not given in advance, but something must be done.’
So persistent was this possession that took over me that I decided to do something, and two years later I went back to school to study this archive in earnest. Having only my memory of the visit and the single remaining image as the only tangible evidence of my first encounter, it became a critical anchor to all my subsequent explorations. It would be another four years before I could return to the archive in 2022. The world was still reeling from the pandemic that hit us all, and much had changed on the ground amidst an ever-deteriorating political climate. That year, in addition to the material I managed to collect to replace the first set that was lost, I discovered the existence of a second prisoners’ archive. This one was in the Abu Jihad Museum for Prisoner Movement Affairs in Al-Quds University in Abu Dis, a small village just outside of Jerusalem. I learned that this archive also contains books and notebooks from prisons that closed after Oslo. But the story of how they came to be in this location remains unclear for reasons I won’t get into right now.
Before I show you glimpses of this archive, some historical contextualising is in order. The archive, in both its iterations, records a period in the Palestinian prisoners’ movement that was vital to the Palestinian liberation struggle, a time when prisons were turned into active and organised learning sites by prisoners that produced prison literatures, political debates, strategic prison-wide strikes, and everyday acts of noncompliance that challenged the system of control imposed by the prison authorities. The system of organisation, popularly dubbed the ‘Internal Order’, or النظام الداخلي, became a powerful counter-order that was all-inclusive in nature in that it embodied and addressed all spheres of a prisoner’s daily life. The material conditions and facilities of a prison cell, various forms of education, as well as a comprehensive and daily programme requiring prisoner participation in political discussions and democratic decision making. Many former prisoners cite their time in the Internal Order as transformative and foundational to their political formation. It’s where they read political theory, philosophy, theology, history, and also one another.
The 1970s and 1980s was an era of strong popular mobilisation, one that was galvanised by a close entanglement between the prisoners’ movement and the Palestinian national movement, in which the movement inside prison walls in many ways informed the prison move, informed the movement outside, and vice versa. And this is evident in the notebooks, books and communiqués that I will be showing you glimpses of now.
And now I’m just going to describe some of the images that I brought to you today. But I also want you to, like, really kind of try to encounter them as I did the first time, without really understanding their context, their content. I know many of you don’t speak Arabic, so can’t read what you’re seeing, but just visually like appreciate the, the, sort of the richness that these notebooks contain.
Just really quickly, there are about 875 handwritten journals in this archive, so there’s quite a few of them. They’re mostly anonymous and contain political analysis, memoirs, short stories and plays, letters, periodicals and poetry. Many of them have collaged covers, made of magazine cutouts designed to make them innocuous and unassuming as a mode of subversion, to hide and conceal their content in many ways. I chose just a few, like a selection of these notebooks but I also wanted to show you the interior of one page in particular because of a quote that I thought was really interesting. The black, sort of big words that you see at the bottom read as قد تستمر مسيرة النضال مئة عام، فعلى قصيري النفس التنحي جانباً which translates to ‘The journey of the struggle might continue 100 years. So those who have short breath should step aside.’ [laughter] And, I, you know, I think a lot of, a lot of my time in the archive is just like, really getting lost in these little notes that they were writing to one another. Which, which is always really moving. And the archive also contains about 8,000 books, books on political theory, theology, Marxism, struggles of the Global South, language, poetry. And what’s really fascinating about these books is that they contain a lot of annotations, and the annotations sometimes are responses to what they were reading, but also just doodles and scribbles and, you know, oftentimes very playful, as you can see in front of you, you know, drawings of various animals with weird proportions. But also one recurring thing that I kept seeing on and on was names. Names of, of the prisoners and where they came from and also the duration of their sentence. So the one on your right in blue basically says Ghazi Jum’a Farhan from the Balata refugee camp and his duration is one year. And there’s something really haunting about just this. Okay. I’m told I have five minutes, and I still have a lot to go.
Yeah, so I found these scribbles really haunting sometimes because it’s like a marker of presence in a space of complete erasure. And so I tried to document and take photos of, of every encounter like this that I saw. There are also, you know, other marginalia like cutout hearts. And on the top right photo you’ll see one word that’s repeated three times, المؤبد, which means ‘lifetime’, and I’m assuming it’s referring to a lifetime sentence, which I think for me was, I really kind of paused at this photo because it was just really heavy, and how just like that recurring word haunts, المؤبد, for me felt it came with this weight of, like, a lifetime sentence in prison.
Moving on. The archive also contains various technologies of concealment and ways to transfer political communiqués between different, faction leaders. This book, for example, is carved out in the middle, in the centre to conceal letters that were being circulated between these faction leaders. This is the only book of its kind in this archive that I could find, as far as I know. And as you can maybe tell, the handwriting in these letters is really, really small, and that’s by design. And it’s really, really small a) to, you know, make economic space of the letter, but also to conceal and make it very difficult for the prison authorities to read their contents, which is a technology that they called مسمسم. So مسمسم is the name of the handwriting, which is really small because it’s rooted in, I think, sesame, like tiny seeds. And there were other ways also that they were transporting these messages, and it was this, this capsule is one of those ways, كبسوله is, is how they say it in Arabic. It’s basically these plastic containers where they hid also these letters when they knew a prisoner was about to be released or moved to a different prison. He would basically swallow these capsules and then deliver them in his final destination.
So I’m going to start wrapping up. There’s so much in this archive that is rich and complex and inspiring and indicates a spirited world of revolutionary thought and action between prison walls. What I found most moving about the contents of this archive is that ultimately, these prisoners were reading and writing for one another. Even though they were confined to their cells, their words could still travel between them, reinforcing their collectivity. After walking you through the minutiae and marginalia of the archive, I wanted to close with this image because it shows you the view from the archive where I sat every day. On the left side you may be able to spot the apartheid wall, a visual fixture dividing the West Bank into geographic fragments. Many times, as I sat in the archive and looked through notebooks written by men in prison, I experienced surreal moments of spatial and temporal collapse when I looked outside the window and was reminded that I, too, was in their prison. This is the reality of this archive, a record of confinement itself captive within a larger sphere of confinement, always suspended and always at risk.
Which brings me to the present moment. It is day 229 of the genocide in Gaza, and the wholesale destruction of a people, place, land and memory rages on. Yesterday, an image of an Israeli soldier burning books at the Al-Aqsa University Library in Gaza were circulating like fire online. You may have seen it. It shows a soldier in full army gear kneeling in front of a bookcase that was set ablaze. Balancing a machine gun on his lap, he holds a book in his hands, seemingly looking at it. I read a post by a Palestinian friend from Gaza describing how this image brought tears to his eyes. He writes, and I quote, ‘You don’t know how much Gazans love their books. You don’t understand what it means to see them burning our books. Hundreds of thousands of homes in Gaza had small libraries. What message do Israeli soldiers want to convey to us? As Heinrich Heine said, “Where they burn books, they will end in burning human beings.” But now people and books are being burned’, end quote. There’s a whole story of looted and destroyed Palestinian archives that go all the way back to the, to 1948, and this moment is no different. In fact, it is a culmination of settler colonial violence and its attempt to eradicate not just life, but all memory connected to it. To end, I’ll leave you with this question by historian Mezna Qato in her writing on Palestinian revolutionary history. ‘How do we write histories of revolt and revolution after ruin, disappearance, and archival and political collapse?’ Thank you.
Alia Al-Sabi is a writer and researcher based in Brooklyn. She is currently a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at NYU, where she is researching prison literatures in archives in Palestine.