Palestinian Folklore Politically Powerful

By Catherine M. Willford

Lullabies, wedding customs, embroidery, and folktales play a role in the intifadah as important as strikes and stone throwing, according to Dwight Conquergood of Northwestern University. The Palestinians, he says, have "been so assaulted, their identities as much as their bodies, their culture negated and denied, that the simplest act of asserting 'We are Palestinian' through traditional expressive forms is a profoundly political act."

Dr. Conquergood, an ethnographer, studies cultures through their folklore, oral traditions, and art. He works with refugee cultures because they are societies in crisis which, in the absence of governmental organs, laws, and other trappings of sovereignty, must constantly assert their identity through their folk culture.

The political significance is not lost on the Israelis—who either suppress or appropriate Palestinian national arts.

The intifadah has created an increased need to celebrate the Palestinian identity, Conquergood maintains. Traditional lullabies, which link generation to generation, are recorded on audio tapes and written down. The colors of the forbidden flag are worked into embroidery. Folktales are being retold and collected. "Any folk item, custom, or art that preserves Palestinian integrity and culture acts as a way to connect the people with their roots and their purpose, which is to remain, to be steadfast," Conquergood says. He adds that the political significance is not lost on the Israelis—who either suppress or appropriate Palestinian national arts. They suppress by banning nationalist art and songs. They appropriate by having Palestinian embroidery on the uniforms of EI-Al stewardesses.

Dr. Conquergood has traveled to Gaza for each of the last three years, returning from his latest trip in September. Initially, he studied men who had been released from Ansar Prison in 1985. These men had grown to adulthood behind prison walls. They spontaneously created their own culture of songs, traditions and art as an act of solidarity. Conquergood was drawn into the lives of these men and their families, living among them in the camps, enduring the hardships and joining in the political discussions and community celebrations. He faced a poignant mixture of rage and tenderness. Gazans would scream at him, venting their rage at US policies, but would later treat him as a beloved guest when they learned that he had come to learn, share and understand.

Conquergood's acceptance by the Gazans enabled him to gain unique insights into the day-to-day realities of the Intifadah during his stay this summer. He was greatly impressed by the level of economic self-sufficiency. Everywhere the camp dwellers have set up vegetable gardens, duck ponds, pigeon coops, and rabbit hutches so that they need not be dependent on the Israelis for food. The Popular Committees have set up food-rationing and blockade-running systems. The Palestinians are setting up an infrastructure so that they can survive as long as it takes. The Israelis feel sufficiently threatened by this to deliberately kill these small food animals with tear gas attacks.

The Palestinians are setting up an infrastructure so that they can survive as long as it takes.

Conquergood was tear-gassed by the Israel Defense Force soldiers as he traveled to the Ketziot prison camp, known to the Palestinians as Ansar III, in the Negev. He was travelling with a busload of women, including four members of the Italian Parliament, when they were stopped at a security checkpoint and denied permission to continue. The bus riders got off and began a demonstration. Soldiers fired warning shots in the air and then threw teargas canisters among the women. Palestinian women from a nearby village ran out to assist the coughing and sick demonstrators, giving them onions to hold under their noses. Conquergood says of the gas, "You know that it's poison. It just knocks you out. You can feel a stinging-like acid in your lungs. And this was outdoors! I can well imagine that it can be lethal in an enclosed area."

Struggle Unites Palestinians

He feels that the reports of a leadership struggle in the Gaza camps between the secular groups and the Islamic fundamentalists (Hamas) are greatly exaggerated. He spent a night amid deplorable conditions in the gunshot ward of Shik Hospital, the Israeli government hospital in Gaza. Conquergood was awakened when a rat jumped through the screenless window onto his chest. He said the teenage patients in the ward, who had only one doctor and one nurse to attend to them, took care of each other, with no regard to factional differences. "If anything, tensions have diminished, " Conquergood said. "The struggle has given them a transcendent reason to look beyond past differences."

Overall, this American ethnographer found morale to be high as the Gazans settle in for the long haul. No IDF patrol goes unchallenged by the children. Old women haul baskets of stones to the barricades. The old men exult that the IDF must resort to sweeping arrest raids because they still cannot identify the leaders of the uprising. When Conquergood asked what the camp dwellers most needed he was told, "We have food to survive. We have clothes to get by. Send us two people to stand behind and bear witness."

Catherine Willford is a free-lance journalist and circulation director for the Washington Report.