http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2000/490/books7.htm
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Remapping, remembering
Reviewed by Amina Elbendary
The Landscape of Palestine: Equivocal Poetry, Eds. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Roger
Heacock and Khaled Nashef , Birzeit, Palestine: Birzeit University
Publications, 1999. pp268
"Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the
mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers
of rock." -- Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory.
[Mermaid note] btw Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory is now one of my
favourite books. I picked it from the library some weeks ago and I recommend
it to anyone who have always wondered about the intricate relationship
between culture and nature and how exactly shapes the other.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679735127/qid=1028520251/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/104-9342416-2335126
<snip>
Editorial reviews:
Cultures are shaped by place. Forests inspire tree worship; rivers are gods.
These cultural constructs are the source of "landscapes," the transformation
of earth into metaphor. Schama, a fluidly creative scholar and adept author
with far-ranging interests, has conducted what he describes as an
"excavation" of Western culture's profound landscape tradition. What he
reveals in this intricately structured, finely detailed, and wonderfully
engaging analysis is the endurance of our veneration for nature, a
perspective we still hold dear in spite of our environmental difficulties.
Schama believes that a deeper understanding of our "core myths" may help us
see our way through the present crisis. Schama focuses on three types of
landscapes: forests, rivers, and mountains. As he describes each
setting--from the tragedy-filled forests of Poland to California's
astounding redwoods, to the heavily navigated Thames and Mississippi, the
otherworldly Swiss Alps and even crass Mount Rushmore--Schama interprets the
myths, literature, art, and polemics that have infused each place with
metaphorical, spiritual, or political significance. This beautifully
illustrated volume is an awesome achievement, a masterful, multifaceted
survey of the many stories and images Western culture has evolved to express
our complex relationship with place and the rest of life. Donna
Seaman</snip>
[Mermaid]Sorry to digress, but I enjoyed the book and I had to take a detour
from the subject discussed to spread the joy.
"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even
know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because
geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab
villagers are not there either... There is not a single place built in this
country that did not have a former Arab population." -- Moshe Dayan, in a
speech at the Israel Institute of Technology, 1969.
Cultural geography and the history of landscape are among the most
interesting fields of enquiry to have developed over the past decade. Yet
nowhere does the politicisation and urgency of this new discipline appear as
clearly as it does in this collection of essays, The Landscape of Palestine.
The art of remembering the past, of making history, has always been imbued
with political overtones; this collection demonstrates how the making of
geography, so to speak, is also an overtly political act.
In his introduction to the book Edward Said refers to the role of geography
and landscape in collective memory. As he points out, through the
construction of a decidedly Israeli history for the land that is Palestine,
Zionist propaganda has sought to legitimate its contemporary agenda.
Palestinian occupied territories have been renamed "Judaea and Samaria."
Similarly, the Jewish National Fund has been preoccupied with planting
certain types of trees to reshape the landscape even down to the vegetation
on it.
However the Israeli design to manipulate landscape of course took its most
violent form in campaigns to destroy and obliterate Palestinian villages, by
so doing attempting to wipe Palestine off the map. In his article "The
Mountain and the Plain: Some themes of Continuity and Change in Palestinian
Landscapes," one of the contributors to the book, Malcolm Wagstaff,
demonstrates that Palestine lowlands were traditionally associated with
change, while the mountainous uplands were associated with stability and
settled landscapes. However, he shows that since 1967 a new pattern of
change has occurred in the uplands, changing the traditional landscape and
populations. Most of the Arab villages destroyed by the Israelis were upland
villages, and strategic Jewish settlements have been built above the Jordan
valley. Wagstaff argues that such elevated sites have been preferred because
of their classical association with defence, but also because of their
cultural and political connotations of domination.
In a similar vein Ghazi Falah in his "The Transformation and
De-signification of Palestine's Cultural Landscape" differentiates different
types and degrees of destruction in the 418 Palestinian villages depopulated
in the course and in the wake of the 1948 war. He also analyses the
significance behind these different categories of transformation, arguing
that violent changes in the landscape -- where villages were completely
destroyed and levelled -- were often effected by changing land use. Many
formerly Arab villages, mostly in the lowlands, were turned by the Israelis
into fishing ponds or garbage dumps, while other destroyed villages were
hidden among thick plantations of forest. Villages in or near to the suburbs
of Palestinian towns occupied in 1948 were replaced by Jewish settlements,
with Jews taking over houses abandoned by fleeing refugees.
Geographical and physical obliteration were thus used to ensure political
and cultural annihilation. It is self-evident that Israeli policies of
dealing with depopulated Arab land were geared at changing the landscape so
as to prevent -- or at least severely curtail -- any endeavours by the
displaced and dispossessed Palestinians to return. For, following such
Israeli rewriting of the landscape, what would they now return to?
This displacement of Palestine is also the subject of Mark LeVine's article
"From Bride of the Sea to Disneyland: The Role of Architecture in the Battle
for Tel Aviv's 'Arab Neighbourhood'." In it he analyses the planning of the
Tel Aviv-Jaffa region and demonstrates the inherent Israeli ambivalence
towards Jaffa and towards the Arab communities in general. The battle for
this contested space reflects how architectural movements are inscribed in
the politics of national identity, contrary to the presumptions of the
Israeli discourse on planning, which presents itself as apolitical and
concerned only with development.
For Israeli urban planning has on the one hand worked here to erase
tradition (for example through using architecture in the International Style
in the city) and on the other hand has reclaimed it through a discourse on
heritage that reimagines the old city of Jaffa only this time in the Israeli
image. Jaffa has thus been swallowed up by Israel's main city, Tel Aviv,
which literally grew and expanded on the ruins of the old Arab port, though
in Tel Aviv's creation mythology it was constructed as a city on the sands,
built on a desert empty of people.
In this context, the renewal of the historical neighbourhoods of what is now
Tel Aviv should be understood not as "preserving" the past, LeVine argues,
but as "rewriting or inventing" it. Buildings are renovated to correspond to
ideal visions of the past and to serve contemporary Israeli needs, leading
to the systematic erasure of Jaffa's Arab identity despite the Oriental
claims of the vernacular architecture. In addition, the process of
gentrification that has been going on in the Tel Aviv-Jaffa region since the
1990s through close collaboration between private developers and the Israeli
government has made living there unaffordable to many Arabs, "the market"
thus pushing them out of the city, and not the Israeli authorities.
Nowhere is the politicization of geography clearer than in the process of
drawing maps and consequently in remapping territories. Maps in this sense
are presumptuous creations, presumptuous in that they seem to present
objective facts, mirrors of geographic reality, while being in fact cultural
constructions. This line of argument is followed by Nabil I Matar, professor
of English Literature at the Florida Institute of Technology, in his article
"Renaissance Cartography and the Question of Palestine". Here he analyses a
16th century map of the world by Abraham Ortelius in which Palestine is
depicted as "the Holy Land" and therefore is mapped in biblical terms. This
is in stark contrast to the rest of the map, which is remarkable for its
geographical accuracy by the standards of the time.
By tracing the origins of contemporary Zionist remappings of Palestine to
such early maps, Matar sees in them the result of a 16th-century European
notion of the mapping of the Jewish Exodus, and of an eventual return of the
Jews to the Promised Land before the Second Coming of Christ. Such maps
"taught Europeans to view Palestine as a meta-Palestine, a holy land without
history, people and, given the inaccuracies of the maps, even geography" --
a frame of mind that persists to this day. The construction of Palestine as
the "Holy Land" by Europeans is also the subject of Dominique Edd\é's
article on the writings of French travellers to the region in the 18th and
19th centuries, as it is of Lynne D Rogers's article on literary snapshots
of Palestine in the writings of Mark Twain and William Thackeray.
Just as the Israeli authorities have attempted literally to change the facts
on the ground by manipulating the landscape, so they have attempted to
manipulate the way that ground is mapped. Counter-histories, such as those
contained in this book, can however work to recover the facts that were on
the ground, and still are despite Israeli attempts to deny them. In his
introduction to the book Edward Said laments the fact that the Palestinians
have not thus far given due attention to the construction of a collective
history for themselves as a tool in their struggle for national
independence. In presenting alternative histories of the landscape and
culture that is Palestine, this fine collection of essays is nevertheless an
important step in that direction.
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