Librarians and Archivists with Palestine's “One Book, Many Communities: Mornings in Jenin”

LAP - "One book" campaign
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Most Archive Education Officers and volunteers are familiar with Librarians and Archivists with Palestine ("a network of self-defined librarians, archivists, and information workers in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination") because we've sung their praises quite a lot.

We rather like their latest project - a new reading campaign called  “One Book, Many Communities" which is similar in concept to our own real time (wherever Archive staff are based) and cyber (when we meet online as a group) book club meetings and morning teas. So we thought we might take part :)

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The  “One Book, Many Communities: Mornings in Jenin” project:

"draws inspiration from the “one book, one town” idea—wherein people in local communities come together to read and discuss a common book. Librarians and Archivists with Palestine invites readers, librarians, and others to organize gatherings in January 2015 to discuss Mornings in Jenin, the acclaimed novel by Palestinian-American author and activist Susan Abulhawa. 

"Mornings in Jenin is a sweeping, heart-wrenching historical saga about four generations of the Abulheja family. From Jenin to Jerusalem to Beirut to Philadelphia, the novel follows the family from its displacement from Ein Hod village in 1948 through love and loss over decades of life in Palestine and the diaspora. 

“Every now and again a literary work changes the way people think. Abulhawa…has crafted a brilliant first novel about Palestine… [This] intensely beautiful fictionalized history… should be read by both politicians and those interested in contemporary politics.” –  Library Journal 

"LAP’s “One Book, Many Communities” campaign will introduce readers to the richness of Palestinian literature, and create a broader awareness and understanding of Palestinian history and the struggle for self-determination. 

"Please join us! If you’re interested in organizing a reading group in your community, let us know and check back here soon for more information and resources. Book groups can be held at a library, university or school, at a local non-profit organization or community center, in your living room, or at a bookstore. If you schedule your event for sometime during the month of January 2015, you’ll be connected to readers across the globe who will be reading and discussing the book at the same time. Use your imagination! And let us know what you’re planning! "

We thought we'd hold one in Canberra, but also wanted to suggest some of you - scattered around the world as Archive Education Officers and volunteer staff are - might like to hold one in your own town / country / city.  Check out LAP's very useful "One book "reading group toolkit page on their website for how to plan an event / what type of format / date / venue / reading resources etc and don't forget to tell LAP. And us as well - like LAP we'll list on this blog and link to it on our Facebook page.

You might prefer just to attend one of the events LAP are co-ordinating.  Keep an eye on LAP's events page as they'll be listing new events all the time over the next few months.

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Those of you near New York might like to attend the official launch of LAP’s “One Book, Many Communities” campaign and meet Susan Abulhawa who wrote Mornings in Jenin, at the Bluestockings Bookstore, Café + Activist Center on Saturday, November 8 at 7:00pm.

We are sure most of you are familiar with Susan Abulhawa - we first became aware of her via her Playgrounds for Palestine project and more recently always look out for her Electronic Intifada articles and book reviews - but if not you might like to check out her Wiki page which says of Mornings in Jenin:

"Abulhawa, who at the time was working for a drug company, visited Jenin as an international observer in the aftermath of the 2002 Israeli attack on a refugee camp there. 

"The visit “transformed” Abulhawa, she later said. “You grow up as a Palestinian knowing about these massacres and the wars and the injustice but it was completely different to be there." "What I saw in Jenin was shocking at so many levels,” she later said, “but it was also quite humbling to watch how the people came together and shared what little they had. So when I left there, I really wanted to tell their story because I knew nobody was going to talk about it.” 

"Returning to the U.S., she had trouble reconciling the concerns of her coworkers at the drug company with the travails of the people of Jenin. “They were two parts of my life and it was suffocating. A few months later I was laid off and it was probably the best thing that happened to me.” The result was a novel, Mornings in Jenin, which was published in 2010. 

"It has been described as “a poignant, lyrical tale tracing four generations of the Abulheja family as they suffer loss after loss - first, with the kidnapping of their son Ismael in the 1948 Naqba by an Israeli soldier and then through their violent expulsion from their village near Haifa.” The novel follows the family through “successive horrors inflicted during the 1967 war, the siege of Lebanon and slaughters in Jenin, Sabra and Shatila, the devastation and agonies wreaked on ordinary Palestinians are depicted through the struggles of the book's protagonist Amal, whose brother Ismael is raised as the Arab-hating David.” 

"The novel, published by Bloomsbury, has been translated into Arabic by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing. It has also been translated into at least two dozen other languages and has become an international bestseller. 

“In the Palestinian narrative,” she has said apropos of the book's story, “there are no two sides. There are no two sides to this conflict in the same way that there were no two sides to the Holocaust. There were no two sides to apartheid. There are no two sides to slavery. You have a nuclear power that is pitted against principally an unarmed civilian population. This is not a matter of sides.”

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We've got two copies of Mornings in Jenin in the Archive's Research Library, one in English and one in Arabic, which we can lend to anyone who wants to read it, but let us know quickly as there will probably be a bit of queue of people wanting it.  Also you could buy a copy yourself - links below.

We thought we might hold our Canberra book reading at Zar Bakery and Cafe (Canberra's only Palestinian food outlet) as that way no one has to worry about catering and exact numbers re attendees. If you've not tried Zar's yet have a read of our earlier post.

For those interested in attending a Canberra event, get in touch via our Facebook page. We'll also be discussing the Canberra event idea further when we meet up for our next cyber morning tea and also when we meet up for the Sydney and Canberra parts of the Palestinian Film Festival which is in the first half on November.

More Info:

• Librarians and Archivists with Palestine
• Librarians and Archivists with Palestine on Facebook
• Librarians and Archivists with Palestine - “One Book, Many Communities: Mornings in Jenin”
• Official launch of "Librarians and Archivists with Palestine's “One Book, Many Communities” Bluestockings Bookstore, Café + Activist Center New York on Saturday, November 8 at 7:00pm
• Susan Abulhawa
• Mornings in Jenin (you can purchase an autographed copy via links on this website as well as the author's wonderful My Voice Sought The Wind)
• Mornings in Jenin on Facebook
• Playgrounds for Palestine
• Bluestockings Bookstore, Café + Activist Center
• LAP - list of "One book" events
• LAP - "One book" tool kit

Palestine Poster Project Archives accepted for review by UNESCO's Memory of the World program

“Salma” by Sliman Mansour (1988)
published by Roots
Palestine Poster Project Archives website
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We were absolutely delighted to hear that the Palestine Poster Project Archives has been accepted for formal review by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s Memory of the World program. The UNESCO program’s International Register inscribes library and archival holdings of “world significance and outstanding universal value.” The nomination form states:

"Posters in the Liberation Graphics Collection representing a key era in the evolution and maturation of Palestine poster art, providing primary documentary data on the contemporary history of Palestine and serving as an extraordinary source of inspiration for artists from a diverse range of geographic locales, political affiliations, nationalities, and aesthetic perspectives. The Palestine poster genre is unique in world art and a much overlooked feature of Palestinian cultural heritage "

It is, indeed. As Dan Walsh, curator and owner of the Archives, says in an interview on the Mondoweiss website:

"these posters ... create a rich and textured portrait of Palestine that’s very different from the caustic and superficial stereotypes with which Palestinians were burdened subsequent to the Nakba. In these works of art we see keys and kaffiyehs, oranges and olives, horses and doves, poetry and embroidery, all mobilized to tell a story. These and other symbols, icons, and traditions of Palestinian identity are celebrated, preserved, and legitimated in the posters. 

"So the posters are a real teaching tool. Viewed collectively, they enable Palestinians to learn more about their own history and for non-Palestinians to undo the hasbara that has mis-educated them. It’s a source for national pride"

We're so pleased to see this nomination.  The Palestine Poster Project Archives and the Palestine Costume Archive share many things. Both archives came into being after academic research revealed the need. Both are staffed by volunteers. Both operate with severely limited resources. Both are committed to education. Both acquire specific forms of Palestinian cultural heritage. Both of us have collection / research areas which overlap - we both acquires posters featuring traditional Palestinian costume and embroidery iconography. Our own archive has a large works on paper collection, with a small but significant poster collection that always features in our traveling exhibitions, although sadly we lost about half our poster collection when our traveling exhibition "Symbolic Defiance: Palestinian costumes and embroideries since 1948" was "mislaid" at LAX on it's way to MESA, after being displayed at WOCMES.

We also like that the Palestine Poster Project Archives shares our frustration with Palestinian cultural material being mislabeled in archives and libraries and museums - Dr Walsh mentions this in the You Tube video below, which was a talk he gave at the Palestine Fund:


We know how hard everyone at the Palestine Poster Project Archives works, and we think it would be wonderful if that hard and very important work was acknowledged in this way :)

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Here's the rest of that interview, published on August 16, 2014:

In early August, the nomination of a major collection of posters from the Palestine Poster Project Archives was accepted for formal review by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s Memory of the World program. The UNESCO program’s International Register inscribes library and archival holdings of “world significance and outstanding universal value.” 

The nominated work, the Liberation Graphics Collection of Palestine Posters, is the first documentary heritage resource ever nominated by the state of Palestine for inscription to the Memory of the World. The review process takes about a year to complete. If inscribed, the Palestine posters will join a register that includes the Bayeux Tapestry, the Book of Kells, the Phoenician Alphabet, the Gutenberg Bible, Karl Marx’s personally annotated manuscript of Das Kapital, and hundreds of other historically significant documents.
Aside from the prospect of inscription into this prestigious register, the nomination itself is a watershed event for Palestinian art, culture, and history. Its significance is addressed in the following exchange between Dan Walsh, curator and owner of the Archives, and Catherine Baker, a member of the Archives’ advisory board. 

CB: Dan, describe the collection that has been nominated.

DW: The Palestine Poster Project Archives includes paper and digital images of almost 10,000 Palestine posters created by more than 1,900 artists from 72 countries. It’s growing by the day, both through acquisition of older posters and the addition of newly created works. UNESCO’s Memory of the World only includes defined and complete resources, so what was proposed for inscription is our core collection. This is a body of 1,700 posters published from the mid-sixties through the mid-nineties. They were produced during a key period in Palestinian history commencing around the time of the Six-Day War of 1967 and the 1968 battle of Al Karameh and continuing through the first intifada. The posters reveal how Palestinians organized and asserted themselves in response to the loss of land and the resulting displacement and diaspora. 

CB: Who made these posters? 

DW: Hundreds of Palestinian artists are represented. Some produced their work at locations within Palestine and others contributed from points around the globe. Palestinian artists whose names Mondoweiss readers might recognize include Ismail Shammout, Kamal Boullata, and Sliman Mansour, but there are many others.  The posters also represent a wide range of Palestinian publishers, from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to lesser known groups such as the General Union of Palestinian Plastic Artistsand, of course, the artists as publishers themselves. 

A good many of the posters were created in solidarity by non-Palestinians. To name a few: Marc Rudin from Switzerland, whose early solidarity with Palestinians earned him the honorific Jihad Mansour; the Italian comics illustrator Elfo; and the Italian set designer Elizabetta Carboni. There are many international artists who created Palestine solidarity posters in their early years and have subsequently enjoyed prominent careers in the arts. A number of the international posters in the Liberation Graphics Collection were self-published by the artists, others were published specifically for exhibits such as Palestine: A Homeland Denied, and a substantial portion were published by organizations outside of Palestine; as one example, the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America. 

CB: What topics do these posters address? 

DW: This particular collection includes many about armed struggle, but other themes emerge as well. A 1982 poster quoting Yasser Arafat says: “This revolution is not merely a gun, but also a scalpel of a surgeon, a brush of an artist, a pen of a writer, a plough of a farmer, an axe of a worker.” These posters reflect that society-wide commitment to the revolution. Some are about a particular individual or group of Palestinians, and some are about events such as music festivals or cultural traditions such as sculpture and film.  We’ve got posters on the theme of return, literacy, voting, children’s theatre, refugehood, you name it. The joys and the challenges of Palestinian life are all represented here. 

CB: In a nutshell, what’s the big deal about this nomination? 

DW: Apart from the possibility of actual inscription in UNESCO’s Memory of the World register—which we hope will occur following the review process—the nomination itself brings world attention to a unique genre of posters that heretofore has been essentially unrecognized. 

CB: What do you mean by that? 

DW: Typically, posters related to Palestine have been archived by libraries and museums under all sorts of rubrics depending on who made them or where they were made. They’ve been catalogued under various terms such as Muslim, Arab, Middle East, Jewish, Israeli, Holy Land, Levant, and so on. This means that related posters were not readily available for unified analysis. We posted a definition of the Palestine poster at the Archives web site, and we included all posters that met that definition. When we did that, what emerged is a unique genre of tremendous breadth and scope. It’s a goldmine for artists, historians, and academics. There is simply nothing else out there like that in the poster tradition. 

CB: You’ve twice now called the Palestine poster a “unique genre.” On what grounds do you make this claim? 

DW: First of all, it’s the only political poster genre to make it from the street to the Internet. The other major poster genres of the mid-twentieth century— such as the posters of the Spanish Civil War, revolutionary Cuba, Nicaragua’s Sandinista movement, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the People’s Republic of China, Zionist colonialism—they’ve all faded away. Only the Palestine poster genre endured to the twenty-first century, seamlessly made the transition to the digital age, and continues to flourish. 

Another factor that makes the Palestine poster genre unique is the degree to which it has been suppressed, censored, banned, and forced underground. At the web site we have a whole special collection dedicated to this topic. 

But perhaps what is most unique about the Palestine poster genre is that it has survived virtually intact. After all, what is a poster but a piece of paper that’s plastered on a building, handed out at a concert, or taped to a dorm wall? It’s not meant to last; it’s ephemeral. But those 1,700 posters in the Liberation Graphics Collection were preserved because people kept them. People around the world participated in a spontaneous expression of salvage anthropology. They stored posters in their attic or in a roll under their bed or in the back of their artist’s studio. And eventually they contributed those posters to the Palestine Poster Project Archives. And they’re still doing that. Every month, it seems, somebody contacts me about some posters they picked up back when they were traveling or produced themselves a decade or four ago. And so since 2005, when we launched the web site, we’ve seen this narrative emerge. It’s like a documentary film in the making. Collectively, the people of Palestine and their friends are fleshing out an authentic history of contemporary Palestine. 

CB: Now I have to ask you to explain to Mondoweiss readers what you mean by “authentic history.” 

DW: The narrative presented by the Palestine posters is authentic in the sense that it is by, for and about Palestine and the Palestinians. No editors, no censors. Each poster reveals the attitudes, aspirations, and actions present at the moment of the poster’s creation. It’s unfiltered and it’s unrevised by later events. Collectively these posters carry incredibly useful primary data on Palestinian political, military, cultural, and social history.
I need to say here that, with some incredibly hardworking volunteers, we have been able to build a super-powerful Drupal site that is searchable six ways from Sunday. Academics enthuse over the capacity of the web site. I expect to see some impressive research coming out in the next few years based on this resource. 

CB: Talk to me more about the role of artists in forming the history of contemporary Palestine. 

DW: We’ve heard from the politicians, the journalists, and the diplomats and the academics—all the professionals in the so-called peace process industry. This genre elevates the voices of the artists. It allows us to hear people speaking directly to people. You look at these posters and you walk away with a completely different take on what Palestine is and what it means to be Palestinian, compared with what you get from talking heads through the news media. The great titles resonate: this quality is not something that can be fabricated, purchased, or faked. 

CB: Aesthetically, what excites you most about the posters in the nominated collection? 

To their credit, the early Palestinian political leadership never sought to centrally control either the internal or international production of posters. As a result, artists from around the world had the freedom to combine their own graphic styles and iconography with those of contemporary Palestine. The result is an astounding cross-fertilization. A good example is the 1979 poster, “Palestine: A Homeland Denied,” in which Thomas Kruze fuses the Danish woodcut style with the Palestinian iconography of white horse, dove, and embroidery. The posters also reveal how much the Palestinian cause has been taken to heart by political movements around the world. We see the joining of causes in, for example, Lazaro Abreu’s 1971 Cuban poster expressing solidarity with Syria, in which the flag of Palestine is included almost pro forma.  And we see solidarity reaching out in the other direction, in such posters as Solidarity With Students, People, and Youth of Vietnam.  

That’s a poster created by Hosni Radwan and published by the General Union of Palestinian Students. 

There’s one other thing I really love about these posters. It’s the remixing—the borrowing of iconography to make a new statement. Take for example the 1988 poster “From the Launching to the Uprising An Incredible Journey.” It was created by an unknown artist and published by an American artists’ collective called Roots. The poster features a photograph of a woman waving the Palestinian flag. That same year, artist Rene Castro re-mixed the image as a silkscreen for the poster, “In Celebration of the State of Palestine. ” 

CB: What’s the end goal with the UNESCO Memory of the World nomination? 

DW: As you well know, the Palestine Poster Project Archives is supported by nothing more than a collection of volunteers, both Palestinian and non-Palestinian. We’re doing the best we can with limited resources, but these posters need to be prepared for eventual acquisition by a Palestinian national institution capable of maintaining them in perpetuity. Ideally, this would be in Palestine itself. The Memory of the World nomination will hopefully help raise public consciousness and generate resources that will enable us to properly conserve these posters. 

But sharing these posters with the world has another benefit, because they create a rich and textured portrait of Palestine that’s very different from the caustic and superficial stereotypes with which Palestinians were burdened subsequent to the Nakba. In these works of art we see keys and kaffiyehs, oranges and olives, horses and doves, poetry and embroidery, all mobilized to tell a story. These and other symbols, icons, and traditions of Palestinian identity are celebrated, preserved, and legitimated in the posters. 

So the posters are a real teaching tool. Viewed collectively, they enable Palestinians to learn more about their own history and for non-Palestinians to undo the hasbara that has mis-educated them. It’s a source for national pride— the Palestinians’ gift to the world, really. In an article I wrote a few years ago, I called the Palestine poster genre the “visual equivalent of jazz.” 

CB: This is the first-ever nomination of a documentary heritage by the state of Palestine to UNESCO’s Memory of the World program. What other UNESCO programs recognize Palestinian art, culture and heritage? 

DW:  The poster nomination as a documentary heritage comes on the heels of two successful inscriptions of geographic sites by Palestine to UNESCO’s World Heritage List. The first was Church of the Nativity and the Pilgrimage Route in Bethlehem, inscribed in 2012; this was the first bid by Palestine after joining UNESCO. And in June of this year, the cultural landscape of southern Jerusalem, Battir, was also inscribed on the World Heritage List, after an emergency nomination that Palestine submitted in face of the threat posed by extension of the separation wall. All this UNESCO activity is raising the cultural prestige of Palestine, which is a welcome development.

More Info:

•  Palestine Poster Project Archives 
• UNESCO's Memory of the World program
• Wiki - Palestine Poster Project Archives
• Leah Caldwell  "The Palestine Poster Project: A Virtual Memory of Struggle and the Everyday". Al-Akhbar English 6 Dec 2011
• Philip Kennicott “Poster Art, Painted with a Palestinian Perspective,” The Washington Post 
• Maureen Clare Murphy - “Review: Poster Art of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” The Electronic Intifada Jan 2004
• Dan Walsh - thesis: "The Palestine Poster Project Archives: Origins, Evolution, and Potential". 

Yasmine Chemal's post on Lydie Bonfils

Portrait of Lydie Bonfilsprivate collection
documentation of Fouad Debbas, TFDC
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To celebrate International Women's Day the British Library's Endangered Archive's blog published a very interesting post by Yasmine Chemali, grant holder of EAP644, about Lydie Bonfils and early women photographers in the Middle East.

It begins:

"Photography arrived in the Middle East in 1839, the same year that Louis-Jacques- Mandé Daguerre produced his first daguerreotype in France[1]. Félix Bonfils, a French printer who migrated from France to Beirut along with his family in 1867, established one of the first professional photographic studios in the Middle East. Very little is known about women photographers in the region. Félix’s wife, Lydie Bonfils, can be considered the first professional woman photographer in the region. 

"This blog will focus on the Bonfils production and especially on the photographs that could be attributed to Lady Bonfils. The Fouad Debbas Collection, based in Beirut, Lebanon, is the most important private collection of photographs and archives of the 19th and of the first half of the 20th centuries currently conserved in the Middle East, with approximately 40 000 photographs of the region. EAP 644 is currently focusing on digitization and assessment of the Debbas Bonfils collection

"Much has been written so far about the Bonfils family and their photographic establishment in Lebanon. From the moment they moved from France (Gard) to Beirut, Lebanon, until the establishment was sold to Abraham Guiragossian in 1907, Félix (father), Lydie (mother) and Adrien (son) produced one of the largest bodies of photographic work in the Middle East...."

We have several Bonfil photographs in the Archive's collection, including the one below, which is also illustrated in the post.

Group of Bedouins from Jericho c.1876-85
albumin print, Maison Bonfils
TFDC_520_034_0644
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Establishing which member of the Bonfils family took them is tricky, and Yasmine Chemali explores this, noting:

"Traditionally, all photographs signed Bonfils were attributed to Félix, but it is now clear that both Lydie and Adrien contributed to the firm’s pictorial output. Specific authorship, however, is at best very speculative…"

Woman from Nablus c. 1876-85
albumin print
attributed to Lydie Bonfils (?)
TFDC_139_026_0619
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We have assumed - but without good research - that Félix’s wife, Lydie Bonfils, took some of these because of her gender.  It looks like we were on the right track as Yasmine Chemali also discusses this later in her post:

"Due to social conventions in the Middle East, it is presumed that Lydie made the photographs of female subject."

But Lydie's role it appears was much wider.  We encourage all Archive friends and Education officers to  read Yasmine Chemali's beautifully researched and very interesting post, which you'll find here :)

Young woman from Lebanon c. 1876-85
albumin print
attributed to Lydie Bonfils (?)
 TFDC_520_002_0257.
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