Magazine

Fadwa Tuqan

2 years ago

فدوى طوقان
  •  Birth1917, NABLUS, PALESTINE 
  • Death12 DECEMBER 2003, NABLUS, WEST BANK

Fadwa Tuqan was born in Nablus. Her father was Abd al-Fattah Tuqan and her mother was Fawziyya Amin Asqalan. She had five brothers—Yusuf, Ibrahim, Ahmad, Rahmi, and Nimr—and two sisters, Fataya and Adiba.

She attended elementary school in Nablus at the Fatimiyya school and later at the Aishiyya. She had barely completed five years of study when she was removed from school under pressure from her brother Yusuf for “social reasons” and forced to stay at home.

She was greatly influenced by her brother Ibrahim.  After he graduated from the American University of Beirut and returned to Palestine, he was determined to help her continue her education and to act as her guardian. She was able to escape to some extent from the harsh conditions of her home life when she decided to move to Jerusalem to live with him. She had contemplated suicide more than once, and the move to Jerusalem might have removed that thought from her mind for good.

Thanks to Ibrahim, who taught her to write poetry, a new phase of her life began. She started to become aware of her individuality, humanity, and right to education, and she took private lessons in English. She sent her poems to literary magazines in Cairo and Beirut, using pseudonyms. When they were published, her confidence in herself and her literary abilities increased.

After the deaths of her brother Ibrahim (in 1941) and her father, and then the Nakba of 1948, she began to take part, though from the sidelines, in the political life of the fifties. In 1956, she travelled to Stockholm as part of a Jordanian delegation to a peace conference, a trip that also took her to Holland, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China.

In 1956, she joined the Cultural Club established in Nablus by Walid Qamhawi and was an active member of it. This marked the beginning of her career as a poet. Through the club she met Kamal Nasir, a poet and member of the Jordanian parliament, as well as the poet Abd al-Karim al-Karmi (Abu Salma). She also met some leaders of the nationalist movement in Jordan such as Abd al-Rahman Shuqair, whom she hid in her house when he was pursued by the Jordanian authorities and helped escape to Syria in 1957.

In the early sixties, Fadwa left for England and lived for two years in Oxford, where she studied English language and literature. That trip left a deep impact on the development of her poetry and her personality.

When she returned to Nablus, she decided to remove herself from family and people and so built a house of her own to the west of the city. However, the disaster of 1967 drove her to once again take part in the public life of Nablus, now under occupation, and to commence a series of poetic and journalistic disputes with the Zionist occupier and his culture. That disaster transformed her poetry, moving it from personal and social subjects to poetry of resistance.  Eventually her poetry became more comprehensive and human in theme, treating subjects like life and death, love, nature, family, and societal repression.

Tuqan was uniquely open and bold in her confessions as shown in her two-volume autobiography, which dealt with her private life and the social and political life of Nablus and the customs of its residents. She voiced her rejection of many of these customs, which in her view stifled the pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment so important to her. In that same work she dealt with her political and cultural activity, her resistance to occupation, and her contacts with Palestinian poets living in areas occupied in 1948.

Tuqan was elected to the Board of Trustees of al-Najah University when it was founded in Nablus in 1977. She wrote the university anthem and was granted an honorary doctorate by the university.

Tuqan, known as the “Poetess of Palestine,” is considered one of the most prominent cultural figures of Palestine. Between 1952 and 2000, she published eight collections of poetry. Selections of her poetry have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Persian, and Hebrew. She was awarded a number of prizes and medals, including the annual Sulayman Arar poetry prize; the prize of the Union of Jordanian Writers in 1983; the Sultan Uways prize of the United Arab Emirates in 1989; the Jerusalem medal of the PLO in 1990; the prize of the World Festival of Contemporary Writing, Salerno, Italy, in 1992; the Tunisian cultural medal of 1996; and the PLO prize for literature in 1997. Several books and university theses have appeared about her and her work in a number of Arab and foreign universities, in addition to many articles and studies in Arab and foreign journals. The Palestinian novelist Liana Badr produced a documentary film about her life and poetry entitled “Fadwa: A Poetess from Palestine.”

Fadwa Tuqan died on 12 December 2003. She was almost 85 years old. Four years before her death she had suffered from a brain clot, which severely impaired her vision and her reading and writing. She was buried in Nablus.

Her death was announced by the Palestinian Authority to the world and to all who are concerned with culture, literature, and thought. The announcement ran as follows: “We announce the death of the great poetess of Palestine, an innovative and original talent, a daughter of Nablus, the mountain of fire; daughter of Palestine, educator, fighter for justice, cultural icon, exceptional literary figure, winner of the Palestine medal: the poetess Fadwa Tuqan.”

Selected Works

صدر لها، ما بين سنتي 1952 و 2000، ثمانية دواوين شعرية. وجمعت أعمالها في: “الأعمال الشعرية الكاملة”. بيروت: دار العودة، 2004.

[The Collected Poetical Works]

Some of her poetry were translated into English, German, French, Italian, Persian and Hebrew.

Prose

“أخي ابراهيم”. يافا: المكتبة العصرية، 1946.

[My Brother Ibrahim]

“رحلة جبلية، رحلة صعبة: سيرة ذاتية”. عكا: دار الأسوار، 198.

[A Mountainous Journey, a Difficult Journey: An Autobiography]

“الرحلة الأصعب: سيرة ذاتية”. عمان: دار الشروق، 1993.

[The Most Difficult Journey: An Autobiography]

Translated Works

A Mountain’s Journey: An Autobiography, Translated by Olive Kenny and edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi (London: Women’s Press, 1990).

Le Rocher et la peine: Mémoires 1, Traduit de l’arabe par Joséphine Lama et Benoît Tadié (Paris: l’Asiathèque Langues du monde, 1997).

Le Cri de la pierre: Mémoires 2, Traduit de l’arabe par Joséphine Lama et Benoît Tadié (Paris: l’Asiathèque Langues du monde, 1998).

Sources

بدر، ليانة. “ظلال الكلمات المحكية: حوار مع فدوى”. القاهرة: دار الفتى العربي، 1996.

ديكان- واصف، سارة. “معجم الكتّاب الفلسطينيين”. باريس: معهد العالم العربي، 1999.

شاهين، أحمد عمر. “موسوعة كتّاب فلسطين في القرن العشرين”. الجزء الأول. دمشق: المركز القومي للدراسات والتوثيق، 1992.

كامبل، روبرت. “أعلام الأدب العربي المعاصر: سير وسير ذاتية.” بيروت: المعهد الألماني للأبحاث الشرقية، 1996.

لوباني، حسين علي. “معجم أعلام فلسطين في العلوم والفنون والآداب”. بيروت: مكتبة لبنان ناشرون، 2012.

Abdul Hadi, Mahdi, ed. Palestinian Personalities: A Biographic Dictionary. 2nd ed., revised and updated. Jerusalem: Passia Publication, 2006.

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Zulaykha al-Shihabi

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FEMINIST FIGURES

زليخة الشهابي

 Birth1903, JERUSALEM, PALESTINE

 Death13 MAY 1992, JERUSALEM

Zulaykha al-Shihabi was born in Jerusalem. Her father was Ishaq Abd al-Qadir al-Shihabi, and her mother was Zainab al-Muhtadi. She had two brothers, Subhi and Jamil, and two sisters, Rasmiyya and Rifqa.

She was educated at the Notre Dame de Sion school. Her father (unlike most fathers at the turn of the century) insisted on sending his daughters to school to learn the sciences and languages, and Zulaykha was among the top students in her class.

From an early age she became conscious of the dangers of Zionism. She had been raised in a family with deep roots in Jerusalem, and she learned the history of her city since its earliest Arab Islamic days. She in turn conveyed to her classmates what she had heard from her parents.

She joined the nationalist struggle during the turmoil that followed the al-Buraq rebellion. She was present at the Palestine Arab Women Congress, which was held in Jerusalem in October 1929, was the first women’s political meeting at the national level, and was attended by some three hundred women, to discuss the political situation. The meeting then issued a memorandum setting out the reasons behind the rebellion and the demands of the people. She was elected as a member of the delegation that presented the memorandum to the High Commissioner. Matiel Mughannam gave a short speech in English; Tarab Abd al-Hadi gave a speech in Arabic. When the delegation returned to the meeting, a massive demonstration by women broke out, with some one hundred cars driving through the streets of Jerusalem and shouting thunderous slogans, amidst enormous popular enthusiasm.

She cofounded the Arab Women Society in Jerusalem as a follow-up to the resolutions of the 1929 meeting. Similar women societies were founded in most cities; some went by the name Arab Women’s Committees.

She worked with Milia al-Sakakini in a voluntary and free campaign to teach young girls basic reading and writing skills, and she founded al-Dawha School, which became well known for the education and health care it provided young girls.

Through the Arab Women’s Committees she played a prominent role during the General Strike and the Great Arab Revolt (1936–39). It was her idea to organize a large audience to attend the trials of rebels to raise their morale and to show the authorities that the people were behind their heroes.

She was a prominent member of the twenty-seven member delegation of Palestinian women that took part in the Eastern Women Congress in Cairo at the invitation of Huda Sha‘rawi, the Egyptian feminist leader, for the purpose of supporting the cause of Palestine. The conference convened in Cairo in October 1938 and included a very large number of Arab women who were pioneers in the social and national fields. Palestine was the focal point of that First inter-Arab women congress. Shihabi delivered her speech in the name of the Women Society of Jerusalem and spoke of the history of the problem and of British policy. When the congress came to elect deputies from each delegation, Shihabi and Wahida al-Khalidi were elected from the Palestinian delegation. At the end of the congress, she was invited to deliver a speech in the name of Palestine; she thanked everyone and ended with these words: “We return convinced that the people of Palestine are not alone as they wage their sacred struggle to save their homeland.”

Returning to Jerusalem she proceeded to implement Huda Sha‘rawi’s recommendation to unify Arab women’s activities under a single name, the Arab Women’s Union. So she announced the dissolution of the Arab Women’s Society in Jerusalem and the creation of the Palestinian Arab Women’s Union.

In heath and social welfare matters, her most notable achievement was to create, through the Women’s Union, a first-aid field committee charged with treating the wounded. She also created a clinic to treat the destitute, provide free inoculation against infectious diseases, and care for pregnant women and childcare; she also took part in securing shelters for orphans. The union defrayed the cost of educating tens of orphans in Dar al-aytam al-Islamiyya. In Jericho, she founded a winter resort for convalescence and a home for destitute women. People remember her as a woman who used to visit prisons and detention camps to encourage rather than console prisoners, carrying with her symbolic presents for political detainees to let them know that the people supported them.

She showed a special interest in sports. Under her supervision the union established a sports club with its own executive committee, its own sports program, and a large playing field. When the union held its conference on 16 July 1946, attended by a large number of Arab women from various Arab capitals, the flags of their countries were displayed on the sidelines of the playing field.

In the 1940s, she intensified the union’s activities in the cultural domain and sent out invitations to writers and artists to give lectures on scientific and national themes and to discuss cultural issues.

The secret of her success was that she did not rely solely on voluntary contributions but on productive work as well. Thus, the union from the very beginning bought several plots of land planted with vines or fruit trees and presented these plots to families of martyrs who would then care for the land and live off its produce. So too with women. The union taught them needlework and weaving in order to provide them with an income. The most notable decision was to teach young girls the art of flower making; they began to create artificial flowers. Shihabi herself would happily join them in their work and would join them also as they manufactured beauty creams. The union frequently organized charitable markets to sell its diverse products and spend the proceeds on charitable projects.

After the Nakba she redoubled her activities. Jerusalem remained her primary residence, but she frequently traveled to Amman. In 1959 she added to her other responsibilities the presidency of the Union of Charitable Societies in the Jerusalem District.

She travelled extensively, attending Arab and international women’s conferences, and visited both Britain and Russia in addition to many Arab capitals. She was an ideal representative of the Palestinian woman and the most eloquent in explaining the Palestine cause in public forums.

As an elected member of the executive of the General Union of Arab Women, she attended the meetings of the union as well as conferences devoted to women’s issues in Beirut, Cairo, and Jerusalem. She was a prominent female member of the First Palestine National Congress, from which emerged the PLO on 28 May 1964. As president of the Jerusalem women’s union she sought to popularize the idea of creating a general union of Palestinian women.

On 20 February 1965, she organized a general meeting in Jerusalem of representatives of women’s unions in Palestinian cities to prepare for a general conference to include Palestinian women both in Palestine and the diaspora and with the object of creating a broad framework to be called the General Union of Palestinian Women. As chairwoman of the preparatory committee, she oversaw the convening of the Palestinian Women’s Congress in July 1965 in Jerusalem. This was attended by 174 members, and the PLO Department of Popular Organizations contributed to the creation of the Union on the constitutional, organizational, and administrative levels. The union then came into existence.

After Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967, Shihabi was one of the first figures it deported to Jordan. However, the intervention of several states and the United Nations forced Israel to allow her to return and resume her work as president of the union. She continued to work tirelessly until her death at age 89.

She died on 13 May 1992.  Her funeral prayer was held at al-Aqsa Mosque and was attended by many prominent national figures.

Sources

“الحركة الوطنية الفلسطينية: 1935- 1939. يوميات أكرم زعيتر”. بيروت: مؤسسة الدراسات الفلسطينية، 1980.

خرطبيل، وديعة قدورة. “بحثاً عن الأمل والوطن: ستون عاماً من كفاح امرأة في سبيل قضية فلسطين”.  بيروت: بيسان للنشر والتوزيع، 1995.

طوبي، أسمى. “عبير ومجد”. بيروت: مطبعة قلفاط، 1966.

Khalidi, Anbara Salam. Early Arab Feminism; The Life and Activism of Anbara Salam Khalidi. London: Pluto Press, 2013.

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Caricaturing colonialism in British Mandate Palestine

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In 1930s Jerusalem, a young boy walks to school through the narrow, stone paved streets of the Old City. Every morning, as he reaches Damascus Gate, he passes a group of men gathered at a local coffee shop to listen to the latest news.

His name is Hazem Nusseibeh, and over eighty years later, he describes the scene to us from his home in Amman. “Big groups would come in from the villages near Jerusalem,” he says. “Their faces would be pink from all the walking and they would be carrying baskets of grapes and figs.”

He describes how men from the villages would bring their harvest into the Old City to sell it at market, then go to a coffee shop where a man would read the newspaper to them. During the 1930s, only around one in five Palestinian-Arabs could read and write, so it was common to read newspapers aloud and show the pictures and cartoons to those who were illiterate. Through these gatherings, illustrated newspapers spread their message to a wide audience, shaping the political awareness of both literate and illiterate Palestinian Arabs.

 

Drawing the Headlines

Gatherings like these were so widespread that after the 1929 Buraq Uprising, the British officials who had been sent to investigate the conflict reported back to His Majesty’s Government that “In almost every village there is someone who reads from the papers to the gatherings of those villagers who are illiterate. The Arab fallahin [smallholding farmers] and villagers are therefore probably more politically-minded than many of the people in Europe.”

Political cartoons always appeared on the front page of these newspapers, providing sharp critiques of political negotiations, tactics and economic developments.Yet the woman who drew the most widely read cartoons in 1930s Palestine remains shrouded in mystery. All we know is that she was a Christian from Eastern Europe, and that the owner of the newspaper Falastin, ‘Isa Daud al-‘Isa, would think up the ideas for the cartoons and ask her to draw them. Her story was told over sixty years later, in an email from ‘Isa’s son to the American academic, Sandy Sufian, just a few years before the son passed away. Had it not been for this email, this mysterious woman would have disappeared from history entirely.

 

Sneaking Past The Censors

At first glance, there is also something mysterious about the cartoons themselves: the way they suddenly became popular, then just as suddenly faded back into obscurity. Before and after the 1936 Great Arab Revolt, political cartoons rarely appeared in Palestinian newspapers and as the conflict intensified, they became more frequent.

It is no coincidence that as tensions in Palestine rose, British censorship of newspapers increased. Journalists were jailed, the publication of certain types of information was banned and daily newspapers were closed down for publishing “dangerous” articles. More than once, the British suspended all four Arabic dailies at the same time for what they considered to be provocative articles. During the early phase of the revolt, Arabic newspapers were suspended thirty-four times, while the Jewish press was suspended thirteen.

In this repressive atmosphere, political cartoons were useful because subversive messages could be shifted from the text to the image, where they were more likely to pass censorship regulations.

Though they may seem simple and direct, some of these cartoons contained multiple layers of symbolism. 

 

 

The June 1936 Falastin cartoon titled The Zionist Crocodile to Palestine Arabs tells a multifaceted story about the colonization of Palestine.

 

The bug-eyed crocodile salivates as he prepares to devour Arab fallahin and their citrus groves, his tail emerging from the sea like a ship’s ramp. He embodies two key strategies of early Zionism: gaping jaws representing the colonization of indigenous land through Zionist land acquisition, and scaly tail alluding to the arrival of tens of thousands of European settler colonists to Palestine by ship.

 
 
In the drawing, a tall British policeman in white uniform smokes a pipe. His face resembles a bulldog, in allusion to John Bull, a fictional character often used to symbolize Great Britain in cartoons at the time. The scholar Sandy Sufian remarks that “The officer is smiling, but this is not an innocent smile; it is more the sneer of a sly, criminal man. He is wearing heavy, cleated boots that match the black scales and claws of the Zionist crocodile, indicating congruence between the Zionists and the British.”
 

In the 1930s, the displacement of fallahin through Zionist land purchases was a pressing economic issue. Fallahin debt and default on credit reached critical levels, made worse by the fact that British had started to tax many previously untaxed pieces of agricultural land. The fallahin resisted by joining trade unions and political organizations, and engaging in civil protest and cultivation disputes directed at the British, Zionists and the Palestinian upper class.

 

Worth A Thousand Words

At a library in Beirut, a middle-aged man puts on a set of rubber gloves, takes a small reel out of the archive and attaches it to the microfilm reader. The reader is a clunky grey machine that looks something like a PC from the 1980s. The Beirut-based library of the Institute of Palestinian Studies is one of the few places where these caricatures have been preserved, but sadly much else from this period has been lost forever.

Caught up in the fervor of revolt and faced with harsh British repression, it seems Palestinian revolutionaries and their supporters had little time to document their stories and preserve their history. Much of what had existed was lost a decade later in the Nakba, as Palestinians fled their homes in the face of danger from Zionist militias. In these rare drawings, we see some of the few remaining images that tell the story of an anti-colonial consciousness awakening in British Mandate Palestine.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

  • Nusseibeh, Hazem. Interview by Thoraya El Rayyes & Ibrahim Tarawneh, Amman (2015), sound recording.
  • Ibid.
  • Khalidi, Rashid. The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Beacon Press, 2007.
  • Shaw, Sir Walter Sidney. Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August, 1929: Evidence Heard During the 1st [-47th] Sittings, HM Stationery Office, 1930.
  • Sufian, Sandy. “Anatomy of the 1936–39 Revolt: Images of the Body in Political Cartoons of Mandatory Palestine”, Journal of Palestine Studies 37, No.2 (2008).
  • Shaw. Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances.
  • Sufian, Sandy. “Anatomy of the 1936–39 Revolt: Images of the Body in Political Cartoons of Mandatory Palestine”, Journal of Palestine Studies 37, No.2 (2008), p. 25.
  • Ibid.
  • Ibid, p. 27.
  • Ibid.
  • Ibid, p. 30.
  • Ibid.
  • Tamari, Salim, and Issam Nassar. The Storyteller of Jerusalem: the Life and Times Wasif Jawhariyyeh, 1904-1948, Olive Branch Press: 2013.
  • Sufian. “Anatomy of the 1936–39 Revolt,” p. 30.
  • Azoulay, Ariella. “Photographic Conditions: Looting, Archives, and the Figure of the” Infiltrator”, Jerusalem Quarterly, No. 61 (2015): 6
 

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Nablus Soap Production

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The production of soap is a very old tradition in the Middle East: it is based primarily on the production of olive oil. At first a domestic production, the soap industry developed in urban centers: the most famous are Aleppo in Syria, Tripoli in Lebanon, and Nablus in Palestine. Throughout the Ottoman period, big families of the urban bourgeoisie acquired the main soap factories located in the city center of Nablus. In the nineteenth century, the soap industry became the dominant economic sector of the city: owning a soap factory became a symbol of wealth, prestige, and urban belonging.

Process of Making Soap

The few Nablus soap factories that have remained operational follow more or less the same manufacturing process (except for some minor changes) that was developed two centuries ago. It is a five-step process—cooking, laying, cutting, drying, and packaging—supported by four different teams of workers.

At the ground floor of the soap factory, olive oil (the main ingredient) mixed with caustic soda and water is placed in a large bowl (halla) and “cooked” for three days. (In the first half of the twentieth century, caustic soda, imported from Alexandria and Europe, replaced the qeli, a plant turned into ashes.) Under the tank, a boiler helps the process of saponification. Once the mixture is ready, the head of the team tastes the soap or crumbles it on his hand to check its texture. Then porters carry the mixture in buckets and pour it on a designated section of the first floor (mafrash), where it dries for a day before being shaped into small cubes, stamped with the brand of the soap factory, and cut by a team of three to four trained workers. A day later, the same workers pile the pieces of soap into pyramids (tananir). The soap then dries for two to three months. Another team packages the soap, wrapping it in a paper with the brand of the soap factory. These workers pack an average of 500 to 1,000 bars of soap per hour.

In the heyday of soap production in Nablus, factories were registered companies with brand names and a printed logo on the soap wrapping paper. These brands were often symbols or names of animals; examples include muftahein (the two keys), al-jamal (the camel), al-na‘ama (the ostrich), al-najma (the star), al-baqara (the cow), al-badr (the full moon), and al-assad (the lion). Slogans were added on the packaging such as al-sabun al-Nabulsi al-mumtaz (Nablus soap extra) or al-ma‘ruf (the well-known).

Decline of Soap Production in Nablus before 1948

By 1930, Nablus soap production had experienced its first important setback. Several reasons are usually given for this decline. Egypt and Syria, which were major markets for Nablus soap (especially Egypt), imposed taxes on imported soap. Nablus soap was competing with soap production in Egypt. The label “Nabulsi” attached to the soap was not protected, and as a result, counterfeiting took place. This, coupled with the rise in the price of pure olive oil after the Great Depression of 1929, contributed to raise the price of Nablus soap, making it difficult for Nablus producers to compete with other imported soaps. In addition, Jewish mechanized industry, which also succeeded to obtain customs benefits from the British Mandate, provided local competition.

This first soap crisis reveals the effects, though indirect, of Jewish immigration in the region of Nablus, hitherto relatively protected from the consequences of the Zionist colonization. In general, the absence of a sovereign state capable of controlling borders and taxes meant that Nablus soap was unprotected, while at the same time the British Mandate granted customs benefits to the Zionists traders, and Egypt and Syria were able to impose barriers to protect their local production.

After 1948, the market of historic Palestine closed; so too did the Egyptian market. The East Bank of the Jordan River (Jordan) became the main market for Nablus soap. Soap producers were gradually forced to import olive oil from Syria and Lebanon, and secondarily from Spain and Italy.

Transformation and Final Decline of the Soap Industry

In the 1950s Hamdi Kan‘an, brother-in-law of the soap producer and trader Ahmad Shaka‘a, introduced in Nablus what was called “green soap,” a soap made from jift (solid remains of first press olives, mainly kernels) oil: it was a lower quality soap used to wash the floor and do the laundry. This was a small revolution. Indeed, the exploitation of this new, much cheaper type of oil allowed less wealthy families to rent soap factories and mass-produce household soap. During the 1970s, production of this “second class” soap (which quickly took the generic name of “Kan‘an”), developed rapidly. But it also helped some soap factory workers to become small manufacturers; they rented soap factories in the old city and started to produce soap. At this time, some soap factories tried to mechanize and “develop” the Nablus soap in its form, packaging, and ingredients. Another change (a consequence of the Israeli occupation of 1967) is that all kinds of oils started to be used.

Despite the attempts by some in the soap industry to transform production and adapt to the changing circumstances, the soap industry experienced a steady regression during the second half of the twentieth century, and the first intifada marked the final decline. Small factories producing green soap were already being marginalized by the introduction of detergents and washing machines and cheaper foreign products (like Lux and Palmolive). They could not compete, nor could they afford the new taxes imposed on the soap: their lack of capital prevented them from maintaining their production. Moreover, since the first intifada, soap production became harder to maintain, because the old city was the target of Israeli attacks, and many soap factories thus closed in the 1990s.

In summary, cheaper foreign products as well as the introduction of new consumption patterns brought about the decline of the soap industry in Nablus. Of the more than thirty soap factories in the old city of Nablus, several were damaged by the Israeli invasion of 2002 and two of them completely destroyed; most of the rest have been abandoned or put to other uses. For example, the Arafat soap factory is being developed into a cultural center for children; some producers are using perfumes and mechanization to produce new soaps to keep the tradition of soap making in Nablus alive. Since 2007 only two soap factories have remained functional in Nablus, and they belong to the Tuqan and Shaka‘a families, who keep them as a heritage. These factories export the vast majority of their production to Jordan, taking advantage of long-standing relationships with the distributors on the East Bank of the river and the importance of the Palestinian population in Jordan. From there, a small part of the production is sent to Kuwait and the Gulf.

Selected Bibliography

Bahjat, Mohammad, and Rafiq Tammimi. Wilayat Bayrut: al-qism al-janubi [The Province of Beirut: Its Southern Part]. Beirut: al-Iqbal Press, 1916.

Bontemps, Véronique. “Soap-Factories in Nablus. Palestinian Heritage (Turâth) at the Local Level.” Journal of Balkan and Near-Eastern Studies 14, no.2 (2012): 279–295.

Bontemps, Véronique. Ville et patrimoine en Palestine. Une ethnographie des savonneries de Naplouse. Paris: Karthala/IISMM, 2012.

Doumani, Beshara. Rediscovering Palestine, Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus (1700–1900). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995.

Graham-Brown, Sarah. “The Political Economy of the Jabal Nablus, 1920–1948.” In R. Owen, ed., Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982.

Jaussen, Antonin.  Naplouse et son district. Paris: Geuthner, 1927.

Sharif, Husam. Sina‘at al-sabun al-Nabulsi [The Nabulsi Soap Industry]. Nablus: Palestinian Authority: Municipality of Nablus, 1999.

Taher, Ali Nusuh. Shajarat al-zaytun. Tarikhuha, zira’atuha, amraduha, sina‘atuha [The Olive Tree: Its History, Culture, Diseases and Production]. Jaffa, 1947.

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Death of the storyteller, birth of the theater

2 years ago

1900 to 1948

In one scene, children gather around a travelling storyteller and his Box of Wonders. In another, a hakawati tells a story about the mythic Arab hero, Abu Zayd al-Hilali, who almost killed his estranged father. In a third scene, the mischievous shadow puppet Karagoz fails miserably at the latest in his long line of get-rich-quick schemes.

Karagoz in the village square

They say that drama was born in the village square. And in the towns of villages of Palestine, scenes like these were a common part of daily life for hundreds of years. In coffeehouses and at religious festivals, hakawati storytellers dramatically recited folkloric tales and the adventures of mythic heroes. The crafty, vulgar fool Karagoz was especially popular among the people of Jerusalem, young and old. 

He was rude, rough-spoken and knew well that he was a fool– his jokes were not only directed at others but also at his own stupidity.

In the words of the Arabic literature professor, Mas’ud Hamdan, Karagoz was “a fool with a high degree of self-consciousness.” On stage, Karagoz’s constant companion is an arrogant, cold-hearted puppet named ‘Aiwaz who is always trying to “refine” Karagoz, a thankless task at which he is doomed to fail. During the fast of Ramadan, shadow puppet shows were traditionally presented twice a night, and local puppeteers competed with visiting performers from other Arab cities.

But at the beginning of the twentieth century, as theater performances in the Western style began to develop and cinema began to spread, scenes like these became less and less common. “The theater silenced the storyteller” says Serene Huleileh, a Palestinian cultural activist who works to revive the art of the hakawati.

Hamlet in Gaza

In 1911, Hamlet stepped onto the stage for his first ever performance in Gaza. At the time, many of the plays that were performed were translated works originally written in English or French and most theater in Palestine was non-professional and amateur. Influenced by the Arab cultural revival (al-Nahda) of the time, and especially the Egyptian cultural scene, an interest in Western style theatre began to emerge. In Jerusalem and Haifa, young poets, writers and dramatists were invited to read their works in literary salons.

 

Images from the Palestine Broadcasting Service

 

Images from the Palestine Broadcasting Service

And when Palestine’s first radio station began broadcasting in 1936, the director of the station’s Arabic programs, the famed poet Ibrahim Touqan, encouraged playwrights and actors to perform their work on air. The first play to be broadcast on the Palestinian Broadcasting Station was an interpretation of the story of Samson and Delilah written by the Jerusalemite playwright Nasri al-Jawzi.

The first actresses

Long before the rise of the theater, the women of Palestine were experienced storytellers who recited tales to each other and to children, but only in the private spaces of their homes. But as theater performances became more popular, a number of pioneering women started to perform in public as theater actresses.

Because actresses were few and far between, female characters in translated plays were often converted to male characters or else they were portrayed by men dressed and made-up as women. According to the playwright Nasri al-Jawzi, the biggest obstacle faced by theater troupes at the time was “finding an educated, well-mannered girl who would agree – whose family would accept that she – get on stage and act out the romantic roles required by the theater.” Things became easier in the mid-1930s, after the Palestinian Broadcasting Station was established, because women actresses did not have to appear before a live audience and could use stage names instead of their real names.

One of the earliest actresses was an unnamed Argentinian woman of Arab descent who spoke Arabic with a heavy foreign accent. Al-Jawzi also tells the story of an actress who took on a role of the romantic heroine in a play during the early 1930s. During rehearsals, whenever the male lead would approach her to declare his love, she would tell him not to come any closer and warn him that there would not be any kissing. On the evening of the performance – in a theater packed with people – when her love interest walked towards her on stage, she unexpectedly yelled “Don’t come closer, there won’t be any kissing!” And from the dark rows of the audience, a man yelled out “It’ll be left until later!” since the male lead was – in fact – her real life fiancée.

Does it matter where you tell a story? If you perform it on the radio, or recite it in the street on a warm Ramadan night? The demise of popular storytelling culture and development of formalized theater in Palestine is often presented as progress, a development from naïve folk art to sophisticated high art. This is a view taken by many, from Israeli academics who study Palestinian theater such as Reuven Snir to Palestinian dramatists such as Nasri al-Jawzi.“It shows us another level of freedom and creativity. The storyteller doesn’t have to have a stage, or knowledge of Western art, or even props. Sometimes he only has his presence.”

But not everyone agrees. Samar Dudin is a theater director who sees the old forms of storytelling as much more than a mere performance of folktales. “This type of storytelling is based on improvisation” she says, adding that “It shows us another level of freedom and creativity. The storyteller doesn’t have to have a stage, or knowledge of Western art, or even props. Sometimes he only has his presence.” To her what was special about the hakawati was his freedom, the lack of restrictions on how he tells his story. Because of this, she sees these storytellers as existing outside the confines of society’s moral values and of political power structures.

“It shows us another level of freedom and creativity. The storyteller doesn’t have to have a stage, or knowledge of Western art, or even props. Sometimes he only has his presence.”

In the words of the cultural activist Serene Huleileh, “There is something democratic about storytelling. The hakawati is free. He can go anywhere and speak to whomever.” She adds, “Anyone can tell stories. You don’t need a degree, or approval from the censor to tell your story.” Huleileh points out that in the storytelling tradition the audience plays an important role when they interact with the hakawati, unlike in traditional Western theater where the audience is passive. It is only in more contemporary, experimental forms of Western theater that audience involvement and improvisation have emerged as important.

“They say theater is the father of the arts” Serene Huleileh tells us, “but storytelling is the mother of the theater.”

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

    • Snir, Reuven. “Palestinian theatre: Historical development and contemporary distinctive identity.” Contemporary Theatre Review 3, no. 2, 1995, pp. 29-73.

    • Hamdan, Mas’ud. Poetics, Politics and Protest in Arab Theatre: The Bitter Cup and the Holy Rain. Sussex, Sussex Academic Press, 2006.

    • Snir, “Palestinian theatre,” pp. 29-73.

    • Hamdan. Poetics, Politics and Protest in Arab Theatre.

    • Ibid,p.

    • Snir, “Palestinian theatre.”

    • Hamdan. Poetics, Politics and Protest in Arab Theatre.

    • Samar Dudin and Serene Huleileh. Interview by Thoraya El Rayyes, Amman (2015), sound recording.

    • Al-Jawzi, Nasri. Tarikh al-Masrah al-Filastini, 1918-1948 [The history of Palestinian theatre, 1918-1948 ]. Cyprus, Sharq Press: 1990..

    • Snir, “Palestinian theatre.”

    • Samar Dudin and Serene Huleileh. Interview by Thoraya El Rayyes, Amman (2015), sound recording.

    • Ibid.

    • Snir, “Palestinian theatre.”

  • Al-Jawzi. The history of Palestinian theatre.

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