Practicing wujud: A Constellation of sumud in the Fragmented Palestinian Present

Abstract

The Zionist conception of history and its material project of expansion and land annexation produce a temporality of catastrophe (Nakba) that constantly reiterates violence, dispossession, and displacement in Palestinian lives and experiences. The linear temporality of the colonial process, including the neo-liberal framework of one of its crucial phases—the Oslo Accords (1993), has fragmented Palestinian existence throughout the past decades on multiple levels—economic, political, social, and geographic. Reflecting on Palestinian sumud as a constellation—within an epistemological and methodological relational perspective that aims to counter colonial linear epistemologies and temporalities, this article looks at how three significant Palestinian embodied, material and symbolic practices of wujud (presence) function within collective sumud. On the one hand, such experiences resist colonial annihilation by re-integrating the physical and cultural Palestinian presence in the face of catastrophe. On the other, they embody the diversity of Palestinian ontologies and the multi-vocality of Palestinian epistemologies. Practicing and asserting wujud and reclaiming relationships with the land are refractory Palestinian spaces, in the here and now of a fragmented present, to the Zionist colonial temporality, material and epistemic order. They enable the existence and resistance of the Palestinian people and alternative understandings and imaginations of time, meaning, and presence.

Keywords:

• Decolonization
• land
• Nakba
• Palestine
• sumud
• temporality
• wujud

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my interlocutors for sharing their experiences and thoughts. I relate to them in terms of collective thinking and co-building of knowledge, and they have had a very important role in the elaboration of my research and analysis. They are not brought here as case studies that need to prove my use of theory and concepts, but rather as people I have exchanged thoughts with and together dream of and practice liberation. I dedicate this work to my people, especially in the Gaza Strip, as I bear witness to their sumud and wujud in the face of colonial violence.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The ‘ontological turn’ in Anthropology has centred this connection by especially engaging with indigenous epistemologies that configure the relationship between humans, non-humans and the land in radically alternative ways. A relevant example, in this sense, is: Viveiros De Castro (2009). Palestine studies have been increasingly interacting with the ontological turn lately.

2 One of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s poems, published in 1971, carries, in fact, the title ‘Diary of a Palestinian Wound’.

3 De Martino deeply interacted and was inspired also by Antonio Gramsci’s thought and work, which he creatively integrated in his own eclectic approach.

4 Others I engaged with worked on material cultures (such as tatreez), food, or specific objects.