I learned much of value from the oral history projects, which proliferated from the 1990s as Palestinian activists and scholars interviewed elders before they died in an effort to record Palestinian life before the establishment of Israel in 1948. Since death had thinned the ranks of Palestinian women born in 1933 or earlier, Palestinian communities are dispersed throughout the world, and historic Palestine is difficult to navigate given its apartheid segmentations by Israel, I turned to analog and digital oral history ( al-tarikh al-shafawi) archives on the Web or held in Beirut, Ramallah, Birzeit, and Amman to deepen my understanding of Palestinian daily life during the British Mandate period. I ultimately conversed with dozens of informants in person, and hundreds more electronically, and conducted formal interviews in cities, towns, and refugee camps in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon with more than sixty people on matters of healthcare, reproduction, and birth control, including twenty-six Palestinian women born between 19 who met my marital and reproductive criteria. Palestinian historians I consulted similarly believed that existing government archives held in Israel and England provided limited information on Palestinian abortion practices given abortion’s stigmatization and illegality. A brainstorming meeting in Jerusalem with Anita Vitullo in July 2016 made clear to both of us that original interviews with elderly women would be necessary to address Palestinian abortion practices during the British colonial period given the non-archival nature of the subject and deliberate lack of record-keeping. I ultimately conducted substantial archival research, analyzing British vital records, Department of Health and Colonial Office reports, news stories from the Hebrew press, thousands of pages of correspondence in Palestine Department of Health files, and Palestinian oral history interviews conducted by activists and researchers since the 1990s. I imagined a primarily document-based research project on reproductive death during the British colonial period in Palestine (1917–1948).
This required pursuing the “non-eventful quality” ( Reference StolerStoler 2009, 107) of archival and other coeval sources and creating new ones, and using transnational feminist reading practices to analyze different kinds of texts. I sought to avoid such cataclysmic historical points to tell a story about life and death, and about missing bodies and experiences, that exceeds authorized frames of collective pain and heroism. The events of 1948 came to be understood as “the foundational station in an unfolding and continuing saga of dispossession, negations, and erasure” ( Reference Jayyusi, Sa`di and Abu-LughodJayyusi 2007, 109–110). For Palestinian generations living under multiple jurisdictions, 1948 is “not a moment but a process that continues” ( Reference DoumaniDoumani 2009, 4–5). The 1948 establishment of Israel as a settler-colonial state was radical in its psychic and material impact on Palestinians, most of whom were dispossessed and expelled more than 150,000 were internally displaced within the borders of the new state ( Reference DoumaniDoumani 2009, 4 Reference MasalhaMasalha 2008, 127–129). Following Ghani’s approach to reconstructing the Afghan film archive, in 2016 I entered research on reproduction and quotidian death in Palestine “slantwise,” “as if approaching a horse with an uncertain temper” ( Reference Ghani and DowneyGhani 2015, 43, 45).
It makes the case that racism was central to the colonial and settler-colonial order and to the distribution of health, life, and death in British Palestine. Buried in the Red Dirt shows, to use Ghani’s words, how “past and future inhabit the present” in the paradoxical peripheralization and hyperbolization of Palestinian sexual and reproductive life. Rather than being linear, she argues, time “bends around the tale or the story’s will” ( Reference GhaniGhani 2012).
Miriam Ghani makes this point in an interview about her filmic installation “A Brief History of Collapses,” a two-screened, floor-to-ceiling visual memoir produced from the perspectives of two iconic buildings, one in Kassel, Germany, and the second in Kabul, Afghanistan, for Documenta 13.
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