Meadows of scarlet anemone, wild mustard and daisies – these are not images the world's media allows us to easily associate with "Palestine". But these, and fields of wheat and water springs splashing with laughing children are what Adam Rouhana chooses to put before us. Before Freedom, which publishes on October 21st, is a collection of 78 photographs, an offered alternative to the thousands of images of suffering, displacement, and death that have attached themselves to Palestine in our consciousness over the decades and that have gained such speed, such volume, and currency over the last three years.
The Second Intifada was just gathering pace when I went to Palestine for the first time. I had been brought up on the Palestinian Cause; images of Palestine were part of my visual constitution, posters of freedom fighters hung on my bedroom wall. I knew what I would see if ever I went there. But that first morning in Jerusalem I stepped out of my hotel and the familiar buzz and bustle of an Arab city took me by surprise. Groups of schoolchildren walked by, their uniforms pressed, their bags strapped to their backs, the girls’ hair tied with bright ribbons. Men pulled open the shutters of their shops, arranged their merchandise, called out greetings. Then, at the spectacular city walls at Bab el-Amoud, I saw what I had been expecting to see: Israeli police patrolling among the people. My breath caught, but no one else so much as glanced at them.
I went through that first week, and through every visit that followed, and again through Adam Rouhana’s photographs, admiring how fully the Palestinians – under the conditions of a military occupation – occupy every atom of their own lives. We see them here: boys parkouring against the backdrop of the giant separation wall in Qalandiya. Laborers – hemmed in at Checkpoint 300 – stoically setting off to work at 5am every morning. A young man reveling in his horsemanship on the Mount of Olives.
“SUMOUD”: to stand firm in the face of adversity, to resist pressure, to focus on your objective. “Sumoud”, intuitively displayed by the Palestinians since 1948, is to root yourself like the olive and cling like the clematis. It was the stance that developed into the multitude of social, economic, political and cultural initiatives supporting the demography and sustainability of life under occupation.
From the first day in Palestine, you understand the form: ignore the Israelis and try to conduct your day as if they were not there. This is the sumoud action practiced by every citizen, every day: to bar the enemy from any but the most minimal, unavoidable space in your psyche.
The sumoud of the people is that they know who they are, and they know what they believe is normal and they hold onto it. They have been immersed in the brutality of the enemy for decades and have withstood it without losing themselves. The enemy fights in the name of his “exceptionalism”, the Palestinian is forced to fight for her normalcy.
I pause. Is it right to write of normality, of life and culture and continuity while the genocide burns in Gaza and spills and slicks north into the rest of Palestine and Lebanon? Before Freedom sits in the centre of my screen, my working document on its right, slightly overlapping. For a moment I yield and call up X on the left of the screen and there are the Israelis dragging away three little boys who’d been foraging, picking daisies and herbs. Or there’s that spring in al-Aujeh, centre screen full of local kids playing, to the left full of Israeli settlers.
I minimize the window on the left, concentrate on Rouhana’s central image, follow the photographer’s particular act of sumoud. Center stage is the land and its people on it; they are here on their own terms, bright and vivid, free before freedom, in a normality which recognizes no borders: from a rave in Haifa to an impromptu recital in the Dheisha refugee camp, to builders on a break in Bethlehem and young men about to dive into the sea in Akka. For sumoud is not denial: it sees the enemy. Its work is to protect and preserve everything that the enemy threatens. It acquires its meaning as it faces, in full cognition, the threat of annihilation. Yes, the enemy is here; the jeeps, the soldiers, the detention, the checkpoints, the spiky cameras, but his interruptions are relegated to dark corners, waiting to be nudged off the page.
THE ARABIC ROOT, حَلّ (ha/lla), is to arrive in a place with the intention of staying. I7tilal (“occupation”) derives from it, as does i7lal (“substitution”). The Palestinians have always known that Israel will move from i7tilal to i7lal. “We could have accepted them living here alongside us”, they say, “but they want to live here instead of us. 1948 continues.”
The same root also means to untie, to disconnect, to loosen. To achieve i7lal, the imposition of a Jewish Israeli population in place of the native Christian/Jewish/Muslim one, Israel has worked hard to sever the indigenous’ connection to the land and to each other. Sumoud resists this. Rooted deep in the land, it holds on to the shared histories, traditions, and cultural practices that create community.
And community never lets go of those who have paid its price; it holds them close, sumoud needs their energy to power on. See the rooms in Nablus, their walls a layered impasto, commemorating the city’s slain freedom fighters. See how the name of “Allah, most exalted” decorates the shrine of (the Christian) TV reporter Shireen Abu Aqleh in the Muslim heartland of Jenin. See the quote from Ghassan Kanafani (d.1972) on the wall of the Dheisha camp: “I will not stop until I plant my paradise on this earth, or seize a paradise from the sky.” On these walls, martyrs and poems are as plentiful as hearts and arrows.
Sumoud is knowing what matters and making sure it stays alive.
WHAT MATTERS. Father and daughter, her hands comfortable on his cheek, on his neck. The laughter lines around his eyes ready to crinkle, her eyes on us as she smiles mischief into his ear. He’s lending himself to her whisperings, ready to be amused. Behind them the untidy green bush, the house and, unseen, her siblings, many siblings, and their mother, and their grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles back, back into time, in and َout of kitchens replete with oil and herbs and grain. The root عَمَّرَ (3ammara) to build, to populate, to maintain, to do the work man is on earth to do – and this is a man who does this work.
A man whose hands speak of hard work and generosity: like the hand pouring milk in Sinjil, the hand resting for a moment on the white column in Ramallah, the hands holding the prayer beads in Tulkarm. Solid. Rough. The nails clean-trimmed. The knuckles dusted with the white powder of stone or flour.
THE LAST IMAGE in the collection is from the diaspora, from Cairo. A silver pendant on a silver chain. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti (d. 2021) used to say we work for the day when it will no longer be necessary to wear Palestine on a chain around your neck.
Sumoud is what you practice before freedom. Sumoud is working for and willing freedom to come, to be complete. It’s holding on, insisting that after many, so many lives have been ended that Palestinian life will live on, free; a man’s hands in freedom will still pour milk, his shadow falling on the fresh-mown mound of hay at his side. A boy will hold out an offering: a cool, crisp watermelon in a pocket of bread, the cutter at the ready, digging out the heart. This is the heart. The heart knifed to bits, distributed, for each a red chunk of sugar and water. The heart excavated, hollowed out, the red glistening with moisture, the seeds waiting, waiting for their release into new life in the ground.
Subscribe to The Key at the Subscriber Tier or higher to get 10% off all items
