Growing up in rural Galilee, Palestine: memories of childhood geographies

Abstract

This paper reconstructs the author’s geographies of childhood growing up as a Palestinian in a small village in the Galilee in the early 1950s. It seeks to narrate his experience as a ‘shepherd boy and a schoolboy’ at a certain phase of his life. This type of duality in performance of tasks in everyday life – being a schoolboy but also a shepherd/goatherd contributing to the family’s work, and the maintenance of the household and home from a young age – is presented as a revealing experiential autoethnographic window. It becomes a prism for exploring spatial memory and attachment, and for reading a place and understanding what such places mean to their indigenous inhabitants and occupiers (i.e. people are not ‘thrown’ into places but they make them). The paper further demonstrates that indigenous attachment by individuals to their home place can be a catalyst for political resistance and directly challenge forces emanating from state ideology, as illustrated here in the case of Palestine. Today, as 60 years ago, Palestinian ‘homes’ are seen by Palestinians who are challenging Israeli policies of uprooting on a daily basis as sites impregnated with distinctive existential qualities and a high level of resistance. Such places and spaces acquire substantial new meaning for their indigenous owners who are compelled to dare to protect and guard them.