History as a Cautionary Tale

Abstract

Palestinian women tell each other history in the form of cautionary tales. Whether in oral history interviews or over an otherwise pleasant afternoon coffee with the family, recollections of the past come in the form of eerie, gloomy, heart-wrenching tales of personal and collective suffering. These stories are often told in a calm, pragmatic, matter-of-fact tone, one not too dissimilar from the so-called detachment of the early twentieth-century historian. They are partly animated by the impulse to preserve collective memory in the face of the memoricide and erasure perpetuated by the settler colonial regime. But there is something else at play. These stories are meant to prepare other Palestinian women for the worst that is sure to come (because it has never stopped). They caution against invaders, rulers, banks, and the ephemeral solidarity of passersby. They alert listeners that the rules apply to us differently, that what we know about how the world works is bound to confront a sobering reality that will shatter that view. The few scholars who mine these stories as a historical resource often package them in a narrative of resilience, steadfastness, or hope in the face of impossible odds. This body of work has played a vital role in critiquing and transforming the once-prevalent reductive image of Palestinians as powerless victims. It remains invaluable to narrativizing the history of Palestine and the Palestinians (Sayigh; Meari; Qumsiyeh). But if read these stories at face value, not as narratives of resilience, but as cautionary tales, we begin to see them as a means of telling history, a historiographic form. The pessimistic realism of this communal historiography has much to teach us.Consider Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, a country in the throes of a world-shattering economic, political, social, and environmental crisis. In Lebanon, temporality is the seven-hour queue at the gas station; the brief duration of power supply emanating from exorbitantly priced private generators; the long hours of darkness; the shelf-life of food, purchased at black-market rates, before it rots in refrigerators transformed into de facto pantries; the cycle of breaking news that nothing has changed. These crises overlap with the individual and mundane pain of everyday life, of elderly sick parents and hearts broken over lost love. Collective and individual pain merge in rapid and constricted breaths. What is a historian to write in the face of this despair? How does she capture pervasive pain and misery? How does she look to the past for inspiration when visiting archives is a luxury, when historical claims ring hollow?For Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, this suspended temporality is layered on top of other forms of long-term suspension. They have lived suspended for seventy-three years in exile, without the right to work, own property, or move freely; with the violence of encampment and ghettoization; and with the estrangement of serving a life sentence as a returnee in waiting, perpetually out of place (Suleiman; Hanafi, Chaaban, and Seyfert). The pandemic has hit them hard, but life goes on. Their history is one of perpetual crisis, a hundred years of dispossession, loss, and damage control. Every crisis triggers the previous trauma; it is a training ground for the crisis to come. Their form of history telling, their vision of the future, can tell us much about our moment of global crisis.Writing history from the vantage point of a hundred-year-long crisis reinforces the historiographical revisions and reflections of the past five decades: the artificial slicing of history into periods, the biases and erasures of archives, and the corrective potential of micro and social histories. We learn that a crisis has no beginning or end; it only waxes and wanes, accumulating structural violence along the way. This reminds historians to be cautious about the analytical weight they afford periods, no matter how necessary periodization may be as a tool. It invites us to make room for the mundane “stuff of life” that carries over from one period to the next. This “stuff” is found decades later and is rarely in the archives. The violence and pain of 1948 Palestine or 2021 Lebanon could perhaps be reassembled from news reports, personal letters, and relief records, but lived temporality, the omnipresence and pervasive nature of the mundane, lies beyond the scope of academic and state archives. Their magnitude can only be sensed through those communal narrations of history. History—states, ideas, the built environment, culture—is built atop of the struggles of mortals; its happenings lie in their daily life. It is those struggles we must understand.Telling and listening to history as cautionary tales can help historians better understand these struggles. Cautionary tales as a historiographic form capture the precise magnitude of the crisis while accounting for the patterns of the past and projecting its pitfalls into the future. Cautionary tales distill a moment into its most brutal articulation and help us make sense of it. They also produce a less familiar kind of hope: a utilitarian hope that prepares one for a grim future. Cautionary tales offer warnings of and lessons on the quotidian harshness of life in perpetual crisis. They provide a set of tools, skills, and mindsets to cope with that reality. Hope, in this case, comes not from inspirational stories but from the accumulation of survival skills against a brutal set of odds. We retell the history of crisis not to inspire hope for a bright future but to temper the intensity of the future crises, to better prepare us to cope. Hope, thus, comes from surrender to a perpetual state of crisis. It comes from the realization that there simply is no other way to live. Cautionary tales are a form of making sense of life not out of hope but despite it (Arondekar and Seikaly, this issue). Why, then, do we write history in this moment of collapse? I write history to understand others—their personal struggles, their means of resistance, and their coping mechanisms—with the hope that we will, one day, be understood.This came out of many insightful conversations prompted by the question, “Why do we do what we do?” with Muneira Hoballah and Lana Salman in the summer of 2021.