The Fellaha/Laji’a Double Consciousness of Nakba Generation Palestinian Women

Abstract

Despite colonial constraints and their triple alienation as refugees, Palestinian Nakba-generation women rely on their memories of place to construct their subjectivity. By practicing the methodology of ground-truthing narratives among eight Shu’fat refugee Nakba generation women, this article draws mainly on Du Bois’s conceptualization of double consciousness to map the temporality of Palestinian women journey in three stages. First, it shows how memories of place are re-arranged based on new events, a process of constructing double consciousness via Othering. Second, they re-define the now space of the refugee camp, while the physical and cultural landscapes of their pre-Nakba homeland are frozen in time, if not completely absent. Third, they conjoin two separate modes of spatial expressions, the pre-Nakba peasant (fellahat) and the post-Nakba refugee status (laji’at), in an overarching narrative filled with dogged strength as an outcome of a second sight. Overall, such a journey is a collective creation of memory, place, and culture that contributes to indigenous knowledge. By exploring how Palestinian Nakba-generation refugee women experienced Zionist colonization and constructed their subjectivity across time and space, the article traces their ontological resistance in the process of conjoining their double-consciousness, as both peasants and refugees.