Abstract
Ruins serve as a poignant reminder of loss and destruction. Yet, ruins are not always physical, and they are not always best understood through visual language—the sense memory of loss extends for displaced people far beyond crumbling monuments. Exploring the sonic element of loss and displacement is key to understanding the way people relate to the spaces they have to leave. This article explores the particular disjuncture of staging and commemorating Arabness in Tel Aviv, the “Hebrew City.” The disjuncture of being Arab in Tel Aviv is apparent to any visitor who walks down the beach promenade, and this article examines the main sites of Arab contestation on the border with Jaffa. Most apparent to a visitor is the Hassan Bek Mosque, the most visible Islamic symbol in Tel Aviv; I describe the process of gaining admission as a non-Muslim, and of discussing the painful and indelible memory of 1948 with worshipers. Delving deeper into the affective staging of ruin, I trace Umm Kulthum’s famous concert in Jaffa (officially Palestine at the time), and examine the way her imprint has moved across the troubled urban border of Tel Aviv-Jaffa. A ruins-based analysis of the urban sites of disjuncture in Tel Aviv, therefore, offers a glimpse into underground sonic subcultures that hide in plain sight.
Highlights
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
“Know that if a wound begins to recover, another wound crops up with the memory So learn to forget and learn to erase it My darling everything is fated It is not by our hands that we make our misfortune Perhaps one day our fates will cross when our desire to meet is strong enough For if one friend denies the other and we meet as strangers And if each of us follows his or her own way Don’t say it was by our own will But rather, the will of fate.”. These are the closing words of “al-Atlal” (“The Ruins”), the poem written by Ibrahim Nagi, immortalised by Egyptian musical legend Umm Kulthum in her 1966 rendition
A microcosm of Tel Aviv-Jaffa in so far as its landscape represents a history of pain and complexity (Bernstein 2012, p. 134)
Summary
Tel Aviv and Jaffa are inextricably linked, one emerging from and dominating the other (Rotbard 2005), like Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms (Khalidi 1997). That was a Greek neighbourhood, and gradually from the 40s, people came who were Persian, Algerian, Moroccan, and they settled in the industrial area and set up a market (shuk)—a Persian shuk—and today that’s shuk Levinsky.” (Interview, February 2018, Tel Aviv). This narrative describes an organic inflow of Jewish migration, and it leaves out the details of the zone being completely emptied of Palestinians (“Arabs” as they were called or continue to be called by Israelis today) and never quite rebuilt. A sonic and multi-sensory reading of Manshiyya offers testimony to the bi-lateral, not necessarily symmetrical, process by which, even today, Palestine is erased from the city and Jews erased from Arab history
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