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Attribution License (This essay seeks to reflect within and across two sites of injustice to excavate the circuits of structural violence and resistance that can be revealed across and placed in conversation with the stubborn particulars of place, history, and culture. We are working toward a “fully loaded cost accounting” (Painter, 1993) of the social psychological capillaries and consequences provoked by apartheid in South Africa and by occupation in Israel/Palestine in the bodies, communities, and political imaginations of women and men in these two sites of contestation. Presented hereby are two decolonizing research projects. The first, Breaking Naturalized Silences of History and Constructing Counter-Narratives to Represent Women’s Voices of Apartheid Unheard in South Africa, highlights how embroidery can be used as a form of narrative to re-stitch lives, create personal stories, and connect the present to the past. The use of embroidery as a form of visual representation of narrating life experiences opens up space for ‘counter-narratives’ that do not conform to the official transcripts of a recently written colonial history. The second project, Widening the Geographic Imagination Through Counter-Mapping, reports on a Participatory Action Research (PAR) mapping project that engaged Palestinian and Israeli activists around envisioning the right of return for refugees and internally displaced Palestinians.
These projects searched for fitting research practices to amplify unheard voices and excavate the social psychological grounds for critical analysis and resistance. Drawing from Ratele (2003, p. 13) we assert that a critical psychology practice should take seriously history and structure and engage with varied inquiry practices to visualize, materialize, and make public voices smothered, censored, or buried, placing them on the publicly visible landscape of rage and desire. Yet as many postcolonial researchers have critiqued, augmenting the voices of others is where research often falls into the murky terrain of colonialism. Macleod and Bhatia (2008), for instance, recognize that harvesting and circulating “voices unheard” can reproduce the process of speaking for others. They argue that even under the guise of ‘meaning well,’ the softer sides of colonialization prevail.
The discussion of post-apartheid segregation and lingering effects of uprootedness on South-African women, and of erasure and expropriation from land and home of Palestinians, problematizes “speaking” with hauntings of past violence and silencing. As such, these projects employ inquiry practices that resist erasures: embroideries to produce counter-narratives of life before, during, and since the fall of apartheid; and counter-maps to complicate the official history and cartography of land-struggles. These methodological choices offer the use of non-verbal production of counter-representations as a possible tactic for decolonizing work. Yet, visual representations, although useful in rendering the processes of erasure and injustice, do not necessarily produce emancipatory products. As we later disclose, the politics of representation often carry with them an internalized set of “imperialist eyes” (Smith, 1999) that reproduce prevailing narratives of colonization. Both projects further discuss the strengths and challenges of methods that seek to document and release memories and imagination from within their colonial settings.
This paper further highlights the need for a material analysis and evidence that are produced through action and lived experience. These, we suggest, produce positioned knowledge that can stretch toward what Michelle Fine (2012) has called provocative generalizability—the capacity for research linked to activism to reflect deeply within a site and also echo boldly across sites, linking movements of resistance and human rights. In turn, these projects demonstrate the ways in which material evidence that accounts for lived every-day experiences attempts to ‘undo’ hegemonic representations of suffering and resolution and instead opens up a political imagination around resistance, social justice, and the politics of redistribution.
In his work on the “epistemic decolonial turn,” Grosfoguel (2007) urges social scientists to turn away from imported and borrowed knowledges, shift from hegemonic frames, and cultivate a rich understanding of local frames. The projects presented here are locally rooted, site-specific inquiries into contexts that bear the scar tissue of colonialism, dispossession, and occupation. We are interested, indeed, in the critical project of decolonizing knowledges, which involves contesting what liberation psychologist Ignacio Martín Baró called the “collective lies” being told about people and politics. Nevertheless, even in the language of struggles, one can hear the dialectics of colonial and decolonizing discourses. Decoloniality is thus an unfinished iterative project. To decolonize, we suggest, is to look within and undo/rework the colonizing oppressive structures from the inside-out and then look again from the outside-in. In this article we attempt to reveal critical voices (in South Africa) and political demands (in Israel/Palestine) that have been denied and silenced and also to highlight how continuing challenges might be understood within their historical context.
Breaking Silence as a Decolonizing Project: Embroidery as Counter-Narrative
In South Africa, apartheid rules and policies always bled into people’s homes rendering that which they perceived to be private as nothing but a false impression. The challenges of dislocation caused by forced removal of people for racial segregation purposes, and Bantustans/homelands that stripped many of their rights to land ownership and free movement, led to the disintegration of families. This disintegration often left women with the sole responsibility of taking care of children while men disappeared into the cities in the quest for employment. The resulting separation of family members led to the break in the rootedness of people’s cultures and caused loss of connection among loved ones. During apartheid, and to some extent in the present South Africa, many continue to struggle to access resources including quality healthcare and education. While South Africa is perceived by outsiders as a model of ‘true democracy’ (the country is perceived to have one of the most progressive constitutions in the world highlighting issues such as gender equality, non-sexism, freedom of religion, sexual orientation, etc.), it is crucial to take a closer look to notice the ghosts lurking in the shadows.
Women are among those who face these dark forces that are not easily visible or noticeable under the mask of ‘gender equality.’ With the new policies neatly in place, continuous struggles of poverty, violence, unemployment, and dislocation that many women continue to face might be easily missed. These everyday struggles are what Harvey (2012, p. 529) calls “secondary violences.” Harvey uses this concept to “underscore both the intentionality, and also the violent nature, of the policies that have been directed against the more marginalized.” Official empowerment programs initiated by the government and various non-governmental organizations are put in place; however, those towards whom the programs are geared still do not have control or power in many of the decision making processes. “Despite all the tools in place intended to promote women’s empowerment and elimination of gender discrimination, women still bear the brunt,” argues Gysman (2004, p. 9). Yuval-Davis (1993) critiques the notion of citizenship and its meaning and argues that being considered as a citizen should go hand in hand with having access to resources and power that goes beyond official documents. A number of initiatives have been put in place to assist in the empowerment of communities; however, many continue to come up short. The Intuthuko embroidery project is one such initiative.
The Intuthuko embroidery project was formed in 2002 and is based in one of the townships in the East Rand part of the Gauteng Province in South Africa. It is a community empowerment initiative which seeks to provide poverty alleviation alternatives for ‘previously disadvantaged women.’ The process of empowerment remains a contested terrain as often those who are meant to be “empowered” remain in the periphery hardly forming part of the decision making processes. Many of these programs are initiated by private corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and the government itself. While these programs are presumably designed ‘for’ the previously marginalized groups—for example, women—many are not part of the decision processes thereby leading to a continuous silencing as they are not offered space to voice what they perceive to be important to them. Many accept this assistance coming their way because they are in need and struggling. As I point out elsewhere (Segalo, 2011), we must problematize empowerment and consider issues of power, class, and history when ‘empowering’ people. In particular, it is crucial to problematize the idea of ‘empowerment’ when women’s advancement is embedded in gendered, classed, and racial hierarchies that remain untroubled by the fall of apartheid (Segalo, 2011). This point is supported by Manjula (2000) in her assertion that, if change is decided and implemented at the governmental (macro) level only, then “the attempt to address the cultural and ideological issues related to women” (p. 5) cannot succeed. In this way, what Manjula calls “the spiral of silence” will persist as women’s subjectivities continue to be ignored. South African women were regarded and treated as second class citizens and for a long time have had their expressions and experiences denied space and acknowledgement. While they have now ‘regained’ their citizenship, it is crucial to understand the interconnectedness of this citizenship to their empowerment and agency within their individual lives. The role of women’s personal testimony in shaping the nation and citizenship is particularly important in a country such as South Africa, where the legacies of colonialism and apartheid have effectively silenced Black women’s voices.
Working with a collective of ten women from the Intuthuko project, I sought to look for ways in which I could collaborate with them to carve an alternative narrative (through making of personal embroideries) that highlights Black South African women’s experiences of growing up during apartheid and theorize how they define their citizenship within a newly democratized country. McEwan (2003, p. 756) asserts that “without spaces for the articulation of memory, black women’s citizenship, in terms of social standing and belonging, continues to be compromised.” It is critical to point that although the women could depict their individual and collective life experiences through the embroideries they made, I had a ‘script’ that I took to them; that is, I already had a research question that I needed answered based on a research proposal required and approved by my academic institution. By making the script as open-ended as possible (not having an interview schedule but a theme/statement that I put forward to the women allowing them to interpret and make sense for themselves), I attempted to offer the women space to share, in their own voice, that which they could otherwise not be able to share.
The discipline of Psychology has long relied on spoken language to make sense of people’s lived realities. In many ways the assumption that one has to verbally express thoughts and feelings/emotions in an attempt for meaning making is problematic, and we must acknowledge alternative ways of expression. In her work on trauma, Rogers (2007) interrogates the notion of the unspeakable and looks at how trauma becomes or is carried through the body—rendering spoken language often insufficient in expressing deep rooted experiences and emotions. She offers multiple and creative ways that people can communicate that which they cannot easily talk about—the unsayable. According to Rogers, the invisible, unsayable trauma marks itself in the body, and one of the ways to express it is through “the symbolic form of art” (p. 14).
Using embroidery as a form of counter-narrative, the women weaved their personal experiences onto the cloth, carving stories that highlighted their suffering and a need for accountability and cost accounting of the pain they endured for decades. The making of embroideries is not a new phenomenon; it is a form of writing/storytelling that has been developed for centuries. In fact, most of the women were familiar with making embroideries/needle-work/sewing and many of them hinted to how they learned the needle-work skill from their parents while they were growing up. By using this art-form, the women embarked on a decolonial project where they could tell a narrative in an artistic and visual way that allows for multiple interpretations of their experiences, thereby negating the notion of a single story that does not acknowledge multiple perspectives and contexts. Using embroidery was a way in which the women could use a skill they already had to break the silence. By creating personal embroideries, the women highlighted not only the inequalities (for example, struggling to afford good quality education and access to health systems) with which they must continuously contend in their everyday lives, but also the need for social justice, stable families, and education that will ensure a better future for their children. By highlighting their struggles, the women showed that “when we reject dominant western oppositional hierarchies of silence and speech, and instead adopt frameworks where words, silence, dreams, gestures, tears all exist interdependently and within the same interpretive field, we find that the mute always speak” (Motsemme, 2004, p. 910).
The making of embroideries where the women depicted their experiences of growing up during apartheid allowed them to carve a counter-narrative that does not play into the dominant narrative that speaks of equality and democracy, but instead that acknowledges and highlights the interweaving of their continuous struggles amidst the celebratory chorus of emancipation. While they perceive the country’s democracy as a step towards the right direction, they are also quick to point out challenges they faced during apartheid, some of which can still be felt in the present:
When we arrived in town we went into one shop, it was a butchery; we wanted some meat to go and braai. After we finished choosing our meat they said there is the line for black people, the line for whites is there. That was where a fight broke out. I have R50 and the white person has R50. My money is not short; it is same and equal money. So, why should I stand in a line for black people when my money is the same as the white person’s? They chased us out. We did not pay; we did not even take the meat.
In this excerpt from her reflection on her embroidery, Keneilwe shares an incident where she refused and resisted discrimination because of the color of her skin. Black South Africans lived under an oppressive system that denied them access to numerous resources that were necessary for comfortable living. Her reflection points to the resilience of people under an oppressive regime; she does not see herself as a victim, but rather a resistor of an unfair government law.
Keneilwe chooses to focus on the politicization of school learners, taking a moment in history as her point of reference. In her embroidery (see Figure 1), she shows a broken fence which highlights the determination of learners who leave the school grounds to put their point across. The burning tires are positioned in a way that shows them as representing a barrier between the learners and the police. The learners do not appear to be deterred by the police holding guns. Keneilwe informs us about what the learners were protesting, evident in the placards that the learners are holding or have dropped on the ground. The school yard appears to be deserted as school officials are nowhere to be found in the embroidery. She put the date on top of the embroidery, possibly as a way to highlight its importance.
Figure 1
Keneilwe’s embroidery.
Through embroideries the women highlighted structural violence and resistance, refusing the too easy alliance of oppression and damage. Their production of embroideries reveals colonial wounds, but also displays their various struggles and a rediscovering of history.
Now what is most painful is the pass. You see the pass traumatised us, because you could not get work. If you work without a pass you will find that the white person will pay you a very meager wage. This is be...be...because you do not have a pass—where will you report them? You would be arrested, if you reported her. They would say you do not have a permit to stay there, where is the pass that states that you live here. You are just... working just to... No it was painful. Now if you go to the office at Thema they would say what do you wa....nt? Go back where you come from. Where are you going to return to? You see that you are traumatised. Life is difficult. Apartheid damaged us. So it is important now because this generation does not know if you talk about apartheid what you are talking about. They do not know what we call freedom. It is known only to those who were there. They say children must not be disciplined, that we must not do anything to them, parents must leave them alone. They do not know where their parents come from with this... You see with us when you talk about freedom we know what you are talking about. Look freedom to them is to do bad things. Can you see that? So we know it, where it traumatized us, about where to stay and where to live. When you are asleep, when you are grown up, sleeping in your in-law’s family, if there is a knock at night you wake and sit up, because you are going to be arrested. What do you want here? You are not supposed to be there, and they go in…, they go in at any time. They are looking for those people who are there illegally. Yah… that was the difficult part to us.
Apartheid damaged us! With this statement Tselane does not single herself out, but highlights how others were also affected by apartheid. In her reflection on her embroidery (see Figure 2), she expresses how it affected schooling, where people could work, and where they could live. For her, freedom has dual meaning: freedom for those who endured oppression and for those who were born into it. This, she sees as affecting how children are reared as well. She perceives democracy as misunderstood where children mistake discipline for abuse. She feels that freedom should be embraced but not misused as many suffered for its attainment.
Figure 2
Tselane’s embroidery.
The women’s narratives as presented in the embroideries show how the psychological cannot be divorced from the political. Political conflicts that these women went through influenced their lives at a personal and a collective level. The above narratives offer us a glimpse of how interwoven people’s experiences are. The women were echoing each other in the telling of their personal experiences thereby showing how the suffering they endured affected them at both an individual and a social level. Their embroideries beg for a politicization of the psychological effects of conflict on people’s lives.
When reflecting on being part of the research project, the women stressed the hard work and journey that still lie ahead. Positive changes are still yet to be seen, as people are still poor with many being unable to afford the basic human need like food. Food prices go up every month, while people’s earnings do not. The unemployment rate is high, and those who suffer are the youth as they obtain educational qualifications only to struggle finding jobs. With unemployment, basic needs are hard to maintain (e.g., putting food on the table), and with hungry stomachs people struggle to focus on other things. The women expressed anger as they were hoping for a better life. While they acknowledge that oppression due to the color of their skin has decreased, they argue that the remnants of apartheid can still be felt and seen. Racial imbalance is still rampant, and for the women in the project this means: where you come from, determines what you get access to.
Another crucial point raised during reflection was the health issue. The women acknowledge that they now have access to private hospitals; however, many do not go as they cannot afford to pay for the treatment. There are public hospitals in many townships, but most lack resources needed to assist patients. The women argue that they are still waiting for change and a better life. Highlighted in the women’s acknowledgement of their persistent challenges is a shift from apartheid to what Grosfoguel (2008) refers to as neo-apartheid where colonial administration ends but elite control of power over the economy in maintained. Reflecting back on apartheid is to go back to the beginning/causes of challenges in their lives. They expressed their hurt about the lawlessness they see around them. One of the problems is the people’s mentality of entitlement, this is the new South Africa, we do what we want! The women concluded by saying that maybe it is time for women to re-convene and make their way to Parliament just like their aunts, mothers, and grandmothers did in 1956. With this, the women highlight “the Eurocentric myth that we live in a ‘post-colonial’ era and that the world and, in particular, metropolitan centers are in no need of decolonization” (Grosfoguel, 2008, p. 607).
Confronting ghosts of their painful past through embroidery making ‘forced’ the women to notice connections between their personal lives and the country’s politics and enabled them, individually and collectively, to grapple with their suffering. The women’s embroideries assisted in highlighting the multiple narratives that they all carry: narratives of trauma, silence, gender, and the role played by history in the present. With these they also point to how suffering is experienced not only at an individual level, but also at the family, community, and societal levels. Very visible in the women’s narratives is how they use suffering as a descriptor of their childhoods, family relations, school experiences, and life in their communities. In this way they show how suffering was widespread in the different spheres of their lives and not something experienced alone. The threads in their stories show the connections of the personal, social, economic, cultural, and political, and how these together feed into their experienced trauma of the past. In her work on soul murder and slavery, Painter (1993, p. 7) argues that
(…) even though families, as the site of identity formation, shape the elaboration of politics, and public policy profoundly influences family, family dynamics have been treated as private and separate from the public realm, and have not traditionally figured very prominently in the writing of history.
With their embroideries, the women are involved in a project of reclaiming their voices which were silenced by the apartheid regime.
The Decolonial Turn
This research project draws from and is in line with the notion of critical border thinking (Mignolo, 2000): “the epistemology that emerges in the ‘in-betweenness’ of two languages, two cosmologies, two epistemologies, where the subversion of the hegemonic knowledge is produced from the geopolitics of knowledge of the subaltern” (Grosfoguel, Cervantes-Rodriguez, & Mielants, 2009, p. 15). The women’s embroideries offer us an alternative way in which South African Black women’s suffering could be understood from their own standpoint. Being involved in the project offered the women the opportunity to do what Maldonado-Torres (2011, p. 10; see also Grosfoguel, 2008) refers to as the “decolonial turn”, which seeks to “shift the geography of reason” where the status quo is challenged and the taken for granted questioned. Their work problematizes and troubles the symbolic order of things and offers us a lens through which we can start to critique notions of empowerment, emancipation, and liberation. The women’s artistic creation in the form of embroideries as a way to tell their own stories and situate themselves allows them space to imagine life differently and remind us of how Being can be conceptualized in various ways. The women’s stories remind us of the importance of remembering. One of the key tenets of decolonizing is acknowledging the colonial subjects’ experiences and looking at how the present structures continue to operate using the colonial tools. Decolonizing calls for a dismantling of these structures so that there can be a space for true emancipation. The zooming in on the challenges pertaining to access to good education and health points to the turn that the women deem necessary.
Connecting Embroideries and Counter-Maps
Puleng Segalo’s work described thus far highlights the importance of integrating creative, visual processes into research for the praxis of decolonization. Similarly, the following project utilizes visual processes in the form of maps and participatory map-making to lift up silences and trace processes of erasure. Producing detailed material accounts within sites and across sites, highlighting and drawing analytical connections of the processes of dispossession without assuming a “sameness of oppression” (Mohanty, 2003) is what Marxist feminist geographer Cindi Katz theorised as counter-topographies (Katz, 2001). Committed to a counter-topographic research, these projects take up a material analysis of political struggles as they surface in the lives of our collaborating researchers within these two sites, lifting up understandings of human desire, resistance, conditions for solidarity, the ethics of representation, and collective imagination. Both projects suggest that the process of visualizing—embroidering and mapping—is as important as the final product. A visual qualitative process allows a complex, multilayered analysis into the production of documents of justice/resistance and an understanding of the pitfalls of reproduction of injustice.
We maintain that decolonizing work is the documenting and exposing of a complicated cost account of colonialization. That is, before moving forward to ‘undoing’ we must produce, document, and count lost homes and lost lives; ruptured communities; stolen lands; and people expelled and erased from the dominant cultural and physical landscapes. We are grateful for the opportunity to think across our projects and to deepen our interrogation of decolonialist praxis. In our accounting, we find that land is a key factor in decolonization projects. Franz Fanon insisted, and over a million of landless South African people concur, that “for a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” (Fanon, 1967, p. 9). In the following project, Einat Manoff relates the cost account of expropriated land and dreams.
Widening the Geographic Imagination as a Decolonizing Project
Counter-Mapping Return (2010) is a PAR mapping project, which set out to study the spatial implications, potentials, and obstacles of planning for Palestinian refugee return. The right of refugee return is a critical issue that hinges on any future resolution in Israel/Palestine, yet there is little research on how Israelis and Palestinians may envision and think of what justice may look like given the possibility of its realization. The denial of both the Nakba—the Arabic word for catastrophe which people use to refer to Palestinian dispossession from their land—and the rejection of Palestinian right to return, has obstructed imagination of peace, which remains stuck at the nation-state level. The issue at hand is further entangled in discriminatory immigration policy and land-grabs and requires an engagement with a colonial present and history through an imagined future of justice. This work seeks for alternative counter-narratives and realities to those limited by the nation-state and to find ways of making space for justice.
Counter-Mapping Return suggests that the denial of return can also be the product of an inability to imagine the practical manifestation of return within a larger framework of social and spatial justice. This is what David Harvey calls “the geographical imagination,” the ability to link a social imagination (Mills, 1959/2000) to a spatial–material consciousness (Harvey, 2004). This work evokes a political and geographical imagination that aims to dialectically confront processes of partaking in and resisting colonialist representational regimes. Our project set out to dismantle ‘return’ as an abstract concept and investigate return to a specific place: the expropriated Palestinian town of Miska which served as a case study for the mapping exercises. The project’s co-researchers, 14 adult Palestinian and Israeli peace activists (working with zochrot.org), all share a connection to Miska. Together, we re-inscribed Miska back on the map and reimagined it as a site of inclusion, where complex solidarities and geographic imaginations were formed.
Tracing Miska
One day I met this [Israeli] guy from Sde-Varburg ... it was hot and we were talking about summer fruit and watermelons. He then said something like, ”when I was young we used to eat the most incredible watermelons. Juicy and big and great ... He said something about them being vernacular to the region that he’s not sure why they stopped growing them ... I felt like shouting: VERNACULAR? These are Miska watermelons. I am from Miska! These are the fruit my grandfather planted and that my father harvested ... you are being nostalgic about my land! my crops! my memories!
As the Palestinian co-researcher told this story, she carefully placed dry watermelon seeds onto the large printed aerial photograph around which we all sat. With these seeds, she traced the plot of land that had belonged to her family. Sitting around the mapping table, on this hot summer morning that was the first day of the workshop, the mapping group members had each brought an object relating to our case study, placed it on the map, and shared his/her environmental autobiography. A Jewish co-researcher spoke next:
I was born in Israel but have spent most of my life in North America. I came back here recently. I’ve always been politically active, and so I became active here around Palestine solidarity. I learned about the Nakba, went to the protests, did what I could, you know ... but then I learned that my family left me a plot of land. It’s right here. See, I’ll mark it in a circle, north of Kfar Saba [in proximity to Miska’s agricultural lands] ... Now you can see how this complicates things. I am no longer sure what to do. Am I entitled to this land? ... or am I not? I am torn apart over this ... I came here with great hesitation. Afraid of what I might learn, of what you Miska people will think of me. But knowing I have to do something. The more I learn about Miska, I feel like uprooting myself and going back to America.
Another Palestinian co-researcher placed a metal key onto the map:
It’s just a key, a famous symbol for Palestinian return. Miska is my home and the return to Miska is my life’s cause. I teach this to my kids; I meet with Miskawees around the world. And I tell you; those in Balata [refugee camp] are not in “dialogue” mode. They are angrier than we are and they do not trust this NGO business. I am afraid to sit here and talk on their behalf. Really, we live in Tirah. We have a place and we get to see Miska, walk to Miska, smell Miska. And no one can tell us it doesn’t exist. For us it is a reality, but for them ...
With emotional breadth and restraint, the group members related their complicated subjective positioning around Miska and the Nakba. As they placed their objects onto the map, annotated and wrote their names, the large map and the air around us quickly grew heavy with painful stories of uprootedness and of political awakening; of solidarity and distrust; of fear and hopelessness. For many years, there has not been an active, collective Palestinian-Israeli memory. Memories have been separated by the same forces that segregated fates and territories. Maurice Halbwachs asserts that individual memory requires a group to mirror, affirm, and reestablish certain events. Further, Halbwachs explains that it is not necessary to physically witness an event, as one’s role in a certain history is constantly merging and re-writing itself in relation to others (Halbwachs, 1950/1992). Environmental biographies were a first step in constructing an affective community, producing such earth-shattering moments of understanding a responsibility to past injustices and an appreciation for a shared territory and fate. This newly formed Israeli-Palestinian collective memory was key in building solidarity between the members of the group, across political positions, and across generations—a solidarity fraught with and that feeds from different power-knowledge relations; issues of privilege, access and hegemonic language; and most saliently – relationship to Zionist settler colonialism. How can we begin to chart out trajectories for return? We proceeded to our next task—creating the base map—with anxiety and caution.
Accounting for Miska
Miska was a small town in the Tulkarm district of Palestine under the British Mandate (what is now considered ‘central Israel’). The 1945 census placed Miska’s population at 1,060, with 123 houses counted. In 1948, which marks the formation of the Israeli state and is commemorated by Palestinians as the Nakba, Miska's Palestinian inhabitants were expelled by orders of the defense organization prior to the formation of the Jewish state.
One mapping group member recounts a conversation with “an old Miskawee woman who portrayed the fairly cooperative relationship that existed between Miskawees and their Jewish neighbors until what she described as the ‘frightening men on horses’ who came to bully the women working” (Haran, 2009). A few days later, the Miskawees were forced out of their village, and the newly formed Israeli government declared the lands “abandoned.” A British mandate leftover ‘absentee property law’ was utilized to ‘officially’ hand over refugee property to a state agency, which then leased it to the Jewish National Fund (JNF). A JNF official ordered it be demolished. Similar to numerous cases throughout the land, Miska’s property was torn down in 1952 and a eucalyptus grove planted to cover its scars and ruins (see Figure 3). The school building and the mosque were the only buildings left standing. Miska’s agricultural lands were then handed over to the management of the Israeli Land Administration (ILA), which has turned a blind eye to the Jewish coop-agricultural settlements (in Hebrew: Moshavim) that have steadily sprawled on this territory for over 65 years.
Figure 3
Landscape of Erasure: Miska today. After the village was bulldozed down in 1952, the Eucalyptus grove—the thick wooded area—was planted by the Israeli Land Association (ILA) to cover the scars and ruins. (Summer 2006, Printed with permission of Zochrot.org).
Miska was erased from the ground and official state maps but is evermore engraved in collective memories. As a second-generation Miskawee woman recalls,
For years I have taken my kids to Miska, to see where they come from, to play on the ground, to touch, smell and get a taste of the soil. But most importantly, we would visit the abandoned school. Look, I told them, it is all about teaching.
The school was torn down years later, in 2006, after Zochrot activists held memorial services and poetry readings to commemorate Miska. Officials gave a sardonic reason: the activists were trespassing.
Tracing Miska was a process of making space for the mapping work upon which we were about to embark. As the base-map unfolded, another space materialized—a space holding a complex solidarity, a complicated history, different ages, identities, and levels of belonging to the original space—a contact zone. Mary Louise Pratt’s (1992) “contact zones” are places in which difference is used to negotiate various relations to power. María Elena Torre advances on this work of in relation to PAR projects: “Conceptualizing our collaborative as a contact zone, both theoretically and methodologically, allows for a more textured analysis across power and difference. More specifically, it creates an opening for an analysis that lingers in the ‘space between’ (Torre, 2005, p. 253).”
The Dialectics of Decolonization
An intermediate exercise in the mapping workshop required that we divide into planning teams to chart the existing and the future space. Each team picked an area of focus: movement and transportation; preservation and restoration; public spaces; housing and agriculture, manufacturing, and industry. In this intermediary stage of the workshop, a team of Jewish group members presented their proposed map of the historical village and the surrounding agricultural lands. Their map consisted of a reconstruction of the old village, preserving its “historical village characteristics” (see Figure 4).
Figure 4
Day 2: Intermediate proposal: land-use. Large yellow circle signifies a proposed “new Palestinian town” adjacent to the Arab-Israeli town of Tira. The smaller yellow circle marks the location of historical Miska, where the team proposed a conservation plan of the old village.
At first, the Palestinian group members protested that the plan deemed the historical village “static,” leaving it ”stuck” in the past. The implicit motivation for the plan, they argued, was a desire to acknowledge a vague and far removed Arab past, but not the more threatening events associated with recent Palestinian history and recognition of the Nakba (Benvenisti, 2000).
Since one of the workshop’s goals was to plan for the return of all the refugees and expellees, now estimated of over 10,000 displaced people, the land-use team added a location for new housing. Their plan proposed a new ‘modern’ town, located further east, between the two existing Arab-Israeli cities of Tirah and Tul Karem (see Figure 4), which they envisioned as having “all the necessary infrastructure needed for a highly dense, ‘prosperous’ urban growth.” As articulated by a group member:
As soon as we start talking about the future, we understand that the size of the land and the number of people that should be considered are ever-increasing, this amounts to tens of thousands, and so the problems multiply as well. Something, which is hard for Israelis to deal with.
This initial proposal generated a heated debate around exclusionary territorial practices. It portrayed the ways in which the social issues are deeply embedded and masked within spatial/territorial reasoning. Palestinian group members protested the fact that the proposed ‘new town’ was not planned on historical Miska lands: “Why can’t we simply build new housing on our lands? The historical lands of Miska?” These maps exposed an exclusionary ethic that is practiced throughout Israel, by which historical claims over land, or ‘historical justice’, are permitted only to Jews while Palestinians were and are excluded from the fight for historical justice.
Further, the Palestinian collaborators exposed that the plan for a new town will in fact create an ‘all Arab region’, separate and removed from central Israel, which will lead to additional displacement. This dispute described above suggests that it is not the fight over land and resources per se, but also the dread from a rising Palestinian population that perpetuates the ongoing policy of segregation. Put plainly, this line of thought draws upon density and sprawl to mask its racist premises. One can read the alarmist discourse around “urban sprawl” as one of social exclusion rooted in a fear of “Arabization.” As one group member articulated: “Why is it that when it comes down to a Jewish city you call it ‘urban expansion’ and when it comes to an Arab city you call it ‘overly populated’ and need to ‘limit sprawl’?”
This critical moment in the group dynamic is mirrored by an elaborate set of spatial practices and state policies, which have cemented the ongoing segregation between Jews and non-Jews (Peleg, 2004; Yiftachel, 2006). This distinction takes place in explicit distribution of state resources and most importantly in land and housing. This fear of refugee return is entangled in spatial practices highlighting the ways in which land and territory are entrenched in the colonialist project and the rejection of the Palestinian catastrophe. Israeli leftist philosopher Adi Ofir disparagingly articulates the prevailing sentiment that underlies Jewish-Israeli comportments: “After all, if we admit to have expelled them [i.e. recognize the Nakba], we may have to admit that they have the right to return” (Ofir, 2009, p. 32 author’s translation).
This critical moment in the participatory research informed and shaped our debate, yet this map was left behind and did not make it to the final map (which the entire collective agreed upon and signed). Group members openly discussed ways to create reverse regulation and to “limit sprawl” on Jewish settlements while allowing “full urban expansion” for Palestinian return. The group also surfaced the need to navigate and integrate our decolonizing counter-mapping efforts with broader legal and political systems for effective results and to navigate this as a consensus process.
Mapping uses the cartographic skills and technologies available to the colonizer—and as such it often reifies a colonial gaze (Smith, 1999). While engaging in the undoing of colonialism, the decolonial process of the land-use map also reproduces and solidifies existing exclusionary territorial practices that stem from the need to map out new territories or prove land ownership. In order to dispute an existing territorialization of land, the group reproduced models of sovereign power, private ownership, and mirrored existing Israeli state exclusionary measures. In this, I see decolonizing as a praxis that opens up a dialectical space that is at once producing and reproducing the sovereign and at the same time using it as a reflective mirror to protest existing order as a step toward decolonization.
This dialectical space continues the discussion of the participation of representational regimes (expressed, in part, in the drawing of maps) in the creation of an occupied space, polarized in national, social, and physical terms and connected to the implantation of the capitalist market logic. Decolonizing thus hinges on a broad interpretation of what is meant by effective representation of knowledge. These accounts warrant critical reflection of counter-mapping with its inherent contradiction, in relation to the group’s aim of decolonization. The counter-mapping process revealed decolonization to be an iterative process that works in dialectic tension between colonizing and resistance; and between (political and visual) representation and spatial production. The structural colonial inequalities were exposed through this contact zone (Torre, 2009) and then proceeded to further uncover the internalized colonialist processes of exclusion. This was a first step in this iterative process. The second critical move was reworking the colonialist processes through direct opposition.
By direct opposition, I mean that the group produced other proposals which were all but too similar to Zionist strategies. These included a suggestion to form an agency that will welcome the incoming refugees (parallel to the Jewish Agency which promotes Jewish immigration to Israel). Another proposed to take back Miska’s land by setting an over-night camp and quickly rebuilding the school—a notion which echos Homa Umigdal (in Hebrew: Tower and Blockade)—a Zionist overnight settlement method used during the British Mandate of Palestine. It should be noted that these suggestions were uttered with a fair amount of cynicism, and were immediately (and unanimously) rejected as “duplicating Zionist strategies” as the group critically maintaining that “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house” (evoking Audre Lorde, 1984/2007).
Yet, although these sets of Zionist-parroting suggestions were disdained, I see them as significant to understanding the deep internalization of the colonizing gaze. They also play a part, I argue, in obstructing the political geographical imagination—causing one to be limited in seeking alternatives, seeing only as far as the myth of the land and the exploitative customs that rule its terrain. It is important to think through this obstruction, for it has implications for action-research and the work of counter-mapping.
The Final (Consensus) Map
On the final day of the workshop the group drafted the final map that brought together the different teams and themes. In the previous days, the group had devised an initial program outline for the maps and divided into planning teams. Each team mapped one feature from the outlined program and worked on one thematic layer—also a literal layer—with overlaid trace paper on top of the collective base map. During the deliberation stage that followed, the teams presented their proposed maps and the group debated the social, political, physical, and visual aspects of each layer. As mentioned above, these discussions surfaced the contested issues and shed light on some of the barriers to return.
The concluding step was to create a map that superimposed the layers one on top of the other to create a collective proposal for return—the final map (see Figure 5). The final map’s legend mostly coincided with said layers. The map included a communal housing design, a natural conservation plan with water sheds, plans for natural restoration of the wetland surrounding the bank of wadi Falak (from Arabic: Falak creek) that runs through the village, and replanting of vernacular crops on a crop rotation plan. The ‘existing conditions’ team contributed a policy paper along with the map. Its key principles included reversing the existing discriminatory policies by offering inclusionary zoning to Palestinians. The group also devoted considerable attention to identifying and assigning locations for cultural and educational institutions—some intended to be spaces of co-existence (Jewish and Palestinian) and some educational facilities were strictly separate and designated for Palestinians. The list goes on.
Figure 5
Day 3: Final Map. Super-imposed consensus layers.
On the right hand side, the map legend was marked and penned in Arabic and Hebrew (and later also in English). The group drafted this statement:
This is an experiment in imagining our shared spaces. It is a plan for the full refugee return to Miska. Ours is a vision that requires no house to be further demolished. This proposal represents only the members of the mapping group. Critical examination is open to all with love.
Signed: –The Miska Counter-Mapping Group
“What would return look like?” “How many families lived in pre-Nakba Miska?” “How many housing units should be built?” “Should these be single-family houses, or something else?” “Who will build them, and how?” These questions evoke the geographical imagination. While visually recording a material history and testimonials onto the map, the group also worked through the present—assessing existing material conditions and policies, recording differing visions of place, outlining clashing visions of justice, and investigating internalized hegemonic discourses. Then, using cartographic attributes, the group imagined future alternatives. As members of the group attest, the debates and activities of counter-mapping opened up a space of critical thought around the plan and action of return: “Now that we have sat down to start planning for return, our questions have become concrete and we can begin to organize around this new map.” While complex solidarities were articulated and the barriers to return became more concrete, the blocked geographical imagination began to unlock and a creative action-space cracked open. This space generated new possibilities for both for the group of co-researches and for the future community of returning Miskawees.
That maps play a primary role in spatial politics is nothing new. Although they record and reproduce spatial knowledge, maps are not objective representations of ‘real’ space; rather they render visual geographic imaginaries. It is important therefore, to acknowledge maps as colonizing tools as well as sites for critical intervention. What implications do counter-mapping processes and the geographical imagination offer radical practice and rights-to-land struggles in particular? Counter-mapping works can also be challenged to go beyond interventions that are in binary opposition to the status quo. These projects ought to chart out radically new grounds. I would use our project to suggest two working guides for doing so. The first is recognizing (and harnessing) the work of decolonizing as a cyclical process that works in dialectic tension between reproduction and resistance—contradictory political positions that are at the same time also mutually conditioned. Once these dialectic tensions are rendered visual through the maps, they produce visual material iterations that can be reflexively addressed and challenged by the mapping-group. The second guideline is a call for expanding the geographic imagination beyond the available structures. Both of these guidelines can be employed in mapping projects. In order to reach a state of mapping alternatives, the group needed to make visible (at the cost of reifying) the particular set of oppressions that were at play. The group subsequently reacted against these oppressions using a limited geographic imagination (one that relies on a strong analysis and a good sense of solidarity yet is limited by existing structures) working in direct opposition, in a binary resistance, against the status quo. At a certain point, the group pushed through with a particular energy to think beyond the readily available set of colonialist codes and toward a complex set of ideas of inclusion and distributive justice, and worked creatively towards resolution. This is a critical moment in an iterative dialectic process that produced radically new proposals.
Our reconsideration of the maps of Miska was intended to make visible processes of exclusion and erasure, to investigate the connection between territory and identity, and re-situate facts “on the map” once again. The mapping-group warily avoided reducing the fraught political question of return to a set of lines of a map, and we did not presume to achieve balance between violated rights and compensatory measures. Instead, the group mapped memories, movements, links between places, and possible future deployment in space that may serve as a basis for thinking about the right of return.
Epilogue
We must tell stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe....Remember this: Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing. (Roy, 2003, p. 127)
In the spirit of Roy’s invitation, Puleng Segalo and Einat Manoff try to tell stories of oppression, resistance, and imagination that carry the breath of another world. Not a perfect world; not one that has resolved histories of relentless injustice; but they have opened spaces where bodies, affect, rage, struggle, imagination can breathe. Grounded in local struggles, seeking to deploy critical visual methods to honor and reveal collective biographies of oppression and struggles, Segalo and Manoff document stories of what was/is/could be, contest dominant lies and induce an expanded imaginary of possibility by constructing designs, methods, and products that speak to the traditions of the local and the provocations of global. Puleng Segalo from South Africa and Einat Manoff from Israel/Palestine reveal to us the dangerous territories and the obligations of a decolonizing praxis for psychology in/beyond the academy. Below we consider critically the stories they tell and peer into the shadows of new questions of epistemology and ethics lifted up by decolonizing methods.
Drawing from her work with women in South Africa, Segalo offers textured (her)stories as a new genre of qualitative visual evidence of oppression and desire. On fabric, the personal is quite literally stitched into the political and historic landscape. In the larger portfolio of her research, Segalo also interrogated Truth and Reconciliation Commission transcripts narrated by women survivors of apartheid and verbal interviews with women from the same community. Analyzing how the constricted/constructed context of telling shapes the stories that are told and muted, Segalo compares the embroideries with the TRC testimonies and interviews and recognizes that no method is uncontaminated by the past. The hauntings of oppression past and present linger in the text and the immediate context of narrative production bears consequence for the unfolding narratives. While it may be easy to fall in love with the embroideries, these artistic practices must be conceptualized as activity and product, situated in a context of global capital. They were, after all, produced by Black South African women working for a White woman in a company that sells their stories, stitched onto blank black canvas, shipped across oceans, to consumers in Asia or the United States. While the stories reported in this text were harvested for a purpose distinct from “bags for sale,” the context of narrative production nevertheless remains one in which the production and commodification of traumatized/transcendent li(v)es is negotiated across bodies of water and racialized imaginaries. Like all methods, decolonizing practices of inquiry are situated in and plagued by history, context, and relationships.
And yet still, these embroideries contrast sharply with the TRC testimonies, revealing a “story different than the one we are being brainwashed to believe,” threading cumulative violence, nostalgia, oppression, desire, and fear. Exploring the canvas we learn how much structural violence transforms everyday constructs, including mobility and also freedom. The embroideries and interviews provide an opportunity to listen carefully to post-apartheid dreams spoken by tongues animated by post-revolutionary desire and imaginaries: “This is the new South Africa. We can do what we want.” Neo-liberal cries for freedom are smuggled into a liberatory history. The theoretical project requires that critical researchers both separate and braid colonized and decolonized discourses narrated in the confusing midst of political transformation. With neither romance nor cynicism, it would be important for Segalo to deepen the inquiry about how women make sense of the contradictions that layer their lives and aspirations, and those of their daughters and granddaughters; how they think about the emboldened promises of liberation by race and sustained oppression by class and gender; how they have been scripted, within the embroidery collective, to tell sellable stories and craft transcendent narratives, marketing bags and peddling particular historic accounts of post-apartheid progress. Segalo’s work reminds us that it would be important to learn more about the affects, identities, and subjectivities released and rehearsed when women are asked by supervisors, NGOs, feminist organizations, fund raisers, or philanthropies, to perform, sketch, sing, embody, and narrate “branded” biographies of trauma and survival. How do trauma tales get packaged, stitched into the souls of Black canvas and bodies, as an artifact of history and a balm to the global desire to believe that violence is behind us, progress awaits? How does oppression turn a profit as artifact? What are the circuited motives of those who produce, profit from, and consume these artifacts in our homes and offices?
Unlike the women of Intuthuko, who gathered as a collective of similarly situated women to speak their stories to one another and also to audiences far away, the men and women of the Miska Counter-Mapping Group came together as an intentionally and potentially contentious contact zone of Jews and Arabs, within a precarious space, interrogating the stories that had been told and lived and recreating collectively new stories of possible return. Here the audience was local, the ground rules filled with anxiety and tension. A distinct set of subjectivities, relationships, and performances were undoubtedly at play. Manoff herself is an activist within the organization, a peer and facilitator. She notes, as Segalo does, the ways in which neoliberal and Zionist discourses permeate even moments of radical possibility. What she calls “Zionist parrotings” reveal the seepage, even within exquisitely prec(ar)ious spaces carved to enable different stories, in which colonizing discourses, practices, and histories bleed through time and space, staining even a widened geographic imagination. Unlike the women of Intuthuko who look back in time to assess justice claims and desires against the metric of apartheid and the revolution, the men and women of the counter-mapping project look simply out their windows to understand the sustained oppressions they endure, reproduce, and resist.
I would love to know more, reflectively, about the affects of the project in Miska, burdened, one can only assume, by the cumulative weight of occupation and stratification everywhere evident. While the right to return for Palestinians provokes a compelling vision of justice, it is of course far from accessible. It would be important to track the affects of counter-mapping; how do despair, trust/cynicism, desire/defeat, anger/guilt circulate in a space that takes up the deliberate project of creating what could be, when all of the evidence is that it will never be?
And yet like the embroideries themselves, the praxis of sketching maps in the subjunctive, the what could be, lifted up evidence of how everyday language privileges “urban expansion” (for Jews) over “sprawl” (for Arabs); they activated an understanding of the complex dynamics of both segregated spaces and integrated ones in the psychic settlements of the occupation. Manoff offers counter-mapping as a “dialectical space that is at once producing and reproducing the sovereign and at the same time, using it as a reflective mirror to protest existing order and as a step toward decolonization.” Counter mapping denaturalized current arrangements and unhinged the normalization of one-sided right to return. Participants came to see the current circumstances as made by people and potentially unmade by people. By “mapping liberation,” contemporary oppressions were made visible and scrutinized, binaries were complicated, erasures were resurrected, and return was recognized as a non-negotiable right for all. And yet, although given license to imagine, Manoff argues that she was taken by “the understanding of how deeply present and internalized is the colonizing gaze”; how “obstructed” is the political geographic imagination.
These two projects are obviously wildly distinct, although both have been wrapped in a language of counter narratives of apartheid struggle. Indeed it may be naïve or arrogant, U.S.- or Euro-centric, to try to elicit points of shared praxis. And yet with humility and provisional thoughts written in pencil, below I try to craft some insights/incites across the two decolonizing projects that differ dramatically in terms of colonial histories of struggle, oppression, and occupation and the historic relation to armed struggle, collective resistance, and liberation. And yet critical methods deployed across the two sites share some radical commitments of epistemology, politics, and action: privileging silenced/suppressed voices, contesting dominant narratives of justice, complicating power, inviting revision, and insisting that participants contend with history and tomorrow. Below I will sketch with appreciation some provisional commitments of a decolonizing praxis engaged by these pieces.
Practices of Inquiry That Honor Local Knowledge and Struggles
To begin, these projects offer us a set of humble and emergent commitments to honor local language and practices as they theorize the affects, embodiments, and consciousness through color, gender, ethnicity, class, and religion (Fals Borda, 1979; Smith, 1999). Each project has been cultivated in deep and delicate relations with local experts/activists/elders who know, in their bones, the chill of oppression, the desire for justice, and the challenges of resistance. These relationships, as we could hear and imagine, are always fraught with questions of power, authority, privilege, and loyalty. Relations between the academy and communities of struggle are, by definition, fraught and should be intentionally always in revision and reflection.
Challenging Dominant Lies
By design, these projects contest what Martín-Baró would call the collective or dominant lie: that post-apartheid, the questions of distributive justice have been settled; that Jewish Israelis deserve the right to return but not Palestinians. With tools of critical inquiry that privilege activity over words, making over speaking, collectives over individuals, dissent over compliance, and invite revision through collective visual practices of embroideries and mapping, Segalo and Manoff reveal delicately the ways in which the dominant story distorts. At the same time, their projects expose how people resist boldly and quietly, with entitlement and humility, in protest and in tears, on the streets and in songs to their children, insisting on justice even as history tells them it is unlikely. And still, contradictions loiter. The collective lie is unfurled even as colonizing practices and discourses persist in “Zionist parroting” or neoliberal beliefs about South African freedom. The challenge is clear, and the multi-phonic discourses of resistance and survival are worthy of deep thought and reflection.
Revealing the Concealed: Pain, Loss, Desire, and Complex Subjectivities
Once “dominant lies” are denuded, the praxis of embroidery and collective map-making made visible lives, struggles, and desires that have been silenced. These projects honor what Avery Gordon (2008) calls complex personhood, revealing loss and violence as well the resilience, resistance, and struggles. And yet by so doing, we are left wanting to know even more about the haunting affects associated with life in the post-apartheid moment when struggle continues to surround and invade the soul, or when yet another round of Middle Eastern “peace talks” fails, violence and the occupation persist, and Palestinians are blamed.
Demanding Justice: Redistribution and Recognition
Drawing on the writings of feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser (2010), these projects address two significant demands for justice. They interrogate a justice of (re)distribution of land, resources, and opportunities, and also a justice of recognition in terms of dignity, identity, history, and collective biography. The justice of recognition, linked to material redistribution, is particularly acute in South Africa and Israel/Palestine where activists on the ground are engaged in struggles for material resources, acknowledgement of history, and dignity for the next generation. Although we are far from redistribution of resources in either site, the materials lifted up by Segalo and Manoff reveal the demand for recognition to be as serious as, and braided with, the demand for redistribution.
Research for Provocation
Maxine Greene (2000), existential philosopher, distinguishes between experiences that are anesthetic, numbing of the soul, deadening of possibility, and narrowing of vision, and experiences that are aesthetic, that is provocative, enlivening, and inducing a “wide awakeness”. These critical scenes of stitching biographic embroideries and collective mapping of the right to return are indeed aesthetic, provocative, and de-colonizing. Segalo and Manoff seek to break silence, provoke a radical geographic imagination, and speak the unspeakable.
Space/Time Travels
And finally for now, another provisional commitment of decolonizing psychology involves generating products that speak boldly across time and imagination: documenting what is but—more than that—provoking the radical imagination for what might be. The two projects produce academic scholarship but also and more important will produce locally materials for community organizing, local policy, use in courts, museums, and online platforms, and as resources for those in struggle around the globe (see Fine & Ruglis, 2009).
Decolonizing praxis, in psychology, begins in the struggles of local communities and reveals the entangled circuits of power, dispossession, and resistance that link us. A decolonizing psychology, at this historic moment, has further ethical obligations—to invoke a justice of (re)distribution and recognition, refracted through an intersectional lens, rooted in an epistemology of desire and struggle, and focused on a new imaginary of solidarity and justice. And yet as Segalo and Manoff help us imagine a deeply critical psychology, the classic struggles of power, authority, representation, and potential for epistemological violence hover still as the next generation of work moves psychology toward a more radical decolonizing project.