In a living room, women gather to sing and dance. A bride sits on the couch donning a two-hundred-year-old golden headpiece, worn by the family brides, and a traditional thobe. A mix of generations from those who survived the Nakba to the young who have yet to learn of it sing expertly of marriage, hinna, brides, gold bracelets, and diamond watches. All sing in unison the songs passed down from one generation to the next. One song nearly brings the bride and her mother to tears… In his living room, my eldest brother-in-law recounts the story of Ayyoub AbuLaban’s disappearance. Ayyoub went on an “operation” into Occupied Palestine in 1971, he was twenty-one. He never returned. No dead body was ever found. The Israeli authorities vehemently deny they have him. He left behind a mother who believed he would return. When she died, her last breaths carried his name and the urge for him to come back…. In a refugee camp somewhere sits an old man nearing the ninetieth year of his life. He recounts his exodus from Palestine in 1948 and dreams of returning to the land he left, to that fig tree he loved so much… In a university classroom a professor teaches Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and connects it to the first Intifada. The eighteen-year-olds stare back at her in awe as she speaks of sit-ins, demonstrations, curfews, arrests, home schooling, home gardens, Israeli-product boycott, and a brutal occupation… A young writer releases her second book based on stories from her own village, an esteemed academic tells the story of Tell Balata, somewhere in Gaza people gather to exchange stories about key moments in Palestinian history. And an anthropologist maps out bedtime storytelling in Palestine…

Our oral narrative is rich with folkloric songs, tales, and countless personal accounts of Nakba, diaspora, imprisonment, etc. But what is desperately needed is that Palestinian writers, photographers, poets, painters, and storytellers take this narrative out of its historical, academic context and place it directly into the hands and hearts of the world. Then and only then might we have hope that the world would come to terms with what happened to us, that their blind eyes would finally see, and their deaf ears would finally hear. Although this issue remains heavily academic, it is a collective of personal and institutional efforts to make Palestine’s oral history more communicable worldwide. Enjoy the read…