Refugee Camps and Cities in Conversation

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RescRipting Religion in the city



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Rescripting Religion in the cityMigration and Religious identity in the

Modern Metropolis

Edited by

Jane gaRnettWadham College, University of Oxford, UK

alana haRRisLincoln College, University of Oxford, UK



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© Jane garnett and alana harris 2013

all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Jane garnett and alana harris have asserted their right under the copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.

published by ashgate publishing limited ashgate publishing companyWey court east 110 cherry streetUnion Road suite 3-1Farnham Burlington, Vt 05401-3818surrey, gU9 7pt Usaengland

www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:Rescripting religion in the city : migration and religious identity in the modern metropolis/edited by Jane garnett and alana harris. pages cm includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-3774-1 – ISBN 978-1-4094-3775-8 (ebook) – ISBN 978-1-4724-0352-0 (epub) 1. Cities and towns–Religious aspects. 2. Emigration and immigration–Religious aspects. 3. Identification (Religion) 4. Identity (Psychology)–Religious aspects. i. garnett, Jane, editor of compilation.

Bl65.c57R47 2013 200.9173ꞌ2–dc23 2013002712ISBN 9781409437741 (hbk)ISBN 9781409437758 (ebk – PDF)ISBN 9781472403520 (ebk – ePUB)


© Copyrighted Materialww

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Refugee camps and cities in conversationyousif M. Qasmiyeh and elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh

throughout my childhood, my mother would sporadically leave our refugee camp, sometimes with us [my siblings and me] and at times with other women, and walk through the Lebanese neighbourhood bordering our camp, to the isolated mound which was home to the wali [holy man]. Reaching this annexed space, neither camp nor city, exposed us to our lebanese ‘neighbours’ en route to the shrine. Walking with my mother and my siblings, the shrine’s green exterior would appear; we knew to be silent as we approached the tomb. As we started to read al-Fatiha,1 my mother sometimes cried, whispering her calls to heaven. i never questioned my mother’s intentions as she completed these religious exercises in this secluded, private space – as if it were an extension of the mosque we left behind in the camp, a spiritual correlative for my mother and other women.2

this chapter engages an emerging body of literature which explores the multi-dimensional connections between refugee camps and cities. such literature includes considerations of whether refugee camps ‘can be likened to virtual cities in view of their population and demographic density’,3 assessing camps’ and camp-dwellers’ positions vis-à-vis basic typologies of urban concentration and processes of urbanization. other studies explore ‘the phenomena of refugee camps with the methodologies of architecture and urbanism’, identifying desert-based camps as a ‘borderline case’ of urbanity4 or the military destruction of palestinian refugee camps such as nahr el-Bared as a case of ‘urbicide’.5 More philosophical

1 Al-Fatiha is the first chapter of the Qur’ān.2 Very few women in the palestinian refugee camp in north lebanon referred to in

this extract attend the camp’s mosques, preferring to pray indoors. With only one mosque in Baddawi camp (Masjid al-Sunna) having a female prayer room, women typically pray at home. although men as a collective are religiously obligated to attend the mosque for jumu’ah prayers (Friday prayers), women are exempted from doing so and at times individually visit the shrine to perform extra rituals beyond their required prayers.

3 Marc-antoine perouse de Montclos and peter Mwangi Kagwanja, ‘Refugee camps or Cities? The Socio-Economic Dynamics of the Dadaab and Kakuma Camps in Northern Kenya’, Journal of Refugee Studies 13/2 (2000): 205–22, at p. 205.

4 Manuel herz, From Camp to City: Refugee Camps of the Western Sahara (Zurich, 2012).

5 adam Ramadan, ‘Destroying nahr el-Bared: sovereignty and Urbicide in the space of exception’, Political Geography 28/3 (2009): 153–63.



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Rescripting Religion in the City132

reflections in turn examine refugee camps as ‘non-places’ or ‘spaces of indistinction’ which ‘do not integrate other places, meanings, traditions and sacrificial, ritual moments but remain, due to a lack of characterization, non-symbolized and abstract spaces’.6

in contrast with the existing literature, which is primarily written by external observers and analysts, this chapter centralizes subjective experiences and perceptions of both camps and cities from diverse perspectives over time and space. it especially critiques the denomination of camps as ‘non-symbolized and abstract spaces’ and their supposed failure to integrate ‘sacrificial’ and ‘ritual moments’. as noted by one of the authors of this piece:

My role here is not to talk about the historiography of ‘the camps’, but rather to present my own perceptions and my own fights with these places. I was born in Baddawi camp on the outskirts of the Northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. According to many Palestinians, Baddawi is an insignificant camp in the sense that it is not as popular as other refugee camps such as shatila in Beirut and ain el-helwe in sidon. We used to visit my mother’s family in nahr el-Bared camp nearby, and we spent a very long time there, visiting and staying in contact with my grandparents, my uncles and aunts, cousins, and of course their respective families. We always perceived that their celebrations, as well as their funerals, embodied the continuity of our common presence in lebanon. hence, throughout my life, the journey itself to nahr el-Bared has embodied an unbreakable link between one camp and another through a non-camp space. However, the unbreakable nature of this link was both amputated and transmuted due to the lebanese military’s destruction of nahr el-Bared in 2007, which entailed the physical erasure of the camp and the relocation of the entire camp population, including my relatives, to my own family camp – Baddawi – and other camps across lebanon. Despite the physical destruction of the camp infrastructure, or what Ramadan refers to as an instance of ‘urbicide’, this space, this land, still bears the traces of both the living and the deceased, and my mother has continued to visit the cemetery where my grandparents and relatives are buried in nahr el-Bared. if the destruction of nahr el-Bared in and of itself embodied a nakba within the Nakba,7 the determination to return, visit and revisit the cemetery there has become a central form of solidarity with

6 Bülent Diken, ‘From Refugee Camps to Gated Communities: Biopolitics and the end of the city’, Citizenship Studies 8/1 (2004): 83–106, at p. 91 (referring to Marc Augé).

7 Nakba (catastrophe) is the Arabic term used to denote the mass exodus from Palestine in 1948 (see Constantine Zureik, Ma’na al-Nakba [Beirut, 1948]). The notion of a nakba within the Nakba therefore refers to an additional catastrophe (such as the destruction of the camp and subsequent displacement from Nahr el-Bared) within the overarching national catastrophe. as noted by adonis, ‘place is not outside of a human being but rather inside and so every spoilage of the place is damaging to human beings’ (‘Beirut today: a Veritable city or a Mere historical name?’, Home Works II [Oct.–Nov. 2003]: 14–23, at p. 15).



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Refugee Camps and Cities in Conversation 133

memory and history. since leaving the camps to live in Beirut and later oxford, i have completed what i would refer to as a benign desertion of the camps – this is a physical absence that allows you, or perhaps requires you, to reflect on the ways in which you perceive and understand camps and cities. it is as if i needed that absence from the camp to be able to evaluate the situation from a different location.

Far from an official historiography of the Palestinian or other camps, this chapter therefore invites further conversations between differently situated individuals to explore the interconnectivities between diverse types of camps and forms of city-space. it centralizes subjective accounts constituted and reconstituted at a critical distance and incorporating comparative experiences which facilitate a sharper and more multi-faceted understanding of these spaces and diverse dynamics. the nature of palestinian refugee camps is thus addressed through a reflection on the position of the individual and the collectivity in relation to the construction and reconstruction of ‘the camp’ at home and away. the traces and symbolisms embodied in such camp-like spaces are illuminated, as are the ways in which refugees and those bearing the signs of ‘refugeeness’ negotiate their belonging to a medium which is both abstract and yet ever-present.8

the chapter presents the outcome of an iterative process which has involved the development of three rhetorical lenses which ultimately culminate in the emergence of a joint voice.9 it derives from a preliminary informal conversation held between, and subsequently transcribed by, the two authors: yMQ, a poet and translator who was born in a palestinian refugee camp and who lived and worked in a variety of camps in Lebanon before arriving in the United Kingdom, and EFQ, a scholar working within the field of refugee studies with extensive academic experience of conducting research in and about refugee camps and urban hosting contexts in the Middle east and north africa. Rather than systematically presenting these two voices as separate and distant interpretive positions, however, it is precisely the long-standing shared and intimate connection and attachment with each others’ experiences, interpretations and re-interpretations of such matters which has led to the explicit development of a third voice. in spatial terms, once could depict this as a multi-directional and fluid movement between space A and space B into the constitution of space c, a hybrid ‘third space of enunciation’ (following Bhabha).10 it is this intense personal and academic interconnectivity

8 this chapter can usefully be read in conjunction with Fiddian-Qasmiyeh’s multi-sited contribution regarding Muslim asylum-seekers’ and refugees’ inter-generational negotiation of religious identity and practice in three key city-scapes in this volume.

9 We thank the editors of this volume for encouraging us to implement this rhetorical device in our piece.

10 Bhabha refers to the third space as a ‘contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation’ arguing that ‘it is in this space that we will find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others. And by exploring this hybridity, this “Third Space”, we



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and the recognition of the processes of mutual influence underpinning both our individual and conjoined perspectives, which has led to the development of this third voice, which neither negates nor confirms our respective views. While the original transcribed conversation which underpins this piece was formally structured as yMQ and eFQ respectively posing and responding to one another’s questions, ideal-typically from the position of insider and outsider,11 the third voice aims neither to dilute nor to artificially amplify the divergences and similarities of our opinions. As a result, and perhaps as a direct reflection of the increasingly fluid ways in which both camps/cities and normative and symbolic religious/spiritual practices and identities are conceptualized, this chapter at times presents a clearly identifiable speaker whose lived experiences are immediately recognizable as ‘their own’, while at other times the authors’ voices and perspectives are blurred.

In addition to reflecting on the tropes of cities and camps and focusing in particular on the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and camp-like spaces constituted by palestinians elsewhere, the chapter investigates selected religious or sacred dimensions of experience within city/camp life and a range of ways in which social and socio-cultural rituals and religious practices may overlap in these contexts. In so doing, it transcends an explicit identification and analysis of religious modes per se and rather develops an ‘alternative’ articulation of forms of expression and identification which may, or may not, fall within the traditional remit of ‘religious studies’.12

may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves’ (homi K. Bhabha, ‘Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences’, in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin [eds], The Post-Colonial Studies Reader [2nd edn, New York, 2006]), pp. 155–7, at pp. 156, 157).

11 In earlier collaborative work, we addressed the researcher’s insider–outsider position in more detail and presented ‘an invitation for future research to invite refugees and asylum-seekers to become co-researchers rather than simply “participants” and “interviewees”’ (Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, ‘Asylum-Seekers and Refugees from the Middle east and north africa: negotiating politics, Religion and identity in the UK’, Journal of Refugee Studies 23/3 [2010]: 294–314, at pp. 300–1). The present chapter transcends this denomination of ‘co-researchers’ through the alternative rhetorical voice and invocation of Bhabha’s third space of enunciation.

12 As argued by Talal Asad, ‘there cannot be a universal definition of religion’, as its ‘constitutive elements and relationships are historically specific, [and] because that definition itself is an historical by-product of discursive processes’ (Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam [Baltimore, MD, 1993], p. 29). in line with his argument, this piece is guided by the recognition that ‘religious symbols cannot be understood independently of their historical relations with non-religious symbols or their articulations in and of social life, in which work and power are always crucial’ (ibid., p. 53). As such, we draw upon and explore a range of symbols and practices which can be seen as marking and being marked by temporality, permanence and/or transient permanence in a specific historical and geopolitical context: that of the Palestinian refugee camps in lebanon.



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at least two ontological religious modes emerge as being prevalent in Palestinian camps such as Baddawi. The first is intimately and inherently related to religion as an organic power which sheds light on the individual’s beliefs as well as his/her practices according to a clear set of principles and values governed by faith itself. the second is the metaphorical condition which gives the camp a central role in people’s lives as the all-encompassing sphere to which people return in an attempt to seek validation of their identities as refugees.

In other words, camps themselves have become a key destination-point (both for those of us who live in the camps and those of us who have been able to leave to live elsewhere), which can only be accessed through a laborious process of identification and understanding of the place itself. palestinian refugees who live in camps, as well as those of us who visit on a seasonal basis, can be understood to perceive their journey, on a symbolic level, as a pilgrimage to a sacred space which attaches them directly to their national dreams and pending state. the conceptualization of these pilgrimages as a strategy of constant reconnection between the (current or former) camp-resident and the camp itself not only problematizes the way we observe religion and religiosity in general terms, but also challenges us to upgrade the status of camps into that of, for instance, mosques, churches and altars: destination-points with key metaphorical and ontological underpinnings. such an aporia draws attention to the simultaneous tension and attraction between permanence and transience, visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, which pervades conceptualizations of religious practices and performances, on the one hand, and the image of the refugee, on the other, as the one who visits and then disappears and as the one who remains omnipresent. Refugees return to that innate place which we call a camp because it is there that the remnants of ourselves lie, and it is there that we believe in ourselves as refugees whose status is still pending. only there do religion and its metaphorical interpretations lie equidistantly from each other.

Beginnings

Refugee camps are archetypally conceptualized as temporary and transient spaces, with temporality or temporariness typically associated with the notion of the camp:

Refugee camps boast a new quality: a ‘frozen transience’, an on-going, lasting state of temporariness, a duration patched together of moments none of which is lived through as an element of, and a contribution to, perpetuity. the inmates of refugee camps live, literally, from day to day.13

this conceptualization would suggest that it is paradoxical to consider a refugee camp to be a home. yet, qualifying such generic imaginations of the camp, it is possible to propose that memories and politics of the home-land ‘are

13 Zygmunt Bauman, Society Under Siege (Malden, MA, 2002), pp. 114–15.



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complemented and at times superseded by the development of and longing for’ refugees’ home-camps. such refugee camps themselves become ‘spaces to be remembered, and equally spaces for political intervention and action’.14

Directly challenging the typical understanding of camps as spaces or structures constructed a priori – for you rather than by you, by others rather than by yourself – we can counterpoise elements of a self-constructed entity. camps are not merely places which have been imposed upon people; rather, at times they may be chosen, despite the inherently limited array of options available, in order to mark a personal inbetweenness and to highlight an inability to return to a place of origin. creating this temporary space may thus permit the accentuation of concrete political and social injustices. even following displacement, a refugee can still pitch a tent and assert that this is her camp – this is her temporary address – and this is an affirmation not directed by United Nations agencies such as UNRWA15 or UnhcR.16 this is a way of viewing a relationship with a place which is not your own – which is not a place that you were given the chance to choose. the lack of choice, from that perspective, creates ‘the camp’. There is no inherent contradiction in structure and agency in such a context: we have no other option, apart from creating or constructing that place, that camp, to mark our existence. a tension exists, however, between the recognition that camps are not absolutely constructed by UnRWa or UnhcR and the fact that it cannot simplistically be stated that an individual can wholly create her or his own personal camp. the camp ‘always already’ exists before that individual takes the decision to establish a camp or to establish a home within a camp. indeed, can one individual’s house be a camp, or is there an inherent need for a collectivity and an a priori structure to justify the construction of that particular space of inhabitation as a camp?

Whether individually or collectively established, these temporary places rarely become permanent: what is accessed is a state which is beyond temporariness but remains less than permanent – what Bauman refers to as ‘transient permanence’.17 hence, it is somewhere, sometime, between temporary and permanent – it is beyond temporary but is not yet permanent, as we know neither how this refugeeness will end, nor who, or what, might have the capacity to transform this individual and collective state of refugeeness: the Un, states, organizations or communities themselves. We have yet to find a new adjective or transitive verb to mark that phase more precisely.

14 Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘The Inter-Generational Politics of “Travelling Memories”: Refugee Youth Remembering Home-Land and Home-Camp’, Journal of Intercultural Studies (29 Jan. 2013), <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07256868.2012.746170> (accessed 19 Apr. 2013).

15 The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near east.

16 the United nations high commissioner for Refugees.17 Bauman, Society Under Siege.



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the intention here has not been to create or enlarge a rupture between the collective and the personal but to underline the force of subjectivity: the individual is the one who determines whether a place is a camp or not. For example, there are certain places in Lebanon not classified, either legally or logistically, as camps, because they do not fall under UnRWa’s areas of operation: these are instead officially labelled ‘gatherings’. The inhabitants of these so-called gatherings, of which there are 39 in lebanon,18 including the Qasmieh and Jal el-Baher gatherings, nonetheless consider these places to be camps. it is not the institution that defines the place but rather the individual who does so, the individual who then forms a community or becomes part of a collective.19 given the variety of people’s depictions and conceptualizations of the term ‘camp’, such heterogeneity must be recognized and explored further.

Transitions and Transpositions

a particularly relevant development in the way that people see themselves as refugees, residents or citizens is conspicuous in the example of palestinian refugees who have successfully left the camps for Sweden and live as citizens, legally speaking, in what might be called ‘estate-camps’ (in terms of their location in social housing estates) or ‘tent-ative camps’. to visit a small neighbourhood in sweden and discover a ‘new Baddawi’ beyond Baddawi camp can be pleasantly disconcerting20 – to meet former neighbours and school-friends living together in a swedish estate, rather than in the refugee camps of my childhood, is deeply suggestive of the significance both of channelling certain identity-markers and of re-creating certain spaces, to ensure that your position as an individual who has a cause, who belongs to a loaded history – that is your refugeeness – continues to be palpable.

these people, who decided or had to leave certain refugee camps in lebanon for europe, initially attempted to distance themselves physically from the camp, and yet, in so doing, they have ultimately reconstructed a camp in a new location: the act of deconstructing the camp in lebanon ironically produced another form of camp in sweden itself, in the urban spaces allocated by the swedish authorities. these spaces now have better conditions, and yet their inhabitants continue to

18 Danish Refugee council, Needs Assessment of Palestinian Refugees in Gatherings in Lebanon (Beirut, 2005).

19 the term ‘community’ is not used as such in this context given the presence of multiple, fragmented and often contesting and contested communities within the camp. attempts to present the camp as a homogenous or homogenized place inhabited by a refugee community must therefore be unsettled rather than reproduced.

20 the notion of a ‘new Baddawi’ emerging in sweden was referred to by yMQ’s brother following his visit to the city of helsinborg in southern sweden, where he encountered dozens of acquaintances whom he had last seen over a decade earlier in the original Baddawi in lebanon.



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believe that they belong to something, to a state which takes them back to their national identity, to their homeland and even to certain cultural, religious and national(istic) rituals which are regularly observed both in Sweden, and during seasonal visits to the camps. indeed, collective celebrations such as iftar (breaking the fast) during Ramadan, the establishment of Muslim burial sites and the annual commemoration of the palestinian Nakba in swedish towns and cities are now markers of permanence which are as institutionalized as the anticipation of those who remain in the camps and who expect their family members to continue their seasonal migration to the south (to paraphrase Tayib Salih)21 not only during the summer holidays but also during Ramadan, eid al-Fitr and eid al-adha.

it could be argued that palestinians’ seasonal visits to the camps have been made both possible and necessary by the increasingly permanent migration of the camp to the city, leading to blurred boundaries between these constructs. it is therefore impossible to present a pure and monolithic understanding of specific places, as if these were static and lacked the energy or the ability to change and evolve – as if these places were devoid of residents. Rather, it has been a conscious decision amongst palestinians in sweden to congregate around the same location and to pursue a similar set of activities, rituals and commemorations as those which they and their families pursued in the refugee camps and continue to re-enact during their seasonal visits. in so doing, it is as if they have truly established their own camp for the first time in Sweden, having been constrained through diverse structures when the camps in lebanon were established for them and, ostensibly, on their behalf.

is this conceptualization of the swedish estate-camp or new Baddawi made problematic by these inhabitants being citizens rather than refugees? can one have a refugee camp inhabited by citizens, just as we can have refugees and asylum-seekers living in cities? To what extent does the legal denominator ‘refugee’ or ‘citizen’ mean that the designation ‘camp’ is not solely used from inside but also recognized and is legible for outsiders? once again, i would argue that such a stance should be determined through these individuals’ lenses:

Reflecting upon my own experience, becoming a [British] citizen does not exclude or erase the fact that i was born a refugee. on the contrary, it is particularly vital for me to remain in contact with my history, or perhaps histories, of refugeeness, and the reality that the majority of my family are still refugees, and are still inhabitants of different refugee camps in lebanon. how can a son or a brother be a citizen while the rest of his family are refugees elsewhere? It is that personal, familial linkage which allows you to respond to that history with knowledge and acceptance of the fact that you are part of a group. It is not a tribalistic linkage, and yet as a result of being part of that place, of that upbringing, your citizenship does not cancel out the refugeeness of the other (which is simultaneously part of yourself).

21 tayib salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. D. Johnson-Davies (oxford, 1969).



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That is why you can, of course, have refugees, citizens and asylum-seekers all within the same place, all within a camp or, indeed, within a city. in effect, it is possible to relate cities directly to diversity, to their ability to absorb people with different cultural, religious, social and political backgrounds and who may have different causes within that particular place. london as a city is rooted in differentiation – the capacity to include or incorporate different nations within its space, nations which ultimately function within an overarching nation but continue to have other, transnational relationships.

In this regard, leaving Baddawi camp to work in Beirut was a highly significant transition for me, despite the apparent geographical proximity of these locations. Relocating to live with my brother in Burj al-Barajneh camp on the outskirts of Beirut and to work in the Sabra and Shatila camps and then to leave Burj al-Barajneh and settle in Shatila camp offered me the opportunity to live and work in different refugee camps. Revisiting the relationship between individual and assigned spaces, i have been fully aware that the physical transposition, which in some respects offers the opportunity to expand and flourish, is compromised by an inability to feel settled. sadly, we have never had this feeling: we have never felt settled or at ease with the place. indeed, leaving a camp does not necessarily mean changing conditions – you are only changing geography, and yet these conditions continue to haunt you, continue to accompany you. When moving between camps, cities such as tripoli and Beirut have only acted as transit stations, as the route which you cannot inhabit, on which you cannot stay for long, which you have to leave. it is about passing or crossing or moving from one camp to another – these cities have always existed outside the camps rather than functioning as ‘real’ cities. i have always had a problematic relationship with these places, and, tragically, i have always felt relatively more comfortable in the camps: this attachment to a space, despite its ostensible temporariness and transience, is validated through a diversity of means, ranging from the intrinsic characteristics of the place and its inhabitants, to the ambivalent relationship revolving around physical and spiritual markers embodied in specific sites and signs therein.

Markers of (Im)permanence

Despite their size, some of the camps have acted like cities in their capacity to include tens of thousands of people of diverse nationalities – not only palestinians, but also Sudanese, Egyptians, Sri Lankans, Syrians and even Lebanese. These individuals and groups have continuously permeated the camps, because they correspond socially and economically within the parameters of the camps. in that respect, the palestinian camps in lebanon act as small cities, developing their own economies, their own shops, even if these do not exist as concrete architectural additions. such mechanisms are intimately attributed to survival and to the fact that people may establish a shop to maintain their own precarious existence but also to respond actively to, and within, a very passive environment. in light of all of the



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sanctions and restrictions placed upon the camps’ inhabitants, responding to such enforced passivity in such a creative fashion is ingenious, inscribing their presence and concurrently a sense of security and belonging, even if this is characterized by investing in a place which is ultimately dead. Dead in the sense that camps – if we personalize them – do not belong to the rest of lebanon. even if they have been trying to be part of that landscape, they have failed to be accepted and take on a life of their own. Whilst acting as independent spaces within a country, they have nonetheless always maintained their own passivity, in the sense that they are physically and psychologically besieged – feeling unable to expand, to belong, to believe that their presence will be acknowledged in a way which might show some human correspondence between palestinian refugees and the lebanese government.22 palestinian refugees remain ostracized within their refugee camps, unable to exercise, to look after their bodies and ageing dramatically as a result. simultaneously, both architecturally and demographically, the population is increasing, and yet the space is contracting – hence the term passivity, as these two dimensions have not developed at the same rate, resulting in a sense of stagnancy: despite the multiplication of the population, these places fail to grow in terms of facilities, vision or acceptance by others.

In spite of the existence of permanent markers and markers of permanence in the camps, important points of reference such as ration-centres, on the one hand, and markers such as tombstones, on the other, paradoxically resist representing a stable sense of place. Frequenting the former demonstrates the ambivalent bond which exists between palestinians and UnRWa, suggesting refugees’ reliance upon a god-like entity which acts as the ultimate provider23 to which we pay homage in order to ensure our survival, while visiting the latter centralizes a crucial but transcendent bond between refugees, their history and the space of memory. the existential attraction to these particular sites located within the camps, both by camp residents and those undertaking seasonal visits to their home-camps, is often paralleled by processes of individual and collective repulsion, rather than these spaces and experiences necessarily being perceived as symbols of stability and belonging:

Visiting the camp and its constitutive sites, in particular our family home, the market and the cemetery, acts as a unifying factor for those of us who live outside of the camps. it is not the inherent characteristic of the camp which attracts us

22 tragic incidents, including the israeli invasion, the camps War and the civil War, are amongst the numerous processes which have scarred the relationship between palestinian refugees and the lebanese government.

23 The notion of UNRWA as a god-like entity implicitly relates to Turner’s research, which explores Burundian refugees’ perceptions of UnhcR as ‘a better husband’ by virtue of its power to provide for families which are unable to or prevented from providing for themselves (simon turner, Angry Young Men in Camps: Gender, Age and Class Relations among Burundian Refugees in Tanzania, UNHCR Working Paper No. 9, New Issues in Refugee Research [Geneva, 1999]).



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to return. Rather, it is an almost magnetic force that draws us towards our past and present, a ‘placeless place’,24 in which we are positioned on ‘the inside of the outside, or vice versa’,25 to which we travel in order to fulfil our material and symbolic duty towards our families and broader communities, to personally sustain a continuity between refugees in the camps and those dispersed abroad. When my sister, who is based in sweden, my brother, based in canada, and i, direct our sights towards the camps from a distance, and when we return to our home-camp and the camps of our relatives, we do so primarily to maintain the pulse in our bond with our family and heritage, and, of course, to assist our families materially. comfort in this respect is related to being able to belong – not to a fixed identity or a fixed place – but to an overarching community and its major concerns and unfulfilled hopes.

if the camp itself is simultaneously a magnetic and yet repellent space, which one is beholden to visit and revisit, despite the suffering which it entails, to which we belong without belonging, particular spaces within the camp further demonstrate the specificities of this ambivalent relationship.

in many respects, the regularity of queuing up at UnRWa distribution centres could be interpreted as a ritualistic act in itself, mobilizing palestinians in and towards these pre-assigned places, effectively conditioning refugees to flow towards these sites in the expectation of receiving a material reward: to prepare, to travel, to arrive, to enter, to receive, to exit, to exist. to quote my mother’s words at each and every distribution ritual: ‘Let us all queue up so we can find a place.’

The entire rule revolved around us and, for them, it was for our sake. I never believed them. hours of waiting at the UnRWa distribution centres for some flour, a few tins of tomato paste, sardines and corned beef never made us full or patient enough to come to terms with a superficial reading of Machiavelli.26 My mother would always get up very early to make sure that we received our rations quickly. All of us would take part. My mother was the one whose fingerprints were taken at every ration distribution. No signatures, since she is illiterate.27

24 See Peter Johnson, ‘Unravelling Foucault’s “Different Spaces”’, History of the Human Sciences 19/4 (2006): 75–90, at p. 77.

25 ibid., p. 81.26 The notion of a ‘superficial reading of Machiavelli’ refers, simultaneously, to the

principles that ‘the end justifies the means’ and that the ‘habituation to laws and gods makes possible the institutional life of [refugee camps], in that cooperative habits solve the collective-action problem faced by a multitude of self-ruling [refugees]’ (we have substituted ‘refugee camps’ and ‘refugees’ for the original terms ‘republics’ and ‘citizens’ respectively) (Markus Fischer, ‘Machiavelli’s Political Psychology’, Review of Politics 59/4 [1997]: 789–829, at p. 789).

27 yousif M. Qasmiyeh, ‘Rationing time’, Critical Quarterly (forthcoming). ‘Let us all queue up so we can find a place’ is the opening line of this piece.



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Despite certain family members’ ambivalence or explicit refusal to believe, it is as if palestinians have come to perceive these distribution centres metaphorically as shrines which they attend regularly to ensure their survival and well-being both as individuals and as a collective.

Regular visits to the tombstones of people’s loved ones also conspicuously and vividly mark the way in which the ritualistic connects with the religious, and vice versa. Whilst such visits to the cemetery often take place in line with particular institutionalized religious occasions (especially during Eid) and national commemorations (such as visiting the tombstones of those martyrs killed during specific wars and attacks),28 these enactments also represent a fluid and highly personal attempt to bond with one’s own history through the dead. i recall my mother once saying that ‘tombstones are the only thing that we will not be able to carry with us when we leave’.

Despite its tragic roots, her statement ironically represents a form of physical permanence which is sadly embodied by the dead while the living continue simultaneously to seek transience in the camps and permanence through a desired return to palestine. as such, while the living ‘desire’ transience and refuse their permanent situatedness in the camps – wanting to move, migrate or return to the palestinian home-land – the inevitability of leaving physical and spiritual traces through both bodies and shrines continues to force a never-ending bond with this transience. it is as if neither transience nor permanence has in this context succeeded in existing as a monolithic mode.

Renewed Beginnings

Demonstrating the extent to which this conversation is but starting, the centrality of returning to visit and revisit the cemetery has become even more pertinent since the destruction of the nahr el-Bared camp by the lebanese army in 2007: ‘the old cemetery in the camp is off-limits to civilians because the army has classified it as a military zone, thereby restricting cemetery visits to religious holidays or at the times specified by the army.’29 Refugees have responded vehemently to the interruption or explicit prohibition of their access to these spaces by demanding the opening of the cemetery,30 not only as an embodiment of memory and history but also as an intrinsically holy site within the camp. By reclaiming such burial sites and demanding unmediated access to them, palestinians have not only restated

28 lala Khalili, ‘palestinian commemoration in the Refugee camps of lebanon’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25/1 (2005): 30–45.

29 Qassem Qassem, ‘palestinians in lebanon struggling for neutrality’, Al-Akhbar (20 June 2012), <http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/8702> (accessed 12 Aug. 2012).

30 Marcy newman, ‘Free the Refugees of nahr al-Bared’, Aljazeera (26 June 2012), <http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/06/2012624122326485838.html> (accessed 12 Aug. 2012).



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their desire to forge a strong connection with their past but also to ensure that current and future generations continue to understand and validate their present and presence through the centrality of that and those who have been lost: it is here, in the camps as a whole and in our cemeteries more specifically, that the remnants of ourselves lie.

through a purposefully subjective analysis, which has centralized personal experiences of being physically absent from and yet intimately connected with Baddawi camp, and through the invocation of a ‘third space’ and ‘third voice’, this piece has explored the complex and at times paradoxical relationship which exists between refugees, camps, cities and their respective markers of permanence and impermanence. As key destination-points for residents and seasonal visitors alike, the palestinian refugee camps in lebanon and their constitutive parts, including distribution centres, cemeteries and shrines, have been viewed from a distance and from within, demonstrating the extent to which such spaces can be seen to be replete with, rather than devoid of ‘meanings, traditions and sacrificial, ritual moments’.31 although not all of these locations would traditionally be conceptualized as religious or spiritual in nature, the relationship between the ritualistic aspects of refugees’ visits to distribution centres and those to cemeteries, tombstones and shrines, have been explored in this chapter, in order to shed light on refugees’ relationships with UnRWa, their identity, their past and their precarious present. seasonal visits from urban contexts, which can themselves be characterized as miniaturized camps (such as the Swedish estate-camps), in turn demonstrate the diverse motivations for our on-going return to our home-camps, despite the harsh conditions there. such a return constitutes a means of substantiating both our presence and absence, through pilgrimages to what can be considered to be ‘holy’ camps.

31 Marc Augé, cited in Diken, From Refugee Camps to Gated Communities, p. 91.

Documents

Refugee Camps and Cities in Conversation