'I want to remember the ordinary': Carol Sansour on the Palestine that exists beyond destruction

"Before Palestine was something I had to explain to anyone, it was simply the trees, the breeze and the world in which I knew myself," begins poet and cultural producer Carol Sansour.

In other words, for Carol, Palestine was rooted in the ordinary details of childhood. On snow days in Beit Jala, when the roads were covered in snow and the family was cut off, her mother would cook lentils to keep them warm. Inside, the television would be tuned to Jordan TV, one of their few options, while the family gathered around the ‘Aladdin’ gas heater, burning orange peels in it.

Those memories remain part of how Carol understands Palestine today, and they have also shaped the way she writes about it.

Born in Jerusalem in 1972, she has lived and worked between Palestine, the United States and Europe. Her first poetry collection, In the Time of the Apricots, appeared in Cairo in 2019, followed in 2022 by Jamelia and the French edition, À la saison des abricots.

Her poetry, translated into French, English, Italian, Spanish, Greek and German, moves between intimate memory, displacement, identity and the everyday.

She now lives in Athens, where she directs the Athens Palestine Film Festival and has founded Dounias, a non-profit organisation that produces and presents Arab art and culture in Greece.

Speaking in more detail, Carol shares more about her experiences with The New Arab.

The New Arab: What would you like us to notice if we could walk together through the Beit Jala of your childhood?

Carol Sansour: Just breathe in the scent of the first apricots of the season, feel the fresh breeze on your skin, and listen to the sounds around you. Before I tell you anything about Palestine, I want you to notice how the place makes you feel.

Can we go into the women who shaped your understanding of Palestine and life?

There are women everywhere in my work: Jamila, my great-grandmother, and Jalilah and Ramona, my grandmothers. They shaped not so much my understanding of Palestine as my understanding of life, while showing me that their lives could not simply be reduced to ideas of 'Palestinian womanhood'. Simply by being who they were, they guided the curious little girl I was towards the matters that really mattered.

Their hardships, and more importantly, the ways they carried themselves through them, taught me things that no political language or official history could have taught me.

I carry their experiences differently because I have the privilege and responsibility of looking back on them, placing them within a larger history and asking questions they may not have had the space to ask.

If you could remove the words 'occupation' and 'genocide', how would you describe Palestine to somebody who has never encountered it?

It is really occupying me... forgive the pun... I find it very difficult to imagine who we could have been without occupation and genocide. I don’t know what my psyche would have been like if I had been born free. I wonder: what does it feel like to be free?

But oppression has not made Palestinians jaded.

If anything, it has made us understand the essence of life in a very particular way. Maybe because we cherish it, because we long for it, we know how to find pleasure in it.

There is an insistence on living, not simply surviving, but finding ways to laugh, love, celebrate, and be together.

Palestinian women are often represented internationally either as victims of suffering or as figures of heroic resistance. What kinds of women, and what kinds of ordinary life, disappear between those two images?

What disappears between those two images is the woman herself. Mothers, daughters, lovers, difficult women, funny women, angry women, women who contradict themselves, women who desire things, women who make mistakes.

The dangerous thing about these two images, however, is that both are useful. The victim creates sympathy; the heroine creates admiration. But neither necessarily creates intimacy.

That is where I want to live. In the space between the headline and the symbol. In the ordinary life that continues alongside history.

In the expectation of representation, do you see a contradiction between European institutions celebrating Palestinian artists and deciding which Palestinian speech is acceptable?

I have seen how the expectation of representation can erase the diversity of Palestinian experience.

I experienced this directly when a poem I wrote about Palestinian political prisoners was removed from a German anthology of Arab poets writing in Europe.

I was being included as a Palestinian poet while a part of my Palestinian voice was being excluded.

Institutions and individuals can be very eager to celebrate Palestinian artists; to programme us, translate us, exhibit us, talk about our work, but sometimes that welcome comes with an invisible condition.

I believe solidarity should create space for somebody to speak in their own voice.

When those offering solidarity begin deciding what can be said or which parts of Palestinian experience are acceptable, it becomes another form of control.

What we need is not necessarily more people speaking on our behalf.

We need more spaces where Palestinians can speak for themselves, including when what they say is uncomfortable, contradictory, angry, inconvenient or simply not what is expected to hear.

An institution can create a platform for my Palestinian voice while controlling its boundaries. I call this a very sophisticated form of silencing because, from the outside, it can appear to be inclusion.

They are handing the Palestinian the script and not the microphone.

Through the Athens Palestine Film Festival, you've insisted on encountering Palestinian cinema as cinema rather than merely political testimony. What can a Palestinian comedy, love story or science-fiction film tell the audience about Palestine?

Through the Athens Palestine Film Festival, I have insisted that Palestinian cinema should be encountered as cinema.

They imagine futures. They make jokes. They fall in love. They are bored, ridiculous, tender, ambitious, angry. They are, in other words, human beings.

I can’t believe I am saying that. For a moment, the Palestinian is not a political subject, not a headline. They are simply a person whose experience is recognisable.

For me, the most powerful moments are often not the large political scenes but those in the laughter in the cinema, in an uncomfortable silence, or in the reaction to something so ordinary that it could have happened in a Greek or Palestinian home.

Those moments are incredibly powerful because they don't require us to manufacture a connection. The connection is already there.

I don't want Palestinian cinema to become acceptable only when an audience can recognise itself in it. A Palestinian comedy doesn't have to teach a Greek audience about Palestine; it can simply make them laugh.

A love story doesn't have to explain an occupation, but it can simply break their heart. When, for a moment, nobody is being asked to perform their identity, and we are just sitting in the dark watching a film together.

Palestine has been encountered internationally through an overwhelming visual archive of unprecedented destruction, occupation, famine and genocide. How do you protect your own memories of Palestine from being overwritten by those images? What are you afraid the world will remember about Palestinians and, perhaps more importantly, what are you afraid it will forget?

Is it too much to say that I no longer care very much about what the world remembers or forgets about Palestine? What is ‘the world’, anyway?

I am more concerned with my own responsibility to remember and, specifically, the silence of my grandparents and ancestors. That silence was born of human brutality, but it could also be a means of survival.

Sometimes people survive by not speaking, by putting certain memories away. I want to leave a trace of my own childhood in Beit Jala, in Jerusalem, in Haifa and in Gaza and its Mediterranean coast, of what it felt like to be there before these places became almost entirely represented through images of destruction.

I want to remember the ordinary and the complicated, because they are part of what is being erased too.

I want to be a witness, but also a thorn in the side of those who think that futures can be built on the corpses of my people without those people having futures of their own. A thorn in the side of perpetrators, and of anyone who would rather history become clean, convenient, and forgetful.

What would Palestine ask Carol Sansour?

I think Palestine would ask me, "When are you coming back to be physically with me?" I am sure ‘She’ misses me as much as I miss ‘Her’.

[Cover photo credit: @institutfrancaisgrece Instagram page]

Tatiana Svorou is a journalist covering forced migration and humanitarian policy, with a focus on the Mediterranean