“You Will Not Kill Our Imagination”: Palestinian writer Saeed Teebi’s book launch at Western University

(*artwork by Incé Husain: Palestine flag emerging from olive tree, filled with imagery of watermelons, oranges, Palestine sunbirds, keys, a keffiyeh, the sun and the sea.)

“The greatest battleground in any war is always that of story,” reads Palestinian writer Saeed Teebi from his memoir You Will Not Kill Our Imagination at his book launch at Western University’s Conron Hall on November 10th. “In my view, Israel’s greatest accomplishment is that, even decades after its colonial inception, its story has remained in the foreground, while the stories of the Palestinian natives to the land continue to exist in relative obscurity. Of course, the obscurity of the Palestinian story is a manufactured one, a whole cloth tailored to fit snug over the minds of Western audiences. It takes forms too numerous to count, from the suppression of our news, however significant, beneath the seams of the front page, to the compacting of our bodies into bloodless statistics…the Palestinian story is, in its very existence, a refutation of the founding Zionist mythology of a land without people… Palestinian narratives in the West are thus counternarratives and forever carry the whiff of subversiveness for that reason. The oppressed exist in an omnipresent parallel with their oppressors. Palestinians are not permitted to be people on their own, outside of their adversariality to Israel. This is a narrative duality that is only applied in one direction; Zionist stories can, and usually do, ignore Palestinian existence, even if it would seem impossible to do so credibly…Things like this seep into us eventually. We internalize oppressive expectations when we tell our own stories. When every popular conception of you is that of someone in chains, you begin to feel the chains even if they aren’t physically there. You narrate yourself, not in spite of the chains, but around them.”

Thunderous applause filled the auditorium at the end of Teebi’s reading. The evening continued in a dialogue between Teebi and Fatme Abdallah, a PhD candidate at Western University studying Palestinian prison literature. Seated across each other in armchairs, Teebi and Abdallah discussed questions of identity, representation, language, Nakba stories, and prisons - both real and symbolic - as probed in Teebi’s memoir. The book, written in part while Teebi was  writer in residence at Western University last year, documents Teebi’s reflections on witnessing genocide in Gaza from afar. The inside cover of the book reads: What does it mean to be of the Palestinian diaspora in such a moment? What does it mean to be of a people who have sustained such a large-scale assault not only on their homeland but also on their entire identity? What is the role of art, of language - of imagination - in asserting one’s identity when that very assertion is read as an act of subversion?

Abdallah describes her experience reading You Will Not Kill Our Imagination as a “struggle between two extremes.” She was caught between celebration of the book’s sheer courage and devastation that the genocide it reacts to continues. By the end of the book, her resignation had “transformed to a new vigor” that brought her hope. 

Pauline Wakeham, Western University professor of English and Writing Studies, was viscerally marked by the memoir.

“I could literally start to feel my heart pounding beneath my chest. Saeed’s words are so unflinchingly honest and urgent that I was being awakened in new ways to the horrors of genocide, to the destructive effects of silencing, and to how such silencing has spread far beyond the borders of Gaza into our lives here in Canada and across the world,” says Wakeham. 

Little Wren Books set up a stall at the book launch with copies of You Will Not Kill Our Imagination and Her First Palestinian, Teebi’s short story collection. 

***

As a work that centers questions of Palestinian identity, Abdallah began by asking Teebi how he grappled with representing the Palestinian people while writing about his own life. How did he deal with that burden of representation, a weight described by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish as “the collective voice exists within my individual voice, whether I want it to or not; when I speak about a sad winter’s evening in Paris, for better or worse every Palestinian thinks that I’m representing him”? How did he balance responsibility and truth in his work? 

Teebi refused to think about representation.

“I couldn't think about representation because if I thought about representation I'd be allowing myself a level of dishonesty. When we're thinking about representation as artists, we’re now concerned with the audience, how the audience is viewing us. And I didn't want to care about the audience,” says Teebi. “I wanted to write this book as an expression of myself, but more importantly, to a community of people very much like me. A community of people who have witnessed the genocide that we’ve witnessed - the most anti-human thing that they’ve witnessed - and do not understand how the rest of the world is okay with it. I could not allow myself, in the course of writing this book, to concern myself with everybody else because concerning myself with a general population is what got us to the stage where we're afraid to say a word that is contrary to what the mainstream would want us to say. If I were to submit to that, it would be dishonest and counterintuitive.”

In 2008, Mahmoud Darwish wrote about Palestinian writers and the range of their voices: 

In this difficult condition of history, Palestinian writers live. Nothing distinguishes them from their countrymen – nothing except one thing: that writers try to gather the fragments of this life and of this place in a literary text; a text they try to make whole… Each poet or writer has their own way of writing themselves and their reality. The one historic condition does not produce the one text – or even similar texts, for the writing selves are many and different. Palestinian literature does not fit into ready-made molds.

Teebi writes of his father, an accomplished scientist who thought of writing an autobiography as a way to bond with Teebi. When he approached this with Teebi, who was twenty one at the time, Teebi responded that his father’s life story wasn’t “remarkable” for an autobiography. It strayed from the Western notion of “acceptable narrative” that Teebi had internalized. Teebi now recognizes his reaction as “an encapsulation of the mind colonization that I was under at the time.” 

“My father was an incredibly accomplished scientist- just actually truly beyond words, just how good he was at what he did as a researcher and as a physician. And he had survived not one but two exiles in his life, and continued, in every new exile, his career and his intellectual pursuits, almost hardly affected, which is rare. And here I was telling him I actually don't think that's remarkable. Because I didn't see how someone like that who doesn't follow the canonical story of most Western conceptions of success - which did not include being Palestinian, in which you wouldn’t talk about being in exile as a Palestinian - that wasn't something that struck me as a story that could be told.” 

Teebi’s father identified most as a poet. When his father was in his fifties, a poem he had written in Arabic at the age of twenty-five was published in Al Jazeera. One line reads: “My age approaches a quarter century and I have not found an identity.” 

Teebi shares that his father insisted on suppressing Palestinian identity, aware that it carried risk. 

“My father was the reason that I started concealing my own story. If his life advice to me as a Palestinian could be distilled, it was  ‘marginalize yourself, make your identity as a Palestinian as small a piece of you as possible’,” says Teebi. “The way I was brought up, being clear about your identity is the quickest way to find yourself in danger. If you are clear about your Palestinianness, you become someone who is controversial, someone who is unacceptable, someone who comes with unsavory connotations, someone whose body is actually precarious depending on which part of the world you live in.” 

In a 2002 interview, Darwish said of the Palestinian identity: 

We have our own identity, a personality that is peculiar to us, just as we have our own questions that are particular to our condition, in addition to the others that we share with the rest of humanity. Any trite, routine image ends up reducing and usurping the humanity of the Palestinian and renders him unable to be seen as merely human. He becomes either the hero or the victim—not just a human being. Therefore I very seriously advocate our right to be frivolous. I strongly believe in our right to be frivolous. The sad truth is that in order to reach that stage of being frivolous we would have to achieve victory over the impediments that stand in the way of our enjoying such a right.

Abdhallah reads a quote by Darwish on identity: “Identity is the child of birth, but at the end it is self-invention and not an inheritance of the past.” She wonders how Teebi approaches the question of identity. 

Teebi rejects the idea of a singular identity and gravitates towards a multiplicity. He fears his self-concept being confined to one thing. For him, identity is “where you fit in the matrix of the people that you care about.” He shares that those close to him care deeply about things that arise from their identities as Palestinians; they see Teebi reflected in that communal identity, a tie he cannot sever. 

“I consider myself in life to be a bit of an escape artist, just generally. I fear being pinned down, I fear being told that I am one thing. I have had a phobia of being clear about myself for a long time because of the way I escape the conception of a singular kind of identity,” says Teebi. “My mother cares about the poetry of my father, which is about Palestine, she cares about so many things that are very much inextricable from her identity as a Palestinian. Similarly, everybody of my identity sees me as belonging to that, so how can I really have the luxury of escaping that? The people who are closest to me, mean the most to me, the ideas that are super important to me all come from the fact of that inheritance of identity.” 

***

Abdallah notes Teebi’s “reclaiming” of two Arabic words in his memoir: jidaal and jaakara. He explains “jidaal” as a “useless argument” and “jaakara” as “part spite, part insouciance, all defiance.” Abdallah says both words carry “inherently negative connotations” in Arabic, but Teebi writes about jaakara as something to strive for in the Palestinian struggle - “a refusal to yield, a stubborn insistence on living and speaking in the face of the settler colonial order not only built to dispossess but built to destroy completely.” He describes a scene from his memoir that embodies this: a Palestinian in Gaza who sets up a folding chair in the rubble of his apartment building and starts smoking a cigarette. It is an unrelenting declaration - this is where I live. 

“He doesn't give a shit. The concept is that just because you’re getting hit doesn't mean you stop. It means you don't give a shit and you're gonna do what you want,” Teebi explains. “I want to embody the concept of jaakara.”  

Teebi contrasts this with the work of Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, who would flock to public debates to outreason Zionists and enlighten listeners. Teebi describes Said as “valiant but harried”, engaging in an “intellectual struggle that risks futility” - a well-meaning embodiment of jidaal. 

“The idea at the time was that he was a representative of Palestinians and he was trying to convince an impartial-minded audience that Palestinians have a just cause. I don't think that his premise that his audience was impartial was a correct one. The arguments against Palestinian safety, security, justice, liberty, are all bad faith arguments and they should be treated as such,” Teebi explains. “That’s why I very specifically did not write this book trying to convince people. I wrote this book to try to solidify us, to try to solidify myself, to try to solidify likeminded people. If somebody is on the fence, truly, in a good faith way, they will be brought in. The people who are on the other side - no amount of words will convince them. They respond to things like power, pressure.”

Abdallah senses that Teebi’s writing career carries the metaphor of both surrendering to prisons and breaking them. In his memoir, he writes of the “linguistic imprisonment” that confines Palestinian narrative. Some of his previous work lies snugly within these prisons; vying for a writing award, he wrote a short story that “recycled tropes of Arab masculinity” to flatter Western audiences. He succeeded in securing the award. 

“Prisons don’t have to be extremely literal to be made. The prisons that Palestinians in exile are in, the linguistic prisons, are incredibly widespread and wide-ranging,” says Teebi. “I got an award for that story because I locked myself into those bars. I said ‘here’s the thing you want from me’ and they said ‘thank you, we will take it and give you a prize so you may continue to produce stuff of that kind’. That's why when I accomplished that I was so mad at myself for having unconsciously given into the imprisonment of the mind. All these different kinds of prisons are things that we see for Palestinians. This book represents my explicitly rejecting them.”

Teebi’s references to prisons in his memoir were intentional but deliberately unexplained. He thought of the literal prisons that cage Palestinian hostages, the illegal blockade of Gaza, and the life-suppressing apartheid. 

“As an exile, I walk freely in whatever land I'm in. It felt presumptuous for me to talk about prisons, and yet I very specifically put it there without drawing that (connection).”

***

The first chapter of Teebi’s memoir recounts his grandparents’ story of exile during the Nakba. It describes their bus ride from the north of Palestine to Gaza, a camp in Gaza with Egyptian soldiers, and a conversation between a soldier and his grandfather. Abdallah was astounded by the story’s level of detail. She shared that her own family’s stories are largely unknown or untold; the retellings convey only a few glimpses of displacement. She asks if Teebi engaged in “imaginative storytelling”, creating a fictionalized representation capable of holding a revival of timelines, logistics, landscapes, emotions, and dialogues. 

Teebi shares that he talked with many family members to find the story, seeking strands of commonality and divergence in their retellings to weave into a lucid timeline. Gaps in the story were stitched together with details from Palestinians with similar pasts. Teebi is unsure whether his grandparents truly took a bus to Gaza or the course of his grandfather’s talk with the Egyptian soldier; he knows that many Palestinians who made the same journey took buses, and that encounters with Egyptian soldiers are well-documented in diaries of Palestinians. 

“They were highly educated imaginings. I'm very clear about what I know and don't know. I’m not afraid to deconstruct it. It very well could have happened that way, and if it didn't, the emotional framework for what happened is there in the storyline. The construction of the narrative becomes almost mindblowing,” says Teebi. “That’s my job as a storyteller. Whenever you make that narrative, that's necessarily an imaginative process. It’s the richest, most amazing thing that you have as storytellers, to be able to revive that part of time. I’m not a historian; I consider myself as being an active participant in their life because I'm the inheritor of those lives.”

Teebi’s cousin, an illustrator, created visual landscapes of a future Palestine. Olive trees stretch in the town halls of all the major cities, geographic signposts mark their names. The landscapes are elaborate and relentlessly imaginative. Teebi finds them beautiful and motivational. He writes:

I want to never hope, to never be stuck in its expected static. I want to always imagine because there is nothing that compares with the engine of imagining. 

“The title of the book is You Will Not Kill Our Imagination. I didn’t say You Will Not Kill My Imagination. For me, my imagination is all secondary to the collective imagination,” says Teebi. “People imagine primordial values like justice and liberty - all the things that are constitutional type values. Those constitutional type values do not exist. And I think that’s what we all imagine. Security - that you can live in dignity walking down the street in Palestine, that I could visit Palestine and not have to go through ten hours of (interrogation), that normal kind of baseline level of imagination we all share is what I’m envisioning.” ♦