This is a conversation with Yafa El Masri, a Palestinian refugee researcher who grew up in Burj El Barajneh in Beirut, Lebanon. She’s currently finishing her PhD at the University of Padova in Italy.
We primarily spoke about her paper “72 Years of Homemaking in Waiting Zones: Lebanon’s “Permanently Temporary” Palestinian Refugee Camps” which she presented at the 2022 Pluriverse of Eco-social Justice summer school in Coimbra, Portugal, where we met.
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Mentions and Recommendations:
- A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Sornit
- Eleven Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exiles edited by Muhammad Ali Khalidi
- The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You by Dina Nayeri
- Placeless People: Writings, Rights, and Refugees by Lyndsey Stonebridge
- Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Sornit
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Transcript via Antidote Zine:
It contradicts the idea that we present of the camp in Lebanon: as dangerous, as unsafe, as a bad place. It helps people understand that it’s also a welcoming space, a space of support, a space of rescue. It’s a safe haven for many people who are often abandoned by the state in a life-threatening manner.
Yafa El Masri: Hi and thank you for having me. My name is Yafa El Masri; I am originally Palestinian, but I am a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, which means I grew up in a small refugee camp in the south of Beirut called Bourj el-Barajneh. I spent most of my life there, but now I’m finishing my PhD dissertation at the University of Padova in Italy, and I work on solidarity among refugees, commoning, and networks of care in refugee camps for my thesis.
Elia J. Ayoub: We met last summer in Coimbra, Portugal, as part of a summer school called The Pluriverse of Eco-social Justice. You gave a presentation on a paper that’s called “Seventy-two Years of Homemaking in Waiting Zones: Lebanon’s ‘Permanently Temporary’ Palestinian Refugee Camps.” At the time I was reading a book by Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, and I obviously thought about it. The thesis of this book is that it’s debunking the myth that’s pretty widespread in media and apocalyptic movies that when shit hits the fan, it becomes a dog-eat-dog world, everyone is killing and robbing each other, that sort of thing. Basically survival of the fittest. The evidence tends to point the other way.
Yes, of course, there are moments of panic, but overall people come together, they understand that this is an emergency, this is a disaster, and we need to come together. After Hurricane Katrina in the US there was lots of mutual aid; after every big disaster, as we saw more recently in Turkey and Syria, people for the most part come together and volunteer to do something. After the Beirut port explosion in 2020, we saw the same thing. Everyone I knew who was there, regardless of nationality, was picking up rubble, helping out, donating blood, that sort of thing, and they didn’t need anyone telling them to do so. In fact, the state completely abandoned the survivors, as we know, and people probably died because of that.
The reason I thought about this was that obviously Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon are historically a result of the Nakba in Palestine that came as part of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and the Nakba literally means ‘the Catastrophe’ in Arabic. In some sense it’s a form of disaster—it’s an ongoing one; it’s one that’s been prolonged by Israel first and foremost, but also by the state of Lebanon’s own policies against Palestinian refugees.
With that framing in mind, can you introduce your paper? What does “permanently temporary” mean, for example? And what drew you to that topic?
YM: It’s really interesting, the topic of the book you mentioned—I’m not familiar with it but it’s relevant to the concepts that I’m trying to convey in my work. Because I am a Palestinian refugee, I am quite interested in researching topics related to Palestinian refugee camps, because it is an experience that I went through. I am personally and politically attached to it.
Palestinian refugees are the world’s oldest refugee crisis; it’s been going on for over seven decades. They are also one of the world’s biggest stateless communities. So we are talking about a unique situation in terms of protracted displacement, and these refugee camps are the oldest in the world. The one where I come from, Bourj el-Barajneh, was established in 1948. You don’t find that anywhere else in the world; there are no other surviving refugee camps that are this old.
The protracted displacement of Palestinian refugees is quite unique, and quite intense. And specifically in Lebanon, it is also unique in another layer: there is an intersectionality between being excluded from their lands due to the establishment of the occupation, and the exclusion from becoming citizens or active participants in Lebanon.
In the constitution in Lebanon, it’s clearly mentioned that there is never resettlement of non-Lebanese in Lebanon, and this has always been the strategy. This is also a legacy of French colonialism; that part of the constitution was established by French colonialism and then was never changed, it stayed there forever. That is what excludes Palestinian refugees from being able to access public services, from being equal to other citizens in the country.
With that exclusion, if you compare the statistics or the surveys of Palestinians in Lebanon to all the other Palestinians who exist in the Middle East, the difference is striking. The Palestinians in Lebanon have the highest rates of abject poverty, they have the lowest rates of education, they have the highest rates of food insecurity, also related to housing conditions and unemployment—they have the worst conditions compared to refugees even in Syria and Jordan, and even inside Palestine.
That’s striking because if you compare the economic or living conditions between the West Bank and Lebanon, before this crisis at least, Lebanon had a better security situation and a better economic situation, and still the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon suffer the worst circumstances.
The problem here is that we have this double exclusion, and there is this population that is now in Lebanon, between 200,000 and half a million (we don’t know because there are no clear statistics; last time Lebanon had a census was under French mandate in the thirties), in spaces that were established as temporary. UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians in the Near East] was established as a temporary organization to assist these people; their first mandate was for six months, and then for a year.
It is one of the oldest United Nations organizations, and it is quite unique: there is no other United Nations organization that serves one group of people—again because it was meant to be temporary. Six months, one year, two years, and here we are seventy-five years later.They’re older than the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, they’re older than the UNHCR!
But they were designed to give temporary assistance to refugees the same way; they were designed to give temporary housing—all of the aid that we say is designed to be temporary. Refugee camps are not designed to be permanent. But then you look at these temporary resources, and these people are there for seventy-five years. There are four generations of Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon—also across the Middle East. Four generations! They are not temporary anymore.
And it’s such a contradiction, because the kind of assistance you’re getting, the kind of resources you have, the kind of humanitarian aid you get—it’s all designed for temporariness. It’s not designed to be permanent. But still these people are making permanent lives: they’re still raising generation after generation, they’re still inhabiting spaces that are not built in very systematically, architecturally well-engineered ways.
There is this gap: we don’t have the means needed to build permanent lives, because we’re not citizens; we don’t have access to public services; we’re not allowed to construct legally inside the camp—but we do have permanent lives. My family members were born in Bourj el-Barajneh and died in Bourj el-Barajneh. You live your entire life there; that’s a permanent life. You cannot tell me that’s not a permanent life.
So there is this contradiction, this gap, and it’s important to understand this, because it means we need to rethink refugee camps, and we need to rethink displacement, and redesign working with refugee communities.
EA: This is one of the things that’s always frustrated me. I tried to write an essay years ago on the concept of the Other in Lebanon specifically—this is something I’ve taken from James Baldwin. The concept of the Other is fascinating; when it is studied seriously, you understand how crucial it is in the formation of certain identities. Any identity includes an Other; the Other doesn’t have to be a hostile thing, it just means you’re not from here; it can just be a discriptor rather than something that is inherently negative.
But in the context of Lebanon, you mention how old the “refugee crisis” is, going back to 1948, barely after the state of Lebanon officially declared independence after the Second World War—so basically as old as Lebanon, effectively. This is concerning to me. I’ve been doing “Lebanese studies” (for lack of a better term) for a long time now, and this is so core to the idea of Lebanon yet at the same time not talked about as often as you would. It’s categorized separately.
There will be specific studies like refugee studies; they go to the camps in Lebanon and do studies, and those can be very interesting, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not often the case (and when it is, it’s very notable, because it’s uncommon—this is across three languages; English, French, and Arabic) that there will be a study of Lebanon as a political idea that includes and integrates this “Other.”
That’s bizarre, because it leaves out a significant percentage of the population that is as old as the rest of the population, as far as citizenship goes (we “became Lebanese” in the forties).
YM: Especially since Lebanon is the country that hosts the highest percentage of refugees in the world. According to UNHCR, two out of five people in Lebanon are refugees. That’s the highest percentage on the planet. For that country to have that is very strange.
EA: It is important to bring up the concept of sectarianism in Lebanon, because most Palestinian refugees in Lebanon happen to be Sunni Muslims, and in Lebanon, sectarianism is a huge thing. The reason why my grandfather, who was born and raised in Haifa and met my grandmother in Haifa (she is Italian)—the reason they became Lebanese citizens is because my grandfather was a Christian, and this was part of the politics of the fifties under Chamoun. I grew up not knowing we were part Palestinian—I had no idea until the age of sixteen.
The reason it’s so crucial to talk in terms of sectarianism is because, in the calculation of the politicians who want to maintain the system as it is, they use those terms explicitly. [Leader of the rightwing Free Patriotic Movement] Gebran Bassil infamously said some years ago that he is in favor of Lebanese women passing on their nationality (that’s still not allowed in Lebanon) to their spouse and children as long as Syrians and Palestinians are specifically excluded.
They can’t make it law because there’s no way of doing so without explicitly discriminating, so they just don’t do it at all. It’s such a core component of everything. I took part in the uprisings in 2015 and 2019, and there were Palestinian refugees, friends of mine, among us. They were just there. There was nothing distinctive about them, with the exception of a few who flew the Palestinian flag. For the most part they were just other Beirutis, Tripolitans, some are from the north, some are from the south.
YM: Because what happens in Lebanon directly impacts them! They are part of that country. If the economy changes, they’re changing. If the laws change, their lives change. They’re living there—it’s crazy that they’re not considered to have rights or that they’re part of the country.
EA: And it’s rendered invisible. Palestinian friends who were there (and Syrian friends the same) felt it: Don’t make yourself too visible. Be there as just another person on the streets, but don’t specifically say that you are there as a Palestinian, because then you can be the target of media smearing. TV will say Daesh is coming from Idlib to Tripoli and shit like that!
YM: My mom told me the same in 2015. She was like, It’s going to be in the news the next day that the Palestinians are infiltrating the protests, trying to ruin it, planting things and spying.
EA: We’re laughing about it, but it’s a real problem.
I mentioned I didn’t know we were Palestinians until the age of sixteen or seventeen. How I found out is a ridiculous story, and also sad. We were doing a genealogy thing for a school project, and I go to my grandmother, who, as far as I knew, was a Lebanese woman from Zahlé in the Beqaa Valley, and she forgot she was supposed to lie to me. When she said she was born in Haifa, I was like, What? And then she said, Yes, Haifa. No, Zahlé!
On the spot she didn’t quite recognize what happened, so she went along: she actually told me part of the story, in a completely incoherent way: she wasn’t actually born in Haifa, she was born in Italy, but she grew up in Haifa where she met my grandfather. She had told the wrong lie, because it was my grandfather who was born in Haifa. It was this complete mess.
Long story short, after years of poking and prodding and asking questions here and there, at one point my father got his aunt, my grandmother’s sister, drunk one evening and she spilled the beans. She started telling this entire story: Yes, we suspected your grandmother might be Jewish because she was with the wave of Jews who went from southern Italy to Palestine at the time, just before the Holocaust.
So she met my grandfather in Haifa at some point and they moved to Lebanon in ’48. We know that it happened during the Nakba. And, probably to simplify their lives, they both said they were Lebanese Christians, rather than saying they were one Palestinian Jew and one Palestinian Christian who moved to Lebanon and had to deal with refugee status. That’s the story they maintained until my grandmother accidentally said the wrong birthplace.
I remember we took a road trip to Zahlé with school one time, and my grandfather told me, You’re going to meet our relatives! and I went there thinking that I’m going to meet relatives (because there is in fact an Ayoub family there), and I’m telling friends on the bus, We’re going back to where my grandfather is from. I didn’t know anyone! No one was there, there wasn’t anyone to talk to. I was just there. My grandfather thought I would just forget or something—when I got back home, I told him and he said, Oh, maybe they were busy.
This story, rendering things invisible, is not uncommon in Lebanon. A lot of the formation of the nation-state itself has been: Erase everything that you were before this artificial date; don’t talk about how your grandfather was Turkish or your aunt was Armenian; don’t talk about identities, because the state has been created and khalas, you’re one of those eighteen accepted boxes, and there is no nineteenth box, because our brains will break.
It’s at the core of the concept of the nation-state formation in Lebanon, and the formation of sectarianism. The reason sectarianism has been prolonged to this day—a good part of it is because if you don’t have sectarianism you have to deal with the “Palestinian question” or the “refugee question.” Without sectarianism there is no bogeyman where you can say, If you naturalize them we’ll have 200,000 more Sunni voters! That’s the only thing that matters in the logic of sectarian calculation.
The Lebanese, for the most part, want to tackle sectarianism without also tackling the “refugee question.” Lebanon is one of those countries that doesn’t give refugee status at all. You cannot claim asylum in Lebanon. I think one person was ever given asylum in Lebanon, a Japanese person in the early eighties.
YM: Lebanon was not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention. They never signed it, so they’re not legally obliged to do it. But obviously they also aren’t interested in doing it.
EA: Exactly. All of this brings us to the topic of bordering, creating identities by having an inside and an outside, an in group and an out group. There’s a concept by [Mohamad Hafeda], a Lebanese scholar who wrote an excellent book: he calls it “bordering practice,” the practice of creating a border. In Lebanon it’s very visible. One of the first things people who have never been there comment on, especially if they go to Beirut (but honestly most of Lebanon is like this), is the sectarian flags. There are so many party flags. You go to one neighborhood, there are Hezbollah flags; another neighborhood, there are Lebanese Forces flags.
This is the only reference you have to know that you’re now in a different part of Beirut. Most of Beirut looks the same in terms of building architecture; this is the way you know you’ve entered a “Hezbollah area” or a “Kataeb area” or a “Phalangist area.” Once I was walking in Beirut—I didn’t grow up there, so I wanted to discover the city—and at one point I walked into Bourj el-Barajneh, and the only reason I knew I entered is that I saw a bunch of Palestinian flags.
I remember feeling it in my body—this was around the time I discovered we were partly Palestinian. I had been primed, after a decade and a half of growing up, at a homogeneous Catholic school in the mountains, to feel like I had entered a different space. This is no longer Lebanon, or This is no longer Beirut. None of this was conscious. This was completely inherited fears and biases which were internalized because it was meant to distance myself from part of my own identity.
With all of this, what do you see as the relationship between creating borders—bordering—and homemaking? What is the relation between those two?
YM: It was interesting, everything you said. I feel like I want to reflect a bit, because you mentioned the idea of the Other and othering, and creating the Other. There is really interesting work emphasizing the Other in terms of displacement and refugees, specifically refugee camps, saying that states always need to establish the necessary Other through refugees or refugee camps because they emphasize to the citizen How much you need [the state].
It’s implying to its citizens: This is what happens to people who abandon their state, who go against their state, who withdraw from their state, who upset their state. They get dismissed, and look at the bad stuff that happens to them! They live a humiliated life. So in a way, it’s creating discipline for citizens by showing them If things go bad between me and you, you’re going to end up stateless, exiled—it’s creating fear of what happens to you when you don’t get along with the state; it’s creating discipline.
You don’t want to be a refugee; I’m showing you what refugee camps are like. It’s creating this necessary Other to discipline the public or the nation against social movements, against riots, against any kind of demonstration that jeopardizes obedience towards the state. It is a way of establishing the necessary Other, but in a discipline format. It’s pretty crazy how human populations that are living in distress are also being punished as a tool of disciplining citizens.
On the other hand, there is also an interesting article published by National Geographic several years ago that relates to your experience and to how identity is formed. It’s called “In the Twenty-first Century, We Are All Migrants.” The article builds on this historical framework, but in simple terms really says, Humanity did not originate in Cairo or Los Angeles or Sicily or Tokyo; many centuries ago none of these civilizations even existed, and technically if we all come from Mother Africa then we’ve all migrated from Africa to the other continents, to the hot spots on these other continents to other cities, from the cities to villages or vice-versa.
So technically, we all migrated over the years, or were refugees due to changes in agriculture, lack of access to food, weather conditions, and so on. Along our histories and along our family lines, we’re all migrants, we’re all forced migrants, we’re all protracted migrants. We’re not really that different at the end of the day, so the whole idea of purity and My line of family is Lebanese or American or European is never really true.
As you said, we invisibilize it over the years. Maybe it’s for simplicity. But it’s also interesting to talk about simplicity, because for me here in Italy (and I’m sure for other Palestinian refugees, especially in Lebanon, do the same thing), everywhere I go I get asked the simple question: Where are you from? In your case you would say, I’m Lebanese. In my case I would say, I’m Palestinian. And people will say, Okay, where do you live in Palestine? And I’m like, I don’t live in Palestine; I was born in Lebanon and grew up in a small refugee camp in Lebanon.
So you’re Lebanese?
No, I’m not Lebanese!
And then they’re confused. What nationality or citizenship do you carry?
I don’t carry citizenship. I’m not legally Lebanese and I’m not legally Palestinian.
Because I come from the city of Yāfā [Jaffa], and Yāfā after 1948 was occupied and became part of the occupation by the state of Israel, then Yāfā is no longer a Palestinian city. So legally, I do not have Palestinian citizenship. I cannot be Palestinian, because the place I’m from is no longer legally Palestinian.So now I’m not Palestinian, I’m not Lebanese—in the eyes of the law, I’m not really anybody.
So for simplicity, sometimes I drop it and say I’m Lebanese, because I don’t want to go through that entire process of fifteen minutes of explaining Middle Eastern history and the Nakba and a few segments of international law. Just to explain where I’m from, I have to use at least ten references, five history books, and a few news articles. And they don’t get it in the end! You explain it, and it’s still not clear.
I don’t blame them, because even for me it’s still not clear. I’ve lived in this situation for thirty-three years and it’s still not clear for me how this happened, so I can’t imagine what it’s like for strangers. So for simplicity, I either say I’m Palestinian and just say I’m from the West Bank and get the story done with, or I say I’m Lebanese, I’m from Beirut, and just hope they never get to see my documents and never figure out I was simplifying things.
Your experience of going into a camp—there’s a really nice documentary called A World Not Ours by Mahdi Fleifel. It’s a bit old by now, but is a really nice way if someone wants to visualize what life in the camp looks like, and also the movement between the world of the camp and how it interacts with the borders.
That’s a nice way to enter the topic of homemaking within the borders. As you said, it’s not that clear—borders are always made and remade in Lebanon, to confine refugee camps. But what I always try to argue is that the camp resists, and also the city somehow resists that. Somehow these borders always get blurred. Borders are established—whether they are military checkpoints, or legal confinement, or the condition of buildings and the architecture you see—but one argument is that the slum areas, or “misery belts,” sometimes get entangled with the refugee camp. They deteriorate so fast, especially in the economic crisis, that the slum areas actually expand, and they intertwine with the refugee camp and you can’t tell the difference anymore. You can’t tell when you’re exiting the slum area and going into the refugee camp.
Because living conditions are deteriorating everywhere. Housing conditions are deteriorating; people are building more informal areas. That’s a consequence of the political system and the economic system, which is apparently not just excluding Palestinians but excluding a lot of classes in Lebanon, a lot of groups and a lot of minorities, so they are overlapping with each other. All these people who are abandoned by the state, whether they are citizens or not, are overlapping in their living conditions. So those borders are not really that clear anymore.
One of the things I focus on are the different, subtle ways the camp resists. In one paper, I focus on how Palestinian refugees, or the camp, interacts with other refugees and other minorities in the city. This is common knowledge for people in Lebanon: Palestinian refugee camps are not just a residence for Palestinian refugees but a lot of people with no income, or underprivileged migrants and domestic helpers who need cheaper housing, who don’t have access to the very expensive housing of Beirut. They move to the camp because life is cheaper there.
Nobody tells you in the camp, You cannot rent here or You cannot have this house because you’re not a Palestinian refugee. Nobody cares! Here we’re all refugees, we’re all excluded, we’re all the ugly duckling of the city. There are a large number of Syrian refugees who live in Palestinian refugee camps, and there is a really great paper by Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh; she works on refugee-to-refugee humanitarianism and how, with all these waves of Syrian refugees, a lot of them were being hosted in Palestinian refugee camps, given housing, given emergency aid—by refugees themselves and not by humanitarian aid.
This was especially important when we had the closing of the borders in the face of Syrian refugees. This was crazy, because the crisis in Syria didn’t end, but we decided in Lebanon that the crisis ended and we don’t need to take in Syrian refugees anymore, so let’s close the border. Technically, they closed the borders first in the face of Palestinian-Syrians. Syrians were still allowed to enter, but Palestinian refugees coming from refugee camps in Syria were not allowed to enter. This is crazy because they were fleeing exactly the same war. The war in Syria is happening to both of them, so it’s not logical that you say, No, you as Palestinians are safe in Syria, but Syrians aren’t safe.
It took another year and a half to block it for everybody—which was such a crazy action, not just because we’re blocking safe entry of humans who are under threat, but also because obviously that never works. If there is something we have to learn from humanitarian crisis, it’s that blocking entry of humans only makes the crisis worse, and people are still going to be crossing—whether in safe ways or not in safe ways. What is it going to take to get us to understand? People are fleeing life-threatening events and whether you close the borders or not, they’re still going to have to flee, so of course they’re going to flee in an unauthorized manner.
Because people were fleeing in an unauthorized manner, they were ending up in Palestinian refugee camps, because that’s a place where they cannot be scrutinized or captured by the government. That’s also why Palestinian refugee camps were hosting a lot of Syrian refugees, and it became a welcoming space for them.
One of the issues I wrote a paper about was when I was trying to study how Palestinian refugees were handling the pandemic. I did this fieldwork, I was staying there for a while, I spent part of the pandemic there trying to observe how people are establishing commons, how they’re creating solidarity. Because we were second-class beneficiaries of healthcare during the pandemic; obviously we don’t have equal access to public healthcare in Lebanon, but in the pandemic things got worse and we definitely had second-class access to everything.
There were all of these structures that were done in a grassroots manner between people, whether it’s crowdfunding or food-sharing, to try to respond to the impacts of the pandemic. There was a medical center established in Bourj el-Barajneh camp where they were treating, for free, people who were infected, helping them quarantine, providing them with food, and also caring for them—especially those who don’t have someone to care for them. There was a quarantine facility and medical volunteers and nurses and so on.
When I went there, to my surprise, I saw very few Palestinian refugees. I saw Syrian refugees who were undocumented so were afraid of going to any medical facility outside the camp, because they were afraid of getting deported. I saw migrant domestic helpers who had earlier fled their employers or had problems with their employers so they had lost their visa or were working in the black market, so were also afraid of getting caught—so they caught the virus, and they’re afraid to go to any hospital, to any doctor or clinic, because they might get treatment but then they’re going to get deported.
So they came to Bourj el-Barajneh to receive treatment. It was a way of showing how much the camp is actually porous, how much the camp expands, and how much the camp welcomes people, especially people who are abandoned by the city; how much it’s connected to the city but also how much it is a space of rescue. It contradicts the idea that we present of the camp in Lebanon: as dangerous, as unsafe, as a bad place. It helps people understand that it’s also a welcoming space, a space of support, a space of rescue. It’s a safe haven for many people who are often abandoned by the state in a life-threatening manner.
EA: It’s literally that, it’s a safe haven. It’s the rest of the country that is hostile, that is dangerous, if anything. To paraphrase your mom, a lot of Palestinians in Lebanon are fully aware of the limitations, and how visible one can be.
On two specific occasions, I’ve seen that contrast of how visible people can be in some areas. For the most part, there isn’t really a clear-cut way of telling a Lebanese from a Syrian from a Palestinian. Sometimes it’s the accent in Arabic, but in the case of Palestinian refugees you don’t even have that, because, as you said, it’s the third or fourth generation.
I have a friend from one of the camps, from Shatila, and she was coming to my house in the mountains, in Mount Lebanon, in an area that’s pretty homogeneous, mostly Lebanese Christians. In terms of an accent, she didn’t have anything distinguishable from someone else in Beirut. But she was wearing a keffiyeh—this is distinctive, visually, for someone from the mountain: Oh, this is a Palestinian from Beirut. At some point, when we entered our area, she started feeling uncomfortable and she removed the keffiyeh. I told her she didn’t have to, but in the end she thought it was probably safer. She was actually thinking about me—she didn’t want me to have to worry.
Another time, it was a Syrian friend visiting our house. He was a refugee, he had been in Lebanon for four or five years, but he grew up in Syria, so he had a distinctive Syrian accent when speaking Arabic. For him it wasn’t anything physical, it was auditory. He couldn’t talk out loud without it being super obvious to a Lebanese ear that this person is from Syria. His English was very bad, but we ended up just speaking in English—in my house, in the garden, where at best my grandmother could hear us and that’s about it. No one could actually hear us; we’re surrounded by a field, some chickens, a few trees. But he was so paranoid, so worried at the tiny possibility of someone knowing that he is Syrian, that we ended up talking mostly in English, in my own garden.
For me that’s an example of a bordering practice that’s intangible—it’s not physical or visual, more auditory—but can still be very oppressive. In the context of a Palestinian refugee or a Syrian refugee, there are all these multiple layers of growing up knowing, or being taught, or learning the hard way, about the things you can and cannot do, and you have to position yourself based on all the things you cannot do.
A few years ago, the government decided to allow certain jobs that had been excluded to Palestinian refugees. We should say that Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, to this day, are excluded from most jobs. So they said, Okay, Palestinians are allowed to access a few more jobs (though within a month or so a Maronite church complained and they withdrew it). I remember the day they announced it; so many friends I knew were ecstatic: Yay! We can be engineers!
YM: We’d been waiting our entire lives! I remember when that came out. This was news that I’d been waiting thirty years to hear. When you’re a kid and you’re like, Yeah, I want to be an engineer, I want to be a doctor—we couldn’t do that. We were taught, You have to keep your ambitions low, because you’re going to have your heart broken. Even if you graduate as a doctor, you cannot work as a doctor.
I don’t know if you’ve heard this story: there was a famous case of a Palestinian refugee from somewhere in Beqaa, and she was accepted as one of the world’s youngest medicine students; she went into med school, got a full ride and graduated at the age of sixteen or something, and when she returned to Lebanon she had a ceremony with the Lebanese president—and it was so ironic, because she was getting honored as one of Middle East’s youngest doctors, but she couldn’t work as a doctor in Lebanon!
It was mind-blowing. That’s great, we’re throwing her this party, giving her this medal by the Lebanese president—do I hang it on the wall? Does it mean anything to you that you’re honoring me, recognizing that I cannot use this certificate, I cannot help cure people and rescue people’s lives? It’s so disturbing how we decide not to acknowledge the contradictions.
EA: I think she left at some point. I’m thinking of listeners who don’t know the context we’re talking about; I have a similar enough experience when I explain certain things from Lebanon: on the surface they are so absurd, and make no sense from any logical perspective. But when you integrate a sectarian logic, it’s about competition, it’s about quotas, it’s about representation in parliament, What’s the percentage of the sect that you’re going to have? In that case it makes sense. It can work within this narrow logic in this very tiny country, and nothing else has to make sense. Just this tiny sliver of internal logic has to make sense, and even if it harms everything else—the public sector, the private sector, hospitals, education—the state is not going to remedy it.
Again, Gebran Bassil, who I love to quote, posted on Instagram in 2014 or so warning against Syrian refugees and saying, Remember what happened when Palestinian refugees got too comfortable in Lebanon! In other words: They caused the civil war. This is loaded with so much baggage that we don’t have time to get into it. All he did was post a photo of a refugee camp from the fifties, from the early days, and just said, Remember. That’s it. And all of the subtext and connotations are immediately understood by everyone: We welcomed all of those people and then look what they did. All of the problems in Lebanon are because we were so nice in the forties.
It’s an absurd and ridiculous statement; in a way it works because it’s so absurd and ridiculous. It requires a divorce from reality. The people who believe these things need one another to have this mutually assured delusion. They have to mutually reinforce one another’s fear and hatred of the Other, their conceptualization of the Other—which almost never has anything to do with anyone actually existing. In order for the Other to remain an Other, you need to not talk to people; you need to not meet them, you need to not know who they are, how they talk—Oh! They actually talk like us!
For all of these things there has to be this bordering practice, most of the time invisible. It’s not always a line on the map, although sometimes it is. But most of the time it’s just there. You just need to know, growing up: Don’t go there. That’s it. You don’t need to know anything else; you don’t need to be given any kind of information about a camp. You just need to be told, Don’t go there. We don’t go there.
If you don’t know better, if you’re not lucky like me and end up meeting folks at some point in Beirut and do your studies, this can become an embodied thing. Intellectually you may know that this is wrong; you may have read a book or reasoned your way out of it. But it stays in your body; you know which areas you can go and which areas might be more risky, because you’ve been told that your entire life. It ends up becoming a de facto bordering practice that people do without even thinking about it. It’s part of the make-up, part of the wallpaper of Lebanon.
When I was sixteen or seventeen, there were a couple of Syrian workers who came to our house to work on the garden, and I immediately knew, Those guys are not Lebanese. That’s it. Nothing was said. No one talked to me; I just heard them speak. It was there, in the background, in the ether. A non-Lebanese has entered the room. It’s amazing that none of this involved thought. I was never told explicitly, “We hate these people” or “These people are not like us.” It’s a vibe. It’s something you just know. This person isn’t from here; you can be nice, talk nice, but be careful. Keep your guard up.
This is a bordering practice, and it ends up reinforcing everything we’ve been talking about, because even at sites of protest, even among activists, there will be Lebanese people who privately are completely fine with refugee rights and all of that stuff but are still like, This is too complicated, we can’t deal with this right now. We can’t have Palestinians among protesters who are too visibly Palestinian. Sure they can come, but don’t tell anyone. Be a body on the street but don’t express yourself in a non-Lebanese way!
This was never said out loud in the 2015 uprising, but it was understood. So much of the language is completely wordless. It’s body language. There are some visual and auditory cues, and somehow we form an entire base that’s reinforced by those things.
YM: It’s true on the other side: we could feel these things; none of us had to talk. It’s so embodied in us. We’re already so apprehensive all the time, we’re already afraid. Our side of the experience is loaded with fear. You know you’re being judged; you know you’re the outsider. You know you’re the one who is less protected by law, less protected by sect, by the state in general. You feel threatened, you feel unwanted.
A lot of times, we are pushed to do things illegally, because that’s how you survive. Most of the jobs I’ve had, even if they were administrative jobs at big companies, I wasn’t registered as an employee. I wasn’t legally allowed to work in these jobs in administration, procurement, accounting. I wasn’t allowed to do them. I was always afraid. I could be let go any day; we could get a surprise inspection. I was always afraid of upsetting my employer, because if anything happened I couldn’t sue them; they could fire me for no reason.
But also around people in general, I always felt scared of being accused, for example, of bringing the riots to the protest, accused that I am the one planting something, I am infiltrating protests to create violence or ruin things.
EA: You know Schrödinger’s refugee? Schrödinger’s cat, in theoretical physics, is when you put a cat in a box and at some point you have no way of knowing whether the cat is alive or dead, so in theory the cat is both alive and dead at the same time—you can’t know. So Schrödinger’s refugee (it’s said in Europe) is both very lazy and at the same time is taking everyone’s job.
In Lebanon, they are very lazy but they also manage to destroy everything all the time! They cause traffic, they cause a crisis of trash, it’s raining because of them! When the wildfires happened in 2019, Syrian refugees were blamed for causing some of the fires and then moving into the houses that were on fire (because refugees are fireproof?). This is part of the discourse!
YM: We are consuming the state’s resources, we are causing the economic burden on Lebanon—even though Lebanon isn’t giving us anything!
The only time I had a legal job, it was so funny because I was paying a social security contribution, but I’m not entitled to get anything. I pay for healthcare, but cannot ask for anything, not covered. Explain this to me: why am I paying if I can’t get anything? Because you’re a Palestinian refugee, you’re not entitled to anything. Then why am I paying? Because that’s the law.
It’s also that contradiction. We are told that we are consuming the resources of the state, that we’re burdening it, that we’re taking things away from the Lebanese. But we’re not taking from the state, we’re not benefiting from the state in any way! I don’t get how they do so well at framing us in that portrait. It’s unbelievable.
EA: I don’t know what to say. I wrote part one of this essay on Al Jumhuriya in 2019, and I have not written a part two since. This otherization at the core of Lebanese identity—it doesn’t have to be this way! Identities are social constructs. Right now we can decide how to change that, as a society. There is no way of “becoming” Lebanese other than through inheriting it from you father or marrying into it because your husband is Lebanese, or in some very special cases because you are Salma Hayek or Shakira.
That’s the joke, by the way: you know how if you’re Druze, you can’t convert someone into the Druze religion, so in theory you’re not allowed to marry an outsider—the exception being if you’re George Clooney. In that case it’s fine. We have a lot of exceptions when we want to.
YM: Speaking of inheritance, I have to say it. Because we are refugees, we are not legally allowed to inherit anything. If a parent or grandparent passes away, and for some reason they do have property, a bank account, a car, or any wealth—because we’re Palestinian refugees we’re not allowed to inherit it, and these funds or properties go Dar el Fatwa or whatever.
This brings up the whole idea again: our resources are the ones being taken away, not the other way around. I’ve seen so many people save up money, or they manage somehow to get a property, and there is no law for passing the inheritance. This is also taking away people’s rights.
EA: That’s what I mean with the narrative being so absurd. Often the opposite is true! It’s not that they are a “burden on the state,” but the state is literally stealing resources. Most of the time that’s what happens, because at the end of the day people are people, and in order to have this separation between the inside and outside group, you have to create an artificial line. And then it’s reinforced through culture, politics, the state.
Legally, if the law changes one day, if we have political momentum, there could be a way of “becoming” Lebanese, and this is such a crucial part of that puzzle. There’s an Ethiopian woman I met; she’s forty-five and has been in Lebanon since the early nineties. She speaks Lebanese Arabic; she hasn’t been back to Ethiopia because the village where she comes from is pretty miserable and she fled an abusive father; so she’s been in Beirut almost her whole life. She’s of course illegal, because there’s no way of renewing your visa indefinitely as a migrant domestic worker unless you have a Lebanon sponsor, and she hasn’t found one. And she’s been working in the black market for a decade and a half now, since the 2000s. If you ask her where she’s from, of course she says she’s Ethiopian—there is no legal way for her to become Lebanese and be able to say, I’m a Lebanese-Ethiopian.
The only way this is legally possible is if your father is Lebanese and your mother is Ethiopian, and they get married (usually outside of Lebanon). Then the kid is Lebanese-Ethiopian, is allowed to claim both nationalities. There are folks like that. They tend to be in the minority, because growing up in Lebanon is so difficult that they usually end up growing up outside of Lebanon. So there are a bunch of Lebanese-Ethiopians who, if they go to Lebanon, they can be Lebanese—but only because they grew up outside of Lebanon!
This is one of the many contradictions of Lebanese-ness as an identity: one cannot become Lebanese, but of course a Lebanese who leaves Lebanon can become American, Italian, Argentinian, all of that.
YM: Almost every Lebanese family seems to have a son who works abroad—how do you expect these countries to treat and employ and welcome your family members but you have these migrants in your country and you’re so angry at them? How does this contradiction work?
EA: Because we’re special, Yafa.
As a closing note, do you have any reflections on what it is like to engage on this topic? Because it is obviously so personal. I am curious what it’s like to engage refugee studies as a field of academic study, being yourself a refugee. I’ve been engaging with Lebanese studies as a Lebanese, and it’s been bizarre.
YM: It has definitely been an experience I did not expect. I wouldn’t say I got tricked into it, but I kind of did. I was working in humanitarian aid in Lebanon, I was working at UNRWA, so I was always interested in humanitarian aid. But I came to do my master’s degree in development studies, because I was more interested in humanitarian development. I wasn’t specialized in refugee studies. Then, when I started doing my PhD and my professors were encouraging me to engage in refugee studies since I know the topic so well as a lived experience, I did not expect (and nobody warned me about) the personal aspect, the emotionality—the situated knowledge, and also the positionality of it and the repercussions of your situation as a researcher/refugee.
I grew up in Bourj el-Barajneh, and we always had this extensive flow of white researchers and white international organization workers or volunteers. Sometimes you would get volunteers who were very nice and very friendly, and they really believe in your cause, but a lot times you would get volunteers who were guilt-washing: I saved Palestinian refugee children, I’m feeling better about myself, I’m going to go there and take a few pictures of me saving the kids, and go brag about what a great activist I am.
We also had a great bunch of researchers who really couldn’t care less about anything but getting a career or job out of our stories and getting publications and citations out of whatever information they could get out of us. They would take your photo without asking; they would make you look as miserable as possible. They would use you as a source of information in a very non-human way.
There’s a nice article about it: “Palestinian Refugees are Not At Your Service.” It speaks about how when researchers arrive to refugee camps, they feel entitled to have information from you, and you should feel grateful that there are researchers who are coming to tell your story to the world and work towards—some day, somehow, maybe in a million years, we don’t know—maybe improving your life through their publication somehow. They feel entitled, that they have the right to come into your home; they have the right to your story, they have the right that you share with them your intimate personal life.
They often don’t have enough respect for our privacy. Being a refugee means you should always be available to have your photo taken and your life exposed and your details shared with the public. And that’s just not okay.
There’s another article that’s really interesting, it’s called “On the Problem of Over-researched Communities.” It’s specifically about Shatila refugee camp, and about what happens when there is a big flow of researchers coming. One, it builds expectations. You think, Oh my god, there’s research being done! Khalas, tomorrow there is going to be a project or program that is going to fix this problem they are researching! Then it brings disappointment. These researchers come, they give you this hope, and then nothing happens.
They go away, and you don’t know what they did with the information they got. You don’t know what kind of papers they published. You don’t know if they said good or bad stuff about you. You never see them again, and you end up feeling used. It brings so much disappointment to the community that the community doesn’t trust researchers that much anymore.
Me being on that end was really stressful in a way, because I’ve lived the experience of being under the interview, being under the lens, and I’ve seen these white researchers, and I’ve seen how research works, and I did not want to be that. I did not want to do that to people. So it was very hard.
There is a really nice text by [Virginia] Dominguez called “For a Politics of Love and Rescue,” and she says if you work or research on people you really care about, you are going to face real editorial dilemmas. She’s not saying don’t do it, but you really have to stay attentive to the emotionality. This is something I wish somebody had told me before. It was so hard to write this research, because every time I was writing, even though it was general sometimes, it’s like I was speaking about myself as a child, about my mother, my father, my relatives, my aunts, my friends. Because they are still a part of that community today. They are still going through these things.
You also have to think how privileged you are now since you have departed from that situation and you’ve become that privileged researcher who comes on a research trip and gets a career jump out of publishing someone’s story. It’s not a good feeling. It’s a very complex experience. I would love to say I have discovered a way to work around dealing with emotionality and dealing with this complex positionality, but I haven’t. If anyone is listening and has a solution, please message and tell us that you have found the right way to research the community you come from! Especially if it is a community that is still fighting and struggling and you’ve just disconnected yourself a bit from that struggle, at least geographically.
It’s a very complex position, especially refugee studies.
EA: Experiences are not the same and I don’t want to compare. But when I was living in Edinburgh I went to therapy, and at some point the topic of my PhD came up. I said, Well, it’s on hauntings and temporalities in postwar Lebanese cinema.
She said, What is hauntings?
Hauntology—Derrida, Mark Fisher, all that stuff. I started explaining Jalal Toufic as well, and a bunch of other theorists and academics.
At some point, she said, So you’re studying ghosts?
Yeah, I guess I’m studying ghosts.
She said, Do you know why you’re studying ghosts?
And I had this realization, this very basic Freudian moment. Oh, right. The thing you’re studying is actually yourself!
Of course there’s still a need to have a degree of objectivity; it’s not a memoir. But now I mention in the thesis of the PhD that it’s a “value-explicit” research. The idea that this can be “objective” research is already not possible if you’re studying human beings in the first place, let alone if you have a personal connection to what’s happening. More often than not it’s better to acknowledge this positionality, the potential biases, and then you do the research—and because you acknowledge it, maybe you actually see where those biases are and where to be careful, rather than just assuming you don’t have biases, which is the usual way of doing things, and just covering the subject with all your biases because you think you’re being “objective.”
YM: It also aligns with what Donna Haraway says about situated knowledge: Even our own organic eyes are mediated lenses. Your own organic eyes are not showing you what is really there! It’s showing you something mediated, adjusted, a bit more controlled and defined and colored by the structure of the lenses that we have. Everyone has their own lens and there’s no such thing as unmediated images.
We’re humans. As researchers, our images are always mediated. So I totally agree with what you said.
EA: What are three books you would recommend to listeners, and why those three?
YM: The first is a bit of a personal one: it exists in both Arabic and English. I co-authored the Arabic version in 2016; it was the last thing I did before I left Lebanon. It was the project of a workshop with an author called Hassan Daoud, and he was so good at writing in an autobiographic way. He trained us for a year at the Institute for Palestinian Studies, asking us to write our stories as Palestinians. Just a few months ago it was translated to English. It’s called 11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exile, and it’s just the lives of us, eleven Palestinian refugees who come from different Palestinian refugee camps across Lebanon.
It’s our personal stories but also how we relate to Palestine and how we relate to Lebanon. There are also stories of refugees who are double refugees from Syrian refugee camps who were displaced later to a camp in Lebanon. There are those who went through double displacement because some refugee camps in Lebanon, such as al-Zaatar, were demolished completely and then people were displaced again. It’s a summary of our stories, lives, and experiences as Palestinian refugees.
This book means a lot to me because it’s a direct story, a narration from Palestinian refugees themselves. It’s not someone telling our story; it’s just us as refugees telling our story directly. This will always mean a lot to me.
Another book I would recommend is called The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri. She’s an Iranian author who has worked in humanitarian aid but also worked as a journalist. She and her mom escaped from Iran, they came to Europe, and she tells this experience that is often shared among refugees: whenever you arrive to a host community, everybody expects you to be so grateful, so thankful to the white world, to the Western world. Thank you for saving us! Thank you for rescuing us!
We’re not supposed to speak; we’re not supposed to have political agency; we’re just supposed to be thankful and grateful and not criticize anything, and we’re supposed to accept anything that’s given to us. I think it’s such a bold recollection of her own story, but also of the stories of refugees that she encountered doing humanitarian aid. She summarizes more recent stories from the last decade in Europe. You’ll encounter beautiful and genuine stories of refugees in that book, between past and present.
The last book is called Placeless People by Lyndsey Stonebridge. It’s about why refugees write. It’s more of an academic study, but it’s also very emotional and inspiring if you are a refugee and you have to write stuff, because it explains how refugees write as a form of resistance and how you telling your story as a refugee is a way of resisting being forgotten and resisting oppression.
One of the things I like in this book is this citation: All sorrows can be borne if you tell a story about them. She later explains: To suffer invisibly is to be dead to the world, and telling that story is you resisting death. She goes through a lot of refugee poetry and publications; she has a beautiful explanation of how refugees can be agents and resisters and rebels through writing.
EA: Amazing.
I recently read Rebecca Solnit’s book Orwell’s Roses; it’s a very detailed meditation, a work of nonfiction that includes journalism and a lot of other fields, trying to explain how Orwell’s love for gardening informed a lot of his politics, including his anti-authoritarian politics. If you then reread his novels, like 1984 especially, you see how much imagery there is when it comes to gardening, roses, other flowers and plants, in a way that’s very interesting. She ends up talking about the Cold War and Stalin and the West, about Orwell and the Spanish Civil War, through roses, through flowers, which I found really fascinating.
Yafa, thanks a lot for this, this was fantastic.
YM: Thank you, I was so happy to do this.
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