By Wafa Hasan

On September 18, 2005, the Palestine House had a cultural picnic in Mississauga and celebrated it as a fundraiser for Palestinian children.  It was a time for getting together with family and friends.  I invited an Italian friend and a Barbadian friend to come along and, as I realized later, to “watch.”  There were two underlying themes to this event.

First, subconsciously, I wanted to “show” my friends who Palestinians were.  I wanted to illuminate the intricacies, contradictions and multiplicities that make up this group of people.  In light of the bombardment of media images (mis)representing Palestinians, it can be quite difficult for people to disentangle their perceptions of Palestinians from the stereotypes: the homogenized “terrorist”-slash-angry arab-slash fundamentalist.  Interestingly, my friends were shocked to see many Palestinians with a gleaming cross hanging from a necklace and only a ratio of the women wearing headdresses.  They realized, “Oh! Not all Palestinians are Muslim?”  (I’m not saying that this pseudo-Christianized depiction of Palestinianness is valorized over others nor am I advocating that a non-Muslim Palestinian gathering was “progressive” because that would perpetuate Orientalist and Western-centric valuations of ethnicities and religions, which would put Christianity at the top of the hierarchy).  I am saying that the monolithic and one-dimensional depiction of Palestinians most Westerners receive through mainstream media, was complicated by the tangible manifestations of the intersections of class, gender and religious-beliefs within the Palestinian group.  I wanted to, maybe problematically, show the world, through my two friends, that Palestinians are people just like everyone else and that we are not defined by our victimization-slash-involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  We are not only sufferers or terrorists, as the media would have you believe.  We are short, tall, funny, fat, skinny; we negotiate the conflict in different and in sometimes competing ways, we cry and laugh.  For this reason, the event was important to me.  After watching Western media for a while, I had to re-teach myself not to stereotype my own people and looking at the multiplicity of identity negotiation at the picnic was electrifying.

The second function to this event was ambiguously political.  MOSAIC performed a traditional Palestinian dance and everyone cleared the way for them.  It was quite exciting.  As one of my girlfriends was performing, I was particularly interested in getting a good view.  It was not until the performance began that I realized what was happening before my eyes.  As the girls were dancing, in their traditional (and somewhat anachronistic) outfits, and as the sound system blasted dabkeh music, one man on the side of the crowd waved around a massive Palestinian flag.  At this point I realized this was a pedagogical moment of nationalizing the group.  The human in me almost came to tears as I thought of this moment as one in which we were responding to the deaths of many of our friends and family and to the destruction of our national existence.  The critical eye in me saw this as a moment in which we were being hailed into a national consciousness.  I want to say that while I am critical of nationalism, a national consciousness is forcibly imposed on people when they are under occupation for there are material realities one must contend with (like passports, rights, mobility and so on).  Therefore, a critique of nationalism here would only serve to abstract the ways in which the people before me were attempting to re-establish their existence as part of humanity.

I am not sure what I walked away learning from this event.  But I do know that this aforementioned moment of unity in which we were dancing, laughing, eating, singing, and talking was a poignant one because it de-centered Palestinian existence from victimhood or terrorization (the two lenses that some of the Western media has chosen to represent Palestinians through) and it was therefore elating.  Call me an escapist but it’s one of the few settings I have to celebrate my past.