Heritage and Spatial Subjectivity

As psychoanalysis proves the importance for individuals to establish links with the personal past (Lowenthal and Binney 1981:19), Palestinians find themselves required not only to ‘assert the relevance of the past’ but also ‘to ensure that its tangible relics survive…as guarantors of historical identity for [their] descendants’ (Lowenthal and Binney 1981:31). Like any threatened indigenous people, who find themselves in a continuous identity struggle with stronger groups or states, Palestinians require in their dramatically changing landscape different kinds of reminders to fill in their ‘imagination’ with memories of the past.

Heritage in Palestine has a salient position in the postcolonial discourse. Restoration cannot be seen as the material reproduction of the past; rather, it is the repair of the run-down places spaces and palaces of memory into significant symbols ready for political appropriation. No wonder then that some Palestinians see restoration as a mode of expression that helps them undermine the colonial project including its historiography (see De Cesari 2010). In a sense, Palestinians are following a universal fashion as ‘virtually every modern state feels some obligation to safeguard historic monuments from vandalism, neglect and redevelopment’ (Lowenthal and Binney 1981:10).

Institutions, such as RIWAQ, the Bethlehem Centre for Heritage Preservation, the HRC, the WA and others have been working on the restoration of the built cultural heritage in Palestine, and have been preoccupied with restoring not only the buildings, but also the cultural practices they once support. In making these spatial practices and longings explicit, they make possible the transformation of architectural heritage in Palestine into symbol. As an explicitly formatted aesthetic form, the symbol becomes available for political action. The restoration of heritage in Palestine and the revitalisation of historic centres are, therefore, dialogic practices that are not explicit representations, but ‘implicit’ engagement with the political.

There is a stark difference between the official (the PNA) vision of heritage in Palestine and the on-the-ground localized heritage practices. While the PNA succumbs to the universalising discourse of heritage in terms of WHLs, charters and platforms (such as UNESCO), and thus, adopting the Eurocentric approach to heritage, local initiatives have been moving beyond such approach and contributing to the heritage discourse at large. Instead of being the recipient of the knowledge, they produce knowledge and challenge the taken-for-granted European aesthetics. De Cesari rightly notes (2010:625) the NGOs’ takes on heritage, which mounts to defying arts of government. In a way, heritage NGOs in Palestine escapes predefined meanings of heritage to contemplate an idea about, and to engage with, the political (ethical) questions—i.e. why heritage is valued in the particular time and space. Biennale (2005, 2007, 2009, 2012) is one initiative that challenges the well-established art biennales and its staging/aesthetics by turning built heritage and historic centres into a medium that artists, architects, planners and social scientists express their dreams about alternative aesthetics, histories, geographies and futures.

The Colonial Wants the Postcolonial to be Precolonial

Embedded within the postcolonial discourse is a tricky subject position that the postcolonialists are called to embody: the over-valuation of the pre-colonial era—obsessive nostalgia and romanticism (Tamari 2003:69–70, 77). The colonial despot expects the indigenous people to ‘return’ to their primitive modes of life because of what Fanon coins as ‘a postcolonial sensitivity’(Fanon 2004:161). As if the colonial utters the ‘open sesame’ words: ‘Congratulations, you got your independence, you are free, you got your Ministry of Tourism and Antiquity and you also got your Ministry of Culture, etcetera. So, reproduce your pre-colonial conditions.’ This is the danger in the postcolonial discourse, which assumes the indigenous people have been living static or primitive past that can be reproduced. In other words, embedded in the postcolonial discourse is a whole set of preconceptions about the indigenous that are inherently colonial (see Anderson 1983).

If ‘the view that the tangible past is attractive is initially rooted in the Renaissance perception of a classical antiquity clearly distinguishable from, and superior to, the recent past’ (Lowenthal and Binney 1981:10–11, cf. Halbwachs 1992; Nora 2001:xiv),18 Palestinian officials and practitioners need to ask questions such as: does the Palestinian preservation of the past and the attention paid to folk traditions are following the European aesthetic value system? What does make such approach national? And, what goals are set in the process and who are the targets? To decolonize, Fanon (2004) urges us to follow neither the colonial aesthetics nor the primitive indigenous aesthetics—already past at the moment of decolonisation. Instead, it is imperative to look forward and have self-reflexive approach to one’s heritage that keeps searching and targeting the human in us—not the other.

In the postcolonial era (if we are to live one), art, music, folklore, architecture and cuisine are all expectations and attributes of the postcolonial era, and it is upon the postcolonial to choose the direction to follow. Fanon argues that the colonized intellectual, at the very moment when he undertakes a work of art, fails to realize he is using techniques and a language borrowed from the occupier. He believes that culture never has the translucency of custom; rather, it eminently eludes any form of simplification. In its essence, it is the very opposite of custom (Fanon 2004:160–161). National culture, for Fanon, is the collective thought process of a people to describe, justify and extol the actions whereby they have joined forces and remained strong. The crystallisation of the national consciousness will not only radically change the literary genres and themes but also create a completely new audience. Whereas the colonized started out by producing work exclusively with the oppressor in mind, he gradually switches over to addressing himself to his people. This is a combat literature because it informs the national consciousness, gives it shape and contours and opens up new, unlimited horizons. Therefore, national culture is the outcome of tensions internal and external to society as a whole and its multiple layers (Fanon 2004:170–177).

The government, as important as it gets, cannot and should not mask the political in its technicalities, and should allow and facilitate the humanist approach to heritage, an approach that combines the populous, the intellectual and the expert. The role of the intellectual in zones of suffering and blurred images, and times of uncertainty is to be part of the popular, part of the people, and part of a humanist approach that calls for alternative modes of fashioning the self and searching for unity between the physical and psychic spaces.

Memory for Future

Despite all, the preservation of the built heritage in Palestine has gained momentum over the last two decades. Heritage has become not only a mode of expression, but also a mode of knowledge production that reverses or, at least, undermines the colonial conditions on different terrains. First, Palestine sets a precedent in using cultural heritage for job creation. Instead of restoring heritage for their architectural and historical merits, historic towns and buildings have been restored to help unemployed Palestinians make a living. Second, in the process, the restoration projects have become the sites of knowledge production and revival of techniques that had been lost as a result of ‘modernity’, and contemporary (and colonial) construction techniques. Third, the newly acquired crafts by young Palestinian labourers serve as tools and modes for living. Fourth, this knowledge is valuable for understanding the past and what Palestine might have looked like if Palestinians had continued to manage their resources. Fifth, the end product of these restoration projects not only stands in between the private and public world recreating the common space, which had been sacrificed by the colonialist and, regrettably, by the postcolonial projects, it also stands as a metaphor of a possible ‘renaissance’ (on the postcolonial indigenous people’s own terms) without being a by-product of the aesthetics the European Renaissance produced. Finally, the design, mapping, planning and modelling of historic spaces has been functioning as a medium for empowerment for Palestinian artists, architects, designers and planners, allowing them to practice what the colonial once prohibited, i.e. planning the future. When young architects and planners engage with their own spatial questions, they are no longer thrown into a world to inhabit; rather, this world is waiting for them to shape and change it.