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The Witnessing Voice
Abstract by Hanna Salmon On Session IV-14  (Memory and Living History)

On Tuesday, November 12 at 2:30 pm

2024 Annual Meeting

Abstract
In his famous 1984 article “Permission to Narrate,” Edward Said condemned the systems of propaganda and censorship that erased the narratives of Palestinian people, denying their existence as a people and dehumanizing them. 40 years later as Israeli bombardment in Gaza continues, the erasure and dehumanization of Palestinians is even more evident. In response, Palestinian scholars, writers, performers, artists, and activists have resisted by sharing their stories via multiple media and techniques. As practices acutely engaged with narrative, oral history and storytelling have already been the subject of significant ethnographic research for their role in sustaining Palestinian communal memory, sense of identity, and calls for justice. This literature on Palestinian “memory-work” addresses the content, narrative style, and affective and political impact of these stories (Abu-Lughod & Sa’di 2007, 3; Salih 2017; Sayigh 2007, 2020). However, in much of this analysis the vehicle of storytelling – the voice – is overlooked. Oral storytellers engage their voices to bear witness to a particular event, to communicate information, and to express an inner world; but the voice is also a material phenomenon, wrapped up in the somatic and the sensorial, the vibrant movements of the body. I argue that when a storyteller speaks in their own voice, they bear witness to the story’s events with a visceral intimacy that can sensitize listeners to the storyteller’s felt experiences, building a foundation for deep communal connection and solidarity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the West Bank during the spring of 2023, this paper will place Palestine Studies, voice studies (Cavarero in Sterne 2012, LaBelle 2014), affect studies (Stewart 2010), and feminist literature (Hamzeh et. al. 2020, Minh-Ha 1989) in conversation to analyze the vocal practices of contemporary Palestinian oral storytellers in their live performances. I examine one performance by a student storyteller telling a personal story to family and friends at a showcase event to demonstrate how the timbre and corporeality of a storyteller’s voice contributes to the impact of the tale. This paper contributes to understandings of Palestinian oral history and storytelling by advocating for the embodied aspects of the voice as quintessential to the power of Palestinian storytelling as a witnessing practice.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
West Bank
Sub Area
None