Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Hello, and welcome to Women of the.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Middle east podcast, Women of the Middle east. This podcast relates the realities of arab women and their rich and diverse experiences. It aims to present the multiplicity of their voices and wishes to break overdue cultural stereotypes about women of the Middle east. My name is Amel Malki. I'm a feminist scholar and educator. This is women of the Middle East.
[00:00:31] Speaker A: Dana Dajjani, palestinian actress and poet, and much more. So, tell us more. Who is Dana Dajjani?
[00:00:39] Speaker C: So I ask myself this question quite often. Who is Dana Dejani? And I like to turn to the page when I ask myself this question, because for me, writing is a practice of self organization. Every time, I attempt to answer it differently. Sometimes it's in a poem of metaphors, and sometimes it's like a list of these are my titles, and these are the projects under my titles. So I'm constantly checking in, who am I today? Who am I right now? In broad terms, I can tell you I'm a palestinian american spoken word poet and theater maker. My background was in theatre. I was constantly presented with scripts that I felt didn't represent me or the stories that I wanted to tell. And when I graduated from my BFA in theatre, I decided to put together a manifesto. And in this manifesto, I wrote that I will not be part of telling stories that are islamophobic, that are misogynistic, that are violent, that promote anything other than the values that I stand for, and I outline them for myself. And so this has been the framework that has governed my work in many different fields. So whether on stage or writing music, performing poetry, presenting events, then we can.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: Display our identity in different ways, through the cuisine we adopt, the clothes we put on. And you come from an ancestry of strong palestinian women who have done that. And I can tell you, I'm a huge fan of Sahar Khalifa. For example, I've been taught about palestinian women's resistance through her work and through her novels. How does Dana carry her identity?
[00:02:23] Speaker C: For one, Taatri is a way that I keep Palestine close and wear my heart on my sleeve, as it were, wearing the kofiya jewelry, palestinian jewelry. I'm so proud of my heritage, I let it color my identity. Because the funny thing is, when people see me in public, I've gotten all sorts of questions. Are you native american? Are you persian? Are you french? Are you mexican? Are you spanish? Are you italian? You know, I look culturally ambiguous, so I strive to eliminate all doubt.
I'm very proud to be palestinian, definitely with the aesthetic I surround myself with. I like to represent my palestinian identity in eating our food, in listening to our music, in asking our elders to tell us stories of their past, of their time in Philistine, how they left the memories they still have from the land. In recording those stories of my grandmother or family, friends, for example, this is a big part of how I keep my culture alive and close to me.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: The palestinian identity, especially for the generations that did not live in Palestine, didn't feel and go through the displacement, oppression. But still, all of those are part of their DNA as well. But the palestinian identity is constructed out of memory. And you just spoke about the stories that were told, you know, about Palestine. Tell me a bit about that. How do you collect those stories? How do you react to those stories?
[00:04:04] Speaker C: Well, there's a project that's been very close to my heart, my maternal grandfather. So Abu Ammi, he lived to be about 102 years old, but towards the last ten years of his life, I watched how his memory got shorter and shorter and shorter. He used to be able to tell a story in 20 details, and then it became ten, and then it became five, and then it became two, and then, oh, yeah, that happened. But what details he couldn't. And so with my paternal grandmother, I really decided twelve years ago that I'm gonna start recording her stories from now. And so I would sit with her and I would tell her anything, anything. And I would start to write them down and record these stories. And at some point, she started to tell me.
I was like, how is there a video? Eventually, she unearthed for me 60 reels of eight millimeter film, which she took from 73 till 81. After she left Palestine with my grandfather, and by virtue of my grandfather's job, he used to work for Air India in Jerusalem. And then he went on to work with different airlines. He would open new cities for the airline as a destination. So he was always kind of first boots on the ground. And by this virtue, when they left fabulous. They lived a very different refugee narrative. In fact, Teto called their life the poor millionaires. She said they lived this jet set lifestyle on a shoestring budget, traveling the world in a time where refugee still was not a dirty word, when they still had the ability to travel. So I was fascinated, of course, by the stories of Palestine, the stories leaving Palestine, and the video footage that she gave me. And then she also gave me hundreds of dresses because she had a boutique in Jerusalem where she used to travel with Dubai dresses and sell them, but it was called petit Paris. I inherited from her dresses I inherited from her stories, I inherited from her the video footage. And all of these kind of assemble to create the identity of my lineage, the identity that I was born into. One unfortunate thing is that as I dug, I uncovered her wounds. Because there are times when I would ask her and I would push for her to tell me, hey, there's gaps in the story.
What happened between here and here? What happened between here and here? And eventually, when I did touch those points, I could see, I could feel. I can sense so viscerally how much pain she still carried when she remembered how much she lost. And I had to stop myself from investigating, from wanting to fill the gaps of those stories for myself, because I could see how much pain it caused her, which also caused me pain. Not that she just experienced that, but that it will remain hidden from me and I will never be because I don't want to hurt her in the process.
[00:07:04] Speaker A: Tough, but it's also part of the intergenerational trauma, right? That maybe you need to deal with and process so you wouldn't pass it on. This makes me wonder, do you feel that a big part of palestinian women's histories haven't been recorded? We know the history, okay? We've been taught and we taught our children the history of Palestine, but we know little about what women went through. Do you feel that now that you have gone through your grandmother's history, there are things that we are still don't know? And how would we know if we get too hurt to know?
[00:07:46] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:07:47] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:07:47] Speaker C: What a question. I was having this conversation with a friend of mine earlier about how much emotional labor women do to contain the family, to take care of the elders, the parents, the children, the community, the neighbors. And unless someone was a writer for themselves, and only if they really have the great fortune of being able to hold onto their possessions, as we saw with my grandmother when she left Palestine in 48, and again in 67, they lost every material possession. So unless they were really fortunate to be able to hold on, then we will never have an archive or testament to all of the efforts that went into raising generations. Raising generations to feeding and clothing and housing and homing and loving all of our ancestors. Because of the breadth of this emotional labor and because the home is a space for.
It's not a space for contracts, it's a space for conversation. So it's our oral histories. It's all of the learning that was passed on through song, through here. Let me show you. Stitching, doing things by hand, preserving the food for the spring season or for the winter season, harvesting the food, cooking the food, taking care of the children, taking care of the animals, taking care of the land, all of those things, they didn't need to be documented. It's here. Let me show you with your eyes, with your hands. There is no telling how much we've lost. There is only an embodiment of what we've retained and the desire to excavate and keep alive and tap into the knowledge of our elders and say, please pass on what you remember, pass on what you can stand to remember, even from what hurts, so that we can work through it and we can carry it on. But in general, I feel that even those women who were fortunate enough to be literate and to have the time to write and to be documented, I feel like many women were erased from history, like the palestinian lebanese feminist writer Maisiade. The records of her literary salon, which every literary salon had records that were kept, her records were erased. And because she wrote under a pen name, people weren't quite clear for some decades that the breadth and scope of her work. And even just 1520 years ago, I was trying to do some research about her. It was very hard to find. I had to go to Lebanon to find some of her work that was published in press houses, publishing houses in Lebanon, to find some of it. Now, yes, we're seeing reclamation of these characters and a celebration of these characters that were somehow lost to history. But I think that in the case of women like Maisie Ada, she was specifically silenced and tried to be erased from history.
[00:10:34] Speaker A: And this covers women in different fields, but because there are women researchers now who can stand at par with men on equal footing, saying, you know, I'm using the same qualitative or quantitative tools you're using. And this is why, you know, we started to be heard, whether in academia or research or scholarship, but also in arts and storytelling, right? So it's evident that you believe in the power of the word, the power of storytelling, and we tell our stories differently. Did you choose this vehicle of communication or mode of communication because it offered you something that other modes didn't? Why poetry?
[00:11:18] Speaker C: So my first love was, I say theater, but actually my first love was reading. And reading turned into a love of speaking, reading out loud, which turned into a love of theater. And I still had that love of writing, which also relates to reading. I studied theater, and a year or so after I graduated, I moved to Dubai, where there was no theater scene, but there was a poetry scene. And the commitments required to do a production are many from financial resources to a space, to commitments from cast and crew. There's so many moving parts and variables. I had the idea of scaling down my theatrical performance to not just a one woman show, but poems, which can be vignettes, which can be bite size scenes through which I can approach different topics through character. Because one of the things that, when I did turn to poetry, I realized that slam poetry and spoken word in general is really influenced by the United States. So much so that the spoken word poet in Japan and the spoken word poet in Argentina perform with a Philly accent. They perform with the same american accent that they've seen other american slam poets perform, which makes the form homogenized. Even if they're talking about different things, it sounds the same. So I thought, how can I break this repetition in the form? I'm going to bring theater, I'm going to bring character, I'm going to bring accent and gesture and the theatricality. So it wasn't intentional that I turned to theater, that I turned to poetry. It was what was around me. And bringing theater to poetry created a form that felt so authentic to me because I had always written poetry growing up, and it just became like the space where these two worlds meet. And it was very exciting for me to see what happens there.
[00:13:11] Speaker A: And you were in the middle and you felt that this embodiment is you.
[00:13:16] Speaker C: Right? Because poetry doesn't appeal to the logical mind. Poetry appeals to the emotional body. I want to have a conversation with you. And we both have very different ideologies. Our minds will battle each other until the end of time if we believe that we are right and we're not open to feeling compassion, feeling empathy, feeling that what you're feeling is real and valid, and, ah, maybe there's a way that we can both meet again in a middle space. So this is why poetry really appealed to me, is because, ah, logical mind goes offline, heart opens up to listen, because it's speaking to the subconscious. And in that space, story really connects to anyone, everyone.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: You're a palestinian American, so the story you tell isn't yours only in the global sense of narratives, a contested one. It's the story of the people, rather than being the story of the powerful. How do you think we can expose the historical fallacies and the colonial narratives about Palestine?
[00:14:24] Speaker C: I think that there are many ways to do that. One way is spotlighting history as we have experienced it, because we know that history has been rewritten by the victors. And in this way, we've all been living. You know, they say we're living in a simulation. It doesn't mean we're living in a computer simulation. What does it mean? It means that we're living in a simulation of reality. We're living with facts that shape our context of reality, facts that are not true. And in this way, we're living in a simulation of reality because we're not living truth. And so I think that our task is to uncover those real stories and then also to find a way to accept, even if they happened hundreds of years ago, even if they happened 1000 years ago, to still say that we are the inheritors of that history, of that legacy. We acknowledge it, we take somehow responsibility for it, and we choose to readjust reality, to be in line with what really happened and not in denial of it, and not in complete remorphing of the reality that we live in. And I'm so grateful to social media because 1015 years ago, it's like, how do we get more people on board to come out and say that this is who I am and this is what I believe in. We don't need to surrender our agency to leaders who are meeting behind closed doors, who are very privileged, who really don't have the majority on their mind. I'm so grateful that social media has come out to be such a democratic platform, although we can't say it's entirely democratic, because we see censorship and we see control and we see biased media, and we see the phenomenon of echo chambers, you know, where we're just speaking to our own crowd and we're really not informed of what's happening on the other side of the fence. So it's not entirely democratic. And I think that it would be wise for, particularly the arab region, to invest in an alternative. I don't want to call it a social media platform. I want to call it a civic engagement platform, because this is what we want to be doing on our social media. We want to have a meaningful way for civic engagement. And yet our social media platforms are about aesthetics and they're about commercial sales. It's a sales platform, then we get to numbers. So numbers become the bottom line. And if it's about numbers, then it's competitive, it's not collaborative. So the whole framework of social media doesn't support us to do the things that we want to do with social media, which is to connect and engage as global, global citizens, which the Internet has made so, so clear that we are. It used to be that I don't know what's happening over there. That other is strange. And now we see just how clearly we are all unified and connected.
[00:17:21] Speaker A: What can we do for Gaza? And this is my final question.
[00:17:24] Speaker C: Well, I really enjoyed the conversation with you. There are many things that we can do for Gaza. For one is to keep educating ourselves so that we don't slip into the illusion again that the west is best, that the west knows what's right. There needs to be a reclamation of the arab identity, pride and unity in the region as a whole. So finding ways to support, include raising awareness, include fundraising, include creating opportunities to celebrate the palestinian identity. We are always connected to haram Sakin, Muslim, and it's true. But we also need to be very proud of who we are and the strength of our characters, the integrity of our history, the love of our ancestors. All of these things we need to keep alive and also recognize that the change that will come, and it is coming, will require sacrifice from everybody. Right now we see Al Ghazaar sacrificing their lives or the global change that is to come. We will all have to sacrifice something. Some people right now are sacrificing their starbucks. Thank you. That's amazing. But ultimately, we will have to sacrifice and make decisions of is what I'm doing in line with the benefit of the whole? Is it in line with the greater system change that I want to see? Because Gaza is setting off a decolonization movement that we're going to see unravel around the world for years to come. And so it's about understanding the vision and the mission that it is our time and our duty to do this and help really heal this global wound. It is a global wound of colonization. And the last remaining stance is in Palestine. And when it is eradicated, we will see a big shift happen globally.
[00:19:18] Speaker A: There's always a silver lining to things, even this horrible thing that's happening now, the genocide in Gaza. But I would say, of course, there is a global empathy. But more than that, there is this awakening of identity. I can see it in the generation of my kids. We gave them a cause to fight for. Those kids belong to a generation that is based on consumerism and on privilege, really. I love the fact that they understand and they talk about humanity and the language that we want them to adopt, not the UN's language, not the global language that was imposed on us and its hypocrisy and double standard was exposed to us. And I'm really happy to see the younger generation, you know, standing up and having their own vocab to explain it to the world.
[00:20:09] Speaker C: It's not just the younger generation. It's now a worldwide issue on everyone's tongue. I can't believe it took 75 years for that to be the case. But Alhamdulillah, now it is. And it's not going to go away. It's not going to go away. It's not going to be swept under the rug. It's hard to ask human beings to live a life without purpose. And we are sold that our purpose is to accrue material wealth and assets, gain assets. But when you do that and you find that you're still losing here, you still don't feel good. Only then can you realize, ah, what's important is a value far beyond something that I can fit in my hand. It's justice, it's liberty, it's health, it's happiness, it's my integrity, it's my word. It's all of these things. And so for the youth to also have that wake up call, that it's not just about the latest dance on TikTok or the newest iPhone or whatever, that there are people that are suffering and that you can be part of the change, of making a new world, one that is equitable and fair for all. That is a purpose to live for. That is the purpose.
[00:21:22] Speaker A: Dana, lovely, lovely to have you.
[00:21:24] Speaker C: I enjoyed the podcast. I got to hear some episodes leading up to this conversation and keep up the amazing work. Thank you for spotlighting women from the Middle east and giving us the platform to share our stories.
[00:21:35] Speaker B: This is women of the Middle east. Thank you for listening and watching. To stay up to date with women of the Middle east podcast, you can subscribe and don't forget to rate us. If you would like to contact me directly, you can do so on Instagram or via email.
