According to Google Maps, the distance between Jerusalem and Bethlehem is 5.7 miles. The predicted travel time — based on Google’s algorithmic data- crunching — is around thirty minutes. For such a short drive, one that might be unremarkable in many other cases, the expected speed seems slow: painfully so. Depending on who you are, of course, the pace of your potential progress could quicken, or become significantly slower still. This is a busy, main thoroughfare — the Hebron Road — and like so many routes across this intricately fragmented and strategically segmented geography, it is interrupted by checkpoints: barriers where the meaning of ‘who you are’ is, in part, determined by where you’re from, or even, indeed, when you’re from. Possibilities for movement and passage depend on what type of passport or ID card you carry — and which version of these you hold in your constant possession is, unavoidably, an outcome of a complex, cruel history, a continuing effect of oppressive present-day politics, and, fundamentally, a divisive product of the ways that those in power have placed you — the ways they have located and limited you — as a citizen or subject.

 

Here is a dispiriting, everyday example, one of many documented by Emily Jacir over fifteen years ago in Where We Come From — and one of a million micro-incidents that might be easily overlooked amongst the multitude of frustrations, restrictions, and humiliations suffered by Palestinians on a routine basis. In 2002, the 5.7 miles between Jerusalem and Bethlehem could not be travelled by a man called Munir, his humble wish being to visit his mother’s grave on the day of her birthday. Born in Jerusalem but living in Bethlehem, Munir had sought to undertake a modest personal pilgrimage: paying tribute to his deceased mother, praying and laying flowers at her final place of rest. By any reasonable measure, this decent, apolitical act should be no big deal. As the holder of a Palestinian passport and a West Bank ID (and as the son of parents exiled from Jerusalem in the Nakba of 1948), Munir was, however, subject to the capricious constraints of state power and denied the right to cross from one neighbouring locality to another. On this occasion — as with, no doubt, so many others over subsequent years — Munir’s honourable family commitment could not be fulfilled. But even if, in such cases, certain borders can be crossed — official entry permits approved — the predicament for Palestinians wishing to make such standard, dutiful journeys — going from here to there and back again within the familiar settings of quotidian life — is arduously intolerable.

 

The practical impact of an anticipated checkpoint might change; the probable duration of a planned journey might be impossible to judge. And as John Berger has written, the effect of this on daily life is relentless. As soon as somebody one morning says to himself ‘I’ll go and see — ’ he has to stop short and check how many crossings of barriers the ‘outing’ is likely to involve. The space of the simplest everyday decisions is hobbled, with its foreleg tethered to its hind leg.[1]

 

Time too, Berger said, becomes ‘hobbled.’ Movement is fitfully impeded, disrupted with maddening unpredictability. Trips across minor distances become drawn-out expeditions: “nobody knows how long it will take this morning to get to work, to go and see Mother, to attend a class, to consult the doctor, nor, having done these things, how long it will take to get back home.” Any sure sense of “temporal and spatial continuity” is destroyed. And if they are maddening, these conditions must be deadening, too: so much precious time given over to going nowhere. “For the most part,” Edward Said once observed, “Palestinians wait: wait to get a permit, wait to get their papers stamped, wait to cross a line, wait to get a visa. Eons of wasted time, gone without a trace.”[2] Where We Come From (2001–03) is, amongst much else, a double-edged account of movement and stasis, a richly plural record of both relative freedom and severely imposed confinement. Across a series of small, evocative images and succinct accompanying statements, we are given glimpses of thirty Palestinian lives (a selection from the considerable number of people Jacir actually communicated with), each one acknowledging a different type of daily, highly localised limitation or traumatic, long-term separation. As the holder of an American passport, Emily Jacir had, at that time, been able to travel with more certainty and regularity than many fellow Palestinians: This identifying document afforded her the flexibility to come and go both within and beyond her homeland. (It’s worth emphasizing, of course, that such an entitlement should not be exceptional: It is a fundamental condition of individual liberty, enshrined in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.) Jacir’s US passport had empowered her to proceed past checkpoints, to cross borders with a degree of confidence. Movement was possible, if not straightforward — as no movement from place to place in Palestine is ever allowed to be. But Jacir’s travel credentials were valuable in enacting another, more expanded and collective kind of access. Put to new use in the conception and realisation of Where We Come From — a work comprising thirty-two photographs, thirty framed texts, and a single video — the passport provided, as Jacir has noted, a way to “access Palestine for Palestinians.” Jacir’s conceit was to go to locations on behalf of others, to carry with her the requests, messages, prayers, desires, memories (and much more besides) of those prevented from making it to particular places themselves. Where We Come From thus captures a sequence of excursions, experiences, meetings, and observations; it reports back from trips that others could not take, because they were either prohibited from entering the occupied Palestinian territories, or denied the everyday licence to move freely inside these controlled, carved-up, highly militarised landscapes. (In recounting these conditions, the past tense is important, but not because this period has been left behind. Since the early 2000s, there has been substantial change, but zero improvement. Holders of American and European passports do not, now, have their once-available ‘freedom of movement’; and longer, higher walls now divide and isolate communities with insistently intensified force.)

 

So, then, Where We Come From introduces us to Munir from Bethlehem, who asks Jacir to visit his mother’s grave. We meet Hana who lives in Houston, Texas, and who has never been to Palestine — her wish being that Jacir might “go to Haifa and play soccer with the first Palestinian boy you see.” We meet Rizek, a student at Birzeit University in the West Bank; his hometown is Bayt Lahia, around fifty miles away in Gaza, and having left, he can’t return. After three years away — maybe the first three years of forever — his hope is that Jacir might call on his family and perhaps bring back a picture of his brother’s kids. Some such requests strike a poignant note. (From a man called Jihad, living in Ramallah: “Visit my mother, hug and kiss her and tell her that these are from her son. Visit the sea at sunset and smell it for me and walk a little bit.”) Others speak to the absurdity of life under extreme, fenced-in conditions. (From Mahmoud, living in Kufar Aqab: “Go to the Israeli post office in Jerusalem and pay my phone bill. I live in Area C . . . under full Israeli control, so my phone service is Israeli...I am forbidden from going to Jerusalem, so I am always looking for someone to go and pay my phone bill.”) Others again seek expressions of untroubled, uncomplicated existence, remembered or imagined: Marie Therese in New York asks Jacir to “Do something on a normal day in Haifa,” making us wonder, surely, what a word like ‘normal’ might yet mean. The stories recorded in Where We Come From — judiciously distilled as brief, explanatory notes and up-close, in-the-moment snapshots — are both divergent and consistent in their evocations of personal history and political reality. We see Palestine from multiple, plural perspectives while gaining a strong, stirring sense of shared desire, shared disappointment, shared despair. From one angle, the collated ‘plurality’ of viewpoints has, perhaps, a disturbing dimension: Where We Come From demonstrates how extensively — and purposefully — the Palestinian people have been separated into diversely located and dislocated clusters; defined, segregated, and dispersed as disconnected groups. (Some are labelled, and locked into a way of life, by the colour-coded IDs that denote residency in Gaza, the West Bank, or Jerusalem; others have their identity — and liberty — partially determined by ownership of Israeli, Jordanian, or American passports.) Yet the title and content of Where We Come From declare resistance to these fixed, enforced designations. Jacir’s work calls an anxious, urgent ‘we’ into provisional existence, just as, at the same time, it concentrates our attention on the diverse, under-represented details of individual Palestinian experience.

 

1. John Berger, “Stones (Palestine, June 2003),” in Landscapes: John Berger on Art, ed. Tom Overton (London: Verso, 2016), 232.

2. Edward Said, Wherever I Am: Yael Bartana, Emily Jacir, Lee Miller (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2003), 35 (first published as “Emily Jacir” in Grand Street 72, Autumn 2003).

 

— Declan Long, originally written for 𝘌𝘮𝘪𝘭𝘺 𝘑𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘳: 𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘞𝘦 𝘊𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘍𝘳𝘰𝘮 (Hanover, New Hampshire: Jaffe-Friede Gallery, Dartmouth College, 2019)