The estimated number of Lifta refugees today is around 30,000 who are scattered around the world. My family, along with dozens of other Lifta families live in Jerusalem. We can visit the village but cannot return to it while a number of Jewish settlers live in some of Lifta’s houses.
In my imagination created by the stories I’ve heard and the reality I see, I perceive Lifta as an inhabited place, full of people and amazing nature. I imagine the people meeting during the days next to the water spring, where young women fill their water jugs and young men wait to chat with them. In the evenings, people meet in a house to listen to the al-Hakawati (storyteller) who tells stories inspired from history and our culture. I imagine the wedding-parties next to the water spring where young men and women dance debke — the Palestinian folkloric dance — to the flute and sing dallona (folklore) songs.
I have no words to describe my feelings when I see my house and land in front of me inhabited by strangers who prevent me by their laws from returning to it. I thought maybe through pictures I would be able to tell part of the story of Lifta. To express myself, my anger, my hopes and my dreams, I created the above work. It is my way to feed my imagination and develop a new vision of the place that belongs to me and the place that I belong to. A place that the Zionists failed to erase from my memory.
Lifta, like many other Palestinian villages, does not only consist of abandoned walls and trees, rather they are history and future, life and existence, struggle and victory that will be achieved one day through the right of return. With the images I’ve captured, as well as my imagination, I try to illustrate, on one hand the destruction of the place and the society that inhabited it and on the other a continuous picture that connects past and future, sadness and happiness, dreams and reality.
Anan Odeh is a human rights lawyer and refugee from Lifta, Palestine. Born in 1972, he lived most of his life in Jerusalem and moved to the US two years ago to continue his studies.Slideshow, Anan Odeh
Nativewoman said,
April 1, 2008 at 00:19
As are the native Americans.