Video: Witnessing the Unseen: Reflecting on Presence and Absence in Native Lands

Visual Artist John Halaka reflected on the experiences of presence and absence of displaced populations. His talk was anchored in his extended engagement with Palestinian refugees and the creative work that has ensued from that relationship. Halaka’s artwork positions the viewers as witnesses to concealed histories, and guides us to acknowledge our personal relationships and moral responsibilities to populations that have been forcibly displaced from their native lands.

The event was moderated by Hilary Rantisi, Assocate Director of the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, Religion and Public Life. This event is the second in a three-part series, "Arts and the Moral Imagination."

Biography: John Halaka is a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of San Diego. His artwork investigates narrative of cultural survival and political resistance in colonized and diasporic communities. Halaka’s drawings, paintings, photographs, oral history archives and documentary films, visualize the tensions between the emotional presence and physical absence of populations whose cultures have been devastated by the violent intrusions of settler colonialism. Halaka’s artwork is produced as a result of extended personal engagements with marginalized communities and is designed to provide an arena for both the participants and the viewers to meditate on survival and resistance as conditions that shape the life experiences of displaced populations.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

NARRATOR: Harvard Divinity School.

NARRATOR: Witnessing the unseen reflections on presence and absence in native lands. March 11, 2025.

HILARY RANTISI: Welcome, everyone. I feel like finally it's the beginning of spring, maybe, Inshallah. So it's delightful to see so many of you here, especially when the weather is so nice outside. Welcome, everyone. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Hilary Rantisi. I'm the Associate director of the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at the Religion and Public Life Program at Harvard Divinity School. So welcome. Welcome to our second event in our moral imagination series that we're hosting at the Religion and Public Life program.

Before I introduce our program and what we're doing in this series, I just wanted to take a moment to Thank my colleagues, without whom arrangements for this program and such programs is not possible. So first Reem, Tammy, Natalie, Rachelle, Delis, and Sarah behind the camera. So thank you all.

[APPLAUSE]

I also wanted to introduce our work at RCPI for those of you who don't know, because it's important to make these connections and know what we are doing and why we're doing it. So our work centralizes an analysis of structural injustice, violence and power. And the primary case study that we are focusing on is on Israel-Palestine. And our aim is to stretch the scholarly discourse around religion and the practices of peace-building and examine the decolonial potentialities of art, religion, and identity transformation.

So at RPL, we're hosting a three-part series this semester that engages scholars, practitioners, and scholar practitioners on the role of the arts in just peace building. So these conversations engage with the work that I just described on just peace building and centralizing and analysis of structural injustice, of violence and power.

So in our classes, we often talk about the work and the scholarship of Professor and Activist John Paul Lederach, who defines the moral imagination as the capacity to imagine something rooted in the challenges of the real world, yet capable of giving birth to that which does not exist. So we're invested in what is possible, not in what is.

The first event in our series was a dance performance by conference of the birds, which we went to just about two weeks ago. And our third, which is upcoming, will be an exploration of comics and narrative change, which was happening in April. But today's event, the second in our series, is witnessing the unseen, reflections on presence and absence in native lands. We are honored to have with us artist Professor John Halaka, who will reflect on the experiences of absence and presence of displaced populations.

So before I hand it over to John, I just wanted to give a brief bio of him. A few years ago, we were trying to exactly remember when it was, maybe 2 and 1/2 years ago. It was right after-- well, COVID had started, but it was safe to travel. So it was I don't know, December 2021, I think maybe 22, maybe. Yeah. We went to San Diego with our fellows, many of them artists, and John was very kind to host us in his studio and to talk to us about his work. And ever since then we've been wanting him to host him here at Harvard. So welcome. Finally, we have you here with us.

So Professor John Halaka is a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of San Diego. His artwork investigates narratives of cultural survival and political resistance in colonial, colonized, and diasporic communities. Halaka's writings, drawings, paintings, photographs, oral history archives, and documentary films visualize the tensions between the emotional presence and physical absence of populations whose cultures have been devastated by the violent intrusions of settler colonialism. So we are very honored to have you with us here today. Please, join me in welcoming Professor Halaka.

[APPLAUSE]

JOHN HALAKA: Thank you all for being here. And thank you, Hilary, for that very thoughtful and generous introduction. There's a lot of you all here. I'm glad. I'm very glad to see that. So Yeah, I've asked for them to turn the lights off so you can see the screen better. There's plenty of light, so you probably won't fall asleep. But if you do fall asleep and you start snoring, we're going to call on you.

So I want to start with a land acknowledgment. And I want to acknowledge that I stand as a grateful guest on the unseated land of the Massachusetts's people, and that wherever I live or visit on this continent, I humbly recognize that I'm a guest on the Native lands of sovereign nations. I also acknowledge that as an immigrant to this land, I'm the beneficiary of a long and cruel history of settler colonial violence, land theft, dehumanization, and genocide that continues to impact the cultures and the lives of native people on this continent.

And as a Palestinian-American who struggles against the colonization of my ancestral land, I'm deeply aware of and troubled by the irony of also being a settler on the native lands of other nations and people. I seek the guidance and the wisdom of our Indigenous sisters and brothers in being a caring Steward of this shared land.

So I want to start also by thanking the good people at the Harvard Divinity School, and especially Hilary Rantisi and Reem Atassi for-- both at the center of Religion and Public Life, for inviting me to engage with this community. And I'm very much looking forward to our conversations. And I look forward to learning from you. Well, actually, I shouldn't say this, but putting things on the big screen, mistakes appear fast, so there should be an S at the end of lines that I didn't catch that on my little screen, so I'll move the slide away.

So I want to share with you some of my artwork, and to reflect on the complex relationships between the physical presence. And emotional absence of indigenous populations that have been forcibly displaced from their Native lands. I also want to reflect on the ways that the representation of presence and absence have evolved in my work.

Visual artists make works of art for all sorts of reasons, and those reasons change and evolve over the course of the careers of the artists. As a visual artist, the primary motivation that drives me to continue to produce new works is that I like to learn, and the artwork that I make provides me with opportunities to learn broadly and deeply over an extended period of time about topics that I'm interested in and become very passionate about. I also make art to share the things that I'm learning with others so they can also learn.

So during the process of learning, I become a direct witness to the experiences, the histories, the cultural knowledge that shapes the people and places that I focus my research on. I've traveled to Palestine, to refugee camps in Lebanon, to Jordan, to the Galilee and other parts of historical Palestine in order to seek out and meet and speak with Palestinians.

My goal is to be an active witness to their reality. I do that by sensitively asking questions and listening to their experiences and their stories, the stories of men and women who have been brutally displaced from their homes and homeland, as well as Palestinians living under the dehumanizing rule of a repressive settler-colonial occupation.

I seek out and speak with multiple generations, including the descendants of the 1948 refugees who were born in the aftermath of a catastrophic cultural rupture that resulted in the permanent dismemberment of families, the loss of all of those families, properties, businesses, and economic means, the shattering of cultural histories and traditions, and the violent dislocation of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children from the lands that they belonged to.

When working with communities of refugees, one quickly realizes that the multiple generations of exiled people have been deliberately cast into the shadows of the world consciousness and forced behind a veil of political invisibility. It's important to remind ourselves that those peoples are not invisible, although they have been deliberately unseen. The refugee are also not mute, albeit their narratives continue to be muffled by dense political wall of silence, a wall that silences their stories. Their stories remain mostly unheard.

Their narratives have been repeatedly muted, and their experiences and stories continue to be refuted, denied and scrubbed from the master narratives that glorify the victors and erase the histories of the victims. It is that erasure of history, the forced absence of the experiences of generations of displaced and dispossessed Palestinians, as well as the experiences of generations of men and women living under occupation that I try to address in my work. My work is a humble effort to underscore the historical presence that must be justly and continually asserted in support of the liberation struggle of the Palestinians.

The experiences of the few hundred displaced men and women that I met are closely related to the experiences of millions of other Palestinians, whether they be refugees or are living under the yoke of occupation. They have all been relegated to the unseen margins of the marginalized. There are more chairs up here if you guys want to sit. The stories reveal histories that few know about. The men and women I spoke with conveyed their personal realities with poetic depth, emotional power, and a political clarity that few scholars, poets, and artists have ever conveyed in their publications or creative work.

It is through the stories of ordinary Palestinians that are living in exile or under occupation that I've learned the most about Palestine and the Palestinians. And it is with the guidance of their experiences, their faces, and the places they were forced to leave behind, as well as the places that have sheltered them, that I construct my work. I record and preserve their personal memories, as well as the memories of memories that were passed down to them by their elders and ancestors, so that we can begin to become informed witnesses to their unseen realities.

I'm eternally indebted to the wisdom, compassion, and clarity of the Palestinian men and women that I have listened to. Their cultural knowledge guides their survival, and prioritize their love for their children over their animosity for those who displace them and continue to persecute them. The Palestinian refugees, the farmers, the artists, and the activists that I've spoken with Invest me with their stories. And I consider it a privilege, as well as a profound responsibility to be a humble carrier of those stories, to be a will and witness to their complicated realities. My work does not speak for them, they speak through my work. So that you might become a carrier of their stories.

I'm sharing with you a few words from a couple of projects that explore the tension between the psychological presence and the physical absence of Indigenous populations that have been stripped of their history and identity and were forcibly displaced from their homes and homelands. The stories, the work, the persistence of the men and women that I listened to demonstrate a powerful moral presence in the face of inconceivable suffering. Their narratives underscore their ability to love and care for their families and their neighbors in the face of generational injuries. The experiences they shared are powerful and inspiring acts of survival in the face of persistent dehumanization.

The image on the screen is a large drawing from the early phase of the series, Forgotten Survivors. The project has evolved over the years to encompass several series of drawings and paintings, and oral history archive, series of photographs, and documentary films. The large drawing was started-- this large drawing was started in 1993 and completed with repeated revisions in 2003. The drawing and much of my work from the period between 1987 and ending in 2005, was very much focused on the forced absence of the refugees from native lands, their forced displacement, their shattering-- the shattering of their cultures and the fragmentation of their families, their clans and the interlinked societies and their broad disbursement from into a global diaspora.

Refugees are reduced to a state of absence from their homeland and can quickly become an absence from our political consciousness. The men and women presented in a drawing become, like many other displaced indigenous populations, anonymous, forgotten survivors who exist in the shadows of the world's consciousness. The drawing was an effort to represent the anonymity of the refugees-- of the refugee populations, as they have been relegated to a life of drifting from nowhere to nowhere.

The figures in the drawing represent humans, just like you and me, men and women who have been stripped of their identity and driven from their land, their past erased, their present unstable and their future undetermined. They drift and they drift and they drift towards unknown destinies, with nothing to carry but their memories. They exist in a liminal space between an unstable physical presence and an erased historical absence.

I try to construct the drawing so that the transitory and unstable state of displaced population was made visible through the thousands of restless marks that define the forms of each of the figures and the space. Each of those marks is made up of two rubber stamped words that say forgotten survivors. I intended for the figures to look like they were in the process of simultaneously appearing and disappearing before our eyes. Their location between presence and absence is up to us, the viewers who stand as witnesses to their march from an erased past into an undefined future.

The position of the displaced population in this drawing is left up to each viewer's connections, to personal histories and experiences of exile. It is up to each of us and the actions that we choose to undertake or to not undertake, to decide whether we want the drifting and anonymous mass of humanity to appear and remain present in our consciousness, or to disappear and to be further erased from the worlds consciousness.

The anonymity of the figures invites each viewer to define her or his personal relationship to the unidentified men and women by projecting on the figures in the drawing their personal history as a survivor of people who have been violently displaced, or as the descendant and beneficiary of those who have forcibly displaced other populations from their Native land.

There are many times when we're both of those things the displaced and displaced, the colonized and the colonizer, the victims and the victimizer. That realization should provide us, whichever side of a conflict we stand on, with the possibility of beginning to understand the complexity of our opponents, and should offer us a glimmer of insights that could guide us to recognize their humanity.

Whether the figures become present or absent is up to the moral imagination of each viewer who witnesses their displacement. It's up to each of us as witnesses, to envision the possibility of their future, to acknowledge the instability of their present state, and to creatively address the historical harms that they suffered and the festering injuries they are forced to live with.

In 2005, my approach to my work on exile changed dramatically when I started to record the personal stories of Palestinians who had been displaced from their homeland, as well as those who are living under occupation. The process altered my vision and my work. The naked bodies that had earlier been lumped together in my images and presented as displaced masses of anonymous humanity, were replaced by individuals with faces, with names, and with unique stories that conveyed personal experiences with complex, vivid and vivid memories.

The stories of the men and women that I listened to and recorded reshaped the approach to and the focus of my work. Instead of my images exploring the physical absence of forcibly transferred population from their native lands. The personal experience that I listened to redirected my drawings, my photographs, my films and oral history archive to focus on the psychological and emotional presence of the dispossessed.

I recognized through the stories I listened to that although banished from their homes and homeland, the spirit of the displaced are ever present in the villages that were destroyed after 1948. Their spirits were present in the stolen farmlands and in the once verdant orchards that had been planted by countless generations of their ancestors. When I walked through some of the destroyed Palestinian villages, I felt that spirit. I felt the spirit of the displaced, hover like ghost that persistently reclaimed their emptied homeland. They were forced to leave, but their spirits remain and their ghosts returned to repossess the villages after they died in exile.

The emotional energy of the displaced was ever present in destroyed homes and demolished schoolhouses, and uprooted orchards that I walked through and photographed. While walking through destroyed villages, I better comprehended how memories of the fertile fields and groves that nurtured the elders once youthful bodies, are ever present in their imagination and their narratives, and that the voices of their ancestors materialize within their stories, like apparitions that haunted the spirits of generations of displaced Palestinians.

Walking through the destroyed villages, guided by the stories of refugees that I carefully listened to, I began to understand the complex synergy between presence and absence in the experiences of the Palestinian. The psychological and emotional presence in the homeland provides the energy that sustains their effort to reverse their physical absence from that now forbidden homeland. The ghost of presence call on generations of forgotten survivors to reject physical absence by remembering their Homeland, by rebuffing force, invisibility, by refusing to be silent, and by insisting on returning to being present in their native lands.

Lasting cultural survival is the goal, while effective creative resistance is the duty of all Indigenous people facing the threat of cultural erasure through exile or occupation. The process of survival and resistance are not separate tactics, but are a linked strategy for envisioning a hopeful future. The extended conversation I recorded with Palestinians expanded my understanding that the art of-- that art and literature, the art and literature of survival and resistance, are the antidotes to absence and forgetting.

By helping to ensure that experiences are preserved and that current and future generations are informed, the art and literature of survival and resistance offer a path to Indigenous presence, even in the midst of extended and enforced absence. In studying and contemplating reoccur histories of settler colonial repression, I find inspiration in the work of the native American scholar Gerald Vizenor, who coined the term survivance, a combination of the two words survival and resistance, to describe the creative resilience of the indigenous people of the Americas against long and brutal histories of cultural and physical genocide.

The concept of survivance applies to the struggle of all colonized populations, as cultures of survivance are defined by an active Indigenous presence against imposed political, physical, and psychological absence. Acts of survivance underline a dynamic will of the individual and underscore the power of the collective by creatively employing memories, personal communal stories, as well as tales of ancient customs and evolving traditions to convey a living culture that refuses to disappear.

The art of survivance is a collective act against imposed cultural erasure. It serves as an antidote to forgetting Indigenous histories, customs, and traditions, while helping to ensure that native experiences are preserved and that current and future generations are well informed. The creative arts, including the diverse field of visual arts, might be the best vehicle for informing, developing and sustaining cultures of survivance.

The ability of artists to witness, interpret, assemble, reimagine, and to creatively construct narratives of political, cultural, and spiritual resistance and survival, provides community of viewers with the potential to imagine and implement change. The art of survivance is a purgative that can potentially liberate our clogged moral imagination.

The cultural wisdom of Palestinians, passed through the spirit and experience of their ancestors, guides them to not seek vengeance, but to seek justice and only justice to borrow the words of Reverend Naim Ateek. Justice, and only justice for the losses they suffered, the cruelties they experiences, the poverty they endure, the pain they feel, and the deprivation they still live with. As justice and only justice is the path to their liberation, the road to their survival and the trail to their return-- to the return of the displaced.

The struggle for justice is the fuel that powers the creative engine of our moral imagination. The realization of justice begins with an honest acknowledgment and repudiation of the sins and cruelties of settler colonial supremacy to admit wrong and acknowledge the harm is the first step in a complicated process of truth and reconciliation that Bishop Desmond Tutu developed. When nations speak of a roadmap to peace, I believe that they should navigate that journey using the following set of directions.

The journey towards peace and reconciliation begins with a fundamental understanding that the acknowledgment of harm and repudiation of wrongs will set us on a path that leads towards justice. Justice must be founded on strong pillars of legal, political, and social equality that ensures a life lived in dignity for all involved. Equality for all and not supremacy for some is the foundation upon which a culture of justice must be built.

Because justice is a single trail that can guide us towards peace, and only in a state of peace can we find the path to reconciliation. And reconciliation is the road that can guide us to coexistence, while coexistence can lead to the mutual liberation of both combating population from cycles of hatred, of violence, and vengeance. And liberation will eventually guide former adversaries to the valleys of forgiveness.

As distant and improbable as forgiveness may appear during extended periods of hateful violence, we need to reimagine the process of achieving peace, and to visualize that complicated moral journey as starting with an acknowledgment and cessation of harm, and to visualize a process that can eventually lead us to forgiveness. I'm well aware that the genocidal violence for the past 16 months has set back the cause of justice for at least a generation. Violence should not deter us from seeking justice and must not fill us with the poison of vengeance.

We need to speak about and to teach our children about forgiveness as the toxic emotions of vengeance that we often pass on to our children will only guide them to become the monster that they wish to destroy. To paraphrase the late Bishop Desmond Tutu, without forgiveness, there can be no future. But before we can begin to proceed towards a distant valleys of forgiveness, we have to be willing to witness the unseen and to listen to the unheard so we can achieve the initial milestones of acknowledgment and the second road marker of justice.

One of the first things that I learned from recording the stories of survivors is that they're not invisible. They're not ghosts silently living in the shadows of the world consciousness. They are living, loving, suffering, and thriving individuals with unique experiences of displacement, survival, and resistance. They are not mute. They have stories to tell and are eager to share them. They want their stories to be heard and their realities to be seen.

They want for their experiences of survival as well as those of their children and grandchildren to be known. The forgotten survivors of Palestine, as well as survivors from other native lands, have been rendered into an absence that is being filled with the presence of the settlers, whose strategy is to fully dominate native lands that are free of native people. The experiences of the Palestinians are still deliberately being made invisible, and their stories continue to be strategically silenced by supremacist regional and global powers that cause and continue to expand their plight, their dehumanization, and their suffering.

The process-- sorry, those powers want, the faces of the forgotten survivors to remain unseen, to disappear into eternal darkness. They want the voices of the oppressed to remain unheard, to fade into everlasting silence. In short, they want to permanently enforce the absence of the displaced from their Homeland, from the world's consciousness, and to erase them from history. So they can replace him with their presence.

The tragic reality is that they are succeeding because large numbers of people who have been unwilling to listen, to see, and to learn. But the forgotten survivors want their presence to be known, their suffering acknowledged, and their struggles remedied. They asked for justice and only justice. They asked for the end of cycles of violence that have left generations of Palestinians traumatized. They seek the presence of Justice and the absence of cruelty. They demand equality never supremacy. Is that too much for anyone to ask for? It is a moral and just request and a baseline for life of dignity.

Are as a people of goodwill who seek justice and abhor cruelty willing to listen to their unheard stories and to witness their unseen realities? Can we cultivate the moral imagination to stand in solidarity with the forgotten survivors? Can we reimagine a future of justice based on equality and not supremacy? And I'm not only speaking about Palestine and the Palestinians. We all have histories that define our relationships with oppressed people. Each and every one of us can have an impact on the condition and well-being of others.

The drive to witness the unseen, to listen to the unheard and the effort to heal the pain of others can be implemented on a very local level, literally across the street and across town. We need to ask ourselves, where can I help to realize the presence of justice and ensure the absence of cruelty?

I look closely at the unseen faces of hundreds of Palestinian refugees and listen carefully to their unheard stories. Those stories continue to shape my consciousness and to impact my work. I want you to look closely at the face of an elder. His name is Hussein Lubani. He's from a village called Al-Damun in the Akkar District of Northern Palestine. He spent the past 76 years in exile and lives as a Palestinian refugee in the city of Tripoli, in Northern Lebanon.

I want you to listen to a small clip from a long recording of him recounting the story of nine-year-old Hussein Lubani, a small, smart, gentle, and sensitive boy who was uprooted from his farming village from his ancestors historical land from his animals, his friends, his neighbors and from the culture that shaped him, shaped his elders as well as his ancestors for countless generations.

The people of Al-Damun were fellahin, land tillers to use the Arabic word for peasants. They were farmers who were stripped of their land, their homes, their homeland, their culture, and their ancient history of tilling the land and living simply and gratefully from its bounty.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- [SPEAKING ARABIC]

[END PLAYBACK]

JOHN HALAKA: Hussein Lubani is a storyteller. He's a writer. He's published 17 books. He's a historian of Palestinian folklore. He's a remarkably eloquent man. And even in the midst of tragedy, he finds humor. And that's one of the characteristics is that we as Palestinians can still laugh, can still love, can still think kindly of the word of the world when the world is not to us. She's being shy out there.

But that story is only part of the story. So there's that story of exile, that painful story. I interviewed him in 2012. And-- hold on. Don't go away on me. I interviewed him in 2012. I was living in Lebanon for almost a year, 11 months, doing research, recording stories of Palestinian refugees Three generations. And twice during that year I went to Palestine.

And the main reason I went to Palestine, I mean, I was working on other projects, but the main reason I went to Palestine was to look for and visit the destroyed villages. Not all of them. There's 512 destroyed villages that have been accounted for and probably more. But I would look for them. So I wanted to find Al-Damun. And Al-Damun does not exist. It doesn't show up on maps. There's nothing that acknowledges its presence. It is an absence inside Israel.

So I rented a car and I had a before 1948 map of Palestine and a current map of Israel, which includes the West Bank and Gaza, is greater Israel. And I was sort of trying to triangulate and find the village. So I drove in the area, and I did that with multiple villages, and I couldn't find it. So I kept driving and looping. I knew it was in this area, but I didn't know where. And clearly the roads were new and clean and there were no such roads, and the roads probably divided and destroyed lots of villages.

But I saw Palestinian-Israeli women, three of them hijabed, walking by this fairly large, desolate area, and I did a quick U-turn and drove right up to them and asked them in Arabic, do they know where Al-Damun is? And they first looked at me with surprise because no stranger asks for Al-Damun and they yeah, if you go down about 3/4 of a mile or half a mile, I can't remember exactly what they said. And you'll see an old water pumping station. Take a right and that dirt road will lead you to the village.

And I did just that. Saw the big pumping station, took a right, pulled my little crappy rental car in and I-- it was a very steep, gradual Hill that went up and it was filled with rocks. So I said, I'm not driving this little rental car up there. So I stopped, took my camera, started to walk up the hill, and the very first thing I noticed was those rocks were not just rocks, they were the cut stones of the homes that had been bulldozed, had been scattered all across. This was a site of genocide. Not genocide of people, but genocide of a culture.

So I walked through and I photographed, and I kept going all the way up that steep Hill until I got to the top. And I was hoping to find some structure that was still there in other villages that were part of a mosque. They were there. They were part of homes. A village, for example, like [INAUDIBLE] in the North, has a lot of structures, and it's a remarkable place to walk through, especially when you walk through with survivors. But there was nothing. There was occasionally just a small part of a wall that was like the edge of a house.

And when I got to the top, I noticed on the other side of the hill there was a woman, hijabed woman and a man in his 20s, late 20s. And they were putting wood in the back of a car, like firewood, they were collecting wood. So I took some pictures of them and they saw me, and they got really nervous and started to quickly put the wood in the car. So I ran down the hill because they thought I was an Israeli, and I ran down the hill and I said to them, I'm sorry if I made you nervous. I'm just here to take pictures in Arabic, to take pictures of Al-Damun.

And again, she looked at me with surprise. She says, how do you know Al-Damun? And I said, a few weeks ago, maybe a month before, I had interviewed this gentleman called Hussein Lubani, and I came here to take pictures for him and to collect some dirt. I always carried one gallon ziploc bags, and I would fill them with dirt from the village and bring them back to the people.

And when I said Hussein Lubani, her face literally went white and her jaw kind of opened and she said, Hussein Lubani. I've heard about him all of my life. He's my cousin. I've never met him because she was born after 48, but I've heard about him. My family still speak about him because he's a well-known author historian, and she grabbed the ziploc bag out of my hand and dug the earth with her fingers, filled the bag, and then took a ring off of her finger and buried it deep inside that bag and closed it and said, please give this with my greetings to my cousin Hussein.

I said, well, let me record you giving a greeting. So I recorded her saying hi to Hussein, and she said-- hold on. She said [SPEAKING ARABIC], I'm the daughter of Miriam. In my Arabic, which is not as good as it should be, I heard her say, I'm Miriam, I didn't-- I missed that binte Miriam part. So I took the bag. She recorded her story, and when I went back to Lebanon with literally a bag full of-- bags of soil, and I was so lucky to get through customs in both countries because they're not very kind to-- the Israelis, at least, are not very kind to Palestinians when people bring in things out of the country.

I went back and knocked on the door of Hussein Lubani unannounced, and I should have made a call, but I just went unannounced. And he lives in the Northern part of Lebanon and Tripoli, and I had already recorded two long interviews with him. And Hussein, I didn't know it at the time, but he was starting treatment for cancer. He was frail. He was not all that well. So he opened the door and he saw me and he got a little nervous. Oh, he's back for more stories.

And I said, hello, I'm sorry I didn't call, but I have something for you. May I come in? So of course he let me in. His wife made us coffee, brought us sweets. And after the niceties of how are you doing and all that, I said I was in Palestine and I have something for you. And I pulled out of my backpack and I set up my camera. I said, can I record? I set up my camera. I pulled out of my backpack this bag-- Ziploc bag of dirt, and I gave it to him, and he looked at it really strange, and he opened it up and he put it up to his nose and he started to weep. He started to weep. And his wife came from the kitchen worried. What had I done to Hussein? And she started to weep. She's also from Al-Damun, but she was born after 48.

And then he put his hand and he was smelling the dirt. And then he came across this thing and he pulled it out and he said, what's this? I said, it's a gift from your cousin Miriam. He said, I don't have a cousin named Miriam, at least I don't know of one. So I played the recording of her greeting him, and he and his wife were really touched by this reunion, this at least virtual closure of a circle that had been broken in 1948.

And then he went to his office in the back and he came back with a ring. He said, I just got this when I went on the Hajj last year. And I would like for you to please give this to Miriam. So I took the ring and I put it in my-- that little compartment in my computer bag where you put your mouse and all those cords. And I said, I'd be happy to. And that was actually the last time I saw him. He's still good. Because my Arabic is weak. I don't call people on the phone and because I can't write Arabic, I don't email him. And his English is even worse than my Arabic. But I check on him through other people and last I checked, he was OK. He was doing well, but that was in 2022. So it's been three years.

So I took the ring. I bid him farewell. Actually, no, I didn't bid him farewell. He insisted that I stay for dinner, which is a very Palestinian-- he wouldn't let me leave. He said, we've got to eat and you're going to stay with us. So we ate, and then I bid him farewell, and I left. And I didn't go back to Palestine until the following year. But that ring stayed in my computer bag and I went back to Palestine.

And his cousin, she had been an internally displaced refugee, so her part of the family were kicked out. But they didn't leave to Lebanon, they winded up staying and they relocated to a town called Tamra. It was then a village, but it became a town. And so I went to Tamra, and I realized when I went to Tamra, I don't know this woman's last name. It's not Lubani because she was married and she's from his mother's side. And it was just really stupid.

But I printed a picture of her and I went to butcher shops, the grocery store. I said, do this woman named Miriam? And they all looked at-- there's a lot of Miriams in town, but nobody knew her. And I did that twice over three years. Went once, didn't come back. following year, came back. But always carried the ring with me. Six years later, I had an exhibition in Jerusalem at a gallery in East Jerusalem, and I gave a talk about this-- it was an exhibition of my photographs of the refugees. And I gave a talk about the people there. And I talked about Hussein Lubani and I mentioned the story of the ring.

And after the talk, this young woman who I had met earlier that day named Marwa Bakri, who's an artist, she came up to me. She said, I have a friend who lives in Tamra. Can you email me her picture? I said, I'd be happy to. So I'd gone out to dinner with a bunch of people, went back to my little hotel, emailed the picture before I went to bed. I think it was around midnight. I woke up the next morning at 6:00 AM. I checked my email and there's an email from Marwa says, I found her.

I mean, 6 years. I was carrying this ring, she found her. And so I called her. I didn't call her at 6:00, I called her like at 9:00 and she said, let's go. So we got into her car with her partner Hamada and the director-- at the time, the director of the gallery, and we drove to the Galilee. Maura lives in Jerusalem, Hamada lives in Jerusalem, and they have the permit. They're able to travel in 1948, Palestine. So we traveled to the Galilee. We went up to this house, and she had told her friend, don't tell her we're coming.

So we drove up to this house. It was like most Palestinian homes. It had a court, a wall and a metal door. And they said, just wait out here. So they opened the metal door and they walked in and they all embraced. I forgot a small part of the story. I'll get back to it. They embraced, and then Marwa signaled me in and I walked in. And there was this woman, hijabed woman, the woman who I thought her name was Miriam, sweeping the courtyard. And she looked at me from this distance, and she said, where have you been? I've been waiting for you for six years.

And she came over and gave me this big hug. She said, you delivered my ring. I said, absolutely, and he gave me a gift for you. So I showed her a video of him giving her the gift and she wept. So it was this really remarkable story of the potential of reunion. It was not a real reunion, but it was the potential of a reunion. And the reality that we can return and we will return. In one way or another, we will go back to our land. I don't know if we have time for the next one, but how are we doing on time? We started a little late.

HILARY RANTISI: I think just because of the breaking of the fast, we probably should.

JOHN HALAKA: Yeah, well, there's another video. You can see it if you go to my website and you click on films and archives and you look up under a woman named Umm Aziz. Umm Aziz, she's not a poet. She's not a historian, but she's lived tremendously complicated life. And she speaks of losing her four sons one morning in September during the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

She was displaced in 1948 when she was 18 years old. She had had a brand new newborn baby and another girl that was a little bit over a year and was-- the village-- she was home, not in the fields, because she had just given birth recently and she ran out of the village when it was being bombarded, put her two daughters in a little washing tub, ran out a village, a bomb fell in front of them. A shrapnel fell on the chest of the newborn, who died that day. The one-year-old daughter died two days later of dysentery, because she had given her water from a well that had been infected, dead animals were thrown in there. And she joined this river of humanity that were being driven out of their land, hundreds of thousands of people.

And her husband and his family and her family ended up staying in Palestine, became internally displaced refugees. Her husband left Palestine voluntarily to go look for his wife and his daughters, and found her almost two years later in a refugee camp in Southern Lebanon. They rebuilt her life, had a bunch of kids and grandkids, and then four of her boys were disappeared in September 12, 1982. And that's the story that you'll listen to from Umm Aziz.

[APPLAUSE]

We won't forget her?

HILARY RANTISI: Yeah, I wish we had more time because I really would the story you shared with us of Hussein is not only remarkable, but unforgettable. So first, I have so much gratitude for what you have brought to us this evening, not only in word, in images, and in the work that you do. I mean, so moving that I'm feeling very emotional after hearing these stories. And so grateful that you are sharing them with us and bringing these stories to us here, that they will-- these stories also live, continue on.

I want to thank you for bringing moral imagination into our space, for bringing beauty, for bringing stories. And reuniting people together even maybe not in real life, but the importance of that. I mean, hearing the stories of Hussein and the feeling, what he felt as a child, bringing that to us today also brings to life stories of children now also being displaced, that we are seeing, that we are able to feel, to hear people maybe in a different way and also be motivated to be activists, to make a change in the world. So thank you for bringing us closer to that. You have made a change. So please join me in thanking John.

JOHN HALAKA: Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

NARRATOR: Sponsor Religion and Public Life.

NARRATOR: Copyright 2025 the President and Fellows of Harvard College.