 Hello and welcome. I have with me Penny Johnson, who is an independent researcher associated with the Institute of Women Studies, Pazit University, Ramallah, and is also an associate editor with Jerusalem Quarterly. Hello. Hello. So I have a bunch of questions to ask a few from the edited book Seeking Palestine. I would begin with the question of a phrase that you use there, which really struck me, which is that this was you and Raja editing it, weren't conceiving of it to be a representative anthology but an imaginative one? And I know it means a number of things when talking about Palestine, but I would want you to talk a little bit about this idea itself. Well, the politics of representation, I think, is a very vexed and kind of a troubling question, and we were looking for something else. We were looking for a sort of ground where Palestinian writers, and you are right, could use a sort of encounter between memory and imagination in a more intimate key and in that way to think again about these kind of iconic words of home and exile in the present tense of Palestine in this very fragmented and difficult time. And I think the writers really took up this challenge, at least as I remember them and recall the pieces. Each of them was very individual, but each of them looked at home and exile in their own life in Palestine and outside Palestine in a way that was not nostalgic but that was sort of breaking some kind of new ground, and that's what we were looking for. And I want to say that we were very happy that this book was both initiated and born in India, thanks really to Ritu Menin of Women Unlimited in Delhi. Yeah, in fact, it's a wonderful collection. It's this arabesque collection, which also has writings from Iraq, from a number of other places. It's beautiful. I think it's a great initiative. I would, moving back to the more historical aspects of this, I mean, I would like to imagine that most such conceptions, such ideas, of course, emerge and perhaps more so in Palestine with the immediate realities on the ground. Do you have any recollection of were there ideas on the ground that kind of led to the coalescence of this particular idea of this book that you talk about, this imaginative anthology? Well, I think less ideas but a very troubled present where Palestine both is and is not. We seek it and as I think one of the poets said, we are seeking for something that has not happened yet and yet is not lost. So this requires, I think, a writer's imagination. To come to grips with this kind of is and is not. And that can even be done in a comic vein. Like one of the writers, Soia de Lamerie, is in an Italian airport and they're looking for the code for Palestine. And what is it? She tries occupied territories, Palestine occupied territories, West Bank and Gaza, everything. And finally it turns out P.S. And she says, maybe it's Palestinian stupidity. I don't know. We cannot find the code and we cannot always find the language. And that's part of what seeking Palestine is about. Yeah, I guess that's where another part of what you wrote really struck me was that this is a conversation and I love the way you say a conversation perhaps amongst friends the hills of Ramallah or, you know, on a seaside in Beirut somewhere else. And it really comes through like that. I would just take one example of where Rajesh Adi talks about this layers of meanings of a building and what what it means to the historical memory of a place and the deep loss associated with it. But just next to that, just after that is Murid talking about Palestine being driven by his driver Mahmood in that cab. So and that really plays out like a conversation, you know, but I was wondering if with the benefit of hindsight, you thought there was some conversation which could have also made to that book a conversation, another idea that I mean, there are always those ideas like, okay, this could have also been there. Is there something like that that you think could have gone into this book or maybe another version of the book? Well, there are other writers that would have been wonderful to include. But a conversation I think is ongoing. I mean, I you brought up Murid Bargouti's wonderful piece where it was in a particular time in the second Intifada where none of us could move around. And there were, well, there still are thousands of roadblocks. And he sees Palestine recreated in this driver who gets somehow, some way, gets his passengers to Jericho from Jerusalem by the most intricate routes. And we've all experienced that going through olive grows, going through queries, going all over the place. And so I think it's that kind of recreation of Palestine in a moment that begins a conversation, perhaps. And then of course, the question of nostalgia, like you said in the beginning that it wasn't about nostalgia. But I mean, I'm not just saying the politics of nostalgia, but even the conversation of nostalgia, because we're talking about people who have such different relationships to Palestine. I mean, you look at Susan Abu-Hawa, I mean, that amazing woman and the way she narrates her association. So maybe it's not romanticizing, but is the problem with nostalgia the romanticization? Or why would you say that nostalgia isn't really central to this? Nostalgia is when you sort of put the past sort of in an amber glass to sort of look at it or glorify it or mourn over it. It doesn't have an active force. I mean, that's why I think we use the words of Mahmoud Darwish. Home and exile are not words. They're not these overburdened just concepts. Home and exile are something else. And that's what we were looking at. One of the final questions that I would have now is, and this is really important for me in the reading of this book, because your work and your association with women's studies, your academic work, otherwise, has opened up so many different aspects of the struggle. And you're originally from the United States. So I would like to have some idea about your relationship to the struggle. And I think it's really a question of how various people are located around a question, and everybody is located in a different way, including the writers who are all tracing their ancestry in Palestine in different ways. But how do you associate with the struggle? And that's I think a fundamental question for a lot of people who have solidarity with Palestine. What is that relationship that takes us forward in that way? Well, I came to Palestine in 1982 to Birzai University. At that point, the universities, there was a kind of addiction by the Israeli army to closing universities. And they would close them every few months or so. And I'd been working with academics in the States and thought I would come for one year to work on issues from the side of the university. And of course, I have stayed for over 35 years and most of my lifetime, in fact. So perhaps I also found a home in Palestine, but many, Palestine is an international struggle, I think. When I came to Birzai, I was part, a quarter of the faculty had foreign passports, including some Palestinians. And it was a time when the army again, the Israeli army, was requiring all of us to sign loyalty oaths against the Palestine Liberation Organization in order to get work permits. And nobody would. So we were all sort of undercover. And the same situation remains today with international faculty at Birzai. I know many young scholars that are not getting work permits, but it is an international struggle. There's a reason people come. And there's a reason people work together. And in that way, Palestine is this idea of non-exclusion, of a place of imagination and of solidarity. And I think that's still there. We have to kind of always reclaim it. And nothing is ever there permanently. We always have to bring it back. Which is why the title Seeking Palestine, and that's really brilliant in the way that has been written off. But just that final question of, because you said you went there in 1982, and they've continued to work there. And I know of a number of people who have made these journeys in their life. But typically, I would say in my generation, so to speak, we have come to relate to Palestine through different routes, even perhaps because our own country's history has gone in a direction where a lot of important questions have just dropped off the map. So I'm not asking how would they sort of make that association, but more like, what do you think is the basis of that association? Which I believe can be there everywhere. But what are the nuances and grounds of that for a generation like today's, which is also struggling in a world which is increasingly more rightward, neoliberal, post-colonialism, the struggles of post-colonialism, post-colonial struggles are not in their recent memory. So what would you say to a generation? Well, I think in many ways we're coming closer, perhaps in the atmosphere of disaster, that is the atmosphere of our globe right now. We often say that one way to see Palestine is sort of as a laboratory where practices of discrimination and inequality and we're being exercised. But I think these practices are much more widespread in the globe today. So I think for the younger generation, which we are hoping will be able to turn over some of the inequalities that we're all suffering from, Palestine can be one, a place to learn and two, a place also to find ways to sort of combat some of the things that are not just in Palestine now, but are very widespread around the globe. Absolutely. Thanks a lot. That's all for today.