New Theatre Guests: Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson

The meeting will be led by Aleksandra Lipczak

Today we find ourselves... in a situation which John Berger, when he came here, described as invincible despair. That's how I feel it. This is why Forgotten was created. We tried to back off. We are looking for a past that could prove useful, one that would allow us to move beyond this terrible moment in which we found ourselves.

Penny Johnson in an interview with Liberal Culture.

The authors of the book take us on a journey through present and historical Palestine. We walk with them through the streets of Nablus, Jerusalem and Jaffa. Stumbling over obstacles and checkpoints, we reach the Gamla nature reserve in the occupied Golan Heights and to the shore of the drying Dead Sea. We visit the unobtrusive mausoleum, look for traces erased from the map of villages, Nakba memorials and the graves of the great Palestinian poets — Mahmoud Darvish and Rashid Hussein. As we navigate this increasingly restricted space for Palestinians, we travel through the ages — from ancient times to the present.

Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson are trying to recreate lost connections: Some of these connections — they write — broke off centuries ago, but still recall the times when pilgrims, adventurers and merchants crossed paths in our region from Baghdad and Istanbul to Haifa and Accra. Others perish in the maelstrom of current affairs, such as Israel's categorical refusal to recognize the Nakba. Ruins whisper about earlier times, such as the remains of Byzantine architecture in At-Tir, a district of our city, Ramallah, or the elaborate Bronze and Iron Age irrigation systems and wine cellars discovered by archaeologists on the hillside near the village of Jib, whose name today is the Israeli outpost. Layers of peoples and civilizations — it is worth cultivating the memory of them, and not reducing it to a single simple story.

This beautiful and melancholic book is an attempt to save the memory of places and the people who inhabit them. It is also a gesture of resistance to the Israeli occupation, which wants to remove the Palestinians from the land between the River and the Sea and erase their history.

Raja Shehadeh was born in 1951 in Jaffa. He is a Palestinian writer, lawyer, human rights defender, one of the founders of the human rights organization Al-Hak (Truth), author of numerous books on international law, human rights and the Middle East. He has published several books, including Palestinian Wanderings. Notes on the Vanishing Landscape, Strangers in the House, Occupation Time Diary. In 2008 he received the Orwell Prize, in 2012 he was a finalist of the Ryszard Kapuściński Prize. He lives in Ramallah.

Penny Johnson is the co-founder of the Institute for Women's Studies at Birzeit University, a contributing editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly, and the author of Companions in Conflict.

Aleksandra Lipczak — Journalist and reporter. She is a Fellow of the European Programme for Young Authors and Translators of CELA. Her book debut People from Sun Square was very well received by readers and critics, and was nominated for the Witold Gombrowicz Literary Award. He publishes, among others, on the pages of Polityka and Przekroju. She co-created the civic initiative Welcome to Krakow. Her second book — Lajla Means Night (2020) — was widely discussed and awarded many times (including finalist of the “Nike” Literary Award 2021, Witold Gombrowicz Award 2021, UNESCO City of Literature Award, Beata Pawlak Prize).