A SPECTRAL SUMUD: JAFFA IN KAMAL ALJAFARI’S PORT OF MEMORY
Mezna Qato and Sadia Shirazi
Goldhill, Simon, ed. Being Urban: Community, Conflict and Belonging in the Middle East. London: Routledge, 2020.
Kamal Aljafari, still from Port of Memory (2010).
ABSTRACT
This chapter is a meditation on one of Kamal Aljafari’s films set in Jaffa—Port of Memory (2010). We argue that in this film, Aljafari overturns normative cinematic narratives of Palestinian cities as either dead or fully ensnared in a statist project. In Port of Memory, Jaffa is not represented as a site of urban ruin nor as an ‘underdeveloped’ city undergoing ‘redevelopment’ but as a place of habitation and rebellion against gentrification and occupation. Aljafari, we argue, not only reclaims cinematic representations of Jaffa as an act of ‘cinematic justice’ (Handal, 2016), but in his restitution of the city and its built environment to its Palestinian inhabitants he engages in a radical act of historic preservation. Aljafari’s film creates a cinematic archive in which obdurate stones resist as do the inhabitants of the neighborhood of Ajami, both engaged in what we call ‘a spectral sumud’ in which habitation functions as rebellion. Aljafari’s work creates a space of reconstituted materiality for the Palestinian subject in Israel who finds themselves doubly erased – on the one hand by the imminent threat of dispossession, and on the other, by erasure from cinematic archival records.