Possible and Imaginary Lives
yasmine eid-sabbagh / rozenn quéré
Where should we go after the last frontiers?
Where should the birds fly after the last sky?
Mahmoud Darwish, [the earth is Closing on Us], 1995
This is the story of four strong and feisty women, four sisters born in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s, whose lives were marked by one exile after another, first to Syria, then to Lebanon…
It is a fragmentary account of their lives, tinged with tenderness and humour, somewhere between documentary and delusion, biography and theatre, based on audio interviews and family photographs collected from their cupboards in the four corners of the earth – a narrative of both actual and imagined events. At the heart of this story is Graziella, the only one who remained in Beirut. Her twin, Stella, left war-torn Lebanon for New York; Jocelyne, the eldest, chose Cairo; and Frida, the youngest, sought a better life in Paris.
It is a testament to endless resilience, to a life that always moves forward, to extravagance, despite the accumulation of difficulties, separations, and the melancholy they bring. It is a reflection on memory. Childhood memories of the horizon over the sea in Haifa, the garden in Ramallah and its pomegranate trees, food prepared from what was picked in the garden. The encounter between individual memory and collective memory, the fabrications of one, the memory lapses of the other, the memories of the dead… And above all, memory is one of the most powerful weapons. Since the beginning of the 20th century, Palestinians have continued to record family histories in order to write their stories, prove their existence, document the narrative of their repeated displacements… until today, or perhaps today more than ever. It is a matter of recording, documenting and narrating in the face of extermination.