Long before books and screens, people relied on storytelling to connect with one another, remember their past, and make sense of the world around them.
In this episode, we sit with Palestinian storyteller Sally Shalabi to explore the Palestinian context of this ancient tradition. As she invites us into her craft, we learn how she reimagines and adapts traditional stories to make them resonate with our time.
For Sally, storytelling is far more than just entertainment, it helps us imagine what liberation from a settler colonial reality might look like, which is the first step towards building alternative futures.
This episode is hosted by Afaf Shawwa Bibi and produced by Tala Elissa. Our executive producer is Zina Jardaneh. Our associate producer is Zeena Shehadeh. Video Editing by Ahmed Ashour. Social media by Leen Karadsheh. Research and copywriting by Dima Sharif. Branding by Sara Sukhun. Theme music includes excerpts from Clarissa Bitar, The Popular Art Centre - مركز الفن الشعبي & Rim Banna.
This conversation was recorded on February 24, 2026. You can watch it on YouTube, here.
Tarwida is a series of conversations that bring Palestinian arts, culture, and heritage to the forefront. We hear from artists, including writers, filmmakers, musicians, architects, culinary practitioners and more about their very own Palestine.
In a nutshell, if you want to know more about (Creative) Palestine, this is the place to be.
Follow us on socials @tarwidapodcast
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Sally: [00:00:00] The occupation has taken away so much from us. They've taken away time, they've taken away imagination, and we have to constantly fight to bring that back. And I think that's really one of the places, you know, we need to, to fight for. We have the right to imagine and imagine a, a life of joy, freedom, liberation, and liberated Palestine.
Afaf: Marhaba, everyone. Welcome to Tarwida, I'm Afaf Shawabibi. Today I sit in conversation with a performance artist and storyteller who has carved a unique space for herself in the contemporary art performance landscape. Joining me from Amman is Sally Shalabi, also known as Shalabieh Al Hakawatieh. Sally transforms, folktales, epics and personal testimonies into live performances that engage both the collective past and the present moment.
In addition to her live work, Sally is a writer, translator, and cultural researcher. We're recording this on the 24th of [00:01:00] February, 2026, and before we start, I encourage you to subscribe to our channel so you can get notified about new episodes. And don't forget to follow us on social media. We'll leave you the link in the description.
Ahlan wa sahlan Sally! Thank you so much for being with us.
Sally: Thank you, and Ramadan Kareem.
Afaf: Ramadan Kareem. And we're lucky to have a storyteller with us. Um, and, uh, there's no way better way to start this episode than maybe a riddle or something that, you know, just a story from you.
Speaker 6: Sure. I'll tell you one of my favorite riddles from last year, so if anybody wants the answer, it's already online.
Speaker 7: Okay.
Speaker 6: Um, so this one, or if you want, I'll tell you the answer you tell me at the end. In my first lifetime, I'm a white pearl. In my second lifetime, I'm a green emerald. In my third lifetime, I'm a red ruby. Explain, oh dark one, and your explanation will be worth yellow gold.
Afaf: Hmm.
Sally: Do you want the answer?
Afaf: I know the [00:02:00] answer, I think
Sally: Try.
Afaf: I know.
Sally: Try.
Afaf: Uh, when you listed the colours, I thought of a watermelon. But then you said yellow and you lost me.
Sally: It is something we eat. I'll give you a clue. It's about this big and it's, we, Yafa is very famous for it.
Afaf: Ah, so white and then yellow?
Sally: So I'll answer.
Afaf: Okay.
Sally: Do you wanna try?
Afaf: Yes, please do. No, no, go ahead.
Sally: Okay. Oranges, at first, its flower is uh, white, and then the fruit is green. And then as it ripens, it reddens to a bright orange. Yellow gold is like the payment for it because it was like gold.
It was gold back in the day.
Afaf: Yeah
Sally: Yafa oranges were gold.
Afaf: Yeah, it's, it's a nice one and you know, it, it really just, uh, shows that people, people will always want to hear a [00:03:00] story, you know? I mean, somebody can give a, a talk or a presentation, and most of it might be forgotten, but they will remember a story if it's told
Sally: Absolutely.
Afaf: In there, you've said that you view storytelling as the mother, maybe the mother of all arts art forms. What do you wish more people understood about storytelling? What are some of the stereotypes people have?
Sally: Oh,
you hit it right on the head with that question. Well, um, what I would love for people to understand about storytelling that it's not just about folk tales and, and it's everything that we do in every, in everything that I strive to do. I love to find that beautiful arc of, uh, you know, the rising actions, the climax and the resolution, how we all rest into things. The other thing about it is I do a lot of work and I've been working for 20 years in storytelling and I've been a professional, um, since 2012. A lot of people still continue to [00:04:00] hold onto the idea and this notion that because we work with traditional materials and oral heritage, that we should stay there and get stuck in an image and, and stuck in modes of transmission and modes of, um, presentation that have to look like they did a hundred years ago, 50 years ago, even 20 years ago.
So many a time I'm asked to wear a thobe, or why am I not dressed traditionally? Why have I changed the story? Why am I not in a traditional setting like this orientalist view of what a storyteller is has, has continued to, to seep into how people view the art form today, and it's probably, I think, the biggest challenge because like, especially in Ramadan, here we are sitting talking about storytelling 'cause everybody remembers storytellers in Ramadan. Throughout the rest of the year, it's not like that.
Afaf: Yeah, yeah.
Sally: And so how do we, uh, you know, challenge [00:05:00] those things? What does it mean to be contemporary today? Why am I working with these materials, you know? A lot of people think that there's something quaint and beautiful about it, which there is, but this is an over romanticization of the craft, and it is a craft that needs to be honed and practiced and improved upon and layered and, and, you know, utilizing everything around us.
And, and this continuation of storytelling, um, doesn't always utilize that. And the other stereotype, I think that's the biggest, especially, you know, uh, as a woman, is that I'm an educator and should be working with kids. Which,
Afaf: Right.
Sally: I love kids, don't get me wrong. But my favorite form of storytelling is for adults.
And there's something about a big meaty story that you can go in and out of that you can build on, and work from is really beautiful. And if we really look at our materials, a lot of them are for adults. They're not for children, which is the irony of [00:06:00] all of this.
Afaf: Yeah, yeah. But let's talk about the, the beginnings of the Hakawati, the, the traditional role that the Hakawati played in the village life and in the cities in Palestine and the Levant, which is what you focus on so that people can understand the roots of this storytelling.
Sally: So historically, we've, uh, been oral communities throughout and even to this day. And then, uh, and in that there is an, uh, there's, there are all these oral traditions that we transmit through, uh, through storytelling, through poetry, through singing, through all these different forms.
Even al zaghareed. In storytelling, the storytellers, the, the public storytellers were always men. Up until like, you know, the last, you know, last a hundred years, that started to shift with education, with women's entering the public life in a more predominant way. Um, and, and their role was [00:07:00] multifold. They were to gather people, they would transmit news and they would entertain and they would, you know, community-build in that way and, we have to also realize this was before radio, before television, before internet. So all of these things came in and shifted that. The women told privately in the homes. And, and if I was to look at, you know, at the women's role, what I've discovered in my research in my work is there is this central woman called Al Badaah, in our communities in different, and in each community there's more than one. The role of the Badaah is to, uh, you know, be the keeper of all these stories, songs, sayings, zaghareed. And because there's more than one, they compliment each other. Sometimes they're in competition with each other and, and they're the keepers of knowledge and wisdom and, and holders of community in that way.
And so whether it's the men who are outside in the coffee shops or in the diwan [00:08:00] or wherever they're sitting, you know. Or going around from village to village and town to town and place to place like a traveling bard or being the woman inside there is always that role and, and a good Badaah and a good storyteller, Hakawati, would be able to tell the right story at the right time. They would be so integral to their community and able to see what's going on, what's happening. And how they can use the right story to either bring people together or illustrate how to fix a problem or, you know, um, be that person that brings people together so they had those very important roles.
Afaf: And so the men told stories in public and they're about, you know, heroes and bravery and, and the women, um, in private was more about like wisdoms and, and, and learnings and and whatnot. Are there ones that span different cultures [00:09:00] and languages? Because as I understand, you've, you've taken, um, you know, there are certain stories that are common in different countries.
Sally: So absolutely. So stories have a life of their own, we don't know. And a lot of our folk tales, we don't know where they were birthed, you know, who came up with them first. But different stories get, um, traction in different places or enjoyed more in different people.
I tell a particular set, a particular repertoire, a different storyteller will tell a different repertoire and the point, you know, and the thing is, they grow and they live where the storyteller likes to have them grow and live. They're like plants. And so some of them have roots in our region, some of them come from other places.
So for example, Sinbad is actually from China.
Afaf: Ah
Sally: You know, even though it's ours and we love that story, and it's, it's not ours.
It's come into our lore from through travel and through exchange and all of [00:10:00] that, and it's come and, and we, and it's part of Alf Leila We Leila, 1001 Nights. And, and so you see that and, and then there are stories like I'm listening to a Welsh storyteller telling a story he wrote, and he's, he is beautifully versed in folklore, uh, from his region and from the United Kingdom and from Wales. But I'm listening to the beginning of his story and I recognize one of the stories I tell from our region. You know, so the, the archetypes, the motifs, they travel and then they take on shapes and forms from the location and from, they become local in different ways.
We have stuff that are like, so for example, Nus Nseis is very similar to Thumbelina. You know it's the half person, it's the small person. And you have other characters where you, you start to recognize the archetypes in different places, and that's really beautiful, I think.
Afaf: And you, you, you've said that you love the ghoul.
Sally: Oh, I love them.
Afaf: [00:11:00] What does the ghoul mean for you? Like, why is it used? Who was the ghoul?
Sally: So the ghoul, if we look at real like mythology and folklore and, and legends and all of that, it's one of the levels of Djinn, in our lore. However, if we don't wanna go down that road and we can look at them in the story as these, for me, they're misunderstood, uh, monsters. And they're like people. Some of them are evil and some of them are good. But one of the things that I love about ghouls, and it's one of the beautiful wisdoms we have in our, uh, lore, is, um, you hear the ghoul saying after somebody says al-salamu alaykum, or marhaba, just greets her, he or she, they will always answer with,
if it weren't for your greeting before your words, I would've eaten you meat and bones. And look at how beautiful that is, so you can approach this, this monster and get whatever you [00:12:00] want from them, this magical being. And you know, have them on your side. And there are different ways to approach them. And if you drink her milk, you become like her son or her daughter. If you eat her flour, if you eat from her food, you become close to her like her brothers. And so you have all this beauty that, that, you know, sharing food, being close to someone, uh, you know, being fed by them. All these things. And they are magical beings. They're shapeshifters.
Uh, they can be good, they can be evil. Um, I think there's something about that. I love fantasy and there's something about, you know, this magical creature that can do so much and can move and be force of good or force of evil, and it's just, yeah, I love them. I rarely like the heroes in my stories. I love these other like side characters a lot more.
They're what enrich stories. I think. [00:13:00]
Afaf: Sometimes the heroes are boring, I feel.
Sally: I absolutely agree.
Afaf: Like, uh, you know, they're just, they're too good. They're too proper. They're, they're not interesting certainly like, uh, to perform, you know, the villain or the, the monsters is more fun for sure.
Um, do you ever make up stories from scratch?
Sally: I do.
So I did a project last year with an organization for children in Gaza, where we were looking at how we can, um, you know, bolster their, um, their steadfastness, their sumud and at the same time help root them in identity with everything that's happening, all the destruction around them.
And, uh, we did some folk tales that we selected some folk tales, but then also I ended up writing, uh, about seven stories for that. And performing them in audio, um, for the project and I really enjoyed them because they were research based, but they were not lessons, [00:14:00] they were not, you know, they were proper stories.
So we have stories that were about the fauna in Palestine, where we had five animals come together and say why each one is the strongest. And in the end, uh, the, the Sunbird says, you're all strong. No one is stronger than the other. You're stronger in your unity. There was Leila Al Akkawiye who jumps off, uh, the wall in Akka and just all of that anticipation of a 10-year-old girl wanting to jump and learning to jump and learning to swim to do that.
And we talk about Akka through that. There was a story that I, I love letter writing, so I, I had to include it in one of the stories. And so it's set in the 1930s between two, between Al-Bassa and Gaza, and these two kids are exchanging letters. At first they arrive by the sea like messages in bottles, and this kid finds them and he's like, he wants to write back, he wants to, you know, he doesn't wanna keep waiting for letters from the sea.
And they exchange about their villages, and their towns and their places and their [00:15:00] families. And so you learn about Palestine in the 30s through them. So things like that. And I've written more like historical fiction around Karimeh Abbud, and Daher al-Umar as characters from, not characters, as personalities from our history as well.
So writing stories about them. So that was, that was a lot of fun.
Afaf: Mm. You've said that getting a good story is not hard, but performing a good story is not easy. Tell us about the performance aspect of it, and I'm sure over the years your style has evolved.
Sally: Absolutely. So in performance, I've learned to tone it down.
I've also learned to, um, work with the audience that you have in the space that you have. I, I work with my voice a lot, so a lot of, uh, people talk to me about that, like whether it's the, the cadence of the voice or it's also improving like a lot of the sounds or making like these minute [00:16:00] changes. Um, so I've learned to utilize that.
I do a lot of, and I also try to, throughout the years, every year, kind of take a performance-based workshop that's outside of my discipline. So I've taken mime, I've taken dance, I've taken, uh, you know, um, theater work. And to me that all comes into storytelling 'cause as the mother of arts, you kind of are the most multidisciplinary art.
I have to be the sound, the film, the image, the, the, you know, all of it, and because I don't, storytellers typically don't work with directors or producers or whatnot. We are the director, the producer, the the performer. Um, so it's really hard. So you have to constantly have this external eye working with you as well.
Sometimes it's, um, by asking people to attend performances, uh, rehearsals and whatnot. So I would say my, my style has matured, has calmed down, [00:17:00] uh,, and it's, it's one where I like to invite people into the story and really let their imaginations do the work. I think that's really beautiful if we can do that.
Afaf: And when you don't have an audience to, you know, feed off from, you know, their energy, how is it when you're recording online, like for, you know, for video, how was that for you, performing?
Sally: I am gonna tell you what happened during Corona. So during COVID, I got a call, like we locked down in Jordan quite quickly and intensely, and I think we locked down on a Monday.
And by Wednesday I was online because I got calls the next day. Our kids are climbing the walls, what do we do? Because I have like this kid, you know, I have this community around me. And so the community reached out and I went online and it was really hard because. We, we were so isolated at the time, and the only way I had to communicate with people was the camera, and the camera suddenly became the [00:18:00] faces of all the people that were in the audience before, and it was not hard to imagine. So I would, because people would then, whether during the live stream or during the, the recording, they would, afterwards, they would say, Hey, hello, we watched this. And so I would start to, to imagine them in my mind's eye and, and kind of see them there.
Uh, if we were live and they said something, I'd reach out to them. And it was really funny. The kids thought I could see them. Uh, yeah. Because I was saying their names and, and for me that imagination that the camera is not a camera, that the camera is a person, that the camera has people behind it. To me, that's what makes a difference.
It's, it's, um, it was what also makes you real on camera. It's when I have to be photographed that I find it really awkward.
Afaf: So Sally, you were the first woman to publicly reclaim and perform Sirat al-Zahir [00:19:00] Baybars, uh, which is, which is actually a very male dominated epic, bio-epic. Um, and you revived it for modern audiences and, uh, how was that for you? How do you take a traditional story, make it relevant? What can change? What must remain untouched?
Sally: It's an excellent question. I've been working with the sirah since, uh, 2017, so it's been nine years now. Oh my god. Nine years. Um, and when I first encountered it in 2016, I was very dismissive of the work and, like you said, it was a story of a man told by men to men of male heroics. Uh, but we did a mujaawarah, in 2017, and I was going there to be with Dr.
Fayha'a Abdulhadi, to look at oral history work that she had done and how we transformed that into performances. But they had merged the two together [00:20:00] and I love magic and fantasy and good lore and I, and you know, and there was something just so captivating about the sirah, there was something that was just, you know, drawing me into it.
The text was written in Ottoman Arabic. It's about 200 years old. So it was, uh, peppered also with a lot of Turkish, peppered with a lot of different words that we don't use today. And it was difficult text and like I've omitted a whole character. I just didn't like how this character was, uh, presented. He was, uh, a simpleton, you know, following Baybars around in Cairo.
And as I deepened with the story. I learned that he isn't a simpleton, he is Mubarak, and he sees things. He presents himself in that way, so I cannot omit him. So I've brought him back, but I talk about him with a little bit more respect than how the storyteller in the past would present him.
He was [00:21:00] such a caricature, and that's what really agitated me, you know? But he would say these things of wisdom and he would see things that Baybars couldn't see. He would take him out of harm's way without papers knowing. And suddenly the simpleton became this really integral character. And we also have another example is the women.
The women characters in the Epic, they're quite flat. And so for me, the idea that, I want to bring these women to life. Now, I can't, you know, uh, you know, add so much more, but I can give them, you know, height and width and depth and names and bring them, you know, forward in a way that this misogynistic text, which it is, doesn't do, which I won't allow.
So, uh, there's also, the way they treat the women sometimes is quite misogynistic and all of the days passed. They were appropriate for days past. They're no longer appropriate for today. So I work with the text in that way, and I build those in and I bring it back in. [00:22:00] So those are some of the changes I make to the text.
Afaf: Have some people reacted that, you know, no, this is not how the story is, or is there pushback on that?
Sally: None whatsoever. People don't know the original story.
The people who have read the story enjoy my retelling, so it's totally fine.
Afaf: Okay, great.
Sally: I mean, there are only, Afaf there are only five of us, in the world today, who have read the whole text. Who know the
Afaf: How did you know that?
Sally: whole story. From the researchers.
Afaf: Wow.
Sally: The people who worked on it and myself.
There are people who have the text that have read parts of it, but they don't know it as a -full-bodied living creature. So, yeah, I have a lot of license and I want to tell you something. Here's something that, uh, you know, we tell people all the time. I have the [00:23:00] license of the storyteller. I can embellish, I can change, I can, you know, salt and pepper and some researchers like Dr. Sharif Kana'neh, who is the father of Palestinian folklore, so to speak.
I remember walking, you know, we had had lunch at his house and he holds me arm in arm and we were walking to the door, you know, in the gate, and he's in his eighties, so he is walking slowly. He's a bit hard of hearing and he goes, Sally, you need to tell people you changed the stories. And I look at him and I tell him, but Dr., everybody knows I changed the stories.
And, and it's, and to me that, that is a little bit about that, um, that friction between academia and conserving and, and maintaining our traditions versus, you know, being an artist and being a contemporary artist. And what does it mean to work with these historical works, these artifacts that have, that we're bringing alive, you know, and, [00:24:00] and dusting, dusting them off and making them palatable to people who will not have access them, who look at them as something from a day gone by.
Afaf: Mm.
Sally: So for me that, that tension is really important,
Afaf: Yeah.
Sally: in how we work with it. And, and, and probably, you know, this is what differentiates a storyteller from another..
How they work with these materials, what they do with them, and do they, are they satisfied with just being relics of the past and mouthpieces of the past? And, and I say this with all honor, uh, with all respect of course. Or do they wanna be, you know, avantgarde and contemporary and play with them and change them?
And, and, and for me, changing them is not about. Inserting a, a, a mobile phone in, in a character's hands, you know, or all of that. But really making them reflect the, the values and the morals of today and what we see in society today, because that really is a big part of what we do. We're a mirror of society even in these [00:25:00] stories.
Afaf: Yeah.
Sally: That's what they were, these stories.
Afaf: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And, um, another, another thing that you've done to make traditional things from our culture, more accessible to the audiences it has to do with the zaghareed the emhaha. Um, so first before we get into that, can you explain to the audience what, what they are?
Sally: Sure. So we have this tradition where we have um, a three part call. The first part is um, uh, we call it lafeth al nida'a just a hey or hey, like a hey you. And then we have four verses from poetry. And the third part is the ululation. Together, the three parts are called zaghroudeh, or I call them haha. And this is a very ritualistic call, a very ritualistic, uh, you know, oral tradition that is done around celebrations mostly.
Afaf: [00:26:00] What was it originally though? It wasn't celebrations, right?
Sally: Oh no, it wasn't. It was a war cry. So this is pre-Islamic, uh, history. And this is, so when we look at it, it's actually, uh, has roots in, in men and women standing at the, the battlefield and calling out to the warriors, the fighters with this cry, with four lines of poetry that encouraged them to fight, encouraged them to bravery, encourage them to defending honor, and, uh, is actually a war cry that has come to us from Africa and so the, the call at the beginning is, is Arab, and the poetry is Arabic. And then we have that last part. And for over the centuries it has transferred. It has, you know, migrated from the, uh, Arabian Peninsula where it was, where it was done, where it originated to the Levant, [00:27:00] where we are now. And it has transformed in that migration from a war cry to a celebratory cry.
And the Badaah, the woman who, who knows this, sometimes we have in Arabic the words to mean improvise, but the Badaah creates.
From something that is really beautiful. So she comes up, she also improvises, but the word, the roots of the word is so, you know, there's, there's something just so much more beautiful about it than which also has the word rajil (man) in it, you know? So here my feminist leanings come in and I prefer the word Badaah. Yeah.
And, and a lot of, a lot of zaghareed we have today were, uh, we're produced by women who didn't read and write, but they were such poetresses that they were able to look at what was around them and come up with these four lines of [00:28:00] poetry, these verses and make them a celebratory, uh, piece of joy. So there was just, there's something just really beautiful about it.
And my research was looking as why have we lost these women, these Badaahat, why are, why aren't we transmitting these zaghareed and where are the women? Where have they gone? What has happened? And so, uh, by the way, the research is available to download. It's available to everyone on my website and the links to the podcast if anybody wants to hear them.
It's all in Arabic though.
Afaf: So I'd, I'd love for our audience to hear an example of, uh, of a, you know, emhaha
So what does this mean?
Sally: [00:29:00] Yeah. Yeah. That means, um, in front of our home is a beautiful pomegranate tree. It's beautiful, it's ripe, it's lovely. And I have promised not to cross by it until my lover, until my love comes back to me.
Afaf: Oh, that's beautiful.
Sally: It is.
Afaf: That's beautiful. And so one of the things that, uh, I heard on your zaghareed podcast was how you took one of these, uh, emhahas and you made, you made a song called The Ezzak Song, uh, with, uh, electronic music.[00:30:00]
What was your, what was your goal in doing this?
Sally: So, as I said, the research was to try and figure out why we aren't learning zaghareed, why they aren't being transmitted, what's happening to the women. And for me as an artist, my role is to experiment and my experimentation with music and, and what if we change what we hear or how we hear it.
Will a younger generation learn? If they're not hearing the hajeh voice, doing the ahhwiha, and you know, the zaghareed, it's not in that cadence, it's not in that rhythm. It's in a completely different, you know?
Afaf: Yeah.
Sally: Will they, will they memorize the words now and will they, when need to, you know, have, have them around them?
I [00:31:00] actually played it for a lot of different people and, uh, you know, when I was talking about the research and the book, and what was interesting was some people mostly in the West Bank were like, you can't do this. You've ruined our, our, uh, oral traditions this way. You, you've desecrated them. And then when I played it to some people in 48, they just loved it.
They, they celebrated it.
Afaf: Wow.
Sally: And to both of them, I said, thank you because, you know, my role is to put this out there as an artist, as a contemporary artist, I have to experiment and I have to find ways to keep what I love alive in different ways, but, whether you like it or not, whether you want it or not, that is your role as an audience.
And if it works, it works. If it doesn't work, it dies and it tells me I need to experiment some more.
Afaf: Yeah. Yeah. And so you've said that you, at, at a certain point, you, you felt that, uh, not that you maximized, [00:32:00] but you were ready to move on to other forms of storytelling and that's when you began to do, to focus on oral histories. And among your notable performance works is Khair Ya Tair that, uh, tells the story of the Palestinian Nakba through oral testimonies and inherited memory. And then you continued since the genocide, you began focusing, uh, on oral histories of people under occupation and which is the
Sally: Yes.
Afaf: performance series you mentioned before. Uh, and, 'And I Saw' in Arabic, it's,
Sally: mm-hmm. Wa Ana Shifet
Afaf: Um, which merges history and personal narratives with music.
[00:33:00]
Sally: So in 2023 in February, I was in Palestine collecting stories for, uh, Al-Harah Theatre in Beit Jala. And they were wanting these personal narratives to, um, build theater performances for site specific, for the site specific festival. And they also wanted some storytelling stories. So I did the research, I met all these people, these beautiful storytellers, and I then had to write them in both Arabic and English and, you know, send them to theater makers and to use them as source material.
And when the, um, when the genocide [00:34:00] started. All production stopped. I mean, the, the festival happened in 2023 in late summer, and I found myself after the genocide just completely unable to work. Trying to understand as well what was happening around me as an artist and as a person, as a Palestinian first and foremost.
And, um, I actually didn't produce any kind of work for about a year. And in listening to, to my community here in Jordan, the Palestinians and the Jordanians, like watching this, this eradication of our people in front of our eyes. I felt we needed to hear and see something else.
Afaf: Yeah.
Sally: We needed to, um, to support each other in a way where we saw our steadfastness, our resilience, our ability to, to withstand and resist occupation.
And I took this source [00:35:00] material and I, you know, presented, uh, different, like, so each show would present two stories of Palestinian resistance and steadfastness. Some of these stories were of, um, you know, uh, I, I did nine stories in a five part, so it's a five part series and I do nine stories in them.
And each story illustrates a different part of Palestinian life. So they're not really repetitive. So we only have one Nakba story, and it's a very particular story, actually two. One is from Jerusalem where you actually hear about the ethnic cleansing of the western part of Jerusalem, which we don't hear.
And Fayza was, uh, 10 years old when this happened, and she remembers, uh, being, you know, forcibly evicted from her home, put, you know, blindfolded, put in a truck, driven around the city, only to find [00:36:00] out at the end of the night they were two streets away from their home and they could never go back. So that's a story we don't always hear.
Carlos Barham, who we start the series with is, uh, in his seventies and he walks every day to the Makhrour. I don't know if he still does. I've been told he still does, uh, because al-Makhrour is part of, uh, the lands that were confiscated and, uh, you know, illegally taken by Israel in the last land grab. But he would walk there every day and I actually met him on his land and it was really beautiful.
And he talks about the love of the land and it's a very beautiful, poetic, nostalgic piece. So we start there as well. We have, uh, Firyal Abu Hekal this woman who's known as Fatat Al Khalil. She would write under that pen name in the newspapers, and she grew up, she was born in 47. So she grew up, um, you know, in Al Khalil and then saw it [00:37:00] under occupation in 67.
So we hear about 67 through her eyes as Khalil fell and these white flags are put up and so you constantly have this strength that from these incredibly beautiful people and all these different stories, and I felt that this is what we needed to hear, you know? Yes, we are being, uh, killed and yes, we're being, you know, decimated and we're told our bodies mean nothing.
But look, we've done this, we've done this before. We've withstood and we've withstood with humor, with grace, with humility, with ingenuity, with education, with so much, you know, and that's what that series was about.
I burned out from it though.
Afaf: I'm sure it, I'm sure it's very draining. Um, I mean, so this is, this is a way to, you know, preserve the, the collective memory, but [00:38:00] how does it differ from other forms of, of history, let's say, or, you know, the written form, let's say.
Sally: So we always say, you know, history is written by the victors. And, um, even our Palestinian history is the, the official narrative. Who writes that official narrative? Who tells it? And who tells Fayza who saw her father at, uh, Bawab al-Mandelbaum, the, the gateway, you know, and didn't recognize him. Who tells, uh, Amna and how she got a divorce from her husband and carried her family through and still carries her family through only to have her son martyred.
Who tells, um, you know, um, Peter Qumri, who was a doctor who would help, uh, you know, kids who were shot during the Intifada, but really at the same time was such a Baathist that he could ask Saddam Hussain for 20 million. Who tells these stories?
Afaf: Yeah.
Sally: You know? We [00:39:00] have to, we, you know, these stories are in the homes of every one of us.
They're in this, they're the stories of our mothers, our fathers, our uncles, our brothers, our brethren, our cousins, you know, people around us. And because the, the political narrative or the, the official narrative. Is out there told from so many different perspectives and it makes it come alive completely differently.
It's not about, um, it's not about dates and numbers and, and just that it just viscerally comes alive. And I think that's what's really important to me. They, what I do is, and this is why it's called 'And I Saw', is I bear witness. To what they bore witness to. And so we're constantly bearing witness to, to their time and, and we're bearing witness to our time.
And so within the stories, I always say, and I saw, and I think that's one of the important roles for us, you know, as the genocide still continues to this day, that how [00:40:00] do we bear witness? It's not about explaining who we are, or it's, it's not about, you know, giving the west a lesson. My, I think my role as a storyteller is to hold those stories and bear witness for myself and for others in my community, first and foremost.
And, in that I preserve my grandmother's memory, my mother's memories, um, and, and my people's memories in ways that like my grandmother witnessed the, the Nakba my mother was in Tulkarem when the Israelis came in 67 and how she fled and all of that. So I honor them by honoring all these stories.
Afaf: Yes, definitely.
And so when, now, when you were describing, you know, the difference between the, the, the official written historical narrative, who, who's the one who writes it versus these, these oral personal stories, uh, that can be collected to, to really understand in detail what's happening. I mean, it can, it's the same as, you [00:41:00] know, mainstream news, mainstream media versus all the social media, uh, accounts of
Sally: Absolutely.
Afaf: what's happening in the genocide.
And it made me think of, uh, you know, Bisan, the who's a Hakawatieh actually. Before, before the genocide, she was, she was a teller of stories, a Hakawatieh, and who became essentially a, a journalist. I mean, people turned to her to really see what's going on, uh, in the ground.
And you've also said that storytelling is a tool for liberation. So if you wanna take it a step further,
Sally: Oh.
Afaf: What about storytelling will allow us to [00:42:00] liberate ourselves?
Sally: So, I always say storytelling is about imagination, and if we don't have imagination, we can never imagine our liberation. And I think that's probably one of the biggest things we need to look at.
I was just in Palestine, uh, at the end of last year and I was doing workshops with kids around stories and storytelling and memory and imagination. And what really, um, you know, tore at me was, we are really good at looking back and using our memories and remembering, but imagining a new future is really difficult for us.
And I think that storytelling as a tool for liberation means we have to activate our imagination as a practice so that we can have a, um, build an imagination, build a new awareness of what it looks like to be liberated instead of being stuck in the [00:43:00] past. And I think that's, you know. And that's where I sit today, where my research sits today.
How do we activate imagination? How does imagination become a daily practice for us? Working with these kids, we worked on stories. This was in Jenin and Tulkarem mostly working with, uh, displaced children and, you know, in one they were given a, a task to imagine a, a liberatory act without those words, of course, for themselves and said in the future.
And the idea was, can you imagine writing a story to someone else in 500 years? And both kids, both groups of kids were stuck. They could only reflect their current situation, or the past. They couldn't imagine a liberated Palestine. And to me that was so [00:44:00] heartbreaking. That was so frustrating. And of course you don't say that to the kids.
You encourage them and, and you prod and you push. But the occupation has taken away so much from us. They've taken away time, they've taken away imagination. And we have to constantly fight to bring that back. And I think that's really one of the places, you know, we need to, to fight for. We have the right to imagine and imagine a, a life of joy, freedom, liberation, and a liberated Palestine.
And if we are constantly producing materials from the past and historic works, which are important, I'm not saying they're not, but where are the people working on the future?
Afaf: Yeah. Yeah. So how can our listeners support Hakawatis like you or, you know, are the events like Mahrajan Al Hikaya, um, or other events, you know, are, are [00:45:00] they well attended?
Are people interested?
Sally: That's such a great question. So, um, sometimes they're really well attended and sometimes they're not. I think the best way to support us as storytellers is come to the performances and if you don't like them, tell us, critique us so that we can get better. I think the also the important thing is, and part of uh, what I view as a liberatory approach to the arts is that, we need to pay the artist. And what I mean by that is for, for me to stay independent. So, and part of, uh, and what I'm saying is that like, 'And I Saw' was purely independent. There were no logos on that, on that show, there were no sponsors. Nobody paid us except the people who came and they, they paid us.
They supported us by, you know, buying the tickets. And I, I know every single person that came into my audiences and I really appreciate them and I send [00:46:00] them out a lot of love and support because, what they did by buying that ticket was allowed me to stay independent and say true to my voice and tell what I want.
I wasn't, uh, you know, uh, being produced by anyone. I wasn't getting money from an NGO or a Western cultural organization or being told what to say or how to say it. So I think something needs to shift and, and we are at a very, you know. We're at a crossroads right now with, with funding and all of that.
It's like we are rejecting a lot of funding. We're being censored by a lot of organizations as Palestinians, and we really have to turn to the audiences to help us continue. But if we are always telling the stories that are funded, when do we tell our own story? You know? And so I think that's how the audience can really support us.
So that the next generation can continue to do independent work. We have to start now. I won't see the [00:47:00] switch in my lifetime. I know this, but I hope that the younger generation benefits from the fruits of our resistance and our stance today and our, our political like perspectives. Because there isn't an artist that isn't political. That doesn't exist.
And if they tell you they're not political, they're not paying attention. They're just not paying attention.
Afaf: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Uh, you know, this is a, this is a common thread with, uh, with artists, uh, this issue. So, just so that we can, you know, round off on a, on a, a sort of more creative note, um, can you, can you leave us with maybe a riddle or something that, you know, just, uh, have a nice, uh, ending to this?
Sally: I'll leave you with one that I won't answer. I'll leave you with one that I won't answer. Answer me, oh knight, with something that I saw sitting. He resolves people's issues but he was never educated.
This one was also from [00:48:00] last year. The answers are online. I'll leave you there. Think about it.
Afaf: Okay. Okay. Sally, thank you so much. We could, go on for much longer. But I encourage all our listeners to check out your, uh, social media channels, uh, Instagram, YouTube, to see the, the great work and the rich work that you do.
It's been a pleasure having you. Thank you.
Sally: It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much. And you guys keep doing what you do. Thank you [00:49:00] Tarwida.