The Artists Preserving Palestinian Collective Memory

An image of two Palestinian children playing in water against a backdrop of brown soil and olive trees sits alongside the statement: “Indigenous people protect their land, settlers do not.” The spread is from the newly-released book, Yesterday, Come Closer, a 728-page compilation of visual art, photography, new and old writing, and archive material sourced with the help of the Palestinian Digital Archive. 

Edited by creative director Ibrahem Hasan with contributions from practitioners and thinkers who have contributed to various resistance movements throughout history, Yesterday, Come Closer is an attempt at consolidating Palestinian collective memory as the violent untethering of Indigenous people from their land and ecosystems relentlessly continues in Gaza and the West Bank. The book is an urgent exploration of all facets of Palestinian liberation movements, spanning works that reflect on the necessary role of women to the resistance, the transformative importance of religion and spirituality, as well as the present-day violence of eco-colonialism and land degradation. All profits from the book are being donated to grassroots organizations and efforts on the ground in Palestine. 

Yesterday, Come Closer began in 2023 through a personal research project initiated independently by Hasan. Just 12 months later, the finished book is nothing short of a cultural landmark, accompanied by a sound system led by Ahmad Zaghmouri (aka Shabmouri and co-founder of Palestinian rap group BLTNM) as well as a website with a “Research in Progress” section that offers the public access to a wide range of digital material pertaining to Palestinian social justice movements, academic writings, research, interviews, books, visual material, and much more ephemera. Each chapter of the book is testament to how intentional design can serve and strengthen a movement for social justice—even down to the website developed by Adam Gee, which features interactive movable images of Palestinian families through the ages, of women in traditional clothing, and of native plants on the landing page.

After designing the book for an exhibition last year, Hasan decided to “rip [it] apart” and start over—this time enlisting the help of London-based writer Sarra Alayyan who joined the project as lead narrative editor and researcher alongside assistant narrative editor Hussein Amri, calligrapher Tarin Karimbux, researcher Moun Aicha Soussan and film researcher Jude Khalili. “I realized in the making of that [exhibition that] I didn’t really know what the hell I was making or doing,” Hasan told Atmos. “It was just a series of questions and I was figuring out [the end goal]. I realized that I needed to do more digging, I needed to do more understanding of who I am. And then October 7 [happened], and all of us as a team knew that we needed a timeout for all the emotion. [That was when] there was a recalibration [of the project].”

One of the core questions posed by the book is if “home [can] be passed from one body to the next, like a secret whispered in the ear?” For the diasporic voice, one that knows the weight of a homeland separated by geography but carried through blood as well as intergenerational stories and collective history, it’s a sentiment that is deeply felt. “As I was making the book I knew that it was going to be a therapeutic process,” Hasan said. “It was built around the visualization of the memories that I had from childhood to adulthood as a Palestinian American trying to understand and conceptualize the idea of home.” 

It’s a sentiment that is shared with Hasan’s wider team. “A lot of memory studies went into the research,” said Alayyan.“This is a very pneumonic book that looks at how one person can bridge a personal memory [of home] with the collective memory of Palestine.” Memory is a recurring theme throughout Yesterday, Come Closer in part because it is so crucial to the wider Palestinian struggle for liberation. After all, the erasure of memory ensures the erasure of the subject itself––and it’s why the title, Yesterday, Come Closer, is positioned as an imperative phrase that’s begging for greater intimacy and proximity with history. 

In one visual essay, titled “The Road to Gaza,” photographer Rowan Katba re-visits her hometown again years after immigrating to Europe, and reflects on the exhaustion and humiliation of traveling through countless Israeli checkpoints to reach her family’s home. Similarly, Karmel Sabri’s work retells her journey crossing the King Hussein bridge from Jordan to Palestine and being denied entry to Israel despite holding an American passport; a project that highlights the relentlessness of militarism and occupation for those living outside of Palestine—let alone those experiencing it everyday of their lives. “The aesthetics, sounds, and literature attached to [Yesterday, Come Closer] rejects Western stereotypes and oppressive regimes,” said Sabrii, who wrote her essay in Amman the same week the events occurred in 2018. “Despite the diaspora, we are findinging each other and that in itself is resistance.” She added: “dire circumstances breed creativity—existing is resisting.”

The book also creates space for envisioning a new future, one that promises liberation in part by remembering Palestinian history and the Palestinian people’s struggle against apartheid and state-sanctioned violence. Sophia Azeb’s written essay “Who Will We Be When We Are Free?” is a powerful meditation on identity and Palestinian futurity. 

Yesterday, Come Closer makes manifest the memories of the Palestinian collective experience both in the diaspora and at home through archival images of Indigenous Palestinian women picking olives from trees, adorned with traditional brass and silver pendants, amulets and chain necklaces dressed in beautiful dresses woven with tatreez. These images not only remind us of the historic and sacred presence of Palestinian people on the land, but serve to highlight a darker reality in which life is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain––years before October 7th. For decades, the Israeli military has forbidden Palestinians to fish, limited their agricultural work, forbidden them to harvest their crops, bombarded their soil with poisonous gasses, and killed their livestock amid countless more abuses.

“There is a lot of poetry and there’s a lot of prose that explores Palestinian connections to land as well as loss of land and degradation of the land—and this idea of Indigenous cultivation being taken away,” said Alayyan. For example, one story explores the work of Palestinian seed archivist and eco-activist Vivien Sansour who replanted Indigenous watermelons a couple of years ago in Palestine. “I think Palestinian land is almost as important, if not as important, as life itself,” Alayyan said.

Yesterday, Come Closer was published alongside a Sound System created in collaboration with Ramallah-based Yesterday, Come Closer producer Ahmed Zaghmouri and Palestinian platform Radio Al-Hara, which lives on both the website and independently . Contributors are free to submit their own audio, which so far includes interviews and conversations between Palestinians as well as (in Zaghmouri’s words) “the deadliest techno mix ever” by Kuwait-based artist Van Boom, traditional folkloric music, an eerie performance by “Gaza Children’s Space Ensemble,” Quran recitation, and much more. The end result is a digitally-transmittable, borderless, and accessible sound system, intentionally collecting community voices for people “that maybe don’t have the words to describe what they feel,” said Zaghmouri.

The Yesterday, Come Closer sound system is a vital component of the project’s liberatory motivations. “It’s the first time that anyone’s [been] allowed to do whatever [they want],” Zaghmouri said, speaking of the soundsystem. “I’d rather listen to what someone feels musically rather than read books about how people think Palestine should or should not be… The most glorified photographers that take pictures of Palestine are white people on a visit.” 

Beyond the final, material product, the process of making the book itself was a practice in collective resistance with a deeply community-focused approach––a “liberatory practice” in the words of Alayyan, who led the work with feeling first, research second.

“I’m truly trying to do the best I can to support my people and my bloodline; my ancestors,” said Hasan. The goal was to create a book which was fully comprehensive and accurate to the Palestinian experience, and that meant letting go of academia and statistics—and allowing emotion to flow through the pages. It’s a spirit that’s reflected throughout the book; like in Adam Rouhana’s photograph of a boy joyfully eating a cracked watermelon or in the spontaneous, diary-like annotations with no clearly attributed author. 

Yesterday, Come Closer is a devotional work: one which will surely go down as a testament to the Palestinian spirit of endurance and the palpable power of a community’s creative collaboration; one that will continue to honor the ancestral voices who maintain today’s spirit of resistance to the ongoing violent occupation of land and its people. In the words of contributing writer Karmel Sabri: “Without the land and the literal fruits of our love and labor, what is this all for? She deserves to be respected and tended to by the people who understand her best.”