We caught up with Sami Hermez, associate professor and director of the Liberal Arts Program, to talk about his new book, My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2024). This work of narrative ethnography focuses on the story of Sireen Sawalha, her brother Iyad, who joined the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the first and the second Intifada, and her larger family based in the Palestinian village of Kufr Ra’i. Hermez highlights the ethical tensions and contradictions of armed resistance and, more broadly, demonstrates how the systemic oppression of the Israeli occupation affects ordinary Palestinian lives.
How would you describe your personal inspiration behind writing this book?
How does one describe that ephemeral moment twenty years ago that inspired me to write this book? No words could really capture what kept me going, and it is hard to imagine that whatever inspired me then would keep me running all these years. Perhaps it was Sireen who inspired me and kept me going. Certainly, she did. But perhaps also, it was—and remains—a personal commitment to fight settler colonialism. Sireen and this commitment kept this project alive and inspired it. Through the years, I wanted people to understand Palestinian resistance in all its rawness—without apology, without falling into Zionist traps such as creating parity between both sides—to feel what it’s like to live every day under military occupation, and through this, come to better understand the question of Palestine. So, I set out to tell a story of life in a Palestinian village and a story of Palestinian resistance. I was motivated by Sireen’s retelling of her family life history, and I wanted the world to hear about her family’s experience because it felt like a quintessential Palestinian one while also being unique in that her brother was a leader in the resistance, particularly with the Islamic Jihad in Jenin. If I wanted the story to get out into the world, I knew I had to write it in a way that would appeal to people in a way that academic monographs normally do not.
What are the work’s key interventions in the overlapping fields to which you speak?
The book straddles a number of fields—anthropology, oral history, creative writing, memoir, Palestine studies, and Middle East studies. Here, I want to just note the intervention in anthropology. Anthropology, like culture, can take us in many directions, but one thing this book does is take more seriously the discipline's injunction to tell the stories of people because, in the face of oppression, we have nothing but our stories. As an anthropologist, I wanted to let the story tell itself and, as Walter Benjamin would say of the novelist, to tell it “free of explanation.” Methodologically, the book challenges the limits and meaning of ethnographic writing. What constitutes ethnography? We know it is not simply the process of doing research but also the process of writing. We do ethnography in the field, but we also write ethnography and write ethnographically.
What does this mean? Are there boundaries and limitations? What does it mean to write a life story from an ethnographer’s perspective? How do we, as anthropologists, contribute to the meaning-making of our interlocutors, whose world of meaning is itself the thing we try to understand? And how does the text help us do this? This book will call on anthropologists to grapple with these questions. In this sense, while ultimately a work of creative nonfiction, it is also a thought and writing experiment in ethnography. For anthropologists, the work also calls on us to question how we work with our interlocutors and involve our sources. For oral historians, it carves out a different way of relaying and weaving history together.
Can you speak to your research methodology and the nature of your sources?
This research was based on gathering oral history primarily from one interlocutor, Sireen, who is also a collaborator and co-author. Her stories form the basis of this text. I also conducted several visits to meet with and interview extended family, as well as friends and neighbors. I recorded Sireen’s stories during walks through her village and was welcomed into her family home. To craft the story, I also relied on archives at the Center for Palestine Studies in Lebanon, prison notes and court documents, interviews with former prisoners, documentaries, scholarly writings on Palestine, and news articles from the four decades covered in the book.
Besides other academics in your field, what audiences do you most hope will read your book, and how might they benefit from your work?
I wrote this book as a piece of creative nonfiction for a general audience to be able to tell a story from Palestine and make people feel the heartache of settler colonialism past and present. According to one reviewer, the book would be useful for young adults, so I look forward to readers of all ages picking this up.
