Winner of the 2014 Chicago Folklore Prize, My Voice is My Weapon builds on nearly a decade of intensive ethnographic fieldwork and historical research to explore how Palestinian identities and histories have been sung, danced, and performed into existence through time and across space. The geographical scope includes Israel/Palestine, the occupied territories, and areas of the Palestinian diaspora, particularly in Jordan. The time frame stretches nearly a century from the late Ottoman period of the early twentieth century through the second Intifada of the early twenty-first century.
As such, the book is organized logically into two main sections. The first (chapters 2-5) is ethnohistorical in approach, starting its investigation with the pre-1948 canon of Palestinian resistance song and tracing its development in response to shifting political landscapes up through the first Palestinian Intifada of 1987-1993. This chronological overview offers careful textual and musical analysis identifying resonant images, themes, and tropes that have served as the traditional resources available for creative recycling in the midst of changing needs and conditions, in the midst of competing discourses we may identify as nationalist, Islamist, and Arabist. No one has traced this history of Palestinian music, identity, and nationalism in an English-language monograph, and this alone may be worth the price of admission.
Complemented by the author’s field recordings—accessible online through Indiana University's EVIA Project—the second half is ethnographic in approach, emerging from David McDonald’s tireless efforts in a period of profound instability, starting with his first trip to Jordan in 2002 as the Second Intifada raged just across the border. In Jordan among the exiles and later in the West Bank among the occupied, McDonald attended weddings, demonstrations, and concerts—the primary sites where people sang the songs and danced the dances that made them feel most Palestinian. McDonald expanded his insider perspectives by recording the life stories of individual activists and musicians, and by playing the nai, an end-blown flute, with The Songs of the Lovers, a group that had come into prominence as a resistance ensemble in the 1970s and ‘80s and were then making a come-back.
Traveling back and forth between Jordan and the West Bank with the relative benefit of an American passport, McDonald served as a kind of nostalgia mule, bringing Palestinians in Jordan mementos and photographs from ancestral villages. His travels were far from easy, however, as he had to negotiate harassment from both Israeli forces and wary Palestinian youths. In a rather hilarious episode, McDonald finds himself in the middle of the night with no way home except by convincing an exhausted bus driver to let him drive the bus, which McDonald did, collecting fares and baffled passengers all the way home. Such is the occasional absurdity of fieldwork.
In chapter 1, McDonald artfully anticipates an important theme throughout the second half of the book. His interactions with an aging musician/activist at a Palestinian wedding in Jordan, an elderly folklorist and archivist in the West Bank, and a young cosmopolitan rapper extolling the essential Palestinian-ness of Tupac Shakur offer a suite of vignettes that illustrates how there is no one homogenous Palestinian national community. There may be an interconnected web of people scattered by the same events, compelled by a desire for belonging, and invested in the astounding transformations made possible through performance. But they are also people significantly divided by the many fractures of differing experiences, assumptions, positions, and subsequent agendas.
As such, like folklorists who shift attention from the potentially reifying noun-form of tradition to the active process that is traditionalization (or from context to contextualization, or from text to entextualization), McDonald appropriately shifts attention from identity to identification processes when addressing questions about what it is to be Palestinian. These ever-important processes are at base relational—between Palestinians and others, between distinguishable factions of Palestinians—and they take place nowhere more affectively than in performance.
Having established these perspectives early, McDonald bears down in chapters 6 and 7 on his work with Jordan-based protest singer Kamal Khalil, who was popular in the 1980s and found himself sought after and relevant again during the Second Intifada. Khalil’s articulate reflections on intimidation, imprisonment, and exile illuminate the perspectives and agendas of the dispossessed. In chapters 8 and 9, McDonald considers the popularity of rap among young Palestinians (and also Jews), and he underscores Palestinian heterogeneity by focusing on the rap group DAM from the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Rapping in a mixture of Arabic, Hebrew, and English, DAM sampled classic protest songs but eventually sought to transcend ethnic and national boundaries, substantially expanding the terms by which Palestinian identity may be figured and resistance expressed.
Given the topic of Palestinian music, resistance, and nationalism, one might expect an enlightening but fairly straightforward celebration of expressive forms that accomplish important social work—shaping identity, enacting solidarity, performing Palestinian-ness, embodying the as-yet stateless nation in the face of considerable hardship and repression. What McDonald delivers, however, is something subtler than an admiring account of resilience through artful resistance to occupation and exile. Dissatisfied with the stalemate binaries of domination and empowerment, the powerful and the powerless, McDonald extends the observations of Lila Abu-Lughod to rethink the nature of resistance.
We should not automatically assume acts of resistance—no matter how artful—to be successful refusals to be dominated. Sometimes they are, but we should also consider whether acts of resistance are best understood as a diagnostic of power, as clues for identifying social relations and power differentials, even the limitations of agency. As McDonald notes, "conventional understandings of resistance are perhaps ill-equipped to account for the myriad ways that acts of subversion may in fact serve to consolidate, rather than destabilize, entrenched power discourses" (27). All too often such assumptions about resistance can facilitate superficial notions of solidarity, naturalize difference, and essentialize identity—false steps that the rap group DAM seems to be actively trying to avoid. Others of course might call it selling out, and thus continues the ongoing debate over what it is to be Palestinian.
In all, McDonald marshals both historiographic and ethnographic methods to provide an excellent case study in the construction and negotiation of collective identities through musical expression—performance after performance, from one time, place, and interested party to the next. My Voice is My Weapon is a remarkable achievement pointing to a bright future in precisely the kind of research where folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and others find the most common interests and common cause.
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[Review length: 1064 words • Review posted on October 18, 2016]