Practicing wujud : A Constellation of sumud in the Fragmented Palestinian Present

The Zionist conception of history and its material project of expansion and land annexation produce a temporality of catastrophe (Nakba) that constantly reiterates violence, dispossession, and displacement in Palestinian lives and experiences. The linear temporality of the colonial process, including the neo-liberal framework of one of its crucial phases—the Oslo Accords (1993), has fragmented Palestinian existence throughout the past decades on multiple levels—economic, political, social, and geographic. Reflecting on Palestinian sumud as a constellation—within an epistemological and methodological relational perspective that aims to counter colonial linear epistemologies and temporalities, this article looks at how three significant Palestinian embodied, material and symbolic practices of wujud (presence) function within collective sumud. On the one hand, such experiences resist colonial annihilation by re-integrating the physical and cultural Palestinian presence in the face of catastrophe. On the other, they embody the diversity of Palestinian ontologies and the multi-vocality of Palestinian epistemologies. Practicing and asserting wujud and reclaiming relationships with the land are refractory Palestinian spaces, in the here and now of a fragmented present, to the Zionist colonial temporality, material and epistemic order. They enable the existence and resistance of the Palestinian people and alternative understandings and imaginations of time, meaning, and presence.