Between Earth and Echo: Listening to the Lived Histories of Palestinian Landscapes

The Labs for Liberation fellows are exploring how ideas about disability and race can better inform how we think about design and technology. They will examine these intersections through blog posts throughout the year. In this year’s second blog post, Jumanah Abbas explores maps of Palestine, including controversies around mapping territory and the possibilities of multisensory mapping, including sonic mapping, for solidarity. 

Section one: Early Memories

When I was seven years old, we lived in At-Tira, Ramallah. Our apartment was a landmark in the neighborhood: a beige building with red rooftops, otherwise known as the lone wolf sitting at the end of the road, next to the abandoned police headquarters. Another iconic landmark, the police station, was destroyed in 2002 as a result of the ongoing Israeli aggression during the 2001-2003 Second Intifada. Both buildings stood in stark contrast to the backdrop of the occupied West Bank’s mountains and valleys, dotted with the indigenous flora and fauna of Palestine. 

The apartment was mid-rise level, while the police station was a two-level building, both overlooking the horizon and the mountains whose contours formed a strong silhouette and pierced the sky. One of my earliest memories of the landscapes surrounding Ramallah was observing these hinterlands. Adajnect were valleys and waters stretching into the distance. In the front, large green cars traveled across a road in the far mountains, usually during the afternoons and later into the evenings. Eventually, I realized those cars that I was seeing were Israeli military jeeps, and the roads were intended for settler-colonial use, cutting through the mountains and disrupting their natural ecologies.

On the night of the attack, the bombing of the police station, we were lucky not to be at the apartment. By lucky, I mean we were the unfortunate residents of a country that didn’t allow us to live on its land. As holders of an Irish passport, we had to travel to Jordan every 3 to 6 months to renew our residence. Our time in the West Bank was limited by the expiration of our ‘tourist visa permit,’ which was issued by the Israeli embassy. The constant back-and-forth trips were all-consuming: the rugged roads, thick with dust from the early construction of the apartheid walls and checkpoints, the sounds of  clamor-whether from the construction, or the orders of the Israeli soldiers against shuffling of the moving Palestinian bodies. These unsettling shaped my imagination of a landscape being cleared for surveillance walls and checkpoints soon to be built. 

As I look at the images of these landscapes, they are not lands to be analyzed and observed. They are also looking at their observers. These landscapes are not mere objects, they are sites of sharing lived experiences. They are not natural terrains to be drawn and calculated, they are witnesses to shared experiences and to histories of violence and survival. Therefore, to look at a map through the lens of the cartography is to question its veridicality. As the writer Jorge Louis Borge reflects in the Exactitude of Science about the map-territory relationship, maps reduce the representation of not only lands but also realities. These maps conform to the discipline of geography while neglecting the realities of access, disability justice, and those who are unable to claim rights to both. 

Section Two: Maps of Palestine

In the discovery of the hinterlands, images of idyllic valleys and rising hills lingered as a way of visualizing and imagining landscapes, with their romanticized notions often inherent in readings of land as idyllic and devoid of inhabitants. Settler-colonialism would transform these tools into means of erasure and oppression, as noted in the scholarly work of the architecture historian Nadi Abusada about the erasure of Jaffa’s city.

This realization only cements the idea that the production of oculocentric maps has been limited to scientific legends and Cartesian notions of spaces, as noted in the scholar-based work of Laura Krugen and Dara Barwley, as well as in the artistic-driven works of This is Not an Atlas. These maps are tools of coloniality—an enduring legacy that persists today in the form of Google Maps, GPS coordinates, and satellite imagery. Palestine has been mapped and remapped through a colonial gaze, which only permeates and enables those who can see maps to continue seeing them.

As we look back and move ahead with these new perspectives, how do we ensure the accessibility of these maps? One of the earliest examples is the Madaba Mosaic map, rendered in earthy tones, characterized by the extrusion of buildings and waves of brownish-beige used to map the surrounding terrain. A juxtaposition to this would be the latest developments in digital cartography, such as UNESCO maps, which represent advancements in technology but often fail to address the inequities and erasures inherent in their creation.

Section three: Controversies around mapping

If I can recall landscapes beyond my vision, what would I hear and what would I be able to listen to? These landscapes were a refuge to me.  For colonial powers, they were spaces to occupy and control.  As I recall the contours and topographic lines of the landscape surrounding my house: my memory is jaded, blurred by time. But I vividly remember the noise polluting the roads: the sounds of cars across rugged paths, the honks and grunts of frustration, and the cries of people against an apartheid wall about to be built.

 I, then, ask how to visualize these landscapes if seeing is not the only mode of mapping, but so is hearing and feeling. How, then, can we map landscapes when seeing is not the only way to know them. Tactile maps offer one solution, allowing users to engage with raised surfaces that reflect contours, roads, and valleys, while Braille labels provide essential context. Haptic technology, such as touchscreens with vibrations or wearable feedback devices, transforms maps into tools felt rather than seen. These innovations allow us to navigate landscapes with our hands, aligning maps with the lived experiences of those often excluded from traditional cartography.

By incorporating touch and movement into mapping, we can challenge the exclusionary nature of maps, reclaiming them as tools of accessibility and resistance. Maps, when designed to be listened to and felt, can tell stories beyond the visual, amplifying the voices and experiences of those erased from the land.

Section 04: New ways forward

Balancing visual readings of maps—two-dimensional tools—with visualization techniques that allow for multisensory engagement is critical. These questions shape my research as I delve into the fellowship scheme. In Listening to Images, Tina Campt describes a method of engaging with photography and archival documents, focusing on quotidian practices that “capture the sovereign gaze” and “refuse the very terms of the photographic situation.”

In a similar way to Tina’s framework, the maps and documents we gather around Palestine engage with the sonic registers of the landscapes, becoming attuned to sensory modalities often silenced by the state-colonial grammar of the archive. By listening closely to maps, this research aligns with emancipatory practices seeking to confront the violence of maps without simply reproducing it. There are different ways we can listen to and hear the maps of Palestinian territories through these techniques of haptic maps. 

Section 05: Sonic resistance

As I work towards these multisensory maps, I ask myself: what is the present soundscape of Palestine? What are the sonic elements of landscapes, and how do we amplify the sounds, chants, music, and conversations emitted from Palestinian bodies and spaces? How is sound used as a metaphor to decipher resistance and foster collective action that makes demands for justice audible? How do we invite others to hear and listen to these sounds of resistance in relation to maps?

These questions arise as I engage with these tools that enhance access and multi-senses, considering how soundscapes might help reclaim narratives that have been silenced. For instance, one example of a sonic memory to be visualized could be the sound of the explosion on the night the police station was bombed—had we been in Ramallah for longer than three months, we might have heard it in person. Sonic maps could include the echoing calls to prayer, the rhythmic chants of protests, or the quiet rustling of olive trees swaying in the wind. These vignettes, pieced together, would form an understanding of how we can both see and listen to maps. They could represent the resistance, pain, and resilience etched into the landscapes of Palestine.

By attending to these multisensory elements, we might begin to create maps that truly represent the lived experiences of those who call these landscapes home.