Awna Thaher is a retired teacher from Yasid. He also has rather amazing museum, in his house. The porch, the entry hall, the lower areas outside, are all covered with stuff: clothing, maps, trinkets, tools. One part of this is a sort of village history, including albums filled with pictures, newspaper clippings, Mandate-era sale contracts, and copies of old documents that all tell the story of the village. A 1953 petition to the state, signed by everyone in the village, asking the Jordanian government not to send a particular guy to teach in another village far away. Next to the petition is a picture of this man, when he was younger, holding his young son.
The photos, I think, were the best part. Awna had collected pictures of everyone, often when they were much younger. The best one was this young dude with a black afro and a mustache. Turned out to be the sheikh, who was sitting next to us and now sports all white clothing, skull cap, hair and beard. There was something really nice looking through these albums with him and the men that were there, watching how happy they were that these pictures were around, remembering things and laughing.
The house-museum is also trying to tell, in a rather idiosyncratic way, a story of change over time. There were different examples, from the more obvious ones like clothing or tools, and to the more esoteric. The most interesting of the latter was the collection of bells, which were used at different times and had markedly different sounds caused by their construction and the way you would ring them, from a metal pole to an electric pulse. Awna has an almost manic energy, and was ringing each bell to demonstrate its distinct sound, creating an uneven cacophony as diminishing rings mixed with new ones. Sometimes, it was not clear how it fit into any story, with collections of trinkets and antiques, all nicely arranged, but not clearly part of any kind of story.
Even the defining events in Palestinian history had their own twist. Refugees from 1948 often keep the keys to their homes, bringing them out to demonstrations and events. This museum had its own key of return, but with a strange addition: it was on a chain with dozens of other, newer keys attached to it. These were, according to Awna, to represent each apartment in the apartment building that Israel had built on top of the (presumably destroyed) home to which that key belonged.
Sometimes the stories told by a given collection of objects did not fit squarely within nationalist or even natural history (like the scenes of birds cut out from books that were not Palestinian at all, or the plant information in German). But this didn't seem to bother him, nor did it seem to upset the flow at all.
Unsurprisingly, Awna doesn’t want his collection to stay in Yasid forever. It seems he wants space to move the collection somewhere else, to travel it around and have it visit different places to show Palestinian history. I think that would be unfortunate. As soon as it becomes a didactic tool, a representative of "real Palestinian history" is the minute it might fall apart, as it will get compared to other, more professional kinds of representations, or to the narratives that already exist. So much wouldn't fit, so much might be cut away as junk, if it enters professional curated spaces. And its connections to Yasid, to the people that live and used to live there, would be cut off. I think its great where it is, and if you’re ever north of Nablus, well-worth a visit.