What is Deixis of Memory

The plight of refugees fleeing from Palestine in 1948 raises several key questions regarding their historical fragmentation as a nation and their future. From a social anthropological point of view, the existing literature seems to tackle the Palestinian case from different perspectives influenced by the mass exodus of Palestinians from their homeland. Such perceptions took for granted the recognition of the state of “refugeeness” of the exiled Palestinians around the globe, while, in reality, it is a mutual interaction between people, place, and time. In the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli War at the beginning of the year 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes in Palestine to the nearby Arab countries, among them was Egypt. Some thousands settled in different areas all over Egypt. Based on a preliminary research on the literature, the author can argue that this is the first ethnographic study of the social life of the village of Jaziret Fadel and its Palestinian inhabitants in Egypt. The chapter is about tackling the historical trajectories, genealogies, memories, and present of the inhabitants of this village who seemed to be torn between two nostalgic pasts. The author's emphasis within this chapter is about how the narratives of the past memories could reveal a lot about the present time of the human societies and their future.