Dr. May Seikaly made her mark as a historian by championing and mastering the practice of gathering oral histories. The author of “Haifa: Transformation of an Arab Society 1918-1939,” Dr. Seikaly has long made use of oral histories in her work and was one of the first scholars to recognize the importance of comprehensively documenting the personal accounts of Palestinians who lived through the Nakba (“catastrophe”), the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in 1948.
Seikaly has written extensively on the Nakba and the resulting Palestinian experience of dispersal (“shatat”), and has interviewed and recorded the testimonies of many hundreds of Palestinian survivors of the 1948 exodus, both within historic Palestine and in the diaspora. The value of such an undertaking is best illustrated by the fact that many of the people in Seikaly’s oral histories have died, but thanks to her work, their stories will be passed down. “I believe Palestinian history has to be reclaimed and restructured,” Seikaly says. “And for us to keep our pride in our own identity, in our Palestinianism, it is very important to see it as a whole.”
It is this understanding of her craft as a historian, and the tool of oral histories in particular, that led Dr. Seikaly to undertake countless projects documenting the stories of those remaining Palestinians from the 1948 generation, and to author numerous articles on the subject. “My aim has always been to catch the voices of those who are fading,” Seikaly says. “Oral history creates persistence. It shows indirectly the spirit of continuity, the spirit of resistance that the Palestinians have exhibited throughout, and symbolizes their perseverance in spite of all adversity. For this reason it was important for me as a social historian and as a Palestinian to keep a record for those that come after me.”
Dr. Seikaly also puts her work into a larger context, insisting that it is what younger generations of historians, artists and others decide to do with these oral histories that will ultimately make a difference. “We need youth who are artistically-oriented, who are skilled in writing and literary appreciation, to take these interviews and make sense of them and bring them to the general, and in our case here, to the American public. That is how our society and the American public can really begin to understand our story.”
Today, Dr. Seikaly intends to donate her considerable database of oral histories—which goes back two decades, and is still in progress whenever subjects are willing to contribute—to concerned institutions in order to make them available to the public. This, she says, is so that “everyone will have access to these stories in order to write and document these narratives, and to cement all parts of the Palestinian historical mosaic.” Since Dr. Seikaly is on the verge of retirement, the safeguarding of the collection has become paramount.
As a professor of Middle Eastern social history at Wayne State University in Detroit, Dr. Seikaly has built an academic course for students to master the science and Art of Oral history collection and to experience its tools by studying the Arab-American communities of metro Detroit. Students have flocked to this course and many have had the benefit of encountering the diasporic local Arab communities, Palestinians among them.
Originally from Haifa, Seikaly’s father went to the U.S. early in the 20th century, and upon his return to his native city found himself unable to compete with newly established Zionist businesses. So the Seikaly family moved to Nazareth (where Seikaly was born) and started a distribution company that specialized in bringing Egyptian films to Palestine.
In 1948, when Seikaly was three years old, everything changed—her parents found themselves penniless and forced to head north with their five children to seek the help of relatives in Lebanon. They later moved to Jordan, where Seikaly grew up. Seikaly’s outspoken sense of solidarity and respect for the plight of others began in these early years. “From the very beginning, my life was imbued and intertwined with a feeling that I have a certain responsibility because as a Palestinian, I am marginalized,” she says.
After discovering an interest in politics during her teen years—which coincided with the Algerian revolution and the rise of Arab nationalism—at a boarding school in Bethlehem, Seikaly went on to study at Birzeit University and in Beirut. She then did her graduate work in the U.S. and England, receiving an MA in Middle East History at UCLA, followed by a PhD from Oxford under the supervision of the venerable historian Albert Hourani.
Seikaly is to this day driven by the memories of Palestine passed on to her by her parents and later the many older Palestinians whom she interviewed. “Oral history is the tool to keep the story alive and to continuously excavate it,” she says. “It is the tool to lay reality naked for all generations and particularly for people in the U.S.”