Deborah Willis

Summary

Writer and exhibitions coordinator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture who was a delegate on the March 28-April 24, 1989 delegation recorded in Occupation and Resistance: American Impressions of the Intifada, quoted in Chapter 1 of Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine on how the trip gave Palestinians names and faces the US news never gave them (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.54).

As quoted by G. Roger Denson and read by Kelly: “the news never gave the names or showed the faces of the Palestinians. But on the trip, everything was one-on-one. I saw people’s faces and knew their names. I heard their stories personally. Some of the Palestinians even became my friends” (PDF p.54).
Kelly reads the account as pointing to US news media’s construction of Palestinians en masse, vacillating between “victim” and “terrorist”, while leaving open why people in the United States need to know Palestinians personally to understand their subjection to the military rule the US bankrolls (PDF p.54).
In Gaza during the first intifada, Willis explained the residents of Beach Camp “had no preparation at all for their arrival and didn’t trust the delegation”, and recalled a Palestinian woman asking the delegates, “What is this road show all about? This isn’t a picnic here. Why are you in our homeland?”; after a television crew filmed in the camp, soldiers entered and a child was killed, and residents thought the killing was the result of the crew’s visit (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.59).
Her quilted collaged piece Mothers and the Shebab (1989), in the Alternative Museum exhibition, uses African American quilting traditions and the metaphor of stitching to connect African American struggles, particularly losing children to state violence, with Palestinians’ (PDF p.71-72).

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aliases