The Ongoing Catastrophe: Erosion of Life in the Danish Camps

The majority of Palestinians in Denmark have followed a route from villages in
Palestine via camps in Lebanon to housing projects in Denmark. Whereas it is
well known that the camps were modelled after the villages, it is less well known
that the housing projects are referred to and enacted as camps. Based on
fieldwork among Palestinians in the Danish camps, this article explores why
my interlocutors describe their current lives as a catastrophe. Al-Nakba literally
means the catastrophe and, in Palestinian national discourse, it is used to
designate the event of 1948, when the Palestinians were expelled from their
homeland. However, according to my interlocutors, al-Nakba never stopped,
but continues in the present. To understand this phenomenon, I suggest that it
is conducive to think of al-Nakba as a reverse national myth, a figure of
un-becoming, which is replicated in the present. I argue that, unlike the
spectacular catastrophes in Palestine and later in Lebanon, life in the Danish
camps is characterized by minor mundane catastrophes that are each so small
that they barely register or elicit a moral response, but nevertheless erode the
lives of my interlocutors.