As I write this the current situation in Israel and Palestine is one of a temporary ceasefire. How brief this will be, I shudder to think. Yet while the Hamas attack is still described as terrorism, the Israeli attack is described as self defence. A disparity in all lexicons. In my opinion war is terror, war is a crime yet war crimes according to international law have occurred and will occur again of this ceasefire does not hold.
What can we do? Protest, petition, donate to humanitarian causes. All theses are useful but as writers, artists and allies in addition we can celebrate the culture of the oppressed. What follows is a limited series of references which you are welcome to share. First let’s think about how oppression works.
A part of oppression is not just the socio economic, political or the physical; imposed borders, western backed coups, imprisonment and torture. It is and always has been the demonisation of a people and the debasement of their culture.
I would argue this has been a project in extremis as regards “the Arab” a systematic project to hide or fail to disclose their achievements in astronomy, mathematics, literature and art, though much of the architecture remains. Who in the right mind would pull down the Alhambra in Grenada?
Perhaps this has been so intense because colonialism of the Middle East was so recent. Many of the borders were drawn in 1945. The words of Gil Scott Heron from Black History/ The World ring in my ears, “Egypt and Libya used to be in Africa/ They’ve been moved to the Middle East” Full lyrics here
Painting by Palestinian Yasmeen Shamout
Colonialism, relies on this, as in the period of slavery, it is necessary to depict “the other” as less than human or subhuman. When the imperialists debased the Arabic culture, with their hook nosed caricatures, ignored their literature and buried their history of astronomy it was to justify their brutal colonialism and thirst for oil.
Few in the West for instance have heard of The Epic of Gilgamesh. This epic “hero journey” story, from the 12th Century B.C. was recoded in cuneiform in ancient Mesopotamia and is considered the worlds first novel. With over 30 000 words (in English translation) and a debate of what it is to be human I rather think it was unlikely to be the first, rather the first excavated and translated.
In my opinion the West lost so much wisdom and knowledge and the rest of the world has suffered so much as a result of imperialism and colonialism. Witness the genocide in the Amazon! While it is estimated their are one million widows in Iraq following the 2003 invasion by the “Coalition of the Willing” led by the U.S. and U.K. During the Iran/ Iraq war, which now seems like ancient history in the West at least, both sides were funded by and supplied with arms by the West.
I also can’t help recall how my mother told me, in one of her fervent history lessons in the steamy kitchen, about the Suez crisis. I didn’t entirely understand the situation beyond her outrage and disgust in the words, “And WE went to war with the French in THEIR [the Eqyptians] country. It was THEIR canal.”
Nowhere is this debasement more apparent than in Hollywood movies with omissions and worse stereotypes epitomised by the early 20th Century movies The Sheikh and The Son of the Sheihk. “The Arab” is depicted as untrustworthy, deceitful, brutal and money grabbing.
Palestine, incidentally, has had a film industry since 1935. The first film made was a documentary based on the Visit to Palestine of Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia made by Ibrahim Hassan Sirhan (or Serhan), from Jaffa. Recent titles here
Painting by Palestinian Nabil Anani
As Zena Takieddine, art history writer and editor, puts it “Edward Said was the first to formulate a language for that slippery yet pervasive kind of racism that exists in the ‘western mind’ towards us Arabs; slippery because it cannot be based on skin-color, nor can it be based on religion, since people of Arab culture come in all colors and in all religions, (which is, in itself, a testimony to a rich civilizational fabric that cannot be reduced or ignored, no matter how hard they try)…. Edward Said explains it all.”
His seminal text Orientalism is described as the, “1978 book by Edward W. Said, in which the author establishes the term “Orientalism” as a critical concept to describe the West’s commonly contemptuous depiction and portrayal of The East, i.e. the Orient.”
The civilisation project relied on the denial that these cultures were already civilised, and of course, on might as right. We will invade your country, our armies, our guns are bigger than yours and you had no idea we were coming to “civilise you.”
An example that persists in architecture is the “couloirs sanitaires” or sanitary corridors, set up by the French around the old cities of Marrakesh and Fes. The attitude is in in the word “sanitary.” It required building a system of roads, that still exist to this day, that circumvent the old city centres.
The positive here is the old cities remain in tact though in Marrakesh people line the alleys leading to the main square, begging. People who resemble a queue for the A&E/ ED, seated in the dust, limbs bandaged, limbs in casts, palms outstretched. Todays poverty in much of the North Africa is the legacy of this colonial underdevelopment.
So what is to be done? Let us celebrate the achievements of those hidden histories of culture. Hidden only from the curriculums in the west, celebrated by the descendants of the Middle East and North Africa. It was Iraqi’s who introduced me to the Epic of Gilgamesh! This in itself, I believe, particularly at a time like this, is an act of solidarity. Some poetry suggestions here. See also The Academy of America Poets Newsletter And the Poetry Foundation
Mahmoud Darwish. Photo by Don J. Usner.
Mahmoud Darwish is perhaps the best known Palestinian poet, arrested in the 1960s, he was imprisoned for reciting poetry and traveling between villages without a permit, find his poetry here
The Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan is also well know known for her work based on the experiences of Palestinian refugees, “particularly the feelings of displacement that came with being expelled from the homeland and the dream of returning home.” More info here
I Write the Land
I want to write the land,
I want the words
to be the land itself.
But I’m just a statue the Romans carved
and the Arabs forgot.
Colonizers stole my severed hand
and stuck it in a museum.
No matter. I still want to write it –
the land.
My words are everywhere
and silence is my story.
translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid
More info here
A blog post by Anne Enith Cooper
Find my bio here
Contact me here
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