Comment: What is to be done – On Colonialism and Culture

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.

by  Najwan Darwish

translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

More info here

A blog post by Anne Enith Cooper 

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Comment: A brief history of the world

It might not look like it but the sun is shining up there. Here’s a screenshot from the Star Chart app, my favourite app, looking east, note it uses some of the original Arabic names.

Let’s face it they mapped the stars while we were all running round in loincloths, ok I exaggerate a bit, but their “golden age” overlapped our “dark ages.” What follows is the result of a morning freewrite, though I added the links later, as I pondered why this knowledge erased from history. 

I suggest that when the west colonised the Islamic countries in the 19th Century and early 20th century, simultaneous with the “scramble for Africa”, it was necessary to portray these societies as primitive and undeveloped and bury this history. 

In Morocco when the French occupied they established what they called a cordon sanitaire – a santitary corridor – around the old cities, implying the residents were disease ridden and unsanitary. This can still be seen today in the layout of cities. 

In Hollywood Arab men have been portrayed relentlessly as hook nosed characters not to be trusted or worse violent and barbaric. The 1922 film The Sheik being a good example.

It seems to me all this prejudice resurrected big style with Bush’s “axis of evil”  and the eventual invasion of Iraq 19 years ago. We saw the growth of Islamophobia on an unprecedented scale. 

Yes the regime of Saddam Hussein brutal but worse than the 45th, Bolsonrao, Orban, Erdogan? Many of the people knew it, I suggest how different Iraq would have been today if the people had brought Hussein down established their own democracy. 

Instead we saw the Iraqi people hacking pointlessly at a fallen statue while the overlords installed themselves in the Green Zone and crushed under the tracks of their tanks irreplaceable artefacts from ancient Mesopotamia circa 3000 BC. 

Yet even back then in the era of Mesopotamia the lands on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates were passed from empire to empire. Seems to me the entire history of humanity has been one of war and domination, empires rise, empires fall, borders are redrawn, even as far back as that.

Isn’t it time to recognise our common humanity? To honour the achievements of all societies? To stop the cycle of endless war and its justifications? 

We face a crisis now, the climate emergency, which we will overcome if we unite as one human community. The biggest obstacle I see is corporate power and the governments in their pockets. Those that still pursue the profits of the black gold; oil, coal (and gas.)

They dehumanise, discriminate against and murder those who stand in their way. Often indigenous peoples who embody the experiences of poverty, racism, misogyny, the theft of their land, the degradation of their land, it’s eco systems and carbon sinks from the Amazon to Canada to Siberia  to Australia. They are at the frontlines. 

Seems to me it’s a form of neocolonialism that casts these people as ignorant and savages. Loggers in the Amazon tied an indigenous teenage girl to a tree and burned her alive.

I figure the meek won’t inherit the Earth we will have to fight for it, stand up for it. Put aside our differences, honour out differences, there no place for “these are our people, these are not,” based on human made borders carved out 100 years ago. 

One world, one people is a long way off, but we do have one responsibility. I figure we in the west must standing solidarity with those on the frontline, amplify their voices, recognise their wisdom, we, like they, need to Think Global and Act Local the fossil fuel companies have their hands in all our pockets. They pollute and potentially rob us of our future. 

The way I see it is another world is not only possible but absolutely necessary if humanity is to survive.

A blog post by Anne Enith Cooper 

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