Nothing in my mind is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position that you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political, you want to keep a reputation of being balanced, moderate, objective. Your hope is to remain within the responsible mainstream. For an intellectual, these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence. Personally, I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.” — EDWARD SAID

The problem with genre in the various fields of cultural study is that, like any concept, it has a history and a limited scope, and yet there are too many objects to analyze for any of them to escape categorization. The result is an incoherent mishmash of terms, punctuated by occasional abortive attempts to assert order. I suspect a big reason why they always fail is because they can’t make themselves fit with the essayistic, anti-scientific form of most cultural study. Here’s one that does, by Carl Freedman from Critical Theory and Science Fiction:

“…a genre is not a classification but an element or, better still, a tendency that, in combination with other relatively autonomous generic elements or tendencies, is active to a greater or lesser degree within a literary text that is itself understood as a complexly structured totality. In other words, a text is not filed under a generic category; instead, a generic tendency is something that happens within a text” (20).

He’s not the only one to say this; one can note that this notion of genre, coming after the structuralist and poststructuralist debates of mid-century, is actually the dominant one today within academic literary and film criticism. Its notion of the individual text as the primary unit of study, a “complexly structured totality” whose fundamental and unique distinctiveness only emphasizes further the multitudes it contains, seems custom made for close reading, opposed as it is to any kind of empiricism.

But in its suggestion of transindividual entities (genres) being re(?)constructed from within the apparently stable text, it contains the seeds of a very different approach. It may be that only now when the serious study of literature is a minority interest, when Philip Roth can argue that the novel’s future will be “cultic” and surprise no one, that the field of literature can be cleared for genre to be useful again.

I’m of course thinking of Franco Moretti’s work on the novel. In Graphs, Maps, Trees, he suggests, on the one hand, a shift in thinking that takes into account the historical fluctuation within every novelistic genre, or genre cycles, where say the Gothic appears in the late 18th century, declines in the early 19th, and reappears in the late 19th and again at different moments during the 20th: “variations in a conflict that remains constant: this is what emerges at the level of the cycle — and if the conflict remains constant, then the point is not who prevails in this or that skirmish, but exactly the opposite…” The novel then benefits from its capacity to “use a double pool of talents and forms, thereby boosting its productivity, and giving it an edge over its many competitors.” This process can only be seen at the level of the cycle — individual episodes (individual novels or abstract blocks or stages of time) and the  presentation of transhistorical categories as timeless tend to conceal it.

This approach nevertheless requires the use of stable generic categories, though individual texts can belong to several at once. One has to be able to say, to take an uncontroversial example, that the late 19th century and late 18th century Gothic are both Gothic. More controversial are units like ’spy novel’ or ‘historical novel’ and the supposed timeframes (arbitrarily borrowed from other scholars). One could argue that these categories only make sense after the breakdown of classical genre, literature’s complete commodification, and the rise of distinct market categories in the 19th century. Only at this point do generic markers take on an empirical value.

On the other hand, in the Trees section, Moretti adopts a quasi-Darwinian framework for tracking the evolution of stylistic tropes, structural features, etc., apparently on the level of ‘memes.’ It seems to me an approach like this requires database analysis and developments in pattern recognition software and machine learning to be really successful. As far as I know Moretti is pursuing precisely that, but I have no idea if it’s working out beyond this amusing blurb in Wired.

At any rate, both approaches undermine the centrality of the text as the primary unit of analysis and permit the study of literature en masse. The centrality of canon and author are also undermined, which might sound old hat to anyone who’s read their Barthes and Foucault until they look around and are forced to admit that canons and authors are still very much central to literary study. Internal resistance movements like feminist and postcolonial theory can’t contest the eurocentrism of the Great Books without asserting alternative canons and authors. Cultural studies relies on the canons produced by pop culture. And perennially disrespected genres like sci-fi, horror, fantasy, detective novels, etc. can’t get ’serious’ attention without a canon. Studying the novel (and probably other literary/textual genres, like philosophy, say) outside the metaphysics of bourgeois individualism it did so much to propagate — of which the most egregious is probably intellectual property — will require moving beyond these structural limits, and Moretti’s work is valuable for this reason alone.

*

All of which only serves to make me feel more awkward, because despite my growing interest in the history of fantasy, for which genre is a central concern, I’m not sure Moretti’s work can help me. And so what follows are some barely organized notes on potential problems, as I see them, in the empirical use of genre as an organizing concept for such a project.

From the beginning of literature, there were arguments over mimesis. From just before the beginning of the modern European novel in the 18th century, there were arguments over fiction, romance, verisimilitude, in a word, ‘realism’ — what would become the ruling ideology of literary representation, the very presupposition of ‘novel.’ These arguments came on the heels of the 17th century controversies over the proper form of natural philosophy. Should it include the wondrous, miraculous, and strange? The whispered rumors of sea travelers, the eyewitness accounts of the vulgar? The evils of witchcraft? The society of men on the moon? The Royal Society’s answer was, eventually, no. In the 18th century such things would be relegated to a psychologized, pathologized imagination, something that needed to be rigorously controlled, in the behavior of the vulgar no less than in the minds and the epistemologies of the educated. And in the early 19th century, shortly after the formalization of aesthetics in Germany and the revolution in France, Tzetvan Todorov’s ‘fantastic’ emerges in Jan Potocki’s Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse as the other of realism, that “hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.” The multitude of 17th and 18th century genres — the chivalric romance, the Gothic, the Oriental, the pornographic, the conte philosophique, the fable, Tory satire, etc. — the popular as well as the esoteric — are corralled and contained in the figure of the other and the faculty of the (creative) imagination. Prose, the discourse of histoire, grants itself permission to openly disclose visions.

Somewhere in all of this is the role of imaginative prose in its own marginalization, and its role in the war over knowledge that builds and rebuilds ‘the modern.’

Following the history depicted in this thumbnail sketch, we find all the traditional fantastic genres: fantasy, science fiction, modern fairy tale, supernatural horror, etc. 20th century attempts to categorize them lie between two main tendencies: 1) Russian formalist-derived methods of synchronization, transforming the field into a collection of tropes which can be spatialized and chronologized – born of course in the study of folktales 2) ‘deep’ psychologizing methods such as those of Jung and Freud (modernized by Lacan). These are all modes of analyzing linguistic signs, whether they attempt to delve into the individual or mass psyche behind the text, or limit themselves to the organization of its surface. To put it too quickly, their weakness is their ahistoricism.

But how to narrate this long history without reifying the generic markers and without recourse to nominalism? What historical struggle do these forms manifest? No single set of genres is adequate because genre itself undergoes at least two rebirths in the midst of this history. Critics have found it necessary to deploy a protagonist large enough for the task. Fredric Jameson’s favored term, following Frye, is ‘romance’ — the macro structure of the counter-novel. Where ‘fantasy,’ referring to a non-’realistic’ content, might name a psychological desire (following Freud), romance for Jameson, referring to a non-mimetic narrative structure, is the name for a historical desire, the recapturing of the “worldness of world” stamped away by the onset of capitalism.

For Lukacs, Bakhtin, and Jameson, the “novel is the end of genre;” the study of literature in the wake of the novel (as the literary shorthand for ‘modernity’) requires different structures: “properly used, genre theory must always in one way or another project a model of the coexistence or tension between several generic modes or strands: and with this methodological axiom the typologizing abuses of traditional genre criticism are definitely laid to rest.”

There is, it seems to me, a contradiction here between Jameson’s simultaneous emphasis on historical narrative (structured around a historical subject) and on a kind of heterotopic spatialized history, where multiple histories vie for dominance within any given moment. Here is Edward Said on narrative (from Orientalism):

“Narrative asserts the power of men to be born, develop, and die, the tendency of institutions and actualities to change, the likelihood that modernity and contemporaneity will finally overtake ‘classical’ civilizations; above all, it asserts that the domination of reality by vision is no more than a will to power, a will to truth and interpretation, and not an objective condition of history. Narrative, in short, introduces an opposing point of view, perspective, consciousness to the unitary web of vision; it violates the serene Appollonian fictions asserted by vision.”

And recall that for this early Jameson at least, “storytelling [is] the supreme function of the human mind.”

Does a history of literature have to take narrative form? Are the limitations inherent in these kinds of narratives the same as those so often criticized in the novel (i.e. the centrality of an individual, transcendent protagonist)? European prose narrative, as far as I know, gets its start in the form of the compilation of folktales, the proto-encyclopedia (like the various Arthurian cycles), where narrative inheres in a structure of knowledge, not the novel, where narrative is supposedly primary. The forms of the fantastic retain this connection, albeit in different ways. Stories are as weak as they are strong.

We all watched this couple walk into Obama’s first White House State Dinner last week without any invitation.

Michaele and Tareq Salahi greet President Obama

We all asked, “How did they do this?  Where was the Secret Service?  Who are these people?”  Well, answers to some of these questions are beginning to come forward.

Maybe, this was not the couple’s first time meeting the President?  Take a look at the next photo and posting on Gateway Pundit

From the Polo Contacts Website–
“America’s Cup Polo Pre-Event with President-Elect Barack Obama”

Obama and the Salahis at a Polo Event

From Left to Right is: Randy Jackson, better known as a Judge on American Idol – his previous life he was a bass player for the Rock band JOURNEY, which also performed at the America’s Polo Cup. Others pictured are Black Eyed Peas Rock Band, Tareq Salahi the President of the America’s Polo Cup, President Elect Obama, Fergie from Black Eyed Peas and Michaele Salahi a former Miss USASuperModel. and

American Power discovered this on the White House party crashers- They belong to a radical anti-Israeli group:

Tareq Salahi, the polo-playing intruder, is a Palestinian nationalist with ties to the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) , a pro-Palestine lobby demanding the “right of return” for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants. The “right of return” has long been considered the backdoor to Israel’s destruction. But not only that: ATFP President Ziad Asali is an America-basher who blamed 9/11 on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Asali was a lead U.S. official to PLO terrorist Yassir Arafat’s funeral in 2004. And in a position paper in 2007, the ATFP called for a power-sharing agreement at the Palestinian Authority, which would have included the State Department’s designated-terrorist group, Hamas.

And, there’s more…
Canada Free Press reported that the American Task Force for Palestine (ATFP) has airbrushed references to Salahi from its website:

We do know for a fact that among the slew of memberships on charitable boards, Tareq Salahi is a former member of The American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP). The only way to know for a fact is because even though ATFP scrubbed all references to Salahi as a board member, he can still be found on Google cache. (Canada Free Press)

Sad that White House Secret Service are looking like Keystone Kops in the aftermath of Obama’s very first state house dinner in the tent.

While the media is fixated on the hitch in Michaele Salahi’s git-along, there can be no doubt that these recently minted “party crashers” really get around.

American Power has more on the Salahi’s leadership role with the the American Task Force on Palestinian, the “moderate” rights groups pushing a thinly-veiled program of Palestinian nationalism and the “right of return” (the backdoor destruction of Israel).

According to Discover the Networks, ATFP’s former vice president is Rashid Khalidi, the Columbia University Middle East Studies professor and militant Palestinian rights activist. Khalidi cites the late Edward Said as his major influence, and according to the entry cited, “As with Said before him, Khalidi’s involvement with the Palestinian cause goes beyond mere support.” And, “Khalidi so strongly identified with the aims of the PLO, which was designated as a terrorist group by the State Department during Khalidi’s affiliation with it in the 1980s, that he repeatedly referred to himself as ‘we’ when expounding on the PLO’s agenda.” Also, according to Campus Watch, ATFP remains in full support Kahlidi, for example, during charges of academic misconduct in 2005, at the time of Senator Barack Obama’s meeting with Tareq Salahi. See, “ATFP EXPRESSES FULL SUPPORT FOR COLUMBIA PROFESSOR RASHID KHALIDI.

Note too that Obama’s ties to the Palestinian community became something of an issue during the 2008 campaign. See, the Los Angeles Times, “Allies of Palestinians See a Friend in Obama.” Plus, from Andrew C. McCarthy and Claudia Rosett, “In Obama’s Hyde Park, It’s All in the Family: Passing Anti-American Radicalism From Generation to Generation.

As you may recall. The LA Times hid the tape of Barack Obama attending a 2003 Jew-bash where he praised and toasted the former PLO operative Rashid Khalidi.

With Barack Obama, it’s always about the radicalism. Always.

It looks like the Salahi security breach is much more than just an “embarassment” for the Secret Service.

UPDATE: Bennet send this–

I noticed you posted about the Salahi’s crashing the party, but did not mention that–as Canada Free Press mentioned–Obama met them back in 2005. I assume you did that because CFP did not give proof for their claim that their picture together (along with the Black Eyed Peas) was from 2005 and not last year as the Polo Contacts website claims.

I searched for proof the picture was from 2005 without any luck–until I realized the proof is from the Polo site itself.
Right click on the image and save it: the current name of that file is: ROCKTHEVOTEJune82005014.jpg

Seems that reading The Da Vinci Code finally paid off.

This doesn’t prove Obama was as friendly with the Salahis as with the Khaladis, Saids, and the Ayers’–but it is still interesting to note.

America, this is not funny at all.  God just keeps on giving us clue after clue.  Obama and the ‘LAME STREAM MEDIA’ did an excellent job during the 2008 presidential campaign of hiding all his radical associations and activity but you know what?  You can fool some of the people some of the time but you can’t fool God any of the time.

Looks like the White House Party Crashers have just opened up that old can of radical worms all over again….. OBAMA!

Haidar Eid, Socialist Worker , November 19, 2009

“Zweifellos beinhaltet jede Repräsentation, genauer gesagt der Akt, andere zu repräsentieren (und damit zu reduzieren), beinahe immer eine gewisse Art von Gewalt gegen den Gegenstand der Repräsentation (…). Der Akt oder Prozess des Repräsentierens impliziert Kontrolle, er impliziert Akkumulation, er impliziert Eingrenzung, er implziert eine Art von Entfremdung oder Desorientiertheit seitens des Repräsentierenden.”

Edward Said: zietiert in Reinhard Braun: Die Desorientierung des Blicks. Zum Verhältnis von Blick, Bild-Schirmen und Kunst. Auf http://braun.mur.at/texte/desorientierung_3300.shtml

Samuel Huntington

In 1993, Foreign Affairs published an article by Samuel Huntington, an American political theorist. This article was called “The Clash of Cinvilizations?”. In the article, Huntington proposes his famous “The Clash of Civilizations” theory, which states that people’s cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. In his support, Huntington divides the world into several civilizations and pays close attention to the “West” and “Islam”.

Bernard Lewis

Huntington also draws on another article, “The Roots of Muslim Rage”, by Bernard Lewis, a historian, Orientalist, and political commentator that was published in The Atlantic in 1990. In that article, Lewis attempts to explain “[w]hy so many Muslims deeply resent the West, and why their bitterness will not easily be mollified” (Lewis).

Edward Said

Both of these articles are criticized in Edward Wadie Said’s article, published in The Nation in 2001, “The Clash of Ignorance”. Before his death in 2003 from chronic lymphocytic leukemia, Said was a Palestinian American literary theorist, cultural critic, and an advocate for Palestinian rights. He was also a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism. Robert Fisk, the Middle east correspondent for The Independent, once described Said as the Palestinians’ “most powerful political voice” (Ashkelon).

In “The Clash of Ignorance”, Said came down on Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” theory and his use of labels and generalizations. Said notes that the clash between the West and Islam takes the “lion’s share of [Huntington's] attention.” He sees that his use of such terms is careless and antagonistic.

“Labels like Islam and the West mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to make sense of a disorderly reality.”

Said claims that the use of labels like the West and Islam are nonsensical. His defense is that while the West is a geographical location with a multitude of differences, Islam is a religion not restricted to a single area.

Said goes on to note how Huntington’s theory has spread and is being used almost unabashedly by big political figures and influential publications like Benazir Bhutto and The Economist. He then goes on to mention a series of articles by the late Eqbal Ahmad, Pakistani writer, journalist, and anti-war activist. These articles, published in the widely respected Pakistani weekly Dawn, deal with extremists’ view of Islam and how inaccurate and how far from the truth it is.

“The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis is better for reinforcing self-pride than for a critical understanding of the interdependence of our time.”

Said found that Huntington’s article and theory had no basis in truth or dedicated scholarly credit. The lines it draws and the civilizations it groups are both fallacious and hostile. In conclusion, Said saw that Huntington’s contestation was unhelpful as a critical view at conflict, but great to strengthen already existing supremacist views.

Strengths

Said is an excellent writer. He gets his point across clearly and completely. Another strength is the use of other pieces of writing that further strengthen his point. However, strongest of all is the argument itself. The importance of such well written, carefully constructed, and clear purpose is immeasurable. There is not enough of this information being published. The only angle available seems to be that similar to Huntington’s and Lewis’s.

Weaknesses

I cannot find a major weakness in this paper. Some may say he seems biased. Well of course you’re biased when it’s towards a racist or white supremacist like Huntington or Lewis.

One of the many books I’m in the middle of right now is Aaron W. Hughes’ Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline (Equinox, 2007). Hughes suggests that the study of Islam has moved from a superficial, orientalist critique of Islam (according to which Muhammad was a “self-serving, power-hungry, and over-sexed individual”) to an anti-orientalist protectionism of Islam. He suggests that the latter goes too far:

An unfortunate byproduct of [the critique of orientalism] is that it has become all too easy to write off critical scholarship on Islamic origins or the Qur’an as Orientalist, thus tainting such scholarship as somehow invested if not in physical empire maintenance then at least in the academic imperialism over others. (24)

At one point he puts nicely what is pretty close to my view on whether or not religious traditions have essences:

Neither the Orientalist nor the apologist approach … provides a proper understanding of something called Islam precisely because no such thing can exist. Despite appeals to the contrary by either practitioners or scholars of the tradition, Islam, like any other religious tradition, is a series of sites of contestation, where regimes of perceived truth do battle against other such regimes in the service of something murkily called authority, tradition, or authenticity. (54)

I’d quibble with the “no such thing can exist,” but I like the rest very much!

An Open letter from a Palestinian Resident of Gaza to the President of the United States of America, Mr. Barak Hussein Obama

Barack Obama and Edward Said

Dear Mr. President,

You will probably not read this letter due to your busy schedule and the huge number of messages you receive from Presidents, Kings, Princes, Sheiks, and Prime Ministers. Who is a Palestinian academic from GAZA, after all, to have the guts and write an open letter to the President of the United States of America? What has triggered this letter is a picture of your Excellency sitting with the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. That, of course, happened before 2004.i.e, before you underwent a process of metamorphosis which I personally think is unprecedented in history. Seeing you with Edward Said, I must say, surprised me. Said, a true public intellectual must have said something to you about the suffering of the Palestinian people. In the picture, you and your wife seem to be listening attentively, and admiringly, to him. But the point remains; did you really understand his eloquent, passionate defence of the rights of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine? Judging from your recent policy shifts, I very much doubt it. It is precisely the incongruity between the photograph and these policy shifts that has prompted this letter.

Mr. President,

The whole world celebrated your election as the first African-American president of the US. I did not. Neither did the inhabitants of the concentration camp where I live. Your sympathetic visit to Sderot—an Israeli town which was the Palestinian village of Hooj until 1948 when its people were ethnically cleansed– three years after your first visit to a Kibbutz in northern Israel in support of its residents, and after your pledge to be committed to the security of the State of Israel and its “right” to retain unified Jerusalem as the capital city of the Jewish people—to give but few examples—were all clear indications of where your heart lies.

Another reason for the writing of this letter is shock at the indifference and arrogance with which Secretary of State Hilary Clinton dismissed Palestinian concerns about Israel’s illegal Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank. Only a few weeks ago you made the admirable statement that ALL Jewish settlement must halt, and you made it clear that this included expansion of existing settlements as well as the construction of new settlements. However, when Netanyahu let it be known that he had no intention of stopping settlements, you missed an historic opportunity to draw a line: no more billions and no more weapons for Israel unless and until this condition is met. Now Secretary of State Clinton has the Herculean task of pretending that your position on Jewish settlements has not changed, though it is clear you have chosen not to use the very real power at your disposal to bring Israeli policy into line.

About six months after your election, you gave a speech in Cairo, addressed to the Arab and Islamic worlds; which some people found impressive. I found it impressive in form, but not in substance because your actions have not matched your rhetoric. Why did I not buy the new language of the new American administration? Because while you were giving your speech, we were burying my neighbour, a terminally ill patient, who needed treatment in a hospital abroad, since, thanks to the siege imposed by your own administration and Israel on the Gaza Strip, the facilities that would have saved his life are not available in Gaza. Like more than 400 terminally ill people in Gaza, my neighbour lost his life. In spite of the fine Arabic words of peace, “salaam aleikum,” you made it crystal clear that the point of reference in any negotiations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is Israel’s security. By doing that, Mr. President, you are effectively marginalizing the whole issue of Palestine, and unfortunately setting the stage for renewed Israeli assaults against a starving Gaza, an entity that has, thanks to your “unbreakable” ties with Israel, been transformed into the largest concentration camp on Earth.

Your failure to support the Goldstone report, your indifference, not to say your contribution, to Palestinian suffering and the process of “politicide” against the Palestinian people of Gaza is, to say the least, unfathomable, coming from a man who listened so earnestly to Edward Said. Your advisors must have told you about the cutting off of medicine, food and fuel to the concentration camp where I live. Patients in need of dialysis and other urgent medical treatment are dying every single day. A majority of our children, many the same age as your two beautiful daughters, are badly undernourished. You must have skimmed through the executive summary of the Goldstone report detailing the horror inflicted on 1.5 million civilians for 22 days, horror caused by F16s, Apache helicopters, and phosphorus bombs made in American factories. Hundreds of children were burnt to death by phosphorus bombs; pregnant women were brutally targeted in what Israeli soldiers boasted off on their T-Shirts: “1 bullet, 2 kills.” And yet, not a single word of sympathy, Mr. President! Edward Said had this to say upon his first visit to Gaza: “It’s the most terrifying place I’ve ever been in… it’s a horrifyingly sad place because of the desperation and misery of the way people live. I was unprepared for camps that are much worse than anything I saw in South Africa.” This was back in 1993, Mr. President, before conditions dramatically deteriorated. Gaza has now become, as the leading Israeli Human Rights Organization B’tselem describes it, “the largest prison on Earth.”

Mr. Obama,

Unlike your predecessor, you seem to be a smart man. You must have realized that a two-state solution has been rendered impossible by Israeli colonization of the West Bank, by the war on Gaza, by the construction of the apartheid wall, by the expansion of so-called Greater Jerusalem, and by the increase in the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank. You must have realized also that there are 6 million refugees, most of whom live in miserable conditions waiting for courageous, visionary leaders committed to true democracy, human rights and international law to implement UN resolution 194. And yet, you and your State of Secretary, like every U.S. president since 1967, have decided to support Israel in creating conditions that made the two-state solution impossible, impractical and unjust.

Were you a supporter of the Bantustan system in South Africa under the Apartheid system? Are you opposed to equal rights and the transformation of Israel/Palestine into a state for all its citizens? The two-state solution means the Bantustanization of Palestine, a solution you, to our knowledge, never supported for South Africa. Are you, Mr. President, opposed to civic democracy, which is the demand of most Palestinian civil society and grassroots organizations? This is what your role models, Martin Luther King and Steve Biko, died for. Was Nelson Mandela wrong to spend 27 years of his life in pursuit of justice by demanding equality for the indigenous people of South Africa? Do you realize that what you are supporting in the Middle East is a racist solution par excellence? A solution based on “ethnic nationalism”. Your Secretary of State and envoy to the Middle East, unashamedly, stood with beaming smiles next to Avigdor Lieberman, who, not only defends openly the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, but also calls for a new genocide in Gaza! Do you realize, Mr. President, that this Hitlerite fascist might become Israel’s next prime minister, thanks to your administration’s complacency and support?

Our only immediate demand is that your administration insures that Israel fulfills its obligations in terms of international law. Is that too much to ask?

Mr. President Barak Hussein Obama,

We, the Palestinian people, are fed up!

Sincerely,

Prof. Haidar Eid
Gaza, Palestine

Source: chicago.indymedia.org

Koolhaas'ın Dubai'de tasarladığı bir rezidanssss

Oryantalizm karşısında ne yapmalı? Bu bir batılının açısından cevaplaması kolay bir soru, doğuya oryantalist bir perspektifin dışına pek çıkamıyorlar ya da çıkmak istemiyorlar, o yüzden onlar açısından ortada pek de bir problem yok gibi.

Fekat, bir doğulu olarak, biz ne yapmalıyız?

Zorunlu olarak aldanırız, sahip oluruz veya sahip olunuruz. Tamam, meşhur kartlar kulesi zorunlu olarak seçenek yapmaya çağrıldı. Örneğin birisini kupa papazını seçmeye çağırmak istersiniz. ve önce şöyle söylersiniz: kırmızıları mı siyahları mı istersin? Eğer kırmızıları derse siyahları masadan kaldırırsınız; eğer siyahları derse, onları alıp, yine masadan kaldırırsınız. Size de sadece devam etmek kalır: karoları mı yoksa kupaları mı istersin? Ta ki papazı mı kızı mı istersine kadar. İkili işleyişler bu şekilde yola konulur, isterse röportaj yapan iyi niyetli olsun, hiç farketmez. Yani, bu işleyiş bizi aşar ve başka sonuçlara yarar. Psikanaliz, fikirleri birleştirme yöntemi ile bu açıdan örnek teşkil eder. Yemin ederim ki verdiğim örnekler gizli ve benim başımdan geçenler olmasa da, gerçektirler.*

Sanırım şu durumda bizimde önümüzde pek bir seçenek yok gibi, kendimize oryantalist bakacağız (Edward Said için, iki rekat namaz kılacağım şu mubarek cuma akşamı) ya da doğululumuzu hiçe sayıp, dergilerde, internet, interrail gezilerinde gördüğümüzleri taklit edeceğiz. Her iki durumda da, haklı olarak, ya kendimize yabancılaşmakla ya da batıya yaltaklanmakla suçlanacağız.  Üçüncü bir yolun merakına ilk düşen ben değilim, ama şu güne kadar bu soruna tatmin edici bir cevap verebileni göremedim. Basma kalıp bir söylem olduğunun farkındayım ama, ne yazık ki Japonları bu genellemenin dışında tutmak durumdayım. Belki derin bir tahlille onların da bu problemden kaçamadıkları ortaya çıkacaktır, ama ilk bakışta bu probleme kendilerince bir çözüm bulmuşlar gibi görünüyor.

Bugün artık, milli demeyeceğim elbette ama, bu kültüre yabancı olmayan bir mimari üretmek mümkün müdür? Ya da 2009 yılında her şeyin bu kadar birbirine girdiği, coğrafyanını öneminin kalmadığı (Zaha Hadid), zamanın önemi olmadığı,anakronik  (Venturi) bir dünyada böyle bir soruyu sormak anlamsız mıdır?

Diğer bütün sorunların olduğu gibi, bunun da sadece mimari bir ile ilgili olmadığının, arkasında pek çok ekonomik, sosyolojik meselenin yattığının farkındayım, böyle bir çabadan bahsetmenin bile abes olabileceğinin de farkındayım.

Bu pirinç daha çok su kaldırır, ileride yazacağım tekrar.

Gilles Deleuze-Claire Parnet, Dialogues, çev. Ali Akay, Bağlam Yayın., 1990, s. 37,38

It is late afternoon on Wednesday, and I have somehow managed to accomplish everything I needed to accomplish by this time. On Friday, this seemed like a goal that was unattainable, so I am reasonably pleased.

Somebody mentioned to me this last Saturday, “I occasionally read your rants against post-structuralism.” It had not been explicitly discussed in class that Foucault and company actually constitute an “-ism”, so I’m sure I was a deer in the headlights for a second while I figured out what my friend meant. Flesh of My Flesh has been explicitly exposed to more theory than I have, so I’ve been hearing about the supposed difference between signifier and signified for some time, but again, that this movement had a name was new information for me. A couple of things clicked once I understood the label; this is the same friend who a few years ago overheard me saying that it made no sense to me to read modern ideas of sexual equality and identity into texts for which those ideas would be anachronistic, and consequently chided me for “not believing in gender theory,” adding, “Applying theory is not ‘reading something into’ anything. That’s just you having an ideological problem.”

For all I know, maybe he’s right. He’s in the English department, and maybe there’s a way these things actually make sense from the standpoint of literature. Maybe, too, this is the difference between a “scholar” and an “intellectual” — I do not give a fat, furry, flying rat’s hindquarters about theory. I have not entered an academic discipline because I am interested in the “isms” which seem to plague the humanities right now. (I am told that “thing theory” was rather well-represented at last week’s Byzantine Studies Association of North America conference, which makes me want to tear out my own teeth with a rusty screwdriver.) I have entered an academic discipline, because, funny and naïve and idealistic as it may sound, I am actually interested in, and even like, my subject of study.

What does that make me? A paleostructuralist? If so, then so be it. (“Paleostructuralist” sounds cooler and more dignified than “anti-post-structuralist” anyway.)

I still have more to write on Foucault in this space, but it’s going to have to wait a bit yet while I finish some other things. In the meantime, my most recent (and last) response paper for my “Introduction to the Professional Study of History” course starts to sketch out some of the thoughts that will show up there. Certain elements will be no surprise to those who visit here somewhat regularly, there are a couple of moments where it will be evident that I just got through watching all of Christopher Nolan’s movies in chronological order (which merits its own post), and the couple of somewhat coy suggestions that certain things should be discussed elsewhere will be developed in my final paper for this course.

–

The Safe Retreat into Omniscient Third-Person:

The Problem of Historicizing Oneself

Or

A Response to Kate Brown’s “A Place in Biography for Oneself”

(As Well as a Number of Other Bits and Pieces from the Fall 2009 H601 Course)

“Historians,” writes Kate Brown in her essay “A Place in Biography for Oneself,” “expose other people’s biographies, not their own.”[1] How can this be, however, when according to Marx, “[m]en make their own history” [2]? How, ultimately, may historians be their own agents of history while being true to their own profession? How might historians assume the first person voice in their own work, that is to say, our own work, or still more to the point, my own work – honestly?

To expand Marx’s quote, men make their own history, “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.” Brown certainly did not choose her circumstances. She is from a small Midwestern town whose economic history could have stepped out of the pages of The Marx-Engels Reader; in her home town of Elgin, Illinois, as she tells it, the beginning of her life intersected with a narrative of Western expansion, labor strife, industry flight, economic redevelopment, and gentrification.[3] Her own retelling of the story gives significant credibility to Marx’s claim that “[t]he tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living”[4]:

From Elgin… I came to understand how closely one’s biography is linked to one’s place… I recognized the impulse to bulldoze and start over, to push on toward a brighter, cleaned-up destiny, which meant abandoning some places and people and losers of an unannounced contest.[5]

The past – that is to say, one’s history – and its relationship to location are a weight that one must learn to carry or learn to jettison. Perhaps this can be understood as an inversion of the opening line of Pat Conroy’s novel The Prince of Tides – rather than the wound being geography, the anchorage, the port of call, it is geography, and the confluence of circumstances that one encounters in that geography, that is the wound.

All well and good — but how real is this confluence of circumstances? How objectively may its existence be assumed? Per Benedict Anderson and his analysis of how seemingly disconnected events make up the front page of a newspaper, perhaps not much:

Why are these events so juxtaposed? What connects them to each other? Not sheer caprice. Yet obviously most of them happen independently, without the actors being aware of each other or of what the others are up to. The arbitrariness of their inclusion and juxtaposition… shows that the linkage between them is imagined.[6]

What, then, is the difference between one’s life and the front page of a newspaper? Do they both represent a constructed – that is to say, not objectively real – and affected way of arranging events? For the historian, how does that construction and that affectation influence how they read history, view history, and write history? How does understanding how one’s life interacts with one’s work impact either, for better or for worse?

As a scholar, I have been carefully trained to avoid using the first person in my work. “Don’t ever say things like ‘We can see the following…’ in your research,” I remember being told in one undergraduate course. “This is not a journey ‘we’re’ going on together. It’s a research paper.” My training in languages also tends to inform how I view texts – “Read what it says, not what you think it means,” my first Greek instructor repeatedly told our class. My research goal, therefore, is typically to state a clear, impersonal thesis and then get the hell out of the way of my own argument, simply letting the facts and the observations speak for themselves as much as possible. If I present it as something that “I” think, then I will have fundamentally devalued and undermined my argument – why should anybody care what I think?

Naturally, there is far more to it than a hope to rest comfortably on objectivity. Why should anybody care what I think, indeed. I’m a nobody, a college dropout from nowhere, a first generation college graduate at the age of 29, having taken eleven years to finish a four year degree (a B. Mus. at that, not a liberal arts degree), who then, even with good grades and test scores, still had to do three years of coursework as an unmatriculated student before there was any way to be competitive for graduate schools, all the while hearing from a chorus of professors, “I’m more than happy to write you a letter of recommendation, but I’m not sure you’re going to be able to get there from here.” Why should anybody care what I think? Good heavens, I will need to make sure I publish under a pseudonym just to be taken at all seriously. Better yet, I should somehow indicate on my C. V. that I simply sprang forth fully-grown from the head of Zeus with my PhD already in hand.

But there is still more to it than that, surely. I’ve been at Indiana University in one capacity or another since 2003, somewhat ironically making it the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere. My family bounced around a lot for reasons best recounted elsewhere, and even now, they live, quite dispersed, in places I have never lived, in houses I never called home, in zip codes I never visited until they moved there. Brown can rely on her connection with the place of Elgin, Illinois as an anchor for where she is now, but I am literally from nowhere, in the sense that I have had to construct my notion of “home” from different raw materials than place and family, and I find it very difficult to relate to concepts of home that do center around place and family. If my family moved around for reasons having to do with the military or career development, than I might be able to legitimately claim – as a friend of mine, the son of a prominent Russian History scholar, does – to be a “citizen of the world,” to be from everywhere. Alas, I can claim nothing quite so romantic or interesting. Robert Frost once said that home is where, if you have to go there, they have to take you, but the places where that is even marginally true are places that have never actually been a part of my life. If Brown is correct that one’s biography is closely linked to place, than I truly am the Nowhere Man – so again, why should anybody care what I think?

But, of course, there is still more to it than that.

“In my quest to explore the human condition,” writes Brown, “I have hidden behind my subjects, using them as a scrim to project my own sentiments and feelings.”[7] There is an undeniable connection between who somebody is and what interests them; for her own part, Brown describes this connection by saying, “I believe that I was able to see stories that had not yet taken shape for other historians because of the sensitivities I acquired in my past.”[8] My advisor, Professor Edward Watts, is potentially an example; he is an academic raised in a family of academics. His parents are both academics, and his sister is an academic. What was the subject of his dissertation? Rhetorical education in Late Antique Alexandria and Athens. As I told him after I read the book, it is difficult to not see his work as having an aspect of meta-commentary on the academic life. He chuckled and said, “You wouldn’t necessarily be wrong.”

Beyond that example, I saw with my own eyes how the personal connection between historian and subject might manifest with my colleagues during orientation and initial class meetings:

“Hi, I’m Roberto Arroyo, and I’m interested in Latin American history.”

“My name is Isaac Rosenbaum, and I do Holocaust history.”

“I’m Lakshmi Patel, and I’m studying the history of relations between India and Pakistan.”

The Late Antique Byzantinist whose last name is not “Ioannides” or “Sotiriou” is left at something of a disadvantage in such company. Yes, there is, in fact, a personal reason that connects me to my subject of inquiry, a personal reason that should not be too hard to surmise for the careful observer (but one that is best discussed in another setting), but a personal reason that is nonetheless internal, abstract, and conceptual rather than immediately and concretely constructed by place or family – that is to say, by the circumstances which I did not choose. I have personal stakes that led me to my areas of interest, but because they are of my own choosing I must be circumspect in how I speak in terms of “I”, “we”, and “our” if I am to be seen as having sufficient distance from my subject to be credible as a scholar. Edward Said and Dipesh Chakrabarty appear adamant that cultures and societies must define themselves, that to not allow such self-definition is cultural imperialism,[9] and yet this mandate of courtesy with respect to communal identity does not appear to extend to those who have embraced certain communities voluntarily.

Of course, I also have the problem that I am not interested in my subject from a critical point of view; I find it anachronistic to explicitly read whatever my own political beliefs and values may be – and, for today’s purposes, we may broadly describe them as uncomfortably conservative as Russell Kirk defined the word, which according to contemporary definitions probably makes me liberal – into my historical subject, but per Elizabeth Blackmar as quoted by Ted Steinberg, we historians are not supposed to evade the question of politics.[10] According to Steinberg, the role of the historian in the present day is evidently to explore “the history of oppression,”[11] and this attitude is one I see largely borne out in my cohort. Nonetheless, the reality is that such a history is not the history of the Late Antique Eastern Roman Empire I have any desire to write. I have better things to do than study something with the express purpose of tearing it down. I fundamentally believe it is possible to be more productive and constructive – but do I only believe that because of my other beliefs in the first place? Is my choice of the word “constructive” itself telling, possibly signifying that I would rather buy into the social constructions that historians are supposed to deconstruct? The 3^rd person voice of objectivity keeps me from having to mess with such potentially treacherous questions.

If men make their own history, but not under circumstances they choose for themselves, and history is supposed to be the history of oppression, then must a historian writing their own history engage in self-hatred by definition? Brown does not appear to write a piece of self-hatred, but it is clear that she is uncomfortable with the implications of her own essay – “My palms sweat as I write this… The intimacy of the first person takes down borders between author and subject, borders that are considered by many to be healthy in a profession situated between the social sciences and the humanities.”[12] Chakrabarty suggests one possible way out, explicitly referencing autobiography and history as two separate and distinct genres[13] – so not only is autobiography, the history of oneself, not history, but history isn’t a discipline anyway, it’s a genre. But here is the rub – if history is a genre somewhere “between” the social sciences and the humanities, and a historian writing their own history must find a methodologically honest way to not engage themselves at the level of self-hatred, which then in fact moves the work into a different genre altogether, then the historian can never actually engage in a real work of self-historicization that is not self-mutilatory.

At any rate, can we claim objectivity anyway by avoiding biographical detail or the first person? In a post-structuralist world where we must assume a fundamental disconnect between signifier and signified, does it really matter to begin with? Or is a research paper written in the omniscient third person much like Bruno Latour’s depiction of the laboratory[14] or Bonnie Smith’s history seminar and archive[15] – a socially constructed, that is to say false, space of knowledge-based privilege that can assert authority it does not actually have simply because a particular group of people have become convinced that it does?

I do not have answers to my own questions, posed at the outset of this musing. I am not certain where to go with them. My inclination is to say the various circumstances of my own life may appear as arbitrary as Anderson insists the front page of the newspaper actually is, but by virtue of the very fact that I in fact experience those circumstances in chronological order, I nonetheless perceive them as my own narrative. My inclination is to say that I cannot be forced to historicize my own life as a history of oppression any more than I can legally be required to self-incriminate in a court of law. My inclination is to say that nonetheless, I am better off keeping my arguments in the third person and keeping my “self” out of the voice of my own work, that regardless of what I think, we all know what a coffee table will feel like if we rap it with our knuckles, and that in saying that I am not privileging people who have hands or who do not have nerve damage. My inclination is to say that there must be a world outside of our own minds, and that there must be a way we can discuss it, even if our own minds tell us how we’re going to organize our perceptions of that world. Are these words and ideas too strong, too dangerous, too naïve, too uninformed? I do not know, but I do not know where else to start.

And perhaps that is why it is good I work in a period many people find irrelevant. It keeps me from becoming a danger to myself or to others.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. 2 ed. New York: Verso, 2006.

Blackmar, Elizabeth. “Contemplating the Force of Nature.” Radical Historians Newsletter no. 70 (1994).

Brown, Kate. “A Place in Biography for Oneself.” American Historical Review no. 114 (2009): 596-605.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks For “Indian” Pasts?” Representations no. 37 (1992): 1-26.

Latour, Bruno. “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World.” In Science Observed: Perpsectives on the Social Study of Science, edited by Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay, 141-70. London: Sage, 1983.

Marx, Karl. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 594-617. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1978.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Reprint, 2003.

Smith, Bonnie. “Gender and the Practices of Scientific History: The Seminar and Archival Research.” American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (1998): 1150-76.

Steinberg, Ted. “Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History.” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 798-820.

[2] Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1978), 595.

[3] Brown, “A Place in Biography for Oneself,” 600-3.

[4] Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” 595.

[5] Brown, “A Place in Biography for Oneself,” 604.

[6] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2 ed. (New York: Verso, 2006), 33.

[7] Brown, “A Place in Biography for Oneself,” 603.

[8] Ibid., 605.

[9] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994; reprint, 2003). Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks For “Indian” Pasts?,” Representations, no. 37 (1992).

[10] Elizabeth Blackmar, “Contemplating the Force of Nature,” Radical Historians Newsletter, no. 70 (1994)., 4. Quoted in Ted Steinberg, “Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002), 804.

[11] Steinberg, “Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History,” 802.

[12] Brown, “A Place in Biography for Oneself,” 603.

[13] Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks For “Indian” Pasts?”, 8.

[14] Bruno Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World,” in Science Observed: Perpsectives on the Social Study of Science, ed. Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay (London: Sage, 1983). Accessed online at http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Latour_GiveMeALab.html on 9 November 2009.

[15] Bonnie Smith, “Gender and the Practices of Scientific History: The Seminar and Archival Research,” American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (1998).

«Comemora-se este mês o fim da Guerra Fria. É precisamente esse o ponto de partida de Tony Judt na introdução deste livro: os eventos de 1989 foram o resultado do fracasso político e humano da URSS, mas não eram inevitáveis e não devem ser deixados na gaveta da História. Como escreve o historiador – um intelectual descomprometido –, a sedução marxista sobreviveu à abertura de Gorbachev e o fim da História de Fukuyama é uma piada de mau gosto.»

Jeg fant dette klippet for noen par uker siden når jeg gikk rundt og loket på YouTube. Klippet heter “Planet of the Arabs” og er en trailer som ble vist på Sundance Filmfestivalen i 2005. Det er en trailer laget ut ifra klipp fra forskjellige filmer, hvor en eller flere av karakterene er muslimer og/eller arabere.

“Out of 1000 films that have Arab & Muslim characters (from the year 1896 to 2000) 12 were postive depictions, 52 were even handed and the rest of the 900 and so were negative.”

Det som er bemerkelsesverdig med dette her er at traileren viser en ukultur som eksisterer i Hollywood. En ukultur som er i realiteten rasistisk motivert og etnosentrisk – hvis man skal tørre å kalle en spade for spade. Nå er ikke undertegnede tilhenger av rasisme-kortet, men likeså så er jeg ikke heller tilhenger av orientalismen. Dette er en ukultur som gir næring til det som kalles for orientalismen (ifølge den palestinske professoren Edward Saids definisjon).

“Said argues that Orientalism can be found in current Western depictions of “Arab” cultures. The depictions of “the Arab” as irrational, menacing, untrustworthy, anti-Western, dishonest, and–perhaps most importantly–prototypical, are ideas into which Orientalist scholarship has evolved.”

Filmkarakterene som skal fremstille arabere og/eller muslimer blir fremstilt som en gjeng usiviliserte barbarere som ikke lever for noe annet enn å ha et dypt hat til USA og Vesten.

Nå vil en del spør meg om jeg ikke har fått med meg de tusenvis av filmer hvor seriemorderen eller voldtektsmannen eller de kriminelle barbarene er amerikanere eller vestlige? Jo, jeg har nok det, men det spørsmålet er irrelevant i dette tilfelle. På hvilket grunnlag er det irrelevant? Jo, fordi de som produserer filmene er amerikanere. Problemet er ikke at man fremstiller noen amerikanere som kriminelle i filmer, siden de fleste amerikanere som lever i USA vet at det finnes kriminelle amerikanere i virkeligheten. På like måte så er ikke det problematisk heller at man fremstiller noen arabere eller noen muslimer som kriminelle.

Men det er det at majoriteten av filmene hvor karakterene som er muslimer og/eller arabere blir fremstilt som ingenting annet enn skruppelløse banditter.  Det som er også problematisk er at en god del amerikanere uten å være generaliserende har ikke noe som helst formening eller kjennskap til arabere eller muslimer for den saks skyld og deres kultur/levemåte. Det er ikke utenkelig å tro at en del av disse amerikanerne kan være så “naive” og “blåøyde” at de tror at alle arabere og/eller muslimer er terrorister slik som de blir fremstilt i disse filmene.

Det finnes for øvrig en bok om dette fenomenet. Boka heter Reel Bad Arabs og er skrevet av Dr Jack Shaheen.

“Here is another face of a woman spun out with the familiarity of years, concealing a lifetime of episodes, splendidly recorded by a listening photographer. It is a face, I thought when I first saw it, of our life at home. Six months later I was showing the pictures casually to my sister. ‘There’s Mrs. Farraj,’ she said. Indeed it was. I first saw her in 1946 when my cousin married her daughter, who was the first beautiful woman I encountered in real life. Then I saw her in the fifties, and then again now, in Jean Mohr’s pciture. Connected to me, my sister, my friends, her relatives, her acquaintances, and the places she’s been, her picture seems like a map pulling us all together, even down to her hair net, her ribbed sweater, the unattractive glasses, the balanced smile and strong hand. But all the connections only came to light, so to speak, some time after after I had seen the photograph, after we had decided to use it, after I had placed it in sequence. As soon as I recognised Mrs. Farraj, the suggested initmacy of the photograph’s surface gave way to an explicitness with few secrets. She is a real person – Palestinian – with a real history at the interior of ours. But I do not know whether the photograph can, or does, say things as they really are. Something has been lost. But the representation is all we have.”

- Edward Said, After the Last Sky

Nicolás Boileau

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicol%C3%A1s_Boileau

http://www.canalsocial.net/GER/ficha_GER.asp?id=379&cat=biografiasuelta

 Stephen Crane

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Crane

http://www.epdlp.com/escritor.php?id=1610

http://www.solodelibros.es/22/10/2007/la-roja-insignia-del-valor-stephen-crane/

http://busqueda.fnac.es/ia201814/Stephen-Crane

http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/crane/

  Henri Troyat

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Troyat

http://www.epdlp.com/escritor.php?id=2708

http://www.ojosdepapel.com/Index.aspx?blog=377

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/Fallece/Henry/Troyat/escritores/populares/Francia/elpepucul/20070305elpepucul_3/Tes

 Edward Said

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Said

http://www.epdlp.com/escritor.php?id=3325

Premio Príncipe de Asturias

The Google video won’t embed — here is the link to Edward Said’s long last interview from 2003.

“And what projects are you working on at the moment?”

“An exhibition…and…I’m working on the completion of a new book, something very close to my heart.”

“What’s it about?”

“The Palestinians.”

There was a rather long silence…my friend looked at me with a slightly sad smile, and said “Sure, why not! But don’t you think the subject’s a bit dated? Look, I’ve taken photographs of the Palestinians too, especially in the refugee camps…its really sad! But these days, who’s interested in people who eat off the ground with their hands? And then there’s all that terrorism…I’d have thought you’d be better off using your energy and capabilities on something more worthwhile!”

Swiss photographer Jean Mohr describes a conversation with a friend.(1)

Palestine is a thankless cause, one in which if you truly serve you get nothing back but opprobrium, abuse, and ostracism…Palestine is the cruelest, most difficult cause to uphold, not because it is unjust, but because it is just and yet dangerous to speak about as honestly and as concretely as [he] did.

Edward Said on intellectual/activist Eqbal Ahmed. (2)

Jabaliya, Gaza February 2009 Copyright Asim Rafiqui

Most independent photographers arriving in Palestine carry with them the awareness that much if not all of their work will go largely unpublished. This is not only because Gaza and the West Bank are amongst the world’s most thoroughly photographed human tragedies, but also because speaking of the Palestinian’s as a real people with real suffering remains near impossible. Their story has been effectively reduced to that of ‘terrorism’, ‘extremism’ and one of ‘instigators of violence’. Their rights and demands for justice drowned out by the shrill insistence on Israel’s infinite innocence and need for restitution for historical wrongs. And on presumptions of their mendacity and single-minded determination to destroy ‘the Zionist entity’. Even President Barack Obama, in a recent speech in Cairo, placed the principal responsibility of regional violence on their weak, unarmed and repeatedly defeated shoulders. Photographers and journalists who try to reveal a different reality or raise questions about the myth of Israeli innocence or question the assumption of Palestinian mendacity, find themselves ignored, marginalized and unpublished. Independent photographers who come to Palestine do so armed not with major assignments but with convictions that are personal and individual. And they usually come alone.

I arrived at Rafah, Egypt – the only crossing into Rafah, Gaza, during the last days of Israeli’s Operation Cast Lead. This time I was luckier than most for I had the support of a Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting grant and the encouragement of Ted Genoways, the creative and poetic editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review magazine. By the time I argued my way into Gaza, a way repeatedly blocked first by the Israelis and then by the Egyptians, I found myself in what had by then become only one of the most important prime time news events of the year.

The Israeli assault on Gaza began on the last day of Hanukkah on December 27th 2008 and eventually left nearly 1400 dead, thousands injured and tens of thousands displaced. It was covered by every major international TV news channel, daily newspaper and weekly magazine. Their cameramen, on-screen personalities, photographers, directors, fixers and coordinators stormed the walls of Gaza in a rush to film, edit, transmit and broadcast the events as they unfolded. On any given day, at any given hour, dozens of videographers and photojournalists could be seen in the hallways of Gaza’s famous Al-Diera Hotel speaking anxiously into their mobile phones, or sitting at tables in the restaurants, hunched over their laptops, cursing the slow internet connections and desperately transmitting their latest images. And when they were not scoffing down a quick meal, they were furtively discussing plans with their local minders, or rushing towards their waiting cars to get to a ‘hot’ location. Amidst this mob of media I, with my little film cameras and a small grant that gave me the freedom to work at my own pace, found myself apart, confused and more alone than ever before. How would what I came to say be heard over this noise?

My first time in Gaza was in the summer of 2003. I was a novice photographer who went because Edward Said wrote a small response to an email I sent him and encouraged me to go. I then returned and continued to document the situation in Gaza, particularly in southern Gaza city of Rafah where I worked for nearly 2 years. The settlers were still in Gaza then, and so were activists from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), and the armored bulldozers and their accompanying tanks that were constructing the massive steel wall along the Rafah’s border with Egypt. The American activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death by an Israeli armored bulldozer, was still there; alive, determined, passionate and beautiful. Home demolitions were frequent along the Rafah-Egypt border as bulldozers tore down Palestinian homes to make way for the steel wall. Tank patrols would terrorize residents living along the border, and there would be frequent firing into these neighborhoods resulting in deaths and maiming of residents. As a photographer I documented my fair share of funerals, Hamas marches and families salvaging their belongings from the ruins of their destroyed houses. Between 2003 and 2006 I made several trips to this surrounded territory, continuing to document the slowly shrinking social, political, economic and cultural space of its inhabitants.

And then I stopped coming. Dozens of courageous Palestinian photographers were doggedly documenting the bitter and crushing existence of the Gazans, and the incessant economic and military violence against them. The international photojournalists too kept coming to photograph the ‘militants’ and the ‘fanatics’, as if to provide the ‘facts’ that would maintain what Saree Makdisi has recently called a language that prevents us from recognizing what’s really going on in the Middle East.3 I felt that after three years of consistent work I had nothing new to add to this dialogue, nothing new to show. In retrospect I realize that it was an act of surrender by a young photographer frustrated by his inability to effectively capture in pictures the sufferings of those around him..

But now I was back again, and walking through the devastation left the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead I was struck by how familiar it all looked. The scale was larger than anything that I could remember, and its consequences very familiar; the bombed homes, the displaced families, the tank-track torn olive and citrus groves, the stunned relatives of the dead, the funeral dirges, the Hamas marches, the victory songs, the numbing buzz of the pilot-less drones overhead, the children scavenging amongst ruins, the sirens of the ambulances, the men on donkey carts carrying debris to nowhere, and that constant, distant human wail of a life torn apart or a hope torn asunder. Here I was again, but I had been here before and seen it before. The scenes I witnessed were remarkably similar to those I had seen during my time in Gaza between 2003 and 2006. As some of the world’s best photojournalists scrambled all around me to capture the devastation for the world’s audience, I found that I still had nothing new to say and by the second day I put away my cameras and stopped taking pictures.

And then I met Ismail Ibrahim Abu Eida.

He was walking alone near the rubble of his family home lost in thought. When he noticed me standing close by he merely nodded and said nothing. I stood there looking at him stumble and trip across the pile of rubble that had once been his home. A lone figure amongst thousands of lonely figures all over Gaza who were at that very moment quietly, resignedly stumbling and tripping across the rubble of their own lives. I wanted to talk to him about what was going through his mind, but he seemed reluctant, even a little embarrassed. “What will I tell you that others have not?”, he said quietly. And he was right.

Abu Eida’s pain – the loss of his life’s work, the displacement of his family, and the ruination of his livelihood, was an oft repeated occurrence in this land. Tens of thousands had already suffered it, and it was certain, given the entrenched ideas and ideals that perpetuate this conflict, that tens of thousands more are destined to do so in the future. In this land of pain, where everyone has experienced the gravest of loss, it has become difficult to express individual suffering or ask for compassion. In a life that must accept as normal the sudden and violent erasure of all that one holds dear, a life in which you console your neighbor knowing full well that someday they will be consoling you, you no longer speak about your own sorrows. You no longer share your burden because others are so crushed under their own. In a life of collective punishment your scars and sufferings are starkly your own to confront and tolerate.

Abu Eida was fortunate. No one had died. His family had been displaced to a UN refugee center, and he was sleeping on a mattress in a cargo container on the family property. With a voice that was severely controlled, he explained to me how tanks and bulldozers had forced him to flee and leveled everything he had built over the course of his life, including his family’s orange groves. Then he invited me for tea. He had only one cup. Ten minutes of digging in the rubble produced a second—broken but usable. He had no place for me to sit but a shout to a friend down the road produced a three-legged plastic chair. I protested this kindness, but he wouldn’t hear of it, reminding me that I was his guest. “It is our way, Mr. Rafiqui,” he insisted, as he made himself comfortable in the dirt, “to honor our guests— and to remind ourselves of the things within us which cannot be destroyed by tanks and missiles.”

As the day grew hotter, the mist that shrouded the citrus groves lifted, revealing what had once been the Jabaliya industrial zone. Ismail pointed toward Israel. I could see a wire fence and the silhouettes of soldiers walking along it. Israeli farmers had begun returning to their fields that morning as jeeps carrying soldiers raced back and forth along the border areas. Snipers kept an eye on the few Palestinians who dared to return to their lands. Despite the cease-fire, Gazan farmers were being shot and killed at random. “I used to work in Israel,” Ismail said. “But that was a different time, a different world.”

This world, the one whose remains surrounded us that morning, now lay in a shroud of dust raised by the hundreds of hands salvaging valuables from the remains of their homes, factories, stores, and farmlands. As I looked up from my cup of tea and out towards the scarred landscape I could see people sifting through rubble, searching for bodies, salvaging remains of machinery, consoling their children, or just sitting amongst the ruins of their homes. It struck me that indeed how fortunate were the dead who had at least, as Plato said, seen the end of war. The living however go on and suffer its horrors, carry it’s burdens, tolerate its indignities, appease its sorrows, and accept its cruelest gift – the death of loved ones.

Later that morning I finally made my first photograph – a family searching for the remains of a patriarch. The bulldozer roared and clawed mercilessly against the pile of ruins, churning up metal, concrete, electrical wiring, toys, clothing and whatever else its massive jaws caught in their broad sweeps. Around it sat many family members and friends, patiently watching the bulldozer work, prepared for the moment the body is discovered. “How do you know if someone is still trapped in there?” I asked. “You can smell it!”, came a slightly exasperated reply. There were no camera crews at the site, no photojournalists waiting to capture the moment. It was just one body, one individual, being searched for. The ‘hot’ news stories were elsewhere that morning and will be elsewhere the day after.

But these searches, these sorrows, and the days without those who were once so close, so needed, will go on. As I stood on a small hill and watch the bulldozer tear away at the collapsed walls of the house I was struck with the realization that even when the world’s attention falls on them, the Gazans are most distant, misunderstood and isolated from us. The world comes to them asking them to be either the hate-filled militant out to destroy Israel or the innocent victims of Israel’s fanaticism. And in the process it denudes them of their ordinariness, frailty and flawed humanity. In its attentions the world ghettoizes them, refusing them their history, politics, memories and agendas. Gone are their love affairs, their family feuds, their fears and hopes for their children’s futures, their infidelities, their ambitions, their material desires, their days on the beach, their care for their elderly, their gentleness towards strangers, their love of food, their eye for the perfect coffee bean, their undying and near familial love of the olive tree and their sense of connectedness with the land.

This land called Gaza – a love and a curse.

Photographer’s Note: This essay was submitted to a Swedish magazine that eventually considered it too uninteresting for publication. It was also the essay I submitted recently to a grant committee to continue my work in Gaza. I did not receive the grant. I share it here despite its seemingly sorry record, as perhaps nothing more than a way to allow the thoughts I put down here to escape from the confinement of my hopes and disappointments.

1: Said, E & Mohr, J (1999) After The Last Sky Columbia University Press, New York, New York

2: Barsamian, D, (2000) Eqbal Ahmed: Confronting Empire South End Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts

3: Makdisi, S (19/6/2009) A Language That Absolves Israel, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, USA.

An exhibition called ‘Beware The Cost Of War’ recently opened in London.

Reading about it in the New York Times ‘Lens’ blog left me deeply disappointed and concerned.

Let me explain.

(Aside: Yoav Galai, the curator, is someone I have called a friend for some time now and I hope that he will forgive me for this very critical review of what is something he clearly put a lot of work in to. It is not personal, but merely a reflection on this propensity in our world to fear speaking, to raise a voice, to add details and specifics where generalizations only confuse, perpetuate injustices and acquit the guilty. I am sorry Yoav. I must say my piece.)

∞

In their book Another Way of Telling photographer Jean Mohr and writer/intellectual John Berger present an experiment where a series of Mohr’s photographs, each with their captions removed, are shown to a number of ordinary strangers and each is asked to explain what they see in the photograph. As Jean Mohr himself explains:

Was it a game, a test, an experiment? All three, and something else too; a photographer’s quest, the desire to know how the images he makes are seen, read, interpreted, perhaps rejected by others. In fact in face of any photo the spectator projects something of her or himself. The image is like a springboard. (page 42)

The result was that each individual described the photograph differently, thereby rending each photograph meaningless, and completely erasing it of history, context, intent and meaning and replacing them with what were little more than randomly created ideas based on fantasies, prejudices, and ignorances. The photos gave nothing to the viewer, the viewer merely imposed their ‘knowledge’ – factual and otherwise, onto the image. The images became springboards indeed, but they also became empty vessels into which the viewer could put anything and make them what s/he wanted. The images offered nothing, taught nothing, revealed nothing and as a result added nothing.

∞

Jean Mohr also collaborated with the writer/intellectual Edward Said to produce what I consider to be one of the finest, most important, book of photojournalism ever – After The Last Sky. This book, about which I have written elsewhere, is a masterful collaboration between a photographer and a writer. It is one of those rare photography books that has managed to lift itself from the fashionable but frivolous shelves of photography books and into the more relevant Middle East History section of a bookstore.

The book grew out of an unusual context; in 1983 Edward Said was a consultant to the United Nations International Conference on the Question of Palestine (ICQP) and he suggested that some of Jean Mohr’s photographs of Palestinians be hung in the entrance hall to the main conference site in Geneva, Switzerland. The official response to this suggestion, as Said himself describes it in the book, was unusual; they would allow the photographs to be hung, but no words could accompany them, and no explanations.

It was then that Said and Mohr came up with the idea of writing about the Palestinians – about adding the words to the photographs. As Said explains:

Let us use photographs and text, we said to each other, to say something that hasn’t been said about Palestinians. (page 4)

But they were aware that the problems they faced was not a lack of text on this matter, but perhaps too much of it. But it was also clear that:

…for all the writing about them, Palestinians remain virtually unknown. Especially in the West, particularly in the United States, Palestinians are not so much a people as a pretext for a call to arms. (page 5)

Confronting this challenge about how to convey the Palestinian experience to a reluctant audience was not going to be easy, and yet it was crucial and clear that text was going to be a fundamental act of resistance, and that its place for a people oppressed was fundamentally important because:

Stateless, dispossessed, de-centered, we [Palestinians] are frequently unable either to speak the ‘truth’ of our experience or to make it heard. We do not usually control the images that represent us; we have been confined to spaces designed to reduce or stunt us; and we have often been distorted by pressures and powers that have been too much for us. (page 6)

∞

“Beware The Cost Of War” is an exhibition of Israeli and Palestinian photographs now being shown in London. In a review written on the New York Times blog ‘Lens’, a review titled Stirring Images, No Names the writers explain that:

“Beware the Cost of War,” a show opening Friday at the Blackall Studios in London, will be conspicuous for many reasons — one of them being what it lacks: captions and credits next to the images, which were taken both by Israeli and Palestinian photographers.

The notion is that, without words, the pictures will be freer to speak for themselves.

In a slide show of some of the images we are shown scenes of grieving Palestinian and Lebanese families and of Israeli families. The curator, Yoav Galai, we are told:

…hoped viewers would discard customary ideological and political preconceptions as they looked at the images, many of which are deeply disturbing…

He is later quoted as saying:

“I realized it’s hard to show what’s really happening,” Mr. Galai said. “Once a photograph is out there, people ascribe whatever they want to it. So I thought, why not take all the pictures and tear them away from their narrative?”

∞

Yoav Galai is a young photographer. An Israeli who has documented the destruction of the Palestinian social, cultural and physical space in occupied East Jerusalem, he and I have frequently communicated via email and I respect his individual voice and determination.

But sadly I find myself in deep conflict and disagreement with this entire exhibition, and the silencing of the experience, history, and narrative of the Palestinian people already suffering from decades of silencing, marginalization, and erasure. The entire impression of ‘balance’ here is specious, and frankly misrepresents the situation which is simply one of a powerful military occupier systematically repressing and controlling an otherwise unarmed and desperate Palestinian population.

Tearing away the narrative, the history, the context of a photograph is the best way to further enable people to ascribe whatever meaning people want to images, and hence, only confirm and not question their prejudices, hates, ignorances and fears.

That Israeli historians, intellectuals, writers and journalists can clearly speak of this, admitting to the injustices their government has been executing against the Palestinians, only reminds us of the vast gap in intellectual and physical courage that imbues our societies when it comes to the question of the rights of an Arab people.

This exhibition in its current format ends up committing a number of sins against the history of the situation it claims to speak about, and even about the lives of the people involved.

• The exhibition removes context, so that we never know who is the occupier, and who the occupied. It pretends to suggest that everyone is a victim, when in fact that is not true. Israel is an occupying force, its citizens repeatedly voting into power civilians leaders, most all with deep military track records and connections, based on their ability to ‘handle the Palestinians’. The Palestinians are an unarmed people now trapped in quite possibly the most extensive, professionally administered, rationally planned, efficiently executed occupation regime in history.

• The exhibition removes chronology, so that we never know whether the act occurred this year e.g. the brutal and unnecessary massacre of nearly 2000 Palestinians of Gaza in early 2009 prompted by Israeli domestic political needs and condemned in the recent UN Goldstone Report vs. the aftermath of a suicide bomb that occurred many years ago and the likes of which have not been repeated in years.

• The exhibition removes history, so that we never know what it is that violence represents i.e. acts of legitimate violence in order to resist and overthrow and illegal occupation vs. acts of repressive violence meant to occupy, steal, and control.

• The exhibition removes the ugliest of constant and material facts; the dehumanizing and degrading check points, the summary arrests, the illegal (and yes, please, they are illegal) settlements, the military patrols that enable them, the hideous barbarism of the fundamentalist, fanatical and humanly deviant Jewish settlers, the summary executions, the entire infrastructure – administrative, military, political, under-cover of the occupation regime, the displacements, the senseless closures, and the constant threat of violence that hangs in the air and frequently manifests itself into reality.

The exhibition in fact become a tool of oppression, creating ‘balance’ where there is none, offering the easy consumption of ‘violence’ while ensuring that nothing provokes us to realize the truths that create the violence, the injustices that continue to be perpetrated, and the powers that have to held accountable for what is a clear and simple crime against humanity and massive violation of international law.

As writer Peter Lagerquist comments after hearing and reading about this exhibit:

It’s not only offensive but brutalizing, because it perpetrates another violence on those pictures, and their subjects. They are robbed of meaning, the viewer is robbed of their ability to think critically about violence, rather than merely wringing their hands over it…All that we are left with here is diffuse pathos, the knowledge that violence is bad.  And this simply is not enough; we need to understand something else.

We don’t have to love the Palestinians, but why must we insist on shutting them up? Why must we be so dismissive of values and laws that we with such fanfare created and offered at Nuremburg and enshrined in so many UN charters and Geneva Conventions? Why, when it comes to the ‘lesser’ people, do our voices suddenly find no air, our minds no thoughts, our courage no will and our photographs no captions?

∞

An oppressor wants to erase the voice of the oppressed. ‘Balance’ serves the interests of those exercising disproportionate violence and control over a weaker people and society. A people displaced, dispossessed, ignored, dehumanized, and incarcerated, in flagrant violation of our most valued principles of international law, justice and rights, do not need us to ‘remove’ their context, history and experiences of their suffering. On the contrary, it is precisely words, text, and voice that need to be used to unveil their experience. It is crucial to our responsibilities as reporters, journalists and photojournalists, to speak with courage and clarity and add our voice to those of the weak to counter, and challenge the easily heard and broader disseminated voice of the powerful.

Michael Massing took on the issue of specious ‘balance’ that today’s media organizations strive for and identified it as one of the major problems with journalism today. In a piece called The Press; The Enemy Within he quoted the writer Ken Silverstein (I am a big fan of Ken’s work!) who was then working on a piece about voting fraud in St. Louis and who found clear evidence of Republic Party manipulation of votes but was not allowed to say it as such and encouraged to ‘balance’ it with comments about similar actions, though far less systematic, by the Democrats:

I am completely exasperated by this approach to the news. The idea seems to be that we go out to report but when it comes time to write we turn our brains off and repeat the spin from both sides. God forbid we should…attempt to fairly assess what we see with our own eyes. “Balanced” is not fair, it’s just an easy way of avoiding real reporting and shirking our responsibility to inform readers.

Any easy was to shirk our responsibility to inform readers, and I would add, help them understand the perspectives and principles that are in fact consistently and necessarily defensible. And we are being cowards to not admit that there are principles of law, justice and national behavior and they are enshrined in documents that we love to quote e.g. Sudan, Kosovo, or Kuwait when it suits our needs.

I quote Edward Said from his work Representations of the Intellectual when he points out that:

Universality means taking risks in order to go beyond the easy certainties provided to us by our background, language, nationality, which so often shield us from the reality of others. It also means looking for and trying to uphold a single standard for human behavior when it comes to such matters as foreign and social policy. (page xiv)

My point would be that for the contemporary intellectual [or individual] living at a time that is already confused by the disappearance of what seem to have been objective moral norms and sensible authority, is it unacceptable simply either blindly to support the behavior of one’s own country and overlook its crimes or to say rather supinely “I believe they all do it, and that’s the way of the world?”

To speak consistently is upholding standards of international behavior and the support of human rights is not to look inwards for a guiding light supplied to one by inspiration or prophetic intuition. Most…countries in the world are signatories to a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed in 1948, reaffirmed by every new member state of the UN. There are equally solemn conventions on the rules of war, on treatment of prisoners, on the rights of workers, women, children, immigrants and refugees. None of these documents says anything about ‘disqualified’ or less equal races or peoples. All are entitled to the same freedoms. (page 97)

This exhibition, sadly participated in by Palestinians photographers themselves, further oppresses the Palestinian experience, because it reduces everything to merely violence and sensationalism. This is the legacy of wire photography, and of mainstream photojournalism that chases blood, celebrates murder, and titillates through the tragic.

At a time when more than ever we need to speak with courage and clarity at the systematic dispossession of what little has been left to this blighted people, we have photojournalists and curators participating in a project of silence and obfuscation.

∞

“Beware The Cost Of War’ unfortunately attempts to balance what is so terribly imbalanced. And in that process it misleads. There is nothing to be gained by wringing our hands at the hideousness of blood and flesh torn by bombs. There is nothing to be understood by images of mothers crying. There is no value in the sight of another babies still body. To produce something that can really only provoke pity – a debilitating and cowardly emotion, is to produce nothing at all. (I am reminded of Nietzsche’s argument that… the thirst for pity is a thirst for self-enjoyment, and at the expense of one’s fellow men. It reveals man in the complete inconsideration of his most intimate dear self, but not precisely in his ’stupidity’.)

As photographers we must demand that the text be returned to us who made the works. Our eye and our text is our intent, our ideas, our values and our risks. We must insist that our images not be exploited or left open to the random violence and fantasies of an indifferent and/or confused viewer. Context matters, history matters, and memory matters. We must insist that our words are not dismissed, that the intents with which we produced our images is not marginalized, and that our images do not become merely ‘illustrations’ but are clear statements of our work and our beliefs.

Our words anchor the image, and give it something that itself does not contain; meaning and intent. The caption is crucial because it is also the photographer’s insistence on controlling the use the image is put to, and to what extent it can be manipulated. In a world overrun with meaningless illustrations, the caption takes on even greater value. Context becomes a powerful weapon against propaganda and obfuscation. And a means towards clarity and understanding. We should not surrender or relinquish this right easily. In a conflict mired in millions of words of propaganda, from both sides of course but certainly largely from the mouths of the powerful who have an unbalanced access to mainstream print, internet, and tv media, the words of those who have witnessed first hand are paramount.

Epilogue: A few days ago a Swedish magazine invited me to publish my portraiture from Gaza in its pages. A highly respected publication, it offered me the choice to submit as many images as I liked, with just one condition – they would not use the words that accompanied the work. They only wanted the pictures. You can see this work, images with words, as it appeared in a recent issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review. I refused to let them publish the work, arguing that erasing the words reduced them to meaningless aesthetics, and silenced the voices of the individuals who sacrificed their time and patience in the most horrifying of conditions so that I may carry to the world their sufferings. As photographers we either forget, or prevented from being complete individuals; thinking, creative individuals with opinions, ideas and realizations. We must defend this completeness, and the sanctity of our individual experiences, understandings and conclusions.

Update: The No Captions Needed site, authored by two professors, one from Indiana University and the other from Northwestern University and described by them as ‘…a book and a blog, each dedicated to discussion of the role that photojournalism and other visual practices play in a vital democratic society.” also discussed the ‘no caption’ approach at this exhibit which you can read here: Visual Ironies

Personal Note: This post was edited to ensure that it is understood that it does not claim that the curator(s) intended to oppress the voices or remove context, but simply that the current format inadvertently ends up doing that. This is a criticism of the format, not of the individuals involved, all of whom I am more than sure have the most determined and committed intentions to raise awareness of the situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

]]> http://traxus4420.wordpress.com/2009/10/18/my-absence/ Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:48:42 +0000 traxus4420 http://traxus4420.wordpress.com/2009/10/18/my-absence/

Work and play have been keeping me from this blog. That will change, the sooner the better. Until then, here’s what I’ve been thinking about:

What is the role of humanistic knowledge and information if they are not to be unknowing (many ironies here) partners in commodity production and marketing, so much so that what humanists do may in the end turn out to be a quasi-religious concealment of this peculiarly unhumanistic process? A true secular politics of interpretation sidesteps this question at its peril.

– Edward Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community”

Though I am not interested in a politics of interpretation, I am interested in a secular politics. Perhaps I believe the two are incompatible.

Moving on:

Here, Sariputra, form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses and consciousness.

– Heart Sutra

True words are not ‘beautiful.’

‘Beautiful’ words are not true.

Those who know are not ‘widely learned.’

The ‘widely learned’ do not know.

The good do not have much.

Those who have much are not good.

The Sage accumulates nothing.

The more he does for others, the more he has.

The more he gives to others, the greater his abundance.

The Way of Heaven is pointed but does no harm.

The Way of the Sage is to serve without competing.

Dao De Jing Verse 81

Contrary to most amateur readings of Buddhist and Daoist tenets I’ve seen (I don’t read the professionals), my sense is that they don’t at all consider ‘harmony’ to be easy or automatic. Of course, I can only refer to my own tiny inroad into (the very different) Buddhism and Taoism, but it seems evident that much as ‘Being’ might be the central problem for  Greek philosophy and its offspring (whether through the logic of sympathetic resemblance or identity and difference), Harmony is rather what these texts are about; it is their organizing problem. The reactionary conservativism and historical fatalism that seem to be their general political tenor is a consequence. But another consequence is the rejection of ‘the Being of Being’ or ‘Being’s being-for-itself’ as a false problem however much it is also a inevitable one, whose solution is its negation. The real question for positive knowledge is the relentlessly practical one of appropriate relations. The effect of meditation on Being is the foreclosure of any logic of Being, and the ‘utility’ of philosophy is its own self-abnegation. I believe this point is what continues to sustain my interest in these practices, and how I might one day justify my frivolous, Orientalizing indulgences.

MP3 audio of an Edward Said and Noam Chomsky lecture at Columbia University:

Part 1

Part 2

post-thanksgiving roll. 

today was supposed to be day 2 of the series on s/heroes. however, I have had to make last minute changes to the presentation. This series is interrupted for me to rewrite the stories with no names. i consider it an exercise in growth. but i’m saddened  at my (imposed) self censorship. That I can’t just talk freely about my comrades en sistren. because it’s still not safe for us. but then again it is. because we have done what we need to make it safe for ourselves. though let me make clear that when I say I yam angry. that is strategic and political. I yam actually not FEELING  angry, I mean who would I get anrgy at? my friends and family that are concerned about their safety? I can not be angry at them. I can say I’m angry at the world. But no one has necessarily done anything (yet) in reaction to this blog. at least I don’t think so. So my use of the word, is political.

It is to transform the fear and reality of unsafe spaces. to acknowledge the anger of fear for our lives. to take on the battle for others who are not even allowed to express that anger, who can do nothing other than nurse those wounds, or worse yet, die.

but there are many of us who are still here. we are the survivors. en I yam not angry anymore. I have been angry many times before. I will still willfully carry that tag of the mad black woman. the strong black woman. but i am neither of these things. I have been blessed with love and luck. I write these stories, because I can, because I want to, en because I think it’s necessary.

I believe in the uses of anger, the power to transform with fiya. It is also true dat fiya fi burn. and it is deadly to be  consumed by it. we need all the elements in our growth. fiya, wota, earth, air.

and, in another prelude to that future post, (the one that I mentioned earlier), a retraction…..

let me say again, that this blog is political. it is strategically rooted in the personal.

I, molisa nyakale. write about me, en my work, en my personal life.

en yet, this blog is not about me at all. it is about resistance to all forms of imperialism and rebuilding healthy, loving, sustainable communities. it is about strategising with comrades. about equipping ourselves with the neccsary resources. this is a work of love.

 this blog is that extra/visible contra/diction.

 i tell you the details of so’ en so’….but I don’t gossip.

it is about season 2 of the q werd. queer/trans afrikan lives in tdot.

but that’s a story I’ll tell you another moon. today.

i’ll dedicate to el hajj malik shabazz instead.ase.

and i give thanks for (my other) teachers like, angela davis, assata shakur, audre lorde,  audrey mbugua, amilcar cabral, bell hooks, cornel west, d’bi young.anitAfrika, dionne brand, edward said, ernesto che guevara, frantz fanon, kwame nkrumah, kwame ture, mwalimu nyerere, muthoni wanyeki, nalo hopkinson, notisha  massaquoi, pouline kimani, staceyannchin,  vandana shiva, walter rodney king  en wangari maathai…en more

i give thanks for our ancestors, our elders, and our youth.

i give thanks for the power of (u) people. (and for hanifah walidah and olive demetrius)

i give thanks for none on record.

they are re/building our archives.

they are re/inscribing our existence, en our afrikan decsent,

they have some jood stories. go listen to them.

and listen to this piece of malcolm’s.

OUR HISTORY WAS DESTROYED BY SLAVERY