Category: art

In Naomi Shihab Nye’s first volume of poems, Different Ways to Pray, she writes, “My grandfather told me I had a choice./Up or down, he said. Up or down./He never mentioned east or west.” A compiling of life’s choices, and the decision to fulfill them all, comprise a sort of ars poetica for Nye. This restless strain, seeking to encompass more than the poet sees around her, runs through Nye’s words and those of her speakers, across continents and generations.

She calls herself a “wandering poet,” and, growing up in St. Louis, Jerusalem and San Antonio, she has spread her own roots wide. Nye writes with a deep affection for people and places, while always remaining conscious of the social, spatial, and personal rifts that tear us apart, and keeping an eye toward the volcano in whose shadow we all live, telling it soothingly, “We would be happy if you slept forever.” William Stafford has said that Nye’s poems “combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight,” while the The Grand Rapids Press adds, “When she exhales, the world becomes different. Better.” (the poetry center, smith college)

For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15
by Naomi Shihab Nye

There is no stray bullet, sirs.
No bullet like a worried cat
crouching under a bush,
no half-hairless puppy bullet
dodging midnight streets.
The bullet could not be a pecan
plunking the tin roof,
not hardly, no fluff of pollen
on October’s breath,
no humble pebble at our feet.

So don’t gentle it, please.

We live among stray thoughts,
tasks abandoned midstream.
Our fickle hearts are fat
with stray devotions, we feel at home
among bits and pieces,
all the wandering ways of words.

But this bullet had no innocence, did not
wish anyone well, you can’t tell us otherwise
by naming it mildly, this bullet was never the friend
of life, should not be granted immunity
by soft saying—friendly fire, straying death-eye,
why have we given the wrong weight to what we do?

Mohammed, Mohammed, deserves the truth.
This bullet had no secret happy hopes,
it was not singing to itself with eyes closed
under the bridge.

From You and Yours (CBOA Editions, 2005)

“waltz with bashir” is a thoughtful, somber animated film about the surreal, irrational violence of war – its messiness, its moral ambiguities, its psychological toll. the film focuses on the sabra and shatila massacre – the massacre of palestinian civilians carried out between the 16th and 18th of september 1982 by the lebanese forces militia group, following the assassination of phalangist leader and president elect bachir gemayel. the israeli defense force (IDF), which surrounded beirut’s palestinian refugee camps, allowed the lebanese forces christian militia to enter the two camps of sabra and shatila. between 2,000 to 3,500 people were killed in shockingly vicious, depraved ways.

the film explores the massacre from the point of view of young IDF soldiers and how they’ve dealt with the trauma. many have blocked memories of the massacre and their involvement in it, some are haunted by recurring nightmares, others dissociate from what they saw as if it were a movie. in the hands of the filmmaker, ari folman, the film becomes a tool to reconnect to those memories, recreate the past and ask painful questions.

the animation is intricate, severe, limited to certain colors (e.g. night scenes from the war in lebanon are mostly painted in black and a sickly, fluorescent yellow – symbolic of the flares provided by the IDF which lit up the night sky above the camps and facilitated the murderous work of the phalangists). characters proceed with the mechanized, repetitive movement of shadow puppets. to me it seemed clear that the intent was to emphasize the two-dimensionality, the cold, fragmented, dream-like feel of hindsight. however, once the protagonist can finally plug into his memories, they become very real. how appropriate that animation suddenly turns into real footage. the carnage is no longer a cleaned-up recreation of the past, it comes alive in all its vibrant, colorful, graphic shock.

for those who have the stomach to read it, here is robert fisk’s description of what he saw when he entered the refugee camps. fisk was one of the first journalists to be present on the scene of the massacre on september 17, 1982. he has published a number of different books and currently writes columns for the independent newspaper. the following is extracted from his book, “pity the nation.”

Remembering Sabra and Shatila
SABRA AND SHATILA by Robert Fisk

Robert Fisk was one of the first journalists to be present at the scene of the horrific murders in Lebanon, September 17th, 1982. He has published a number of different books and currently writes columns for The Independent newspaper. The following is extracted from his book, “Pity the Nation.”

What we found inside the Palestinian camp at ten o’clock on the morning of September 1982 did not quite beggar description, although it would have been easier to re-tell in the cold prose of a medical examination. There had been medical examinations before in Lebanon, but rarely on this scale and never overlooked by a regular, supposedly disciplined army. In the panic and hatred of battle, tens of thousands had been killed in this country. But these people, hundreds of them had been shot down unarmed. This was a mass killing, an incident – how easily we used the word “incident” in Lebanon – that was also an atrocity. It went beyond even what the Israelis would have in other circumstances called a terrorist activity. It was a war crime.

Jenkins and Tveit were so overwhelmed by what we found in Chatila that at first we were unable to register our own shock. Bill Foley of AP had come with us. All he could say as he walked round was “Jesus Christ” over and over again. We might have accepted evidence of a few murders; even dozens of bodies, killed in the heat of combat. Bur there were women lying in houses with their skirts torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies – blackened babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24-hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition – tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded US army ration tins, Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of whiskey.

Where were the murderers? Or to use the Israelis’ vocabulary, where were the “terrorists”? When we drove down to Chatila, we had seen the Israelis on the top of the apartments in the Avenue Camille Chamoun but they made no attempt to stop us. In fact, we had first been driven to the Bourj al-Barajneh camp because someone told us that there was a massacre there. All we saw was a Lebanese soldier chasing a car thief down a street. It was only when we were driving back past the entrance to Chatila that Jenkins decided to stop the car. “I don’t like this”, he said. “Where is everyone? What the f**k is that smell?”

Just inside the southern entrance to the camp, there used to be a number of single-story, concrete walled houses. I had conducted many interviews in these hovels in the late 1970’s. When we walked across the muddy entrance to Chatila, we found that these buildings had been dynamited to the ground. There were cartridge cases across the main road. I saw several Israeli flare canisters, still attached to their tiny parachutes. Clouds of flies moved across the rubble, raiding parties with a nose for victory.

Down a laneway to our right, no more than 50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other in the agony of death. All had been shot point-blank range through the cheek, the bullet tearing away a line of flesh up to the ear and entering the brain. Some had vivid crimson or black scars down the left side of their throats. One had been castrated, his trousers torn open and a settlement of flies throbbing over his torn intestines.

The eyes of these young men were all open. The youngest was only 12 or 13 years old. They were dressed in jeans and colored shirts, the material absurdly tight over their flesh now that their bodies had begun to bloat in the heat. They had not been robbed. On one blackened wrist a Swiss watch recorded the correct time, the second hand still ticking round uselessly, expending the last energies of its dead owner.

On the other side of the main road, up a track through the debris, we found the bodies of five women and several children. The women were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short dark curly hair, her eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was dead.

Another child lay on the roadway like a discarded doll, her white dress stained with mud and dust. She could have been no more than three years old. The back of her head had been blown away by a bullet fired into her brain. One of the women also held a tiny baby to her body. The bullet that had passed into her breast had killed the baby too. Someone had slit open the woman’s stomach, cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child. Her eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror.

“…As we stood there, we heard a shout in Arabic from across the ruins. “They are coming back,” a man was screaming, So we ran in fear towards the road. I think, in retrospect, that it was probably anger that stopped us from leaving, for we now waited near the entrance to the camp to glimpse the faces of the men who were responsible for all of this. They must have been sent in here with Israeli permission. They must have been armed by the Israelis. Their handiwork had clearly been watched – closely observed – by the Israelis who were still watching us through their field-glasses.

When does a killing become an outrage? When does an atrocity become a massacre? Or, put another way, how many killings make a massacre? Thirty? A hundred? Three hundred? When is a massacre not a massacre? When the figures are too low? Or when the massacre is carried out by Israel’s friends rather than Israel’s enemies?

That, I suspected, was what this argument was about. If Syrian troops had crossed into Israel, surrounded a Kibbutz and allowed their Palestinian allies to slaughter the Jewish inhabitants, no Western news agency would waste its time afterwards arguing about whether or not it should be called a massacre.

But in Beirut, the victims were Palestinians. The guilty were certainly Christian militiamen – from which particular unit we were still unsure – but the Israelis were also guilty. If the Israelis had not taken part in the killings, they had certainly sent militia into the camp. They had trained them, given them uniforms, handed them US army rations and Israeli medical equipment. Then they had watched the murderers in the camps, they had given them military assistance – the Israeli air force had dropped all those flares to help the men who were murdering the inhabitants of Sabra and Chatila – and they had established military liaison with the murderers in the camps.

“American-led troops were accused yesterday of dragging innocent children from their beds and shooting them during a night raid that left ten people dead. Afghan government investigators said that eight schoolchildren were killed, all but one of them from the same family. Locals said that some victims were handcuffed before being killed. Western military sources said that the dead were all part of an Afghan terrorist cell responsible for manufacturing improvised explosive devices, which have claimed the lives of countless soldiers and civilians.” (Western troops accused of executing 10 Afghan civilians including children, by Jerome Starkey, TimesOnline, December 31, 2009)

WHAT CAN BE DONE
by Damien Adia Marassa

What? Can be done. What can be done.

The elysian Empire with its golden hair of corn silk blowing in the winds of genetically altered human conscience: this just in.

Strange and bitter crop harvested to fertilize the tree of liberty. Warning: do not become furious at the war ning, nine, nig, nig, niggers are furious. With no reason! Neck out the noose, head off the hook. LYNCHMOBS TURNED LOOSE IN Afghanistan. Breathe easy, queasy.

Notice: no one notices. The soy bean stalking. Soylent green peace keeping. As UnAmerican as rotten apple EmPie or umpire – EVIL EMPORIUM? we sank in (our own teeth) Like Titanic in icebergs.

Sacred as the oroboros backward: devoured by the tail that wags the dog, I walk myself around the town on leashes made of forgiveness and patience, “wait and see,” shock and offal – spilling out of every region’s unclassified transparency:

All we see is the opaque: the lense of eyelids tattooed with a sight that shutters itself over every possible eventuality: our victimization made synonymous with reflection, with remorse, repentence, reparation.

I may not live to see the day – but this, is this called living? – but if not, the night will come, to bring rest to Eyes pitchforked open on the scene of a world’s subjection, toothpicked perky to the rape rape rape and pillage of the old by the new, of the many by the few, of the do do do what you do do do do: best, if not only, and thus worse, and therefore ever after more quickly and more perverse.

I am older every day, and each day I am younger than before as innocence swells swollen jaws and lips, bulging eyes and asphyxia membranes with every tick of the clock, the tock of the time bombs of shock and horror. I am becoming the offspring of orphans, I am become the child of night.

Technology and social media platforms have revolutionised the way we communicate and campaign on global and local issues. We have seen examples of the power of social media to shine a spotlight on oppression and hold governments to account, notably in Iran and Burma. Full article.