Category: politics

Review: paintings scream to break walls of silence

Images of the suffering of the Palestinian people are already very familiar to us from news reports, but these paintings recontextualize them. They reference many representations, particularly those in mainstream media. There are fragments of newspaper reports amongst the jumble of images in some of the paintings. Many also feature stenciled, graffiti-like words and phrases. The canvases are like an extension of the wall, which Frere says is “covered in graffiti, slogans, messages, insults and sometimes striking artistic images” extended to Britain, a country which has the influence to intervene in the situation and helped create it in the first place. These paintings incorporate the art of resistance, and attempt to achieve that status themselves. In that sense they are a call to action. Indeed, the text in one of the paintings reads “Keeping silent against violence is to be a part of it.” Full article.

Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading BY MAHMOUD DARWISH

New York/ November/ Fifth Avenue
The sun a plate of shredded metal
I asked myself, estranged in the shadow:
Is it Babel or Sodom?
***
There, on the doorstep of an electric abyss,
high as the sky, I met Edward,
thirty years ago,
time was less wild then…
We both said:
If the past is only an experience,
make of the future a meaning and a vision.
Let us go,
Let us go into tomorrow trusting
the candor of imagination and the miracle of grass/
***
I don’t recall going together to the cinema
in the evening. Still I heard Ancient
Indians calling: Trust
neither horse, nor modernity
***
No. Victims do not ask their executioner:
Am I you? Had my sword been
bigger than my rose, would you
have asked
if I would have acted like you?
***
A question like that entices the curiosity
of a novelist,
sitting in a glass office, overlooking
lilies in the garden, where
the hand
of a hypothesis is as clear as
the conscience
of a novelist set to settle accounts
with
human instinct… There is no tomorrow
in yesterday, so let us advance/
***
Advancing could be a bridge
leading back
to Barbarism…/
***
New York. Edward wakes up to
a lazy dawn. He plays
Mozart.
Runs round the university’s tennis
court.
Thinks of the journey of ideas across
borders,
and over barriers. He reads the New York Times.
Writes out his furious comments. Curses an Orientalist
guiding the General to the weak point
inside the heart of an Oriental woman. He showers. Chooses
his elegant suit. Drinks
his white coffee. Shouts at the dawn:
Do not loiter.
***
On wind he walks, and in wind
he knows himself. There is no ceiling for the wind,
no home for the wind. Wind is the compass
of the stranger’s North.
He says: I am from there, I am from here,
but I am neither there nor here.
I have two names which meet and part…
I have two languages, but I have long forgotten
which is the language of my dreams.
I have an English language, for writing,
with yielding phrases,
and a language in which Heaven and
Jerusalem converse, with a silver cadence,
but it does not yield to my imagination.
***
What about identity? I asked.
He said: It’s self-defence…
Identity is the child of birth, but
at the end, it’s self-invention, and not
an inheritance of the past. I am multiple…
Within me an ever new exterior. And
I belong to the question of the victim. Were I not
from there, I would have trained my heart
to nurture there deers of metaphor…
So carry your homeland wherever you go, and be
a narcissist if need be/
The outside world is exile,
exile is the world inside.
And what are you between the two?
***
Myself, I do not know
so that I shall not lose it. I am what I am.
I am my other, a duality
gaining resonance in between speech and gesture.
Were I to write poetry I would have said:
I am two in one,
like the wings of a swallow ,
content with bringing good omen
when spring is late.
***
He loves a country and he leaves.
[Is the impossible far off?]
He loves leaving to things unknown.
By traveling freely across cultures
those in search of the human essence
may find a space for all to sit…
Here a margin advances. Or a centre
retreats. Where East is not strictly east,
and West is not strictly west,
where identity is open onto plurality,
not a fort or a trench/
***
Metonymy was sleeping on the river’s bank;
had it not been for the pollution
it could have embraced the other bank.
***
– Have you written any novels?
I tried… I tried to retrieve
my image from mirrors of distant women.
But they scampered off into their guarded night.
Saying: Our world is independent of any text.
A man cannot write a woman who is both enigma and dream.
A woman cannot write a man who is both symbol and star.
There are no two loves alike. No two nights
alike. So let us enumerate men’s qualities
and laugh.
– And what did you do?
I laughed at my nonsense
and threw the novel
into the wastepaper basket/
***
The intellectual harnesses what the novelist can tell
and the philosopher interprets the bard’s roses/
***
He loves a country and he leaves:
I am what I am and shall be.
I shall choose my place by myself,
and choose my exile. My exile, the backdrop
to an epic scene. I defend
the poet’s need for memories and tomorrow,
I defend country and exile
in tree-clad birds,
and a moon, generous enough
to allow the writing of a love poem;
I defend an idea shattered by the frailty
of its partisans
and defend a country hijacked by myths/
***
– Will you be able to return to anything?
My ahead pulls what’s behind and hastens…
There is no time left in my watch for me to scribble lines
on the sand. I can, however, visit yesterday
as strangers do when they listen
on a sad evening to a Pastorale:
“A girl by the spring filling her jar
“With clouds’ tears,
“Weeping and laughing as a bee
“Stings her heart…
“Is it love that makes the water ache
“Or some sickness in the mist…”
[until the end of the song].
***
– So, nostalgia can hit you?
Nostalgia for a higher, more distant tomorrow,
far more distant. My dream leads my steps.
And my vision places my dream
on my knees
like a pet cat. It’s the imaginary
real,
the child of will: We can
change the inevitability of the abyss.
***
– And nostalgia for yesterday?
A sentiment not fit for an intellectual, unless
it is used to spell out the stranger’s fervour
for that which negates him.
My nostalgia is a struggle
over a present which has tomorrow
by the balls.
***
– Did you not sneak into yesterday when
you went to that house, your house
in Talbiya, in Jerusalem?
I prepared myself to sleep
in my mother’s bed, like a child
who’s scared of his father. I tried
to recall my birth, and
to watch the Milky Way from the roof of my old
house. I tried to stroke the skin
of absence and the smell of summer
in the garden’s jasmine. But the hyena that is truth
drove me away from a thief-like
nostalgia.
– Were you afraid? What frightened you?
I could not meet loss face
to face. I stood by the door like a beggar.
How could I ask permission from strangers sleeping
in my own bed… Ask them if I could visit myself
for five minutes? Should I bow in respect
to the residents of my childish dream? Would they ask:
Who is that prying foreign visitor? And how
could I talk about war and peace
among the victims and the victims’ victims,
without additions, without an interjection?
And would they tell me: There is no place for two dreams
in one bedroom?
***
It is neither me nor him
who asks; it is a reader asking:
What can poetry say in a time of catastrophe?
***
Blood
and blood,
blood
in your country,
in my name and in yours, in
the almond flower, in the banana skin,
in the baby’s milk, in light and shadow,
in the grain of wheat, in salt/
***
Adept snipers, hitting their target
with maximum proficiency.
Blood
and blood
and blood.
This land is smaller than the blood of its children
standing on the threshold of doomsday like
sacrificial offerings. Is this land truly
blessed, or is it baptised
in blood
and blood
and blood
which neither prayer, nor sand can dry.
There is not enough justice in the Sacred Book
to make martyrs rejoice in their freedom
to walk on cloud. Blood in daylight,
blood in darkness. Blood in speech.
***
He says: The poem could host
loss, a thread of light shining
at the heart of a guitar; or a Christ
on a horse pierced through with beautiful metaphors. For
the aesthetic is but the presence of the real
in form/
In a world without a sky, the earth
becomes an abyss. The poem,
a consolation, an attribute
of the wind, southern or northern.
Do not describe what the camera can see
of your wounds. And scream that you may hear yourself,
and scream that you may know you’re still alive,
and alive, and that life on this earth is
possible. Invent a hope for speech,
invent a direction, a mirage to extend hope.
And sing, for the aesthetic is freedom/
***
I say: The life which cannot be defined
except by death is not a life.
***
He says: We shall live.
So let us be masters of words which
make their readers immortal — as your friend
Ritsos said.
***
He also said: If I die before you,
my will is the impossible.
I asked: Is the impossible far off?
He said: A generation away.
I asked: And if I die before you?
He said: I shall pay my condolences to Mount Galilee,
and write, “The aesthetic is to reach
poise.” And now, don’t forget:
If I die before you, my will is the impossible.
***
When I last visited him in New Sodom,
in the year Two Thousand and Two, he was battling off
the war of Sodom on the people of Babel…
and cancer. He was like the last epic hero
defending the right of Troy
to share the narrative.
***
An eagle soaring higher and higher
bidding farewell to his height,
for dwelling on Olympus
and over heights
is tiresome.
***
Farewell,
farewell poetry of pain.

Translated by Mona Anis

MAHMOUD DARWISH

Yasin Gaber: The Marvels of Exile

“The right of return has to be both complex and effective, which means that it has to be grounded in the rights of refugees, the illegitimacy of dispossession, and a new conception of the redistribution of lands.” This necessary step, Judith Butler argues, is nearly impossible when the very history of this dispossession is constantly being effaced, preventing its actualisation as a historical truth.

Butler encourages us not to work within the structure of colonial power but to undo the edifice of colonialism. Through Darwish’s poem, entitled ” Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading”, she highlights the self and identity. “Identity is the child of birth, but/ At the end, it’s self-invention, and not/ An inheritance of the past,” Said tells Darwish in the poem. There is probably no one who gave voice more clearly to the condition of unwilled proximity, the modes of being bound together in antagonism and without contract, than Mahmoud Darwish. He did not precisely imagine a solution to this problem, Butler explained, but he made clear that this terrible embrace had to become something else, and that exile forms something of a signpost for the future.

Full article here.

on western civilization and being human

In Derrick Jensen’s interview with Father Thomas Berry, the deep ecologist tells Jensen that the West is in decline, and “the mission of our times is to reinvent what it means to be human.” Jensen asks Berry, “Should we just get rid of Western civilization?” “Not at all,” the 88-year-old Catholic monk replies. “Because the problem is within the Western world, the solution must be there also… humans need to be taught how to be human.”

Police exonerate Israeli officers who shot tear gas canister into U.S. activist’s eye

“Every investigation of killing or injuries ends up emitting this stench of blamelessness,” Sfard said. “This particular case shows that the negligence borders whitewash. Anyone who finds no need to question objective witnesses, who have stated the Border Police officer took direct aim, is obstructing the investigation and is as good as confessing to having no interest in finding the truth.” Full article.

Stop Drone Strikes

resident Obama, I strongly urge you to stop targeted killings (including drone strikes and other killings) beyond war zones unless there’s an imminent threat, and I insist that your administration disclose the criteria used to determine how U.S. citizens end up on kill lists.

sign petition here.

goings on about town

so general musharraf was in town. over dinner with some of the locals he talked about how his visits to the u.s. r arranged by the u.s. govt and how he gets $50,000 per speech. he’s now in toronto to garner more support from pakistani expats. looks like the u.s. might be interested in propping him back in power, in pakistan. yuck!

Aftermath–Six Questions for Nir Rosen – By Scott Horton

It is impossible to imagine an imperial power like the United States caring about “people,” even its own. The effect our wars and policies have on them are ignored. Perhaps if policy analysts and policy makers paid attention to the people in Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere, they would rely less on English-speaking eli…tes who are disconnected from the reality on the ground. CONTD. “They would then be better aware of what the people want, which movements are popular, and who has power. In Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other countries in the Muslim world, the people have obstructed American goals. If America …had listened to the people, it might not have gone to war with the Muslim world after September 11. It might have learned that Al Qaeda was not a movement but a group of marginal individuals rejected by the mainstream and ignored by most Muslims. If it listened to the people, America might cease propping up hated dictatorships and calling them “moderate.” If it listened to the people, it might support democracy in the Middle East rather than compliant regimes that are proving brittle and will eventually crumble violently. But even if it didn’t listen to the people out of good intentions, it would have at least been a far more competent occupier, provoking less instability. But then again, if the American government listened to people, it might spend less of its resources on foreign wars and more on the welfare of its own people. (Nir Rosen)

v interesting interview with nir rosen here. his book is “aftermath – following the bloodshed of america’s wars in the muslim world.”

Robert Fisk: An American bribe that stinks of appeasement

In any other country, the current American bribe to Israel, and the latter’s reluctance to accept it, in return for even a temporary end to the theft of somebody else’s property would be regarded as preposterous. Three billion dollars’ worth of fighter bombers in return for a temporary freeze in West Bank colonisation …for a mere 90 days? Not including East Jerusalem – so goodbye to the last chance of the east of the holy city for a Palestinian capital – and, if Benjamin Netanyahu so wishes, a rip-roaring continuation of settlement on Arab land. In the ordinary sane world in which we think we live, there is only one word for Barack Obama’s offer: appeasement. Full article.