Softcore

by Zolghadr, Tirdad;

  Something in the tone of Stella’s voice suggested that perhaps things did not end with one last single malt and a polite peck on the cheek. So I claimed the entire spiel was stolen, tel quel, from a late Walter Benjamin essay, and whenever Stella mentions Christenhuber I invariably sigh and shake my head, disgusted by the intellectual frivolity of it all.

  What is more pressing than a celebrity academic, I suggest to her, is some resemblance of a thematic backdrop, not for the audience or the contributors necessarily, but for the brochure, the trilingual catalogue and the international e-flux press release. Spectacles of Simulacrum and Struggle. Perhaps. Simulacral Spectacles of Struggle. If I Can’t Google, I Don’t Wanna be Part of Your Revolution. Beyond East/West: Remapping Aesthesis as the Dismemberment of Sheharazade. Every Time a Good Time: Resistance in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

  Administration

  It’s dark when I wake up to catch the Middle East Airlines flight to Beirut, just a vague trace of blue on the horizon, but the traffic already reassuringly heavy on the highway outside my window. I switch on MTV Asia Kickstart, shower to the ambrosial sounds of chirping pipes and faucets, make myself a sweet Turkish coffee and call a cab. As I walk out of the main entrance to block 44D, I see my neighbors standing by the doorway in groups of three or four, talking in hushed voices. A teenager who flunked his high-school graduation exams just threw himself off the rooftop. Did I want to take a look? I hesitate as I consider the offer, but in view of the traffic I decide I’d better leave.

  The cab driver is the same young Brezhnev in the polyester suit who drove us to Karaj only weeks ago, the Neil Diamond tape still playing in the Samsung stereo.

  It’s past noon in Beirut. I’m sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Continental, waiting for Uncle Tan, who is to meet me for an afternoon tea. An unobtrusive hotel, baroque, some art deco, small white cases suspended on the walls displaying Patek Philippe Calatrava 5120 and framed color photographs of national tourist attractions. The employee at the reception faintly resembles the chronotopic marvel from the hotel in Odmarschen, Hamburg, if much taller and decidedly more handsome. I’ve never been to Beirut before. The stereo is actually playing Feiruz. Meyteh a’lah beera, habibi, says Feiruz. Meyteh a’lah beera.

  The forum is taking place at the time of yet another military onslaught on Palestinian cities, and everyone has heard the story of how Dr Tan Christenhuber, visiting an artist’s studio in Ramallah, had to heroically sneak through lines of Israeli tanks to reach Beirut, braving death or imprisonment or worse.

  As he walks into the lobby, I can see he’s wearing a black corduroy suit and the same felt hat he had on for the TF1 interview. His hair has grown, along with his beard, and I now remember that when I first saw his picture in the festival catalogue, I mistook him for Kris Kistofferson.

  ‘I feel so incredibly guilty,’ he moans as he lets himself flop down into an armchair next to me. ‘So. Incredibly. Guilty. Sitting here babbling about the history of photography and this and that and this and that. And in Jenin and Ramallah you get shot for carrying out the trash.’

  I look down at the green and khaki wall-to-wall carpeting, then glance shyly over at Tan, whose familiar, droopy eyelids still make him look like he’s fighting the urge to fall asleep. I nod, waiting for some sign of recognition, of family complicity. But he carries on without blinking.

  ‘I mean, half the art scene is at the demonstrations. All of them telling me it’s nonsense to be chatting about aesthetics at a time like this.’ He suddenly raises his head and laughs at the ceiling, as if giggling at a private joke.

  I offer a small handful of conversational schemes on the subject of art and politics, most of which I remember from my Moleskines, particularly the ones under ‘History’. Tan watches me with sleepy eyelids, and just as I think he’s about to recognize me, he continues, ‘In Ramallah, a tank unit just destroyed the photo archives. Historical photos of everyday life before the Israelis. Historical photos that didn’t correspond to the founding myth of the nation of Israel. Which goes a little something like this: “Before us, there were only idle Arabs lying around in camel dung.” So Ramallah’s Center for Photography was blown to bits, along with its archives.’ Tan is not as angry or emotional as one might expect. He may just as well be explaining a ripped sleeve on his Burberry overcoat.

  I’ve always been intrigued by the amount of attention Palestine has successfully generated, more than Ethiopians, Kurds, Chechens, Chiapans, Bolivian coca farmers and Tibetan monks put together. Not to mention the Iraqis. Back in the nineties, a million Iraqi minors casually starved to death by UN sanctions or blown to humus by Clinton’s weekly air raids weren’t enough to make it onto the mainstream circuit. But all you needed were a small handful of Palestinians, a hundred casualties a year would do fine, and you had half the students in the northern hemisphere walking around in red-and-white kaffieh neckscarves. Encouraged by Tan’s pragmatic air of nonchalance, I’m about to ask him about this ingenious example of media promotion but decide against it.

  My presentation was written entirely by Stella, and I haven’t taken the time to study her paper in the plane as I’d intended. I urgently need to read the text at least once and, that aside, I would like to offer something more personal by way of an introduction, something flip and self-ironic, about the little things which lend Mid-East art scenes a gauche and untimely touch. Not unlike MTV Hip Hop tycoons proving street credibility by yelling Murder Incorporated and nigguh, I aint frontin, you one dead nigguh, from cruise ships and helicopter landing platforms. The idea was to introduce the talk with a first-hand account of a north Tehran cocktail party. A suave, light-hearted and yet vaguely moralistic, self-righteous sort of spiel, a hint of Hezbollah, a sprinkle of Evelyn Waugh.

  But now I’m not so sure. On the one hand, war crimes and suicide bombings, on the other, the Tehran cocktail party. How trite. A discursive Medio y Medio at best. In my breast pocket I can feel the contours of the speech, which I’d meant to rehearse in front of my bathroom mirror in Zirzamin. I fondle the edges, somewhat disgusted, as if it were a cyst or a skin disease. Tan suggests a drive to some pan-Arab photo institute, and I half-heartedly agree. Outside, the passersby look relaxed and sweet-tempered despite the late-afternoon drizzle.

  At the institute, we drink sweet coffee and cardamon with a video artist dressed in motorcycle goggles and a black leather outfit, and hear of the difficult search for sponsors and the impossibility of relying on the Ministry of Culture. I cannot stop thinking about my cyst. Soon, it’s 5 PM, and I still haven’t returned to the Continental to study Stella’s talk, but we’re already moving towards a bar, so let’s have an apéritif, have you tried Lebanese arak, it’s great, a’n jad, and so I tag along, but keep running my fingertips over the bump on my breast. The talk begins in seventeen hours precisely.

  The bar is known to be frequented by cheerful constituents of the ageing communist intelligentsia, drinking arak and watching TV, tuned to a Hezbollah channel, just like every other television set I’ve seen so far. I watch them drink, realizing this is precisely what the Neo-Leninists and Stalinists, Trotskyists and Maoists in Zsa Zsa’s cellar must have looked like. Copious moustaches, exhausted demeanors, V-neck sweaters.

  I’m introduced to some of the art crowd, including several dark-skinned women with stern, elegantly sculpted features, almost Eritrean in character. Not like the Eritreans from the famine reports, but like the ones at food stands at music festivals in Munich or Glastonbury. By comparison, most of the men look surprisingly bland, precisely the type to stand in line in Munich or Glastonbury for overpriced Eritrean mutton sauce in a sourdough crêpe. Tan and some of the forum participants huddle in a corner by the door, drinking beer or Ballantine’s.

  Sharon, Ramallah, the photo archives, past massacres, coming massacres, ongoing massacres, massacres tout court, friends and family who have wondered aloud about the pros and cons of blowing themselves up in a supermarket in downtown Tel Aviv. Europe
will never do anything about anything. We need another 9/11. Just one, then they’ll get it. Perhaps.

  No but the Americans should come over I swear, a’n jad, they should occupy everything. Two advantages. Listen. One. We get rid of all our Arab leaders. Two. Once the Americans are on the ground, we can shoot them.

  I’m reminded of the images of dancing Palestinian children that went around the world immediately after 9/11. Many a liberal-minded progressive found the pictures were not representative. Propagandist, racist bigotry against the nicer Muslims, and most of them were, they insisted, clearly nice. It soon turned out the images were actually taken from older archives dating back to Desert Storm, and a senior BBC official stepped down in protest. Then again, someone back at the Elahieh cocktail party claimed the images were proven authentic after all, and that they were now suing the official who’d stepped down.

  9/11 was great. We could hardly believe it. Everyone took time off and got drunk with the communists in front of the TV. One stupid crack after another. Rarely laughed so much in my life. So can I get you a different whiskey this time no I’m sticking to Ballantine’s what kind of a whiskey is that well whatever it’s my drink OK? I can hardly concentrate, for I’m constantly laying my right hand on my left breast pocket, as if practising the traditionally mannish-Mid-Eastern manner of greeting.

  Seventeen hours later I’m standing at the front of a large, half-filled auditorium with ridiculously bright lights shining in my eyes. Sitting in the front row, I can make out a small crowd of Iranian diplomats, all in flabby, oversized dinner jackets and collarless white shirts, comfortably fondling their standard six-day stubble. Tan had warned me about the delegation, but I don’t mind in the slightest. On the contrary, its presence provides a perfect touch of geopolitical bearing.

  I start with a coquettish remark regarding my being the only non-Arab speaker at the forum. Then another, equally superfluous comment comparing the Promessa to an exotic pack of foreign cigarettes you place on a bar counter, and which allows you to start a conversation with people you’d otherwise never meet, only to encounter a silence emanating from beyond the floodlights. Still trying to win over the audience, I go over a choice selection of carefully intellectualized Tehran art gossip.

  Mehrangiz’s laughable taste in film and video, for example, which ‘perfectly mirrors and matches her dress sense’, the nose-jobs at the openings, the conceptual art festival and such.

  ‘You see, the basic problem is not censorship per se, but the provincialism through which we view the international cycle of supply and demand.’

  At this, the Iranian ambassador bursts into applause, demanding I repeat the statement in Farsi, so his colleagues can understand.

  I then unfold Stella’s text for the first time, furtively skimming the first page as I pretend to clean my glasses on the sleeve of my navy blue Fendi suit, slightly taken aback as I encounter what seems to be a catalog of pointed speculations on links between Aryan mythology and the founding of Israel.

  ‘These historical links’, the introduction sanctimoniously reads, ‘will once and for all effectively dispel a staggering number of persistent misunderstandings. What else can one do in this day and age but repeatedly refer to our misguided histories of arrogance and bloodshed, in the hope of never repeating them again?’

  Stella, I assume, was high on the newest rendition of Munich amphetamines when she wrote this, but I do my best to peer grimly into the floodlights and ceremoniously put on my glasses as I begin the lecture.

  ‘When it comes to the Holy Bible, the most popular stories are the first myths: Paradise, Babel, Noah’s Ark, the first nomads, Sarah and Abraham and Moses and the return to the Promised Land, before we get to Joseph’s Virgin and such. What is striking, however, is that the gap between Moses and Mary amounts to a period of six centuries, during which Israel was colonized by Persia for several hundred years. And nothing, apparently, really happened during this time. On the contrary. The Persians politely invited the Jews back home from exile in Babylon, to live in peace and do their thing, exactly the way they liked it. The Pax Iranica as Hebraism’s golden age. And since peace is boring, it’s no wonder neither Ezra nor Nehemia are major characters in kindergarten coloring books.

  But Persian statesmen were also known for their shrewd identity politics for imperial ends, using unflinching methods of forced resettlement to ghettoize entire populations. The ethnic units thus created could hold their proper cults and emblems, which appeased anti-Persian sentiment, and were assigned specific economic functions, which permitted a more efficient administration of the imperial body.

  The Jewish returnees from Babylonian exile formed a fraction of the local population but were granted exclusive privileges by the Persian imperial authorities. Political spokesmanship, land rights, the official cult. If they didn’t control the local intermarriages, the regional paganisms and oral histories, they had the archives and the land grants, along with any other written records, for that matter.

  A cult of the forefathers emerged among the Jewish returnees during this era, a shift towards kinship rather than territory. Lineage is the better way to clearly define who is clearly Jewish and to lay claim to land one possessed a long time ago.’

  Stella’s talk now launches into a barrage of Bible stories exemplifying the move from territorial paradigms to mythologies of kinship, then offers a comparison of the Jewish and Persian godheads of the time, portraying Moses and the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda as uneasy bedfellows who nonetheless settled on a number of matters, like monotheism, personal answerability and rabid doctrines of racial supremacy. Cross-racial proselytism was not exactly de rigeur among the Persians, nor among the Jews. Much as Ahura Mazda is not a universal God, but God of the Aryans only, YHWH is the exclusive God of the children of Israel.

  Several millennia later, Stella’s lecture finally concludes, and prophet Zoroaster is rediscovered and popularized by the same cultured celebrities in silly wigs and fluffy shirtsleeves who devised the European understanding of the Aryan myth.

  Within an hour, I’m sitting in a taxi with Uncle Tan, on the way to some restaurant. Like some over-eager, compulsive bookkeeper, I’m already looking forward to putting down Stella’s Perso-Israeli ruminations in my Moleskine, adding them to my already sizeable index of opaque branches of quasi-colonial conspiracies and capillary ideological networks to be narrativized in my next notebook, under ‘Gossip’ presumably.

  We can have an apéritif at the bar, yalla habibi, it’ll be really nice, a’n jad. Tan, who has clearly developed a habit of relentlessly repeating the few Arabic turns of phrase he can muster, is obviously pleased with me. Or with Stella, rather. He keeps smiling, shaking his head and whispering sweet nothings at the car window. ‘Stella, Stella’ and ‘Stellastellastella.’ The temptation to call Uncle Tan’s bluff, to demand he stop pretending he’s never seen me before, or to at least get to the bottom of that revoltingly congenial email referring to my wife, my Italian lover and whatnot, is excrutiating. But it’s unlikely Stella would approve of any confrontations or family reunions at this stage, so I prefer to restrain myself. Stella aside, it’s impossible to tell whether Christenhuber has failed to recognize me or merely chosen not to.

  When he asks me whether I had any idea of what Stella was trying to imply with the talk – ‘I mean in the overall scheme of things’ – I have to answer that no, I didn’t, not really, and Tan turns back to the window, once again softly chuckling at the persistent evening drizzle outside.

  The restaurant turns out to be an enormous, rectangular cube of brute concrete with a single, long dinner table running through the center. Hovering high above the table, in midair, is a massive steel tube. After taking the elevator, I realize that this suspended steel contraption contains the restaurant bar within.

  Having ordered our drinks, seated about halfway down the tube, I question Tan on the enigma of Palestinian public relations. He takes a moment to smile and scrutinize me, then slowly goes thro
ugh a small list of possibilities, ranging from seventies relations to the European intelligentsia, including the Rote Armee Fraktion, to latent post-Balfour guilt, to a quasi-Biblical concern for the region.

  ‘Jesus was, after all, a Palestinian,’ he mumbles into his Tanqueray and tonic. ‘But à propos public relations. I’m not into this knee-jerk game of show and tell anyway habibi. A’n jad. And I don’t think understanding is possible in the first place. What we can hope for is some kind of emotional empathy. But not an awareness of the situation on the ground. Nor of the subjectivities at stake.’ He peers through the tiny slits in the steel paneling at the restaurant below. ‘But maybe awareness or understanding don’t have anything to do with it. What can I tell you?’

  Dr Tan Christenhuber smiles once again, raising his eyelids just a touch. ‘In any case, why should all that bother you? It’s your job, in a way. It’s your job to run around the comfy corridors of power deconstructing geographic metaphors and allegories of colonialism in Gaugin and Pocahontas and all that. It’s not for you to worry about everyday problems in these parts of the world.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad some people are more into the corridors of power than running around with lovable intentions listening and understanding and comparing and taking off their shoes and sitting cross-legged in mud huts sipping pepper soup with Ali and Fatima.’