This Is Not A Border

by Ahdaf Soueif

  The unexpected nature and swiftness of the night’s trajectory, from the calm of the concert to petty harassment, to a potentially extremely dangerous situation, leaves me shaken. But everyone else is obviously hardier than I, and the girls, who have no time for watching dust settle, start discussing blogging competitions with me as soon as we get back to the hotel. We continue with oud playing and poetry reading on the top floor. ‘Let’s be constructive,’ they say as we try to find out where the girl whose phone was snatched has gone. She comes back later (phone returned) to hang out and listen with the rest of us.

  Security waits downstairs.

  GAZA, FROM THE DIASPORA – PART ONE

  Jehan Bseiso

  I

  Even from space Gaza is on fire, is

  children sheltering in UNRWA schools (hit), is

  entire families huddled in hospitals (hit), is

  you sitting perfectly still in the dark, hoping this one

  will miss you.

  II

  From Amman, from Beirut, in Chicago.

  We, online, yes.

  But no 140 characters this.

  1,000 killed, 4,000 injured, thousands displaced no place.

  III

  Twitter feeds and Facebook timelines and

  10 Reasons Why You Should Boycott Israel Now, and

  5 Ways Children Die in Gaza Today, or

  How to Lose 18 Members of Your Family in One Minute

  (@Bibi54 stop saying the rockets are in the damn hospitals, in the schoolrooms, under the beds of four-year-olds).

  Maybe it helps that 8 Celebrities Expressed Their Outrage.

  Tweeted and deleted.

  (@CNN@Foxnews bas rewriting history, bas lies on TV)

  @Jon Stewart, thank you for educating the silent majority with satire.

  IV

  Day 17: What happened? What is still happening?

  In Jabaliya, the dead console the dying;

  Anisa, with one child in her arms, and another in her belly (dead).

  In the hospital they put the pregnant women alone because they’re carrying hope

  because they don’t want them to see what can happen to children.

  Oh white phosphorous (and unconfirmed reports of illegal dense inert metal explosives).

  V

  I can confirm this:

  international law is clearly for internationals only.

  By now, a seven-year-old in Gaza has survived three wars already, and you’re still talking about talks, and sending John Kerry to the Middle East, and thanking Egypt for facilitating nothing.

  There’s more blood than water today in Gaza.

  DARKENING THE DRAMATURGY

  Omar El-Khairy

  My father said: Speak the language that pays for your bread

  My grandmother said: Speak the language that keeps its distance

  from what has taken place in words

  My brother said: Speak the language that gives life to the machine

  My mother said: Speak the language worth the price of betraying me

  Athena Farrokhzad, White Blight

  ‘Palestinians can be cunts too,’ I fired back. It was the early hours of the morning, and I’d just received another email from the director with this one stubborn, recurring note on the latest draft of my play. ‘You sure this is how you want to represent Palestinians on a London stage?’ The implication was clear. The burden of representation was a dramaturgical weight that could now be strategically deployed to tie down artists. For, in most cases, it is no longer self-imposed – laced with the anger and expectation of past national liberation projects – but rather politely lenied on them by white, well-meaning liberal tastemakers. Despite a new generation of Palestinian artists – working both at home and within the diaspora – openly rejecting a renewed politics of performing respectability, there remains a burden – an expectancy, even – on certain artists to not only represent their particular communities, as imagined by institutions, funding bodies and commissioners, but equally to shed a particular light – either revelatory, focusing on certain repressive socio-cultural practices, or celebratory, reorienting the noble savage for our modern times.

  It is important to stress that, us artists, caught up in this twisted logic of the culture industries, have been equally complicit in its propagation. There are those fighting for a new language, a new aesthetic, that neither occludes past struggles and their yet-unrealised dreams nor submits to the culture talk of our creative industries. However, there are others who choose to play along – either in the hope of changing such reductive perspectives or for the simple, short-term rewards that come with reaffirming certain undisturbed narratives. For, although usually left unspoken, we are all aware of what play, novel or art piece would garner the necessary attention to afford us a public(ised) career. Such rewards, however, always come at a cost – in this case, a self-defined, long-term career being the primary causality. A recurring motif with such artists – usually once the flashing lights have shifted on to the next bright young thing – is the expression of frustration at being pigeonholed (usually by their compromised, breakthrough work) and their subsequent inability to move beyond the words and images that have brought them such success.

  It is for these reasons that I was reluctant to write about Palestine so early on, as I was finding my footing as a playwright. Sour Lips, my first play, although set during the 2011 Syrian uprisings, was very much an exploration of Western fetishism around what was to be become the Arab Spring. It was a period in which everyone was clamouring for work about the revolts spreading across the region. I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with artists, those entrusted with the necessary cultural capital – both from within the region and in the West – serving as cultural translators for Western audiences, usually to put them at ease with all the turmoil. So, I wrote a fake verbatim play about Tom MacMaster, the man behind the ‘Gay Girl in Damascus’ hoax. Many were rightly angered by a middle-aged white man appropriating the identity – albeit fictitious – of a young Syrian woman. There is no denying the obvious violence of such an act. Nor can one ignore the real lives his blog unintentionally put at risk. However, what interested me more was both MacMaster’s fantasy of what a liberated generation in a new Middle East would look like and his astute appreciation of how best to attract the gaze of the culture industries – for seemingly good intentions. His ability to manipulate the Western imaginary of the Arab world, in particular its manifest desires for the region, was an act of surprising subversion. For, his creation, Amina Arraf, was beautiful, (American) educated, sans hijab – having taken it off at some point, of course – religiously ambivalent, leftist and a lesbian. MacMaster began blogging at a time when Syria was in a state of near media blackout, especially since the breakout of revolts in March. Amina, however, spoke directly to liberal English-speaking readers – becoming an overnight media sensation, bamboozling both the Guardian and the BBC. And despite his subsequent vilification, MacMaster ultimately showed up the paternalistic inner logic that links Western cultural institutions of all political persuasions.

  At a time when we are witnessing a resurgence of identity politics – and with it a return to the comforting clamour for authenticity – our cultural landscape feels especially fraught. It is a particularly precarious moment – one in which Lionel Shriver, donning a sombrero, can arrogantly dismiss cultural attachment, believing it is fair game for everyone. While others – unwavering Beyoncé fans, most notably – forcefully exalt the reification of subaltern cultures, leaving little room for any ambivalence, play or critique. Given the relentless drive to dehumanise Arabs and Muslims – unwittingly elided in most imaginaries – in our news reports, television dramas and Hollywood blockbusters, I fully appreciate the instinct to both defend our territory and counter such depictions with more positive representations. However, both camps in this reignited debate on cultural appropriation are retreating into dangerous territory – the same territory, ultimately. The
y have both managed to manufacture a false – mutually self-serving – dichotomy in which culture is reduced to the realm of authenticity and ownership.

  So, although The Keepers of Infinite Space was marketed as a play documenting the history of incarceration of Palestinians in the Israeli prison system, for me it will always be an inter-generational family drama – Chekhovian in its approach to class, land and heroism. The family at the heart of this story are neither imbued with the romance of the freedom fighter nor the pity inflicted upon the refugee. They are the proud bourgeoisie – headed by a comprador patriarch, helping develop Rawabi, the first planned city (or neo-liberal wet dream) built by Palestinians in the West Bank. I had little interest in romanticising the already over-signified figure of the Palestinian. Although the code of not airing our dirty laundry in public still resonates within certain quarters of the Palestinian community, particularly in the diaspora, where an untarnished memory of the homeland must always be kept intact, I sought out ambivalence instead. I chose to shun the arrogant presumption that I – and my play – stood in for Palestine – thus creating space for critique to work alongside solidarity. I – and seemingly everyone else in London – love Mahmoud Darwish, but he was not an inspiration for the play. His poems are neither recited by any of the characters nor set to the sounds of Marcel Khalife as mood music. I am reminded of the dilemma faced by the protagonist in Percival Everett’s blistering novel Erasure. Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison’s writing career has bottomed out – with one reviewer wondering what his reworking of Aeschylus’ The Persians has to do with the African-American experience. He seethes on the sides of the American literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited ‘some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days’. In his rage and despair, Monk rattles off a novel intended to serve as an indictment. However, My Pafology – written under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh – soon becomes a smash hit. It is this very bind – moral, political and artistic in nature – that many Arab artists working in the West find themselves having to negotiate.

  The transnational flows of Arab culture (and capital) are there to be celebrated, but sometimes we take for granted the privileged position afforded to those who manage to position themselves between places – Jerusalem and New York, Ramallah and London. For the most part, these networks are left unchallenged. It is not simply a question of one’s ability to travel freely in an increasingly administered world of militarised borders, but how such a positionality essentially leaves Western culture undisturbed. It fails to appreciate how Western cultures – in the past, but also in the present – are being shaped by young Arabs born and raised in them. These transnational elites may speak of the unruly nature of culture – collapsing racial or national markers – but ultimately, they fall back on traditional ideas of ‘home(land)’. Such an outlook, however, fails to recognise the messiness of cultural formations taking hold outside the region – of what British Arab culture actually looks like, for example. And with respect, it is not shaped by cooking classes or calligraphy workshops organised in particular London enclaves by centres of mutual understanding. For us, it resides in Prince Nassem Hamed’s ‘Thriller’ ring entrance and oversized Adidas leopard-print shorts or with Mighty Moe, the Palestinian member of the Heartless Crew – the iconic London garage motley crew.

  It is this outernational spirit that runs through the spine of PalFest. Although the festival never presumes to replicate the Palestinian experience for the international literary figures it invites to traverse historical Palestine. Neither does it shy away from taking writers – star-studded or not – out of the safe enclaves of hotel lobbies and embassy gardens. The organisers’ radical gesture is to continually unsettle canons, geographies and uncontested cultures. Waiting has become a central feature of contemporary Palestinian life. And I will always cherish a seemingly inconspicuous exchange with a writer I greatly admire. It was early on in the festival. I was a young buck surrounded by acclaimed writers – and as a Palestinian, I was still questioning whether or not my place on the trip was going to waste. But there I was, sat beside China Miéville on the coach, waiting at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Jerusalem, talking Emile Habibi and science fiction. However, it was not until our conversation shifted to our mutual admiration for PhoneShop, the classic British sitcom set in a mobile-phone shop in Sutton, that I fully appreciated the rare conviviality, radical alterity and simple humanism that this remarkable festival affords all those fortunate enough to be invited to take part and share in.

  THIS POEM WILL NOT END APARTHEID

  Remi Kanazi

  this poem

  will not end apartheid

  my words, no matter how beautiful

  clever or carefully strung together

  will not end the occupation

  allow the return of refugees

  or create equality

  within Israeli society

  the status quo is a fantasy

  telling us it’s ok

  to sit on our hands

  call political art propaganda

  rather than calling those

  who politicise our lives

  propagandists

  every American

  should ask this question

  why are mortars and missiles

  devastating open-air prisons

  with money that should be paying

  for our medical expenses?

  to the academics

  and pseudo leftists

  I appreciate your books

  on Israeli massacres

  but you refuse to take

  bullets out of Israeli guns

  with your stances

  the problem is not just the occupation

  or putting a better face on Zionism

  because 750,000 Palestinians

  were displaced

  before those settlements

  were constructed

  half of them before

  Israel was created

  we don’t need another book

  explaining the situation

  we need a lesson plan

  to stop the next bomb

  from dropping

  silence is complicity

  over-intellectualisation tells us

  to theorise on the power of art

  while farmers are kicked off land

  children are stoned

  on the way to school

  people are caged in

  beaten and split

  from loved ones

  blasted and broken

  in blockaded dungeons

  bought and paid for

  with our tax dollars

  we are part of the problem

  that is not theoretical

  it is time

  to boycott all

  Israeli products

  and go to the root

  of the conflict

  every 729

  cultural institution

  and dialogue farce

  from Sabra to Ahava

  Max Brenner to Aroma

  Lev Leviev to SodaStream

  switching drink preferences

  stacks up little to 67 years

  of continued dispossession

  finally

  to the artists

  building bridges

  between apartheid

  and normalisation

  you serve an agenda

  that rebrands colonialism

  as enlightened liberalism

  concerts, ballets, and raves

  in Israel’s Sun City

  a haven and party stop

  for pinkwashers

  who callously ignore

  Palestinian LGBTQ groups

  working against all systems

  of oppression

  Palestinian civil society has spoken

  don’t cross this picket line

  or cash in a paycheck

  signed apartheid

  c
ancel that gig

  put down Stolen Beauty

  and join the rest of us

  on the right side of history

  AN IMAGE

  Geoff Dyer

  What makes this picture stand out from the thousands of others showing the effects of Israel’s assault on Gaza? It was taken by Finbarr O’Reilly on 24 July 2014, in a hospital, after the shelling of a UN-run school where sixteen people were killed. Other images were more heart-rending, showed more appalling scenes of injury and death or provided more comprehensive views of the scale and intensity of destruction. But I kept coming back to this one – partly because I couldn’t work out why I kept coming back to it.

  The answer came as soon as I stopped searching for it: Don McCullin. Specifically his picture of a Vietnamese man crouching with his back to a wall, holding a blood-soaked girl injured in the wake of a US attack in Hue in 1968. The resemblance between the pictures is extraordinary – and, on reflection, completely unextraordinary: when a civilian population is bombed scenes like this are inevitable.

  John Berger refers to the McCullin picture in his well-known essay ‘Photographs of Agony’ (1972). Berger claimed that the publication of images like McCullin’s could be taken either as a sign that people ‘want to be shown the truth’ or that growing familiarity with images of suffering was leading newspapers to compete ‘in terms of ever more violent sensationalism’.

  Rejecting both of these options, Berger concluded that such pictures place events – which are the product of politics – outside the realm of the political, where they become, instead, ‘evidence of the human condition’. They accuse ‘nobody and everybody’.

  It’s a thesis that still merits consideration more than forty years after the essay was written. Shortly after O’Reilly’s picture was published Israel announced that it was ‘investigating’ the accusation that it was responsible for the school shelling. This was to be expected. No government will readily admit that it bombed a school if this is in any way deniable – or even postponable. The calculation is that by the time responsibility is conceded the degree of blame or temperature of outrage – and the attendant political consequences – will have somewhat diminished.