This Is Not A Border

by Ahdaf Soueif

  The actors explain this mystery by saying that the rucksack should be seen as something originating in Israel that’s come the way of Palestinians: it could be a ‘peace’ initiative, say, or a description of their own identity and history that they don’t recognise. However seriously they try to take it, respond to it or make a mark of their own on it, it’s sure to go off in their faces. The other groups, who’ve enjoyed the minimalism of the piece, don’t seem to need the explanation: it’s for Robin and me.

  These raw presentations were worked up in roughly fifteen minutes; some contained the kind of detail you’d only expect to come with the finishing touches. What if we’d had more time? But time in the West Bank is eaten up by the Byzantine demands of the occupation, which interfere with everything, including sitting final exams – any moment now. The rucksack, I notice, as the owner shrugs it onto her back, is full to capacity.

  2009

  The sound system has gone into attack mode. Every time one of my students reaches towards the middle of the table for the biscuits, there is a peal of thunder from the speaker in the ceiling, followed by the sound of supersize rats in a warehouse full of tinfoil. The conversation comes to a halt for a moment, but the students are oblivious: this is a video conference. I’m in a building in Ramallah and they’re fifty miles away in Gaza, with the biscuits in front of them and Israel in between. The sessions have been put together by the Palestine Writing Workshop, a project supported by PalFest. The workshops happen once or twice a year. I’m here to take part in editing and non-fiction sessions. (Non-fiction means journalism, and a bit of memoir: we look at a few models and build from there.) Most of the students are in their twenties; some are doing similar workshops in Arabic, when they’re available; others use the workshops to sharpen their English. This is the second year we’ve tried a video link to Gaza. This year, thanks to the British Council’s facilities, it’s no longer as though we’re shouting into two tin cans joined by a long piece of string.

  A session about images: Y, a journalist, has sent a picture of a blue sky, streaked with cirrus cloud and inscribed with a white arabesque that corkscrews from right to left. From the print I’ve made of the jpeg it might just be a painting. The image, it transpires, is a photograph and Y wrote about it in February: the photo and her text appeared on the website of Target, an alternative outlet for film-makers and journalists covering the Middle East. In Gaza, she writes, ‘people keep talking of a new war . . . About two weeks ago, I saw what looked to me like a confused Israeli pilot flying around in his F16, drawing circles in the sky. People immediately took it as a threat and a signal that war was coming. They even made up memories . . . and were convinced that on 27 December 2008, an Israeli jet, possibly even the same one, drew the same circles in the sky, and that was when war started . . . Well, congratulations Israel for winning the psychological war on Gaza.’ This is the second reference, in the time we’ve spent together on this link, to the confinement and killing of Palestinians in Gaza. The first was from A, who wrote a stoical piece about Operation Cast Lead, quoting a remark by his little brother that the best thing about these terrible days was the splurge of meat-eating. Once the grid was down, all provisions, frozen or refrigerated, had to be eaten before they rotted.

  Last year, when Birzeit put up the workshop link to Gaza and several participants aired their memories of the Israeli offensive, the fury was full on. There’s a sense of narrative distance now. It’s not that things have ‘moved on’ for this year’s participants; more that there’s been a kind of packing down. The ground feels firmer and the writing is freer to roam across it without falling into a bomb crater. The workshop term for this is ‘consolidation’: it’s what people do when they’re staying put, biding their time.

  2011

  DRAWING PALFEST

  Muiz

  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but there is no comparative metric to experiencing something first hand.

  At sixteen years old my identity had already been the subject of debate on a global scale in a post-9/11 world, so much so that I would purchase every major newspaper title each morning on my way to school, in part for information but more so to explore the variability a single story would manifest in the headlines or reportage. It was my introduction not only to the power of language but, more importantly, the image.

  This propelled me to explore ways of introducing Palestine to a wider audience within my final art exam piece. It would be judged not by my professor of seven years, but by an external examiner whom I would never meet. The piece was a twist on Michelangelo’s iconic pietà, with the ivory-white marble replaced with a black cloth draped over a Christendom-like arch, which was then wreathed around the clay-sculpted head and hands of a faceless mother. In her hands lay the limp body of a chicken-wire child, bandaged completely in a pure white shroud made of gauze. The photo of an Israeli soldier, whose outstretched hand nearly eclipsed the photographer’s lens, was printed onto an exhibition stand and placed in front of the artwork, to both distance the viewer from the piece and block a clear view of it.

  By recontextualising an icon of Western art and culture with a narrative often typified by ‘other’ and orientalised language and imagery, I managed to bridge an emotional connection to the situation in Palestine with those who had never heard of it, so much so that the entire faculty of my school came to see it. My initial concern with this attention was calmed by reassuring handshakes for producing something that had sparked a debate among them. A more extreme reaction to my work was by another art student, whose work was exhibited on a wall directly opposite to mine, who, while I was in the room, decided to deface his own abstract art piece by graffitiing a giant yellow star of David over it.

  I was awarded the highest grade possible, 100 per cent, and for me this became not only a first-hand experience of validating the power of the image but, more crucially, the importance of maintaining a level of integrity and conviction in your authorship, no matter the perceived odds against you.

  THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL

  Five years later someone retweeted about @PalFest successfully delivering a shipment of books into Gaza through the British Council. This instantly piqued my interest, as most proclamations of shipments to Palestine that I’d encountered were related to food or charity, and as such were fleeting.

  I tracked down PalFest’s email address and offered to supply more academic books via my university for any future shipments. They assured me that none were needed, but having noticed my email signature told me they needed a designer. The following year, after custom-designing and art-directing their marketing materials, I embarked with PalFest on my first trip to occupied Palestine.

  My first artwork for the PalFest campaign used deconstructed typography of the full festival name in both English and Arabic as a way to announce our existence to both the country and the world. The letters were created using fragmented geometric shapes, each word a different tonal colour from the national flag. I was fascinated by the interpretations people drew from the work, especially by the differences between those of the international and diaspora writers and those of our Palestinian audience. This further asserted the power of the image – that something as deceptively simple as coloured shapes could trigger such significant variability of relatable thought and therefore resonate beyond its base use as an advertisement.

  I also established lifelong relationships in this time – from the local student tour guide who assumed I was a stray student from the university and demanded to know what I was doing alone on the festival tour bus, to my delaying a tour of Nablus because the two volunteer guides had assumed they’d been replaced when they saw me talking about the city with our writers while we waited.

  Those six days were a life-changing experience that both built and broke me. It is the country where I fell in love. It was and always will be home.

  ALL ART IS POLITICAL

  All art is political because those who create art are governed by it, as is
every space that that art may occupy once it is created. So in a country where your birth, existence and even your death is a political act, I understood that PalFest and – more importantly – our audience in Palestine would not benefit from nor appreciate further politicisation of their private spaces by my design work. They are all too aware of the visceral realities of the colonisation and cancerous occupation of Palestine and its unrelenting suffocation of every aspect of their every day.

  Graphic design, or visual communication, is not only the process of effectively articulating a message to an intended audience, but understanding the impact of how it is delivered and its legacy.

  The Palestinians in Palestine need not be lionised, nor do they need to be pitied or preached at. They are people, just like us; it is their dignity and creativity in the face of the brutal threat of oblivion that makes them exceptional and inspirational. They too need respite to reconnect their hearts and minds to beauty, happiness and laughter.

  Nowhere was this better reflected in our design work than when I created the campaign for PalFest’s Gaza debut. The work featured the city’s name rendered in a traditionally cursive, elegant Arabic calligraphic script, which erupted with olive-laden branches. The pride and emotional subtext of the piece proved so popular that we had to print twice as many posters because they were being taken down by passers-by as keepsakes within hours of being put up around the city.

  By reflecting and reinforcing what was inspiring about our audience in Gaza, we refused to imprison and traumatise their imagination and self-image the way Israel has their bodies. When existence is resistance, then every facet of Palestine, from the cuisine, the language, the fashion, the ceramics to the architecture, can and have become politicised. What purpose, then, is a design that would continue to scratch at the open wound of a siege and decades of massacres when aimed at a community experiencing and surviving them?

  We’ve continued to subvert expectations in our work just as the Palestinians subvert the expectations of their colonisers, reflecting our hosts’ playfulness and ingenuity in our campaign visuals and poster artwork. I’m honoured our work continues to be so well received by our family and friends there each year, and hope that we will celebrate and honour them in a free Palestine.

  DIARY

  Deborah Moggach

  Literary festivals are where writers go to whinge. Not to the audience, if they’ve got any sense – why should the paying public feel sorry for people who don’t have to commute to work every day or deal with a ghastly boss?

  But get writers together backstage and they’re off. They moan about their agents and their editors and not seeing their books in bookshops and not getting on Start the Week and only getting one review in the Daily Express – of all newspapers. They moan about literary festivals themselves. About travelling all day to be greeted by an audience of three and a dog, about not getting a fee and being snubbed by a more famous author who’s snaffled the last glass of wine, and of being put up in a B & B with nylon sheets and tinned tomatoes for breakfast.

  How writers moan! Not realising how deeply privileged we are compared to most of humanity. For we are so very lucky – not just as authors, but as human beings. How comfortable and free our lives are, and how much we take for granted! And nothing could throw this into greater relief than travelling to Palestine, where the lives of writers are astonishingly hard. But then so are the lives of everybody else.

  I went there with PalFest back in 2009. It was its second year of celebrating, in Edward Said’s words, ‘the power of culture over the culture of power’. The fifteen other writers included Michael Palin, Claire Messud, Jamal Mahjoub, Abdulrazak Gurnah, the late Henning Mankell and the dazzling poet/performer Suheir Hammad.

  We travelled in from Jordan. After being held for five hours at the checkpoint we arrived in East Jerusalem for our first event, at the Palestinian National Theatre. The audience was just sitting down when armed police barged in and ordered us all out. Despite our protests that we were hardly a dangerous bunch (‘Oh I don’t know,’ whispered Palin. ‘Far too many people were crossing their legs.’) we found ourselves outside on the street, where the French came to our rescue and offered us an alternative venue. So we picked up the plates of food and walked through the streets to the French Cultural Centre garden, where we started the whole thing all over again, with eight police cars parked in the street outside. Dangerous things, poetry readings.

  So began our Kafkaesque journey into the West Bank, a journey punctuated by checkpoints where teenage Israeli soldiers smoked in our faces and disembodied Israeli voices ordered us through holding pens like cattle in an abattoir, where the high, hideous concrete wall sliced through communities, cutting off farmers from their land and children from their schools, a barrier which was graffiti’d with paintings of trees and the pitiful CAN I HAVE MY BALL BACK? For a newcomer, the brutality was hard to comprehend, for however much you read about something, nothing prepares you for the reality.

  The next evening, in Ramallah, we listened to Suad Amiry. She’s an architect but has written a hilarious best-seller called Sharon and My Mother-in-law, about the absurdities of everyday life in the occupied territories. She talked most eloquently about the disconnections of time and geography in a place where the journey to Nablus, which should take an hour, can take all day. She told us how time is measured by curfews and checkpoints, themselves so arbitrary that people are constantly disorientated and can rely on nothing. Where roads are constantly blocked, disappeared and reinvented. Where everything conspires to obliterate certainties and instil a low thrum of fear and humiliation. Where you can never, ever, simply get on with your life. (If you want to see this thrilling woman in action, log on to her TED talk.) The only way to cope, she says, is through laughter; it’s the only thing left.

  We were blown away by meeting her, and she was the first of many. As the days passed we travelled around in our bus, stopping at various towns, where we met students, did workshops and readings, listened to poets and musicians, talked for hours and ate delicious food. Everywhere we were given the warmest of welcomes and were astonished by the courage, humour and resilience of those we met. ‘We don’t have the luxury of despair,’ one man told me.

  One memorable afternoon Raja Shehadeh, whose book Palestinian Walks is an elegy to a lost landscape, took us for a walk through the Ramallah hills, now designated Zone C, which meant we all could be arrested. It’s the most beautiful biblical landscape, filled with wild flowers and the occasional tortoise, which wisely carries its own tank on its back. There was a surreal moment when Michael Palin told me about being crucified in The Life of Brian. They all had little bicycle seats to sit on when on their crosses. The real thing happened, of course, only a few miles away.

  This ancient landscape is now blighted by illegal Israeli settlements: huge concrete blocks of flats sitting on the tops of the hills, dominating the countryside and built so the occupants have no sight or connection with the local people living below. The roads to them are forbidden to Palestinians. In the past, we were told, there was more interaction between Israelis and Palestinians, but now they are so separated that it has become easier for the occupied population to be demonised – faceless people can so quickly become the enemy.

  Not only are the Palestinians cut off from the future; they’re cut off from the past. In the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, a few days later, a youth-club worker told us how he had managed to take some children out of the occupied territories and behind the Green Line into Israel, to visit the lost family villages they had never seen, which their parents had never seen, and how they filled plastic bottles with fresh spring water to take back to their grandparents, who hadn’t set foot in their homes for sixty years.

  Our last visit was to Hebron, an ancient and beautiful town where Israeli settlers have actually moved into the centre, taking over the upper floors of the buildings above the bazaar, which over the past few years has slowly been throttled by intimidation and lack o
f access. There were 101 checkpoints in the city, and many places are now unreachable due to roadblocks. Outside the mosque only two Palestinian shops remained. In one the old man burst into tears when talking to us. ‘I shall never leave,’ he said, while the Settler Centre opposite blared out nationalist Zionist songs, drowning out the call to prayer from the mosque. An old and enduring way of life is slowly being exterminated by this ethnic cleansing.

  The only people who could walk freely were the settlers, who had four security guards to every person and strolled around with large dogs. One of them was filming us. When asked why, he replied, ‘I’m filming for God.’ When we asked, ‘What sort of God would permit this?’ he replied, ‘God wants me to photograph you so you can go to hell.’

  When we returned to East Jerusalem for our final event we found the theatre closed again, and we had to decamp to the British Council garden. After only seven days this seemed perfectly normal.

  I can hardly describe the horrors of what is going on. It reduced many of us to tears, and of course the situation has deteriorated since then. As we left I thought of my favourite New Yorker cartoon. Two men are walking away from the crucifixion. One says to the other, ‘Why don’t we just put this behind us and move on?’

  2009

  UNTIL IT ISN’T

  Remi Kanazi

  death becomes exciting

  tolls, pictures, videos

  tweeting carnage

  instagramming collapse

  hearts racing to break

  24-hour entertainment

  every glimpse, splinter

  and particle of pain

  jammed into torsos

  and cheekbones

  loved ones

  want to sit

  for a minute