Romeo and Juliet in Palestine
Page 11
We read most of the first scene, skipping through a couple of longer speeches. When we got to the point where Horatio and others each say the ghost of Hamlet’s father is ‘here’ three times and then ‘gone,’ I drew a picture of the Globe Theatre. We discussed how it might be utilised in the scene, for example with the characters each blocking one of the three exits at the back of the stage and the ghost disappearing through the trapdoor.
I had begun to feel a little high on the energy of the class and I felt the students had started to understand some of what we were discussing. I checked the time and then asked if there were any questions. I was expecting us to wrap up at that point but, to my delight, one woman put her hand up immediately. She had not spoken before, and now she took a deep breath.
‘What is your name?’ she asked me.
I had started to wonder whether Marcellus was being more literal than is normally supposed: maybe it really smells in Denmark. One of the peculiarities of life in the West Bank is the endless piles of rubbish you encounter: at the sides of streets, in gardens, even on rooftops. A young American who worked at Bard told me that when he first arrived his Palestinian friends used to laugh at him if he put a sweet wrapper in his pocket instead of throwing it on the street. I was told there were three reasons for the accumulation of rubbish: the lack of proper funds for refuse collection from the Palestinian Authority; a culture in which people kept their own house tidy and clean but did not worry about the public space; and a general depression about the situation. Apparently, a huge effort had been made to clean up the West Bank in the 1990s, but the situation had deteriorated again. There was also a story that the Palestinians had to share rubbish dumps with the Israeli settlements, which were often full, and that the Palestinians could not afford to pay for extra space.
The West Bank had started to bleed into my reading of Hamlet in other ways too. I was asked to give a lecture on the play to the first-year students at Bard. I had been reading an essay by Hannah Arendt called ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’ and I started to construct a reading of the play around it. Arendt claims that it is characteristic of thinking that it makes each of us two people instead of one and that it plunges us into indecision. I divided up one of Hamlet’s soliloquies into two parts to try and illustrate this to the students:
Hamlet 1:
To be
Hamlet 2:
Or not to be
Hamlet 1:
—that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Hamlet 2:
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep—
Hamlet 1:
no more—
Hamlet 2:
and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep—
To sleep, perchance to dream
Hamlet 1:
Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Hamlet 1/2:
Must give us pause
Hamlet is in two minds—one urging him to continue, no matter what ‘outrageous fortune’ throws at him; the other urging him to ‘end’ his troubles in death. Yet the two minds together ‘must pause’ in their debate, because neither of them is dominant.
One of the central points of Arendt’s essay is that, however dangerous thinking may be, it is equally dangerous not to think: ‘By shielding people against the dangers of examination, it teaches them to hold fast to whatever the prescribed rules of conduct may be at a given time in a given society […] In other words, they get used to never making up their minds.’ I suggested to the students that in Hamlet we have a perfect example of this. Osric, a courtier who enters briefly at the end of the play, agrees with anything Hamlet tells him, including a series of contradictory statements about the weather:
Hamlet:
Put your bonnet to his right use: ‘tis for the head.
Osric:
I thank your lordship, it is very hot.
Hamlet:
No, believe me, ‘tis very cold, the wind is northerly.
Osric:
It is indifferent cold, my lord, indeed.
Hamlet:
But yet, methinks, it is very sultry and hot for my complexion.
Osric:
Exceedingly my lord, it is very sultry…
Osric’s attitude will keep him safe in his own society, but might also lead him to follow any orders from his superiors, no matter how they would contradict reality. Osric is thus an example of what Arendt famously saw in the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, someone who is capable of evil because of an inability to think for themselves. In contrast, thinking can put you at odds with your society, your friends—or even with yourself. Hamlet’s tragedy is not that he cannot make up his mind, as is often claimed, but that he is determined to make up his own mind, whatever the cost.
Just before the start of a Special Topics class at around this time, there was a sound like an ambulance siren outside. It was constant and it did not seem to move nearer or further away. Inas had arrived early and she told me that a prisoner had died. His name was Maysara Abuhamdia and he was suffering from cancer. I read later that his diagnosis had been delayed because he was given limited access to doctors in gaol. I started the class by asking the students to tell me about what had happened. There was some confusion about whether the man who had died had also been a hunger striker. Tariq explained that if a prisoner had been denied their humanity, going on hunger strike was a way of reclaiming some basic dignity, because it was the one thing left over which you had any choice: ‘Only a human can refuse food, an animal would not.’
I asked the students whether they thought there would be another strike at the university, because of the death. ‘Probably,’ said one student. ‘Hopefully,’ said another. I suggested there were other ways of responding to this kind of incident, which would be less disruptive of their studies. I was imagining that we could have a teach-in, abandoning normal classes but discussing what was happening. ‘But then we would accept that this is normal,’ Inas said.
In that class, we were reading some of the Walid Khazendar poems, which I had posted online during the strike. I gave the students a handout which linked the use of the word ‘rights’ in Paulin’s translations of the poems to the UN Declaration of Human Rights. ‘Belongings’ especially, with its opening question—‘Who entered my room when I was out?’—seemed to speak to Article 12 of the Declaration: ‘No-one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his property, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour or reputation.’ I encouraged the students to follow the link I had given them and to read the Declaration. ‘But why would I read it,’ asked Tariq, ‘when so many countries ignore it?’
A week or so later, I gave the students Franz Kafka’s short story ‘A Hunger Artist’, which tells the story of a talented performer who finds that interest in his art, of starving himself, rapidly declines. At the end, the hunger artist is asked why he insisted on starving himself, long after the crowds had gone away. He replies:
Because I couldn’t find a food which tasted good to me. If I had found that, believe me, I would not have made a spectacle of myself and would have eaten to my heart’s content, like you and everyone else.
The discussion was rapid and confusing, with some of the students talking so quickly that it was hard for me to grasp all of the points that they wanted to make.
Ruba was a slight young woman, with long black hair, who would tilt her head to the right as she spoke and look up from under her fringe. She could be unusually forceful. ‘For our hunger strikers,’ she said, ‘there is a point to their actions. But for him, it is pointless
.’ Tariq said the story was ‘suggestive,’ and we discussed the fact that it was not written in a realistic style. Someone said that the story was about the value of human life. Haytham picked up Ruba’s question: ‘But what’s the point of any of the stories we read?’ At first, I thought the question was directed at me. But he and Ruba started to debate angrily with one another. Haytham insisted that the story was relevant. He was close to being unmanageable, and at one point seemed closed to tears. Then he did turn to me, and asked why I chose the stories for the course.
Several students stayed to keep the debate going at the end, and Wafa said that it would be good to have more ‘real’ debates, because normally people tended to make one point, either agree or disagree, and that was it. I was reminded of the limited debate we’d had around the Maupassant story earlier in the term. Yet I also felt uneasy, as though I had encouraged emotion in the class that I had not fully understood.
When I got back to the office, I ran into Wafa, Tariq, Haytham and a couple of their friends in the hallway outside. They offered me a cigarette and then carried on with a conversation they were having. It seemed to be connected to the Kafka story.
Eventually Tariq turned to me and said: ‘Why did you give us that story?’
One of his friends leaned towards me. ‘He thinks you just wanted them to make a point about the hunger strikers.’
I admitted that I tried to pick stories that I thought were relevant. ‘But the worst kind of class would be one where I know exactly what you’re going to say beforehand.’
Haytham spoke about a post that another lecturer had made on Facebook, advocating that Al-Quds should be teaching students how to resist the occupation. ‘This would be just perfect for the Israelis, then they can bomb the university.’ I asked whether students ever had debates about the curriculum, or the occupation, in class. They said that they could not discuss these issues in class, because some students were affiliated to different factions—such as Hamas, Fatah, or the Muslim Brotherhood—and they were afraid of spies, including Israeli ones. Tariq said that about 70% of Palestinians were not affiliated, and yet these groupings dominated.
Haytham told a story about coming back from a party in Bethlehem and being stopped by Israeli soldiers. He was sober, but his friends were drunk. ‘One of my friends said that there had been drunk Israeli girls at the party, and a soldier put his gun to the boy’s head and said: “Say that again.” So my other friend got involved. And the two of them were taken away to that room and beaten up.’ He and Tariq exchanged a glance.
As the conversation moved on, Tariq argued vigorously that you could not blame everything on Israel and the occupation. ‘Look at what has been achieved in Israel, compared to how little we had done in the time before.’ Haytham disagreed. He said several times, ‘I am not living’ and then he insisted to the others: ‘We are not living.’
I said that I needed to go and catch the servees back to Ramallah and Haytham walked with me to the front gate. He was still furious with Ruba. He said other students were speaking in class only to show they were participating, and that all they wanted was to write down the answers, and that they would then get better marks than him. I thought Ruba was a strange target for his ire. They were well-matched as adversaries, and I was concerned that he did not always listen, especially to the women in the class. I told Haytham that one of my colleagues at home told his first years that 80% of what they learned during their degree would not be assessed.
I knew that if Haytham had been a student at home, I might have pushed him, in a different way, to work harder. But I did not know what motivation I could offer him that would not raise his hopes unfairly. It seemed as though he just wanted to talk.
As we walked towards the entrance to campus, Haytham told me that his father had died when he was finishing school and that he was not always able to visit his grave, because it was on the other side of the Wall. ‘Sometimes a soldier will let me through,’ he said.
‘Once, I was walking home at 2am and some soldiers stopped me. I had my rucksack with my Playstation in it and one of them said: “What’s in there? Put it on the ground.” So I bent down, and he kicked me in the ass, and then they kicked me down the hill.’
11
Split the air
I was sitting in the sunshine, before the final Hamlet class, when I felt a change in the air invading my eyes and nose. I saw people scurrying inside at every corner of the square, and I followed some other lecturers into Bard. There were students dotted throughout the building, in pairs and small groups, some of whose eyes were streaming. Some kids—either from the university or a local school, depending on who I asked—had thrown stones at Israeli soldiers, who had responded with tear gas. Only six students came to the class. Hamdi turned up briefly, but then he ran off, saying breathlessly: ‘We have to defend our country.’ I stopped the discussion after 45 minutes and went back to the English Department, where I ran into Tariq. He told me that the tear gas canisters had landed at the feet of a group of students, who had passed out.
For a while, it seemed as though almost every class was disrupted. In one Special Topics seminar, Tariq stood up and left the room, followed by two other men, in response to some sort of signal from the corridor. I opened the door, to find Tariq standing outside, smoking and red-eyed. He apologised and explained that the father of a friend of his had died. He had to leave to pay his respects before the funeral, which would follow very quickly.
Another class was cancelled because of a union meeting. We had not been paid again, and there were rumours that there would be another strike. I had told the students they should either turn up anyway and hand in their assignment or e-mail it to me. One woman, Dalia, said that she lived in Ramallah and I agreed to collect her essay from her uncle’s jewellery shop, which was opposite the ice-cream store on Rukab, one of the main streets. When I got there, he waved to me from the window. I sat in a corner of the shop, next to a small work station, with a pan on a hob and a soldering iron. He made me a coffee and his teenage daughter told me about her school. She said that she was hoping to study sciences, which I had been told was what the brightest students were encouraged to do. (At Bard, I had been assigned a teaching assistant who was studying medicine but who read Hamlet with more hunger than the rest of the class.)
When I had first given the students this assignment, their response had been grumpy and reluctant. I had given them a list of ten questions, and asked them either to write an essay in response to one question or a series of five short responses. ‘We do not like this sort of assignment,’ one woman said. The questions were deliberately tied to the discussions we’d had about reading. For example, I asked the students to write about a character with whom they felt empathy, a story they did not finish, how the place where they read a story affected it, or about how they would re-write one of the stories. One student said, in a tone of bewilderment, ‘But this means we have to have read all the stories?’ and I replied ‘Yes!’ to general laughter.
This turned out to be the assignment where there were the biggest problems with plagiarism. I found that three of the students had plagiarised one answer from the internet, and one student had copied everything; each of her answers read like a generic summary of the story, and it quickly showed up when I searched online. The three students who had copied one answer denied it at first, then they admitted it in part, and finally they tried to get a second chance (‘Please, doctor, please—give me one more chance’). Two of the students cried, and there was something childlike in their bargaining. I reassured them that they had still passed the assignment, but I asked them to think about whether it showed respect for me to hand in an assignment in that form—and then to deny doing it. The students were baffled by my response, since it seemed to be a criticism of them for a lack of courtesy, which they hotly denied.
I knew the likelihood was that I had missed other instances of plagiarism during the semester. I wondered often if I was being strict enough with the stu
dents, and if my policy of trying to encourage some responsibility in them actually had the opposite effect. It wasn’t the only time I questioned myself. I found that I would quickly become paranoid if attendance was poor at seminars. I would search my notes to think about what we had discussed in the previous seminar, or what they had been reading, to see if there might be a problem I had not anticipated. When Haytham stopped attending for two weeks, I was convinced I had offended him. I was constantly expecting to be caught short by my lack of local knowledge, or to discover that I had made an assumption that would turn out to be erroneous, or even offensive.
I was surprised to find that the assignment where everything was plagiarised was by Lika’, who was one of the sharpest students in the class, and who could sometimes be quite severe on her fellow students (and me). She was absent when I was returning the assignments, so I e-mailed her about it, and she came to see me, close to tears but putting on a brave face. She quickly conceded her mistake. I asked her why she had done it. Lika’ explained that her brother had been arrested in the week the assignment was due in, and that her mother had been ill. She was distressed, because she knew that she would fail the course if she got no marks for this assignment and then she would not be able to graduate.