Leaving Beirut

by Ghoussoub, Mai;

  Traitors presuppose a climate of war, and informers a climate of fear. They are partners to tyranny and grow within the social context that encourages them. Julian’s reasons for betraying his Christian king were justified in his eyes by a higher set of values. In our own century it has been often in the name of some ideology that such tyranny has been exerted, creating heroes false and real, and traitors and informers of all kinds. Let us leave aside the Nazi ideology – Nazism excluded millions from showing courage or cowardliness, generosity or greed, and did not even give them the chance to be honest or opportunistic, and in this Nazism was outside humanity.

  But what about other ideologies? Even some that claim to follow the road of liberalism. What about the Stalinist purges and the McCarthyite witch-hunts? Both were products of societies that taught their youth that there were times, abhorrent times, when Christian faiths had forgotten about toleration and those times were to be seen as the Dark Ages. Those times turned the defenders of faith into torturers for an absolute truth. Those old times were full of persecutors of the freedoms that people took with their souls and their beliefs. These were the times when Muslims could take pride in themselves for being more civilized and tolerant than the Catholic West, which was ruled by a church that turned its members into torturers, informants and bodies burning on crosses. Against memories of this kind the New World could hold up its liberal system of politics, while the Communist regime sought to create a New Man.

  It took a few centuries for this memory to fade before the needs of the rulers and their supporters asserted themselves. Then, both in the Soviet Union and in the United States, witch-hunting became acceptable again. The faith that lay behind this witch-hunt was not religion, but something similar – an exacerbated nationalism, or the purity of one’s fidelity to the ideology of the system in place. And it went hand in hand with an obsession with security, meaning that any thinking that did not fit absolutely with the dominant thought was to be eradicated. In Russia, this purification killed millions. In the United States, it meant the loss of jobs and dignity for only a few hundred. The difference is enormous and essential, but the spirit behind these purges is a reminder that we are not immune to the re-emergence of times when heroes and traitors proliferate.

  Behind both purges lies not only a pursuit of ideological righteousness but also an obsession with traitors. In the Soviet Union, the belief in this truth meant that many ex-heroes of the revolution ended up admitting to being traitors to their nation. People who had resisted the oppression and the tortures of the Tsarist regime found their will broken when the system they fought for and believed in demonized them, and they ended up admitting to absurd crimes or accusing their colleagues of having betrayed the Communist cause. The famous case of Pavlik Morozov, the fourteen-year-old child who denounced his father to the Stalinist authorities speaks for those terrible days. Pavlik declared that his father, who was a president of a kolkhoz, had helped the Kulaks to evade the state authorities. He was turned into a national hero, a myth of fidelity to Communist values. He was seen as a great hero, because he had done what Gorky recommended: encouraging pioneers in the new generations to ignore parenthood based on blood relations and make them discover parenthood through the spirit. Gorky hoped that an ‘engineering of the soul’ might achieve this. The film-makers rose to a request to direct a film that would honour the boy’s exploit. The film was never finished because the authorities found it too sophisticated for the purpose of propaganda. Molozov himself was assassinated by members of the families of the kulaks whom his father, he claimed, had helped to escape. And there a fable of heroism and betrayal is brought to a most sinister end.

  The United States during the 1950s was not a totalitarian society, nor even a dictatorship, but it still fell into that dark gulf which societies fall into at some point in their history, when unhealthy passions take hold and the primitive instinct of annihilating ‘the Other’ turns into a crusade. These societies act as if they are at war, even when actual war is not a prospect. In the USA, too, informers were turned into heroes; and people who believed in loyalty and solidarity and did not want to harm their friends ended up being excluded. Here, too, people – mainly intellectuals and artists in this instance – reacted according to their nature and their beliefs to a situation that they could not control. Some with more or less courage, others with more or less cowardice.

  Elia Kazan chose to cooperate with the un-American Activities Committee. He admitted past membership of the Communist Party, and named names. On 12 April 1952 he explained in the New York Times why he had done so: far from being an informer, he wrote, his action had been that of a man fighting for democracy. He declared that liberals ought to speak out, because secrecy was only beneficial to the communists, who had systematically raped the daily practices of democracy to which he adhered, and into which he had been trained.

  A year or so later, Albert Einstein, also in the name of democracy, printed a desperate call to the intellectuals in the same newspaper asking them to refuse to cooperate, in the spirit of Ghandian resistance. Intellectuals, he said, should be ready to go to jail, to be ruined financially and to sacrifice their personal well-being for the cultural well-being of their country.

  What Kazan forgot to mention was that what was going on in the US was similar in its methods to what totalitarian regimes do all the time – divide their people into angels and devils, and create heroes, traitors, collaborators and victims. All in the name of some higher truth – a truth that is religious in nature even if it claims to be secular. Our modern societies may not care much about Florinda’s virginity or El Cid’s dilemmas between his love for Ximena and the duty he had to avenge his father’s honour. But they still face dilemmas in which other things are at stake – things that bring back the language of accusation and the terminology of praise. A language that is far from dead.

  1. Girgi Zaydan, Fath al-Andalus, Dar Maktabat al-Hayat, Beirut n. d.

  2. Pierre Corneille, The Cid, tr. John Cairncross, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1975.

  Symbols with Shaven Heads

  Without you, Mme Nomy, we might never have learnt at such an early age about the French resistance to the German occupation. You told us about the struggles and sacrifices of those who had fought the terror and the cruelty. You told us many stories about the fate of the victims. You read many poems that I was to return to later, searching for soothing words in the days of despair when war was killing on our own streets. What you did not tell your students, however, was how some of the victims reacted. Let me tell you a human tale narrated in black and white. Bear with me, for it is a long story. Revealed by a photographer who created it in a fraction of a second.

  A few months ago I attended an exhibition of Magnum photographers. I came across Robert Capa’s haunting photograph depicting the tondue (shaved woman) of Chantres. For me it was a reminder that the sad game of victims and victimizers is as old as history itself. When you look at the picture you know instantly who is the focus. She is in the middle. She is as centred as the image of Christ in depictions of the crucifixion. However, despite the centrality of the tondue, the image is not univocal. Its message is more complicated, more ambiguous than that of the crucifixion scene with Christ in the middle and a thief on either side. In fact, all the characters are central. They each have a role to play. The victim is to be found everywhere, in each one of them, and there is a constant question mark over who exactly are the victimizers.

  A picture shot in a fragment of a second tells a dramatic story of heroism and cowardice, of pardon and revenge, at a moment in European history. The struggle for survival in the midst of cruelty, and the cruelty inherited and internalized by the survivors themselves. A picture in black and white, catching its subjects just after the world had been divided by World War II. Looking at Capa’s pictures, I know now why black and white pictures are more effective: in wars and revolutions there is no place for nuance. The line separating life from death, cruelty from compassion and frie
nd from enemy is either horrifically black or unbearably white.

  Her name is not to be told. This is as far as compassion goes. Her shaved head tells us all we need know about her. Her shaved head is there to be exhibited, like the hanging bodies at public executions. This woman, though, is not to be killed. She is to be humiliated. Her function in this performance is to exorcize the frustrations of the war’s starved and exhausted survivors.

  She is holding her baby. With a direct gaze she looks at the new life she brought into the world during the war. The father was possibly German. We can’t tell if it is a look of love, that of an ordinary mother, or whether she is directing her gaze at the only place where she will not meet judgemental faces. Or maybe she is doing what they want her to do – looking at the baby as testimony of her treachery. Wherever we look at the other players in this performance our eye always returns to the tondue, to her shaven head. She is the focus of all eyes, with one exception – the old man at the front of the picture. He is carrying somebody’s belongings in a large bag. Whose? There is a puzzled expression on his face. He is the only one apart from the tondue and her baby who is not expressing enjoyment or curiosity. He looks slightly ashamed. Perhaps that is the way that we should all feel as we look at this dreadful, farcical spectacle.

  The setting is carnivalesque. Most of the actors are enjoying the festival. Women, mostly undernourished and poorly dressed, are enjoying another woman’s humiliation. The form of the humiliation is not bloody. Rather it is consciously directed against what is seen socially as the essence of femininity – the woman’s hair. Or her lack of it. Children are brought along, either because the mothers didn’t want to leave them alone at home or, more likely, so that they too can enjoy the show. The same happens when there is a carnival in town. The same happens in countries that carry out executions by hanging on Sundays. Fathers bring their children early, very early, in order to get a good place and the best view of the kicked-away chair and the distorted, agonized body.

  In this snapshot fresco Robert Capa tells the story of all the tondues. He also tells us the story of all the others – all of us – when, during a moment of ugliness, we choose to share in the strength of the winner, and bury our own shame, doubts and anxieties in the savage ritual of punishment and the taking of revenge.

  Who is this tondue? Some remnant of human decency has worked to erase her name and the names of all other tondues like her. Somebody would have pointed a finger at her at the moment when Chartres was liberated in August 1944. ‘Look,’ they would have said, ‘she is not skinny like us. She went to bed with a German. We suffered, we resisted, we were honourable French citizens, and we want to show it by seeing others being dishonoured. We had to lie low during the occupation, and we grieved in silence, but now we want to yell and shout our lungs out. We have been insulted by the occupier, now we want to insult somebody ourselves. We are not heartless … Look at this picture … the atmosphere is that of a village fête … Look how many of us are laughing and smiling. We’re not burning witches here, we’re just playing at it. The tondue will not be hurt physically, because we are not torturers. She will just be shamed. And our children who have been brought to watch will see that we are proud and upstanding. They will finally have a different image of us from all those years when we kept our heads lowered and our voices hushed.’

  Capa narrows the angle at the back of the image, upsetting the laws of architectural perspective. The French flag stands guard over the crowd. This whole bizarre procession is in honour of that flag. The ritual is thus based on symbols. Symbols help to exorcize feelings. Here the age-old game of betrayal, shame, revenge and false heroism unfolds between the flag and the tondue. Between collaboration and victory, between fear and cowardice. Where is the true Résistant? I see no faces that speak of conviction in this picture. Perhaps the Resistance fighters did not need such mean evidence of their victory over Nazism. And where are the pretty French women we saw in the photos of civilians fleeing the bombs? Even then they had found time to dress well, to put on their high heels and their elegant hats. But in this carnival, this witch hunt, this pitiful charade of justice, the women have not bothered about their looks. Instead of high heels and nylon stockings they wear aprons over their dresses, and sandals and socks. You dress nicely when you are running for your life. You don’t bother to look presentable and pretty when you celebrate a ritual of ugliness. You want to exhibit your misery, not run away from it.

  The French collaboration with the Nazis was a dreadful story. But the victory celebrations were not always virtuous either. Where Hitler’s genocide was engineered according to the most modern methods and techniques of the industrial age, the parades of the victors often appeared more inspired by the Middle Ages. All the shame, all the suffering inflicted by the occupation, the frustration that people had to endure, was to be exorcized in this procession, where the sexual and the political were conflated to form the horrible image of the ‘sexual collaborator’. A witch, a traitor, a threatening female.

  Recently, during the celebrations surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of the Normandy landings, many spectres were unearthed. Questions about the collaboration of the French, the responsibility of the Germans and the ‘heroism’ of the Allied forces assailed us from all sides. I am sure, Mme Nomy, that you were as hooked to the TV set as I was, and as addicted as I was to all the newspaper articles that looked back at the history of World War II. Suddenly we were transported back into what we had come to think of as a fading world of black and white. Questions like ‘How dare the French, who were the first collaborators, refuse to allow the Germans to participate in the celebration of the victory over the Nazis?’ were asked by a few journalists. Or with more assurance, phrases such as ‘The Germans have not yet paid for their crimes’ were uttered in the course of the martial celebration in the mass media. Fifty years later, people were still not immune to generalizing vocabularies. If we believe that lack of nuance is the hallmark of times of turmoil, wars and revolutions, and that a world in the midst of upheavals needs easy explanations for things, in which ‘History is written in capital letters’, then we need only look at photographic documents that are in black and white in order to begin to understand how all this could have happened.

  Capa turns his camera into an eye that scrutinizes the human predicament. For Capa knew, as John Steinbeck put it so lucidly, that ‘one cannot photograph war, for war is mainly emotion.’ So Capa photographed the effects of war. His camera searched for images of betrayal and cowardice as much as of heroism and generosity. What constitutes his photos are the same ingredients that determined our human history. We carry these ingredients with us just as we carry our own bodies in which both agility and awkwardness combine. When we punish traitors we are fighting the temptation of the traitor within us. When we worship heroes, we are wanting the excellence that is in them to arise from where it lies within us too.

  The tondue is an easy target for the exorcism of our fears and frustrations. All the more so because she is female and entangled in the most uncontrollable issues of human life – death and sexual desire. Her persecution is that of a ‘criminal’, who is also a victim, by a crowd of the righteous. Their self-assurance is bolstered by their numbers in a mechanism as old as time itself. Adulterous women were – and in some parts of the world still are – punished in the same manner, and here the method is used on women who are judged to have committed adultery against the whole nation. In this photograph fear has evaporated with the defeat of Germany, so the masses can afford the joyful carnival atmosphere that Capa has caught with his camera. Capa’s photography tells us shrewdly, and in an austere and dignified way, about the effect of war and its humiliations. He speaks through the expressions on the faces of his subjects. He speaks by making us see faces that are distressing to look at.

  Capa uses his camera in the same way that Zola used words. When I read Germinal as a teenager I felt the violence of war (Zola’s class war), and frustration, before I act
ually understood the concepts behind the book. For weeks I would wake in the middle of the night with images of the women tearing the shopkeeper to pieces. The shopkeeper symbolized the root of the miners’ starvation. He had to be dehumanized physically, by dehumanized masses, and forced to eat wood, in order to assuage their demonizing hunger.

  Later, when I became part of the Left movement I always felt somehow uneasy among the crowds at demonstrations. I would fight my fear, my Germinal memories, by screaming the slogans all the louder. Like all real artists, Zola had influenced me in contradictory ways. I was going to revolt against injustice and exploitation, but I would fear the victims’ eventual metamorphosis. Victims all too easily conditioned to become victimizers. To make his point, Zola had chosen the weakest, oldest woman and had her doing something dreadful – holding the shopkeeper’s amputated sex aloft like a trophy. Fortunately in Capa’s photograph there is no blood. The attack on the sexuality of the woman traitor is symbolic. It is her hair, the symbol of her femininity, that will fall before the eyes of the crowd.

  The famous French singer Arletty, to whom it is said we owe the everlasting rouge baiser lipstick (she had to find a lipstick that would survive the multitude of kisses she distributed during her show, many of which went to the German officers who were being entertained in occupied Paris), was too powerful to be a tondue. On hearing of the fate meted out to women accused of ‘sexual collaboration’ she declared ironically: ‘Quoi! On veut se mêler de nos affaires de cul maintenant?’ (‘What! They want to interfere in the business of our cunts now?’)

  Eluard’s anger at the fate of the tondues came out in the form of a moving poem. A poem that was influential, given that it came from a communist at a time when the communists were in a winning position. In condemning the acts of revenge perpetrated against those poor women, he lamented the fate of womanhood as a whole – the fate of beauty, as he put it, perhaps a touch awkwardly, in that pre-feminist age: