Abstract: In the hands of Palestinian artists, the concept of bearing witness not only serves as a means of recording a past tragedy but also involves a complex.
SAGE Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC
Bearing witness in Palestinian resistance literature TAHRIR HAMDI Abstract: In the hands of Palestinian artists, the concept of bearing witness not only serves as a means of recording a past tragedy but also involves a complex repertoire of strategies, including interrogating the past, recreating it and, most importantly, forging resistance against the assassination of liberation itself. This article examines how artists of resistance, such as Naji Al Ali, Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani, use the concept of bearing witness to tragedy as a tool of resistance and to guard against the idea of liberation itself dying. It is argued that the state of Israel has used assassination as a means of extinguishing the will of the Palestinian people to resist, targeting both political leaders of resistance movements as well as cultural and literary figures. Keywords: assassination policy, ethnic cleansing, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, Naji Al Ali, Nakba, Palestine
‘One nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.’ Arthur Koestler1 ‘The dual injustice of exile and occupation could not break the will of a people bent on achieving freedom, dignity and redemption of history.’ Mahmoud Darwish2 Tahrir Hamdi is associate professor of postcolonial literature in the English language and literature department at the Arab Open University, Jordan. We are grateful to the Naji Al Ali family for permission to publish the cartoons reproduced in this article. Race & Class Copyright © 2011 Institute of Race Relations, Vol. 52(3): 21–42 10.1177/0306396810390158 http://rac.sagepub.com
22 Race & Class 52(3) The tragedy of Palestine is rooted in an international historical process which can be traced back through several important events, such as the 1897 Zionist conference in Basle, Switzerland, the US entry into the first world war in 1916, which made it possible for Britain to be awarded the mandate for Palestine,3 the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and, possibly, even a literary event which preceded all of the above – the publication of George Eliot’s 1876 novel Daniel Deronda without which, as Kenneth M. Newton believes, ‘the state of Israel might not exist’.4 And, ever since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the story of Palestine has been a long narrative of massacres, land confiscation, dispossession, deportation and assassination. In her provocatively entitled article, ‘They had to die: assassination against liberation’, Victoria Brittain explains how, in general, assassination aims at destroying resistance movements, thus sapping the will of a people to resist and forcing them to accept the status quo. Brittain states: ‘The assassination campaign by the apartheid regime aimed to take out the movement’s best brains and to sap the will-power of the rank and file to organise against apartheid.’5 This, of course, applies more emphatically to the Palestinian situation, as Brittain explains, especially as the economically and positionally strategic ‘Middle East’ has historically been the most colonised part of the world and, even more importantly, Israel’s policies have always gone unchecked in a world marked by power politics and double standards.6 Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law and practice at Princeton University and the UN rapporteur on human rights abuses in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, agrees with Brittain’s assertion of Israel’s flagrant impunity and the appalling Palestinian tragedy, as clearly stated in his 2007 article, ‘Slouching toward a Palestinian holocaust’, in which he compares the Palestinian situation to other world tragedies: ‘But Gaza is morally far worse, although mass death has not yet resulted. It is far worse because the international community is watching the ugly spectacle unfold while some of its most influential members actively encourage and assist Israel in its approach to Gaza. Not only the United States, but also the European Union, are complicit ….’7 It is interesting to note that Falk’s words were written before Israel’s most recent war on Gaza in 2008–9. The 2008–9 offensive on Gaza underscores the aims of an assassination policy. What could be the aim of Israel’s use of non-conventional weapons such as Dense Inert Metal Explosives, white phosphorous and possibly even uraniumbased weapons? This Israeli version of ‘shock and awe’ is an attempted assassination of liberation (to alter Brittain’s title a little) by which it hopes to kill the will of a people to resist, not simply root out Hamas or some of its leaders. Israel’s impunity is an international licence to kill. And, for that reason, Palestinian leaders, civilians, writers and artists ‘had to die’. With the assassination of such people as the novelist, short story writer and essayist Ghassan Kanafani, the cartoonist Naji Al Ali and the poet Kamal Nasir, one has to ask why specifically did these people have to die? Barbara Harlow asks a similar question in her 1996 book After Lives: legacies of revolutionary writing: ‘What is the task of the political artist/the artist politician?
Tahrir Hamdi: Bearing witness in Palestinian resistance literature 23 And why should it get them killed?’8 Before Harlow attempts an answer, she borrows the definition of assassination provided by the political scientists Havens, Leiden and Schmitt: ‘the “deliberate, extralegal killing of an individual for political purposes”’.9 Thus, we need to agree at the outset that the assassination of a writer, such as Ghassan Kanafani, or an artist, such as Naji Al Ali, are, at their most basic level, politically motivated acts. But what does the assassin hope to gain by the assassination? In these particular cases, as Harlow goes on to argue, it is, quite simply, the literal ‘death of the author’.10 But the assassination of the writer has a broad historical, political and cultural dimension in which an attempt is made to silence the witness and extinguish the flame of resistance. These writers and artists of resistance have taken it upon themselves to bear witness to an unspeakable past, something which dominant History has been bent on silencing. Thus, by killing off the author, the assassin is hoping not only to erase the history of the dispossessed but to kill their defiant will and their story, which are the main targets on the agenda of assassination. The Palestinian poet Samih Al Qasim captures the essence of this idea in the following lines from his poem ‘Slit lips’: I would have liked to tell you the story of a nightingale who died I would have liked to tell you/the story … Had they not slit my lips.11 A sub-genre of literature called ‘bearing witness’ addresses the need for a kind of literature that communicates to the present about a past that is unthinkable and which, in the case of the Palestinian narrative, has been intentionally suppressed by the dominant narrative. This is when the writer is called upon to ‘create’ an archive which would ‘contribute to [his or her people’s] constitution’.12 What exactly does the genre of bearing witness entail? In order to better grasp all the nuances involved in the concept of bearing witness, I will first endeavour to piece together various quotations in order to try to capture the essence of this sub-genre of literature. It is obvious that the past figures prominently in bearing witness, as it is focused on a tragic past event that has a clear impact on the present. The poet or writer takes on ‘the role of guardian of the society’s historical past, its memory’.13 The witness writer is inevitably encapsulating her or his people’s suffering, documenting it and producing an archive that would prove necessary for a mass witnessing. The renowned Irish poet Seamus Heaney comments on the nature of the witness writer: he represents poetry’s solidarity with the doomed, the deprived, the victimized, the under-privileged. The witness is any figure in whom the truthtelling urge and the compulsion to identify with the oppressed become necessarily integral with the art of writing itself.14 We can even say that this radical past event has so transfigured the experience of the witness writer that the act of writing itself becomes a kind of reclamation,
24 Race & Class 52(3) a restoration of something lost, a reconstitution that is part and parcel of a people’s survival. Bearing witness, then, is a writing back into history of what has been deliberately erased. Perhaps the ‘truth-telling urge’ of which Seamus Heaney speaks is what Mahmoud Darwish had in mind when he invited the world renowned writers Wole Soyinka, José Saramago, Breyten Bretenbach, Juan Goytisolo and Russell Banks to the West Bank to witness first hand what was happening to the remaining part of Palestine, as a result of Israel’s unjust settlement policies. Darwish explained the aim behind his invitation: ‘I wanted to show them how the geography of Palestine is broken by settlements, as though they are the centre and the Palestinian towns are marginal. No propaganda; we let them see the truth.’15 With each passing day, in fact, what remains of Palestinian land is quickly diminishing with Israel’s periodic announcements of thousands of new Jewish settlements, aggressively and defiantly eating away at Palestinian topography, and literally erasing the Palestinian presence from the map. Nadine Gordimer, in her Naguib Mahfouz memorial lecture, describes the difference between journalistic truth and ‘inward testimony’ as being one of meaning. Journalistic truth can record the ‘immediacy of the image, the description of the sequence of events’ but it is the witness writer who can produce ‘the intense awareness, the antennae of receptivity’, the meaning that cannot possibly be discerned from reporting the daily event.16 Reporting the daily event is, of course, essential; however, the witness writer’s inward testimony will take this deeper – ‘towards the goal of truth’, especially in an ‘era when between slogans and the truth is an abyss’.17 A tragedy of the magnitude of the Palestinian narrative is a poignant example of the absolute necessity of an inward witness because, unlike other tragedies, the abysmal truth has been intentionally concealed or distorted. Thus, a witness writer or truth bearer, such as Mahmoud Darwish, is not only writing himself but also writing his people, or, as Munir Akash explains in his introduction to Darwish’s The Adam of Two Edens, ‘it is … an in-the-beginning-there-was of a Palestinian genesis’.18 Bearing witness in the hands of the Palestinian artist comes to incorporate a complex repertoire of strategies that include not only recording a truth from the tragic Palestinian past but also a thoroughgoing interrogation of that past, directed at not only the victimiser but also the victimised. Since the Palestinian loss has been especially pronounced, the Palestinian artist has, in the case of Darwish for example, been involved in recreating or reconstituting a history for his people. The work of the Palestinian artist is necessarily informed by the threat of complete identity erasure, a complete loss of land and history. Thus, bearing witness becomes the Palestinian artist’s tool of resistance against the assassination of liberation, as I will attempt to show below in representative examples from the works of the cartoonist Naji Al Ali, the poet Mahmoud Darwish and the novelist Ghassan Kanafani.
Tahrir Hamdi: Bearing witness in Palestinian resistance literature 25
Figure 1
Naji Al Ali: drawings on the walls Cartoonist Naji Al Ali’s ‘Handala’ has become a symbol of Palestinian resistance and defiance.19 Al Ali’s personal story, like that of so many other Palestinian artists, itself bears witness to the Palestinian tragedy. Born in 1937 in the village of Al Shajara (now part of Israel), Al Ali was part of the Palestinian exodus of 1948. For most of his childhood, Al Ali lived in Ain Al-Hilweh refugee camp near Sidon in Lebanon. He later lived in the Shatila refugee camp, the scene of a massacre in 1982. The Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani ‘discovered’ Al Ali’s drawings on the walls of the refugee camp during a visit to Ain Al-Hilweh and published his drawings in the literary magazine Al-Huriyya, which he edited.20 Thus began Al Ali’s journey, which was cut short when he was shot in the face and killed by the Israeli Mossad in London in 1987.21 He is perhaps best known for creating the child witness, Handala, who appears in most of his cartoons with his back turned, witnessing the atrocities which have beset his people. As shown in figure 1, Al Ali well understood that the pen would indeed be his main tool of not only expression but, more significantly, resistance, hoping to light the current Palestinian darkness by keeping the story of his people alive, ironically, without uttering a word. The image is a powerful tool in the hands of the artist who is himself a witness and a victim of assassination, as a result of his very act of witnessing and telling the story of his people. Al Ali’s
26 Race & Class 52(3) emblem, Handala, is the child witness of the refugee camps who gets his name from an Arabic word for a bitter plant called al-handal to represent the bitterness of the Palestinian experience. Handala is eternally ten years old in all of Al Ali’s cartoons, the same age Al Ali was when the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, befell the Palestinian people. One who is even vaguely familiar with Al Ali’s biographical details will indeed notice the close affinity between Al Ali and his creation, such as their refugee camp backgrounds, the ten-year-old boy connection mentioned above, their ‘witness’ status and even their political views. In his position as witness, Al Ali wielded his pen not only against Israel but also complacent Arab regimes and leaders (Palestinian included); in a similar gesture, Handala turns his face from the gazer’s view in defiance of the international, historical forces opposing Palestinian liberation and of Arab complicity, lethargy and impotence. Handala conspicuously lurks in the corner (unless he is the main player) of almost every Al Ali cartoon, witnessing the scene before him; he is also sure to be found in the corners of refugee camp walls, which have become the popular canvas of the Palestinian artist in general. Handala’s presence is a constant reminder of the Palestinian tragedy, as revealed by the more than 15,000 cartoons penned by Al Ali.22 And for this, Handala’s creator had to die. The assassin, however, did not count on Handala’s capacity for immortality. He, unlike his creator, is an idea and ideas, especially when concretised and made easily accessible, tend to have an afterlife, if I may use Barbara Harlow’s word for the immortality of an artist’s work. The Handala idea has naturally and easily drifted into the Palestinian psyche. The truth that Handala communicates to the Palestinian collective consciousness revolves around rootedness and resistance. Many of Al Ali’s cartoons tell the story of sumud or steadfastness under the most difficult of conditions. In figure 2, the Palestinian mother gives Handala a stone with one hand as she carefully plants a flower with the other, defying the barbed wire fence which seems to be uprooting the flower. All of this is being done defiantly against the darkness which envelops the Palestinians’ precarious situation. An important point to be made here is that the Palestinian woman is a very important presence in Al Ali’s cartoons, as she is in Darwish’s poetry. She is not only the care-giver of the land of Palestine but is completely (and necessarily) enmeshed in her community’s tribulations and not, as one might expect, simply involved in her ‘natural’ role of mother, giving birth and caring for her children. The Palestinian peasant woman was never as cloistered or secluded in a domestic sphere as her sister in the town was. Many of Al Ali’s cartoons show women totally involved in the thick of the struggle. Al Ali seems to be saying (or, more accurately, showing) that without woman, there can be no liberation, a notion we also find in Darwish’s poetry, as we shall see later. The ‘liberation’ of one’s land necessarily entails presence, not absence or exile; rootedness to the land is symbolically portrayed in Al Ali’s cartoons by depicting characters with natural roots (see figure 3), a theme we meet again in Darwish’s poetry. Again, it is worth mentioning that the characters here are
Tahrir Hamdi: Bearing witness in Palestinian resistance literature 27
Figure 2
significantly female, a woman (very clearly shown wearing a traditional and carefully decorated Palestinian peasant dress called thob) and her daughter who are obviously not tending to their domestic activities at home but totally involved in the Palestinian intifada, the first of which started the same year Al Ali was assassinated, 1987. These women represent more than the country, nation or ummah, which in Arabic comes from the same root or origin as the word umm, meaning ‘mother’;23 they are active participants in the struggle, on the front lines, not reservists, so to speak, a far cry from the traditional, masculine, essentialised image of woman as merely representing the ‘motherland’. Perhaps history (or the loss of it) has taught Palestinians that the total involvement of mothers, sisters and wives in political struggle is essential for a community’s survival. Al Ali’s identification of woman as being intricately connected to and rooted in the land, a commonality in Arabic literature,24 is particularly poignant in Palestinian literature, especially as this emphasis on rootedness is a lesson learnt from the past, a response to the often repeated question of ‘why did you leave?’, which is a reference to the mass exodus of some 800,000 Palestinians from historical Palestine in 1948.25 Of course, their flight was a result of the fear of massacres, such as that carried out at Deir Yassin in 1948 by the Zionist Irgun and the Stern gang. But the question posed by these artists revolves around the kind of awareness (which the Palestinians lacked in 1948) that would defy death itself. Would the Palestinians have left had they known that they were not going
28 Race & Class 52(3)
Figure 3
to return to their land after a few days? As discussed below, this is the essential question that Ghassan Kanafani and Mahmoud Darwish ask in their literature. Thus, the Palestinians’ sacred attachment to the land can be seen as a direct response to the mass exodus of 1948. When asked, ‘Where do you come from?’, it is not enough for a Palestinian to know that one’s parents or grandparents are from Palestine – the question is, which town, village or even harra (neighbourhood)? This attachment to land (which Al Ali portrays through his presentation of female figures, as noted above) is as strong as a mother’s bond to her newborn child. In figure 4, a Palestinian family is shown ploughing their Israeli-occupied land with an AK47, led by their child Handala. But, significantly, the mother is shown showering the single barley stalk with her love, even as the land is being taken away from beneath them, as is evident by the Star of David engraved in the parched, cracked earth. The implication here is that the land will not be lovingly looked after by its new owners, who will not tend Palestine’s fertile orchards with the same level of care as the uprooted peasant population. Al Ali predicted his own assassination in one of his cartoons but he has also been quoted as saying that he will live through Handala after his own death, in the afterlife of his work. Al Ali always allowed his mostly wordless drawings to bear witness to the past and present of the Palestinian narrative – and, in some cases, the audience is allowed a revelatory glimpse at the future. By bringing about the actual death of the author, the assassin hopes to kill the will of a whole
Tahrir Hamdi: Bearing witness in Palestinian resistance literature 29
Figure 4
people, as Harlow seems to imply in her question: ‘What happens should genocide turn to assassination?’26 These genocidal intentions are at play in the personal witness story of Al Ali, as he seems to prophetically be suggesting in figures 5 and 6. The implied genocide of a whole people is represented in the silencing of the witness as presented in figure 5, which shows Handala assassinated by an arrow shot into his heel, an obvious allusion to Achilles. Al Ali, who used his pen as a sword, saw himself as a warrior, an Achilles. But the mighty warrior fell precisely because his pen was a sword which he wielded effectively, so effectively indeed that it got him assassinated. The arrow placed in Handala’s heel is also the artist’s pencil, which gave voice to the voiceless through Al Ali’s mainly wordless images. The aim behind killing the witness is to silence not only the storyteller but also the story, thus resulting in the erasure of a people’s history. The assassination of one important person (the witness), as Al Ali seems to be saying in these two cartoons, is the attempted assassination of a whole people (who are shown ‘wanted’, Wild West style, behind a barbed wire fence – see figure 6) and with them their cause. Interestingly enough, the only face not facing forward in figure 6 is that of the witness Handala in the lower left hand corner of the sketch. However, it can safely be said that Handala has indeed outlived his creator in the collective consciousness of the Palestinian people. It is believed by many Palestinians (whether Naji Al Ali intended it or not) that Handala will face forward when he can finally return to the land of his ancestors in historical Palestine. Naji Al Ali, in the image shown in figure 5, knowingly predicted his own assassination. He was perfectly aware that, in his role as witness, he communicated to a mass
30 Race & Class 52(3)
Figure 5
audience without which the witnessing act would be futile. Thus, even after the assassination of the witness, Handala’s continued telling of the story would keep the idea of liberation alive and indelibly impact future generations of Palestinians. Mahmoud Darwish: genesis of the Palestinian people ‘You do not even know the names of the Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist – and not only do the books no longer exist, the Arab villages are not there either … There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.’ Moshe Dayan27 Barbara Harlow, quoting the French historiographer Marc Ferro, identified one goal of the writer as the restoration to one’s people of the history of which they were deprived. It is not enough to make use of the archives: what if the state archives do not exist any more, as noted in the above quote by Moshe Dayan? One needs to ‘film, question those who have never had the right to speak, never had the right to bear witness’.28 This is what the Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta has endeavoured to do for his people – to create an archive which would enable the Palestinians to bear witness to the loss of their land and history. For Abu Sitta, this enormous project entailed an exhaustive collection of facts and figures from every village destroyed and depopulated of its Arab
Tahrir Hamdi: Bearing witness in Palestinian resistance literature 31
Figure 6
inhabitants. It also meant consulting oral history by talking to the actual witnesses and trying to provide information on ‘where that village was, how its population was expelled, what happened to them afterwards’.29 This is the work of the historian and researcher; what of the poet? Mahmoud Darwish, born in 1942 in the village of Berweh (in the district of Aker), which was depopulated of its Arab inhabitants in 1948, endeavoured to do in poetry what Abu Sitta is doing in research and what Al Ali accomplished in his drawings. Sadly, Darwish, the voice of Palestine, died after heart surgery in August 2008. Darwish, as a poet, has attempted to reach deep inside the Palestinian psyche, perhaps more intensely than most writers have been able to do, in order to capture the essence of the Palestinian experience. Darwish’s personal witness story begins when, as a six-year-old child in 1948, the village of Berweh was totally ‘obliterated from the face of the earth’, as a result of the establishment of the Jewish state.30 Expelled from their home village, Darwish and his mother made a very difficult journey to Lebanon. Darwish recalls the journey in a poem called ‘Hooriyya’s teaching’ (Hooriyya is his mother’s name): Do you remember our migration route to Lebanon? Where you forgot me in a sack of bread (it was wheat bread) I kept quiet so as not to wake the guards The scent of morning dew lifted me onto your shoulders. O you, gazelle that lost both house and mate.31
32 Race & Class 52(3) Every aspect of the Palestinian experience is documented in the lines of Darwish’s poetry. Here, he records his personal memory, which becomes a collective Palestinian memory that merges past, present and future. This journey was made by hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who just packed up some of their meagre possessions as quickly as possible and fled in various directions, some going to Lebanon, others to Syria, others to Jordan – becoming refugees. People thought they would be gone for a few days; it is now over sixty years. Through his own personal memory of flight, Darwish tells a story similar to multitudes of personal stories, which would together constitute an archive of the Palestinian experience representing ‘a challenge to the erasure of the memory of an entire nation’.32 Without this forging of a Palestinian genesis, as Akash argues, the survival of the Palestinian people is at stake, not simply their physical existence but even more importantly their ‘sense of survival’.33 Darwish bears witness to the loss of land and home by highlighting the smallest of details, which has an effect of communicating to the Palestinian psyche most penetratingly, as can be seen below in his poem ‘As he walks away’: Good evening to you! Say hello to our well! Say hello to our fig trees! Step gingerly on our shadows in the barley fields. Greet our pines on high. But please don’t leave the gate open at night. And don’t forget the horse’s terror of airplanes. And greet us there, if you have time.34 Here a Palestinian family, who now live in a hovel, are visited by an Israeli man who has taken over their family home and comes to drink their tea as any guest would. The pain felt by the Palestinian family is clear when they remind the Israeli to greet their well, fig trees and barley fields as he walks away. They also sadly remind him to ‘step gingerly on [their] shadows’ which are still there on the land. They may be physically absent but their presence can be felt in every word, action and odour: Greet our house for us, stranger. The coffee cups are the same. Can you smell our fingers still on them?35 With these haunting lines, Darwish recounts a very personal and emotional kind of memory which strikes a chord with every Palestinian family who not only lost their land but their most personal possessions. He invites his reader to witness this tragedy at its most intensely personal level and we too are asked to ‘step gingerly’ on the Palestinians’ ‘shadows’ and ‘smell [their] fingers still on’ the coffee cups. We witness how violently and unnaturally the
Tahrir Hamdi: Bearing witness in Palestinian resistance literature 33 Palestinians lost their land and homes when we are asked to consider the smallest of details, such as the coffee cups above, thus allowing this tragedy, which has great historical and cultural ramifications, to quietly penetrate into people’s homes. Darwish’s poetry can, of course, simply record the actual event, as it does when Darwish mourns the loss of life, especially young innocent martyrs such as Muhammad Al Durra, the 12-year-old boy who was killed by Israeli soldiers as he hid in a corner of a street in his father’s lap. But even in this seemingly straightforward narration, Darwish uses the occasion to break down barriers between Palestinian Muslims and Christians, when he says: Muhammad Small Jesus sleeps and dreams inside the heart of a holy picture made out of brass. The identity of Muhammad is intentionally conflated here: is the poet referring to Muhammad Al Durra or the Prophet? Muhammad, the young martyr whose martyrdom ‘was written for him on the wall’ (which as we have already seen with Al Ali is the canvas of the Palestinian artist), brings to the poet’s mind the sacrifice of Jesus and the Ascension to Heaven of the Prophet whose name the child bears. Muhammad (Al Durra) is described as a small Jesus whose life on earth has ended, as he moves on to greater heavenly fame. By bringing together the two names, Muhammad and Jesus, Darwish may have implied the unity of Muslims and Christians as Palestinians, their unity in tragedy and struggle.36 Tragedy, however, makes way for resistance proper (physical, in contrast to other forms) in Darwish’s poem ‘Ahmad Al Za’tar’. It is obvious that, in poems such as ‘Ahmad Al Za’tar’, Darwish is writing for the Palestinian masses whom he is careful not to alienate, something that may not be very palatable to western tastes. He dedicates this poem to ‘Ahmad, the Arab’, who, unlike Muhammad above, wrote his own martyrdom in a refugee camp, which ‘gives birth to fighters and to thyme’, and from which he springs and where the seeds of resistance are sown. Ahmad, who identifies himself as ‘the bullets, the oranges and the memory’, held a stone of resistance and thyme, which he planted in the camp. It is interesting to note that Ahmad’s family name, Za’tar, is the Arabic word for thyme which, when dried and ground, becomes a distinctively Palestinian food, eaten with olive oil; Ahmad planted the thyme and irrigated it with his martyred blood, giving birth to more fighters and thyme. The two (fighters and thyme, a plant found in abundance in Palestine) coalesce into a single image of resistance – Ahmad, the fighter, is the za’tar of Palestine. Darwish’s mention of oranges is probably an acknowledgement of Palestine’s pre-1948 status as a major exporter of the world’s oranges.37 These items (stone, thyme, oranges, refugee camps, bullets) become symbols of resistance which are employed by Darwish to weave a Palestinian narrative that will live in the collective memory.38
34 Race & Class 52(3) The defiance which is present in the poem ‘Ahmad Al Za’tar’ is omnipresent in his very early poem from the mid-sixties, the perennially popular ‘Identity card’, which became a rallying cry for the Palestinian masses. This poem, which was written in Darwish’s youthful nationalistic phase, bears witness to Israel’s demeaning way of dealing with the Palestinian individual, who must carry an identity card, a mobile prison cell. The identity card, a matter of great humiliation and discrimination, defiantly becomes a matter of great pride and dignity. In the following lines, the Palestinian cardholder tells an Israeli soldier who has stopped him: Write down! I am an Arab I have a name without a title Patient in a country Where people are enraged My roots Were entrenched before the birth of time39 Darwish’s defiance is in his identity as an Arab who ‘descends from the family of the plough’ and is deeply rooted in the land (as in Al Ali’s cartoons). In a later poem called ‘Passport’, the Palestinian individual’s identity does not need a passport. Darwish writes: Oh, gentlemen, Prophets, Don’t ask the trees for their names Don’t ask the valleys who their mother is From my forehead bursts the sword of light And from my hand springs the water of the river All the hearts of the people are my identity So take away my passport40 Palestinian identity is so inseparable from the land of Palestine that it does not need any further identification. Here, the Palestinian has become integral to the very nature of Palestine. As Darwish continues to build his poetic oeuvre into a Palestinian genesis, he concerns himself more and more with the origins of the Palestinian people and their inseparability from the land. This theme is echoed in a speech Darwish gave on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakbah, in which he stated: We, the Palestinian offspring of this sacred land, … Declare our resounding presence in time and place, … We have refused to adopt their distorted version of our history And we remain advocates and witnesses of the authentic narrative of Palestinian endurance and will to live.41
Tahrir Hamdi: Bearing witness in Palestinian resistance literature 35 Only the Palestinian can tell the authentic Palestinian narrative, which is inevitably linked to the Palestinian people’s endurance and their will to live. Darwish’s emphasis on origins and history serves the purpose of rooting the Palestinian individual in the land, regardless of the ‘vast cultures and civilizations’ which have come and gone over thousands of years. The culture of the Palestinians has emerged ‘from the fullness of this diverse and rich heritage’.42 As Darwish’s poetry develops, his youthful nationalistic phase (1960s) gives way to a quieter, more mature aesthetic phase (1990s perhaps?), if such a term is appropriate, which clearly relies on the use of mythology and ancient history. What I have referred to as a ‘nationalistic’ phase, others have called a ‘resistance’ phase,43 which can be quite misleading since this classification suggests Darwish’s later poems are not informed by the idea of resistance. After all, what does resistance entail? A gun and a scream? Can resistance not be whispered, as in ‘As he walks away’ above? In a poem from his later phase, entitled ‘On a Canaanite stone at the Dead Sea’, Darwish etches out his genesis of the Palestinian people. The Canaanites, whom Darwish presents as the forebears of the Palestinian people, were a matriarchal people ‘who lived in agricultural communities’ and who preceded the Biblical Hebrews in the land of Canaan.44 Darwish invites the stranger to take from the bounty and civilisation of the land of Canaan but not to steal his dream, nor the ‘milk of my women’s breast’ nor the ‘ant food dropped in the cracks in the marble!’ Of course, Canaan is the poet’s matriarchal motherland and the rape of the land is being compared to the rape of woman. The poet accuses the stranger of coming to the land to murder and to ‘increase the saltiness of the sea’.45 The stranger cannot seem to understand the spiritual ties between the Canaanites and their land. This separation has not only caused the individual to suffer but, likewise, the land, which is now ‘sadly degraded’.46 Darwish’s Canaanite/ Palestinian is ‘growing greener with the passing of years on the oak’s trunk’, coalescing almost completely with the land of his ancestors as he firmly declares: ‘This is me, I am myself./This is my place in my place.’47 The Palestinian, as Darwish seems to be showing repeatedly in ‘Identity card’, ‘Passport’ and in this poem, is the very nature of Palestine, its trees, valleys, rivers, even its ants and ant food! Darwish also offers the Palestinian a continuous line of descent which originates with the beginning of civilisations and continues until the end of time: All the prophets are my kin. But heaven is still far from my earth and I am still far from my words. … My mother is a Canaanite, and this sea is a bridge leaping to Judgement Day.48
36 Race & Class 52(3) The Palestinians, the sons and daughters of the Canaanites, are the descendants of the prophets. Darwish’s line, ‘My mother was a Canaanite’, is an obvious reference to the matriarchal origins of this people who, like Native Americans, were intricately connected to nature. Darwish, like Al Ali, emphasises the role of woman in Palestinian history, which he traces back to the matriarchal Canaanites. Darwish even seems to be tracing his origins ‘matrilineally’ and identifying himself with the mother, whom he presents as rooted in the historical land of Palestine, something we also saw in Al Ali’s cartoons. Like Al Ali’s characters’ attachment to the land, Darwish’s Palestinian identifies himself/herself with the love of the land; planting is a recurrent theme: ‘Stranger, hang your weapons in our palm tree/and let me plant my wheat in Canaan’s sacred soil.’49 The stranger, though, has desecrated the land by uprooting the tree and the Palestinian, thus separating the poet from his words. Of course, the poet’s reunification with his words will be realised with the Palestinian’s return to his land. This return would atone for a past that has so haunted the Palestinian psyche, which has repeatedly and interrogatingly asked the question: ‘Why did you leave?’ In Darwish’s poetry, the question becomes Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, the title of a collection of poems published in 1995. In a poem from this collection, ‘As he walks away’, discussed above, Darwish writes ‘he forgets to tell us … about a horse of ancient melodies abandoned on a hilltop’.50 This abandoned horse is obviously a metaphor for the abandoned land but also for everything that the Palestinian has abandoned, especially the idea, which if allowed to disappear, would mean the end of Palestinian existence. Liberation in Darwish’s poetry, as in Al Ali’s cartoons, seems to be associated with the feminine, albeit in a different light. In asking for the return of Anat, an ancient Canaanite goddess of fertility, in his poem ‘Phases of Anat’, Darwish seems to be calling for a new creative form of feminine resistance: ‘Poetry is our ladder to the moon/Anat suspends over her garden.’ In order to rise above the physical loss and chaos which resulted after Anat’s departure, when ‘Wells dried up’, ‘streams and rivers ran dry’ and humans lost all ‘desires’ and their ‘prayers turned to bone’, Darwish wishes to reach an aesthetic sphere (Yeatsian style) where poetry survives aesthetically and the poet can create, as does Anat who ‘creates herself from herself and for herself’. It is in this realm that the poet is truly empowered: As for the horses, let them prance forever … where there is neither life nor death where I neither live nor die. Where there is neither Anat nor Anat.51 This aesthetic freedom, which Darwish finds in language, is far superior to any kind of earthly existence that can easily be denied – as it has in Palestine. It is precisely in this realm that the poet finds his only true form of liberation and
Tahrir Hamdi: Bearing witness in Palestinian resistance literature 37 can guard against the dying of the idea. I would argue that, in fact, the element of resistance is stronger in Darwish’s quieter, later poems than it was in his earlier (masculine) nationalistic poems. Darwish seemed to have realised that the earthly realm could not secure for Palestine the immortality it would enjoy in poetry, where he can create his own eternal Palestine. Ghassan Kanafani: man is a cause Ghassan Kanafani, born in 1936 in Aker, a city ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian inhabitants in 1948, is said to have written ‘the Palestinian story’ which made it ‘possible for that story to continue to be written, and lived, today’,52 even after the death of the author who, like Naji Al Ali, was assassinated – on 8 July 1972, he and his niece were killed in Beirut in a car booby-trapped by Mossad.53 Why did Kanafani have to die? Perhaps because he wrote the ultimate Palestinian narrative, a narrative that is not only aware of the past but urges its readers to contemplate the present and future of the Palestinian situation. Returning to Haifa (originally published in 1969) is a novella that clearly addresses the past, present and future of the Palestinian question. Kanafani gives the reader an eyewitness account of what happened in 1948 and 1967 (two significant years in Palestinian history) and encourages his reader to interrogate that past – what happened and why? Kanafani is very careful to give his reader the specific time and place of the actual historical event in Returning to Haifa. The present (the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war) is narrated in an almost journalistic style and then the ‘past erupted as though forced out by a volcano’.54 Said and Saffiya, after fleeing their home in Haifa in 1948 and settling in Ramallah in the West Bank, have ‘returned’ to Haifa to meet up with their past, a journey that Kanafani invites his Palestinian readers to make in order to interrogate their past, not simply to evoke it romantically and sentimentally. Their ‘return’ to Haifa is very painful for the couple because they will have to unearth what has been silently buried in their new life in Ramallah, not only an abandoned land but also an abandoned child, Khaldoun, who was only five months old when Safiyya, in hysteria, forgot him in his crib and joined the swarms of people outside being guided by the ‘shots, bombs and explosions’ which ‘were pushing everyone toward the port’.55 The theme of abandonment reverberates on every page of Returning to Haifa; we are reminded of Darwish’s question, ‘why have you left the horse alone?’ But where Darwish whispers, Kanafani screams. The couple’s return to Haifa is not a real return at all, as the reader is carefully reminded: ‘You’re not seeing it. They’re showing it to you.’56 That is the present reality; the real return, as Kanafani explains, must be on different terms. Kanafani allows his reader a romantic (if painful) remembering of the past, knowing that his Palestinian reader will read such parts tearfully, emotionally, sentimentally: The names began to rain down inside his head as though a great layer of dust had been shaken off them: Wadi Nisnas, King Faisal Street, Hanatir Square,
38 Race & Class 52(3) Halisa, Hadar … The events mixed together suddenly, but he held himself together and asked his wife in a barely audible voice: ‘Well, where shall we begin?’57 Kanafani jerks his reader to the past with the words ‘Morning, Wednesday, April 21, 1948. Haifa, the city, was not expecting anything, in spite of the fact that it was filled with dark tension’,58 allowing his reader to relive the catastrophe in full force: People were pouring from the side streets into the main street leading down to the port – men, women and children, empty-handed or carrying a few small possessions, crying or being floated along in a paralyzed silence in the midst of the clamor and confusion.59 Kanafani’s description of the flight, or Palestinian exodus, is in line with an actual account given by the Zionist newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, ‘which openly reported the next day about the exodus, it was an offensive “forcing them to flee by the only open escape route – the sea”’.60 The British army, which later pulled out, allowing for the Zionist takeover and the establishment of a Jewish homeland, as stipulated by the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate of Palestine, was said to have been ‘ready to transfer out of Haifa anyone who was able to reach the port’.61 Kanafani’s technique of constantly shifting from past to present and present to past underscores his emphasis on the temporal inseparability of past and present, and their direct relationship to a future Palestinian identity and existence, which, according to Kanafani, will entail resistance and an in-depth understanding of the ‘true Palestine’, as Said tells Saffiyya in the novella. What is the point in a sentimental return to ‘see our house. Just to see it’, as Safiyya tells her husband?62 But, of course, Safiyya wants to see more than her house – she wants to see what happened to her baby Khaldoun, whom she abandoned in 1948. Kanafani’s abandoned child is Darwish’s abandoned horse, both symbolic of the abandoned land, history and identity of the Palestinian people. Both Darwish and Kanafani tell a similar tale of very personal loss. Just as Darwish dwells on the coffee cups which used to belong to the Palestinian family in ‘As he walks away’, so too does Kanafani’s Said dwell on the peacock feathers in the wooden vase in his house in Haifa, which has been taken over by the Jewish family who found the abandoned Palestinian child Khaldoun and gave him a new identity: renamed Dov, he is now a twenty-year-old Israeli soldier. The abandoned child Khaldoun, who in 1948 was five months old, underscores the Palestinian reality. Palestinians abandoned their children, homes and land out of fear. Massacres, such as that at Deir Yassin, played an important role in creating fear and panic amongst the Palestinian Arabs who were trying to flee the fighting in Haifa and to which they thought they would return after a few days. Haifa fell to Zionist forces on 22 April 1948. Thus, ‘the Deir Yassin effect’, if I may term it as such (what would today be called ‘shock and awe’), proved to be
Tahrir Hamdi: Bearing witness in Palestinian resistance literature 39 a valuable card in the hands of Jewish forces in 1948. The Irgun leader and sixth prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, later declared: ‘Arabs throughout the country … were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened, uncontrollable stampede … The political and economic significance of this development can hardly be overestimated.’63 This may be what Israel hopes it can repeat today by using internationally forbidden weapons against Palestinians, such as those used in Gaza. This hysterical scene was certainly repeated over and over again in about 500 Palestinian villages in 1948. For Kanafani, however, bearing witness entails more than setting the record straight. It is not enough to record the ‘truth’ of the past – that would be simply ‘search[ing] for something buried beneath the dust of memories’.64 Palestine, for Said in Returning to Haifa, is ‘more than memories, more than peacock feathers, more than a son, more than scars written by bullets on the stairs’;65 such symbolic details would amount to simply recording a past tragedy. An atavistically motivated act of remembrance would not significantly impact present or future ‘Palestines’. The objective of Kanafani’s bearing witness in Returning to Haifa is to emphasise the inseparability of the devastating, mistake-ridden past and a present which should be based on an unsentimental understanding of the past. The present entails struggle or a fighting phase, the labour, if you will, which would bring forth a future fulfilment. In other words, Kanafani seems to be saying, there is no birth without labour. The true Palestine is in the struggle, not in the buried dust of memories. Khaldoun or Dov, the abandoned Palestinian child, has metaphorically died because the Palestinians failed to reclaim him. Dov represents Palestinian mistakes, namely abandonment and ignorance, a lack of awareness of what was happening to the world of the Palestinian. It is precisely an abandonment that was based on a lack of knowledge, which would eventually lead to a complete erasure of Palestinian identity, a possibility embodied in the character of Dov who also represents the future of the Palestinian problem should the idea of Palestine be allowed to die. The flesh and blood of Dov was easily moulded into a new idea, identity and history as a result of the Palestinian’s past mistakes. Kanafani presents Dov as an interrogation of the Palestinian self, identity and history, underscoring that ‘man is a cause’ and Palestine is an idea above and beyond flesh and blood which, in the end, are simply not enough to keep that idea alive.66 Khalid, Dov’s younger brother who was raised by his Palestinian parents, does not ‘know’ the past in the way his parents ‘know’ Palestine, yet he represents the true Palestine. Khalid is the idea, which the witness writer cannot allow to die. Khaldoun or Dov, on the other hand, proves that man is a cause, not flesh and blood. Dov’s Palestinian blood was not enough to keep the idea alive in the same way that the existence of the Palestinian past is not enough to keep the idea of Palestine alive. Of what value is filiation in the absence of affiliation? Filiation to Palestine by the mere accident of birth or blood is a meaningless and restrictive stance that is imposed upon an individual, as Joseph Massad explains in his essay entitled ‘Beginning with Edward Said’.67 Affiliation, however, is a more meaningful and liberating stance that is wilfully chosen by the individual and by
40 Race & Class 52(3) means of which s/he freely identifies with a cause or idea or, as Kanafani more summarily states, ‘man is a cause’.68 The witness writer must safeguard against the death of the idea, which is an even greater loss than the loss of the land. Keeping the idea alive requires more than just sentimentally invoking the past; it is an active process of struggle which entails remembrance, interrogation, reclamation and resistance. Resistance in Returning to Haifa is embodied in Khalid, who has joined the freedom fighters and represents the future. Said says to his wife: We were mistaken when we thought the homeland was only the past. For Khalid, the homeland is the future. That’s how we differed and that’s why Khalid wants to carry arms … Men like Khalid are looking toward the future, so they can put right our mistakes and the mistakes of the whole world.69 Another character who represents the ‘true Palestine’ is Faris, who, like Said and Saffiya, returned to Haifa to see who now occupies his family home. But, to his surprise, he finds an Arab family that did not leave in 1948. Faris encounters two acts of bravery which for him become important historical and moral lessons. His lesson begins when he finds his martyred brother’s portrait hanging in the house with a black ribbon adorning its frame. Faris learns that his brother’s portrait has become a member of this family, giving them strength and companionship in a ‘sea of raging hostility’.70 Faris comes to learn that the true Palestine belongs to those who deserve it – those who fought and were willing to face death bravely, as his own brother did in 1948, and those who stayed to resist the loss of their land, such as the Arab family now living in his own family’s pre-1948 home. His brother’s portrait belongs with the family who earned it; it is not his to possess by virtue of his birthright. It belongs to the people who possess the will to resist. The Palestinian people must retain that will in the face of assassination, the suppression of the Palestinian story and history, and attempts at erasure or obliteration of the past, which the Palestinian witness writer must not allow to happen. The Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta emphasises the importance of documentation that would ‘revive the collective memory of the Palestinians and the Arabs’.71 Edward Said agrees, as he makes clear in his 1995 book The Politics of Dispossession: ‘The interesting thing is that there seems to be nothing in the world which sustains the story; unless you go on telling it, it will just drop and disappear … it is strange that no narrative of Palestinian history has ever been institutionalized in a definitive masterwork.’72 Said goes on to give a very telling image of this intentional destruction of Palestinian history when he recalls that the Israelis shipped out the ‘archives of the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut to Tel Aviv’ in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.73 Thus, the utter importance of bearing witness for the Palestinian writer and artist must not be overlooked. Creative resistance entails writing, drawing, documenting the Palestinian narrative, creatively shaping a Palestinian experience that would be meaningful to the storyteller and his or her audience, and which would enable a mass witnessing of that experience, thus keeping the idea of Palestine
Tahrir Hamdi: Bearing witness in Palestinian resistance literature 41 alive in the Palestinian and Arab psyche. Once the Arab individual comes to a total awareness of the past and present, the future story of Palestine can be etched out according to a new understanding by sincere leaders, intellectuals, writers and artists. To blame the tragedy of Palestine wholly on a historical process and on Arab ignorance will not vouch for the Arab in history, for the present comes with a burden of knowledge of the past and ‘after such knowledge, what forgiveness?’74 References 1 A. Koestler, Promise and Fulfilment (London, Macmillan, 1949), p. 4. 2 M. Darwish, ‘Mahmoud Darwish’s speech on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of al-Nakba’, Palestine, 14 May 1998, . 3 R. Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire (London, I. B. Tauris, 2004), p. 120. 4 K. Newton, ‘Second sight: is Edward Said right about Daniel Deronda?’, Times Literary Supplement (9 May 2008). 5 V. Brittain, ‘They had to die: assassination against liberation’, Race & Class (Vol. 48, no. 1, 2006), pp. 60–74. 6 Ibid. 7 R. Falk, ‘Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust’, 29 June 2007, . 8 B. Harlow, After Lives: legacies of revolutionary writing (London, Verso, 1996), p. 15. 9 Ibid., p. 25. 10 Ibid., p. 26. 11 S. Qasim, quoted in B. Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York, Methuen, 1987), pp. 1–2. 12 Harlow, After Lives, op. cit., p. 46. 13 A. Calder et al., Literature in the Modern World: literature and history (Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 2005), p. 14. 14 Ibid. 15 M. Darwish, quoted in M. Jaggi, ‘Poet of the Arab World: Mahmoud Darwish’, Guardian (8 June 2002). 16 N. Gordimer, ‘Witness: the inward testimony’, Al-Ahram Weekly (7–13 December 2006), . 17 Ibid. 18 M. Akash, ‘Introduction’ to The Adam of Two Edens: selected poems by Mahmoud Darwish (Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 32. 19 Naji Al Ali’s cartoons can be viewed at . 20 N. Al Ali, ‘My signature, Hanthala: the symbol of the child’, . 21 M. Kallam, Naji Al Ali: all of Palestinian soil, for this they killed me (Beirut, Bissan Publishers, 2001), p. 140. My translation from Arabic. 22 ‘In Memoriam: Naji Al Ali’ (14 June 1999), . 23 O. Ishaq Tijani, ‘Gendering the Iraq-Kuwait Conflict: literary representations of Kuwaiti women’s resilience and resistance’, Journal of Arabic Literature (No. 39, 2008), p. 253. 24 Ibid. 25 E. Said, The Politics of Dispossession (New York, Vintage Books, 1995), p. 139. 26 Harlow, After Lives, op. cit., p. 20. 27 Moshe Dayan, quoted in Akash, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. 31. 28 Marc Ferro, quoted in Harlow, After Lives, op. cit., p. 46. 29 A. Howeidy, ‘Salman Abu Sitta: right of return’, Al-Ahram Weekly (13–19 May 2004), .
42 Race & Class 52(3) 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74
Akash, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. 31. M. Darwish, The Adam of Two Edens (Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 86. Akash, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. 32. Ibid., p. 44. Darwish, The Adam of Two Edens, op. cit., pp. 51–2. Ibid., p. 53. . W. Khalidi, ‘Revisiting the UNGA partition resolution’, Journal of Palestine Studies (No. 27, 1997), p. 13. . . . Darwish, ‘Mahmoud Darwish’s speech’, op. cit. Ibid. A. Nasser, ‘Mahmoud Darwish between the political and the aesthetic’, Banipal: magazine of modern Arab literature (No. 33, 2008), p. 32. Akash, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. 37. Darwish, The Adam of Two Edens, op. cit., p. 76. Akash, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. 40. Darwish, The Adam of Two Edens, op. cit., p. 76. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., pp. 99–102. K. Riley, ‘Ghassan Kanafani: a biographical essay’, in G. Kanafani, Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and other stories (Boulder, CO, Lynne Reiner Publishers, 2000), p. 11. Ibid., p. 9. G. Kanafani, Palestine’s Children, op. cit., p. 151. Ibid., p. 155. Ibid., p. 151. Ibid., p. 152. Ibid., p. 153. Ibid., p. 155. Quoted in Kanafani, Palestine’s Children, op. cit., p. 190. Ibid. Ibid., p. 158. J. Zoghby, ‘Remembering Deir Yassin’ (17 November 2000), . Kanafani, Palestine’s Children, op. cit., p. 187. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 181. J. Massad, ‘Beginning with Edward Said’, in M. Sokmen and B. Ertur, eds, Waiting for the Barbarians (London, Verso, 2008), p. 130. Ibid. Kanafani, Palestine’s Children, op. cit., p. 187. Ibid., p. 176. S. Abu Sitta quoted in A. Howeidy, ‘Documenting the catastrophe’, Al-Ahram Weekly (1998), . Said, The Politics of Dispossession, op. cit., p. 118–9. Ibid., p. 119. T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland and Other Poems (London, Faber & Faber, 1972), p. 16.
