THE HANDSTAND
FEBRUARY 2004
War butlers and their language
by Mourid Barghouti
AUTODAFE n°3 - Printemps 2003
“Palestinians are like cancer. There are all sorts of solution to cancerous manifestations. For the time being, I am applying chemotherapy.”
Moshe Y’alon, Israeli chief-of-staff
“Eventually we will have to thin out the number of Palestinians living in the territories.”
Eitan Ben Eliahu, Israeli Air Force commander
“For every victim of ours there must be 1000 Palestinians.”
Michael Kleiner, Israeli Herut Party chairman
“I believe in liquidationists.” (Assassination brigades targeting Palestinian activists)
General Meir Dagan, head of Mossad
“No negotiations.”
George W. Bush, president of the USA
What can a poet do to face such a language as It flies high with the assistance of US-provided Israeli F16s and Apache gun ships and sinks deep to the lowest point of crime? Being the Palestinian against whom this language is directed, and the poet I happen to be, it becomes imaginable how much grueling and intricate it is to become the poet I dream of. For whoever fights monsters, as Nietzsche put it, should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster, “when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you”. I am eager to harp my poem into the ears of the world whereas tragic and hard-hitting history and geography are vociferously drumming the scene around my shoulders. Surrounded by daily humiliation and daily death, I dream of writing a poem about life. Attacked by the apartheid diabolic hate-language of Israeli generals, a language that is reinforced by the anti-Palestinian inciting choir of such empire-builders as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condolezza Rice, Wolfowitz and Perle I crave for writing a poem about love!
The only postmodernism in occupied and now mostly ruined Palestine, is
the Israeli Occupation Army, and the most sophisticated state-of-the-art
product is the Israeli weaponry! The prolonged Israeli occupation has
brought sclerosis to our language. Our poems have been more pulverized
than our streets. Yet, the majority of us are aware of the fact that we
must resist military meter, simplistic imagery and khaki poems;
not an easy task but we have to pursue it with painstaking attention and
care. Being the victims, the exiled, the dispossessed who suffer
deprivation and displacement and who live under constant threat, curfew,
collective punishment, humiliation and re-re-re-occupation, we, the
Palestinian poets have to struggle not only against all this existential
danger and defenselessness but also against the aesthetic vulnerability
of our poetry: Living under the pressure of pain and the pressure of
hope, caught in the middle between the nightmare of polluted reality and
the dream of writing genuine poetry, we struggle to free our poems from
the pressing burden of freedom.
I am 4 years older than the State of Israel.
I was born in 1944 in the mountainous village of Deir Ghassaneh near
Ramallah, on the eastern hills of Palestine. In childhood I came to see
some Palestinian families and individuals whose accents were in a way
different from that of the Barghouties who constitute all the
inhabitants of Deir Ghassaneh and seven other neighbouring villages. It
was obvious they had arrived from other places. They used to ask for
shelter and food. It was then that I heard the word refugees for the
first time. I was told that they were expelled out of their homes in
hundreds of coastal villages destroyed by the armed Zionist brigades
that declared The State of Israel in 1948.
Refugees? I used to ask my father, “Why do we call them refugees when
they are Palestinians like us”? Endless answers to endless questions
were created by their incomprehensible presence among us. In the same
period I heard for the first time the name of Deir Yassin. I saw sleek
horror and dreadfulness on the faces of people talking of a massacre
perpetuated in that small village near Jerusalem, killing hundreds of
Palestinian villagers. The Deir Yassin massacre was repeated on
different scales in many other places and that resulted in the massive
expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, dispersing them all
over the neighbouring countries to create the Jewish State. Israel was
declared on the western parts of Palestine lining with the
Mediterranean. Two minutes later, Truman, The U.S president recognized
the new state.
I did not realize what it meant to be a refugee until I have become one
myself. When the Israeli army occupied Deir Ghassaneh and the whole
eastern part of Palestine in 1967 the news bulletins began to speak of
the occupation of the Israeli defence forces of the West Bank. The
pollution of language is no more obvious than it is in concocting this
term: West Bank. West of what? Bank of what? The reference here
is to the River Jordan, the west bank of the River Jordan, not to
historical Palestine. If the reference were to Palestine they would have
used the term eastern parts of Palestine. The west bank of the river is
a geographical location not a country, not a homeland.
The battle for language becomes the battle for the land. The destruction
of one leads to the destruction of the other. When Palestine disappears
as a word it disappears as a state, as a country and as a homeland. The
name of Palestine itself had to vanish. The occupation wanted it to be
forgotten, to become extinct, to die out. The Israeli leaders,
practicing their conviction that the whole land of Palestine belongs to
them would concretize the myth and give my country yet another biblical
name: Judea and Samaria, and give our villages and towns and
cities Hebrew names. But call it The West Bank or call it Judea and
Samaria the fact remains that these territories are occupied. No
problem! The Israeli governments, whether right or left or a combination
of both, would simply drop the term occupied and say The Territories!
Very brilliant! I am Palestinian but my homeland is The Territories!
What’s happening here?
By a single word they redefine an entire nation and delete history. The
Israeli occupation would impose a double, triple, endless re-definition
of the Palestinian: Call him the militant, the outlaw, the criminal,
the terrorist, the irrelevant, the cancer, the cockroach, the serpent,
the virus and the list becomes endless. This cannot be done without
the proper tools: materializing the myth as political reality, and
dressing military strategies and war tactics in a moral and missionary
wording. And it becomes very easy: Be the one who puts the definition.
Define! Classify! Demonize! Disinform! Misinform! Simplify! Put the
label! Then send the tanks! Kill the enemy! Who will blame you then?
Aren’t you in a state of self-defense?
While the common, regular, day-to-day language is a burden to a poet,
the political language is smog. It has always been the case; but what
the world is witnessing now is a language that kills, a stupid language
that yields clever bombs and sends young men and women to the killing
fields.
Can Verbicide lead to genocide? Oversimplification was always one of the
factors behind the failure of poetry and prose and, indeed, of any
discourse, but when it is the dominant characteristic of the discourse
of the policy-makers it ends in many forms of fanaticism and
fundamentalism. Coupled with invincible superiority and a sense of
sanctity, simplification might be, as history teaches us, a recipe for
fascism. That’s why the rhetoric of them/we or either with us
or with evil is not just an irresponsible jargon but an act of
war.
The terrorist attack on New York was despicable and condemned by all the
nations of the world. As a Palestinian victim of Israeli occupation, and
as a poet, I immediately identified myself with the victims inside the
two towers and sympathized with each soul lost that day. Now, more than
one year after, I ask myself why has September 11 gone down in history
without mentioning the year 2001? They say Nine Eleven and that’s it.
Professional analysts can find an appropriate answer of course, but it
seems to me that George W. Bush and his advisors in the current American
Administration wanted this date to look ahistorical and apolitical in
order to bring to a halt and eventually destroy any sense of the
continuity of history, its interrelatedness and interconnectedness; thus
paving the way for a sly and sneaky theory that prefers to see Nine
Eleven as the beginning of history!
This wily oversimplification implies that the action and the reaction
must be summed up as absolute Evil versus absolute Good. Nothing more.
Nothing less. This would allow the White House to block any historical
or political analysis, and to preclude and disqualify any slight linkage
with any issue on this earth and to end the conception of neutrality in
war, and to ignore the international law and to practically destroy the
UN role, if not the UN itself, thus threatening the world order
altogether. Do the American people and the people of the rest of the
world have the right to think and analyze and examine this perfidious
language? Yes, theoretically, they have. But this administration does
not like, and will not allow, too much analysis. Through manipulating
language the administration wants to bend the belief-systems of the
peoples of the earth. And the administration wants to organize the
results of thinking and control the future of ideas!
And what about writing and writers in our times? What can I do with my
poetry and my own language here and now, in my part of the world? What
happens to a poet in a cataclysmic society, where people live under
semi-eternal emergency, and their life is destabilized and exposed to
daily horror and endless suffering? For decades, Palestine has been
pushed to the edge of history, the edge of hope and the edge of despair,
present and absent, reachable and unreachable, fearful and afraid and
ragged into zones A and B and C. etc. This Palestine is my identity,
this Palestine is the absence of my identity; my imposed memory and my
imposed oblivion, my telephone notebook that is almost half-filled with
the telephone-numbers of my absent friends and neighbours and
relatives whom I will not be able to call again forever, but, for
reasons not clear to my heart, I won’t remove their names and numbers
from my notebook. Nature, old age, illness or traffic accidents, are not
the most common causes of Palestinian death.
Death has made us his family. Death has earned a residence permit among
us. It haunts us day and night and looks into our faces wherever we go.
Death lives normally among us in a country that requires everyone of its
citizens, the old man’s cane, the old woman’s shawl and the baby’s
milk-bottle to remember everything all the time and to forget every
thing all the time and, what is more cruel and inhuman, to be heroes all
the time.
And miserable is a country that needs all kinds of heroism from all her
citizens. This is the brink of life, or life at the brink. You want to
end the occupation of your homeland. You resist. And the occupation gets
more brutal. Your dream of normal life is postponed and you feel that
everything is temporary. And when you learn to live in this transitory
eternity you will know what it means to be a Palestinian! Prolonged
occupation prevents you from managing your affairs in your own way. It
interferes in every aspect of life and death; it interferes with longing
and anger and desire and walking in the street. It interferes with going
anywhere and coming back, with going to the market, the emergency
hospital, the school, the beach, the bedroom or a distant capital.
In a cataclysmic society all priorities become hindered and mixed up,
including the cultural priorities, but there must be always, even in the
center of the tempest that sweeps nations in a given period of history,
a group of creative men and women who are willing to explore the
intriguing ability of art to preserve its qualities and of language to
resist its own destruction. In one of his early articles, the
distinguished American poet W.S.Merwin wrote:
"Where injustice prevails (and where does it not?) a poet … has no
choice
but to name the wrong as truthfully as he can, and to try to indicate the
claims of justice in terms of the victims he lives among."
I share with him this view, and also his pointing to the danger facing
such a poet of putting his irreplaceable singularity in jeopardy and of
having his gift itself deformed into a loudspeaker. Israel took from us
the land of the poem and left us with the poem of the land. But our
poem’s horizon expanded far beyond this confined duality to embrace the
universal, the human, as well as the intimate and personal. Most of the
Palestinian writers are aware of this fact: For a fanatic it is always
useful to simplify; for a poet it is categorically suicidal. The
suffering of a nation should not be used as a pretext to justify the
mediocre, the clichéd and the thumb-worn, in any form of artistic
expression. It is not acceptable that because we are on the tragic edge
of history to reduce the painting into a poster, the lyric into a
military anthem, the play into preaching, the novel into straight
ideology, or the poem into slogan.
I have always disagreed with that popular concept of the so-called patriotic poetry where the individual self and national self are always good and perfectly right, and where the poet and his or her country, leadership, party, faith, traditions, political affiliation, war and peace etc. are blindly cuddled and endorsed. “Writing” as I earlier put it “is a displacement. A displacement from the normal social contract. A displacement from the habitual, the pattern and the ready form. A displacement from the common roads of love and common roads of enmity. A displacement from the believing nature of the political party, from the idea of unconditional support, from your family, your community, and your leadership. The poet strives to escape from the dominant used language. He strives to escape from the chains of the collective and the tribal approvals and taboos. If he succeeds in escaping and becomes free, he becomes a stranger. It is as though the poet is a stranger in the same degree as he is free. His soul throngs with these displacements and cannot be cured by anything, even the homeland. He clings to his own way of receiving the world and his own way of transmitting it. It is unavoidable that he should be taken lightly by those who hold the ready recipes; those who live by the normal and the known; those who say he is moody, changeable and unreliable and so on through all adjectives stacked like pickles on their shelves; those who do not know anxiety, who deal with life with unseemly ease.”
Complacent poetry is a contradiction in terms. Poetry is a critical
attitude to this world where strong muscles and the arrogance of force
occupy our center stage, and war has become the first option in the
handling of world affairs. In recent years we have witnessed mushrooming
small wars and repeated military attacks in so many regions of our
planet. The term peace process is in itself misleading; and is another
proof of hypocritical manipulation of language and a euphemism for
prolonged suffering and absent justice. A unilaterally decided justice
is total injustice. And when a peace process is designed and
supervised by a biased superpower to retain hegemony and dominance it
will be nothing but a green light for aggression, a license to kill and
an invitation to war.
Poisoned language cannot work without the key role played by poisoned
media. Billions of dollars are spent to convince us of the necessity of
war! Through colourful programs and vivid talk shows and predestined
press conferences, the giant TV stations usher us to war, educate us
into war, and urge us not only to accept it but also to applaud it! What
is the role of intellectuals in all this? Aren’t those media men and
women creative writers, thinkers, theorists, academics and artists who
opt to be used as war butlers and servants of hell? The importance of
the brave intellectual minority in each and every society cannot be
underestimated. And in this khaki age that we live in they are
mostly needed. In the battle for language, silence is definitely not the
answer and connivance is crime.
In the time of crisis people gradually learn to accept the relative and
imperfect. In a prison, or a detention camp, experience tells us,
prisoners dream of such small miracles as having a bath, a haircut, a
letter, a visit, or a pen; on the operation table the patient dreams of
a drop of water after awakening from anesthesia; the paralyzed dreams of
the slightest motion and the drowned looks for a straw. Is this the age
of small dreams? As a Palestinian, with negated history and negated
geography, with an occupied will and an occupied homeland, I do
understand very much, why the oppressed, in general, do not soar up in
the eternal gazes but they delve deep in the earth in search of the
living roots, potential shrubs and trees. Didn’t Martin Luther King sum
up the aspirations of successive generations of African-American poets
in a simple vision of black and white kids boarding the same school bus?
Didn’t he pay his life for that down-to-earth dream? Dreams become most
tragic and dangerous when they are simple. Many of my poems are built up
on dreaming of little things, tiny little things that might seem
insignificant. There were times when the poetic imagination worked to
escape reality and I claim that the poetic imagination now works to
confront it.
Through poetic imagination I construct my own perception of lived
experience; a new version of reality, different from the original. And
may be because of its difference, it enters into a problematic converse
and oppositional dialogue with the every-day reality. Language is
the key word. Language is a shared element between the world of the
market place and that of poetry. The dissimilar language of Poetry is
our suggestion of a different language for this world. It is our attempt
to restore to each word its specificity and resist the process of
collective vulgarization and to establish new relations among words to
create a fresh perception of things. Poetry, I believe, is stepping out
of the orchestra to play solo with the single instrument of language.
That is why the poetic imagination becomes an act of resistance par
excellence. It is a declaration of mutiny on board of this world’s ship
whose course we are never allowed to direct.
The amazing paradox is that while political powers resort to exuberance,
zeal, hyperbole and the soaring language of romantic flight, poets
resort to physical language, surgical precision, understatement and
economy of expression. The poetical is not poetry anymore. In a sense,
the poetry of today, or a significant part of it, is the poet’s
repudiation of the language of the market place and the repulsive
agreed-upon-deal and its version of reality. The poets keep renewing
their language, contrary to all attempts of the status quo to fix its
language as a means of guaranteeing its survival. Poets turn into a
break with and a verdict against this collective collusion of the
existing certainties and their official representatives, as much as an
expression of our incapacity to revoke it. This failure might explain
the sadness of poetry in this world.
In my poetry I resort to the concrete rather than the abstract, to the
eye’s perception rather than to mind contemplation. The poet’s eye can
see the two faces of the coin simultaneously. It sees:
The confident person’s confusion/
The nun’s desire/
The preacher’s obscenity/…
The grandeur of the trivialities/
The loser’s dignity/
The winner’s loneliness/
And that stupid coldness one feels
When a wish is granted.
One of its charming miracles is that through its form, Poetry can resist
the content of authoritarian discourse. By resorting to understatement,
surgical precision, concrete and physical language, a poet contends
against abstraction, generalization, hyperbole, and the heroic language
of hotheaded generals and bogus lovers alike. Palestinian poets often
found themselves caught in the middle between two pressures: one from
their audience pressing for clear and direct handling of the collective
themes and preoccupations, and another from within, pressing for the
singular, the personal and the genuinely private. Striking the proper
balance between the two has always been the unmistakable sign of
creativity and excellence.
It is natural for a poet to be preoccupied with the private and the
public, but those who want him to entirely limit himself to the former
will be pushing him to psychiatric clinic poetry; and those who want him
to limit himself to the latter will confer to him the duties of
news-correspondents.
While the specter of war is haunting the world we are witnessing now
what may be called an international apartheid language; a
language that labels and defines, and divides values and virtues, and
segregates nations in two categories of good and evil.
For all decent human beings, lovers of life, beauty, peace, integrity,
fairness and justice, truth seekers, friends of nature and artists, the
twenty first century has started in a catastrophic way. The Individual
terrorism and state terrorism, fundamentalism and fanaticism prevail on
both sides of the divide. The language and the intentions and the deeds
of terrorists and preachers of globalism, the neo-imperialists and the
war-tailors alike, are endangering human life and making our planet a
less safe place. However, poetry remains one of the astonishing forms in
our hands to resist obscurantism and silence. And since we cannot wash
the polluted words of hatred the same way we wash greasy dishes with
soap and hot water, we, the poets of the world, continue to write our
poems to restore the respect of meaning and to give meaning to our
existence. Aware of the fact that we will always be a minority, and that
success is not at all guaranteed, we cannot connive with those who do
not blink when they preach a war that might take away millions of
innocent lives for the sake of their self-tailored ultimate justice.
November 2002
Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti was born in Ramallah, Palestine, in 1944. He has published 12 books of poetry, the last of which is Muntasaf al-Lail (Midnight), Beirut, 2005. His Collected Works came out in Beirut in 1997. A Small Sun, his first poetry book in English translation, was published by The Aldeburgh Poetry Trust, 2003. He was awarded the Palestine Award for Poetry (2000). His poems are published in Arabic and international literary magazines. English translations of his poetry were published in Al Ahram Weekly, Banipal, Times Literary Supplement, Pen, and Modern Poetry in Translation. His autobiographical narrative Ra'ytu Ramallah (I Saw Ramallah), 1997, published in several editions in Arabic, won the Naguib Mahfouz Award for Literature (1997) and was translated into several languages; the English translation was published by the American University in Cairo Press as well as by Random House, New York and Bloomsbury, London; Barghouti participated in numerous conferences and poetry readings and festivals in almost all Arab countries and in several European cities. He lives in Cairo. Edward Said described I saw Ramallah as “one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement we now have.” and John Berger wrote that I Saw Ramallah was “a bedside book if ever there was one, unforgettable memories, razor insights, name–games, stories with eyes closed, no conclusions, only the passionate pain of exile, recounted at the end of the day by a true poet.”