Jewish emancipation … to play loud instruments

I’m a fan of the traditions of klezmer music, with a long time favourite group of klezmer musiciams being the Pressburger Klezmer Band.

Like many I suppose, I’d always assumed  that the clarinet was an intrinsic part of klezmer, something that gave klezmer its distinctive sound. However that assumption appears mistaken and the social history behind that assumption is fascinating. I was reading – in the Slovak Spectator, as one does – of a collaboration between an English musician, Merlin Shepherd  and the Pressburger Klezmer Band in which he explained in response to the assumption that ‘the clarinet was decisive for the mood and atmosphere of klezmer’, as follows,

I am not sure I agree. Clarinet has only been used in klezmer music for about 150 years; and as klezmer is probably 500 years old, if not older, this is really a short period. Until about 1860 it was forbidden for Jews to play loud instruments. They played classical music, but not their own music on their own, loud instruments. That meant clarinet, that meant brass, that meant percussion. So they were confined to play cymbalo, cello, violin, flute; no drums, no clarinet. And I think it was Tsar Alexander who emancipated Jews, allowing them to play loud instruments. So clarinet only became evolved in klezmer music in approximately 1860. And now it has become the very sound of klezmer – but before that, it was the violin. You can get as much expression from a violin, easily, as you get from a clarinet; it is just that a clarinet is louder. And when it came to recording, in the early days the clarinet was an easier instrument to record, because it was louder. Klezmer is essentially wedding music – and weddings were mostly held outdoors, and so 150 years ago, when clarinet was allowed, if you imagine 200 people dancing outdoors, it was an easier instrument to carry the sound. So clarinet took over from violin, although it’s not a better instrument.

[my emphasis]

What kind of law and legal reasoning could have held it that a specific group of people were to be prohibited from playing an ostensibly loud musical instrument ? What was going through the mind of the legislator who devised this particular prohibition on Jews ? Was this ban particular to Jews or did other religious or linguistic or national groups also suffer from this kind of ruling ? Maybe Armenians must not play plucked instruments. Hussites are forbidden valved-brass instruments perhaps. Cossacks must never be permitted access to a piano, obviously. Welsh nonconformists, you get to play the triangle; nothing else.

The notions of emancipation through normalisation, of equality through assimilation, of freedom through integration are of course highly problematic and ones characterised by  deeply troubling histories of continuing persecution and discrimination, but faintly absurd though it may sound and though seemingly trivial in its form, we should not discount the importance of securing the right to play loud instruments. For the significance of emancipation was not just that of being nominally free of the Czarist yoke or any other imperial or monarchical subjection, but also, it has to be said its significance lies in emancipation from sheer idiocy.

To my surprise – and to the much greater surprise of my Turkish friends – I found, thanks to Ates Uslu, that a favourite and popular tune of the ultra-nationalist right in Turkey has its not too-distant origins in the Yiddish klezmer of nineteenth century Hungary. Here, played by the Pressburger Klezmer Band, the klezmer melody has the Yiddish lyrics telling of the fate of a drunken rabbi, a far cry from the nationalist growlings of grey wolves.

Writing of ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’.

Over recent months Orwell’s June 1941 radio essay ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’ has been flitting in and out of my mind. Whatever the dangers of wilful ahistoricism, Orwell’s depiction of the totalitarian modus operandi in this essay, to be more thoroughly developed in 1984, speak directly not just to my current institution but to the politics of the vatan.

There’s a crucial paragraph or two where Orwell wrote,

And then – remember that he is writing in June 1941, with the British Empire is at its territorial zenith and with the Nazi-Soviet pact still intact – he clarifies as follows,

He then explains what is distinctive about totalitarianism in a manner which has stood the test of time, unlike his characterising of liberalism and socialism which now seem touchingly naive. What Orwell means by totalitarianism doesn’t just repeat old ideas of, for example, total control, but prefigures the incertitude, the ambivalence and the loss of anchor which marks the postmodern. Thus,

Totalitarian power is not just that it is comprehensive and exhaustive and in those senses total. The exercise of totalitarian power is total insofar as it itself is not governed by its own rules or logic. Governors of a totalitarian order do not, indeed cannot, themselves keep to their own erratic rules. Totalitarian power is one in which what was certain was never; that which was fixed never was. It is the unceasing uncertainty which is total.

The totalitarian order survives as much through the exhaustion of its subjects as through its direct elimination of its errant subjects.

The first part of TS Eliot – of whom Orwell was no great fan – and his “The Hollow Men” (1925),

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

These stuffed men are the subjects of a totalitarian order for they can only whisper together, both quiet and meaningless, because no clear voice can declare for themselves yes or no, good or bad. Today’s yes is not the same as yesterday’s yes, tomorrow’s no is at odds with today’s no. Who knows the why or wherefore ? Not us, the hollow men. Orwell illustrates the shiftiness of totalitarianism by invoking the immediately pressing example of the (secret) Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939, which was fully exercised in mid September 1939.

 

But Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia are easy examples of totalitarianism. They have become almost cartoon cutouts of totalitarianism. More intriguing, more subtle and more dangerous are the non-militarised and supposedly non-violent totalitarian orders.

And so back to literature. Or writing and enquiry more generally. Orwell typically presents the author, artist and literature in the face of power as a simple issue, which I’d echo. That which has pretense at significance has to aim to endure. It cannot be fleeting and fickle. That which is serious is slow in coming and requires time to become present. It cannot be created. No click to send. No press to continue. No ‘like’ to love. No ‘unlike’ to dissent. No ‘tweet’ for truth. But in 1941 he expressed it like this,

 

 

The essay had begun with the contention, which can hardly be denied, that

 

The totalitarian order, insofar as its rule is inconsistent, shifting, transient and capricious (hypocrisy doesn’t get anywhere near the matter) disallows stability nor anchor nor, therefore, any endurance which may merit the term history. In this light it is mistaken to assume that a totalitarian order is one which is, for example, essentially militarist or ordered through great physical  somatic violence although they may well be so. Rather the totalitarian order is 0ne to be found in micro- as well as macro-social orders, and may manifest themselves in otherwise seemingly ‘peaceful’ and ‘civilised’ institutions and societies. When Orwell eventually returns to the totalitarian order in 1984 he rather melodramatically refers, through Smith’s voice, to a totalitarian vision of the future “imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” Of course this is nowhere nasty enough; this is rather commonplace cruelty. Instead the totalitarian order of the present is that order which can impose incessant and inconsistent change on its subjects, who can discern neither rhyme nor reason for today’s age-old new rule. The subjects of a truly totalitarian institution or society are those who – to use a Marxist term – are totally alienated i.e, they cannot determine anything for themselves, because in large part they cannot stop for a moment to consider who ‘themselves’ are. Back to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.” Hollowed men; stuffed men.

And for the full essay by George Orwell, from which the excerpts above were taken, see ‘Literature and totalitarianism’

 

 

Who’s the criminal ? Pretty Boy Floyd or Fitch ?

In the calculus of human suffering I wonder if the actions of Standard and Poor’s, Fitch or Moody’s outweigh the actions of al-Qaeda. When private credit rating agencies nod, nudge and hint the world economy into mass unemployment, homelessness, wage depression, soaring staple prices then terrorism might be better understood otherwise, or additionally, to planting bombs and indiscriminate slaughter.

Woody Guthrie‘s ‘Pretty Boy Floyd‘, written in 1939, observes that,

“Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.”

Woody Guthrie

It is the death warrant of whole livelihoods that the pens of credit rating agencies are deployed to sign. Credit rating agencies are possibly the most unaccountable, most powerful, most anti-democratic institutions of our times, and all perfectly legal. (See the late great Peter Gowan on the historical rise of the new global credit economy in which the credit rating agencies have become kingmakers).

Woody Guthrie concludes,

“And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.”

 

Footnote : It is worth recalling that Woody Guthrie was the composer and lyricist of “This land is my land’, now an anthem appropriated by the anti-democratic, nationalist right in the US. But Woody Guthrie was a Communist in the ‘Wobblies’ tradition. He’s reputed to have said, “Where three communists meet, the fourth one ought to be a guitar player.“

The name of genocide : denial, prohibition and truth (Part I)

That a genocide was committed against Armenians by a Turkish Ottoman polity and policy in the last decades of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century, plumbing abysmal depths in 1915 has only been qualified by euphemism, not substance. The naming of mass killings, like the naming of all aspects of life and death, has a politics. That is to say, naming is a power struggle.

Just to make an example of the politics of two naming conventions, we could take a deontological means of naming mass killings on the one hand, and a consequentialist means of naming mass killings on the other hand. The deontologist is concerned with the intentions that lie behind actions. Thus the deontologist might say that only those mass killings, or should I say mass deaths, in which the perpetrators intended to destroy or eradicate a people should carry the name genocide. So the deontological case for naming a genocide as such rests upon the production of historical evidence that identifies perpetrators, uncovers policies and plans which refer to the orchestration of genocide, and establishes material evidence of the translation into action or implementation of those policies and plans by the direct perpetrators. In the naming of genocide by deontologists, intention needs to be demonstrated. By contrast the consequentialist is concerned with …. errr … consequences; they’re focused on effects and thus correspondingly discount intentions.  So even if immediate perpetrators cannot be identified, even if mass death came from the privations of cold and hunger rather than from the bullet or the sword, and yet tens of thousands of bodies are counted or hundreds of thousands of persons ‘disappear’, then the effect has been genocidal.

The official position of successive governments of Turkey has two strands to it. First there is the basic objection to the vocabulary of genocide. Second, it has followed a deontological reading. In this way Turkish governments have a mixed set of arguments including, but not limited to the claim that Armenian deaths have been exaggerated and therefore do not warrant the label ‘genocide’ (rather forgetting or ignoring that genocide has never been defined by any numerical threshold); that Armenians were killed in the course of internal or civil wars in which their killing was not as Armenians but as rebels; that Armenians, amongst many other ethnies or nationalities of the wider Anatolian regions, died under wartime and ‘peacetime’ conditions of hunger and famine, diseases of malnutrition and insanitary conditions, and as unfortunate casualties of necessary forced migrations or deportations; that Armenians were killed by local, uncontrolled and unauthorised warlords, rogue army squads and irregular militias; that Armenians died at the hands of other ethnic or national minorities and not principally at the hands of Turkish Ottoman authorities or agents of the Turkish Ottoman state. These claims, together with other claims, amount to a deontological denial of any systematic or coherent intention to kill or otherwise eradicate the Armenian people.  To summarise in a rather casual phrasing the official Turkish government position regarding the Armenian question [that being, of course, a euphemism] : ‘The Ottoman Turkish state never carried out an intentional persecution of the Armenians and in any case it was not as bad as people make out.’

Whether on a deontological reading or a consequentialist reading I think the naming of the deaths of Armenians over the turning decades of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries as genocide is entirely appropriate. Whilst there is always room for historical refinement and revision as a consequence of new rounds of scholarship, the fundamental parameters of intention and effect have been well established for the genocide of Armenians.

But of course the scholarship and historical evidence regarding the Armenian genocide is not, ironically, the big issue. The big issue continues to be the politics of naming and the way that this politics plays around genocide denial. And it is to this politics that I want to turn next. But before concluding this first part, I want to signal my subsequent, seemingly inconsistent, argument : In the interests of truth, Turkey’s denial of the Armenian genocide is a terrible wrong but genocide denial should not be prohibited.

All the seasons of our discontent

The well-known opening of Shakespeare’s Richard III has Richard, Duke of Gloucester, reflecting upon England’s new-found peace, with the following disingenuous assessment :

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Instead of the currently familiar seasonal metaphor of the ‘Arab spring’ let me displace and substitute it with a suitably metaphoric season and local meteorology which tells a different and more realistic story of the Egyptian struggle :

Now is the spring of our hope

Made bitter winter by these enduring thugs of yore;

And the returning khamsin that scoured our house

In the wide heart of Tahrir still shows.

To switch the metaphor, the Egyptian ‘spring’ changed the chief clown but left the same troupe and circus in town. Outside critics and supporters of the Egyptian upheaval alike have made the oft-repeated mistake of anthropomorphising the state, of interpreting the man as the regime, of discounting the maintaining order in favour of the immediate object of derision. To claim that the ills that have befallen or been shouldered by Egyptians for decades were the casual consequences of a careless Mubarak such that a deposing of the feckless man and his immediates would be to argue that Richard III was a simply a play about a bad man. Whilst Richard, Duke of Gloucester is without doubt morally suspect, he is by no means evil and, crucially, no worse than his entourage and class. Indeed I read Richard III not primarily about what a bad man can do but as an account of the preconditions which obtain for a man to act badly. ‘Badness’ needs others. Badness is the condition of complicity.

Springtime and the summer sun of  2011 saw the order throw a sacrificial lamb before Egyptians and the ‘international community.’ It ejected the man Hosni Mubarak after the extraordinary discovery, at least by the ‘international community’, that he was bad.  One does not amass in excess of $70 billion in personal family wealth without help and complicity of a ruling class. The spring air did not, however, have chance to cleanse the complicit.

The complicit are still there, secure in their ‘protection of democracy’, relatively undisturbed as they try to ‘maintain order’, enjoying the the sympathy of the international community as they oversee the transition to law. The complicit are not only those who beat with impunity; who torture without concern; who casually violate;  who detain without charge; who, if you want a picture of the present, have a “boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

"always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever." George Orwell, 1984

The complicit are not just, not even primarily, the foot-soldiers. After all the foot-soldiers can be identified and named. The complicit are, to be sure, those who continue to hold the reigns of power but they are also those who say that arbitrary arrests are conducive to public order; those who see a policeman beating a protestor to the ground and see no problem; those who witness a right boot in the kidney and rue the lost opportunity for a repeat from the left boot; those who promote the frequent gymnastic of the truncheon as the necessary exercise of political order; those who cannot see order without the swirling clouds of tear gas; those who whose horizon of moral reasoning cannot go beyond the self-interestedness of blaming the victim.

It is the Egyptian military or, rather, the security apparatus in toto which has ruled Egypt for half a century and continues to do so despite the revolutionary spring. The military has always been in season in Egypt. The military is a corrupting perennial.

I’m not one for aphorisms especially of the saccharine-sounding kind, but in the light of the worldwide contagion of beatings, bloodshed and butchery committed in the name of “law and order” the temptation to invoke (and adapt) Gandhi is too strong : “Recall the face of the most vulnerable person whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him or her. Will she gain anything by it? Will it restore her to a control over her own life and destiny?”

Those complicit in Egypt and elsewhere cannot answer in the positive to this test.

Micturating on Maastricht, Lavatorial on Lisbon, Excreting on the EU

Cameron not taking the piss

As we witness possibly the most dramatic change in UK foreign policy in a century or more, resulting in the splendid isolation of 26 European states from the UK, we also learn of the key factors determining Cameron’s decision.  Cameron thought it best to be outside the tent pissing in, rather than inside the tent pissing out. Excruciatingly, his decision to piss inside the tent from the outside was taken whilst he was inside the tent refusing to piss outside the tent. Got that ?

Masochistic self-denial, of which only the abused public school boys of Eton can truly know,  has long been the spiritual source of British foreign policy. (For its accomplishment, the sadistic slaughter of others has been its twin). Notwithstanding IgNobel-worthy research on “The effect of acute increase in urge to void on cognitive function in healthy adults” , apparently the Prime Minister is an authentic piss artist, whose refusal to void, reports explain, is because “Cameron [has] …  used his tried-and-tested “full-bladder technique” to achieve maximum focus and clarity of thought.”

(And now back to the failings of Marxist critiques of society : A Marxist would never make this sort of thing up. A good Marxist would say something like “Cameron was defending his paymasters, that capital fraction in the City of London whose freedom from European regulation his executive position was made to ensure.” And not, “His resolve was maintained because by crossing his legs in painful distraction he couldn’t pay attention to what his fellow EU leaders were saying”).

Whichever way you cut it, Cameron pisses on everyone except himself. Again.

Israel, Palestine, Gaza and the idiocies of ‘antis-‘

Support for Palestinians (August 2011) in Sanna, most westerly village of mainland Britain

That Israel has a right to self-defence is, in my view, a given. Its’ right to self-defence is that which inheres in any people as well as confirmed in international law. To that extent its’ right to self-defence is no greater and no less than that of Palestinians.

(Let’s face it, there are basically two positions from which those who are critical of Israel can start : there are those who I’ll label rejectionists, or exterminists, who refuse the right of Israel to exist at all; and there are those who, for principled or pragmatic reasons, recognise a state approximating in some way the 1967 borders whatever differences there may be on the rights of return (aliyah and Palestinian). For me the first position is indefensible in principle and would be genocidal in effect. I start instead with an open mind to a two state or one state democratic solution).

In this Gazan war Israel is wrong in principle and wrong in the way that it is prosecuting this war. Far from Israel strengthening its position and shoring up its’ security through this war, its’ insecurity will further deepen. The lessons for the Israeli government of the 2007 Lebanon war have not been learnt and the errors are set to be repeated.

Exercise of the right to self-defence is also subject to some kind of proportionality test, and the low rate of casualties within Israel, does not warrant an all-out war. It merits a response, to be sure, but not this. Not collective and indiscriminate punishment. The jus ad bellum is weak morally, legally and politically.

If the jus ad bellum is weak, the Israeli government’s jus in bello is criminally absent. Many have rightly commented on the (dis) proportionality question. We have been foolishly deluded into thinking that modern war is precise, as if it is fought through sophisticated discriminating technologies with one hand whilst the other hand holds a copy of the Geneva Conventions. It is not. Those who justify the Israeli way of war as necessary in the peculiar spatial and social composition of Gaza have surely lost all moral compass. Having recently read Mark Mazower’s brilliant account of the administration of Nazi rule across Europe (Hitler’s Empire : Nazi rule in occupied Europe. Allen Lane, London. 2008) I can’t help but identify the very close parallels in policy in the isolation and treatment of ‘untermenschen’. That Hamas militants have used a school as a platform from which to fire missiles is not grounds to disregard the lives of unfortunate school children and condemn them to death for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. That injured Hamas militants and their families may be taken by ambulance and treated in hospital is not licence to fire upon the hospital. That people, warned by text message or air-dropped leaflet, are instructed to leave buildings for open spaces otherwise they’ll be regarded as legitimate concealed and hiding targets is no choice for those innocents frozen in fear to their familiar rooms and homes.

It is a false hope that so many hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets around the world this weekend to protest the Israeli war on Gaza. Those anti-imperialists, anti-Zionists, anti-racists and socialists of different kinds who protest Israel’s war are right to do so.

Condemning Israel’s policy and the barbarism of its war is the easy bit. But we must stop and reflect on the sometimes fine distinction between protest and support. When supporting the Palestinian right of self-determination – a right at least that of Israel – we are not obliged to lend support to any and all movements. Hamas has a right to organise for self-determination of the Palestinian people for sure, but they have no claim on virtually every other right that socialists or democrats would hold dear, such as human rights, women’s rights, freedom of expression and conscience, workers’ rights, and so on. Hamas is no bringer of liberation : it is a movement which would lock up and suppress if not directly shoot 90% of those people who protested Israel’s war. Hamas is a deeply reactionary intolerant and fundamentally anti-democratic movement which would have no truck with socialists or atheists of any kind. Opposition to the Israeli war machine, itself determined and timed in my view by domestic Israeli politics (and not by the alleged frequency of Hamas missile attacks) – must not entail the support of Hamas. To do so would be simply to follow the Israeli government’s long-standing irrational and ultimately self-defeating policy of ‘my friend is my enemy’s enemy.’ Democratic socialism has been defeated in the Middle East and worldwide in large part because metropolitan ‘antis’ have been seduced by this ‘enemy’s enemy’ nonsense. The history of the region is one in which the ‘democrats’ of the metropolis singularly failed to support democratic forces in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, the gulf states, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, leaving democrats and socialists to be annihilated in their hundreds of thousands rather than upset the brutal rule of reaction or disturb strategic alignments. Professing democracy is no guarantee against supporting barbarism.

Far better for socialists to engage in democratic solidarity with the currently somewhat meagre voices of opposition within Israel. That another war could have been launched by Israel so soon after the carnage of Lebanon is a function of the collapse of any serious opposition within Israel and the corresponding right-ward leap-frogging of the Israeli political establishment and its indulgence of populist ‘solutions’. Apart from the exterminists of the Hamas ilk, the war against Palestine will remain a permanent war so long as there is no effective democratic opposition within Israel. (The exterminists who refuse to recognise Israel’s right to exist in any form are not bothered by the absence of democratic opposition and democratic alternatives : Hamas and the Israeli right are deserving twins; Palestinians and Israelis are their undeserving victims.

See the following for just a few of the varied initiatives in Israel against the war and against Israel’s prevailing policy towards Palestine and the Palestinians ..

Bat Shalom : women for justice and peace

B’tselem – the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories

Courage to Refuse

Indymedia (Israel)

Israel Occupation Archive

Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions

Israeli Left Archive

Peace Now

Sabbah Report : because silence is complicity

[This piece was written on 11th January 2009]

‘Memory for Forgetfulness’

Mahmoud Darwish wrote a ‘Memory for Forgetfulness’, as a Palestinian exile unable and unwilling to leave the siege of Beirut in 1982. The manner in which the daily barrage of shells, naval gunfire, aerial bombardment, missile attacks and small arms fire is endured, indeed is rendered almost banal, is relentlessly reported by Darwish. The monotony and the numbness induced by the daily grind of trying to live, to accomplish the most mundane and simple of tasks is achieved by Darwish by repetition of the same. The plot or should I say biography (of him and the city of Beirut) just doesn’t move on. It’s stuck. And where this should be a fatal criticism of a book it is precisely this interminable cycle of memory and forgetting which makes his book so powerful. Beirut 1975-1982; Palestine everyday.

But it is not the daily drama and permanent trauma of the siege which grabbed me in his book. Rather it was simply the best account I’ve ever come across of the importance of coffee and the coffee making ritual – an unintended paean to coffee. Read this :
“Three o’clock. Daybreak riding on fire. A nightmare coming from the sea. Roosters made of metal. Smoke. Metal preparing a feast for metal the master, and a dawn that flares up in all the senses before it breaks. A roaring that chases me out of bed and throws me into this narrow hallway. I want nothing, and I hope for nothing. I can’t direct my limbs in this pandemonium. No time for caution, and no time for time. If I only knew—if I knew how to organize the crush of this death that keeps pouring forth. If only I knew how to liberate the screams held back in a body that no longer feels like mine from the sheer effort spent to save itself in this uninterrupted chaos of shells. “Enough!” “Enough!” I whisper, to find out if I can still do anything that will guide me to myself and point to the abyss opening in six directions. I can’t surrender to this fate, and I can’t resist it. Steel that howls, only to have other steel bark back. The fever of metal is the song of this dawn.

What if this inferno were to take a five-minute break, and then come what may? Just five minutes! I almost say, “Five minutes only, during which I could make my one and only preparation and then ready myself for life or death.” Will five minutes be enough? Yes. Enough for me to sneak out of this narrow hallway, open to bedroom, study, and bathroom with no water, open to the kitchen, into which for the last hour I’ve been ready to spring but unable to move. I’m not able to move at all.

Two hours ago I went to sleep. I plugged my ears with cotton and went to sleep after hearing the last newscast. It didn’t report I was dead. That means I’m still alive. I examine the parts of my body and find them all there. Two eyes, two ears, a long nose, ten toes below, ten fingers above, a finger in the middle. As for the heart, it can’t be seen, and I find nothing that points to it except my extraordinary ability to count my limbs and take note of a pistol lying on a bookshelf in the study. An elegant handgun—clean, sparkling, small, and empty. Along with it they also presented me with a box of bullets, which I hid I don’t know where two years ago, fearing folly, fearing a stray outburst of anger, fearing a stray bullet. The conclusion is, I’m alive; or, more accurately, I exist.

No one pays heed to the wish I send up with the rising smoke: I need five minutes to place this dawn, or my share of it, on its feet and prepare to launch into this day born of howling. Are we in August? Yes. We are in August. The war has turned into a siege.[1] I search for news of the hour on the radio, now become a third hand, but find nobody there and no news. The radio, it seems, is asleep.

I no longer wonder when the steely howling of the sea will stop. I live on the eighth floor of a building that might tempt any sniper, to say nothing of a fleet now transforming the sea into one of the fountainheads of hell. The north face of the building, made of glass, used to give tenants a pleasing view over the wrinkled roof of the sea. But now it offers no shield against stark slaughter. Why did I choose to live here? What a stupid question! I’ve lived here for the past ten years without complaining about the scandal of glass.

But how to reach the kitchen?

I want the aroma of coffee. I want nothing more than the aroma of coffee. And I want nothing more from the passing days than the aroma of coffee. The aroma of coffee so I can hold myself together, stand on my feet, and be transformed from something that crawls, into a human being. The aroma of coffee so I can stand my share of this dawn up on its feet. So that we can go together, this day and I, down into the street in search of another place.

How can I diffuse the aroma of coffee into my cells, while shells from the sea rain down on the sea-facing kitchen, spreading the stink of gunpowder and the taste of nothingness? I measure the period between two shells. One second. One second: shorter than the time between breathing in and breathing out, between two heartbeats. One second is not long enough for me to stand before the stove by the glass facade that overlooks the sea. One second is not long enough to open the water bottle or pour the water into the coffee pot. One second is not long enough to light a match. But one second is long enough for me to burn.

I switch off the radio, no longer wondering if the wall of this narrow hallway will actually protect me from the rain of rockets. What matters is that a wall be there to veil air fusing into metal, seeking human flesh, making a direct hit, choking it, or scattering shrapnel. In such cases a mere dark curtain is enough to provide an imaginary shield of safety. For death is to see death.

I want the aroma of coffee. I need five minutes. I want a five-minute truce for the sake of coffee. I have no personal wish other than to make a cup of coffee. With this madness I define my task and my aim. All my senses are on their mark, ready at the call to propel my thirst in the direction of the one and only goal: coffee.

Coffee, for an addict like me, is the key to the day.

And coffee, for one who knows it as I do, means making it with your own hands and not having it come to you on a tray, because the bringer of the tray is also the bearer of talk, and the first coffee, the virgin of the silent morning, is spoiled by the first words. Dawn, my dawn, is antithetical to chatter. The aroma of coffee can absorb sounds and will go rancid, even if these sounds are nothing more than a gentle “Good morning!”

Coffee is the morning silence, early and unhurried, the only silence in which you can be at peace with self and things, creative, standing alone with some water that you reach for in lazy solitude and pour into a small copper pot with a mysterious shine—yellow turning to brown—that you place over a low fire. Oh, that it were a wood fire!

Stand back from the fire a little and observe a street that has been rising to search for its bread ever since the ape disentangled himself from the trees and walked on two feet. A street borne along on carts loaded with fruits and vegetables, and vendors’ cries notable for faint praise that turns produce into a mere attribute of price. Stand back a little and breathe air sent by the cool night. Then return to your low fire—If only it were a wood fire!—and watch with love and patience the contact between the two elements, fire colored green and blue and water roiling and breathing out tiny white granules that turn into a fine film and grow. Slowly they expand, then quickly swell into bubbles that grow bigger and bigger, and break. Swelling and breaking, they’re thirsty and ready to swallow two spoonfuls of coarse sugar, which no sooner penetrates than the bubbles calm down to a quiet hiss, only to sizzle again in a cry for a substance that is none other than the coffee itself—a flashy rooster of aroma and Eastern masculinity.

Remove the pot from the low fire to carry on the dialogue of a hand, free of the smell of tobacco and ink, with its first creation, which as of this moment will determine the flavor of your day and the arc of your fortune: whether you’re to work or avoid contact with anyone for the day. What emerges from this first motion and its rhythm, from what shakes it out of a world of sleep rising from the previous day, and from whatever mystery it will uncover in you, will form the identity of your new day.

Because coffee, the first cup of coffee, is the mirror of the hand. And the hand that makes the coffee reveals the person that stirs it. Therefore, coffee is the public reading of the open book of the soul. And it is the enchantress that reveals whatever secrets the day will bring.

• • •

The dawn made of lead is still advancing from the direction of the sea, riding on sounds I haven’t heard before. The sea has been entirely packed into stray shells. It is changing its marine nature and turning into metal. Does death have all these names? We said we’d leave. Why then does this red-black-gray rain keep pouring over those leaving or staying, be they people, trees, or stones? We said we’d leave. “By sea?” they asked. “By sea,” we answered. Why then are they arming the foam and waves with this heavy artillery? Is it to hasten our steps to the sea? But first they must break the siege of the sea. They must clear the last path for the last thread of our blood. But that they won’t do, so we won’t be leaving. I’ll go ahead then and make the coffee.
• • •

The neighborhood birds are awake at six in the morning. They’ve kept the tradition of neutral song ever since they found themselves alone with the first glimmer of light. For whom do they sing in the crush of these rockets? They sing to heal their nature of a night that has passed. They sing for themselves, not for us. Did we realize that before? The birds clear their own space in the smoke of the burning city, and the zigzagging arrows of sound wrap themselves around the shells and point to an earth safe under the sky. It is for the killer to kill, the fighter to fight, and the bird to sing. As for me, I halt my quest for figurative language. I bring my search for meaning to a complete stop because the essence of war is to degrade symbols and bring human relations, space, time, and the elements back to a state of nature, making us rejoice over water gushing on the road from a broken pipe.

Water under these conditions comes to us like a miracle. Who says water has no color, flavor, or smell? Water does have a color that reveals itself in the unfolding of thirst. Water has the color of bird sounds, that of sparrows in particular—birds that pay no heed to this war approaching from the sea, so long as their space is safe. And water has the flavor of water, and a fragrance that is the scent of the afternoon breeze blown from a field with full ears of wheat waving in a luminous expanse strewn like the flickering spots of light left by the wings of a small sparrow fluttering low. Not everything that flies is an airplane. (Perhaps one of the worst Arabic words is Ta:’irah—airplane—which is the feminine form of Ta:’ir—bird.) The birds carry on with their song, insistent in the midst of the naval artillery’s roar. Who said water has no flavor, color, or smell, and that this jet is the feminine form of this bird?

But suddenly the birds are quiet. They stop their chatter and routine soaring in the dawn air when the storm of flying metal starts to blow. Are they quiet because of its steely roar, or from the incongruity of name and form? Two wings of steel and silver versus two made of feathers. A nose of wiring and steel against a beak made of song. A cargo of rockets against a grain of wheat and a straw. Their skies no longer safe, the birds stop singing and pay heed to the war.
• • •

The sky sinks like a sagging concrete roof. The sea approaches, changing into dry land. Sky and sea are one substance, making it hard to breathe. I switch on the radio. Nothing. Time has frozen. It sits on me, choking me. The jets pass between my fingers. They pierce my lungs. How can I reach the aroma of coffee? Am I to shrivel up and die without the aroma of coffee? I don’t want. I don’t want. Where’s my will?

It stopped there, on the other side of the street, the day we raised the call against the legend advancing on us from the south. The day human flesh clenched the muscles of its spirit and cried, “They shall not pass, and we will not leave!” Flesh engaged against metal: it won against the difficult arithemtic, and the conquerors were halted by the walls. There will be time to bury the dead. There will be time for weaponry. And there will be time to pass the time as we please, that this heroism may go on. Because now we are the masters of time.

Bread sprang from the soil and water gushed from the rocks. Their rockets dug wells for us, and the language of their killing tempted us to sing, “We will not leave!” We saw our faces on foreign screens boiling with great promise and breaking through the siege with unwavering victory signs. From now on we have nothing to lose, so long as Beirut is here and we’re here in Beirut as names for a different homeland, where meanings will find their words again in the midst of this sea and on the edge of this desert. For here, where we are, is the tent for wandering meanings and words gone astray and the orphaned light, scattered and banished from the center.

But do they realize, these youths armed to the teeth with a creative ignorance of the balance of forces and with the opening words of old songs, with hand grenades and burning beer bottles, with the desires of girls in air-raid shelters and pieces of torn identities, with a clear wish to take vengeance on prudent parents and with what they do not know of the sport of active death; armed with a rage for release from the senility of the Idea—do they realize that with their wounds and inventive recklessness they are correcting the ink of a language that (from the siege of Acre in the Middle Ages to the present siege of Beirut whose aim is revenge for all medieval history) has driven the whole area east of the Mediterranean toward a West that has wanted nothing more from slavery than to make enslavement easier?[2]

And when they set about putting the siege under siege, did they know that in bringing the actual out of the marvelous into the ordinary they were supplanting the legend and revealing to the misguided Prophet of Doom the secrets of a heroism woven by the movement from the self-evident to the self-evident? As if a man were to be tested on being male, and a woman on being female; as if dignity had the power to choose between selfdefense and suicide; or as if a lone knight had a choice other than single-handedly to cleave this insolent space and clear a path to the secret motive within him, rather than accept that his personal valor and his moral and physical heroism must await the return of official chivalry. As if a handful of human beings were to rebel against the order of things so that this people, whose birth was tempered with stubborn fire, should not be made equal to a flock of sheep herded over the fence of complicity by the Shepherds of Oppression in collusion with the Guardian of the Legend.[3]

They shall not pass as long as there’s life in our bodies. Let them pass, then, if they can pass at all, over whatever corpses the spirit may spit out.

And where is my will?

It stopped over there, on the other side of the collective voice. But now, I want nothing more than the aroma of coffee. Now I feel shame. I feel shamed by my fear, and by those defending the scent of the distant homeland—that fragrance they’ve never smelled because they weren’t born on her soil. She bore them, but they were born away from her. Yet they studied her constantly, without fatigue or boredom; and from overpowering memory and constant pursuit, they learned what it means to belong to her.

“You’re aliens here,” they say to them there.

“You’re aliens here,” they say to them here.[4]

And between here and there they stretched their bodies like a vibrating bow until death celebrated itself through them. Their parents were driven out of there to become guests here, temporary guests, to clear civilians from the battlegrounds of the homeland and to allow the regular armies to purge Arab land and honor of shame and disgrace. As the old lyric had it: “Brother, the oppressors have all limits dared to break / To battle then, of ourselves an offering to make…/ Of a sudden upon them with death we came / In vain their fight, and nothing they became.”[5] And as those lyrics were chasing out the remnants of the invaders, liberating the country line by line, these youths were being born here, any old way—without a cradle, perhaps on a straw mat or banana leaves, or in bamboo baskets—with no joy or feasting, no birth certificate or name registration. They were a burden to their families and tent neighbors. In short, their births were surplus. They had no identity.

And in the end what happened, happened. The regular armies retreated, and these youths were still being born without a reason, growing up for no reason, remembering for no reason, and being put under siege for no reason. All of them know the story—a story very much like that of a cosmic traffic accident or a natural catastrophe. But they also read a great deal in the books of their bodies and their shacks. They read their segregation, and the Arab-nationalist speeches. They read the publications of UNRWA, and the whips of the police.[6] Yet they went on growing up and going beyond the limits of the refugee camp and the detention center.

And they read the history of forts and citadels conquerors used as signatures to keep their names alive in lands not theirs and to forge the identity of rocks and oranges, for example. Is history not bribable? And why, then, would many places—lakes, mountains, cities—bear the names of military leaders but that they had mouthed an impression when they first beheld them, and their words became the names still used today? “Oh, rid!” (How beautiful!) That’s what a Roman general cried out when he first saw that lake in Macedonia, and his surprise became its name. Add to this the hundreds of names we use to refer to places previously singled out by some conqueror, where it has since become difficult to disentangle the identity from the defeat. Forts and citadels that are no more than attempts to protect a name that does not trust time to preserve it from oblivion. Anti-forgetfulness wars; anti-oblivion stones. No one wants to forget. More accurately, no one wants to be forgotten. Or, more peacefully, people bring children into the world to carry their name, or to bear for them the weight of the name and its glory. It has had a long history, this double operation of searching for a place or a time on which to put a signature and untie the knot of the name facing the long caravans of oblivion.

Why then should those whom the waves of forgetfulness have cast upon the shores of Beirut be expected to go against nature? Why should so much amnesia be expected of them? And who can construct for them a new memory with no content other than the broken shadow of a distant life in a shack made of sheet metal?

Is there enough forgetfulness for them to forget?

And who is going to help them forget in the midst of this anguish, which never stops reminding them of their alienation from place and society? Who will accept them as citizens? Who will protect them against the whips of discrimination and pursuit: “You don’t belong here!”

They present for inspection an identity, which, shown at borders, sounds an alarm so that contagious diseases may be kept in check, and at the same time they note how expertly this very identity is used to uplift Arab-nationalist spirit. These forgotten ones, disconnected from the social fabric, these outcasts, deprived of work and equal rights, are at the same time expected to applaud their oppression because it provides them with the blessings of memory. Thus he who’s expected to forget he’s human is forced to accept the exclusion from human rights that will train him for freedom from the disease of forgetting the homeland. He has to catch tuberculosis not to forget he has lungs, and he must sleep in open country not to forget he has another sky. He has to work as a servant not to forget he has a national duty, and he must be denied the privilege of settling down so that he won’t forget Palestine. In short, he must remain the Other to his Arab brothers because he is pledged to liberation.

Fine, fine. He knows his duty: my identity—my gun. Why then do they level against him countless accusations: making trouble, violating the rules of hospitality, creating problems, and spreading the contagion of arms? When he holds his peace, his soul is taken out to the stray dogs; and when he moves toward the homeland, his body is dragged out to the dogs. The intellectuals, capable of trying on the latest models in theory, have convinced him he’s the only alternative to the status quo; yet when the status quo pounces on him, they demand self-criticism because he has gone too far in his patriotism: he has gone so far as to put himself beyond the fold of the status quo. Conditions are not ripe. Conditions are not yet ripe. He has to wait. What must he do? Chatter his life away in the coffee shops of Beirut? He had already prattled so long he was told Beirut had corrupted him.

Society ladies, armed with automatic weapons, amid the tinkle of their jewelry give speeches at parties organized for the defense of the national origins of mujaddara. Yet when he feels embarrassed by this and says something to the effect that the homeland is not a dish of rice and lentils, and when he takes up arms for use outside, on the border, they say, “This is overstepping the bounds.” And when he uses these arms to defend himself inside, against the local agents of Zionism, they say, “This is interference in our communal affairs.” What’s to be done then? What can he do to end the process of self-criticism, other than apologize for an existence which has not yet come into being? You are not going there, and you don’t belong here. Between these two negations this generation was born defending the spirit’s bodily vessel, onto which they fasten the fragrance of the country they’ve never known. They’ve read what they’ve read, and they’ve seen what they’ve seen, and they don’t believe defeat is inevitable. So they set out on the trail of that fragrance.
• • •

They shame me, without my knowing I’m ashamed in front of them. The obscure heaps up on the obscure, rubs against itself, and ignites into clarity. Conquerors can do anything. They can aim sea, sky, and earth at me, but they cannot root the aroma of coffee out of me. I shall make my coffee now. I will drink the coffee now. Right now, I will be sated with the aroma of coffee, that I may at least distinguish myself from a sheep and live one more day, or die, with the aroma of coffee all around me.

Move the pot away from the low fire, that the hand may undertake its first creation of the day. Pay no heed to rockets, shells, or jets. This is what I want. To possess my dawn, I’ll diffuse the aroma of coffee. Don’t look at the mountain spitting masses of fire in the direction of your hand. But alas, you can’t forget that over there, in Ashrafiya, they’re dancing in ecstasy. Yesterday’s papers showed the carnation ladies throwing themselves at the invaders’ tanks, their bosoms and thighs bare in summer nakedness and pleasure, ready to receive the saviors:

Kiss me on the lips, Shlomo! O kiss me on the lips! What’s your name, my love, so I can call you by your name, my darling? Shlomo, my heart’s been passionately longing for you. Come in, Shlomo, come into my house, slowly, slowly, or all at once so I can feel your strength. How I love strength, my darling! And shell them, my love, slaughter them! Kill them with all the passion waiting in us. May the Blessed Lady of Lebanon protect you, Mr. Shlomo! Shell them, sweetheart, while I prepare a glass of arak and your lunch. In how many hours will you finish them off, my darling? How many hours will it take? But the operation has gone on too long, Shlomo, too long! Why are you so slow, my love? Two months! Why haven’t you been advancing? And Shlomo, your body odors are rank. Never mind! That’s no doubt due to the heat and the sweat. I’ll wash you in jasmine water, my love. But why are you pissing in the street? Do you speak French? No? Where were you born? In Ta’ez? Where’s this Ta’ez? In Yemen? No matter. No matter. I thought you were different. It doesn’t matter, Shlomo. Just shell over there for my sake, over there![7]

Gently place one spoonful of the ground coffee, electrified with the aroma of cardamom, on the rippling surface of the hot water, then stir slowly, first clockwise, then up and down. Add the second spoonful and stir up and down, then counterclockwise. Now add the third. Between spoonfuls, take the pot away from the fire and bring it back. For the final touch, dip the spoon in the melting powder, fill and raise it a little over the pot, then let it drop back. Repeat this several times until the water boils again and a small mass of the blond coffee remains on the surface, rippling and ready to sink. Don’t let it sink. Turn off the heat, and pay no heed to the rockets. Take the coffee to the narrow corridor and pour it lovingly and with a sure hand into a little white cup: dark-colored cups spoil the freedom of the coffee. Observe the paths of the steam and the tent of rising aroma. Now light your first cigarette, made for this cup of coffee, the cigarette with the flavor of existence itself, unequaled by the taste of any other except that which follows love, as the woman smokes away the last sweat and the fading voice.

Now I am born. My veins are saturated with their stimulant drugs, in contact with the springs of their life, caffeine and nicotine, and the ritual of their coming together as created by my hand. “How can a hand write,” I ask myself, “if it doesn’t know how to be creative in making coffee!” How often have the heart specialists said, while smoking, “Don’t smoke or drink coffee!” And how I’ve joked with them, “A donkey doesn’t smoke or drink coffee. And it doesn’t write.”

I know my coffee, my mother’s coffee, and the coffee of my friends. I can tell them from afar and I know the differences among them. No coffee is like another, and my defense of coffee is a plea for difference itself. There’s no flavor we might label “the flavor of coffee” because coffee is not a concept, or even a single substance. And it’s not an absolute. Everyone’s coffee is special, so special that I can tell one’s taste and elegance of spirit by the flavor of the coffee. Coffee with the flavor of coriander means the woman’s kitchen is not organized. Coffee with the flavor of carob juice means the host is stingy. Coffee with the aroma of perfume means the lady is too concerned with appearances. Coffee that feels like moss in the mouth means its maker is an infantile leftist. Coffee that tastes stale from too much turning over in the hot water means its maker is an extreme rightist. And coffee with the overwhelming flavor of cardamom means the lady is newly rich.

No coffee is like another. Every house has its coffee, and every hand too, because no soul is like another. I can tell coffee from far away: it moves in a straight line at first, then zigzags, winds, bends, sighs, and turns on flat, rocky surfaces and slopes; it wraps itself around an oak, then loosens and drops into a wadi, looks back, and melts with longing to go up the mountain. It does go up the mountain as it disperses in the gossamer of a shepherd’s pipe taking it back to its first home.

The aroma of coffee is a return to and a bringing back of first things because it is the offspring of the primordial. It’s a journey, begun thousands of years ago, that still goes on. Coffee is a place. Coffee is pores that let the inside seep through to the outside. A separation that unites what can’t be united except through its aroma. Coffee is not for weaning. On the contrary, coffee is a breast that nourishes men deeply. A morning born of a bitter taste. The milk of manhood. Coffee is geography.
• • •

Who is that rising out of my dream?

Did she really speak with me before dawn, or was I delirious, dreaming while waking?

We met only twice. The first time, she learned my name; and the second, I learned hers. The third time, we didn’t meet at all. Why then is she calling me now, out of a dream in which I was sleeping on her knee? The first time, I didn’t say to her, “I love you.” And the second, she didn’t say to me, “I love you.” And we never drank coffee together.
• • •

I got used to counting the number of weevils in the dish of lentil soup, our daily fare in prison. And I got used to overcoming my disgust, because appetite is flexible, and hunger is stronger than appetite. But I never did get used to the absence of my morning coffee and having to take washed-out tea instead. Was that why I never adapted to prison life? A friend asked after my first release from prison, “Did you have a good time?” “No,” I answered, “because they didn’t offer coffee.” “Shocking!” she exclaimed, “though I don’t drink coffee.” “I don’t know many women who are obsessed with coffee in the morning,” I answered. “Men open their day with coffee; women prefer makeup.”

That was not what grieved me, though. One morning a fellow prisoner managed to bring me a cup of coffee. I fell upon it with lust but gave myself time to contemplate it, which only moved another prisoner to cast longing glances in the direction of the cup. I ignored him, to be one with my possession. I ignored him and sipped the coffee with a sadistic pleasure that later gave rise to feelings of guilt.

That was twenty years ago, yet that imploring look still haunts me, always urging me to reexamine myself and correct my behavior, because giving and sharing in prison are the very measure of generosity. I never could get rid of that guilt despite my showering him with cigarette halves in an attempt to buy back my psychological balance. What selfishness! I had deprived a fellow prisoner of half a cup of coffee, which motivated the fates to punish me. A week later my mother came to visit, bringing with her a pot full of coffee, but the guard poured it on the grass.
• • •

Coffee should not be drunk in a hurry. It is the sister of time, and should be sipped slowly, slowly. Coffee is the sound of taste, a sound for the aroma. It is a meditation and a plunge into memories and the soul. And coffee is a habit which, along with the cigarette, must be joined with another habit—the newspaper.

Where is the newspaper? It’s six o’clock in the morning, and I’m in hell itself. But the news is that which is read, not heard. And before it is recorded, the event is not exactly an event. I know a researcher in Israeli affairs who kept denying the “rumor” that Beirut was under siege simply because what he read was not the truth unless it was written in Hebrew. And since Israeli newspapers had not yet reached him, he wouldn’t acknowledge that Beirut was under siege. But this is not a madness I suffer from. For me, the morning paper is an addiction. Where is the newspaper?

The hysteria of the jets is rising. The sky has gone crazy. Utterly wild. This dawn is a warning that today will be the last day of creation. Where are they going to strike next? Where are they not going to strike? Is the area around the airport big enough to absorb all these shells, capable of murdering the sea itself? I turn on the radio and am forced to listen to happy commercials: “Merit cigarettes—more aroma, less nicotine!” “Citizen watches—for the correct time!” “Come to Marlboro, come to where the pleasure is!” “Health mineral water—health from a high mountain!” But where is the water? Increasing coyness from the women announcers on Radio Monte Carlo, who sound as if they’ve just emerged from taking a bath or from an exciting bedroom: “Intensive bombardment of Beirut.” Intensive bombardment of Beirut! Is this aired as an ordinary news item about an ordinary day in an ordinary war in an ordinary newscast? I move the dial to the BBC. Deadly lukewarm voices of announcers smoking pipes within hearing of the listeners. Voices broadcast over shortwave and magnified to a medium wave that transforms them into repulsive vocal caricatures: “Our correspondent says it would appear to cautious observers that what appears of what is gradually becoming clearer when the spokesman is enabled except for the difficulty in getting in touch with the events, which would perhaps indicate that both warring parties are no doubt trying especially not to mention a certain ambiguity which may reveal fighter planes with unknown pilots circling over if we want to be accurate for it might confirm that some people are now appearing in beautiful clothes.” A formal Arabic with correct information, ending with a song by Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab in colloquial Arabic with the correct emotion: “Either come see me, or tell me where to meet you / Or else tell me where to go, to leave you alone.”

Identically monotonous voices. Sand describing sea. Eloquent voices beyond reproach, describing death as they would the weather, and not as they would a horse or motorcycle race. What am I searching for? I open the door several times, but find no newspaper. Why am I looking for the paper when buildings are falling in all directions? Is that not writing enough?

That’s not quite right. The one looking for a paper in the midst of this hell is running from a solitary to a collective death. He’s looking for a pair of human eyes, for a shared silence or reciprocal talk. He’s looking for some kind of participation in this death, for a witness who can give evidence, for a gravestone over a corpse, for the bearer of news about the fall of a horse, for a language of speech and silence, and for a less boring wait for certain death. For what this steel and these iron beasts are screaming is that no one will be left in peace, and no one will count our dead.

I’m lying to myself: I have no need to search for a description of my surroundings or my leaky interiors. The truth of the matter is that I am terrified of falling among the ruins, prey to a moaning no one can hear. And that is painful. Painful to the extent of my feeling the pain as if the event had actually happened. I’m now there, in the rubble. I feel the pain of the animal crushed inside me. I cry out in pain but no one hears me. This is a phantom pain, coming from an opposite direction—out of what might happen. Some of those hit in the leg continue to feel pain there for several years after amputation. They reach out to feel the pain in a place where there is no longer a limb. This phantom, imaginary pain may pursue them to the end of their days. As for me, I feel the pain of an injury that hasn’t happened. My legs have been crushed under the rubble.

These are my forebodings. Perhaps it won’t be a rocket that’ll kill me in a flash, without my being aware. Perhaps a wall will slowly, slowly fall on me, and my suffering will be endless, with no one to hear my cries for help. It may crush my leg, my arm, or my skull. Or it may sit over my chest, and I’ll stay alive for several days in which no one will have the time to search for the remains of another being. Perhaps splinters from my glasses will lodge in my eyes and blind me. My side may be pierced by a metal rod, or I may be forgotten in the crush of mangled flesh left behind in the rubble.

But why am I so concerned with what will happen to my corpse and where it will end up? I don’t know. I want a well-organized funeral, in which they’ll put my body whole, not mangled, in a wooden coffin wrapped in a flag with the four colors clearly visible (even if their names come from a line of poetry whose sounds don’t signify their meanings), carried on the shoulders of my friends and those of my friends who are my enemies.[8]

And I want wreaths of red and yellow roses. I don’t want the cheap pink color, and I don’t want violets, because they spread the smell of death. And I want a radio announcer who’s not a chatterer, whose voice is not too throaty, and who can put on a convincing show of sadness. Between tapes carrying my words, I want him to make little speeches. I want a calm, orderly funeral; and I want it big, that leave-taking, unlike meeting, may be beautiful. How good is the fortune of the recently dead on the first day of mourning, when the mourners compete in praise of them! They’re knights for one day, loved for a day, and innocent for that day. No slander, no curses, and no envy. It’ll be even better for me, because I’ve no wife or children. That’ll save friends the effort of having to put on the long, sad act that doesn’t end until the widow feels compassion for the mourner. It’ll also save the children the indignity of having to stand at the doors of institutions run by tribal bureaucracies. It’s good I’m alone, alone, alone. For that reason my funeral will be free of charge, no one having to keep an account of reciprocal courtesy, so that after the funeral those who walked in the procession can go back to their daily affairs. I want a funeral with an elegant coffin, from which I can peep out over the mourners, just as the playwright Tawfiq al-Hakim wanted to do. I want to sneak a look at how they stand, walk, and sigh and how they convert their spittle into tears. I also want to eavesdrop on their mocking comments: “He was a womanizer.” “He was a dandy in his choice of clothes.” “The rugs in his house are so plush you sink into them up to your knees.” “He had a palace on the French Riviera, a villa in Spain, and a secret bank account in Zurich. And he kept a private plane, secretly, and five luxury cars in a garage in Beirut.” “We don’t know if he had a yacht in Greece, but he had enough sea shells in his house to build a whole refugee camp.” “He used to lie to women.” “The poet is dead, and his poetry with him. What’s left of him? His role is finished, and we’re done with his legend. He took his poetry with him and disappeared. Anyway, his nose was long, and his tongue.” I’ll hear even harsher stuff than this, once the imagination has been let loose. I’ll smile in my coffin and try to say, “Enough!” I’ll try to come back to life, but I won’t be able.
• • •

But to die here—no! I don’t want to die under the rubble. I’ll pretend I’m going down to the street to look for a newspaper. Fear is shameful in the midst of this fever of heroism erupting from the people—from those on the front line whose names we don’t know, as well as the simple souls who have chosen to stay in Beirut, to devote their days to the search for enough water to fill a twenty-liter can in this downpour of bombs, to extend the moment of resistance and steadfastness into history, and to pay the price with their flesh in the battle against exploding metal. Heroism is here in this very part of divided Beirut in this burning summer. It is West Beirut. He who dies here does not die by chance. Rather he who lives, lives by chance, because not one span of earth has been spared the rockets and not one spot where you can take a step has been saved from an explosion. But I don’t want to die under the rubble. I want to die in the open street.

Suddenly, worms, made famous in a certain novel, spread before me. Worms arranging themselves in rigid order into rows according to color and type to consume a corpse, stripping flesh off bone in a few minutes. Just one raid. Two raids, and nothing’s left except the skeleton. Worms that come from nowhere, from the earth, from the corpse itself. The corpse consumes itself by means of a well-organized army rising from within it in moments. Surely, it’s a picture that empties a man of heroism and flesh, thrusting him into the nakedness of absurd destiny, into absolute absurdity, into total nothingness; a picture that peels the song from the praise of death and from the escape into flight. Was it to overcome the ugliness of this fact that the human imagination—the inhabitant of the corpse—opened a space to save the spirit from this nothingness? Is this the solution proposed by religion and poetry? Perhaps. Perhaps.”

You can read the editor’s intro to the book at http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XvqoL4esHIgC&dq=memory+of+forgetfulness&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result#PPP13,M1 and more parts of the text, including the coffee making you can read athttp://www.escholarship.org/editions/view?docId=ft1z09n7g7&chunk.id=ch1&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ch1&brand=ucpress

An obituary for Mahmoud Darwish can be found here.

[My brief opening comment was written in January 2009]

History did not begin with the Qassams

Amira Hass

Here, below, is a very good article from today’s Haaretz Two things that I want to pick up from this. First, such an article expressing these kinds of views or showing this kind of integrity of analysis could not be published in Hamas-controlled Gaza or any other Middle Eastern state. The journalist would be disappeared, imprisoned or otherwise punished and prevented from writing. The publisher would be closed and otherwise punished. Freedom of expression, Article 19, etc is fundamental to the very possibility of democratic socialism. Second, Israel, the state in which Haartez is published, is prosecuting (again) a brutal war against Palestinians. Israel, as we know, is one of the most highly militarised societies in the world …. my questions are these : what is the relationship between a relatively free press and the tendency to prosecute demonstrably brutal wars ? what is the relationship between politically deeply repressive states (eg Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia) and their sheer inability and unwillingness to provide meaningful solidarity to the Palestinians ? is opposition to the war more likely to be built effectively in and with a country with a relatively free press or is opposition to the war more likely to be built effectively in and with a deeply repressive country ?

[This comment was written in January 2009. I think that my questions are pertinent still in the light of the so-called ‘Arab spring’, the imperial interventions in Libya, the indeterminate situation in Syria, the UN statehood claims of Palestine, and the deterioration of Turkey-Israel relations].

History did not begin with the Qassams
By Amira Hass

Wed., January 14, 2009 Tevet 18, 5769

“History did not begin with the Qassam rockets. But for us, the Israelis, history always begins when the Palestinians hurt us, and then the pain is completely decontextualized. We think that if we cause the Palestinians much greater pain, they will finally learn their lesson. Some term this “achievement.”

Nevertheless, the “lesson” remains abstract for most Israelis. The Israeli media prescribes a strict low-information, low-truth diet for its consumers, one rich in generals and their ilk. It is modest, and does not boast of our achievements: the slain children and the bodies rotting under the ruins, the wounded who bleed to death because our soldiers shoot at the ambulance crews, the little girls whose legs were amputated due to horrible wounds caused by various types of weaponry, the devastated fathers shedding bitter tears, the residential neighborhoods that have been obliterated, the terrible burns caused by white phosphorus, and the mini-transfer – the tens of thousands of people who have been expelled from their homes, and are still being expelled at this very minute, ordered to cram into a built-up area that is constantly growing smaller and is also under sentence of incessant bombing and shelling.

Ever since the Palestinian Authority was established, the Israeli public relations machinery has exaggerated the danger of the military threat that the Palestinians pose to us. When they moved from stones to rifles and from Molotov cocktails to suicide bombings, from roadside bombs to Qassams and from Qassams to Grads, and from the PLO to Hamas, we said with a whoop of victory, “We told you. They’re anti-Semites.” And therefore, we have the right to go on a rampage.

What enabled Israel’s military rampage – the proper words to describe it cannot be found in my dictionary – was the step-by-step isolation of the Gaza Strip. The isolation turned Gaza’s residents into abstract objects, with no names and addresses, except the addresses of the armed men, and no history, aside from the dates determined by the Shin Bet security service.

The siege of Gaza did not begin when Hamas seized control of the Strip’s security organs, or when Gilad Shalit was taken captive, or when Hamas was elected in democratic elections. The siege began in 1991 – before the suicide bombings. And since then, it has only become more sophisticated, reaching its peak in 2005.

The Israeli public relations machinery happily presented the disengagement as the end of the occupation, in brazen disregard of the facts. The isolation and closure were presented as military necessities. But we are big boys and girls, and we know that “military necessities” and consistent lies serve state goals. Israel’s goal was to thwart the two-state solution, which the world had expected to materialize once the Cold War ended in 1990. This was not a perfect solution, but the Palestinians were ready for it then.

Gaza is not a military power that attacked its tiny, peace-loving neighbor, Israel. Gaza is a territory that Israel occupied in 1967, along with the West Bank. Its residents are part of the Palestinian people, which lost its land and its homeland in 1948.

In 1993, Israel had a one-time golden opportunity to prove to the world that what people say about us is untrue – that it is not by nature a colonialist state. That the expulsion of a nation from its land, the expulsion of people from their houses and the robbery of Palestinian land for the sake of settling Jews are not the basis and essence of its existence.

In the 1990s, Israel had a chance to prove that 1948 is not its paradigm. But it missed this opportunity. Instead, it merely perfected its techniques for robbing land and expelling people from their houses, and forced the Palestinians into isolated enclaves. And now, during these dark days, Israel is proving that 1948 never ended.”

History, feelings and memory

Diogenes – natural and social truths

I’ve been re-reading Orwell’s ‘1984’ for the first time since, well, oddly enough, 1984. It really is a great novel but there are one or two problematic inconsistencies. For example, the Party and its members are just too distinct and separated from the proles to make the idea of ideological control and totality plausible. In fact ideological totalitarianism is not even mobilised over the proles. Secondly, there is no explanation as to why Julia joins Winston in their first meeting with O’Brien. Given her political senses, which is well articulated by Orwell, and Winston’s own deep fears the idea that they would both go together to meet O’Brien whom they have neither talked to other than a couple of passing words is just implausible.

But there are a couple of things that I wanted to mention here. “The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world.” (p.134) I think it rather of an irony that Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia has become popularised (and transformed) in the form of Big Brother television shows (not that any devotees of such shows need know the origins of the phrase ‘big brother’) in such a way that trivial feelings – the more superficial and superficially expressed the better – are elevated to the highest account, whereas control of our material conditions is rendered absolutely trivial and irrelevant.

Second, Winston reflects on the differences in attitude and approach between himself and Julia, arguing that Julia has a much sounder understanding and appreciation. And he observes that ‘By lack of understanding they [the people in general] remained sane, They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue … (p.128) The trouble is that the third part of the novel – when Winston and Julia are subjected to torture in the Ministry of Love – is entirely premissed on the idea that order in Oceania (one of the world’s three superstates in which Big Brother rules) is maintained and reproduced by (i) people understanding correctly, (ii) that they swallow everything and (iii) that the harm is extensive and permanent. To wit O’Brien, Winston’s interrogator, eulogizes,
“We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. …. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognise their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me ?” (pp.211-212)
At this point Winston doesn’t understand so he is tortured again and again.

Understanding is not swallowed. Understanding is secured precisely through harm. And even when he reflects on his betrayal of Julia and comes to love Big Brother, even then he, Winston, is still conscious of the residue.

[This piece was written in January 2009]