|
June 11, 2002
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
June 7, 2002
Michael Colby
Bush to the Nation:
You're All Cops Now
Tanweer Akram
Howard
Zinn's "Terrorism
and War": a review
David Krieger
New Security Challenges
Sam Bahour
The Palestinian
Intifada:
A Very American Struggle
Tom Turnipseed
A Crisis of Confidence
in US Leadership
June 6, 2002
Michael Colby
White House
vs. EPA:
Political Hot Air and
Global Warming
Ron Jacobs
The Indo-Pakistan Conflict:
It's Just a Shot Away
Francis Boyle
Take Sharon
to The Hague:
Prosecute Israeli War Crimes
at Jenin
CounterPunch Bulletin
60 Minutes and President Chavez's
Censored F-Word
Mark Weisbrot
Spying
and Lying:
The FBI's Shameful Past
June 5, 2002
Robert Fisk
Berlusconi the Censor
Danielle Brian
Nuclear
Plants and Terrorism
Ardeshir Cowasjee
For What Do We Fight?
George Monbiot
Kashmir
on the Brink
Michael Neumann
What is Antisemitism?
June 4, 2002
Dave Marsh
Bono the Useful Idiot
William Evan / Francis
Boyle
Kashmir:
Invoking Intl. Law to Avoid Nuclear War
Cockburn / St. Clair
The Future Wellstone Deserves
June 3, 2002
Ramdas / Makhijani
India,
Pakistan and Nukes:
A Road Map to Peace
Fran Shor
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan
Neve Gordon
The Caterpillar
Effect
June 2, 2002
Fidel Castro
From FDR to Mister "W.":
Cuba, the US and Democracy
Arundhati Roy
Under the
Nuclear Shadow
Bernard Weiner
Bush 9/11 Scandal for Dummies
June 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
The
Strange Math of Roberto Carlos: Brazil v. Turkey
Gavin Keeney
Bush and Mies van der Rohe:
Architecture and Ideology
Jeff Halper
Sharon's
Post-Incursion Plan:
Incarceration or Transfer?
Walt Brasch
Crumpling the Constitution
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
June 11,
2002
On Dance, Identity and War
by Omar Barghouti
In the middle of our regular dance rehearsal,
our second after the end of the latest Israeli assault, a group
of Belgian artists quietly sauntered into our well-lit, yet cozy,
studio in Ramallah, some for the first time. Unmistakably surprised
by what they saw and heard -- I had chosen a track from Brave
Heart for the improvisation segment that day, our European friends
started shooting -- with a video camera, that is -- and taking
notes, incessantly. Most westerners cannot hide their bemusement
when they see a group of Palestinian dancers -- from both sexes
-- diligently learning a new elaborate Palestinian choreography.
The scene is somewhat surreal to them. Dance in the midst of
"war"!
During the brief rehearsal break I usually
give the dancers, after two hours of hard, sweaty work, one of
the visitors, a filmmaker, interviews me. He asks with some hesitation,
"After all this war and destruction of basic infrastructure,
how do you  convince
yourself and the dancers to persevere in doing what you are doing?
Isn't dance a very low priority in time of war?" I never
asked myself that question. Do we have to stop creating dance,
music, art and literature to join the battle of 'reconstruction'?
Is reconstruction only applicable to devastated buildings, roads,
water pipes and electricity poles? How about shattered dreams
and shaken identities, don't they need reconstruction as well?
I could not but recall John Stuart Mill's definition of humans
as "unique," "self-creating," and "creative
individuals" who are "culture-bearing."
During the latest punishing re-occupation
of Ramallah, days had passed without electricity, running water
and with food shortages, but that did not deter me from listening
to Fairuz, Vivaldi and Munir Bashir, or my wife from listening
to Asmahan, Abdel Wahab and Umm Kalthoum -- yes, we do have substantial
pluralism in our music preferences in the family. My older daughter
still had to practice the violin daily, the exact hours depending
on when it was quietest. The neighborhood kids still invented
new games and new causes of quarrel along with them; all of them
were strongly urged by their parents to allocate some mandatory
time for studying every single day. Our humble collection of
literature books-- from Naguib Mahfouz to Isabel Allende, and
from Abdel Rahman Munif to Ahlam Mistaganmi -- suddenly became
a "public" library for the neighbors.
Several of us read, wrote, wept every
once in a while, cringed at particularly gory footage, argued
with each other on every imaginable political issue-- an idiosyncratic
feature of average Palestinian life-- joked, shouted at times,
rationed the precious little water we had (mainly collected from
rain drainage) between our desperate plants and ourselves, shared
rare moments of intimacy and mutual vulnerability; ... in short,
we lived as "culture-bearing" beings do.
Perhaps our neighborhood is different
from the next, but most of what we did to survive the onslaught
without paying a dear price in our sanity was common virtually
everywhere, at least in all the places where roofs remained standing
where they should be, and where death had not visited.
But even where roofs literally fell on
top of innocent inhabitants, as in the midst of the despondent
devastation in the Jenin refugee camp and in the Nablus casbah,
a nagging concern of parents and community leaders was to make
sure that schools were rehabilitated as quickly as possible to
be able to function normally. One cannot imagine, perhaps, how
a deeply traumatized tent dweller, surviving an appalling atrocity,
left with a profusion of loss, desperation, and anger, and a
scarcity in basic needs, could possibly worry about his/her children's
education. Insight into the innermost scars of Palestinian refugees,
however, could elucidate this mysterious Palestinian obsession
with learning as a means of identity formation.
The "Nakba generation" -- as
the Palestinian generation that suffered the brunt of the initial
dispossession in 1948 is commonly called -- is haunted with guilt
for what it perceives as its mortifying failure to resist the
Zionist onslaught then. The essential culprit in their mind has
always been their "limited consciousness" at the time
-- a recurring theme in that period's oral history -- which in
this context is understood as a combination of ignorance, illiteracy,
being deficient in necessary skills, as well as lacking a clear
sense of identity. Culture -- which learning is a vital part
of -- is therefore venerated as the key to their salvation from
repeated victimization and exile.
In contexts of colonialism, cultural
expression acquires particular eminence in shaping the collective
identity. This is mostly due to the role played by the colonist
in influencing the native's identity. As Jean-Paul Sartre once
described the French settler-colonist in Algeria,
"[H]e has come to believe that the
domestication of the 'inferior races' will come about by the
conditioning of their reflexes. But in this he leaves out of
account the human memory and the ineffaceable marks left upon
it; and then, above all there is something which perhaps he has
never known: we only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated
refusal of that which others have made of us."
Immersing themselves in cultural praxis,
the natives expand the "ineffaceable marks" left upon
their human memory. Despite the widespread devastation caused
by the Inexorably Destructive Fascists, otherwise know as the
IDF, Palestinians cannot afford not to integrate cultural rehabilitation
and identity reformulation into their overall battle of reconstruction
and struggle for emancipation. Our very humanity has been restricted,
hampered, battered by the relentless dehumanizing efforts of
our tormentors. As a reaction, the process of de-colonizing our
minds assumes crucial precedence. Restoring our humanity, our
dreams, our hopes and our will to resist and to be free, therefore,
becomes even more important than mending our infrastructure.
Thus, we dance.
Frantz Fanon described this process saying,
"[Decolonization] transforms spectators crushed with their
inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose of
history's floodlights upon them. ... Decolonization is the veritable
creation of new men." The self-worth, which has been subjected
to unremitting abuse at the hand of the colonists is here given
the opportunity to be resurrected, radically, without losing
sight of the fact that our fetters do not disappear with the
end of our subjugation to the colonist. We've always had some
form of chains, cultural, social, that have also hindered our
assumption of our due position in world development. In our cultural
struggle, we cannot but address those fetters as well.
Cultural expression to us, then, serves
dual purposes: self-therapy and expansion of the "free zone"
in our collective mind, where progressive transformation can
thrive. In response to all the attempts to circumscribe our aspirations,
we must push on, dreaming and being creative, boundlessly. Thus,
we dance.
Omar Barghouti
is a dance choreographer and trainer of El-Funoun Palestinian
Popular Dance Troupe, in Al-Bireh (Ramallah). He is also a doctoral
student of philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He can be reached
at: jenna@palnet.com
Today's
Features
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys
of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping a Nuclear War
in South Asia
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|