Should Poetry Exist After Gaza?

I am still doubtful whether thinking OUT LOUD helps at all in an issue that is already much discussed all over the news media. I sense a lot of distancing from the part of people who claim to be philosophers/thinkers/writers whenever the word Gaza is mentioned. I respect their personal decisions and would never point a finger at anyone who chooses to stay away from certain debates. In fact, I would respect people who speak only when they feel convinced that speaking is inevitable. Gaza brings forth some uncomfortable issues related to the extent to which it is talked about. When we see and hear too much, we tend to turn suspicious of the politics behind it. While journalistic debates revolve around the politics of it for obvious reasons, those who don't have many reasons to be involved in the political, regional and religious aspects of it are worried whether their statements would sound harsh or insensitive to some ears. Many assume that silence is the best solution here. Where do we place arts and literature in this context?

My previous posts dealt with the way the issue is represented in a novel and a few films, and one post made clear some of my own views regarding the whole affair. Here, my attempt is to draw your attention to the role poetry plays in the Gaza affair. Hamid Dabashi's well researched write up on the topic here, which came out yesterday in the Al Jazeera web page will be of interest to many of you who are willing to spend some quality time reading. His arguments derive from a well known view of the culture critic Theodor Adorno, better known for breaking quite a handful of sacred idols in commonly/superstitiously perceived notions of arts and literature in relation to culture. Dabashi opens his arguments by referring to the Adorno quote: "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today." The parallels and paradoxes that come out of this, when placed next to the Gaza situation, is explored in an erudite manner by Dabashi. He draws attention to the fact that the word 'Auschwitz' sounds and feels so much like 'Gaza' now.

  
Moving on to the real state of affairs, one could see that the exact opposite to what Adorno said and hoped for is the case now. You see a barrage of thoughts on the issue , wherever you turn to - TV, radio, social media, YouTube, blogs - and many of them are in 'poetic' forms. I agree that social media has liberated us from traditional views on poetry, though my reaction to it is mixed. While I wouldn't dictate terms to anyone who wants to be a poet in her/his own terms, I am a bit worried about the reluctance of many new writers to take time to read, and understand a bit, about the medium in which they aspire to express themselves. Many literary groups request their members to refrain from posting their doggerel five times a day on the pages' wall. I understand the temptation to share whatever you think and write with the world, now that the task is made too easy. It thrills every one of us when someone shows interest in what we think, what we express artistically. Gaza seems to have let out numerous rivulets of poetic thought. But if you work further on that cliched line of thought, would you see them enriching the rivers and oceans of poetry, or contaminating them? I'll just leave that an open question to you readers. 

Dabashi thinks out loud what the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish would have done in these times, if he were still alive: "He would have either committed suicide like the magnificent Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi who did so in protest against the brutish Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, or he would respond with his poetry" (Dabashi). The way the act of writing poetry is juxtaposed to an extreme act of sacrifice for a cause looked very interesting to me, just like the way the statements by Plato and W. H. Auden that are quite often mindlessly used by the detractors of poetry. The irony in Auden's misquoted line "poetry makes nothing happen" is lost on those who fail to place it in its context. And what poetry makes happen is the concern of those who follow Plato's advice and want it to be banned in modern democracies and other forms of governance. But Dabashi's worry focuses around the power of Gaza to contaminate our thoughts, quite similar to the fear I expressed in my post on Children Who Live, With No Choices. Are we ready to acknowledge the fact that by the simple act of living through a carnage helplessly, we also allow us to be transformed by it? Do we see the ways in which our thoughts are contaminated by our ability to look at a situation and dissect it mindlessly, in ways that are ultimately beneficial to us? It should be a case for serious introspection to all those who try to express their views through their chosen medium of (artistic) expression.

Darwish himself has tried earlier to contain some of his thoughts on the issue in poetry. In Silence For Gaza, which appears like a poem in prose in the translations I have seen, he raises these pertinent points: 

Gaza is far from its relatives and close to its enemies, because whenever Gaza explodes, it becomes an island and it never stops exploding. It scratched the enemy’s face, broke his dreams and stopped his satisfaction with time.

Because in Gaza time is something different.

Because in Gaza time is not a neutral element.

It does not compel people to cool contemplation, but rather to explosion and a collision with reality.

Time there does not take children from childhood to old age, but rather makes them men in their first confrontation with the enemy.

Time in Gaza is not relaxation, but storming the burning noon. Because in Gaza values are different, different, different.

The only value for the occupied is the extent of his resistance to occupation. That is the only competition there. Gaza has been addicted to knowing this cruel, noble value. It did not learn it from books, hasty school seminars, loud propaganda megaphones, or songs. It learned it through experience alone and through work that is not done for advertisement and image.

(Darwish)

The 'full' version of this is available here, and as it turns out, an even fuller version is available here, though I thought some of the poetry is lost in translation.

I would like to share two other poems that appealed to me for their genuine concerns in the issue and the willingness to address the extent to which our existence is transformed in many ways including the contamination of thoughts/perspectives. 

  

 

Here is a poem titled 'Gaza' by the Indian poet Sudeep Sen, published here in The Hindu (August 3, 2014). Sen is a poet whom I admire for the extreme care he takes in the choice and juxtaposition of words and thought patterns. I have read many other poems by him that weave a complex web of thought, but this one in tercets is simpler and direct when compared to them,for obvious reasons. I felt that there was a pull in the subconscious level to make it accessible to readers around the world, regardless of their ability to appreciate the specific form in which it is written, or the poetic devices employed in it. I felt it could also work the way Darwish's 'Identity Card' works in many school/college/university classrooms. I will leave the poem here for your appreciation and responses:

Gaza

~ By Sudeep Sen

Soaked in blood, children,

their heads blown out

even before they are formed.

Gauze, gauze, more gauze —

interminable lengths

not long enough to soak

 all the blood in Gaza.

A river of blood flowing,

flooding the desert sands

with incarnadine hate.

An endless lava stream,

a wellspring red river

on an otherwise
parched-orphaned land,

bombed every five minutes

to strip Gaza of whatever 

is left of the Gaza strip.

With sullied hands

of innocent children, 

we strip ourselves 

of all dignity and grace.

Look at the bodies 

of the little ones killed — 

their scarred faces smile,

their vacant eyes stare 

with no malice

at the futility of all

the blood that is spilt.

And even as we refuse

to learn from the wasted

deaths of these children, 

their parents, country,

world — weep blood. Stop

the blood-bath — heed, heal.

And here is another poem that drew me in with its chilling account of details -  'Running Orders' by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. For a poem that has come out immediately after the carnage in July, this exposed me to a genuine insider's voice that I believe could make a difference in the coming years in the poetic world. It was published in Vox Populi here. 

Running Orders

~ by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

In July 2014, before the Israeli military would fire at a structure in Gaza, they would send a warning “bomb” to let the Palestinian residents know they had less than a moment before the next bigger bomb. They called this “roof knocking”.

They call us now.
before they drop the bombs.
The phone rings
and someone who knows my first name
calls and says in perfect Arabic
“This is David.”
And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass
shattering symphonies
still smashing around in my head
I think “Do I know any Davids in Gaza?”
They call us not to say
Run.
You have 58 seconds from the end of this
Message.
Your house is next.
They think of it as some kind of
war time courtesy.
It doesn’t matter that
There is nowhere to run to.
It means nothing that the borders are closed
and your papers are worthless
and mark you only for a life sentence
in this prison by the sea
and the alleyways are narrow
and there are more human lives
packed one against the other
more than any other place on earth.
Just run.
We aren’t trying to kill you.
It doesn’t matter that
you can’t call us back to tell us
the people we claim to want aren’t in your
house
that there’s no one here
except you and your children
who were cheering for Argentina
sharing the last loaf of bread for this week
counting candles left in case the power goes
out.
It doesn’t matter that you have children.
You live in the wrong place.
and now is your chance to run
to nowhere.
It doesn’t matter
that 58 seconds isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost completed college application.
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are.
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.

I leave the question 'Should Poetry Exist After Gaza' for your instrospection. I hope the poems I shared here give you an idea of the kind of poetry I believe in, for my own reasons. I wouldn't claim that I represent a majority. I haven't been able to write a poem on the issue yet, and I wouldn't consider it a necessity until I feel up to it, until I feel it is necessary that I speak up in that form.  

It is up to you to speak up or not, and to be aware of the various forces around you that affect your ideas. Some worry whether anyone else can speak for the Palestinians, forcing one to take the big Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak question, 'Can The Subaltern Speak?' and place it in this context. One may need to get rid of foolish notions about the burden of speaking for others, when there is no 'we' and 'they' in the larger context. The whole idea of the difficult act of speaking may have to be reflected upon constantly. 

If anyone decides to speak up these days, it has to be done after a lot of thinking. And rethinking. That applies a lot in the case of poetry.

Note: Please do feel free to post your poems and responses to the issues mentioned here. I am so glad to receive a couple of remarkable poems as responses, by the well known writers from Ireland, William Wall, and from Pakistan, Naseer Ahmed Nasir. They were kind enough to make them available below in the comments section.

Hany Abu-Assad's 'Paradise Now'

Paradise Now, directed by Hany Abu-Assad came out in the year 2005. I could see it only recently, thanks to my friend Gopi Sait of Mulberry Films, who is kind enough to give me a lot of valuable advice and assistance in appreciating films and the art of movie making. My response to the movie now is purely based on its thematic structure though. This is in fact an extension of my thoughts in the earlier post The Gaza Blame Game and Children Who Live, With No Choice. 

There had been quite a lot of movies that trace the traumatic events that lead to the making of a suicide bomber. The ones that I have seen and that have made an impact on me are Theeviravaathi: The Terrorist (1997) by Santhosh Sivan, India and Rabia (2007) a short biopic on Wafa Idris, Palestine's first female suicide bomber, directed by Miguel Ali (aka Muhammad Miguel Ali Hasan). 

  

While these two movies have female suicide bombers and exploit their feminine aspects in contrast to the supposedly heinous act they commit, Paradise Now distances viewers a lot for the most part from the two men who do the same. While all three movies have a lot of significance in the way they humanize the protagonists, I was a lot more drawn to Paradise Now and the way its director tackled the issue of dealing with the mental make up of his characters. 

Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) are the young Palestinian men chosen for an 'operation'. They were working in pathetic conditions as garage mechanics, tormented by the general situation in Palestine, menacing employer and clients and their own bad temper. They take the task of crossing over to Israel and blowing themselves up as a serious one, and are seemingly committed to it. They spend their last nights with their family in a remarkably calm demeanor. Said even overcomes his feelings for the beautiful Suha (Lubna Azabal), born in France and brought up in Morocco. Despite her great reputation in Palestinian community as the daughter of a much respected leader Abu Assam who sacrificed his life for their cause, she keeps talking about 'other ways' to deal with the situation. She even tries to influence Said with her logic that violence just results in more suffering, especially for those people who are left behind to live, with no choices at hand. 

The first effort by the young men takes place after a lot of training. They are transformed fully. They get a shave and their hair is cropped. The bombs are well hidden under their western formal outfits. They undergo tedious procedures that are very demanding at times, but also comic in some unexpected parts. They are supposed to give some video messages about their decisions, and the recording is quite often interrupted because the cameras don't work. The impatient Khaled once tries to give a message to his mother during one such recordings about some better, cheaper water filters. There is some mention of contaminated water in a few other places, even the possibility of an easy way of finishing off the Palestinians just by poisoning the water.

 

I wouldn't give any spoilers now. The film focuses on the way the two young men deal with their lives at crucial moments, and how their responses keep changing unexpectedly. It is better that you see the movie to come to your own conclusions. What appealed the most to me was the way the character of Said is presented in the movie. He is seen as someone who opens his mouth a few times to say something important, and then leaves the idea as someone else speaks. He speaks mostly through his eyes, which keep giving you varied impressions depending on the contexts.

At times you feel Said is a confused person, but at times he surprises you with his clear will. He lets out only a few things about himself. He tells Suha once that his father was a collaborator, and he was executed. He stresses the fact that he was just 10 years old then. His mother tries to see the image of her husband in a grown up Said. The director presents very briefly the disturbing face of a young boy who serves tea to Said and Khaled in a wasteland next to the garage. He has a confusing expression on his face as he waits for a little more money from Khaled, or Said. Khaled commands him away with his eyes, while Said doesn't get involved in the whole affair and just fiddles with a matchbox. The expression on the boy's face haunted me. Was it sadness, helplessness, or anger? Said's reference to his ten year old self brought this boy's face to my mind. The siblings of the young men, on the other hand, didn't leave such a lasting impression on me, though their mothers did.

Some of Said's arguments make his case more intriguing. They sometimes serve as a critique to the way movies about wronged people and their 'wrong' decisions are perceived by the public. Here is a dialogue between Suha and Said after Suha gets infuriated by the fact that there are 'martyr videos' and 'collaborator videos'  for sale, and for the same price, in the shops around. 

Suha: Do you think it's normal that those videos are for sale?
Said: What's normal around here?
Suha: It's sick. Three million people are struggling to survive. Nablus has become a prison. I don't know what I am doing here. What a load of...
Said: My father was a collaborator. He was executed. I was ten.
Suha: I am so sorry
Said: No need to be. 
Suha: How did you deal with that?
Said: It was Okay. It's not as bad as you might think. 
Suha: Do you want to talk about it?
Said: What's there to talk about? Will it end the occupation? Will I stop remembering that my father was a collaborator? The whole world knows. 
Suha: I didn't.
Said: What do you know? You come from a different world. Abu Azzam's daughter. Living in a fancy neighborhood.
Suha: What are you talking about?
Said: Why talk? To get your pity? To entertain people whose life is a bit better?  

Said gives Suha a fleeting kiss and runs away to his father's grave after this. It is Khaled who takes part in the discussions on sacrifice and a paradise for the martyrs while Said is someone tormented by his past. However, the radical views of Khaled's arguments come to a comical end once again, when Suha cuts him short in the midst of a rant on martyrs to point out that if he doesn't drive carefully, they would end up being traffic martyrs. 

The movie's climactic moments revolve around the attitudes of the two men and who among them would stick on to their determination - Said, who is much loved by Suha, and has qualities that would suit a family person, or the short tempered, religiously indoctrinated Khaled. Khaled's brotherly love for Said from their childhood is also evident in many parts, and it is curious how the reticent Said would ever be able to return that. 

The moments that troubled me the most were the ones regarding Said's lack of choices, as a child and as a young man. He opens up a bit to the leader of the terrorist group, who is upset by the failure in their first attempt.

Said: I was... born in a refugee camp. I was allowed to leave the West Bank only once. I was six at the time... and needed surgery. Just that one time. Life here is like life imprisonment. The crimes of the occupation are countless. The worst crime of all is to exploit the people's weaknesses... and to turn them into collaborators. By doing that, they not only kill the resistance...they also ruin families... ruin their dignity and ruin an entire people. When my father...was executed, I was ten years old. He was a good person. But he grew weak. For that, I hold the occupation responsible. They must understand that if they recruit collaborators...they must pay the price for it. A life without dignity is worthless. Especially when it reminds you...day after day, of humiliation and weakness. And the world watches cowardly, indifferently. If you are all alone, faced with this oppression...you have to find a way to stop the injustice. 

It is curious that a martyr's daughter Suha gets involved in human rights groups and talks of peaceful ways of intervention, while a collaborator's son Said grows up with so much pent up anger that comes from his helpless situation. This is where the question of children who have to live with no choices become relevant. Said remembers his childhood vividly, he never forgets what happened when he was six and when he was ten. Suha's exposure to other cultures and her mobility help her look at the situation differently. But what about the many who are trapped in a situation forever, with no opportunity to distance themselves from it and to look at if from some sort of an informed position? What about the scholasticide that people don't consider as a serious crime? Just like many think certain historical balancing is inevitable, the only decisions that young people like Said are capable of taking become inevitable as well, if we leave them with no other choices in life.

 
And far more serious would be the lack of choices that the 'spectators' have in this case, whose lives are perhaps a little better, as Said says. There is no choice other than to be 'entertained' by the images we keep seeing. We end up dissecting the lives of those children who are dead, or those children who are alive and will have to go wrong, to take the 'wrong' decisions. And we raise our children to be such passive spectators, deriving pleasure from tears for others, and blaming the world around them for things they think they cannot change. Said doesn't ask you to continue doing that. In the plans he and Khaled has to blow themselves up, there is some space for a plan to put an end to many ways of thinking which they think are not right, just like the way we are bent on thinking that their plan is not right. 

Perhaps that is the complex issue dealt with in the movie, as its tagline goes, "from the most unexpected place comes a bold new call for peace." A peace that's beyond mindless slogans.   

The Gaza Blame Game And Children Who Live, With No Choice

There is no doubt that graphic images of wounded and dead children, who had no role or agency in the Gaza issue, are heartbreaking. Wherever you turn to in this age of incessant ideas, you find lamentations, rants, angry slogans, calls for revenge in this world and the other, and even calls for peace and solutions. It is all very troubling, and life-changing too, for a thinking person. Can we really think of a solution? I can't, to be honest. I can't, unless we shift our focus, at least for arguments' sake, from the children who are dead, to the ones who are not dead. The ones who are not dead and have to live, with no choice.

The inane blame game and its uselessness is looked at with great insight in the recent Guardian article here.  It concludes with a strong view of "[N]ot one more shell in a Gaza schoolyard, ever." Let us hope so against our hopes, against what history warns us. Even then, the question remains of those who survive the experience - both those who suffer and those who cause the suffering directly or indirectly. They will have to live in a world devoid of real choices, morality apart. This is not a pleasant situation, especially when a part of these survivors turn out to be children. Children who grow up to realize at some point in their life that they cannot separate themselves from the history of dead children. Not just because the dead children were related to them by the bond of blood, religion or nationality but also the stronger bond of an ideological situation.

Philosophers keep wondering about free will. Can the idea of free will exist in a world where unfettered thoughts don't exist? Parental influences and institutional/religious indoctrination are not the only things that work against free will. History plays a major part there, a part that can be compared to what our genes play in our biological existence. Just like there is generally no choice in deciding on the genetic pattern/condition we need, there is no choice in deciding what we are in the context of the history that defines our positions.

This may sound like a complex issue, but it is an important one when we try to label people on the basis of existing knowledge systems. It goes beyond the possibilities we count on our fingers about what traumatic experiences can cause in a child's development. It doesn't help to take the case of a so-called terrorist or suicide bomber and work backwards to see how her/his life experiences have led to the 'wrong' decisions s/he had taken in the only life at the only time s/he had, just in order to write her/him off as a causality of history.

We have more causalities around us. Our children, who are alive, and have no choice but to see what is happening around them, to read about them, to be transformed by them. In a case of being drawn into a senseless conflict, one has only two choices - to be on one side, or the other. But those choices are no choices. The real choice would have been to stay away from the senseless conflict, and to focus on something that the individual considers sensible. History draws us to that senseless conflict. Perhaps that's an existential situation, beyond human intervention. Or, is that so? If we talk about decisions, it has to be in the context of someone who is capable of taking them, someone who has choices.

Are we the grown up versions of children who were drawn to conflicts, by histories that define our existence? Is there any way in which some histories can be shaken off, or is it against the rules of Nature? If the latter is the case, we are doomed to produce a generation of no choice. They will end up repeating the cause and effect nonsense, especially if we teach them who they are and bring them up with a great sense of belonging to places and ideologies. There will always be some scores to settle, to prepare the field for a fair game. And the process of this preparation will go on endlessly, through the myriad unfair games that are part of it.

We won't be able to think of a real solution yet, unless we think a little less of what we have to pass on to children. A little less of what we believe in, what we stand for, what we fear, what we dream of, what we are entitled to, what was taken away from us, what others have done to us, what we have to do to others, what we have suffered, what we have done to cause suffering to others, what we should continue to do to cause suffering to others, what was done to our forefathers, what we have to do to their children...Oh, I am tired. I just hope some of you get the point.