Exploring the emotive universe from which the Arab Spring finally blossomed.
A GREAT, GREAT COMMENTARY
By Hamid Dabashi
Man, Can He Write!!
"New York, NY - What if Bashar al-Assad does not fall and all these heroic Syrian sacrifices are for naught? What if Omar Suleiman becomes the next Egyptian president - or any other former aides to President Hosni Mubarak come back to power? What if "the Islamists" take over Tunisia, or Egypt, or succeed in Syria? Is Ali Abdullah Saleh really deposed? Maybe he is still running Yemen from behind the scene? What about Bahrain - why is scarcely anyone talking about the brutal repression of the Arab Spring in that tiny island, the home of the US Fifth Fleet? Aren't the Saudis and the Gulf states in cahoots with the US, the Europeans and the Israelis to repress these revolutions where they can or else hijack them where possible? There are reports that prominent Bahraini activists, such as Nabeel Rajab, are barred from entering Egypt by security forces for fear of collaboration between regional revolutionaries.
Has "the Arab Spring" turned into a winter - already? Did the counter-revolutionary forces - the Saudis, the US, the Russians, the Islamic Republic, Israel, the remaining Arab potentates - turn the tide and kidnap the people's revolution? There are folks on the left who think so, already, and there are people on the right who are doing their damnedest to make sure that it is indeed the case.
There are many discouraging signs - only if we cling to a linear conception of history, of reason, of progress and if we measure the events we witness in tandem with that invisible line - Ben Ali fell, then Mubarak, then Gaddafi, then Ali Abdollah Saleh, and now Syria is in trouble. So, one after the other - and if this linear order were not to be followed, or followed on the model of a total revolution that will, tomorrow morning, result in free and democratic socialist republics - from one end of the Arab world to another - then, for sure, the counter-revolutionaries have turned the tide, succeeded and revolutions are lost.
But Arabs - like all other people - have been dreaming of these revolts for a long time, and like all other dreams, their interpreters have been the Arab dreamers themselves - their visionary artists, poets, critical thinkers, philosophers and filmmakers.
Dreams are not dreamt on a linear trajectory - nor should their interpretations be drawn along such lines.......
Dreams are nonlinear
In many respects, ES' silent witnessing of atrocities he faces is reminiscent of the legendary Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali's (1938-1987) creation Handala. Handala too is a silent witness. His back turned to the world, to us, to those watching what he is watching, Handala fixes his gaze on the event: an Israeli bulldozer uprooting a Palestinian olive tree, an Israeli tank rolling into a Palestinian village, corrupt Arab potentates gathering for yet another useless summit. Handala (also known as Hanzala) occasionally joins in action. He is a fighter. He picks up a stone and joins the intifada. Handala survived after the death of his creator Naji al-Ali, who was assassinated in London in the summer of 1987. To this day, you will see Handala adorning the walls of Palestinian refugee camps, asking the residents to keep the camps clean, while cursing the corrupt Arab leaders. When we screened Rashid Masharawi's Tazkirat illa al-Qods ["Passport to Jerusalem"] (2002) at Baddawi refugee camp in northern Lebanon, we projected the film onto a rooftop wall, on which Handala was painted, proclaiming for the wall and for the whole world to know: "al-Qods lana ["Jerusalem is ours"]"
What Elia Suleiman does with ES is to be more than just a witness to criminal atrocities. Naji al-Ali's Handala is a trope for witnessing....
The formal destruction of linear narratives
For Palestinians at the receiving end of one of the gravest injustices in human history, the calamity they have faced as a people, as a nation, has eventually become a matter of the defiant suspension of normativity, morality, normality. What morality? How can ethics and morality have any place in the face of a barefaced banality that steals other people's homeland, murders its inhabitants, ethnically "cleans" their country and then denies their very existence. "Palestinians do not exist", one of their colonisers once said. Palestinians are "invented people", another said recently. The cinema of Elia Suleiman elevates the fact and phenomena of bearing witness in defiance of that barbaric cruelty to an entirely different register. Through an act of cinematic genius, it pulls the very metaphysical rug - upon which stands humanity at large - from under its feet. You become airborne, suspended, in Elia Suleiman's cinema.
No Saudi patriarch, no Israeli warlord, no US general - and certainly no IMF or World Bank economist - can rob a people of that history of their revolutions writ large....
At a moment when the right is incessantly plotting how to steal the peoples' revolutions, and the left is stuck against a tasteless, soulless and entirely pathetic cul de sac of discounting Bashar al-Assad's atrocities, or else fearing the phantoms of an Islamist take over here, or a military coup there, or a US/Israeli/Saudi plot to dismantle and roll back the whole project, it is imperative to go way back upstream, where these revolutions started in the indomitable spirit of a people and their visionary dreamers.
The Arab revolts are not following a linear course towards a total revolution. They are an example par excellence of nonlinear narrative paving the way towards an open-ended revolution - unfolding more like a Bakhtinian novel than a Homeric epic (I have developed this theme more extensively in my forthcoming book on the Arab Spring). But whichever way the events unfold - counter-revolutionaries plotting to steal it, neoliberal Islamists seeking to appropriate it, military juntas seeking to derail it, or US/Israeli plots to short-circuit it - the revolutionary uprising will continue to appropriate more and more of the public space, transform it into active formation of voluntary associations and fine-tune the machinery of societal transformation beyond anything we have seen before. The combined power of US counter-intelligence, Israeli expertise in creating distractions (such as the Iranian nuclear programme) and Saudi money comes nowhere near the revolutionary synergy of what is unfolding right in front of our eyes.
To learn the courage to face the nonlinear unfolding of these revolutions - the gushing forth of a massive rally here, punctuated by a treacherous plot there - we must revisit visionary masters of Arab dreams, learn their joyous defiance of pain and disappointment and bear witness to our moment in the sun. "
A GREAT, GREAT COMMENTARY
By Hamid Dabashi
Man, Can He Write!!
"New York, NY - What if Bashar al-Assad does not fall and all these heroic Syrian sacrifices are for naught? What if Omar Suleiman becomes the next Egyptian president - or any other former aides to President Hosni Mubarak come back to power? What if "the Islamists" take over Tunisia, or Egypt, or succeed in Syria? Is Ali Abdullah Saleh really deposed? Maybe he is still running Yemen from behind the scene? What about Bahrain - why is scarcely anyone talking about the brutal repression of the Arab Spring in that tiny island, the home of the US Fifth Fleet? Aren't the Saudis and the Gulf states in cahoots with the US, the Europeans and the Israelis to repress these revolutions where they can or else hijack them where possible? There are reports that prominent Bahraini activists, such as Nabeel Rajab, are barred from entering Egypt by security forces for fear of collaboration between regional revolutionaries.
Has "the Arab Spring" turned into a winter - already? Did the counter-revolutionary forces - the Saudis, the US, the Russians, the Islamic Republic, Israel, the remaining Arab potentates - turn the tide and kidnap the people's revolution? There are folks on the left who think so, already, and there are people on the right who are doing their damnedest to make sure that it is indeed the case.
There are many discouraging signs - only if we cling to a linear conception of history, of reason, of progress and if we measure the events we witness in tandem with that invisible line - Ben Ali fell, then Mubarak, then Gaddafi, then Ali Abdollah Saleh, and now Syria is in trouble. So, one after the other - and if this linear order were not to be followed, or followed on the model of a total revolution that will, tomorrow morning, result in free and democratic socialist republics - from one end of the Arab world to another - then, for sure, the counter-revolutionaries have turned the tide, succeeded and revolutions are lost.
But Arabs - like all other people - have been dreaming of these revolts for a long time, and like all other dreams, their interpreters have been the Arab dreamers themselves - their visionary artists, poets, critical thinkers, philosophers and filmmakers.
Dreams are not dreamt on a linear trajectory - nor should their interpretations be drawn along such lines.......
Dreams are nonlinear
In many respects, ES' silent witnessing of atrocities he faces is reminiscent of the legendary Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali's (1938-1987) creation Handala. Handala too is a silent witness. His back turned to the world, to us, to those watching what he is watching, Handala fixes his gaze on the event: an Israeli bulldozer uprooting a Palestinian olive tree, an Israeli tank rolling into a Palestinian village, corrupt Arab potentates gathering for yet another useless summit. Handala (also known as Hanzala) occasionally joins in action. He is a fighter. He picks up a stone and joins the intifada. Handala survived after the death of his creator Naji al-Ali, who was assassinated in London in the summer of 1987. To this day, you will see Handala adorning the walls of Palestinian refugee camps, asking the residents to keep the camps clean, while cursing the corrupt Arab leaders. When we screened Rashid Masharawi's Tazkirat illa al-Qods ["Passport to Jerusalem"] (2002) at Baddawi refugee camp in northern Lebanon, we projected the film onto a rooftop wall, on which Handala was painted, proclaiming for the wall and for the whole world to know: "al-Qods lana ["Jerusalem is ours"]"
What Elia Suleiman does with ES is to be more than just a witness to criminal atrocities. Naji al-Ali's Handala is a trope for witnessing....
The formal destruction of linear narratives
For Palestinians at the receiving end of one of the gravest injustices in human history, the calamity they have faced as a people, as a nation, has eventually become a matter of the defiant suspension of normativity, morality, normality. What morality? How can ethics and morality have any place in the face of a barefaced banality that steals other people's homeland, murders its inhabitants, ethnically "cleans" their country and then denies their very existence. "Palestinians do not exist", one of their colonisers once said. Palestinians are "invented people", another said recently. The cinema of Elia Suleiman elevates the fact and phenomena of bearing witness in defiance of that barbaric cruelty to an entirely different register. Through an act of cinematic genius, it pulls the very metaphysical rug - upon which stands humanity at large - from under its feet. You become airborne, suspended, in Elia Suleiman's cinema.
No Saudi patriarch, no Israeli warlord, no US general - and certainly no IMF or World Bank economist - can rob a people of that history of their revolutions writ large....
At a moment when the right is incessantly plotting how to steal the peoples' revolutions, and the left is stuck against a tasteless, soulless and entirely pathetic cul de sac of discounting Bashar al-Assad's atrocities, or else fearing the phantoms of an Islamist take over here, or a military coup there, or a US/Israeli/Saudi plot to dismantle and roll back the whole project, it is imperative to go way back upstream, where these revolutions started in the indomitable spirit of a people and their visionary dreamers.
The Arab revolts are not following a linear course towards a total revolution. They are an example par excellence of nonlinear narrative paving the way towards an open-ended revolution - unfolding more like a Bakhtinian novel than a Homeric epic (I have developed this theme more extensively in my forthcoming book on the Arab Spring). But whichever way the events unfold - counter-revolutionaries plotting to steal it, neoliberal Islamists seeking to appropriate it, military juntas seeking to derail it, or US/Israeli plots to short-circuit it - the revolutionary uprising will continue to appropriate more and more of the public space, transform it into active formation of voluntary associations and fine-tune the machinery of societal transformation beyond anything we have seen before. The combined power of US counter-intelligence, Israeli expertise in creating distractions (such as the Iranian nuclear programme) and Saudi money comes nowhere near the revolutionary synergy of what is unfolding right in front of our eyes.
To learn the courage to face the nonlinear unfolding of these revolutions - the gushing forth of a massive rally here, punctuated by a treacherous plot there - we must revisit visionary masters of Arab dreams, learn their joyous defiance of pain and disappointment and bear witness to our moment in the sun. "
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