To See the Rubble in the Dark
Perhaps Now has gone further away
and yesterday come closer
So I take Now’s hand to walk along the hem of history
Mahmoud Darwish, from The Mural, translated by John Berger and Rema Hamammi (2009). It has been a week now. I spent that week in the wake, in shiva, avoiding the “images” as best I could. As it happens, this week was also one in which my long-prepared, once-rejected meditation on how to see Palestine was published in Social Text (you can download it free here). The piece asks
How can I, Jewish not Palestinian, not even an “expert” in Palestine studies, see with and in support of Palestine?
It hardly needs saying that this question takes on renewed force after this week. Not only because of the violence, given how long and extensive the suffering of ordinary Palestinians has been since the Nakba in 1948. I have never supported Hamas, or indeed the Palestinian Authority, and so I have no problem condemning their attacks on civilians, even as I want to question this compulsory disavowal.
The question needs asking again because something is beginning, a new conjuncture of counterinsurgency and coloniality, even if inevitably mostly made up of bad pieces from the past. In this moment, what ways of seeing are useful? I am trying to see the rubble in the dark. Let me try and explain what I mean by that.
Rubble
After the second Intifada, the art critic John Berger visited Palestine in 2003. Writing for the London Review of Books, he saw how “the smashed concrete slabs and fallen masonry” around what had been Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah had “taken on a symbolic quality.” Not at all because of Arafat, but because “the rubble of the Muqata [had] become a landmark, a landmark of the homeland.”
In that moment, perhaps surprisingly, Berger came to see himself differently:
And so I am here, unintentionally fulfilling a dream that some of my ancestors in Poland, Galicia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire must have nurtured and spoken about for at least two centuries. And here I find myself defending the justice of the Palestinian cause against people who may be cousins of mine, and anyway against the state of Israel.
One cannot have the Berger of Ways of Seeing and not have this Berger, who recognized his Jewish ancestry (via his father) in the rubble of Ramallah, who offered “the gravest warning” that the occupation would mean that the “dust will have no soul.”
Writing in 2005, Berger saw how the rubble “of houses, roads and the debris of daily lives” in Palestine also entailed “the rubble of words—the rubble of words that house nothing any more, whose sense has been destroyed.” That rubble comprised UN resolutions, always ignored, and the obfuscation of terms like “separation wall.”
The rubble of words, swept away in what is so often called the flood of images created in this digitally saturated present. On this visit, Berger saw in Palestine an “undefeated despair,” meaning “despair without fear, without resignation, without a sense of defeat.” Perhaps a translation of the Arabic sumud, this notion of “undefeated despair” resonates today.
This week, on the very first day of Hamas’s incursion, there was a rubble of words, words like “terror,” “evil,” and “animals.” Words like this foreclose understanding rather than open it. Through this rubble the specter of 9/11 has resurged, with right-wing talk already emerging of an “axis” (like George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” in 2001) between Iran, Russia and China.
And then there was Netanyahu, with all his effort to suppress democracy and the rule of law now forgotten, saying “All the places that Hamas hides in, operates from, we will turn them into rubble.” Not to negate the violence of six thousand bombs this week, or the tanks to come, but Gaza is already rubble in Berger’s sense. All that suffering will be for nothing from whatever point of view you hold.
The Dark
What is the rubble that surrounds me now, like Nagg in his bin, in Samuel Beckett’s Nakba-era play Endgame (1957)? Nagg realizes “our sight has failed.” Hasn’t it just? They talk of a painter gone mad— “all he had seen was ashes.” Pause. “Nearly finished.”
The ashes after the Nakba in my family’s archive on Ancestry.com are disputed fragments of memory, accidental pieces of documentation like shipping manifests, and assemblages of photographs, often undated — visual rubble. There’s a photograph of my father as a child, playing with a British soldier on a boat headed to Palestine around 1939. There’s another of the London house he first lived in, damaged by bombs in the Blitz. Even its rubble is long gone now.
It’s the why and the how of making the Nakba by my relatives, who had themselves been refugees, that literally keeps me awake at night. There is a movement with which I am obsessed: the step that the Jewish refugee, my grandmother, took off the boat from Istanbul onto the land of Palestine. And in that dialectical step, she became a settler. A leap into the dark.
Soon, as she remembered all her life, she would work underground in the dark, assembling weapons for the Haganah militia. “Terrorists,” to the British. Much more so were the Stern Gang, including my great uncle, whom British soldiers somehow managed not to find when he was hiding in the dark of his family house. That branch of the family later sheltered my father and grandmother in New York during the Blitz. Some man, probaby also a relative, took the opportunity for sexual assault, so they returned across the Atlantic at the height of the U-Boat submarine war. All of this is the dark in which I have to see.
A place like that in which my grandmother worked underground is now a museum near Tel Aviv, calling itself the Ayalon Institute — fully lit now, of course, with waxwork figures of the workers. The house where my great uncle hid has been converted into flats in Mea Sharim, the ultra-orthodox area of Jersualem, where no photographs are allowed. The old entryway is an ATM, “the second time as farce.”
To see the rubble that is and has been Palestine since the Nakba, I have to begin in that dark, the negative. I have to see the other which is not, or should not be, one, my other, or grand(m)other. I need to become something other than what I am supposed to have been. At long last, I need to become visible to myself. Above all, I want to create visible relation and, in so doing, to find what Claire Fontaine calls the “human strike.” To strike in the dark.
Coda
The article after mine in Social Text is an interview between Elyx Desloover and Marquis Bey, concerning the latter’s Black Trans Feminism. It celebrates
“what it can look like to think expansively, shed the grip of rules, and actively fissure obsolete foundations.”
For Desloover, ending the
“gender binary, or any other limitedly numbered set of categories into which humans try to cram existence,”
is to make it fall. This fall-ism we have known since #RhodesMustFall in 2015. It has unfolded globally. After the fall, it is then possible to
“joyfully play and hide in the rubble.”
And in the dark.
***
I will not circulate this via social media, for all the obvious reasons, but feel free to share with trusted friends and to use it as you see fit, if it helps to do so.