Scattered in death as in life

Nadia Hijab, The Electronic Intifada, 22 February 2010

The Mamilla cemetery in Jerusalem, 1854. (Wikipedia)

I carried a handful of ashes from my father's cremates into the Occupied Palestinian Territories a few years ago, hoping to take them to his hometown, Nablus. At the border, the only available taxi was driven by an Israeli Moroccan Jew. Delighted I was an Arab, he immediately plunged into conversation and pointed out various landmarks along the way to Jerusalem.

"That road," he said at one point, "leads to Nablus," indicating the tarmac cutting through the rocky soil as we drove through a desolate area. I asked him to stop the car. Israel often kept Nablus under curfew for weeks on end and I didn't know if I'd be able to get there during my short trip. On the road to Nablus, I laid the ashes and paid my respects. Back in the car, the puzzled driver wondered what I had been doing. When I told him he asked hesitantly, "Don't you have rites like ours, including visiting loved ones' graves?"

I stared at the back of his neck, as brown as my own, as I sought a response. We do have similar rites. It is rare for a Muslim to seek cremation, as in our father's case, part of the enforced modernity of exile. In fact, at no time is the loss of Palestine more piercing than at a loved one's passing, reinforcing the realization that, Muslim or Christian, Palestinians are as scattered across the globe in death as in life. But how could one explain 100 years of history in a cab ride? "Yes, but you've made it impossible for us to practice ours."

So it is with special poignancy that I have followed the latest twist in the battle over Jerusalem's Mamilla Cemetery, a Muslim cemetery known in Arabic as Maman Allah, where the US-based Simon Wiesenthal Center intends to build a Museum of Tolerance, a project stalled by legal and other protests since it began in 2004.

Mamilla is estimated to be over 800 years old and was in continuous use until 1948 when the Western part of Jerusalem was conquered as Israel was created. In the latest Palestinian challenge, representatives of 60 of the oldest and most prominent Jerusalemite families have petitioned several bodies at the United Nations to uphold the international legal obligation to halt the project.

The battle over Mamilla encapsulates many aspects of Israel's approach to Palestinian rights since the conflict began, and it is worth considering five here.

First, the use of legal garb to shroud illegal acts. In this case, for example, Israel's high court ruled in favor of the museum project in 2008. However, it turned out that the Israeli Antiquities Authority had withheld its own Chief Excavator's conclusion that the site should not be approved for construction. Calling the Authority's conduct an "archeological crime" the Chief Excavator noted, among other things, at least four unexcavated layers of Muslim graves dating back to the 11th century. However, the court has refused to reopen the case.

Second, the overreach. The move on Mamilla spotlights not just Israel's occupation of Arab East Jerusalem in 1967, but also its original takeover of West Jerusalem. The international community still does not accept Israeli sovereignty over West Jerusalem because the basis for the establishment of the Israeli state -- the 1947 United Nations partition plan -- provides for a corpus separatum for Jerusalem, as the European Community reminded Israel in 1999.

Third, the ongoing creation of facts on the ground to erase evidence of the indigenous inhabitants. As former Israeli leader Moshe Dayan told Technion University students back in 1969, "There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."

Fourth, the Orwellian use of language to mean the direct opposite of what is intended: for example "tolerance" for "discrimination." Indeed, the plans for the Museum of Tolerance are replete with irony. At one point, it was suggested that a horizontal barrier be built to separate the museum and the graves to show "respect" -- a horizontal separation of the dead comparable to Israel's vertical separation barriers in the West Bank and Gaza.

Fifth, the delegitimization -- not of Israel, which is a secure member state of the UN -- but of the Zionist ideology that resulted in Israel's creation. These actions remind the world that one people was displaced by another. The project architect, the renowned Frank Gehry, has since withdrawn his plans. Further international attention to the Mamilla case can only add to the growing global campaign to boycott Israel until it upholds international law.

Mamilla is not just about family history but also a nation's history, as Dyala Husseini-Dajani -- who comes from one long-established Jerusalem families and married into another -- told a journalist while at the cemetery to say a prayer to her forebears. She added, "One day I want to be buried here. And I want my grandchildren to come and say this prayer for me." As I read those words, I wished the Moroccan Jewish taxi driver would read them too.

Nadia Hijab is an independent analyst and a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies. This column was syndicated on 16 February 2010 by Agence Global.

When the enemy vanishes - kill civilians!

Afghan refugees - BBC News

Nato's current offensive in the town of Marjah is being portrayed as a low casualty mission in the "good war" to get rid of the Taliban.
If you were to believe the news broadcasts, it's already a success.

Since the assault was always intended to be as much a publicity stunt as serving any military objective, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown will certainly be pleased at how the media have snapped into line and acted as stenographers for Nato press releases.
The truth is, most of the few hundred Taliban fighters in Marjah vanished well before the much touted offensive began, not being stupid enough to face up to 15,000 of the most heavily armed troops on the planet.

Much of what we've seen on the TV screens looks like random firing into empty space to give the cameras footage for the evening news bulletins.
But with very few enemy to engage it wasn't long -- two days in fact-- before tragedy struck when a missile attack looking for Taliban to kill managed to slaughter 12 civilians, five of them children -- the very people this war was supposedly tailored to keep out of harm's way.

The attack on Marjah is no different from the numerous other Nato "clear, hold and build" missions -- except in the amount of media ballyhoo.
And there's no reason why this should be different in the outcome, with the Taliban withdrawing tactically and biding its time, before infiltrating back into the town, once the overblown Operation Moshtarak, and its accompanying media circus, has moved on to some other flashpoint of resistance to foreign occupation.

The only reason the invading armies continue fighting a war that cannot be won is in the hope that some escape route can be found, from Obama and Brown's "war of necessity", which
will leave intact the credibility of the Western powers' ability to invade other countries with impunity.

The deaths of the 12 civilians this weekend is a brutal reminder of the heavy price many Afghans will pay in the months and years to come to save the face of those responsible
for prosecuting a futile and unjustifiable war.


[The current fuss about twelve civilians being killed is obviously a PR stunt, weighed against, for instance, the previous wiping-out of an entire wedding party and a delegation of churchmen and politicians en route to a peace conference.]

First published by Stop The War Coalition, 15 February 2010

Theatre of Cruelty

THE THEATRE AND ITS DOUBLE
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Translated by VICTOR CORTI

The very phrase, 'Theatre of Cruelty', has passed into such common currency that few of us bother much to give a lot of consideration to what its creator Antonin Artaud, who died in 1948, was really (literally, sometimes) banging on about. Artaud, an actor, director, playwright and poet, was tangentially linked to the surrealists although what he admired most in drama, and what he strove for, was a kind of ultra-realism. Susan Sontag has said that ‘the course of all recent serious theatre in Western Europe and the Americas can be said to divide into two periods - before Artaud and after Artaud’.

The breadth of Artaud’s thinking allowed him to sweep across arguments and counter-arguments while he studied the theatre and pragmatically looked for the Great Answer to its then stagnation. This revised translation of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty Manifestos and related essays can be read two ways: first, from beginning to end, and second, to be thrown on the floor so that parts of it will surface randomly like I-Ching advice.

“We must believe in life’s meaning renewed by theatre, where man fearlessly makes himself master of the unborn, gives birth to it. And everything unborn can still be brought to life, provided we are not satisfied with remaining simple recording instruments.”

In his essay, Theatre and the Plague, Artaud refers to The City of God, where St Augustine points to the similarity between the plague, which kills without destroying any organs, and theatre, “which, without killing, induces the most mysterious changes not only in the minds of indviduals but in a whole nation... The mind believes what it sees and does what it believes, that is the secret of fascination. And in his book, St Augustine does not doubt the reality of this fascination for one moment. Yet conditions must be found to give birth to a spectacle that can fascinate the mind. It is not just a matter of art... And finally from a human point of view we can see that the effect of theatre is as beneficial as the plague, impelling us to see ourselves as we are, making the masks fall and divulging our world’s lies, aimlessness, meanness and even two-facedness.”

In Production and Metaphysics, the beginnings of a seeking after a non-verbal theatre and a look towards Symbolism and the metaphorical world, Artaud points to what he saw as over-literalised drama: “Given theatre as we see it here, one would imagine there was nothing more to know than whether we will have a good fuck, whether we will go to war or be cowardly enough to sue for peace”
He admired Balinese theatre for the “absolute superiority of the producer whose creative ability does away with words.” -and wondered, in Oriental and Western Theatre, if we could strip theatre away from The Words, as everything in theatre outside the script appeared to be subservient to it or merely part of the staging.

Artaud writes like a poet, although he picks at the meaning of meaning like a scientist splitting airs. He felt that current theatre was in decline because it had lost any feeling for seriousness and on the other hand, for laughter. It had “broken away from solemnity, from direct, harmful effectiveness - in a word, from Danger.”
Underlying his dissatisfaction and iconoclastic attitude was a romantic belief in “the profoundly anarchic spirit at the basis of all poetry.” For all his desire to do away with stilted old speech-driven and subjective drama, he yearned after a new kind of grandiosity. Why not? It’s all about spectacle, in the end taking us out of ourselves.

In No More Masterpieces, Artaud looks back at the sources of the Old Grandiosity, to Shakespeare and his ‘followers’. Guilty of instilling a concept of art for art’s sake, art on the one hand and life on the other. “We might rely on this lazy, ineffective idea as long as life outside held good, but there are too many signs that everything which used to sustain our lives no longer does so and we are all mad, desperate and sick. And I urge us to react.”

This probably says much more about the state of French theatre in the early twentieth century than anything. The French were not unique in their long established tradition of declamatory tragic theatre, so risible now. There is a wonderfully stilted, mannered, almost Dalek-voiced John Geilgud recording of Hamlet’s soliliquy, made in the mid Thirties. He would have been pelted with worse than vegetables if he had tried that in The Globe.

...“And bringing two impassioned revelations together on stage, two living fires, two nervous magnetisms, is just as complete, as true, even as decisive as bringing together two bodies in short-lived debauchery is in life.
For this reason I suggest a Theatre of Cruelty.
With this mania we all have today for belittling everything, as soon as I said ‘cruelty’ everyone took it to mean ‘blood’. But a ‘theatre of cruelty’ means theatre that is difficult and cruel for myself first of all.”

Above all a pragmatist, Artaud proposed among other things a theatre where the audience would be hypnotised by violent, pulverising images, “mesmerising the audience’s sensibilities, caught in the drama as if in a vortex of higher forces.”

After the publication of his First Manifesto, he discussed its implications with a few friends and associates, and this book includes some of his letters on the subject, devoted to clarifying the meaning of the manifesto or taking up other theorists on their ideas about staging; which led to the Second Manifesto, which emphasised the importance, as Artaud saw it, of creating transcendence in the audience and of replacing quotidian narrative drama with timeless primal forces.
Quite grandiose, as aspirations go. But the inheritors of the Theatre of Cruelty are everywhere: Second City in the US, 7:84 in Scotland; In England, the Cornwall-based Kneehigh Company, for instance; and appropriately in the vanguard are the French troupes Archaos and Cirque du Soliel.

The extensive appendix to this book is worth a random dip in itself, from the author’s ‘notes in the margin’ to the THEATRE OF CRUELTY Company Limited document.

The Theatre and Its Double is published by Oneworld Classics £7.99