Conflicting Humanities by Braidotti Rosi; Gilroy Paul;

Author:Braidotti, Rosi; Gilroy, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

3.

Asking the question about who the Palestinians are was, in fact, already part of the answer, part of the process of the development of a national culture that could be self-consciously represented and projected: as Frantz Fanon argued, ‘To fight for national culture means in the first place to fight for the liberation of the nation’ (Fanon 1965: 187). The national culture is the struggle, or as Said put it: ‘Our literature in a certain very narrow sense is the elusive, resistant reality it tries so often to represent’ (Said 1986: 38). Ever since, Said and other Palestinians have been producing a body of writing and cultural production, cinema, art, that both defines themselves as Palestinians, and proves it to the world, even the Israelis. Today the lack around Palestinian identity, cultural and historical, that Said laments in 1986 is no longer there – in no small part thanks to Said himself. That generation of cultural capital shows why initiatives such as the West-East Divan orchestra were so important.

In the 1999 interview about the problem of what gets represented and what gets left out, from which I have already cited, Said continues as follows:

In the particular case of the Palestinians, one of our problems is that we don’t have any documents to substantiate what we said happened to us. Take one of the Israeli new historians, Benny Morris, for instance. He’s very literal-minded, and he’s done very important work, but his assumption is that he can’t say anything about what happened in 1947–48 unless there’s a document to show for it. I say, well, why not try to animate that silence? … Why not go through the process of trying to reconstruct out of the silence what was either destroyed or excluded? (Bayoumi and Rubin 2000: 424–5)

That lack of representation has been increasingly answered: for example, the documenting of the Nakba by the historian Ilan Pappe in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), Ahmad Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lighod’s Nakba, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (2007), Nur Masalha’s The Palestinian Nakba (2011), and the remarkable archive photographs published in Arielle Azoulay’s From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (2007). Whereas in 2001 Gabriel Piterberg could suggest that the claim that there had been an ethnic cleansing of Palestine was still a matter of debate, it has become ever harder to deny.6 Representation no longer seems so distant from historical memory, the concerted attempt since 1948 to make Palestinians unbelong at every level has become ever more fully documented, and is now of course commemorated, every year, around the world on 15 May: Yawm an-Nakba, the day of the catastrophe. And as with the forbidden writing at the UN that produced After the Last Sky which will be read for generations, the more the commemoration is forbidden, the more it will be remembered.

In the same way, whereas in 1986 Said cites what he regards as the tentative beginnings of the literary representations designed ‘to restore

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