Encounters with Godard by Williams James S

Encounters with Godard by Williams James S

Author:Williams, James S.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2016-12-14T16:00:00+00:00


The Color of Metaphor: Native Americans/Jews/Palestinians

It is at this point that we need to return to the passage jointly recited by the Native Americans in the empty shell of the National Library, a building, we recall, which, with its Muslim-inspired architecture, served as the central repository of Bosnian written culture and was deliberately targeted by Orthodox Christian Serbian ultranationalists in August 1992 as part of a strategy of cultural erasure. The lines about being mutually other in a pending encounter of two peoples who are both strangers to the same land derive, in fact, from Darwish, specifically his long prose-poem entitled “The Last Speech of the Red Indian,” cited here in selective and modified parts.11 The poem is based on a speech by Chief Seattle, one of the last chiefs to surrender formally to the American government. Prefaced by a direct quote from Chief Seattle on death as a transitional state, it refers directly to Christopher Columbus and establishes an implicit link between America in 1492 and Palestine in 1948. Darwish addresses the destructive legacy of Columbus and the fate of the Native Americans “in the ash of legends.”12 As Emmelhainz indicates, and in line with what we have just established regarding the processes of reconciliation and reconstruction in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the postcolonial plainte heard here is beyond claiming restitution and recognition or singing a nostalgic elegy to what was lost (Emmelhainz 2009: 881). Instead, the words confer on Columbus a list of “rights” that pertain to his particular way of mapping the world according to the dictates of colonial cartography. However, what the Native Americans will never grant him is the right to believe that all men are equal. The recited poem continues:

Let Columbus scour the seas to find India,

It is his right!

He can call our ghosts the names of spices,

He can call us Red Indians,

He can fiddle with his compass to correct his course,

Twist all the errors of the North wind,

But outside the narrow world to his map,

He cannot believe that all men are born equal

The same as air and water,

The same as people in Barcelona,

Except that they happen to worship Nature’s God in

Everything,

And not gold.

Thus do the “Red Indians” convey their past-present status as the inevitable outcome of a historical event that has perpetuated inequality and further humiliation in spite of the universal proclamation of the equality of all humans. Darwish’s inferred juxtaposition here of the Native American ordeal with that of the Palestinians hinges on the form of colonization both peoples have undergone. In each case the experience of disaster has been, as Chief Seattle put it, that of “the end of life and the beginning of survival” (ibid.: 883). Differently from Latin American, Asian, and African colonial and postcolonial processes, Native North Americans and Palestinians have not just been exploited but rather expelled from their land, their histories systematically erased, and their cultures suppressed. In the words of Chief Seattle, the “colonialists’ appetite […] devoured the earth and left behind only a desert.” For the Native



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