Transcript
Claire Schwartz: Hi, good afternoon. My name is Claire Schwartz, and I’m the culture editor of Jewish Currents. I don’t know how to use a mic. It’s my tremendous pleasure to welcome Adania Shibli, Dionne Brand, and David Naimon, and to welcome all of you. I’m thinking today of the detail, the small, the minor. I’m thinking, of course, of Adania Shibli’s exquisite and devastating novel Minor Detail, where the coincidence of a birthday catalyzes the search by a Palestinian woman from Ramallah for the truth about the fate of a Bedouin girl during the Nakba, and of how this brief note that seeks to convey something of the novel’s subject is inadequate to communicate the language’s kinship with quiet, its shimmering attunement to the relationship between complacency and pain.
CS: I am thinking of Dionne Brand’s note prefacing the reissue of her landmark book, A Map to the Door of No Return, where she writes, quote, “hijacked materially and narratively, your life appears in fragments. Whenever I could, like anyone, I tried to detail the minor acts in a day under fracture, under force, under pressure to bring together time and life lived, rejecting the spectacular appearances that only identified suppressive event after suppressive event as totality. Of the elements under fracture, under force, under pressure, not least, these writers remind me, is language: that place we come to meet, where something about who we is gets reiterated, contested, worked out, reimagined.”
CS: Here today are three writers and thinkers whose attention to the minor summons the reader to join in upending the enclosures of the We that confirm the ongoingness of Zionism and other forms of colonial domination. I see this across Adania Shibli’s novels, which appear in English as Touch, We Are All Equally Far From Love and Minor Detail, as well as in her plays, short stories, and essays. I see this in Dionne Brand’s 23 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including Salvage, which will be out in the US in October. And I feel this across the gorgeous archive of conversations with authors that David Naimon has assembled by way of his podcast Between the Covers. Attending to the minor, these writers refuse the endlessly accelerating logics of the spectacle, where life itself becomes the submerged, unthinkable; death, the common sense. They refuse to naturalize the eagerly proselytized workings of empire or to grant its mythic claim to totality. And in so doing, these writers attune us to the other worlds rattling inside this one. I am so grateful to be in their presence. Please join me in welcoming Adania Shibli, Dionne Brand, and David Naimon.
David Naimon: Well, first, I just want to say thank you to Jewish Currents for creating this space, a space to gather and make meaning together, and also creating a sense of home for these sorts of conversations. And I want to thank Claire Schwartz. And I would point to her book, Civil Service, as another book that is animated by a lot of the questions we’re going to explore today. So do seek out Claire’s book.
DN: When we were having our meetings about who to have a conversation with for this specific part of the Jewish Currents live, this was my dream conversation; the ones with Dionne and Adania, their books, The Blue Clerk and Minor Detail, are two of the most important books for me personally, written in the last decade. And I was debating about how to start today. I was thinking of Brooklyn College’s late-in-the-day cancellation and wondering whether to start with questions of silence and silencing or questions of home, now that we have two new homes in the Lower East Side, our temporary homes, I wanted to start with home, and I’m going to start with a question for Dionne: Thinking of the subtitle of A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, but also that you say you have no interest in belonging. I think about in that book, how you had not gone to the physical door of no return when you wrote it, and you said that you didn’t want the shores of Africa to be in that book. And there’s a sense, I think, sometimes in your writing, of a moving away. And I wondered if home was a useful term--as a writer, if home was a useful frame or term for you. And if so, in what way? Or if not, why not?
Dionne Brand: I don’t think that it is a useful term because it is so weighted with what it takes from notions, other notions that are also up for grabs, like nation and family and heteronormativity and so many pressures. So while I understand its pull and perhaps its original meaning, it is that meaning that also is so easily fettered to other kinds of violences, if you will. So my thing is that I want it to be always up for description, that it can have a moving description in some way. I don’t want to jettison it completely, but I want to pay attention to its fracturedness, and how even fascists can call something home. So I really wanted to keep the meaning open and disturbed in some way. Qualified.
DN: Adania, recently at the Hay Festival, you were asked a similar question and you talked about how, growing up, your parents were very restless, that they were always renovating and that there was this fear of being attached to anything because of it, the possibility of it being taken away at any moment. And one thing that you said in that conversation that I thought was interesting is that you said, for you, Palestine, you didn’t think of as home or as a homeland, but as an ethical relationship. And I would love to hear what that means and the distinction between that and home. If there is a distinction between an ethical relationship and a home.
Adania Shibli: Yeah, I mean, it is. Home always is a state of restlessness for me, and this is how I experience it. And probably it is also what my parents—it was a moment that they could not shift or transform; this restlessness in the destruction of home, or not feeling safe at home. A home is not a question of safety. So it becomes somewhere else and something else, home. And I think it’s really this return to a home. I think it’s more like a return to a place, wherever we arrive. For me, it’s never about Palestine. It means something else when I go to Palestine, but whenever I come to a place, I hope to believe that I’m returning to a place. It’s not like I’m arriving there for the first time, because of this constant restlessness. And you seek something, solace somehow.
AS: And therefore, Palestine no longer plays any meaning with this home or homeland. But what it teaches you, what it opens to you beyond the idea of nationalism and the nation-state which we are victim of. I mean, you think about Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel, and this is a nation-state, and you think, well, is this the model that Palestine is gonna imitate or replicate? And you are filled with fear. So it’s no longer about that (or at least for me, it’s no longer about that), but taking all the lessons that are there shared and to allow new forms of imagining being, also with others.
AS: I think it was maybe three or four months ago, there was a conference in Berlin on Palestine, and of course, the Nazi, racist, German authorities, they closed down that venue and canceled the conference. A friend—well, not a real friend, somebody I knew, but everybody’s a friend. She’s a mathematician, and I have so much love for mathematicians, so I always try to be their friend. And she emailed me telling me about the cancellation of this conference and suggested we meet there to protest. It was like, the day after, and we agreed to meet near a fountain, and we didn’t discuss it so much, where to meet there, because I thought it was going to be 50 people, maximum 100. And when I arrived there, there was like, I don’t know, 5,000, 6,000 people. Of course, I couldn’t see any mathematician in the crowd—but what I saw there, I mean, all these people, that suddenly gave Palestine a new meaning.
AS: All these marginalized, attacked, oppressed groups on so many levels. And suddenly this becomes the return to Palestine as a new place for so many people who are excluded. And then also it goes back to when I encountered, for the first time in my life, the erasure of the word Palestine from the map. And that moment of pain. It’s a strange pain. It’s not like pain, but it is a disorientation—okay, if it doesn’t exist, what does it mean in all of this existence? And suddenly the word Palestine appears as a lived form with all these groups. So the word changes its significance. And this is, for me, the idea of ethics. How the world is no longer associated with a nation-state or with a country or with a specific group of people, but it’s open to so many possibilities and meanings and practices. And this is what I mean, the ethics of you not replicating. And you say okay, you continue the act of generosity, it expands, it goes beyond what is being destroyed, or it transforms what is being erased into something bigger that you cannot erase any longer.
DN: I’m glad you brought up maps because when I was thinking about the overlaps or the resonances between both of your works, I wanted to explore the way I see both of you working against narrative, but as a step toward that, I wanted to mention maps, which we might automatically think of as tools of orientation, but they’re also tools of narrative or of story. And those tools get weaponized, and so these stories can be modes of erasure also. So I’m going to read from Dionne’s book, A Map to the Door of No Return, just a little excerpt:
DN: “There are maps to the door of no return, the physical door. They are well worn, gone over by cartographer after cartographer, refined from Ptolemy’s geographia to orbital photographs and magnetic field imaging satellites, but to the door of no return, which is illuminated in the consciousness of Blacks in the diaspora, there are no maps. This door is not mere physicality. It is a spiritual location. It is also, perhaps, a psychic destination. Since leaving was never voluntary, return was and still may be an intention, however deeply buried. There is, as it says, no way in, no return.”
DN: And I’m thinking of the protagonist in the second half of Minor Detail, who is trying to return in time to investigate a crime, a so-called minor detail of the Nakba in ‘48, the rape and murder of a Bedouin girl, and the impossibility of her, not only the navigation of space—do you have the right permit? Do you have the right license plate? Which area are you in? But literally, she’s in the car with many maps, because no map really is mapping her own memory and her own experience. Towns have disappeared. Everything has a different name. And so there’s a bewilderment of orientation. And I think about how there’s no map to the psychic door of no return. And this character who almost seems to have too many maps, which almost functionally seems to be like having no map, and this sense of being uncharted. And I wondered if you could both speak to your own work, or to each other’s, about this question of the map and narrative and story for you.
DB: The map, in this sense that you’ve reprised for me, is really an aperture for imagining and seeing. And it is a set of historical details, if you will, that any protagonist walking through this aperture has. And they may not be like the maps of colonialists, which were only a map to extraction, but they are a map to living, and they’re a map to the lives that were lived, and the lives that are in process of living against these historical details, with these historical details. Not with the historical details in the linear fashion of the colonists and the colonizer and the oppressor, but the map that was used, in a sense, to escape and exceed those notions, if you will.
DB: So, for me, narrative must take a much more open form than the handed-down processes of narrative, of imperialism and imperialistic structures and structures of extraction and so on. So what is narrative then? Narrative must be thrown up, again. So narrative isn’t simply the path of the colonizer through life and really through our lives that we, that I speak with, but the movement that has happened that exceeds that life, and that doesn’t seek to imitate that structure narratively, but to actually point out and record the details of actual living—not just the details of the regimes of a certain economy of violence, but what exceeds that economy. So for me, it is to look at the we who live beyond that economy, and whose actual lives are restricted and constricted by those economies of violence and extraction. I’ll stop there for a bit.
AS: There is a lot of violence in drawing maps. And what is being also eliminated because of—I mean, the immediate violence you would see is these absences, these things that cannot be traced there in a map. And therefore also doesn’t—the map is not the route that you navigate through your movement, even the imaginative, even the literary. I mean, how do you move when there is this absence, also, on the level of language. What lies there as an equal between an absence in the map and the word? And who holds these maps, and who can read them, and who can draw them, as also drawing the narrative form and the linearity of that narrative form, and the rationality of that, which all elements you would be excluded from in your imagination, because you don’t have a presence in that. And this, the scientific—when you are thrown out of that violently, you really end up going beyond that. And I think this, beyond you going beyond that, it becomes an existential form of going beyond. It’s not a choice, it’s not a luxury, but it’s only where you find yourself, and then how to move your characters, as well. And where they start their trip and how they return and how they—and these are really questions that I think have haunted me always.
AS: Perhaps they started with a map because this is like the first act of naming. We don’t have God now asking Adam his name, but this is like you come across these absences and how you narrate after that absence. And how do you move, how do your characters move? Do they go in a line or a circle? Because when we are lost, I don’t know. I learned this somewhere, that when you are lost, you always have to look straight, in a straight line. Because our tendency when we are lost is that we go in circles. So in case nobody wants to be lost, they should look straight. But if you prefer to be lost, just don’t look.
AS: And this circular return. And I find this circular return, the continuous, as also a narrative form, is very inspiring. Because how do—and this circle goes, and each time, with each return, there is also a new discovery of an absence, somehow. And then you don’t become, also, the one who controls the place within which you move, but you move alongside things. And this is a complete, also different relation of drawing, of looking at nature from above. And this comes, really, this practice, also, of mapping, as a colonial practice that brings culture against nature. So your tools of navigation are completely different. And it’s really for me, it always haunts me. If you start from this erasure, then every start can come back as a new start. And this for me is the stutter. Again, you stutter with the beginning and linearity completely disappears somehow.
DN: Well, one of my favorite conversations that I’ve watched you in is with Laily Long Soldier and Madeleine Thien. And in that conversation you said something similar, that you’ve never been good at explaining, and that whenever you’ve tried to explain something, you felt like you’ve destroyed the thing that you were explaining. You said the beginning of writing for you is both a failure of explaining and also a refusal to explain in the face of people who narrate too well. In that same conversation, you say there’s no grand narrative of Palestine; that to put forth a grand narrative, given the absences, would be to put forth a fiction. And I wondered if you could maybe speak a little further about writing against grand narrative in this way, and about this beginning of writing actually being a failure of explanation.
AS: Well, writing is a failure of many things—a failure of finding a proper job.
DN: That’s for sure.
AS: Yeah, I think there is a whole—but this is something we experience every day until now. It’s—maybe in my case, the indignity in explaining, because it comes with a demand from somebody, like: who are you to demand what, from whom? And to whom are you explaining? And I think this is the trouble with explaining. I don’t know how—
DB: I agree. I agree there is a regime of literary practice that demands, from certain bodies, explanations for their presence. And this is the indignity of it. This is the insult. And this is what the writer who is located in this space resists. I am a writer who resists that question all the time because it is a location of something that’s called humanity in a particular terrain. But the demand is strong because the writing world is also an industry. It’s an economy of some kind. But that economy dovetails with colonialism and imperialism. And therefore it demands of these bodies a certain explanation about their presence. And that demand, for me, must be resisted and frankly, ignored.
AS: Yeah, exactly. I lived with a very strong mother. So I think all these industries of literature and culture, if they force me to explain, I should tell them, go and speak to my mother, because she’s much stronger than them. And I had my training there. And I think this is like the refusal of explanation. This is also of the ethics they passed on. Because we were, at a certain time, very rude kids to our parents, asking whether once we knew the Nakba, and what happened, and we have a language and a claim to our parents, oh, why didn’t you tell us? And they just look at us like, who are you? And they don’t say anything. And I think this moment, really: Who are you? And it’s not like they tell it in a way that we are somehow less human, but as if it’s like, What is your claim? And I think this is really fascinating. We grow up with that; you don’t explain. And then it allows you something else. I think this allows you also to think of language not as an instrument for explanation—it’s not something you use, it’s something more than that, alongside other experiences of language and narrative and narration. So narration is never about explanation, but it’s really about transforming and going to that beyond.
DN: Were you going to say something, Dionne?
DB: It slipped me, but keep going.
DN: Well, I wanted to read something from your talk, Dionne, Writing Against Tyranny Toward Liberation, where you said:
DN: “I don’t believe in the notion of justice since it presumes a state of affairs that is somehow formally good, a state that, but for certain anomalies, is legitimate. And in our case, I think that we live in a state of tyranny. And to ask a tyranny to dismantle itself, to claim, to ask for, to invoke justice, is to present our bodies already consigned in that tyranny, to the status of a non-being, to ask that tyranny to bring us into being. And that is impossible, and it won’t. That state is, in fact, anathema. That state is anathema to us. And so I do not write toward anything called justice, but against tyranny and toward liberation. Poetry is liberatory work for me: reflecting, intuiting, making sense of, and undoing the times we live in. A kind of overwriting, a diacritic, a remedy, and a repudiation of the narratives of non-being in this diaspora.”
DN: When you and I talked for the show, we were talking about your collected poetry. And as a poet, it’s very clear this work goes against the linearity that Adania talks about in the sentence. But what about as a storyteller or as a narrative maker, writing narratives that are working against narratives of non-being?
DB: What you just said, that I said, is what I was gonna say earlier. Writing is a very difficult thing. I do it instead of living in a way, right? Because living is hard. I told someone a week ago that living is so difficult, I have to write. I think both poetry and fiction have the same—for me, are the same, have the same questions in terms of language, in terms of what language I must deploy, what language I must make up to describe the condition of being in the world, when there’s a certain linearity that’s attached to my presence in the world. That linearity can only bear my body as it has transported it in the world, right? It cannot bear the fullness of my experience or the fullness of my being, so that I must—and I use this I, in a very we-ish fashion, it’s not me personally, it’s the condition in which I enter the constructed, restrictive world of capital and imperialism. So it cannot bear all the language that comes along with my body, including that body’s indictment of those practices, right? So it must always make that body function in a particular way in the economy of what we live, in the economy of that linearity.
DB: I keep using the word economy a lot, but I do think it is economy, because I think capital constricts time. Capital eats time, eats the body, eats the human being that it works with; only summons certain parts of that being that are useful for it, and jettisons the rest of it. And so my project as a writer is to collect the bits of it that capital would chew and spit out, and present that. And so for that, I need all the language that I am possibly capable of, to reconstitute constantly around capital’s ever-demanding questions, to reconstitute that body and to reconstitute that living, that type of living, that kind of living.
DN: Well, taking this phrase, the narratives of non-being, I wanted to spend some time with the question of the human. In your poem that’s in Jewish Currents, “prologue for now—Gaza,” you look and engage with the phrase that the Israeli government used: human animals. And one thing that seems noteworthy about the language since October of last year of the Israeli government is the absence of any coded pretense to the way that the language is being made. Children of light against the children of darkness. This is a war of civilizations or a war of civilization.
DN: When I think of human animals, and I think of Minor Detail, and you have these two sections, one from ‘48 and one contemporary, that are mapped on top of each other. The continuity between the two are the animals, the spiders and the dogs in particular. But also in the first section with the Israeli soldier, he’s bitten by the Bedouin girl, who is ultimately raped and killed. And he’s also bitten by a spider. And he’s obsessed with this spider. He’s obsessed with the wound that the spider has created, and he has this elaborate ritual of cleaning the borders of this wound. And he, at the same time, will never look at it, which feels really important to me somehow—that he won’t look at the wound, but he attends to the borders of the wound. And the stench that his own bite is creating, he does this act of projective identification, and believes the stench is coming from the girl, the Bedouin girl, instead of being produced by him. But I wondered if you could both speak to the animal, the human animal and the human, in light of the ways you both are overtly engaging with all of those.
AS: Sometimes it’s very interesting how time, the movement between one meaning and another brings so much. What is this time? It’s not a measure of it again, of the linear, that it’s moving, but there’s something as there’s so many, so many things happening, probably happening elsewhere and here and there. There, you just went to. And as kids, I remember the idea of the God; because in Arabic you have the God with the capital, and the god, or the goddesses. And they were always, as the teachers explained, what was special about them, that they were human animals. And it’s very interesting how these human animals took all this time to shift. That was when we were studying all Greek culture and this kind of movement.
AS: And I think, for me, perhaps what was always there between the two chapters is also this trip of the words, from one time to another, and the shift of that meaning. But in this case, it’s not going from Greek mythology to nowadays with this, but it is from almost in the same place, the same smell, that the words shift their meaning and they bring into a new life. And I wonder. Because for me, when I listen to you, of looking for words, somehow I approach words with so much—not fear, but wondering, what life will they bring forward beyond our lives, beyond what our bodies carry? And I think this is a haunting question when you write; because it’s not also, again, and I understand it’s not about the I, but it’s the we, and this we, and the continuation and the relation to language and what we bring to it, and the so many lives we bring to it. And the pains where this shift also can lead to. So I don’t know, it’s not related to an act in a narrative. It’s related to something, I think, beyond that, and there’s a lot of these returns.
AS: I’m just thinking about it, because thinking of also poetry, how it allows these new lives to come constantly. And really, these days, I’m remembering a lot of the epic poetry from the 7th century, and the fact that they always started on a site of destruction. And now today—I never knew why we learned these poems. I thought it was a complete waste of time—until today. And this is also what your life carries in terms of the things beyond the linearity, where words come to you and hold you and take you somewhere else. And I know I omitted the officer and the bite, sorry.
DN: And the what?
AS: I omitted the part of the bite. But for me, it’s not about an actual creature, but really, go back to the language itself and the transformation of these words. There’s no relation to an animal or to an act, but there’s a relation to the language, and how it carries on.
DB: I think just briefly, that when I heard that expression, human animals, it struck a familiar note. And I think it struck a familiar note for many people around the world, people who had been subjugated, people who had been subjugated by British, French, American imperialism in some way; because that is a designation that has always been given to oppressed people. Suddenly, millions and millions of us suddenly heard these words that were usually designated to us and thought, “Ah, I see.” And we knew where this was going. Yeah, we knew that it would involve this incredible force, this incredible violence and genocide. We had lived those genocides already, and understood them deeply. And so it’s significant that the rhetoric of humanism arose at the same time as slavery, as transatlantic slavery, and operated in the same vein. And what it operated to do was to designate certain populations as human animals, and certain others as human. And so that is a physical and psychic alert, immediately. And that is where my poem began. And in the recognition of how language is deployed, to assign those positions in the world.
AS: If I may, because it also goes back to how colonialism positions the human against the animal. And suddenly, as if it’s an insult. And I remember something very important in Polynesian mythology, about where care to nature is because people are born from the sea. Their ancestors, the ancestors, they exist in the water. They are coming from certain types of fish. And so the relation—and this is also the different wording, what a colonialist would relate to the human animal. And whereas in the colonized, this is almost a sacred relation. And this gap in meaning is also a gap in position. It is like how words change their context, but when they are said, each will go in a completely different meaning. And the question where we find their inspiration: when we allow now, the Israeli government, with its acts and the violence that it brings, not only that we cannot comprehend. And then it touches something so central.
AS: And this is what also keeps me thinking, what do we do with this word, human animals, when it’s a system of care? Because I remember the Polynesian cultures, the idea of taking care of the sea is also taking care of your ancestors. And you’re extending culture and nature. They’re no longer opposites. Whereas the colonizer wants to tell us they’re opposite. And the minute that you meet together, this is an insult. And you don’t deserve to be a human. And I think this is very—this is like taking another attack on language, another attack on something so intimate where there is a solace of a relationship between the human and animal. And if this relation suddenly becomes an insult, you imagine this attack on something so deep in your—beyond the language, and also where the animal lies, it’s beyond the language. And this is also beyond the explanation and not agreeing to go into this level of modernity or civilization, modernity where colonialism starts. And for you to be a human, you need to be the real beast. You will be a beast, but a legalized beast.
DN: I want to spend a little bit longer with humanism and liberal democracy. In the poem “prologue for now,” you say:
“I’ve taken this inventory before for all the ‘human animals’
liberal democracy has entirely failed and failed to even hide its fascisms
this narrow path of language
leads me here.”
DN: But I was wondering when Israel puts forth, this is a war of civilization, and then the Western powers go, yes, it is, if it goes farther back than 1492. Cause I’m thinking of Daniel Mendelsohn, the classicist. This is what he says:
DN: “The stereotype of the decadent, despotic, effeminate, inscrutable, untrustworthy, servile, fawning, irrational, sexually ambiguous oriental makes its first appearance in Greek literature, particularly in tragedy: the Eastern barbarian, whether in the person of the protagonist of Medea or of Bacchus’ seductive Dionysus, often stands as the negative image of the idealized Greek self, which is presented as masculine, rational and self-controlled (which very much reminds me of the ritual of the Israeli soldier and the wound).”
DN: But I wondered if you could both speak to this question of liberal democracy or humanism in relationship to how you write. Because I’m thinking of, Dionne, right before the passage that I read, about writing against tyranny, you’re relating an anecdote from 25 years ago, of a communist friend of yours in Tobago who you’re asking if they’re going to vote, and they say, “I don’t believe in democracy.” And you have this moment of fear. But then you also ask rhetorically, well, how can we believe in democracy given all that’s done under democracy’s name? And I think, Adania, you often tell a story of Sakakini, the Palestinian under Ottoman rule, getting his door knocked on by a Jewish man who is illegally there and is being accused of being a spy, and his decision whether to be a good citizen or to give this person shelter. And this question of what it means to be human, which I think, in both of your cases, is not to be a good citizen, I wonder if this sparks any thoughts for either of you.
DB: You said a lot there. Three things, if I could remember them as I go. One, I don’t think that rhetoric of the Israeli government, or the US government, or the Canadian government, or the French government, or the British government—I don’t think anyone believes it. It’s now become very, very thin. Perhaps that rhetoric might have been plausible, vaguely, in some strange way, 40 years ago or something. But we now know how thin that language is, that administrative language that’s used now to justify all kinds of horrors. We now know how thin that is. It’s very, very flimsy at this point. One thing secondly, democracy as a concept has always been, I think, only available to whiteness, or to white people. It’s available to white people in North America and Europe, etcetera. And an aspiration of Black people, right? It’s placed as an aspirational thing. Black people must aspire to it, just as we must aspire to freedom. But it’s available to whiteness. It’s seen as a right, in some kinds of ways. That’s true.
DB: What was the third thing? When I wrote that about—I was taking this inventory before, I was referring to the poem of mine called Inventory, the long poem called Inventory, which I wrote during the Iraq war, during the invasion by the US of Iraq, where one was invited to sit and watch that war on television—in North America, at least. I live in Canada, and it was late at night and there was a big star on a map and that star was supposed to be Baghdad, and somewhere where Saddam Hussein was. And these bombs we were invited to look at falling on this city of 5 million people. And I sat in front of the television and I thought, “Oh, my God, I live in a city of 5 million people. There’s something going on in a city of 5 million people, not simply the location of someone called Saddam Hussein, but the devastation of an everydayness of people who live in a city of 5 million people.” And that poem erupted from there, by taking a list of the everydayness, the life that’s being lived, that’s being overlooked, but that’s being broadcast as evil being destroyed.
DB: So that is the inventory, in a sense, that I take on as a poet; to make that list of the everyday life of very ordinary, very regular people on an individual street or sitting at a café wondering whether, oh, hell, did I leave my bicycle outside? Did I unlock it? Did I not? Where did I—where will I find money to do something very simple and so on? So I think that’s my job as a writer, to make those kinds of small accounts.
AS: Yes, strange because I just was thinking about it today. These democracies, because somebody asked me yesterday if I ever voted in my life, and I said, no. But he was perplexed by my reaction because this is also the experience of what democracy meant to me. It’s an oppressive apparatus. I mean, it is this democracy and this idea of who’s a citizen. I mean, the violence that is being practiced is just the act of naming who’s a citizen and who’s not, and what this implies, this inclusion and exclusion. And it’s wonderful that you mention Sakakini, but because at that moment when he’s faced by the dilemma of betraying his government, or literature. And that’s a dilemma. And he categorizes this of being the citizen, that you follow the rules of the state, of not allowing somebody asking to have a refuge with you; or betraying your literature that always says you should welcome the weak. And this is hundreds of years where the idea of generosity and being an ally to the weak and the oppressed is what instructs you, not who’s a citizen, or the laws, because it’s a completely different register of ethics.
AS: And in Arabic, he goes to say that he refers to these, to this literature, to instruct him, not the government. And this is fascinating because in Arabic, again, the word for literature and ethics is the same, it’s Adab. So when you are well versed in literature and poetry, it also means the same, that you have, you sent as an ethical person. And this gives us a hint too, that I don’t want to be concerned with opposing or not opposing democracy, and being trapped within that discourse. But try to think of different forms that allow us to imagine how we can be together. And the idea, in fact, and this is very interesting because the novel also, as a form, it appears during a time in modernity, and it is used to introduce the idea of the nation. And this is going back to the idea of the grand narrative of the nation. But what is there? Luckily, there are different forms of literature and different types of narratives and non-narratives and anti-narratives that allow for so many other narratives other than the grand narrative to emerge. And the grand narrative is almost like one narrative, whereas the non-narratives of so many. This is about the multiplicity. And this multiplicity is important because it keeps us alert, alert in our forms of engagement, our political engagement within liberal democracies, it has been reduced to an act of voting, or not voting, or one act that happens and then the domain between the private and the public is private, and the care toward others is reduced into that form.
AS: It’s like you shouldn’t care as a person because we, as a state representative of you, can take care of you. What Sakakini proposes is our constant engagement of what to be done. You don’t have, and I think now in Palestine and many other places, we don’t have the luxury of saying, “Oh, this is political, and I’m stepping out. And then I can come and practice my right once every four or five years.” And if I should choose between either, of course, I would find more inspiration in the one that constantly calls us to care, and to ethically engage, and wonder what it is. And as opposed, because this is also something that goes back to literature, which is another thinker, Munir Fasheh proposes about neighboring and the aesthetics of neighboring, which also abandons the fact of who’s a citizen. You no longer think of others as citizens, but as neighbors. Where the relation is, there’s no, the older citizen or the citizen and noncitizen. But there’s the extension toward the other, the intimacy within this relation. And it comes also from, sometimes, the relationship between two. The relations that exist on the margins, and not bringing into the center the state as your point of reference. It abandons the center and the ethics of the center, and wanting to be in the center and withdrawing from the center. You’re constantly functioning in the margins, on the side, to create something else. And for me, this is more an ethics of literature because of the intimacy that also reading and writing create. I’m sorry, my answers are so long.
DB: I hear you. And to follow on, there’s a way in which these democracies that now have reduced being in them to that, voting once every four years or so. But I can walk along the street and see an unhoused person, and I simply can walk along the street because I voted. I don’t have to do anything about that. And so it’s reduced the act of being in the world or being in relation to that. And it’s convinced us that that is the only act that’s necessary, not the other acts of being in relation with each other.
DN: Well, just before I came to New York, I was in conversation for a second time with Isabella Hammad. Her book that’s coming out is the book version of her Edward Said memorial lecture from last year. And it’s called Recognizing the Stranger. So it deals with a lot of what we’ve just talked about. But why it’s such an interesting document is because it’s looking at, or it’s an examination of the shapes of Palestinian narratives and looking at the middle of narratives. So turning points, or what Aristotle called recognition scenes or epiphanies. But she delivers this speech nine days before October 7, and then after October 7, and witnessing the way the world at large responds to what Israel projects that it’s going to do and wants to do.
DN: She has her own recognition scene where she’s shaken around her own notion of what she believes and writes an afterword. And the afterword is a third of the book. So we have this—they’re not at odds, but they’re at right angles to each other, I think. And so for on the one hand, you have, in Recognizing the Stranger, this really great ending where Said is lovingly putting Freud on the couch and psychoanalyzing why Freud believed that Moses wasn’t Jewish, that he was Egyptian, and that he learned monotheism from a pharaoh. And Said’s meaning-making, being around there being an otherness at the heart of Jewishness. And this meditation that Isabella does around finding the stranger within the familiar. And then her connection of that to Said’s notion of Palestinianism, of being not entirely comfortable inside or outside, the connection that Isabella makes between the unhoused character of Jewishness and Said’s own notion of Palestinianism.
DN: But then, with the afterword post-October 7, the recognition shifts. It starts with her mother looking at the television, seeing the genocide live streamed in real time, and her mother pointing at the screen at some Palestinian women and saying, “That is me.” And so we have this conversation where we leap back and forth, uneasily, I think, for both of us. And I think there’s an unease in the book between the notions of the first part and her sense that she’s explicitly lost faith in humanism. And yet, framing that Said himself and even in her mind, Sylvia Winter and Fanon were, what she said were raiding the conceptual toolbox of the Western philosophical tradition to use them to their own—with the hopes of using them to their own ends. But she had lost, she was shaken from that as a project. So she’s giving an Edward Said memorial lecture and also, at the same time, changing her view of recognition.
DN: I guess this would be my long preface to ask if anything about the last ten months has either put some pressure on what you believed or was clarifying to things you already believed in your writing practice, and the ways you’re, as we’ve discussed today, recognizing the otherness, interrogating narration, speaking into and from erasure and anything else.
DB: For me, it dreadfully confirmed things, a certain course of history in some ways, but also affirmed some things, given the response that people around the world, students on campuses, and it affirmed also the fight back against those very things. It, I think, calls for broader analysis. It calls for seeing all of the connections that we have to each other in the world, those of us who think of a world differently than through capital and than through racism, than through imperialism. It connected with things happening in Sudan, Congo. It connected with what I see as a great migration that’s been happening. It connected with the great deaths in the Mediterranean or the Gulf. It called, in a sense, for narrating, for thinking about, for imagining other worlds, imagining a different world. And so, not that I didn’t feel this pressure already, but added to the immediacy of a certain pressure on writing. And I’m searching for company in this, in this world of writing, this writing the world and writing the world we want to live in, into being in some way. Small. That sounds grand, but it’s really a tiny, tiny thing. Paragraph by paragraph or poem by poem.
AS: I don’t know. I remembered a poem by a Swiss poet that I forgot his name, but I just remember the image. It’s the rider on the Lake Constance, that he crosses this lake. It’s very windy, breakable, but he crosses and he crosses and he crosses. Maybe you know the poem. And then when he reaches the village, everybody’s like, surprised. Oh, you managed to go through this? And then he has a heart attack and dies. It’s a very fascinating poem because I’m always thinking about this rider that no one should tell anyone. How did you manage? Or have you been managing? Maybe we just should keep riding. I don’t know why I think that, but maybe what I mean is that it’s a time for me, at least, it’s moving without knowing somehow, or not seeing. And I think the fear of looking is immense of what’s happening. And I think the minute that personally I would look, I would collapse. And this is the importance of nobody telling you to look. We will all end up like this rider, having heart attacks.
AS:And this is where I recall what a friend in Gaza, somebody we’ve been in touch since years, every one or two weeks, because we are working together in relation to a magazine. And suddenly we stopped in October, we stopped communicating because there’s also an immense sense of shame; how we could live, just in general. And he initiated the contact back because you always think, you cannot look, you cannot look, you cannot. And what he said was fascinating, that it’s quite terrible. Like, I would rely on somebody in Gaza to give me the means to survive. And he said that I write, I need to write not to become a monster. And I think this is what writing suddenly like, “Yes, you’re right, we need to write not to become monsters.”
AS:And this is, I think, what this last period, it’s not like the last ten months. And I think the pain is old, even older than us or, I don’t know, it’s so old that it’s around you and just growing and growing and growing. But this is a moment, perhaps, writing it also has a different meaning, it has a shift. That is the last thing before you become a monster. It’s your resistance in that. And yes, of course, it is a savior. This thing comes, it saves you, it saves your practice, it saves the end. Like, okay, you might not have a heart attack and drop at the edge of the lake, but you might drop your ability to write, and then it becomes, “No, this is the essential.” This is exactly the moment that it should continue in any way, in any direction.
DN: Yeah, well, I wish we had a lot more time to have a lot more questions, but let’s give it up for Dionne Brand and Adania Shibli.
