<underfire> chaos, illusions & the 60's
Laila Shereen
shereenl at georgetown.edu
Mon Nov 6 15:55:34 EST 2006
thank you all for several interesting conversations....i have a
couple things to share.
here's a bit of narrative from an artist in beirut this summer....
i would argue that the hyper-text called "war on terror" is deeply
engrained in the american psyche.
--
::Laila Shereen Sakr | Multimedia and Publications Editor
Center for Contemporary Arab Studies | Edmund A. Walsh School of
Foreign Service | Georgetown University
tel: 202 687 6177 | fax: 202 687 7001 | eml: shereenl at georgetown.edu
| url: http://ccas.georgetown.edu
From a friend, Tony Chakar, an artist in Beirut:
This is something i've written recently; i was invited by Documenta
12 to Hong Kong to give a lecture, but i preferred to stay in Beirut
and sent this text to be read there, by someone else. the reasons are
in the text itself.
i hesitated before sending it (it was written in September) because
it is somehow "personal"... but then decided to get over myself. the
text was written right after the July war, and i'd like to dedicate
it to my friends, Christine, Lina, Rabih, Lamia and Hassan (and the
rest of you of course) without whom keeping my sanity would have been
an impossible task. much love to you all.
Tony
?To the ends of the earth
My non-presence with you is not a coincidence; travelling to Hong
Kong would have been difficult in the circumstances that you know
very well, but with the lifting of the Israeli siege it wouldn?t have
been impossible. And yet, I took the conscious decision not to travel
abroad, not to be physically present and instead, to let a text I?ve
written represent me. I could try and explain the reasons for my
decision, like not wanting to bother with the paperwork process of
obtaining the visa, or that after weeks of constant Israeli
bombardments I feel too weak to take a long flight, or too weak to
explain to anyone, once I arrive, what had happened and why, and
especially too weak, or maybe too proud, to see even the faintest
hint of pity in anyone?s eyes. All of these are valid enough reasons
for a person not to travel, but in fact the deep reason for my non-
appearance is elsewhere.
In order for me to try and explain it, I should take a few steps
back. During the long weeks of the latest Israeli aggression on my
country, which felt more like centuries, I was completely paralysed,
and all I managed to write was the following:
Little Hiroshima
I've got my own little Hiroshima right here in my pocket.
Sometimes I take it out, I put it on the table, and ponder.
It will take us countless years and several generations to grasp the
immensity of the catastrophe that has (and is) struck us- and these
women who now wear black, and who become more and more numerous with
each passing day- these women are not only mourning their loved ones,
but they are mourning hope itself.
Where are God's angels when you need them? I just want one of them to
whisper in my ear that things are going to be ok, maybe then I can
breathe again.
Obviously, this was not enough- in spite of the numerous replies I
received when I sent this text by email. It is certainly not enough
if measured to the immensity of the catastrophe that has come to pass
over my country. The space of the catastrophe and its time are very
strange formations that can only be grasped if directly experienced
and then measured to the ?obvious?, to what we all take for granted,
to a normal state of things. The reasons for my non-presence lie
precisely in this catastrophic time, and this catastrophic space,
that I am yet to leave. As long as I remain in them, I will always be
able to say: I am no one. I am no one, and I am legion. I am a
million screaming banshees that have no name, roaming about an
indefinite space that is all inside, that has no limits, that has no
outside (note that the double siege established by both Israel and
Syria over the sea, the air and the land transformed Lebanon into an
unreachable island, a lost land). I am no one, and yet I am a howling
Jezebel that can be everywhere she wishes, when she wishes: I can be
in the halls of the United Nations in New York, floating around Dan
Gillerman, Israel?s ambassador to the UN, shutting his mouth with my
thousand hands, to stop him from saying that Israel is bombarding
Lebanon for its own good, or I can haunt the dreams of John Bolton,
the US ambassador to the UN, when he dreams of the Lebanese victims
who in his eyes are not equal, even in their death, to the Israeli
victims, because the first died in ?self-defence?, while the latter
were victims of terrorism; I can even go underground, to the
Hizballah tunnels, and find the un-findable Hassan Nassrallah, take
him by my thousand hands, and give him a thousand shakes, and tell
him with my thousand voices that there can be no victory over this
field of ruins, and that I am sick of seeing women in black mourning
their loved ones, and that all I want is to be able to ?cultivate my
garden?.
For these reasons I cannot be in Hong Kong: if I were to travel, I
would have to go to embassies and airports, to present papers and
documents that state exactly who I am and where is my place in this
world-structure that we all share. I will have to regain my pre-
catastrophic status of a specific person, with a specific position in
a specific society, and I am simply not ready or willing to see that
happening, at least for now. I don?t want to ?forget what happened?
and return to normality. I am not willing and I am not ready to do
that. So, in short, you can consider this paper as a message in a
bottle, coming to you from across the seas, from a lost island.
[break]
As I said before, the space of the catastrophe is an infinite space
that is all inside, and if I were to use a rather facile and
reductive analogy (reductive because it concretises what cannot be
concretised), I?d say that the closest representation for such a
space would be one of Piranese?s prison drawings. In addition to
these qualifications, I would say, purely empirically, that
catastrophic space and catastrophic time are absolutely irrational,
and absolutely logical. I write ?empirically?, and I?ll give some
examples: we all regained our war reflexes, and those who were too
young to have any, acquired some very quickly; one of those reflexes
is to ?hide under?? to hide under anything actually, anything
available, and it is known that the safest places are the ones that
are well hidden under the ground, like basements or obscure
staircases of apartment buildings; but still, many people decided
that they wanted to hide on rooftops and tried to inhabit the top
floors of apartment buildings. The logical reasons for this
irrational behaviour are simple: these people could not stand the
idea of dying asphyxiated under the rubbles of an entirely destroyed
building, a very probable event with the extensive use by the Israeli
army of implosion bombs and bombs that we still need to find a name
for; also, choosing top floors means that one is safe enough from the
shrapnel of cluster bombs that exploded on the streets. In
catastrophic time, Beirut became an Upside-down City. Here?s another
example: during the aggression, the Israeli planes targeted bridges,
tunnels, trucks, and small motorcycles. One is hardly aware of the
abundance of these in normal times, but once they became targeted,
moving around Beirut by car became a riddle; how to go from this
point to that one without crossing a bridge, or driving behind a
truck, or encountering a small motorcycle? In order to do so, each
person-driver had to reinvent a mental map of the city, with black
gaps for tunnels and bridges, and always taking into account the fact
that chaotic variables (trucks, motorcycles, electricity cuts leaving
streets in absolute darkness, or the worse variable yet: the
shelling) that can never be correctly calculated. And once one gets
to where he was going, he will have to calculate again the return
trip, taking into account all of these variables, and if the shelling
started, superimposing on the original mental map other maps, made
through calculating the time between seeing the flash from the blasts
and hearing the sound of the impact (thus acquiring some knowledge on
the distance of the shelling). In catastrophic times, Beirut became
the Kingdom of Unrelated Points and Infinite Calculations. Another
example: a friend of mine had a war-dream since she was a child. In
her dream, bombs are falling everywhere, but she cannot hear them;
she knows the bombs are falling, like one knows in a dream, and yet
there are no sounds of explosion. For a moment the bombs stop, she
looks under the bed, and BOOM!, a bomb blows up in her face. There is
nothing particularly unusual about that dream, except that, during
this war, a mutual friend of ours had the exact same dream. Exactly
the same, only in her dream, she?s the one in the bed and not the
original dreamer. Weeks after that incident was related to us by its
protagonists, and in spite of the ceasefire, a third friend had a
similar dream- not exactly the same though, but a variation on the
same theme: in his dream, he is in his bed sleeping, and the sound of
the bombs is deafening, and yet he cannot leave his bed. He jumps out
of the bed but remains in it, and the bombs keep on falling. In
catastrophic times, Beirut became the City of Borrowed and Inverted
Dreams.
[break]
For some observers, especially from the outside, and more especially
if the observers were observing the events through the insipid and
dull screens of televisions, it would be very tempting to say that
what happened transformed or reverted a modern city to a pre-modern,
primitive space. The readiness to take such hasty conclusions is
enhanced by the fact that, for almost 150 years now, the discourse on
the ?civilised self? and the ?primitive other?, of the ?good savage?,
is well into effect. And in fact, many things that I?ve read
emphasize the technological advancements of the Israeli army in the
face of the ?primitiveness? of the weapons used against them (an easy-
enough analogy in the Occupied Palestinian Territories- but the same
can apply to Hizballah?s rockets, which have a very low level of
accuracy). Do not fool yourselves: catastrophic space and
catastrophic time are absolutely modern; they are modern in their
irrationality, and their logical systems; in fact, they are the
underside of modernity, the other world that lies behind the mirror
traversed by Alice, Lewis Carroll?s character, and yes, during the
war we lived in Wonderland. And while the inhabitants of Beirut and
its heavily bombarded southern suburb, along with the hundreds of
thousands of the displaced from southern Lebanon, whose villages were
absolutely erased, lived in universes of allegorical times and
allegorical spaces brought forth by the catastrophe, and invented
logical but irrational mental maps to guide them through the Kingdom
of Unrelated Points, and borrowed each others? dreams- while all of
that was happening then, both the Israeli army and Hizballah fighters
were using modernist maps made of Cartesian points and precise
coordinates, one more efficiently than the other, but still. They
both shared the same conception of space: an absolute space of
mathematics and geometry, a space with no place for allegorical time
or existential memories. In such a space, both are not un-important,
they simply have no place to be. The Israeli army and the fighters of
Hizballah were both victims of modernity?s biggest project: the
geometrisation of the world. What is tragic is that they?re both
unaware of how much their mutual conceptions of the world are
similar, and of how oppressive and violent their world is.
[break]
To conclude, allow me to return to something I had written before the
latest Israeli aggression; I?ve written this for my last
installation, ?A Window to the World?:
?Given the right circumstances, the appropriate standpoint
(preferably with one?s back against the sea) and the correct angle of
vision (preferably looking obliquely), one would have the distinct
feeling that all the buildings in Beirut are packed-up and ready to
leave; most of them stand on slender columns that would aid them in
their journey; their antennas and dish receptors look like fancy hats
that one would wear on such a voyage; their balconies are empty
suitcases and boxes waiting to be filled by the small histories that
unfold in every apartment: long hours of anguish and fleeting moments
of excitement. At those times, Beirut would resemble a large horde of
escape boats aimlessly fleeing a sinking ship, and it would be the
best time to sip a cup of coffee by the sea.?
I want to return to this text to say that I am tired. I am tired of
living for the sole purpose of accompanying friends to the airport
(or to ports as of late, for them to be evacuated on ships to distant
countries) in order for me to bid them goodbye and to wish them safe
journeys. And frankly, I cannot imagine my life far from this place;
true, this is the only country I have- but mostly, it is here that I
learned the meaning of the words ?here? and ?there?, and all my life
I?ve been measuring the distance between them, and testing
boundaries. My only solace is the firm knowledge that, even after
centuries of my death, Beirut will always remain the dim and
flickering light that guides all those who are lost in the deserts of
the Orient, whether real or imagined. So send us your weak, your
marginals, your unwanted, your freaks and monsters. In catastrophic
times they shall become kings and queens, from under this cedar tree
to the ends of the earth.
Tony Chakar
September 2006
On Nov 5, 2006, at 6:26 PM, Robertson, Linda wrote:
> I would like to suggest that there are two essential differences
> relevant to the narratives of warfare in re comparing Vietnam and
> Iraq and American public opinion. Vietnam was fought during the
> Cold War. The mise en scene for many Americans was that the
> Communist/Soviet/Nuclear threat hung over foreign policy. The
> disillusionment with the war in Vietnam was related to the effects
> of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the nationwide reaction and call
> for disarmament, not to mention Johnson's decisiion to commit
> Americans to battle.
>
> The threat of Terrorism just does not have the magnitude of effect
> on the imagination that the Cold War did, particularly as there was
> no evidence of either wmd or collusion with Al queda. The mask was
> tron from the Official Story earlier than it was with Vietnam.
>
> There were two similarities which also have to be taken into
> account: As long as Congress went along with the President, the
> press did not enter into any kind of independent criticism of the
> war. It was only after the Gulf of Tonkin declaration was shown to
> have been based on a lie that Senior members of Johnson's own party
> began to raise very serious questions about Vietnam.
>
> Pictures may be important; but unless the political elites are
> fighting with each other, it is difficult to shape public opinion.
>
> The disillusionment with Iraq arises, I would argue, as much from
> the very important insider accounts as well as the reports by
> serious investigative reporters than it does from the pictures on
> the internet.
>
> Linda Robertson
> Director
> Media and Society Program
> Hobart and William Smith Colleges
> Geneva, New York
> 14456
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: underfire-bounces at underfire.eyebeam.org on behalf of Michael
> H Goldhaber
> Sent: Fri 11/3/2006 7:59 PM
> To: underfire at underfire.eyebeam.org
> Subject: Re: <underfire> chaos, illusions & the 60's
>
> But similar issues were evident in Viet-Nam. Neither situation's
> images unambiguously show or showed winning or losing. But y0u are
> right that when an unambiguous victory occurs (and this must be
> rather quickly) the public is likely to be more willing to support
> the (former) war. However, the greater show of images helps make more
> situations ambiguous. And, as I mentioned in my earlier post, signs
> of "enemy" suffering must be considered now in deciding an
> unambiguous victory, which makes the problem harder.
>
> Again, we have to look to history for comparisons. WWI 's long
> stalemate was often not enough to create widespread disaffection
> until many years later. (For instance, New Zealand, which sent many
> troops to the western front in WWI, and has memorials to dead WWI
> soldiers everywhere, apparently didn't much begin to question their
> involvement in that war until the 1990's.) I think something similar
> occurred in the US Civil War, where it took the North years to seem
> to be winning.
>
> Best,
> Michael
>
> On Nov 3, 2006, at 5:14 AM, Eugene Wyatt wrote:
>
>>
>> From: "Michael H Goldhaber" <mgoldh at well.com>
>>
>> "Now a comparison to today: In the US the level of opposition to the
>> Iraq war has risen much more swiftly than a comparable movement did
>> 30 years ago, although the form of opposition is very different.
>> Polls already show a majority quite opposed to the Iraq war, even
>> without the draft, without a major youth movement, with one-twentieth
>> the number of US deaths. Why? I think largely through the much vaster
>> cavalcade of images from all sides that are seen from the Internet
>> and other sources."
>>
>> Perhaps this is somewhat off topic and too obvious, but I suspect
>> that if
>> this "cavalcade of images," etc. were showing that the invading
>> forces were
>> 'winning' in Iraq, the polls would NOT show that a majority at home
>> were
>> opposed to the invasion of Iraq. 'Winning or losing' very largely
>> determine
>> war's acceptability for many. And the sad thing is: if the war in
>> Iraq
>> were to turn around, if the invaders were to be seen as 'winners',
>> so the
>> polls would turn. 'Winning and losing' here make temporary
>> bedfellows, "Oh
>> you're antiwar my dear, since when and for what reasons?"
>>
>> Eugene Wyatt
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Under Fire http://underfire.eyebeam.org
>> 16 October - 10 December 2006
>> International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville
>> all writings copyright individual authors
>> no commercial use without permission
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>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Under Fire http://underfire.eyebeam.org
> 16 October - 10 December 2006
> International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville
> all writings copyright individual authors
> no commercial use without permission
> to post a message, send an email to:
> underfire at underfire.eyebeam.org
> to unsubscribe, send an email to:
> underfire-leave at underfire.eyebeam.org
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