And now, poetry!
This is a clip of Suheir Hammad, a Palestinian-American poet/actress, on Def Poetry. It’s her reaction to 9/11. Someone played it in my Palestinian seminar a few days ago, and I found it very moving. It might be as relevant as ever after Fort Hood.
To Feel the Humiliation
Today I have seen of war
all I want to see.A row of men with blindfolded eyes
and surrendered hands
squat, backs hunched,
before a stone wall.A young boy stays home
for five days, alone,
with the corpses of his family.A man gestures, with loathing,
about how a soldier had defecated
on his bed. An old woman flails
her arms in despair, begging
the distant heavens.To feel the humiliation
to touch the grief of each
I would have to become a monster
with many hearts.- Sharif S. Elmusa, in Flawed Landscape
Although entirely relevant to the video, I wanted to mention Israel/Palestine. Israel/Palestine is not an issue easily avoided here. I had a conversation with an Egyptian at AUC who asked me why Americans support Israel completely, a position that confused him (and many throughout the Middle East). I think that the for many Americans, their image of Palestinians is of the terrorist, which is the only facet revealed by US media and spreads feelings of disgust/fear towards the West Bank and Gaza. We deny humanity to Palestinians. We do not try to expand our very narrow understanding of these people and make it all too easy to mark their suffering as irrelevant, their oppression as necessary for the safety of Israel, the United States and the ‘free world’.
This is not a characteristic that is limited to Americans or the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It seems humans are too quick to reduce the “other” to the status of evil and a threat. If we do not have the willingness or curiosity to understand the context of phenomena (for example, Islamic ‘terrorism’), empathy to understand the condition of others, and the ability to critique our own words and actions, then we will continue to march to war with our bombs, drone missiles and ‘collateral damage’, no problem will be solved and our world will remain divided and unequal.
In other news, I got back from Siwa today. I should have a full report up sometime this week. I hope everyone had a splendid Thanksgiving/Eid al Adha!
