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Introduction 

In one of his poems, the well-known Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai expresses his hope for an era of peace and love between the Palestinians and the Israelis on the land of Palestine:

• An Arab shepherd searches for a lamb on Mount Zion,
• And on the hill across I search for my little son,
• An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
• In their temporary failure.
• Our voices meet above
• the Sultan’s pool in the middle of the valley.
• We both want the son and the lamb
• to never enter the process
• of the terrible machine of ‘Chad Gadya’.
• Later we found them in the bushes,
• and our voices returned to us crying and laughing inside.
• The search for a lamb and for a son
• was always the beginning of a new religion
• in these hills. (Cited in Coffin 1982: 341).

According to the preceding lines, the Israeli poet’s dreams were not fulfilled due to dubious political policies imposed by colonial hegemonic powers. Historically, the British colonial strategy of divide and rule prior to WWII era intensified the conflict in Palestine, widening the gap between the Arabs and the Jews. Due to British colonial policy, the Jews and the Palestinians were not able to come to an agreement about their attitude toward the British occupation. They were not able to drive the British colonizers out of Palestine, and consequently were obliged to confront the possibility of either dividing the country or living in a multi-national state of double nationality.

Apparently, there were important currents and trends within the Middle East on the eve of the Second World War that had a great impact on the geo-political history of the entire region in general and on the situation in Palestine in particular. Just as the First World War was a dramatic historical event that stimulated competing visions about the political future of the Middle East, the Second World War had equally momentous consequences. First, the demands of the war provoked the intrusion of the European powers into the region as they sought to mobilize the political, social and economic resources required to secure their respective strategic positions. Although in the short term this policy appeared to redouble the assertion of European-control, in the longer term it signaled the end of European imperial power. In the aftermath of the war, the exhausted states of Europe, particularly England and France, lacked both the means and the will to maintain the kind of hegemony over the Middle East that had once seemed vital to the security of their interests (Tripp 1991: 88).

In a related context, the great Israeli novelist, Amos Oz argues:  ”The encounter between the Arab residents and the Jewish settlers does not resemble an epic or a Western, but is perhaps close to a Greek tragedy. That is to say, it is a clash between justice and justice, and like ancient tragedies, there is no hope for happy reconciliation on the basis of some magic formula,” (cited in Coffin 1982: 319).  In an interview with Amos Oz, he attempts to come to terms with the essence of the Arab-Israeli dispute. He argues that the Arab-Israeli conflict is greatly influenced by prior confrontations between the Arabs and the European invaders during the colonial era, as well as by the traumatic Jewish experiences and the genocide of European Jews during the Holocaust.  Amos Oz points out: I feel that it is fundamentally a struggle not over territories or over symbols and the emotions they raise. I think that both sides of the conflict overlook the actual enemy. Now for the Palestinian Arab, “Jews are considered a mere extension of the arrogant, white European oppressor. Both parties regard their enemy as an extension of their traumatic experience. Both Israelis and Arabs are fighting against the shadows of their own past” (cited in Coffin 1982: 332). Moreover, the Palestinians are currently struggling against a hegemonic occupying force in a relentless attempt to establish their own nation state.

Irrespective of occasional periods witnessing a growing sense of frustration and pessimism, both Israeli and Arabic literature, prior to 1948, expressed a great yearning for coexistence between the Jews and the Palestinians. Under the impact of western Orientalism, early Israeli fiction portrayed Arab characters in an exotic fashion.  Nevertheless, sentimental Arab images are to be found in the socialist/realist Israeli literature of the late forties and the fifties. In both Arabic and Israeli literature, mutual hostile representation of each other dominates the works written between 1948 and 1973. But the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in the mid seventies marks the beginning of a new era of increased understanding and tolerance between the two sides of the conflict, which is reflected in literary production.

There is no doubt, however, that the existence of militant organizations and regimes that advocate violence on both sides, in addition to the rise of political Islam and the Jihad movements in Palestine-under the sweeping impact of the Islamic Revolution in Iran since the eighties-have complicated the situation in the Middle East. Regardless of violence and bloodshed, there are positive solutions underway in the political arena and many promising developments in the field of civil society on both sides that would bring about a better future of more understanding and tolerance between the two peoples.

 The Myth of Arab Anti-Semitism

In the Arab world, the aphorism “the Jews are our cousins” used to be a recurring motif in Arabic folklore and everyday language prior to the rise of the nationalist movement after the 1967 war and the emergence of political Islam in the 1980’s.  The above-cited aphorism is still used in Arabic discourse, although it gains punning and ironic connotations shaped by the radical developments and political complexities in the ongoing Middle East conflict.  The notion of the so-called blood ties between the Arabs and the Jews is deeply integral to Arab popular culture and local religious traditions, particularly in locations where Jewish communities resided such as Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, Iraq and Palestine.  According to Islamic tradition and popular culture narratives, both Arabs and Jews descended from the same Semitic roots, therefore they are originally cousins and relatives. Regardless of these anthropological narratives, which may contradict their counterparts in Western theology, the Jews, like other Middle Eastern minorities such as the Christians, the Kurds and the Druze, were able to live in a state of coexistence with the mainstream Arab-Muslim population.

Like all minorities and non-conformist groups in the region, the Jews have been marginalized, ghettoized and deprived of certain basic rights as Arab citizens. However, they were not physically annihilated or exterminated due to their religious doctrine. After the massive immigration of western Jews to Palestine during the Nazi Holocaust and the emergence of Zionism as an independence movement, an armed struggle erupted in Palestine between the Arabs and the Jews. The conflict between the two sides culminated in the 1948 war which paved the way for the establishment of the state of Israel and the exodus of Palestinian refugees. The dramatic consequences of the Palestinian tragedy in 1948, the erroneous equation between Zionism as a neo-colonial movement and Judaism as a sacred scripture, a pervasive lack of knowledge on the part of the Arabs of the Nazi Holocaust, and a Jewish history of genocide and victimization intensified Arab hostilities toward the Jews. The Arab antagonism towards the Jews, in Palestine or elsewhere, has never taken the form of anti Semitism in the European sense.  In other words, the Palestinians dealt with the immigrant European Jews as western colonial invaders the same way the Algerians did with the French or the Egyptians with the British during the era of colonization.

Nevertheless, in several fictional and nonfictional texts, Western writers claim that both Arabs and Palestinians are hostile to the Jewish people, which is a distortion of a complex history. In English literature, the negative Jewish image epitomized by Shylock, Barabas (The Jew of Malta) and others, has had an expansive effect on Arabic literature, particularly after the 1948 war. However, there does exist Arab fiction that reveals a counterattack on the Shylock image. While the artistic superiority of the bad over the good Jew is dominant in English literature, the positive image of the Jew in several Arab novels fits the shifting imaginative interests of a changing generation. The fictional Jew, the wandering Jew, and other images that display a stereotypical rigidity are altered by several liberal Arab writers. Incorporating Eastern and Western myths and recalling archetypal figures from the Bible and Islamic history, these writers attempt to be objective in their treatment of the Jew as a historical victim.

In the same context, Trevor Le Gassik points out that in Arab culture, Judaism is approached “as a divinely-inspired religion as the Quran teaches”  (Le Gassik 1982: 250). According to Le Gassick “even armed resistance groups” in Palestine distinguish between Judaism as a religion and Zionism as a political and colonial movement aiming to dismiss the Palestinians out of their homeland. The wide differences between the attitude of the Palestinians toward the Jewish people and towards the Zionists is “a fundamental motif in the ideology of the Palestinian Liberation Organization as many of their publications show,” (Le Gassick 1982: 250). It would appear that many Western authors equate Zionism with Judaism the same way they equate Islam with terrorism, in order to fulfill dubious ideological or political ends. Moreover, even though critics claim that Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, was a dedicated Jew, Herzl problematizes this claim in The Diaries, confessing that “he does not believe in the Jewish religion,”  (Herzl 1960:54).

Moreover, in his discussion of the image of the Jew in Arabic literature, Trevor Le Gassick argues that “Arabic political writings frequently express negative comments on the greed and duplicity of Zionists but reiterate that “there should not be any quarrel with Judaism or its adherents. In general, they emphasize their respect for Judaism as a divinely inspired religion” according to Islamic traditions and insist on the idea that “Zionism is an aberration supported by fanatics in the service of Western imperialism,” (Le Gassick 1982: 250). There is no doubt that the deliberate distinction between Zionism and Judaism in Arabic political discourse is reflected in Arabic literature about the Arab-Israeli conflict. This difference becomes a fundamental motif in the ideology of Arab writers dealing with the Palestinian question. Thus many of the fictional works incorporating Jews and Zionists are extensions of political polemics.  Most of these works aim to express the anger of the writers and incite the Arab masses against the Zionists in Israel. However, “few words in Arabic of recent years involve a major character who is Jewish and the portrayal is rarely sympathetic,” (Le Gassick 1982:  251). In this connection it is significant to argue that for centuries Arab culture has lacked any information about the historical suffering of the Jews, particularly the Holocaust. This cultural gap, in addition to other elements, contributed to what Le Gassick calls “the rare sympathy” (Le Gassick 1982: 252) toward the Jews in Arabic literature.

Apart from Le Gassick’s perspective, it is evident that the image of the Jew in Arabic literature is shaped by a variety of national and international elements including internal social and political transformations and external pressures and interventions. Some of these images are directly inspired by negative stereotypes assimilated from western literature, particularly the works of Shakespeare in which Shylock, the famous Jewish character in The Merchant of Venice, is demonized. Likewise Christopher Marlowe, in The Jew of Malta, introduced a biased image of the Jew through the character of Barabas. In Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens unfortunately appears to dehumanize the Jews by emphasizing the inhumanity of Fagin. In The Cantos, Ezra Pound associates usury with Jewish bankers. Moreover, many of T.S. Eliot’s well-known poems reveal a sense of anti-Semitism.

It is noteworthy to point out that after the defeat of the Arab armies in the 1948 war, negative images of the Jews adapted from western literary sources were transformed and recycled in Arabic literature to serve political and ideological aims integral to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In other words, western stereotypes of the Jews reflecting European anti-Semitic discourses have been extensively duplicated by Arab writers in the aftermath of the 1948 war to underscore Israeli aggression and violence against the Palestinian people. Several Arab versions of Shylock, Barabas, Fagin and others are aesthetically articulated by conservative writers to reinforce the image of the Jew as a fearful and hypocritical colonizer and a sadist who wants to slaughter all the Palestinians and drive them out of their land.

On this basis, it is apparent that many Arab writers, supported by tyrannical/local regimes that stood to benefit, depicted the entire Jewish community in Israel as Haganah militia fighters determined to annihilate the Palestinian people. This simplistic image of the Jew has also been deployed by other Arab writers who introduced a balanced vision of the Middle East conflict. Deploying positive portraits of the Jew and foregrounding the human dimensions of the Jewish character as a defender of the oppressed and the humiliated as well as a victim of a history of persecution and genocide, these writers aim to bridge the gap between the two conflicting parties in Palestine.

For example in Samih al-Qasim’s novel al-Sura al-Akhira fi al-Album/The Last Picture in the Album, the protagonist is a sympathetic Jewish girl who becomes acquainted with the suffering of the Palestinian people after her visit to an Arab village.  The girl, who lives in Tel Aviv, changes her attitude toward the Palestinian situation due to her journey to the Arab community. Consequently, she becomes convinced of the right of the Palestinians to have an independent state of their own (cited in Zalum 1982: 46). In confrontations with her father, a militant Zionist who keeps an album including the pictures of the Palestinians he murders, the Jewish girl asks him to put her picture in the same album as a sign of sympathy with the Palestinian victims.

Another example is al-Qasim’s novel Orange Fruits in which Miriam, a German girl of Jewish origin, identifies with the Palestinians. She even refused to cooperate with the Zionist Agency in Germany.  When members of the Jewish Agency attempted to urge Miriam to immigrate to Palestine she told them: “I will not cooperate with you.  You are criminals.  You want to use us to implement your hateful Zionist agenda.  Palestine is not my homeland.  My homeland is Germany and I will stay here. I will not help you to use our misery as a means of achieving your aims” (cited in Abu-Matar 1980: 410).  Apparently, the Palestinian novelist Samih al-Qasim aims to draw a distinction between the Jews and the Zionists, acknowledging the Holocaust as “our misery,” a painful catastrophe experienced by the Jewish people. The analogy to the Shoah as “our misery” reveals the sympathy of the Palestinian novelist toward the Jewish victims of Nazism and emphasizes the shared Semitic origin of both sides of the conflict.

Moreover, the Palestinian writer Hanna Ibrahim depicts a sympathetic Jewish character in his novel al-Mutasalelun/The Infiltrators. The novel’s events portray the encounter between Sara, a Jewish girl, and a Palestinian family consisting of an old man, his daughter and her baby who came to the doorsteps of Sara’s house inside a Jewish Kibbutz.  At the beginning of the confrontation, Sara carried her gun and went toward the door where she heard strange voices and mild knocks.  She screamed in Hebrew “who is there?” and a female voice replied in Arabic “for God’s sake, open the door.” Hearing the cries of a baby, Sara became confident that the strangers were not Palestinian rebels because the rebels did not carry babies. When Sara opened the door, she found an old man in a state of fatigue, coughing and groaning. His daughter Hind was also exhausted due to the cold weather outside, as the cries of her baby broke the silence of the night.  Immediately Sara threw her gun away and brought clothes for the woman and her baby while attempting to help the cold man who fainted and fell on the floor out of hunger and exhaustion.

Afterwards, the old man told Sara that they should leave her house “because our presence will cause trouble for you” (cited in Abu-Matar 1980: 110), but Sara refused to let them go at night in the raining weather. They left Sara’s house at daybreak, but she discovered later that the Palestinian family had been killed by the Israeli soldiers in the Kibbutz. In conversation with an ex-Israeli soldier Sara became aware that Hind and her father were killed in an olive tree field near the house. The soldier happily told Sara that two Palestinian rebels were killed while attempting to infiltrate into the Jewish community. Sara became very angry and she insisted on reaching the spot where the assassination took place. Inside the olive field, she found a crowd of people and only two dead bodies lying in the mud. She asked the crowd about the little baby and they asked her in return whether she saw them before.

In her embarrassment, Sara told them, she became confident that the dead mother carried a baby after watching “the milk coming out of her breasts,” (cited in Abu-Matar 1980: 112). Sara feels sympathetic toward the Palestinian family particularly when she remembers that Hind’s husband, detained in an Israeli prison, will not be able to see his baby anymore. In addition to Sara, Hannah Ibrahim introduces Shlomo, another sympathetic Jewish character who takes care of the cows in the Kibbutz. Shlomo decides to help Said, a Palestinian villager, to bury the dead bodies of his two brothers, killed by Israeli soldiers seemingly without reason. While the two brothers were carrying furniture from their own house, the soldiers killed them assuming that they were thieves. Shlomo decided to dig the grave insisting on helping Said to bury his brothers despite the Sabbath. Explicitly, the novel reveals the honorable side of the Jewish characters because “Shlomo, the Jew, preferred to offer help to a Palestinian Muslim even if he disobeyed God,” (cited in Abu-Matar 1980: 113).

The Humanization of the Jew in Palestinian Literature 

The humanization of the Jewish subject through literature is a process that originated in the eighteenth century, accelerated in the nineteenth century and continues on in the present time. Western writers must cope with the two great antipodes of the fictional Jewish stereotype, the Jew as a saint and the Jew as a devil, with frequent emphasis on the latter image. The fear and the basic impulse of animus surrounding evil Jewish characters such as Shylock, Fagin and others ultimately lead back to the fabled role of the Jew in the Christian narrative of crucifixion. This nucleus served as lodestone that unfortunately associated the Jew with ritual murder, necromancy, greed, duplicity and lust. In the Arab world, the historical and political ramifications of the Arab-Israeli conflict over Palestine not only created long-term hostility between the Arabs and the Jews; it revived old Jewish tropes and also undermined the possibility of initialing a mutual dialogue between both sides.

One of the main elements of tension that increasingly plague Arab writers who engage the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in their literary works is their recurrent foci on hostilities between Palestinian militants and hawkish Zionists or stone-throwing Palestinians and gun-wielding Israelis. Further, in several Arabic narratives, the Jew is viewed not only as a senseless murderer of children but also as a downright sadist. The invisibility of moderate Jewish characters in contemporary Arabic literature contributes to the anti-Israeli discourse prevalent in Arabic writing and valorizes the Arabic fanatic perspective toward the Hebrew state. In the absence of Jewish counter narrative, in Arabic literature on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Palestinian militancy becomes a suitable alternative to the rhetoric about the suffering of the Palestinian people whereas the Jews emerge as the violent aggressors in the Middle East.

In traditional Arabic literature where the issues of nationalism and Arabism are one of the central foci of contemporary literary discourse, the question of representing the Jew, the cultural other, remains problematic and critical to any serious attempt to engage the Arab-Israeli issue from an objective perspective. In most of the Arabic literature written prior to the 1948 war, resulting into the foundation of Israel, the Oriental Jews were positively represented, even romanticized, as part and parcel of the social structure of their countries in the Arab world. The post 1948 war literature witnessed an unfortunate rebirth of a web of cultural stereotypes where the Jews are either systematically expunged from the textual narrative or, when acknowledged, are associated with a status of ontological otherness, evil and inferiority. Through the narrow lens of an Islamic fundamentalist perspective pervading traditional Arabic literature on the Palestinian question in the aftermath of 1948 war, the Jew emerged as an inimitable and inexorable counterforce to an ideologically pure Palestine. In Returning to Haifa, Kanafani indicates that the categorization of all the Israeli Jews as hard-core Zionists is completely out of touch with the exigencies of contemporary geopolitical realities.  Explicitly, the argument and events in the novel consider the principle behind Jewish hatred as corrupt and self-serving.

Ghassan Kanafani’s[1] famous novel Returning to Haifa (1969) marks a turning point in Arabic literature after the 1948 war and the establishment of the state of Israel, because the author deploys positive images of the Jews, thus challenging orthodox Arabic narratives. Unlike writers who either romanticize or demonize the Jew, Kanafani underlines human issues of common interest between the two sides of the conflict-the Israelis and the Palestinians-foreshadowing the political agenda of the novel. In Returning to Haifa, Kanafani introduces the Arab-Israeli conflict not only by incorporating Palestinian suffering and displacement, as in traditional Arabic literature, but also through an engagement with the Jewish history of Diaspora and genocide. The Jewish motif in the novel has precipitated the emergence of a new pattern of Jewish characters in Arabic literature associated with the nature of the cultural ‘other’. For decades, the awareness of such a motif resulting from an encounter between the Palestinians and the Jews emerged as an outburst of literary consciousness characterizing major Palestinian literature on the conflict.

Returning to Haifa is “the story of a Palestinian couple’s return to the flat from which they were forced to flee twenty years before,” (Campbell 2001:53). The main events of Kanafani’s novel cover the period that extends from the beginning of the armed clashes between fighting factions in Palestine prior to the establishment of the state of Israel until the post 1967 war era. After the 1967 war and with permission from Israel, Said S. and his wife, Safiyya, returned to their house in the Halisa area in Haifa looking for their son, Khaldun, left behind during the occupation of the city in the 1948 war. When they entered the house, they were warmly received by a kind woman, Miriam Iphrat, who did not identify them in the beginning: “She was short and rather plump and was dressed in a blue dress with white polka dots.” As Said began to translate into English, the lines of her face came together questioning. She stepped aside, allowing Said and Safiyya to enter, then led them into the living room (Kanafani 2000: 162).

Miriam lost her family in the Nazi Holocaust and immigrated to Israel. During the carnage perpetrated against the Jews in Europe, she escaped and hid in a neighbor’s house. When she came to Palestine, she settled in the house of Said, which was given to her by the Jewish Agency. She found Said’s abandoned baby son Khaldun/Dov in the empty house and brought him up as her own child. Obviously Miriam felt sympathetic toward the plight of the Palestinian people. This emigrant woman, a Holocaust survivor, witnessed a massacre in which Palestinians, not Jews, were slaughtered. She saw two Haganah (an Israeli militia) soldiers throwing the dead body of a Palestinian boy in a truck. The incident reminded her of the murder of her brother at the hands of German soldiers during the Holocaust. To her, the Haganah violence against the Palestinian refugees is reminiscent of the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany and in Poland under German occupation, from where she has come.

In a flashback, Said S., the Palestinian refugee and main character in the novel recalls the bitter memories of the 1948 war when he was forced on 21 April to leave Haifa “on a British boat” and “to be cast off an hour later on the empty shore of Accra,” (Kanafani 2000: 166).  On April 29, 1948, Miriam and her husband, Iphrat Koshen, accompanied by a Haganah member entered “what from them on became their house, rented from the Bureau of Absentee property in Haifa,” (Kanafani 2000: 166). Escaping from the Nazi Holocaust Iphrat Koshen’s family “reached Haifa via Milan in the month of March under the auspices of the Jewish Agency” (Kanafani 2000: 166). The woman told her visitors that she came from Poland in 1948 to settle in their house, which she rents from the Israeli authorities. In the beginning Miriam’s family had to live in a small room at Hadar, the Jewish quarter in Haifa.

After the initial confrontation between Said S. together with his wife Safiyya and Iphrat’s family, it seems that the Jewish woman had anticipated the visit of the Palestinian family: “I have been expecting you for a long time”, says the woman. “The truth is, ever since the war ended many people have come here, looking at the houses and going into them. Every day I said surely you would come,” (Kanafani  2000: 163). When Said and Safiyya returned to Haifa, their former house was only inhabited by Miriam and Dov after the death of Iphrat.  During the visit of the Palestinian couple to their house and in a conversation with Miriam, she told them that Khaldun/Dov had become an officer in the Israeli army, and is due to come back home within few hours .  Waiting for the return of Khaldun/Dov, Said told his wife the story of a Palestinian friend, Faris  al-Labda – when Faris came back to his flat in Haifa he found it occupied by another Palestinian family who convinced him to join the Palestinian resistance forces. The novel moves toward its climax after the arrival of Dov, and the final chapters witness the confrontation between Dov and his Palestinian/biological parents.

Castigating Said and Saffiya for abandoning him, Dov denounces his Palestinian origins, affirming his identity as a Jew and an officer in the Israeli army: “I didn’t know that Miriam and Iphrat weren’t my parents until about three or four years ago. From the time I was small I was a Jew. I went to Jewish school, I studied Hebrew, I go to Temple, I eat kosher food. When they told me I wasn’t their own child, it didn’t change anything. Even when they told me – later on – that my original parents were Arabs, it didn’t change anything. No, nothing changed, that’s certain. After all, in the final analysis, man is a cause,” (Kanafani, 2000:181). The young man continues his address to Said, his biological father: “You should not have left Haifa. If that wasn’t possible, then no matter what it took, you should not have left an infant in its crib. And if that was also impossible, then you should never have stopped trying to return. You say that too was impossible? Twenty years have passed, sir! Twenty years! What did you do during that time to reclaim your son? If I were you I would’ve borne arms for that. Is there any stronger motive? You’re all weak! Weak! You’re bound by heavy chains of back­wardness and paralysis! Don’t tell me you spent twenty years crying! Tears won’t bring back the missing or the lost. Tears won’t work miracles! All the tears in the world won’t carry a small boat holding two parents searching for their lost child. So you spent twenty years crying. That’s what you tell me now? Is this your dull, worn-out weapon?” (Kanafani 2000:185). Expressing his gratitude to his Jewish foster parents, Dov remains in Haifa as an Israeli citizen. As Said and Safiyya drive back to Ramallah, Said thinks seriously of allowing his elder son, Khalid, to join the Palestinian fighters. In the beginning of the novel, Said prevented Khalid from joining the resistance movement in Palestine, but his meeting with Dov changes his attitude regardless of his fear of a potential confrontation between Khalid and Dov on the battlefield.

Moreover, Said and Safiyya started to see the Palestinian-Israeli question from a new perspective not only because of Dov’s response, but also as a result of the encounter with Miriam. As a Holocaust survivor, Miriam expresses sympathy toward a Palestinian boy treated brutally by some Israeli soldiers in Haifa. Drawing an analogy between the Palestinian boy and her brother who was killed by the Nazis in a concentration camp in German occupied Poland, Mariam is able to change the hostile attitude of the Palestinian couple toward the Jews as a whole.  The new awareness on the part of the Palestinian couple of the painful Holocaust experience opened their eyes to new realities that should be taken into consideration in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

In Returning to Haifa, Kanafani takes the readers back to Iphrat Koshen’s experience as a Holocaust survivor in Europe: “He’d read Thieves in the Night by Arthur Koestler while in Milan, a man who came from England to oversee the emigration operation had lent it to him. This man had lived for a while on the very hill in Galilee that Koestler used as the background for his novel (Kanafani 2000: 166). The allusion to Arthur Koestler’s novel is significant because it recalls a highly romanticized account of a group of Jews who flee the Nazi Holocaust and came to Palestine to build a little settlement in the late thirties. The characters in the novel aim to challenge the surrounding hostilities in order to establish a promising community constructing “houses and inhabit them, and they shall plant vineyards and eat the fruits of them,” (Koestler 1967: 357). The novel, like American frontier literature, depicts an image of an isolated country conquered by young pioneers who stayed in the Jewish ghetto, in Haifa, in “a building choked with people.” Kanafani describes the life of Iphrat Koshen’s family in the “Emigres’ Lodge” where emigrants spend the night, eating dinner together and “waiting for eventual transfer to some other place” (Kanafani 2000: 166). Like the characters in Koestler’s novel prior to their adventure, Iphrat Koshen was not fully aware of the nature of Palestine.

Attempting to counter misconceptions and stereotypes that impede the cultural dialogue between the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine, Kanafani, in Returning to Haifa, does not acquiesce to literary traditions which view the Jew simply as a militant Zionist.  Instated, he deploys a reconciliatory discourse creating positive Jewish characters such as Miriam and Iphrat, two Holocaust survivors, in an attempt to carve out a morally viable narrative of the Arab-Israeli conflict. By locating Miriam, Iphrat-and their adopted child, Dov-at the center of his novel, Kanafani aims to dismantle local traditional conceptions about the Jews as Zionist invaders similar to other European colonialists. Further, the Holocaust motif is unequivocally and passionately introduced in an Arabic novel about the Palestinian tragedy in order to foreground parallel human calamities and suffering.  Convinced that the Arabs were not able to distinguish between the white settlers in South Africa and the Jews who escaped from European anti-Semitism and the Nazi Holocaust, Kanafani reveals a desire to build a new future, a desire that reveals an identification with the other victim who had also experienced humiliation. The idealized portrayal of the Jewish characters in the novel and the representation of the Jew as an individual and a human being signify a sympathetic understanding that would hopefully develop into further understanding and tolerance between the two partners in the conflict in Palestine.

In a related context, Returning to Haifa is a testimony that undermines claims about anti-Semitism in Arabic literature regarding the Palestinian-Israeli issue. Zionist scholars like Neville Mandel and others argue that the Palestinian hostility toward the Israelis is not the result of anti-Semitic sentiments, but due to the former considering the latter as colonizers settling Palestinian territories. Regardless of recent and frequent attempts to engage the race issue in the Palestinian  question, there is no anti-Semitism in Palestinian literature and culture, in the western sense simply because the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict  are primarily due to political  and geographical differences about borders. The hostile attitude toward the Israelis in Palestinian literature stems historically from the false conception that all the citizens of the Hebrew state, without exception, are militant Zionists who insist on transferring the Palestinians off their land. This claim was introduced into school curriculums and was propagated by right-wing media in the Arab world after the 1948 war and the establishment of Israel. Since the Palestinian-Israeli dispute lies in politics rather than race, the Palestinians approach the Israelis in the same way the Algerians approached the French colonizers during the era of imperialism.

As a Marxist oriented scholar, Kanafani, in Returning to Haifa, creates thoughtful voices openly skeptical of traditional Arab views toward the Israeli survivors of the Holocaust. In Arabic literature, it is easy to fall back on the negative stereotypes of the Jew, originally assimilated from western culture and built on models like Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Fagin in Oliver Twist and other European fictional works. In an attempt to purge Arabic literature on the Palestinian/Israeli issue from the realm of political propaganda  advocated by totalitarian Arab regimes that views the Jews in Israel as sadistic Zionists and brutal invaders, Kanafani introduces a balanced vision of the conflict incorporating the Holocaust motif as a sub-plot serving his aesthetic intentions.  Refusing to look at the genesis of the conflict with a myopic eye, blinded by feverish militancy and religious attachment to institutions like al-Aqsa Mosque, Kanafani engages the perspective of the cultural other, dismantling virulent stereotypes of the Jews assimilated in Arabic literature from Western sources.  Unlike writers who disseminate Jewish stereotypes to achieve an ideological agenda, Kanafani weaves the Holocaust motif into the Palestinian issue, narrowing the gap between two histories of pain and exile.

Regardless of the fact that Kanafani’s fiction is ultimately harnessed to the Palestinian national cause promoting native culture and identity, Returning to Haifa explores new horizons confronting Jewish stereotypes in Arabic literature. The novel simultaneously introduces two narratives reflecting the viewpoints of the partners in the Arab-Israeli conflict. For the first time in Arabic literature following the humiliating defeats in the 1948 and the 1967 wars between the Arabs and Israel, the Holocaust experience is aesthetically articulated from a sympathetic perspective that honors the memory of the Shoah. Though it is difficult to study Kanafani’s fiction in isolation from the discourse of Palestinian nationalism, Palestine is depicted in Returning to Haifa as the native land of both Palestinians and Jews.  In this context, the novel is not only a challenge to the Arab official master narrative but also a deconstructive critique of the Arab version of the conflict.

Conclusion

Though Kanafani’s fiction is frequently dominated by what critics call “the discourse of resistance,” Returning to Haifa breaks new ground in Arabic literature dealing with the armed conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis. In the novel, Kanafani unabashedly introduces Jewish images which undermine previous stereotypes about the Jews as antagonists to everything Arabic or Islamic. Returning to Haifa was written during a period in Arabic literature that prioritized a work’s social function as well as literary merit. Sabri Hafez argues that the novel’s socio-economic and political aspects interweave somewhat with the national cause and contribute to its development,” (cited in Harlow 1996: 163). This sense of commitment, in Harlow’s view gives way to a deeper sense of alienation as the 1960’s wore on and it became apparent that grand socialist experiments like Nasser’s or grand political dreams like the idea of Palestinian reunification were going to fall short of their goals. In the dark days after the 1967 war, many Palestinians felt that the defeat of the Arab armies (the United Arab Forces) by the Israelis had also defeated “the very ideals of Pan-Arabism for deliverance and a victorious return to their homeland had largely been based,” (Harlow1996: 72).  This defeat of ideals led to a period of self-criticism, wherein one function of the literature of commitment was to posit which changes of ideals might result in a better future. Returning to Haifa embodies this principle by depicting two similar version of what ensues when Palestinians who have held onto these defeated ideals are forced to face the reality of their defeat.

Discussing the impact of the 1948 War of independence on the relationship between the Palestinians and the Jews, Edna Amir Coffin argues that the war intensified feelings of guilt on the part of the Jewish community in Israel: “the military victory put the Jewish community in the new position of perceiving itself not only as intended victims but also as potential victimizers defending itself but also expelling civilian populations from villages and homesteads” (Coffin 1982: 326). The reference to the dispersal of the Palestinian refugees as a result of the 1948 war triggers an interrogative move toward a re-reading of the Arab Israeli conflict in Israel.  In parallel lines with Coffin’s argument, the incorporation of the Holocaust theme in Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa opens new horizons about the possibility of a revision of Arabic literature on the Palestinian-Israeli question that takes into consideration the painful histories of the two partners in conflict.

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An earlier, abbreviated version of this piece appeared previously on Al Jazeera: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/12/when-revolution-comes-israel-2013121112851708923.html

The Hunger Games franchise has been hailed for spreading a new hopeful message of revolution to millennials around the world. Actor Donald Sutherland, who played President Snow in the filmic adaptations of the novels, believes the franchise has the potential to spur a global millennial revolution. He even reminisced in one interview about the “revolutionary” energy he felt as a young man in Toronto in 1954, as he left a theater outraged by the representation of social inequality and injustice in the double-feature Federico Fellini’s La Strada and Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. He was so moved that he felt compelled to throw stones or gravels at the presumably empty street in protest of all the injustice and oppression in the world.

Completing a Fulbright fellowship at Bir Zeit University in Palestine this year, I could not suppress another image that kept playing and replaying in my imagination: the image of young Palestinian children, some of whom could not be older than four or five years old, who are arrested by the Israeli occupation army on a daily basis for throwing pebbles and stones on similarly empty streets. Theaters for many of these children remain a luxury they cannot afford even if there were theaters in Ramallah. These children also need special permits from the occupation authorities to exit the Occupied Territories to watch the film across the green line.

In light of the particularly bleak context of radical postcolonial politics especially and the unfinished project of the Arab Spring, we have to ask ourselves not only what kind of revolution this franchise envisions, but for what (total transformation or reform) and more importantly, which youth they have in mind and where in the world exactly they are.

Sutherland is well known for his celebrated leftist activism and support for fringe radical groups such as the Black Panthers, and his opposition to the Vietnam War. Nonetheless, his remarks could be dismissed as either a nostalgic throwback to his student activism days (“We did it in ’68,” he was reported saying); a hyperbolic representation of youthful disobedience and rebelliousness (is this not Katniss’ main virtue?) that can be easily confused for the hard work required for a social revolution or, as a purely shameless PR campaign to promote the film. It could also be brushed aside as presumptuous and racist. To assume such a Hollywood fantasy, smacks of the colonial ideology of the “white man’s burden” and its capacity to foment world revolution. It might be ridiculous to deny the power of the imagination to elicit sympathy for the victims of oppression, but it is absurd to think that a single book or film series can spur a world revolution.

These twin questions of sympathy for victims of oppression and the revolutionary potential of the film franchise weighed on my mind as I watched the second installment of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire in Haifa a few weeks ago. Two things caught my attention during the film screening: first, the presence of several young Israeli soldiers in uniform in the row in front of me among the many young Israeli movie-goers, and second, the two rounds of applause that interrupted the movie. The first was a spontaneous, intense and prolonged round of applause in response to the kiss that the two contestants-lovers, Katniss and Peeta, shared. The second was a more localized and weak round after Katniss shoots an arrow into the center of the dome that short-circuited its hologramatic field, leading to its collapse and the rescue of the heroine.

The first round of applause foretold that any messages of compassion for the victims and revolutionary content that might have been, presumably, encoded in the film had already been sapped and sacked. In Hollywood’s ideological universe, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek points out a film’s romantic storyline usually adds an “ideological surplus-enjoyment” that diverts the spectators’ attention from its underlying coded messages of compassion and revolution, if they are there in the first place.

On the surface, there may be no apparent parallels between the fictional dystopian world of Panem and Israel’s apartheid policies and settler-colonialism in Palestine. The structural realities, however, are not that much different. But how did these young Israeli spectators, both civilian and military, decode the images on the screen? Could they have related Panem’s fragmentation into districts to the excruciating realities of the Palestinian cantons and bantustans, or the brutalization of the masses in the fictional and real world for that matter? On whom did they project these images as they witnessed these fictional realities? Witnessing up close the escalating levels of youth racism and violence against Palestinians, African immigrants and other asylum seekers in Israel, the question of the spectators’ sympathy for the victims of oppression and the potential of images of oppression and injustice to spur a revolution, must be tethered to the historical context of production and consumption.

The involuntary public display of affection that the young lovers were forced to perform re-invests the spectators’ emotional and libidinal energies in the love triangle, making it possible for them not only to draw their pleasure form it, but also to endure the boring details and machinations of the spectacle of mutual annihilation called the Quarter Quell. After all, the whole ordeal has nothing to do with the falling of Katniss into revolutionary subjectivity or with her training and formation as a revolutionary leader. She was simply manipulated by both the leader of the totalitarian regime in Panem to save her family, as well as by the vague revolutionary leadership as a revolutionary symbol for her iconic celebrity status.

The second round of applause, as weak it was, could indicate that some people genuinely believe in the revolution and that such Hollywood franchises can, in fact, usher the world revolution to come. Not so fast. In this so-called post-ideological age, as Žižek surmises, people enjoy large doses of ideological cynicism, in that they know very well that, in this case, these revolutionary messages and symbols that emerge out of Hollywood are mere ideological illusions. They know that these cultural commodities are nothing more than pop-culture escapist fantasies or “popcorn agitprops,” but they still believe in them.

This ideological cynicism is carried out on one condition: that people still continue to believe in these revolutionary messages in so far as someone else, an ‘other,’ really believes for them, thus allowing them to feel free to do whatever they want. Belief, for Žižek , is always belief through the other. It contains a minimum of reflectivity in so far as belief (trust) in something is tantamount to asserting that there are others who also hold those beliefs. As he states, “From the very outset, the speaking subject displaces his belief onto the big other qua the order of pure semblance, so that the subject never “really believed in it”.

From the very beginning, the subject refers to some decentered other to whom he imputes this belief” (Žižek 1997, 144-48). For example, in Israel, debunking the founding Zionist mythologies , especially the ones that draw on unsubstantiated biblical myths, is very common among academics and the public, but people continue to believe in them because there is an enormous population of Christian Zionists in the West who continue to believe in these myths for them.

It is important to remember that for Žižek, no ideological system can fully integrate or absorb the subject, because there is always some irrational surplus or residue adhering to an ideology that refuses to be integrated. That is, the subjects of ideology remain to a certain extent anxious about a certain level of meaninglessness and irrationality in ideology—that it does not all make complete sense the way it is represented to them.

Paradoxically, then, the very condition of freedom is the “awareness that the Other regulates the process in which I participate . . . since I know I am not involved. ” Hollywood today, I claim, is that stand-in for the symbolic other that believes for us so that we can avoid being involved and continue the detachment of our daily lives. Indeed, one might say that we are willing to pay increasingly exorbitant admission fees at the theater not simply to be entertained but to be relieved of the act of believing. In many ways, we hire an other, Hollywood to be precise, to believe for us.

Hollywood can thus go on believing for us in the social revolution, trivializing and mystifying it, while neoliberal global capitalism turns revolutionary theory and practice into profitable commodities and marketable brands in a culture that not only defines citizenship and civic engagement by our purchasing power and consumption practices, but that also uses these same revolutionary ideas as vehicles for legitimizing exploitation. The fact is that capitalist commodification of identities, as Rosemary Hennessey maintains, entails the separation of the organization of identity from the complex historical ways capitalism shapes the human relations of exploitation based on these identities (Hennessey 2000, 110). As such, they render invisible the relationship between identity and capitalist exploitation, refusing to address the ways in which these identities are entangled in changes in capitalist consumption and growth in the middle class (Hennessey 2000, 66). Thus, Hollywood believes for us in order to sell us back a commodified version of the revolution, so that we can feel better about supporting social change and bringing an end to oppression, without stopping our shopping sprees. Just wait for the next line of Mockingjay logo on all sorts of merchandise and expect the new Disney-fied Quarter Quell theme park adventure in the near future.

That neoliberal global capitalism has absorbed and coopted the major symbols and iconic figures of revolutionary theory and practice through Hollywood is nothing new. More importantly, it ends up not only rationalizing exploitation but also inadvertently erasing the name of the problem today: capitalism itself. Indeed, as Žižek claims, ideology is most effective when it conceals “the logic of the legitimation of the relations of domination” (Žižek 2012, 15; emphasis on the original). While some commentators have noted the absence of any reasonable Marxist critique of capitalism in the Hunger Games franchise, no one seems to have noticed the deliberate choice of Francis Lawrence as a director for the second installment of the film.

The same concealment operation in the second film of the franchise characterizes Lawrence’s film, I Am Legend, which substitutes the multicultural politics of identity and difference for the importance of class struggle. Nowhere in the film does Lawrence make present the absent system of neoliberal global capitalism or the ultimate capitalist fantasy of living in a world of abundant free commodities and surplus enjoyment, which for the last man on earth can indeed be considered infinite. He would have to live many more lives to be able to exhaust all these resources that sustain it (Khader 2013).

Unfortunately, in both films Lawrence naturalizes and normalizes capitalism and its social relations, by disavowing the need for recognizing the horrific dimension of the class struggle underpinning the fictional narrative world in both films. These films deny the specific conflicts that embody the capitalist conditions of its production: what the power of the hegemonic capitalist ideology does not disclose, in short, is the presence of capitalism itself.

When James Cameron’s Avatar came out, Reuters circulated a photograph of Palestinian children painted blue, brandishing arrows like the Navi tribe in that film, and wearing a kuffiyah around their waists, protesting the Israeli apartheid separation wall at Bilin. Many Mondoweiss readers on the merits and faults of such images for the Palestinian liberation struggle, but one issue remained absent in the discussion: global capitalism itself and how it delinks the commodification of such revolutionary images from the exploitation of the Palestinian struggle and identity to conceal the logic of Israel’s apartheid policies and Zionist settler-colonialism.

The post Mockingjay Delusions: The Hunger Games and the Postcolonial Revolution to Come appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

What if we declared ourselves perpetual refugees in solidarity with all refugees needing safe human harbor from violence and domination and injustice and inequality? …We are all refugees horribly displaced from a benign and welcoming community. And the question is: Can we soon enough create the asylum our lives will certainly wither without?

—June Jordan, “We Are All Refugees”

At the height of the Second Intifada (also known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada) which began in September 2000, a 23 year-old white American student from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, arrived in Gaza to initiate a sister-cities project between Olympia and Rafah, a city in southern Gaza where the vast majority of the population is comprised of Palestinian refugees. As an active volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a nonviolent organization dedicated to the Palestinian cause, she was particularly engaged in protests against the demolition of Palestinian homes by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). It was during one of these protests, on March 16, 2003, less than two months after her arrival, that Rachel Corrie was murdered—run over twice, crushed to death by an IDF armored bulldozer on its way to demolish another Palestinian home.[1]

Three days after Rachel Corrie’s murder, Palestinian American social activist Suheir Hammad’s poem “On the Brink of…” was circulated on the internet. Frustrated by the violence against Palestinians in general, and against Rachel Corrie in particular, Hammad writes, “the murder of this white/girl from Olympia Washington has/my heart breaking and my blood faint./Something like ten Palestinians have been killed since/yesterday, when a Caterpillar bulldozer driven/by a man demolished the home that was her body.”[2] While the conflation of home and body is a significant motif that appears throughout Hammad’s work, that conflation becomes especially complicated in the case of Rachel Corrie who, despite the “privilege” (to use Corrie’s own words) of her race and nationality, was considered Palestinian in the weeks leading up to, and the months and years following, the tragedy. Not only did Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat proclaim her a “daughter of Palestine,” even naming a street in the West Bank city of Ramallah after her, but in her journals Corrie had professed her love for the Palestinian people and had identified herself with them, as did the people of Rafah who spray-painted “Rachel has Palestinian blood” across city walls after her murder.[3] And, in response to the vehement criticism of Corrie’s active solidarity with the Palestinian people, Evergreen professor Therese Saliba remembers her futile attempt to comfort a troubled colleague by explaining that Corrie had “‘become Palestinian, and she will be attacked in the same way the Palestinians have always been attacked and their struggle discredited. She will be called a terrorist or a terrorist sympathizer.’”[4]

Saliba’s sentiment that Corrie had “become Palestinian” borrows from the Caribbean American poet June Jordan’s “Moving Towards Home,” published in 1985 in response to the 1982 massacres at Sabra and Shatila, in which Jordan proclaims: “I was born a Black woman/and now/I am become Palestinian/against the relentless laughter of evil/…/It is time to make our way home.”[5]^,[6] This concept that Jordan lyrically explores—of being “born” a certain identity and “becoming” another by way of establishing solidarities built on an inclusive morality, shared social ethics, mutual respect, and shared experiences with (or shared understandings of) human struggle—was exemplified and embodied by Rachel Corrie, whose “born” identity as a white American woman was complicated and expanded, even transformed, by her love for the Palestinian people and her fight for justice on their behalf (both of which would ultimately cost her her life).[7] It is Jordan’s powerful declaration of being (re)born a Black Palestinian woman that would not only inspire Hammad’s debut poetry collection, Born Palestinian, Born Black (first published in 1996, expanded and reissued in 2010), but would also become both a persistent concern and a consistent theme throughout much if not all of Hammad’s works. In her poetry, Hammad negates and negotiates varying identities in order to engage with and connect the various struggles of (primarily, though not exclusively, colored) peoples across the world. For Hammad, such identification is facilitated through a global (and globalized) sense of self coupled with collective self-love, in which we identify ourselves within others (and them within us) in order to form a global alliance based on shared affective love. Thus, by resituating her own difference within that of various marginalized communities in the U.S. and abroad, Hammad’s poetry redefines individual identity as a cultural collective built upon a solidarity of shared marginalization in the face of global oppressions, through which “patriotism” transcends nation, and the love of self is (re)located in—and conflated with—a universal love for others.

Universal patriotism (particularly in Hammad’s poetry) is synonymous with what Kwame Anthony Appiah interchangeably calls “global citizenship” or “cosmopolitan patriotism.”[8] This way of seeing, living, and being in the world is founded on the sentiment that if the whole universe is our “home,” then as “citizens” we have a responsibility to nurture it—to concern ourselves with the cultures and politics of all parts of our “home,” which just so happens to be the “home” of others as well. For Appiah, difference does not undermine, threaten, nor conflict with this all-embracing conception of home; rather, difference is a part of “home” and is precisely what makes “home” both tangible and malleable. And because home is figured (as it most often is) within kinship and country, cosmopolitan patriots can be considered “true patriots” because they “hold the state and the community within which they live to certain [moral] standards,” understanding that while “it is all very well to argue for, fight for, liberalism in one country—your own,” it is even more imperative to extend that fight to include those outside of our countries and selves, since our very own rights “matter as human rights … only if the rights of foreign humans matter, too.”[9] Thus Appiah not only reconciles traditional views of patriotism with his philosophy of cosmopolitanism, but also expands the definition of patriotism beyond national borders, thereby enabling it to accommodate a changing world and worldview. Although the essence of patriotism has long been argued to consist of “the responsibilities as well as the privileges of citizenship,” Appiah argues that patriotism is more importantly a feeling of connection:

Patriotism is about what the nineteenth-century Liberian scholar-diplomat Edward Blyden once so memorably called “the poetry of politics,” which is the feeling of “people with whom we are connected.” It is the connection and the sentiment that matter, and there is no reason to suppose that everybody in this complex, ever-mutating world will find their affinities and their passions focused on a single place.[10]

Since we are all connected, so to speak, and especially since that connection is not a single, mutually exclusive stream flowing to and from a single place, then there is no reason that cosmopolitanism and patriotism cannot be merged into a collective vision for the betterment of humanity: “We cosmopolitans can be patriots, loving our homelands (not only the states where we were born but the states where we grew up and the states where we live); our loyalty to humankind—so vast, so abstract, a unity—does not deprive us of the capacity to care for lives nearer by.”[11] Rather than conflict, these loyalties to “lives nearer by” and to all of humankind appear to be interrelated, mirroring the interrelatedness of peoples across the world while working towards bridging the gaps between “here” and “there,” “us” and “them,” “our” struggles and dreams and “their” struggles and dreams.[12]

The construction of such bridges among peoples and across cultures is precisely what concerns Hammad, and to which her poetry is intensely committed. Her literary gesturing towards universal self-identification is often connected with an affirmation of collective marginalization, demonstrated here for instance by her contemplation of the “many usages of the word ‘Black’”:

• Black   like the coal diamonds are birthed from
• like the dark matter of the universe
• like the Black September massacre of Palestinians
• the Arabic expression “to blacken your face”
• meaning to shame.

• Black   like the opposite of white
• the other
• Indians in England, Africans in America,
• Algerians in France and Palestinians in Israel
• the shvartza labor of cleaning toilets and
• picking garbage

• Black   like the genius of Stevie, Zora and Abdel-Haleem
• relative purity
• like the face of God
• the face of your grandmother[13]

The first group of usages signifies the negative connotations of “blackness”: the blackness of coal that “births” precious gems but is not a precious gem itself; the all-encompassing, sublime blackness of the unknown or the unfamiliar (“dark matter of the universe”); the blackness of death (“Black September,” which refers to the events of September 1970, in which King Hussein of Jordan unleashed a brutal military campaign against the Palestine Liberation Organization based in Amman, resulting in the slaughter of thousands of Palestinians); and the idiomatic blackness of shame. The second group places blackness within a racial context and furthermore connects “blacks” (here a metonym for marginalized peoples) and black struggles across the world, from the U.S., to Europe, to Israel. It is not until the final category that Hammad reclaims blackness, and posits it in an alternative way that is righteous and sacred (the “relative purity” of blackness); constructive and inspiring, associated with creation instead of death (referring not only to the face of the Creator, but also to the artistic “genius” of black “creators,” such as Stevie Wonder, Zora Neale Hurston, and the influential Egyptian singer from the 1950’s and 60’s, Abdel-Haleem Hafez); and deeply personal and relational (the black “face of your grandmother”). Hammad’s second and third definitions of blackness as both connective and empowering are a significant theme in her writings, and lay the groundwork for much of her poetry.

Collectively, Hammad’s poems explore the concepts (or, rather, the acts) of both self-definition and the continual redefinition of that self. As the poet herself makes clear, “we need to own our definitions and live by them. We need not be afraid to adapt or change them when necessary. Borders are manmade, and I refuse to respect them unless I have a say in their formation.”[14] These manmade borders—between persons, peoples, nations, cultures, movements—are precisely what Hammad undermines and transcends with the formal and thematic diversity of her poetic voice, as Siréne Harb notes:

Hammad exploits the flexible potential of borders and stresses the significance of discovering embryonic entities. Such entities allow her to reorganize cultural practices so as to creatively juggle/redefine cultural, linguistic, and stylistic norms. For this poet, thus, the construction of identity depends on acts of adaptation and appropriation … shaping ways in which she situates herself in discursive spaces and negotiates the heterogeneousness of narrative, social and historical borders.[15]

Hammad’s “acts of adaptation and appropriation” and the “heterogeneousness of narrative, social and historical borders” are readily apparent in the poem “taxi,” in which Hammad connects the plight of the people in the Palestinian Territories with that of African Americans in the U.S. Separated into three sections, the first section, addressed to the self-proclaimed “urban warrior” and “street soldier,” trivializes and scolds the ghetto mentality for which Salman Rushdie offers one of the better, more succinct definitions: “The adoption of a ghetto mentality [is] to forget that there is world beyond the community to which we belong, to confine ourselves within narrowly defined cultural frontiers.”[16] Hammad’s criticism of those in the African American community whose understanding of struggle is limited to “not gettin taxis and little white ladies/claspin purses” necessitates a definitional expansion of “struggle” in all its forms and faces, and what it means for marginalized peoples in other parts of world, particularly in the Territories.[17]

This is precisely the subject of the second section, in which Hammad recounts the nightmarish reality of “refugee camps that make you long for/the projects …/this aint no/boy scout trip this is the real deal hell/on earth what it’s about.”[18] It is not until the third section that Hammad connects both worlds, both realities, in her call for a more all-encompassing understanding of struggle from which transnational solidarity can be built:

• conscious comrade
• there’s a place uglier than uptown’s slum
• where the people are just as beautiful
• strugglin sister
• there’s a debke[19] beat funky as p.e.’s riff
• signalin revolution liberation and freedom

• so when we’re vibin on the pale
• evil of welfare and crack          know i’m
• across the street and across the sea      so when
• we’re combatin cops and prisons          know there are prisons
• like ansar iii[20]   nazis wouldn’t touch     pigs wouldn’t visit
• so when we read baraka and listen to malcolm
• let’s read darwish and keep on
• listenin to malcolm

• so when you call me sista
• ask after our family
• this shit is about more
• …
• it’s bigger than
• our hoods and our heads
• it aint all about this poem
• and it aint all about
• taxis
• and little white women[21]

Here, the urban warrior/street soldier has been replaced by “conscious comrade” and “strugglin sister” as Hammad urges the African American community to extend its own struggle to include that of Palestinians on the other side of the world, who similarly struggle against poverty and crimes of the State, denoted by the “pale evil of welfare” and “cops and prisons.” She associates Palestinian Debke with one of the most influential American hip-hop groups, Public Enemy, to bridge the gap between one black pride revolution and another. Hammad’s imperative, that “when you call me sista/ask after our family” serves to remind us, as Michelle Hartman notes, that “merely local or parochial concerns of one community cannot be the main or only focus of social change. Developing an expanded sense of community must be more than simply calling someone ‘sister’ but show a deeper level of respect by asking about the larger family and community to which this person is tied.”[22] Thus, when Hammad proposes that “when we read baraka and listen to malcolm/let’s read darwish and keep on/listenin to malcolm,” she is gesturing towards and broadening a collective sense of responsibility, for “closed universities and open prisons/curfews and house demolitions/…/…the faces of mournin mothers/losin more sons to american tax dollars” that fund the Israeli military (directly) responsible for such destruction of human life and livelihood.[23] In this way, the references to Amiri Baraka, Malcolm X, and Mahmoud Darwish, like those to Debke and Public Enemy, serve “to bridge, through the juggling of a number of cultural notions, different types of struggle for social justice.”[24] As Carol Fadda-Conrey explains, the positioning of diverse cultural and creative icons in Hammad’s work, evidenced by poems like “taxi,” is a reflection of the poet’s own diverse origins:

[Hammad’s] poetry mirrors the intermixture of influences in Hammad’s life, including Palestinian displacement, connections to African American and Puerto Rican cultures that Hammad was exposed to while growing up in Brooklyn, and the various forms of violence she has experienced and been a witness to, manifested, for example, through the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as through the harsh circumstances surrounding urban youth culture in New York and the disenfranchisement of peoples of color all around the world.[25]

Hammad’s linking of peoples across the world via their struggles against oppression and marginalization foreground what Chela Sandoval and Keith Feldman call, respectively, “oppositional consciousness” and “interracial insurgency,” both of which are explicitly at work in Hammad’s poetry in general and in “taxi” in particular, where Hammad actively attempts to instill a camaraderie—a global patriotism—constructed from a fragmented sense of self that is located in multiple places, at multiple times, amongst multiple peoples.

It is precisely this collective sense of self that will enable both the individual and the group(s) to which she belongs to transcend nationality and reach beyond skin color in order to combat social injustices and sufferings from one end of the globe to the other, as Feldman similarly argues:

If one is to incorporate the multiple fractures of identity politics into the composition of self, then one must also address the political concerns of those individuals living beyond the political borders of the United States from whence the cultural elements have originated, the multiple heritages that have imbued the urban site with its complex of cultural forms. In this way, [Hammad] links ghetto with ghetto and forwards a political act both across the street of the urban metropolis and across the sea in the material locale of her national heritage.[26]

Because the “self” is composed of multiple fragments both within and without, to identify the “self” with others (or as “other”) necessarily aligns the concerns of that self with those outside of it. For Hammad, it is (and paradoxically so) human difference which connects and empowers us, as Trinh Minh-ha had profoundly asserted in her seminal essay exploring the interlocking identities of postcolonial women: “Otherness becomes empowerment, critical difference when it is not given but recreated.”[27] Embodying otherness as a way of being and employing difference as a means of realizing that “political and social commitment to justice depends on a broader vision of home/self” comprises Hammad’s poetic vision of the universal patriot, enlisted in a collective battle against various injustices and oppressions that, despite specificity (of geographic location, of oppressive authority, of victimization) affects us all.[28] As Hammad reminds us, “to find ourselves we hold up a mirror to the worlds we all inhabit,” and it is these worlds with which we relate and for which we fight.[29]

The poem “manifest destiny” not only exemplifies the broader (re)vision of home/self, but also the connective potential of multiplying identities and the power of difference that unifies diversity. In an interview by Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman, Hammad speaks of her multiple identities and identifications, shaped by her immigrant experience and her father’s insistence on her “difference”:

“I didn’t grow up Arab American—what the fuck is Arab American? I grew up Palestinian and Brooklyn, really specifically. And my father’s like you’re not this, you’re not that. And then I’d meet other Palestinians and he’d be like, yeah, but you’re not like them either. You know, because it was a very specific immigrant experience at a very specific time, and I didn’t relate to the problems that were being written about. I didn’t have a half-white parent or a white parent. I didn’t have the sense of cultural clash in my body. I had it outside of my body. In my body I felt like, I look like everyone else I grew up with—whether they were Puerto Rican or Italian or light-skinned black people.”[30]

The self-described similarity of Hammad’s physical appearance to the “Puerto Rican or Italian or light-skinned black people” with whom she grew up complicates notions of race as it relates to Arab and Arab Americans.[31] But rather than pose an obstacle, for Hammad this complication provides the perfect site for negotiating, adapting, and appropriating both individual and socio-cultural identities. This is especially evident in “manifest destiny,” in which an intimate dinner scene with a group of friends sets the stage for Hammad’s exploration of interior and exteriors, as they relate to questions of identity, cultural expectation, and poetry. The poem begins with a collective “we four/sitting nursing/plates of rice and beans in a Cuban diner/we all should have been other people/with other people.”[32] The imperative “should” suggests that such a gathering, at least from the outside, is far from typical, and it is this unlikely friendship among a diverse group of people sharing a meal which undermines the alleged tension between outer and inner, between what should be and what is. The individual descriptions of each person begin with who she may appear to be, and who she actually is: “one/who should’ve been a neo-nazi aryan baby breeder/a machete wielding man-hating dyke/was a lover of both men and women girl of riot and a poet” while “another/who should’ve been a witness of jehovah knocking down doors/or a gyrating video hoochie/was a scholar of african glory lover of knowledge and a poet.”[33] The repetition of “and a poet” ending each description functions to reinforce not only the common ground uniting them all, despite (or, perhaps, because of) their differences, but also the power of poetry to unite people across borders and barriers.

Hammad ends the poem with an affirmation of not only how outer appearances run counter to inner selves (which, in turn, run counter to cultural expectations), but also of how feelings of loss can be a connective force, on a level that is personal and intimate: “missing my family/who couldn’t understand/we four all missing family who wouldn’t understand/creating a family/we struggling to understand/we were where we needed to be/we are who we have to be.”[34] As Feldman notes:

The family unit is renarrated here to contend with the notion of family as the social receptacle of an identity based on genetic descent; rather, it is reconceived in the scene of cultural and political exchange. Heritage is a component of identity here that becomes malleable and contingent on the social construction of wider community, a community situated, in this case, within a transnational urban setting.[35]

For Hammad, this type of unity and community is essential—foundational—to establishing a collective self-identity based on her configuration of home and self, and the conflation of that home/self with other homes/selves, from which a “transnational mobilization of diasporic communities in ghettoized spaces” is made possible.[36] Hammad’s transnational autobiographical identification, which “plac[es] the autobiographical self in solidarity with a network of diasporic populations,” becomes a sociopolitical outlet through which traditional, essentialist, or isolationist understandings of identity are undermined and replaced by a more inclusive, transnational, trans-racial redefinition of home/self.[37] To return to Feldman’s reading of Hammad’s poem:

Hammad locates home in the production of a future through manifold resources of a culture forged in a transnational context and through transnational solidarities. As a community surviving displacement, exile, and diaspora, as Palestinian, as Arab, as Arab American, as a community forged through material, political, and cultural connections with others who survive the material effects of the diaspora, Hammad locates the potentiality for the building of a new home in which members of those ‘othered’ communities—like herself—might speak their own life experiences….[38]

Similarly, Harb argues that Hammad’s relocation of home and her re-situation of self within that home, in all its multiple locations, move towards a “universalism which acknowledges the importance of gendered and ethnic specificities, while at the same time stressing the commonalities and zones of intersection among different groups. As such, the universal is redefined as a form of political awareness of the workings of power and systems.”[39] From this redefined universalism—and re-imagined universe—comes the formation of a collective self, comprised of multiple (and multiplying) identities, and the practice of love towards that self and the others in which it is located, enacted through (and even synonymous with) responsibility.

The association of love (of self and others) with personal and social responsibility is at the heart of Hammad’s (seemingly) romantic “we spent the fourth of july in bed.” Here, the act of lovemaking is interrupted by images of violence and thoughts of suffering—realities that invade and pervade even the most intimate moments, and that continuously haunt the poet/lover and pollute her memory. After an extensive and intensely morbid chronicle of various gruesome sufferings in the world, from the “exploding legs” of Iraqi girls and “ants crawl[ing] out of somali eyes” to the “puerto rican women” and “young philipinas” who “go blind constructing computer discs/poems like this are saved on,” the troubled poet/lover pauses for a moment as she returns to the lusty scene of the erotic encounter: “yeah the smell of suffer/lingers even now/lover as we lay/in amazement and/if baby as you say/my skin is the color of sun/warmed sand then you’re/my moonless night/and we the beach/wet and tidal all that/good shhhh wet.”[40] This sensual serenity is then interrupted, once again, by images of violence, as the poet/lover’s mind returns to the global scenes of the crime:

• yet
• as we lay
• shrapnel awakens pain on
• an island of paraplegics
• courtesy of the 80s gun craze
• to our generation violence
• isn’t a phase it’s the day to day

• and though my head is filled
• with your sweetness now
• this same head knows
• nagasaki girls picked maggots out of stomach sores with chopsticks
• and hiroshima mothers rocked headless babies to sleep
• this head knows
• phalestini[41] youth maimed absorbing rubber bullets
• homes demolished        trees uprooted     roots dispersed[42]

The shift to and from the bedroom and the world outside, between the dreamlike sensuality of post-coital bliss and the nightmarish reality of human suffering, serves to bridge the spatial gaps between the “here” and the “there,” lending a sense of urgency to the poet/lover’s need to end these sufferings. Like in “first writing since,” written in the days following 9/11, Hammad urgently reminds us that the “there” is right here.[43] Her internalization of the “outside world” connects the lovers to the world that is outside of them (at least physically, anyway) and for which they are responsible. Though at the heart of “first writing since,” the collapsing of spatio-temporal binaries and the active refusal to subscribe to the political (meaning imperial) binary of life or death—of “with us” or “against us”—through personal and social responsibility indeed has its roots in this haunting love poem. “‘It’s this idea that we are not responsible for those we push aside,’” that Hammad’s poetry contests, as the poet herself explains, “‘I do believe in accountability on an individual level, but that can only exist legitimately within societies where we hold each other accountable as well.’”[44] Thus, the role of accountability not only bridges the gap between “here” and “there,” inside and outside, but also between self and other—between the individual and the social.

If human suffering is foreground by human intimacy, then individual and social accountability are foreground by human suffering. In “we spent the fourth of july in bed,” eroticism is offset by horror while the illusion of privacy, of the inner self / outer world binary, is shattered:

• this same head with
• all them love songs
• and husky whispers knows
• our moans come with a history
• deeper than our groins     our
• groans marry a story older
• than this lust

• as we lay          and love
• our touch is not free it comes with memories
• and the reality that even now
• food is a luxury
• viruses free
• …
• we baby
• look into our brownness to
• see those who’ve gone without
• knowing this     comfort of entangled legs
• foreheads of sweat     heart beats of love and sex

• our sighs indeed heavy with
• history     destiny     cum     and responsibility
• even now         in this heat
• on this futon
• we are not alone[45]

Here, love is not confined to romance, between a pair of lovers, in a room. Rather, the concept of love is broadened to include the whole world, all of humanity:

The boundaries of the marginalized collective are extended to encompass third world, predominantly female, victims of racial and imperial oppression. Here again, the connecting “we” supersedes the collective Arab American identity, linking the plights of Iraqi, Malaysian, Filipina, Puerto Rican, Yemeni, and Palestinian girls, women, and youth, as well as women from Nagasaki and Hiroshima, thus creating a solid unity out of their suffering, [that] unifies diversity.[46]

If the self is a collective formation, then it necessarily follows that the love of self, and the responsibility that love entails, exceeds the individual and extends to the community and, even further, to the world. In this way, the intimate “sighs” of the lovers are “indeed heavy with/history…and responsibility” for that which is “outside” of them. Thus, Hammad revisits the inside(r) / outside(r) binary she began exploring in “manifest destiny,” as well as the here / there binary she had begun to challenge in “taxi,” and incorporates collective responsibility as the driving force behind Sandoval’s oppositional consciousness and Feldman’s interracial insurgency. It is useful here to return to Minh-ha’s essay about interlocking identities among marginalized peoples, particularly women, in which she also addresses difference and spatial binaries, arguing that “differences do not only exist between outsider and insider—two entities. They are also at work within the outsider herself or the insider, herself—a single entity. She who knows she cannot speak of them without speaking of herself, of history without involving her story, also knows that she cannot make a gesture without activating the to and fro movement of life.”[47] As Hammad demonstrates in this poem, there can be no peace, not even in the privacy of one’s bedroom or home (or “self”), when the world is at war, with poverty, disease, injustice, violence, and other residual effects of imperialism: “even as we lay in/all this good feeling/people lay in dirt vomit shit and blood/and I gotta tell you/that my sincere love for real/is for my peeps my family humanity/love for real for real freedom/well fed human dignity for sisters and their lovers/…/there aint enough good feeling/to push the pain and awareness out.”[48] It is fitting, then, that on the day of American Independence, the poet/lover realizes and asserts that the most patriotic thing to do is to celebrate interdependence, by setting out to correct the troubles of the world for which she is personally and socially responsible: “we gotta get up soon/come on now baby/we got work to do.”[49]

Hammad demonstrates that universal patriotism, facilitated by universal love, begins with an awareness of pain as universal—a recognition that can link people to people, struggle to struggle, and “over here” to “over there.” This recalls Appiah’s imperative that it is also patriotic—cosmopolitically patriotic, that is—to concern ourselves with and defend the rights of others “over there” in addition to our own “right here”:

We should, in short, as cosmopolitans, defend the rights of others to live in democratic states, with rich possibilities of association within and across their borders; states of which they can be patriotic citizens. And, as cosmopolitans, we can claim that right for ourselves. … [T]he freedom to create oneself—the freedom that liberalism celebrates—requires a range of socially transmitted options from which to invent what we have come to call our identities … giv[ing] us a language in which to think about these identities and with which we may shape new ones.[50]

Through the construction and contemplation of a multitude of identities, Hammad is able to subsequently engage in the linking of global struggles as reenacted in “letter to anthony (critical resistance),” in which Hammad connects the issue of prison reform in the United States to both the Palestinian struggle for legitimacy and justice and the global sex trade. In doing so, the poem lends itself to a contemplation of the concept of criminality as a residual effect of imperialism’s oppressive agendas, executed through economic exploitation of the poor (and often colored), the subjugation of women, and the suppression of “minority” voices. In the second section of the poem Hammad issues a confession, an admission of her own guilt: “i have always loved criminals/i tell people who try to shame/me into silence.”[51] As the poem continues, the poet conflates the criminal with “10/years to go nowhere how much deeper/you going to get until a system based/on money deems you rehabilitated” with the Palestinians, deemed “criminals” by a system (Israel) built on their forced absence and perpetual incarceration in refugee camps:

• i have always loved
• criminals and not only the thugged
• out bravado of rap videos and champagne
• popping hustlers but my father
• born an arab boy
• on the forced way out
• of his homeland his mother exiled
• and pregnant gave birth in a camp

• the world pointed and said
• palestinians do not exist palestinians
• are roaches palestinians are two legged dogs
• and israel built jails and weapons and
• a history based on the absence of a people
• israel made itself holy and chosen
• and my existence a crime.

• so i have always loved criminals
• it is a love of self
• and i will not cut off any part of
• me and place it behind fences and bars
• and the fake ass belief
• that there is a difference between
• the inside and the outside

• there is no outside anywhere
• anymore just where we are and
• what we do while we are here[52]

In “letter to anthony,” prison becomes a symbol of forced separation, the embodiment of the inside / outside, here / there binary erected and enforced by hegemonic power structures and their exclusionary politics. Hammad associates Anthony, the “criminal” sitting in an American prison and to whom she is writing, with her father and, by extension, her people: Palestinians whose very existence has been criminalized by Zionism’s agendas. Furthermore, she equates her love of criminals with a love of self—that is, her own “criminality,” namely her Palestinian heritage. Her refusal to abide by the “fake ass belief/that there is a difference between the inside and the outside,” and her conclusion that “there is no outside anywhere/anymore,” recalls her internalization of the external that was at the heart of the poem, “we spent the fourth of july in bed.” The poem’s ending is indeed a powerful affirmation of humanity—and the global patriot’s promise to continue to defend the rights of others everywhere—as well as a reassurance to Anthony in the American prison and to Nazim in the Palestinian refugee camp that there are people, like the poet herself, who erase the lines between inside and outside, bridge the gap between the here and the there.

This is essentially how Hammad connects struggle to struggle across the world and resists on behalf of those who are withheld and withdrawn by structures more powerful than they:

• and there
• are people anthony who make a connection
• between you puerto rican rhyme slayer beautiful man and
• young girls twisted into sex work and these
• people nazim they are working to stop prisons
• from being economically beneficial to depressed
• communities and these people
• bronx bomber they imagine a world
• where money can’t be made off the hurt
• of the young the poor the colored the
• sexualized the different
• …
• they believe human
• beings can never be reduced
• to numbers not in concentration
• camps or reservations not in
• refugee camps not in schools
• and not in jails
• …
• stay well
• and safe
• resist
• and love
• suheir[53]

In “letter to anthony,” Hammad attributes incarceration to invisibility, and invisibility to the hegemonic campaign against the coalitions of difference—like the ones Hammad is constructing in her poetry—that threaten that hegemony. As Minh-ha reminds us:

Difference remains within the boundary of that which distinguishes one identity from another. This means that at the heart X must be X, Y must be Y and X cannot be Y. Those running around yelling X is not Y and X can be Y, usually land in a hospital, a rehabilitation center, a concentration camp, or a reservation.[54]

For Hammad, love, and the alliances born of love, serves not only to bridge disparate struggles and identities across many fronts, but also to connect the traumatic experiences that can otherwise isolate the individual and jeopardize the collective self-love meant to empower them. Collective self-love and the interracial insurgency it motivates (or necessitates, rather) is at the center of “open poem to those who rather we not read…or breathe.” Again, Hammad begins with a collective “we” and an affirmation of a shared interracial, presumably (though not exclusively) third world alliance: “we children of children exiled from homelands/descendants of immigrants denied jobs and toilets/carry continents in our eyes/survivors of the middle passage/we stand/and demand recognition of our humanity.”[55] The opening of “open poem” testifies to “a collective past fraught with subjugation and discrimination (extending to the present)” and reaffirms that Hammad’s “own Palestinian history of exile cannot be disengaged from the larger history of imperialism and colonialism that scatter peoples across the world and sever them from their homelands, whether they are exiles, immigrants, or descendents of slave-trade victims.”[56]

Thus Hammad reconceptualizes “third world,” broadening its scope to include the plights of those who are marginalized in the first world, corresponding to Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s de-limiting description of “third world” as being “defined through geographical location as well as particular sociohistorical conjectures … thus incorporat[ing] so-called minority peoples or people of color in [first world nations like] the U.S.A.”[57] Such a revision of the “third world” as an “imagined community of … oppositional struggles … is useful because it leads us away from essentialist notions of third world feminist struggles, suggesting political rather than biological or cultural bases for alliance.”[58] This movement away from essentialism and exclusion in an effort to unify and mobilize diversity against hegemonic and hierarchical power structures is precisely what is at work in “open poem,” where Hammad “locates her individuality within communal concerns and struggles, thus explicitly situating the poetic ‘I’ within a ‘we’ … represent[ing] a united but multiple-colored voice denouncing American white hegemony,” and in doing so redraws the maps of struggles.[59] As Harb similarly notes, “Hammad accomplishes a critique of power through the rearrangement of traditional geographies and seemingly unrelated spaces. In this process, she uses historical experience rather than geographic location as the frame of reference for the redrawing of maps of struggle against a number of oppressive practices.”[60] This is evident in the poem’s powerful reclamation of humanity through a declaration of resistance, in which “brown-eyed girls clash with governments of war” in their determination to “think, analyze, fight back, and be human beings”:

•              we
• witness and demand a return to humanity

• we        braid resistance through our hair
•              pierce justice through our ears
•              tattoo freedom onto our breasts

• the bluesy souls of brown-eyed girls
• clash with blood on the pale hands of
• governments of war
• … sent on a mission to set back
• our strength     power     love

• we be political prisoners walking round semi-free
• our very breath is a threat
• to those who rather we not read
• and think         analyze                        watch out         and fight back
• and be human beings the way we need to be[61]

Thus, the transnational poetic geographies that Hammad establishes set the stage for a collective resistance against the structures of power intent on “setting back,” meaning marginalizing, various “semi-free” peoples determined to claim full freedom through solidarities built on the power of love. In this way, the cartographies of struggle are themselves composites, much like identity and the “self” it projects, to which Marco Villalobos attests:

Hammad has drawn a map full of dots we still take pleasure in connecting. …[She] reminds us the distance between millenary African Cities and a Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the distance between Cairo and Jerusalem, is only 265 miles—closer than Los Angeles to San Francisco; closer than Manhattan to Washington, D.C.; that Jordan is only set apart from the African continent by the Sinai Peninsula; that the Red Sea doesn’t make so much of a difference in this respect, since it is crossed by the dust of footprints and the wet of tears, since without the wind’s help ululation reaches from one side of the Suez to the other.[62]

This linking of struggles—and securing one’s own link to a variety of peoples through shared concern for and participation in those struggles—is reenacted throughout Hammad’s poetry, and it is through her poetry that she revisits the sites of struggle to engage with the multicolored voices and multiple narratives of oppression, on all levels and at all distances.

By envisioning identity as flexible, relational, and polycentric, Hammad is able to transcend distance and employ disparity as a battle tactic in the fight against hegemonic structures of power and their oppressive practices. Such intercommunalism, or multicultural polycentrism, according to Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, is not only “a more substantive and reciprocal approach” but also a “profound restructuring and reconceptualization of the power relations between cultural communities” which produces “informed affiliation on the basis of shared social desires and identification.”[63] This is very much the basis of Hammad’s universal (or cosmopolitan) patriotism, designed to counter what Steven Salaita calls, “U.S. imperative patriotism,” which “assumes (or demands) that dissent in matters of governance and foreign affairs is unpatriotic and therefore unsavory. It is drawn from a longstanding sensibility that unconformity to whatever at the time is considered to be ‘the national interest’ is unpatriotic.”[64] Hammad’s poetry not only confronts this notion, but proposes an alternate form of “patriotism” that aligns itself with Appiah’s emphases on multilocal connections amidst an increasingly global “feeling” of interconnectedness. It is this redefinition of patriotism that links tragedies across disparate geographical locations so that struggle is no longer figured in terms of binaries, such as “them” and “us.” And as such, each individual becomes responsible for the struggles of others and, by extension, all communities become subject to answer for the ills of the world.

This belief in both a collective responsibility and in a more global(ized) form of patriotism are unsurprisingly at odds with governing bodies intent on maintaining, militarizing, and exploiting borders and boundaries. This tension is most evident in Hammad’s poem “Beyond Words,” written between 2003 and 2004 as chaos was unfolding around—engulfing—the world: “the axis of evil” was cemented into American political rhetoric; Saddam Hussein had fallen; the United States was in the midst of war with both Iraq and Afghanistan; sexual violence in the Congo was the most rampant in the world; and just as news broke about the horrors at Abu Ghraib, the town of Rafah on the Gaza Strip (where Rachel Corrie had been killed) was nearly destroyed by the IDF, determined to quell the Second Intifada. The poet, who had found—or created, rather—a “home” in poetry, who sought refuge in language, was now at a loss for words:[65] “Where has my language gone?/The poet searches for words to wrap around these times/Make them sense Make them pretty Make them useful/…/Desperate for words I can write/…/Language has failed me.”[66] Although Hammad had constructed entire bodies of work upon the premise of a collective struggle against various forms of global oppression, that premise was now under threaten, once again, of being delegitimized by the vocabulary of separation, the mentality of isolation, and the politics of exclusion: “I am told over and over/Iraq is not Palestine/Kabul is not New York/…/Haiti is not Chechnya/Chiapas is not East L.A./Iraq is not Palestine/Over and over I am told/…/No connections here/No illuminated parallels/Two different histories and two different peoples/Make no links/Do not confuse the issues/Only confuse the people.”[67] Hammad finds herself in limbo, and though her sense of responsibility is immense, it is, ironically, the interconnectedness of conflict that leaves her struggling with paradoxical decisions: “How fucked up is it that I have to choose between ending/One occupation or another?/Partition my time and portion my information/…/[I] am taking too much on Too much in/I find nowhere to rest this responsibility/If I say nothing I am complicit/If I say something I am isolated as extreme.”[68]

Hammad’s sense of hopelessness gives way to a series of negations:

• This is about light and dark
• There is no black and white in humanity

• I am told
• Venezuela is not Cuba
• Rwanda is not Kurdistan

• I am not the woman kneeling
• In front of soldiers and their cameras and their weapons
• I am not the child shot in the head by the Israel Defense Forces
• I am not the starving AIDS inflicted mother
• Praying I live longer than my children
• So they will not be orphaned and sick and have to bury me
• I am not the child who watched
• Her family chopped to death in Lebanon in Sudan in Nicaragua
• I am not the father who leaves his children so as not to hear their
• empty Bellies call out Baba, where is the bread?[69]

Followed by a series of affirmations:

• I am the woman whose taxes outfitted this tragedy
• The American the Authority does not speak for
• The Arab the Arab leaders do not speak for
• The woman whose shouts of Not in My Name
• Were spit back at me as a slogan of the misguided at best
• I am the girl from Brooklyn told to mind her business
• I am the poet in search of new words
• And a new world Not Mars[70]

By demonstrating how all that separates us can threaten any attempt at collective empathy and struggle, and also how authorities and leaders exploit those boundaries and manipulate (in addition to perpetrating, of course) human suffering so as to maintain those boundaries, Hammad struggles to regain common ground and reconnect the dots across a world on fire. In the end however the poet remains hopeful, reaffirming the power of love despite love’s vulnerability in times of chaos:

• There is still love in us
• …
• There is still enough resistance in us
• To create a world where there is no
• Your people or my people
• But our people
• Our people who kill Our people who are killed

• I somehow know love will save us
• …
• I know somehow love will save us
• Though I can’t find the passion or desire in my body to make it

• There is still a source for peace deeply embedded in this chaos

• I know love will save us
• Though words fail to point out how

• Amazingly I still pray
• To a god I envision to be larger than any nation Any religion

• And I still hunt for language to gather into a poem
• That I pray will feed those like me
• In need of proof they are not alone[71]

The repeated affirmations of love’s power to save and unite that end “Beyond Words” can be found elsewhere in Hammad’s poetry, such as in “some of my best friends,” in which she proclaims “love is larger than our details/these are my people.”[72] The poet’s—and, by extension, the universal patriot’s—determination to stay connected, to continue to assert that “over there is over here” and therefore “their” concerns should also be “ours,” brings to mind another profound conclusion drawn by Minh-ha:

The moment the insider steps out from the inside she’s no longer a mere insider. She necessarily looks in from the outside while also looking out from the inside. Not quite the same, not quite the other, she stands in that undetermined threshold place where she continually drifts in and out. Undercutting the inside/outside opposition, her intervention is necessarily that of both not quite an insider and not quite an outsider. She is, in other words, this inappropriate other or same who moves about with always at least two gestures: that of affirming “I am like you” while persisting in her difference and that of reminding “I am different” while unsettling every definition of otherness arrived at.[73]

Such is the nature—the mission, the dream—of the universal patriot, neither inside nor outside, here nor there, nowhere but everywhere. In this schema, the world becomes the site of multiple engagements, with home, with self, and with struggle.

In December 2010, American Quarterly featured the forum, “From La Frontera to Gaza: Chicano-Palestinian Connections” in which the aim was to “ask important questions about the connections between pursuits of justice and the organization of bodies and nations.”[74] I could not help but to draw connections between this particular issue of AQ and Hammad’s poetry, which essentially strives to accomplish the same ends. Thankfully, it seems that Hammad’s poetry is part of an ongoing project in which nations, especially “America,” are deconstructed and rearticulated as a series of connections within and without its borders. Such a re-articulation necessitates a revision—that is, an expansion—of a term closely associated with nationhood: patriotism. Curiously (though not surprisingly), while nations extend their borders and expand their frontiers, the same does not follow for the concept of patriotism. In her provocative essay “Intifada, USA,” June Jordan, tormented by the onset of the Gulf War and haunted by images of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, endeavors to link struggle to struggle in the very same fashion as Hammad and contemplates the fate of us all:

• Clearly, a barrel of oil is worth more than any number of Palestinian lives. Clearly, a barrel of oil is worth more than 250,000 young African-American and Mexican-American and Latino and poor white men and women now sweltering on the Arabian desert while they await God-knows-what horrible and untimely death.

• I say we need a rising up, an Intifada, USA.
• …
• We need to rise up. We need to stand against the “standoff” in the Persian Gulf. We need an Intifada, USA.

• At night, I go to bed afraid to close my eyes, or sleep: I ask my soul these questions aching on my conscience: What will happen to that little girl, that child of Palestine? What is happening to you and me?[75]

Those haunting questions Jordan poses at the conclusion of her essay rhetorically close the distance and bridge the gap between “them” and “us” by premising that what is happening to “that child of Palestine” is what is happening to “you and me.” The work of Jordan and Hammad, the activism of Rachel Corrie, and the “project of reimagination” at the heart of scholarly publications like AQ are continuing to make these connections, and in the process are redefining what it means to love one’s country, one’s people, and oneself in a world that is anything but singular. As Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, from the borders:

Through the act of writing you call … the scattered pieces of your soul back to your body. You commence the arduous task of rebuilding yourself, composing a story that more accurately expresses your new identity. You seek out allies and, together, begin building spiritual/political communities that struggle for personal growth and social justice … [and] forge bonds across race, gender and other lines, thus creating a new tribalism. … [I]nternal work coupled with commitment to struggle for social transformation—changes your relationship to your body, and, in turn, to other bodies and to the world. And when that happens, you change the world.[76]

Unfortunately, however, the obstacles are still there, even growing: given the prevalence of violent conflict all over the world, the comfort of hierarchy and the rhetoric of separation seem only to be disseminating instead of dwindling. Thus, the quintessential challenge facing any project of social justice is to invent new ways of drawing out and prioritizing the “we” in “I” in order to be a successful, at least possible, global force for change.

The post “Woman Walking Heavy/Brown Worlds in her Face”: Global(ized) Identities and Universal Patriotism in the poetry of Suheir Hammad appeared first on The Postcolonialist.