Fate and History in Arab World

Fawaz Turki, disinherited@yahoo.com

While a dinner guest at a Palestinian family’s home (more of a shack, really, than a home as we understand the term) in a refugee camp outside Ramallah several years ago, I engaged Um Jamal, my hostess, in a bit of political banter.

Let me first disabuse my readers of the image they may conjure up here of this dinner affair. We ate our food on the floor, off a communal round tray made of straw. Dinner was dried yogurt, black olives, thyme dipped in oil, one thinly sliced tomato, goat cheese and pita bread, washed down with sweet tea. That’s all. These people eat like this most of the time, with the expectation of a hot meal only on special occasions.

My simple question for Um Jamal, a chambermaid at the Palace Hotel in Jerusalem, was whether she followed the news and was aware of developments in the national struggle.

Um Jamal, trusting me as a “soul brother” who had like her grown up in the refugee camps, then did something dramatic. She stood up, went to the wall, and hit it twice with the palm of her hand.

“Do you see this wall, brother?” she asked in a voice full of pathos, speaking barely above a whisper. “This wall gives me my awareness every day. It tells me all about our struggle and how our struggle is developing. When it rains. When it gets cold. When it gets hot. I don’t need these people from the PLO to tell us how our struggle is going. We struggle just to eat. I struggle to visit my two sons in jail. I struggle when the hooligans from the settlements come here. I struggle when the soldiers come. I struggle when this nine-year old (her son sitting across from her), who is being denied a childhood, comes home from school and finds no food on the table.” Then she walked over to Jamal and lovingly wrapped her arms around him as an athlete would his trophy.

Um Jamal may as well be any other Arab inhabiting any part of this region we call the Arab world, stretching, at once grandiosely and pathetically, all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean, the Dead Sea to the Red Sea, and the Arabian Gulf to the Euphrates River.

Arabs like Um Jamal, who represent the overwhelming majority of folk in that world, “just know.” Unlike their Westernized intellectual elite, they know. As teleological creatures, that is the frame of reference through which they filter objective reality around them. They are the poor and the downtrodden, the wretched of the earth, as Franz Fanon called them, and they have a higher consciousness of their world by virtue of their suffering.

Three generations of Arabs have remained frozen in time, immobilized in place, unable to thrust themselves beyond their fixed meaning, to meet the challenges of history and modernity.

I’m writing this on the eve of a trip I plan to make soon to the Middle East, engaging myself in self-address and my readers, where they please, in self-reflection.

I ask what I am about to encounter as I first set foot in the old country (I was born in Palestine, grew up since my mid-teens in Australia, and now live in the US)? For starters: Two Arab peoples, Iraqis and Palestinians, living under occupation, and several failed states where poverty is unspeakable, corruption is rampant, and discontentment is pervasive.

Sure, these are two incontestably sad facts that will hit me in the face like a closed fist upon arrival.

But I’m most concerned about encountering a sadder fact still, the one that I consider the root-cause of our malaise.

And this has to do with repression — both of the individual and the public debate. Upon arrival, I will inevitably, predictably, be forced to contrast the zestful abandon with which discourse is conducted in the US (the Big Satan), where no constraints are placed on how you put it in print, with how discourse in the Arab world is embodied in cant, outside which no one is allowed to venture. Within such cant, much of linguistic and cultural reality exists as a set of obscure, irrational notions, where something like a conspiracy theory is best suited to explain the world.

Where there is an established set of rules in society beyond which discourse is inadmissible, that society will not produce a durable, timeless literature. How could it do so when it does not allow anything adversarial, critical or innovative to be said?

That there is an intimate relationship between language and culture is axiomatic. It can be argued further that individual freedom is either enriched or diminished by the quality of linguistic and cultural interplay.

The politics of coercion in Arab society, however, press the individual to guard and stylize his words and to adopt a convention of constraints in writing and in speech, with the end result that his idiom of every day rational exchange rests on a hinge of evasion, conspiracy, ambiguity and opacity.

Repressed by the social system to watch what they say, people take refuge in double-speak, for they know that, in their world, if they were to speak openly they would, at best, lose their livelihood and, at worst, stand in mortal peril.

I stress the issue of language because linguistic polarization speaks more cogently than anything else about the anarchy of feeling, the helplessness, as it were, that characterizes the Arab world today, and defines its wretched role in history and its place in the global dialogue of cultures.

To ask how Arabs speak and write may well be one way of asking who they are, for language, of course, is more than simply a medium of exchange. It not only communicates experience but to a large extent determines it.

In modern Arab history, the call for the ideal — the summons for coherent self-definition — sounded three times. First was the Arab struggle to rid themselves of the yoke of Ottoman rule. Next was their struggle against colonialism. Last was the coming to grips by the Arabs with the existential question of why they inhabit a world that boasts twenty one “sovereign” nations but no “sovereignty” — sovereignty over their daily lives, over their political destiny, over their public discourse.

When I visit the old country soon that will be the first question that I will ask my fellow Arabs, essentially a question having to do with why they have so meekly acquiesced in the forfeiture of their powers of self-determination.

And when do they plan to get into top gear and do something about it, for like time and tide, fate and history wait for no man.