This post is a transcript of a recent lecture from the author on June 24. A video of the lecture and more information on the conference where it was given “Between State and Exile” Rethinking Jewish Politics” can be found here.
1.
“… لا بد أن تقول الرواية ما اعتزمت قوله دفعة واحدة”
affirmed Gassan Kanafani in his novella ما تبقى لكم /All that’s Left to You, published in 1966. Extending from Kanafani’s affirmation that “[…] the novel must say what it intends to say all at once […]” (“Clarification”) to the genre of lectures, I begin where I want to end with a quote by Roberto Bolaño, a citizen from another misfortune region in our world who nevertheless (or therefore) negated both exile and states. Bolaño thought that:
“[…] nationalism is wretched and collapses under its own weight. If the expression ‘collapses under its own weight’ doesn’t make sense to you, imagine a statue made of shit slowly sinking into the desert: well, that’s what it means for something to collapse under its own weight.”
“Literature and Exile”, 2000
For Bolaño, his homeland consists of his son and his books. That is to say, home is less found in the land where people are born and more in the life they choose to live and the people they love to live by.
2.
If it had not been for these brilliant articulations which simplify what only seems too complicated to understand, this lecture would have started elsewhere. I planned to say that if I forcibly ignore the dramatic event when Mahmood Darwish stood in front of his father and declared: أنا يوسف يا أبي / “Father, I am Joseph,” at the first moment of acknowledgement that what he experienced was a de-ja-vu, that what is happening to the Palestinian people had already happened in the history of the Muslim people and before that to Jewish people – mas o menos – and I turn my back away from this closing circle, then I can confidently confirm that a Jew I am not.
Still, I think the invitation to the conference did not come to me by mistake, nor did my hosts mean to make an empty pose. I thank you for this kind invitation, but I must say at the outset that since the contemporary situation of Arabs and Muslims is in deep shit. Since I am not a dead woman walking in the streets of Gaza in search of her beloved, I’m rather busy trying to measure the distances between my people, the Palestinian people, and the world [like was Hannah Arendt]. I profoundly doubt having the tools to initiate any new conversation on any subject—distracted and frail, yet here I am.
3.
On August 30, 2023, I received the invitation letter to this conference titled “Return to exile?” Since the letter was written without sound, I was unsure of the tone of the question mark. But, it seemed to me that our hosts wanted to spell out ‘return to exile,’ not for the sake of an imaginative exercise, but to throw it to fire, to the hot pot of politics, and wait to see what happens then. “Our hope,” was written in their original letter, “is to gather leading voices in the field of Jewish Studies, Israel Studies, historians of Zionism, and those in other adjacent fields [which is where I belong; my emphasis] to present original work on the question of exile, its negation in Zionist thought, its future as a philosophical/theological idea, and its present historical reality.”
Now, as a group of people who are obsessed with the idea that history matters (I assume many of us sitting in this room), we can agree that in the last few months, the aforementioned big hopes have been receiving a series of electric shocks. Thereafter, the word ‘return’ and the question mark disappeared, leaving ‘exile’ standing alone, naked on an empty stage. By then, and while becoming perplexed about the title’s orientation and the exact concepts to tackle, our hosts first suggested talking about “Rethinking Jewish Politics: Between Exile and Sovereignty” and then changed it to “Between State and Exile: Rethinking Jewish Politics.”
In other words, when a black hole flashes (as if suddenly), old habits show up (as if they had disappeared). The old-aged “between” was called back on stage and brought with it the swing of our existence, the pending status between past and present, inside and outside – shared by Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, and the many invented others by the modern Western civilization.
The comeback of between to the title is a fresh reminder of how discourse forces itself on a chaotic reality. Nevertheless, nothing said or done can cover up the fact that returning to exile is not a retrospective realization, but it is already operating in our present. In fact, it has been exile all along.
4.
Let’s pause with Naguib Mahfouz, awlad ḥaritna/The Children of our Neighborhood, which translates usually to The Children of Geblawi.
One day, a poet from a faraway neighborhood in some corner of the world was sitting in a local popular coffee shop and dared to wonder laud who is the true sovereign of the people. “من سيد الناس؟”/ “Who is the sovereign of the people?” repeated a strong-armed man but didn’t wait for the poet’s contemplations. “The sovereign of the people is the one who beats the people, oppresses the people, and assassinates the people; you know [very well] who is the sovereign of the people.” (120).
5.
I, too, tried to change the title and shared it with Gilad [Sharvit] who responded with great compassion. I considered offering the title “All that’s Left to You: What would Gassan Kanafani’s mother have thought about Exile?”
Location: Jaffa (where Kanafani grew up); time: May 1948. Basic plot: a mother puts her elder daughter and her little son on a ship to Gaza and then disappears. The narration focuses on the aftermath of such disappearance 16 years later and its effects on the actions, thoughts, and relations between the two siblings. “The novel must say what it intends to say all at once,” Kanafani said in the preface to the novella, in what seems like a later addition after realizing that almost nothing of what he just finished to write was at the forefront. As far as I understand, the only sentence that the narrator manages to make clear is repeated in the background of the ticking clock, which is in the shape of a little coffin hanged in the sister’s house in a refugee camp in Gaza, and provides the pace for the brother’s footsteps while he crosses the desert to Jordan in search of their lost mom. The only thing that the novella manages to say outright is:
“لو كانت أمك هنا، لو كانت أمك هنا”
“[Just] If your mother was here, [just] if your mother was here” (12).
The brother and the sister alternate saying the leitmotiv to each other and others. If that’s all what is left in this story to say, if that’s all what is left to the modern Palestinian grand story to tell, then it is a multitude that deserves careful attention.
6.
Jewish side eye to Egypt (the original title I sent to the conference).
Location: occupied Sinai desert. Time: A few days after the ‘67 war. Text: “Remembering Egypt.” Author: Jacqueline Kahanov. The text was originally written in French and translated into Hebrew and published in 1976. It is a record of Kahanov’s wish to cross the desert back to her home in Cairo where she was born and spent her formative years. In their new locations, Kahanov and Kanafani suffered from claustrophobia, a severe lack of oxygen. For me, this is what nationalism feels like – claustrophobia. What interests me in this text is, in part, how Kahanov’s new location influenced her opinions concerning her past relations with Qadria, a Muslim girl she closely befriended during childhood, and how she saw the conditions and limits of those relations once she had moved to Israel and became Israeli.
But since we finally reached the moment of talking about friendship, a subject that has occupied me since October (and I assume occupies others sitting in this room), I want to recall Hannah Arendt’s article, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing.” The text was written in German in 1959 [in Hamburg] and translated a year after to English.
In our days, just like in Arendt’s days, “we are not to see friendship solely as a phenomenon of intimacy, in which the friends open their hearts to each other unmolested by the world and its demands” (24). Arendt writes that “Humanity manifests itself most frequently in dark times when it becomes so extremely dark for certain groups of people that it is no longer up to them, their insight or choice, to withdraw from the world” (13). In other words, we consider our friends those who can keep a secret and help us stop feeding our inner monsters.
This is all true, but following Lessing, Arendt wanted to resonate with the ancient perspective of friendship. The ancient perspective of friendship is directed to the opposite side of withdrawal and whispering. Friendship is a relation that occupies the center of the polis, is the subject of the polis, and is manifest in people shouting and working together to get rid of false gods or people that behave like gods. It is a relationship with top political relevance. According to the Greeks, “For the world is not humane just because it is made by human beings, and it does not become humane just because the human voice sounds in it, but only when it has become the object of discourse.” (24)
Friendship is significant. It is significant, because it is fun, fundamental, and foundational. It is where our voices are heard, coming out of hysteric or silenced cry or hysteric or silenced laughter. My friends are those with whom I gladly share all that I have: my cooking, my family, and my traditions, with whom I don’t feel shy to say that knowledge based solely on experience is overrated and those whom I don’t get tired of reminding them that what seems a misfortune perhaps is a fortune.
Undoubtedly, in places where the walls are not too high and people can see each other casually in the street, a Palestinian and an Israeli-Jew can behave like any other normal human being, indeed coming together to “feel the warmth of intimacy” (30).
Yet, as far as I know, during the last decades, such mixed relations have not always led to a relaxed withdrawal or a confident appearance in public. Some of these mixed relations even confess an amount of passion that stems from staying in contact with the world, a kind of dramatic input, while others are uncomfortable with the constant vulnerability that accompanies such relations.
Lessing was obsessed with the need that “we must, must be friends” (25) (as the leitmotiv in his novel Nathan the Wise), and Arendt, too. In a letter she sent to her friend Gershom Scholem from 1946, she emphatically said something in the spirit of “people are more than what they think or do” (“Zionism Reconsidered”, p, 111). And I want to ask, are they? Is there more in people than what they think or do? I greatly doubt that whatever remaining there might be, is not in the capacity of the human eye to see. Just like with other kinds of love, friendship is never achieved by force. The command “we must, must be friends” doesn’t work in reality. And just like falling in love, friends fall out of love. In a sense, breaking up with people who were previously close due to unbridgeable gaps in how we see and relate to the world could be seen as ‘all that’s left’ of love. Because friends don’t lie.[1]
[1] I thank my friends Caroline Jessen, Elisabeth Gallas, Khaled Furani, and Enrico Lucca for sharing with me some of the readings above.
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