ITALO CALVINO ON PALESTINE

To Issa I. Naouri—Amman 

Turin 10 October 1968  

Dear Mr Naouri,  

I have read the poetry of the Palestinian resistance that you have kindly sent me. They seem to be poets of powerful expressive force, full of sincere poetic and human warmth.  The best thing would be to find a journal to publish these poems, I will try to contact a friend to bring them to journal's attention. Of course, in us Europeans the trauma of the persecution of the Palestinians has a special resonance because their current persecutors suffered—in themselves and in their families—persecutions that were the most horrific and inhuman in centuries, both under Nazism and also a long time before that. That the victims of the past should turn into the oppressors of today is the most distressing fact, the one which I think it is necessary to emphasize. I am sorry that none of these poets deals with this motif. 

Personally I think that the only solution to the Palestinian problem lies down the revolutionary road both in the Arab world and amongst the Israeli masses. A revolution by the Israeli poor (to a large extent of Middle Eastern and North African origin) against their colonialist and expansionist rulers; but also a revolution by the popular masses in Arab countries against their reactionary and militarist oligarchies (even although these call themselves more or less socialist) who exploit the Palestinian problem for nationalist demagoguery. The real Resistance is not only a struggle against a foreign invader: it has to be a battle for a profound renewal within the society of one's own country.  

I wanted to clarify my thoughts in order to confirm my solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians and their Resistance fighters in the context of a general political and human vision.    

Thank you so much and best wishes. 

From Letters, 1941—1985 by Italo Calvino, translated by Martin McLaughlin with an introduction by Michael Wood (Princeton University Press, 2013) p. 358-359. 

VILLAGES REMEMBERED

I met you in al-Zīb: a shattered gravestone,

coffee kettles,

mud storage bins,

cooking vessels,

stone basins for kubbeh,

a grandfather's cane hanging, 

crucified threshing sledges

and a skull in a cage.

Dates once inscribed on the buildings

are still fresh in my memory

speaking to me,

its voice not hoarsened. 

— Hanna Abu Hanna, excerpt from "I Choke on Your Sap" 

al-Zīb

Erased from the powerful maps of the world, Palestine was sheltered by the memory of its poets. Outside the map and without one, Palestinians took poetry with them wherever they went. Palestinian poets remembered the lost homeland in the lost homeland itself, in refugee camps, in prisons, and later on in the lands Israel further occupied in 1967, in cities throughout the Arab world and in many other places beyond it. 

From: Khaled Furani, Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012)  

Suhmata

The basic facts of Suhmata are these: in 1922 the village had a population of 632, which by 1931 had become 796 and by 1945 had grown to 1,130. Suhmata's population in 1948 was approximately 1,350 to 1,400, of which fifty to sixty were Christians and the rest were Muslims. Suhmata's Christian community (at most, four extended families) belonged to the Greek Catholic Church, the largest in the Galilee villages. Church endowments included a church and some olive groves, but members of the Christians community also owned large tracks of land in and around the village.

Despite the small size of its Christian community, Suhmata's mukhtar (the village headman, officially appointed and community approved) was a Christian. His name was Jiryis Kaysar Sim'an. The story of this mukhtar whose father occupied the position before him and who continued in this role in exile in Lebanon  is, according to the oral testimony of the displaced villages, he chose to leave with his community, which settled in the refugee camps of Lebanon. He preferred to share the fate of those who had become refugees, living the wretched life of the camps in exile. When Greek Catholic Archbishop Maximos Hakim offered in 1948 to use his influence to try and repatriate Sim'an and his family to Israel, Sim'an declined the favor unless it included all Suhmatans in exile. He lived the rest of his life with his community.

The identity of the Suhmatans is nourished by such stories, recounted by both Muslim Suhmatans now residing in the wider exile of the Arab world and Christian Suhmatans in internal exile within Israel. Visions of a cohesive, loving, and cooperative community are depicted and praised: 

We were all Suhmatans, living a harmonious life, no difference between Muslim and Christian. We celebrated the happy and the sad events with each other. My friends came from both sects with no conscious differentiation. (Author interview with W., 26 August 2000) 

The people of Suhmata lived like two locked hands [shows to interlocked fists]: united, respectful, and loving. For weddings, a Muslim would take a Christian as his best man and vice versa. (Author interview with N.S., 25 August 2000) 

I welcome all Suhmatans, Christians, and Muslims. We still hold a long history in common. (Author interview with M.K., 28 October 2000) 

From: May Seikaly, "Excavating Memory: Oral History and the Case of Suhmata," in Camille Mansour and Leila Fawaz, eds. Transformed Landscapes: Essays on Palestine and the Middle East in Honor of Walid Khalidi (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2009)

OH WORKERS! MAY DAY IS YOUR DAY OF FREEDOM - YAŞAR NEZIHE (1924)

The early Turkish socialist movement was composed primarily of intellectuals. A salient exception is Yaşar Nezihe the daughter of an unemployed municipal worker. Despite her father’s opposition, she learned to read and write. None of her three husbands supported her; she worked her entire life. Eventually she began publishing poems. Her ode celebrating May 1, 1923 appeared in the socialist weekly, Aydınlık  (Light). This excerpt from her  poem for May 1, 1924 shows that, although the Turkish working class was fragile and largely dispersed in small-scale enterprises, the ideals of the international socialist movement were beginning to be meaningful for some working people.  

Oh workers! May Day is your day of freedom

March forward, there’s light [Aydınlık] to lead you.

The workshops are silent as though the world sleeps.

The exploiters shake, in fear.

Today the Red Flag spreads its inspiration

Opening the path to liberation tomorrow.

Don’t tire of demanding your just rights.

The bourgeoisie always deceive with their lies.

. . .

The greatest celebration will come only when you seize your rights.

What a sweet thought is liberation from exploitation!

Always be united and show your strength!

Don’t abandon unity if you want victory.

You are no plaything in the patrons’ [bosses’] hands.

Raise your head and make them bow before you. 

From: Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)  

THE RHETORIC OF BRITISH BROADCASTING

Hear the white world
horribly weary from its immense efforts
its stiff joints crack under the hard stars
its blue steel rigidities pierce the mystic flesh
hear its deceptive victories tout its defeats
hear the grandiose alibis of its pitiful stumbling 

Pity for our omniscient and naive conquerors! 

— Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land 

  

Member's of the BBC's Empire Service staff, including T.S. Eliot and George Orwell, thinking of ways to bring Literature to the natives, 1942. Via @bintbattuta 

By 1939, the British Council had developed significant holdings in Cairo, Alexandria, and Baghdad, and later expanded its operations in Jamaica, Nigeria, and throughout Latin America, ensuring at the very least the continued circulation of English literature and criticism abroad. The “Panel of Book Selectors” included the literary critic Ivor Brown, who authored Contemporary General Literature, and Daniel Jones, a linguist who had written extensively on English phonetics and pronunciation. The council published short introductions to a culturally dominant group of writers. To name a few, Stephen Spender’s Poetry since 1939 summarized the New Signatures movement; Rex Warner revived an interest in E.M. Forster; Edmund Blunden wrote a short book on John Keats; Herbert Read did one on Byron; and John Lehmann provided one on Edith Sitwell. John Hayward wrote Prose Literature since 1939. The council copublished works, such as Bernard Lewis’s British Contributions to Arabic Studies, as a way of reinforcing and maintaining power amid growing anticolonial pressure.  

. . . By the beginning of decolonization, the spaces that the council occupied were extensive. It opened offices in Kenya in 1947, Malawi in 1950, Malaysia in 1948, Pakistan in 1948, Sri Lanka in 1950, and India in 1948. The council’s library system was the most extensive in the world. At the end of 1956, there were ninety-five libraries in fifty-seven countries, containing about 900,000 volumes and about 10,000 periodicals. The cultural presence of the council assumed many forms: institutes, centers, libraries, pamphlets, novels, poetry, manuals, magazines, auditoriums for conductors and symphonies, and spaces for exhibitions. The Sound Department of the council recorded a talk by E.M. Forester to accompany and exhibition of a large model of an Elizabethan theater that was installed adjacent to a display that provided a history of “Shakespeare in the British Theatre”—all to ensure English culture maintained its value in what was then East and West Pakistan; or at the very least, that England retained its imperial identity in order to exert its authority in countries it no longer directly controlled.   

* * * *  

With the postwar expansion of new occasions for transmission and translation, as well as the emergence of new forms such as the “radio magazine,” the relationship between the writer and the public underwent further transformations that would decisively expand and constrain cultural space. Working for the East Indian Division of the BBC, Orwell produced a series of radio talks from 1941 to 1943. Entitled Voices, the radio program brought together a group of Anglophone writers to read and discuss their poetry and prose on the air. In London, the BBC’s Third Programme, which began broadcasting in September 1946, performed a critical function in establishing a dominant culture and community, thus securing the reputation of Isaiah Berlin and T.S. Eliot as public figures and intellectuals. Isaiah Berlin, for example, delivered numerous addresses on the BBC’s Third Programme. T.S. Eliot was broadcast more than on more than eighty occasions on the Third Programme, for which he recorded his British Academy lecture on Milton. Edward Sackville-West speculated that the Third Programme would become “the greatest civilizing force England has known since the secularization of the theater.” What was significant about these institutions is the way that they appeared to inadvertently interact and overlap with the CCF [Congress for Cultural Freedom] and the various organizations it had established in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, and Rome. The first comptroller of the BBC’s Third Programme, Herman Grisewood, served as the treasurer for the British Society for Cultural Freedom, was the editor of the Twentieth Century, the successor to the Nineteenth Century and After, among one of the first publications that the CCF sponsored before it launched Encounter in 1953.

— Andrew N. Rubin, Archives of Auhtority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012, p. 48; 60-61. 

Poster for the "Hands off Somalia: No to Imperialist Intervention" campaign, 2012.

We decided . . . to see just how 'numerous' the BBC's references to Chavez's legitimate elections are, taking as a dataset all articles about Venezuela between the start of November 1997 (when the BBC website began) and the end of December 2011. This totalled 2,248 articles from the BBC website. Our objective was to research how regularly Hugo Chavez is referred to as a democratically elected president, and to compare this with how often words depicting the president as autocratic or dictatorial have appeared (including direct quotes from opposition politicians/media).   

We found that, indeed, out of the full dataset, there were 146 articles (165 mentions in total within them) which referred to Hugo Chavez as either being elected or winning elections. The word 'legitimate' has appeared only in direct quotes by Hugo Chavez himself.  

Looking further into the data gave interesting results on some of the more unfavourable reporting of Venezuela since Hugo Chavez was elected. In the full dataset, there were 160 articles (containing a total of 198 references) in which Hugo Chavez is described as 'authoritarian', 'totalitarian', or a 'dictator', 'autocrat', or 'tyrant'. These descriptions were overwhelmingly from the Venezuelan opposition and the US government; however there were three instances in which BBC reporters used such descriptions directly in their own words.  

— "13 Years of BBC Reporting on Venezuela's Hugo Chavez," newsunspun.org, February 14, 2012.  

HERZL: BOURGEOIS!

Lazare and Herzl

You are bourgeois in your thought, bourgeois in your feelings, bourgeois in your ideas and bourgeois in your conception of society. As such, you want to guide the people, our people, who are poor, unhappy, working class . . . You act outside of them and above them: you’d like to have them follow you like a herd of sheep. Like all governments, you want to disguise the truth, you want to be a proper government whose principle obligation is not exposing the national shame. But I want to expose it, so that everyone can see poor Job on his dungheap, scraping his sores with a piece of broken bottle.   

— Bernard Lazare in a Letter to Theodor Herzl, February 4, 1899.

The masses had two functions in Herzl's initial strategy of Zionism. On the one hand, they would provide the shock troops of exodus and the settlers in the promised land. On the other, they could be used as a club to compel the rich European Jews to support the Zionist solution. The ghetto Jew as carrier of the new nation, the ghetto Jew as weapon: of the first of these mobilizations, Herzl spoke publicly; the second, no less integral to the new key in politics, he confided to his diary.  

In his first and greatest political pamphlet, Der Judenstaat (1896), Herzl candidly explored the best methods for directing the masses. Criticizing the attempts of Jewish philanthropic colonizers to attract pioneers by appealing to personal self-interest and by financial inducements, the irreligious Herzl urged instead that the Jews follow the models of Mecca and Lourdes. A mass can best be led if one sets a goal or center of aspiration for its "deepest need to believe." In the Jewish case, the desire to harness and guide was the age-old wish for "the free homeland." While Herzl tapped the archaic religious aspiration, however, he did not, as a modern secular leader, fully rely upon it. At first he did not even wish to locate the Jewish homeland in Palestine though, as he told the Rothschilds, "the name alone would be a program . . . strongly attractive to the lower masses." Most Jews, however, were "no longer orientals, and had accustomed themselves to other climes [andere Himmelstriche].""  

Theredor Herzl added essentially modern attractions to the allurements of ancient hopes in his political Gesamtkunstwerk. He envisaged the seven-hour day as the principal magnet for the modern European Jew. Zion would outbid the Socialist International by one hour of leisure! Even the flag of the Jewish state was to reflect the value which Herzl attached tothe drawing power of modern social justice. On a white field signifying the new life of purity, seven gold stars would represent the seven golden hours of our working day. " For under the sign of work the Jews go into the promised land." Of the star of David or any other Jewish symbol, Herzl made no mention.  

— Carl E.Schorske “Politics in a New Key: An Austrian Triptych,” The Journal of Modern History, V. 39 N. 4. December, 1969. p.380-381. Later republished in Schorske’s 1979 book Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture.

Herzl viewed Polish Jews from the vast distance of his Viennese bourgeois standards of gentility and cultivation. He himself spoke the pure German of the cultivated, without a trace of even the Viennese dialect. Even after having become a Jewish statesman, he referred to East European Jews as “semi-Asiatic.” For Herzl, Polish Jews were undifferentiated. He was a stranger to the vast differences between the elite Talmudic culture of Vilna and the more down-to-earth Hasidic communities of Galicia or the schools of Jewish enlightenment in Brody. What he saw was a stereotype, shaped by conceptions of Germanic enlightenment and Viennese refinement.

—Jacques Kornberg, Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism, Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, p. 80.