How Dare You Get Away

Bear with me, because I am thinking again of History. Not small h-history, the thing that happens to oneself or one’s country, but History as in the idea that the past holds currency, that it matters more than anything that is yet to come. Maybe this is because in the previous two months, I have found it impossible to think of anything new. I read this incredible piece on new ways to use language, which I loved, because I’m struggling on that account, and this piece from the Palestinian Youth Movement, which I found to be an excellent example of artistically sound polemic. For myself, I have been working on sharpening and distilling old impulses, old directions, old thoughts.

1. I am thinking of Mahmoud Darwish, who wrote in Palestine as Metaphor: “I have learned that language and metaphor are not enough to restore place to a place. . . . Not having been able to find my place on earth, I have attempted to find it in History, and History cannot be reduced to a compensation for lost geography. It is also a vantage point for shadows, for the self and the other, apprehended in a more complex human journey.” The idea, in particular, that History is more than a compensation for lost geography or displacement keeps crashing against me in waves.

2. I am thinking of how I was a newspaper child throughout my early reading years; I only left the daily paper life when I came to the US, which seems too transparent a parallel to comment on. In the early 2000s, I was about 10, and the second intifada was raging on, and I was asking my father for guidance on how to think about armed resistance. He told me that when a people were under threat for their life, dignity, and the security of their children, they were fully within their right to resist by any means necessary.

3. I am trying to think more deeply about what I said in my previous post about the ahistoricity of the US. I still believe that it is strongly tied to intervention abroad; it becomes a great deal easier to commit war crimes the world over once you’ve opiated your citizens out of any sense of global politics. We’re living through a superlative example of this right now. In Bethlehem, the birthplace of Isa (Jesus), the Lutheran church has set up a heartrending nativity scene showing a keffiyeh-clad Baby Jesus surrounded by rubble. Jesus birthed amidst rubble. The oldest church in Gaza, one of the oldest in the world, was hit by an Israeli airstrike in the beginning of the war, killing at least 18 people. In the US, the Christmas / Happy Holiday machine chugs on. I would be shocked to hear of any pastor mention Palestine, if even its Christians, in his sermon. What does it mean to celebrate the birthday of Jesus Christ when these are the images coming out of his birthplace? Nothing. It means nothing, because it actually, genuinely, means nothing. I believe my very smart friend Sarah Thankam Mathews once called most holidays in the US exercises in ritualized consumption.

   But also, as another friend pointed out yesterday—the US is a massive country, where people [have to] move tremendous distances for work. History, even without accounting for global context, means a different thing from many other places in the world. People migrate large distances in a routine fashion, which leads to fragmentation and a lack of rootedness in land. Ann Arbor, where I did my Masters, was right next to Detroit, a city that half a century ago had been a booming place but which was, in my recollection, a haunted house to walk through in 2021. A country so large that whole cities can rise and fall within decades…What a freedom, what a curse.

   At my numbest, or maybe most practical, moments, I think—isn’t the whole point of life to avoid history? As a parent, I can imagine how desperately one would try to protect one’s children from war and hunger and destitution. So many immigrants come to the US to get away from history’s affflictions—wars, poverty, political repression. Why not then aim for the end of history that is a neat and clean American suburb?

4. I am thinking of the 1974 OIC Summit in Lahore, Pakistan. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, hosted the second iteration of a worldwide conference for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation; the first one was held in 1969, in Morocco, in the aftermath of the arson of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Muslim leaders from around the world flew into Lahore—that was the era of an internationalism and pan-Islamism that now seems twee. There’s a photo of Bhutto looking on as Mujib-ur-Rahman, Bangladesh’s first President, shakes hands with Tikka Khan, the army chief instrumental in orchestrating the Pakistani army’s 1971 genocide in East Pakistan (Tikka Khan was known as the Butcher of Bengal). In the photo, both of them smile. Apparently, Mujib was not initially slated to come; Pakistan had not yet recognized the state of Bangladesh. After the conference started, someone managed to convince Bhutto, and the Algerian president’s plane was flown to Dhaka to bring Mujib in. (This, by the way, is a fascinating, anecdotal account of the summit, by the military historian Syed Hamid Ali).

   There’s another photograph. It shows Friday prayer at the historic Badshahi Mosque in Lahore. In the front row of worshippers, we see Bhutto, Mujib, Shah Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Anwar Sadat of Egypt, Yasir Arafat of Palestine, and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. In the coming years, every single one of these leaders would meet violent, unnatural deaths. A year after the summit, Shah Faisal was shot by his half-brother. A few months later, Mujib was assassinated by the Bangladeshi army in a coup (some say the friendly IR arm of our ahistorical Americans, known as the CIA, was involved; maybe sense of history is a scarce resource, and Americans generously keep giving their share to the rest of the world) In 1979, Bhutto was executed. In 1981, Sadat was assassinated at a parade in Cairo. In 2004, Arafat died, with many alleging a poisoning by Israeli state actors. In 2011, Gaddafi was killed by Libyan rebels.

5. On a slightly more hopeful note, I’m thinking of ways in which one can respect and care for History without fearing it. i.e. How to think of History as something to pay attention to even when it does not seem to directly and materially affect us (as much as that delusion can hold). How to understand it as something greater than us, as something more than lost geography. How, also, to separate it from nostalgia. Some people call this cocktail God, but now I’ve failed the challenge I set myself with each of these letters—can I finish without mentioning God?

Wishing everyone a peaceful, reflective end of the year.

Love,

Dur