narratives of resistance

7/27/2019 Narratives of Resistance

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III

Barbara Harlow

NARRATIVES OF

RESISTANCE

You gringos are always worried about violence done withmachine guns and machetes. But there is another kind ofviolence that you must be aware of too. I used to work on thehacienda. My job was to take care of the duetto's dogs. I gave

them meat and bowls of milk, food that I couldn't give my ownfamily. When the dogs were sick, I took them to theveterinarian in Suchitoto or San Salvador. When my childrenwere sick, the dueno gave me his sympathy, but no medicine asthey died.

To watch your children the of sickness and hunger while youcan do nothing is a violence to the spirit. We have suffered thatsilently for too many years. Why aren't you gringos concernedabout that kind of violence?1

In his introduction to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul

Sartre demanded of the first European readers of the book, 'What does Fanon

care whether you read his work?' 2 The Wretched of the Earth was first published

in France in 1961, the year in which Fanon died, the year, that is, which

preceded the independence of Algeria, achieved after nearly a decade of violent

struggle against the French colonial occupation of that North African country.

Fanon, originally from Martinique, had in the meantime become part of the

Algerian resistance. The rhetorical ring with which Sartre's question resonated

in 1961, a quarter of a century ago, echoes again now with a certain renewed and

more than rhetorical urgency: 'What does Fanon care whether you read his

work?' Since 1961, not only Algeria, but all African countries as well - with the

exception of South Africa where the white minority regime of apartheid

continues to dominate the black majority population - have gained their

independence, many through violent national liberation struggles. The violence,

however, did not end, despite Sartre's 1961 reading of Fanon which seemed to

augur a different future: 'It is to his brothers that he denounces our old tricks,

and he is sure we have no more up our sleeves.'3 'As for us', wrote Fanon in the

chapter 'On national culture' in The Wretched of the Earth, 'as for us who have

decided to break the back of colonialism, our historic mission is to sanction all

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revolts, all desperate actions, all those abortive attempts drowned in rivers ofblood.'4

The revolutionary violence of popular resistance which Fanon advocated inhis representation of armed struggle as the effective means whereby the colonized

subject will restore his and her human dignity and historical agency is

now, twenty-five years later, stigmatized in current dominant rhetoric as

'terrorism'. The opprobrious stigma is in turn used by politicians and the

complicit media of the First World powers to sanction the ruthless exercise of

state violence and the concerted and calculated implementation of repression in

the interest of what is deemed, for public consumption, the 'security' of the

state. In the Middle East alone, where Palestine, like South Africa, remains

subject to a settler-colonial regime, the last four years have borne witness to the

1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon culminating in the massacres of Palestinian

refugees in Sabra and Shatila, Israel's 'iron fist' policy, announced in 1985, in

the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli bombing of thePLO headquarters-in-exile in Tunisia (1985) and the United States attack on

Libya in April 1986. In the mean time, Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestine

Liberation Front, a splinter group of the PLO, who allegedly organized the

hijacking of the Achille Lauro luxury cruise ship, was featured prominently in

the pages ofPeople magazine (4 November 1985). Seven months later NBC

nighdy news was censured by US administration officials for their televised

interview with the same leader now in hiding (New York Times, 7 May 1986).

Not only were the media providing unwarranted publicity for the 'terrorist' but, the

officials complained, the network refused to disclose the interviewee's

whereabouts. It is in this context, then, that Sartre's 25-year-old question insists

itself once again: 'What does Fanon care whether you read his work?'

'Decolonization', according to Fanon, 'which sets out to change the order of the

world, is, obviously, a programme of complete disorder. But it cannot come

as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly

understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process.'5 Various

studies of Fanon, such as Irene Gendzier's Frantz Fanon or Holy Violence by

B. Marie Perinbam6 have sought in part to adjudicate the apparent critical

contradiction between the 'complete disorder' and a 'historical process' by

examining not only the political influence of Fanon, but his very real

contributions as a practising psychologist as well. Such concern with an

understanding of the so-called 'revolutionary personality' dictates too the

dynamics of Soraya Antonius's novel The Lord.7 Set in Mandate Palestine, The

Lord recounts the efforts of a woman living in contemporary Lebanon to

reconstruct the personal history of Tareq. Tareq, who is eventually executed at the

end of the novel for his alleged incitement of the Arab population against theBritish Mandate audiorities, had once been a student of Miss Alice in the missionary

school run by her father in Jaffa. It is through her interviews with the former

schoolteacher that the narrator seeks to piece together for the sake of the novel the

fictional Tareq's legendary role in the 1936-9 revolt in Palestine.

Tareq is given the role here of an itinerant magician, a conjuror, who wanders

from village to village entertaining the people on feast days and at wedding

celebrations with the ordinary tricks of sleight-of-hand common to such

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performers. Under Tareq's influence, however, the word patience, sabr, can be

made to look like subbdr, the word for 'prickly pears' or cactus. Or again, Tareqhas become famous for the act in which he transforms a hat into a keffiya, thus

replacing the symbol of the European occupier with the cotton headscarf of the

Palestinian peasant or labourer which was later to become an emblem of national

resistance. According to the novel neither Tareq nor his mission were any better

comprehended by the populace of the villages than they are by the modern

researcher almost half a century later: ' "You will lose your homes," he told the

gaping audience which for some time went on hoping to see what they had all

heard about, the hat turn into a keffiya, and felt rather disappointed with what

they were getting instead.'8

The historic significance of the 1936-9 rebellion in Palestine lies rather in its

popular character of a widespread peasant revolt which further galvanized a

general strike throughout the region and disabled the British Mandate

authorities for three long years.9

More than a psychology of a charismaticpersonality is necessary to understand the emergence of popular resistance and

the fictional Tareq is no more, if no less, responsible for the 1936-9 revolt than

is Libya's Colonel Mu'ammar Qaddafi for contemporary acts of political

violence. Demonology does not suffice as a substitute for historical and material

analysis. As Fanon had maintained,

to educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean making a

political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to

teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is

their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is

no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the

responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves

and the magic hands are finally the hands of the people. [Emphasis added]

Unlike The Lord, with its insistence on the interpersonal conflicts between

colonizer and colonized, Sahar Khalifeh's 1976 novel Wild Thorns (Al-Subbdr)10

emphasizes in its narrative of conflict the socio-political conditions of

exploitation which generate forms of resistance and violence in the Israeli-

occupied West Bank.

At the beginning of the story Usama is returning to the West Bank from

several years of exile in the oil-rich Arab states of the Gulf. But he has also been

with the cadres of the resistance organization there, and his mission now in the

Occupied Territories is to blow up the Egged buses which transport Palestinian

peasants, proletarianized without having been urbanized, into Israel where they

provide cheap labour for Israeli factories. Usama's cousin Adil, though, like his

friends Zuhdi, Abu Sabir and others too, are daily passengers on those same

buses which Usama is meant to destroy. The novel thus suggests the tensions

and conflicts which riddle the collective relationship between the Palestinians

who have remained on the land itself under Israeli occupation and those who

five in exile and struggle to return.

Today the difference between them lay in the fact that each believed he was in

accord with the group. Usama shook his head in regret. If Adil had only left

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the West Bank and met with comrades elsewhere, he'd have understood what

was necessary. The area where they now stood, bounded by the river on oneside and enemy fortifications on the other, had become a major threat to

revolutionary thought in the whole region. For the people had become soft,

been brainwashed with lies and Israeli cash.

His own duty was to accomplish his mission, no matter what the sacrifices.

. . . No, not even if his uncle and Adil were both to die. The comrades abroad

would take care of things. People here would understand. Even if the older

generation didn't, the younger ones would understand when they grew up.11

Usama himself comes only slowly to the realization that, as Fanon had

maintained, 'the native and the underdeveloped man are today political animals

in the most universal sense of the word'.12

Sahar Khalifeh's Wild Thorns not only exhibits the personal and political

contradictions within the Palestinian social order generated by the Israeli

military occupation of those territories captured in the June War of 1967, but

demonstrates as well the violence of the repressive state machinery which

distorts and exploits that social order. The Israeli prisons in which 20 per cent of

the Palestinian population of the West Bank have at some time been detained

establish the scene in which the child Basil, arrested for taunting Israeli soldiers,

grows suddenly into adulthood and Zuhdi learns the significance of collective

endeavour. Israeli factories, like the military apparatus, are examined as part of

the occupation's exploitative order. In the end, Usama, who has already killed

an Israeli army officer, stabbing him while he shops in a grocery store with his

wife and daughter, carries out his mission and blows up one of the buses.

Zuhdi, who had been on the bus, is killed by the military, as he is struggling to

join Usama in the fields. The novel concludes with Adil and his family, who

stand with a few belongings outside their home in Nablus, watching the Israeliforces demolish the house.

'The practice of destroying Arab houses as a means of reprisal has been used

since the beginning of the occupation.'13 In Occupier's Law, Raja Shehadeh, a

prominent West Bank lawyer, examines the military and juridical parameters of

Israel's 19-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza with reference to

international law. Combining legal analysis with documentary evidence and

extensive case studies, the Palestinian lawyer proposes still another contemporary

version of the narrative of political domination and popular resistance to it: the

expropriation of Palestinian land, Israeli military courts and tribunals, and

manifold human rights violations by both Israeli settlers and the military

authorities ranging from 'terrorizing the population and destroying property' to

the 'closure of educational institutions'. The interviews with his clients includedverbatim by Shehadeh in his report, like the 'free world vignettes' which

introduce Noam Chomsky's Turning the Tide: US Intervention in Central America

and the Struggle for Peace,14 resemble the case studies of his patients presented

twenty-five years ago by Fanon the psychologist in the last chapter of The

Wretched of the Earth, 'Colonial war and mental disorders'. Personal histories

though they might be, these cases are not narrated as what Fanon had criticized

as 'dramatizations' on the 'plane of the troubled intellectual and his tormented

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conscience'.15

For Irene Gendzier though, reading later these accounts

presented by Fanon of his patients, 'there is something obscene about writing

about the case studies . . . the material itself is not fiction and one is forced to

deal with it. Yet a reading of the cases cannot take place without considering the

political question of terror, the place of random violence in the Revolution, and

the ethical questions which this raises.'16 These questions, political as well as

ethical, still insist themselves, as states, both First World powers and their neo-

colonial client regimes, more and more take on for themselves the task of

violence, torture and terror. The violence, however, is random only when

history is disacknowledged. Perhaps it has now, after all, become time for critics

in the west to care whether they read Fanon's work.

NOTES

1 Cited in N. Chomsky, Turning the Tide: US Intervention in Central America and theStruggle for Peace (Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1985).2 J.-P. Sartre, Preface to F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by

C. Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 11; first published in France, 1961.3 ibid.4 Fanon, op. cit., 166.5 ibid., 27.6 I. Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (New York: Grove Press, 1985);

B. M. Perinbam, Holy Violence: The Revolutionary Thought of Frantz Fanon(Washington DC: Three Continents Press, 1982).

7 S. Antonius, The Lord(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986).8 ibid., 160.9 Numerous studies of the 1936-9 revolt have emphasized its popular character. See,

for example, N. Johnson, Islam and the Politics of Meaning in Palestinian Nationalism

(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982) and G. Kanafani, 'Thawrah 1936-39 fiFilastin', Shu'un filastiniyya, 6 (1972), as well as T. Swedenburg, 'Problems of oralhistory: the 1936 revolt in Palestine', Bir Zeit Research Review (Winter 1985-6).

10 S. Khalifeh, Wild Thorns, translated by T. LeGassick and E. Fernea (London: Al-Saqi Books, 1985).

11 ibid., 87.12 ibid., 64.13 R. Shehadeh, Occupier's Law: Israel and the West Bank(Washington DC: Institute for

Palestine Studies, 1985), 154.14 Chomsky, op. cit., chapter 1.15 Fanon, op. cit. , 194.16 Gendzier, op. cit., 104-5.

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