The Camera

Art by Emily Lawson-Todd

From the chilly obscurity of the Thames bank, the silent moving picture of people — chatting, drinking, laughing — in the warmly lit interior of the Southbank Centre felt cheerfully detached. I was fleetly swallowed up into the noisy frenzy of people rushing to the toilet last-minute, navigating our way into the Royal Festival Hall.

In my scramble to get to my seat on time, I nearly collided with Khalid Abdalla. I backtracked to commend and thank him for his shatteringly good solo show ‘Nowhere’, dubbed ‘an anti-biography’, which explored personal and global histories of capitalist coloniality. This interaction encapsulated the feel of the auditorium that night as an ideological sanctuary but also substantiated my scepticism towards the echo chamber that I so often snugly find myself in.

The full house quickly fell into an expecting near-silence, a palpable anticipation uniting the audience. An impressive lineup of thinkers-writers-activists from Gaza, Nazareth, Lebanon, Iraq, Cairo and the U.K. was due to take the stage in celebration of the Fitzcarraldo republication of Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine — written in 1977-1978, revised in 1992, and now brought back into the spotlight more than a year into the staggering escalation of the Palestinian genocide. The contemporaneity of this historical work in the context of the destruction of Gaza and wider geopolitical condition is eerie — both deeply depressing and an urgent reawakening.

The Arabic word azā, meaning ‘ceremony of mourning’, suits the occasion that sought to fill the void left by Said and by many thousands of Palestinian lives lost. The word azā can also mean ‘solace’ and ‘equanimity’; gathered in the hundreds, we heard Said’s wisdom multiplied over time and space, his posthumous presence felt through a video compilation of his interviews over the years. His critique of the ‘ideological fictions’ of ‘Occident’, ‘Orient’ and ‘Islam’ expose the pig-headed mystification found in the perverse asymmetry of the so-called ‘Arab-Israeli conflict’ or ‘Israel-Hamas war.’

Aimee Shalan, director of the independent organisation Makan (which provides intersectional education and advocacy for Palestinian liberation) and the event’s host, eloquently introduced the eight speakers with an important notion of Said’s: ‘the word and the idea, the writer and the teacher, and the artist […] matter.’ She continued, ‘language and knowledge and culture are a core part of our ability to resist oppression, colonialism and annihilation. Palestinians have always known this.’

The editor of The Question of Palestine’s 2024 edition and first speaker, professor of literature Saree Makdisi reiterated what Said wrote in his preface to the book: ‘For Said, the Palestinian struggle is above all about representation.’ Self-representation is key, as the poet-physician Fady Joudah strongly insists in the latest episode of Makdisi Street podcast, where the Makdisi brothers have been hosting discussions with important thinkers on the question of Palestine since Israel’s ‘war’ on Gaza started last autumn.

Palestinians are now on all our screens and in our consciousness. The newsbreaks, statistics, images strewn across the news and social media bring visibility to the fore, to the extent that, now more than ever, ‘ignorance is no longer an excuse’, as Palestinian writer Jehad Abusallim insisted in the second talk of the evening. Yet the temporary interruption of the endless social media scroll cannot convey the richness of Palestinian lives; our screens, though more ‘democratic,’ obscure the reality, continuing the more-than-a-century-long process of Palestinian dehumanisation.

Words, not images, were the pivot of the event organised by the Palestinian Festival of Literature, from Makdisi’s expressive descriptions of everyday details like ‘Arabic coffee laced Gaza-style with cardamom’, to shā‘ir al-Quds, or ‘the poet of Jerusalem’ Tamim al-Barghouti later reading his father Mourid’s phenomenal poem ‘Midnight’, translated from the Arabic by Tamim’s mother, the novelist Radwa Ashour.

Jehad Abusallim stressed the importance of language as a tool to bridge the gap between metaphor and reality. Language can enable ‘erasure, annihilation and uprooting,’ but also its opposite: to remember, rebuild and create Palestinian futures, through projects such as Abusallim’s anthology Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire. The fact of Abusallim’s online attendance to the event, owing to his visa not being issued in time to travel from the U.S., awkwardly called to mind the term ‘present absentee.’

Birkbeck Professor of Humanities Jaqueline Rose analysed the psychoanalytic depths to Said’s language, reading into the title The Question of Palestine ‘a way of lamenting the invisible status of the Palestinians in Western thought.’ The ‘question’ is ‘a way to say there is always a knowledge to be pursued and we should never give up on that question, never close down the question of understanding.’

The writer Budour Hassan voiced the question looming over the event: ‘What would Said say?’ — as if projecting the impossible impasse we currently stand in onto the ghost of Said himself. She mourned his vision of ‘the full spectrum of Palestinian humanity,’ but recognised that this prophetic quality has been handed down to a great multitude of new thinkers-writers-activists.

Jaqueline Rose speculated Edward Said’s response: ‘Genocide must be named but it must not be given the last word. At the core of his engagement with writing on politics is that no word ever should.’

Today’s generations understand that Palestine is synonymous with the broader struggle for social justice and freedom. Hassan lamented the sickening reality that only in the light of Israel’s worst genocidal brutality have Palestinians broken into the global consciousness ‘to reassert their existence, to form their radical subjectivities, their political existence, to win so many battles, especially the battle for poetic justice, for existence, for their drama to be recognised as a drama of persistence, defiance and self-determination.’

Writer Max Porter declared ‘every utterance is a failure. (…) Whatever you write will feel inadequate. Crass. Gauche.’ He went on to demonstrate the power of words in the performance of his ‘Jerusalem Piece: A Failure,’ which mapped out his manic brain activity during his recent visit to Palestine. He tells us of the beauty of the land and its people, of the ugliness and perversity of random but systemic surveillance violence, of the tangled melodies of voices and sirens, of intrusive thoughts and numbing empathy. Stringing together words like ‘erasure jokes hospitality’, Porter conveyed the absurdity, grossness and monstrosity of the inexpressible wrongdoings in Palestine. ‘It is insane. It is psychopathic violence.’

Edward Said’s lecture-turned-final-book Freud and the Non-European expresses optimism in the psychoanalyst’s identification of Moses as an Egyptian, examining the limits of identity. Historian Avi Shlaim, born an Arab-Jew in Baghdad, raised in Israel and later educated in the U.K. – where he met and married the granddaughter of David Lloyd George, PM at the time of the Balfour Declaration – embodies nuances of identities in abundance. ‘The hyphen in Arab-Jew does not divide, it unites,’ he states, demonstrating the poignant reverberations of language, down to its punctuation, in the ideological world of politics.

Tamim al-Barghouti and Wadie Said, Edward Said’s son, jointly pronounced a statement for the liberation of Palestine: the constitution of Palestine to-be inshallah. In so doing, they, alongside all the other speakers, continue Edward Said’s journey as, in Ahdaf Soueif’s words, an ‘activist and oppositional intellectual’ and honour enduring Palestinian resilience and resistance.

Soueif, the founding chair of the Palestinian Festival of Literature, did not deliver her usual novelist’s lyricism but seemed rather at a loss for words. Her scatteredness reflected a deflation of the tension that had been swelling over two hours and started waning as early leavers trickled out before the outpouring rush at the end of the event.

Ahdaf Soueif expressed a hopelessness that only activism can stir. Though everything we say or do feels and is imperfect, we must not stop doing. Together, imperfect acts become a collective movement: ‘co-resistance’ as Aimee Shalan put it. Shalan repeatedly expresses that none of us are doing enough. I quote Max Porter citing Said: ‘in our writing, speaking, thinking, acting, voting, in every breath, with every utterance, Palestine must survive, must be free, “there is no other acceptable alternative.”’ At an 3EIB discussion of Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness at Space 4 SWANA, sound artist Dirar Kalash implored us all to ‘become Palestinian’ and embody liberation.

Blinding lights lit up the audience every time we clapped, creating interesting moments of self-reflection and scrutiny. Though I did wonder if it was an unfortunate mis-rigging that left the stage dark, the white glow over the audience foiled the self-gratification risked in such an echo chamber.

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The livestream of the event is now online and I urge everyone to watch it, be moved, inspired, to read more, write more, do more.

In addition to engaging in BDS and Palestine Action, I recommend visiting theculturalintifada.com, a website for creative resistance that activist theatre-maker Zoe Lafferty signposted at a panel discussion after the radical show ‘Cutting the Tightrope: The Divorce of Politics from Art’ running at the Arcola Theatre until 7 December.

By Elena Pare