Omar+Barghouti+clings+to+sanity+amidst+war+and+destruction+through+dance,+music+and+culture:+through+the+expression+of+a+cultural+identity Click to view caption In the middle of our regular dance rehearsal, our second since the end of the latest Israeli assault, a group of Belgian artists sauntered quietly into our cozy, though well lit, studio in Ramallah. Some were on their first visit. Surprised by what they saw and heard -- I had chosen a track from BraveHeart for the improvisation segment that day -- our European friends started filming with a video camera and taking notes. Most Westerners cannot hide their bemusement when they see a group of Palestinian dancers -- of both sexes -- going through the elaborate choreography of a new Palestinian dance. They apparently find the scene surreal. Dance in the midst of "war"! During the dancers' brief rehearsal break after two hours of hard, sweaty work, one of the visitors, a filmmaker, interviewed me. He hesitantly asked: "After all this war and destruction of basic infrastructure, how do you convince yourself and the dancers to persevere in doing what you are doing? Isn't dance a very low priority in time of war?" I had never asked myself that question. Do we have to stop creating dance, music, art and literature, I wondered, to join the battle of "reconstruction"? Is reconstruction only applicable to devastated buildings, roads, water pipes and electricity poles? How about shattered dreams and shaken identities, don't they need reconstruction as well? John Stuart Mill's definition of humans as "unique," "self-creating," and "creative individuals" who are "culture-bearing" leapt into my mind. During the latest punishing re-occupation of Ramallah (March 29 - April 21), days had passed without electricity, running water and with food shortages. But I had listened (on battery-operated cassette players) to Fairuz, Vivaldi and Munir Bashir. My wife had listened to Asmahan, Abdel-Wahab and Umm Kulthoum -- yes, we do have substantial pluralism in our music preferences in the family. My elder daughter still had to practice the violin daily, the exact hours depending on when it was quietest. The neighbourhood children still invented new games and new causes to quarrel over. Their parents urged them constantly to allocate daily time to study. Our humble collection of books-- which featured authors such as Naguib Mahfouz, Isabel Allende, Abdel- Rahman Munif, Ahlam Mistaganmi -- suddenly became a "public" library for the neighbours. During the unpredictably long period of a rarely interrupted curfew, several of us read, wrote, e-mailed, wept every once in a while and cringed at particularly gory TV footage. We argued with each other over every imaginable political issue -- an idiosyncratic feature of average Palestinian life. We joked, shouted at times, rationed the precious little water we had (mainly collected from rain drainage) between our desperate plants and ourselves. We shared rare moments of intimacy and mutual vulnerability; in short, we lived as "culture-bearing" beings do. Perhaps our neighbourhood is different from the next, but most of what we did to survive the onslaught, without paying too dear a price in terms of our sanity, was common virtually everywhere. That was so, at least, in all the places where roofs remained on the houses to which they belonged and where death had not visited. But even where roofs fell on top of the inhabitants of the houses, as in the devastation of the Jenin refugee camp and in the Nablus casbah, a nagging concern of parents and community leaders was to make sure that schools, in particular, were rehabilitated quickly to be able to function normally. How, you can well wonder, does a deeply traumatised tent-dweller, who has survived an appalling atrocity and is keeping his head above an ocean of loss, despair and anger, worry about his/her children's education as well as grope for his basic needs. Understanding of this mysterious Palestinian obsession with learning as a means of identity formation requires an insight into the innermost scars of Palestinian refugees. Click to view caption The "Nakba generation" -- as the Palestinian generation that suffered the brunt of the initial dispossession in 1948 is commonly called -- is haunted with guilt for what it perceives as its mortifying failure to resist the Zionist onslaught then. The essential culprit in their mind has always been their "limited consciousness" at the time -- a recurring theme in that period's oral history -- which in this context is understood as a combination of ignorance, illiteracy, being deficient in necessary skills, as well as lacking a clear sense of identity. Culture -- of which learning is a vital part -- is therefore venerated as the key to their salvation from repeated victimisation and exile. In the context of colonialism, cultural expression acquires particular eminence in shaping the collective identity. This is mostly due to the role played by the colonist in influencing the native's identity. As Jean-Paul Sartre once described the French settler-colonist in Algeria: "[H]e has come to believe that the domestication of the 'inferior races' will come about by the conditioning of their reflexes. But in this he leaves out of account the human memory and the ineffaceable marks left upon it; and then, above all there is something which perhaps he has never known: we only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us." Immersing themselves in cultural action, the natives expand the "ineffaceable marks" left upon their human memory. Despite the widespread devastation caused by the Inexorably Destructive Fascists, otherwise know as the IDF, Palestinians cannot afford not to integrate cultural rehabilitation and identity reformulation into their overall battle of reconstruction and struggle for emancipation. Our very humanity has been restricted, hampered, battered by the relentless dehumanising efforts of our tormentors. As a reaction, the process of de-colonising our minds assumes crucial precedence. Restoring our humanity, our dreams, our hopes and our will to resist and to be free, therefore, becomes even more important than mending our infrastructure. Thus, we dance. Frantz Fanon brilliantly described this process: "[Decolonisation] transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose of history's floodlights upon them. ... Decolonisation is the veritable creation of new men." The self-worth, which has been subjected to unremitting abuse at the hand of the colonists is here given the opportunity to be resurrected, radically, without losing sight of the fact that our fetters do not disappear with the end of our subjugation to the colonist. We've always had some form of chains, cultural, social, that have also hindered our assumption of our due position in world development. In our cultural struggle, we cannot but address those fetters as well. Cultural expression to us, then, serves a dual purpose: self-therapy and expansion of the "free zone" in our collective mind, where progressive transformation can thrive. In response to all the attempts to circumscribe our aspirations, we must push on, dreaming and being creative, boundlessly. So we dance. The writer is the dance trainer of El-Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe, in Al-Bireh (Ramallah). He is also a doctoral student of philosophy at Tel Aviv University.
