An incurable malady: hope

"What is happening in Palestine is a crime we can stop. We can compare it to what happened at Auschwitz,"
In the midst of atrocities committed by the Israeli army in occupied Palestine, and in the face of the world's seeming indifference, voices of international conscience have been speaking out. From 24 to 29 March, on the eve of what would turn into the siege of not only a president in Ramallah, but of an entire nation, a delegation of eight members of the International Parliament of Writers, two of them Nobel laureates, visited Palestine to bear witness to and chronicle the appalling situation. Russell Banks, Breyten Breytenbach, Vincenzo Consolo, Bei Dao, Juan Goytisolo, Christian Salmon, José Saramago and Wole Soyinka saw -- before the recent escalation to fully-fledged war -- the reality on the ground and, in defiance of the Israeli attempts to isolate Yasser Arafat from the international community, met the Palestinian president at his Ramallah headquarters.
Members of the delegation also met faculty members and students at Bir Zeit University, refugees at Al-Amari camp and, at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, Palestinian intellectuals including Ezzat Ghazzaoui and Mourid Barghouti. An evening of cultural exchange was organised in their honour at Ramallah's Kasaba Theatre, where messages of solidarity from intellectuals such as Jacques Derrida and Helene Cixous were read out and Kamilia Jubran and the group Sabreen sang lyrics by the Palestinian poet Fadwa Touqan and the Egyptian Sayyed Hegab.
Members of the delegation expressed shock at what they saw. "What is happening in Palestine is a crime we can stop. We can compare it to what happened at Auschwitz," announced Saramago, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. In reaction to the uproar in the Israeli and international press following his comparison, Saramago remarked: "What I said has been said. If the word Auschwitz is so shocking, I will call it a crime against humanity."
South African artist Breyten Breytenbach was equally horrified, describing Israeli occupation as "a system that denies all humanity and whose goal it is to humiliate the other" before paying his respects to "the resistance and extraordinary dignity" of the Palestinian people.
The delegation was welcomed to the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, whose welcoming speech we publish here along with excerpts from his most recent poem "State of Siege". In Oxford, Al-Ahram Weekly interviewed Irish poet Tom Paulin, who broke the conspiracy of silence in Britain
It gives me great pleasure and honour to welcome you in this land during its bloody Spring, a land yearning for its old name: the land of love and peace.
Your courageous visit during this monstrous siege is one form of breaking the siege. Your presence here makes us feel no longer isolated. With you we realise that the international conscience, which you honorably represent, is still alive and capable of protesting and taking the side of justice. You have assured us that writers still have a valuable role to play in the battle for freedom and in the fight against racism.
Responsibility for the human destiny cannot find statement solely in the literary text. In situations of emergency and human calamity the writer searches for a moral role to play in other forms of public action, a role that consolidates his literary integrity, and mobilises public consciousness around higher values, most important of which is freedom. This is what we read in your noble messsage for us today: the message of solidarity and sympathy.
I know that the masters of words have no need for rhetoric before the eloquence of blood. Therefore our words will be as simple as our rights: we were born on this land, and of this land. We knew no other mother, nor any mother tongue but its own. And when we realised that it has too much history and too many prophets, we understood that pluralism is an all-embracing space and not a prison cell and that no one has a monopoly over land or God or memory. We also know that history is neither fair nor elegant. But our task, as humans, is to humanise history, as we are simultaneously its victims and its creation.
There is nothing more apparent than the Palestinian truth and the Palestinian right: this is our country, and this small part is a part of our homeland, our real not mythical homeland. This occupation is a foreign occupation that cannot escape the universal definition of an occupation, no matter how many titles of divine right it enlists; God is no one's personal possession.
We have accepted the political solutions based on the principle of sharing life on this land within the framework of two states for two peoples. We only demand our right to a normal life, within an independent state, on the land occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, and to a fair solution to the problem of refugees, and an end to colonialist settlement. This is the only realistic path to a peace that will put an end to this vicious circle of blood.
Our state of affairs today is self-evident, it is not a case of a struggle between two existences, as the Israeli government would like to portray it: either them or us. It is a question of ending an occupation. Resisting occupation is not only a right, it is a national and human duty that transforms us from the condition of slavery to the condition of freedom. The shortest road to averting more disasters and to reaching peace is to liberate the Palestinians from occupation, and liberate the Israeli society from the illusion of controlling another people.
The occupation does not content itself with depriving us of the primary conditions of freedom, but goes on to deprive us of the bare essentials of a dignified human life, by declaring constant war on our bodies, and our dreams, on the people and the homes and the trees, and by committing crimes of war. It does not promise us anything more than the apartheid system, and the capacity of the sword to defeat the soul.
But we have an incurable malady: hope. Hope in liberation and independence. Hope in a normal life where we are neither heroes nor victims. Hope that our children will go safely to their schools. Hope that a pregnant woman will give birth to a living baby, at the hospital, and not a dead child in front of a military checkpoint; hope that our poets will see the beauty of the colour red in roses rather than in blood; hope that this land will take up its original name: the land of love and peace. Thank you for carrying with us the burden of this hope.
* Full text of Mahmoud Darwish's speech before the IPW delegation in Ramallah
From State of Siege
By Mahmoud Darwish
Here, at the slopes, before sunset and the gun-mouth of time,
Near orchards deprived of their shadows
We do what prisoners do
What the unemployed do:
We nourish hope.
Countries on the verge of dawn. We have become less intelligent,
Because we stare at the hour of victory:
There is no night in our night shining with artillery.
Our enemies stay up at night and light for us
The darkness of cellars. [...]
Under siege, life becomes the time
Between remembering its beginning
And forgetting its end.
Here, at the heights of smoke, on the steps of home,
There is no time for time.
We do what those ascending to God do:
We forget pain. [...]
Soldiers measure the distance between being and nothingness
With the telescope of a tank...
We measure the distance between our bodies and the shells
With a sixth sense. [...]
Siege is waiting
Waiting on a leaning ladder in the middle of a storm.[...]
Under siege, time becomes place
Fossilised in its eternity
Under siege, place becomes time
Lagging behind its yesterday and its tomorrow [...]
Translated by Amina Elbendary
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