Held hostage

By Nur Elmessiri
We never come empty to what we see. A twisted torso belonging to a young man with a defiant, determined grimace, eyes looking up high as if to a giant, stone in one hand, when frozen into image, matted and framed -- when stolen from the heartbreak of a people living under an occupation and when offered on the supremely indifferent altar of art -- will evoke so much more than the moment thus snatched: David and Goliath inevitably, perhaps Bernini's (not Donatello's or Michelangelo's) David. If the fortuitous moment made to stay on negative also included roses and flames, lines from Darwish and Eliot might also come to hover around the image:
Be that as it may,
I must reject the roses that spring
From a dictionary or a diwan (poetry collection).
Roses grow on the arms of a peasant, on the fists of a labourer,
Roses grow over the wounds of a warrior
And on the face of a rock.
(Mahmoud Darwish, "The Roses and the Dictionary")
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
(TS Eliot, "Little Gidding," Four Quartets)
Palestinian photographer -- photojournalist freelancing for Reuters -- Osama Silwadi, whose colour photographs of "Intifadat Al Aqsa" are on exhibit at the Sony Gallery of the American University in Cairo, has a the-less-said-the-better view of the images on exhibit. "The images should speak for themselves," was his e-mail response to Sony Gallery curator Nora Bahgat's request that he provide captions for the photos, or simply indicate where they were taken. The succinct (100-word) statement he sent the Sony ends "a picture is worth a 1000 words" and begins: "To be a photojournalist in Palestine means to be a war photographer." Having published a book on Palestinian women's lives, Constant Giving and Creativity, he cannot possibly mean that photographs taken in Palestine are inevitably of war, just that photojournalism there, especially during this, the second phase of the Intifada, is.
A first, quick look at the exhibit might elicit an initial "So what's new?" response. There is nothing new under the sun, it has been said; certainly by now, at the time of writing, three months into Intifadat Al Aqsa, there is, in a terribly oppressive way-- in spite of the daily loss of lives -- nothing new in Palestine. A daily exchange: "Any news?" "Not really." "How many today?" "Six." "La hawl walla quwatta illa billah." And then -- as with Iraq for 10 years -- daily life (and shelling and killing) continues.
Israeli soldiers in cumbersome gear; Arab shabab (youth) throwing stones, wounded shabab carried by hatta- (black and white chequered headscarves/shawls) wearing comrades, landscapes submerged in black smoke, debris, the shrouded bodies of martyrs bestowing colour (red and green) on funerals become demonstrations, women (mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, friends) weeping: all too familiar and by now (dare one say it?) almost banal imagery thanks to satellite television. But, as S Abdallah Schleifer, in the catalogue accompanying Silwadi's exhibition, remarks of the images of Mohamed Al-Dorra (may he rest in peace) taken on video by Talal Abu Rahma (who "has since been the object of countless death threats sent to him by Israelis"): "even as video they suggest the lifetime of the still -- those images endure as freeze frames; they live on from one end of the Arab world to the other no longer in the video format in which they made their first shocking appearance but as frames, as still photos... to be printed, blown up and reproduced as posters and in pamphlets."
If you are living in a perpetual state of trauma, in a state where the shock of sudden death is a staple of daily life, the permanent something to hold on to (a flag, a photo -- an icon) means something vital and life-sustaining, and is hence no mere cliché. The human barbarity of shooting a child, of shooting the shooting of the child on video, this is a fact of war and war coverage. Stilled, this fact can be made to resemble and partake of the holy: meaning is somehow salvaged from unspeakable suffering. Via the Dorra image, Mahmoud Darwish in "Mohamed Al-Dorra" finds himself beholding a piétà, Al-Umm Al-Hazina, the Mother holding in her arms the Son sacrificed to wash away the sins of the world. From death an icon; from "cliché" images (like that exhibited of the Dome of the Rock around which figures in white circumambulate) framed and held up high, still points of funeral processions.
Mercifully there are no dead or dying children in the photos at the Sony, photos which, spurning lyrical pathos, leave no doubt in the viewer's mind that war is man-made. Apart from in three photographs -- a little girl in a house that was bombed; boys, some smiling, wielding flags and photos of a smiling Abu Ammar; schoolboys with bashful and wary eyes that want to trust being smiled at and talked to by Mary Robinson -- the children are where we (particularly if we are Palestinian mothers and fathers) would like them to be: far from the dark killing field (of the sole black and white photograph of the exhibition), far from the shooting. Silwadi -- at least in this exhibition -- will not aim at them his Canon lens on which his fingers rest as on a trigger. In his photo at the Sony, Silwadi wears a helmet and has the military look of someone in khaki.
In the photos on exhibit the Israeli military apparatus appears flimsy and unreal. When captured against a kitsch-blue-sky, two tanks and (in another photo) a clean-shaven, sunglass-wearing, machine gun-wielding figure emerging from a tank, are reduced visually to the status of boys' playthings. When three such earnest Ken-doll types aim their guns, the effect aesthetically is of an American war B-movie, especially if this image is seen in conjunction with that of the eight Israeli soldiers carrying, like Let's Go creatures, all manner of backpacks, headpacks and gear, trotting across a field with a group of video cameramen to the fore.
Which is not to say that Silwadi's exhibition suggests that the occupation -- represented by the army maintaining it -- is child's play. Prison inmates of what used to be their home, as one photo shows, Palestinian men have to pray shod (an allowance in Islam for life-threatening states of emergency) outside the mosque in which they would like to pray, cordoned off behind the bars of police barriers, while security forces and cameramen (and via the latter, "sympathisers" in their satellite-TV fitted rooms) watch the spectacle as if praying men are caged zoo or circus creatures. The Zionist occupation has been, for those dispossessed by or living under its suffocating conditions, a nightmare from which they have been struggling for over 50 years to awaken.
When not shooting, the photos show, there is something ridiculously (almost pathetically) insubstantial and ungrounded about those young Israeli soldiers: in a souq in an old part of the city everyday men and women walk purposefully to the beat of daily life, clothes hanging from stalls, bread neatly stacked on a wooden cart while five loiterers -- healthy, handsome young men dressed up convincingly as soldiers, boots, machine guns and all -- lean against a wall. The five loiterers seem a surreal apparition none of the real-life people appear sufficiently bothered to note.
Strange creatures these -- and they do shoot (very real bullets, as one zoom-in photo shows) to kill.
We, too, have our own wondrous creatures, Silwadi's eye tells us. There is the Nibla (sling shot) Man from whose back a Palestinian flag has sprouted and whose shadow has a life of its own, the life of some primordial reptile that evades capture and classification. There is the Masked Man, the fida'i. His face is black and white chequers, he wears a headband on which is inscribed the name of a brother who died for the cause and, ever-prepared to give his own life to the qadiya (cause) he has chosen to serve, he rests his gun against his shoulder. An armed struggler, he is cruel to be kind, detached from the things of this world, larger than the life he will -- if needs be -- sacrifice.
Strangest, most wondrous of all the Palestinian creatures we love and cherish is the shahid (martyr), the dead man who will never die and who moves us to love colours -- green, red, white, black. His body, borne on the shoulders of the procession of the living, bears living fruit: arms, hands, a finger pointing to the sky bearing witness.
Silwadi's lens bore witness, held hostage a historical moment, redeemed some of the sad, wasted media time and footage.
Related stories:
Intifada in focus 26 Oct. - 1 Nov. 2000
Intifada special 19 - 25 October 2000
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