    |
 |
Regional Programs > Israel
& Palestine > Next Story

On Dance, Identity and War
Omar Barghouti, Palestine
June 13, 2002 In the middle of our regular dance rehearsal, our
second after the end of the latest Israeli assault, a
group of Belgian artists quietly sauntered into our
well-lit, yet cozy, studio in Ramallah, some for the
first time. Unmistakably surprised by what they saw
and heard—I had chosen a track from Brave Heart for
the improvisation segment that day, our European
friends started shooting—with a video camera, that
is—and taking notes, incessantly. Most westerners
cannot hide their bemusement when they see a group of
Palestinian dancers—from both sexes—diligently
learning a new elaborate Palestinian choreography. The
scene is somewhat surreal to them. Dance in the midst
of "war"!
During the brief rehearsal break I usually give the
dancers, after two hours of hard, sweaty work, one of
the visitors, a filmmaker, interviews me. He asks with
some hesitation, "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 never asked myself that question. Do we have
to stop creating dance, music, art and literature 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? I could not but recall John
Stuart Mill's definition of humans as "unique,"
"self-creating," and "creative individuals" who are
"culture-bearing."
During the latest punishing re-occupation of Ramallah,
days had passed without electricity, running water and
with food shortages, but that did not deter me from
listening to Fairuz, Vivaldi and Munir Bashir, or my
wife from listening to Asmahan, Abdel Wahab and Umm
Kalthoum—yes, we do have substantial pluralism in
our music preferences in the family. My older daughter
still had to practice the violin daily, the exact
hours depending on when it was quietest. The
neighborhood kids still invented new games and new
causes of quarrel along with them; all of them were
strongly urged by their parents to allocate some
mandatory time for studying every single day. Our
humble collection of literature books—from Naguib
Mahfouz to Isabel Allende, and from Abdel Rahman Munif
to Ahlam Mistaganmi—suddenly became a "public"
library for the neighbors.
Several of us read, wrote, wept every once in a while,
cringed at particularly gory footage, argued with each
other on every imaginable political issue—an
idiosyncratic feature of average Palestinian
life—joked, shouted at times, rationed the precious little
water we had (mainly collected from rain drainage)
between our desperate plants and ourselves, shared
rare moments of intimacy and mutual vulnerability; ...
in short, we lived as "culture-bearing" beings do.
Perhaps our neighborhood is different from the next,
but most of what we did to survive the onslaught
without paying a dear price in our sanity was common
virtually everywhere, at least in all the places where
roofs remained standing where they should be, and
where death had not visited.
But even where roofs literally fell on top of innocent
inhabitants, as in the midst of the despondent
devastation in the Jenin refugee camp and in the
Nablus casbah, a nagging concern of parents and
community leaders was to make sure that schools were
rehabilitated as quickly as possible to be able to
function normally. One cannot imagine, perhaps, how a
deeply traumatized tent dweller, surviving an
appalling atrocity, left with a profusion of loss,
desperation, and anger, and a scarcity in basic needs,
could possibly worry about his/her children's
education. Insight into the innermost scars of
Palestinian refugees, however, could elucidate this
mysterious Palestinian obsession with learning as a
means of identity formation.
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—which
learning is a vital part of—is thereforevenerated as the
key to their salvation from repeated victimization and exile.
In contexts 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 praxis, 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
dehumanizing efforts of our tormentors. As a reaction,
the process of de-colonizing 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 described this process saying,
"[Decolonization] transforms spectators crushed with
their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the
grandiose of history's floodlights upon them. . . .
Decolonization 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 dual purposes:
self-therapy and expansion of the "free zone" in our
collective mind, where progressive transformation can
thrive. In response to all the attempts tocircumscribe our
aspirations, we must push on dreaming and being creative,
boundlessly. Thus, we dance.
Omar Barghouti is a dance choreographer and trainer of
El-Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe, inAl-Bireh (Ramallah).
He is also a doctoral student of philosophy at Tel Aviv University.
From Al-Ahram Weekly Online (Cairo), June 13, 2002.© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
|
|
 |
 |