Monday, October 31, 2011

דממה

דממה

אנני ידעתי להחריש
עד ששמש ירד מול עניי
חששתי
פחדתי
ביתי, מצאתיהו לא
לעולם פליט, בעולם
אי
נסעתי הימה
תמיד רציתי להרדם
נפילה
בתפילה
לשכוח
וחללתי
בדרך ביתך
עניך, בתוכי
תייר, מנותק, מתמוטט
ימי קסם
משביר דיקדוק
התנכרות
פזור נפש
ללא מקום חזרה
הגירה
באופן חסר תכלית
מחלל גופי
טמא
אהבה
איסור
ללא מוות
לעולם

Are we being cheated? New Media for a Newer Middle East



First published at BIKYA MASR

Are we being cheated? New Media for a Newer Middle East

Let us imagine that we could hold a discussion panel in which we would be able to freely ask questions to deposed and deposable Arab dictators about what is it that they fear the most. The answer in almost every case would not be the United States, God or the threat of foreign intervention; almost univocally the answer would be: ‘We are afraid of the youth’.

It is no wonder that it has been them who have been most mercilessly clamped down everywhere from Libya to Bahrain; young people have been not only denied the opportunity to engage in building the future of their countries but in the course of Arab Spring, more than any other group, they have also been the main target of reactionary forces nearly everywhere the prospect of a revolt loomed close. They have been persecuted, arrested, tortured, put on trial in military courts, denied the most basic legal rights and ultimately brutalized, sodomized and murdered.

It is no one but young people who have stood as the symbol of the revolutionary efforts in the Middle East: Mohammed Bouazizi and Khaled Said, to cite only those who come to mind immediately. But it is not only them who have suffered under brutal regimes whose earlier ideological laziness has now turned into a frenzy of murder and repression; prisons all over the Middle East are crowded with Maikel Nabils and Khaled Saids and Feras Baqnas that bear so many names, so many nationalities, so many stories, so many lives and as a common denominator especially the tyranny that wants to make sure that young people do not have a voice, so that the struggle for freedom in the region is once again silenced for another generation yet.

In the course of a conversation with Egyptian liberal T. Fouad, he remarked that at one point he thought that the youth of Egypt were going to take over and that all of us, now adult professionals, would be thought passé, yet it is us, the same people, in the Middle East and elsewhere who are today blogging and writing and speaking for their lives. 

“The destiny of any nation at any given time depends on the opinion of its young people, those under twenty-five”, the words of German poet Goethe, resound through and through today truer than ever.

Looking in retrospective at the year of the Arab revolutions, it is an undeniable fact that it was the empowerment that the young in our midst received through the communicative possibilities enabled by the Internet age what made this new beginning possible, no matter how long is the road that lies ahead not only in creating a new age of politics but also in leaving behind the old era of authoritarianism, so deeply entrenched in the vast majority of people.

During the 16th annual conference of the Arab-US Association of Communication Educators “Digital and Media Literacy”, hosted by the Media Studies program at the American University in Beirut and running through this weekend, it was said that the three most important new online media outlets in the Arab world were Jadaliyya, Al-Akhbar English and Bikya Masr; all of which reach audiences far beyond the Middle East and are made possible through cooperative efforts that go beyond the boundaries of nation, race, religion, language and politics. Nearly all the contributors of these new sites, part of the independent media revolution, are young aspiring journalists and researchers from the Middle East and a small group of expats with a serious concern about the kind of critical thought that is necessary for lasting peace and true revolutions – there’s no revolution other than that of the mind, politics is always secondary to the spirit of peoples and their commitment to freedom.

While we read this with a great sense of achievement and pride and with great optimism about the future, it remains altogether true that the real makers, those who achieved the impossible, are not those who jumped on the wagon of the revolution before it was too late and now speaking at conferences and being showcased by all Western media as revolutionary icons; many of our best men and women, bloggers and activists, who believed in freedom and who worked tirelessly to change the spirit of the times, they remain imprisoned and silenced while counterrevolutionary efforts blended in with the sloppiness of many self-appointed political heroes move toward an endless repetitive cycle of the same folly that was apparently overthrown.

One of these men is Saudi blogger Feras Baqna who has been imprisoned since October 16 together with producer Hussam Al-Drewesh and cameraman Khaled Al-Rasheed. Their only crime was producing and airing an episode in their online show “We are being cheated” that dealt with poverty in Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh and offered viewers a comparison between the life of Saudis in two different parts of the city, contrasting the complacent comfort of many with the outrageous poverty of so many others in one of the world’s richest countries, where yet poverty and absence of political freedom are as abundant as are reserves of oil.

Even though they had been summoned for a “brief” investigation that was expected to conclude only within few hours, they have been held in extended unlawful imprisonment without any charges being brought against them. It is difficult to think what case or what kind of charges could be made against these young men that will justify detention without a charge and the adamant refusal to provide them with legal advice. This situation however is not unfamiliar to many other countries in the region such as Bahrain, Syria and Egypt where people have been arrested and in many cases also tortured for no other reason than exercising their freedom of speech.

It is not only that they didn’t commit any crimes but also that they kindly brought to the attention of many the problem and offered politically viable solutions to the problem in a country that gives hundreds of millions of dollars in aids and gifts to friendly countries often not with the intention to bring relief to distraught people but to fuel violent crackdowns against uprisings and protests. These men were arrested only because they cared for their country and in doing so, they were part of the efforts of so many young people to renew the common world on fairer definitions of justice, solidarity and community.

As their extended and unlawful arrest goes almost into its third week and that little is known about the fate they will face, the Western friends of freedom have remained silent and so far we haven’t heard of any phone calls made by the champions of democracy and freedom all over the world to demand their immediate release. We are no longer surprised at the indifference of the so-called international community that has nothing of a community in it; their support for the struggles of Saudis has been shy when not silent and the mediocre coverage of mainstream media has done little to bring the case to relevant international organizations to act on for their release. This has been the case in nearly every uprising for which the response of those that invaded entire countries with the pretense of bringing freedom, has been as null as the freedom they have brought.

The government of Saudi Arabia has spared no efforts to make an example of them just like the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces in Egypt did with Maikel Nabil. The only reason behind the imprisonment and uncertain fate of all these young men all over the region is nothing but the widespread fear on the part of the rulers about the newly found political power of young people. The message of Feras Baqna and his team, however, has not remained silent and over half a million people have watched the episode of “We are being cheated” about poverty in the oil-rich kingdom.

As the Arab Spring recedes into winter, it is timely for us not to forget that it is to these people like Feras Baqna and Maikel Nabil to whom we owe the real thrust of the new beginnings that so many are fighting for now, especially because they did it at time when in their countries nobody was ready to believe in possibility, let alone believe in the power of the human mind to liberate entire countries from tyranny.

It is at this time when independent Arab media outlets consolidate themselves in the eyes of the world as vehicles for knowledge, peace and justice that we ought not to forget our prisoners of conscience and there will be no reality to this enormous human struggle until each and everyone of them is free.  The only way to prove that we’re not being cheated after all is not to keep silent, because in the person of Maikel Nabil and Feras Baqna there’s also each and everyone of us. The next person arrested could be not only my neighbor and my friend, but eventually also my brother and myself.

"On Steep Waves" The Exhibit by Daytime



















"On Steep Waves" Prince Yussuf

"On Steep Waves" Sarajevo

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Postcard from Beirut



Every night, the same paradoxical behavior.

Walking back and forth in the patio, unaware of the sky above, never daring to look up and stare for as long as the street light behind the wall remains lit; nothing would be visible anyway from this earthly distance other than the smoke signs coming out of my mouth. As if blazing, the walking back and forth is somewhere between impatient and desperate, yet so small the tiny patio; the walker seems himself as if trying to prove Zeno of Elea's dichotomy paradox: "That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal", in words of Aristotle's Physics. It is not only that the destination cannot be reached but that the journey cannot even begin, that there's no movement at all, ever. That is how the patio night walks set the background for a certain style in writing; it is not necessarily despair what is at work there but more like a patient waiting, waiting and thinking that with time the colors, and hence the motions, of the furniture and the things inside the house will change, will come to pass, will be destroyed. Nothing happens. So it is with the world. The walking continues, every night, back and forth, surrounded by the smoke and by the cold. The waiting drags on, the naught moves and unfolds.

A postcard arrives from Beirut. Beautiful is not a word to describe geography, but he remembers the Mediterranean quite well, not visually so, but a certain weather descending upon promiscuous shoulders, exposed to the caresses of the sun, of a thousand suns, then at the end of the day, a gentle breeze that can make the bleeding of the waves cease, cleanse the gloom of the upper lip and embalm the body for the procession of the night; hopping from eyelid to eyelid, in a last attempt to lose oneself in otherness, to shatter the mirror, release the shadow. Repeat every night. This breeze never lasts more than a few minutes, sometimes just a couple of seconds, but you know it's there, you remember the waiting and the paradoxical behavior and the dichotomy of movement. It is the equivalent of walking up and down the seashore, all the way from Jaffa to Ramat Aviv and in your dreams, stretching all the way to Beirut, the city of the red roof tiles, in a summer war day. Sometimes red from blood, sometimes from blushing, sometimes from beauty. You can never know. Check your calendar. It is not 2006. It depends. No movement, remember?

"We could live this life for a hundred years", so said a local journalist to an American writer during the siege of Sarajevo, what could he have meant? Certainly not death, since death is expected to last over a hundred years, and by any definition, eternity is a very long time. It is not even a time. Isn't it war, or the permanent state of unrest, where and when we relinquish all responsibility and relieve ourselves from our burdens only to live on the fringes of that thing we use to call humanity?  War is not only a period, but a particular type of time and space. 2006, the year of Beirut. Is it possible that we haven't returned from there? Is it the Holiday Inn, completely bombed out? Or is it the Martyr Square? I can see Beirut from my patio, from the smoke, through the smoke, I see nothing else... At night, the pitch dark of the southern cold flares up in my dreams, writing as I am sleepwalking, blazing back and forth, erratically; I can still see "Sahet el Shouhada", riddled with bullet holes, so many times, over and over, yet still standing. I could see it from Tel Aviv, not from the top of any tower - thought once I saw Jordan from a tower, but from a cafe without windows. It was in a garden, on a summer night, prosperous with ivies and the food untouched; I think it was perhaps from a drawing.

The garden could have been anywhere in between my atelier, that little hungry cave looking into a repair garage, and that church, bombed out, now surrounded by a parking lot and what not, where the lease contract never expired and now the same ivies and prosperous but thin trees of Tel Aviv have settled indefinitely. Once the scenario of turbulent love, in spite of the bullets on both sides of the wall - crumbling but standing - that gave a proper name to Beirut in the life of the mind. It could've been today or yesterday, I wouldn't know because of the dichotomy of movement. Then it was different, there was nothing but lust and walls with bullet holes, sometimes a scrapbook. I didn't write articles and never crossed my mind the thought that someone would ever look into the most private corner of the galaxy: the open book of my mind. Sometimes fictional, sometimes not. My friend at the top of Mt. Scopus or Mt. Olives, can't remember which, drawing a garden on and on, listening to Mahler, whispering about all the parties from the past, of the infinitely past.

The necessity to write, as of today, doesn't attest to the richness of one's experience or his maturity or even to a vault of accumulated memory; it has to do more with having forgotten everything and everyone at all. That's what happens in the course of permanent exile, the sky is everywhere the same, the writing is a battle, a battle against death, not about the death of the other but about dying without having remembered everything, every single detail. Paradoxical behavior: Philosophy contains no past at all. Yet one doesn't desist, in spite of the permanent state of change which runs so rapidly that one doesn't notice the movements at all, as if it were a popular song. He begins to admire the courage in the friends that live deep inside art, that only sporadically make contact with reality, like wolves, like whores, hunting for the best raw materials and disappearing swiftly afterwards like he himself tends to disappear on people, real and imagined, that have offered any type of love that doesn't come with one-way flights elsewhere. Everything is dissolved, the message is not delivered, the sentiment is relinquished and only the work, the poem, the essay, flourish and give birth to themselves.

Only in this rabid cold, unaware of the sky, always looking down, barefoot, one recognizes the skies of Beirut, in himself. It is perhaps easier that way, without recognizing the change, the immunity to the passage of time, the immutability of art as a form rather than as an object. Counting the bodies and the prisoners and the revolutions, with little marks in the fingertip and in the cheek, engaging in something so radically as to forget yourself completely, as to forget the dichotomy, moving throughout Gods of history that delay sickness one day more at a time, that keep death one day away, as it always is. Like the postcard, from Beirut, he's nothing but a witness, traveling, on and on, unmolested by the facts, as if they could amount to or construe anything; only interested in the lust, in the flames, in the limbs, in the memory of that sinful breeze.

Paradoxical behavior.

Monday, October 24, 2011

On Steep Waves / Auf steiler Welle / στην πλαγιά των κυμάτων

A postcard wandering exhibition
Collected by Katherina Olschbaur
With a text by Arie Amaya-Akkermans (dedicated to Maikel Nabil Sanad)


First Station Athens, 27-30 October 2011




Friends, artists and people that I have met on journeys in the course of the last few years were invited to send me postcards to my temporary addresses, stations, in between Vienna and Athens. The message from another place, the place that is not present, or the person that is absent; that is the central theme of the exhibition. The title was chosen freely from a line of Arthur Rimbaud's 'Le Bateau Ivre (1871) in the German rendition of Paul Celan, out of which we are drawn to the image of the vessel in a turbulent sea as a metaphor for a journey with an open end, or for a permanent state of unrest.

"On steep waves/ Auf steiler Welle// στην πλαγιά των κυμάτων " relies at the same time on a very personal experience: solitude - and here poses the question if at this very junction of time it becomes political as well ? - upon awareness of one's loneliness, one is ready to receive a message, a message from far away, in times of utmost uncertainty. 

"On steep waves/ Auf steiler Welle / στην πλαγιά των κυμάτων" is made as a wandering exhibition, with its first station in Athens, Kerameikos-Metaxourgeio, 27.- 30. October, 2011. The second station will be in Vienna on 16. of November 2011, a one evening show at the Fluc in Vienna, during the Vienna Art Week "Reflecting Realities"; other stations are still open and in planning. The exhibition will change and grow in the course of this journey. Unlike the idea of an archive, the exhibit is more like a collection, an open book of about 40 poems where each message is visible to the beholder and holds a singular importance on its own.

K. O.

Auf steiler Welle / στην πλαγιά των κυμάτων   
27/10 - 30 /10/2011

 Ζήτησα από φίλους, καλλιτέχνες και τυχαίους ανθρώπους που γνώρισα στα ταξίδια μου τα τελευταία χρόνια να μου στείλουν καρτ-ποστάλ στις προσωρινές διευθύνσεις μου, σταθμούς μου, μεταξύ Βιέννης και Αθήνας. Το μήνυμα είναι από το άλλο μέρος, το μέρος που δεν είναι παρών και ο αποστολέας είναι απών· αυτό είναι το κεντρικό θέμα της έκθεσης.   Ο τίτλος επιλέχθηκε ελεύθερα από ένα στοίχο του ποιήματος του Αρθούρου Ρεμπώ  Το Μεθυσμένο Καράβι (1871) από την γερμανική απόδοση του Paul Celan, που θα μπορούσε να μας δώσει την εικόνα ενός πλοίου στην ταραγμένη θάλασσα ως μια μεταφορά για ένα ταξίδι χωρίς προορισμό ή για μια μόνιμη κατάσταση αναταραχής. 
Η έκθεση "Auf steiler Welle" ( ) στηρίζεται  ταυτόχρονα στην προσωπική μου εμπειρία της μοναξιάς. Σε αυτό ακριβώς το σημείο θα μπορούσε να γίνει η υπόθεση οτι η έκθεση αγγίζει την πολιτική σε ένα ποιητικό επίπεδο· όταν το άτομο συνειδητοποιεί την μοναξιά του είναι έτοιμο να δεχτεί ένα μήνυμα, ένα μήνυμα από πολύ μακριά, σε περιόδους εξαιρετικής αβεβαιότητας.

Η "Auf steiler Welle" είναι φτιαγμένη ώστε να είναι μια περιπλανώμενη έκθεση, με πρώτο σταθμό τον Κεραμεικό της  Αθήνας τον Οκτώβριο του 2011.

Ο δεύτερος σταθμός θα είναι στη Βιέννη στις 16 Νοεμβρίου 2011 μόνο για ένα βράδυ στο πολυχώρο Fluc, κατά τη διάρκεια της εβδομάδας Τέχνης της Βιέννης  "Reflecting Realities" · οι επόμενοι σταθμοί είναι σε σχεδιασμό και ακόμα ανοικτοί. 

Η έκθεση θα αλλάζει και να αναπτύσσεται κατά τη διάρκεια αυτού του ταξιδιού, σε αντίθεση με την λογική ενός αρχείου, και περισσότερο σαν μια συλλογή, ένα ανοικτό βιβλίο των 40 ποιημάτων, όπου κάθε μήνυμα είναι ορατό στον θεατή  κατέχει την δική του μοναδική σημασία. 

Artwork for the exhibit










With


Anonymous artists from Bahrain, Nadja Athanassowa (A), Arie Amaya Akkermans,  Eva Chytilek (A),  Ida Marie Corell (D) Mara Diener (D), Haris Dumic (BA),  Nilbar Güres (T), Michael Horsky (A), Michael Gorman (D), Benjamin Hirte (D, A) Christoph Holzeis (A) Verena Kamler (D),  Nadja Kelm (UKR), Christian Kobald (A), Marie - Luise Lebschik (D), Giorgios Makkas (GR), Luiza Margan (HR), Jim Morrison (heaven), Robert Muntean (D), Ekaterina Shapiro - Obermair (A, RUS) , Panos Papadopoulos (GR), Lisl Ponger (A), Serge Poliakoff (UKR), Alfons Pressnitz (D), Bernhard Rappold (A) Anja Ronacher (A,UK) Inna Sawhorodnia (UKR), Tim Sharp (A), Michael Strasser (A), Deniz Soezen (CH, T, A),  Prince Yussuf II, Jerusalem , Dorota Walentynowicz (PL) , Herwig Weiser (A), Linda Williams (UK)... 
and many more... (artists from Egypt, Yemen, Sweden and elsewhere to be announced shortly)  


Participating works will be showcased after the exhibit.

Leonidou 11, 5th floor apartment ( ReMap Point 14)
Kerameikos - Metaxourgeio, Athens, Greece
27/10 - 30 /10/2011
Opening: 27/10, 19.00
Opening hours of ReMap 3

Katherina Olschbaur is a painter. She studied Fine Arts in Vienna and London.
She is living and working in Vienna and abroad.
Arie Amaya is a freelance writer and philosopher.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

On Steep Waves (final text for the exhibit)



On Steep Waves

All those who leave, always leave a little of themselves in you… Is that then the secret of memory?” It is the question asked by director Ferzan Özpetek in his film “Facing windows” (2003) – What can we learn from that question? Why is it that the memory is so important? Why would the message, any message, would be completely lost without it? Hannah Arendt wrote in 1929: “It is memory and not expectation (the expectation of death as in Heidegger) which gives unity and wholeness to human existence… Remembrance in man discovers the two-fold before of human existence… This is the reason why the return to one’s origin can at the same time be understood as an anticipating reference to one’s end”.

The secret of the memory is not revealed to us there but our voyage begins with the question of the message –What is it? What is it that we do when we speak?  What happens when we live a little in order to die and die a little in order to live? Words, images, thought… What are they? Gifts of life? Gifts of death? Why are messages always, like letters and postcards, delivered a little too late? Even the messages from above and beyond come as belated greetings – for we are always caught unprepared for death. Here you picture Ingeborg Bachmann’s “Malina” as she anxiously wrote letters and immediately thereafter disposed of them, angry at the thought that they would never be delivered on the same day. What is there in the delivery of a message? Is it the world?

What kind of world is this in which messages, like philosophy and prophecy, can never arrive on time? What kind of world is this in which we want to live and speak, even be heard? Michael Cunningham brings this question to life in his novel “The Hours”:  “Still, she loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows others people must love it too, poor as well as rich, though no one speaks specifically of the reasons. Why else do we struggle go to on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed? Even if we’re further gone than Richard; even if we’re fleshless, blazing with lesions, shitting in the sheets; still we want desperately to live. It has to do with all this, she thinks”. The same perplexity of Clarissa Vaughan, Cunningham’s fictional persona is what stays when we realize all what time has left engraved in us – the faces and the proper names.

But the facts of the world remain as it is - we are harmed and transformed by them. We need to withdraw not only in order to understand and analyze, but also to create alternative versions with which we may be able to live unmolested. That is how we transform the world into a recollection of images, postcards and photographs – not even a collection because collecting would imply that we are able to choose the finest pieces and not as it is often the case, end up walled and carpeted with advertisements, inebriated geographies and absurd topologies in lieu of earthly experiences. Philosophy is the recollection of world history, in the words of Hegel.

We leave the comfort but also the immense responsibility of the home and begin wandering in the world as if through an anonymous hotel, checking out at our earliest convenience when the turbulence becomes uncomfortable to handle; all what we have for a reminder of our life on earth is the remainder of the post cards and photographs that we carry instead of suitcases or passport. The postal system of world history in which messages are exchanged not only across cities but also across the most distant ages, between gods and philosophers, between writers and heretics, between lovers and soldiers, between rulers and fallen divinities; that postal system out of which we have derived religion, literature, thought and the arts is a slow but necessary device to protect our secrecy. If we were to have unmediated encounters with the words and the loudly speaking facts of the worlds, we would be burned down and torched so completely. Yet even in our intimate cities of refuge there is little we can do to protect ourselves from acts of hearing and speaking, either of the indirect kind (art) or the direct kind (politics). King Solomon and Socrates have warned us about the bear trap of knowledge, yet it is not only in reading and writing that the memory is set free – the act of seeing itself suggests as well the acceptance of what we are seeing as facts; there is nowhere to run. 

Reality and language intersect in the postcard as a token of the broken memory, as a fragment of something that in itself has no beginning and no end, what is the gift then? To visualize the intersection it is necessary to resort to more than reason and faith; we must learn to see with the two eyes of Ibn al-‘Arabi - ذو العين – doing enough justice to transcendence-cum-immanence: Both the eternal transience and the mortal worldliness of things. How lonely it is to live or to write or to remember if the message is not delivered – It is in the message, the postcard, the image, where the lens is amplified and the word leaves the flesh to become one with the world.

The composer Hans Werner Henze responded to Ingeborg Bachmann’s “Malina” and her despair over the belated message of the letter by saying that “I’m very touched by the richness, great sadness and despair in your first symphony, which is in fact Mahler’s eleventh”. How could one live with the fact of having written an unwritten symphony? “Nothing else will come” responded Ingeborg Bachmann in a poem sent to Henze in 1968.  Do such ends of history exist at all? Do we cross invisible lines after which poetry and art can be no more? It seems as if what happens is that fragments of the world show such incredible resistance to being forgotten – unlike the world itself that survives on a dynamic of oblivion and instinct.

To understand the postcards and the messages from the past as forms without a soul of its own deteriorates into what Ibrahim Kalin warns: “It does not enable to find a home in a world of homeless minds, uprooted traditions and soulless masse; there must be something else that pushes the boundaries of the archive into a telescope of mnemographies, act of delivering messages across times and spaces – as though a Copernic voyage. The message is more than the visible – why would we want to live if it is not for facing windows? Peering into distant silent worlds? Into distant worlds that remind us of the natural sounds of love and war? One can conjure up images of Susan Sontag directing ‘Waiting for Godot’ during the siege of Sarajevo and jotting down the Bosnian text into the English lines and memorizing a play in a language she doesn’t know. Isn’t that hunger to deliver a message?

“Live dangerously and you live right” in words of the great Goethe. The intensity of the living is made manifest there: There’s no insurance against life, it is impossible to live without the risk, without the danger, without sinister panic and guilt. We rather navigate in the open sea at the expense of a boat perhaps sunken or drunken; it is always preferable to the eternal ennui of Paradise – Adam and Eve followed commandments but did not remember things! The postcard is not a vault but a telescope, we are allowed to peer through only for a fraction of a second and we are not permitted to keep anything. What we experience on the steep waves of the ocean before shipwreck is that any attempt to communicate, to deliver a message, is nothing but hunger for freedom – vertiginous freedom. When Tim Hetherington shot his “Diary” in 2010, an experimental film recording a decade of his photojournalism work covering the most restless corners of the world, he was only offering us a pornographic tour through the naked limbs of contemporary history; little did he know then that after his death in February – murdered by mortar shell fires fired by Gaddafi’s forces in Libya – we would see now through his diary how desperate he was to live. And so are we. That is why we fluctuate through oceans of disrupted messages, seeking in our origin, our end – like Postcards.


By Arie Amaya – Akkermans/ Dedicated to Maikel Nabil Sanad, political prisoner at El Marg Prison – Egypt, since March 28th 2011 

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

"On the Slope of the Waves" Text for the Art Exhibit

On the Slope of the Waves

“Tutti coloro che se ne vanno, ti lasciano sempre addosso un po di sè? E questo il segreto della memoria?” [All those who leave, always leave a little of themselves in you, is that then the secret of memory?] That is the question posed by director Ferzan Özpetek in his film from 2003 “La finestra di fronte” [Facing windows] in a letter addressed by a fictional character to a long by-gone friend, at end of which we are left with nothing but a certain empathy about this open-ended question. What is the secret of the memory then? Why is the memory so important that a message, any message, would be completely lost without it? Hannah Arendt wrote in 1929: “It is memory and not expectation (the expectation of death as in Heidegger) which gives unity and wholeness to human existence… Remembrance in man discovers the two-fold before of human existence… This is the reason why the return to one’s origin can at the same time be understood as an anticipating reference to one’s end”. While this does not reveal the secret of memory, it points in the direction of why are messages of others important in the construction of life – living a little in order to die and dying a little in order to live – and how the messages are always delivered a little too late – even the messages from above and beyond, death always catches us unprepared. Here you can imagine Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina anxiously writing letters and immediately thereafter disposing of them, angry at the thought that they would never be delivered on the same day. What kind of world is this in which messages, like philosophy and prophecy, can never arrive on time? What kind of world is this in which we want to live and speak, be heard? Michael Cunningham brings this question to life in his novel “The Hours”:  “Still, she loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows others people must love it too, poor as well as rich, though no one speaks specifically of the reasons. Why else do we struggle go to on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed? Even if we’re further gone than Richard; even if we’re fleshless, blazing with lesions, shitting in the sheets; still we want desperately to live. It has to do with all this, she thinks”. The same perplexity of Clarissa Vaughan, Cunningham’s fictional persona, does not leave us when we are faced with the facts of this world, we are harmed by language itself and need to withdraw not just to understand and analyze facts but to create alternative versions that might allow us to go on living unmolested. That is how we transform the world into a recollection of images, postcards and photographs – not even a collection because collecting would imply that we are able to choose the finest pieces and not as it is often the case, end up stuck with advertisements, inebriated geographies and news in lieu of reminders of our earthly experiences. We leave the comfort but also the immense obligations of the home and begin wandering in the hotel of the world, checking out at our convenience when the turbulence becomes uncomfortable to handle; all what we have for a reminder of our life on earth is the remainder of the post cards and photographs that we carry instead of suitcases and sometimes in lieu of a passport itself. The postal system of world history in which messages are exchanged not only across cities but also across the most distant ages, between gods and philosophers, between writers and heretics, between lovers and soldiers, between rulers and fallen divinities; that postal system out of which we have derived religion, literature, thought and the arts is a slow but necessary device to protect our secrecy. We would be immediately burnt and torched completely by the unmediated encounter with the words, with the loudly speaking facts of the worlds. Yet even in our intimate cities of refuge there is little we can do to protect ourselves from acts of hearing and speaking, either of the indirect kind (art) or the direct kind (politics). Socrates advises to become a φυλακή, a guardian or sentinel of truth by protecting this truth, keeping ourselves from reading and writing at all and avoiding thus the pains begot by knowledge. The Gospel of Matthew informs us that even in spite of the vigilantes and sentinels the apostles were visited by God himself while imprisoned so that even a ban on acts of reading and writing should not suffice; the act of seeing itself as the Greek σκοπια suggests, means that upon seeing we are also accepting as a fact the existence of what we’re seeing – the lesson of St. Paul in his epistle to the Corinthians. Reality and language intersect in the post card as a token of the broken memory, as a fragment of something that in itself has no beginning and no ends, being unsure on whether it is life or death where it begins or ends, which one is the gift? To visualize the intersection it is necessary to use more than reason or faith and to see with the two eyes of Ibn al-‘Arabi - ذو العينين - doing enough justice to both the eternal transience and the mortal worldliness of things. Seeing with two eyes is not the old philosophical duality but the ability to see the one and same thing twice. The writing or the experience are universally lonely if the message is not sent from one end to another, it is in the message, the postcard, the image, where the lens is amplified and the word leaves the flesh to become one with the world. The composer Hans Werner Henze responded to Ingeborg Bachmann’s masterful postcard “Malina” by saying that “I’m very touched by the richness, great sadness and despair in your first symphony, which is in fact Mahler’s eleventh”. How could one live with the fact of having written an unwritten symphony? “Nichts mehr wird kommen” [Nothing else will come] responded Ingeborg Bachmann in a poem sent to Henze in 1968.  Do such ends of history exist at all? How do we unwillingly leave the realm of words and turn into musical winds? Do we cross invisible lines after which poetry and art can be no more? What is that memory which art sets free and that makes the aesthetic experience so universal? It seems as if what happens is that fragments of the world show such incredible resistance to being forgotten – unlike the world itself that survives on a dynamic of oblivion and instinct. To understand the postcards and the messages from the past as forms without a soul of its own deteriorates into what Ibrahim Kalin warns: “It does not enable to find a home in a world of homeless minds, uprooted traditions and soulless masses”, there must be something else that pushes the boundaries of the mere archiving and organizing information into the creative act of messaging each other across times and spaces – as though a Copernic voyage. It is nothing but the discontent with mere survival and the pressing demand to live in a better world – as exemplified in the story-telling of Özpetek’s films – what presents the vast vaults of the memory as an open book in the eternal and internal postal service of Western art. The memory of art is always a commitment to freedom, either located in an infinitely remote past or in the distant future, but never simply a reflection of the present, conscious or unconscious. The departure point is always a “via negativa” as that of theology: We are always ought to begin with what we don’t know, and even when we stand in front of a mirror we still don’t know. The intensity of the living is made manifest in the message for there’s no insurance against life, it is impossible to live without the risk, without the danger, without the sinister panic and guilt of mere existence. There’s no possible φυλακή to protect you against the slope of the waves, only blindness and silence. Insofar as you’re committed to speaking, the life of art and the message of the postcard is nothing but hunger for freedom - the kind of vertiginous freedom that leads great men to virtue and average men to vice.

By Arie Amaya – Akkermans/ Dedicated to Maikel Nabil Sanad, political prisoner at El Marg Prison – Egypt, since March 28th 2011  

Saturday, October 08, 2011

The Trial of the Egyptian Revolution: Maikel Nabil



First published at 5PMBAHRAIN
It is a chilly winter. Not yet you would say. Except in the Middle East, where the Arab spring has opened a Pandora box of winterly creatures that spared us autumn altogether. Rather than staying stranded in the complex political economy of the Arabian Gulf, where change is expected to come slow and the process of state-building hasn’t been finished so far, we looked with hope at North Africa when the people united with the cause of freedom and overthrew the regimes of Egypt and Tunisia and ultimately that of Libya as well.
What seemed to herald then the beginning of a new era in the Middle East is now the symptom of what Egyptian blogger Maikel Nabil put into words months ago: To overthrow the dictator but not the dictatorship.
A new era in Middle Eastern politics has no doubt begun: It is a new era of authoritarianism, abuse and yet more silence for the people. Those of us who followed day by day the events at Tahrir, long before the spring would reach Yemen, Syria and Bahrain; we did so not without a certain measure of skepticism which was manifested by global leaders alike.
On the one hand, we had to celebrate how political power unexpectedly seized the street and grew exponentially by the minute until several weeks later the Egyptians were victorious; on the other, one could not express enough reservation about the transition of power.
Apparently successful examples of liberation from tyranny such as Iraq, Afghanistan and other lesser conflicted nations could never pass the stage of transition until alas another conflict would break free. I strongly believe that political power cannot be passed, created or transitioned; it is something that must happen and its absence is not a symptom of failure, rather, it is the failure itself.
By the end of the rather long period of protests (however brief compared to the situation in Syria and Yemen and to a lesser extent and for different circumstances, Bahrain), the same Egyptian army that had pledged loyalty to President Mubarak and that had ruthlessly launched attacks on protesters, decided to join the revolutionary struggle and from then onwards began to be voiced the all too felicitous claim that the army and the people are one.
Few people expressed criticism at the time and then a fragile period of transition began, one that saw the emergence of groups that had been forever silenced in Egypt – with the good and the bad; but ultimately the true colors not of the revolution (a revolution is always beautiful) but of the revolutionaries began to surface; quickly enough previously self-appointed activists fell prey to the opportunism typical of those keen and quick enough to realize that the change of regimes was only nominal and that they had to play their cards the best they could.
This was followed by the ruthless authoritarian grip of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forced that has put over ten thousand civilians on trial in military courts on bogus and meaningless charges, number which amounts to more than those tried in Mubarak’s entire rule.
Some countries in the region do consider relevant to charge a culprit on insulting the military, criticizing the government and spreading rumors; while this is true, none of those countries (perhaps with the curious exception of Turkey) unlike post-revolutionary Egypt, are confessed to be democratic and at best have insisted that democratic processes will last several decades. The list of abuses committed by SCAF runs very long:  helpless bureaucracy, corruption, physical and verbal abuses, virginity tests, tight censorship on media and journalists, intimidation of Egyptian and foreigner alike, political maneuvering and endless manipulation.
The ugly truth of revolutions is that it is never revolutionaries who make the revolutions; they are only lying in waiting until political power is ripe in the streets and then they seize it, what happens then of course is precisely what I outlined above: political power, the result of human mutability and contingence is as such, a very fragile thing, it must be let happen, it cannot be seized lest it be destroyed and turned into violence.
Violence such as that practiced by SCAF is never political – because politics and political power is the will of a people, whereas violence is the will of one man or one group, and like with the Egyptian Pharaoh, political power by means of violence is a very solitary institution. This is what happened in Egypt, once the people achieved the revolution; their power was seized by revolutionaries – the same that will be turned into staunchest conservatives the day after.
But the trial of the revolution has begun. It began already when a young blogger, Maikel Nabil, a 25-years-old Egyptian Copt known for his radically unsettling views about the military and the State of Israel, began blogging about how the army and the people have never been one, and reported about ideological inconsistencies and abuses committed by the army on the people during and after the revolution.
He probably had been under the radar for a long time before that, accordingly, his house was stormed, and he was put in prison, tried in a military court as a civilian and given an extended sentence of three years for doing nothing but expressing his opinions publicly on the web. Although many others (in fact thousands) were tried the same way, Nabil was the first political prisoner of post-revolutionary Egypt, and the only one who remained in imprisonment only because of a blog.
Other prominent media personalities who had risen in the course of the revolution as star bloggers were otherwise released. Nabil’s case did not gain much prominence at home or abroad derived from the facts of his life: An ethnic Copt, an atheist, an atypical radical, supporter of Israel, critic of the revolution. His plight fell on almost deaf ears.
Over forty days ago Mr. Nabil began a hunger strike to demand his immediate release. Now entering the 43rd day, an appeal had been scheduled on October 4th, however it was postponed until October 11thbecause of a court file that did not arrive on time; circumstance that no one seemed to bent on overturning other than a few activists who were at the court and who were harassed, threatened with imprisonment and one of them summoned into the court briefly: For no other reason than using her phone camera in a demonstration in front of the military court, Sahar Maher was charged with misdemeanors, her phone confiscated and she was informed that she would be as well tried on a military court the following week.
Even at the prospect of his death, knowing full well that he had committed no other crime than the exercise of free speech, not only the decision remains unchanged but the support of Egyptians at home and activists abroad is rather weak compared to other cases where the risk involved was substantially less. The few people campaigning for his release, among them his father and brother and some activists, among them the very prominent Egyptian blogger Mona Eltahawy, have assured us that the postponement of the trial is nothing but a death sentence.
So much for democracy, it is not only that the true intentions of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces have truly surfaced but also have the capabilities of the Egyptian populace. The belatedness in expressing vocal support for the case of Mr. Nabil derive from the fact that few in Egypt today are willing to hear any criticism on the outcome and success of the revolution and like Mr. Nabil said, what was true for himself in March, is already true for many others: There’s more fear in the streets now than there ever was under Mubarak.
No doubt there is a long road ahead of Egypt in this new era, however, of what of worth is all this bloodshed, all this madness, all this sacrifice? What is the worth of this all if once the beginning had been supposedly achieved; the rights of the innocent cannot be protected, if criticism cannot be heard, if the life of this one man is not worth another public outcry like the one at Tahrir, then what was the life of Mohamed Bouazizi worth after all? What was the life of Khaleed Said worth at all?
This one case, apparently simple and straightforward as it is, it is ought to put the Egyptian revolution to its hardest test yet, to its definite trial, which in case of failing, will leave us with the bitter taste of realizing how it is that it took only a couple of weeks not to liberate Egypt, but to make it go from oligarchic authoritarianism to military authoritarianism. It is time to stop finding guilty culprits abroad and elsewhere for everything that happens at home; in Egypt, in Bahrain, in Israel and everywhere in the Middle East.
If it wasn’t the case that there’s so much wrong with ourselves, it would only suffice to ‘overthrow’ one power or the other to change our lives, but time and again, this old and rather dead paradigm is proven wrong on and on and on. How can we stand up to tyranny in the region if we cannot change our own ways of thinking? If we cannot change the prejudice and the hatred we are taught at home? If we cannot let go of tribal, religious and cultural masks?
So right she had been in the 1990’s when Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller declared in recanting her older socialism, that she would go in the direction of Kierkegaard (introspection) rather than Marx (political action) because the revolution, the revolution of everyday life, that revolution is ought to begin in yourself – it cannot be brought from anywhere, no one can bestow it upon you, there’re no manuals written for revolution.
Egypt has to redefine the meaning of patriotism for the Middle East now, whether it is an awakening of values, human ideals and the autonomy to use your own judgment, or if once again, it is more and more of the old anti-imperialist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, backward, monolithic and especially egoistic system. It remains to be seen whether Egypt will remain enslaved to Pharaoh or whether they will cross the Reed Sea, and then finally understand that politics is not about how I feel about Maikel Nabil or not, or anyone, but about how we build the common world.

6th of October in Jerusalem



Published first at BIKYAMASR
It is that day of the year – 6th of October – that glorious day in the Egyptian psyche that commemorates, or rather celebrates, so runs the story in the Egyptian media, the victory during the 1973 October War when the Egyptian army defeated the Israeli army and regained Sinai. Events planned to commemorate the Armed Forces Day included on Wednesday, among others, the visit and floral offering of Hussein Tantawi, chairman of the Superior Council of the Armed Forces, to the memorial of the Unknown Soldier in Nasr City; art and sport performances in schools, and a variety of events held or to be held on Thursday in different governorates all over Egypt. Another celebration planned in Alexandria will honor warriors of the 1973 October war and also the martyrs of the Egyptian January 25 Revolution.
The writing on the wall of what this national and military celebration represents for the Republic of Egypt nowadays, after the strange twist that the revolution has taken, is something about which one cannot express discontent as much as hesitation. There may be too many versions of the story; for some like the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and some of nascent nationalist movement perhaps it is business as usual; for others it might be reason to scorn, to laugh, to complain, to mourn – all this is still subject to intense debate. What does it mean, though, 6th of October in the capital of the Jewish State? How do they view Egypt then and now? Should we congratulate the new Egypt on this simultaneously cheerful and sorrowful day? Or should we express panic and fear about what the near future holds in store?
This year 2011, almost 40 years after the war and in the happy year of the Arab revolutions, the celebration falls almost on the same day of Yom Kippur, which infamously codenamed the war in the Israeli mind as Jews walk into the holiest and most solemn day in the liturgical calendar. It remains still difficult to speak about Egypt without falling prey to the politics of enmity. In the course of preparing for the Israeli matriculation exams for Zionist history and then later on in university, the topic is by no means avoided, nevertheless, it comes as a surprise to hear that Egyptians celebrate a victory while we were told and taught that Israelis were the victors. This proposition in itself would ignite the most violent reactions charged with intense emotions. There cannot be two victors in a war.
I would even dare say that for the average Israeli, looking at 6th of October as an Egyptian celebration would be more or less a taboo. There are some facts nonetheless that are very clear from a historical point of view: The Israelis were not prepared for the war and the blow on the morale of the Zionist institution was rather severe so that enquiries were launched to investigate possible culprits, the outcome of which is widely documented in Israel. The State of Israel remained nonetheless religiously committed to the idea of its military superiority and its position of power in the region. Never did I see this idea challenged until the year 2006 with the outcome of the Hezbollah-Israel war in Lebanon, when it became clear that the army had become a monolithic, all too heavy, all too undisciplined institution.
How could one address himself to the Egyptians to discuss the meaning of 6th of October if it is not yet possible to discuss it at home? It would be unfair to deny that one writes not without a certain degree of fear and guilt. Israeli society has been radically transformed in the course of these decades, younger generations have emerged, less connected to the tragic history of European Jewry, highly critical of or at least ambivalent about Zionism, less committed to the military institution and certainly less afraid of facing their Arab counterparts.
In theory and at home this comes easier said than done. I remember being lost once in the Old City of Jerusalem at the age of eighteen with a British friend and then coming out of Damascus Gate right into the center of East Jerusalem; I had never been so afraid before, it was this foreign language, Arabic, the curious faces of the pedestrians, the inspecting laughter of the young men and the climate of self-inflicted hostility. The same culture of fear that had driven us out of our native lands to seek shelter in the land of our ancestors, it was the same fear of the other what we experienced that day.
In retrospective it is possible for me to say nowadays, with the years and kilometers of distance that have elapsed, that many Israelis feel guilty about the injustice committed on the Palestinians and this guilt is easily transfigured into fear. No matter how hard we try to convince ourselves otherwise, no matter how much we rely on the military and on the leadership, it is impossible sometimes to escape that helpless feeling that what happened to our ancestors in Europe and elsewhere in the Arab world will also happen one day in the land believed to be promised.
The ruthless occupation and the terrifying instability led many people, in spite of the great prosperity, to live in a constant state of anxiety. At times I questioned myself about how really Jewish the state was; the internal paradoxes of Zionism often made manifest how right had been Hannah Arendt, writing a decade before the creation of the state, that Israel would become a semi-sovereign militaristic state, behind threatened borders from which Jewish culture would somehow vanish. On the other hand, there was always this optimism and this defiance, this willingness to make ourselves part of this great project in the make, called the State of Israel. The paradoxical existence of this irregular state in an ocean of hostility seemed to be yet one another paradox of Jewish life itself.
Looking back at 6th of October, there is not only the dread about a certain weakness perceived only silently but also the seed of that very fragile and often imaginary peace between Israel and Egypt which was indirectly the consequence of the war, but the Arab Spring and the end of Mubarak’s rule put an end to this illusion in dramatic ways. Just like the United States, Israel was not quick enough in sensing the true reach of the protest movement and the old leadership expressed much concern about how a new Egypt without the artificial long-established peace would challenge the status quo of the region for the Jewish state. The delusions of realpolitik showed their true colors when the Israeli leadership made it clear that it was preferable to remain at peace with a regime than at war with a free country. People in the Israeli public understood this and that is how the protests in the country demanding equality began with the slogan ‘Walk like an Egyptian’.
No doubt the Israeli leadership belongs to the generation of Mubarak and Bin Ali; they lack the vision to imagine a new Middle East and anchor themselves on each and every failure of the Arab revolution, in order to bring their point across over and over. Egyptians are in the right to challenge the legitimacy of the peace agreements that were never such; otherwise not only the economic but the cultural ties between the two countries would have been strengthened rather than let alone to cool and die.
The Arab revolutions must become for the State of Israel not a panic alarm but a well awaited opportunity to fix the injustices committed against the Palestinians and to provide the space for the type of self-reflections necessary, if we want to live one day without this unbearable guilt and fear that nobody speaks about. It is clear to me of course that while I am defending Israel’s right to exist and the possibility of a peaceful coexistence with Palestine, some of my personal friends consider my position that of a traitor and resent the welcoming approach to the revolution which after all, is not in Israel’s best interest.
Truth being said, they’re not completely mistaken and not for political reasons. Many dormant chimeras of the last hundred years have arisen from the dead since January and it has become clear that not only a political solution between our countries seems far fetches but also that the hostility toward Jews in the Arab world is as alarming as we had always thought or perhaps more. Several incidents in the last couple of months have made it clear not only that the Egyptian revolution is far from complete, but also that there seems to be no place for Jews outside the threatened borders of Israel.
Zionism has become not an allusion to the dreadful combination of European nationalist politics of history and the plight of a homeless people, but also a cliché of the Arab world applied to anything that falls out of favor; whether it is King Hamad of Bahrain, the Syrian regime, Mubarak, the liberals, the religious, the leftists; in short, anyone who is an object of distaste or disagreement is immediately labeled a Zionist and not only that, there is no differentiation whatsoever between Jews and Zionists.
I would be the first to agree that normalization with Israel, not between governments but between peoples, will come by as an impossible task unless Israel meets for once its commitment to peace, to stop the settlements and to treat the Palestinians fairly – this is beyond question. Where I become worried is when Egyptians fail to recognize that the State of Israel is not going to go anywhere, perhaps it will be possible to change the demographic and geographic landscape, but this state in itself is not going to go up in smoke, sloppily as it is maintained. In order to question the legitimacy of Israel a certain measure of political decency is necessary in which Egypt will have to assess its own relationship to the Jewish people historically and how the 1973 war in itself wouldn’t have been possible, hadn’t it been one another power game of the Cold War.
6th of October is a celebration that the Egyptians have owned up to and they are in their right, as it represents their struggles past and present and a way into the future, whatever this future holds in store. However, circumscribing it entirely to a military parade under the present conditions signals perhaps a deliberate avoidance to tackle the impossible political situation they are living in under a more or less established military rule. Jerusalem will remain cool and cold on what this celebration represents but what Jerusalem might think is irrelevant to the unexpected course that Egyptian history took.
Defining politics as friendship or enmity with a foreign country is a rotten left over from European politics of the past centuries, from the vicious complacency of nation states and from what threatens democracy the most: The yoke of tribal and ethnic politics. There is no better way for the nascent free Arab states to support the Palestinian plight than stressing their own commitments to democracy and plurality, rather than replicating the blind circles of hatred and fear that we were taught in. A war, always a silly thing, can be the leitmotif of greatness as the Greeks knew so well, but greatness is not self-serving, it is a responsibility without which no freedom can last longer than the hour of liberation.
As a Jew, I want to see a free Egypt, a free Palestine and a democratic Israel; none of that will be possible while thousands of people are put on trial in military courts, while people chant death to the Jews, while authoritarianism slowly erodes democratic promises. Let’s celebrate 6th of October, not for what it stood in a past that a nation wants to be free thereof, but on the basis of what can be built thereupon.